by Boye, Kody
Johnny… my baby…
Settling myself into the chair in my shitty, run-down motel room, I bowed my face into my hands and cried. Johnny lost his father, all because of a fear of being thrown in jail for reckless driving. How could any sane, proud man dream of leaving a child who had been diagnosed with an almost-fatal disease? The umbilical-cord blood saved him, sure, but his father—his one and true father—left him, just like that?
“I’m a coward,” I whispered, trying my hardest not to scream. “I’m a damn, motherfucking coward!”
Impulse took hold of my arm, slamming my fist into the table. The side of my hand caught my plate with buttered toast and sent it into the air. Flying like a bird shot with a BBgun, it soared through the air for about five feet, then landed on the muddy carpet.
Crumbs galore, I thought.
The roaches would be eating well tonight.
Forcing myself out of the chair, I bent down, gathered what crumbs and toast I could, then turned and tossed it toward the sink.
The plate fractured on impact.
The bread would be soggy in less than three minutes.
“Johnny… why?”
For what seemed like the millionth time since I left the scene of the crime, I contemplated why I left and why I hadn’t tried to call 9-1-1. My cell phone had sat in the driver’s tray right beside me—waiting for three magic numbers to be pushed—yet I’d done nothing. And, upon lousy judgment, I hadn’t stopped to consider putting the hummer in park.
That woman could still be alive, had I kept my head on straight. She could be in a hospital bed, possibly recovering from a severely-fractured leg and a few scratches and bruises. She could be talking to her husband—her children, her family, her parents, maybe even her brothers and sisters—and I could be apologizing for what I’d done, signing a check to pay both the hospital bills and the karmic debt that had surely come back to bite me in the ass.
No.
I’d done none of that.
I ran away from the responsibility of ending a perfectly-healthy, middle-aged-woman’s life.
And now, sitting in a shitty motel room, crying over the fact that I’d left my baby boy and battle-weary wife, I broke, destroyed, and mourned for the things I had lost, when others had lost more than I could ever imagine.
I mailed my wife a postcard under the name of Timothy L. Johnson.
I told her her ‘husband was well’ and that he ‘was sorry he left so suddenly.’
The rest of the note detailed a fictuous account of an affair that never existed.
I cried the whole time I wrote it.
I sent it standard.
She would wait seven-to-eleven days before she read it.
I sent it with stamps embossed with the image of Lady Liberty.
One of those stamps lay drenched in tears before I pushed it to the paper, all the while knowing I would never have to lick it.
My sorrow signed my deal for me.
The postcard had a picture of a man and the woman in the front.
They stood on a beach, in Hawaii.
We spent our honeymoon there.
I broke down in tears in front of the mailman when I handed him the postcard and drove away.
Days, weeks, months—all went by in the blink of an eye. Like a second to its minute, and a minute to its hour, time didn’t seem to exist anymore. One minute it’d be Sunday, then the next it would be Thursday. Nearly a week would have gone by before I’d rise to shave, much less eat. It didn’t seem important anymore. Nothing did, not since I left my family.
All because I wasn’t paying attention.
Sighing, I pushed myself out of bed, made my way into the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror. Haggard, with sunken cheeks and a head full of stubble, I resembled someone you’d find out on the street begging for change or a piece of pizza. But unlike the people who intentionally looked like that to get what they wanted in life, I looked that way because I couldn’t help myself.
You’d be better off on the street than wasting your hundreds in a shitty motel room.
“Yeah,” I grunted, “I would.”
Reaching up, I opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out an electric razor, and went to work tidying myself up. I shaved my head, trimmed my beard back to its original, brown-grey length, and washed the dirt off my face.
By the time I finished, I couldn’t help but break out in tears.
Daddy! Daddy! You’re home!
“No I’m not,” I sobbed, resting my head in my hands. “I’m not home, Johnny, and I’ll never be home!”
With the razor still running, I tossed it at the medicine cabinet as hard as I could.
Glass exploded.
My sanity went with it.
Live and let live.
Die and let die.
Suffer and let suffer.
In my endless, waking dreams, my son chased a kitten across the street, laughing, crying and screaming in excitement. During this dream, he’d wear a tattered flannel stained with blood. His shoes would be missing and one side of his head would be caved in, flattened by some extraneous force. Like the devil from the dead, his one remaining eye gleamed red. His smile, once young and innocent, became cruel—vile, even. Fangs appeared in place of baby teeth and stubby fingernails now became claws, stained with the blood of those long since dead.
The dream shifted.
Johnny no longer chased the cat.
Impaled in his hand, the kitten mewed, legs limply twitching as the last moments of its life ended.
Shocked from the hallucination by the sound of a screeching horn, I looked up and out the nearby window to find a woman jabbing her finger at someone in a truck.
Almost got hit.
“You’d be dead if he hadn’t been paying attention,” I mumbled.
Just like Clah-Clah-Loria, Johnny whispered, tugging on my arm. Daddy?
“I’m not here, buddy.”
Yes you are Daddy. I can see you.
“But I can’t see you.”
What color of shoes am I wearing?
“You’re not wearing any shoes, buddy. The ambulance knocked them off your feet.”
Johnny ceased his incessant tugs. I looked down just in time to receive a fanged smile.
You’re one of us now, Daddy. One of the crazy people.
“I’m not crazy, Johnny. I’m not…”
Crazy?
I turned my head up to meet another ghost.
Head mostly missing and stomach imploded, its spinal cord twitched and moved, vibrating like the rattle on a snake.
Or a baby’s toy.
“I’m sorry, Cloria.”
You killed me, Mr. Johnson.
“My name isn’t Mr. Johnson. It’s…”
Mr. Johnson, you have no reason to lie to me. I know who you are. I know what you wrote on your letter.
“My wife…”
Your wife has been having an affair with another man.
“No, she…”
You’ve been gone for three months. People die—they move on.
“She couldn’t have. I’m not…”
Dead? Alive? Cloria paused. The sharpened tip of a vertebra twitched, as if willing its former occupant’s missing head to tilt. How do you know whether or not you’re dead?
“Because I’m here, talking to…”
You.
Neither Gloria nor Johnny had spoken.
Who could it have been, if not them?
You?
Me?
Them?
Who were they, standing at the window, with their dull, black eyes and their twisted, black horns? Why would intruders dress up as goats and stand at the window, only to watch me talking to ghosts?
Daddy?
“You’re not Johnny, Johnny.”
Can I go outside and play with them?
“Play with who?”
The goats.
“The pedestrians.”
Something touched my shoulder.
&nb
sp; A hand—adorned with a wedding ring—traced the curve of my muscle and set its broken fingernails to my neck.
Do dead men bleed, Mr. Johnson?
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “You tell me.”
A nail sunk into my neck.
I swallowed.
The nail withdrew itself.
No blood followed.
Do dead men bleed? Cloria asked. Or is it just you?
Just me?
Yes, Mr. Johnson—just you.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I…”
The pedestrians pressed their hooves to the window.
Baaing, moaning, crying, they pressed their weight forward and shattered the window.
Like babies crawling to their mother, they poured over the broken window and made their way toward me.
I think of them as goats, those pedestrians.
When they walk across the road, it’s as though some primal, mechanical instinct has pushed them in harm’s way.
Father’s Day
He cries over the drawing his son did eight years ago.
It’s simple, really: he left his family and is sitting in a hotel room—drunk, possibly, unable to control his emotions—trying to remember the good times. Those times, however, are extremely difficult to find, because in a haze of emotion, alcohol or not, it’s hard to decipher just what it is he is missing in his life.
Is it you? he thinks. Or is it me?
It could be either, really. Johnny is thirteen now, a young man in his own right, who is learning how to be a man without him, who is learning to shave without a father at his side, who is learning to deal with emotions he has never dealt with before, who is, ultimately, trying to decide just what it is he wants in life. He could want a girl, he thought, or he could want a guy, and whatever it is that Johnny may want, he does not have his father, but whose fault is that though if not his? It can’t be his ex’s, because regardless of what he thinks of her, she was right to kick him out. He was a drunk—is, still, even though he hates to admit it—and while he had problems and reasons to turn to the beer, the whiskey, the vodka, the margarita, it wasn’t as though he was devoid of emotion, of promise, of want.
Father’s Day, 1993—he’s sitting in a hotel room while the prostitute he picked up on the side of the road for fifty bucks is in the room showering in the single-person stall and crying over the drawing his kid did when he was only five years old. Daddy, it says, in bright blue crayon, Happy Father’s Day! I luve u.
Love is spelled wrong. There is no O, a U instead. His mother, if he can recall correctly, was the one who told Johnny how to spell ‘Happy,’ ‘Father’s’ and ‘Day.’ His ex, an English teacher, would have wanted the date to be spelled correctly, and though Johnny was only five at the time, he showed a remarkable aptitude to read and write despite the fact that age was always against him. Some say that such talents can’t be developed until they are six, seven, maybe even eight, but regardless, it is within a few simple words that all of his problems seem to develop—that his heart, as shattered as it is, seems to break even more.
“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, Johnny.”
Tears fall from his face and onto the single piece of paper, which, from him carrying it around so much, has been stained yellow either by sweat or tears and maybe, in some instances, maybe even snot. He doesn’t know. It’s a ritual, one would say, crying in a hotel room. It takes a lot to be able to pick a woman up off the side of the street and fuck her senseless, to feel as though someone really does love one for but a few minutes, and it takes a lot to take the fifty out of his wallet and pay her without so much as another word in passing. She showers, in the other room, cleaning the filth away. Of course he’s used a condom, because God knows what she could have, and even though there seemed to be but a shield of resistance between the two of them, those few moments had allowed him silence that he has not had in years.
In the other room, the shower turns off.
He raises his eyes.
The prostitute steps out, towel around her naked form, and begins to go through the clothing around the floor, searching for first her bra, her panties, then her shorts, much too short, and her shirt, much too skimpy. She then tosses the towel on the floor and begins to dress—first in her bra, then her panties, then her shorts, much too short, and then her shirt, much too skimpy. She looks like a fifth-class whore who could have been picked up anywhere. She’s not even that pretty, but does that really even matter in that moment? No, it doesn’t, because there was but a moment when she was able to take away all his pain, and that moment is now over.
“You have a kid?” she asks, turning to adjust her still-wet hair in the mirror beside the bed.
“I used to,” he says.
“What happened?”
I don’t know, he thinks.
Tears fall from his face.
“Happy Father’s Day,” the woman says, then turns and leaves.
The man closes his eyes.
Happy Father’s Day, the piece of paper, old and yellowed and crinkled and stained, says. I luve u.
AID Me
I used to live in happy times. When the rain fell cold, when the grass grew green, when the birds used to preen and the kids were mean. I used to live in days when innocence was given, not taken, and when friendships came to life with a simple touch of the hand.
I used to live in happier, happier times.
I don’t know why they’re gone.
There’s a boy that stands on the corner of First Street and waves his arms whenever someone passes by. Be it a car, a plane or a train, he lifts his hands in the air and waves. It doesn’t matter if the person’s young or old, black or white, gay or straight—he waves.
Simple to matters, happy for presence, he smiles whenever he lifts his hand and someone acknowledges him.
When the people pass, he stops waving.
The smile fades to frown.
A simple notion given to a person who just wants to be recognized, happiness comes and goes like it is day or night.
One moment you are welcomed, the next you are shunned.
Who knows where you’ll be the next.
In the following weeks, I come to know the boy’s name. Timothy Anderson, aged sixteen and decrepit from the lies that follow him—his parents disowned him after they found out he had AIDS.
Screwing around with boys, they’d said, then kicked him out the door ass-first.
It took little to recognize what Timothy Anderson actually went through. Shirt torn and chest hollow, his eyes tell a story when they’re not smiling. Beige, slightly blue and full of truth, they speak of a disease that wreaks havoc on his body and kills him from the inside out.
Sometimes, if you’re watching close enough, you’ll see his long-sleeved shirt shift to reveal the sores underneath.
Black, blue, and full of you, they take pride in the fact that they’re acknowledged once revealed.
Anyone who sees starts to whisper.
Then they know.
Oh, yes.
Then they know.
Timothy Anderson sits in the rain on a cold, August night. Temperatures preceding the forecasted-estimate of below freezing, he shivers in forty-degree weather as all that God has known is spilled forth. It’s torture, what the boy goes through, and no one stops to help when they pass.
Umbrellas throw their heads to the sky and bask in the ignorance of those who carry them.
Timothy is spared but momentarily as someone walks past him.
Sorry, one would say, but only when they’d stumble over him.
Do you want a dollar? another would ask, as a dollar can grant you salvation in Burger King if for an hour, maybe two.
Do you need help, honey? those fortunate and goodhearted would ask, once five feet past and full of shame and guilt. I can give you a ride.
In the darkness, they wouldn’t be able to see what he is marked by.
Timothy lifts his head.
No, he replies, to an
y and every that offer help.
There is no thank you, no sigh, no quiet, honest cry.
Timothy suffers a world that he isn’t supposed to know.
Suffer he does, for the things he loves.
Sunday mornings are meant for God, grace and place. They are meant for people who pray and those that may. They are meant for families, trust, forbidden, begotten lust—they are for everything, save for those that must.
On Sunday morning, a missionary passes by, then stops.
Indecision in his eyes, he sighs, takes a deep breath, and steps forward.
Are you all right? the nameless, God-given man asks.
I’m fine, Timothy replies.
Why are you here? You should be at home, with your family.
Timothy cringes.
Family—especially when spoken with such clarity—is a word he cannot trust.
What? he asks. Tears are in his eyes—unshed, but there, waiting to spill forth and reveal themselves for what they really are. What did you say, sir?
What’s wrong? the God-giver asks. Why are you crying?
I have no home, sir.
At this, the God-man pauses.
Though he is meant to give hope to those who have none, it is unlikely that there is any amount of hope for Timothy Anderson.
Come with me, the God-man says, and like a savior, extends his hand to the boy. We can do something for you.
No one can do anything for me.
That’s not true.
Yes it is.
It is at this moment that Timothy slides his sleeve down his arm.
His curse revealed, the God-man sighs, then closes his eyes.
You can’t stay here.
Who said?
The God-man says nothing.
Rising, he takes a deep breath, brushes his hand as though he has been touched, then begins to walk away.
