by D. Foy
Wendy never returned. How could I hope to know what would be? I took Avey’s hand, and we turned to face the crowd. A series of watercolors lined the walls, made by kids. Most scenes were happy families, father on the left, the tallest, followed by mom and the children by height, with a dog at the end: Daddy, Mommy, Stephanie, Abbie, Socks. There was a drawing too of a gold-haired woman with a jagged smile and flat blue eyes. That was it—no father, no children, no dog. Beneath her, in lopsided scrawl, was the single word, MOM. And mom was crying, and her tears were blood. Barry Manilow muzak piped through the speakers, just below the general din, “Copacabana,” it seemed, though I didn’t know for sure. Next to a TV running a soap sat a hundred gallon aquarium, filled, like the room its people, with all manner of fish. I watched them bump through a maze of shipwrecks and logs, endlessly gaping, until an old coot hobbled by, stinking of baby food and bad cologne, and a little girl maybe four years old let out a howl only children can make, packed with the world’s own pain and sin. At that, her mother jerked her wrist and quick as light snatched the slipper from her foot and rapped the child’s head. And then a woman was at my ear, with braces on her teeth and Mary Hartman braids.
“He’s outside,” Avey told her.
“In the parking lot?” said the woman’s colleague. Stocky like a miner, she had a mullet with gelled spikes on top and a stringy mane down her back—the kind of do middle-aged lesbians have been rocking for a decade or so.
“In our truck,” said Basil. He’d limped over once he realized the women had come for us. “You guys’re going to take him?”
The stocky woman clasped her hands at her waist and wore a face reminiscent of certain preschool teachers, deceptively bemused, falsely sympathetic. “Do you know what happened?” she said.
“We had an accident,” I said.
“An accident,” said the tall gal. Now she was the sweet one. No crappy faces or half-baked pity. She was for real.
“We had a wreck last night.”
“Up on the mountain,” Basil said.
“And then what,” said the stocky one, crossing her arms.
“They went out for some ice,” Avey said, “and got into a wreck. When we woke up this morning he’d… you know.” She started for the door. “You’ll probably want to see for yourselves.”
“You got something to carry him in on?” Basil said.
The stocky woman twirled the tail at her shoulder. “I’m going to pack it over my shoulder,” she said.
“Pardon?” Basil said.
“I’m exceptionally well conditioned,” the woman said.
“Come on, Karen,” said the tall one with a big metal smile. She was a peach, this gal, for real. I guessed she had a houseful of animals, not cats, but dogs. “Eden,” said her tag.
Basil had already made it to the first set of sliding doors. “When you’re finished, maybe you could take care of him, too,” I said. “I know you’re busy and all.”
“What’s your name?”
It occurred to me that in my polka dot shirt and muddy boots I was still dressed like a clown. “He’s in pretty bad shape, you know.”
“Maybe we should have a look at you first,” Eden said.
With her gurney on wheels, Nurse Karen marched out and fell in beside us. Super had enfolded Lucille with an arm to mumble his wisdom as she cried, and she had let him do it. The tailgate was open still, Dinky exposed to all who cared. Once again it began to rain.
“What’re you doing?” Lucille said, her face wide with horror. Nurse Karen had hopped up and crouched near Dinky’s head.
“Now, now,” said the old man.
“Mind if we take it with the blanket?”
“It?” Lucille said.
Super peeled off from Lucille to face Nurse Karen. “You’ll excuse our saying so, misses, but we’ll have to ask you to disembark the wheels till we’ve given the boy his due.”
“Looks like a three-phase operation,” Nurse Karen said to Eden. “Slide it down—”
“Step off the wheels, misses,” Super said, “if you please.”
Nurse Karen’s face hardened. “As you can see, sir, we’re much too busy for formalities. Just take up the feet,” she said to Eden, “and slide it down far enough for us to make the turn.”
“That’s it?” Lucille said. “You’re just going to haul him away?”
“Maybe you could give us a minute?” I said to Eden.
“Karen?” she said.
Nurse Karen bounced from the truck and began to pace.
“It’s raining,” Eden said to me. “So…”
“Thanks,” said Avey.
Super drew off the blanket… Birds were in the trees… I smelled ice cream, I smelled rain… In the distance I heard laughter, but knew it wouldn’t count—no one counts laughter, because laughter disappears… I was just an animal, words on the lake… Then a bird flew, and the rest flew after, and Basil limped up and took Dinky’s feet and pulled his shoulders to the gate, where Super spun him even to it—our old pal Dinky, he was dead.
I hadn’t seen the geeze take his nickels from Dinky’s eyes, but somehow he had, only to lay them down again and step back cap in hand.
“It is clear, friends,” he said, his voice grown solemn, “that before us lies a perturbed spirit without a finger on his lips to smother grief. It’s our job to send him off with nary a whisper at his ears, though he be alone. Blood or no blood, you were his brothers and sisters. And so you loved the boy as we did. You don’t have to croak for us to see how forty thousand brigands couldn’t add to our sum, not with all their stolen love. For ourselves, we’d eat a crocodile if it meant he’d be delivered, ready to bend and give and move through the world with a smile. And we know you’d do it, too. Give this boy his due, friends, then cut the line with hearts full of thanks and cheer.”
Some gawkers had massed about twenty feet off. Lucille was shuddering, she was crying so hard. She took Dinky’s hand and kissed and pressed it to her cheek. Then she lurched into the truck.
“What the fuck’re you staring at?” Basil said to the gawkers. It wasn’t until he’d started toward them that they began to part. A woman walked by, shielding her daughter’s eyes.
“But what is it, Mommy?” the child said.
“That’s right,” Basil said. “Scram!”
“Finished?” said Nurse Karen.
I touched Dinky’s hand. A crust of blood had grown along the top of one of his nails. Avey held me. Her face was swollen.
“Take him,” she said.
“Wait,” Basil said. He brought out a guitar pick—Paul Stanley’s, I knew—and tucked it into Dinky’s shirt. “Rock and roll, buddy,” he said. “We’ll catch you on the rebound.”
And that was it. No police, no questions, no forms. Nurse Karen and Eden just put our pal on the gurney and whisked him through the doors. Poof! He was there, and then he wasn’t. Disgusting. Tremendous. Done.
Super’s dolls covered the bed of his truck, plastic eyes rolling, plastic hair clinging to horrible plastic heads. No sign of sun, no sign of shit but mucho rain and mucho mud. A wind rose up and drove the trees…
Times like this the whole blasted planet creaks on its hinges, waiting for you to give, the way it knows you will, if you’re ordinary… Your life’s just residue. You’re the sloughing-offs of so many sloughing-offs you couldn’t say which was which or what went where and when. You can’t see between the main or remains anymore, the remains or the remainder’s residue. All you know is flux and everflux, the monstrous process—in the big sense, the really big sense—of eating and shitting and eating and shitting and eating… For a single hideous moment, there in the slippery rain, surrounded by the only people I’d ever truly known and who for that reason were strangers, I saw the ruin of distinctions. The weight of Dinky’s absence became the weight of Dinky’s presence. His death had become his life, his laughter my memory of it, my memory the laughing world’s. Beauty and terror, the sacred and the feared—these h
ad lost their color…
“You want me to get in the back a while?” Basil said, his eyes gone crooked the way they did when he grew tired.
“Might as well take care of your feet while we’re here,” I said.
“Yeah,” Avey said. “You wait much longer, and they might have to amputate.”
“Go on, boy,” said the geeze. “That old gal with the tracks in her mouth’ll take good care.”
Basil limped to his girl, who hadn’t seemed so much as to blink. “You okay?” He took her hand, but she didn’t twitch. “I’ll be back in a flash with a Coke on ice,” he said, “just the way you like it.”
IT WASN’T TILL LATER, AS WE LAY IN OUR MOTEL, that Avey said why she told Lucille what she told her while Basil fixed his feet.
“I’m never going to see those people again,” Avey said from her pillow.
“How do you figure?”
“You think this is the first time I’ve hit a snag?”
“How aren’t you going to see them?”
“You won’t either.”
“Avey,” I said. “They’re all I’ve got.”
She ran a finger down my chest. She kissed me there, she kissed my mouth. “Were, baby,” she said, “and had.” I considered the stains on the ceiling, adjusting to her words. “You know it’s over,” she said. “I saw it coming a week after I met you guys, and I’m slow.”
“That still doesn’t say why you had to tell her all that.”
“It made her feel better.”
“But it’s just a name.”
“A name is not a name is not a name. And it sure as hell isn’t me.”
I waited for her to continue, but she rolled to her back and took my hand and smiled.
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Look. I know you’re restless. What I don’t get is, why me?”
“A long time ago,” she said, “just after I’d run away from home the first time, I bought a fifty-cent box of chow mein down on 42nd street, in New York. I ate it all, and when I finished, I ate the fortune cookie, too. You want to know what the fortune said?”
“Fortune’s are for weaklings,” I said.
“It said, Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”
I didn’t have to tell her the idea was worth regard. But neither did I want to say something too glib or hifalutin.
“Traveling cures these things,” she said. “I’m on the road. My secrets are my steps.”
“Sounds like a fancy way to say you’re just a liar.”
“Let’s go to sleep.”
“If it’s the way you say it is, then why didn’t you tell her your name was Mud?”
Avey put two fingers on my lips. “I’ve never told anybody that,” she said. “Not even you.”
There must’ve been more to Avey’s telling Lucille her real name than she’d admit. Our friend had died, the woman was filled with grief. Lucille wouldn’t’ve cared if Avey had said her name was Trash.
It was hard at first. Lucille’s silence, it seemed, was a forest through which she couldn’t find her way. We asked how she felt, for nothing. We asked was she tired, the same. We asked what she wanted now we were free, but still she said not a word. I flicked the monkey so it bumped and spun.
“The old man calls this thing José,” I said. “As if at any minute it might want to rhumba.”
Lucille was listening now. Her eyes had kicked the blur. She even almost laughed, I thought.
“I notice you haven’t called me Elmira,” Avey said.
“I like Hickory better.”
“What if I told you Elmira’s no more my name than Hickory?”
“I’d say that was a good thing.”
“What if I told you it’s Avey?”
“You want to be called Avey, I’ll call you Avey. You want the other, I’ll call you that. Just tell me what you want.”
“I want for you to be happy.”
“Basil wants to get his truck,” said Lucille.
The old man had remained quiet in the drizzle. “What about him?” Avey said.
“He needs us right now,” I said.
“Somebody needs somebody,” Lucille said.
“The man is back in town!”
And so he was: Basil Badalamente, musician, doofus, drunk, asshole-cum-friend, friend-cum-foe, and foe-champ, all in the sense of huge, of extraordinaire, of bigger than life itself. Yes, yes, yes, Basil was big, Basil was huge, as huge as ever and maybe huger, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a fake. Fakes was what we were, really, every last one of us, and fakery was our game, especially times like these. There’s no such thing, after all, as the Comedown, so long as we never called it. Ergo, with fakery and lies, this had become routine. I am not ugly, but stoked. I am not wounded, but charmed. I am not hurt, but pissed. And I will laugh at it all—ha! ha!—and keep on laughing—ha! ha! ha!—down to the putrid dregs. Basil, undisputed King of the Fakes, now threw down his cane and proffered a Coke on ice.
“Am I good, baby,” he said, “or am I good?”
I took the soda. “Mighty white of you, friend.”
“How are you?” Lucille said.
He looked like a hairy scab. But to see his twinkling eyes and mouthful of teeth, you’d think he thought himself a hawk. “On top of the world,” he said. “On top of the freaking world!”
“Hey, Super,” Avey said, tugging at the old man’s sleeve. “You ready?”
“Our name’s Steady,” Super said.
“We thought we’d pick up some clothes,” I told Basil, “then hit a motel and place to eat. Then you can see about the Cruiser.”
“That okay with you, geeze?” Basil said to Super.
“So long as Horatio here lives to tell the tale, we can run the race.” And at that, Fortinbras the dog appeared in the bed behind his master.
“We’re not getting back there again,” I said.
Lucille sat up to protest, but Avey cut her off. “And we shant be drawing straws.”
“It’s only just down the way,” Basil said.
I offered Lucille the Coke. Little by little her face grew soft. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.
We didn’t say a word. There was no word to say. Her sorrow, I saw, was more than she herself could say. Her face was the saying, and the wet of her eye. I thought of infants and of hatchlings, and of the trillions of creatures searching through this world, those in this land of wintry muck and those out there, beneath the sun, away at the world’s ends. Lucille was in her hair shirt. Times like this you don’t say dook. What you do is breathe.
Super drew the door and stepped aside. “Well sure you are,” he said. “Sorrow’s always better than laughter.” Avey got out, then Lucille, the old man tapped his chest and grinned. “It’s by sadness the heart’s made good.”
“If only this were another day,” Lucille said.
“Oh, but you’re wrong, young misses. This here day’s better than the rest, by far.”
“Not to change the subject or anything,” Avey said, “but do you know where these guys can get a change of clothes for cheap?”
Super said he did, and sure enough, at the 89 and 50, it was: a Millers Outpost, like a beacon from the mist. With the $52.38 in my pocket, the bills completely soaked, I bought some 501s, a cheap blue flannel and long sleeve tee, and was left with some change till I could tap my nest egg, 262 lousy bucks. Basil got identical stuff, fifty sizes larger, and a pair of Reeboks, size 17, for the bindings on his feet.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a paper I could buy?” I said to the kid who helped us. He was a white boy, skinny as Fred Astaire, with a baseball cap and little bald head and giant shirt across which, in skate-punk graffiti, read the word THINK!
“Don’t be crazy, man.” He took a paper from under the reg and tossed it on the counter. “Y’all can have it.”
“Slap me some skin,” I said, and held out my hand.
The kid eyed my ha
nd like it might become a snake. “You a weird-ass.”
“Slap me some skin,” I said.
Basil was waiting. The kid ran his hand across mine, way too fast, and our business was complete. “You a weird-ass dude,” he said. “I check you out.”
I opened the paper. LAKE MAROONED BY TORRENTIAL RAIN, said the headline. Basil leaned over my shoulder:
With rushing floodwaters undermining U.S. Highway 50 in numerous locations, the main route from Sacramento to South Lake Tahoe will remain closed indefinitely… Rain and melting snow have filled rivers and caused dangerous mudslides throughout the Tahoe Basin, where more than 2,000 US West customers were without phone service… About 7,300 Northern California customers were without power yesterday, while about 13,000 Washington households were without power, down from a peak of 250,000…
“I wasn’t going anywhere, anyway,” Basil said. “You going anywhere?”
“I’m just a weird-ass, Basil. You know?”
He pinched one of his little ears, and it struck me he didn’t have his hat. He’d slept and showered and shit with the thing for the better part of ten forsaken years, and now, someway, it was lost.
“Speaking for myself,” he said, “I’m one famished son of a bitch.”
“We need a room,” I said.
“Mark my words. We’ll be sleeping in the old man’s crate.”
On top of the flooding, it was New Year’s Eve, a not-so-small fact that happened to’ve slipped my mind. Super rolled to the 50 again and headed for Nevada. The world was still a sad-sack place, its folks a sad-sack lot. Every roach trap along the way had someone sleeping in a closet. Maybe he was right, Basil, and we were doomed to a night in the basement of a church, eating macaroons and Jello with bluehairs and bums and other sundry dopes.
Through this spot and that we made our way, past the unlucky bastards we’d seen the journey in, the roofs of their cars nearly swallowed. A grown man sat on one, a big old dude with a Grizzly Adams beard and shearling vest. From a distance it seemed he was talking to himself, or maybe even singing, but closer it grew plain the bear was sobbing like a kitten. He just stood there on display, right in the open, pouring out his guts.
