by Owen Thomas
“And you do?”
“Yeah. I do. I goddamned mother-fuckin’ do care. I said I would take care of you and I will. But this here is a fuckin’ two way street.”
“I can’t just pull your fee out of my ass, Glenda.”
“Then it’s time to go see daddy, Dave.”
Her words are like an arrow to the dead center of my chest. My mouth opens, but the words are not there. Glenda raises her eyebrows and waits, still twirling my boxers.
“I can’t ask my dad,” I mutter, staring at my shoes. “I can’t ask my family.”
“Last I checked, they had money.”
“You checked?”
“I don’t do this shit for free, DJ. ‘Course I fuckin’ checked.”
“I can’t ask my parents.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me a first-class fuck up. You don’t understand.”
“No, I get it. But I wonder what they’ll think during visiting hours.”
“Glenda…”
“You’re a big boy, Dave. And you’ve got real fuckin’ big boy problems. I know this is gonna really ratchet up the pressure on Father’s Day, but you either have a fuckin’ family or you don’t. And you’ve got more family than a lot of people. More family than I ever had. For damn sure. You need to act like someone whose fuckin’ life is on the line.”
I sigh and shake my head and rub my temples with the heels of my hands. She is still twirling and staring.
“Time to suck it up and go to the well, Dave.”
“Glenda, there’s got to be some other way. Isn’t there something we can do? Isn’t there some other arrangement…”
Glenda smiles wryly amid the wholly unintended insinuation that now hangs heavily between us. She turns and closes the closet doors and then turns back, stepping around the corner of the bed, stopping very close to me. My eyes align with the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are huge and bright and terrifying in their dusted blue lids. She presses the underwear into my hand. I swallow hard and she lifts a palm to my cheek, patting it with affection.
“You want to work it off, stud?”
“I . . . I wasn’t…”
It is the certain knowledge that my lawyer is about to close the three inches between us and kiss me on the lips that robs me of the power of speech and prevents anything I might otherwise be able to say to clarify my stupid question. I smell perfume. I smell beer. There is a slight citrus aroma that must be coming from the tower of hair. I feel her breasts, or I think I feel them, straining for me, but I am afraid to look since that would require me to divert my attention from her eyes and the features of her face that will give me the only advance warning I will ever get.
“Mmm. Mmm. Food for thought.” Her lips are a shade of sun-bleached eggplant to go with the rest of her ensemble. They are so large and glossy and perfectly shaped that I cannot help but think of the red novelty telephone in Tilly’s bedroom back when she was in the seventh grade. “Well, I’m off, Sweetcakes. Tomorrow is a new day and the ass-kickin’ starts early.”
She pushes past me and is out the front door, closing it behind her, before I can recover the presence of mind to say good night.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say to the door.
I listen to Glenda start the engine and roar off. I knock my head against the door jamb until it starts to hurt. Silence rises up around me, accumulating like a dark, lonely snow. The couch is beckoning from the living room and I obey, shuffling down the hall, because I know now that, as tired as I am, trying to sleep will be pointless for hours.
I am still holding the promise of financial ruin in my hand, the answer to which, it appears, is either abject humiliation in asking my father for huge sums of money to keep me out of prison or selling myself into sexual slavery as my lawyer’s bitch. I see my father’s face in my head. I hear his voice. The esquire’s concubine option suddenly seems the better choice. And yet that might not even be an option since, as usual, I cannot tell whether Glenda is serious or just reveling in the sport of making me feel uncomfortable. I drop the envelope on the table and pick up the remote. Incredibly, I long for a joint.
I turn on the television and flip mindlessly through the channels with the sound off. Seen it. Seen it. Don’t want to see it. Seen it. Boring. News. News. Cooking. Weather. My mind refuses to pay attention, content with its self-preoccupied disaster loop. I keep flipping. Sci-Fi. Sigourney Weaver is talking intensely with Tom Skerritt over the stricken form of their shipmate who is lying quietly with a space octopus on his face. They both know something awful is coming; I can see it in their eyes. They don’t have any idea what it is yet. They only know that in some profound, irremediable way, they have really, really, really fucked up. Hmm. This seems about right.
I collapse on the couch, cursing all the world but my very own existence and I’m quite sure I will get around to that shortly. I look over to Nelson Mandela for solace. He is still above my television. I am unclear as to whether it is the top photo or the bottom photo that will help me most. The poster speaks to me: There is no easy walk to freedom, anywhere. Above those words, his words, Mandela stares out from between the bars of his cell at a sun-scorched land. His expression is sober. Contemplative. Patient. He is righteous, by God, because he knows the truth of history before it has happened. He sees history taking shape in the chrysalis of the future and he waits. I tell myself that this is the perspective I should adopt. This will all turn out. I am innocent, after all. The trick is knowing that the details will work themselves out. I will afford a defense somehow, with or without sexually servicing my lawyer. Brittany Kline will turn up sometime, dead or alive, with or without her violin. People will learn about me what they learn. They will understand or they won’t understand. But I know the end result; I can see my own history in the future.
Except that I can’t really.
I have absolutely no confidence in what the hell that is out there on the horizon bearing down on me. I discern neither angel nor demon. I hope for the former and fear the latter but I have the calm of confidence in neither. Nor can I pretend to myself that the details are unimportant. I care desperately about every micro-movement in the transformation of my uncertain future into the foregone conclusion of my past. The making of history is a process I inherently distrust. Nelson Mandela may see destiny wriggling in the chrysalis, but I cannot help but imagining destiny – my destiny, anyway – making its entrance more like the baby Alien bursting through my chest cavity in a shower of bone and tissue slick with viscera and pumping acid through its veins, looking for all the world like an angry penis with tiny sharp teeth, splitting me open and leaving me behind like the poor schmuck on my television. I will not live through the experience.
I turn off the television and toss the remote on the table next to the overturned box of fish supplies. The remote skitters off the table onto the floor, popping off the back panel and sending the batteries rolling in different directions. I watch them roll. I consider the lower photo of Mandela; the one where he is free and older and laughing, head back, with a squealing towheaded child in his arms as a pride of lions looks on from the not too distant shade of an acacia tree.
I am not stupid. I do get the point. I know that we are each the chrysalis for our own destiny and that life, for an individual or a society, is but a series of transformations from one consciousness to another. I should think of this ordeal of mine as an excruciating blooming of consciousness. I should have the confidence and calm that comes with the certainty that all transformation is a manifestation of beneficence and that my life will ultimately be better. Freer. Happier.
But I do not. I am not confident. I am not calm. Something terrible is coming and whatever it is, I have invited it. My father. God, what must he think of me when he learns the state of my life? How many times must I confirm what he already knows and tries mightily to deny? I squint up at the poster. Is the child in Mandela’s arms really laughing, or is she screaming? How easy it would be for him to fling
her by the ankles, this child of the oppressors, over the jeep and into the tall grasses where the future ends.
I look past the man and the child. The lions are always there in the background. They are looking back at me. They watch and they wait. Mercilessly, and with savage abandon, they judge me, and they will hold me accountable. They know me; they know my little conceits. Better than I do. They know the end of things. They see my history in the future and, whatever it is, it can only be the history I deserve. The lions will see to it.
CHAPTER 34 – Hollis
Laundry should not be this complicated, he thought. There was a machine for washing. There was a machine for drying. Powdered soap goes into the machine for washing, it fills with water, it does its thing – soak, spin, whatever – the clothes come out and go into the dryer with a static guard sheet from the pink box on the shelf next to the soap, they tumble around for awhile, the buzzer goes off and that’s all except for folding.
So then why, he wondered in irritation as he lifted the washer lid, must Susan insist on over-complicating absolutely everything. Last Hollis had checked, Maytag did not manufacture thermonuclear reactors.
He switched the clothes from one machine to the next, tossed in an anti-static sheet and started the dryer. Then he picked up the laundry basket at his feet, lifted it over the hole in the top of the washer, turned it upside down, dumped in the clothes, added a level scoop of soap, dropped the lid closed with a clang, twisted a dial, punched a button and whammo, laundry done. Mission Accomplished. Bring home the troops.
He left the basket by the dryer and picked up his glass of Australian Shiraz which he thought was particularly good for an impulsive purchase. He took a sip and let the wine roll around on his tongue.
It certainly had not been necessary for Susan to call him on his cell phone. He knew the call had had nothing at all to do with the laundry. She had been checking up on him. She had opted to abandon her life – her husband and her son – for the lesbian campfire. No one forced her to do that, No Siree.
But now she saw the downside, didn’t she? Now she could no longer keep tabs on him. And that, he thought with some dark satisfaction, must surely worry her a little. Now she was feeling some regret about just walking out on everyone to suit herself. Just what was Hollis doing and who was he doing it with? That was why she had called. She would have been far better to be honest about it and just ask him outright – are you off fucking that Bethany friend of yours? Just ask, that’s all. He would tell her. It demeaned them both to manufacture some great concern about needing to rewash the clothes she had forgotten, and to hang and not dry this blouse or that blouse. No, no, not the heat! Anything but heat! Everyone will die! He was not an idiot. He wasn’t rewashing a damn thing. Clean was clean. Dry was dry. The call had been all about Susan’s paranoia.
The call had been unfortunate timing for both of them, for she had called him just as Hollis was about to place his order for the Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Waffle Supreme. He should have let his phone ring and placed his order, but the impatience radiating off of Hello, I’m Ruth, for whom it had taken Hollis all of thirty seconds to develop an intense loathing, made him want to take the call as she waited.
“That’d be your wife,” she had said, pointing at him with her pen. “Callin’ to check up on where you’ve been. She’s catchin’ on there fella. She’s no dummy. ”
“Hello? Susan? Hold on minute.”
Susan had waited for him to order and then deluged him with instructions on how to enrich plutonium and he pretending to take notes over the phone. He was convinced that had she called him at home the whole laundry ruse would never have happened. He would have been where he was supposed to be, out of trouble in his study or doing something with Ben.
But he hadn’t been at home. He had been out someplace she could not fathom, doing something out of the ordinary. She had no control and no information and that was unsettling. The hyper concern over laundry was partly an excuse for calling and partly a coping mechanism. Hollis understood all of this about Susan, and because he understood it, he was able to set the entire conversation aside and not let it upset him that his wife felt she needed to check in on him like a child or a paroled convict.
Nor would he let it bother him that Susan, if he had understood her correctly, had imposed on David to come by and check up on him.
“It’ll be good for him to see you,” she had said. “He can check in on Ben.”
That had been the give away. Check in on Ben. She wanted David to check in. Maybe Hollis was out every night drunk or fornicating in the streets leaving poor Ben alone in front of a hundred salacious cable channels as he scavenged through the garbage for scraps of food. This was all about Susan having some eyes and ears at home while she was off doing God knows what. She was gone, so she would send David over.
She did not trust him. That much was clear. She trusted neither his motivations nor his competence. But Hollis knew better than to let the harsh judgments implicit in that lack of trust sink in. These were judgments born of fear and a lack of understanding and while they might have been hurtful had they been full-minded and well considered, they were neither of those things and not, therefore, to be taken seriously. So Hollis had dispassionately set the judgments aside with the rest of their conversation.
He turned off the light and headed down the hall for the stairs but stopped suddenly before ascending. The door to the old boiler room was open just a crack and a bar of old yellow light sliced its way through the opening down onto the hallway carpet where it lay like a fallen log of amber.
This was perplexing because Hollis had not been downstairs today, or yesterday for that matter, and he certainly had not been in the old junk room. He listened. The laundering machinery hissed and rumbled from down the hall behind him. He adjusted his attention. There. In front of him, coming from the old boiler room – from the junk room as the kids called it, where the past took its place on the shelf one passionate interest at a time – there was a shuffling sound. Bodily movement.
“Ben?”
There was no answer. A thump followed the silence. Adrenaline up, Hollis proceeded past the stairs to the lit door and pushed it open.
Ben sat on the concrete box in the back of the room, his back against the old iron boiler. His headphones were on, leaking a high-pitched distortion out into the air. In his hands he held Susan’s old flattop Guild Acoustic, the black case open at his feet. The guitar was stringless as it had been since the late 1970’s. Ben was hunched intently over the body, head down, eyes closed, gripping the neck with his left like a backwards tennis racket and exorcising demons over the sound hole with his right. His body swayed and shook and his face was as close to a hardened grimace as Ben could ever get. On any other face, it was an expression that bespoke some horrifically soulful pain – a knife blade to the heart. On Ben it looked more like he had been forced to eat something awful – raw anchovies maybe, or liver. But Hollis could make the translation easily enough, adjusting for his son’s open features and limited expressive range. His mouth opened and closed and contorted, shaping soundless lyrics.
Hollis slowly pulled the door back to where it had been, backing out of the room. He paused at the doorframe, smiling at the authentic innocence in Ben that never ceased to touch him. Ben looked up briefly and opened his eyes, perhaps sensing some change in the room around him. But the music in his ears and the scene in his head took him back quickly and he returned to strumming and picking at strings that were not there, shaking and swaying and belting out raw emotion to untold millions, no doubt a live worldwide broadcast from this tiny amphitheater of wooden shelving rising up around him on all sides, his trusted axe plugged into the massive, black cylindrical speaker towering behind him on the concrete pedestal, which to the uninitiated might have looked for all the world like an old iron boiler.
Hollis backed down the hall and took a seat on the stairs. He had a drink of wine and remembered Tilly, unbidden. She had loved to entertain h
erself in that room, back in the days when the boiler was actually a boiler and not an imaginary speaker, or whatever Ben thought it was. How many times had he found her down here, sitting in precisely the same spot; inches away from a tank holding thirty gallons of scalding water. Tilly had befriended the damn thing. Named it. Helga. No. Not Helga. Greta. That was it. Greta the boiler. Greta had long since been decommissioned and painted a solid glossy black.
My God, he mused. How many years since he had remembered Tilly and Greta? The conversations he and Susan had over heard, eavesdropping together from this very step as Tilly had explained to Greta the things only children knew.
“My, oh my, she has some secrets,” Susan had laughed, whispering in his ear. “This kid doesn’t miss anything.”
How much had changed. Tilly had been innocent once. She had been pure with a child’s imagination. She had befriended a boiler with which – with whom? – she had taken to intense, brow furrowing conversation as she colored mermaids and drew elaborate undersea kingdoms and pretended that they – she and Greta – were in a submersible exploring the depths.
But now. She was lost to the world now, the innocence gone a thousand times over, hating him and all of this from whence she had come. David had grown up. Matured. Evolved. But Tilly had simply left. Tilly had become part of a different species. And now it seemed that after all of this time, Greta had made a new friend.
The washer stopped filling and began its sloshing and agitating. There was a clunking sound from the junk room followed by rasps and mumbles that he could not discern. Hollis took another drink of the Shiraz.
He thought about the idea of his daughter changing wholesale while his oldest son had continually evolved into more mature versions of himself. He thought this to be a rather profound analysis and he entertained a thought that he had entertained many times before; a thought every bit as fanciful as Iron Greta herself. What if Tilly had turned out more like David? What if she had followed a normal trajectory? He thought she’d probably be a lawyer. That seemed to fit her. She’d have a husband in the public accounting field, or maybe a comptroller for one of the hospitals. The husband would want her to go to church, and Tilly would hate the idea because she would be too independent minded for such nonsense, but she would indulge him because she adored him and for the sake of the kids, of which there would be at least two.
