by Harvey Smith
In an instant, he was thrown back against the truck. He registered three pale faces turn toward him in shock against the backdrop of the dim garage, howling apparitions. Thrashing like a shot animal, his mind went blank and his body flew into convulsions. Brilliant light flared from his left eye and he made no sound for a timeless second. He could not hear and he could not breathe. Only when he began to wail did he realize that he was lying on the concrete under the front of the truck.
They rushed toward him, around him, shrieking like birds fighting over a scrap.
Jack screamed and screamed, but the burning in his face only got worse.
Chapter 20
1999
At the curb, I killed the car and studied the block. Running along the river, it was shorter than most of the streets in Lowfield, oddly truncated. Eight houses sat in a line on the same side of the road. Some of them had sidewalks and some didn't, creating a gap-tooth grin along the front lawns. There were no houses on the opposite side of the street, only a levee, covered in wind-whipped salt grass and pieces of trash. The road terminated at the end of the block in a field of goat weed.
Next to a bus stop, I leaned against the car for a while, unprepared to go into Dad's house. A seagull floated by on an updraft, rising from behind the levee and eying me as it rode the air overhead. I remembered older kids at school bragging about throwing Alka-Seltzer to them during lunch, watching them swoop in to snatch the flat pills, only to fall to the concrete and bleed out minutes later.
I placed my fingertips against my eyelids, holding them closed, pushing against my eyes until I couldn't stand the pressure. “Please,” I said to no one.
There was a bench at the bus stop, sitting on a slab. Someone had hacked “H.B.W.” into the wood with a knife or screwdriver and in marker someone had written, “blows his brother” underneath. Off to one side, more graffiti offered a translation, “His Black Wings?” To which someone countered, “Hash, Bitches and Whiskey.” Behind the bus stop, a rusted barrel overflowed with garbage and the area reeked. Hunting for a clean spot, I sat down and slumped against the bench.
Masts and antennas were visible beyond the levee, where commercial boats were docked at a decaying marina. When I was growing up, one of my friends had lived a few blocks away and we explored the area often, avoiding drunken shrimpers as they staggered out of the marina bar. Their boats smelled of diesel smoke and dead fish. We often walked to the end of the rotting pier, once a train bridge, throwing bottles as far as we could across the river. The dark waters of the salty river were sheened with prismatic oil and floated with bits of Styrofoam. At the edge of the water, great chunks of rock and concrete sat just below the surface, broken bottles and torn aluminum cans nestled in their mossy crevices like bits of rot in bad teeth.
When I was fifteen, the city attempted to turn the area into some sort of boardwalk. The idea was to hold an event once a month, a fried seafood party with bingo and live music. Along the river, they set up picnic tables and aluminum pavilions. Hoping to draw in people from all over the county, the City Council invited local businesses to set up booths. I went once, riding my bike down to the docks and walking around alone.
It was terrifying…fishermen and day laborers staggering around and yelling. Hey, kid…you ever had any pussy? The third time they held the event someone got stabbed to death and that was it. The whole thing was suspended, never revived.
Sitting on the bench, I wondered what my mother was doing. After the funeral had she just gone home to watch television? What had she felt, standing beside the grave? Remorse? Some final sense of freedom? For a moment I felt the desire to call her, to ask, but the notion fled as soon as I remembered what it was like to sit at a table with her, to carry on a conversation. I visualized her spotted face, but it became Jenny's...older, with blackened teeth and patches of missing hair. She sat in her trailer, a simpering zombie. Would this have happened if I'd stayed in Lowfield? Would I have hollowed her out just like my father did to my mother?
Leaning back, I looked up into the sky. My mouth tasted like poison. Turning my head, I spat and the saliva tumbled end over end through the air like a boneless acrobat. The wind blew a plastic bag down the street until it got caught under the car.
I made my way up the front walk of the house.
In the neighbor's yard, a rusted bicycle lay on its side, the chain loose and spilled out like entrails. A water-logged football sat next to the bike, the foam torn full of holes like craters. Several bags of trash had been piled around the front steps and one of the bags had been clawed open by a stray dog trying to get at a disposable diaper. I wondered with perverse amusement about what kind of relations my father might have had with the people living around him. A feud? An affair? Either seemed just as likely.
As I approached Dad's front door, a woman came out onto the porch of the neighboring house, calling out across the yard.
“He ain't there.” She was in her late twenties, with black hair and pale skin. Bruises ran along her arms and legs. “He killed hisself.” She tucked her bathrobe around her body, which might have been appealing a few years ago, but was now lumpy. Just as she spoke, a child peeked out from behind her, hanging onto the pillar of her thick left leg. He wore a diaper, nothing else. Insect bites covered his skin like a constellation of red stars. There was food matted in his baby-soft curls and his mouth was smeared with something that looked like jelly. Probably three years old, he looked across the yard at me with wide eyes.
“He killed hisself,” she said again. She was almost smiling, thriving on the words, the most drama-rich part of her week. I heard her shrieking, falling back as I rushed her, as I forced her backward into her home and choked her to death on the floor while her doomed child watched.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “I'm just here to look at the house. I didn't know the man who lived here.”
“You movin' in?” She lifted a cigarette to her lips and took a drag. Her other arm lay folded across her waist, holding the robe closed.
I almost laughed at her, thought about smashing her body with the rusted bicycle in her yard. “No,” I said. “I work for the owner of the house.”
She stared at me, sullen now as I crossed Dad's narrow porch. The child in the diaper scratched violently at the sores on his belly. Reaching down, the woman yanked his hand away.
Looking at the little boy, disgust and sympathy warred across my thoughts. Lowfield was full of his kind, born into a world blighted, following the wake left by their parents, swerving and miserable, only to bring up their own offspring a couple of decades later, often sooner. I turned away, dropping them into an unmarked grave somewhere in my head.
The house was small, maybe 800 square feet. It sat on a plot of land that was barely larger than the house. The porch creaked under my feet. At the far end, away from the front door, I pushed a lawn chair out of the way. Holding one of the pillars supporting the porch roof, I leaned out and looked down the side of the house. A chain link fence ran around the back yard, where I could see pieces of a Frisbee scattered like shrapnel after a blast. Several plastic chew bones protruded from dried mud at odd angles. They reminded me of news footage...cops excavating human remains from an overgrown backyard. The neighbors never suspected anything. They said he was just a normal guy. A length of very thick, knotted rope rested in the corner of the yard like a serpent stuffed with newborn kittens. All the grass was gone along the fence and two ceramic dog bowls lay upside down in the dirt.
I peered into my father's bedroom. There were no curtains on the window, but the glass was warped and filthy with dust and streaks. I might as well have been trying to look into another world. The dim space beyond was barely visible, swimming as I shifted.
The front door was unlocked. I tried the handle and pushed the door open. Pausing for a second, I called out into the living room. When no one responded, I entered. The house was quiet and the air inside had a different quality, still and dry.
My father's thi
ngs were gone of course, the rooms stripped bare. Without furniture, it was bigger inside than I remembered, bigger than it seemed on the outside. The interior smelled like pine-scented cleaning chemicals and I laughed softly, the sound of my laughter surprising me, disturbing the dead atmosphere. He worked in the plant that created the chemicals. Maybe they used the chemicals to clean up the blood.
I had visited my father in this place over Christmas just after he moved in. He seemed oddly content. The man was living alone for the first time in his life. He got my mother pregnant when she was a teenager and subsequently he always lived with me, Brodie and his various wives...always with a succession of wives. Living alone in the last days of his life suited him. That is, until he blew his brains out.
Visiting for the holidays that year, I was shocked by how much weight he'd lost. This was months before his death and he looked bleached out. The house resembled one of the hunting lodges I remembered from childhood. It smelled of fried bacon, coffee and cigarettes, and it was littered with girly magazines and gun catalogues. Awkwardly, I had presented him with a Christmas gift. Buying gifts for Dad never brought me any joy, but I felt guilty when I failed to do so.
Taking it, he looked concerned. “I didn't get you nothing.” He took a slug from his premixed whiskey sour and set the glass down on the kitchen table. Losing so much weight, he looked wiry. Combined with his small stature and his years working outside, he was leathery and elf-like.
“That's okay, Dad.”
As soon as I said this, his concern vanished. Ripping into the package, he tore it to shreds and dropped the paper at our feet. He pulled out the t-shirt, which was folded around a card. A stack of gift certificates bulged beneath the front cover of the card; hundreds of pre-paid dollars to the chain stores in the area...cafeterias, a Western-style clothing outlet, an automotive parts shop, a drive-through liquor store. I knew Dad would use them.
The t-shirt depicted two deer, lamenting a target-shaped birthmark circling the eye of one of the deer. Dad had come to mind as soon as I saw the shirt.
He blinked, confused. “I think you got me this same t-shirt last year. Ain't this the same one?”
As soon as he said it, I realized it was true and embarrassment flooded me. “I guess it is,” I said. “Sorry…I just forgot. I thought it was funny.”
He looked uncomfortable, studying my face with concern before turning his attention to the gift certificates. He draped the t-shirt over a chair at the kitchen table and forgot about it.
“Hot damn, boy. I love the food they got there.” He held up the slip from the cafeteria then from the parts store. “…and I need some new tires. I can barely see the goddamn treads.” He cocked his head and looked up at me, one eye bulging larger than the other as he broke into a grin, which was the closest he ever came to thanking anyone.
I smiled back at him, but my stupidity nagged me. There was something pathetic about buying him the same t-shirt two years in a row. We just couldn't connect, not even over something as scripted as a Christmas gift. Not over anything.
I stood blinking in the dead air of the house, fighting to pull myself back into the present, back into the world. I walked into the kitchen and looked down at the rickety dinner table, half expecting to see the shirt hanging from a chair.
I saw him sitting there, near the end, drunk and munching on a candy bar, muttering to himself. The lights in the house were off and Dad sat in the dark, lit by the streetlight that fingered in through a kitchen window. I stared across the space, half seeing my father and half seeing an empty room.
All the dishes had been removed from the sink and the cabinets were empty. Someone had made an effort to clean up the counters, but they were so old and scarred that the effort was largely pointless. There were no curtains around the window over the sink. I leaned close and looked out through the screen, filthy with dead insects and spider webs.
The back yard was trashed. Muddy pathways cut back and forth in patterns that only made sense to a dog, orbiting tall tufts of dallisgrass. Leeched of color by the sun, a pale beer can stood half-embedded in a fire ant mound, leaning to the side like a haphazard smokestack. Several lawn chairs were scattered about, one of them on its side. Most of the weaving had rotted away from the aluminum frames and the fringed edges blew in the wind like hair from a dried skull.
I rifled through a couple of empty drawers before drifting
out of the kitchen. Nothing but tiny, pinched mouse droppings.
In the empty bedroom, a spot on the wooden floor had been scrubbed practically white, where the bed must have been. The cleanest spot indicates the dirtiest deed. I started to laugh, but the sound caught in my throat.
Kneeling down, I knew this to be the place where my father had finished himself, the exact point in space where Big Jack sat, weeping and raging, cradling his beloved pistol as he rocked back and forth. I touched the floor softly, running my fingers over the old wood. As I traced the outline of the bleached spot, I heard my father speaking in a low tone, next to me. The words were meaningless, unintelligible. He sat there as skinny as a circus freak. I recalled his expressions in life, the way anger, confusion and fear had often moved across his face, as they must have just before pulling the trigger. I wondered what his voice sounded like inside his head. His thoughts, or a caricature of them, spun and fell and floated through my mind like feathers in a dark and empty grain silo.
*****
The pistol on the kitchen table was a Browning BDA,
manufactured in 1983. Entirely black, it was the snubby compact model, holding a 7-cartridge magazine loaded with hollow-point rounds. Like a family of nested dolls, the slugs were stacked inside the magazine, snug within the grip of the pistol. The gun rested on a rag streaked with oil, with the words FABRIQUE NATIONALE HERSTAL visible along the length of the barrel. On the table nearby, sat a cup half full of whiskey sour and a coffee mug, speckled with droplets of blue paint reminiscent of a bird's egg.
The house was quiet, with no air conditioning. All the lights were dark and many of the windows were covered. Over in the corner, between the ancient refrigerator and the counter, the floor creaked as Big Jack adjusted his stance. The joints in his toes cracked as he lifted the heels of his boots to get a better view out the high kitchen window. In the dimness of the house, only his face and one hand, gripping the window ledge, were illuminated. It had been almost a week since he'd washed or shaved, and his chin and cheeks bristled with whiskers. His nails tapped on the sill as he studied the yard.
From his vantage point, he could see more of the alley and the neighbor's yard than his own; sagging chain link fence, clumps of weed and muddy trails where nothing grew.
He shook his head from side to side. Oh, man, he thought, Daddy woulda hated to see that. Just hated it.
At one corner of the yard, a thick rope lay coiled in the mud. He had taken it from a co-worker's fishing boat almost a year earlier, borrowing it for some task he couldn't remember now. He tried to get a glimpse of the dog where it slept against the wall during the day, but he couldn't see it.
At the table, he fell into a chair and took a gulp from the plastic cup. It collapsed under his calloused fingers then popped back into shape as he set it down. When he stopped moving, the house was quiet except for somewhere down the street kids were yelling at one another, their voices faint and brief. Taking up the pistol, he held it in both hands, knuckles yellow-white against the black metal. It was cold, leeching away the heat from his skin. Sighting down the length of his arms, he held the gun away from his body, pointing it at the wall then making a quick correction and aiming at a badly tilted clock hanging five feet off the floor. When he toggled the safety off, the clicking echoed through the old house. The muscles in his arms tensed, ropy and lined with veins. His skin was dark, freckled in places and long-tanned from working outside. A deep sigh escaped him.
He pulled the gun close and flipped it around, closing one eye and straining to see down into the barrel. Swaying
a bit, he caught a beam of weak light from the window over the sink, but it wasn't enough to illuminate much of the deep, perfect bore. Looking at the barrel, pistol profile, he contracted his brows and ran his tongue across his teeth, pushing against the enamel. The etched lettering was barely perceptible as his thumb slid back and forth along the surface.
Outside the front door, someone took a couple of heavy steps across the porch. Big Jack jerked his head toward the front of the house, just as a stack of mail shot through the slot in the door, sliding to the floor.
“Goddammit,” he said. Caught by surprise, his voice was raspy. Stock still, he listened as the footsteps retreated.
He dropped the pistol onto the cloth and stood. Made with the last packet of mix he had, the whiskey sour was no longer cold, but it lit up his mouth and burned as it went down his throat. Cup in hand, he made his way to the door. In front of the pile, he used the toe of his boot to separate out the mail. He squatted and looked it over, a collage of overdue bills, junk offers and coupon fliers.
A pained expression crossed his face as he picked up one of the bills, dropped it, and picked up another. He rubbed his mouth, eyes wide and bloodshot.
A table stood against the wall with a fat county phone book resting on the lower under-shelf, spine toward the wall so that the ratty pages faced him. Someone had written his name, HICKMAN, on the spread of the pages. An old phone was positioned on top of the table, but the cord had been yanked from the wall. Grunting, he braced himself on the table and stood up.
He moved closer to the front door, stepping on the scattered mail and looking past the edge of the curtain. Tomorrow was a workday, or he thought it was. It might have been the middle of June and he winced thinking about how many days of time-off he'd taken. He tried adding it up, but couldn't. Whirling in place, he sent envelopes skittering across the wooden floor, his steps shaking the house.
