by Jacob White
Four days ago I’m scraping Mexican off plates in some clattering kitchen way off in the outland slabs of west Houston, and today I’m departing a green dog park in Florida, nosing onto an empty sunny highway, my blinker blinking like each blink might be its tired last. Across the highway sits one of those unfortunate little brick bungalows trapped between a quick-mart and the intersection of twelve or so empty lanes of new blacktop that two years ago was a pine swamp probably, the complicated stoplight cycling two or three times before a car hushes by. “This little city’s about to explode!” my fiancé says each morning, circling jobs for me with all her urban heart.
In the narrow front yard of this bungalow there is a spectacle. A black man in a pale black tee shirt and tight pastel shorts swings a cane viciously at a red-tip shrub, handle first, as his little boy and toddler girl watch. He swings the cane as one swings a machete deep in the jungle—wide, shoulder-dislocating, murderous thwacks—rocking back on his heels against the force of each swing—sitting, nearly. Then the man pauses, stands blinking at the shrub, and holds the cane out to the boy. The boy takes the hooked end and swings at the shrub while not exactly looking at the shrub—loose flails that send the cane lolling around the back of his neck and nearly clip the vertical pigtail on his sister, standing behind. After a few swings she too is handed the cane. She walks around holding the cane like a machine gun, aiming it at her father, then at the side of their brick house. Her father stands close by, hand on hip, instructively observing, winded. A car goes by between us with a gray hairdo inside and glides through the red light, floating off into the distance as if swept along on thermals, and the man squints after it, his mouth wide and exultant and breathing. He looks back at his girl for a moment, thinking, then across the road at me. His mouth is still wide, exultant, breathing, but his eyes are as complicated as the word ascertain. I drive away from the dog park.
I cross a river whose name I have yet to learn. San something. There are always homeless men walking across this bridge, like they can’t get off it. The homeless here are shirtless and tan. Then you get close and their faces are plated like a desert iguana’s and they tell you it was better here in the eighties.
I don’t go home. Home is a murky seven hundred square feet of brown paneling and three little windows crowded by dead banana leaves. “We live under jungle rot,” I said yesterday, and the look I got. Then I said, “I bet Tom Petty doesn’t live under jungle rot!” and laughed because an old Mexican I’d worked with in Houston told me Tom Petty lives here and the day I arrived I’d told my fiancé, who said she didn’t think so and we’d argued about it, and now I was trying to make a joke out of the argument so I might head off a new one but got even a worse look.
So I drive straight to the beach and enjoy a fugitive beer at a café close enough to the ocean there’s sand lumped across the parking lot. Twenty years in Houston and I never saw the ocean. I haven’t still. I am here to fetch my fiancé’s purse, left during brunch. I am dressed unforgivably, and I am happy. Clare, wet from the dog park hose, naps in the backseat on my fiancé’s textbooks. The café will close soon, in minutes. Soon my fiancé will notice I am not back, or she will not notice, and I am now enjoyably at the beach, most of a beer in front of me, a purse on the bar. I pluck a card of soup specials and begin writing on the back of it. I write about my day more or less. I’ll fold it up and slip it into her change purse. I imagine how her face will soften when she finds it, and soon I’m whipping an account of my day onto that paper with some real sense to it. I’ve never had so much to report. It’s funny how the retired schoolteachers won’t meet my eyes, like they can’t stomach that I made it out of fifth grade. The part about the family is sharp. An overweight waitress wiping down the bar tells me she admires people who keep diaries, that her older brother writes in one all the time, though it turns out he isn’t worth a shit.
I laugh, and I think, My god, some charity . . .
Charity. Now there’s a name fit for a dog. Who the hell names a dog Clare.
I try to imagine her face again. I choke down on my pen. One day do you think you could find some charity in your heart for me?
But when I write this part it ruins the rest. I pay with quarters from her purse and ask where Tom Petty lives, and outside after I toss the soup specials into the shrubs I hear the CLOSED sign slap its little rebuke. I walk Clare out to the beach for what I hope will be an orgy of self-pity only to discover what a chilling thing the ocean is to stare at. An older woman walks across the sand toward me, and I think it’s one of my retired schoolteacher friends come to tell me that grade school is behind us, don’t sweat the small stuff, I see your dog is just mouthing. Instead I get lectured on leash laws. I am ruining everyone’s retirement. I drive home a little scared of Florida and its eyeless marshes, already stacking and restacking the minutes of my day like pebbles for the dreaded evening progress report. Clare’s head hangs out the back window, higher than my own, ears and lips flapping in the dusk, her eyes steady and serene, looking beyond, beyond. My fiancé’s purse sits on the bar. Tom Petty lived here in the eighties.
5. Unvanquished by the Dusk
Two thumps from the front porch: he was out of his wheelchair again.
Rollsy remained on the living room couch some minutes, staring at his hands—his chief means of recreation since being tricked into a summer month at his grandparents’. Outside, another day moved off, trailing a syrupy light reserved for the play-wearied, while Rollsy soaked in the pastel pallor of their den. He tried to forget the noise.
This was the third time during his stay his grandfather had set off crawling down the front porch steps in search of a death spot more befitting. Had the old man his way, dusk’s end would find him curled inside a crook of root, under melon-yellow ditch weed, or on a bed of creekside shale. Each time, he’d drug his feet down the two steps—thump, thump. Last week Rollsy’s grandma ran out and collared him as he rasped his belly down the front walkway like some loose iguana.
“Your papaw’s just took heavy heart since his legs went,” she explained afterward, Rollsy shuddering. “He ain’t picked up a club since spring, you know.”
Not being able to golf had hit the old man hard. He’d laid himself up in the bedroom, let the drawn curtains blue the scene with sorrow. He wouldn’t even get up to see little Rollsy and little Marion Junior whenever their parents brought them to visit—though, upon being shoved into his room, the brothers were inevitably met with a grandeur confounded in their hearts with the far-spanning love of God; the old man sat atop the high bed, knees mountainous under the coverlet, and spoke at them from a great, snowy distance.
Once excused from his confine, the boys quick-pattered down the hall and sat through the gabble of their grandmother with silent relief, speaking only in the car afterward to ask their mother what did regression and transgression mean, and what was the difference.
Now Rollsy was stuck here. A month. Marion Junior was with the Cub Scouts up on Kings Mountain, having more fun than an Indian, probably.
Peeking through the column of panes by the front door, Rollsy saw the wheelchair—silvery and upright on the front stoop, undisturbed by the body that had leaked out of it. Also undisturbed was the white sneaker which, upon opening the door, he saw sitting upright at the foot of the steps, tied still.
“Papaw.” Rollsy leaned from the doorway, noncommittally watching his grandfather drag himself into the yard. “Papaw.” Where was his grandma?
The old man looked back, suffered to roll round on his hind end. He settled on his elbows and considered the boy. “I’m off, boy. Got to get me a good hide-’n’-seek spot. You tell ’em . . .”—he looked down at his feet a minute, noticing what he hadn’t felt—the missing sneaker—then back to Rollsy. “Well, you tell ’em, boy.” He grunted and rolled back to his belly. He lay there breathing a minute, then began pulling himself over the grass in small, weak heaves.
Rollsy shut the door.
“Grandma.” His voice hammered through the house, setting china awarble. “Grandma.” Nothing. In a voice like a shrug, he said, “He’s getting away.”
Rollsy looked in the garage: the Cadillac sat there, white and glacial, undriven for months now; but her equally glacial Lincoln was gone.
In the kitchen he stared at the phone, thought of calling 911. Then he sighed. He sighed with what he felt was very mature irritation.
Leston breathed in the earth. All the soft, sweet smells of nature broke down at this proximity, broke into hard and bitter pebbles of rot. Loam crumbled into rock salt, leaf mulch, worm crust. He pulled himself through the smells, all bitter as quarry dust.
Their custom ranch house allowed for no such decay—which is why he couldn’t stay, not for a second more. He’d had it built ten years back, when, near crazy from being stuck in that backwood coon trap with his idiot son, he finally dug up the jar of money. He took his wife’s arm and left Marion to the bog water and mosquitoes, foolishly thinking the boy too stupid to come after his due stake. Leston bought a lot and a country club membership in a private community two counties north, up by the Carolina border. The place had a gate even. But Marion, the tricky shit, out did himself, plucked up a girl from church and set her quick to childbearing. Leston was a granddaddy before the first paintbrush hit his new house, his destiny divided. He hated the South.
Quarry dust: he worked the quarries as a boy. Blasted out mountainsides. He’d like to have told somebody about that.
A few months back, just before Leston gave up on his legs, he’d stopped in the hallway to notice a hairline crack running up the top half of a white wall and a few feet out into the ceiling. He ran his finger down it: it was a crack! A suck at the center of his chest told him how now it was just a matter of waiting around in that house until death hatched on him like an egg.
Rather than let him properly wither, the house would preserve him until the end. It would insist on his wellness up till that moment death walked in, dressed in golf digs, absently practicing his swing and chuckling about “the last putt”—this, the sort of bad comedy by which death is known here. Nice swing! . . . not even a divot. So, time to clear out. Time to live deliberately and rot. Cut his goddamned losses, before they cut him. You feel a tickle of the sickle, you run.
The old man had almost reached the far corner of the yard. Rollsy walked across the monkey grass and stood over his grandfather.
The khakis had ridden up his lifeless legs, bunched and grass-stained over a white calf. Rollsy’d never seen a shank so puny. He heard individual blades of grass pop under the wide-knuckled fists. It was a progress of inches.
“You said you was going where, now?” Rollsy held a pencil and Post-it pad, hoping to defer the matter to his grandmother whenever she came back.
“Listen to you—wuz.” The old man hung his head. His bald spot was red and beaded with sweat. “Wuz, ain’t, neverhow—your sorry daddy teach you no better? They not have grammar at that school, yours?” Rollsy’s papaw didn’t like to be reminded of how hillbilly Rollsy and his family were. He was rich now, his papaw—or at least compared to Rollsy’s own daddy, who’d stayed in the same clapboard his daddy’d left him in—his daddy being Papaw, Rollsy knew, though he had trouble seeing the two in any way kin: his daddy had a lanky mope, and Papaw called him Mary—short for Marion, Rollsy’s brother’s name, too, and the last name of the wiliest son of a bitch their state ever knew, Francis Marion the Swamp Fox. Rollsy tried once calling his brother Mary, but Marion Junior called him a fat shit before pinning him to the dirt and punching at his face.
It never occurred to Rollsy to ask how his papaw got rich. But he did ask his daddy once how Papaw was so rich and they so poor. His daddy looked at him, eyes slumping out of focus in a way that showed how slow-minded he was, then said Papaw was once poor as the prairie but had some investments come through from when he’d been a hardbit Yankee. Rollsy asked when would theirs come through, and his daddy took him outside, debelted, and just clobbered him.
If his papaw’d been poor, he’d sure come up. He and Rollsy’s grandma, Cochina—Mexican for red dirt, his mama’d said—lived in River Heights Plantation, which wasn’t so much a plantation as a “community” where more old people lived. Everyone drove big clean cars and drove them slow. Lots of cut grass, lots of gardens and golf courses. Rollsy couldn’t imagine anywhere more miserable.
“You coming in or not?”
“I’m off, boy.” The old man was almost to the curb. Across the street was some thin forest, beyond which, last week, Rollsy—his belongings in a backpack—had heart-sinkingly discovered more golf course.
Dusk was coming in. Some cricket worried like a dry hinge.
“No use following. I’m history. Off to my tenement of clay, to the great re . . .” A car eased down the road in front of the house, the old driver waving as she passed, smiling at the cute scene. Rollsy waved back while, at his feet, the old man watched the car off, muttering about the primordial cul-de-sac.
Rollsy watched his papaw scurry across the street in a bone-scuffing scrabble. “Papaw.” Rollsy walked across the street after him. He followed him onto the grass at the other side. “Papaw—”
“Dammit, boy. Get on inside, or drop a knee, one. I can’t keep rubbernecking around every time you start up.”
Rollsy looked back at the house, then at his papaw, all twisted up in his clothes and snarling at the grass, then at the woods ahead, which dusk left thick and black. Fireflies hinted something from the corner of his eye.
“All right, but I ain’t—aren’t—allowed to dirty these here shorts.” His grandma’d bought them after throwing away the jean cut-offs his mama’d wadded into his duffel, but said they weren’t play shorts. Rollsy pulled at the creases. He looked back at the house again.
The sky was spit through with bats. A good sign, Leston thought.
His grandboy was on his knees, following behind. If there was to be any measuring up in this family, it’d have to be him.
“That’s it, boy,” Leston laughed, crawling into the pines. “Kneel to the knell.”
Among the trees, no light lingered. Windows down the street glowed amber, and even the green lawns stretched luminous through the dusk. But here in the trees, day was long exhaled. Leston felt an honest coolness—the dying gasp that surrounds the black pit of the present. In the now, everything’s dying.
Behind, the boy watched his own fat hands pad gingerly into the gloom. Pinecones, gumballs, and other forest rot punished Rollsy’s knees and shins while his papaw sputtered of the undiscovered country and blessed release. In lulls of silence and snapping twigs, Rollsy made known through intermittent half-whines his reservations about breaking curfew, missing supper, not to mention the play clothes infraction. But the legs dragged on ahead of him, one-shoed, disappearing around trees like some fat tail. Through the bleary toil and half-light, Rollsy kept forgetting whose legs they were, or that they were legs.
He had been duly warned about his papaw. His mama said the old slit-mouth was crazier than all get out; she—whom his papaw called Bob instead of Bobbie Ann—wanted his daddy to sic a lawyer on the money. As for his daddy, he never spoke against Papaw—Rollsy guessed because he was scared. Rollsy had to admit, both had a point. The things his papaw said to him and Marion Junior in that bedroom of his: facts of death as toothy and as queerly radiant as autumn. Today, boys, I’d like to tell you about the Quench of Quietus, or the Recumbent Retreat, or Our Pale Blow to the Head. Throughout his discourse, he made a scene of limply waving off whatever food was set by his bed, but there’d be hardly a crumb left when Rollsy was sent in later to retrieve the plate. Also, nights, Rollsy heard the wheelchair banging around in the kitchen, then the rodentile sawdusting of Triscuits.
But he followed him close because this is what grandsons did. And because it wasn’t every day
you got to see a man die.
Up ahead, Leston was discovering how the years of golfing and gardening had been a delicate thing: a kind of taxidermy, wherein sprite fluffiness makes you forget the ancient decay inside. They were all decaying, he and his golf partners. It was called necrobiosis. But golf was funny: the fluidity in the joints, the continuity of gentle, far-reaching arcs, the fluffy fairway winds—why, there was surely a salubrious force at work. One failed to age so long as he had his swing. Leston had golfed well into his infirmity. He’d been hobbling up to the tee for several years. Last summer he’d had to load a walker onto the cart to steady himself against as he swung—and damned if he didn’t shed a few strokes. By spring, though, the grinding in his hips had him growling through each swing. His legs got so bad he one day waved for Orin Mobley to help him out of the cart. He played through that hole, then told Orin, dropping his putter into the bag, that he guessed he was done. It was a fine stroke of bravado, but once alone in his Cadillac, driving home, Leston began to heave and sweat.
He clawed ahead. His arms were all he had to move himself with, and they hurt. His right shoulder, especially. He’d hurt it diving from a southbound near forty years back; awaking in a boxcar, he’d looked out and spotted a woman working a dirt-road pickle stand, and her ochre skin made him think he’d hit Mexico, so he dove. But pain, too, began to decay, disorganize, splinter like an arrow, no longer finding its way to his heart. His bones felt skewered through his body.
“There’s a star,” the boy said.
He had eaten nothing since hopping the car in Utica, and she fed him pickles. She consoled his shoulder and his idiocy, and he knew he’d marry her. “Use it wise,” he said.
