Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale

by Chuck Kinder

  But Jim had got himself an acute case of the old whirly-birds and had fallen backward onto the bridge instead of forward into the cold, dark big drink, and he had passed out cold there in the cold rain, a real fortunate pilgrim that night. Which explains why Jim responded so strongly to Mary Mississippi’s depictions of naked, well-endowed sailors leaping overboard to practice their dead-man floats, for he could understand why men could do such a thing. Jim tells Mary Mississippi that he wishes she had a hot tub handy, or some such body of water wherein he could demonstrate his own dead man’s float.

  Well, darlin’, all I got is a big ol’ hot and steamy shower. Mary Mississippi winks and blinks from the deep old South.

  I have known suicidal sadness in my lifetime, too, S. Clay pipes up. —My old ma croaked when she gave birth to my baby brother, who is this crazily carnivorous Cyclops child.

  Your momma isn’t deceased! Mary Mississippi exclaims. —You are such a sick puppy for uttering such a thing.

  My baby brother shits through his ears, S. Clay says.

  We could pretend we are singing in the rain, Jim says. —In your hot and steamy shower.

  I just adore singing in the rain, Mary Mississippi says.

  I hate to bring this up in mixed company, my little candy lamb, S. Clay says to Mary Mississippi, my little main squeeze for the moment, my own little hot, many-holed honey, but, toots, it is just about time to give your old pork pirate his 3:13 a.m. blowjob.

  S. Clay, darlin’, Mary Mississippi says, why don’t you just retire to a far corner all by your lonesome and play nice with your old baloney bayonet.

  We can look up and open our mouths and pretend we are all singing in the rain in your hot and steamy shower, Jim says, and unbuckles his belt.

  I, for one, S. Clay says, am juiced to the tits.

  Turkeys have been known to drown in the rain, Lindsay says. —But that is because they are stupid creatures, not suicidal.

  Say what? Jim says.

  Turkeys, Lindsay says. —They are too stupid to come in out of the rain. And sometimes they drown in it.

  Turkeys? Jim says. —No shit?

  Turkeys, Lindsay says. —Rain starts dropping on a stupid turkey’s head and it gawks up at heaven in utter amazement. Then sometimes they forget to shut their stupid mouths, and gulp gulp gulp, they are goners. Mary, maybe you should paint a stupid-turkeys-drowning-in-the-rain series.

  Right now, hon, Mary Mississippi says, I am busy as a little bee painting a botched caesarian section series.

  Mary Mississippi does the cutest bump and grind as she matches Jim’s silly striptease piece for piece. S. Clay gets in the act, stomping about the room in his motorcycle boots to the beat of the Stones blaring “Satisfaction.’’ So then Lindsay, feeling as though she is being caught up in some sacrificial fiction, peels off the tight-fitting, sequined, truck drivers* dream black blouse Jim had begged her to wear. She swirls it about her head a couple of times and then somewhat surreptitiously folds it neatly on a table.

  Mary Mississippi’s naked body is as beautiful as Lindsay has feared, perky little tits, strawberry nipples, two perfect handfuls of hips, a haze of pubic hair the same soft reddish hue as the tiny tufts under her tanned, toned arms. Lindsay feels not unlike a heifer lumbering about to that rock-and-roll beat Mary swings her tight pretty little ass in perfect time to. As the four of them bop about the room becoming naked, Lindsay tells herself the trick is to adapt to the moment, to utterly love the present as an exciting place full of possibility where you have never been before, that she should push out of her mind those pressing premonitions of dark turns, escapes too narrow, that she should resolve to a bottom line of behavior that will include quitting smoking the first thing tomorrow and losing ten pounds in a week.

  Hey, take a look at downbody, S. Clay calls out, and Lindsay’s heart stops. —Get down, jellybutt, S. Clay hoots, but he is pointing at Jim as Jim spins the perfectly naked Mary Mississippi under his arm. Jim is still wearing his jockey shorts and he has his fedora pulled low over his eyes and at some point he has pulled his boots back on.

  Hey, jellybutt, S. Clay calls to Jim, you fetid son of a homely whore, why don’t you stick your thumb up your jellybutt and bark for us? Hey, get a load of Lindsay! Lindsay’s got a pair of tits that won’t fucking quit! Come here to Daddy, you big-boobed babe, you, S. Clay calls out to Lindsay, who vows to herself on the spot to befriend and defend S. Clay Wilson from this day forward to all those multitudes of people who claim he is probably the world’s greatest walking talking asshole.

  I dig your haunting perfume, is what Lindsay overhears Jim say to Mary Mississippi once when he swings her near.

  Bald Boy

  1

  Ralph Crawford’s house could have been a ship afire as usual, for all the lights blazing from it as he pulled into the driveway. After Ralph had suddenly felt compelled to heave his outrageously expensive dinner into the toilet, he had searched the restaurant high and low for Alice Ann, who had clearly bolted, but without the car. Who knew where she had run off to or how. Who cared. Maybe she had gotten a ride home somehow.

  Ralph kicked his way though the cats lurking in the kitchen. He snapped off light after light as he made his way back through the house to the bedroom, where in his most secret inner sanctum he had a little something stashed for snakebite. At the closed bedroom door Ralph stopped abruptly, frozen to the spot, his hand on the knob. He placed his ear against the door. There was no mistake about it. Ralph could hear low voices, whispery voices, coming from behind that closed door, and low laughter, too, coming from his and Alice Ann’s bedroom. Ralph backed away slowly, quietly, down the hallway.

  In the living room Ralph sat down heavily on the couch. He reached up and turned off the lamp, and then sat there in the dark. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette. Ralph sat there in the dark and tried every trick he knew to quiet his runaway heart. He thought about those whispery voices and the low laughter back in the bedroom and his mind buckled, filled with a swarm of unthinkable images. Ralph shook his head violently, tried to create other possibilities, other conclusions. But Ralph knew the worst. Had he called Alice Ann Lindsay! Had he been that dumb? But he thought about her all the time, Lindsay, every waking moment. So maybe he had been that dumb, called Alice Ann Lindsay and brought this terrible turn of events down on his own dumb head. He knew what Alice Ann was capable of, like bringing some tattooed low-rent biker home to fuck in their bed. His mind roared with that terrible knowing.

  Was this rock bottom, then? Had he and Alice Ann finally sunk to it? Had all their yesterdays together, all those yesterdays with their incomprehensible yet relentless logic, added up to this sorry state of affairs? Ralph reached up and turned the lamp back on. He blinked in the sudden light and his eyes teared. Ralph let the tears come. He sat there, his purple face and nose in his hands, and shook with sobs. He could feel his purple nose running into his hands, and he could taste his own snot and tears. He gently pressed one painful purple nostril and then the other, exhaling violently, blowing gobs of snot onto the new carpet at his feet, then he ground them in with the soles of his shoes. Ralph picked up a copy of his book on the coffee table and studied his picture on the back. He turned the book over in his hands, examining the bite marks. He opened the book to the dedication page and ripped it out. He crumpled the page in his fist and tossed it into the fireplace. Ralph threw his book into the fireplace.

  Ralph got up stiffly and walked over to the fireplace, where he picked up a cast-iron poker. He tested its heft. He smacked it lightly into the palm of his good hand. Back in the hallway outside the bedroom, Ralph put his ear against the door. The sound of voices rose suddenly, followed by laughter, and Ralph thought that he had never heard anything so frightening in his life. His heart was jumping as if he had been running up a hill. His legs were ropes of water. He remembered how as a boy, when his dad took him hunting, how he would consciously will himself cold and unrelenting, heartless, every nerve alert, ready to pull
the trigger on anything that moved, or not, ready to kill anything, or not. Ralph lifted the cast-iron poker above his head and turned the doorknob slowly.

  2

  The radio had been a Christmas gift from somebody sometime somewhere. Ralph had never liked the thing. It had never worked worth a damn from day one. That radio was no friend of Ralph’s. It had brought no comfort into his life. Its sound rose and fell randomly, its tuner roamed all over the face of the dial like it had a mind of its own, stations cross-fading crazily with other stations amid screams of static; its alarm went off when it felt like it. The news that radio had brought into Ralph’s life was news he didn’t need, news of airplanes dropping from the sky, families burned up in unexplained fires, mass murderers on the prowl, news that seeped into his sleeping brain as he turned in the current of his already dark dreams and left him at daybreak full of an abiding dread. Sudden loud laughter from that radio gave him a start; then a voice rose and faded away, and Ralph was left with an inexplicable but profound sense of loss, as though he had just heard his dead dad’s voice again for the last time. Ralph felt on the verge of sobs again. Ralph smashed the radio with the cast-iron poker, swinging it like a ball bat. Ralph was the sultan of swat, the Babe Ruth of serious radio bashing, as he sent blinking, spluttering parts of that radio over the fence.

  Next Ralph attacked that pyramid contraption Alice Ann had for some unfathomable reason erected above their bed. He bent the thin hollow metal tubing of its frame and then bashed the whole shebang onto the floor and stomped it flat. Ralph beat the abandoned, unmade bed until he was breathless, dizzy, and coughing. He flopped down on the edge of the ruined bed, then sat there panting. Ralph felt as though a huge, cold hand was squeezing his heart. He lit a cigarette with his shaking hands. He lay back on the tangled, yellowing sheets and pillows that smelled of their scents, his, Alice Ann's. Maybe if he simply closed his eyes and let himself drift off, he might get lucky and not wake up in this world. Had it been a mistake when Ralph, once upon a time, married the darling, clear-eyed girl he loved. Had it been wrong for Alice Ann to marry the hopeful, ambitious boy she loved? Had his and Alice Ann’s days been numbered from the beginning? How long could he and Alice Ann go on telling themselves they could still turn out to be the people they had started out believing they would become? The thought occurred to Ralph that we are all identified finally by what we do to other people, and that betrayal is simply another word for loss. He put those thoughts out of his mind in a heartbeat. Ralph felt as though somebody had rearranged his organs and his heart was thumping from somewhere down in his stomach. Suddenly Ralph had the notion that he was a man without a true human interior, that his soul had no inner landscape upon which to move.

  Ralph got up and hurried to the closet. As Ralph pushed his way back through the hangers, he was amazed how just the scent of Alice Ann’s clothes gave him a little chubby. He got down on his knees at the entrance to the narrow tunnel he had constructed between the piled boxes of old Christmas decorations, ruined toys, torn teddy bears, tattered, outgrown baby clothes Alice Ann steadfastly refused to discard on the faint chance they might be needed again in this family. On his hands and knees Ralph crawled deeper and deeper into the starved closeness of the closet’s darkness, as though he were descending into the midnight recesses of some Kentucky cave. Ralph felt his eyes grow large and lustrous. He imagined he could hear the sound of dripping water and smell a damp, earthy odor not unlike mushrooms growing rampant and huge in the dark, an aroma that put him strangely in mind of sex, whereupon he entertained another little chubby. But Ralph pressed forward, and after a time the darkness began to feel accommodating and safe and even sweet, and the memory of the outer world of light began to fade away like some dim dream from childhood, and Ralph imagined that he was slipping through some strange ring into another realm. At last Ralph arrived at that tiny, hushed clearing at the closet’s deepest part. He could not see a thing in the pitch black, but sight was not necessary now. Ralph opened that old battered trunk handed down to him from his dad and ran his hands over the hidden treasures.

  As always Ralph sniffed at that old shirt of his dad’s, rubbed it over his face, imagining that he could still inhale that faintly sour, smoky smell he had loved. He touched the old tackle box that held those elaborate lures his dad had spent the happiest hours of his life fashioning, sitting at the kitchen table night after night, sipping whiskey or beer, tying flies and talking of secret hot spots for fishing that only he and his boy knew about. Ralph picked up the pearl-handled pocketknife with the bottle opener and closed his fist about that precious item. Ralph pictured his dad’s hands whittling with that old knife, carving, cleaning nails, popping open beers, gutting fish in the grass of riverbanks, those big hands silvery with scales, fingers stained with the dark blood.

  Ralph’s dad used to take him fishing all the rime, even in winter. His dad fished for whitefish mostly, using a belly reel, and pencil-length sinkers and red, yellow, or brown flies baited with maggots, which his dad used to keep alive and warm under his lower lip. This was the only thing about his dad that ever made Ralph’s skin crawl. Ralph had quit letting his dad kiss him good night because of the thought of those godawful maggots, which his dad had misunderstood. His dad had thought it was somehow cute, that Ralph was trying to act too grown-up to kiss his old dad good night.

  Ralph had always imagined he would teach his own son to fish, that he would show his boy all the secret hot spots to fish his dad had shown him back home up in Oregon, teach his boy all the tricks about fishing his own dad had taught him with patience and exactness and love. Ralph had taken his own boy fishing just once. Back before things had grown so bad between them, back when the boy was about four, Ralph figured. All the boy had wanted to do was throw rocks into the river. The boy had had his little heart set on bashing some fish. Now Ralph wouldn’t be able to find any of those old fishing hot spots back home if his life depended on it.

  What Ralph wished the most was that he had never stopped kissing his dad good night. What Ralph wished was that he had turned out to be more like his dad, for all his dad’s faults. Even though his dad had died a drunk. Ralph was going to quit drinking himself. He meant it this time. Just as soon as he and his dad polished off the last of that bottle of ancient Scotch Ralph had paid an arm and a leg for and kept stashed in the secret inner sanctum. And what Ralph and his dad could use right now was a little bracer. Whenever he and his dad were hoisting a few together there deep in the inner sanctum and talking rainbows, Ralph would take one drink for himself and one for his dad. Tonight Ralph planned for them to kill that half-full bottle of ancient Scotch and then that would be it for Ralph. His drinking days would be behind him. Ralph rummaged through the old trunk. He ran his hands along the sides and across the bottom and into the corners. Ralph emptied that old trunk in a New York minute, tossing his dad’s treasures over his shoulders into the darkness. But there was no bottle of ancient Scotch to be found. That hooch was history.

  So it had finally come to pass. The little devils had finally found and violated Ralph’s last secret place. Ralph closed his eyes and simply sat there listening to his own breath. He had nowhere left now. He could never escape the surface of his life. Ralph felt around on the dark floor for his dad’s treasures, and one by one placed them back in the old trunk. He came upon the precious pearl-handled pocketknife with a bottle opener. Ralph opened it and rubbed its dull old blade over his wrists. Ralph ran the blade slowly up and down his pant leg, as though cleaning it, imagining his own hands silvery with scales, his own fingers smoky with blood.

  Ralph had come to truly believe in the existence of evil, and he believed that evil lurked about the edges of our world waiting for the least opening to squeeze through, like a rat. Not long before these events, Ralph had let Alice Ann drag him to a movie called The Omen, in which Gregory Peck and Lee Remick played a handsome, highly successful couple who had, because of either pure bad blind luck or an evil contrivance of fate, en
ded up raising a child they had thought was their own flesh and blood but who was in reality the Son of Satan loosed into this world to fulfill his biblical destiny as the Antichrist. After much bloody mayhem and murder, the movie drew to its climax with a wounded Gregory Peck dragging the screaming, struggling boy toward a church altar in the dead of night in order to ritually stab him to death and thus save the world from dark dominion. Ralph had sat in the dark theater finishing up the last of his buttered popcorn and watching this desperate act unfold with a profound sense of appreciation.