Big Jack Is Dead

by Harvey Smith

  Jack could hear them talking over the Christmas music as he approached. To his surprise, they didn't seem angry. Everyone got quiet when he entered the room. Ramona had already swept up the glass from the picture frame, leaving the busted remains of the portrait on a nearby counter. The picture was very old and depicted Jack's great-grandfather standing in front of a woodshed.

  “Jack, come here,” his grandfather said.

  He walked up slowly and stood next to the recliner, head bowed.

  Grandpa reached out slowly with one scarred hand and took Jack's shoulder. “Now, listen, boy. What you did was wrong, you understand?”

  Jack nodded. Everyone in the room was quiet. Everyone watched them.

  “I don't want you to bite any more, alright? Bitin' is for babies.” The old man waited, looking at Jack through his black-framed glasses. “If you bite me again, your daddy is gonna whip you. You understand?”

  Unable to prevent himself, the boy looked over at Big Jack who was now standing in front of the Christmas tree. He was silhouetted against the tree…a dark, empty body made of shadow and surrounded by glimmering red-gold light.

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said, looking back at the old man.

  Grandpa tightened his grip on Jack's shoulder until the boy squirmed and the cartilage popped. “Are you sorry for what you done?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said.

  From across the room, Granny said, “Now give your grandpa a hug and let's get on with Christmas.”

  Jack leaned forward into his grandfather's leathery embrace, smelling the strong aftershave around his neck intermingled with cigarette smoke. They released each other and Jack went over to the couch as quietly as possible. He sat down softly then bent over to re-tie his sneakers, which allowed him to disappear.

  Big Jack turned to Grandma. “We gonna have pie now or we gonna open presents?”

  “Presents first, dessert later,” she said. “Ramona, set up a trash bag by the back door for the paper.” Grandma waited until Ramona started moving. “Why don't you play Santa Claus this year, son?”

  Big Jack's eyes widened. He turned to his father. “Daddy, is that okay? You don't mind if I do it, do you?”

  Somehow this humiliated the old man, but he tried to hide his expression. “No, I do it every year, so you go ahead.” Grandpa had always performed this function, choosing the presents to hand out and reading the name tags. From his seat on the recliner, he smiled meekly at his wife.

  Big Jack stepped over to the Christmas tree and knelt. Everyone got settled behind him, taking up seats and waiting for him to offer up the first present. Digging around in the pile, he pulled out a small package wrapped in silvery-blue paper. He read the tag then set it back on the pile. After reading the tag on the next box, he turned to the room with a grin. “This one is to me from Momma and Daddy.” He turned around and tore into the package. It was open in seconds and he tossed aside the thin paper, holding up a new pocketknife in a leather sheath.

  “Hot damn,” he said, opening up the knife. “It's a lock-blade.” He got up and walked around the room, showing everyone the knife. It was ten inches long when opened, with a black and green rubber grip.

  Jack saw his own face reflected in the blade as his father held it near.

  “Look at that, boy,” Big Jack crowed. “It's big, ain't it?”

  Jack faked an expression of awe and nodded.

  Grandpa got serious again. “Now we spent a lot on that so take care of it. It's a nice one…one of the most expensive knives they had at the gun shop.” He grinned at his son.

  Big Jack looked back at him and nodded. “I will, Daddy.”

  “Dear,” Grandma said. “Why don't you pick out one present for everyone? That way we can stay on schedule.” With a fingernail, she tapped the watch affixed to her thick wrist.

  “Oh,” Big Jack said. “Alright then.” He snapped the knife closed and slipped it into his pocket. He picked out several presents, including another for himself, and distributed them around the room.

  Jack sat on the couch opening an oblong package. He tore the paper slowly, afraid of appearing too greedy. He removed the paper and all the pieces of tape then folded everything up, taking it over to the plastic trash bag near the back door. Taking his place on the couch again, he opened the box carefully. It was surprisingly heavy. The lid came away, revealing a new BB gun, nested in tissue. Jack plucked off a bow and lifted the gun out of the box. All over the room, the others were opening their own packages.

  “Would you look at that?” Big Jack said. “…I got a new thermos.” He focused his attention on the object in his hands.

  “Well, who was it from?” Ramona asked.

  Big Jack blinked. “I don't know.” He stared at her then dug around in the paper. He read the small tag and looked up at her again. “Oh…” He chuckled. “It's from you, Jack and the baby.” Then the smile faded from his face. “Though you gotta admit…you, Jack and the baby don't work out at the plant. So I sorta paid for this myself.” Ramona opened her mouth, but didn't speak. She turned her head toward the patio doors, staring into the dark backyard. Big Jack turned his attention back to the thermos and unscrewed the lid. He held it under his nose and sniffed for a long time. “Oh, man…I love that new thermos smell.” He held it up to one eye, looking into the silvery glass barrel of the thing.

  Granny called out to Jack. “Whatcha got, little Jackie?”

  “A BB gun,” he said. “I love it.” He put on a smile.

  Grandpa pointed at him and arched his eyebrows. “Now listen, boy. If I catch you shootin' anybody's mailbox or winders with that air rifle, or puttin' out some dog's eye, I'm gonna whip that ass. You hear?”

  Jack pretended to study the gun in fascination. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I won't.”

  Big Jack looked over at his son. “I had a .22 rifle when I was your age. Not an air rifle, but a real gun.”

  “He sure did,” Grandpa said. “He grew up with guns. Not like kids today, with the television.”

  Jack looked up at each of them. He felt ashamed, but didn't know what to say, so he turned his attention back to the BB gun.

  Big Jack gathered up another round of presents and passed them out. They repeated the ritual, opening gifts until the skirt under the tree was bare. With each round, Grandma asked Ramona to collect all the loose wrapping paper and stuff it down into the trash bag.

  When all the presents were gone, Grandma lined everyone up for photos, directing them by pointing and shaking her heavy arms, making disgusted sounds and frowning until they understood her wishes.

  Afterward, they ate pecan pie.

  Chapter 6

  1999

  That morning at the El Cinco Motel, I woke up slowly, wondering where the hell I was. Finally, my daze passed. I remembered that I'd returned home and I remembered why.

  Rolling over and kicking free of the covers, I sat in the near-dark at the edge of the bed. My shoulders and neck were stiff until I rolled them and stretched for a couple of minutes. A thin wall of light reached across my lap from a gap in the curtain, dividing the bed crossways. I blinked a few times and tried to wake up. My tongue felt swollen and dry as it moved around within my mouth. I rarely drank anything while I was visiting the coast. The water smelled even before it hit your lips and the coffee was thin and usually stale. I stayed dehydrated, surviving on the overly sweet orange juice they served in 24-hour breakfast places scattered along the highway.

  The region had a distinctive smell, with the dank air acting as a carrier for various chemical odors. No one living down here ever noticed, but the smell assaulted me every time I came home. It went beyond smell. It was an atmosphere created by the gray landscape of refineries. Waking up, eyes burning, it was always the first thing I noticed.

  At the window, I pulled back the drapery, leaving the gauzy under-layer in place. Dust floated around me as the morning sun lit up the room. The carpet was stained and filthy even though it was probably vacuumed daily by the
minimum wage housekeeping crew. My skin crawled as I looked out over the floor...pubic hair woven through the carpet fibers, interlaced with occasional roach legs or antennae. I wanted a shower.

  In an effort to keep them off the floor, I'd draped my clothes over a chair the night before. I collected them up now and shook out my shirt and jeans. At the closet, I reached for a wooden hanger and the others went swinging wildly, clacking like dried bones.

  The rectangular window over the tub allowed a fair amount of light into the room, so I left the overhead light off. With great care, I avoided the toilet's cold porcelain base as I maneuvered around in the tiny space. Under the shower, I started to feel better. The steam helped me breathe and the warm water woke me up.

  My mind went to Mandy back in Sunnyvale, all red-blonde curls and petite body. She'd been talking about her upcoming honeymoon and this had a powerful affect over me. Eyes closed, I thought about taking her clothes off in my office, late in the evening. Pulling on myself until I was erect, I leaned into the cold tile and started jerking off. Pleasure rushed through me a couple of minutes later and I angled myself away from the wall, pumping semen onto the transparent shower curtain. The little spurts left clean places wherever they landed, clearing downward pathways on the filmy plastic before disappearing into the drain.

  I coasted into one of the available parking spaces attached to my mother's government-subsidized apartment complex. The place was located in the far northeast corner of town, next to a massive field of salt grass. A train track ran alongside the road, throwing the place into a thunderous rumbling for short periods. The train served the numerous chemical plants in the area exclusively, freighting industrial materials into and out of the plants.

  Horrible stories circulated about the contents of the trains when I was growing up. The words stenciled onto the sides of the cars were too long and too alien to pronounce. Over the years, a dozen train cars exploded, flooding entire neighborhoods with lethal gasses and forcing the evacuation of hundreds. Industrial accidents had killed three of my friends' parents. Once a field of cattle were found dead because a train passing through their pasture leaked chlorine gas. The entire herd suffocated in the middle of the night. Sometimes when I was trying to sleep, I could see them lying in the damp field, convulsing. I could hear them lowing and bellowing.

  Not everything made in the plants was toxic, but that didn't seem to matter. Vacuum-sealed tanker cars often carried tons of small plastic pellets. These were shipped out to locations across the country and melted down for injection-mold operations. The pellets were compressed for shipping and a train car full of them ruptured during my sophomore year in high school, killing our quarterback's father. Tiny pieces of plastic. When the vacuum seal on one of the tankers cracked, the resultant explosion shredded the train car completely, tearing the man to pieces and showering the area with white pellets. Someone from school drove by and said it looked cool, like snow.

  I switched off the Lexus and sat behind the wheel, looking at the complex through dark-tinted windows. It had been built by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. All the people who lived there were ostensibly too old or otherwise incapable of making it on their own. The buildings were ugly, made of pale brick and the cheapest possible building materials. None of the structures had more than one story, giving the entire place a squat profile. Electrical and telephone wires crisscrossed overhead and occasionally something triggered a flight of marsh birds from one of the surrounding fields.

  I glared out over the grounds, watching an old woman hobble from her unit to the central building, probably to check her mail. She wore slippers and a flower-printed dress, and there was a scarf tied around her head. I shook my head, wondering what she did every day, whether there were people who wanted to be around her, or whether she was just miserable and isolated, too broken to carry on a reasonable conversation.

  Visiting my mother here for years, I knew that many of the residents weren't even old. Many of them were drug addicts who managed to hoodwink the bureaucracy operating the complex. Like my mother.

  I locked the doors and walked across the parking lot. As I passed a dumpster, a younger guy approached me, very lean and ropey like a racing dog, wearing nothing but a loose pair of shorts and high top sneakers. He was so pale that an extensive network of veins showed from beneath his skin.

  “Hey, want some smoke?”

  “No, I'm all right. Thanks.”

  He seemed to forget about me, continuing along the sidewalk without response, rounding the corner of the closest building.

  I walked up the path leading to my mother's front door. A strip of masking tape was stuck to the plate bearing the apartment number. The tape was peeling up at the edges and someone had pinned it in place with rusted thumbtacks. In faded script, the tape said RAMONA HICKMAN. A few potted plants were scattered across her porch, all dead. The porch light next to the door was covered with spider webs and the husks of moths. I reached out and rapped on the door.

  A long while passed and there was no response. I knocked again, much louder. Finally, something rattled behind the door.

  Muffled, but distinctly afraid, a woman's voice sounded out from the other side. “Who is it?”

  “Mom, it's me.”

  “Who?” asked my mother.

  “It's me…Jack.”

  “Jack?” She sounded confused.

  “Mom, it's your son…Jack. Open the door.”

  There was a faint, “Oh.” The chain clicked and rattled as she slid it out of the groove. The door swung inward, revealing my mother a few feet beyond the threshold, a shrunken figure in a housecoat. I smelled cigarette smoke and garbage. She was barefoot and her legs were covered with insect bites. Her kinky red hair had washed out to gray and her skin had an ashen quality.

  “Oh, Jack,” she said. “It's so turr'ble about your daddy.” She just stood in place after speaking.

  I wanted to turn away, to walk back to the car without a word. She would stand in the doorway for a minute, I imagined, confused and mumbling to herself. She'd close the door, go back to the kitchen, and smoke a cigarette. Ramona could not be touched by such a gesture. Her emotions, if she had any, were inaccessible. If I left and never contacted her again she would simply continue to live in the housing complex until her death. She only called me once or twice a year when she managed to get her hands on a phone or acquired a prepaid calling card. She only contacted me to ask for money, saying she'd gotten into a bind and needed cigarettes or toilet paper.

  I let out my breath. “Yeah, Mom, it is…it's terrible. He was never happy.”

  “No,” she said. “No, he wasn't.” She looked off into space over my shoulder as if trying to remember something.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  I waited for another second and when she didn't move I took a step up into the apartment. My mother shuffled backward, allowing me to enter. She closed the door and hurried to lock it, awakened into action.

  “Mom...it's okay. No one is out there. It's daylight outside and I'm here.”

  “Well, you never know about people,” she said, twisting the bolt.

  The place was just as it always had been before, maybe worse. There was a path cleared through the jumbled landscape of her belongings, leading from the front door to the living room, then from the living room to the kitchen. I knew that there was a single bedroom and a tiny bathroom in the rear of the unit. She'd piled every imaginable piece of domestic junk along the walls and most of the floor space. The place was filled with broken pieces of furniture, a couple of dead television sets, numerous trash bags full of old clothing, a barbecue pit that was missing its lid, a massive Christmas wreath on a tripod and a number of yard ornaments. The old TV sets looked massive compared to my new Sony.

  I stepped closer to my mother, causing her to freeze. Leaning in carefully, I put one arm over her shoulder, hugging her. Her body felt strange to the touch, like it completely lacked m
uscle tissue.

  “Oh,” she said, recognizing the gesture. She smiled in a way that resembled a grimace and said, “Well…”

  I made my way along the path to the kitchen without touching anything. Sitting down on one of the wooden captain's chairs there, I perched at the edge of the seat, avoiding contact with the ratty cushion tied to the slats in back. Every square inch of Ramona's dining table was covered with glasses, diet soda cans, ashtrays, food cartons, medicine bottles, celebrity gossip magazines, and equipment related to her books-on-tape setup. She'd acquired the ridiculous tape machine through a program dedicated to helping the blind. After that, being on a mailing list for the blind had opened the door to additional benefits.

  She tottered through the dimly lit room, stopping next to her one working television. She picked up a pair of channel lock pliers from a tray next to the television. She fumbled with the pliers, using them to manipulate the controls. She twisted the broken-off knobs until the television came on and began to blare loudly. Holding the channel locks in her left hand, she straightened up and looked down at the screen. Long seconds passed before she moved again. Bending slowly from her thick waist, she went down again, trying to change the channel, but failing, the clumsy pliers slipping off the plastic knob.

  “Durn it,” she said quietly, repeating the process. Finally, she managed to grab the tip of the knob and changed the channel.

  The frayed material of her housecoat blocked part of the screen, which was discolored and snowy. A male newscaster in his fifties was presenting a story on a local food drive. Waiting on my mother, I suddenly found myself thinking back to the night in Point Reyes when I watched the homeless man sitting in a torrent of bird shit. I could see his vacant expression, his lack of concern…the disarray of his clothing and the filth in his beard.