The Vocabulary of Guns
André Carrière
818-915-4735
I point my pistol at the poster on my bedroom wall. Christie Brinkley, barely covered by a blue bathing suit. I shoot the supermodel six times. Click, click, click, click, click, click. But I don’t see her. I see a light-skinned black man with freckles and green eyes. He’s my girlfriend’s stepfather. I want to kill him. My fantasies are filled with this scenario:
***
Each morning my father is late which means I’m late. My first class is algebra, which I am repeating.
‘Don’t sweat it,’ my father says. ‘I never needed math, and I turned out all right.’
My father pens articles on brown lung and boll weevils for the United States Department of Agriculture. His dream, his ultimate dream perhaps, has been realized. He is a published writer. One need only have access to various government journals and you can read his steady prose. Or visit our house. There’s a suitcase in the attic, stories of ghost Negroes and wild pigs eating troupes of Boy Scouts, churches on fire and the lonely wanderer plunging from the steeple. My father is gifted and deeply troubled. A man without dreams is the stuff of wasted matchsticks and empty cans of beer. It is a page folded down in a book of poetry, returned to again and again. It is the care put into a well-scrubbed sink, a disemboweled handgun, a stained piece of scrap wood. It is the first thought before coffee and the last thought before the last beer. It is a question. What happened?
My father comes out of the house and gets in the car. He buckles up as I drop the car into gear and ease away from the curb. As always, he checks to see that no one is coming behind us. He hates to drive and is grateful that I take him to work, but I make him nervous. I recently burned out the clutch, so he knows I drive hard. But he can’t say much. He taught me everything I know.
We wheel past a row of one-story brick homes built by my stepmother’s real estate company. It’s a bleak and hopeless landscape of young families and retirees, housebound recluses and the morbidly obese, cops and crooks and firemen and arsonists and us. We’re just like them, another family trying to make it one day at a time.
My father lights a cigarette, cracks the window. He looks thumped.
We turn onto
When we first moved out here, Bullard was an unpaved dumping ground where my father would test his growing collection of guns, unloading into burned and rusty muscle cars, blowing holes in the doors and the fenders. Bullard has since become a broad fast boulevard with dangerous curves and a wide neutral ground planted optimistically with oak saplings. There is almost no traffic but what there is hauls ass.
“Slow down,” says my father. “Please.”
As I come to a stoplight, I see Dr. Dex reaching up to make the fingertip catch. I see the ref signal touchdown. The light changes and I drop the car into gear.
“Hold on a moment,” says my father. “I’m going to grab that piece of lead.”
A lead tire weight is lying on the side of the road. Traffic is piled up behind me and he wants to stop the world to grab a piece of lead.
“Come on pop.”
He gives me a look. You too? That’s what that look is. Then he opens the car door and gets out. Horns blow, cars whip around us as my father quickly walks over and picks up the lead, then scoots back.
I gun the car.
“Let me get in for Christ’s sake. They can go around. I don’t give a damn.”
We wheel up the
My father fondles the piece of lead.
“It’s not the lead, Gabriel,” he says. “It’s just something to take my mind off things. You know?” He opens the glove box to stash the lead. “Shit a mile,” he says. “I forgot to take the gun out of the car. I can’t take the damn thing to work. It’s against Federal law to have a firearm in that building. I guess you’ll have to keep it in the car. Don’t go waving it around at your friends.”
“You know I would never do something like that.”
“I know,” he says.
***
My father trudges up the steps of the Ag Building, turns and waves. I wave back, then drop the car in gear and pull out of the parking lot. I have already unbuckled my seatbelt. I race down
***
There’s a double set of traffic lights ahead at
***
He emerges from the camera store carrying several envelopes of developed photos, gets in the car, starts it up, pulls away from the curb and heads for
This is where their seconds sweated and the surgeon’s hand was the last a man felt as he met his God. Somber in their witness of me and my folly, the oaks seem to bow ever lower. I stick the gun into the pocket of my letter jacket and walk across the little bridge.
***
He’s sitting behind the wheel, probably looking at his photographs. I position myself in his blind spot and move closer. I could do it now. Drop to a knee and unload into his temple. Bang. Then run like you’ve never run before. I glance around the park. Nobody here but us chickens. I catch sight of a reflection in the long windows of the station wagon. Standing behind me is an old black man, a face like saddle leather, hair snow white. He holds my gaze a moment, shakes his head ‘no’ and then fades. A dream? A ghost? A vision? I’m clenching the gun inside my jacket pocket. I exhale, then step over to the car and tap on the glass. Donald looks up and sees me. He rolls down his window.
“What’s goin’ on cat?”
I just look at him.
“Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Yes. I saw you driving and I followed you here. I wanted to tell you something.”
“What did you wanna tell me?”
“Just that I know.”
“You know what?”
“You know what I’m talking about, cat. You know exactly what I am talking about.”
I hold his intense, green-eyed stare. He could kill me. He might. I’ve got a gun and I may have to use it. But I just turn and walk away. I’ve got to get to school. I’m failing algebra.
***
“Good morning, Gabriel,” says Miss Lou, handing me an algebra test, five pages of purple problems mimeographed on the dying office copy machine.
‘In three more years, Jack's grandmother will be six times as old as Jack was last year.
If Jack's present age is added to his grandmother's present age, the total is 68.
How old is each one now?’
I picture Jack and his grandmother having a toast as they celebrate her birthday. Then I see Donald Jones looking at me like he could cut my throat. Somewhere in the classroom, a clock audibly ticks. I look around. I’m the oldest dude here, the quarterback, failing his ass off.
‘Question: Josh, Sunny and Andy did a job in the ratio of 1: 3: 3 and earned a total of $364. What percentage would Andy get after dividing the money according to the ratio of the work done?’
I picture the three of them painting a house. Sunny mixes paint while the guys goof off. Josh spills the turpentine and Andy sets himself on fire. Meanwhile, how did they arrive at the sum of $364? The clock ticks. I remove my letter jacket and hang it on my chair. I realize for the hundredth time in the last half hour what I have done. I have opened a can of worms no algebra will ever be able to close. She told me her secret. Now he knows I know. What next? Will it kill him or will he feel compelled to kill me? Tick-tock, the clocks don’t stop. Sweat in rivulets running down my arm. Water reaches its own level. The surface tension creates a stream inside my bicep to my forearm, falling and splashing to the floor.
‘John has 50 stamps, some worth 15¢ and some worth 20¢. If their value is $9.50, how many of each kind does John have?’
John is sending off his applications to college. John is waaaaay ahead of Gabriel. John is going to the college of his choice. Gabriel will be repeating algebra in summer school.
Then I see the old black man, my conscience maybe, stopping me from ruining my life.
The pencil in my hand trembles. I have not answered a single problem. The desk under my forearm is wet with sweat. Tick-tock, tock-tick.
‘John drove for 3 hours at a rate of 50 miles per hour and for 2 hours at 60 miles per hour.
What was his average speed for the whole journey?’
John’s a busy man. Where’s he going? Is he leaving town? Is he done with this place? Is John free? If not, how long before John will be free? Tick, tick, tick, tick, like the sound of 60 Minutes signaling to you that the weekend is dying, indeed is already dead.
‘A class of 25 students took a science test. 10 students had an average (arithmetic mean) score of 80. The other students had an average score of 60. What is the average score of the whole class?’
Christ, do I have a science test today too? No, but I have a short story due for Miss Simpson. Where has my head been? Up my ass, and deep too. Tick, tick, tick, sweat, sweat, sweat. I get up, put on my jacket and hand in my test, totally blank.
“How was it?” says Miss Lou.
“Piece of cake.”
***
In the Green Hall:
When the bell rings, like a scene from a movie, as if the many extras were crouched behind doors and around corners, droves of students burst upon the scene, opening and closing lockers, dicking off with their combinations or keys, Freshmen struggling through the melee carrying bags that would kill a Sherpa, school band musicians and their instruments fighting to get out of the cafeteria, PE classes crashing out of the locker rooms, heads wet with showers and sweat, conversations running the crescendo from whispers to shouts, punctuated by squeals, notebooks rustle, textbooks fall to the floor with a thump.
Our wheelchair-bound student wheels his motorized apparatus among the throng, slyly pinching a little ass when he can, slaps my hand as he cruises past and again I thank God that it is not me attached forever to that machine, that it wasn’t me that dove into the river that day (so the story goes) and hit something unseen, snapped the neck and now and forever will be doing wheelies. A tall, good-looking kid, he would be an asset on the football team, the big tight end we so badly need. His football days of course are gone, and I wonder as I grab a notebook if he will make it through the semester, much less graduate with our class. He appears to be loaded most of the time, and that won’t get the job done at Ben Franklin, the only public school in the city in which one can fail out of.
***
Miss Simpson is my favorite teacher. I want to steal her from her husband and run away to
“Class, as you know, your short stories are due today. Gabriel, I’m sure yours will be quite interesting as always. Do you mind going first?”
Miss Simpson in her languid beauty hath put me on the spot.
“Sure. Can I have a minute?”
“Of course,” she says. “We’ll begin when you’re ready.”
All eyes upon me as I open to a page of history notes, my longhand scrawl running across the college ruled paper. Breathe. Breathing is the key to everything. Connect the breath to the action. Concentrate all movement and then exhale. I stand. My notebook rests on the desk in front of me, and I refer to it from time to time, but what I say I am not actually reading.
Copper Pipes
Once upon a time my father was a broke-ass high school student who ran with a group of outsider types, smart guys, pranksters, teenage alcoholics, generally harmless riff-raff.
One night they’re hanging out at their high school, down to their last dime and a Friday night no less when my father happens to notice that one of the school’s drainpipes (which had recently had an encounter with a bus) was copper, a valuable metal. This drain pipe was simply asking to be liberated, so that’s what they did, grabbing and pulling until it comes crashing to the earth. They load those overgrown metal straws into a no-brakes car and drive down to see the Junkman, a quiet old black man with a barn full of dead machines. My father and his friends unload the copper pipes, the Junkman gives them money and off they go on a mighty drunk, all the while congratulating themselves on their cleverness.
A few days later they’re walking the streets and who comes pulling up alongside them but the Junkman in his truck, a tarp in the back covering a pile of angular familiars. He kills the motor and looks at them.
“Ya’ll boys took them pipes from that school.”
None of them says anything.
“Ya’ll know what they do to me, somebody thought I stole them pipes?”
They know.
After a minute or so, the Junkman nods towards the back of the truck.
“Go on, white folks, take them pipes.”
My father and his buddies quickly unload the drain pipes onto the side of the road. Nobody says a word about the money because there is no money, it’s long gone, but the Junkman just waits until his tarp is back in the bed, then he drops his truck in gear and drives away. Someone gets the no-brakes car and they load it up with the copper pipes. It takes several hours of driving around before they find a junkyard owned by a white man and are able to sell the pipes a second time.
The End.
Miss Simpson frowns. “Did they give the Junkman his money back?”
“No ma’am. They went and got drunk again.”
***
Mr. Gonzalez peers at me through his eyeglasses, his features obscured by pipe smoke.
He appears wizened but he’s not even 30 years old. “I want you to rewrite that sociology paper that you submitted last week,” he says.
“I thought I was supposed to ‘divine the meaning of my street.’ That’s what I did. Pressburg is-”
“Yes, yes, formerly known as
“
“Very poetic, Mr. Doucette. Do you know it completely?”
“I think so, at least the stretch near my house. Pressburg actually begins at the Lakefron-”
“Excellent,” says Mr. Gonzales. “Start where the street commences and follow it. If nothing else, you’ll know your street from beginning to end.”
***
I cut through the school yard and head for the street. TC, shooting hoops, asks me where I’m going.
“Taking a ride.”
“Hold on, I’ll ride with you.”
That’s how it is when you’re young. You just drop everything and do what you want.
We walk down to the little Honda and go. TC gets in and opens the glove box to play with my father’s many lethal toys.
“Whoa,” he says. “There’s a gun in here.”
“It’s loaded, so please don’t shoot me.”
TC points the pistol out the window, blows away an old woman.
“Boom,” he says.
He reaches across my face and shoots the bank guard in front of the Whitney, wastes a priest, a college student and black man walking through the doors of Popeye’s Fried Chicken. He blows away a streetcar driver, kills a woman waiting for the bus.
“Boom, boom, boom, boom,” he says.
“Don’t you ever reload?”
“Nah,” says TC. “It’s like a movie.”
Indeed it is. It’s more like a movie than it will ever be. All our worst mistakes are still in front of us. We can blaze away at friend and foe alike. There are no consequences for us, the future, the hope.
***
We reverse my route from this morning, passing under the freeway, the boom as cars fly overhead, the sharp sweet smell of peppers at the Crystal Hotsauce factory, the monolith of the Fontainebleau Hotel. At the red-light at Broad, a gaggle of tourists are looking hopelessly lost. Where’s the French Quarter? Answer: A long way from here.
“Did you see the newspaper?” says TC.
“No.”
“The Times-Picayune picked us to lose.”
“That’s bad.”
“My mother said we should use it for extra motivation.”
“Like we need any extra motivation.”
“No shit,” says TC. “We suck.”
Actually, only I suck. Once upon a time I couldn’t throw a football twenty yards. Now I’m like a monkey with a machine gun. I can overthrow every player on my team which for some reason I thought would be useful.
I shift the little Honda fast, moving around the dawdlers, taking silly risks, pushing the limits of the machine. We cross
I did something today that I have wanted to do for six months, since the night that she got wasted drunk and told me. Since the night that she pushed my hands off her, forgetting who I was, and called me a name that wasn’t mine. And she curled to protect herself, turning her head away, turning her head to the window, closing her eyes, frowning, a look of grief and shame on her face. If I have the strength to not waste that son-of-a-bitch that did that to her then I have the strength to win one football game. Clutching, shifting, hitting those gears, taking us fast over the Interstate, above twin rivers of hot traffic whipping by, next to Tad Gormley Stadium where we will never play, the rusty cross-bars shining in the sun, the dead grass field, the empty concrete seats, City Park spread out before us like a summer day, all of that in an instant.
I think I know all there is to know. I am wrong.
***
TC pulls the city map out of the glove box and guides me to the starting
“What are you looking for?” says TC.
“I don’t know. Something unknown. Some essence. A reason for being.”
“Great,” says TC. “That’s real helpful. Look, there’s an old fart hosing down his driveway. The essence of mankind. Nothing to do but hose down the driveway. The end.”
“Yeah, Gonzo will appreciate that.”
“Just write it up with all those crazy descriptions you use. He won’t know what the hell you’re talking about; he’ll have to give you an A.”
“I’m supposed to be in search of Truth. That’s what history is.”
“I thought history was written by the winners.”
“That too.”
We cruise down two long blocks of Pressburg before it dies at
“You could let me drive.”
***
The second stretch of
“Okay,” he says, grinning. “Here we go. Wheeeee!” He eases off the clutch and we stall.
“Shit.” He tries again. We shudder forward a few feet, the car lurching like a drunk. The mailman passes, smiling knowingly. “What’re you looking at? Screw you buddy. Deliver your goddamn mail.” He fires up the car again. “Okay,” he says. “I got this.” We stall again. “SHIT!”
“Easy, brother. Just hold the clutch and let the gas take over, like you’re-”
TC tries again, gently this time, waiting for the feel, the roll of the clutch and the swing of the gears as they catch and they do, they catch, and we’re moving, winding it out past a sprinkler and a cat on a stoop and azalea and oleander and crepe myrtle and TC shifts to second like Parnelli Jones, winds it out because the Honda has a tall second and he’s grinning, TC is learning how to drive. He’s no different, none of us are, we all want to get the hell out of here and we cannot bear to leave. Learning to drive a car will allow us to run away someday, run away, but we’ll always be able to return, (perhaps in a vintage set of wheels and we’ll bring back dogs, tattoos, long hair or no hair and weird ways, always weird ways. We’ll go away but we’ll always return, cruising back into town, lurched over, high on gasoline, stretching our limbs, we’ll step back into our friends’ lives, the ones we taught to drive but they haven’t fled yet and they’ll say, ‘Damn, look at you. Well, welcome home.’
***
We’ve reached the last bit of
“Okay, where to now?” says TC. “That’s the last block of Pressburg ahead and I don’t see shit. Three parked cars and an old woman watering a dead tree. You can write about how boring it is. Nothing going on out here. These people don’t have secrets. There’s nothing secret about this place at all.”
***
When I was a kid, my father took me to see Roman Polanski’s ‘Tess.’ Afterwards, we went to
Still, the heartbreak left him speechless. “That fool,” he said at last. “That goddamned fool had everything and he threw it away.” He was referring to Angel Clare’s decision to abandon Tess after she confessed that her cousin had raped her. My father took a sip of beer and contemplated the gloaming. The concave sky seemed more melancholy for all its beauty. I thought he was in love with Nastassja Kinski but I realized that there was something more. I realized that my father, like everyone, was in love with love itself. And I realized that my stepmother and he weren’t in love. Maybe they never had been, or if so, it was so brief and paralyzing that it seemed to pass like an illness, hallucinatory, exhausting and good to be gone. Yet the heart operates independently of the brain. It will have love. It will be loved. Tess walking to her death in the shadow of
***
The coaches assemble the football team in the cafeteria. Coach Walleye, built like the lineman he used to be, is holding a copy of the Times-Picayune sports section in his hand. “Who wants to be famous?” he says. Nobody says a word. Clearly this is some kind of trap. Coach repeats the question. Still no takers. “Maginnis, you got a big mouth. I bet you wanna be famous.”
“No sir.”
“No? What about you TC? Don’t your parents write for the movies or sumthin’? You wanna be like them, huh? Famous? Makin’ movies?”
“I don’t care about that,” says TC.
“You don’t huh? What about you Doucette? You like to walk around out there with your shirt off. I bet you wanna be famous someday.”
I consider the question. I’d like to be famous. Why not? Beats anonymous. I look at coach and say, “Sure.”
Coach Walleye is delighted that I have taken the bait. “Well I tell you what you have to do. It’s real simple. You wanna be famous? Lose tonight. Lose to a team hasn’t won a ball game in over two years. You’ll be famous. Hell, I bet you make the USA Today. Whattya think, Coach Chick?”
Coach Chick’s mustached face regards us. “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he says. “I wouldn’t doubt it at all. We have to be able to pass the ball on this team. Ya hear me Doucette?
We ain’t gonna be able to just run all over this team. They’re stout in the middle. If we can throw on them, we got a chance. That’s all I got to say.”
Head Coach O’ Sheen speaks last. He tells us what he always tells us because it’s always true. Fundamentals. It all comes down to fundamentals. The team that blocks the best and tackles the best will want it the most and nine times out of ten they’ll win.
We’ve lost the last two games in a row. We need more than fundamentals. We need playmakers.
“All right,” says Coach O’ Sheen. “Any questions?” There are no questions. “Okay, gentlemen, the bus leaves at 4:30. Be dressed and have it loaded by 4:15.”
***
JW and I take a walk to the broad green levee. Enormous towers of steel carry electric current in either direction as far as the eye can see. From the crest, beyond the willows, Big Muddy plows into view, its vast chocolate surface boiling and swirling. A tug named Hercules pushes a barge upstream. JW and I sit on the river side, the afternoon sun glowing up our faces. Joggers and equestrians pass. I was going to tell her about this morning, but somehow we’ve gotten on the topic of this past summer. She tells me about a party at her aunt’s house. It should have been a real good time. Drink a little liquor, dance to the beats. Have a good time, ya’ll. But JW says she didn’t feel like partying that night. She’d been away from me all summer and though she hadn’t called me in weeks, she said I was on her mind. So that night she went downstairs to the rec room, put on an Earth Wind and Fire album, covered her mind with headphones and lay on the sofa in the darkness, dreaming of me. Some time passed. Then she sensed that she wasn’t alone. Some guys had snuck down there. They grabbed her. She fought back until one of them punched her in the face. Then she fell to the floor. Three guys. One left without going through with it. The other two stayed.
“They hurt me,” she says. “They hurt me bad. I called for you. I did. I said, ‘Gabriel.’ But you didn’t come.”
There’s the river. There’s Hercules, chugging away, hard at his labors. There’s the thicket of willows. The wind has jostled their branches, stripped some of their leaves. The willows have changed. A horseman that clopped past is now a mile away. He and his horse have changed. And I have changed too.
***
She says she put a steak on the black eye they gave her. She giggles involuntarily when she tells me. I imagine JW walking around her aunt’s house with a piece of meat stuck to her face. I wonder how she explained that. She told no one what happened down in the rec room. She said she was frightened, that the guys said they would kill her if she told. She must have made something up about walking into a wall. She waited an extra week to come home, time to allow the bruises to heal. Now the entire line of action makes sense. She stayed in
***
The yellow school bus rambles down
***
She returned to
***
We pass the Times-Picayune building, auguries of our defeat. We pass the Orleans Parish Prisoners painting another mural in the lee of an overpass. Bald eagles and jet planes and the admonition that Freedom isn’t Free. Outside the windows, the viaduct of the Interstate. Rooftops covered with red clay pipes. Shanty buildings. Abandoned schools. Neon signs. Candy factories. In the distance, the A-frame cranes loom, clustered along the
***
What do I see when I look around the school bus? Quiet young men on their way to the game. Their faces are pale, Even the black guys look grey. Serious. We are all very serious. We know what is at stake. We have the best chance of our lives so far to be famous and nobody wants to be famous. I look over these brothers and I am reminded that there’s a whole other world. Who am I seeing? Are they even real? Maybe. Dr. Dex sitting next to me on the bench seat, softly singing to himself. ‘Caribbean Queen, now we’re sharing the same dream and our hearts they beat as one. No more love on the run.’ Dr. Dex, quietest man in the universe. Ears so small you wonder how he can hear out of them. Dex, my friend all summer long, he is certainly real. Across the aisle is Lil’
***
The bus exits I-10 at Bullard and passes within two hundred yards of my house.
If we were to stop now, I could get out and walk home. I’d find my father sitting on the back patio, the cat on his lap, a beer in his hand, contemplating the woods behind our house. I could sit with my father and have a beer. I could tell him about my day. I could tell him what I saw, the indisputable evidence that he’s living a lie. He wouldn’t care. Gone is the fantasy that he and I will move into an apartment uptown, somewhere close to Ben Franklin. He can’t imagine himself without her. He’s dead. Dead behind the rib cage. The only thing that matters anymore are his guns. He might show me a new .45 or a new .44 or a new .357. Something with some stopping power. You’d only need to shoot a man once to put him underground. If I were to tell him what I know, might he just drink himself into the power of violence and take a taxi to the Holiday Inn? Walk into the Kit-Kat Lounge; espy his wife and her business partner, her foot wrapped around his shin.
Just that and he would know, it would be confirmed what I said was true and then he’d say her name once and then she’d say his name once and then she’d say what in God’s name are you doing with that gun? And then my father would shoot his wife and then shoot himself. That would be it, a murder-suicide at the Kit-Kat Lounge. For years afterwards, people would drive by and point it out, people who hadn’t been there would claim to have seen it all, how my father shot my stepmother in the chest, then shot out his own heart. Two very clean wounds. Almost surgical in their precision.
***
It’s too far to walk home and getting farther by the minute. But if it wasn’t I’d get off and walk back through time. I’d walk back to late July. I’d go into my room and pull out the only letter she wrote me. I’d read it and smell it once more, and then I’d write down the superscription off the envelope, a house on a street in
***
The school bus crests the bridge over the Intercoastal Waterway. Below, a power plant emits clouds of white steam. An oil tanker slumbers down the channel. A Coastguard cutter cruises. To the west, the sun sinks into the horizon, an orange crab consumed by the earth. The sky is shot with angry reds, majestic purples, calming green. Onboard the bus is the scrape of cleats on the hard floor, shoulder pads clicking, water bottles jogging together and the ever-prominent rumbling of the bus. There’s a radio but the driver will only put it on after the game and then only if we win. I feel the bus descend the bridge to ramble along the alluvial plain. Outside are a hundred familiar sights. Shell roads and marinas, seafood stands, a lonely rathole bar. A gun shop. A few scattered houses. A shuttered snowball stand. The bus turns onto
***
The St. Bernard stadium hoves into view. It consists of one grandstand and a wooly field. There is nothing on the visitor sideline except two sets of rusty bleachers. Beyond are a parking lot and a swamp. The lights are on and insects are converging on the purple-white glow. The gridiron is chalked; the scoreboard is lined with zeroes, the crowd is amped, the band already murdering 1999. They’re stoked. They know they’re been picked to win. Go Eagles! The crowd does the wave. We take the field for our warm-up. One, shout the captains. Two, shouts the team. Three, shouts the captains. Four, shouts the team.
***
You may lose the coin-toss, calling heads when you know it will be tails. You may watch your opponents leap about and you know that this show is a long way from being over. You may watch Maginnis kick off to the St. Bernard Eagles, watch the return man take the ball out to the forty yard line giving the offense excellent starting field position.
You jog out with the defense. You hear Coach Chick telling you to watch number forty-five, an offensive lineman who’s been converted to fullback. He’s hard to bring down and you find this out right away. The Eagle quarterback calls a handoff to the fullback and after he caroms through the defense for fifteen yards it takes you and TC and Dr. Dex to bring him down. The Eagles easily move down the field and you’re lying there on the ground when Big 45 trundles into the endzone. You watch the extra-point zip through the crossbars, see the Eagles cheer and congratulate themselves, hear the crowd rock and roll, and then you jog from the field as the kick return team heads out. Coach Chick looks at you and says, ‘Jesus Christ. You guys let ‘em score that easy it’ll be a hundred to nuthin’ by halftime.’ You say nothing because you know you’ll win. You aren’t thinking about your sweetheart in the band bleachers, playing ‘Let’s Groove Tonight’ on the flute. You certainly aren’t thinking terrible thoughts about her and her summer vacation. No, you are watching Lil’ Roy take the kickoff and he’s about to be pummeled but he makes a man miss and then he’s in open space, running scared but he takes the ball all the way out to the fifty yard line. Coach O’Sheen grabs your facemask and says, ‘Run the dive.’ You jog out to the huddle. Your linemen bend over as you address the backs. ‘I-right, two dive, on the color, huddle break.’ The offense claps in unison and the Eagle defense is jumping in and out of the gaps and they’re barking out, ‘It’s a run! It’s a run!’ Which it is because it’s always a run to start the game and it’s always a dive to the two side (the right side) because Coach O’Sheen hates the right guard (Big Mike) and wants to teach him a lesson. You call the count and Maginnis snaps you the ball and you pivot and hand off to Dr. Dex and then get out of the way, watching as the defense blasts the good doctor. Gain of one. Lil’
***
Three minutes left in the game. The score is St. Bernard Eagles 15, Ben Franklin Falcons 14. The Eagles drive down to the Falcon five.
Thirty seconds remain in the game. Fourth and goal for the Eagles at the Falcon twenty yard line. The Eagle quarterback is in the shotgun. He calls for the ball. I drop back into coverage, eyeing Big 45. Sure enough, the colossus chips Maginnis and then flares out, catching a perfectly thrown screen pass. He turns upfield, only one man to beat to the endzone. Will he try and juke me? No, he will not. Will I lead with my facegear? Yes I will. Will I have the sensation that I dreamt this, perhaps in another lifetime? Yes I will. Will Big 45 go down? No, he will not, but the collision will stagger him and TC will fly in to finish him off.
***
And the final horn will blow, though you barely hear it. Coach Chick strides across the field and shakes your hand but you hardly feel it. You slap hands with the Eagles and they’re pissed and depressed and you don’t know why. You walk to the bus. As you board, the driver says, ‘Good game, number ten.’ You thank him but you don’t know what he’s talking about. You sit in your usual seat with your shoulder pads off. You see a pretty black girl outside the bus, looking. She sees you and waves. You wave back and she blows you a kiss. Who is that beautiful girl? Was she waving at you? And now the bus is filled with singing football players and as it eases out of the parking lot, slackers and drop-outs gathered around their crappy muscle cars give you the finger. Why? What have you done? You look over at Dr. Dex seated next to you. His ankle is wrapped in ice and he has a gash across his hand. Still, he seems happy. ‘Dex, did we win?’ He looks at you and says, ‘You okay man?’ You don’t know how to answer that so you just repeat the question. Dex smiles. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘We won.’ You won. You won. You defied the Times-Picayune and will be as anonymous as ever to the USA Today. You won, you won. Why doesn’t it feel like you won?
***
The victory party is at TC’s house. There’s a keg of beer and a trash can of Long Island Ice tea in the kitchen. Big Mike is teaching a gaggle of chicks how to play Mexican, a very involved drinking game. TC’s older brother, John William, listens as Big Mike goes over the rules.
“You shake the dice and then you check to see what you got. You can lie or you can tell the truth. Doubles go in reverse. Boxcars everybody drinks. Snake eyes only you drink-”
“Fuck this noise,” says John William. “I got a drinking game. Put all the beer on the table. Start drinking. Last person alive wins.”
That suggestion is met with approval.
I like it when John William crashes our parties. He’s a reminder of what we don’t want for ourselves. He’s stuck in high school when the chicks came easy and your friends were your friends to the end. They drank with you and hung out. You all had the same goals, just getting a buzz at The Fly. A life of fucking off. A timeless time. But that’s no good and we know it. You can’t be having a middle age crises when you’re twenty-one. You can’t be looking back in nostalgia for the good times of five years ago. That’s death. That’s cancer of the mind and tuberculosis of the soul. So we study John William and we watch his movements, graceful for a big man, handsome features going to drink, the neck, the face, the gut. We hear him lumber from his bedroom to the bathroom like Piltdown Man on the loose and we laugh, at him, not with him, but inside there’s a sick feeling that maybe, just maybe it will be us one day. Already the good times are going. They’ve been leaving since freshman year. Now, in the best times of our early lives is the realization that we are only a short distance now from the Future, from our New Selves, and all the cultivation of our private empires, our personalities finely tuned for the high school world will be completely useless. At least that’s what should happen. And should it not, we’ll wind up as John Williams, all of us, lurching from one set of good time mammaries to the other, sucking at the tit of time.
***
JW nuzzles my ear. She’s light and tipsy and whispers all the bad thoughts away. Gone are images of shooting holes in people and forcing cars off the road. Gone is her stepfather. Gone are my stepmother and her heartbreaking ways. Gone is algebra, creative writing and the Coach. Here and now is the love, the tender love of my life and it’s time to find a little corner where we can be alone. This is the length and width of her whispers and I’m game. Not to mention sore. Even copious amounts of alcohol can’t ease the ache I feel from my feet to my face. It hurts less badly than if we’d lost but it still hurts. JW holds me up like an arthritic old man as we walk through the large house, seeking a nook. Downstairs is filled with ancient stuffed furniture, spinets and credenzas and half tables. On the walls are TC’s frowning ancestors, watching your every lecherous move with clear, Indian-killing eyes. We go upstairs. Here the way is treacherous for the bedrooms are watched over by TC’s grandmother. A doddering but sharp old lady, she roams the hall like Attila, ready to snuff out coitus with ruthless fury. No sooner do we make it to TC’s bedroom but she’s over our shoulder, smelling of lavender and age, telling us to keep the door open. Across the hall is a shut door. Grandma steps over and tries the knob. Locked. She starts knocking and continues until Dr. Dex emerges with two girls in tow, lipstick smeared, eyeglasses fogged up, clothes a mess and totally busted, they scurry away with Grandma’s warnings in their ears that this isn’t a body house. Our search continues. John William’s room is a temple to late 70’s
***
Let’s take our lover home. Let’s put her in a bucket seat and belt her in and fire up the motor and drop it in gear and go home. But let’s go to our own home, somewhere between here and nowhere, an apartment of the mind with a view of a park and a museum. And trees. And a streetcar. And a neighborhood bar where we’ll dance unfettered by racial glances. We’ll be one and we’ll be in love and we’ll be purer than ever. We’ll return to our apartment, to its attic-like upper rooms and we’ll make love, JW and I, and the soft rains will drape our window sills. Her cries will be cries of joy and happy surprises. I’ll teach her to drive. We’ll travel and have only strangers for friends. We’ll take new names. We’ll be internationally famous yet will remain largely anonymous. Religions will come and go, great political systems will crumble, indeed the Iron Curtain might return to a figurative past. No matter. Our love will endure like a Classical bust. The sculptor will show us both embracing and breaking simultaneously. JW, collapsing at the knees will in turn destroy me. I shatter in the femora, collapsing under the strain.
Instead of this fiction I take her back to her crib on
There certainly are.
I pull in front of JW’s house. “Stay. I’ll walk myself. If he’s up...”
“I wish he’d try. I’ll put six in his ass so fast he won’t know what happened.”
JW looks at me. “I wish that were true,” she says.
For a moment there’s nothing. She’s about to leave and I won’t see her again until Monday morning. Goodnight my sweet love. God how I love you. How I love you. I love you. Love you. You. “What were their names?”
“What?”
I don’t know why I’m asking this but it’s coming out of me like another person from another time. An ancestral time. When you reached for the matching matchlocks and you took cap and ball and powder and there was justice. Or you took the shotgun your mother gave you for Xmas and you walked downtown and waited until the Vidrine brothers crested the hill, three of them in their sedan and you opened up on them, didn’t you Uncle Felix and avenged yourself for the whipping they gave you.
“What are their names? The two guys that did it. What are their names?”
“Why?”
“I wanna know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Something. Maybe. I don’t know. Just tell me, please. Do you know their names?”
She speaks their names.
Goodnight sweet angel. Rest in peace. I’m on it. I’m on it. And Jamaal Washington and Eric Head, I’m coming. I’m coming for you. Soon. Gotta do something, right? You can’t just let these kinds of thing go unanswered. Somewhere two guys are laughing and slapping dap, bragging about how they fucked that bitch up, how they taught that little cocktease a lesson. Hell yeah. Hit that ass hard, homeboy. Like driving a nail into an oak tree. Whap! And laughter. And drinking. And adding JW Jones to their list of bitches that they hit. Yeah, somewhere in the Texas darkness those cats are chilling, unmaliced by night terrors, no cold sweats, no invisible hands ripping them open from eyeball to asshole, no terror in the night, no walking, talking, waking nightmare, none of that, right? Right? Right, you motherfuckers? Well, I’m coming for you. I’m the Righteous Angel and I’m bringing Smith and Wesson.
***
My father is still up at 1 a.m. He’s in the garage, futzing around with his reloading equipment, half waiting up for me. “How was the game, Ugnaught? Did you win? You did? Very good. That’s very good. Say, do you have the gun? You do? Excellent. You didn’t shoot anyone with it did you? Let me see. A quick swab of the barrel would reveal whether you are telling the truth. And we have ways of making you talk. No, of course I trust you. I just get nervous. I wouldn’t want one of your knucklehead friends to pull it out and accidentally shoot you. Or themselves. I’ll have to be more careful in the future. You kept the car locked I’m sure. Good, good. Do you want a beer? Would you mind getting me one, then?”
I move through the quiet house to the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator reveals the immaculate floors, sink, counter tops. The dishwasher is grunting along, exhaling clouds of bleachy steam. I fetch a beer, return to the garage and hand it over to my pop.
“Thank you son,” he says. “Do you still want to go hunting tomorrow? You don’t have to if you don’t want. You do? That’s good. I’d like to get out in the woods for a while. Not being able to drive myself anywhere is the fucking pits. Don’t let it happen to you, you hear me? Take a cab or stay home. This DUI is a pain the ass. I feel trapped, And the funny thing is, I never went anywhere anyway. Now that I can’t I feel caged in. Makes me want to shoot something. Or someone.”
His gaze is drifting over his bookcases. A few are worn as old dogs. Yeats. Ulysses. Beckett. Keats. The Sound and the Fury. Those old friends are handy but what are closer to hand are the gun magazines, each with a political view that borders on anarchist. My father laughs at these coots who think it would take nothing less than a .44 Magnum to stop a determined assailant. My father laughs, but as he laughs he handles one of his many high-powered pistols.
Like the one in my room. And it’s just sitting there in the drawer, dying to go shoot someone. When can I go? When can I leave? Christmas? Thanksgiving? Halloween? Tomorrow? Tomorrow. Tomorrow night. I’m supposed to work wrestling at the Superdome. Not gonna happen. I’ve got a different agenda now. A drive to
“You okay, Ugnaught?” says my father. “You must be exhausted. You should get some sleep. A lot on your mind? Well, you’re young. These things will pass. Hell, someday you’ll look back on the things that were worrying you when you were seventeen and you’ll laugh. Lovesick. Walking around all dopey over a girl. I remember one I had the hots for. Beatrice Fontenot. A very pretty girl. No, let me correct that. A striking girl. Dark hair, dark eyes, nice smooth skin. But there was something else there, too. I don’t know what. Well, and I’m sure I told you this before; I spent a summer thinking about her. But I didn’t call her or write. I said to myself, I’ll show her. She’ll miss me. Because she liked me, you see? At least I thought so. Well here it comes, the first day of senior year, and I’ve been waiting the whole summer to see her, to show her what’s she’s been missing. Boy I was sure I had played it so cool. And she sees me and she says, ‘Benny, why how have you been? How was your summer?’ I said ‘Fine, how was yours?’ She said, ‘Grand. Look, I got engaged.’ And she showed me her ring. Boy, I skulked off like a scalded dog. I got over it of course. I went to college. Got married. Hell got married three times. Anyway, you see what I mean? It all works out. You look back on these things and you laugh. They’re not so serious after all.”
“Don’t you wish you had called Beatrice at least once that summer?”
My father says nothing for a full minute. Then he picks up his beer and toasts life, destiny, the Sisyphean task that is this world.
“Sure. Sure I wish I had called her. She was a very striking girl.”
***
I feel the all-consuming sexual energy of a teenager drowning in a
***
Your father nudges you awake to ask if you still want to go hunting. The answer is no.
Everything that hurt last night hurts more this morning. Your right ankle. Your ribcage. Your left knee. Your hands. Your feet. Your back. Your face. No, no, no way in hell are you going to drive to
“Yeah. I’ll go.”
“Good. The coffee is ready.”
You take your coffee like your father takes his, lots of sugar, lots of half and half. You stand in the kitchen while your father stands out on the patio and smokes. He always seems faraway when he’s out there. It’s the woods in front of him that give the illusion of living at the edge of a jungle, where a man could just chuck his cigarette and head into the bush with nothing but the clothes on his back. Your father looks up at the sky, then down at the ground. Where is his mind? Lost like Ulysses or home with his Penelope? Hard to say. All is illusion. Dreams of antiquity die still-born in the reality of today.
Is he composing his last stab at greatness? Is he recalling old times? Does he have anyone or anything to guide him through his increasing middle age? Where are his gods, or did he ever have any? Beckett, Joyce, Yeats, Faulkner, all have let him down. He’s typed his way into the suburbs. No one knows his genius, knows who or what he wanted to be. Should he drop dead on the patio tomorrow, only his sons and wife would read his manuscripts sealed in a suitcase. What writer dreams of posthumous fame? None. The clash, the pull between anonymous and recognition is as subtle as good versus evil. You never know when you’ll be capable of achieving one or the other.
***
Coffee done, you load the car. Your Stevens .12 gauge. Your father’s Remington automatic. Two boxes of number six shot. Hunting vests, gloves, hats, bags. The car loaded, your father gets in the passenger seat and buckles up.
“Let’s see,” he says. “I have my smokes, my lighter, my gloves, my glasses. Okay, let’s go.”
You drop the four-banger into gear and ease down the street. Steam rises from the storm drains. The mantis-like streetlamps exude their eerie orange glow. Bladerunner. Dystopic, lonely, a world without trust, love, future or hope. A world of poisonous gas and dead landscapes. A world of men who dream of androids and androids who dream of men. A world inseparable from this one. A world in which life imitates art imitating life.
***
I remove my shotgun from its sheepskin-lined case as my father stands off to the side relieving himself.
“Ah,” he says, zipping his pants. “The greatest of small pleasures. Well, let’s see. I’ve got my gun, my knife, my smokes, my lighter, my glasses, my compass and some TP in case I get lucky and can take a shit. Okay, what else? Do you have everything you need?
Do you have a slug in case you encounter the boars that allegedly haunt these woods?”
“I’m carrying buckshot, though how I’d get it into the chamber and then into the boar before he gored me is anyone’s guess.”
My father nods, his eyes trained on the sky to the east. His goal is to be in the
“I’ll take it.”
“You will? You’ll do that for your old pa? Well isn’t he the sensitive Ugnaught? That’s very kind of you son. There will be a reward for your courtesy: One Coke, no ice, in a cracked glass with a hair in it. And a bug. Half a bug.”
“Yuck.”
“The gun’s loaded of course. Don’t accidentally shoot yourself if you start blazing away at imaginary Hell’s Angels.”
I slip the gun into my hunting vest, recalling the feeling I had yesterday. ‘I wish you had killed him,’ she said. There are so many people that need killing. I wonder if I’ll ever get to them all.
My father locks the car, checks the hatchback and then we cross the empty highway, down a ditch, over a busted wire fence and into the woods. These are real woods, not the scruffy patch of hackberries behind our house. We are standing amongst old pines. The landscape is littered with years of needles, a dreamlike carpet of silence. In the darkness we separate, tacitly agreeing to meet as always at the cancerous burl. Until then we are alone with our thoughts. I move through the pines slowly, feeling their creeping grandness rise above me. Hardwoods appear, oak and maple and sycamore. Here I move slowly, still-hunting, listening to the woods. As my father says, the key to most things in life is listening. For him this has become difficult with age. Years of gun play have given him tinnitus, compounded when he’s at the office by the drone of Fluorescent lights, copy machines, typewriters, the hum of a building eating up the watts. It lessens somewhat at home. Classical music helps a little. Nine beers help more. It pains him in small moments. A TV commercial pierces his head like a spear; a song on the radio causes him to turn the knob off with disgust, muttering that there hasn’t been anything good in art since 1962.
I listen for the stir of critters, but I do so halfheartedly, moving through the trees like a ninety year old man. The woods grow in depth and height, the world of dark hues replaced with spots of vivid color. A maple flames up in a shaft of red and orange. A magnolia’s hunter green emerges amidst a few scattered blooms, their dense lemony scent. A tree losing its orange blossoms like a woman dropping a million earrings. The noises of the woods increase. Where before was only your soft tread of boots meeting needles, then the crackle and crunch of leaves, now is the flitting of small birds, the caw of a distant crow, the crash of a fallen limb. I step over a mossy log, peering for snakes. Stumbling on weak knees. Football players emerge from the shadows and blast into me with extreme prejudice. Then they fade and I’m standing at the edge of the woods, marshland before me, a view of swamp grass and mucky black ponds. In the distance is an island of scrubby oaks. My father dreams of piroguing out there to claim the grandfather of all fox squirrels, a big gray fucker with nuts the size of ping pong balls.
That dark green kingdom, a refuge from the storms, a haven for a limping grizzled 17 year old.
I sit under the skinniest of trees and feel the wind begin to rise. Cirrus clouds dot the upper heavens as cumulonimbus arrive from the southwest, towers of crenellated cream. I lay my shotgun on the ground and stretch out my legs. I remain this way, letting thoughts pass through me. After awhile, a squirrel emerges from a tree and moves into my range. Without standing I am able to lift the gun to my right shoulder, draw a bead on the squirrel and blast it into the Valhalla of Rodents. The poor bastard. Never knew what hit him.
***
My father is smoking a butt, pondering the sky. This is where he deserves to be. The hardwoods of the mind. His hand rests on a large cancerous knob protruding from an oak tree. What if I could make all his problems disappear? If I could transport him to a place where the typewriter hummed each day, spinning memories into words, clouds of thought condensing into pools of prose. His last book was his last shot, a roman a clef about his own life. His Vega is the comic relief, a car perched on the edge of disaster. I read of his detachment, His ennui, and the disco world he and my stepmother briefly lived in. I wonder if he ever sent the manuscript off. The public missed the hero sitting on the rocks at Henderson Point, a view of the town of
I ask my father if he had any luck. He smiles and nods at his hunting vest resting on the ground. I bend over and lift it. Heavy. Too heavy for squirrel. “Jesus, what did you shoot, a dog?” My father laughs as I open the bag and discover a raccoon. “Aw, poor guy,” I say. “I like coons. I like their faces. And their hands.”
“Yeah, me too,” says my father. “I heard it thrashing around up in a tree and thought I had bagged the mother of all fox squirrels. I shot it without seeing it, something I rarely if ever do. Oh well. What the hell else could it have been? A monkey?”
“I’ve never eaten coon.”
“Me either. We were poor but not that poor. Blacks ate it. I guess they liked it. I don’t know. They probably had to.”
“What do you think it tastes like?”
“Gamey, I’m sure. Like squirrel, maybe tougher.”
“How do you cook it?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Stew it I suppose. I could ask Uncle Tommy. No, he’s a middle class Coonass. They look down on eating things like that. I could ask Johnny Wartell. He and his brother Jimmy tried to eat one of everything. Their parents even caught them roasting a buzzard once. Hell, I don’t have any idea where he is or if he’s even alive. I could ask Miss Ruby.”
Miss Ruby is our housekeeper. She’s sweet as chess pie and totally unreliable. We’re her Friday and Friday is the end of a long week for the Miss Rubys of the world.
“You’re gonna ask an old black woman how to cook a coon?”
“Sure, why not? You think she’ll be offended? She won’t care. She knows where I’m coming from. She knows I ain’t no redneck. Hell, I like her. She’s a hoot. I just wish she wouldn’t no-show so much. It about drives Agnes crazy.”
“Well, just let me know when you’re gonna ask her for her Coon Recipe so I can not be around.”
My father smiles, glances at the sky. “I think the hunt is over,” he says. “Too windy. How’d you do, by the way? I heard the shotgun once.”
I show him the unluckiest squirrel in the world. He asks to see the pistol, then aims at a pine tree about forty feet away. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Chips fly, the air vibrates with the tinny pops and the pine tree has a new white navel. My father asks me if I want to shoot the last two, he can’t leave them in there, it hurts his mind. I take the gun from him. Through a shaft of sunlight I see Eric running away from me. I take aim, drawing in my breath, holding it for a long moment, concentrating all thought into one action. Then I pull the trigger. Bang! A chunk of tree bark spins into the woods as Eric (a white dude) falls, grasping at his spine. I turn my gaze to Jamaal, (a black dude) running away. He’s almost out of range. If he escapes he will spread his contagion. Last. Chance. To. Do. It. Bang! A 50-yard headshot on a moving target.
“Took you long enough,” says my father, reaching down to retrieve his coon.
***
The ritual following our hunts is to head to the nearest roadhouse for many beers. Exactly how many is our secret. Today my father will have a pitcher by himself, drinking it like the old farts do with a cup of ice floating on the top to keep the beer cool. Meanwhile I sip a Coke and look out the backdoor at the end of the world. That’s how it appears, for the marsh is on fire in several places, (purposefully set to encourage new growth) huge towers of smoke that billow into the atmosphere like the product of a nuclear bomb. My father’s regular joke is that the rednecks have tamed the atom’s wrath but like the Russians they haven’t mastered ballistics. Their response is to pile on the pig uranium and the old car batteries and launch it into the ozone. It’s funny and not funny. Not a week goes by that the news isn’t bringing more talk of ICBM’s, nuclear subs, anti-war protests in
“How are you doing, Ugnaught?” says my father. “You look worried. I know what you mean. Things with Agnes aren’t any better. I’m not a jealous person, you know that. But frankly it pisses me off that she keeps attracting these older, father-figure types to confide in. I mean, I don’t expect to have some kind of gooey, tell-me everything relationship, but hell, I am her husband. She can talk to me. But she doesn’t want to. She talks to her shrink. She talked to Emmanuel when she had the real estate company. Now it’s Glen. Ah hell, I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess I’m saying this. I love her. I know that’s probably hard for you to believe, but I do. For all her craziness, I love her very much. And I don’t want to lose her.”
My father lights a smoke, then winces as the bartender turns on the TV. Two old timers are sitting next to each other at the bar, sipping their beer, not a word passing between them. The jukebox is quiet. The moth-eaten pool table collects silence and dust. The bartender changes the channels with a pair of pliers. Cartoons. Tom and Jerry have teamed up to create an ice rink. They flood the kitchen floor, then rip the Freon cables from the back of the refrigerator and drop them into the water. Instant ice. Together the cat and mouse skate across the kitchen floor. Jerry acquires a bow tie, as does Tom. For once their war has halted. We have peace between traditional enemies, brought together for grace, beauty and art. Sadly, the appearance of the maid and the bulldog end the détente. Dog chases cat chases mouse as the maid climbs on a table and screams.
“Who’s playing today?” says the bartender to no one in particular.
“The Saints play tomorrow,” says my father.
“No shit, Sherlock,” says the bartender, a blonde of uncertain age. “College on Saturday, Saints on Sunday. That’s how it is.”
My father regards the bartender with amusement, and then looks at me. “Are you working tomorrow?”
“Yeah and tonight too.”
“What’s tonight? A dog show? A tractor pull?”
“Wrestling.”
“Ah, wrestling. Will Andre the Giant be there?”
“I don’t know. It’ll be one mutt knocking the shit out of another mutt, then they’ll switch.
The crowd doesn’t care. They root for whoever is getting his ass kicked.”
My father asks me how they get the wrestling ring moved and the football field installed in time for the game. I explain what I know which is very little. My job at the Superdome consists of ferrying vast quantities of ice to the concession stands. As a proud and minimally paid member of the warehouse crew I see almost nothing of the events. My world is the bowels and secret elevators, the corridors of the powerless. My father asks me who the Saints are playing.
“The Rams.”
“Are they any good?”
“Same as the Saints. 3-3.”
“Do you think they’ll win?”
“Nah. I’m about done with them.”
Not the bartender. She announces to the bar that she’s got fifty bucks on the Saints.
“They better NOT lose,” she says. “I’ll be one pissed-off bitch. Last week I kicked my boyfriend out my trailer. I told him he’s bad luck to my Saints.”
“I guess you’ll be taking the car,” says my father, pouring another beer. “Oh well, stranded again. I’m sure Agnes will be off doing something or another. However, if we see her, let us decide now how many beers I’ve had. Let us say…three. If asked, I have had three beers. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“They need to stop that Dickerson,” says the bartender to one of the old men.
“Who is Dickerson?” he says.
“Dickerson? You don’t know who Eric Dickerson is? He’s a badass is what he is.
He plays running back for the Rams. Every time we play them he gives us problems. He’s big and fast. I wish he played for the Saints. All our running backs are turkeys. Earl fuckin’
“Well nowadays, I can’t tell one from the other,” says the old man, sipping his beer. “Seems like it’s just our nigras fightin’ their nigras.”
“You got that right,” says the other old coot.
***
My father’s hero is a gunsmith named Walter Gates. With his jeweler’s eye and his tiny tools, Mr. Gates hunches over a gun, studying its innards, shaving metal down, polishing gears and tightening springs. Mr. Gates will look at his work and say aloud, ‘I am one hell of a gunsmith.’ No sooner are those words uttered however than Mr. Gates will correct himself. ‘Ah, what am I saying? I don’t know anything and I never will…’ He’ll trail off into silence, absorbed by the intricacies of the killing machine. He has several firearms himself, including an oily smooth .44 Special that he keeps in the small of his back. The only thing he’s ever shot with it, besides tin cans, was a dog. Not just any dog. A big barking brute. And despite his requests to the neighbors, the dog, unchained, shitting everywhere, continued to bark. One night, on his way through the apartment building parking lot, the dog surprised him. With the crack of a shot, he silenced that dog forever.
That kind of decisiveness impresses my father, not that he’s got any dogs that need killing. Mr. Gates knows his place in the world. Like my father, he too is tending to a sick wife. In his case, her invalidism is all too real. Mr. Gates is absolutely stalwart, makes no reference to a life lived any other way. Well, perhaps once he might say something like, ‘Yeah, it’s not easy…’ But he’ll trail off after that and correct himself quickly. ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I’m fine, I’m great. Everything is great.’ And he’ll take your gun and it shoots one way and in a week he’ll return it and it will shoot a whole other way, as if to glance at it were to fire it.
Mr. Gates avoids violent situations and violent people. Should any evil doers come his way, he has a finely tuned weapon, his false good cheer and his personal philosophy: ‘I’m always polite.’ My father repeats this expression from time to time and seems to live by it like some messianical revealing. He’ll be telling a story and mention how he inserted a ‘sir’ or a ‘madam’ into the exchange (‘because I’m always polite’). He wants to take more direct action with his life. He approves of this in himself. Too long has he been spent in pleasing others. He’s on his third wife now. To hell with them all. Two boys. That’s good. But to hell with wives and women. What a man needs is a cabin of his own, a fire, a comfortable chair, a lamp, a heavy rug, cigarettes, perhaps a glass of Benedictine, a cat on his lap and a foul wind blowing outside, rattling the windows, shaking the door, but he is warm, bundled up. He’s a southern man who dreams of snow. Conifers weighted down with white. The howl of wolves. A black moon. A north wind. And a house in the woods impervious to the cold. A Walter Gates tooled weapon sits on the table. All is right with the world and my father is always polite.
He gets the chance to try out this philosophy on the ride back home. We stop at the Time Saver for ‘one more beer.’ I watch my father head for the cooler. He holds his hooch as well as any man alive. He pulls out a tall can of the High Life and heads to the counter, pulls money from his wallet, purchases the beer and a pack of cigarettes. He’s the last straight dude in
“Excuse me gentlemen,” says my father. “We were just about to leave.”
Two of the guys continue straight on into the Time Saver. The third stops, gives us the finger then heads inside. OZZY was tattooed across his knuckles. My father sighs, then puts the beer down, opens the glove box, takes out the Police .38, checks to see if it is loaded, it is, closes the chamber, rests the gun on the open windowsill and waits. A minute passes. The guys emerge with sacks of beer. OZZY stops to light a cigarette and exhales that first good hit.
My father lifts the gun off the windowsill. “Excuse me, gentlemen.” OZZY and his buddies become as still as cigar store Indians. “Boys, I want you to listen real good because I’m only going to say this once. I want you to get in that car right now and get out of here or tomorrow morning your mama is gonna be looking at you in a coffin.”
The Camaro leaves in a blaze of smoking tires as my father pops his beer, takes a foamy sip and more to himself than to me, says, “I’m always polite.”
***
As I unload the car, my brother comes outside to help but refuses to carry anything except a vest. My shotgun remains in the car waiting for a second trip while my father interrogates my brother as to his wife’s location. Yves says she said she was going to play golf.
“Natch,” says my father and heads out to the patio to brood.
That leaves me and my brother and a wide open Saturday. He asks me if I want to go for a bike ride, though we only have one bike between us, his, as I have given up childish things. I should be beat-ass tired but I’m not, especially with the adrenaline rush of what my father just did. I tell Yves about it as I pedal us down the street, him riding on the handlebars.
“Do you think pop would have shot him?” says Yves.
“Pop says never pull a gun unless you plan on using it.”
We head down Bullard, the last vast bank of woods on our right. My brother asks if we can go look for the legendary Devil Worshipper’s Clubhouse. He too has noticed the houses going up out here, knows that these woods will go the way of the woods where our houses used to be. The great maw of the forest calls. Sure, little brother, we can go look for the so-called Devil Worshipper’s clubhouse. We’ll find the boogie man and the yeti, too. We’ll carry Bigfoot out of there on a pole. Anything for you, you sweaty-headed bane of my existence, loyal as an old dog, bitchy, whiney, adorable. You think I hung the moon.
So sure, let’s park the bike in the bushes and cover it with briars and leaves and set forth into the jungle, the Black Forest, darkest
So let’s walk through the woods, finding a bike path that leads under sycamore and dogwood and hackberry and oak. Let’s espy yellow spiders making their Indian summer webs in the spaces between the trees. Fat monsters striped like tigers, their nets alive with struggling flies. Let’s plunge deeper into the woods. Let’s cross a boggy creek and follow the path which diverges now, one way to become an oval amidst the leaves, the other way deeper through a stand of trees, amidst a bramble of blackberry bushes, through a wall of poison ivy to stumble into a clearing and there we find the legendary Devil Worshipper’s Clubhouse.
A shack-like structure composed of scrap wood. A few pentacles spray painted on the outside. A tree with a swing rope torn off some ten feet above the ground. No more swingers, no more devil worshippers. Inside the clubhouse, the walls are covered with the names of rock bands. The devil worshippers like the same music that I do. AC/DC. Led Zeppelin. Blue Oyster Cult. These are my people, wherever they are or whoever they were. A few empty beer bottles indicate they favored the High Life. A lovingly crafted marijuana leaf is etched into the doorframe. I’m not a pothead but maybe I am. Maybe I’m a heroin addict and an acid eater and a dope fiend and a cokehead and a weedhead and a gashuffer and a painthuffer and the Marlboro Man. Who knows anymore? Who knows anything? If the devil worshipper’s clubhouse which we heard about for years can really exist then anything is possible.
And I can do this. I can do this. Get my .357 Magnum and get on the road.
“You could have taken Elsa here,” says my brother.
“What are you talking about?”
“Elsa, from school. I know you liked her.”
“I didn’t like her. She was just my friend.”
“Then why did put ‘I (heart) Elsa’ on your windowsill?”
“What were you doing in my room?”
“I wasn’t in your room. I saw it from the outside.”
Elsa was my eighth grade crush, but she dated high school guys. One of whom stole her away. For a week or so she was a runaway, both of them were. When the police finally found them they were wrapped around the inside of what was left of his car. They were drag racing on
“I saw you and Channing rape her,” my brother says.
“What.”
Behind us is the clubhouse. The swing tree looms like a cave. Green here and there but mainly grays and browns mixed with yellow and flaming reds.
“I saw you and Channing pull her into the woods behind our house,” he says.
“We were joking. We didn’t do anything to her. We were playing around.”
He says nothing, instead swiping at the air with his little knife. The devil worshippers and their beaten down clubhouse bore him.
My friend Channing and I were playing around with Elsa. She was calling us barbarians as we lashed each other with our fighting sticks. How did we come to each have her by the upper arm? How did we come to be perp-walking her through the woods? She was laughing, wasn’t she? She was. She was saying, ‘You are joking, right? This is a joke, right?’ And you said, ‘Maybe’ didn’t you? Yes, you did. And Channing laughed and said, ‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe not.’ And he laughed because he wanted to; he wanted to, and he wanted you to want to too. All you had to do was say, ‘Yes.’ Not even out loud. Just inside, say, yes. Because you loved her, you wanted her, you (hearted) Elsa and if she didn’t (heart) you back, oh well. You could have said yes. But you didn’t. You said no.
***
My father needs more beer if he’s going to spend another Saturday night alone.
“Quasimodo’s,” he says. “For old times sake.”
Quasi’s is a small grocery store in a strip mall that we’ve been visiting for years. It exists as an oasis for men like my father who need peace and quiet when they drink. Yes, it’s like old times. Except now I’m driving and my brother stays behind. There’s something on TV.
“Bring me something,” he says and my father assures him he will.
We tool down Read Road to the corner of Morrison. My father gets out of the car and heads inside. Sad. He’s a sad man. He walks deliberately, his gaze forward, obscuring his drunkenness by an act of pure will. He’s a good man, beset with good intentions. His path is paved. All that is required now is the steady plodding pace to continue until one day he no longer knows the language of literature, only the vocabulary of guns.
My father used to take Yves and me to the store nearly every night. He’d give us each a dollar while he purchased himself a few tall cans of beer. Then we’d sit in the car, casing out Quasi’s joint. The proprietor, a slug-like man composed of jowls soon came to ignore us squatting in his parking lot in my father’s old Vega, my brother learning to read from the storefront advertising. Home Freezer. Okra. Zatarain’s Crab Boil. McKenzie’s Pastry and Cakes. Boudin. Pabst. Charcoal briquettes. Often my brother was lost in the backseat while my father conversed. He’d cover all the bases in a single evening, poetry, film, politics, literature, astronomy. It seemed my father knew something about everything and had a lot to say about it all. Between my fantasies about the apocalypse and my father’s fantasies that he was the reincarnation of William Butler Yeats, my brother was fortunate if he could get in a word about anything.
Until the telescope. During the time we were getting a telescope he and I shared an interest and would talk about nothing else. The telescope had been ordered from a catalogue full of exotic as well as household gifts. Our mother had sold so much car insurance that year that she won anything she wanted from the catalogue. In her generosity, she let my brother and I choose. After poring over it for days, we decided on the telescope. Three fine wooden legs and an array of lenses and knobs. The accompanying blurb claimed we’d be able to see other galaxies, other life forms, the deepest secrets of Red Giants and White Dwarfs. We informed out parents of our choice and sat back to dream. My brother was six. I was 13. The idea of a telescope seemed romantic, like a medieval scholar on the cusp of the Renaissance. I imagined us lugging the delicate instrument onto the roof. From there we’d catch comets in action, see the phases of the moon, admire the lunar deserts, oceans, marshes and seas. My brother imagined even grander plans. We’d mount a BB gun onto the telescope and shoot things very far away. We’d rig up a wagon and take it with us on bike rides. We’d attach it to the hood of the car and look into the future as we drove.
All of this telescope talk must have been making my father feel like an outsider. He didn’t care about looking through a tube. He preferred to read about black holes and their ilk, imagining a universe that expanded and contracted. Perhaps he was afraid if he looked into the heavens he’d discern that all celestial bodies were simply moving away from each other, bound and determined by forces they’d never understand to flee to the very limits of their possibilities. In any case, one day he pulled me aside and said he’d spoken with my stepmother and they agreed that we shouldn’t get the telescope after all. Why? Well, there were a number of reasons; primarily my father didn’t think the telescope would work worth a damn. Big promises, small results. Too much ambient light in the suburbs and he sure as hell wasn’t driving us somewhere at night to look through a telescope. And besides, we needed a new weed eater. I was wearing out the old one with my lawn business. So it was decided, a new weed eater instead of the telescope.
“Back me up on this with Yves, okay?”
“Okay.”
That evening we drove to Quasimodo’s, sat in the Vega and stared at the shimmering fluorescents. My brother began his monologue from the backseat. He wanted to know if the telescope could be used to see behind the sun. He wanted to know if it could be used to study ants. He wanted to know if the telescope could be mounted onto a plane and then flown really high to allow us to see even farther into space.
My father interrupted him.
“Yves, your brother and I have talked about this and he agrees with me, we need a new weed eater. Those damn telescopes never work worth a crap anyway. Maybe when you’re older we’ll get another telescope. But until then, no more talk about the telescope, okay?”
There was a small pause and then Yves said, “Oh.” That’s it. Just that one syllable. He understood immediately. No telescope. No. Telescope. No. No. No. So he didn’t say another word. In fact he didn’t make another sound. He was trying as hard as possible not to cry and it worked. But he didn’t want to practice reading and he didn’t want to talk about school and I didn’t either. And my father, for the first time that I could remember, didn’t have anything to say. He finished one beer and crushed the can up the way tough guys do. He always made fun of those guys. He didn’t ask for his second beer. He started the Vega and pulled away from Quasi’s.
At a light we stopped alongside a heavy muscle car, rumbling and throbbing, Black Sabbath emanating. When the light changed my father popped the clutch on the Vega and jumped ten yards on the muscle car before it even knew what was happening. In a moment it blew past us. My father turned down
We pulled up in front of our house; my father turned off the car, got out and went inside without waiting for us. He went to the master bedroom and closed the door behind him. We heard the TV blaring the theme from MASH. We heard their voices, my father and my stepmother.
“Agnes, we are getting that fucking telescope.”
“Why are you yelling? You know I don’t like that.”
“I’m not yelling. I’m just upset. Do you know what he said?”
“Calm down. You know I don’t like it when you act crazy. What who said?”
“Yves. What Yves said. That little shit. He said, ‘Oh.’ That’s it, just ‘oh.’ Christ, it breaks my heart. I tell you it breaks my fucking heart.”
And so we got the telescope. And it didn’t work worth a damn. Too complicated, too much ambient light. But it sat in the living room for years like a harpsichord that no one knew how to play, a reminder of the power of ‘oh.’
***
Pandora. The poor dear releases untold sorrows into the world and hope is all we have. Hope that it will get better. More likely we only hope that we can stop thinking about our story long enough to live our lives. It’s hard. It dominates every move we make. Our story becomes indistinguishable from ourselves. All we are is what has happened to us and what we’ve done. Where is there room for hope? Nowhere. You hear stories and wonder how it came to be that way. A man may tell you that he fooled around on his wife two or three days after their wedding. It was only one time, he’ll say, as if once weren’t so much more than enough. ‘I only shot him one time,’ you tell the judge. ‘I didn’t know it would kill him.’ I only had sex with her one time, you tell your wife. I didn’t know it would kill your soul. And now that story is also her story and to some extent your own story for having heard it, for having listened. You may wonder to yourself how the wife felt about it all. Her husband’s part of the story would be difficult to forget. The embodiment of the incident would literally lie on top of her at night. It must have been difficult, if not impossible to not have the story follow you in dreams.
And you, the listener, you and I may both wonder how that story might morph over time like a steady growing tumor, enlarging on its own schedule independent of its host. The story might shift, become another story. The man might tell you something else. He might say, Well, I’ve told you practically everything about us. I may as well tell it all. He might pause and sip his beer. He may look down at his feet wondering how they got into this kitchen at this time of the day. How he came to be home or even have a home or a son, two sons, in that home. And one son in front of him now to talk to, to tell his story to. He might say, We swapped partners with another couple. He’ll say it as if it were torn from his mind with forceps. Snap, and it’s out there. His face wears the two masks, tragedy and comedy and it’s a perfect moment. It is Life, capital L, and it is the next layer of the story. How A leads to B. How a deed unredeemable would manifest itself into this next revelation. How his wife mooned over a policeman. How he felt nothing horny about the policeman’s wife. How his wife got VD. How he was unable to perform. More chapters, more verse. The story flows over the floor and you, dear listener and me, one of two sons, might listen and hear and see the poor storyteller thrash about his kitchen, swig deeply from his beer bottle, laugh, cry, say your name, say your name again and again, then say, Dear God. How did this happen? How did I get here? He’ll say it but he’ll already know the answer. He’ll have to. He’ll see twisted sheets of infidelity, sheets of yesteryear, sheets in the bed of a woman so forgotten he might not even remember her name, just that she was an Indian.
And then he’ll be done. Done with the telling. He’ll leave the kitchen and walk out onto his back patio to have a smoke. You’ll watch him stare into the woods behind the house. He’s free for a moment, just a nanosecond, but free for a moment nonetheless. Free to have hope. Hope that he’ll forget. He never will, of course, just like the son will never forget and perhaps you the listener will also not forget. It has become Story, the one we’re all living, all that’s been done to us and all that we have done.
***
“Do you want to shoot any of your books?” says my father. “As you know, normally, I’m against that kind of Nazi shit despite the Hitler Youth Knife in the glove box which we both know is a joke. But anyway, if you want a target, something to shoot at, go grab a few books.”
I contemplate my bookcase, stuffed tight with science fiction. All these dream worlds, the Dune Trilogy, the Foundation Series, Riverworld, all fantasies to fill the mind, occluding the brain from the real craziness going down every day. How many cries are floating through the skies? How many assaults are occurring even now? For whom will this be the most terrible Saturday night of their lives? Some predator somewhere is sharpening their claws, unstretching their limbs. Somewhere bad shit is happening and there’s nothing I or you or any of us can do about it except wait to find out. My gaze wanders over several collections of Harlan Ellison short stories. That phony. ‘I Was a Hired Gun.’ I was a hired gun my ass. Screw you, Harlan Ellison, or whatever your name really is. I grab two collections of his stories as well as the .357 Magnum from my underwear drawer and return to the kitchen.
My father’s own .357 with its stainless steel finish and blonde grips rests on the countertop. Next to it is an attractively-bound collection of Yeats.
“I’ve read plenty of books,” my father says. “Or rather, I’ve read a few books many times. So what? So fucking what? And as for this thing…”
He picks up the Yeats. It’s a thoughtful gift from his wife. It’s true he was born nine months to the day that Yeats died. Who knows what the laws of reincarnation really are. Is there a time delay, a vacation from your past life or do you immediately become another soul struggling for life, at mercy of every carriage wreck and kicking mule?
With a beer in one hand and his pistol in his right, my father walks off the patio and heads into the woods. I follow. We walk into the trees until we can’t hear the lawn mowers of the world. My father stacks a few logs against a tree, a backdrop that should prevent us from killing ourselves or some distant neighbor.
“I’ll go first,” my father says. “Not because I’m impolite. I just don’t want you to get in trouble in case someone hears us.”
He gazes at the blue sky. If we weren’t filled with bile it would be a lovely day, but we are weak and mean and we are taking it out on our masters, our heroes, our pleasures and challenges, our friends, our books. My father places Yeats against the logs, sets his beer on a stump, makes sure I’m out of danger and then takes aim. Bang, bang and he plugs ‘No Second Troy.’ Bang, bang and down goes ‘Men Improve with Years.’ Bang, the death of ‘The Magi,’ Bang, a shot to the heart of ‘He Mourns the Change that Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved and He Longs for the End of the World.’ The woods echo with the death of poetry. My father sips his beer and walks over to look at his work. A nice spacing of shots. Bits of paper lay about in the leaves, the last words of my father’s reincarnated ghost.
My turn. On the log I place ‘The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.’ I step back and take aim. I’m killing them all, all the enemies of me and mine. I’m gunning down all you untried and uncharged monsters, you rapists and murderers and fiends. Bang, bang and I blast you. Bang, and you fall. Bang, and the Beast flies through the air. Bang, and Eric grabs his chest. Bang, and Jamaal grabs his eye.
“Nice shooting,” says my father, pleased that he’s managed to hand down to me one useful talent.
***
My father takes both our pistols to the garage and sends me to the car to fetch the Police .38. He wants to be certain I don’t accidentally take it to work, much less drive to
I head inside and turn over the Police .38 to my father.
He sits at his reloading table, a shaft of afternoon sun cutting through the thick layer of cigarette smoke. Holding his Smith and Wesson in one hand, he wipes it down with a rag soaked in Hoppe's #9. The garage smells of guns, books, smoke, beer, gunpowder. My father is a mellow drunk, just buzzing along for hours. He’ll stay awake until my mother trots home. She won’t want to talk about anything important like their failing marriage or his and hers deteriorating health, much less the state of their sons. Both their children are on their own now, Yves in the world of children, me in the world of men. My father asks me to fetch him another Busch Bavarian before I hit the shower. When I return he asks me to sit for a moment. I do, expecting another dose of Ulysses or Yeats, a selection from an unshot volume.
Instead my father tells me a story. It’s his greatest tale ever, and he has some doozies. It begins with a character I haven’t heard of before. Foot, he of the six plus feet and the large shoes. Foot, a big blonde kid, rare for Cajuns. Foot, who was a several years older than my father. Foot, who had attended
My father sits in a single shaft of sunlight surrounded by cigarette smoke. It is as if he himself were afire, a slow smolder, painless but forever, consuming gradually all his best parts, leaving behind only memories of what was done and not done. The story is finished. He’s fielding no questions. He waves off any further conversation. I am left to move on to my own business. I can take a shower and cleanse myself of the day’s funk, the smell of cigarettes, the grit of the road, the moist aromas of the woods. How to cleanse the mind of unsafe thinking and unsafe thoughts is another matter altogether.
***
You can call home and hope the answering machine picks up. You can put another barrier between yourself and the Truth. You can call the Truth and if you leave a message, then you’ve done your part. Truth must find you. The onus is upon Truth. But if there is no answering machine or the callee gets to the phone before you can hang up after four or five rings, well then you may be forced to speak, to communicate, tell where you are and what you are up to. You may be required to answer a few questions, perhaps some higher brain function-stuff. Why? Why don’t you want your husband to join you at the Holiday Inn bar? You may object to your husband’s drinking but he’ll tell you that he’s only had three beers even if you both know it’s (at least) three times that. You might say that you and your business partner are talking shop, tell your husband that he’d just be bored. Your husband might say something like, ‘I miss you.’ Despicable. When have they ever missed each other before? When have they ever had that giddy courtship, that new love? Never. Well maybe for five minutes after they got married. So screw you and who you miss, she says. Drink your beer, clean your guns, go shoot an old car. Feed the kids. I’ll be home later. Goodbye.
***
I hear my father hang up the phone as I finish packing an overnight bag. On my bed is JW’s letter. I can still smell the fragrance. I’ll be haunted by that scent for the rest of my life. ‘Raffinee,’ I’ll whisper in my sleep. I’ll ask salesgirls for a sample and when they ask me if it’s for my girlfriend I’ll say No, I’m just remembering someone. That’s sweet, they’ll say but of course they won’t know the Truth. No, the Truth is out there in the world tonight and I’m not avoiding its call. My bag is packed. My shotgun is sleeping in the car. I look at myself in the mirror. I smile. There’s no happiness there. Just staring into the infinity of fate.
As I leave my father asks me if I need any money and without waiting for an answer, he pulls out his wallet and hands me a twenty.
“Be careful,” he says, looking abstractedly away.
For a moment I am so engulfed in love for my father that I can’t move. He’s a frail man. He doesn’t have the word ‘cruel’ in his vocabulary. He only wants peace. Live and let live. He’s a good Cajun who plays as hard as he works and he doesn’t do either very hard at all. Why does life have to be so difficult? Shoot a gun, read a poem, go see Raiders of the Lost Ark for the 15th time. Revel in suburbia with a pocket woods behind the house and two good boys beating on each other with shovel handles. Why fuck it up? Why would anybody want to fuck up this easy life that we have? Nobody’s dead. Nobody’s dying. Why does it all have to be so hard? My father, a generous and likeable man is simply screwed to the mast of his marriage. He’ll stay to the end, come hell and high water, he’ll never leave her and she’ll never leave him. They’ll just go on and on until one of them finally pops. My father, head down, lost in Yeats, lost in Busch Bavarian, lost in a lonely place in the mind that feels very familiar, the young man on the streets of Washington, walking every night, up and down, saying to himself ‘I’m gonna walk this town down. I’m gonna walk this son-of-a-bitch out of me and when I leave I’ll never come back again.’ He did. He left. He walked out and kept walking until he reached his third wife, his two kids from two women, a job behind a desk, a garage full of books, tools, dies, firearms and hot lead. And he’s as alone now as he was then. No, he’s more alone now. Back then he had his dreams. Those are gone. Where? Who knows? Maybe they walked back to
“Okay, pop. I’ll see you tomorrow. Go Saints.”
“Go Saints,” says my father. “I love you Gabriel. You’re my good boy.”
“Goodbye pop.”
“Goodbye Gabriel.”
***
You leave the East and all that you are back there and you begin the journey to new lands, new ideas, new experiences. You are not fleeing. There’s no one after you, no posse comitias, no angry father and no jolted wife. You are simply leaving because you have to leave home forever if you hope to come back again. You have to blow the dust of that place off your boots and get behind the wheel of a car and drive across
How I got behind the wheel of my father’s four-banger and drove west to kill two bad boys. I had my shotgun and two shells. If I needed more I didn’t care. I was so sure of my destination and my inherent righteousness that I never once considered that I might fail. I knew I was destined for greatness. I knew I could close the deal. And I knew that I didn’t know what was coming but I’d be ready for it when it came.
There I was, taking the
***
Maginnis is on the Superdome loading dock bossing people around. Dr. Dex and Lil Roy push a bin full of bagged ice off into the bowels of the stadium. TC, wrestling with the giant ice machine, sees me walking up. “Good, Gabe’s here. He can takeover. This shit sucks.” Maginnis asks me where my shirt is, referring to the maroon Ogden Foods t-shirts he and TC and the others are wearing.
“I’m not working tonight.”
TC stops the machine. “Why?”
I tell them that last summer two guys beat up JW and tried to rape her. I tell them that I know where they live and I’m gonna go kick their ass. And my friends believe me. Maginnis would come too if he wasn’t Mr. Honesty and Integrity, Class of 1985. He says something about wishing Miguel Champ were here. Miguel would take charge of this and make sure it got handled right.
“I’ve got my shotgun riding shotgun. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do this without Miguel.”
“Be careful,” says TC. “You get caught with a gun your ass might be getting butt-fucked in a
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“What about the Saints game,” says Maginnis. “You’re not gonna miss that are you?”
I tell him yes, that I’ll have to miss the privilege of watching the Saints get their ass kicked tomorrow. I’ll be busy. Doomed like the Saints, beaten already even as they rest in their hotel rooms, are two bad boys whom I lied about so plausibly, denying their truth, The Truth, that what they did was oh so much more, but I can’t and I won’t do that to JW nor do that to my friends. I don’t want them to see her that way. I want them to continue to see the girl that I fell in love with, those uniquely long arms and legs, that tiny bouffant of perfectly relaxed hair, that cocoa caramel skin, that birthmark over her eye that resembled a permanent bruise, like the one she got when they punched her to the floor and she called out ‘Gabriel!’ So let them live just a few moments longer in the bliss of ignorance.
“When are you leaving?” says Maginnis.
“In a few hours. I wanna get there around dawn tomorrow. Do it early and go, you know?”
TC looks at me. He’s bought into my lies. Gangs, drugs, older women, I’ve pretended to do it all. The vocabulary of guns has carried me far, a secret history that I’ll be spending the rest of my life trying to live down. “Don’t get yourself fucked up,” says TC.
“No sir, I sure don’t want to do that.”
“You can crash at my house for a few hours.”
“Or mine,” says Maginnis.
We all slap dap the way the black guys have taught us, then it’s time to get back to work. Forklifts are running up and down the dock. The ice machine cranks back to life. TC curses and puts on his gloves.
“Bye brother,” says Maginnis. “Be careful.”
“Always.”
***
John William is chilling in TC’s room when I stop by. There’s a football game on TV. The Auburn Tigers at
“Ha,” says John William. “He’s fucked now. His confidence is shot to shit.”
Halftime has come and gone. John William has destroyed a twelve pack and taken 75 pisses. He finally stops going to the bathroom and simply urinates out the second story window. It’s the
“Look at this shit! It’s a fuckin’ free-for-all!”
It sure is.
“Coach O’Sheen must be calling that play. Why didn’t he pass? The pass is open all day. What an idiot.”
He’s got a ton of stories about Coach. He can’t understand the old Mick. He can’t know how it must feel to have coached so many losers. John William’s senior team went 1-8 and lost Homecoming 45-0.
“It was the drug heads,” John William says. “Guys would smoke pot before a game, drop everything thrown to them. Forget snap counts. Take the play off. Then when we lost they’d all go take acid. How the hell you supposed to win a football game when your head’s full of acid?”
I wouldn’t know. My acid days are years ahead of me, as is pot. Right now I’m sipping the uncola, watching two teams play as if the starters would be executed Aztec-style at midfield; their hearts cut out and fed to their conqueror.
“Let’s try that again,” he says.
We do and are somewhat more successful. He leaves a bag of beer bottles on the floor, his last words the same as the ones he greeted me with.
“I love watchin’ football. It makes me feel like I can still play.”
***
Maginnis’ mom is sitting on the porch of the house on
“Aren’t you working?”
I tell her no and she offers me a beer. Yes, I need a beer. I just stood for ten minutes in the billiards room at TC’s house hearing JW’s cries of love turning into cries of pain and fear. I heard ‘Gabriel’ bouncing around the walls. I heard Grandma creeping about, looking for sin. I heard the refrigerator snap on and run angrily. I stood next to a wall of books, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade. And then I left TC’s House of 10,000 Delights and drove over to Maginnis’ place.
It’s a bit weird at the edges, like the Maginnis clan themselves, however many Ms. Mac has these days. She adds them like house plants. Her own kids, other people’s kids, homeless high school students. Miguel Champ lives here from time to time when he’s not slaving for Uncle Sam. She’s got a heart bigger than the Antarctic and one day it will fail her at her moment of greatest grief, not for a kid or a kid’s kid, no it will finally shatter for this place, her adopted city,
“So what’s up?”
And you could say nothing and she’d chat about the weather or any random thing. Or you could open your heart to this great and magnificent woman, mother to us all until the end of time and tell her, let it out Gabriel, let it out; it’s killing you, man. Tell her everything, every terrible detail you could not have done a damn thing, she’ll remind you of that but it won’t matter, it’s always pushing the chance back up the hill, the chance that you could have just taken a ride to
One of her kids will appear on the porch and bite their fingers and leave again. Music will come on from upstairs. Prince. You can’t escape him. Dig if you will a picture. You and I engaged in a kiss. The sweat of your body covers me. Can you my darling, can you picture this? Someone upstairs is singing along, one of the Maginnis girls, and she’s got a sweet voice. Ms. Mac will look at you, not even imagining what you are planning on doing.
“It’s gonna be all right. You’ll be all right. You’re a good egg, Gabe.”
You have to get on the road soon but the road sounds hard and faraway. You’ve had a long day. Lay down on the Maginnis community couch. Just for a minute. Five minutes. Ten at the most.
***
8:08 p.m., a pair of red digital eyes impelling me out of the quiet house. I turn the car radio to WYLD and let Papa Smurf ease me down St. Charles Avenue, past Saturday night lights, past Delmonico’s and the ubiquitous Popeye’s and then onto the Pontchartrain Expressway, connector to the Interstate and its vast grid that covers America like a gauze. I shift to fourth gear and begin my limitless drive. I could fool ‘em all, just hop on the 10 and not get off until I reached
The raised crypts of the cemeteries, a sea of bone yards. Pass under the railroad bridge and its ever-changing graffiti messages. ‘Do the Dance!’ has been replaced with ‘Do the Dishes!’ Perfect. Cross out of Orleans Parish and merge with the Interstate. Traffic is fast, it’s a Saturday night all across
So buckle down and let’s get through Metairie, flat as an iron, dominated by a few conical hotels and then pass the Kenner police car, vacant for years, parked on the median to warn the uncaring and now I’m on the first bridge that gets you out of the city that care forgot, a long causeway over moon-dappled waters crossed by a ribbon of power towers carrying electricity to white folks on the north shore. Haul ass if you dare.
Fuck up and it’s over the side. Maginnis would say stay at 68 but I’ll do 72 as New Orleans recedes, black night arrives and there’s Larry Blackmon’s voice, now static, now clear, easing me out of my ancestral home and out into life, to go forward and do at last what needs to be done. ‘Girl I’m trying to make you see, I’d rather have you here with me, falling in love again. But baby until then I’ll be hanging downtown.’ And I want the chance to make it right, the way it was when I didn’t know anything at all. Back to the past, and if that’s impossible then create a new and better past. So drive on, sweet daddy, drive on. I’m 17 years old. I’m an unkillable, infinite being.
***
I enter a willowy landscape like miles of women combing their long tangled green hair. There’s enough moon to imagine you see colors but really the night is just brazen darkness made the more so by the cone of light that you travel in. A glance may train on the backseat, wondering what apparitions will arise. Might I see the old black man back there? Yesterday morning I saw his ephemeral figure shimmering in the window of Donald’s car. His look, his mien, the way the light passed through him, the way he regarded me with a hopeful yet fatalistic look, as if to say, ‘Oh no. don’t be just like them.’ Them referring to the line of killers of which I was one. Them that lived by the vocabulary of the gun. Don’t be like great-Uncle Felix who shot down three men with his brand new shotgun. Don’t be a murderer, a killer, a man without sleep, damned forever to pursue Macbethian visions. And I understand now who he is and why he’s here. He’s the phantom of the old man my father saw stomped to death, the phantom of the man who was dragged/carried, bloody and repellant down to the bayou and cast in the mud-brown waters to be borne on into Mother Night, food for critters, eye sockets for the endless God.
That old black man warned me not to do something stupid like shoot Donald Jones dead, for even if I ran away I’d never get far. I couldn’t deprive myself of kin and country and join the Foreign Legion, erase myself from the family photo album like an Orwellian device. No, I need to live, to do more, be more than just a hired gun. The old man’s spirit saved me then from totally bitching up my life and I wonder if he will turn up now and tell me to turn back, go home, stash the gun, take a nap, a long cool nap and wake refreshed and young and ready to carry on. I expect him any minute, but maybe he won’t show, or maybe he doesn’t cross state lines. No matter. I’ll be ready to talk him down with a single look, or at least a listen. “Hear that?” I’ll say, turning down the radio. “Hear that sound bouncing around the car? Do you hear it? ‘Gabriel.’ That’s what it is. It’s my name and it’s bouncing around the car like a wild sheet of newspaper.” But he’ll shake his head, the dead old man, for even with his powers he can’t hear what only I can hear and what only I can know.
***
The willows give way to hardwoods as the land begins to rise. Here and there a mighty white oak stands totem in its own field, dappled by the moon’s dead glow. Do you remember when you climbed such trees, when you lived only to scale those arboreal heights, to be the kid who went highest and therefore saw more? Is that desire still in you? Will it be the compelling mechanism that will send you down corridors of druggy good times and meetings with LSD Jesus? Maybe. Maybe the child will fight forever to dominate the brain. When Saturdays had nothing to do with guns and ammo and hunched over the killing wheel.
No, Saturdays were spent mowing lawns all day in the New Orleans sun, baked and brain-fried by sundown and then you washed all your grass-eaten clothes including your tennis shoes and showered off the day’s dirt tan and put on clean jeans and a velour shirt and your clean sneakers and caught a ride to the mall and walked around looking at girls and the Farah Fawcett poster at Spencer’s. You didn’t know shit from shinola and how good it was. You stood at the rail of the ice skating rink in the heart of the Plaza shopping mall and watched fine-rumped women in short skirts swim by. You ate an ice cream cone, sneered at the mall cops, stole a book from B. Dalton’s. You lived in fantasy and dreams and the world of tomorrow. Thirteen seems so long ago it might have happened to a different boy. What would you tell him, oh sagacious 17-year old? Stay away from girls? Study your math? Run away to the circus? Run away to the world? No, nothing really. Already I can see that every step I’m taking is the one I was made to make. Altering a single filament of time would shatter the whole mechanism, obliterate the dream.
***
A sign for the
***
The rich families are still rich in 1984 and they hold the land bisected by the Interstate. Hardwoods, palmetto-thick in summer, ghostly and black in the winter. It gives one a pleasant feeling after miles of weedy willows and the slow rise into higher land to come upon a remnant of forest amidst the south Louisiana sprawl of trailer homes and strip malls and Cajun this and Coonass that. You could be a traveler in a medieval time, a crusader returned from the wars, a conquistador home from darkest
And someday if you have any kind of nutsack, you will come back to the Hilton Hotel, all the Hilton Hotels of your past, and ask to see the manager, Larry or Steve or Peshawar or Dao or Rita or Susann or Nancy or Kate or in this case, it will be Tom, Tom something, like two first names, Tom Frank perhaps. And the desk clerk who you do not know will ask who you are.
“Gabriel Doucette.”
A proud name, an ancient name, a name with its own street in a not so faraway town and you’ve sullied that name that was picked out with such care. And you look around the lobby of the hotel where you know no one anymore and that’s a blessing. No, Henry is still here, the only black bellman, tall and handsome and a little grey at the temples; he remembers you and walks over to hug you.
“What’s up man, where you been?”
He’s so country you could kiss him, and you say where you’ve been all this time,
“Man that’s what I need to do,” he says. “Get out of here.”
But he won’t because he can’t, the wife, the baby, maybe two, he’s stuck and you’re free, free to fuck off the rest of your life.
You hear your name, you turn around and Tom the Hotel Manager is waving you into the suite of offices. He still has the same mustache, brown shirt and yellow tie. As you walk in you catch the eye of the Food and Beverage Manager who always knew you were a thief. Then you sit across from Tom. Where you’ve sat before, denying everything, lying through your eyes with a Batman button on your oxford shirt. Batman oughta kick your ass.
“What can I do for you?” he says, looking at you like you screwed his wife.
You tell him how you stole and lied and lied and stole. You say that you have no excuse, you’re not here to make an excuse, only to promise that somehow, someway, you don’t know when, you’ll pay that money back, however much it was, you don’t know and you never will. There will be a moment of silence in that office with the pictures on the desk of his two daughters, gawky girls holding fishing poles.
“I knew you were lying and I knew you were stealing,” says Tom. “That doesn’t matter anymore. Doing what you did today, coming in here and admitting what you’ve done, that’s what a man does. He admits his mistakes. He doesn’t lie to others because he doesn’t lie to himself.”
You sit there listening, not believing it, waiting for the cops to arrive or someone to spit in your face but they don’t, they won’t, not at all, not a bit, Tom will stand, you stand, he shakes your hand and puts the final nail in the coffin of your past.
“If you need a job,” he says. “Come see me. We’d love to have you back.”
You walk out the door feeling a new man.
“Goodbye, Henry.”
“You look out now, baby. I’ll be seeing you.”
He won’t. No need. There’s no need to ever go back there again.
***
The capitol building, lit by a million watts, looms on my right as I cross over the
He did what was needed and therefore he could go back to the past which had swiftly become a brand new present. Along the way he encountered the man with the Twitch and it set off an existential crisis for old Jack Burden. He couldn’t get it clear in his mind if the Twitch was just itself or if it was connected to something larger. Jack saw Willie Stark gunned down and he knew that he may as well have put the gun in the assassin’s hand. He killed his own father like Oedipus of old but saved his father as well. The bad dad was dead and the good lived on. Or vice-versa, for each man, Jack came to understand, has equal measure of good and bad and what we do determines what we are and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or something like that.
Willie’s capital city is behind me now and before me is the black, headlamp-lit highway. I love Jack’s love for Anne, the inarticulate feeling bigger than twenty suns. The older man writing about the younger man resonates deepest with the young. It is we who must struggle to tell the story of ancestral sins. It is we who must be agents of vengeance. It is we who must find and attach ourselves to something greater than ourselves. And so ‘All The King’s Men’ was something of a manifesto to our 11th grade English class. We debated whether ends justify means and I came out on the side of Willie Stark. It’s the do-gooders like me and Mussolini who want a world of predictability, minus the gas ovens. Classmates openly wonder whether I’m not the type to come to school with a gun. Not me. That’s not my speed. The pen, I pretend, is mightier than the revolver. I dedicate myself to the written and the spoken and not the silent language of the trigger pull, the moment of inhalation before the final exhalation. I want to be Jack Burden. I want the girl at the end and a chess-playing father and the house in the town named for our family, with a view of crashing gulf surf and a fire in the fireplace and my manuscript finished and the drink is just right, we’re all happy now, okay with mother’s absence, dead or drugged up in a convalescent home, it’s all the same to us, we sweet and happy few.
***
The thing about the songs you like when you’re seventeen is you think Kool and the Gang sat down and wrote your life out on a napkin and later set it to music and now it’s spinning on a turntable somewhere in the south
And so on into the future when you immerse yourself in Obsession and Guess, when you wear your polo collar up, then down, with an oxford, without, change your hair color until your hair falls out, slick it back with jell everyday for a year, dream you are an underwear model, an Esquire Man, the Soloflex Man. All along the way, your personal soundtrack will dominate your thoughts. ‘You’re my heart. You’re my soul. And my love has got to go. If it’s a thrill, then I will. Hey misled, be for real.’ For a few sweet years it will all feel real. Then you’re twenty-one and nobody thinks you’re funny anymore. You’ve wrecked cars and girls and friendships. You get off work at 7 a.m. wearing the black suit of the hotel desk clerk and you trundle down to Ms. Mae’s on
You only want to love and be loved. You can’t say your heart was poisoned. You can’t say that your emotional growth was stunted. That’s chicken shit.
You can’t be that forever man in all the Ms. Mae’s of the world, can you?
You can’t/won’t be the guy, the one who can’t leave high school, who still talks about the TD he scored against blah-blah and the time sophomore year when Miguel Champ was late for the blah-blah game because he was making it with JW at her house and they got caught and Miguel jumped out of the house naked and JW got grounded and that summer her punishment was making bunk beds and then her stepfather raped her in the bed she’d made, how’s that for irony, huh?
Please don’t be that guy.
Stay away from the old music. Misled, indeed. Turn the knob when they take you down memory lane. Do anything for your sweet 16 but leave Billy Idol to rock the house with a cane and an ear trumpet. Leave it be. Make new memories, new loves, new growth. Remember that you can only feel the way you feel when you feel it. It’s like cutting yourself. It’s never as painful as the first time, no matter how much it continues to hurt.
***
I hear the thoughts of passing truck drivers; catch in a glance all their hopes, dreams and fears. One hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gearshift, seatbeltless, I ride the wave of the insomniac, the night trawlers who people the Earth.
The Honda’s shell of glass and cheap steel around me and the radio picking up nothing but country and Cajun music and so it’s just silence and the roar of commercial vehicles passing me every 18 seconds.
I realize now why my old man has never given me much advice about women. He must have been a cherry when he met his first wife, his shortest marriage. Well, when your wife screws your best friend six months into ‘until death to us part’ you’d be a fool to stick around to see exactly whose death will part you.
JW is my first. She doesn’t know this. Years from now, I wonder if she’ll still remember our first time. The hotel room looming high above
***
When we wanted to find someone in 1984 we consulted the phone book, or called an operator.
‘Yes sir, how may I help you?’
You tell her that you’re trying to find your mother.
‘What’s her name?’
You tell her.
‘Where does she live?’
You don’t have the foggiest idea.
‘Try
And while the operator, a sweet-voiced lady with a touch of the
‘I’ll be downstairs,’ he said. ‘Take as much time as you need.’
You didn’t need much time. You sat on the floor in your mother’s apartment and played with your new toy. It was one of those long-beaked tin birds on a spring, yellow like a school bus. She asked you if you liked it and you said yes. You didn’t look up at her or around the room though it looked like all the other places you had lived with her, cleaner perhaps, a little less chaotic. Her boyfriend was back in prison. Your father had told you that. Her new baby was in a crib in the extra room. Your room, if you wanted to move back. You didn’t. You didn’t want to move back in with her because you didn’t miss your mother even a little bit. Nope, not at all. You’d gotten used to regular meals and your own bed free from crashing drugheads and an apartment that was quiet at night except for old movies on the black and white TV. You didn’t miss the wild, all-night parties that turned into soggy, grey, depressed next days, ashtrays full of needles and a pool of vomit on the floor and a kitchen that looked like hell had taken over. You didn’t miss any of that. And you looked at your mother and you saw yourself, blonde hair, blue eyes, pale freckled skin. The woman who had nursed you and birthed you and loved you sat there on the edge of her chair leaning forward, trying to get you to say that you preferred to live with her, right? She spoke as if you didn’t know your own mind, as if you hadn’t learned the hard way to think for yourself because in a house of heroin addicts nobody was going to think for you.
‘No,’ you said. ‘I want to live with papa.’
Her face snapped shut like a closing refrigerator door, click and the light was out. You had now joined the long (and getting longer) line of men who were letting her down. She stood, smoothed her groovy colorful skirt.
‘Okay if that’s what you want then fine. Fine. Go live with your father. But you remember that you had the chance to live with me and you messed it up. Remember that Gabriel. Remember that.’
And then she opened the window and called down to your father and he came upstairs and got you and took you down to his Volkswagen and put you in the front seat and made you buckle up and then the car started, you were moving, it was true, you were leaving now, she wasn’t running after the car or yelling at you or looking at you that way. You glanced up at the window and saw her orange curtains blowing. Then the window was shut, trapping a piece of curtain outside. That little flare of orange, peeking out into the world looked so lonely, so isolated. It wanted to be inside with the rest of the colors that would inevitably fade.
And you knew it then, that she would fall apart someday, she’d lose the baby and she’d lose another baby in Mormon country and she’d come as close as is necessary to losing her life before she’d get her shit together, before she’d send your father a letter saying that she was clean and she wanted to see you. You’d watch your father destroy that letter.
‘I don’t want her back in my life and I don’t think you do either. She’s bad fucking news.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says the operator.
She could be your mama. She could pull you to her breast and rock your blues into the next century. She could be the one that would love you the way only a mother can, flesh of my flesh, product of my loins. She would look at you and say, ‘I carried you inside me for the better part of a year. I brought you into the world in a fit of great agony and joy. You are mine and I am yours and we will never lose that bond.’ Say it. Please, say it. Say it, Miss Operator. Say you love me, say it. Say, ‘I love you son’.
‘I don’t show any listing,’ she says. ‘Would you like to try another name?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you sir. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
***
I do the math as I crest the bridge, one last magnificent view of Dante’s 8th circle, fire and steam and majestic buildings composed of pipes and reactors and scaling ladders. When it’s 2010 I’ll be 43. That’s old. That’s crazy old. Will the world even exist? Will we have made contact? Will we have blown ourselves off the planet, left it for the roaches and the sharks? Flying cars? Certainly. Jetpacks? To be sure. Laser guns? Absolutely. Space stations and a base on the moon? Are you kidding? Yeah. All of that and more. You can see it arriving out of the black landscape of prairie that surrounds
Will the simple things change? The car I’m driving, speeding tinnily through the night on a 1.3 liter engine, front wheel drive, made in
Hell, dream big. As you ride across flat land betrayed only by billboards and road signs, the big trucks pounding you but your hands are sure and the digital clock is your friend not your enemy and you still have gasoline and the gun is sleeping like a baby, hell, dream big, big daddy, dream the ultimate dream. Yes, you’ll be alive and no, the world won’t have ended and yes, you’ll be a writer and you’ll have a dog and a girl and a sunny place to live and the skies won’t darken with death each night, no, and most of all, best of all, you will have lived to see the Saints win a Superbowl. Amen, hallelujah and gimme the love.
***
What’s the difference between a Coonass and a dumb ass? Answer: the
I usually can’t remember jokes. Freud has a whole subset for people like me who pathologically forget jokes. Our brains don’t remember the story, or perhaps the imprint of the joke isn’t made unless we turn around and tell it again.
Here’s another one. A rare monkey is being transferred from the LSU Biology Lab in
‘Man, I did,’ says Mr. Boudreaux. ‘And we had such a good time, now we’re goin’ to Astroworld.’
***
My driving will be impeccable. It won’t be what I do behind the wheel that will be of concern. Hopefully. I can’t spend time rehearsing what I’ll do. Be like the ninja. Be present. Take four deep breaths. On the last exhale, do what must be done. When the moment is at its ripest. Not before or not too late. All is ripeness. So take it easy, coolio. Fiddle with the radio and pick up some conjunto and some country, lots and lots of country and commercials and so screw it, relax into the wheel and the bucket seat and remember to remember your first joke ever.
***
Or rather it was a dirty song. How did it go? ‘Not last night but the night before, twenty-four nigg-’
That’s about as far as you got before your stepmother cut you off. She was driving the old Ford Galaxy. You were heading home. You and your friend sat in the backseat, a roguish boy, king of the first grade. It was he who had taught you that song. ‘Gabriel, where did you hear that?’ said your stepmother, looking at you in the rearview mirror. The king of first grade fidgeted as you ratted him out. Your stepmother looked at him and said, ‘We don’t use that word in our house.’ No, you did not. That night your father said, ‘I’d rather you said motherfucker than say that word.’ Not that you had many opportunities to say motherfucker when you were six years old. It was the point of the matter. How he loathed and despised that word.
***
“That’s right,” says the old Negro.
It is he, the murdered man, Foot’s murdered man and my father’s murdered man and my murdered man as well and he’s here, riding shotgun, a mystic death-force helping me commit premeditated murder and then escape across state lines. He’s a specter, nearly silent, but he’s my sage, my Virgil and he’ll be here for me as long as he can, as long as I believe in him and the obligation that he represents.
“Your daddy didn’t cotton to none of that racist mess. He saw the worst people in charge of the best people holding down the poorest people. He saw all that and he decided to educate his mind. Of course, he owes it all to Mrs. Courvillion. You know that right?”
“Right.”
Signs pass, mileage to
“You mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
He lights a cigarette, cracks the window. His entire mien is like a black version of my old man.
“She’s the one that held him back in the 3rd grade. You know that right?”
“Sure.”
I recall dimly the relief I felt when I passed 3rd grade. I had heard it in my father’s voice when he described the humiliation of staying behind, of having his dumminess exposed to the world.
“She sat him in that desk and said, ‘Bennie you are going to learn how to read.’ And he did. You know he started out dumb as a box of rocks and by the end of third grade he was reading Tolstoy. ‘
***
I allow the old Negro and his cigarette to fade. No need to dwell on the ramifications of his arrival. Clearly, I’m losing my motherfucking mind. That’s fine. That’s cool. The road still rises up to meet me. I’m still a Coonass on the warpath for a couple of dumbasses. A nod of the head to Mrs. Courvillion, dead perhaps or really old and long retired, the school teacher that taught my father to read his way right out from under their noses, all of them, all the rednecks who used words like ‘nigger.’ My father rode Tolstoy and Keats and Yeats and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and Samuel Motherfucking Beckett right out of
***
Who doesn’t love a Stuckey’s? They have everything. Hot dogs, pecan logs, ceramic plates shaped like all 50 states. Row upon row of knick-knacks, untouched, undisturbed, unsold for the lifetime of the store. Not that Stuckey's has much competition out here in the middle of the
They get me coming as I wheel into the parking lot and go inside for coffee. I wander the aisles for a moment like a spaceman returning to Earth. The hard fluorescents, the elevator music, the calm and well-ordered world keeping perfect time at 2:30 in the morning. A pimple-faced girl at the register offers to sell me a lottery ticket from her high school. The grand prize is a shotgun. I decline.
“I wish I was allowed to enter,” she says as she rings up my coffee and a map of
With that she gives me my change. Fortified with coffee, I join the race to
‘She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman that I ever seen.’
If I could meet AC/DC I’d tell them that they got me through some dark days. How ‘Back in Black’ saved my soul, kept me in high school, kept me alive. How I rocked the house with my tape purchased through Columbia Records. How I had ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ on vinyl and I burned out the needle with that brain shaking riff. How I played ‘Highway to Hell’ deep into the night.
‘Night prowler, I sleep in the day. Night prowler, get out of my way. Night prowler, watch out tonight. I’m the night prowler when you turn out the light.’
A song about rape. A rapist’s fantasy or a fantasy about a woman’s fantasy, it’s hard to tell. Their music is full of that noise.
‘Let me put my love into you babe, let me put my love on the line. Let me put my love into you babe, let me cut your cake with my knife.’
What a lame rhyme. And what am I singing about anyway? Is this the kind of music I’m supposed to hear?
‘No one’s gonna warn you and no one’s gonna yell attack and you don’t feel the chill ‘til it’s hanging down your back.’
Is this the soundtrack of badness? Sensory elements telling me it’s okay, it’s what girls want, a little rough stuff, tie them up, break into their bedrooms, do anything for love.
The fool who doesn’t exactly think with his dick so much as his dick thinks for him. Is that what I am becoming? I see a blur of images, all the dirty deeds that have been done dirt cheap. I see JW and the night prowlers, then her and her stepfather and he’s saying let me put my love into you. It’s terrifying, this inability to control your own thinking, your own thoughts.
‘She told me to come but I was already there. Then the walls started shaking, the earth was quaking, my mind was aching and she was saying that you shook me all night long.’
***
I forgot my wallet at Stuckey’s.
And you know to turn around is futile if you left it on the counter but maybe not so turn around anyway which is not so easy, the exits are miles apart and then race back the way you’ve come, only twenty minutes or so away but it always feels like time moves faster and the distance is farther and you at last pass the east bound Stuckey’s, identical to its sister in every way, the same pecan rolls, the same angry teenager making change and then beyond to another exit and now back to the first Stuckey’s and pull into your same parking spot and hustle on in expecting to find Darlene or Roxanne or Tiffany or Sharon but there’s a dude behind the counter, he says the girl’s shift is over, she’s gone home or wherever and nope, nobody turned in a wallet.
It would be stupid to even think much less suggest that the daddy-hating cashier walked off with it, your money, driver’s license, library card.
Stupid to think but not impossible.
So back in the car and the coffee has cooled and you still have some gas but no more cash so be careful, whatever that means, drive the speed limit I suppose, 55 is fast enough my ass, I have a job to do, places to go, people to kill. Crank that FM station. You’re beyond the
And the gods save me. They put on the song that I need at this exact place and time. Do you hear it? Do you recognize that distinctive guitar riff and that pulsing drum beat? You do and you know exactly what I’m talking about. ‘And the radio plays that forgotten song. Brenda Lee comin’ on strong. And the newsman sings his same song. Oh one more radar lover gone.’
***
And if you’re a stooge like me, you imperil yourself and others until at last the old Negro, appearing like a dear friend, takes the map from my hand and steers me through Houston and into one of her many golden suburbs, a ring of homes in a cul de sac, sycamores rising, the scent of fireplaces in the cool air. An automatic sprinkler system steams to life, then another, then a third. It is a well-manicured world of
And behind those doors and up those stairs and in those rooms under those sheets, what monsters sleep? What do they dream about? Are they like the rest of us, or are we all in the same brew of denial? I’d like to think that my night sweats don’t compare to yours, Mr. You Know Who You Are. I’d like to think that in my dreams I am able to fly like Daedelus, free at last on wings of my own doing. I’d like to think that in your dreams, Mr. You Know Who You Are, each night like Prometheus, the great Roc comes for you and tears out your liver. And that each day while you recover and pray for death, your liver regrows. I’d like to think that yours is the sleep of the ones who choose to live by their own rules and therefore must be forgiven.
Yes, I said it. I can forgive you. I can finish this long look at the house where you did what you did, then drive home, put away the gun, never mention it to JW. Pretend it didn’t happen, that it’s the fevered work of a hashish-eating fool. That none of it went down the way I said it did. That we were all free and clear of bad thoughts and evil confessions. That she never said a word about what happened because nothing happened.
Nobody pushed over the first domino. Miguel Champ wasn’t late for the NOA game because he was at JW’s house trying to hit a Homerun. Her stepfather didn’t catch them in the act. She wasn’t grounded for the summer. She made no bunk beds and therefore her stepfather didn’t rape her in said beds. She didn’t flee the next summer to this house on this street in this city. There was a party in late July but JW wasn’t here. She was home with me. We had that last good summer before your senior year when you look good and feel good and if you can keep from getting knocked up or killing yourself you can have the best time of your life. That’s what should have happened and that’s what I should be writing about. But I can’t. You know that. To forgive, to truly forgive, you must write what you know.
***
Bad news. I’ll hear plenty of it in my time. Mostly from bosses. Fired. Fired again. I’ll live a life that Bukowski would be proud to call his own, shit-canned from damn near every place I worked, or the job went away, the business closed, the sugar daddy went sour, the Board mismanaged the funds. Boom, and the world slips out from under you, time on your hands to think about what was and what might have been and perhaps what might still be.
Someday I’ll have my own bad news to share. Someday I’ll take a ride with JW Jones to a burger joint and we’ll order food and then start to talk and we’re being watched, as always. ‘Not here,’ she’ll say. ‘I don’t want to talk about this here.’ You and this beautiful girl in flowered shorts and a sky blue top with spaghetti straps will ride to
And that is why you park across from the museum and you sit by the lagoon and you give her the bad news.
‘I want to take a break.’
She bursts into tears, just like a novel. She clutches your shirt and leans her head against your chest and weeps.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’
And you are free now, if you want to be and you can also undo it, if you want. You can say, Okay, you’re right; we should try to work this out. But you can’t and you won’t. You’ll just go ahead and let her digest the newest news. You’ll drive her home and walk her to that front door and for the last time you’ll say, I love you.
‘If you loved me you wouldn’t be leaving me right now.’
***
That whole thing is the unknowable future, however, so this is as good a time as any to wake the house. Six o’clock Sunday morning, I’m sure these people are just thirsting for bad news. Several rings before JW’s cousin Terry stands before me, a big man looking sleepy and annoyed.
“I’m sorry to wake you at this hour. I’m Gabriel, JW’s boyfriend from
Immediately his countenance changes. “I thought you looked familiar. What’s going on? Where’s JW?”
“She’s in
“She’s in
“No. I mean there’s no emergency. I can explain in a minute. But can I use your bathroom first?”
“Sure man, right down the hall.”
As he escorts me into his home a voice calls down from upstairs. Aunt Julia wants to know who in the hell is ringing the bell at this hour. I step into the bathroom as Terry heads upstairs to explain. Again, a moment of doubt. Nobody needs to know. I can carry this feeling with me for the rest of my life. Gabriel. A car alarm at 4 a.m. Gabriel. A cat screech. Gabriel. The dreadful thump of a bus meeting a pedestrian. Gabriel. Bones break. Gabriel. A toenail is torn from its root. Gabriel. A head-on collision with a pickup truck. Gabriel. A view from the crest of the Mississippi River Bridge with a view of Willie Starks’ empire and Jack Burden’s soul. Gabriel. Use the same faucet they used. Gabriel. Flush the same toilet they flushed. Gabriel. This is the house where it all went down. Gabriel. And the owners of the house have got to know. Gabriel. For me. Gabriel. For my sorry and imperfect soul.
***
Terry is in the kitchen making coffee. He offers me OJ and I drain a glass. Then he asks me what’s up.
“Ya’ll have a rec room?”
“A rec room? We got a pool table in the basement.”
“Can I see it?”
“The basement?”
“Yeah, can I see it?”
“You wanna see my basement? You drove all the way from
“I have something to tell you and I need to tell you in the basement because what happened, happened in the basement.”
Terry looks at me, then turns and hustles the coffee and a bottle of Tylenol upstairs to his mother. When he returns he walks through the kitchen and opens a door next to the pantry. He flicks on the light and descends the stairs. I follow, noting that the door can be locked from the inside. Downstairs, a single bulb burns, lighting up the low-ceilinged room. A ratty sofa. A washer/dryer. A pool table. A pool table. A pool table where her hands were pressed against the legs while they….a stereo, turntable, headphones. She was playing a record. Earth, Wind and Fire. ‘Reasons. The reasons that we’re here. The reasons that we fear our feelings won’t disappear.’
“So,” says Terry. “The basement.”
I don’t tell him to sit down. Why do people say that? Just spit it out. Say it and get it over with because there’s never an easy way to deliver bad news.
“Last summer during a party three guys came down here and jumped JW. Except one left without doing anything. The other two stayed.”
Terry looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“What!? Who!”
And I tell him their names. And he repeats them. He repeats them in disbelief. He loved them like brothers, he says. Brothers from other mothers and this is what they did. They ran a train on his cousin. They gangbanged his cousin while the joint was jumping and the juice was flowing and the record was spinning, ‘Two thousand zero, zero party over oops, out of time. So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.’ He punches a wall several times, then he looks at me.
“What the fuck, man? You drove all the way here just to tell me this shit?”
“No. I thought you’d know where they live.”
“I do know where they live. What you gonna do?”
“I’m going to kill them.”
“Oh yeah? Kill ‘em, huh? Well, all right. You brought a rod?”
“Shotgun.”
“A shotgun? The motherfucker brought a shotgun. Well, that sounds good. That sounds real, real good. Okay, give me five minutes to change.”
***
Sunday morning all over
“When did she tell you?”
“The night before last.”
“I wonder why she never told me,” he says.
“She said they had guns and would kill her if she told.”
“Guns? Eric and Jamaal ain’t got no guns. Those bush ass mutherfuckers ain’t got guns. Wouldn’t matter if they did. Wouldn’t matter one bit.”
We ride through the foggy
“Turn here.”
Turn down a side street and pull into the parking lot of a rundown apartment building. Park and get out and Terry gets out and you open the hatchback and take out the gun case and the gas can, you hear the slosh of gas, unzip the sheepskin and remove the gun, a Steven’s single shot crack-barrel, .12 gauge, your first gun. Load it with buckshot. Glance up. Three kids are riding their bikes down the street. Two chase one. Each has a toy pistol in their hand, the kind with red tips that sparkle when you pull the trigger. The guns rattle as the boys ride past.
“I got you, I got you.”
“No you dint, no you dint.”
***
We enter the courtyard. I’ve got my shotgun. Terry is carrying a plastic can of gasoline. There’s a swimming pool, surround by a rusty chain-link fence. A woman is in the laundry room, folding clothes. A small boy holding a Wild West revolver watches us walk by, his mouth dropping in wordless amazement. A TV talks from behind a closed door. The smell of bacon. We walk upstairs, turn a corner and stop at
“What the fuck, man? I was sleeping.”
Terry punches him in the face. Bam, and the boy staggers, his eyes wide in frightened surprise. He knows. He knows why we’re here. He’s dreamt about this day too. Terry kicks him in the nuts. He falls backwards. We step inside and I close the door as Terry continues to administer kicks.
“You mutherfucker. You and Jamaal ran a train on my cousin. On MY cousin, bitch.”
“No! It’s not true! It wasn’t me! It was Jamaal! I didn’t do anything.”
Terry delivers another series of kicks, then opens the can and sprinkles gas on Eric. “You feel that, bitch? I’m fixin’ to burn your ass up.”
There’s nothing on the walls, just a bong on the coffee table, a couch, a TV, video games. The sliding glass door onto the balcony is open. I should close that sliding glass door. That’s what I’m thinking as Terry steps over to me. The gas can is empty, the floor is soaked and Eric is bleeding and moaning. Terry asks me if I have a match.
“Nope.”
“Shit. Let’s see if this little bitch got one in his kitchen.”
The moment we step in the kitchen, Eric jumps to his feet. I lift the shotgun but Terry puts his hand on my arm. We both watch as Eric sprints through the living room, crashes through the screen door and dives over the side of the balcony.
“I knew that little Rambo mutherfucker would try that shit,” says Terry.
We step out onto the balcony and peer over the side. Eric is stuck on the chain link fence. His face is terribly gashed and he appears to have broken both arms. He tries to pull himself off the fence. He fails. He tries again. He fails better. A door opens downstairs, a brown face appears, there’s talking in Spanish, then the door closes.
Terry walks to the front door and opens it. A shaft of sun cuts across the wet tiles. I ask him if we should we mop up the gas.
“Nah,” he says. “It’s just water.”
***
The mist is burning off, but patches of fog remain in the fields, in the scattered copses of trees that are hanging on despite the encroachment of man and his need to destroy.
Terry guides me through the streets, turning me here, turning me there until we reach a neighborhood of middle class homes. We park across the street from a red brick house. Terry takes the shotgun, walks up to the front door and stashes it in the bushes. Then we head around the side of the house. He pauses at a window and taps on the glass.
“Jamaal. Wake up.”
He repeats it twice more. The blinds suddenly jerk and the window opens.
“Yo, niggah,” says a dark-skinned black dude with a Jheri curl. “What the hell you doin’ knockin’ on my window?”
“Lemme use your phone, pardner. Our car broke down.”
“What the hell you come to my house for?”
“We were in your hood. Yo man, just lemme use the phone.”
Jamaal closes the window and we head to the front door. It opens. Terry tries to introduce me but Jamaal could care less. Rubbing his eyes, he walks us through the house to the kitchen where a large black woman is frying ham.
“Mama,” says Jamaal. “You remember Terry?”
“Of course I do. How you been child?”
“Good,” says Terry.
“He needs to use the phone,” says Jamaal.
“Of course he can use the phone,” says Mama. “It’s right over there.”
Jamaal heads back to bed. Terry fetches the portable telephone and then leaves the room. I step over and introduce myself to Mama.
“Ya’ll had car trouble?” she says.
“Yes maam.”
“Aw, that’s a shame. You go to school with my Jamaal?”
“No maam, I’m from
“
“No.”
“Yes they did. In broad daylight. When that happened I knew it was time to go home. You hungry?”
I am but I don’t get the chance to answer because Terry is leading Jamaal into the kitchen at the point of the shotgun.
Mama drops her spatula. “Lord have mercy!”
“I’m sorry to have to scare you like this, Mrs.
Jamaal stands there in boxer shorts, utterly terrified. Same as Eric, he knew this day was coming. He knew it was coming from a long way off and from very far away but one day it would move towards him at great speed and suddenly be upon him. Because it wasn’t just JW Jones, now was it, friend? You know as well as I do that there were many other times when you spread your sickness. Ask around. People will tell you. You’ve been a busy boy.
“Tell her,” says Terry. “Tell your mother what you done to my cousin.”
“Oh my God,” says Mama. “My blood pressure, my blood pressure. I need to sit down.”
I grab a kitchen chair and she sits. “What is going on Jamaal?” she says. “What is he talking about? What did you do?”
“Tell her,” says Terry. “Tell her or I’ll smoke you, fool.”
His voice low, barely a whisper, Jamaal says, “Mama, I did something bad. Something real bad.”
“What you done, son?”
“We, me and Eric Head, we…we…”
“What?”
“We…we raped a girl.”
“Oh my God,” says Mama, putting a hand to her breast. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Why? Why, Jamaal? Why? Why on God’s green Earth would you ever do a thing like that?”
Jamaal doesn’t know why. Maybe it just sounded like it would be fun.
“Who was she?”
“Terry’s cousin,” says Jamaal.
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh my Lord. You don’t know. You don’t know. You done ruined that girl’s life forever, and you don’t even know her name.” Tears form at the corners of her eyes, run in silver streams down her rich brown skin. “Who are you? Who are you? You’re not my son. You’re not my Jamaal. You’re not the boy who sat by his grandmother’s side until she passed. You’re not him, are you? You took him away. You took him away and replaced him with somebody I wouldn’t recognize if Jesus Himself asked me who you are.” She gets up and with great effort, walks over to Jamaal and lays her hand on his face. “Jamaal, so help me child, I’ve loved you with all my soul. But today, hearing this, it makes me wish you had never been born.”
Standing there, crying and shaking, Jamaal shits himself.
Mama steps back. “Lord have mercy,” she says. Child, you done messed up my floors.”
***
Both of us seem to be more or less satisfied with the events of the morning. We do more before 8 a.m. than most people do all day. Terry asks me if I’m going to tell JW what we’ve done.
“Yeah, I guess so. It might make her sleep easier.”
“Cool,” he says, and that’s it, we’re at his front door, he shakes my hand then takes his gas can and walks inside his house.
Now I have to get to
***
And now is the day reversed, the flat wet ricey landscape and the double Stuckey’s and the great city of Beaumont with its single tall hotel and Orange, Texas with its row of factories that have altered the landscape into moonscape, the black and cinder-colored trees, the lifeless lawns of glass, and then the Sabine is on the horizon, the boaters hauling boats and the hunters in their camouflaged trucks and their three-wheelers lashed to the back and the big rigs hauling ass, cutting time, high on Bennies and porn and the kids wave and the teenaged girls show their braces and mama nods and father waves and you are all right and the world is all right.
And you are back in
***
The car runs out of gas ten minutes later. As I start to walk, it begins to rain. And now what was dream will become nightmare. Just as the hero thinks he has safely reached an
Therefore when the beat to shit Nova slows and then pulls over on the shoulder going the other way and the driver rolls down the window of the dingy white car and says, “Where you going?” you think it’s some kind of red neck joke. But you say “Krotz Springs. I’m outta gas,” and he says something to the guy in the passenger seat and then the driver says, “Hop in, we’ll give you a ride,” and you can’t believe it, saved, saved again, another messiah to help a voyager on his last voyage home. So you run across the highway and climb in the backseat and you sink into the sweaty dank filthiness and you say to yourself, Thank God.
***
The driver is a fat boy in overalls, no undershirt. The passenger is a skinny dude, tattooed, front tooth missing. They argue about the radio as we turn around and head towards Krotz Springs.
“Put on some rock,” says Fatboy. “Find some Zeppelin.”
“Zeppelin sucks,” says the Skinny Dude. “I’m tired of that old shit.”
Fatboy punches the Skinny Dude in the arm. “Never say that in this car. No, fuck that. Never say that around me, ever. I should kill you for even thinking that.”
The Skinny Dude rubs his shoulder. “Thanks for fucking my arm up. Now it's dead.”
“Good,” says Fatboy. “YOU should be dead.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You like Zeppelin, right?”
“Best band ever.”
Fatboy nods. “It sucks you ran out of gas.”
“Yeah. I’m really screwed. My wallet got stolen too.”
“Whoa,” says the Skinny Dude. “You are screwed.”
“Yeah. I’m gonna have to call someone collect to come save my dumb ass.”
“Well,” says Fatboy. “We got a gas can.”
“Sure,” says the Skinny Dude. “And we can give you a few dollars for gas.”
“Really? That would be great man. I just need enough to get me to
“Sure man,” says Fatboy. “We’ll work something out.”
He finds some AC/DC on the radio. Hells Bells. “Perfect,” he says as the bells chime and the grind of guitars begin to short circuit the mind.
And it is perfect. ‘I’m rolling thunder, falling rain. I’m coming on like a hurricane.’ And for a moment you three are one mind and one dimension and the music is loud and the window won’t roll all the way up and rain flies in and lands on the seat and it’s good, it’s like flying over the sea, you and them, all of you tapping something and humming a little and Hells Bells indeed, Hells Bells indeed.
***
Krotz Springs. A view of the bridge that killed my aunty paralleled by a much newer bridge. And the contrast in styles could hardly be more apparent. The old one is all cast iron and rust. The new bridge seems to be a parabola held aloft by the hand of God. Both of these bridges are a larger thing than itself. The old is the past, our family and our family sins. The new bridge is the future. Someday I will take it to the west, to
Fatboy starts the Nova and is rewarded with Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song.’ He drums on the steering wheel. The yellow Mustang pulls out of the gas station. We pull out and follow it onto the highway and then up the old bridge, passing over the very spot where my aunt exited this place.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re following that chick,” says Fatboy.
“I can see that. Why?”
“That’s a good question,” says Fatboy. “Why? Why are we following that chick?” He looks at the Skinny Dude. “Tell the man.”
The Skinny Dude, who’s adjusting something in his crotch, looks over his shoulder. “We’re gonna fuck her up.”
“What?”
“We’re gonna fuck her up, man. Me and my boy. You can fuck her too.”
“Wait, do you guys know her?”
“Hell no, brother, we don’t know her. But look at her man. She’s hot. You know she wants it.”
The blonde exits the bridge onto river road, a long thread of asphalt fringed on one side by swamp and the other side by the emerald green levee. “Perfect,” says Fatboy. “Fuckin’ perfect. There’s’ nothing out here. This is gonna be awesome.”
“Are you gonna do like last time?” says the Skinny Dude.
“Maybe,” says Fatboy. “Whatever it takes to get her to stop. And when she stops, that’s her ass.”
“Hey,” says the Skinny Dude. “Do you want me to say what I said to that last bitch?”
“Sure,” says Fatboy. “That’d be cool.” He cranks the music louder.
Over the crash of guitars the Skinny Dude looks at me and says, “Last time we wrecked this bitch, I told her ‘If my buddy thinks your ass is tight enough, he’ll let you live. And if I like how you suck my-”
“Dude, pull over.”
“What?”
“Dude, pull the fuck over. I am not doing this. Pull over right now and let me the fuck out of this car.”
Fatboy turns down the music. “What?”
“He doesn’t want to do it,” says the Skinny Dude.
Fatboy looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Aw come one man. Do it with us. We’ll give you a ride back to your car. This will repay us. Besides man, three dudes always make it easier. Sometimes with two, the bitches get messed up.”
“Yeah they do,” says the Skinny Dude. “They sure do.”
“I am not joking. Pull over and let me out of this fucking car. I am not doing this.”
“Yeah you are,” says the Skinny Dude, turning in his seat to point a little automatic at me. It’s a Titan .25, the same model my father once bought for my stepmother. She didn’t like it. Too many moving parts. For a while it was mine and from time to time I was allowed to empty a clip or two into the old muscle car on
And the Skinny Dude says, “You’re doing this with us man or I’ll waste your ass right now.”
“Yeah you will,” says Fatboy.
“Yeah I will,” says the Skinny Dude. “I sure will.”
And now like all good ninjas, you must take four deep breaths. One. Clear your mind of imperfect thoughts. Two. Imagine yourself as fluid and all powerful as water. Three. Erase doubt. Four. Take action. And when the fourth breath leaves my lungs, I sweep my hand across my face taking the gun with it. And it goes off, shattering the driver’s glass. And the car swerves off the road, into a ditch, we are launched into the air with the motor gunning like a horse in labor and thus propelled we meet a thick-trunked cypress tree, it’s Man versus Nature, and Nature triumphs. All fly forward. Fatboy goes face-first into the steering wheel. The Skinny Dude goes back-first into the unforgiving dashboard. I smash into the back of the bench seat.
***
I awaken a moment later. My nose is bloodied, the gun improbably in my hand. The engine steams and ticks. ‘Immigrant Song’ continues to play. I push Fatboy’s body forward in the seat and emerge from the vehicle. Car crash. There’s no feeling like it. I’m alive. I look back at the smoking, ticking Nova. Hammer of the Gods, indeed. Those two misguided souls may be still kicking but I’m not sticking around to find out. I toss the pistol in a culvert and it goes off with a flash and a bang. I head back down the river road and up the onramp of the new bridge over the
The End
André Carrière
818.915.4735
