by D. Foy
First thing I noticed was the monkey—dead—dangling from the mirror on a string of beads. It could’ve been a fetus of hair, this thing, with pebbles for eyes and corn for teeth. The man that had hung it sat motionless behind the wheel, clad in weathered denim. He had sunken cheeks and hollow eyes and a silver beard to boot. I scratched my ear—his eyes traced my hand. I drummed my fingers—his eyes traced my hand. Klaus Kinski came to mind, as Herzog’s Nosferatu, and grunions filled my head, beneath a heavy moon. We were alone.
“That little flake,” said the man as he nodded to the monkey, “is called José.” He sucked a tooth and gestured to a crucifix he himself must have painted red. “Ronald, though, he’s not so bad as Fortinbras or him.” Tattooed across the fingers of one hand was the word BEND, across the other, GIVE. A cigarette twitched in the webbing there. Empties fouled the dash.
“We hit a bear,” I said.
Why I did I couldn’t say. We’d had an accident. What difference how? Maybe I feared any less a case for invading the old man’s turf—and sure as shit I had such a feeling, like I’d missed some glaring portent of doom, I didn’t know—would send him on a rampage. Or maybe it was just his creepy gaze.
“Who’s that?” he said. Dinky was still in the mud.
“He’s sick.”
“I see, I see, so that’s who he is.”
“Listen, mister, we need a ride bad.”
“You need something bad,” said the man. In slow order he tapped the Christ, the monkey, and the yellow dog beside him. “What do you fellows think R-E this crisis?” I stood waiting while he sucked his teeth some more and spit. “Throw him in,” he said with a jerk of his thumb to the rear.
“He’s sick,” I said.
“You hear that, Fortinbras?” he said to the dog.
I found no change in the geeze’s tone, but Fortinbras dropped from the window and appeared in the bed behind him. A spate of dolls in varied dismemberment lay about the beast, some missing heads, others arms or legs. The man shot me a look part fishy, part fatherly, his eyes running off two ways at once.
“You going to lay one, boy, or get off the pot?”
I wanted to be naked, to lie naked beneath a tender sun. I wanted the smell of a clean bright day, and heat, tart and dry. I wanted a heat that lasted, endless sand, visions of dazzle and grain. Why wouldn’t his eyes release me?… Lanterns, vultures, many things in hell… I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever… Madmen know nothing…
I got Dinky in the cab. The man took my hand. It was smooth and hard and cold as outer space.
“The name is Super.”
“Andrew,” I said. “That’s Dinky.”
“Pleased to rub truth with you boys.”
“We could use a doctor now, I think.”
Super gripped his wheel. “You do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you’ve got. Catch our drift?”
Dinky drew himself up to look at this strange man. “We hate doctors,” he said.
“Then which way you going?” I said.
“The only way that’s good,” Super said, “and that’s the way we come.”
“That is good,” Dinky said with a smile. “Because we sure do hate a doctor.”
BIRDFEED AND BULLETS, THE WEEPING BARK OF A million pines…
A freezer’s scent of the clinic and the morgue…
The gleam of a roadside can…
The road wound on, the road kept winding, and sound was a cat’s rough tongue…
Super’s face was constant motion—that silver beard, those leathery cheeks, tiny eyes that flitted and bounced…
He ranted and sang and whispered and howled, and he did it all with ease…
We’d been forsaken, more or less, adrift with the phantoms that were the old man’s words, loosed, it seemed, with each wave of his troubling hand…
At some point he set in about the doings in our cabin, inexplicable, he said, slippery, he said, though never exactly what…
I saw the lovebird, its gaping beak and eyes, I smelled ice cream and road kill and blood…
That familiar longing had returned, for my noons of summer, counting minnows in a jar and naming each breeze. What had happened to those days?
A meerschaum appeared in Super’s hand and then from the glove a bag of gnarly weed, but Dinky went on drooling. Super crammed the stuff in the pipe and with a nail snicked the match he’d somehow managed to keep…
He chortled and smiled, puffed and drove, happy is as happy can…
I took the pipe, he the bottle…
The road was thick with water and mud and stones from the crumbling earth. At every pothole my friend yipped like a dog asleep till at last he jerked to with eyes that could’ve been eggs. When Super gave him the pipe, I thought he’d start coughing, but instead his face melted with the smoke from his lips.
“I was going to ask where we were,” he said, “but now I don’t even care. Onward, Benson!”
“We are no man’s slave,” Super said, and jerked his thumb aft, referring, I supposed, to the bed of broken dolls. “If you care to differ, interrogate the rest.”
“I’m an army man, mister whatever-your-name-is,” Dinky said.
“The name, boy, is Super.”
“The way I said, Super,” said Dinky, and drew himself up, “I’m an army man. And the only thing I’m good for is knowing what makes the grass grow green.” He pointed at Super. “You know what makes the grass grow green?” he said. “Bright red blood.”
“See what you know after you’ve been wearing that grass for a hat a few years.”
“He’s not always like this,” I said.
Super let out a noise, maybe a chuckle, maybe not. “Oh, but you know he is,” he said. “He’s the marathon man. Catch our drift?”
“I am man!” Dinky shouted. “Hear me roar!”
In the distance a light appeared, I hadn’t seen it off to the west as we came in—who lived out there? I thought, there’s a light out there attached to nothing, it looked, a lonesome bulb in the trees—but then soon enough, like everything else, the question fell away, and when I looked up, we had reached our cabin.
The man turned his body and head in tandem. His mouth was an earwig, his eyes gleaming coins. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“You don’t have to go,” Dinky said. “This is our place.” Super fixed his gaze on my pal and said no more. “But we’ve got booze,” Dinky said.
“We’re a free man, boys, and wish you alike.”
It must’ve been a good ten minutes we stood in the rain while Dinky worked to bring Super in, but the man evaded my friend until he had no choice but to turn away.
“There’s nothing you can take from me,” said Super when Dinky announced he’d take his leave, “but my life, but my life, but my life. Fortinbras!” he shouted at his dog. “It’s time to make the soldiers shoot!”
Fortinbras appeared in the cab with his nose out the window, and the truck sputtered on. The last thing I saw was a sticker on the bumper. I Have a Dream!
WE STOOD IN THE RAIN, WATCHING BASIL through the window, berserk with his cherished knife. The freak never left without it, plus some rope and his grandfather’s stupid hatchet, what, with the sack that held them, he called his man-bag. Every so often he’d mellow some, long enough to hypnotize whatever conjured fool had been dumb enough to block him. Then he spun off into the kicking, punching, and cutting he thought his moment of glory, the killing time. Well, the boob was dancing, and who could tell him otherwise?
Soundgarden was the band they’d picked to beat the ghosts. Hickory of course was what my eyes wanted, but they got Lucille—goddamn—snapping her fingers as she twirled. When finally Hickory did float up, Dinky fairly groaned. She was too lovely for her own good, it was true, and I was a fool in the rain.
“She’s so beautiful,” Dinky said.
“Lucy?” I said. “She’s all right.”
“Look at her,” Din
ky said. “She moves like… smoke.”
“I don’t know about you, but I am freezing.”
Dinky wiped his nose. It could’ve been rotten fruit. “Basil won’t be happy about his truck,” he said. “He won’t be happy at all.”
My pal didn’t look so hot. In fact my pal looked downright fucked. “Basil,” I said, “can gargle my nut sack. Let’s go call you a doctor.”
“Who do we think we are, always telling us what to do?”
“We think we’re the guy who’s smarter than the moron we’re taking care of.”
“Where’s our bottle?”
“Milk’s all gone, Dink,” I said. “Diapers, too, in case you’re wondering.”
My friend glared like I’d stuck him with a shiv. “Have you ever chased a pig with a spear, AJ, then realized there was no pig?”
“What?” I said.
“Exactly,” he said, and walked up the stairs.
SOMEONE HAD SET OUT THE CASE OF OLD CROW we’d brought, and the liter of Safeway coca-cola, all in a row with five new glasses. The rest lay spread across the table—CDs, lighters, bottle caps, shades, smoke packs empty and full, a half-munched bag of Chips Ahoy and a full one of Doritos, gum wrappers, peanut shells, matches, gum. Basil still had the knife, but now he had a bottle, too, stuck in his hole, what else. I thought he’d drain the thing for sure, but somehow he found the grace to pull up short and squirt an arc of whiskey through his teeth. Maybe fifteen bottles and cans lay about him, Lucky Lager, this round, with rebuses in their caps.
Hickory pointed at us the way children point at people who are fat. “They’re here,” she said.
Lucille ran outside, looking, I guessed, for the ice we’d never got.
“Some rabbits ran across the road,” I said, and listened to the phone hum like a seashell at my ear.
“Where’s my truck?” Basil said, moving in.
He did this sort of thing a lot, most recently to some pencil-necked kid at Radio Shack. At first the kid had given Basil hell for a mike cord he wanted to return. By the time we left, he’d freaked the kid so bad he had both his cord and a gift card worth ten bucks.
“We had an accident,” Dinky said.
“An accident,” Hickory said.
“This phone’s shit the bed,” I told them. “Is there another?”
Lucille, wet once again, had balled herself up in a chair by the hearth. Poor girl. The world wouldn’t reckon like she’d been told.
“You blockheads,” she said with tears in her eyes. “You’re all a pack of blockheads.” Dinky’s nose was crusty with blood and snot. Anyone else would’ve been horrified just to see him. But these people, they didn’t say a word. “All I wanted,” Lucille said, “was a bag of ice.”
Part of me had a craving to smack Lucille. Instead I knelt down before her. “Pretty often,” I said, “it’s hard to tell the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t.”
“I’m a sellout,” she said. “A crappy, lousy sellout.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Basil said. “I mean, you’re just doing what you got to do.”
“What would you know about it?”
“I work.”
“At staying drunk you do. At schmoozing you do.”
“Lucy,” I said.
“You’re wasting your time, AJ,” Basil said. “Nothing you can do when she gets like this.”
Lucille took up the National Enquirer at her feet and began to shred it. “How would you like to go around calling yourself, AJH vanden Heuvel, failed painter? AJH vanden Heuvel, CreditCom’s newest Junior Project Analyst?”
“No one said you can’t still do your thing,” I said.
“Oh, joy. Yes, I’ll give china-painting lessons Sunday afternoons. That’ll do it.”
I put a hand on her leg. “Have a beer,” I said.
“I know what I am,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t seem to help myself.”
“People only think they know what they are.”
“Yeah, well, I may not know all that, but what I think I know is that I’m a bitch.”
“You hear that?” Basil said. “Mark that shit down.”
“What I want to know,” Lucille said, “is how life ever got to be so lovely and sweet.”
The dead bird, its horrible stink, I couldn’t get away…
I looked over my shoulder, and what should I see but two eyes staring from this poster, a cowgirl circa ’75, with her fringed suede vest and denim blouse round the tits of the poster girl she was. She’d perked herself up against a pair of skis to smile toward the bedroom her smile let you know you’d soon be in… And now a shade’s old song gamboled through my head, a poem I’d written way, way back, the worst… a thousand wintry heaves ache beneath the sky… stop the whisper, recall the spring… when your shadow nears my blood, i sleep…
“He needs a doctor,” I said.
“Is he sick?” Lucille said.
“Is he sick.”
“Are you sick, Dinky?” said Hickory. She’d got down beside him now and was stroking his arm.
“Look at him,” I said. “I mean, Christ, you know?”
Basil drained a beer and flung the can. “Let’s everybody look at poor Dinky.” He wrinkled up his face and extended his hands like an impresario weary of his freak. “You’d think he’s miserable. But the thing is, he likes it when crap goes sour.”
“Are you actually putting effort into being such a dick?” Hickory said.
“All this attention he gets?” Basil said. “He’s as happy as white on rice.”
The tube meantime had been feeding us steady ruin—houses mired in water and mud; trees on roads; children clutching elders; stern-faced men, spent-faced men, some with slickers, others dusters, hauling sandbags and chattel; stranded vehicles and collapsing bridges; creatures mad with terror…
“AJ, baby,” Basil said. “Bosom buddy. Please. Where the hell’s my truck?”
“There was this rabbit,” I said. “A guy gave us a ride.”
“And who, pray tell, might that be?” Hickory said.
I told them about Super and his monkey. I told them about Fortinbras, and the little red Christ, and the truck of mangled dolls. Dinky stood up and shouted. He said how nervous we’d got when Super claimed to read our thoughts, how the geeze had ranted on about eagles and atomizers, the reversal of poles and the rest. Hickory asked if he was a shrink.
“He gave us drugs,” Dinky said.
That got them frisky, all right.
“I’ll tell you guys what,” Basil said. “Maybe—and I mean just maybe—if you two morons get me really fucking baked, I’ll forget you wrecked my truck.”
I hadn’t thought to query the old man whether he kept a stash for times he ran across dorks in the rain at night. That’s what I said.
“So what was his name, then?” said Lucille.
“This you’re not going to believe.”
“Like I didn’t already stop believing anything you say ten years back.”
“He said it was Stuyvesant Something Something. Yeah. But he told us to call him Super.”
Lucille said, “Next you’ll be telling us he put a gun to your head and banged you in the heiny.”
“Banged them in the ear, more like it,” Basil said. “Knocked what was left of their rocks clean out.”
Hickory said, “But wouldn’t it be a marvel if he and Dinky were blood?”
Basil was pacing. “What are we going to do about my truck?” He poked Dinky’s arm. “Cause in case you guys didn’t know, good old shit for brains here was right for once in his life. The weatherman says it’s going to flood like hell.”
“Limo Wreck” became “The Day I Tried to Live.” We gaped speechless at the phone till Hickory’s sigh confirmed the real.
“We’re stuck,” she said.
Basil took up his knife. For a long time he gave us his back, running a thumb down the blade, but then he spun round and flung the thing at a pile of wood.
&nb
sp; “You two morons are so lucky,” he said after his knife had clattered to the floor. “I should skin you both, right here and now.”
“You’re lucky Granddad isn’t here to skin you,” Dinky said. “Granddad wouldn’t like the way you’re treating his place.”
Lucille’s face looked suddenly very stupid, like some girl about to get killed in a flick. “Did you hear that?” she said. No one said a word. “It was a voice,” she said. “Like some horrible singing.”
“You might remember, kids,” Basil said, “there’s something out there called a storm?”
“Sometimes, squeeze,” Lucille said, “I think about what a bummer it is I’m not a man. I’d fuck you so hard you’d never—”
Subtle though it was, the sound repeated, just as Lucille had said, like some horrible singing. She went to the window—followed by me and Hickory and Basil with his hatchet—and moved from it to the next.
“Maybe it was a bear,” she said after we’d covered the place for nothing.
Again Basil turned on her. “That’s about as retarded as when you didn’t know what a belly button is.” This was true. At a lobster joint north of Ensenada, Lucille had downed a pitcher of booze and claimed belly buttons the stuff of shots at birth.
