by Martin Clark
“Open it up and look. You’re actin’ just about silly. It’s won’t bite you. I just wrapped the top up in case it came open or started leaking.”
“This is too bizarre.” Evers kicked at the tissue with his foot, moved the lump around on the floor. He could feel the plastic top inside the ball of paper.
“I’ll have one of the mechanics give me a sandwich bag. You can feel safe carryin’ it that way and look at it whenever you want to. In your kitchen or something, with gloves on. And one of those surgical masks. You’re sure acting like you think I’m tryin’ to do something to you.” Ruth Esther sounded bewildered, resigned, but not angry.
Ruth Esther went into the garage area, came back with a clear plastic bag, picked up the wad of tissue and sealed it in the bag. “Here.”
“Why is it that you have white tears?”
“It’s just the way I am.”
“Are you sick, or taking some kind of medicine?”
“Nope. Not at all.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like this before. It would make a hell of a sideshow attraction.”
Ruth Esther handed Evers the bag. “What are you going to do with them?”
“I don’t know. I think I’ll take them to my friend Dr. Rudy, let him make a slide, and we’ll all have a few drinks and look at it under the microscope.”
“No kidding?”
“You never know,” Evers said.
“I really don’t like you asking me to do this. I just hope you know I sort of felt that I had to, so you wouldn’t think something was going on or that I was tryin’ to trick you.”
“I still think something is up, only I’m not sure what it is.” Evers loosened his tie, pulled the knot away from his throat. “For all I know, you got a bottle of correction fluid while I was in the restroom.”
“Well, thank you for coming, regardless of what happens. And thank you for the beer. Do you want me to walk you to your car?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Okay. Well, God bless you.”
Evers grimaced. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I hope things go well for you.”
“Oh.” Evers turned and took a step toward the door. “Take care,” he said, and he heard Ruth Esther’s name called over the intercom again.
Evers walked out of the showroom into the warm air, and he heard the sounds of cars passing on the highway and a few people talking in the lot. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and carrying a taped-up ketchup top wrapped like a mummy in a clear sandwich bag. He thought about a beer, and about driving home, and then he stopped walking and thought about his mother and the smell of her food in the kitchen at three-thirty, after school, and the dishwasher when she opened it and bent over, the bottom rack, plates and bowls. Evers noticed that he’d stopped moving. He looked down at the asphalt and over at his car. He turned back toward the showroom, where Ruth Esther was standing in the door watching him, and waves from the pavement lifted her up in little shimmers and rises, like she was rocking on water. Evers knelt down and put his hand on the parking lot; it was warm, but not hot.
When he got into his car, Evers’ head and stomach felt good enough to take on some more alcohol. He poured part of a beer onto the ground—emptied the bottle down to the top of the label—mixed in tomato juice, and started drinking with an eye toward finishing at least three of the beers before he got to his apartment in Norton.
When Evers got home from the car dealership, he took a cooler out of a closet in his apartment, twisted two plastic ice trays into the cooler and dropped the bag with the albino tears into the ice. He sat down on the arm of an oversize chair, leaned forward, balled up some of his hair in his fist and looked around his apartment. There were two water glasses on the floor beside the chair, one empty, the other with flat soda and cigarette butts in it. Evers slipped down into the chair, picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s number. She answered almost immediately. It was already past nine, and Evers told her he wasn’t going to drive to Durham for the weekend. Jo Miller was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she finally said, and then she and Evers talked about where she had eaten lunch and a few other things.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“You know, Evers, you haven’t been down here in over a week, and you left early the last time you came. And you’ve called just once. One time in a week. At three in the morning, remember? You and Pascal had been outside watching a toad, and you kept going on about how it looked prehistoric when it jumped and about the gold ring in its eye. You weren’t sounding all that normal.”
“Sorry. I’ll try to make it up to you.” Evers glanced at the cooler. It was sitting on the kitchen floor, next to the refrigerator. “You could come up here to see me if you wanted to. I’m just worn out; I had to work all day.”
“We’ve had that discussion before.” Jo Miller coughed and cleared her throat.
Evers could tell she had turned her head away from the receiver. She coughed some more, and Evers waited for the noise to stop before he said anything else. “Well, it wouldn’t kill you to drive up here just once,” he suggested.
“Probably not, but I’m not going to.”
“Right.” Evers didn’t push the issue. “Maybe I could come down, you know, late tomorrow or early Sunday.”
“Just call first to let me know.”
“Do you want me to come?” he asked.
“That’s up to you.”
“If you don’t want me to, if you don’t care one way or the other, then I might just ride down and visit Pascal.”
“Look, Evers, if you want to see your brother, then go see him. If you want to come down here, then come on. Please just don’t do this chump dance and try to get me to bless your choice even if I don’t like it.” Jo Miller’s voice hung and scratched in her throat.
“You sure are sputtering and hacking a lot,” Evers said.
“I always get a cold around this time of the year, when the seasons are changing.”
“Well, I’ll let you know. I’m not trying to be hard to get along with.”
“Fine. Call me in the morning. If you’re not coming, I’m sure I can find something else to do.”
“I’m sure you can,” he answered sourly.
“We need to talk about some things, Evers. In person. Face to face. I need to … to get this cleared up. And, I guess, I need to tell you some things.”
“Tell me what? What do you mean?”
“I need … we need … I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. I just want to get some things out on the table.”
“Why not tell me now?” Evers asked. “I’ll be miserable and worried until you tell me. You’re going to drop this ominous, curdled hint and leave it hanging until I see you, right? That’s not very thoughtful.”
“You deserve a little discomfort, Evers. And you have a good idea what I’m going to say.” Jo Miller blurted out the last sentence. “I’ll talk to you later. There’s no need to belabor this now.” She hung up the phone. Evers heard a click and then an empty, disconnected line. He felt his stomach stir up, like the first boils in soup or porridge—big, slow, plopping bubbles started turning over in his middle. “‘A good idea what I’m going to say,’” he muttered.
Evers still had the receiver in his hand and he started to call Jo Miller again, tapped in the area code and two more numbers, then stopped. He let the receiver drop, didn’t hang it up, just opened his hand, and the receiver hit the floor beside his chair and pulled the rest of the phone along behind it—train cars crashing over a cliff, one pulling the others along, banging and clanging and piling up when they hit bottom.
Evers picked up the cooler, took an opened bottle of cabernet out of the refrigerator, walked down the stairs to his car and headed toward his brother’s.
When Evers got to Pascal’s trailer, it had been dark for several hours; a couple of lamps were turned on inside the mobile home, and a purple bug zapper was mixing up t
he light and turning everything near it—the shadows, the ground and Pascal’s face, hands and clothes—an unnatural, bright gray. Evers shut his car door, and his brother waved at him. The bug zapper electrocuted an insect with a violent, hissing snap.
“I’m glad you’re here, Evers,” Pascal said while Evers was still walking down the driveway to the mobile home. “We are, in this season of frolic, cotillions and lawn parties, recumbent here at my house trailer, smoking dope and drinking and talking about things. And, of course, we always look forward to hearing your thoughts, given that the state of North Carolina pays you for your opinions.” Pascal grinned. He was barefoot and had not shaved in two or three days.
Evers sat down next to Pascal on a long cloth sofa in the yard in front of the trailer. One cushion in the sofa was damp because Pascal had forgotten to put a brick on the corner of the large plastic sheet he used as a cover, and rain had made the seat soggy. Pascal’s friends Rudy and Henry were sitting in lawn chairs, facing the two brothers.
“So, if you had testicular cancer, okay, and you could live for sure but had to have your balls cut off, or you could leave them intact but have a seventy-five percent chance of dying, what would you do? That’s the question.” Pascal had picked a piece of foam out of a rip in the sofa and was rolling it around in his hands.
“You’re using a lot of poor medical assumptions, Pascal. This is fairly bizarre. Hard to imagine such an odd set of circumstances,” said Rudy. Rudy was a physician. He was drinking expensive merlot out of the bottle. He had brought the wine with him to Pascal’s trailer since Pascal drank only beer and the cheaper varieties of hard liquor.
“It’s a philosophical question, Dr. Strangelove, not an empirical one.” Pascal gave Rudy an impatient look. “Don’t be so literal.”
“I’d want to die with my balls on,” said Evers.
“No doubt,” remarked Pascal. “How about you, Dr. Rudy?”
“I don’t have sex as much as you guys. I’d be happy to be alive and work on cars and drink quality wine.”
“The doctor to the cars,” Evers quipped. His pants were soaking up dampness from the wet cushion. Pascal handed him a blue plastic picnic cup half full of warm scotch. “What about you, Henry?”
“I’m married, don’t use them anymore. I’d let Rudy do the work, too.” Rudy was the kind of physician who probably would do well in a critical situation—blood geysering from a cut artery or a toddler with a Tinkertoy lodged in her throat—but he drank too much and couldn’t be trusted around all the whiz-bang hospital gadgetry, hemostats, pharmaceuticals and other doctor’s prerogatives, all the means and tricks and palliatives that are best just left alone or used on others. The doctor to the cars spent most of his time working on automobiles, boozing and filling in at the local emergency room during summers and on holidays.
“You know, there aren’t a lot of people with balls anyway,” Rudy said. He was almost supine in his chair, his bottle on the ground beside him. “The world’s full of eunuchs and jesters and egg-laying roaches.”
Henry nodded several times. “I saw my buddy Bono the other day, in this old video with Frank Sinatra. Bono has on these dumbass sunglasses and is disgorging his world-weary Irish wraparound minstrel spleen onto one of Frank’s songs. ‘Under My Skin,’ I think it was. It was perverse. Terrible. Bono has no balls at all. He’s the worst kind. Puts on this cinders-and-fury show, and, probably, the high-water mark of his virility is smashing a hotel lamp or cursing a hair stylist.”
“Sinatra had balls,” Evers said. “Always did.”
“I agree,” Pascal added. “Even though he was wearing a wig for a few years before he died.”
“Good call.” Henry looked at Rudy. “I wonder what Frank made of Bono?”
“Let me tell you something, brother.” Evers sat up from the back of the sofa. He lit a cigarette. “Something of interest. I have a chance to spend a couple of weeks trying to track down some money. About a hundred grand. It’s a pretty unusual situation. This lady—and I don’t know that much about her—has two of these clues that will lead to the money, which is hidden somewhere. She has a partner, her brother, who has the other clue.”
Rudy waved his hands. “Slower, Evers. And don’t put more than one idea in each sentence. We’re stoned, okay?”
“I’ll go slowly.”
“We would get more out of it if you did.”
“There are three clues. We have two. You need all three clues to find the money—one hundred thousand dollars. My potential partner is a lady, very attractive, as a matter of fact. She’s blond and dresses well. If I help her and we find the money, I get twenty-five thousand dollars. If you guys go with me, I’ll split that with you, so that—”
“We would each get sixty-two hundred and fifty bucks.” Pascal finished his brother’s thought.
“Around sixty-two hundred. Yeah.” Evers drank some scotch.
“Who’s the lady?”
“She sells cars. Her brother’s in jail. I’m not sure about this yet. I just thought you guys might enjoy the trip. I mean, I realize it will be hard to leave the lawn sirens and tar-baby embrace of the doublewide, but I wanted to mention it. It might be fun, sort of a glorified road trip.” Evers paused and looked sideways at Pascal. “Like the mazes on the back of cereal boxes. A trip with some curves.”
Pascal was making another marijuana cigarette. He sprinkled the dope into a paper, rolled the paper, licked the edge and twisted the ends. “I’m fairly smoked up, Evers, but it’s fair to assume, I guess, that this is not a radio promotion or buried Civil War treasure. Dick Clark’s not on the envelope?”
“It is my understanding that the money’s stolen, probably from someone who gained it illegally.”
“Where is it?” asked Rudy.
“What a stupid question.” Henry frowned at the car doctor.
“That’s not what I’m asking. Is it, you know, in this state, at the bottom of the sea, where? Six thousand is okay if all we have to do is pick up a duffel bag at the Asheboro bus depot, but a little short if we have to battle jackals and walk over skulls and rats and pools of acid in Nepal.”
“I think Evers’ point is, Rudy, that it might be an odyssey.” Henry took the joint from Pascal. “Thank you for including us, Evers. I’ll go if it promises to be a good drive and a fun trip. I hope that we will have plenty to drink and some reefer, and … a bus would be nice, too. Let me know when you make up your mind.”
“Does this involve your job, Evers?” Pascal asked. “It certainly doesn’t seem wise to risk your career over money you don’t need. And very little money at that.”
“Well, I haven’t decided yet; I’m not sure about the whole thing. I didn’t mean for you to think that I was definite about it. And there’s something not right about the story … the setup doesn’t make much sense. The story about these clues and how everything got to this point is hard to take at face value. But still … I don’t know … it still might be okay. This has sort of a little hook in me.”
“Is it the woman?” asked Henry.
“I just met her. I guess it’s a lot of things.” Evers took the joint from Henry and sat back on the sofa. He inhaled the smoke, and the end of the cigarette turned bright orange. “The weirdest thing about this lady—she’s very pretty, very attractive, long, blond hair, very composed, and she has a voice that, if you’re in a crowd, sounds like it comes out of her all over, like a speaker, not just out of her mouth. At least it sounded that way to me. I was hungover this morning, but that’s the way it sounded. Plus, it was like everything around her kept—I don’t know—sort of melting and jumping at the same time, like I was looking at things over the top of a charcoal grill. Or like the tar and gravel roads in the summer, the way the heat waves come up and distort everything for about three feet. And the strangest thing is … is—and I saw this—she has white tears. Snow-white tears. That lined up on the ground in a smile. That’s what got me to begin with, stayed in my head all day.”
&nb
sp; Pascal and Rudy and Henry started laughing—bursts and giggles and snorts. Henry sat his drink on the ground beside his lawn chair, put his hands over his face and leaned back in his seat.
“How the fuck would you know this, Evers?” Rudy asked.
“I saw her cry. Today. She did it twice.”
“So you watched this woman cry? What are you talking about?”
“As queer as it sounds, yes. More or less. Twice.”
“And then a host of cherubs and fairies appeared and sprinkled rosewater from their soft fingers and buttercups danced with peacocks.” Henry waved his fingers in the air.
“I brought some with me. They’re in the car. I wanted Rudy to test them.”
“Brought what? We’re fucked up. Am I hearing things right?” Henry asked. “You’re fucking with us, right?” Henry looked at Evers, then at Pascal. He and Rudy began laughing again.
“They’re albino tears,” Evers said.
“No way, Evers.”
“This is like a college prank, frat initiation or something. It’s a bunch of miniature marshmallows or something, and you’re going to eat them or do some fake-ass Halloween riff to fuck with us.” Henry picked up his drink. “I’m too stoned for this.”
“Is there a punchline, Evers?” Rudy moved his feet and almost knocked over Pascal’s cup.
Evers ignored him and went on in the same tone of voice. “The other thing is, after I talked to her, when I was leaving, walking to my car and—wait … okay … let me back up. Before I left she said something like ‘bless you’ and when I walked outside I had this strange feeling, like I was seeing my thoughts, things were in vignettes in front of me—if that makes any sense—and I was thinking about our mother, Pascal. I felt really good for an instant, despite how many things have been bothering me lately.”
“Have you ever seen the Jungle Book when you’re stoned?” asked Rudy. “King Louie, the Ape King, is like a beatnik or something.”
“Shut the fuck up, Rudy,” Henry said.
“Whatever you decide is fine with me, Evers.” Pascal had tilted his head back and was staring up at the sky.
