by Steve Vernon
I’ll never forget how I lost them.
Some folks have to tie a string around their finger if they want to remember something important.
Not me.
See, I’ve got a ring of teeth marks, branded like a tiny rope burn, right around my left ring finger. Where I’d bit down when the pool cue swung me home. I can see those marks there, branded like the fires of hell, a row of red teeth marks like the goodbye lights of that detour trucker and his trailer load of wishes.
Tinseled Trailer-court Viscera
My mother’s imagination was a flowing stream of open and endless possibility. She found the secrets of the universe encrypted upon a butterfly’s wing or gnarled into the bark of her backyard oak. Windows were her eyes to heaven, the sky rolled on forever and logic was always open to personal interpretation.
My father was a rusted iron door with rigid rules and petrifying strictures shot through his bone-work and circulation like lightning galvanized through a sadly revivified corpse. Nothing moved and nothing worked without purpose and his life’s ambition had ended with my birth.
“You can do anything you want to,” my mother told me. “If you wish hard enough dreams can come true.”
I believed her because no one ever told me different.
“Children are evil, the world is hard and the sooner you die the better off we all will be.” were my father’s bedtime goodnight wishes. His smile was a calcified veneer of patriarchal omnipotence.
He believed every word he said and I couldn’t deny a thing.
*
It was Saturday night. The blue collar world has just hit the spin cycle; suds and pretzels and pizza and whatever happens to be on the television. I’m watching the woman three trailers over being beaten to death by her husband. He beats her every Saturday night. Ten o’clock, halftime for the hockey game. He’ll be finished with her by the time the puck drops on the third period face off.
He hits her again using only his right hand. He doesn’t want to dent the soft gold hollow of his wedding ring. I sit in the darkness of my trailer cellar and watch it all unspool like the nightly news. I can see the stars from here like light reflected from mirrors trembling and dizzying upon the water. Stars aren’t really there, you know. Stars are just echoes of light. Dreams and memories and glances cast a thousand years ago.
The stars I see shine from a different darkness from the walls of web covered mason jars, shimmering with the color of grass stained tissue and clotted blood. Eyes and light sheen out from each slow dark glass like shimmers of moldering lime piss.
There’s a sound in the darkness. A soft scuttling. A mouse, a beetle or maybe it’s just the trailer settling. It does that a lot. Settling. Like a fat aluminum accountant, totting up the debts and tallying the transgressions. Lifetimes, owed and received, everything must balance out.
He hits her again. In the stomach, so it doesn’t leave any mark. His aim is wasted. The invisible is far more indelible than the obvious. The marks he leaves are forever. She needs a knight in shining armor but there are few to be had in this trailer park. The best she can hope for is an honest voyeur.
I watch, never blinking.
He continued to beat her to death. It will take him years to accomplish. He’s a patient man. You have to admire persistence like that as he slowly beats her into the waxed floor. He’ll keep at it for as long as it takes.
I’m not seeing any of this. I’m not there, not all there, not there at all. The whole thing spins out before me like a shadow burned onto the far dirt wall. The trailer and the jars show me everything I need to see.
He hit her because he loved her. You could see that in how hard he hit her. Nobody hit that hard without some feeling of ownership and connection or maybe his team is just losing.
I shouldn’t laugh. I’m watching a woman being beaten to death. It shouldn’t be funny but it is. I opened the jar in my hand, pushed it to my mouth and giggled. I turned the lid and shook the jar gently. Something inside the jar rattled, like a lightning bug. I caught the lid shut, nearly trapped my own lip and giggled again.
Three trailers over she laughed too. She giggled at him. He couldn’t believe his ears. He hit her again and she kept on giggling. That was the spell. That was the magic of the jar. It held whatever I placed inside it and cast its reflection out into the darkness of the trailer park.
He hit her again and again. The more she laughed the more he hit her. The blows rained down like fat wet kisses. She laughed, her belly heaving and pumping like she was giving birth to a minor moon, laughing her guts out, the blows raining down, her entrails spilling like mis-packed stuffing, long organic shiny wet cables squealing about his horrified fists.
The trailer moved its power through me.
The woman unraveled.
The man kept screaming.
I am the conduit.
*
I sit here wrapped in darkness, hiding from myself. Halfway up and halfway down the staircase in the cellar of my trailer. I’m looking at all of these jars. Shelf upon shelf of them, lined like careful eggs just waiting to be hatched. Rows of them lined up in a soft immaculate readiness.
And I’ve used so very few of the jars. They yearn and ache like unclaimed kisses, voices and sounds whispering in the bottom of each jar like a tarnished penny spinning in the bottom of a wished out well.
Where did the jars come from? I don’t know. Maybe god laid them, like eggs. Maybe the devil grew them, like mushrooms. I don’t know. The jars were already here when I moved into the trailer. I tried breaking them once. The first time after I saw what they did I used a hammer. The jars screamed as they broke, short wet howls that bled about my ears like a sky full of melting snakes and then they grew back. The pieces grew back together and the screams echoed in my trailer and I learned to stop fighting them.
And that’s where I am tonight, watching the woman giggle to death somewhere deep inside my jar. I tightened the lid, working my wrist into the screw. I felt what was inside flutter like a small trapped bird. The green light burned an ambient glow. Inside, a soft wet giggle stirred like torpid madness.
It will never stop moving.
I placed the jar on the wall shelves that grew out of the aluminum colored dirt. I rowed them up neatly next to my many accomplices. An hour later the ambulance arrived, slapping each trailer with a cool wash of red/blue light. The police are there as well, leading the husband away from the trailer, his wrists wrapped in cold steel handcuffs. The handcuffs looped neatly about his wrists like twin wedding rings. His head is bowed in shame and sorrow. His mind is an empty scream. He will never see the rest of his hockey game.
They carried her out on a stretcher. Her face is blessedly covered. I felt her spirit trapped beneath the bruises oxidizing upon her cooling flesh; the blood torpid and congealing in her veins; the trapped glotal of hope caught and fluttering like a moth trapped inside her windpipe.
She’s laughing, dead and laughing. The cool flesh started and twitched like a sneeze forever trying to gesundheit. The panicked breath of fear sparked her features in steps and starts, one long quick laugh, over and over. The sheet they’ve placed over her moved in spite of the shiny duct taped they’ve wound around her twisting dead body.
She will never stop moving.
A slither of wet wriggling meat spilled from beneath the sheet. The paramedic recovered the bit of offending matter and applied more duct tape. If the police noticed they pretended not to. They were used to the strange occurrences that went on in this trailer park.
Since that night when the bars of a holding cell wrapped themselves and squeezed about a murderer who thought he’d got away, they’ve learned to stop asking questions; but downstairs in the dark cellar of my aluminum sarcophagus I cannot ignore her quiet laughter as it beat like moth wings upon the sides of one more sealed soft dusty Mason jar.
*
The first time was easy.
The rock came straight through my window, flung by a child who stood ou
t in my yard waiting for me.
Do you know where the word vandal came from? They were one of several Teutonic tribes who helped destroy the Roman Empire. They were nothing more than a pack of dirty sandaled long haired hooligans, clambering over the walls of hallowed Rome, wiping their bottoms on scented patrician togas.
“Did you throw this?” I shook the rock in his face. “Did you throw this rock?”
The little bastard stood there and grinned. “Rock is my life,” he said, trying to be funny. “Why don’t you go back to your Lawrence Welk?”
I grabbed him by the shoulders.
“I’m calling the police.”
He only laughed.
“Think they’ll arrest me? Haven’t you heard of the laws governing minors? There are none. They can’t touch me. Neither can you. You let go or I’ll press charges.”
Couldn’t touch him? In whose imagination could this travesty be possible? The little brat was going to get away with it.
I let him go. I carried the rock back inside. I sat it on my chrome table and stared at it like a crystal ball as if I could see my future inside its dark dirty depths. As I stared I felt something touch me like the tail of a cat passed across my leg.
I looked down and there it was.
The trapdoor, covered in soft gray ash.
*
The sun slanted through a feathered cumulus caul. It painted the sky a tarnished shade of soft silver grey. I felt naked in a pair of garish Bermuda shorts. A towel, draped about my pale shoulders served as a shield from the sun. I was a gone-to-seed Superman, squatting upon a case of Lutheran-inspired kryptonite hemorrhoids.
I cleaned the trailer, splashing water from a snake green garden hose to wash the spider webs from the sterile aluminum walls. It’s surprising what can grow upon aluminum. The stream of water jets out like a long lance, splashing and drumming hollowly against the aluminum siding.
This isn’t where I’d wanted to end my days. I remembered being young and dreaming about a house with walls and a foundation and a white picket fence. Mind you, I’m not that old. By the calendar I’m barely creeping through the foothills of forty. Those years linger over me, bleak towers streaked with mildew and regret. They hang over me like a fat spider gallowed in a dusty dry cobweb.
I tried that once. Hanging. I remembered the rope, coarse forgiveness burning raw stitched tattoos, the slipknot choking home, kicking my way in midair into inevitable stillness – but the jars grew me back.
The trailer needed a keeper.
I’d been warned by my father about the dangers of living in a trailer park. A trailer is a poor investment. There’s no return on your equity. What about hurricanes? My father was in real estate and precious metals. He was a concrete man. He believed in the tangible. What you could lay your hands upon. The chain of allegiance stretched between us was a thin strong leash. He insisted upon maintaining this chain and I’ve honored his wishes one long lonely aluminum stained shackle at a time.
I splashed away another web. The drops clung to the remnants of the web like bits of fallen dew. The broken sunlight shone and glinted like bits of sharded glass. The spider picked herself up and crawled into the dirt.
I could never use a hose like this without thinking of my father. I found myself thinking about the time in my youth when I stole the pistol nozzle from my father’s garden hose. I wanted to play cowboy and I needed a gun. I was the Lone Ranger and what was the Lone Ranger without a gun?
I could hear my father now, screaming. “Do you know that nozzle is brass? Solid brass? Do you know how much brass is worth?” He beat me with the hose. The brass nozzle caught in the flesh of my back, tearing and chewing chunks of meat, scars that I still carry. The nozzle was worth more than my flesh.
I have souvenirs too. A Polaroid of my mother, nine days before the cancer took her, her face worn and hollowed down to nothing but an empty smile. I keep her ashes in the living room in a ceramic urn. I keep what’s left of my father in the cellar, the sixth jar up from the left. I can hear him now. Screaming and tasting a hard-pissed stream of brass bullets washed down his throat forever.
The spider moved in the dirt. I stomped at the insect but he got away in the shifting crush of gravel. He’ll be back on the trailer’s aluminum siding by this time tomorrow with a fresh new web. The resilience of vermin was incredible. There was always one more to kill, one more to squash but I swore I would stop them.
I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m a Neanderthal. Following Hammurabi in my dispensing of wished out justice. An eye for an eye.
Teeth for teeth.
*
There’s a moving van next door. I watch the men in their stained blue overalls hoisting the furniture inside. It’s cheap stuff, mostly particleboard. The signs are easy to read. It’s just another piece of trailer trash, blowing into the park. There’s constancy in transience. Trailer parks rarely stay empty for long. Poverty is an endless rope dragging a rabid dog that would not die.
A small car pulled in beside the moving van. A woman got out. She was tiny with soft blonde hair. A wisp blew across her eyes no matter how often she brushed it aside. The wisp was whispering. That’s what her hair was doing. It whispered low soft wet maddening whispers like rats in the walls. I heard the whispers over here. I could hear her hair and a part of me wants to whisper her name into one of my jars.
She saw me and waved. For an instant I thought she was throwing something. A grenade? A jar? A Molotov cocktail? She waved frantically as if she might be drowning, determined to be noticed.
Very well. I waved back and forced out a smile.
What have you done, I wondered? What is your crime? There had to be something hidden beneath that veneer of tawdry respectability. People are parcels. Secrets, with strings attached. We all hide something.
The paper boy rattled up behind me. I whirled like a nervous gunslinger, my finger on the trigger of the hose spray. The boy balanced in front of me on his red painted bicycle, the steel wires upon his teeth glinting cockily in the early morning sun.
What secrets did you hide, I wondered. Did you cheat your customers on collection day? Misjuggle their change? Did you peep in women's windows, nastily masturbating in their nasturtium beds?
I smiled. I made my face seem harmless. “Your name’s Billy, isn’t it?”
He looked at me. Half scared. The young are so wise.
He nodded.
Billy. I know you boy. I have my eyes upon you. And a cellar full of mason jars. A half an hour later I whispered his name into one of them. Billy. The name tasted of glass and spittle and cold threaded steel. The jar made a sound like a playing card spoked against a slowly spinning wheel as I tightened the lid closed.
I thought about my new neighbor and her soft sun gold whispering hair.
What had you done?
*
Women were evil.
My father taught me that first but I learned it later when I loved one. We were in high school. Her name was Marilyn. She was a cute girl with a pox of freckles scattershot across a pair of round chewy cheekbones. A chain of red braids framing a pair of glassy green eyes.
She looked like she was smiling even when she wasn’t.
I could tell she was forcing it. I knew what she thought. Even then I could get behind a person’s eyes. I felt their thoughts like water spilling out from an open fountain.
I am the conduit.
I wanted to be her boyfriend but every time I tried to tell her the words vanished in my mouth. I stood there opening and closing my lips like a hooked pickerel.
“You’re making spit bubbles,” Marilyn said.
So I spit on her.
Later that year she found the boyfriend I was supposed to be. He was a football player, heavy and smelly with a gap between his two front teeth. She didn’t really like him. I could tell. Then one day I showed him. I saw him in the library, watching her read. Sitting there with his chair cocked back like the trigger on a gun, looking fat and smug, l
ike he’d just fucked her up the ass and she’d thanked him for it.
I came up behind him, picked up an empty chair and swung it at him. The edge of the leg tore a chunk out of his forehead. He stood up, his face a sudden mask of blood. I hit him again but he caught the chair and pulled it away from me. I threw myself at him, catching at his ears, gouging his eyes, working my teeth into the open wound on his skull.
I tasted his thoughts. I chewed on the fat bastard, feeling him run through my mouth like hot spilling terror. I tasted all of his dreams, all of his fear. I sucked at them. Chewed and sucked until he had me down hitting me, calling me faggot, hitting me.
I didn’t care. I’d won. I’d tasted his thoughts. He’d never be the same. He’d always see me coming at him. Eating, sucking and chewing; I’d be in his thoughts forever.
They suspended me for a week. They called it punishment.
What did they know about punishment?
I tasted his thoughts even now. Eating through me, like a hollow cancer dream.
I am the conduit.
*
An hour later I closed the trapdoor. I sat in front of my television screen. I’ve read the newspaper from cover to cover. There’s nothing left to do but cook supper and watch the evening news while I wait for the night to fall.
The paperboy was nothing but an appetizer.
There were sausages in the refrigerator. I didn’t put them there. I never do. It’s just something the trailer does for me. Sometimes it’s steak. Sometimes it is pork chops. It is always meat. The carnivore needs his meat.
I watch the sausages sizzle in the pan. I poke them a few times with my fork and watch the juices bleeding through the sausage skins. The trapdoor is waiting for me to return. It is waiting, as patiently as a knife. I watch the news with the aluminum fry pan balanced upon my knees. The heat of the metal doesn’t burn me. The trailer won’t let it.
