by D. Foy
“Last I checked the girls were upstairs in bed.”
“I just want to go home.”
“We need a plan.”
“But we can’t go home. Because we are fucking stuck.”
“I say we take what we can carry and go.”
“Like a pack of tittysucking rats.”
“I’m serious, dude.”
“Denial ain’t a river in Egypt, Jackson.” He looked at me now with gravity I’d never seen. For the first time in his life he was trying to be real. “You smell me, or what?”
I sat on the bench and lit a smoke and handed it to Basil, then lit one for myself.
“I wish to God I couldn’t,” I said.
“And I wish to God you could understand me for once. You know that?”
“No, I don’t. I’ve got no idea what you mean.”
“Of course you don’t. You never do, and never have. You’ve never understood a thing about me.”
“We get ourselves out of here in one piece,” I said, and grinned, “I promise we can go to counseling. How’s that sound?”
“I love you, too,” Basil said. “So, so much.”
Lucky for us he’d remembered to bring his suitcase in before Dinky and I wrecked his Cruiser. We stripped our clothes and argued over who’d wear what. Basil pointed at my shriveled up dong and asked how I’d gotten a shroom to grow in my crotch. I called him a rich boy. I called him a monkey-fucking banana dick. Then I put on one of his dress shirts, with the French cuffs and polka dots, and a red velvet vest over that, and lo and behold, I looked like a numbskull in the hand-me-downs of his brother the mime. Basil went to see about the girls.
In its way the earth had gone quiet, the solemn trees, the heaving sky. Veils of rain continued to fall, the lake was hidden, there was only mud, only trees and sky. But soon a woman cried out, and soon another began to scream, Lucille louder than Avey at first, though presently they were wailing as one, cries with pain enough to rend the hardest man, ah, exactly what we needed. Hardly had I thought to investigate than Basil stood beside me again, his face as long and blue as ever a face could be.
He lifted me off the ground and squeezed till I lost my breath. I could feel him shaking, his whole body in tremors, ambushed by a life of hurt. It was only some years later, or so it seemed, that he gave in, his voice a boom in my ear, nothing comprehensible. Shaking and sobbing, he just held me tight.
“He’s dead, AJ. I went in to see him… He was just dead.”
Basil said that, and his face dropped away like a coin off a cliff. I fell dizzy with pictures of catheters and cotton and chromium rails, and screens above flowers and sirens, too, host after host, and widowers and widows, the injustice of their eyes, and needles, and hoses, and smocks, and tubes…
A hand lay on my brow, cool as a spring, I could smell Avey’s breath and hair. We lay on the bed we’d slept in, a cheap coverlet scratching at my jaw. An old chiffonier stood across the room with its small brass tub of imitation flowers. Next to it was a smattering of novels from the World’s Best Reading and a painting of Jesus in a dime store frame. Lucille was perched on a cedar chest, her arms around her knees. Basil sat beside me, with a smoke.
“Are you okay?” Avey ran her fingers through my hair, they were light and soft.
“Where is he?”
“Sssshhhh.”
I looked into her eyes. I nuzzled in her hair. “I’m okay. I’m fine.”
Basil went to Lucille, he held Lucille’s hand. They were silent.
“Where is he?”
“In there,” Lucille said.
For a moment the room seemed crooked, everything floaty with mist. Then it cleared, and I was on my feet, steady as could be by Avey, her hand on my leg.
There was a door.
I went in. By the bed I got down. I got down on my knees. But I did not look. Not at him, his face. I couldn’t. For a long time I sat that way…
His face. Not his face…
No can. Maybe never, maybe not never, not knowing when, maybe never…
Laid there, he, it, he, a cold stiff thing, stretched out like a dummy, CPR, a hand, not like his face had been, not jaundiced, not sweaty and pained, hands of a workman never done work, no not. And fingers, thick, blunt at the tips, where thick hard nails were growing still, no, not growing, not life, never again, not, no, no pulseless mush but veins, and blue cording, and thickish veins, ah, heavy, ah, like ugly crappy wire. Little blond hairs not vanished, no not, no not, and thousands of hole-dots, and lines connect dots, not color in, no not, no not, no not, design, no design, no not, never, nothing, no, where wrinkles there, and cold, so cold, hand in hand, so cold, so cold, no not, not, not, not think meat, not think friend, not friend, not think, no not, no nothing there, nothing, no, not, no, no, no, no, not, no not, no not not, not, not. And you will look, now, yes, you will look. At him. At not him, at not it but him, but Dinky, look at him, no, look at him, yes, you, now, yes, because, because, because. And there, yes, and there now, and there. And it’s okay, you are there, you are fine, it’s okay, it is okay, everything’s okay, it is…
Peaceful is not the word. Dinky’s face was not peaceful. That, I thought, was the big untruth, this business of peace suffusing the dead. But though it looked nothing at all like peace, my friend’s lifeless face, neither did it look sad, nor helpless, nor anguished, nor anything of the sort. Content, perhaps. Or perhaps nothing is more like it. More like it, yes, Dinky had a face of nothing, a face no longer burdened, with worry, with fear, with anything to speak of, desire, anger, rage—that was all.
I wiped my mouth. I wiped my eyes. My fingers shook, and my hand. But then I made that hand touch him, his face, his mouth, his eyes, everything he’d been, my damp hand on his dead face, which wasn’t cold but cool. And that was all. It rested there, I let it, my hand on his brow, and then I began to sob, and everything left me, all my thoughts and all my words swallowed up by that good cry. You son of a bitch, you, you beautiful mother fucker, you, who couldn’t stand another day. I pulled the sheet to his chin and made it straight. I shouldn’t thank you, I thought, but I can’t help it. Thank you, Dinky, thank you, Stuyvesant Wainwright, IV. And then I pulled the sheet over his face and smoothed it again, and then I said, Thank you, again, I said, thank you… Yes, I said, thanks, I said, you old bastard, thanks.
THE WAY WE LOVE THE DEAD’S GOT NOTHING TO do with how we love the living.
I’d be hauling down some road with a mackerel sky against the dawn, watching crows in the fields or egrets in rice, and like fear it would hit me I couldn’t go home expecting his voice on the line whenever I called, rambling about the game he’d just bought or the stripper he’d had that photo-op with, with the massive tits she let him squash his face into while the cameras ticked and flashed. Or before that, before I’d moved to these podunk lands, when I was still a sofa-surfer, tripping place-to-place with my bag of books, I’d be hanging at the Strada or Milano, watching the students and the freaks, the little rich daddy’s girls, the hard-nosed punks shouting for coin enough to make them puke, the date-rape jug heads and beret-wearing doofs with their euro smokes and foreign mags, and it would hit me, uncanny as hell, the friend I thought I’d known like the day, different every time, saying or doing what I couldn’t recall him saying or doing while he was yet alive.
The only thing sure I could say about Dinky was he’d taken off for that whorehouse in the sky—that and how every time I thought of him, I was loving him. But the Dinky of my eulogies had no part in the Dinky I had known. The Dinky of my eulogies was the Dinky of my grief, the Dinky of my heart gone soft. He was never the kid I’d witnessed barfing off a terrace, the kid with a bag of speed grumbling about the law, who cringed at the thought of his father, wanting nothing more than to satisfy the man, at whatever cost to his own small needs. The sob stories he used to spew had lapsed into murk the moment he had himself. And even if he did resemble that, it wasn’t his fault. Always he floated before me as the angel done wrong. He’d lost his way
among the dangers of this shithole world, then found himself in a haunted house. The cards had turned up cold. The cookie had crumbled on another guy’s plate, the milk was forever spilling. The only way he could get what mattered most—a simple embrace, just acceptance, just love—was to die. Well, now he’d got his wish. I can’t speak for his family, but I can for us buddies: Dinky died, and we were sorry, and we loved the son of a bitch now like we never had while he was here to take it.
From time to time I’d think on this, late at night, in the grip of my insomnia. The cicadas would whir. The great horned owls, six syllables to the hoot, would softly, repeatedly call. In the heat of a furnace-like noon, dreaming at the wheel, I’d think about it then, as well, and I’d hate us all in our cock-eyed ways.
Maybe it’s wrong to love the dead. Maybe that kind of love is nothing but the product of our selfish wants, unguent of grief, salve of messy guilt. But what are the options? Should I have committed myself to a life with the monks for not doing right by my friend? Flopped myself down on an old prie-dieu and waited for the Word? It’s not as though I’d intended this, this morbid, useless love. It’s not as though I’d needed Dinky dead before I could give him his deserts. Now and again, though, when the trick’s all said and done, you find yourself left with nothing to say but That’s the way it is. You can talk a lot of dirt in this world, everyone knows, but you can never say the way we love the dead’s got thing one to do with how we love the living.
THE LITTLE GNOME WAS GLEAMING ITS HORRIBLE joy when I stepped into the hall. I kicked its face and watched it blow down the stairs in a dust of plaster and paint…
Some human outside was whistling, “Blue Moon,” the reason far beyond. But out on the deck I understood: Super had returned with Fortinbras the dog. And yet something wasn’t right. Super, Fortinbras, Fortinbras, Super: nothing but a weird old man like rags on a stick—him and his henchman, and through the trees the mist on the lake.
“You got the truck?” I said.
Super had seen our disaster—he must have—and yet he was smiling. Here was a man who’d part for confusion every time. Here was a man who loved what was toppled, broken, spinning, and cracked, the man with the hands of ink and bone, the man with the monkey, the impervious match. O give me a plain where the wild things grow, give me a spread of broken dolls, O give me a national anthem.
“It’s as clear to us as a mountain spring that you smell this business with a dead man’s nose.”
“You think that’s cute?” I said.
“All right, all right, soothe yourself, now. Our wheels we do have.”
“That’s good, Super, cause Stuyvesant is dead.”
For the briefest of instants the old man assumed a pose so brittle it seemed impossible to contain. He might’ve been seized by some grotesque rash of meaning, a thing with talons and fangs, whose sole purpose was to hurl us through the void. He pulled out a watch and wound it so long I thought surely it would break. But then he stopped and looked into my eyes and let fall the watch to crush with his heel.
“Come on in,” I said. “As a favor to Dinky.”
The mannequin lay in a twist of stuff and tree. Bits of glass dully spangled, spears of wood harshly jutted, the mobile clinked, the curtains flapped, the cabin creaked and groaned. The rain had ceased for a time. Beads of grey plopped and plopped, from a dangling wire, a frond of fir, that stupid-ass Mexican boner-doll.
The old man’s eyes traveled the room with a helplessness he hadn’t yet revealed. It wasn’t the cabin’s state that had got him, I thought, so much as what it stood for. The place could’ve gone up like Sodom and Gomorrah, as long as Dinky didn’t watch. But Dinky had watched, and now, leastwise for Super, he’d become a pillar of salt. The geeze held my shoulder. His face drew near, so close his beard touched my chin, and hovered there infused with the grief in an old seal’s eye, perhaps, or the wisdom of a puppy. I began to weep again.
“We know this concern,” he said. “We’ve been where there is to be and seen what there is to see.”
The tears were coming so hard it was difficult to stay with Super’s words.
“Like we said, the world’s gone flat. Days’ll come and go and leave you shy of a whit of sun—of that you can be sure. But so long as you’re living you ain’t broke. No matter what you do, you can only go so low. You bend, you give, you give some more and then you bend again. And just when you think you’ve got to where you can’t go no more, you find yourself giving another pinch of sand, bending another inch. And then you twist back up and start from the get. You might want to, boy, trust him, old Super knows, but you couldn’t break if you tried. You’re too tiny.”
The old man stepped off with a face of good and held me till I laughed.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll take care of the Wainwright boy.”
I’d forgotten about Avey and the others. I thought of what Basil had said, that he’d wanted the old man dead.
“I’d better go let them know you’re here.”
“You do that. And when you’re finished, we’ll be waiting.”
The crew had by now fully zonked. I shut the door and whispered. No one stirred. I kneeled at Avey’s side, I stroked her hair, I gazed into her sleeping face. She murmured. Then I kissed her, and she murmured like before.
“Super’s back,” I said. “Wake up.”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
I kissed her face. I kissed her eyes, her mouth, her nose. “All we’ve got to do is make it to the truck.” When she stirred again, Basil jerked to with screwy eyes.
“Calm yourself,” I said.
“Where you been?”
“Listen. You do something stupid, you could really botch it up.”
“He’s back?”
“Yes.”
Basil tried to stand, but couldn’t. “Son of a bitching mother fucking shit!” he said as he collapsed.
I felt for him, a little. The guy couldn’t make any more trouble for Super now than he could for the pope. Of course this commotion had pressed our beauties to another go at life.
“What’s wrong?” Lucille said.
“His feet are all messed up.”
“That’s why you woke us?”
“The old man,” Basil said. “He’s back.”
“With the truck I hope.”
“Yup,” I said.
Lucille jumped. “What are we waiting for?”
“Super’s going to help us with Dinky. Okay?”
“You just make sure,” Basil said, taking up his bottle, “that that fiend ain’t pulling a fast one.”
Super appeared at the door. He looked at the girls and said, “Hello, butterflies.”
“Don’t take this personally,” Lucille said, “but I thought you had a truck.”
“It’s up the road,” I said.
“That,” Basil said, “is where he and his beast are going to chop us into suey.”
“Now, now, Laertes,” Super said, and extended a bony hand, “we were hoping there’d be no armored sentiments here.”
“My sentiments’re armored all right. I don’t feel a thing.”
“Come on,” I said. “Shake his hand.”
“I don’t want to shake his hand.”
I couldn’t believe it. The lunk was positively sulking. “Basil. The man is helping us.”
“You can stay here if you want to, lover,” Lucille said. “You want to stay here?”
“I’m like an elephant. I never forget.” Basil sat there blinking. His head was swaying, a balloon on a string. We watched him. “What the hell,” he said, and gave his hand. “If it’ll make you tits all happy.”
“You’re a good boy, Laertes. Fortinbras said so on the hump. We’re sorry you had to learn that way.”
“Was he really that much trouble?” Lucille said.
“We never did know the meaning of that word.”
“I only meant,” Lucille said, “he didn’t mean any harm.” In her voic
e I heard desperation. The time had long passed for rudeness with the geeze who for some crazy reason had kept on coming back. “We just want to go home.”
“The sooner we get to the wheels, the sooner you’ll not be here.”
“So,” Avey said.
No one had to probe her gist. Her gaze had wandered toward Dinky’s room. Basil hit the bottle. Lucille picked her lip.
“We take it that’s where you’re weeping for the Wainwright boy,” Super said.
“How is it you plan to get him out of here?” Basil said.
“We can help,” Lucille said. She looked at Avey.
“You two help Basil,” I said. “We’ll get Dinky.”
“What,” Basil said, “you think he somehow lost a hundred and fifty pounds?”
“I can carry my half,” I said, “if he can carry his.”
“We can carry him and his coffin if needs be,” Super said.
“AJ,” Basil said as he drew near. “You really think the old man’s square?”
“He takes us into town, I don’t care what the fuck he is.”
Basil looked out through the ruins, his features hardening. “Right,” he said.
Pink Champagne Bitch lay by Dinky, next to some bottles and a tray full of butts. A wad of bubblegum stuck to the nightstand. A pair of socks poked from under the bed. There was a wet and stinking pea coat, two shitty sneakers, a bag stuffed with underwear and shirts and a worthless belt. And shaving cream, and toothpaste, and lotion, and a pack half-empty of Camel Lights, and those stinking awful clowns.
When Super pulled down Dinky’s blanket, I expected eyes like pinballs staring through the cold. But someone had come in and put a ski cap over his face, which I removed and placed on my head. And his face was cold, and his eyes were pinballs, blind as pinball chrome. Maybe that was good. Who could say what Dinky saw on the other side? Maybe little nymphs with paper wings, or hobgoblins and beetles and fire and heath, and the flesh of sinners peeling from bones. And anyway, who the hell really cared? I only knew what he wouldn’t be seeing, what he’d never dream again. Not the tsunamis of December or the tippy-tip toes of a gorgeous ballerina. He’d never once, not ever again, see a hatchling from its egg, a leaf on a breeze, chocolate on a shelf in the sun. Women would fight with their men in tenemental gloam, and trout would flop on the fishmonger’s board. And masons would trowel, and strippers dance, and bankers bank, but Dinky, he wouldn’t know it, because, turning to dirt like a rabbit in the woods, he wasn’t any more now than the dream of the dreamer dreaming. If only it were easy as saying, Arrivederci, pal, and good luck. I’ll toss one back when there’s land in sight. Goddamn, but one thing’s sure—there’s not a stitch of glory in death.
