Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

  “What the hell is going on?” Jennings demanded.

  I knew there was a window, however slight, that had opened. An almost imperceptible space in time when I could do something, something big, something important, something right. I reached one hand out for Larry, bracing myself against the door frame with the other. He took it. Even as I felt his rough hand cover mine, I knew Larry couldn’t be as evil as he appeared. But at that moment, I didn’t care. All I cared about was making sure he couldn’t hurt anyone again.

  “Come on,” I said reaching out my free hand. “Give me your other hand.”

  He looked at me then, his eyes locking right on mine. I nodded, reassuring him. He looked afraid. Damn if that look doesn’t still haunt me. Why is it some of us can feel pity when it is least deserved while there are others of us who cannot even fathom the sentiment?

  He must have read the pity in my eyes because he let go of the door release bar and reached for me.

  It was easy. Much easier than I thought. Just before I did it, I heard Jennings behind me, telling me to hang on, he’d pull the bus forward and goddamn why had we let him back up so far? I also heard the blast of a 45 and my father again: just go play, okay Jake, just go outside and play.

  I let go.

  His eyes stayed locked on mine as he fell. I’d like to believe I saw a kind of recognition in them, a flicker of insight that took most people years to obtain. I’d like to believe in the instant before his body broke on the rocks below that he thought about how cruel and pointless his life had been and how his actions had only brought pain to himself and those around him. I’d like to believe a lot of things. But in reality, I don’t believe much of anything these days.

  Jennings grabbed me from behind and pulled me back into the bus. It was only then I realized I was halfway to falling out myself.

  I was sobbing. I’m not sure for whom.

  Jennings heaved me into a seat. “It ain’t your fault. You tried, son. You tried.”

  And I did try. In my own way, I tried to do the right thing, to turn the violence that needed to jump out of me like an ungrounded current into a kind of heroic act. Thirty years later, I’m not sure I succeeded. I’m not sure how to put together the pieces of my life. I turn the events over and sometimes try to force them into something like meaning, but those constructs are only temporary, as enlightening as learning truth isn’t absolute and the world is a series of indecipherable paradoxes. In the end, I always come back to that long drop, the look in Larry’s eyes as he fell, the rocks waiting beneath. This is absolute, I tell myself. Truth, I tell myself. Greater good. I did the right thing because there is a right thing.

  But then I remember my own indiscretions, the fumbling, half-skewered world of my childhood without a mother. And I think maybe when I let go of Larry, I dropped someone else off a cliff as well, somebody who loved him. Somebody who needed him. I don’t know.

  I do know this: Larry wasn’t the only one who fell. I’ve been falling too. The difference is he found what he was looking for: a hard line at the bottom that could not be crossed. My greatest fear is I’ll fall forever and never find the bottom.

  The Water Tower

  “There’s an alien in the water tower.”

  Heather held the door open and squinted at Jeremy Reddin, her eyes slow to adjust to the bright summer day. He stood at the front of her trailer, dressed in camouflage fatigues, glasses crooked on his sunburned nose. As usual, Heather had to resist the impulse to reach out and straighten them. Above him, the sun passed its zenith and hung lazily in the western sky. His dirty-blonde hair caught the light and filtered it toward her in soft hues.

  “Clyde found it yesterday, floating right in the tank. I overheard him talking to Ronnie Pearson about it. You know the rooms in our house are thin as paper. He said it was light blue, the colour of a vein. Tiny, but a big head. Ronnie said that made sense ’cause aliens are smarter than us, but if you ask me, it’s pretty dumb to end up dead inside a water tower.”

  Heather wondered where all this was going. With Jeremy, you never knew. He took the special ed classes in school. It wasn’t so much that he wasn’t smart or couldn’t learn; it was more that he was just Jeremy. He would never fit in anywhere in life. His older brother, Clyde, just let him tag along because Jeremy would do his dirty work, like stealing whiskey from their father or sneaking up to Jenny Willoughby’s window to take pictures of her. Heather was Jeremy’s one friend, and even she could only take him in small doses.

  “Anyway,” he said, after he caught his breath, “I thought you might like to see it.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Heather said. “You want me to walk all the way through the woods, clear out to the train tracks to see something dead in a water tower?”

  Jeremy smiled. He had a good one, and when he did it at just the right time, Heather always liked him, always wanted to root for him. “I got a feeling about this,” he said. “This could be big. But we’ve got to beat Ronnie and Clyde out there. Summer school lets out in like an hour. They’ll go to Clyde’s house to drink for a while.” He glanced at the sky. “I’d say we’ve got until dark.” Reaching into the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a slim, silver camera. “Digital. If this is what I think it is, I’m going to have pictures to prove it.”

  “And what do you think it is, Jeremy?”

  His grin widened. “An alien, of course.”

  Heather laughed. Not at him exactly. No, his enthusiasm was revved too high for that. She laughed because she wanted to go . . . well, she wanted to get out from under the same roof where she had spent the better part of a long, hot summer trying to avoid her mother and especially the men that came over in the afternoon.

  She looked at Jeremy, his big smile still plastered across his face. Someone had given him a bad haircut. Probably Jeremy himself, considering he barely had enough money most of the time to get a roast beef sandwich at Hardee’s, and his dad didn’t believe in personal grooming. Despite all this, something was right about Jeremy. It was hard to say what, exactly, but it was there. She knew it.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go. But I want my name on any pictures you take. It would be nice to beat the Barrows to the punch.”

  “Barrows?”

  “Ronnie and Clyde.” Jeremy frowned like he sometimes did in class when he didn’t understand. “Never mind,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Heather had no sooner said the words when an old blue truck spun its tires out on the road and turned down the worn gravel drive leading to her trailer.

  Heather’s mother appeared framed behind the kitchen window, a silent face next to the smudged glass. Heather saw her take a drag of her cigarette and watch the truck roll toward the house. She did not look in Heather’s direction.

  At a certain point, somewhere past the junkyard, out beyond the little pond that, over the years, had been used to dump the things even the junkyard didn’t want, the woods changed. Artefacts from a different world slowly began to appear: remnants of a car buried under kudzu vines; a pile of beer bottles so old the labels had faded into obscurity, bled white by the long sun; a pair of trousers, half buried in the mud. A plough had lain too long in the sun and turned a fleshy white so it appeared to Heather like a skeleton, wooden arms stiff and outstretched, grasping for something just out of reach.

  “There’s a whole world back here,” Heather said.

  “Yeah, my dad told me about it once. The water tower, these ruins, all of it was once a town. I forget the name.”

  “What happened?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Don’t know. I guess folks went in for trailer parks and electricity. No power out here. But it’s got something else.” He looked around. “Soul. Yeah. It’s got soul.”

  Heather smiled.

  “What? You know what I mean. You’ve been to places before that suck the soul o
ut of you, right? Like the trailer park where you live. No soul. Soul sucking, but no soul. Except when it rains. Everyplace has got soul then.”

  Heather grinned. Jeremy was right. This place did have soul. On their left, a creek weaved between the trees. A wooden fence leaned precariously over the water, one of its poles dangling free and occasionally dipping into the slight current. A snapping turtle lay sunning itself on a moss-covered rock, and overhead the tall pines swayed mysteriously, giving Heather a pleasing touch of vertigo each time she looked up.

  She saw how this might have been a community. The structures, little more than vine-covered ruins, were sinking deeper into the earth with each passing year. The homes had been burned, the walls black and raw. Inside the least damaged, Heather found bedding and clothes and some dirty magazines.

  “This is where David Masters and Jessica McKissick used to come,” Jeremy said. “Me and Ronnie used to climb that tree—” He pointed at a tall, leaning oak. “—and watch them. They put on a hell of a show. At least until she got pregnant.”

  “Jessica McKissick? I didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  “She was. Then she wasn’t.” Jeremy leaned over close to Heather and whispered, “I think she had an abortion, or maybe just got rid of it.”

  “Did her parents know?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “I doubt it. Ronnie and me and David, of course. We might have been the only ones. I could tell because she started wearing big sweaters and jackets and stuff. Anyway, once that happened, the show stopped.”

  “It’s just hard to believe. How she could get pregnant and hide the whole thing from her parents?” Heather said. She was intrigued, especially by how a girl could get pregnant, have the baby, and her parents never be the wiser. “So, she got rid of it?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “She doesn’t have a baby anymore. My brother saw her a few weeks ago. He said she definitely wasn’t pregnant.”

  Heather thought of her mother, perpetual drink in one hand, half-smoked cigarette in the other. Thought of her mother’s long face, always so blank and uncurious, always ready to speak without thinking, to criticize without understanding who she criticized.

  Heather tried to picture herself pregnant. Tried to think of how it would feel to have a life growing inside her, kicking and turning and needing. Would her mom notice? Possibly not. Weeks might go by without interaction between them. If Heather put a little more effort into it, she could go forever without her mother seeing her.

  The last time Heather saw her father was two years ago, at the end of sixth grade. Because her mother wouldn’t take her, Heather had saved the money for cab fare and travelled down to the VA where her father lived full time. He’d been in the Gulf War and had come back with shrapnel embedded in the back of his neck and spine, but that wasn’t why he was off.

  According to her mother, it was just his crazy gene kicking in.

  “What happened to him,” her mother had said shortly after he was committed, “will happen to you one day, too.”

  Heather, only eleven, wanted to know why.

  “DNA.”

  “Huh?”

  “The stuff in your blood that makes you, you. You’re a Watson, Heather. You’ve got the same genes as your father. I should have known when I married him, his elevator would eventually get stuck.” She breathed out a long column of smoke, watching it drift lazily across the room. “Just like his father and his father before him.”

  Heather didn’t see her father as crazy. In fact, she considered him—had considered him—the sanest person she knew at the time. Sure there had been moments when he seemed different, at odds with the world, and that was what made him special. They were alike in that way.

  When she was nine, he’d taken her to Disney World, just the two of them. He told her she was a princess, just like the real ones.

  “Real ones?” she’d said.

  “Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. All of them. You’re a princess too.”

  “They’re not real, Daddy.”

  He smiled, surveyed the park, as if to spot one in order to prove his point. At that moment, the park seemed deserted, forlorn almost, in the twilight of the late afternoon. His smile faded, turned to a look of confusion. He touched her shoulder.

  “You’re going and going until one day you find there’s nowhere to go.”

  She waited, her nine-year-old mind spinning, trying to make connections that were not there.

  “You look in the mirror. You realize the person looking back is you. That’s when it falls apart.”

  Heather said nothing. His smile came back. “Hey,” he said, “a princess.”

  Heather followed his gaze, but she saw only the long shadows of the sun falling across the park.

  The last time she’d seen him, at the VA, he had said nothing at all. He looked past her, his gaze fixed on the wall behind her, where a dark, mud-coloured stain, possibly blood, had resisted all efforts to clean it. Her father’s lips moved soundlessly. He might have been praying. Or cataloguing all the ways such a stain might have ended up on the wall. He might have been reading some secret language in that stain, some otherworldly alphabet only he knew. Maybe Heather would know it too, one day. This was what she liked to think when she thought about her father. He wasn’t crazy. Instead, he had uncovered the secrets of the world, lifted the veil over them and found himself stunned to silence by what he had found.

  A house appeared, shimmering in the distance, eaves dripping with Spanish moss, front door stripped bare of paint, the colour of flesh. The yard, if you could call it that, was a mess of trash and weeds, tangled together with the undergrowth, which to Heather seemed to creep forth from the trees like fingers searching for something to touch.

  The smell was of man, not trees.

  “Better steer clear,” Heather whispered. She knew there were meth labs out here. And crack houses. And other places that stopped being anything except dead ends. Dying places.

  Too late. Jeremy had already seen something that held him mesmerized. Heather followed his gaze to the makeshift porch, where an old rocking chair creaked in the wind.

  “That’s my dad’s hat,” he said.

  A red hat lay in the seat of the chair.

  A shadow moved inside the house past a window and was gone.

  “Let’s keep going,” she said, though her heart wasn’t in the words. If she’d been in Jeremy’s shoes, she would want to investigate too. There was something about parents, Heather thought: whatever they did, they pulled you along too. Even out here in the woods, in the middle of a place that might as well not exist. You were always part of them, even when they stopped being part of you.

  “Is this where he goes?” Jeremy said. “Don’t tell me this is where he goes.” His voice was angry but weak.

  “Maybe it would be better—”

  “No. I’m going in.”

  She followed him.

  The door swung open soundlessly, revealing a darkened room. A naked woman lay on a couch, smoking something that did not look like a cigarette. She was old, her body wrinkled and crushed by gravity. She brushed long gray-black bangs from her eyes and exhaled a stream of smoke.

  “Who are you?”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “Your dad?”

  “His hat is on the porch.”

  The woman sat up, making no effort to cover herself. Her breasts, once large, now hung down her chest like empty bags.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jeremy Reddin.”

  She nodded. “He never told me.”

  “That he had kids?”

  “That he had any other than the one that died.”

  Jeremy looked at his feet. “There’s me and my older brother.”

  The woman took another toke. “And little Sam.”
r />   “He only lived for an hour.”

  The woman leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. Her knees opened, revealing a dark bed of hair between her thighs. Heather looked away.

  “Yeah, but I hear it was a good hour,” she said, her eyes still shut, a look of complete relaxation on her face.

  “Where is he?”

  Without opening her eyes, the woman pointed to the back of the house. “Out where the graves are.” She took another drag.

  Heather followed Jeremy down a short hallway and into a bedroom covered with clothes and trash and a smell Heather recognized as menstrual blood. A door on the other side of the room swayed in a slight breeze.

  Passing through the door was like passing into another world, or at least another time. The trees swallowed up the sun back here, forming a perfect canopy of dark green, like pictures Heather had seen of tropical jungles. It made Heather think of hiding under the covers with her father when she’d been a kid.

  Jeremy sucked in a deep breath. Stood still. Looked at the clearing where a man lay on the ground, his arms wrapped around something, his broad back turned to them.

  “Dad?” Jeremy said.

  The man did not move.

  Jeremy took a step closer. Heather waited, tense. Unsure how to stand. What to do other than watch.

  “Dad?”

  There was no response, and for an instant, Heather thought he might be dead.

  Jeremy crouched next to the man. Heather heard the woman’s voice behind them.

  “He’s in the mud,” she said dreamily.

  Jeremy turned and grimaced at the woman before reaching for his father. He grabbed his shoulders and rolled him over on his back. The man moved his head and mumbled something. Jeremy wasn’t listening. His attention had turned to what his father had been holding—a rock, a crude marker. He knelt and read the inscription in silence.