• You’re a piece of shit
• Heard that one before
• You don’t deserve her
• Heard that before too
• I’m going to beat you to death. Heard that? That’s just my kind of party
• Sorry, what? I nodded out for a second
• Cute. Let’s just hope your son is around, will give him a chance to see what kind of man his dad really is.
• I haven’t slept much lately. I don’t mean to yawn
• I hate you
• See, I don’t get that. I don’t hate you. For that I’d have to think about you
• Guess what, smart guy? I was at your place the other night
• Oh yeah? Sorry I missed you. Guess where I was
• You don’t deserve her
• Newsflash, world-beater. Neither of us deserve her

The Seven Symptoms of Goodness

1) Sentimentality

2) Bravery. *Author’s Note: There will be anecdotal evidence of “nearly” courageous deeds, “almost” reckless actions, cataclysmic events that were “this close” to happening. And there will be a bad person over there in the corner, laughing his fucking ass off…

3) Something involving children. *Author’s note: This is important. Good people always like to use children, almost always other peoples’, to chin themselves up on the moral food chain. They like to be seen with them, display them, use them, decorate themselves with them. Children are beyond reproach, so … you’ll always know a good person, their degree and kind, by how many references you can find conjoining them children. The children weren’t asked, of course. That was for the good person to decide, just how and when these props got utilized.

4) Humility. *Author’s note: All you gotta do is ask them. So ask them, yo’. The answer’s been at the ready long before you ever came up with the question.

5) Capacity.

6) Honesty. *Author’s note: It ain’t a lie if your page garners enough LIKES. We had Trump’s America waiting for him well before he ever got here.

7) Selflessness. *Author’s note: Never mind the evidence. This is a skin-deep matter. Let’s all cry the same crocodile tears. Salty, yeah? Of course, to know that, you had to be drinking them ….

 

Carter Serling awoke to his terrific talent for telling people terrible things the day he was let go from the law firm of Wylie, Wheeler, Hostetler and Rand. Ronald Rand—“Mr. Black Ops,” the junior associates called him, not without respect—performed the procedure. Carter squirmed before the dread man’s dreadnought of a desk, behind which the managing partner lorded like an Angus beef in pinstripes, expensive hair coaxed and swooped into a peppery fin, tiny hazel perforations for eyes which now flickered bright amber in anticipation of an imminent kill. Party time.

“Carter, I think you know what’s coming.” (And Carter did know, had suspected what was in the offing all along the solitary walk to the partners’ wing.) “And I think you know why.” (Yes. Carter had lost a case. A big case on which he had served as lead counsel of the trial team for the defense.) “Here at WWH & Rand, we represent an array of very important interests.” ( A class-action suit involving a Major American Company, EPA violations, a contaminated water supply, and one-hundred and seventy one cancer-riddled residents of Torrentes, Arizona.) “Our clients are our lifeblood, the cornerstones on which this firm was built. Nothing can be allowed to damage these relationships.” (For appeal the Major American Company had elected to retain different representation.) “Standards must be maintained, and we,” (Rand, Hostetler, Wylie, and apparently even Wheeler, who was dead) “don’t feel keeping you onboard is consistent with those standards. It’s really that simple.” (Except of course that it was not that simple, or merciful; the managing partner was in full pontificatory mode and wanted very much for Carter to realize just how disappointing this was, after all the firm had invested in him, the years of mentoring and training, what high expectations there had been for his future. And furthermore, Mr. Rand wanted Carter to understand just how personally offended he was that he, Carter Serling, had forced him, Ronald Rand, into having to take this uncomfortable step, but that his—Carter again—desultory performance had left “me” no choice.)

And much, much more. But most of the much more was lost on Carter, because in the midst of the man’s monologue, something in Carter Serling broke apart. Broke like a fever breaks, like surf breaks against a shoreline. And in the half-second between onset and aftermath, Carter was changed. The transformation struck with something like the redemptive impact of a conversion experience, a bright, brilliant epiphany. Carter realized: This guy is nothing. Nothing. Take away the three hundred dollar haircut and three thousand dollar suit, and you might think, “Bus driver.” He can’t hurt me anymore. I can do whatever I want, say whatever I want. If I can think it, I can make it so. And he thought of how people in situations like the one he found himself in now rarely acquitted themselves well. Either they sat dazed and dumb throughout the ordeal and spent the rest of their lives revising the encounter in their heads, inserting all the things they could have, should have said; or else they abdicated control completely, turned hysterical, spewed and ranted and raged and rendered themselves utterly ridiculous. When in fact, thought Carter, what you really want is to land that perfect blow, the one which will mortally maim your oppressor, deform him, disfigure him permanently, and to do so utilizing the truth, the perfect, irreproachable truth. Because everyone knows the truth when they hear it, even, perhaps especially, liars—it rings like the crystal note a wine glass makes when tapped with a knife, that beautiful note of simple, sustained clarity. The crux of Carter’s breakthrough was really nothing more than a tactic uncovered, but one which opened onto vistas of potentially devastating ontological force. And here, all at once, the ideal weapons now materialized in his mind, a clinical array of cold instruments set upon a silver serving tray decked with a red velvet cloth, enticing him with stainless-steel winks. Go ahead, tiger, pick us up. Use us.

“Thank you, sir,” Carter broke in, holding up his hand to cut off Rand’s invective—itself an act of temerity that would have been unthinkable even two minutes before—“for being so upfront with me. It is appreciated. I am crushed, I don’t mind telling you, but I accept the partners’ decision. ‘Success is our creed’, says so right there on the masthead.” Carter’s tone was poised, placid, temperate as a lake. “On a more personal note, I want to say how much your counsel in particular has always meant to me. Truly invaluable. I’ll carry your example with me, wherever I go from here. And to see you, strength and integrity intact after the hardships in your personal life, I’ve come to admire you that much more. Not many men could have held up the way you have after the death of a child. A suicide, no less. Awful. I don’t have children myself—my wife and I were going to start trying later this year—guess that’ll have to be tabled for awhile—but everyone in the know says it is just the worst pain imaginable. And you’ve come through like a real champ—kudos to you, sir. Ron—may I call you Ron?—I want you to know, Ron, that no one blames you for what happened to that boy. Everyone is sure you were every inch the devoted father. Sixteen’s a crazy age. How else do you explain a kid like Ronnie Jr., every advantage in the world, doing something as absurd as hanging himself? In a gazebo, of all places. If I may say, there’s always seemed something spiteful in how he did it—picking that place, I mean. Vindictive-like. He knew how you dote on your grounds, how landscaping is one of your great passions. Such an arboreal paradise, such meticulousness – how you insisted that every blade of grass on the acreage of Casa de Rand had to be just so. Seems almost like he was trying to send you a message, one of those cry-for-help things. I’ve got no time for it, myself—I mean, you got to get a message out, send a tweet for Christ’s sake. Got Daddy issues, find yourself a therapist. What you don’t do is knot a noose and let yourself dangle for some ground’s crew to come along and find you. What did he have to bitch about? When I was his age, I’d have loved my folks to split town for Christmas, leave me to my own devices. There you are in Belize, you and Mrs. Rand finally taking some well-deserved R and R, her probably just slipping into her mud bath, you getting a rub down, able at last to enjoy some of the fruits of your labor, and to get a call like that. So cruel, so very, very cruel. Well, the trip was rudely interrupted, but still, you came back sporting one hell of a tan. We find our comforts where we can. It’s the small things in life. I’m talking the really small things, like, microscopic. Ronnie Jr. forgot that, apparently.”

A fondness for Bolivar cigars and single-batch bourbons, combined with a choleric temper, meant that the managing partner’s normal color was quite florid; the razor edges of his heavily starched collars would leave lines white as scars in the flushed red swell of his neck. Now though it was the marks themselves which were red, inlaying a complexion which had drained down to a shade like bone-china. He sat pale and motionless as a wax sculpture, hectoring hand still suspended in air where Carter had interrupted him mid-excoriation. He looked to be under the influence of an acute case of shock; and Carter knew he had scored a total triumph. And, believing succinctness to be of the essence in a quality dispatch, Carter rose to leave.

At the door he turned again to face the man, and made a parting gesture, pantomiming with one hand a rope cinched up above his head, the other hand gripped around his throat for the noose. Then he grinned. “See ya’ round, killer.”

Carter was walking back to his office for the final time when all at once he veered, collapsed against the nearest wall, and vomited into the pot of a decorative fichus plant. Orange heat and bile burning up his throat. His eyes wheeled around, frantic, on the lookout for anyone who might be coming. But the hallway was deserted.

Gradually the fit tapered off into gags, gasps and coughs. Once everything was up and he’d caught his breath, he got to his feet, ran a sleeve across his mouth, smoothed back his hair, straightened his tie, and proceeded. And all at once felt tremendous, amazingly light and free. It was as if for the entirety of his life to this date he had been operating with a heavy yoke around his neck and just now the harness had snapped loose. He didn’t walk so much as levitated; he floated. Floated through the business of cleaning out his office, floated through the processional past the stares of former colleagues, former peers, security escorting him out of the building, floated away forever, his freshly-carbonated soul full of the heady sensation that even though WWH&R was dispensing with his services, gravity had seen fit to grant him a promotion.

*****

Okay, big news on our end: Carter has left the firm. Right now we are weighing options: Carter is considering positions elsewhere, and looking into starting his own practice. All significant life changes bring their share of stress, but we are determined to embrace the moment and eager to start this next chapter in our lives….

So read Kathy Serling’s Facebook posting. Not a social networker himself—Kathy had signed him up for an account but he wasn’t active on it and had never added any “friends”—Carter was intransigently skittish at the notion of turning a personal existence into a show-and-tell session for public perusal, mildly nauseated too by the tone so many users’ messages on these sites seemed to have, almost aggressively ingratiating and mock-deep with their cloy adages and aphorisms, tapas-sized regurgitations of a prefab wisdom. Still, he had to admit such forums were handy for the quick dissemination of information and limited somewhat having to make the disclosure of his recent career setback again and again. And he supposed what his wife wrote was true; there was a certain excitement in starting anew. Inevitable anxieties did abound (money, Money, MONEY!), but he and she had talked about all the new circumstances could afford them, principally in terms of time: time to take stock, time to chart a new course, and more time to spend with each other.

As well as apparently more time to spend with people like the Benedicts. Kathy and Bethany Benedict were BFF’s, had been since their sorority days—each held the number one slot in their respective Friend’s rankings, the unspoken vow being that the other’s topmost place in the hierarchy was secure for perpetuity (F meant F, after all). Outside of their mutual devotion, the women were personality opposites, to the point of being nearly inversions of one another. Becky, despite her husband being eternally well-to-do from a trust fund inheritance, was a self-proclaimed Type A type, strident and punctilious, still commanding a grueling post as research coordinator in the infectious disease department of a large university hospital, while Kathy, kooky Kathy, winsome Kathy, the young wife of a young man who until recently had earned a robust salary, puttered around with pottery classes, Pilates’ classes, hobbies/ passions that ranged from nature photography to compost gardening. Even though the two women did not see each other so often since the birth of Becky and Blake’s first child, Brandon Carlisle, they talked, via one medium or another, several times a week. Now with the baby eclipsing six-monthdom, the Benedicts at last felt comfortable handing him over to a sitter and joining the Serlings for a night out.

The restaurant the wives chose had recently received a rave write-up in a local interest weekly; the couples sat in a cozy back booth, a bottle of Fume Blanc panting in the chiller, picking over a signature appetizer the reviewer had absolutely insisted that everybody try. Carter thought it had too many capers.

Talk naturally centered around baby Brandon: his likes, his dislikes, impromptu demonstrations of his most frequent gurgles, his obviously burgeoning genius, how he got into everything, how he had his mother’s nose and his father’s eyes and Grandma Lilly’s ears. Most of the salient details were supplied by Blake, who in his latest incarnation as house-husband and stay-at-home dad had a ringside seat for the little one’s march of progress. After several minutes of listening to him moo on, it occurred to Carter how the man himself somewhat resembled an infant, with his round, soft-looking head, wispy fair hair, smooth, pillowed cheeks, and credulous eyes of such a watery blue they seemed nearly on the verge of evaporation. Carter and Blake had, either from necessity or osmosis, themselves developed a sort of friendship: hockey games had been attended, light beers consumed, chests bumped. This despite the fact that, frankly, Carter didn’t respect the other man. Blake came from scads of money; Pater Benedict was a rapacious grocery store magnate whose empire enveloped the tri-state area (you wouldn’t believe their prices). This had left the son with both the financial license to be a dilettante and reams of liberal guilt. In the six years Carter had known him, Blake Benedict had been a project coordinator for United Way, a case worker for a homeless advocacy organization, a youth-group leader, and a fifth-grade teacher at an inner-city elementary school, while also inching closer to a graduate degree in social work—or was it family therapy, or theology? All this in an extended pilgrimage to “find” himself, a quest rife with pit stops and detours, sudden shifts and volte-faces. Such a crooked career arc begged a lot of questions, questions Carter always felt the vague itch to actually pose: “Do you quit all these jobs whenever the real work starts, or just when the self-congratulatory high wears off?” “Have you considered giving yourself a time limit on this self-location program of yours?” “Isn’t all this flitting about really an excuse for not being able to hold down a job?” “How big is that trust fund, anyway?” “C’mon Blake, level with me. Deep down, aren’t you at least the tiniest bit ashamed of yourself? And if not, why not?”

Carter broke out of his reverie on realizing that the baby talk around the table had petered out. He looked up to find the other three looking at him. The Benedicts were wearing their sympathy faces, and he realized that, some signal having passed between the others, the time had come to discuss his recent job loss.

“So, Carter, how are things?”

“Things are fine, Blake.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. First-rate.”

“We know you’ve had a tough time lately.”

Inwardly, he stiffened. He detested being the object of other people’s concern—he would have thought his wife at least would have known this. Yet he felt her gaze right along with theirs, hers coming from his right flank, insistent as a fly walking up his cheek, scrutinizing his expression, examining him for any darker pulses and blips as a poker opponent searches for tells. And indeed, all this unwelcome attention was working nicely to ignite a few brushfires, crack open a few fissures in his carefully cultivated equipoise.

“Que sera sera,” he mumbled. “One door closes, another opens, that kind of thing.”

“Sure,” said Becky.

“Absolutely,” said Blake.

Just then the server came to tell them, sorry, but the kitchen was running a bit behind, entrees were going to be awhile. As consolation, she brought another basket of bread and another dish of olive oil and pesto for dipping. Carter asked for a side of butter. He suddenly felt ravenous.

“My termination” he abruptly began, in a full, hearty voice. “What can I say? It hurts, getting the axe, I can’t lie about that. One day you’re a cadet in the Masters of the Universe training program, a legal eagle soaring. Then, WHAP! The powers that be knock you right out of the sky. But I’ll tell you two, because you are such close friends—getting fired might very well have saved my life. Or, at least, my soul.” He leaned in, saw the interest burning in their eyes. He knew he had them.

“Take this big case, the one I lost. We were defending a corrupt, soulless corporation that had been illegally dumping chemical waste—formaldehyde. The company had already been twice fined by the EPA for violations—and this during the Bush administration—but they didn’t care. They thought they were invincible. Why they hadn’t pulled stakes and moved their factories over to Mexico years ago, I’ve no idea. Guess they got their jollies off thumbing their nose at regulations stateside. So what happens? A bunch of townsfolk living around one of their factories come down with acute eosinophilc leukemia, an extremely rare form of cancer, strikes something like one out of every three hundred thousand people.” Becky nodded at this. “And in this little town, one hundred and thirty-one people are diagnosed with it, about one in thirty. And these bastards—the company I mean, not the townspeople, I’m sure they’re fine people and all—these bastards deny any culpability. Say it’s genetics, say it’s the peoples bad diets, their saccharine intakes, claim formaldehyde isn’t even a proven carcinogen. Basically, they say anything to try and save their own hides.

“Understand, I wasn’t Erin Brockovich in this scenario. This sinister corporation, let’s call them Company X, actually let’s call them Koch Industries, was my client, I was their attorney. I was the suit across the table. It’s not an easy spot to be in, from a moral perspective.” Here Carter plucked a baguette and slathered it with a fat pat of butter, which melted into yellow rivulets almost immediately; he tore off a large bite between his teeth and started to chew.

“They should have settled,” he went on, talking with his mouth crammed full. “ I told them but they refused to listen. Wouldn’t stoop to laying out the thirty-five million bucks. That’s what it would have cost, thirty-five mil. Chicken feed. Maybe they were banking we could stall long enough, until there were no plaintiffs left—it’s a very aggressive cancer. But once it went to trial, we didn’t stand a chance. A jury sees a bunch of common folk like that, emaciated kids in beanies, mothers getting wheeled into the courtroom with IV’s in their arms, everybody with dark rings under their eyes, forget about it. Drop the gavel, we’re done. The judge rocked us for seven-hundred-and-seventeen million dollars; I’m talking mongo damages. In fact, I’ve thought that I was set up a bit, that the firm knew once the company tried to go to trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion and that’s why I was appointed lead counsel. None of the senior guys wanted to take the loss on their records.

“But this is what I mean when I say losing the case and my job maybe saved my soul. Because what if I’d won? Oh sure, I’d have made partner, I’d have had the sweet corner office—but at what cost? I’d have been damned. My debt in karmic terms would have been three-quarters of a billion, easy.

“Life now? Well, it’s a scary thing, starting over. But there is this one special person, someone in my life I’ve taken as an example, a kind of guiding light to show me the way. A role-model, I guess you might say.” He felt the warmth of Kathy’s fingers nestle tighter into his.

“And that person is you, Blake.”

Here the other man’s eyes clicked on their high beams, officially set to awestruck. “Me, Carter?”

“Sure,” said Carter, his hand all at once freed of his wife’s grip waving in the air as if it should be understood. “Look at all you’ve done with your life, all you’ve accomplished. While I was playing whore to the corporate world, you were devoting yourself to the most worthwhile causes. You’re teaching inner-city kids long division and there I am trying to keep Fortune 500 companies from having to honor unemployment benefits to the latest cluster of employees they’ve downsized. You’re working as an advocate for the homeless—or at least people in really shitty houses—and I’m sucking the hind tit of the robber barons busy carving up America. What better contrast could there be?”

“Gosh, Carter, I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Gosh.”

“Listen to this guy,” Carter nodding to the women, both of whom were looking at him with disconcerted stares, particularly Kathy, whose eyes were betraying definite evidence of ire—Carter registered how one eyebrow had crimped, jutting like the staff of a treble clef. “‘Gosh,’ he says. I swear Blake, you’re the last of a breed. Last of the good guys. I don’t know how you’ve done it, how you’ve kept your soul intact this far. I am humbled. And I hope you don’t mind if I pick your brain for a bit.”

“I wonder how much longer on the food,” murmured Kathy to Becky, who responded with an “I’m not sure, maybe we should ask our waiter,” that was in equally lowered voice. They had lowered their faces, were looking away. But Carter was ebullient now, boisterous, barging in on their attempts to set up a little abbey of private conversation and escape the awkwardness both sensed was mounting.

Blake, on the other hand, didn’t seem to sense anything was amiss. “Sure Carter,” he said, voice full of earnestness. “I’ll help any way I can.”

“I want to be of some use, do something substantial, something worthwhile in my next role. Do you think, Blake, there might some place I could be of service in the good fight? Where, Blake, do you think my talents, such as they are, might best be put to use? I’ve thought of the public defender route, but c’mon, let’s face it, most of those people are guilty as hell, and I’ve had enough of fixing the misdeeds of others. But there must be something I could do. Help me, Blake. Teach me.”

“Oh my gosh, Carter, there is so much you could do. With your background and experience, you’d be an incredible asset. Discrimination suits, all the non-profits that need representation, pro-bono work….” And he was off, running down a list of causes that he himself had been involved with, detailing the challenges they faced: their ever-constricting budgets, their small and harried staffs, the cutbacks in funding, the demands upon them which seemed to increase daily as poverty spread, teen pregnancies rose, public education continued to falter, affordable housing disappeared. So on, and so on. He talked with guilelessness, conviction, genuine sincerity—the guy has sincerity for days, thought Carter, bemused. During the testimonial, Carter at one point caught Becky’s eye. Never had he found Becky Benedict attractive but now she looked practically de-sexed, calcified, her hair alternately greasy and brittle, her chin rash-riddled and perplexed with some sort of eczema that gave it a longshoreman’s raw sheen. Mainly she looked like a bedraggled and wiped-out working mother. He felt a certain kinship with her now, as one does with the spouse of someone who is in the process of making a fool of himself, Blake gushing on, oblivious that he was lost and wandering blind in the maze of someone else’s joke. Carter decided the time had come to bring it to a halt.

“So you’re saying there is important work to do.”

“Absolutely, Carter.”

“Meaningful, necessary work.”

“Very much so.”

“Then why aren’t you doing it?”

“…What?”

“I asked, why aren’t you doing it? Why have you bowed out, Blake? You just said all these social ills aren’t getting any better, that they’re getting worse, reaching crisis level. So how come you aren’t still in there swinging.”

“Well, Carter, I mean… I’m a father now.”

“Meh. So what? Fathers work, that’s what they do. They have occupations, careers. For that matter, mothers have careers nowadays too. Ask your wife. Moms work too, as I’m sure Becky can tell you.” Here he nodded to Becky, who stared back at him with eyes that flared with a malignant light, enraged, seething. So intently did she stare that she didn’t notice her husband had turned to her, possibly to bail him out.

“Carter,” said Kathy, “be quiet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What did I do?” he said, looking around the table with a donned meekness. “Did I say something wrong? What’s the matter with everyone? It’s true—Becky works. Actually honey, she’s the only one at the table who at this moment is gainfully employed. Blake’s not, I’m not, you’re not. I thought this is the stuff people talked about. Families and work. We’ve already talked Baby Brandon to death…bad choice of words that, my apologies—so that topic down. That leaves work.You don’t have a career. We’ve already discussed my recent setback. Becky works in an infectious disease lab, and spores and fungi might be a bit pungent before the meal arrived. Maybe over coffee. So, Blake it is. All I am wondering is why he has abandoned the fray, why he has turned his back when society needs him the most. It can’t be because he is scared to work, I don’t believe that for a second. Can’t be that he can’t hack it, can’t take the pressure. He thinks that’s pressure, he should try working when you actually need the money. Trust funds aren’t the norm, you know, Blake. Just ask those crackhead mothers of yours. Ask the bums down near the bus station. Hell, ask me. I don’t have one either. Believe me, in case you don’t know, life’s a different kettle of fish when work isn’t a pose you strike, a way to gratify your conscience, when it’s actually for earning your keep.”

“Stop it, Carter. Stop it. All you’re doing is making yourself look like a jerk.”

“Really? Well if that’s all I’m doing, then why is she crying?” And Carter motioned across the table, towards Becky. Her head was down, her face in her hands. Her body shook quietly.

“Honey,” said Blake, whispering, putting his arm around the silently sobbing woman’s shoulders. “Don’t cry, sweetie. It’s ok. What’s wrong?” Becky’s elbow caught him sharply in the ribs. Blake Benedict had yelp like a spaniel puppy.

The entrees were served. Nobody answered the server when she asked if anybody needed anything. Sheepishly she slinked away. Carter looked up; on the wall above the table was a framed painting—no, a drawing, a charcoal chiaroscuro etching. Around the restaurant hung drawings in a similar style. The one hanging above their heads was, same as its brethren, predominantly white canvass, largely devoid of image. Against this blankness, were faint shapes, the barest outlines— ghostly silhouettes, the forms like phantoms dissolving into a snowstorm. The work had an aspect of erasure, figures being scored out of existence, returning to vapor. Huh, Carter thought to himself, whaddya know? I understand art now.

*****

What I Hate

By Carter Serling

People who consider walking exercise. People who say they’re dehydrated when all they are is thirsty. Women who want to find The Goddess within. All talk of energy, the universe, intuition, vibes. Raffles. Fundraisers. Pledge Drives. Matching Luggage. Place settings. Men who wear bowties, men in wire-rims, spats, cravats etc. Men who wear t-shirts with band names on the chest and tour dates on the back. People who claim to be distressed about the growing schism between rich and poor. Multi-Vitamins, The Blogosphere, dog parks, 6 month same as cash financing. Estate sales. Women who battle self-esteem issues, women who learn to love again. Personalized greeting cards with photos of pets on the front, E-vites, yearly news letters, neighborhood associations, list-serves, sweaters, swap meets, ceramics, sprinkler systems, dance classes, eating disorders, anti-depressants, commercials for anti-depressants, disclaimers. Power Point presentations, to-do lists, personal goals. Affirmation. People who talk about what kind of person they are. Human Resources Departments, Equifax scores. People who cry on camera, who cry on cue. People who cry. People who claim to know their strengths and weaknesses, people who claim the day got away from them, people who research their family’s genealogies. Generalizations, archetypes.

*****

A patisserie, it billed itself—really only a coffee shop, connected to the main downtown branch of the Public Library. The place had Wi-Fi access, served organic soups, paninis and pastries, eight dollar plates of mixed greens, and played a great deal of Nina Simone. To this location did Carter Serling regularly repair of a morning, armed with his laptop, ostensibly getting out of the house to trawl the Internet for job listings, do some online networking, fine-tune his resume for headhunters, schedule interviews, etc., dressed always in one of his good suits as if for work, tie-clip, cufflinks and all, dark blues and blacks and charcoals while the winter had lasted, mixing in cream-colors and linen as spring sauntered in.
Being such a regular, he had become quite versed in the dynamic of daily business. Between eight o’clock and about ten forty five the trade was sporadic, usually lonely-hearts library patrons with books under their arms, or clerks scurrying in for a quick caffeine jolt before hurrying back to man the returns desk; or pairs of lobbyists in their wingtips walking over from the nearby legislative plaza to take a table, break bread, and talk shop. For this stretch of time the ambiance was languid, serene.
Then, at approximately eleven o’clock, the deluge: the place suddenly bursting with patrons, a long bumptious line that stretched from the front counter and display cases filled with cheesecake and quiches on into the seating area, the harried staff bouncing around, taking orders, dashing into the back for trays of resupply.

A great portion of the lunch rush was comprised of mothers, and their young. Carter assumed they migrated over from the children’s section of the library. This gaggle did not so much enter the establishment as they set upon it, and the women—themselves mostly youngish—didn’t so much accompany the children as they were ridden in by them, prodded like mounts in a raiding party of plundering Vandals. Clamor and noise swept in with them like dust. Pre-pubescent and adult alike were clad in money: designer casual wear, outfits that screamed preciousness, the very best in childhood fashion and baby accessories. Many of the mothers wore their flimsy but pricey gear with cutesy fastidiousness, so many keeping their tops perkily slid off and exposing one shoulder that it might have been an assigned uniform. And many of the women had ruddy, irritated looking nostrils, like they’d all come from a tour of a ragweed farm or hay-fever factory, and whitish mouths, drained of color around the lips, malnourished. They descended in heavy concentrations; some of the mothers had a bawling infant in a sling, a squalling toddler or two in tow, and bellies spherical from the next bounteous blessing due to arrive any day now.

Once the environs was so sacked, any chance at peaceful enjoyment was ruthlessly obliterated. Amazing, thought Carter, just how often children cry—how insistently, chronically, laboriously, piercingly. Then they might not even cry; they might just scream, over and over again, for no rational or discernible reason. What’s more, they had an almost demonic busyness about them—slashing here and there, to and fro, like hatchets whirling in a windstorm. Aggravating, to say the least. Of course, you couldn’t blame the kids; they didn’t know better. But the mothers were different matter; allegedly sentient beings, it was astonishing to see how largely oblivious they were to all the havoc they enabled, as though deaf or under sedation, allowing the most ludicrous behavior to occur right under their pert noses, taking nary a step to intercede or so much as run interference as their riotous spawn raced and reeled around, squealed, flung cutlery, harassed the clientele, while the maters familias sat and sipped chai tea and grazed on hummus, with cloudless faces and vacant eyes as if they’d come en masse from the local lobotomist. Only when the possibility for serious injury reared itself—when a sadistic mop-headed brother was about to belt baby sister with a purloined bottle of San Pellegrino, or when some enterprising tyke was on the verge of pulling an urn of Peruvian free-trade down upon its daisy head—would one snap herself from her stupor to take what almost approximated action.

The first few times Carter witnessed these outrageous phenomena it struck him as merely weird; then it became actually offensive. Why should he, a paying customer, be afflicted by this nonsense? Had they no shame, these women witnessing their offspring wreaking such mayhem, comporting themselves like maniacs, and sitting slackly by, doing nothing? Who acts like this? Who is allowed to act like this?

Today the mother/child gangs marauded with particular ferocity. The time had come to take a stand.

He had recently taken the tack of acting as if he were talking on his cell phone; that way if besieged he could possibly avail himself of the option of becoming indignant at the interruption. That, combined with his belief that bystanders by and large were incorrigible when it came to listening in on cell-phone conversations—persons on phones enunciated a little more clearly, spoke a bit louder, presenting an irresistible opportunity for eavesdropping—were concepts Carter was counting on to make his protest heard.

“Oswald? Carter Serling here. Listen, Oswald, I’ve been going over these figures, and…Excuse me? Sorry Oswald, you’re going to have to speak up. Very noisy where I am. You hear it? Yeah, kids. What are you going to do? What’s that? Sorry, still can’t make you out. One more time, please.” As he asked this of the imaginary Oswald, who was a mild-mannered, sweet-natured fellow, Carter raised his voice considerably, forcing his words through the reverberating rumpus. He knew that at least those nearest to him had to be able to overhear what he was saying.

Still, the adjacent mothers did nothing, continued to let their kids swarm and clap and shriek and crawl around on the floor and tear off into tantrums and fits and screech nonsense syllables and make-believe words. The whole tableaux resembled some wild tribal ceremony, a pagan rite involving blood-letting and incantations. A couple of the little writhing bodies approached him even now, scooting unsupervised along the floor, close enough to smudge his pants leg with their gooey mitts. He had to up the ante.

“No, just at a coffee shop next to the library. I’m not at a petting zoo or science museum or anything. It is weird, Oswald, you’re right. I don’t know where they come from. Maybe there’s some kind of clinic nearby for kids with ADHD, or Asperger’s, or emotional disorders. Beats me…” He believed he saw the face of one mother, the one nearest him, an especially wan and pale exemplar, especially dopey-looking, munching on celery sticks with all the conscious determinism of a woodland creature, sloe-eyed and blond, wearing some kind of ludicrous fitted workout gear, stretchy two-toned lycra, grey and mint-green, little anklet socks and Crocs, prick up her ears, like a doe drinking at a pond who smells a predator upon a shift in the wind. “I think it’s a generational thing, with the mothers I mean. You’re about my age, Oswald. Tell me, would your mother have permitted you to do this—” he held the out the phone to the pandemonium, to let Oswald get an earful “—in a public place? No, mine neither, and look at us, we didn’t turn out drug addicts and delinquents and manic depressives. This is why girls get knocked up at thirteen, this is why boys open fire on their high school assemblies. Bad parenting, inept parenting, simple as that.”

The woman was openly staring at him now, a celery grazing her puffy bottom lip. Carter acted as if he didn’t see her in his periphery. “Oh yes, these are most certainly the mothers. No doubt. You can see the resemblance. If it was a few Trinidadian nannies making fourteen bucks an hour trying to ride herd on a bunch of upper-class brats hopped up on Adderall , then I’d understand. What could they do? But you should see these moms—they don’t work, that much we know. And each one has something like three or four kids. How irresponsible, in this day and age. Overpopulation the number one problem facing the world, and here these airheads are, breeding like sharecropper’s wives. What are they trying to prove? What hole in their soul are they trying to fill? I’ll tell you this, it’s an awful long way to go just to prove you actually found someone willing to fuck you. They wear these kids around them like badges—‘look at me, I have a purpose, I can breed, I can breed!’ Well you know what? So can salamanders. And they probably wouldn’t be any worse mothers than these goofy twats. The one thing you have to do, the great destiny you’ve chosen for yourself, motherhood, and you can’t even meet the job’s basic requirements, can’t even instill any discipline, steer your children in correct ways to behave, ways to function. Forget about teaching manners, being respectful—I mean just do the bare minimum, try to keep them from behaving like total sociopaths. Can’t you at least accomplish that.” Here he turned his head slightly so that he was looking the appalled young mother directly in the eyes. He shot her a wink.

Now other women spread among the neighboring tables had also come to attention; their eyes flicked towards him, some wearing looks of outrage and shock, some of confusion, of dumb fear, as the children continued their brainless rampages. Carter leaned back in his seat, smiling, legs crossed, one foot tapping to the half-caff boss nova beat burbling from the speakers. “My God, Oswald, the racket. It’s truly unbelievable. I swear, these can’t be normal families. You ought to see these stupid slags. Is it any wonder their husbands are probably boffing their receptionists? Who could blame them? Poor dears, likely they’re riddled with STDs and don’t even know it. Syphilis is rotting their tiny little brains. That would explain the listless stares, the slack mouths, the total cluelessness.”

His first appreciator then stood up, hugging her own pride and joy tight to her chest, a stance that seemed to connote somehow that she was using the child to protect herself from harm, wielding the wiggling thing like a shield. She stamped over to the counter where Carter watched her engage the Afro-headed, pierce-browed barista in a dramaturgical session of finger-pointing and other overwrought gestures. The young man was expressionless, looked a little stoned, but eventually he also pointed Carter’s way. Yes, that’s him, he saw the lady nod frantically, refusing herself to look over, as if the whole ordeal were too horrible for her to gaze upon directly. The boy barista shrugged, left the register and disappeared through swinging doors that led to the back. To get the manager, no doubt.

Who himself appeared in short order, a sandy-haired unremarkable piece of manhood in a blue oxford and pleated khaki pants, a brown belt, several nubby brown moles on his face, and an aura of maximum forgettability. Despite himself, Carter felt a prickle of apprehension, a sense memory asserting itself, like being called to the principal’s office. He fought the feeling down, reassuring himself that he had done nothing wrong, was simply standing up for himself. The manager conferred quickly with the injured lady, who had by now summoned the nascent courage to embark on a series of wild gesticulations and looks aimed at Carter; at each revelation and codicil in her tale the fellow seemed to slump a tad more, an already beleaguered schlub with one more distasteful chore presenting itself to him. Carter observed as the man began to round the corner of the serving counter and maneuver his way through the minefield of somersaulting, leapfrogging, cartwheeling children, making his way to Carter’s table.

“Oswald, I’ll have to call you back.” He set down his phone. “May I help you?”

The man seemed unsure even of his own voice. “Uhh, sir, is there some sort of problem here?”

“Yes there is, now that you bring it up. Who am I addressing here?”

“I’m the store manager.”

“Well, Store Manager, your place here is under siege. How am I supposed to enjoy my scone and frappacino in this environment? I didn’t pay seven and a half dollars to endure this sort of lunacy. If I’d wanted to go for snack time in a pre-school, I would have. This is a café, sir, not a day-care center. Presumably you’re running an establishment for adults, a place where some sense of decorum is to be observed. Look around you, Store Manager. See much in the way of decorum, do you?”

The fellow gave little sign of understanding, only looked at Carter uncomprehendingly with tired, heavy-lidded eyes, shifting his weight from one loafer to the other.

“Can you even hear me, Store Manager? I’m not surprised. I can barely hear myself in this carnival. It so happens that I was in the middle of an important business call, one involving monetary amounts with several zeros attached—the exchange scuttled because of this insufferable chaos.”

“Sir, the store is open to the public. To everyone. I’m sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced, but I really don’t think it is as loud as you’re making out—”

“I am the public. Do you understand me? I am the public! It is loud to me, it is obnoxious to me, no less obnoxious than my presence and my protest seems to be to the woman directly behind you. Hello, miss, hello—” here including the scaredy-cat mother with a quite extravagant arm gesture, the lady tear-streaked and trembling with grievous insult and some synthetic sort of terror, but nevertheless so eager to see Carter get his comeuppance that she stood only a couple of feet behind her knight’s shoulder. “Offended you, have I? Well you’ve offended me as well. You and the rest of your ill-mannered, uncouth, irresponsible sisterhood here. Offended me, disturbed me, harassed me—”

“Sir, please, we don’t want any trouble here.” The manager’s left eyelid had started to twitch.

“Who’s we? You and this lady? You and the entire maternity club surrounding me? Are you coming to me as a concerned third-party, as an intermediary? Or are you coming to me as their representative? Tell you what, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Let’s call you an intermediary. Please ask the offended party behind you what the exact problem is. Did I say something to hurt her feelings? Did I insult her? It so happens that I told the truth and nothing but the truth. I was engaged in a private conversation, one on which she brazenly eavesdropped. She is the one who owes me an apology.”

At this, another woman got up from her seat, a tall gangly woman arising like an Avenging Stork, both hand tights around her own children’s wrists, their tiny fingers pulsing white from the pressure. “He was yelling into his phone. He was. He was saying the most awful things, doing it intentionally. There’s no way we couldn’t hear him.”

“Aha,” said Carter, “another army heard from. Ironic that she has to yell to accuse me of yelling. I’d like to know how anyone could carry on a conversation in here without raising their voice. All the squawking and screaming in here from your kids makes it sound like an aviary for jungle birds. My tone would have been considerate and reasonable had you not created an entirely unreasonable and inconsiderate environment. But all of you came storming in like Hannibal’s army. You didn’t give a damn that people were here to find a little peace, might be attempting to concentrate, pausing to reflect for a few minutes. No, you think because you lactate that everyone else in the world has to pull over to the shoulder and bow as you pass by. You want to censor me, think I’m out of line? Pediatrician, heal thyself.”

More woman, though, were rising, standing to form a chorus of outrage and objection, directed at him, and also at the Store Manager, braying for the man to act; the fellow had passed from merely confused to confounded and was now visibly shrinking from the ordeal. This guy is paralyzed, thought Carter. He’s so afraid of doing the incorrect thing that he can’t do anything. Though severely outnumbered in the contest to win the man’s sanction, and veto, Carter was certain he could turn the guy. I have the advantage, surely he doesn’t want this kind of activity in his store on a daily basis. Wasn’t easy, however, not making this guy a target too, much as Carter needed to keep him just a pawn, what with his buffoonish air, his cretinous slacks with their stupid pleats, his mug’s face with the grotty skin-tags that managed to convey more personality than all his conventional features combined. Carter was determined to discipline himself—he was having his dish served cold, and had the perfect remark ready to go, one that would silence them all, prove him right, and give the dullard Store Manager no choice but to call match point and declare Carter the victor.

Only he couldn’t make himself heard. On a decibelage level. Every mother in the place, the entire legion of them, was now in on the action, had taken up the cause of their embattled sister and were spewing individual geysers of hectoring interference. One doughy, strikingly androgynous woman was at the manager’s ear, pointing at Carter with an index finger like a link sausage, accusing Carter of using “profanity in front of my child!” Another one, due any day now to deliver her latest copious bounty to an already overstocked world, was hollering that Carter had used “threatening gestures”, was behaving in a “violent way.” Assenting voices rolled through the maelstrom (apparently all these bystanders had formerly been too intimidated to speak up, but now that they had all instantly found themselves thrown together in this slapdash lynching party, they were as vociferous and indomitable as suffragettes, that and they didn’t want such a perfectly good opportunity for indignation to go unfulfilled). If the place had been noisy before, now it was Tammany Hall. And the subtle nuances of Carter’s proposed coup de grace were lost entirely, swallowed in dissonance, no matter how much he waved his hands for silence, called out for quiet, screamed for them all to shut up. They wouldn’t relent—in fact his exhortations were like throwing kerosene on a fire—and they advanced against him, eyes bloody and teeth bared, looking ready to rip him to pieces.

“I want you to leave,” said the voice at his ear. “Right now.” Carter turned his head.
“Now, leave right now. Or I will call the police.” It was the Store Manager. Astonishingly, Carter realized the man meant that he would call the police on him.

The place exploded in cheers and clapping. The original party, the demure pasty wan petite mother with the conch-shaped ears was being embraced, patted on the back, was basking in the glow of a new-found status as a heroine. Now genuine tears were beginning to well in her eyes, the attention was so validating. Incredible, thought Carter, I’ve actually given this little idiot one of the great moments of her life. Applause continued to assault him as he stowed his laptop back in his case. Applause prodded him out the door, applause and jeers. He itched to get off one more salvo. Something just devastating. But “get a job!” was the only rejoinder he managed to spit out. Even he had to admit it was lame.

In his car, in the parking garage, after screaming himself hoarse and punching the steering wheel until he thought perhaps he had broken a bone in his hand, Carter tried to calmly review the defeat. He tried to be philosophical. So what, so what if they did manage to get me kicked out. A pyrrhic victory at best. Because they’re still nothing but miserable women living pathetic, miserable lives, lives that one day will end, miserably. Karma, isn’t it?

*****

Kathy got a job. A friend of hers owned a hair salon, and had brought her on board working the appointments desk. The position maxed out at twenty-eight hours a week and paid little. The other girls at the front desk were in their early and mid twenties, and were working their way toward college degrees or getting their certifications as stylists. Kathy had eclipsed thirty—and those extra few years felt like eons, separating her almost into a different genus class, as every day she felt the division acutely, between the girls just setting out on a career and a life, and herself, who was falling back, retrenching, taking out of desperation a job that was only offered out of sympathy, for pay that if she worked at the same rate for an entire year would be barely what her husband had made in one month at the firm. It wasn’t just that she knew this; it was the certitude that everyone else knew it too, and the defeat was stamped like a emblem on her forehead, like a paper sign taped on her back. Of course she knew that plenty of people had it worse, far worse; but this was little consolation as she girded herself to go in each morning, to try and make conversation with the twenty-one year old McKenzie or the twenty-two year old Lorna, who seemed to have their own language, who seemed to her like teenagers and yet who managed to be so much more effective than she herself was at the work; swifter, more efficient, more natural. They carried the breezy confidence of those who have never been knocked down, who have never really tasted the feasibility of such a prospect.

Had the role afforded advancement, Kathy thought she might come to enjoy it. But having no aptitude or desire to pursue cosmology, this was as good as it was going to get—a clerical job in the vanity industry—and for the heavy sacrifice in self-esteem the job levied, it returned a pittance in compensation, the monies earned meager and only stalling the advent of a financial meltdown for the Serlings, not preventing it. They were now two months in arrears on the house payment and falling further behind, had used up their savings and cashed out their IRA. Her car was making an insistent dinging noise—instinct told her it was going to be an expensive fix. Disaster could be averted and everything restored if Carter found a job. Only Carter hadn’t found a job. He hadn’t found a job, and didn’t seem especially interested in doing so.
She worried now—about everything, in ways she hadn’t before. Even about her health; lately, she was spotting more heavily in prelude to her periods, and wanted to schedule an appointment with their OBGYN. But their COBRA policy had lapsed, and at the moment they were without coverage. This itself presented a host of anxieties, other than catastrophe the most prevalent being the knowledge that this was only pushing further into the future the plan to have a baby, as most policies and plans required a year of consecutive insurance before covering maternity.

Which was itself an academic point because she wanted her child to have a father, and at the moment there was not only no father, there was no husband. Because the man she knew, the man she had married, no longer existed. He was gone; there was no Carter anymore. And she didn’t know what had become of him, and she couldn’t recover him, no matter what she did. She had tried encouraging him; tried cajoling him; had pleaded with him; begged him; tried everything to convey just how afraid she was. She had tried treating him coldly, attempted to bring him to his senses by indicating that he might lose her. If he grasped the situation, he was untouched. Apathetic to a degree verging on dissociative. She would have been relieved if there were any diagnosis to be made. What exactly he did nowadays, how he filled his time, was a mystery to her. Her suspicion was that he did very little. And that in some way he was content doing it. Asking him had only resulted in her receiving the vaguest answers, or being utterly ignored. It was not just that he was remote; it was the glee he seemed to take in his remoteness, the glimpses of it he revealed. Talking to him was like talking to a stranger, and her husband now had a stranger’s expressions, much of the time.

More than anything else, it was perhaps his new smile which warded her off from asking him more. It came onto his face infrequently, but when it did, it was chilling to behold, because it of its calculated foreignness. Had it been the facial expression of Carter undergoing emotional or mental trouble, that would have been one thing. That would have been tangible, and she could have dealt with that. Her worry and love would have displaced any fear. This was something else again; his was the smile of a man who seemed to be striving for some form of insanity, inviting it, and wanting to sadistically reveal towards a person he knows loves him that this is exactly what he is doing. She dreaded seeing the new smile cross his face, not a smile that had before belonged to her husband in the eight years she’d known him. For fear of having to look upon that smile, and stare into what was hidden behind it, she had turned silent, and tried to keep her dread clamped up tight.

The days grew longer and warmer, afternoons and evenings stretching like drowsy housecats as the seasons turned over. He typically made it home around five to six, after he’d filled up his time with all the pastimes that he could come up with. Often these involved movies—though he had discovered that most movies were terrible; coffee shops were all boring, all the same, all inane and filled with inane clientele, plus nobody could handle that much caffeine. He wasn’t a big drinker so bars weren’t a regular form of recreation. He did a lot of wandering, a lot of driving. Enraged at all times, he told himself he was more content than he’d ever been.

A nauseous feeling would swell in the pit of his stomach when he pulled into his driveway. Liberated as he’d been from caring, from the obligation of obligations, this edifice was the most ample reminder of what a artifice he still labored beneath, or at least beside. What he saw before him, that Georgian façade, the twinned dormers above like pusillanimous eyes, the whole structure a belabored shrine to yeoman delusion, of the cosmological sense. The disappointment with himself was very real, very sour, that months after the initial breakthrough, he still consented to be fettered by these trappings, these civil shackles, tortured by a vexing shame that he hadn’t done more with his nihilistic knowledge.

Inside the door, walking in, the usual routine. Keys go in the pewter dish on the credenza, a glance at the mail, envelopes sorted in the rack. She was already home; he could hear sounds of her in the kitchen.

He walked. Down the hallway, the familiar creak of the house’s floorboards. They sounded like an alarm, little warnings of his approach, saying, He’s coming! He’s coming!

The long light of encroaching evening leaked through the windows. The gallery kitchen was at the rear of the house, adjacent to his office, which was at the end of the narrow, ground-floor hallway. He bypassed the kitchen door, only caught a glimpse of her figure in his periphery. Into his office: the slats of the window treatments splintered the daylight, and the walls were alive and rippling with pale gold bars, vibrating. That and the play of the shadows of tree branches, from a pair of silver maples outside. Really, it was quite lovely.

Something was amiss amongst his things, though. There were some papers arranged on the keyboard of his computer, arranged in such a way that he was obviously meant to find them. He went over, picked them up. Kathy’s handwriting on a purple post-it stuck to the top of the first sheet: Please read.

The pages were of job listings, pulled from the internet. There were fourteen pages in all. Only a couple were for openings at firms specializing in corporate law; then there was a posting for an opening for a personal-injury lawyer, (!); several insurance-related positions and legal services in some or another branch of health care—claims specialists, actuaries, agents and the like; she’d even printed out job postings for computer sales and low-level marketing gigs. She knows I wasn’t disbarred, right? She knows I made nearly three hundred thousand last year, over two-sixty the year before? That I didn’t have a stroke, or sustain a major head-wound? Why not manager at a fast-food establishment while we’re at it? A place that serves fried-fish and cold slaw and hush puppies. It’d be ideal; a name tag and slacks, a first class training program, two weeks of vacation a year. Why not me? I’m self-motivated, I’m a team-first guy, I want to be part of a fast-paced atmosphere with the opportunity for advancement.

In the kitchen, the sounds of pots and pans, drawers opening, drawers slamming shut. The graphite scrape of objects slid across the stove. Water running from the faucet. The chattering clinks of cutlery rattling in their spots in the drawers. She’s making a point to make as big a racket as possible. So obvious, so predictable.
He dropped the papers back onto the desk. He came up to the kitchen and stood in the doorway. She was poised with her back to him, standing above the countertop. A pot was on the stove, the outer ring of the eye beginning to redden, the huffing sound of water within beginning to warm. She gripped a paring knife and was bent over a cutting board, chopping a red pepper into crescent-shaped segments. On a flattened paper sack beside were more vegetables: green peppers, the rubber-banded bulbs of droopy scallions, the gritty clod of a large, dried mushroom. Her posture was tight and bunched, an angry, aggrieved hunch to her shoulders—the muscles beneath the gauzy top concentrated into a stiffened ridgeline like a length of rebar.

“Remember when I bought this place,” said Carter.

She stopped in her chopping, for a second, but didn’t turn around. “When you bought it,” she intoned, robotic as an automaton.

“Yes. You remember. Four years ago this June. We were house-hunting with the realtor, found this place, both of us loved it, then I went and put an offer and they accepted, then I did the contract and went out and secured the loan and closed the next month. I started making payments, and that was that.”

Her face flashed for just an instant as she looked over her shoulder; then turned away again. “What’s your point?”

“Oh, no point, I guess. Just a happy time.”

“Okay then. It was a happy time.”

He stared at her for awhile. She’d moved on to slicing up the mushroom. “Now, today,” he said, “not so happy.”

Her voice sounded weary and warm, perhaps in spite of her best efforts: “Life’s changed. Things are different.” Her face turned to him again, her hand bringing the blade to a pause. “Now I have a job and you don’t.” She sighed, laid down the knife. She turned to him, rubbing her palms together. “In fact—”, the sink continued to run in a steady, meaningless stream from the faucet, and she reached and turned it off with a twist of the knob. “In fact, you haven’t had one in over seven months. Nearly eight.”

He leaned into the kitchen a bit, scratching his chin. “Has it been that long. Hmmm. Time flies.”

Her look was hard, stony. “For some people, maybe.” She turned back around; in two ruthless hacks she disposed of the remainder of the mushroom. Next she plucked up the green pepper.

“What’s that?” he said.

“What’s what?”

“You said, ‘For some people, maybe.’ I’m not catching your meaning.”

“I mean, Carter, that for me, it’s seemed every bit of seven months.”

“Really,” he said, stirring, moving a step closer. “Why, do you think? Because you’ve had to work?”

Her voice dropped a bit, she might have been talking to herself. “I’m not having this conversation right now. I’m not.”

He advanced a couple more steps. “It’s not easy, having to work. It does take a bite out of the free time, the leisure. Can’t read as many magazines, can’t make as many lunches, not always enough time for the gym…sorry, I’d list more, but I never was sure just how you managed to fill your days back then. I plead ignorance.” Fingers of stream started to stretch from the pot simmering on the stove.

“I’m not sure how you spend yours now,” she said. The buoyantly bright green pepper was in slivers on the cutting board; she swept it into its own pile with the back of her hand. Discrete piles of colors, ingredients for whatever. “What do you do all day, everyday?”

“Let’s say I’m recuperating. Recharging my batteries.”

She snapped the band off the bulbs of the scallions. “Please let me know when you’re fully charged,” and she brought the blade down in a heavy snap and crunch on the soft green-gilded white onions.

“Certainly,” he said.

“Hopefully that it will come before we have to file for bankruptcy.” She snatched up some stalks of dried pasta he hadn’t noticed from a tubular blue box just in front of the cappuccino machine. Angel-hair—she began breaking them apart, dropping them into the wafting water.

“Bankruptcy? You mean, the salon job isn’t making the ends meet.”
He had the impression she was continuously forcing herself not to turn around and face him. A long pause as all the designated angel hair was deposited into the pot. “You know it’s not.” Barely a whisper.

“And, continue please. Why is that?”

She turned to him, hand on her hip. “Because it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s not a tenth of what we made before.”

He met her look, and again leaned a bit closer, the distance their faces now just three or so feet. “There’s that ‘we’ thing again you’re so fixated on. We didn’t make anything before, we weren’t working. You were taking tennis lessons or some shit. You had a personal trainer. You were living like Daddy’s own little rich girl while I was subsidizing you. I was working. I was making ten times what you make now. And you say you’ve been doing it for the few months I’ve been unemployed. I was doing it for six years while you were doing nothing, zilch. Multiply what you were bringing in then times a million, times a billion, and it still tallies at absolute zero. At the rate we’re at right now, I could be off work for a decade and you’d still be owing me. I made three hundred thousand last year. That’s how I bought this house. That’s how I bought two cars. That’s how I paid for your backhand, you lazy, ungrateful, talentless little twit.”

She jerked back, as if a firecracker had gone off near her head. But she recovered, quickly, and gazed back at him with something like real curiosity. “What’s happened to you, Carter? Why are you acting like this?”

He stared her cold. The question articulated brought him to a sudden clarity, stark relief. And here and now, he saw there were two paths from which he could choose. This great distance he had traveled from the man he had been to the one he was at this moment, these months had felt like an extended game—more precisely, an experiment, a test of reinvention. Somehow the ramifications, the repercussions, the side effects, had up to now not felt especially real, at a remove from him, as if there was always an out to inoculate his existence before anything permanent occurred. He’d known his life was metamorphosing, yet he hadn’t felt it. Her acknowledgement brought him up short, inculcated on his brain that this was a decisive moment.
He could retreat now, take back all that he had said, all that he had done. He could revert, instantaneously—he knew this was true—and take back up the Carter of old. Experimental phase finished. Or, he could go further. Pursue his transformation, push back the barriers until he exploded them completely, and came out the other side, forever changed. A new being.

He started to speak. Warm pants of vapor drifted up from the stove, suffusing the surrounding air of its moisture. He began to tell her things. About herself. The kind of things one only learns via intimacy, by years of proximity, by trust and confidence. Over years with another person, one learns where the softest areas are located, the spots of greatest vulnerability. He told her now the things she most feared ever hearing another person say to her, particularly her husband. Self-esteem issues; physical issues; worries over her capabilities as a lover; her intelligence; her strained relationship with her mother. He listed such things with dispassion, with all the emotion of an automated message. He didn’t feel like a lawyer anymore—this didn’t feel like an argument. His phrasing and demeanor made it more objective than that. No, he felt like a kind of surgeon, and his hand holding the scalpel never trembled—he cut her open in cool, efficient straight lines. And while she heard him, her face was in perfect arrest, still as an alabaster mask, while beneath her soul crumbled and gave way as her husband continued to relentlessly break her down into a formulation, a presentation, performing an entirely lucid vivisection of her essentially worthless human self.

At some point her balance gave way, and she wilted, going to her knees on the kitchen tile. This is easy, he thought.

What disconcerted him though, what he hadn’t counted on, was the abject physicality of her collapse. There before him now, folded onto herself, how she writhed and struggled, the clenched sobs sounding as if they were being torn from her; how the very molecules around her seemed to be agitated into raw despair. From the stove, the room continued to fill with heat. The water was in a fine boil now, and the foamy spew sloshed over and hissed heinously on the burner’s eye. Carter realized that he’d neglected to breathe for awhile, and feeling suddenly faint, he recoiled slightly to lean against the butcher-block island. Her face lifted; smeared in tears, shining with tears, mucus dripping from her nostrils, yet all in all, somehow more composed than he would have expected. Still Kathy, still recognizably her. She might have only been under the sway of something bittersweet, merely poignant. She gave a big suck of breath—already she had absorbed his blows, was righting herself. She smoothed back her hair, laid her hands on the floor to push herself upright. How normal her body looked as she rose, the muscles flexing beneath her clothes, her familiar body in all its known contours. It was as if she had just tripped, and was getting back up. He didn’t see how they could possibly go on from here. What an incredible amount of work the aftermath would require, after those terrible things he’d said.

She was up, almost returned to full height, her hair accidentally thrown back fetchingly over one shoulder, a look he’d always favored on her. Her face was in a near-perfect profile, only the slightest tremor remaining in the curve of her bottom lip. It was certainly too late by now to tell her, to tell her that he hadn’t really meant any of it.

So he hit her.

*****

Why I Hate,
Cater Serling
Just ‘cause

*****

He sat on the park bench in the crisp height of late morning, blinking into the hawk-eyed sun. The park lawn stretched away on all sides of him, grass green at the tips but browning at the roots, the turf , themselves in the main still sporting lustrous green but with autumn rupturing, russet and cyan and ruddy copper in discrete blazes. To Carter it seemed the season had appeared overnight.

It was a weekday, a non-holiday, a nothing special Wednesday, and turnout at the park was light. A couple of dogs on leashes trailed their owners behind them; a solitary jogger made a melancholy trek around the lawn’s circumference; a Frisbee languidly spun through the sharp air between two truant teenage boys.

And then there were the homeless—they actually were represented in some numbers. Two or three were sprawled on the shaded plots beneath the trees, lolling in their waking fog. Some staggered and limped up and down the paved paths and roundabouts, shuffling in a daze as if trying to recall exactly where they’d left a certain mystery item. And there were ones who were more industrious—imbued with a more diligent purpose. These tended to move in packs of twos or threes, as if they were canvassing teams, and though their business was impossible to rightly discern, they nevertheless made great activity, scurrying over the modest dells of the park landscape, back and forth, talking to one another, with defined, precise motions that looked no less efficient for seemingly having no purpose. They might have been participating in a speed-walking relay match.

The human shape of a shadow expanded on the ground, growing towards him. The woman it belonged to was clearly indigent, Carter saw. A wild fountain of kinky hair sprayed gray and white from the top of her tiny head, tied down with a frayed maroon scrunchy. She was dressed in a loud ensemble not quite suitable for the cooling climate: powder-blue tank top and yellow drawstring shorts that hung baggy, swallowing her waist. Her bared arms and legs were scorched a kerosene color by continuous exposure to the sun and harsh weathers. She came trudging his way, borne down with odds and ends: crinkled sheets of newspaper, pouches of plastic bags that seemed to be stuffed with other plastic bags, a bag of cat food, already opened and the top rolled down, a half-gallon of chocolate milk, and a two liter bottle of grape soda. Her trajectory was decided by her own private compass, as she moved fro and to, there and here, revolving in oval patterns, muttering and giggling all the while, some mischievous narration occurring inside her skull, before she finally came to a stop and sat down, on the other end of the bench from him.

She set down her various burdens in the space between them, except for the grape soda which she sat on the ground next to her sneakered feet, so dirty it looked as if she were shod in pigeons. He gave her ample time to arrange her items, and to grow quiet; but as he suspected, her clucking and gibberish and spastic gestures did not abate, only amplified on her sitting, and she sawed her hands in the air or picked through her assemblage of flotsam, and stubbornly refused to quiet.

“Think you’ve about got things settled over there?”

She didn’t appear to hear him; whatever the other voices in her head, they seemed enough to drown him out.

“Okay,” he said, “I have to ask. Why do you carry around all this ridiculous crap? Seriously. You could find better stuff in the garbage cans around here. Just a minute ago I saw a guy throw away half a hoagie sandwich. Right over there. Go look if you don’t believe.”

She ignored him. He listened, and thought maybe her jabber was becoming more distinctly words; there was a cadence to it, pauses and inflections. No one was there, but she was definitely in the midst of a conversation. He slid a little closer to her. “Do you actually see someone there? No offense, I’m just curious. It’s a genuine question. This is like field research for me. I don’t meet people like you everyday. I don’t make it over to this part of town very often.”

There was a chirruping to her talk, a quick snort—but she didn’t respond to him, nor did she look his way.

“I mean, you see this stuff. All this shit you tote around. You see the cat foot bag, right? That’s real. You see the newspapers. You have your milk here, that’s real. Rancid no doubt, but real. But where you’re looking now, over to your right. You see, that’s just empty space. You’re talking at it, but nobody’s there. Do you believe there’s an actual person you’re addressing all this nonsense to?”

At the last few words, the woman all at once seemed to noticed Carter was talking. She suddenly halted in her dialogue, and tilted her head slightly toward him. Then she looked at him.

There was a baleful light in her eyes. She did not appear pleased at the interruption.
For a few seconds, they stared at one another. A bus on a nearby boulevard gasped to a stop, somewhere from the park baseball diamond behind them an aluminum bat cranked contact against a ball, followed by a terse thud against dirt.

Then she resumed talking to her invisible companion. Carter now could make out quite a few personal pronouns, several articles strung together like beads on a bracelet, and a blunt, blocky verb or two. “Do”, “Be” “Are”. Not much else.

“You can talk to me, you know. I’m sitting right here. And I actually exist. At least if you were talking to me, you wouldn’t look like such degenerate lunatic. Don’t get me wrong, you’d still look like a freak, what with the way you’re dressed and your hair and all, but if they see you talking to me, you might come across as just some eccentric old lady, not a mental defective schizo who ought to be in an asylum basement somewhere. This will be a good thing for you, might keep you from getting hassled by the cops. Ready? Here we go. Hello, you crazy cunt. My name’s Carter. What’s yours?”

This time the patter with her diaphanous companion never relented, if anything became more relaxed and chummy, reasonable. She nodded her head at some truism the incorporeal other party delivered, clucked in agreement, and at the same time reached her hand into one of her many bags. Retrieving something, she pushed it across the bench to Carter.

It was a sock, a stretched-out sock which once had been white but now was ringed in brown and brownish yellow stains and which was so tacky it lay there rigid as if stricken with rigamortis. The look of it, the tawdry, gross appearance of it, was so disgusting that Carter pulled one sleeve over his hand and slapped the rank thing off the bench. It landed in the in the grass, upright, and lay there not three feet in front of them.

The woman thought this very funny. She guffawed, and reached into the bag again, this time producing a flesh-colored lump of nylon hosiery, which she dropped between them, centered like a guardsman taking a penalty shot, and then hit square, sending the tatty undergarment sailing. Her projectile landed several feet farther out than the sock. Her hands clapped excitedly; she clasped them together and shook them on either side of her head..

“You don’t even know how crazy you are, do you,” said Carter, leaning his face closer to hers. “No concept at all. You don’t see how everyone laughs at you and sneers at you, avoids you when they see you coming. It couldn’t have always been like this. Once you must have had a little sanity, the same as you once had parents, a family, maybe friends. Then you just kept getting weirder and weirder, alienating them all. Did you realize it when it was happening? Could you feel it all slipping away? Did you ever catch yourself in the middle of some freak-out and say, Holy shit, that was pretty fucking crazy right there. Why the hell did I do that. Hard to remember those days now, I bet, with all the white noise and static in your skuzzy little brain.”

She seemed to be listening to him, was tuned in and the very picture of attention; she was sitting a bit sideways on the bench, her arms folded and one finger idly stroking her chin, a surprisingly thoughtful expression having come and bewitched her face, clearing it of some of its crevices and smoothing some of the furrows. She nodded along at his words, in an interested but dispassionate way. She might have been a psychiatrist conferring with a colleague, or listening—she maintaining the pose so perfectly that it rattled him, his words petering out, as at this interval she again dipped back into her bag, emerging with a blue pen and a creased and curled stationary pad, on which she started to scribble, tearing off the page and passing it to him with an official flourish, Carter looking down, seeing only unintelligible markings, fierce little scrawls that could indicate nothing, but then, the last line shaping into actual words, and he saw they read, Take two and call me in the morning—to a patient.

He tried to fling the paper away, but it only whipped in the air in front of him, and bobbed there on a flux of breeze, descending coyly downwards in an unhurried sashay.

“Oh I get it now,” Carter yelled, standing up. “You’re one of those lunatics who’s supposed to be so much saner than the rest of us. Is that it? Well guess what, those don’t exist, you broke-down shit for brains bitch. Must be pretty in that diseased gourd to think so, to believe that little myth. But no. Crazy is just crazy, homeless is just homeless, a filthy fucking beggar is just a filthy fucking beggar. Nothing more, just some afterthought half-life, waiting around to die.”

Like a secretary taking dictation, she was back at the pad, scribbling rapidly.
The scrap torn off, extended. He snatched it out of her hand. More scrawls, more jagged slashes and marks. Then,
It must be pretty to think so.

“What’s this! You’re copying me huh? That stupid fucking game. So you’re not insane after all, you’re just a fucking idiot. Stop it, do you hear me. Stop writing this down. Stop copying me!”

The next page read Stop copying me!

Their interaction by now had drawn an audience. In his peripheral vision Carter saw a few stray people, beginning to huddle around them. It was the other homeless, other derelicts, having wandered up to see the show. There were maybe six or eight of them—Carter wouldn’t focus on them long enough to count—and though they had no discernible expressions on their hard-worn faces, he was struck by how vivid were their eyes, burning, sclerotic, fixed on him in rheumy mockery.
The women was yucking it up, still seated on the bench, having a grand time. She passed him another scrap of paper. Carter ripped it up. She began to work on another. Carter lunged at the pad.

But she evaded him. With surprising agility she jumped up and executed a perfect pirouette away from his reach. He heard cackles erupt from the motley crowd surrounding him. “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled at them.

Approximately these same words were delivered back to him, in wheezy, grainy voices, appended with harsh laughs. He looked at his primary adversary; she’d dispensed now with the notepad and was taking a turn in front of her brethren, shaking again her clasped hands on either side of her head, egging on their support. They responded with whoops and cheers.

Carter tried to grab at her. Once again, she spun away. And twhacked him across the forehead with the ink pen, a smarting blow that blurred his vision for a second. Then, with an almost solemn air, the woman marched several paces away from him, before turning with a flounce and holding out the pen before her, like a fencing saber. En guard!. More laughter from the assemblage, more cheering; and Carter looked around him, at the collection of haggard faces, their leers and bright awful eyes and ragged bodies pressing in closer to him, eliminating the space that separated them from him.

Distracted by this advance, he didn’t see the blows coming from his opponent, a quick combination of hard slaps against the side of his head. Little starbursts popped in his eyes, and through the effervescent screen he saw the woman, backpedaling now, as if the ref had called her off, displaying her footwork, fists in front of her, still duking it out with the empty air, keeping her timing sharp.

She moved toward him again, face contorted in a puncher’s mug. He swung now, but must have telegraphed it, because she ducked under it, and he felt a stinging strike against his mouth, and tasted blood.

Something caught him about the knees, and he spilled face first to the ground. Dust blinded his eyes. He tried to scream at her, at all of them, but his mouth was full of grass and dirt. He gagged, and began coughing; he rose and wheeled around madly, flailing, fists whipping around through thin air as a deluge of laughter rained down upon him, hard cruel laughter, a cruel, drunk audience tormenting a failing vaudevillian, a comic whose act was dying.

He was crying when they came to take him away.

Chapter 3

 

August 1999

 

“Don’t you know I’m an animal/Don’t you know I can’t stand up straight/ You can’t show me any kind of hell that I don’t know already.”

 

Elvis Costello was less his favorite artist, more his spirit animal.

 

            When you haunt record stores and music shops as often as Hud did, when you trawl vinyl stacks and remainder bins, when in those rare times you’re actually forced to leave New York City and go cross-country and you stop in dusty truck stops and gas stations in Beulah, Pennsylvania and Jackson, Tennessee and buy those strange compilation cassettes of Tammy Wynette and Buck Owens and Peter Wolf, when you order Japanese imports of fan-recorded Clash concerts and collect Stax B-sides, you are inclined to a fandom frame of mind and as such tend to construct hierarchies in your head – best this, best that, top 5 that, top 10 this.

 

Favorite artist: had to be Dylan, though Hud had a holdout hope that in ten or fifteen years he’d come to understand jazz and a Charlie Mingus or Bud Parker might take the top prize.

 

Favorite record: Exile on Main Street. It was the greatest rock’n’roll record of all time, even though everyone else thought so too. Runnerups: London Calling, Revolver, Never Mind the Bollocks, Every Picture Tells a Story, James Brown Live at the Apollo, The Kinks are the Preservation Green Society, and most anything Sun Records put out from 1954-1959.

 

Favorite Record Store in NYC (therefore, favorite record store): A-1 Records on East 6^th.

 

Favorite Record Store, non-NYC: Amoeba Records in Hollywood.

 

Favorite recording: Uptight, Stevie Wonder. The Motown heat surging through the record, cracking snare, jumping horns, house party hot and damp with sweat.

 

But Costello was what he turned to more often than any other artist – Hud owned every record and in twenty-two years the man had put out a bunch of them – as he could encompass every mood, every temper, every feeling. Some couldn’t stand his glottal, phlegmatic voice, which tended to be pushed up high in the mix. Hud found it a far more pliable and versatile instrument than it’s reputation suggested. Some disliked the jagged thinness of so many of his records, the busy and virtuoso but acrylic edge of the stuff with the Attractions – only on King of America and The Juliet Letters were what one might call “warm” records, and here Costello’s voice sounded full, comfortable, almost inviting. Most had never listened to him, period, at least in the States, unless it was Allison or Everyday I Write the Book on the radio on occasion.

 

Elvis Costello’s appeal to Hud was in the man’s rampant output, his profligacy, and the utter ruthlessness he had in articulation, burrowing inside any and every feeling and coming up bearing bouquets replete with thorns. There was a lot more to his work than simply “revenge and guilt”, as a drunken Costello himself had said one night to Nick Kent, a quote that got a lot of play just as his career was beginning. Essentially it stamped him, stereotyped him. And sure, the harshness and struggle in the singing helped enforce this persona, as did an undeniable talent for putdowns and invective. “You can even shop around/Though you won’t find any cheaper/She’s your baby now/You can keep her.” “You lack lust, you’re so lackluster/ Is that all the strength you can muster?” “The teenage girl is crying/’cause she don’t look like a million dollars/So heaven help her if you can/’cause she don’t seem to have the attention span.” “Forever doesn’t mean Forever anymore. I said, Whatever, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be around much anymore.”

Hud himself was not an especially angry person. His taste to music ran to either ferocious punk, raucous, sloppy rock, or brilliantine soul. Or field recordings and blues songs that sounded like they were recorded from the bottom of a well. But Costello was the artist who could encompass all these – essentially he was the songwriter and recording artist who seemed to have Hud’s exact record collection. Even his 80’s output – an era that Costello once referred to as the decade that music forgot, which outside of nascent hip hop, Tom Waits, and the Smiths, was essentially correct – was salvaged by some of Hud’s favorites: the entire King of America album, Blood and Chocolate, and tracks like Mouth Almighty, little nuggets of pop-perfect genius that Hud adored and could return to again, and again, and again.

Dabo was the only person he knew who adored Elvis Costello as much as he did. And as such, he had little respect for Dabo. Essentially he distrusted what Dabo loved, and suspected Dabo didn’t really love music. His adoration, for Costello or anything else, was essentially a “train-spotting” kind of adoration, a matter of an archivist’s obsessive passion for printing numbers and limited-releases. Anytime Hud tried to engage his friend in talk of lyrics or favorite Track Fours proved dispiriting – Dabo just didn’t have much to offer. He didn’t seek the same sublimity or even relevance that Hud did in the records he listened to. His passion, such as it was, or obsessiveness, was for the search, the acquisition, the completist’s satiation. Whereas Hud could and would sit, or pace, for hours, just listening to music, the same track ten, fifteen times in a row. Hud would clear all of a Sunday and wend his way through My Aim is True to Get Happy, the Live From Hollywood High EP, the Taking Liberties B-Sides compilation.

Some would say this was not a life. Not only spending a possibly beautiful Sunday day inside, not only doing it for hours at a time with headphones on, but also doing it in thrall to an art that wasn’t his – he didn’t even play an instrument and didn’t know whether he could sing or not – just fan-boy diversion pure and simple, drinking the blood of a stranger’s passion. Some would say it was safe, sad, more than a little pathetic, boring, weird, The imagined life is not a life, they’d say. Hud knew they were wrong. The fantasist life was as much a life as any, maybe more. You willingly hang in the sublime, root out room there, live inside the transcendence. Then, in Hud’s case, you write about it. Elvis Costello said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture – though Hud suspected the quote was not original to him – an essentially superfluous enterprise. Hud doubted too the guy really thought this – as a jobbing musician Costello of course looked down his nose at the ones who chimed in on his calling and career, but Hud sensed the man too well understood that selfsame urge, to pay tribute and homage to the greatness that passed through the speakers, to utter odes to an unrequited love. The man’s own liner notes, not only for his own records but other peoples’, spoke to an identical love that Hud felt. And, like Hud, he felt a need to disparage the practice. The difference between the two of them: Hud had no other practice.

Dabo and he had a standing appointment to record shop on Thursday nights in the East Village. From five o’clock to seven, then they’d grab dinner at Dojo’s on St Mark’s Place. Cheap and good. Dabo came with his backpack, chin beard, beefy frame, Husker Du tshirt, hiking boots, and his girlfriend Olivia. The two of them had been together since before Hud met Dabo, at a Guster show Hud was writing up for a local ‘zine and which Dabo clearly had no desire to be attending. They both spent the jammy set running down the experience they were both participating in. This is the kind of scorn that seals friendships.

Olivia entered with Dabo into the cobwebby flourescents of the Stone Love record shop on Houston. The narrow alleyway split of a store, like most places below the grid of Manhattan, all length, no width. Hud noted them entering, having basically concluded making his way through the E’s of the racks written in marker on pasteboard tabs. Not through the C’s, mind you – the E’s. What he’d hoped to find was a mystery, since he already owned every official release and probably most of the common bootlegs. And, interesting fact: Hud somewhat covertly did not like live bootlegs. He preferred studio recordings, outtakes, etc. There seemed always a chance that even with his constant research and reconnoitering, that his favorite artists had somehow released a studio record that had fallen through the cracks. Anything seemed possible when you were flipping through the racks.

He kept his eyes trained on Dabo, who was bearish without being jovial and hearty without being warm. The guy didn’t look pissed so much as preoccupied. Hud deigned not to acknowledge Olivia at all; yet, there she was, short, dark, tangle-haired, full-lipped, slim-hipped, black jeans, army surplus jacket with cuffs rolled up, magenta lipstick, more than a little mascara, eyes the shade of pistachios, scent like last week’s incense. He felt her gaze without having to meet her eye.

“Yo,” said Dabo, “anything yet?”

“Haven’t been here long. Going to R&B next.”

“Word.” Then Dabo, with Olivia in tow, shuffled over to C&W.

Hud came away with a pearl: a Solomon Burke Sings Pop Hits of the Day LP. The lettering on the front listed versions of Day Tripper, Sugar Shack, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. When soul singers sang country tracks, Hud was a lot of times in heaven.

He paid for the LP, waited up near the register and shot the shit with Sweeney, who had worked here for either six months or sixty years, who was supposedly a practicing Muslim or an irreligious pothead, who was shaven-headed and thin-framed, tatted up and meek-voiced. Sweeney was a big fan of The Jam and hardcore, exclusively. Somehow those two polarities seemed perfect within his compassed being, and the fact that there was no exception to such disparate elements also was well-accommodated in his black-and-white-identity. Melody and chaos, individualism and community, two poles with skinny straight meridians connecting them.

“Ready for grub?” asked Dabo as he sauntered up, several record sleeves under his arm. Where does he get his cash, wondered Hud, not for the first time. Olivia had long lashes, big eyes, was sunk slightly behind the big man’s shoulder, not out of reticence but so she could transmit signals recessed from the purview of his peripheral vision.

Hud shrugged, which under certain auspices could have meant an assent to dinner. The taste of Carrot Ginger Dressing was alive in his mouth. And, he felt like an advertisement.

Warm night, everyone out. He was a part of a loose community, so as the doorman at the Beacon and that doorman’s sister were friends with the seamstress at Kato’s and that seamstress had introduced Hud to the girl he dated for a couple of months at Two Boots, the three-night-a-week manager who was super-cute and had a considerable working knowledge of Kung Fu films. The three of them saw them all on their walkabout to St. Mark’s Place. Nods, gestures, casual conversations. They took a patio seat, three chairs at a four top.

Dabo had digestive issues. Sure you do, you fat fuck – this was what cruel Hud wanted to say in moments of max annoyance. But he didn’t, and Dabo didn’t stop having to go to the bathroom for five to seven minutes at a time. Here’s what the conversation was like when Dabo was in the bathroom, in these few minutes, when Olivia was there:

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Well, that’s good. Do you want to have some calamari?”

“Are you joking? That’s all you have to say?”
“I didn’t think you were pregnant. I’m sorry, I know it’s different for you, but I didn’t have to breathe a big sigh of relief.”

“Dabo and I haven’t had sex in over a month. Do you know what would happen if I turned up pregnant? For some reason, even though he doesn’t want to fuck me, he has my ovulation calendar inscribed in his brain. He’d know something was up.”

“In that case, I think that would be the least of our problems. Hey, let’s accent the positive. You aren’t with child.”

“You’re a worthless prick.”

“Fair.”

“Can you volunteer anything else, Hud? Please. Let me know there’s a person behind those blue eyes.”

He never knew what to say to queries like that, though it wasn’t the first time he’d heard them. “Listen,” he said, “I’m not trying to be insensitive or harsh or anything like that. But …”

“You’re not trying to be anything. You’re not trying, period.”

“What do you want me to do? Are you going to do something? Are you going to break up with Dabo?”

“Are you asking me to? I might if you asked me to.”

Hud was suddenly busy rearranging condiment packets and salt and pepper shakers. He kept looking up to see if Dabo was returning from the john.

“You don’t want me to, Hud. That’s ultimately what it’s about. You want to have your cake and eat it too.”

He sighed. “How I hate that phrase. How I always have. What does it even mean?”

There was genuine anger in her eyes. “In this case it means you want me to stay with Dabo and you want to keep fucking me when it’s convenient for you. You want no fetters on your life or your freedom but you need me to stay in my place, at your beck and fucking call. What if I don’t? What if the puppet cuts her strings? What if when Dabo gets back I spill everything – that you and I have been carrying on a torrid affair for the last four months, that we meet up in the afternoons when he’s at work and go at it for hours. That I love you and think about you when I’m with him, even though really, he’s a better person than you are. Would you like that, Hud? There’s always a part of you that wants to be the drama and tumult in people’s lives. Hell, that’d be dramatic as shit. I can do it and totally turn over the apple cart.”

Dabo – still not returning. But the couple at the neighboring table were silent now, obviously eavesdropping. This was some intriguing stuff. “You won’t, though,” Hud said, forcing his voice into a register he wanted to call steely. “You want to come live with me? You think that maybe but don’t really want it when it comes down to it. You think there’s this other person beneath this exterior, and I’m here to tell you there’s not. There is no second layer, no hidden reserve, no well waiting to be tapped. It’s pretty to think there might be but there’s not. So stay in your lane – I’m the guy who’s supposed to fuck other guys’ girlfriends during weekdays, that’s my role. Trying to force me to be anything else will only end up in proving there’s no there there.”

She shrank back into her seat. Was that a tear? “Wow,” she said. “What a life you’ve sculpted for yourself. What goals. All you want is to be women’s dirty little secret.”

It’s what they’ve always wa… And Hud pulled up, even in thinking, because here Dabo was, finally back from his sojourn to the bathroom.

The August air was swamped-up, a panting New York night, bearing car exhaust and city perfumes, oily slicks and garbage brine. Miraculously the three of them had a fine time, even with collusion and secrets and illicit dreams added to the freight of the laden late-summer atmosphere. Dabo and he talked about Costello’s Trust album. On a back reel in Hud’s brain, the man singing a version of Dark End of the Street from, yes, a live bootleg in Copenhagen played. You and me, at the dark end of the street …

Actually, among the things Hud did not divulge during dinner, was that he was going to be reviewing Rykodisks reissues of all Costello’s albums for The Village Voice. Somehow Robert Christagau hadn’t got the gig. Costello himself was writing the liner notes for the reissues. Elvis Costello – Hud Harper’s spirit animal.

*Author’s Note: The title of this story is a total crib from Ernest Hemingway’s collection, Men Without Women. It has been the working title for more than one story draft over the years, each very different one from the other, the only commonalities being that they all seem to feature country roads and cemeteries. Decided I couldn’t improve on the title, left it.

 

Men Without Wives

The men in my family are long-lived as a rule, through no fault of our own. We don’t intend to be, it’s not what you might call a goal. By and large, we are as poor at dying as we are at living – this, our calling, would seem to be for nonsensical survival.

The women on the other hand … abstemious and temperate on the whole, optimistic in that earnest, faded way, stolid with quiet faith and the kind of spirits you might call stoic – they died, died young. They were sweetness and light and the scantest wind blew out their flames. You had Mama departing at forty-nine of septic shock; before her both Granny Butcher and Granny Carlysle passing on in their early fifties (fevers: typhoid and scarlet, respectively). There was my brother Chet’s wife, who though many years his senior was still only a veritable chicklet when she died at fifty-six from complications of gastric bypass surgery. Aunt Evaline still had my cousin Rudy nursing when she came down with cancer of the female parts and was twelve weeks between diagnosis and burial.

My wife died at age thirty-three, by her own hand. The hand at the time was holding a Sig Sauer .380 automatic. She’d removed it from the safe in my office, leaving in its place her wedding band. Never let them tell you they don’t shoot themselves.

But take my daddy, who courted death and called out death and dared the reaper with most every minute of his life to go ahead and drop the scythe, who was permanently pushing his chips to the center of the table, always going all in; Daddy, first stabbed at the age of fourteen by a prideful young black who took umbrage to his unreconstructed parlance – Daddy hit him with some of that invective for which the Butcher boys are so rightly renowned – this merely an early installment to a lifetime of gougings, hackings, beatings, bludgeonings and peltings with small-bore ammo all administered over the years by brigades of cuckolded husbands and friends double-crossed, pool hall confederates stiffed and drinking buddies insulted, irate Sheriff’s deputies (Daddy had tussled with three consecutive generations of Wilkersons, Earle to Buzz to Bailey, peace officers all), and even his own kith and kin, for he was not above dustups with brothers, uncles, cousins or sons, not even when they grew big enough to give as good as they got. (Only brother Shaw ever availed himself of the opportunity.) This man, who granted no quarter and who’d have been righteously peeved to receive any, had now attained seventy-eight years of age. More broken bones than Evel Knievel, near as many gunshot wounds than Cole Younger, and yet still he drew breath, a palsied, twisted chimp of a man, warped with arthritis and shaky from the Parkinsons and mute now for more than a year, all the day long sitting in a chair on the stubbed porch of Chet’s doublewide, staring out on a scrub pasture of cactus flowers and cow paddies. Useless and shriveled and defanged, and still alive, just as he had feared from the very beginning.

Was I what, ten or eleven, the night he nearly set fire to the county? Daddy, on his way home from some ramble, seeing cross-eyed and taking the bends in the road by intuition. He rolled down the window to flick out his Winston, whereupon the whipping wind snatched it up and flung it back into the trailer bed of the Dodge, where it landed among a stack of hay bails. The odor of burning straw made no impression on him; neither it seems did the crackling hell-fire glow in the rearview mirror alert him to the situation. And even once the smoke had gotten ropey and thick and was coiling around the cab and obscuring the beams of the headlights in coal lariats, nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. We witnessed his approach from the front yard, a burning meteor hurtling down the gentle slope to our place, a comet trailing a long yellow tail of particles. Banging and bouncing across the terrain, brakes pumped as the accelerator was jammed, the Dodge finally skidded to a stop a few millimeters in front of where we stood. Out he stumbled. Startled at the sight of us assembled there – our legion dark eyes must have been shining out varmint-like, shimmering with refracted flame – he hollered, “Alright, I’m drunk. Youns don’t have to gawk like it’s News of the World.” Our stares overpowered him; shame occasionally would crawl up, snakelike, on its belly, to this most shameless of men, ready to bite or demand a petting, dependent as reptilian creatures are on the warmth generated by the thing nearest them to tell the temperature of their blood. Still oblivious to the conflagration over his shoulder, the pops and hisses, he dropped to his knees. “Shut off them eyes, goddammit!” he screeched, now weeping, “I can’t take no more.”

“Look hind ye already, ye fuckin idjit,” yelled Grandpa Carlyle. Then the glass in the back windshield exploded and a thousand bits of burning straw fell all around us like orange rain, the rich bottom-land country dark lit up like Antietam. Somebody ran for the hosepipe.

A few years later Mamma happened to scratch her wrist on the striker plate of the back door. No one including herself paid the abrasion much mind, not until it began to turn ugly. By the time she went to a doctor red rings were running up and down her arm, she was having headaches, dizzy spells, and was in bad pain. Some sort of staph infection – she’d never had a tetanus shot. A runaway nightmare: first the arm had to come off, which everyone assumed would be the worst of it, god awful enough as that was. But still she deteriorated. Her weight fell below a hundred pounds, she ceased recognizing any of us. If there was any saving her the doctors at the General Hospital weren’t up to the task.

 

+++

These days I’ve been staying at Gertie Gibb’s modular house. A flaring of my tinnitus roused me that morning. The symptoms tend to take the form of dry clicking sounds in the ear canals, aural apparitions like swarms of cicadas in the treetops beating their brittle wings. The ear-nose-and-throat man in Gacy said the condition could be caused by excessive alcohol consumption. I did not keep the follow-up appointment.

I emerged that morning to find Gertie Gibb in her usual position on the barkcloth sofa, in her dressing gown, watching one of her Judge programs. The decibels made me shudder. She was eating a banana, peeling it free of phloems and arranging the little strings along the armrest. On the cushion beside her was a pink ashtray in the shape of a hippopotamus, one of her tiny BelAir’s smoldering in the belly.

“You have to listen to that thing so damn loud?”

Gertie Gibb’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. “I do when people talk over it.” She did not look over but said, “You’re naked.”

“Just woke up.”

“Congratulations on that.”

“I might make up some eggs. You want some eggs?”

She lifted up the banana as proof that it was indeed food, and that I was stupid.

I was in the kitchen hunting a skillet when her voice called out, “Your brother called.”

“Yeah. What did Chubb say?”

“Not Chubb. The other one.”

“What?”

“It was the other one.”

I returned to the den. “Shaw called here? Looking for me? What did he want?”

She shrugged.

“Well c’mon, what did he say?”

“Didn’t say anything. Asked for you, I said you were asleep, he hung up. The end.”

“You sure it was Shaw?”

With this question she took up the remote control and punched up the volume on the TV to its max setting.

Say the Devil’s name and he doesn’t always appear; might be he calls instead. The wall phone commenced to ringing. I grabbed up the receiver and retreated back into the kitchen. “Hello.”

My eldest brother’s voice is a clenched, constricted glottal crunch, the words coming like a strangled trickle of brown water squeezed from a pipe of rusty galvanized. In person even we indoctrinated have some trouble untangling the barbs and brambles he spits forth; a telephone conversation with him can be akin to spot-translating Choctaw.

“Come again, Shaw?” The only words I’d made out were “assfuck” and “mamma.”

“ – heard me, motherfucker! I said you and {indecipherable} planning to assfuck me {garbled} this thing with Mamma.”

“What? No. What thing you talking about? For Mamma you say. I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

Feral noises cracked horrible in the earpiece, like a gopher rat chewing on a stethoscope. “ – you slippery shit {garbled} lying faggot bitch, don’t lie to me, I’ll gut ye {garbled} and string you up and bite off your {indecipherable}. Chubb squealed, Mr. Smart Mouth, told me what you two got {garbled} and you ain’t cutting me out, goddammit.”

It was a little early to be taking these high hard ones to the head; my legs were going gelatinous. I fumbled for a jam jar from the dish strainer and sloshed it two-thirds full from the box of Chablis in the fridge. Gulped it down to steel my nerves. From the crook of my shoulder, the ferocious voice shredded the receiver. “Answer me, goddammit!”

“Nobody’s cutting you out, Shaw. You’re invited to come along. Sure. That was always the plan. I was just about to drive out to your place this morning and ask you face-to-face. This is a brother thing – I wouldn’t do it without you.” No creature has hearing as acute as a coward, even one suffering from tinnitus. His brain is an opera house, the acoustics superb, and every half-truth, denial, every craven prevarication, rings clear and pristine as a derringer shot from a balcony.

“That ain’t what Shit-for Brains said. Didn’t even know he’d spilled it till after it was out of his mouth.”

“That’s Chubb for you. That’s why he’s Shit-for-Brains. Listen, let me come out and talk to you. We’ll get this sorted. Me and you.” I went on like this for some time.

Finally: indistinct, garbled, indecipherable. Then, a hard bang, and the line went dead. A Shaw Butcher goodbye.

 

+++

For the fourteen years my mother has been deceased she has resided in the relative comfort and quiet of Boorman Cemetery, Alice Lee Road, Hanghop, Tennessee, never making a peep. The accommodations were perfectly suitable and well-placed, nestled there on the northern brow of Hanghop Valley.

The valley was the rub. Because the valley itself was now scheduled for extinction, death by drowning. The state, abetted by the TVA and the Army Corp of Engineers and the Hydrological and Aquifer Commission, was going to open up General Neyland Dam and flood Hanghop Valley. Any of the dead still to be found in their graves would not be spared.

This project had, in fairness, been in the works for years and years. Enough time for the interred of Boorman Cemetery to have been relocated four and a quarter miles away at a new cemetery site. In fact I had voted against the funding for the project during a budget standoff with our governor one year. Eventually it passed anyway; eventually I voted for it, if memory serves. There is an irony there. Official word of these plans had come two Junes ago, the survivors of Boorman residents duly notified. I had received the notification. I did not read the fine print; indisposed at the time, I placed it in a desk drawer for perusal later. There it stayed. Then my life was upended by various misfortunes and I was unable to devote any attention to the matter of transferring Mamma’s remains to a freshly dug plot at Brushwood Rest. And my tribulations, involving political scandal, a very public fall from grace, sordid news coverage and a 3^rd degree felony charge for misappropriation of taxpayer funds (sentenced suspended), along with the suicide of a spouse, denied from my mind attention to detail. Even if I’d managed to pony up the required three hundred and eighty-eight dollars and forty-six cents for the conveyance and re-internment fee – an impossibility as I was notably cash-strapped at that time – this would have required remembering the situation in the first place. Which I didn’t. Notices went unheeded; I had ceased opening my mail. First notice, second notice, and third. Finally final notice was sent – this one I don’t even recall ignoring – and received the same treatment as the others, and the window of availability on safeguarding Mamma’s remains in perpetuity slammed shut. At this point it was too late even to submit her name for inclusion on the memorial plaque offered gratis by the state to those who had been unwilling or unable to reallocate their dead to higher ground. My mother was now due to spend what was left of eternity at the bottom of the soon-to-be birthed Mack McDonough Lake, ensconced forever with waterlogged strangers who had no descendants, or at least none who gave a damn.

Nowadays my life was dramatically streamlined and I had much free time on my hands, and of all the resultant ramifications and consequences from the bad happenings of the last couple of years that grieved and galled me – and they were legion – this was the one most touched with pathos, the most poignant, or the only one that might still be rectified. Over late night powwow sessions with my middle brother Chubb, me properly lubricated with Country Club vodka and fortified wine, he with bacon cheeseburgers, chili fries, and sixty-four ounce Mr. Pibbs, a plan was hatched. We would steal into the defunct Boorman Cemetery late at night, dig up Mamma’s grave, and steal her away for burial elsewhere. The exact location had yet to be determined. I myself pictured a verdant meadow somewhere, alive with daisies, black-eyed Susans and birdsong.

The rescue was to take place tonight, Friday night, the last very last available chance. Tomorrow the floodgates were due to be blown open.

 

+++

Shaw lived in a broken house with a hip roof that sat recessed on a butte above Dooley turnpike, a house that for decades had belonged to a family named Lipscomb and that over the last several years had passed rapidly from quitclaim hand to quitclaim hand, its craggy and haggard appearance showing the wear of so much use, so little love, the cream-colored paint alligatored, scaling and peeling off the boards like skin from a psoriasis sufferer, the roof shingles a queasy olive shade and the porch hanging off the jaw of the place like a goiter. The yard was thicket, hedge, and more thicket dried into a perma-rot, beige and nutrient-free as it continued an unstaunched advance on the dwelling with its thistle and rooky talons.

Pesty Green stood at the front door when I walked onto the swagged porch floor, standing behind a thick wooden screen door, the mesh upcurled off its nails. She stared me down, liver-eyed and sheaved in menace.

“Pesty, how’re you? Good to see you.”

She did not return the salutation all at once. If possible her face turned even more sour and menacing. She was a remarkably ugly woman: sunken eyes circled by purple rims, avian features that after years of little food, heavy cigarette smoking and on-and-off methamphetamine use had slurped inwards on themselves, pulling eyes, nose and mouth into a hostile crater furrowed by interstices of grooves and flaps. Her body was spindly and the clothes she wore, stain-spattered sweatshirt and second-hand blue jeans, hung from her gnarled frame like an afterthought, some curdled concession to conformity, going clothed a custom she was too full of loathing to bother to defy.

“What the hell you doing here?” Her voice was a nasty crunk issuing from the boiled nut of her larynx.

“I came to see Shaw,” I said. Then, as if in placation: “He called me.”

“Well he ain’t here. Get off the porch.”

“Pesty, I’m telling you he called. Told me to come over.”

She eyed me, eager to detect a lie, jutted out her chin, decided she didn’t give a shit either way, spat, grumbled some obscene gibberish, then said something approximating “He’s in back, I don’t have to talk to your squirrely ass no how.” She whapped the door closed behind the screen, and the studs, joists and rafters of the entire Lipscomb place pleaded for help and coughed.

Shaw was at an outbuilding just short of the tree line, a shed built like a lean-to. I smelled butane, a burnt popcorn odor, creosote. Two oil drums were visible in shadows, one dispelling a reeking vapor. My brother stood in the steaming sulfurous emissions, a man wreathed in clouds of toxins.

An ill wind skidded sundry litter around our heels.

Shaw is hard and bony as a man-sized knuckle, sheared of all excess and surplus flesh, a creature of corded sinew and tough tendon, a leather strap that’s been left out all summer to tan. My brother Shaw – a surprisingly nimble, if joyless, dancer. I’d always been terrified of him, which caused me no small amount of shame until I realized that everyone else was too. It was just good common sense.

Assuming there is such a thing as an obsequious showdown I had come prepared for one, overmatched as I perpetually was, always armed with excuses and half-truths, passive pleas for mercy. But my brother, he wouldn’t heed the situation. “Hey, Shaw.” Nor would he heed my presence. He did not nod or deign to notice me, kept rifling the building for supplies, open cans of paint thinner and turpentine. “Shaw, hey. We oughta talk, don’t you think?” That comment constitutes bravery in my world.

“Fetch me over that pike there. That one with the ring at the end.” I sighted around a discrete pile of scrap metal until I spotted a staff of rebar with an iron ring soldered into one end. I handed it to him and stepped back a couple of paces.

He jammed the other end of the rebar into the ground, picked up a rubber mallet and banged it in firm. He looped some twine through the ring, knotted it off, then stretched the twine around the handle of a pail, tying that end off around a four-by-four post already fixed into the ground. The pail hung suspended between the two fixed points, dangling just above a kettle of water steaming over a blue butane flame. Into the pail Dale began to pour chemicals from three unmarked yellow containers.

Warily he eyed the land around, revolving in a circle to get a look at the expanse of the butte. Never once did his eyes settle on me. “What time you and fat ass going to set out for the graveyard?”

“I don’t know for sure. We hadn’t settled on an exact time.”

“Settle on it now. Tell me the time.”

“Just before nightfall, I suppose. Will take a good forty-five minutes to get up there, have to go the old timber road that runs southwards of it.”

He had out a pocket knife, the blade open. He was using it to gouge at a blister on the heel of of his left hand. “They’d have done closed that off already.”

“They haven’t though. Night before last I drove it, followed it all the way down till I could see the cemetery grounds through a break between some saplings.” How giddy it made me to volunteer this evidence of industriousness, forethought.

“Well, could have by now.” He clenched his fist in front of him tight till white squeezed between his knuckles, and a single dollop of puss dropped onto the miserable, scalded grass. “But then they’re all stupid shitheads and could have not thought to block the logging road. I seen them do more shithead shit than that.” Who these stupid shitheads were, he did not particularize. Government men, authorities, county people; really Shaw could and would describe any and all of us in much that same way. “Alright. You starting out there from Chubb’s?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll be to his place round bout eight o’clock. Youns leave out before that and I’ll open up your skull with a spade.” But the threat sounded like it fatigued him, and as if suddenly too bored for life he turned and walked back into the shadow of the outbuilding. His concoctions and cauldrons steamed vapor and death into the air around us. I looked at my brother standing there, poisoned and hollowed out, infernal intentions where by rights a soul was supposed to be. How can a man be so stripped of even the atoms of love? It was as if the storks had picked them from him before pressing the doorbell.

 

+++

Tucked between the seat and the console of my Grand Am was a magnum thermos of wine. I ran by the Magic Mart and paid 50 cents for a cup of ice. I soaked the ice down in Beaujolais and sipped and drove, heading west to Chub’s place. Sometimes I forget about the weather. The day this day was harshly sunned, fly-specked and mazy with humidity, an arcing heat coming in waves across the skimpy fields and altogether unpromising landscape. Gravel parking lots off the highway and repo lots, flinty block structures of auction houses and defunct shipping depots, otherwise vacant land rolling back to skirts of chinaberry trees and cottonwoods, occasional cattle nosing clumps of wild chives and clods of clovered earth. At the turnoff to Chubb’s place a mess of house trailers sat on a corner parcel and beside a communal clothesline a young girl in yellow capris and clogs was beating a dusty floor mat against the stanchion of a basketball pole, the netting hanging from the hoop now just a single strand, one tired tendril like a greasy shoestring.

Electrical towers, red clay, a mangy tom cat darting across the road as I passed. Chubb’s doublewide was a solitary object on a pygmy bluff in front of a nothing field. I turned and steered down past his trailer, down into a gulch where a Rubbermaid storage shed was set against a fence. The shed is Chub’s prized possession. His pickup was parked beside and he was ambling around, a shovel in each hand.

His smile was big and toothy. Everything about Chubb is big and toothy, and earnest and soft and dumb and friendly and devoted. Plump hands, apple cheeks, stained t-shirt always riding halfway up his belly like Pooh bear. Chubb had a fit of local celebrity back in the day when as a pubescent he’d eaten something like forty-five Goo-Goo clusters in a single sitting (someone had happened upon an old case of them in a drugstore that had gone busto). They wrote it up in the local paper and Goo-Goo sent us a complimentary case in appreciation. (Idly I sometimes wonder whether I might strike a similar sort of deal with the Kendall Jackson people.) My brother Chubb is the best man I know; my brother Chubb is a complete imbecile.

“Better grab a third shovel,” I said, stepping out of the car.

“Heya there. Another shovel. Well, I don’t got but two.”

“Should have thought of that before you went and blabbed to Shaw. Moron.”

This irritating habit he has, scratching at the back of his head in befuddlement and causing his cap to rear up. Stupid and lost. “Well hell, I didn’t know we was keeping it a secret. Not from him. Why would we do that?”

“No you’re right. I mean he’s only a violent psychopath and the scourge of every police officer in East Tennessee. My mistake – perfect guy to bring along.”

“We was just talking and I mentioned it on accident. But you know, it’s a family thing anyway I figured.”

“Yeah, that’s what I had to tell him too. Thanks for the strategic thinking.”

The bed of Chub’s pickup was crammed and tangled with all manner of chipped and splintered tools, implements sporting rust, the Paleozoic jaws of thresher teeth, the heads of sledgehammers long loosed from their handles, cheap alloy rakes, tines snapped, under all this a downy quilt of dead leaves, crisp or petrified at the topmost layer, powdery and looking ready to shatter, underneath, pregnant with trapped rain, spongy, fetid, ripe.

I looked the red Durango over. “Chubb, you told me you had the extended bed.”

He poked his head up through the back windows, where he’d been rummaging for God knows what. “ I do. Don’t I?”

“Looks like a standard five-foot to me.”

He stepped back out. “Well, that’s alright.”

“No, it’s not. Not long enough.”

“Sure it is. Plenty. I’ve hauled bigger than Mama. She wasn’t but a little nubbin of a woman.”

“A casket, Chubb. We’re hauling a casket.”

He scratched at the back of his head again. “Well how big’s one of those?”

I wasn’t sure. “Seven feet,” I said.

“No problem. We just prop her over the lift gate.”

“She’s not an extension ladder, Butter Bean. We don’t need a casket jutting up for all the honest world to see.”

He considered this for some time. The cap reared up. Then he snapped his fingers. “I got it. We tarp her.”

“I honestly hate you sometimes.”

A malevolent presence behind me – I sensed it, a translucent spider skittering across my scalp. Forty yards uphill there he sat, perched in a folding chair on trailer’s back stoop of blocks. Bestride his invalid throne in the thin shadow the sun permitted, baleful eyes cloaked by distance and dim but burning just the same. See his shabby form, his warped body, stubborn life-force cohering to scabrous bones. I see you watching, old man. You obsolete cankerous fuck.

Chub went to bumble around in the Rubbermaid and I went up to the trailer. I took a piss, and gulped down a few pulls of jug wine I keep in Chubb’s fridge. When I stepped out the doublewide’s back door, my Daddy’s wicked monkey face looked upwards for just a moment, before his gaze settled again on the indiscriminate nada of the foreground. Possibly he has glaucoma.

He was mostly skeleton these days, crooked stenciling with wax paper skin wearing a sour-smelling flannel shirt, baking in the summer sun. Leaning in close to one cauliflower ear, I whispered, “You shit-streaked old sonofabitch. You stink, you know that? Nobody change your diaper for you this morning?”

He hears me. I can tell. You know by the deeper shade of amber that rises in those amphibian eyes of his, makes them to bulge. The phlegm in his throat started to sounding like a suck-pump.

I giggled, stood up straight, looked around. Then I kicked over his chair. He went headlong and sprawling. For a spell he just rolled and jerked around, trying to make his arms work enough to push himself upwards. Futility in motion. I watched, and tried to laugh over him, but my insides were trembling and nothing came out.

Oblivious Chub sauntered up obliviously. “Well hell, daddy. Did you fall again? Here now, let me get you. C’mon, give me that elbow now.” To me: “Here, help me with him.”

Spittle was hanging from his mouth as we got him back into his chair. And then I turned away quickly, to avoid a possible retaliatory gob and also so as my daddy wouldn’t catch me crying.

 

+++

A man’s life is able calculated in lapses and lost seconds. The greater part of any journey is the straightaways rather than the curves, and it is in these stretches that the seconds elide into years while hypnosis takes hold and he realizes nary a thing as his time on earth dwindles into ether. That was the challenge I remember about campaigning for public office: the days were jam-packed, filled to the brim with public outreach and town halls and radio interviews and meet and greets and fundraising events. Every moment required an intent awareness and focus. It took some getting used to – like exercise regimens, a period of sore adjustment until you work your way to fighting trim. But I did it; something in me during that period eerily approximated ambition.

I had previously been the county comptroller, an appointed position, for just over a year when talk started about me running for state office. Truth be told in my county there wasn’t much for a comptroller to comptroll. The budget changed little year by year and mostly we charted its inexorable dwindling. I hunted for bargain boxes of crayons for the elementary school and postponed plans every fiscal quarter to test the water table. Nonetheless the party people saw fit to approach me about running for the district’s seat in the State House. They believed me a comer, and respected the way I could divvy up a dollar into a hundred and one pieces. Government largesse had to end, they said. Welfare had replaced work; our way of life was under attack; and that wasn’t even to mention the Mooslims. You know they’ve been teaching that stuff in schools?

I agreed to their solicitations, the basis of my agreement being that I was the right man for the job – the job itself was of less import. It is a validating thing to find oneself flattered and feted. Our old District Representative, Bud Upham, had been serving approximately since the advent of the horseless carriage, a blue dog Democrat in a region long since spilling over red. We beat the hell out of the old coot in the campaign, really took it right to him. Rumors sprang up that he had fathered a couple of mixed race children. I couldn’t comment of course – it was beneath me – but other concerned groups felt it fair to point out to the voters that you hear a rumor like that once you dismiss it, twice you dismiss it, three times, well, makes one start to wonder. Then there was the matter of his and his wife’s lake house – in Georgia! Yessir, old Bud had been making out pretty fine there on the public teet …

We crushed him, figuratively speaking. At that point he’d practically outlived most of his core constituents. And I was off to Nashville, part of a wave of new-guard, small government insurgents to the state house labeled by one wag “The Minutemen.” Which I thought unfair to Pamela Dubois, a PTA vice-president from near Jackson who’d also won a congressional seat against a firmly ensconced incumbent and who was also part of our uprising and whom I promptly slept with. I also slept with a call girl in the downtown Sheraton, a hotel that has a spinning top and overlooks the Capitol building. I made a point of sending both of them, elected representative and prostitute, charm bracelets. Engraved.

Gertie Gibb I never intended to have relations with. But halfway through my first term I’d gotten in a sticky patch with my expense reports and required a sympathetic compatriot. She had been the office manager for my campaign headquarters back home, knew her QuickBooks and seemed to have an aptitude for allegiance. But she was also canny and saw that what I was requesting was not exactly street legal. Loyalty cannot be rented or even bought; it can only be underwritten. Your signature is required, your thumbprint, specimens and samples, follicles of hair, pledges and oaths.

 

+++

I did make a point of spending as many weekends as possible at home. Early on Mondays I’d head back to Nashville, setting out alone just after dawn. A stretch of Highway 85 East just before the county line, landscape gleaming in the world’s youngest light, dew still gold and green on the grass, lit up like phosphorus. My campaign signs still dotted the shoulders of the road, my name, the Butcher name, in bold and brash blue lettering. One fine morning I was driving through when unprompted tears sprang to my eyes. I was thinking about Mama, how proud she’d have been of me, the good turn I’d done the family name. How I wished her still alive to see what her boy had become. It was all right there.

What was right there, Mama? Grandma Glover, will I know it when I find it?

 

+++

My second and last year in public office. Investigation by the TBI and the IRS. The Tennessean newspaper and its screaming headlines. Ethics committees. Allegations of consorting with prostitutes. Proof of consorting with prostitutes (surreptitious recordings recorded by Shanaya for the purposes of blackmail, ill-advised text messages). Censure and a vote to remove from office. Civil and criminal charges filed. My wife’s name was Katherine Wertmuller-Butcher. She was, in memory at least, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She loved children, dogs and all the major holidays. Her family hired security for the funeral to bar my attending. They needn’t have bothered; even I believed by then that everyone had had enough of me – I certainly had. Instead I watched the proceedings from a bald hill to the north of the Catholic cemetery, armed with a pair of binoculars and a .75 of vodka. I blubbered to the skies and passed out on the hood of my car, watching hawks do maneuvers up in the azure, looking suspiciously buzzard-like.

 

+++

The notion occurred to me that one more reconnoitering along the timber road would be a wise idea. Already it was getting on to three o’clock – days of nothing are jackrabbit fast, interspersed though they are with interminable, angst-riddled minutes, the straightaways and bends concept again – and now was the time. But in truth I was drowsy drunk at this point and languid and spent. Former energies from the times of yore have never reasserted themselves; my ampage is just less these days, lower horsepower. I writhed around Chubb’s place for awhile, already having silently decided that I wouldn’t be returning to Gertie Gibb’s house before the night’s mission or doing anymore foraging for the day.

The wood-paneled hallway of my brother’s doublewide serves as gallery to photographs of the family. They were hung cramped together, plastic frame touching gold-leaf wood indiscriminately, disarrayed as stones on a shrine. Sipping watery wine I looked at Aunt Ernestine (early fifties or so, leaving the third shift at the hospital, black ice on a bridge) in a couples shot with Uncle Elrod (still hanging on in a VA hospital somewhere) from Olan Mills, a phony scrim of bookcases and a fireplace in the background. There was a black and white of Deandre, our second cousin once removed, holding a tabby cat on a picnic table. Asthma attack. My grandfather Butcher was in color, a smear of sepia tones from a late seventies polaroid, eyes aglow Lucifer red, the old sumbitch sucking at false teeth behind cavernous cheeks, staring into the camera’s eye like it was a copperhead he couldn’t wait to kill.

Mamma appeared in more than one of the frames. She was opening Christmas gifts in a recliner in front of a snow-colored synthetic tree, wrapping paper at her feet, a set of steak knives out of the box and held up for the world to see. She was beaming. If memory serves I bought her those. Then there was one of her and some friends by a table somewhere, the table covered in a cloth and doilies, an array of pies and a French cocoanut crème cake. Someone probably had gotten married or had died.

There was Mama with a baby in her arms. The photograph looked to be taken somewhere not long before the end. I didn’t recognize the baby. None of us had given her any grandchildren.

We buried her on a wet, unseasonably warm November morning the week before Thanksgiving. At some point between the service at the funeral home and putting her in the ground, the rain let up, and thick ribbons of mist rolled down from the mountains and into the valley, making a properly pictorial scene. The preacher was hopeless. Gave a stock eulogy, a scratchy little template he’d no doubt been trudging out for years. Spoke aloofly of one Margie Trible (Margaret, Preacher. Her name was Margaret). He was all over the Paul’s letter to the Galatians, tried to do an altar call during the memorial. Thankfully, he had no takers, a proud moment for me at least. A performer worth his salt has got to know his audience. He’d been recruited by Cousin Annette, the only regular churchgoer amongst us. In addition to lining up the keynote speaker, she booked herself as entertainment. As my mother’s casket was lowered six feet down into the bottomless pit, Annette warbled a pitchy rendition of I’ll Fly Away. Poor Mamma, she deserved a better sendoff. Of course, she also deserved to not have died in the first place. Ashes to ashes, insult to injury.

Eventually I retreated to Chubb’s sofa, dazed in one of my funky afternoon fugues to silently wish the day would hurry up and wane faster. To think my hokum of a worry till now had been that, with summer in full ascent, these long-shadowed days of June, we might arrive at the cemetery too soon and with the sun still holding its own, we’d be detected and scooped up and tossed out. The valley by now being in strict lockdown, Sheriff’s deputies and state police were scouring the appointed area for interlopers or negligent loafers. The real wish behind this spurious fretting was that we would delay embarkation further and further, time tick-tocking on into deeper night, and good sense finally taking match point, we’d ultimately decide that the operation, from infiltration to disinterment to escape, would take a goodly amount more hours than were by then left to us before the dam went kablooey – thus, canceled boys. Shame and failure always to me are always tomorrow’s portion; in the present-tense I am veteran enough to slink out another day wearing their vicious cowl here supine on the pullout; my contribution to this subterranean desire was to drink more and more and pass out there while Touched by an Angel played on the television set, the windows still painted daytime and the sky to the horizon barely tinting violet. Terrible vivid dreams tend to roust me in naps: this time the ball of my thumb was sliced open by an electric can opener, a stag stampeded out upon opening the door on an old Chifforobe, a baby the size of a bar of soap squirted between my hands and fell into the rapids of raging creek. Deep under the hallucinogenic sleep, having the stuffing pulled out of my brains, I also was aware of the surrounding den, heard Chubb’s inalienable clumsiness as he knocked over a TV tray and banged into every other conceivable piece of furniture, heard him audibly hush the inanimate objects after they toppled, imploring them not to disturb my slumber, which after awhile receded from me anyway, a storm cloud moving along to plunder some other soul’s country, the aftermath of me a five-eleven fetus drenched in flop sweat on a microfiber rack.

I believed we secretly all desired the caper to fizzle out, and were ginger and timid with one another while we waited. Chubb didn’t like to leave Daddy home alone at night’s, and had formerly voiced a sad-sack sentiment that we oughta honor the old derelict by bringing him along; now in the pensive countdown even the demon himself, in his prostrate catatonia, came across as unassuming, unprepossessing, benign. Shaw was our holdout hope. And he did his part, sort of, being as how he didn’t show to the rally until nigh on ten pm. By rights that should have been ample to rationalize bowing out, to call the whole thing there and then.

But a weird, inverted ennui took hold, and face to face, no one could bring himself to be the first to suggest the white flag. We were so paralyzed, we kept moving, in a stumbling stupor, gathering ourselves, moseying to fetch the tools and implements, relieving ourselves, lugging ourselves to the truck, Shaw in the back with Daddy, Chubb driving and me riding shotgun, and at last, with nobody man enough to cry uncle, the Durango’s engine was cranked, the exhaust pipe popped, headlights opened their eyes, Chubb shifted into drive and we were off.

The truck’s high beams swept the cascading black green along Fox Run Road. Chubb made senseless stabs at conversation. “Remember Effie Eula’s place, up here around the bend. Big white house with that frilly porch thing in the yard?”

“Gazebo,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“The frilly porch thing. They call them gazebos.”

He snapped his fingers. “Right. A gazebo.”

“Well, what about it?”

“Oh nothing. Just that it went and burned down, that house. Gazebo too, come to think of it.”

“Everybody knows that. The Eula house burned down seventeen or eighteen years ago. Effie Eula burned with it.”

“Well, anyway.”

“Well anyway what, shit-for-brains?” This was Shaw.

“I just always thought it was a real pretty place.”

 

+++

Night in full, low sky blanched by a coffer of obsidian clouds, night in its bandit’s mask and breathing a humidity that was like vapor trapped inside a stoppered beaker. We made the old road – indeed there were barricades up, crossties in X formations swathed in glow-worm yellow police tape and red, reflective No Entry signs. Still the shoulder of the road afforded enough space for Chubb to nose the Dodge around one side. And then we were on a gravel decline that sluiced us into the cockles of the valley. A few bends, a mile more of relatively straight road, followed by another downward slop. We doglegged onto a main branch of road, a runoff of the original state highway. This was where I most worried we might be caught and my pulse ticked up, expecting a State Trooper’s cruiser to be laying in wait each time we came upon a notch in a stand of cottonwoods sitting roadside. But it was well and truly deserted, only the occasional barrel with orange beacon blinking atop, and we turned off the pike to a short rise that circled us up again to a valley ridge where Boorman Cemetery lay nestled.

Two stonework pilasters like sentinels still resided at the cemetery entrance. Once we were through any likeness to the place I recalled vanished – not so much a graveyard now, more desecrated ruins. The plot arrangements looked pell-mell in the high beams, so many headstones removed, the ones remaining like the last studs of teeth in a geezer’s smile. There were mounds of uprooted dirt, gaping rents in the ground; there were chunks of busted limestone, indiscriminate heaps of rubble, a couple of felled trees.

“Pull up along here,” I said to Chubb. “It’s somewhere in the rows this way. I think.”

Daddy we left in the truck, eyelids protuberant while the eyes themselves sunk in languidly – who could rightly say how much the malignant cuss knew about the immediate surroundings. Daddy, did you ever once visit her? We three proceeded, each with shovel or spade in hand, Chubb with a coil of straps over one shoulder. There was the pellucid crunch of our footfalls on dying grass and a few crickets talked in the vale. Notable by their absence was any sound of birds, starlings or night jars – they’d picked up trouble in the wind and had already decamped. I carried a flashlight and hoisted its light aloft, trying to decipher the sign to her resting place. In a sight of despairing beauty, one isolate and grand weeping willow remained stranded in the center of the spread of lawn, and in my memory Mama was buried somewhere just beyond its bower.

The headstones remaining bore their inscriptions, their angelic engravings, trumpets too and crucifixes and ornate calligraphy. Christian names, snippets of scripture, birthdates, death dates, antiquarian and less so. 188____, 189__, 193__, 200___. But the dead are all equally obsolete, and the years slough off any significance soon as that very last number is chiseled in. The flashlight’s beam bounced along the riven ground, showed the deep divots of earth movers’ tire treads and the dank, pumpkin mud of upturned soil. Shaw hissed: “Hold the goddamn light higher. We’re supposed to be reading them names.”

Just like that, we halted. There she lay. Beside me, Chubb huffed with the exertion of the walk; over our shoulders Shaw hung a few paces back. “Margaret Butcher, Faithful Wife, Beloved Mother.”

The next actions were unceremonious. I sank the first shovel into the ground and we set into work. The earth was grizzled and gnarled with roots; nonetheless, bending and rising, bending and rising, the shovelfuls of dirt began to accumulate into a pile, then a mound.

Chubb though wasn’t terribly good with his technique; twice he pelted Shaw with helpings of topsoil. “Well shit, bumblenuts,” said Shaw, “you got to be five percent smarter than the dirt if this is going to work.” I started to laugh. Red-faced, panting where before he was huffing, Chubb shrugged and blinked. I dropped my shovel with laughter. Chubb had an amazing ability to absorb insults and abuse – they disappeared with nary a trace as soon as they hit his person the way quicksand swallows up bicycles and small game. He dug back in, executed a successful lift and toss. “There’s our little prodigy,” hollered Shaw. “No stopping him now. Watch out gravediggers the world over. This one’s got the flair.” Me, doubled up now, laughing at how hard I was laughing. Through the tears in my eyes I caught sight of Shaw’s face and he was looking at me, and his crows’ feet crinkled, eyes taking on a little twinkle. This was Shaw Butcher when mirthful. See you next year.

We were unceremonious too at the sight of the casket. Time was traveling on; we began working straps around its circumference. Which wasn’t easy. Which required more digging, expanding the hole outward, digging out to gain better purchase. Time traveled on. We were growing weary but there was nothing to do except go forward. God forbid but it was heavy. We cantilevered the stern out of the ground, propped that against a wedge of limestone blocks we gathered, set to on raising the bow. I don’t know how we did it except I know we didn’t do it well. Two forty-two in the a.m. Not done yet – Chubb drove the Durango and Daddy over to the gravesite. Then miles more to go with getting that goddamn seven-foot-casket up into the truck’s bed, and the less said about the trouble we had with the lift gate, the better. I’d started to shake, though that may not have been strictly from exertion.

 

+++

The scent of soil, the scent of sweat, men perspiring in their clothes, the old monster’s Depend’s, the sour rank in the cab of the truck. I cracked a window – the spins were coming on. We pulled onto the road of the ridgeline; I kept looking behind us and checking our load. The end of the casket, tarped in fact, and bungeed around, maintained reassuringly a steadfast angle, well-wedged.

Down below dotting the descending road were the tops of trees, canopy tops immobile as a landscape painting. Like a collie dog I kept my face into gush of incoming air, breathing full, calming, healing draughts. I should make a point of breathing more often.

I pulled up in my seat. “Chubb, slow down. Slow down now. What the hell is that?”

A swish of light a quarter mile down the way – the trees were beginning to brighten at their undercarriages. Then, headlights were heading up the way, ascending towards us. “Shit,” I said.

I looked back at Shaw. His eyes were concealed by dark and he didn’t stir. Collected as could be: “Back it up, fatass. One of the shitheads is coming.”

Chubb panicked for just a second, landing us in neutral before settling on reverse, and fishtailing us for a few precarious seconds till we rushed smoothly to the turnoff to the cemetery. “Back in there,” said Shaw, “straighten out and gun it in the other direction.”

I couldn’t remember for the life of me what even was the other way down Alice Lee Road. But we were roaring, dark landscape whirring by. I rolled up the window. Deep countryside was bouncing ahead of us through the windshield. The road beneath was bumptious, difficult. “Shaw, what the hell is in this direction?”

“Hog-fucked if I know. But she’s the only way to go. Now don’t piss your petticoats.”

I saw nothing on our trail in the rearview. But the road was serpentine with curves now and we were sloshing this way and that. Hanging branches snapped against the grille of the truck and tagged our sides. Dirt and rock sprayed from beneath the tires – we were in runnels now and the shocks were no match for the grooves and drops. Then just like that, we’d busted through a curtain of foliage and were off any road entire. Enormous tree trunks reared and bucked in front of us. We lurched, bobbed, careened through brush and over stumps and unknown abutments.

“Chubb …” I nearly whispered, able to get out no more, because I saw what was about to happen. We had come to the edge of the bluff.

Our wheels caught air. Night sky and valley, valley and night sky, purple clouds hanging from the dome of the world, smatterings of manmade electrical lights dimpling the expanse as the unfurled county spread in a horizon on all sides. Shaw hooted, and Chubb too, and goddamn I believe even I did. God forbid now, we were about to die but for a couple of seconds here we’d achieved flight.

No doubt the crown of my head hit the ceiling of the cab. Rents of metal, crashes and wallops that must have been jet engine loud but sounded somehow aloof and muffled, coming from a considerable distance. The steering wheel was jerking Chubb’s arms here to there, left to right. We were charging through a swale of tall grasses.

My body still felt as if it were hurtling even when we’d reached a complete stop. The thought of just a few minutes previous – the one about breathing – occurred to me now. For some time, that’s all I did, made note of breaths, inhales and exhales, measuring them out, that and trying to still my vibrating fingers.

Did you know, we were operable. Standing around the truck, we disbelievingly saw four tires, none blown out or visibly punctured. Both headlights still worked. The chassis likely had sustained some warps, and there were innumerable dents and abrasions, but a test of the transmission, gears, steerage, proved sound. The Durango lived.

“That is,” I said, “without question or exception the damnedest miracle I’ve ever been witness to. The only one, actually.”

It was somewhere beyond a disappointment then, a surrealist joke on the whole idea of relief and gratitude, when we noticed that Mamma’s casket was no longer in the back.

Disbelief is a manner of miliseconds. “Fuck.” “Oh fuck.” “Shit piss.” “Goddamn.” “Where is she?” We scoured the ground, the trail we’d blazed through high weeds and grasses. Nothing. I retrieved the flashlight and directed the beam up along the bluff. We’d rocked down a long ravine – I could just make out tread marks in the rutty dirt. Incredible how far we’d descended, incredible we’d lived, amazing no busted heads or broken bones, indescribable the awful feeling mounting in my guts, sickening what we’d just committed. Of course I blamed Chubb.

“What the hell was that? Where’d you think you were going for Chrissakes? Just before we headed off the edge were you thinking, yeah, I’ll just drive us over the side, that’s a damn first-rate idea.”

He was red-faced, eyes wide with terror and worry, belly and chest rising and falling in agitation. “I couldn’t see nothing. We was just all at once in the woods. I was trying like hell to get away.”

“You got us away all right. Drove us off a damn bluff and also knocked mamma out the back. Lost your tarp while you were at it. Maybe you can cut the fuel line next and put a Zippo to it. A bonfire will be sure to bring the police running our way. That’d be your encore.”

“Don’t,” he shouted, in that peculiar high-pitched way he had when he was aggrieved and feeling especially picked upon, “don’t you talk to me that way. I hate it. You’re always acting like you’re smarter than me.”

“I’m not acting, Gut-bomb. I am smarter than you!”

Chubb advanced. I was stricken silent – this I’d never witnessed before. He had me by a goodly eighty pounds, a couple of inches, was square-headed and glandular. I wouldn’t have fought and if I had wouldn’t have stood a chance. In an instant I was mentally preparing to receive an ass-whooping from my simpleton middle brother. This was going to be the new low.

He bypassed me, bypassed the two of us. Headed right towards the ailing truck. And he began methodically to hammer the sides of it with his fists. Whaps and thumps coming one after another, Chubb throwing his weight into it, punching it like he was delivering body blows to an opponent paralyzed against the ropes.

The sound of distressed metal. “Jesus, ok,” I whispered, in fear and awe. The cab rocked with Daddy’s silhouetted form inside. Shaw stood there, and dropped his face, scratched at the back of his head, something very much like Chubb’s selfsame gesture, and looked almost embarrassed.

The barrage finally ended. His fists and arms dangling, fighting for breath through his nostrils and open mouth. Chubb looked like the world’s most spent, most forlorn giant.

In time, one of us, it might even have been me, said, “We need to find that casket.”

 

+++

Shaw and I scaled back up the slope, leaving Chubb with Daddy in tow to scour the lowland. I looked back and saw the pickups headlights shining into the gathered black. It was after four, dawn would be coming soon and we had to get out of the valley still.

Upside: no police cruiser, no chopper, no sign we’d been detected.

The two of us bivouacked through ripe, rich-smelling bracken. The growth tapered away and we were moving up rockier terrain, sparse with weeds. Shaw drifted right, I continued reconnaissance in a more or less straight line.

A cloud lost its grip on the moon, and the black veil slipped from the outcropping’s face. The limestone gleamed, blossomed almost luminous. The scrubby sumac weeds looked a petrified gray but yet as if they were dabbed in phosphorous. I stood arched and crooked on this minor summit, the hillside’s pitted face. Jagged gullies were gouged into the wider ravine, gullies and washes and pocks, scars from a thousand years of rain. A millennium more, and naught but a pile of silt.

The sight and sound overlapped one another close as two shots from a pistol – I heard the weeping just as I spotted the casket. But I hadn’t made him out yet – the woeful first sensation was that the casket itself was sobbing. A shallow sound, transistor-thin.

It was splayed on its side like a drunk trying to cling to a brick wall to keep the world from tilting. Splintered hasps, the lid gaping open. An emptied reserve. More moonlight infiltrated one of the washes, and there was my Mamma. Mercifully, her face was turned away. I remembered that frock, purple muslin with lace fringe. I myself had picked it out from her closet. The shoulder pads now draped loose and slack from the clavicles of her skeleton.

A plangent sound, the croons of tree frogs accompanying – it was Shaw, voice void of any mannish sustain. He was holding her. I approached timidly, finding footing where I could, trying not to disturb so much as a pebble. He held her like a bundle in his lap. Interspersed in his sobs were snatches of a tune, the scrap of some song he was humming, a snatch of an old lullaby. He petted her hair, steely and long now, a squaw’s mop hanging in fronds of ash and charcoal.

Down below poor Chubb’s voice bounced around, calling out for us. The headlights still shone, weaker now in the blush of moonlight. We did not answer. Shaw’s face raised up to stare at me. The mean slivers of his eyes glistened with tears; I was surprised that he didn’t wipe or blink them away. The terrorizer I’d beheld so long collapsed in a reneging of the years, and it was as if I was looking at a weakened stoat snared in a trap. He was unrepentant in meeting my gaze, and all at once the sight of him dissolved into a puddle’s blur, as mine own eyes welled too. Whether he cried for a grief finally uncorked or from the plaintive sight of the shocking ravishment the postmortem calendar had perpetrated on her form and features and former flesh – mites, maggots and night crawlers, commandos in time’s dirty war – or whether he was crying from remorse for his own determinedly wicked life, that which her best instruction had been powerless to prevent, or whether even it was out of shame that we, her sons, in our slovenly and slapdash ineptitude, in our perpetually ruthless, children’s way, forsaking for one final time all the judiciousness and restraint she’d tried in vain to instill in us, had made such a hash of things, succeeding only in desecrating her slumber, I did not know, only knew that I cried for all of the above, and whatever else was on hand. Like, for instance, that her being her, she would have forgiven even this and loved us just as much in our woebegone stupidity. My brother and I were now in union, along with bumbling, hapless brother Chubb a couple of hundred yards below, bewildered, and too the gnarled nastiness that was our daddy, her husband, four aberrant stars sequestered from heaven and pitched together in a ragtag constellation, brown dwarves, no blue giants among us. We all were in concord at least in this fleeting moment, melded to the glass fresco of country sky, the Orions of the universe wanting not our custom, negligible stars that we were, but still we emitted our own needlepoint of true light, better than the grander twinkles above us, still alive whereas so many of those others scattered in the beyond were but the residue of life, expired from the distances of billions of years and miles, light delivered from sources long dead.

We buried her in a patch of marshy ground behind Chubb’s doublewide, where an old septic tank formerly had been. It was as bad a place as any. Somewhere in there, Shaw stabbed me in the thigh with a meat thermometer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was quite an old man by the time he got round to noticing the fact; and this he considered no bad thing—at this rate, he was sure to be dead before ever having to be afraid of it. The end of his days was a certainty to come after all, irrespective of whether dread attended the event or not, so he could see no point in quailing over the inevitable. He’d by no means greet the grim caller as a friend, but then he didn’t greet friends that way either.
Still—speaking of the days—where had they all got to? It was a marvel how many had vanished while he’d been looking elsewhere, one sly hour after another slipping away down some secret passage. He had never been one to set much stock in time: he never wore a wristwatch, let holidays come and go without a lot of to do, didn’t lash himself to the strictures of schedules or appointments. More often than not he ignored his own birthday. The only day he held sacrosanct was the one circled in black marker on a faded, flower-of-the-month calendar hanging in what used to be her sewing room. There it had been noted and there it had remained, for going on three decades now: August 24th, 198-, the day his Betsy left. Left him to take up with that sonofabitch Driscoll. One might muse that the reason the days since had advanced so swiftly was because his existence among them was but a technicality. In truth, everyday he lived now was as a stowaway from back then, an aimless holdover from that sweltering Monday years ago when the clocks stopped their ticking and the bells ceased their chiming and the very turning of the earth grinded to a halt; when he returned home from his deliveries and found closets bare and her suitcases gone, along with the sewing machine and thimbles and spools of thread, her family bible and set of encyclopedias, and the framed diploma from the teachers’ college missing from the wall, and her granny’s china, and her father’s old army footlocker, her jewelry box and rings, including the band she had worn for twenty-plus years; gone, all gone. This was the moment he got off the train, so to speak, disembarking at a lonely outpost of a station, to wander hereon its antechambers and ghostly halls, and the empty platforms where dried leaves and bits of litter scattered past in a wan wind—bones, blood-pressure and cholesterol were left onboard to continue chugging down the line, blowing the occasional whistle.
But no man resides in memory alone; before there’d been the pastime of employment, nineteen years driving a van and refilling vending machines for a soft drink distributorship in town (and never so much as a sick day taken); but then his hip got too bad to manage the deliveries and he was forced to quit and draw disability—which he despised. What now filled his days?
Well, there was coffee for one; he preferred instant and drank it black. A metal spoon scooped out grounds into a metal pitcher that then was filled with warm water from the kitchen tap. He would stir vigorously, metal clacking against metal, his knotted knuckles tight around the handle, the rounded humps of his shoulders bobbing as he churned and churned. And then his ceramic mug from the dish strainer, the mixture poured inside to spend the next half-minute in the microwave from where it would emerge steaming. A foldout tray, a paper towel, settling his body back into the front room recliner, sipping his brew with the morning television programs coming through at low volume, crinkling with static. Horseflies would pop the mesh of his screen door. Smacks and drones. Thus would the first hour or so be occupied.
Come spring and summer, in the middling heat of the mornings, he often took coffee and all to the front porch, where he’d sit on the old aluminum slide-rocker, batting away flies with a swatter, ears flooded with the sounds of traffic from the highway—and eyes beholding the vast array of signs that covered what once was his yard. Before the motley collection of signs—a good share of the rainbow’s palette, built from various materials and composites, an ample range of sizes—there had been grass and dandelions; before the highway this had been a quiet neighborhood street. And before that ugly, alloyed band of a guardrail was unfurled there had been…trees. Once a row of dogwoods had bordered the outer edge of his property; just saplings when he and Betsy bought the place as newlyweds, they had grown to fair-size youngish trees by the time she decamped, and some years later were fleshing out with hard, dark bark when the road crews took chainsaws to them in order to clear a path for the brand-new four lane blessing him now, a project that all told sheared his land by a third of its frontal acreage.
This was forecast the bright morning a couple of squirrelly-looking government men, in cuffs and tie-clasps and wingtips, came to his door and told him of their intentions to run the big road through here, and how little Little Avenue was to be no more, how it was set to metastasize into Sanderson Highway 141, and how his neighbors’ houses were to be razed(the McDougal’s, the Miller’s, the Mexican’s down the way) but how he was not to worry—they didn’t need to bulldoze his place. All they needed was to cut down his trees, dig up his earth, grade his dirt, sift their gravel, pour their cement, roll their asphalt, bolt and fasten the guardrail, and he would then be free to bask in his proud portion of all this civic progress. If he would just sign this piece of paper, and initial here…and here. Of course, he refused to sign it. Told the slick pair just where they could go and how they might as well take their mothers with them. They, in turn, never changing expression, informed him that securing his approval was a courtesy, and winning it not a necessity, as the legislation had already passed and the deal gone down, the land hereby confiscated for grander purposes. Imminent domain, you know. The highway was completed the following spring, and now the sounds drifting to his place on the porch were not those of birds and bugs alone, but the whirs of imports, the thrums of domestics and the rumbles of tractor-trailers. Sounds by now so commonplace he took scarce notice of them.
Next came the signs, quick as shadows on the heels of said progress. He himself had acquired the first one, picking it up at a booth manned by a frothing fellow with a bullhorn outside the Sunday flea-market, the sign reading Sanderson 141 with a red circle surrounding the lettering and the diameter of a slashing red line. He went home and stuck the sign in his as yet extant front yard, between the trunks of the doomed dogwoods. A silly gesture, he recognized in retrospect—not much point displaying a sign protesting a highway’s forthcoming when the only ones around to see it were the men being paid to construct the damn thing. It did, however, give some enterprising critters a grand idea: what remained of his lot butted against a sweeping curve of the new roadway, and as such would be an ideal spot for appealing to the motorists. Undeterred by his sign, a couple of representatives from the campaign to reelect the governor (bearing striking resemblance to the first pair of harbingers) came to his door and asked permission to park a campaign sign here, on the hallowed ground of one of the governor’s signature triumphs, in such admirable proximity to the eyes of so many potential voters captive in their cars. He heard out their glib spiels and considered murdering them with his garden-hoe, as he would any snakes that had slithered upon his threshold. By now, though, he saw no point in opposing the high-hats, his previous refusal having failed to deter their rampaging. He slammed the door in their faces, sure, but without telling them no—and the governor’s sign was quickly staked. That is, he thought, the way it goes when dealing with power: one can mew and gnash and claw, but it’s like plinking pebbles at a battleship. Power will have its way in the end.
Next came the gubernatorial candidate opposing the incumbent; in a move of guerilla politics, his brain-trust also pitched a sign, a considerable banner strung between two poles, dwarfing the governor’s modest placard and nearly blotting it from sight of the targeted mobile citizenry. This led to accusations of dirty pool, as well as recriminations in the form of escalating signage warfare, each attempting to outdo the other with larger, gaudier displays. He could not now recall the outcome of that particular race, but it was the first crash of the avalanche; afterwards, any local, state, or federal campaign applicable to the area, any voter proposition, any ballot initiative, any bond drive, any public referendum, was trumpeted from his land with planted aluminum signs, acrylic signs, ones of corrugated plastic and nylon-reinforced vinyl. It mattered not if they were in advocacy or opposition, if they promoted a measure or decried it—all found a home here. Now the field of them was so overgrown the signage nearly swamped the steps of his porch, threatening next to overtake the house itself; because no one ever came to retrieve the signs after their moments of consequence had passed. They corroded and rusted in obsolescence, turned to tattered rags in the shifting seasons. Instead, more and more were deposited. Always room for one more.
This freakish repository was the cause for his unwelcome flash of local celebrity. When the hoard had become a suitably awesome sight, the newspaper sent down a reporter and photographer, the former of whom tried in vain to pry a printable quote from the surly resident while the latter snapped a panoramic photo of the peculiar agglomeration that emblazoned the front page of the next edition’s Living section. The Sign Man, he was dubbed in print. Channel 5 swiftly followed—van tires muddying up his driveway, cameramen tossing cigarette butts into his flowerbeds. That night the ten o’clock news ran a sixty-second piece on the mild phenomena, also giving him Sign Man as a handle. The one shot of him was a judiciously edited three or four seconds of video, when the camera crew had managed to catch him standing on the porch; the few frames showed what looked like a wave at the viewer, when in fact it had been a far less congenial gesture he’d made, finishing in the unmistakable salute of a single finger—it was this flourish which was edited from the broadcast. He cared not a whit one way or another; his only thought was to wonder if Betsy had caught the segment, if she still watched religiously the ten o’clock news on Channel 5. And if she had seen it he wondered if she was surprised at how he’d aged. Was she shocked to see his gray face with the weary lines that deepened daily, the hair that had gone all silver? Did she sigh at the sight of his wardrobe, changed not an iota during the intervening years: the predilection for flannel shirts, no matter the temperature outside, the baggy-bottomed khaki pants, the fraying belt-loops, and how his warped pelvis now made a belt hang perpetually slack around his waist, no matter how tight he tried cinching it, like a deflated tire sagging around a rim. And did she observe these casualties inflicted by the years with her head resting in that insufferable sonofabtich’s lap?
Today the noise emitted by the interloping highway was particularly lusterless and ordinary; and then he heard the heavier tread of a set of tires turning down the access road off the main thoroughfare. He looked up to see the dark hood of a car nosing its way towards his driveway. He thought at first it must be some sightseer types—his home was, infrequently, a point of interest for those with an appetite for oddball exhibitions of bona-fide Americana weirdness. They’d stopover, ogle the signs, often try engaging him in conversation (always a fruitless endeavor), take pictures of themselves posing with their arms slung around the signs, cluck like carpenter hens, and then get back in their vehicles and shuttle away—no doubt in search of the next folksy, homespun oddity.
Within a few seconds, however, he recognized the approaching car. It was a black Monte Carlo, grime-spattered windshield, a rust-maligned undercarriage and an engine that sounded like an emphysema sufferer in the final throes. The car made the hard left before his mailbox, narrowly missed taking out the post. Phyllis.
From a certain vantage Phyllis could be considered his daughter; he and Betsy had indeed adopted her when she was fourteen. She was actually Betsy’s niece, the only child of her sister Helen, who had hanged herself New Year’s Day, 1981. Or was it ’82? Helen had risen early that morning, fed her schnauzer, smoked a Lucky, and gone down to the cellar where she fashioned a makeshift noose from a piece of rubber hose she then draped from a hot water pipe. Phyllis was the one who found her, Helen in her housecoat and one slipper dangling from a big toe, swaying gently before shelves full of canned preserves and pickled eggs in mason jars. The father having long since lit a shuck, and with no other family willing or able, the girl came to live with them. He and Betsy had by that time long since given up hope for children of their own, the final verdict of a doctor in Pikesville being that something of his stubbornly refused to properly infiltrate something of hers and could not be reasoned with. They buried the sister, gave away Bedford (the schnauzer), and filed the appropriate papers on Phyllis.
She had been a resoundingly ugly child and maturity had failed to improve her looks. She had greasy hair, eczema, curved teeth with wide, caramel-looking gaps between them. Her personality was given to fits of rage, her character—such as it was— inveterate dishonesty, thievery (after his hip surgery, it seemed Phyllis was constantly checking him, bringing him his mail, acts of concern seemingly out of character—then he noted the hydrocodone tablets steadily disappearing from his pill bottle), and sloth. In his meaner moments he blamed the gangly demi-demon for Betsy’s desertion, which occurred not long after Phyllis reached legal adulthood, when all obligations to the dead had been paid in full; he blamed the impossible girl for sundering their happy home with her delinquency, her piques, her sordid behavior, all driving his overwhelmed wife into the arms of Mr. Sonofabitch. In the darkest moments of all, he viewed sad-eyed Helen swinging as an indictment on the hell-incarnate that was raising Phyllis—the girl would have been enough to make the Virgin Mary herself contemplate such a sad solace.
The Monte Carlo heaved to a stop inches from the bumper of his Buick. Phyllis emerged from the driver’s seat, the passenger-side door also swinging open. A tiny figure stepped out—her son Clarence, seven or eight, loping up the gravel in small sandals that brought up puffs of powdery dust with every step he took.
“C’mon,” she hectored him, “hurry up, I ain’t got all day, get up here Clary, pick up your feet for Christ’s sake, c’mon, move it, get going, get up here right now, faster for Christ’s sake. Sit down!” The boy, just making the porch, dropped into a low cower, curling his pale arms around his bare, paler knees. He was clad in a pair of shorts with torn pockets and a stained blue t-shirt, both garments a few sizes too large for his spindly frame. He had an unusually large head; it balanced on his shoulders like a beach ball on a car aerial, burred with white-blond hair so bright it was painful to look upon in direct sunlight. “Clary, stop picking you nose for Christ’s sake,” she scolded the boy, who hadn’t been.
His name was a flexible matter, dependent on the caprices of his mother’s variable moods: sometimes he was Clarence, sometimes Clary; sometimes he was Fortis Jr., or little C., or big C. Sometime he was Clare-Clare; Phyllis often bemoaned the fact that she had not borne a baby girl.
He laid the flyswatter on the arm of the rocker. “Phyllis, I’d say your vehicle needs a new fan belt. And when’s the last time you changed out the oil? She’s running hot, I’d say. A new set of shocks wouldn’t hurt, while you’re at it.”
She dismissed this talk with a sharp snort. “If you come across the million bucks to do all that, you let me know. Now, I’ll be back for him later on, soon as they finish up with Fortis’s case. Those damn courthouse people don’t get in a hurry to do nothing, it’ll probably take two hours just to call the damn docket. Act like they’re so important and so busy—they took one look at my life and they’d know how good they have it, them and their cushy-ass jobs. That lady judge better not jerk Fortis around like she done last time. She’s got it in for him. His lawyer says we got a case against the county for violation of his civil rights. They’re unlawfully persecuting him. Says Fortis and me ought to sue. Anyways, I’ll be back for Clare-Clare later on.”
It was a piping mess she had just disgorged; he tried sorting through it, last things first. Fortis—the boy’s father and Phyllis’s common-law husband—was locked up and had a court date today. No surprises there; the no-account had all told spent half his life behind bars. Phyllis was going to cheer him on, this being another example of her mercurial temperament: either Fortis was the greatest thing to ever walk two legs, or he was pond scum. She either couldn’t live without him or wanted him dead. If she wasn’t attempting to raise his bail or making conjugal visits to the work farm on the weekends, she was trying to have him arrested. Once she had attempted to turn him in to the FBI, claiming he was a dangerous dissident with a plot to overthrow the federal government, an accusation hatched when she suspected him of taking up with some woman at the DMV, and one immediately withdrawn when some agents picked Fortis up for questioning. Their relationship a chronic fiasco if he was on probation or parole, seemed to thrive whenever he was in custody. This foxtrot between her and him had been going on for years, the steps well-rehearsed, the floor beneath them well-worn.
What didn’t sound familiar was leaving Clarence with him while she ran love’s errand. He had no recollection of her having asked him to watch the boy, or of agreeing to do so—although it was possible. He had been forgetting things lately—more and more, it seemed—and to give her the benefit of the doubt, this might have been something else that slipped his mind. “So you plan on leaving Clarence here, huh?”
By an act of will she made her eyes appear soft and wide. “Daddy, you said I could. You said so last week. Said you’d watch him all day if I needed you to.”
Now he knew she was lying; Phyllis only referred to him as “Daddy” when she was trying to extort a favor or service. Had she really asked, and he had truly forgotten, then she would have immediately sulked up, behaved as if she’d been severely wronged, treating it as another piece of evidence to be admitted in her own ongoing private suit against the world’s unfair persecution of her, which was permanently pending and for which she felt she had an unbeatable case. No, she knew that his memory was faltering, and was canny enough to utilize the knowledge. He looked over at the boy, who had pulled off his sandals and was clapping them together like cymbals. “Oh, hell. Fine. Leave him here, I suppose. Just make sure you come for him before supper. I don’t have the fixings here for two.”
She reared up her back and twisted her eyes, as if scalded by even so minor a contingency—but seemingly decided not to press her luck. “You don’t have to bark at me, I’ll be back by then. Big C., you mind your grandpa now. I hear you caused any problems and I’ll slap you sideways.” With that she harrumphed off the porch, flung open the door of the Monte Carlo, and cranked the engine to a grudging start with a racket like a jackhammer. He and the boy watched her reverse the car down the drive and pivot onto the access road, a fat turn of the wheel that once again endangered the mailbox; then she shoved it into drive and moved up to the turnabout and onto the merging isthmus of the highway, where she broke immediately into the lane rushing beside, spiting completely the presence of a Dodge pickup already traveling there, the truck forced to slam on its brakes and skid side-to-side to avoid a collision, a lucky miss immediately appended by a horn-honk from the driver, which was then rebutted by a torrent of curses issuing from Phyllis’s open window, as she hit the gas and revved the Monte Carlo to top speed, transforming it into a black bullet firing out of sight to leave oaths and obscenities trailing in her wake like streaming ribbons on the wind.
A hot breeze blew onto the porch; Clarence rocked back onto the seat of his shorts and drew his ankles into his lap. A bright green fly swooped down and landed in the exact center of the boy’s bounteous skull. He didn’t seem to notice. “You have more of those sign things every time I come over.” His voice was mild and scratched, with a little inborn quiver.
“Yeah, well, feel free to take some off my hands. Why ain’t you in school?”
“It’s summertime. There’s no school in summer.”
That’s right. It was July, late July, if not already the beginning of August. Betsy used to have summers off too, at least when she hadn’t signed up to teach summer school. She liked to use the months to catch up on her sewing and household projects. “You know, your grandma was a schoolteacher. Still is, far as I know, if she hasn’t retired to become Mrs. Sonofabitch full-time.” The boy made no sign of having heard. “You’ns ever hear from your grandma?”
The child tilted his head to the side like he was trying to unclog water from his ear. “Granny Fortis?”
“Hell no, not that scabby old lush. The other one, your mama’s mama.”
“My mama’s mama is dead. She hung herself when my mama was just a little girl and left her all alone in the world.”
“No, Clarence. The other other one.” But the boy did not seem to grasp the question and didn’t respond. Instead, he scooted to the lip of the porch where he proceeded to rake his fingernails through the mealy mounds of some extinct anthills. The fly roused itself and soared away, evaporating into shimmering veils of high heat.
“You hungry? Your mama feed you?”
“I had a whole bag of peanut butter squares.”
“I’m not talking about cartoon food; I mean a real meal. C’mon, stop fingering that filth and put your shoes on. I’ll buy you some bacon.”

Bailey’s Meat and Three was a smallish luncheonette with a yellow linoleum floor and lacquered tables and an imperious tabby-cat named Frances always dozing on the glass countertop by the register, lording over the candies and peppermints stocked in the case below. He came here at least once a day, except on Sundays when the place was closed. He and the boy had come today after breakfast, but before the lunch rush, consisting usually of a passel of painters and mechanics and stout loud ladies in nurses’ scrubs. At this sleepy point of latter morning there were only a few customers, mostly elderly folk like himself, faces he saw at least once a day except for Sundays, hobbling, wizened people who frequented the establishment as much for diversion as sustenance. He steered Clarence towards a booth in the back.
A smiling waitress with dyed red hair, holding an order pad and stubby pencil and wearing a name tag that read Deidre, came up to the table. “Hello, Mr. Sam. You sure brought a handsome fellow with you today.”
“This is Phyllis’s boy.” He didn’t consider the fact that Deidre hadn’t the first clue who Phyllis was, but the waitress smiled on and winked at Clarence.
“What can I get you two to drink?”
“Tell the lady what you’re drinking, Clarence.”
The boy was marching the salt and pepper shakers across the tabletop like toy soldiers and didn’t look up. “Chocolate milk.”
“And coffee for me.”
Deidre nodded and sauntered away. Clarence halted maneuvers and turned to watch her go. He turned back around. “Why did she call you Mr. Sam? That’s not your name.”
“That’s what all the girls here call me. Always have.”
“Why though? I don’t get it.”
Truth be told, neither did he—early in his days of frequenting Bailey’s one server lady had greeted him as “Mr. Sam”, undoubtedly confusing him with another patron. He hadn’t corrected her then because he wasn’t sure he’d even heard right. But the name stuck, from then on everyone saying hi and goodbye to Mr. Sam, how’s about a refill Mr. Sam, toast or biscuits with that, Mr. Sam—and after being so designated so often, he figured it was more trouble than it was worth to set things straight. And he never did run across this other man he was supposed to be. “It’s kind of a nickname, I suppose.”
Deidre returned with a beige cup and saucer, a teaspoon, a black-handled coffee urn and a brimming glass of chocolate milk, setting them all down on the table with a clatter. She pulled two mini cartons of creamer from the pocket of her apron. “What we having food-wise, gentlemen?”
“The number three for me, sunny-side up, grits, bacon burnt to a crisp, white toast, light on the butter, and lots of extra jellies, especially the grape. Give her your order, Clarence.”
“I want french fries.”
“You can’t have just french fries, you need something substantial.” The boy looked up and shook his head, holding his hands out on either side of him with the palms upturned, as though weighing unknown quantities on his own private scale. “Just bring him a hamburger to go with his fries. Make sure they throw something green on there.”
After the waitress had scribbled on her pad and receded once again, the two entered a stretch of quiet but for the sound of scraping paper as Clarence erected some sort of wall from the pink packets of artificial sweetener. He observed the shape of the boy’s cranium under the fluorescent lights hover like a blimp’s shadow over the construction, and then let his eyes wander over the thinly populated lunchroom, looking close among the booths and vacant seats for a discarded newspaper. Today, though, he didn’t feel much like reading one.
“What about you,” he said to the boy. “You got a bunch of names yourself; I’ve heard your mama call you Clarence and Clare-Clare and Big C and Casino and all sorts of stuff. I can’t even remember what all. I bet it don’t make a bit of difference to you.”
The boy considered this, scratching at the bleached meadow of one temple. “I guess you’re right, I do have a bunch of names.”
“Sure you do—and I bet you’ve found one name is just as good as another. All of them mean the same nothing anyhow; it’s not as if any of us gets to pick our own.”
The boy was struck by this insight and on thinking it over some more began to nod his head in vigorous affirmation. The boy looked at the coffee cup, and held out one of the pink packets. “You want some sweet for your coffee?”
“No, I take mine raw. Here,” he said back, pushing the creamers across the lacquer with his fingertips, “use these for towers for your wall there. Cap the ends.” What the boy succeeded somehow in doing was rupturing the paper tabs that topped the little cartons, spilling cream onto the table and directly into his milk. He didn’t seem to mind the taste however, and had polished off the contents of the glass by the time his hamburger arrived.
At the counter, he paid the bill while Clarence poked Francis in the belly with a ketchup-smeared finger. A chapped-faced, rotund woman made change from the twenty he gave, handing back a five, a one, and some coins. “See you tomorrow, Mr. Sam. Be sure to bring your grandbaby back to visit with us.”

Forgetting things. Some small: where he’d laid his keys, the location of the TV Guide, whether it was a Tuesday or a Thursday, etc; some not so small, like whether or not he’d taken his Lipitor that morning, or his Levatol that night.
Forgetting some things that did not seem trivial at all.
Forgetting Betsy’s face.
The afternoon proceeded onwards and outwards and downwards, like a billion had before, the sun’s rummy eye glowering from the third quadrant of the sky. Clarence played up and down the driveway, head ablaze with light, making like a knight and waving a thin brittle piece of stick around as though it were a sword. He watched the boy from his seat on the rocker, also keeping an eye on the crows gathering on the telephone line. The birds usually congregated there in the deep days of summer; they were highway-savvy crows, and the car noise from the road below didn’t ruffle them. He often sat here of an afternoon and tallied their number—there seemed to be a lot of them today, more so than normal, the cable beneath where they perched sagging slightly from the load. Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven … and he was not yet halfway through the ranks.
Somewhere amongst the seventies he lost count, had to start over. He began again at the first shining black head, going down the line. The birds rarely cawed, and moved little after they’d roosted, but there was some air of expectancy about them as a unit, as if the whole only awaited enigmatic signal to take wing and descend with malevolent purpose.
Forgetting too her letter, the words of which he swore he would always remember. While one parcel of his brain continued the numbering of crows, another journeyed inside, down the hallway growing thick with the day’s browning shadows, and into the spare room, the old sewing room, the used-to-be room, where in a small stack under the window with blinds permanently closed he had preserved the few items she’d left behind: a leather-bound photo album, half-filled, a yearbook from Pikesville High School, where once she’d been a teacher, a rubber-banded bunch of index cards on which were jotted some recipes, some of her old staples: tuna casserole, squash casserole, broccoli and cheese casserole and a meatloaf she used to make using ground round, radishes and red pepper skins. These were the things she’d neglected to carry with her; and of course she never returned to retrieve them. The one contact made afterwards, the one thing directed to the man being consigned to a her-less exile, was the letter. It was a single page of yellow notebook paper, folded in triptych, mailed from the Plymouth Post Office and delivered in a plain white business envelope with no return address, a stamp of Abraham Lincoln’s head in the top right-hand corner, costing twenty cents at that time (the letter shortly followed by a manila envelope sent certified mail, stuffed with legal documents, a gift from some junior Lucifer of a lawyer, formally requesting on behalf of Elizabeth Slocum _______ the dissolution of the partnership of marriage, making no request for financial settlement or future support, only the right to sever all obligations of being his wife, presumably so she could set up house in Plymouth and become Mrs. Sonofabitch Driscoll in an entirely respectable and legally binding fashion).
Slumped back in the rocker, he pulled with his trembling mind the yellow sheet from the envelope, itself weathered to a tobacco yellow, and permitted himself another reading of her final and farewell message, an activity always stocked with hurt, poignancy, and pain, and utterly priceless to him—written in dark blue ink—in her fine, flawless hand:
Dear _____________,
I know this letter from me is too long in coming. I owed you word before now. Where to begin? I have not been happy, not for some time now—that’s not much of a beginning, I suppose. Except it is, I’m afraid it’s the beginning and the end (sorry about my wording, I teach geometry after all). I don’t know how this happened, or how it came to this. Once we were probably happy together but that seems very long ago, years and years—and a year is three hundred and sixty-five days, ten years ten times that, three thousand, six hundred and fifty days. That’s a long time to be unhappy, and I believe that is me. I’m sorry…
Through this line the first fold of the page coursed through, bisecting the words into perfect halves. Effortlessly symmetrical. Inside this crease always awaited for him a rich vein of sorrow. Never had it diminished in all these thousands of days, it stung him fresh each time. And, by this point, his sorrow was three times again as long as what she confessed her own had been.
More bittersweet still were the words of the letter that followed next—except suddenly he could not recall them. Not fully, not really at all, despite the countless times he had poured over them. The words stubbornly refused now to be conjured, they hid out of sight behind violet vapors in the basement of his brain. He blinked into the harsh sun—the burgeoning flock of crows becoming sunspot silhouettes—and tried to remember the next phrase, the next word, the next letter, sure if he could get that he’d have the string and could unravel what followed. But no, he couldn’t take hold. His mind registered naught but crows, a few bobbing in slipshod rhythms, bodies grating on the line nearing full capacity, a battalion of polished heads like black leather helmets; he tried to fashion these into the words, imagined an arrow of sharp air slicing open the sleek, feather-encrusted skulls to make the bellies of lower-case b’s, the dancing bubbles of P’s, shorn beaks melded to make J’s and the crossbars of t’s. Here it came, he had the string now:
…but I couldn’t go on like that. Perhaps some live out their life this way, but not me. Just the same way, it wouldn’t have been fair to you. You couldn’t have had much of a life—us not talking, not touching, not hardly looking at one another most of the time…
Damn. Lost it again. Lost it in the flapping of wings—still more crows alighted on the perch, their wings making backward flaps as they zeroed in on any available space, brethren sidling down the line to accommodate the joiners who nestled into afforded slots to become indistinguishable from their neighbors. Never had he seen so many. Vile birds—there must be two hundred of them by now, he approximated. Maybe more: all packed together, scapulars grazing scapulars, four hundred plus discs of dark eyes peering down with inscrutable intent.
The blond balloon of Clarence’s head materialized before his eyes and blotted them from view. “When’s my mamma coming back for me?”
“Couldn’t say. Never could rightly predict Phyllis’s goings and even less her comings. She’ll be along after awhile.”
“They’re trying to keep my daddy in jail. Mamma say’s it’s a sin, says he’s innocent.”
“Boy, your daddy is many things, but that ain’t one of them.”
The boy poked at a concrete step with the rounded nub of the stick, shaking loose the ruddy dandruff of the wood, peeling up the dead, dingy-gray skin of an exhausted coat of paint. “She say’s he’d be okay if he wouldn’t drink whiskey. That whiskey is what gets him, she says.”
“She would know, alright. Hey, it’s a hot one out there; step on up and shade for awhile. Cool down some.” The boy nodded and came up to the porch floor and went over to the leftmost column, sat down with a plop and leaned back against the cinderblock base. He lowered the stick down between the sides of his sandals, a spent warrior taking respite in camp.
He had to put down the urge to ask the Clarence/Clary questions, to inquire on the matters most dear to him, things which the boy could naturally have no knowledge or insight. He knew the impulse was foolish—Clarence/Clary didn’t know (how could he?) and likely didn’t care (why should he?) a thing about events predating his birth by twenty-plus years, knew little to nothing about Betsy or Driscoll, didn’t know how she left or why she left, and for certain could not be privy to the contents of any letter. He could of course leave the boy here and just go retrieve the letter himself—for all the good that would do—but if he could stifle the urge to ask a child questions for which there could be no answers, he could not as well suppress the urge to at least talk over the sad drama to another soul—as if uttering into words, to any audience, this endangered history, he could recapture it from the swollen mists of vanishing memory and snatch it tight to his heart. He spoke without realizing he hadn’t already been speaking, beginning the tale somewhere at the midpoint:
“You know, I went after him, after I got the letter. Figured no man was going to take what’s mine without me fighting back, least of all some donkey-faced, pencil-geek bureaucrat like that sonofabitch. He’d been the principle at the school she worked at and I guess … well, I guess he’d been laying his little trap for awhile, cozying up to her, cultivating her, so to speak; then when I wasn’t looking, he moved in for the harvesting. He comes in and prunes my bushes and picks my rose—but it was another man’s garden you creeping, belly-crawling sonofabitch! Sorry … didn’t mean to frighten you. Anyways, year this happened, he’d taken another prinicpaling job in Plymouth—you know where that is? No? Well, it’s about forty miles to the east, in Carver County. Turns out, my Betsy had also transferred there; you see, this had all been arranged beforehand, real sneaky like. They’d hatched quite a scheme, were already setting up house together. I found all this out afterwards. So my first thought was to kill the sonofabitch; I pulled the old .410 from the closet and hunted up some shells. I stowed the thing in my backseat—I had the Pontiac then—and headed that way. It was a rainy night, as I recall, seems like it poured the whole way. Thing is, I’d been seeing red this whole time, hadn’t thought things through, and I was in Plymouth ‘fore it occurred to me I hadn’t the first idea how to find the house. Didn’t know so much as the name of the street. I found a phone book at a filling station, but as I recall it was from the year previous, had no Driscoll listed. So I came on back home, all fouled up—lucky thing for Mr. Sonofabitch, he’d of gotten blasted in two.
“Then, thinking it over awhile, it come to me how shooting him wouldn’t get my Betsy back. They’d of just put me in the penitentiary and I’d of lost her for sure. So I changed tactics: I pulled my blue suit-coat out of mothballs, got a fifteen-dollar haircut, splashed with some cologne, and bought a bouquet of chrysanthemums. I figured I’d catch her at that new school, maybe out in the parking lot, maybe find her classroom, go in there and even if all them idiot kids were gawking I’d get down on one knee, raise up them flowers, and profess my love all over the place. All would be forgiven.” He shot an eye over at the crows, still multiplying every second it seemed. “Trouble was, not five miles from the exit, the Pontiac starts to overheating and smoking. I pulled off to the shoulder and popped the hood. Damn radiator had blown. Ended up having to get her towed in. You know, I don’t mind admitting it, that was the time I felt the most alone, squatting there, watching them hitch up the tow chains, all them other cars flying by, holding that bouquet, stuck halfway from her and halfway from home. I don’t know… times like that can make a man feel small. That Pontiac never was worth a shit. Radiator block was cracked; I traded her in the next month.
“By that time, I got to thinking how it was sort of … selfish-like, to go after her anymore. Seemed to me, thinking on it all, that she’d made her decision. The wrong one, mind you, but if she wanted to go off with Driscoll, if that made her happy, well, I just had to let her go. That little thought was like having a light bulb in my stomach, it warmed me a bit from the inside out. Not to say it was easy. It wasn’t. For a week or so, in fact, I tried to become a whiskey drinker—like your daddy. But I always did think that stuff tasted like hot dammit and all I managed to do was make myself retch four nights consecutive. I don’t want you ever to go fooling around with that stuff; drugs neither. Anyways, after that, I just made it through the day, each day ever after. Nights can still get hard.”
Clarence’s head lolled like he was drowsy; the sliding sun cast a narrowing light and his jaw and chin now were encased in easy shadows. The tip of his stick tapped out a sleepy cadence on the porch floor. It was just as well; for the one thing he had no words for which to express to the boy, to anyone, was her face. The absence was twofold: her face was a magic thing to him, and even had he been well-versed in words and wording, he knew he would have failed to do it its due; and, more alarmingly, you cannot describe a thing you cannot picture. Her face, her face, it had disappeared. This was bringing him true panic—it had to be a close cousin to the feel of imminent death. Mind striking out once again, in desperation—underneath the letter, underneath the index cards and that yearbook, inside the photo album; he tore through it now, looking for the one particular photograph. The one from their wedding day: her standing alone, in her white dress with the lemon, posed and poised, her veil up, smiling at the camera and the sun glancing off her teeth, making them look like baby stars, a tumbler of stray hairs dancing over one fabric-laden shoulder, standing before a picnic table laid with a linen cloth and a vase of chrysanthemums and a pewter bowl of ripe red cherries. He could see it perfectly down to the most whispering detail (deep in the background left of the picture there jutted into frame the ghostly shape of his Uncle Gerald’s liver-spotted hand, knuckles knobbed, a hospital bracelet around the hairy wrist—diabetes would take him in the autumn of that same year) but he could not see her face. It was an oval-shaped blank, it was missing, and even the mouth around the glinting teeth, that in his mind’s eye now looked to be floating free below the drawn veil, was truant. It was as if the Polaroid had bled over and ruined the snapshot’s one truly irreplaceable element. Again, he could go and just see the picture for himself. But there was no point if it refused to stay put in his head, if it was only going to drift away once again, if the residue of her essence refused to be cloistered anymore in his memories and, like her body and being had years before, was fast conspiring to desert him for good. Panic climbed to anger—all this forfeited time, he thought, at least I should be allowed to keep this much of her.
“You see them crows,” he said to the boy.
Clarence roused himself and followed the trajectory of the pointing finger over to the stacked telephone lines. He nodded his head and said, “Those kind of birds scare me.”
“They shouldn’t scare you any. Crows are harmless—nasty, good for nothing vermin, but harmless.” However, looking at their swelled ranks, he was not so sure himself. “I tell you what—make your way over there and swing your stick at ‘em. I betcha they fly off.”
The boy shook his mighty head mightily. “I don’t want to.”
“Alright, now don’t go to pieces on me. You don’t have to do it. It’s not like they bite or nothing. Hell, all they do all day is sit there and clean their feathers. And shit; I ‘d wager them signs in the front have twenty pounds of bird shit on ‘em. Probably double that after today.” And so it went that the animals he reviled were dropping their mess on the signs he despised; and the signage was the embellishment to the highway he hated, which had spelled the death for the dogwood trees he had somewhat cared about. And some geeky sonofabitch had pilfered the woman he loved; and now even the memories he so cherished—never had been derelict in his duty towards safeguarding those, not for an instant—were being absconded with by the forces of a power he did not know, could not defy and could not hope to defeat—all the things comprising his life ground down by the same rule of imminent domain, stripped and scavenged, rendered unto the great sucking void.
I hope you will be okay, I hope this doesn’t hurt too badly. If you have to hate me forever, I suppose that is only fair. I do hope you will be happy, whatever that takes. And one thing you should never forget…
“Hey,” he said to the boy, dropping his eyes from the crows fronting the scalding sun, down to the arsenal of signs, “you have to do chores at home?”
Clarence cupped his chin with the palm of his hand, brushing his lips with the knuckles; he thought the question over intently. “My daddy told me that while he was gone I should help mamma around the house. I think he mentioned something about chores.”
“Your daddy wouldn’t know a chore if it was a corkscrew tail growing out his ass. But I need a hand for a spell, if you’re willing. C’mon, toss down that stick.”
They went together through the maze of the front yard, both moving, often sideways, in and out of the narrow aisles afforded by the pell-mell pattern of the signs. He decided it made the most sense to work front to back, each one taking a flank to each sign from its place. It might prove difficult work—many of them had been fixtures here longer than the boy had been alive. They started with the very first, the one protesting the building of Sanderson 141, following it with that whatever governor’s campaign sign; both came unstuck quite easily, the ground chalky and powdered—he thought it a miracle either had stayed upright so long.
When they removed one they dragged it off to the edge of the drive and there let it fall. They began moving down the line, pulling the stakes, toting them away. The dirt came up in clumps and the earth felt hollowed and unstable beneath their feet. A streamlined system developed: most of the signs were not heavy, even for the boy, and they accelerated the process by carrying the signs individually to separate stacks, the boy’s on the left, his on the right, next to a rusted length of wire fencing.
As he was clanking two metal signs together, tucking them both underarm, a great rustle sounded over his head; he looked up to see a tremendous dark mass swarming the sky—the crows may have been well-adapted to the sounds of traffic, but this was something else again, something out of the ordinary, and they took wing, soaring away first as one entity, then exploding into a thousand shards of black flak and fleeing in a cacophonous riot of screams. He laughed lustily and waved over at the boy, who waved back.
The empire of signs began to fall, steadily, as each line of fortifications was removed, he and Clarence going row to row, tossing the markers and placards and banners into their individual piles. When his had become too high to manage, Clarence had taken to leaning signs against his initial cluster, configuring a ring around it. He looked at the formation the boy had made and thought it would make a fine pyre. He had a gallon of lighter fluid in the shed, that and some kindling and he was sure it would burn. Burn like hellfire. Those cowardly crows would see the bonfire from the sky; you’d be able to see the black smoke from the windows of Bailey’s Meat and Three; it would be visible also from the steps of City Hall, from the roof of Channel 5, from most of Pikesville (though not, he knew, from anywhere so distant as Carver County). The newspaper could start up the presses: “The Sign Man’s Revenge—Local Eccentric Incinerates Sole Claim to Fame. What’s got into Mr. Sam?”
The heat of day was intense, the work was tiresome, and his hip hurt something fierce, but on he went. Yanking Cutler for Mayor, yanking Humboldt for State Senate, Pierce for City Council, Dumberg for County Comptroller. And then, after he’d lugged off one reading Vote No on Proposition 258, he realized he was at his porch steps; and he looked back and saw the work was done—the signs all gone. Clarence came and stood next to him. He looked at the newborn open expanse from side to side, the soil rent and decimated, a plain like a freshly cleared battlefield, and, trailed by the boy, he walked the uneven terrain with the hard-won satisfaction of a victorious general. Then he turned and marched back to the house, limping, his hand braced on the boy’s whippet-thin shoulder.
He returned to the rocker, eased back into to it slowly and nodded at Clarence—“It’s all yours now. Give that whatever you were fighting with what for.”
The boy wasn’t much interested in resuming war games. He said, “You don’t have any grass. You ought to have some grass. I’ll water it down for you, if you want. For five dollars.”
He knew no grass would grow: the ground was too dry, it was too late in summer, and the remains of the old yard would need some serious fescu seeding to ever sprout again. And there was his water bill to consider, and the boy’s bid, which seemed a bit steep. Still, he pulled a damp fiver from his shirt pocket and handed it over. “Go to work then; hose and spigot are over other side of the house.”
Clarence came back around with a tangled rope of green hosepipe tailing him and picked a spot in the center of the scruffy land. He pressed the plunger on the sprayer and out burst a cascade of water, meeting first the air as the boy had the nozzle pointed at the sky. Upwards the water crested like a misted wave and the sun caught the mist and stabbed the myriad droplets with its light and when they fell to earth they were run through with sharp glimmerings like amethysts and diamonds. The boy was not much for the lineal—some of the ground got a surfeit of water, some the scantest of portions, as he ran around following the impulses of the mobile fountain he had created more than conducting it. But it was all fine. Soon enough every patch and divot and groove would get a fair taste.
The pain in his hip had become a throb; he rubbed it gingerly with the heel of his hand and watched Clarence’s crazy scampers back and forth, the hose writhing behind his clopping sandals. The sun was still out, colored now like a blood orange, inching nearer to the horizon, and as yet only a few crows had returned, bunched together at one end of the lower line, clearly expecting their associates to rejoin them in good time. He lay back his head, listened to the stray sounds of cars moving down the highway, heard the buzzing of circling flies, smelled the smells of upturned earth, expiring summer afternoons, the odor flannel makes when sweat seeps in; and it was enough, enough, enough to make another day.