by Brady Udall
We went to the hospital and after an eternity of reading women’s magazines and listening to Simone’s sobbing, a doctor came out and told us that it looked like my mother would be fine, that we were lucky we found her when we did because if we had let her sleep another half hour she certainly wouldn’t have made it. Simone began to sob even louder and I looked at Buckeye, but he didn’t react to what the doctor said. He slumped in his chair and looked terribly tired. Relief sucked everything out of me and left me so weak that I couldn’t help but let loose a few stray tears myself.
While my father filled out insurance forms, Buckeye mumbled something about needing to get some sleep. He gave Simone a kiss on the forehead and patted my father and me on the back and wandered away into the dark halls of the hospital. That was the last any of us saw of him.
My mother’s nearly buying the farm and the disappearance of Buckeye, the family hero, has thrown us all into a state. I poke at a mound of Jell-O with my fork and say, “I bet he’s just had a good run of luck selling pantyhose. By now he’s probably selling them to squaws in Oklahoma.” I don’t really know why I say things like this. I guess it’s because I’m the baby of the family, a teenager, and making flippant, smart-ass remarks is part of my job.
My father shakes his head in resigned paternal disappointment and Simone bares her teeth and throws me a look of such hate that I’m unable to make another comment. My father asks me why I don’t go to my room and do something worthwhile. I decide to take his advice. Simone looks like she’s meditating violence. I thump down the stairs, turn up my stereo as loud as it will go, lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Before I go to sleep I imagine sending words to heaven, having the clouds open up before me, revealing a light so brilliant I can’t make out what’s inside.
I’m awakened by a sound like a manhole cover being slid from its place. It’s dark in my room, the music is off and someone has put a blanket over me. Most likely my father, who occasionally acts quite motherly when my mother is not able to. There is a scrape and a thud and I twist around to see Buckeye stuffed into the small window well on the other side of the room, looking at me through the glass.
He has pushed away the wrought-iron grate that covers the well and is squatting in the dead leaves and spider webs that cover the bottom of it. Buckeye is just a big jumble of shadow and moonlight, but I can still make out his unmistakable smile. I get up and slide open the window.
“Good evening,” Buckeye whispers, polite as ever. He presses his palms against the screen. “I didn’t want to wake you up, but I brought you something. Do you want to come out here?”
I run upstairs, go out the front door and find Buckeye trying to lift himself out of the window well onto the grass. I help him up and say, “Where have you been?”
When Buckeye straightens up and faces me, I get a strong whiff of alcohol and old sweat. He acts like he didn’t hear my question. He holds up a finger, indicating for me to wait a moment, and goes to his car, leaning to the right just a little. He comes back with a case of Stroh’s and bestows it on me as if it’s a red pillow with the crown jewels on top. “This is that beer I owe you,” he says, his voice gritty and raw with drink. “I wanted to get you a keg of the good-tasting stuff, but I couldn’t find any this late.”
We stand in the wet grass and look at each other. His lower lip is split and swollen, his half-ear is a mottled purple and he’s got what looks like lipstick smudged on his chin. His boots are muddy and he’s wearing the same clothes he had on three days ago.
“Your mother okay?” he says.
“She’s fine. They want her to stay in bed a week or so.”
“Simone?”
“She’s been crying a lot.”
For a long time he just stands there, his face gone slack, and looks past me to the dark house. “Everybody asleep in there?”
I look at my watch. It’s almost three-thirty in the morning. “I guess so,” I say.
Buckeye says, “Hey, let’s take a load off. Looks like you’re about to drop that beer.” We walk over to the porch and sit down on the front steps. I keep the case in my lap, not really knowing what to do with it. Buckeye pulls off two cans, pops them open, hands one to me.
I have the first beer of my life sitting on our front porch with Buckeye. It’s warm and sour but not too bad. I feel strange, like I haven’t completely come out of sleep. I have so many questions looping through my brain that I can’t concentrate on one long enough to ask it. Buckeye takes a big breath and looks down into his hands. “What can I say?” he whispers. “I thought I was getting along fine and the next thing I know I’m face down in the dirt, right back where I started from. I can’t remember much, but I just let loose. I lost my strength for just a minute and that’s all it takes. For awhile there I didn’t even want to behave.” He gets up, walks out to the willow tree and touches its leaves with his fingers, comes back to sit down. “I think I got ahead of myself. This time I’ve got to take things slower.”
“Are you going somewhere?” I ask. It seems to be the only question that means anything right now.
“I don’t know. I’ll keep looking for Bud. He’s the only brother I’ve got that I’m aware of. I’ve just got to get away, start things over again.”
Not having anything to say, I nod. We have a couple more beers together and stare into the distance. I want to tell Buckeye about hearing him pray for my mother, thinking it might change something, but I can’t coax out the words. Finally, Buckeye stands up and whacks some imaginary dust from his pants. “I’d leave a note for Simone and your folks…,” he says.
“I’ll tell them,” I say.
“Lord,” Buckeye says. “Damn.”
He sticks his big hand out for a shake, a habit he picked up from the Mormons, and gives me a knuckle-popping squeeze. As he walks away on the cement path toward his car, the inside of my chest feels as big as a room and I have an overpowering desire to tackle him, take his legs out, pay him back for my collarbone, hold him down and tell him what a goddamned bastard I think he is. This feeling stays with me for all of five seconds, then bottoms out and leaves me as I was before, the owner of one long list of emotions: sorry that it had to turn out this way for everybody; relieved that Buckeye is back to his natural self; pleased that he came to see me before he left; afraid of what life will be like without having him around.
Buckeye starts up his battle wagon and instead of just driving slowly away into the distance, which would probably be the appropriate thing to do under these circumstances, he gets the car going in a tight circle, four, five times around in the middle of the quiet street, muffler rattling, tires squealing and bumping the curb, horn blowing, a hubcap flying into somebody’s yard—all for my benefit.
I go into the house before the last rumbles of Buckeye’s car die away. I take my case of beer and hide it under my bed, already planning the hell-raising beer party I’ll have with some of my friends. I figure it’s about time we did something like that. On the way down the stairs, I wobble a little and bump into things, feeling like the whole house is pitching beneath my feet. All at once it hits me that I’m officially roasted. Gratified, I go back upstairs and into my father’s den where he keeps the typewriter I’ve never seen him use.
I feed some paper into the dusty old machine and begin typing. I’ve decided not to tell anyone about Buckeye’s last visit; it will be the final secret between us. Instead, I go to work composing the letter Buckeye would certainly have left had he learned to write. I address it to Simone and just let things flow. I don’t really try to imitate Buckeye’s voice, but somehow I can feel it coming out in a crusty kind of eloquence. Even though I’ve always been someone who’s highly aware of grammar and punctuation, I let sentence after sentence go by without employing so much as a comma. I tell Simone everything Buckeye could have felt and then some. I tell her how much she means to me and always will. I tell her what a peach she is. I’m shameless, really. I include my parents and thank them for everythi
ng, inform them that as far as I’m concerned, no two more Christian people ever walked the earth. I philosophize about goodness and badness and the sweet sorrow of parting. As I type, I imagine my family reading this at the breakfast table and the heartache compressing their faces, emotion rising in them so full that they are choked into speechlessness. This image spurs me on and I clack away on the keys like a single-minded idiot. When I’m finished, I’ve got two and a half pages and nothing left to say. A little stunned, I sit in my father’s chair and strain in the dim light to see what I’ve just written. Until now, I’ve never been aware of what being drunk can do for one’s writing ability.
I take the letter out on the front porch and tack it to our front door, feeling ridiculously like Martin Luther, charged with conviction and fear. I go back inside and try to go to sleep but I’m restless—the blood inside me is hammering against my ribs and the ends of my fingers, the house is too dark and cramped. Instead of going up the stairs, I push out my window screen and climb out the well and begin to run around the house, the sun a little higher in the sky every time I come around into the front yard. I feel light-headed and weightless and I run until my lungs are raw, trying to get the alcohol out of my veins before my parents wake up.
Ballad of the Ball and Chain
I couldn’t deny it anymore: Juan, the man in my life, was out of his mind. Whacked-out, loony, apeshit—pick a word, they all describe the person Juan had become. I’d tried to convince myself that he just needed time to adjust, pull together, come to terms, but I had to face the sad truth—if anything, he was getting worse. He refused to get professional help, so all I could do was tell him that I loved him and keep him out of public view.
My friends at work told me I was overreacting. He’s healthy, isn’t he? they would say. He’s not on drugs or violent or anything, right? These things take time, they would say, as if they understood the situation perfectly.
The thing is, I never told them the whole story. I said that Juan was acting strangely and left it pretty much at that. They were not aware that it had been at least two months since he had laid a comb or brush to his hair. They hadn’t seen the flat look in his eyes or the terrible hat he wore all the time. They hadn’t watched him, as I had, wad up a piece of aluminum foil and chew on it until tears came to his eyes. They didn’t know how terrified I was that he was going to stay this way forever.
All of this started on a spring night as beautiful as any other here in Cedar City, Utah. It was the bachelor party for Bart Givens, Juan’s lifelong best friend. They went to school together, were the famed double-play combo on the state champion baseball team. They spent so much time together, were so close, there had been rumors floating around town for years that they were lovers. Even though they were not related in any way, they looked like twins with their bleach-bottle-blond hair, wide shoulders and Hollywood smiles.
Bart was to be married the next afternoon to a girl he had met on one of his sales trips to Salt Lake, a radio weather person named Kitty Logan. Juan was to be the best man. He already had his tuxedo—a tasteless maroon get-up with a mint-green cummerbund—laid out over a chair in our bedroom, ready for the big ceremony.
The party was held right here in our house. Imagine the most depraved sort of gathering that could be put together by a bunch of shameless yahoos and there you have it: piles of buffalo wings, beer flowing from kegs, old-fashioned black-and-white porno flicks playing on the wall, a belly-dancer with hand-clappers and with tiny brass saucers glued to her nipples. Juan and I agreed it would not be a good idea for me to be present for such a spectacle, so I went across the street to Mrs. Whetstone’s where I could still keep an eye on things. It was a warm night and the windows and doors were flung open so I could pretty much see and hear everything. From the shadows of Mrs. Whetstone’s porch, I watched these men, all respectable citizens by day—lawyers and salesmen and schoolteachers—groping after the juking belly dancer, making obscene gestures involving their hips and tongues, belching and vomiting and yelling at each other over the thumping music. Every once in awhile I’d walk across the street and stand on the lawn where I could get a better vantage point. No one noticed me; they were all too busy letting themselves go.
After everything settled down, after the belly dancer had escaped and the beer had run its course, Juan brought out what he was sure would be the event of the evening: a four-foot chain welded on one end to a manacle and on the other to a genuine Civil War cannon ball he had bought from Harris Dinty, an old junk-metal collector who lived just south of town. Juan had spent a week at the high school metal shop manufacturing it. When he finished the welding, he sanded the rust off and painted the whole contraption with a high-gloss black paint, polishing it until he could see his own warped reflection.
The whole group of them grinning like imbeciles, they waylaid Bart, held him down and padlocked the ball and chain to his left ankle. Juan made a speech about how the ball and chain was representative of the institution of marriage and that its purpose was, from now until the wedding, to remind Bart that as of five o’clock tomorrow afternoon he would be giving up his freedom, his life savings, his privacy, his comfort and carefree attitude, his optimistic world view. Hopefully, he said, looking Bart straight in the eye, it will make you think twice. There is still time, somebody said. All the married men in attendance nodded their heads gravely. Someone who was sprawled out of sight behind the couch began to croon a broken version of “Ballad of the Ball and Chain.” Bart held the ball in his lap, stroking it, and said, “I love this thing.”
I watched them leave, stumbling out across the lawn to their cars. Bart was the last one, leaning forward with the chain in his hand, dragging the ball behind him like a baby with a wet blanket. He sped off in his convertible and Juan stood out in the grass, waving happily and shouting, “Think twice, you fucker!”
I went home, put Juan to bed, and began cleaning up. It was four a.m., I was just finishing and ready to go to bed myself, when the phone rang. It was Sheriff Ralsy telling me in modulated tones that they had found Bart Givens at the bottom of the reservoir, drowned. Apparently he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and plunged into the north end, near the dock. He was driving a convertible, the reservoir was no more than twelve feet deep and he would have had no trouble at all swimming his way to safety had he not been weighed down by a ball and chain padlocked to his leg.
I laughed right then, God help me, I giggled out loud. It was four in the morning, I had just witnessed the love of my life sponsor an evening of orchestrated depravity, and now here was the sheriff, in his textbook sheriff’s voice, telling me this.
I woke Juan up and put the phone to his ear, which was smeared purple with the belly dancer’s lipstick. I watched his face collapse as he listened to the news, watched his eyes roll in his head as if searching for somewhere to hide, heard him whimper a few confused vowels, and when he hung up, I hugged him. Seeing him like this, whatever urge I’d felt to laugh at the absurdity of this situation was gone. Juan leaned into me, mashing his face into my collarbone until thick, hoarse groans—oh, oh, oh, oh, oh—came tearing out of him. He clenched my hair with one hand and pounded me on the back with the other so hard it left bruises.
The only good thing that came out of this whole mess was that Juan stopped smoking. I don’t know why. After that night, as far as I know, he never touched a cigarette. No more drinking, either. I would still find packets of Lucky Strikes hidden in places all over the house, stashed in case he ever ran out. I always hated Juan’s smoking and now that the house was finally starting to smell okay again, I found myself wishing for that stale sour scent, for the smoke drifting up and pooling in the corners of the ceilings, the heaps of bent butts in ashtrays. For months, half a keg of sour beer sat like a squat, accusing Buddha on top of our fridge.
For the first few nights after the accident Juan made the pretense of getting in bed with me, but he never came close to sleep. One of those nights, I remember him tossing and sighing an
d kicking off the covers and pulling them up again. Finally he jumped out of bed and ran out of the room. I heard him throwing things around in the pantry, then going out the back door. I got up and looked out the window and there he was in the back yard, bare-skinned except for his milky white Fruit of the Looms glowing in the moonlight. His face shadowed and sinister, he was beating the bushes with a whining Dustbuster in his hand, muttering, “Where are you, fucking cricket.”
After that night he didn’t bother getting into bed with me at all. Instead, he would wander the house like a ghost. At night, he said, he could hear everything: mice running in the walls, the buzz of telephone wires, satellites beeping overhead, all the desert animals skittering over the sand. He told me that only in the day, when there were enough sounds to cancel each other out, could he find the sleep he needed.
And then there was the hat. I came home from work one day and found him in the tub with no water in it, a bottle of Southern Comfort in his hand and a green fedora on his head. The hat was the kind of thing a senior citizen would wear to play bingo or watch the dog races—it had a blue satin band and a red wispy feather that looked like it might have come from a very old and unhealthy bird. The kind of hat no one under seventy-five would be caught dead wearing.
“I’m not going to drink this stuff,” he said, holding out the bottle. “I’ve just got it to look at.”
“It doesn’t fit,” I said.
“What?”
“The hat—too small.”
“I found it, Rita.”
“Where?”
“Bart’s garage.”
It was the longest conversation we’d had in a week. I decided I’d press my luck.
