by Paul Flower
“Good,” the cop said. “Stick around town, okay?”
****
On the drive home, his emotions ran from sad to worried to sorry to angry. When he stepped through the front door of the house, Lavern’s cat, Brad, darted across the floor. Elvis kicked wildly at the stupid animal, narrowly missing him.
He pried off his work shoes without unlacing them and threw them to the left of the door, stormed into the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator, unscrewed the cap, opened the door under the sink, tossed the cap toward the paper bag wastebasket and heard it miss, then closed the door with his foot. He downed the beer in one, long, hungry guzzle and left the empty on the counter.
As Lavern opened the front door, Elvis went into the bathroom and slammed the door. He turned on the water at the sink—just the hot, no cold at all. He let it get good and hot, so hot it hurt just to think about it, then pulled up on the stopper lever. The water began to fill the basin, steam rising from it in a soft cloud that looked scary and comforting at the same time.
Elvis tore off his blue jean shirt; buttons popped and clattered around the room. He stood, skinny arms crossed, staring down at the water, tapping his foot impatiently, waiting. When the sink was full, he cranked off the water, the faucet squeaking in protest, sucked in his breath and pushed his face down into the steaming water. His skin was suddenly bathed in fire. He pushed until his skinny hook of a nose pressed against the chrome drain cover in the bottom of the sink. He stayed there, his eyes clamped shut, for ten seconds, then fifteen. The time clicked through his brain.
Twenty seconds.
Twenty-five.
Face still scrunched against the porcelain and chrome, Elvis stretched one long, stringy arm over his head and snared his Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt; it was hanging from a plastic Abraham Lincoln bust that sat on a plywood shelf he’d made for it. He surfaced with a groan of pain. Flinging a shower of the hot water around the room, he pressed his face into the t-shirt, keeping his eyes shut. His lungs spasmed for air, but Elvis bit down on the shirt and swallowed a scream.
Lavern’s fist beat in a mad rythmn through the hollow core door. “You okay in there?”
Elvis almost laughed. Okay? No way, baby. He could hear music from Lavern’s iPod—she’d hooked it up to the speaker system he’d bought her last Valentine’s Day. The hard-driving song thumped through the door. It was “Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth. The song always reminded Elvis of high school, of the time he and Donnel had driven around half the night looking for Skinky Thomas after Skinky had peed on the tire of Donnel’s car. They’d wanted to find Skinky so they could pee on his car’s tire, but they’d ended up just having to go to Donnel’s house and pee there instead. They’d drunk some beers during the driving around, storing up the pee, listening to WLS AM-89 while they were doing it.
“What’d you do, fall in?” Lavern said.
Elvis dropped the t-shirt, lowered his head and let the shame wash over him. He should say something to her. He should have called Donnel; he could have tried to be confrontational with him. What had he done? At work? What was that? Sheeze, he was gutless and stupid. The loser in him always seemed to come out when things got tough. What had happened at work, well, that was a loser’s mess. Wasn’t his fault but it was his fault. All of this was.
“Hey. I’m needing you out here.” Lavern’s slippered foot thudded against the door.
His mom’s face floated through his brain and he felt a dull throbbing in his forehead. Elvis squinted. He’d been dreaming about Mom a lot lately, even though he couldn’t remember much about the dreams.
“Relax, man,” he whispered, but his head pounded; his heart was racing. He closed his eyes and could see his mother wagging her finger at him. Tears welled. Calm down, he told himself. Get a grip, you stupid moron.
Elvis let his gaze wander up to Abraham Lincoln. He’d gotten the white plastic bust from a machine at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Lincoln was staring dumbly at the opposite wall of the cramped bathroom. An ugly black hole interrupted Abe’s forehead, an exit wound that aligned with the entrance wound in the back of Abe’s head. Both holes had been melted into the plastic one night when Elvis had a group of guys over to play cards. One of the guys had probably done it. Elvis always figured it was Jubal Brown, he being a white supremacist like Jerry. Jubal had come with someone else that night. Elvis wanted to ask him to leave, to tell him he wasn’t welcome here, but he hadn’t known how to say it. Besides, Donnel had been out of town that night. Everyone at the house had been white, so it seemed easier to not rock the boat. There was a whole group of jerks like Jubal in town, and Elvis steered clear of them, but that night, well, he’d put up with the guy to keep the peace. Abe had paid the price.
In the living room, Lavern was talking to her pet cockatiel, Sherman. Lavern and her pets. Good Lord.
Elvis lowered his eyes from Abe and looked at the mirror. He raised both hands and ran his fingers through his wet hair, making trenches. His face was pink from the water.
“You definitely got a screw loose after what happened today. That woman of yours, she isn’t your only problem now, is she?” Elvis said to his reflection, his voice coming out strangled. “You’re losing your woman, and now you got no job. A man’s dead, too. Why’s he dead? My god, how messed up is that?” He shook his head.
He liked talking to his image in the mirror, acting like the guy was someone else. Kids had imaginary friends, why couldn’t he? It wasn’t like he was a nut case or something; it just helped to talk to someone. It calmed him a little to do that right now.
Elvis bent over to pick up the t-shirt and stood slowly, wiping off his arms then rubbing the shirt hard across his stomach and up onto his chest and shoulders. He shook his head, spraying a fresh shower of droplets around the room; Abe got a random shot across the face. Elvis tossed the t-shirt back on the Great Emancipator’s plastic head and grabbed one of Lavern’s brushes—the pink one with the handle shaped like a poodle—that hung from a crooked row of galvanized screws he’d bored into the wall next to the mirror. Without looking at the mirror again—he really couldn’t face himself, not right now—he brushed his hair straight back from his forehead and used one of the poodle’s paws to carve a part down the right side. His hand shook a little.
“Relax, relax, relax, relax, relax,” he muttered softly. He had a feeling he couldn’t relax, not even if someone came along with a gallon jug of whiskey and shot the whiskey and a sedative directly into his brain. For some stupid reason, he thought about the day they’d put Mom in the nursing home. The doctor had called and talked to Lavern. Lavern’d told Elvis, “Your mom’s going in a home, doctor’s orders.” He’d had a sore big toe that day after dropping a box of wire on it at work, so he’d answered, “Fine, we got any Epsom salts?”
He hung the poodle brush back on its screw and caught a flash of himself in the mirror. Elvis stopped and stared at his hair. It was stiff, molded and parted down one side like Ken-doll hair or Abraham-Lincoln-plastic-bust hair. It looked stupid—stupid. He hit the mirror with his right fist, connecting with the fist of his image. The contact sent a jolt of pain up his arm; he’d hit the old scar that ran across the back of his hand. Any time he’d hit that one spot it would jolt him good. The pain felt fine today, he thought as he stared at the mirror. It felt just fine. It was perfect. The pain was. It was just what he needed.
His eyes followed the silvery web spreading outward from where the fists met. Above him, Abraham Lincoln tottered on his plywood shelf.
“Hey, you making a career out of this?” Lavern yelled.
Career? Elvis smiled and thought, oh, Lavern, I don’t have a career, not anymore. Don’t have a boss either. I lost both of them today and I’m losing you. Elvis choked and tears burned his nose.
He flung open the bathroom door. The knob hit the wall. Abe trembled again then settled back into place with the t-shi
rt slung over his head.
Elvis took two determined steps into the living room and stopped. Lavern was settling into a cross-legged position on the floor in front of the couch. Behind her, the thick red drapes she loved (“classy,” she called them) covered the picture window. To her left, next to the couch, was the cockatiel’s cage. Lavern was wearing her usual sweat shirt—this one was a Mickey Mouse one—and stretch pants; her baby face was clenched in an attitude. Her brown eyes glared out from under her dyed-red hair and her tiny, red-lipsticked mouth was set in a hard cold line.
She looked like a frumpy, cotton-clothed, flesh-and-stone Buddha; her plump hands were out in front of her like she was meditating or pretending she was in “The Walking Dead. ” An overturned bottle of red fingernail polish oozed on the orange shag carpet next to her right thigh.
“Baby, what’d you do to your hand?” she said.
“Nothing. What you doing to the floor?”
“Nothing. Don’t go dripping blood on the cat.”
Obediently, Elvis stuck his cut hand out in front of him and cupped the other one under it. Brad the cat skittered under a tattered recliner.
“There a reason you were in there half a year?”
“In there?” He said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Ah, I don’t know. Just taking my time, I guess.”
“Right. You had nothing to do in there for twenty nothing minutes.”
“Like you got room to be criticizing me.”
“What you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean.”
No reaction; Lavern just stared off. Something was on her mind. Probably lovin’ his favorite best old ex-friend. That. That was on her mind. For sure, that was.
The house was gloomy, candle-lit. Lavern liked it that way. She said it looked elegant. Elvis wondered what the heck elegant was. He cut an arc around her, around the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, trying not to trip or drip or bang into anything.
“I heard the news, by the by,” Lavern said.
Elvis’ chest tightened.
“I said, ‘I heard the news.’”
“You what?”
“I HEARD THE NEWS. You deaf now or something?”
“You heard.”
“Yeah.”
“You heard what? What news? What do you mean?”
“You know, the big news. The news news. What everyone’s talking about.”
Elvis gulped. “Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who told you?”
“Wanda, down at the store.”
“Wanda?” Elvis looked out the small, dirty window over the kitchen sink. Their neighbor, a Mexican guy, was duct taping clear plastic to the bashed-out rear window on his old blue Ford. “What exactly was it that Wanda told you?”
“The whole story—everything, start to finish.”
Elvis felt the headache pounding in the chamber behind his forehead. He tried to speak but his mouth was sealed by the ache.
“You know what? The way I see it, that man’s lucky nobody tried to kill him before,” she said.
Elvis shoved his hands under the drippy faucet. He uncupped his good hand, flexed it, and stared at the drops of blood that had puddled in the palm. He thought about how your veins are blue and so was the blood in them, and he wondered how anybody knew it was blue, since it turned red when it hit the air. He wondered if doctors maybe had a way to quick-see blue blood just a second, maybe a heartbeat, before the air and light hit it and turned it red. He’d tried it once, tried seeing it blue. He and Donnel had gone into a dark closet with a flashlight and he’d pricked his finger with a pin. Elvis could still see the shaking white-pink tip of his finger on the edge of pale-yellow flashlight light, a tiny blob of disappointingly bright red blood dancing on the tip of it.
Now, the hand was shaking again. “What, um, do you mean by that—by the man being lucky? You mean like he had it coming?”
“What I mean is, yeah, some people got it coming,” she said. “Like ‘member that Ardie, Arten, you know, Arden what’s-his-name back in high school? He was always doing stuff, like pouring sugar in gas tanks and eggin’ houses and all that. He ended up getting his arm broke by the Simko brothers—‘member that? They caught him screwing around with the blinker signals on that old Thunderbird they had. People like that, they screw people and they screw people, then BWINKO. Arden had it coming to him. Same thing here, this couldn’t have happened to a better guy.” She finished with a sigh.
“You think so?” A fly squirmed, buzzing, against the window. Elvis choked on spit. He pictured his mom, her face smiling in the window pane. Then he saw the faceless man squirming in pain on the floor.
“Yeah, I always hated that Jubal Brown, and Wanda tells me the whole stinking town is glad.”
“Jubal? Jubal Brown?”
He turned and glanced back at Lavern. She was smiling. “Doesn’t sound like you heard,” she said.
“No. No I didn’t.”
“Two black guys caught him spray painting stuff on their car over behind the laundromat this morning. They beat the shinola out of him.”
Elvis turned back to the sink with a rush of confusion and relief. His headache ebbed. “Jubal?” he managed to squirt the name out. “He okay?”
“Pretty busted up, Wanda says. Why do you care? You his mommy all a sudden?”
“Well, no, no,” he said. “I, you know, just wondered.”
“He’s going to live I guess.”
“Good. Good.”
“Know what I think?” Lavern asked with a groan.
Without turning around, Elvis knew she was getting up. She always groaned when she stood. It had something to do with her pelvis; the same condition that had kept them from having kids made her groan like that.
“No. What do you think?”
“I think it’s cool that Jubal’s going to live. Now, he’ll have this thing on his mind all his life. Maybe he’ll learn something from it, turn himself around. People do that, you know. They have something bad happen to them, one way or the other, they never shake it. It either turns them all good or bad and mean.”
In his head, Elvis’ mom was now shaking her bony finger at him and yelling, “You going to remember this for the rest of your life...” She’d always said that when she hit him for saying his bad thoughts. He shivered and looked back to the sink, cranked on the water to a trickle. It dripped onto the meaty part of his good hand, up near the thumb. The water hesitated before sliding downhill to mix with the blood. Elvis wondered if he could just freeze there like that. He wondered what would happen if he never moved again. Nobody move, he thought, everyone just stop doing, then nobody gets hurt.
“Anything like that ever happen to you?” Lavern’s voice was right behind him all of a sudden but Elvis didn’t turn. “Ever have something bad happen that stayed with you like that?”
Her question irritated him for some reason he couldn’t explain. He focused on a mental picture of Jubal Brown with the shinola kicked out of him. He tried to smile at the image, but the smile was stuck behind his face somewhere.
Lavern sighed. He heard her arms flop at her sides. “I needed to get in here, you know,” she said, now from the bathroom. “Stupid nail polish spilled. I needed remover to clean it up. Now I got a mess on my hands. What did you do to the mirror?”
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“What is wrong with you? We don’t have money to fix broken stuff,” Lavern said, her voice loud and back in the room behind him. “Is that how you cut your hand? What is wrong with you?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said to his hand.
“No you won’t. I always have to do it. You never fix a thing.”
Elvis didn’t speak. She was right.
She sighed loudly again, then groaned as she squatted. She started scr
ubbing the floor. “I don’t know what’s in your head sometimes. Busting mirrors. And you got water in the sink—just left it there.”
“Hot water,” he said coldly, looking out the window. The Mexican guy was still standing next to the car, a wad of the duct tape stuck to his hand. He looked mad. He was trying to fling the stuff off.
Elvis closed his eyes and tried to work up the courage to talk to her about Donnel, the faceless man and his job. He pictured Lavern getting into Donnel’s truck in the rain and the faceless man dying. He saw Jerry smirking at him and Jerry’s face becoming Lavern’s. He opened his eyes and spoke slowly to the window. “I filled the sink with real hot water,” he said with a sigh, “and stuck my head in it. I think I wanted to hurt myself somehow.”
The Mexican guy had one wad of the tape stuck to the leg of his jeans. He was working on another, this one stuck to his fingers; it was all twisted up and useless. He looked really mad now. It was getting dark. Soon the guy wouldn’t be able to see the duct tape or the bashed out window.
The phone rang. Elvis tore a paper towel from the roll that hung from the yellow plastic holder next to the sink. He pressed the towel to the back of his hand, pulled the towel away and looked. It wasn’t much damage, just a small bloody gash out of the ragged ribbon of scar across the back of his hand. The phone rang again. He pressed the towel against the wound and walked back into the living room. Lavern was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Brad the cat poked a gray paw, tentatively, out from under the recliner, testing the waters. The phone rang again. Brad’s paw disappeared. Sherman the cockatiel stretched, fluttered and made the sound he always made when something bad was happening in the house.
Someone pounded on the door. The phone rang again. Lavern wasn’t helping. She was scrubbing. Pound. Pound. Pound. The person at the door wasn’t giving up.
“Just a minute,” Elvis yelled. “Hold your pants on.” He grabbed the phone from the table next to the couch as the front door swung open.
“Hooty hooty hoo, man. Hooty hooty hoo.” Donnel strode into the house, past Elvis, pumping his fat fist in the air, making for the refrigerator.
