Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  But Arnold didn’t wait for me to say anything. He picked up the broken pieces, held the handle in one hand, the shattered heat cone in the other. “My fucking hair dryer,” he said. “You’re crazy.” He looked at Forney, then at me. “The both of you. Completely nuts.” He stormed out of the bathroom just as Forney and I began to cackle.

  Over the years, there have been a lot of things that I’ve forgotten—the name of my first grade teacher, my mother’s favorite color—but these memories with Forney still spark with clarity, especially this one, and I think it’s because in that moment in the bathroom, both of us laughing at that poor boy, we became friends, not just people who spoke to each other.

  Later in the evening, we went out drinking. Forney, a fifth-year senior, was over twenty-one and had no trouble procuring us a fat bottle of Wild Turkey. We drove his Honda into a nearby field of buckshot and got soused. Between us, we finished the bottle, and we started singing David Allan Coe and Conway Twitty songs, harmonizing to a network of stars, blinking and uncaring. The night wore on, and he eventually had to call Regan to come pick us up. “Save us from ourselves,” he yelled into the pay phone of the truck stop we’d walked to. I had to help Forney into the back seat when Regan got there; he was far worse off than I was. On the drive back, he started singing the chorus of “You’ve Never Been This Far Before,” and Regan placed her hand on the crotch of my blue jeans.

  “You were listening, weren’t you?” she said, her voice slicing through Forney’s dissonant singing. “That night before I came in. You were listening to us fucking. It’s okay.”

  When I didn’t answer right away, she squeezed. “You are trouble, girl,” I said, and stared at her hand as it began to rub me through my jeans. She touched me without tenderness, her boyfriend not more than a foot behind us in the back seat, which made the whole experience more exciting. We didn’t go any further than that, her touching, and Forney never noticed a thing.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, the three of us spent much of our free time together. We would ride around town listening to Regan’s CDs—she forbid us to play country music in her presence—and we usually ended the night with Forney and me sitting on the hood of his car watching her dance to Liz Phair’s “Never Said”: “All I know is I’m clean as a whistle, baby,” she sang to us, her voice husky. We went to a lot of movies, and most of the time, I sat between them in the dark theater, our breathing taking the same pattern after a while. We saw Jurassic Park twice at the dollar theater, and I can still remember Forney’s astonishment when the computer-generated brachiosaur filled up the giant screen. “Amazing,” he whispered. “Just amazing.” When I was with them in moments like these, I thought that this—this closeness? This friendship?—is what keeps a body from disappearing, from dissolving away. And I started to wonder if I had been so drunk that I’d imagined Regan’s hand on me—she never acknowledged that it’d happened even in the rare moments we were alone.

  One morning we were sitting outside on the grass near the large sundial by the student union, and they asked me to go away with them for the weekend. “You should come,” Forney said. “Mother has gone to Barbados. One of her extended cruises.”

  “The house is supposed to be huge,” Regan said. “We can play hide-and-go-seek for hours.”

  “In the middle of nowhere for three days,” I said. “Tempting.”

  Regan threw a pinecone at me. “He’s coming.”

  Forney said, “He seems determined.”

  “Oh, he’s coming,” she told Forney, and I felt as if I were some kind of wild animal they were talking about, an animal they thought couldn’t understand them. “It’s fall break,” she said, “and he hasn’t got anywhere else to go.”

  * * *

  —

  I KEPT AN EYE on Hooch while we lounged on the front porch, drinking tall glasses of gin and tonic. The more I drank, the more comical the dog became. After the near bite, it retreated to the spidery shadow of a sweet gum, where it stayed for the rest of the afternoon. By evening, with the sky coated in fiery oranges and reds, Regan and I had moved from the porch to the side of the house so we could soak up the last bits of the afternoon light and give Forney some space—he’d brought his electric typewriter with him and was itching to use it. You could always tell when he was ready to write: His eyes would glaze over and he’d chew on the tips of his fingers. He’d get all nervous. I had often wondered just what went on inside his brain that kept him from writing his own poetry and always figured it must have been something like a jumble of words, all twirling and switching around in there, an endless combination that was maddening for him. I think the poems he retyped settled him, gave order to the chaos in his brain.

  While he typed, Regan and I ventured to the tin shed and found, amid the rusty Bush Hog and menacing-looking combine and other pieces of bladed farm equipment I don’t have words for, an old hammock, yellowed but still functional. We carried it outside and fastened it between two sturdy-looking pines.

  The dog shuffled out of the shade and came to investigate. When it got close, sniffing and slobbering, I lost my balance for a minute and stumbled against the hammock, almost falling in it.

  “You are drunk,” Regan said. “Drunk, drunk, drunk.” She shook her head when she spoke, letting her buttery yellow hair fall over her face.

  “Not so much,” I said, and the dog sat down a few feet from us, placing its head on top of its massive paws. I tapped the hammock, making the net swing casually as if moved by the breeze. “Ready for the lazy and the free,” I said, which I thought was witty. Reagan frowned.

  “I need more gin.” She was wearing a purple bikini top, and the rhinestone in her belly button was glittering like a fleck of shattered glass. She wobbled a little as she tried to maneuver herself in the hammock, which made me realize she was a little drunk too. Once settled, she undid her top. “Heaven,” she said quietly, and I had the impression that she had forgotten I was there, but then she held her hand out to me, and said, “We need some vitamin D. Come lie with me and be my friend.”

  I slid to the ground faster than I had intended and became dizzy. The gin was really working on me now that I had slowed down to let it. My head was beginning to feel too heavy for my neck, and I imagined it breaking off and rolling across the yard, the dog playfully chasing behind it. “Don’t think Hooch will ever cotton to us,” I said.

  Regan lifted her head and considered the dog. “It’s so ugly, but then again there must be something special about a dog that’s all bite and no bark.”

  “Maybe it’s forgotten how—to bark, I mean.” I rubbed my tongue along my teeth; my mouth was dry, and my molars felt as if they didn’t belong in there. “I need another drink.”

  “Ooh, me too, me too.”

  I got back to my feet rather easily, but it took me a second or two to remember why I’d gotten up in the first place. Before I could leave, Regan’s hand caught the elastic band of my gym shorts and pulled me over to her. Her fingers traced my thigh before disappearing up my shorts. Her hand felt good, just as it had that night in the car, and I let her touch me for a moment. If I had been soberer, I might have gotten angry with the way she randomly put her hands on me, as if I were hers. I wasn’t angry, but I grabbed her on the wrist, and that was enough for her to stop and take her hand away. “He can probably see you,” I said, and she pulled down her sunglasses to the crook of her nose. Her eyes were pure and absolute, no eyeliner on them.

  “Scaredy-cat,” she said. “Be quick with the drink. I want to go to bed good and stupid.”

  Forney barely noticed me as I passed him on the porch. He had added an old desk to the furniture outside and was sitting there with his typewriter. A thin paperback was propped up on a chair in front of him. He was hunched over the machine comparing what he had written to what was on the page.

  Inside the kitchen, I took t
wo quick shots of tequila and then made the drinks, being generous with the gin and the ice. As I walked back outside, the breezeway shifted under my feet, as if I were in a fun house. I stumbled a bit, falling against the wall, knocking down a picture of some man in his army greens who looked like Forney only ten years older. It had to be his father. He had the same serious eyes, the same hard mouth. I sat the drinks down on a coffee table and picked up the framed photo. His daddy came from money. Probably didn’t know anything about trailer parks and would shudder at the thought of someone like me staggering, half-drunk, in his house. “Old fucker,” I said aloud, and hung it back on the wall. Only then did I see a crack in the glass; it ran diagonally across the picture. My stomach began to clench, and I doubled over, almost throwing up right there on the shag carpet.

  “Fuck,” I said, rising, speaking to the man in the picture. “I am drunk.”

  Forney met me at the doorway. Took the drinks. “Let me,” he said. “You look like you’ve had too much sun. Stay here and cool off, buddy.”

  I leaned my head against the porch railing and watched him go to her, speculating on if she’d touch him as she had touched me. I thought I should be jealous, but I couldn’t quite summon the emotion. I liked them together, and I liked how I revolved around them like a satellite. She didn’t belong to me, but I belonged to them.

  I sat down in front of Forney’s typewriter. He had run an extension cord from the living room to power it and had forgotten to turn it off. The machine was still humming, ready for fingers. The poem being retyped was called “Silence.” It was short, so I was able to read the whole thing. And the last lines had a way of sticking to me even though I was drunk.

  Nor was he insincere in saying,

  “Make my house your inn.”

  Inns are not residences.

  I said the last lines to myself. Not satisfied, I said them again, only louder. I said them to the world. Then I heard Regan squeal and remembered Hooch, that awful mangy dog. I imagined the creature’s slobbery jaws tearing into Regan, mangling her soft skin. I stumbled off the front porch toward the hammock, a wave of nausea passing over me. I knew it wouldn’t be long now before I threw up. When I reached them, I saw Forney first. He stood with his arms crossed, frowning.

  “What?” I said. He nodded toward Regan. She was crouched down by the hammock, laughing as the dog licked an ice cube out of her hand with its thick red tongue.

  “I think he likes the taste of gin,” she said to us.

  “Wrong.” Forney shook his head. “Think he likes the taste of you.”

  I sunk to the ground and finally wretched.

  * * *

  —

  EVENING SETTLED AROUND the house, and the dimming sky was a comfort. My temples were still tender and aching from when I threw up, and relaxing in the Jacuzzi on the deck didn’t help much. I had been in a whirlpool many times in high school, usually at the end of a week of two-a-days, but I had always been alone. It was different having two other people in there with me. Made me more cautious of my movements, careful not to touch a stray foot with my own. We had been in there for about half an hour, not speaking, the steam from the hot water creating a kind of fog around us, when Regan got out and told us that she needed to cool off some.

  Alone, the two of us sat there facing each other, no sound except the air jets. The lights in the floor of the Jacuzzi didn’t work anymore. The sky had purpled into night, and we found ourselves in darkness, pure and complete. “Sex,” Forney said suddenly, “is supposed to be safest in here. The hot water kills the sperm.”

  I lifted my head from the lip of the Jacuzzi and saw nothing: black shapes over a darker black. “Sex is never safe. Not really,” I said, and it was like speaking inside a cave. It was as if my voice were not my voice but his voice echoing back to him from a curved wall of stone. We could hear Regan calling the dog, and I imagined the large creature running toward her, tongue hanging out.

  “Regan can get anything to love her. When she wants to,” Forney said.

  The mosquitoes were beginning to nip at my ears, so I sank deeper in the water, going completely under for a while.

  “Tell me,” Forney was saying when I came back up. “What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done?” I shook the water out of my ears and acted as though I hadn’t heard the question. He didn’t wait long for me to answer before he started speaking, his voice dropping an octave. “After Daddy died, Mother installed this Jacuzzi. Started bringing her boyfriends. Once I watched her fuck a man in here. I was in my room, at my window. Didn’t think they could see me from up there. Later that night, he came to my bedroom and shook me awake. Don’t know what kept me from pissing myself. He said he saw me watching. Called me a pervert and told me that if I ever spied on them again he’d pluck my eyes out with a spoon.”

  “Jesus,” I said, not wanting to hear any more.

  The light fixture beside the Jacuzzi flickered on, and I covered my eyes. “That light never cuts on at the right time. Sensors are broken. Goddamn.”

  Forney paddled to the side of the tub where I was and reached behind me to the light switch. In a flash, we were in darkness again.

  “What about you?” Forney asked.

  I thought back to my childhood in Vicksburg: my parents, those dented and rusted trailers that made up my neighborhood, the river sludge that would sometimes wash right up to our wooden steps, the smoky casino boats, my years playing football, my injury, and having to quit and leave that part of myself behind—it all seemed so insignificant now, almost as if it had happened to another person. I imagined my mind was a chest of drawers and began to open each of them, searching for something, cleaning out the hurt and the disappointment.

  “Horses,” I said to him. He jumped in the water as if he’d fallen asleep and my voice had woken him. “I don’t like riding them. The few times I’ve ridden, I always let the horse go where it wants to. We usually end up lost.”

  “They scare you?”

  “No, not that. I just don’t like the feeling of controlling another living thing like that. Having this great big animal under you, forcing it to go your way when all it probably wants to do is eat grass and rut in ditches.” I’d never said this—or even knew I thought it—until that moment. “Maybe that’s why your mama let Hooch go.”

  “Pretty to think so,” he said. His voice had changed again; it was thin and hurt me to hear it. I dipped the back of my head in the water and gazed up at the sky.

  * * *

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT, in Forney’s old room, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I fingered through all of his books that lay scattered across the floor and on the desk beside the window. Books by people I’d never heard of before. They frustrated me for some reason, much like the picture of his father had. The feeling, however, didn’t last long. I remembered Forney out there in the Jacuzzi, festering like an open wound, and it evaporated. I leaned over the desk and looked out the same window he had as a boy when he’d spied on his mother. The Jacuzzi was turned off and covered. The light beside it had been turned back on, and I could see beyond the deck out into the backyard, where the dog was lying. “You,” I said, and the dog unburied its head from its paws and looked up as if it had heard my voice. I stepped back from the window, startled. I gave it a minute and looked again. The dog was still staring up in my direction.

  The next morning, Forney wanted to ride four-wheelers on the dirt paths behind the house and didn’t want the dog lurking behind us, so he suggested that we put him in the old chicken pen by the shed. I didn’t think the three of us had enough muscle to move the dog anywhere it didn’t want to go. Forney was confident, though, and assured us that he could handle it. He placed a slice of raw meat—a dark gray mystery meat that he’d found in the freezer—in the center of the pen, and we waited for the dog to take the bait, but it stayed clear.

  Frustrated, Forney
approached the dog with a leash, with the intention of dragging it into the pen. The closer he got to the dog, the more it started to growl, and I thought I was about to hear it bark. The dog snapped at him, and Forney kicked the ground, cussing, which seemed to agitate the dog even more.

  “Maybe,” I told him, “we should lay off and go if we are going.”

  “No,” Forney said. “I’m tired of pussyfooting around Hooch. Got to learn it’s a dog. Goddamn.” He had been on edge all morning, not even taking time to type. I chalked it up to being hung over. God knows, I didn’t feel my best.

  “What’s going on out here?” Regan had come back outside, her hair damp from the shower. The dog stopped growling the moment it saw her. She patted her leg, and the dog went to her. As she scratched its ears, the dog whimpered. “It’s only angry because it’s so dirty. Aren’t you, boy?” She told us to go on ahead without her, that she was tired of looking at this animal and wanted to clean it up. Forney threw up his hands and started walking off to the shed where the two Yamaha Grizzlies were kept. Her interest in the dog was beginning to worry me some. I waited until he was out of earshot.

  “The fuck you doing?” I asked her. But she gave no indication that she had heard me. She turned and headed back to the house, the dog following close behind.

  Before leaving, Forney pulled out a dirty cap from a toolbox and shoved it on my head. “For the sun,” he said, and then we were off. I enjoyed driving the four-wheeler down the dirt paths, following Forney on his. We zigzagged through the thick of the woods and came out beside a nearby field. I was able to put Regan out of my mind when I had to worry about the rough trail and keeping my wheels in the same tracks as Forney’s so I didn’t flip. We eventually ended up at a little river, and we parked our ATVs on a little sandbar, side by side, just inches from the water. He had brought two cane poles and a tackle box full of gummy lures, and we fished the dark water until the sun started to droop behind the trees. Having no luck, we decided to give it up and go home.