Biloxi

by Mary Miller

  In retrospect, the night I’d spent in jail after the fight with Ellen hadn’t been so bad: the handcuffs had pinched, yes, but otherwise I’d been alone and drunk enough to not care too much. And no one wanted to examine my asshole for contraband; they hadn’t seemed interested in me at all. I’d asked for a phone call and they’d taken me to the phone. I asked for water and they brought me a cup. But I knew it had been a fluke—I’d seen enough TV programs to know it had been a fluke. I got myself riled up into what could only be described as a full-fledged panic attack. I was sweating and my heart was beating fast. I kept checking the mirrors, convinced I could hear the sirens and see the blue lights. I understood why people tried to outrun the police, abandoned their vehicles to attempt it on foot.

  By the time I made it home, car securely in the garage, I was a wreck. Once again I’d sweated straight through my shirt. I hadn’t had much to eat and it was after five o’clock. The day had been wholly unlike my typical day, which consisted of TV and my chair and the occasional trip to the grocery store. Half the time I didn’t even make it to the grocery store but shopped at the gas station. The closest gas station had become a humiliation, though, because the same young man was always there, and though he was pleasant enough, I felt he judged me for my purchases. I judged myself for my purchases so why shouldn’t he? As much as I told myself he saw hundreds of people a day and didn’t give a shit about some old man buying toilet paper and beer and ice cream sandwiches and male enhancement pills (to test them out), I didn’t believe it. I was pretty sure he was a Muslim. He was Arab, anyhow.

  Sasha greeted me at the door. She was like a different Sasha: curious and worried, wearing real clothes. The house was pleasantly warm and cheesy-smelling and I hoped to God there was an enormous pan of lasagna on the stove. She led me to the bathroom and told me to take a nice hot shower—she would have some delicious food for me and a cold beverage when I got out. She was wearing a dress—strappy, yellow as sunshine. I touched one of the straps, plucked it.

  “Oh my,” was what I said to her, and she petted my head. Smoothing the hairs in the right way.

  I was dying to kiss her. I wanted her to touch my leg beneath the table and my leg would stay right where it was, still and calm. And then I would maul her. Jump on top of her and make her quiver, make her beg for more.

  I finished cleaning myself and sat in my chair with a beer while she set the table.

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow,” I announced.

  “I know it is!” she said. “How exciting.”

  It didn’t excite me much. A birthday would never be anything like it had when I was a child. It was like Christmas—you could try to recapture the glory of Christmases past, but the harder you tried, the more it felt like a sham. The best-case scenario was for someone to bake you a cake and you’d get to blow out some candles, but even this was a simulation.

  I had experienced a lifetime’s worth of emotions in a day, but my hair was nicely combed and my clothes were clean and I was feeling nearly cocky. I hoped she could sense it, and that it impressed her. I felt ready all of a sudden. It was the woman, Diane. She had done it. And then a terrible feeling was upon me again and I could see the document I had left in my car. No—it wasn’t in my car, I had thrown it away, trashed it at the gas station. It had been one of those cans that tried to eat your fingers and I’d had to reach a good portion of my arm in to shove it inside.

  CHAPTER 14

  I WOKE UP EARLY and took an accounting of the previous day. I had passed out early, drunk, having driven my car home drunk. I did not feel well. I did not feel well at all. I’d met a woman and she had given me her phone number. Her name was Diane and I’d liked her, though I hadn’t at first. She had grown on me. I had a headache and my mouth was dry. What the hell had I been drinking? White Russians. What an odd thing for me to drink, but they were delicious and I’d enjoyed them very much. And then there’d been Wild Turkey and beer and a plate of lasagna, Sasha in her yellow dress looking so pretty, asking if I liked her dinner and trying to talk to me about my day, but I’d hardly said anything to her before passing out in my chair. I must’ve gotten up and put myself to bed at some point but I didn’t remember that part.

  There was the usual shame, but it was manageable. I hadn’t pissed myself. I was in one piece, my car in one piece. I wasn’t in jail. I hadn’t said or done anything terrible. I had just wolfed down a plate of lasagna and gone to sleep.

  It was my birthday. I was sixty-four years old, which seemed like an impossible number of years to have lived, and I was alive. I didn’t quite feel alive, though the hangover helped. Perhaps it was the reason, or one of the reasons—the main one being that I liked to be drunk—that I got hangovers as frequently as I did: proof of life. They also provided me with some immediate goals: drink a lot of fluids, sit in the sun and sweat, pop a handful of vitamins from the cache that Ellen had left, etcetera, etcetera. If the hangover was really bad, take a couple of ibuprofen and go back to bed.

  In the kitchen, I drank a glass of water and then went to let Layla out of her room. As I reached to grab the knob, there was fear in my heart—they were gone, they’d left me—but Sasha was sound asleep and Layla was standing there with her tail wagging, eager to start the day. I petted her and her mouth hung open in what I’d come to think of as a smile.

  We had a routine, the early risers, the two of us navigating the mornings alone. It was my favorite part of the day, hungover or not, and the bird was there to join us. I thought the usual thoughts about how I’d like to kill it, how it was driving me mad, had already driven me mad and yet I wasn’t going to do anything about it because it was too much trouble and also I might miss it if it was gone.

  I sat in my chair and petted Layla with my feet as I drank from a fresh bottle of Dr Pepper that had magically appeared in the refrigerator. It was a small, personal bottle, but I needed it more than Sasha did at the moment and I could replace it before she even woke up. After the Dr Pepper, I drank a cup of coffee and ate a piece of bread, which was awful and tasteless. There was no comparison between bread and toast, I thought, as I chewed. I chewed and swallowed and it seemed to go on a long time, much longer than necessary, as I pondered the good qualities of toast, how you could put the butter on before in nice thick pats and there’d be delicious buttery pockets or you could put it on after, which also had its merits, but would be difficult to spread and couldn’t quite compete with those buttery holes. Then I took Layla out to get the paper but it hadn’t come yet. I had beaten the paperboy. I wondered if the paperboy was actually a boy, or a man or a woman or a teenage girl. I hoped the paperboy was a boy about twelve years old on a bicycle but I knew he wasn’t and then a car drove slowly by and two teenagers were chucking papers out of their windows. The driver tossed one at my feet and waved.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m going to take a dump and then we’re going to the beach, goddammit.”

  Half an hour later we were parking in the lot. There was a sign that said dogs weren’t allowed on the sand, but this seemed like the kind of rule that I could not, in good conscience, follow. First, though, I walked her over to the dumpster and let her sniff around, lick the pavement.

  “Let’s see if you can find a T-bone,” I said. “Maybe you can find a bigger T-bone than the one you found before, or are they all about the same size? What bone is a T-bone, anyway?”

  She was fast, efficient. She gobbled a whole bunch of shrimp shells while I watched a homeless man approach from a long ways off. I had a prejudice against the ones who were veterans, in particular, because they used it as an excuse—always holding up signs asking for handouts and I suspected half of them had gone to Canada while I’d lost my brother, my one and only sibling, leaving my parents heartbroken.

  “I don’t have any cash on me,” I said. He looked like all of the other homeless men who hung around the beach, though a good bit younger than I’d initially thought. It was like they were all related.

  “Oh, I
don’t want money,” he said, as if it was ridiculous for me to think he wanted money. In my experience, unknown men did not approach you in parking lots for anything except money, that or they were going to rob you. He did not come over, for example, to compliment my dog, though he did that next, and before I knew it, he was giving me a story about driving over from Louisiana for an interview on an oil rig and getting separated from his friend and spending all his cash on a motel room and now he needed gas money to get back home. He was stuck. A request for gas money was a popular one these days. I decided to test his skills.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked, looking around. There were a few cars and trucks in the lot, four to be exact.

  “It’s at the motel.”

  “Which one?”

  “One of the ones along the beach here,” he said.

  “You don’t remember the name of it?”

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I just got into town yesterday and my brother left me. . . . It’s a motel. It looks like a motel. Why do you need to know where I’m staying?”

  “I thought you said it was your friend.”

  “What? You aren’t friends with your brother?”

  I wasn’t going to get into that with him. “Anyhow,” I said, “that’s tough luck, it really is, but I still don’t have any cash on me. I only came here to let my dog eat trash.”

  He shook his head and thanked me anyway. His shoulders were slumped, his head hanging down. The sight of it really socked me in the gut. And then I started thinking he probably just wanted a nice warm biscuit and a couple of cold beers, a pack of smokes, and who was I to judge? Who was I to deny a man a biscuit and a cold beer? I was no one. I wasn’t anyone at all.

  Ellen called and I hit Decline, goddamn Ellen with her fifty-dollar haircuts and beachfront condo.

  “Sir!” I called. He turned, his whole face lifting. “Wait a minute.” I went to my car and unlocked it. I kept a whole cup of change in the console, mostly quarters and dimes, and handed it to him. An entire cup! It must have been something like ten dollars. He didn’t seem as thrilled as I would have liked, but he said he appreciated it and I knew this time when he was looking down it was into a cupful of silver. I had improved his situation slightly, but the main thing was that he was no longer bringing me down. My spirits, I thought, they are very tenuous, changing with the wind. It was my birthday and I still had a hangover but the dog had just scored a bone, though not a T-bone. All was right with the world, or at least okay. Then she took a gigantic dump and I didn’t have any way to pick it up. I looked around, knowing I looked guilty for doing it but unable to stop myself, and dragged her over to the boardwalk. It was a long boardwalk, built after Katrina, and I had never walked it before even though it was a short distance from my house. It was a nice boardwalk. There were many nice things that I never took advantage of and I was going to have to start seizing the day.

  We arrived at the end where a couple of guys were fishing. I thought about asking how the fishing was but they were weather-beaten and rough and I was afraid they wouldn’t be responsive. It was hard to tell, though. Some people who didn’t look friendly were quite friendly once you engaged them. And I felt like I should also be fishing instead of just walking a dog up and down a boardwalk. So we turned around and walked back, got in the car right in time for Layla to start gagging.

  On the radio, a young man was talking about depression so it had to be one of the God stations. He was going to tell me how his life had improved and how wonderful everything was because he had found God. He said he wasn’t sad, that for him depression was an inability to imagine a future for himself. Something about that hit me: I had never been able to imagine my future, either. If someone asked where I saw myself in five or ten years, as they often had when I was younger, I answered in the abstract: health and happiness, enough financial security to pay my bills. But those things weren’t a future. I wondered if I had been depressed my whole goddamn life. Since I was a child. Since I was in the womb. If that was just the way it was for some people and they didn’t even know the difference.

  When we got back to the house, Sasha’s car wasn’t in the driveway or on the street. I had a bad feeling, like the feeling I’d had that morning when I went to let Layla out of the room, but she’d probably just gone to the grocery store or run to the gas station for a new Dr Pepper. There was no reason to panic. I figured there was probably a note but there wasn’t one in the kitchen or in the den. I opened the door to Maxine’s room and her bag was gone. In the bathroom, which was a goddamn mess—lumps of toothpaste in the sink and hair all over the tub, scraps of toilet paper everywhere—her toothbrush was gone.

  Layla walked the house with me, whimpering.

  “Well,” I said. “It looks like your mama has left us, which surprises me—not that she left me but I figured she’d take you with her. What a world we live in.”

  I truly felt Layla understood these words. Or she didn’t understand the words but she got my meaning: Sasha was gone. I sat on the floor so I could look her in the eye. She wasn’t feeling much like looking me in the eye, though, so I just let her stare at the floor while I petted her, flapping her ears slowly and covering her eyes and mouth. Blind, deaf, dumb.

  “You never know with people,” I said. “They’re unpredictable. And it’s possible your mother is on drugs, if I’m being perfectly honest, bad drugs. Something wasn’t quite right with her, though this isn’t to say that she doesn’t have some good qualities. She does. I have tasted her meatloaf and enjoyed it very much, and her lasagna—I don’t remember her lasagna because I was pickled but I bet there’s some leftovers and I’m sure it’s tasty. And there’re plenty of other things, too, like her love of blankets and blue jean shorts. Showing off her shoulders.”

  It did not seem like a very good list, but it was thorough.

  I drank another glass of water and then we went to the backyard and sat. There was a mouse running along the fence, a goddamned mouse. Whatever cool and breezy weather we’d had was gone. I felt unclean, the poison coming out of me. Somebody ought to shoot me on the spot, I thought, as I followed the mouse down the fence and around the patio. Once it was gone, I looked at nothing for a long time until a flock of birds passed overhead and then a plane. I wondered if Sasha would return for the dog and, if she did, whether I’d let the dog go with her. I couldn’t imagine it. I would have to fight her on that one. She didn’t have the money to sue me, anyhow, and had abandoned Layla by all accounts. It was possible she’d had something to do with getting rid of the dog in the first place, though I didn’t see how that fell in line with the rest of the story. But the whole story was odd, the entire story was something I couldn’t fathom, picturing myself walking up to her house with a briefcase of religious pamphlets, walking into that house with all its cereal boxes and dead flowers. I hoped I never saw her again.

  I had her dog and that was that. And Layla was better off with me. I was a better dog owner, had proved that to myself. Since I couldn’t remember if I’d fed her that morning, I fed her again.

  My phone rang. Digging it out of my pocket, I managed to drop it. It was Diane.

  “Is this Louis?”

  “Yes, this is he.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I dropped my phone,” I said.

  She asked if I wanted to meet for lunch. I still felt like hell—sweaty and fuzzy-headed, not right at all—and I didn’t want to leave the house again, but I also didn’t want to tell her no. It was just bad timing, I felt, as if I had a million things on my plate, but most of the things on my plate were out of my control. I should call the Social Security office, though. Call Ellen back and bawl her out.

  “I could really use some hair of the dog,” she said. “And I’m on vacation after all, so I’m not going to judge myself for it.”

  “No reason to do that.” The mention of a drink perked me right up. It sounded like exactly the thing I needed and I didn’t know why I hadn’t tho
ught of it before, a nice cold beer or a Bloody Mary to take the edge off.

  “And today’s your birthday,” she said. “We have to celebrate.” She said we had to, no questions, no saying no. I walked back inside with Diane still on the line—she had started telling me what her family was up to, where they’d gone the previous night—and noticed the spare key was missing. Sasha had taken it. There was no use looking for it elsewhere in the house. I wasn’t willing to risk leaving Layla alone so I’d have to take her along wherever I went until I had the locks changed. I wondered if this was something I might do myself, though I wasn’t particularly handy. My brother had been handy, even at a young age, he’d been able to fix things. He hadn’t just been the better version of me, it was like there was no relation at all.

  “So, where should we meet?” she asked.

  “Let me think,” I said. I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t go to any of the places I used to go, couldn’t imagine sitting in a booth that Ellen and I had eaten at dozens, if not hundreds, of times and yet here I was the local—and a man—and she expected me to give her a time and a place. I racked my brain for a festive restaurant that allowed dogs where I wouldn’t see anyone I knew. All I could think of was the place next to the place that we’d been the day before, which was basically the same—colorful menus and fish tacos overlooking the water.

  We agreed to meet in an hour at Shaggy’s.

  I showered and dressed, trying to think if I had any valuables to hide in case Sasha returned. This prompted me to take a quick look around the house for anything that might count as a valuable, and that might already be missing. The TV and DVD were still in the living room and there was also a smaller TV in my bedroom, untouched. But my iPad, which I’d last seen next to my bed, wasn’t there. I checked my drawer for my wedding band and the good watch that needed a new battery, both gone. What else did I have that she might have taken? I walked through each room. In the kitchen, the blender was gone. A blender! I couldn’t believe it. I had really liked that blender, too, a nice one Maxine had given Ellen and me one Christmas. It crushed ice like it was nothing, never gave me any trouble.