20

by John Edgar Wideman

  “Tommy!” Hank yelled, shaking his head. “They were going to pay me fifty-five thousand, Tommy!” “What are you talking about?” But now he looked away like he was ashamed. He took me inside the sun porch, sat me down on a lawn chair he unhooked from the wall.

  “Tommy, we're moving south,” he said. “Bullshit you are!” But he doesn't do anything, he just sits there. “We can't take it here anymore, Tommy,” he whispered. “The cold gets to Marge. The taxes are too much for me. All those kids, what do we have in common with them? We're going to Florida. Saint Pete. We bought a trailer.”

  It was probably the next to worst moment I ever had. “You can't do that, Hank,” I said, just as quiet as him. “Not after what we've been through all these years. I was going to help you out with your den. Think of all the things we could do yet. There's another porch we could add on, we could add on a pool.” But he was shaking his head again. “Let's face it,” he said. “You've got nothing left to work on, Tommy. The house is finished. You hear me? Finished! There's nothing left.” He took out his wallet, showed me some pictures. “My grandkids. Terri and Shawn. They live down there now. We want to be close to them. That's the main reason, Tommy. We want to be close to them the years we have left.”

  By now I was getting mad. “Grandkids my ass!” I yelled. “You think your grandkids give a damn about you? Maybe at Christmastime, that's it. To them you're an old smelly man they don't give a damn about they never will. Take it from me, I know.” But then I looked at him…seeing him blink, cover his face with his hands, I got feeling ashamed of myself. “Hank,” I said, “don't leave me alone like this. Please, Hank. Just hold on a little while more.”

  “Fifty-five thousand, Tommy. I can't turn it down.”

  “Listen, Hank. We'll call Big Bill Levitt up. I'll say, Mr. Levitt, my name is Tommy DiMaria, I live on Lindbergh Street, you probably don't remember but you once let me have a house for eighty-three dollars down instead of a hundred. Remember that, Mr. Levitt? Remember those days? Well, a lot of us old-timers are having trouble hanging on to our places you built for us. We wondered if maybe you could help us out. We'll call him up, Hank. We'll call him up just like that.”

  “You and your Levitt! I'm sick of hearing about him! What has Levitt ever done? He built these places and never looked back. He made his pile, then didn't want to know nothing. Levitt? You're so crazy about Levitt, let me ask you something. Where is Levitt now? Tell me that. Where is he now? Where is Levitt now?”

  Like a dope, like the idiot I am, I shake my head, whisper, “I don't know, Hank. Where?”

  “Florida!”

  “Hank,” I said, “I hope you fry.”

  When I got back to my place there was a panel truck in front, two men standing on the sidewalk watching me cross the street. At the same time Mapes's wife is on her lawn pointing at me, yelling “That's him, officer! That's your man!” One of the men came up to me the moment I reached the curb. “You Thomas A. DiMaria?” he said. “Beat it!” “You live at 155 Lindbergh?” “Beat it! You're trespassing on private property, pal!” “We're from the electric company. This is for you.”

  I'm feeling so tired by then I took the envelope, opened it up. Inside is a bill for $11,456.55. “You owe us for thirty-two years' worth,” the man said. “If we want we can put you in jail. Stealing electricity is a crime.” I looked back toward Mapes's house, sure enough there he is with that same half-ashamed smirk hiding behind his Cougar pretending he's polishing the roof.

  “I'm not paying,” I said. “Leave me alone.” With that the other man, the one who hadn't said anything before, comes right up to me, waves a paper in my face. “You better pay, DiMaria!” he said with a sneer. “You don't, we take the house!”

  I didn't waste any time after that. I went out to the tool shed, took a five-gallon can of gasoline, went back inside…took off the cap, taped a piece of cheesecloth over the spout, went into the den.

  Sprinkle, sprinkle. Right over the desk. Sprinkle. Right over the wallpaper. Then after that I went into the bathroom. I remembered those men putting it in. I remembered redoing it with a bigger tub, new tiles, new cabinets. Sprinkle, sprinkle. Right over the cabinets. Right over the rugs. Next I went up the stairs I'd built with Scotty from lumber we helped ourselves to at a construction project on the turnpike…up to the dormer I'd added on for the kids. Their stuff was still there, all the kids' stuff, because they didn't want it, Kathy would never let me throw it away. There's a blue teddy bear called Navy, a brown one called Army. I took the can, poured some over their fur, propped them up in the corner, poured some over the bunk beds. I remembered the time Candy cried because she had the bottom one, she wanted the top. Thinking about that, thinking about the times I sat around the old DuMont watching Mickey Mouse Club with them waiting for Kathy to get home, almost made me stop right there.

  I went downstairs, the can getting lighter, leaving a little trail behind me…into the twins' room where I sprinkled some on the curtains Kathy sewed, sprinkled some on the Davy Crockett hat Chris used to wear every time she came out of the bathtub. Then after that I went into the kitchen. The kitchen cabinets. The linoleum. Sprinkle, sprinkle. Out to the porch where we used to eat in summer, right over the bar I made from leftover knotty pine. I stood there for a while. I stood there remembering the party we had when we ripped the mortgage up, how Scotty got drunk and we had to carry him home only we carried him, dropped him in the pool instead. Sprinkle, sprinkle. Like watering plants. Like baptizing someone. Like starting a barbecue with lighter fluid, all the neighborhood there in my back yard. Into our bedroom, over the floor, the floor where the first night I brought Kathy home we had no bed yet so we lay there on the floor of what we still couldn't believe was our house, making love all night because we were so happy we didn't think we could stand it. Sprinkle. The fumes getting pretty bad now. Sprinkle. Outside to the carport, over the beams, over the tools, over everything. Sprinkle, sprinkle. Splash.

  And that's where I am right now. The carport. The bill they handed me in one hand, a match in the other. I'm going to wait until Silver gets home first. I want to make sure everyone on the block gets to see what fifty-five thousand dollars, thirty-two years, looks like going up in smoke. A second more and it'll be like kids, neighbors, house, never happened, as if it all passed in a twinkling of an eye like they say. One half of me I feel ready to start all over again. I feel like I'm ready to find a new dream, raise a new family, the works. Nothing that's happened has made me change my mind. I'm ready to start again, just say the word. I feel stronger, more hopeful than ever…how many guys my age can say that? That's all I want, one more chance. For the time being I'm moving back to the old neighborhood to my sister's. After that, I don't know. Maybe I'll head down south where it's warmer, but not, I repeat NOT to Florida, maybe as far as Virginia, I'm not sure.

  1986

  WEEDS

  Rick DeMarinis

  A black helicopter flapped out of the morning sun and dumped its sweet orange mist on our land instead of the Parley farm where it was intended. It was weedkiller, something strong enough to wipe out leafy spurge, knapweed and Canadian thistle, but it made us sick.

  My father had a fatal stroke a week after that first spraying. I couldn't hold down solid food for nearly a month and went from 200 pounds to 170 in that time. Mama went to bed and slept for two days, and when she woke up she was not the same. She'd lost something of herself in that long sleep, and something that wasn't herself had replaced it.

  Then it hit the animals. We didn't have much in the way of animals, but one by one they dropped. The chickens, the geese, the two old mules—Doc and Rex—and last of all, our only cow, Miss Milky, who was more or less the family pet.

  Miss Milky was the only animal that didn't outright up and die. She just got sick. There was blood in her milk and her milk was thin. Her teats got so tender and brittle that she would try to mash me against the milk stall wall when I pulled at them. The white part of her eyes looked like
fresh red meat. Her piss was so strong that the green grass wherever she stood died off. She got so bound up that when she'd lift her tail and bend with strain, only one black apple would drop. Her breath took on a burning sulphurous stink that would make you step back.

  She also went crazy. She'd stare at me like she all at once had a desperate human mind and had never seen me before. Then she'd act as if she wanted to slip a horn under my ribs and peg me to the barn. She would drop her head and charge, blowing like a randy bull, and I would have to scramble out of the way. Several times I saw her gnaw on her hooves or stand stock-still in water up to her blistered teats. Or she would walk backward all day long, mewling like a lost cat that had been dropped off in a strange place. That mewling was enough to make you want to clap a set of noise dampers on your ears. The awful sound led Mama to say this: “It's the death song of the land, mark my words.”

  Mama never talked like that before in her life. She'd always been a cheerful woman who could never see the bad part of anything that was at least fifty percent good. But now she was dark and strange as a gypsy, and she would have spells of sheer derangement during which she'd make noises like a wild animal, or she'd play the part of another person—the sort of person she'd normally have nothing to do with at all. At Daddy's funeral, she got dressed up in an old and tattered evening gown the color of beet juice, her face painted and powdered like that of a barfly. And while the preacher told the onlookers what a fine man Daddy had been, Mama cupped her hands under her breasts and lifted them high, as if offering to appease a dangerous stranger. Then, ducking her head, she chortled, “Loo, loo, loo,” her scared eyes scanning the trees for owls.

  I was twenty-eight years old and my life had come to nothing. I'd had a girl but I'd lost her through neglect and a careless attitude that had spilled over into my personal life, souring it. I had no ambition to make something worthwhile of myself, and it nettled her. Toward the end, she began to parrot her mother: “You need to get yourself established, Jack,” she would say. But I didn't want to get myself established. I was getting poorer and more aimless day by day, and I supposed she believed that “getting established” would put a stop to the downhill slide, but I had no desire to do whatever it took to accomplish that.

  ————

  Shortly after Daddy died, the tax man came to our door with a paper in his hand. “Inheritance tax,” he said, handing me the paper.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It's the law,” he said. “Your father died, you see. And that's going to cost you some. You should have made better plans.” He tapped his forehead with his finger and winked. He had a way of expressing himself that made me think he was country born and raised but wanted to seem citified. Or maybe it was the other way around.

  “I don't understand this,” I mumbled. I felt the weight of a world I'd so far been able to avoid. It was out there, tight-assed and squinty-eyed, and it knew to the dollar and dime what it needed to keep itself in business.

  “Simple,” he said. “Pay or move off. The government is the government, and it can't bend a rule to accommodate the confused. It's your decision. Pay or the next step is litigation.”

  He smiled when he said good-bye. I closed the door against the weight of his smile, which was the weight of the world. I went to a window and watched him head back to his green government car. The window was open and I could hear him. He was singing loudly in a fine tenor voice. He raised his right hand to hush an invisible audience that had broken into uncontrolled applause. I could still hear him singing as he slipped the car into gear and idled away. He was singing “Red River Valley.”

  Even though the farm was all ours, paid up in full, we had to give the government $7,000 for the right to stay on it. The singing tax man said we had inherited the land from my father, and the law was sharp on the subject.

  I didn't know where the money was going to come from. I didn't talk it over with Mama because even in her better moments she would talk in riddles. To a simple question such as, “Should I paint the barns this year, Mama?” she might answer, “I've no eyes for glitter, nor ears for their ridicule.”

  ————

  One day I decided to load Miss Milky into the stock trailer and haul her into Saddle Butte where the vet, Doc Nevers, had his office. Normally, Doc Nevers would come out to your place, but he'd heard about the spraying that was going on and said he wouldn't come within three miles of our property until they were done.

  The Parley farm was being sprayed regularly, for they grew an awful lot of wheat and almost as much corn, and they had the biggest haying operation in the county. Often, the helicopters they used were upwind from us and we were sprayed too. (“Don't complain,” said Big Pete Parley when I called him up about it. “Think of it this way—you're getting your place weeded for free!” When I said I might have to dynamite some stumps on the property line and that he might get a barn or two blown away for free, he just laughed like hell, as if I had told one of the funniest jokes he'd ever heard.)

  There was a good windbreak between our places, a thick grove of lombardy poplars, but the orange mist, sweet as a flower garden in full bloom, sifted through the trees and settled on our fields. Soon the poplars were mottled and dying. Some branches curled in an upward twist, as if flexed in pain, and others became soft and fibrous as if the wood were trying to turn itself into sponge.

  With Miss Milky in the trailer, I sat in the truck sipping on a pint of Lewis and Clark bourbon and looking out across our unplanted fields. It was late—almost too late—to plant anything. Mama, in the state she was in, hadn't even noticed.

  In the low hills on the north side of the property, some ugly looking things were growing. From the truck, they looked like white pimples on the smooth brown hill. Up close, they were big as melons. They were some kind of fungus, and they pushed up through the ground like the bald heads of fat babies. They gave off a rotten meat stink. I would get chillbumps just looking at them, and if I touched one, my stomach would rise. The bulbous heads had purple streaks on them that looked like blood vessels. I half expected to one day see human eyes clear the dirt and open. Big pale eyes that would see me and carry my image down to their deepest root. I was glad they seemed to prefer the hillside and bench and not the bottom land.

  Justified or not, I blamed the growth of this fungus on the poison spray, just as I blamed it for the death of my father, the loss of our animals, and the strangeness of my mother. Now the land itself was becoming strange. And I thought, what about me? How am I being rearranged by that weedkiller?

  I guess I should have gotten mad, but I didn't. Maybe I had been changed by the spray. Where once I had been a quick-to-take-offense hothead, I was now docile and thoughtful. I could sit on a stump and think for hours, enjoying the slow and complicated intertwinings of my own thoughts. Even though I felt sure the cause of all our troubles had fallen out of the sky, I would hold arguments with myself, as if there were always two sides to every question. If I said to myself, “Big Pete Parley has poisoned my family and farm and my father is dead because of it,” I would follow it up with, “But Daddy was old anyway, past seventy-five, and he always had high blood pressure. Anything could have set off his stroke, from a wasp bite to a sonic boom.”

  “And what about Mama?” I would ask. “Senile with grief,” came the quick answer. “Furthermore, Daddy himself used poison in his time. Cyanide traps for coyotes, DDT for mosquito larvae, arsenic for rats.”

  My mind was always doubling back on itself in this way, and it would often leave me standing motionless in a field for hours, paralyzed with indecision, sighing like a moonstruck girl of twelve. I imagined myself mistaken by passersby for a scarecrow.

  Sometimes I saw myself as a human weed, useless to other people in general and maybe harmful in some weedy way. The notion wasn't entirely unpleasant. Jack Hucklebone: a weed among the well-established money crops of life.

  On my way to town with Miss Milky, I crossed over the irrigation d
itch my father had fallen into with the stroke that killed him. I pulled over onto the shoulder and switched off the engine. It was a warm, insect-loud day in early June. A spray of grasshoppers clattered over the hood of the truck. June bugs ticked past the windows like little flying clocks. The thirteen-year locusts were back and raising a whirring hell. I was fifteen the last time they came, but I didn't remember them arriving in such numbers. I expected more helicopters to come flapping over with special sprays meant just for them, even though they would be around for only a few weeks and the damage they would do is not much more than measurable. But anything that looks like it might have an appetite for a money crop brings down the spraying choppers. I climbed out of the truck and looked up into the bright air. A lone jet, eastbound, too high to see or hear, left its neat chalk line across the top of the sky. The sky itself was like hot blue wax, north to south. A giant hammerhead sat on the west horizon as if it were a creamy oblong planet gone dangerously off-course.

  There's where Daddy died. Up the ditch about fifty yards from here. I found him, buckled, white as paper, half under water. His one good eye, his right (he'd lost the left one thirty years ago when a tractor tire blew up in his face as he was filling it), was above water and wide open, staring at his hand as if it could focus on the thing it gripped. He was holding on to a root. He had big hands, strong, with fingers like thick hardwood dowels, but now they were soft and puffy, like the hands of a giant baby. Water bugs raced against the current toward him. His body blocked the ditch and little eddies swirled around it. The water bugs skated into the eddies and, fighting to hold themselves still in the roiling current, touched his face. They held still long enough to satisfy their curiosity, then slid back into the circular flow as if bemused by the strangeness of dead human flesh.