Made to Break

by D. Foy

  I got a Christmas card from Jacquelyn and she said you weren’t seeing each other anymore. But that was two months ago. I’m sure things may have changed by now. I wrote Basil about him breaking up too and said we could be 3 bachelor amigos when we get back. But I’m sure your situations will have changed by then.

  Life here in Bosnia is usually boring but occasionally dangerous. The first American just died yesterday—the papers/news media are filled with speculation as to how. Military intelligence has informed us that he went out to take a shit (right off the road). He was squatting down and saw something in the ground. He took his Leatherman pocket pliers and poked at it. The medics found half his leatherman embedded in his brain! Lovely, huh?

  Yesterday I spent all night day burning shit. 9-1/2 hours to burn 1/2 barrel of shit and piss. It is a smelly, shitty detail but somebody has to do it. Ha ha. We pour diesel into the 1/2 barrel (which sits below the bench in the 3-seater latrine) and stir it up. Then we light it and stir it constantly. Sounds like fun, huh? I can’t wait for a job with a desk, buddy!

  Buddies forever,

  Stuyvesant

  It was all too horribly true…

  I had no money, I had no power, Lord of the Latrines I was, Prince of the Pubes, credentials alone to have got me elected President of the Cult of the Fool. How does such a man break out like wild dogs, much less like a parakeet? How does such a man give his ghosts the bodies they’ve lost, much less make them bleed?

  Next to the bath, the cabin had two upper rooms. Dinky was unchanged, mumbling his flow of applesauce and bile. I groped my way into the second room, fixed on purging myself and the girl in it of the germs that kept us low.

  Tweet, tweet, tweet, my darling, tweet, tweet, tweet!

  And the moments, dear, look how fast, look how lithe and fleet!

  MOST NIGHTS I LAY ON MY COT PICKING PETALS off imaginary daisies and conjure visions of those hours with Avey May Jones, of how as she melted to my words it struck me she’d grant my wish at last and give both body and words to me in return, if not forever then for what was left of that one sad night. All my life I’d dreamed of finding her. For all those days and all those years she’d been the knot of my dreams, my honeyed lump of winter mud, my mud song, simple, warm. I wanted to get stuck in her, all right. I wanted to stay that way forever…

  I told her what had happened the time I came home to find Roper and Lucille. I told her what had happened at the Trophy Room, too, when Dinky and Basil had opened their can of fucked-up worms and set high the bar of mutilation. Then I told her the story of my wicked worthless life, of everything I’d thought I knew myself to be, who I was and where I’d been, and where I’d wanted to go and be. Had I tried to present myself as anything more than pitifully pitiful, she’d probably have abandoned me on the spot. However foolish I’d been till then, I was smart enough in those few moments to know my limits. The only thing worse than denying you’re pitiful is to act it while you are.

  “Nothing I told you tonight was the truth,” she said. I’d just finished up my tale of squalor and abuse. “About myself, I mean. When we were playing Truth or Dare.”

  “Not even your name?”

  “Naming something is the fastest way I know to screw it up.”

  “I don’t think I believe that.”

  “Name a thing, you strangle it.”

  “You must’ve had a reason.”

  “I grew up in a dusty little town with a state mental hospital and a Boss Hogg-type cattle baron. My dad worked for the county fixing potholes and signs.”

  “Bet your mom dug that.”

  “Dead people don’t dig anything I’m aware of.”

  “Before that, I mean, if there was a before.”

  “I never knew one way or another how she felt about anything. And what I do remember isn’t much fun.”

  “I guess that’s the problem, huh? How much we need our memories, but hate ourselves for the needing and having both?”

  Hickory went to the bureau with Dinky’s family photos. When she turned back, I knew she was going to spin a yarn.

  “We lived at the outskirts of town. Out by the hills. There weren’t many houses there. Just a couple of adobe bungalows and a big metal barn they used for storing hay. Daddy did side work for the guy who owned it. He was an old guy with a bunch of cars Daddy fixed on weekends. Anyhow, one day when I was six or seven the school had a bomb threat. Somebody called up and said they were going to kill every kid in town, and they sent us home. I’d gone in through the back, by the garage, to scrounge around the kitchen for something to eat. But just as I was turning on the TV I heard voices from the back of the house. Most days Mom was never home, she had a part-time job some place, I don’t know what or where, so at first the voices scared me.

  “I snuck around the corner. You know how you get when you’re a kid and something breaks down your notions of the way things are? No one had ever been in the house during the day except for my mom. But this was a man’s voice. I didn’t know whose it was. I just knew it wasn’t Daddy’s. The man was laughing. Not loud. Soft, but different than Daddy’s kind of soft. The hallway was dark. Up and down the walls we had these family photos, all the usual thieves. Most were people I’d never met, old men and women with eyes like eyes in daguerreotypes. I’d seen them all so many times it’d got to where I didn’t notice them any more. But that day all I could do was stand beneath them, watching them watch me with those eyes.

  “I can’t remember how long I stood there while the man kept laughing. It never got louder or softer. Every once in a while the woman said something I couldn’t understand. It didn’t sound like my mom, though, though I knew it was her. I must’ve done something, maybe scraped the wall, because my dog Blinky-Doo started barking, and then he came trotting round the corner. That’s when the man stopped laughing. ‘Is someone here?’ he said, and my mom said, ‘Hello?’ but I didn’t answer.

  “Next thing I heard was a mumble of whispers and scratchy sounds. Blinky-Doo was licking my face. Then I looked up, and my mom was there with messy hair and her face all smeared, wearing an open robe. The man I’d remembered seeing before, at some store in town or just on the street. He had hair all over his belly and chest. His shirt was unbuttoned, and he had a mustache, that much I remember, too. I thought he was going to say something, but he just looked at me till after a while he left.

  “‘They made me come home early,’ I told my mom. ‘You little sneak,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t,’ I said. My mom’s eyes, I realized, were glued to my dress. It was hot and wet, and so was the carpet. ‘If you don’t tell your daddy what you saw today,’ she said, ‘I won’t tell him what you just did.’”

  “I hate people,” I said. “Sometimes I do.”

  “I never did tell him.”

  “If I ask you something,” I said, “will you tell me?”

  “Depends.”

  “What did they call you, your mom and dad?”

  “The name on my birth certificate says Avey May Jones. But the day I was born, when I was still in the hospital, the nurse who brought me out to Daddy said, She’s the sweetest little mud patty I’ve ever seen, and Daddy said, Hello, Mud. I’m your daddy. From then on out it’s been Mud.”

  “She said that? That’s like, I don’t know, like stuff from fairytales and film.”

  “Like stuff that happens in little towns with insane asylums and slaughterhouses.”

  “She really said that?”

  “I can only guess it’s because Daddy’s half-black. His mother was the only black woman in Ft Smith married to a white man. That’s how they came out here. Nobody could stand it, her practically being made into a whitey.”

  “My name is Mud,” I said. “I like that.”

  “You like it?”

  “Like is not the word.”

  We were on the bed. She was holding my hand, without fear or pretense, as if really and truly it was something she’d wanted as much as I. Her breath smelled like bourbon and ginge
r and peach and smoke, the soul of an antique dream. I could see the smallest hairs above her lip. A vein ran along her jaw, just below her ear, in her evening-colored skin, the faintest pulsing blue.

  “What?” I said.

  I know it couldn’t have really been that way, but that’s the way I imagined it, or thought I’d imagined it, because I thought I imagined she kissed me. Her breath smelled of mountains, then, and of butterfly dust, and of the feathers of quiet birds. The sound of her heart came up through her mouth, I could taste it, too, the sound of her heart, a morsel of chocolate, laughing. She took my face in her hands, she held my face as though at any moment it might explode. Her hair fell across my face, and she closed her eyes, and I felt it again, the first time since forever, brand-spanking-new. That goddamned girl—that’s what she did—she made it all feel so shiny and new.

  We didn’t know it then, or maybe we did, fuck it, but we were only using each other, hiding in each other the fates of our broken selves, all those years of hope and dread. Call-notes of dark sobbing, sang Rilke. And that’s what it was, that love, impossible to swallow…

  I ran my hands along her neck, her shoulders and smallish breasts. A tattoo circled her navel, a sun with rays of purple and black, and I made a circle over that. There was only the wind and rain…

  The clock on the stand said 4:32, Wednesday, December 31st, New Year’s Eve: the beginning of an end, the end of a beginning, more than ninety hours since any of us had known a wink of sleep.

  Avey and I were silent with our new misunderstanding, which was all we could ever have been…

  The smell of us was strong in that mountain air, my breath on her neck, dying…

  My having made this girl had only put us further apart. A pinhead of black had crept into my bowels, but then the sandman came, and I was taken with a sigh…

  THE SUN HAD RISEN BY THE TIME THAT TREE slammed through the cabin, but neither Avey nor I had heard it. I thought of disbelieving Basil’s claim to’ve slept through those tornadoes in Kansas, after the funeral of a chain-smoking cousin.

  “Everybody was in the same room,” he said. “Six or seven of my great uncles and aunts and fifty thousand cousins.”

  “Baloney,” I said.

  “Try staying up for five days of drinking and snorting,” he said, “before topping it off with a funeral. See how fast you come to.”

  We were hanging at the Mallard, waiting to play pool. Down the bar Dinky and some other boobs were deep in a game of liar’s dice. Basil took an ice cube and bopped it off our friend’s titanic head.

  “Hey, O’Connor,” Dinky shouted to the bartender.

  “Now what?” O’Connor said, cramming his brush into a glass.

  “We thought we’d agreed to 86 that blowhard next time he started up with his shenanigans.”

  Basil leaned over the bar to better yell at Dinky. “Just making sure that sack of concrete you call a head was still hard enough for me to knock around at pool, Dink. Serious,” he said, back at me. “I was eight sheets to the wind.”

  “But that didn’t keep you from making a good show for the familia, I’ll bet.”

  “Three tornadoes in a row—blam, blam, blam—one right after the next.”

  “So how is it then you’re still around to tell the tale?”

  “Hit every house but ours, cross my heart. Motherfucking Godzilla could’ve smashed through the walls, having it out with Mothra, and I wouldn’t’ve heard dick.”

  It wasn’t until an incoherent rant had broken through my dreams, like a siren in the distance, that I suspected something wrong. Avey nuzzled into me, the smell of her restful, kind, and mumbled that Lucille ought to shut it. The world was suspended in haze—the rose-patterned linen, the vase on the floor, the print of a goat on a craggy spire, gazing toward a stretch of valleys and arêtes. I wanted to stay in that haze, for a while at least, and in the shelter of Avey’s hair, but the storm raged about us, and the voice went on.

  “Get down here, you guys,” Lucille was shouting. “Hurry!”

  Avey shuffled along beside me, drowsy at the rail. Then we saw the carnage, and snapped sober in a beat. Half the front of the cabin had collapsed into the living room, crushed by a giant pine.

  Lucille looked as we’d left her, a drink in this hand, a smoke in that.

  “Murphy’s Law,” Avey said.

  “What?” Lucille said.

  “Whatever can go wrong,” I said, “will.”

  The tree hadn’t crushed the living room alone, but most of the deck, besides. Good thing for us old Granddad Wainwright had had the wits to hire craftsmen, not the jerks you see today, wobbling round some rafter fifty-feet up, guzzling a frosty as they slice off their ruined hands. None of that, though, meant we could stay.

  “I guess they haven’t made it back,” I said.

  “I only wanted to have a good time before my life was over,” Lucille said, crying. “Nothing big or fancy, you know?”

  “Put on your jacket.”

  “What?” she said.

  Avey made her way to a pile of clothes near the hearth and picked out Lucille’s jacket.

  “Come here,” I said.

  “What?” Lucille said, rooted to the spot with her washed-out face. I stepped through the wreckage and hugged her as she cried like you do when you don’t know who you are.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. Can’t we just, I don’t know… go?”

  “Let’s get your jacket on,” I said. “We’ll get your jacket on and fix a little something up for your belly.”

  “Promise me you’ll get us out of here.”

  “Put your jacket on.”

  “Promise me, AJ.”

  “If Basil and Super get here soon,” Avey said, “we stand a chance of hitting Berkeley in time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

  “Did either of you happen to bring an umbrella?” I said.

  “By the door,” Lucille said.

  “I’m going out.”

  “Maybe we should check on Dink,” Lucille said.

  “Let him sleep,” I said. “You two head upstairs and kick it till I’m back.”

  North and south the road lay slick with mud, worse in the light of day than I’d imagined it last night. With Lucille’s absurd umbrella, semé with smiley faces—yellow, naturally—I went the way of Basil and that freak of a man, hoping round the bend to meet some crew, but found just more desolation. Long minutes passed before a figure appeared at the end of the road, who, it didn’t matter: I wanted news from the world, that was all. But the harder I looked, the greater it seemed the figure to be more beast than man, Sasquatch meets the Scarecrow. It was only after I’d decided to take cover that a man called out, and I knew that it was Basil.

  “Where’s Super?” I said.

  My pal sat down with dangling arms, his feet, both bare, a mass of sores. “That old fucking fuck,” he said. “He tried to take a razor to my ass.”

  Basil unhurt that I could see left me unsure what to say. “So then you never made it to his wheels.”

  “I said I needed to rest. But you know what he does? He starts in with one of those psycho rants. When I told him to cut the crap, dude came up with a razor. And that dog of his. Turned into frigging Cujo.”

  “He was helping us. He needed your help with the truck.”

  Basil picked a twig from his foot. He was virtually in tears. “A hundred times I tried to tell you.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure, AJ,” he said, “I’m fine. In just a second here I’m going to jump up and sing in all this rain.”

  “You must’ve really pissed him off.”

  “Attacked him with a hatchet’s all.”

  “Dude, he took you down and laughed. The man’s a vet for Christ sake.”

  “He’s a psychopath is what he is, AJ.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go ahead then, tit. Believe what you want. All I know is he and his beast came at me like gangbusters.”
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  “And then he let you skate.”

  “The old caveman combo.”

  “Let’s just hope he comes back.”

  “He does, it won’t be to bring us flowers.”

  “He liked us, Baze. He did me and Dinky, at least.”

  “Goddamn it. Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it.”

  “Think you can make it to the cabin?”

  “I am so very fucking done, AJ, you don’t even know.”

  I got Basil to his feet and his arm round my neck. “I forgot to tell you.”

  “Don’t even mess with me, okay?”

  “A tree kind of smashed up the cabin.”

  “Goddamn it. Godfuckingdamn it.”

  We limped up the road. Minutes passed before we spoke.

  “You’re a good guy,” Basil said.

  “I try.”

  Before the spectacle of the cabin, Basil’s face went rubbery and helpless and gleeful and sour, none of it for long. A face of horror took him, then, and then again he began to weep.

  “You guys polish off the hooch?” he managed to say.

  “We got some hooch, I think.”

  “Because I want them to find us like a jar full of top drawer fucking pickles.”

  “The old man’s coming back, you know. He said he was coming back.”

  My friend was shaking now, too, nearly uncontrollably, his feet might’ve been stuffed through an old-school grinder. He gazed up at the cabin and shook his head.

  “Looks like Godzilla came through here,” he said.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Him and Mothra both.”

  IT OCCURRED TO ME AS WE MOUNTED THE STAIRS that Dinky wouldn’t have to engineer a story for his grandfather about the window Basil smashed. The birdcage was there, caging a bird that was dead. I scooped the cage up with Lucille’s umbrella and tossed them in the mud.

  Inside, with no lights or music to make a cheery fiction, everything was cloaked in grey—dripping water, trembling prints, shadows and slime and shit.

  “So now the power’s cut, too, I take it,” Basil said.

  “Yup.”

  “Where is everybody?”