by John Nichols
Still, the Green Gorilla had conveyed him relentlessly from here to there. It had successfully hauled everything from dead cattle to granite boulders to the weighty loads of green piñon Joe cut every autumn with his two-hundred pound solid-steel 1927 Pioneer chain saw (which dislocated his shoulders every time he used it). Loaded well above its stock railings, the truck had never failed to reach Chamisaville, where Joe sectioned the wood using a hydraulic splitter of his own fabrication. Then he retailed the logs for seventy dollars a cord. Good Lord, he mused, how many times had he rattled along dirt roads toting a full load of piñon during late October storms, his shoulders aching, his hands cramped (and frozen), snowflakes that fluttered through the open window plastering his chest and his crotch white, while he sobbed and croaked out rock-and-roll songs to keep his blood flowing on the interminable way home?
Heather’s self-righteous little voice cut through his reveries.
“Boy, Daddy, are you ever gonna get it. Mommy’s having a real conniption. Why didn’t you come home last night? Your name is shit on a platter.”
“Go wash your mouth out with soap,” Joe said dispiritedly. “You got a filthy gab, Heather.”
“I’m rubber and you’re glue. Everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.”
Glumly, Joe asked, “Why is she so pissed? What did I do that’s so wrong?”
“You didn’t come home last night. What were you up to, out messing around with all the chickie-poos?”
Joe stared at her, his face all squinched up in a puzzled, disapproving expression. Heather wore her pink, Easter-rabbit pajamas; they had feet and a ball of white cotton for a tail on her butt. Her perky blond hair was in double ponytails attached with rubber bands. A pair of Heidi’s solid-gold hoop earrings dangled from the earlobes Heather had made her mother pierce nearly three years ago. And lipstick, of course. Sunday mornings being when she was allowed into Heidi’s makeup paraphernalia (which Heidi never used anymore), she usually painted herself up like a Pigalle streetwalker. A fresh plum-purple maquillage on her fingernails completed the garish damage.
Joe said, “How did such an apparently nice little girl like you turn out to be such a despicable yenta?”
Heather twitched haughtily, flaunted her backside, and, as she strutted snootily away, called to him: “Boy, I wouldn’t wanna be in your shoes. She’s fit to be tied!”
Heather loved dramatic sayings. She picked them up at the drop of a hat, then overused them incessantly. She adored dramatic situations, also. Every time Joe and Heidi had a spat, she would approach Joe, asking, “Are you guys gonna get a divorce now?” When Joe snarled, “What are you, Heather, a lousy ambulance chaser?” she replied coolly, “I hope you get divorced, because then I would be able to have two mommies and two fathers.”
“Why do you always refer to her as a ‘mommy’ but to me as a ‘father’?” Joe asked irritatedly. “If she’s your mommy, the least you could do is make me your daddy.”
“You’re too much of a grouch to be a daddy,” she always replied.
And Joe always halfheartedly ordered her to “Go directly to your room.”
Whereupon she usually held up her right hand, the knuckles turned toward him, all the fingers spread wide, sneered “Camouflage!,” and flounced away, rubbing his nose in her insouciantly swinging tushy.
“One time in ten years,” Joe shouted after her, “that I stay out all night, and she makes a federal case of it, my whole happy little family throws the book at me!”
“It’s your own fault,” Heather replied, without breaking stride. “I can’t help it if you’re a dodo.”
“Up yours, Chicken Little.”
“Hey, pipe down out there,” came Ralph Kapansky’s gravelly voice from the tipi. “It’s Sunday morning. I’m trying to meditate!”
“They’re gonna draw me and quarter me,” Joe said miserably. “They’re gonna emasculate me, stuff my private goodies in my mouth, publish in the newspaper that I’m an archcriminal and an adulterer, tattoo a scarlet A on my bosom, kick me out of my own house, take all of my money, maybe cut off my right hand Arabian-style, and send me packing.”
Morosely, he walked over toward Ralph’s tipi, halting beside the plump mechanic-pornographer’s powder-blue sensory isolation tank. It was a large vinyl-lined casket half full of salt water, into which Ralph shut himself for hours whenever his internal stressometer demanded a hit of nirvana, altered consciousness, or becalmed brain-wave activity. That is, he entered the tank whenever in need of relaxation, and lay floating in briny uteral darkness until his alpha, beta, and theta brain waves and hypertension were back under control.
Joe knew at least a dozen people in the valley who had Float-to-Relax tanks in their backyards, garages, or game rooms. He had always mocked them, but right now he could have settled gratefully into Ralph’s lukewarm womb, closed the hatch, and floated for an eternity in the soundless, gently sloshing neutrality.
“What are you meditating about?” Joe asked disinterestedly.
“If you’d only shut up, I could leave this blubbery old temple of the soul, and zip off to Anami Lok, wherein the sacred SUGMAD dwells.”
“What’s a SUGMAD?”
“You’re kidding. You really don’t know what the SUGMAD is?”
“No, actually I’m just asking the question to see if you know.”
“Egads!” Ralph gestured to a third, invisible party. “He doesn’t know what the SUGMAD is!”
“Forget it.” Frowning, Joe slouched away. “I never brought it up.…”
All these minutes stewing on death row could drive an inmate bonkers: better to face the music. So Joe squared his shoulders and started climbing up the ladder to his second-floor domicile.
“Eckankar!” Ralph jeered good-naturedly. “The ancient science of soul travel! I’m off to see the SUGMAD, the mighty SUGMAD of Oz!”
Joe flipped him a finger.
Michael occupied a deck chair on the roof. He cuddled the cat, Barby Lou, in his lap, and was eating a bowl of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran while reading the Gordons’ Sunday funnies. In response to the boy’s negative look, Joe asked, “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
That was his stock answer: “Nothing.” Michael, what happened in school today? “Oh, nothing.” Michael, what happened in the movie last night? “Oh, nothing.” His other habitual reply was “Okay.” Michael, how was the football game on Friday? “Okay.” Just okay? “Yeah.” Anything special or memorable happen? “No, nothing.” Ask him how he felt—it was always “okay.” Ask him if he liked school—it was “okay.” Did he enjoy his teachers? Sure, they were “okay.” How about the lunches? “They’re okay.” What did he want to do that weekend? “Oh, nothing…” Of course, Joe realized that underneath Michael’s imperturbable facade lurked a human being of diabolically complex dimensions who suffered excruciating torments and joyous revelations almost hourly. But right now, all Michael was prepared to divulge to grown-ups was his name, his rank, and his cereal brand.
“What happened to Dick Tracy this week?”
“Oh … nothing.”
“Hey,” Joe barked angrily. “How about a little more information, huh? How about some faint sign of intelligent life? I’m sick of your deaf-and-dumb moron act.”
Smiling, Michael gave him the finger. “Fuck you, Daddy.”
Too tired for threatening to throw his gawky, giggling boy off the roof, Joe returned the birdie and marched on. Occasionally, these displays of prepubescent insolence bugged him, but not often. Brought up in an atmosphere of terrifying formality in his own home, where sassing his father and various stepmothers was a capital offense, Joe had determined that his own kids would have it different. Let them heckle if they wanted, did it hurt anybody?
In front of the door he almost raised one hand to knock. Then, uncertain if a beautiful lady or a ravenous tiger awaited him on the other side, he turned the handle and entered his happy home.
* * *
The house, as usual, was a god-awful shitheap. Yesterday’s sleeping bags and blankets, Mad magazines and sandwich crusts and Richie Rich comic books, and empty yogurt containers accumulated by the kids during their morning cartoon orgy still littered the floor around the TV set. Yellow Hot Wheels track sections were scattered everywhere as if blown to smithereens by miniature Nazis. Plastic imitation-marble chess pieces lay inertly here and there, as if slaughtered while frantically fleeing. Somehow, a towel or two, a pair of Heidi’s panties, and a football helmet had joined the fray. Hundreds of tiny white pieces of chewed-up paper from Michael and Heather’s last spit-wad war added to the mess. And newspaper pages in eighteen different two-page sections were perched atop various noisome heaps like large carnivorous butterflies. What is it about semimoneyed, middle-class, bourgeois families like ours, Joe wondered, that dictates we must live like this amid our own offal?
Off in a corner, Heather was putting a dozen dolls to bed in a mound of pretty pillows. She glanced up with one of those profound, all-knowing smirks Joe associated with children possessed by the devil or by sadistic psychic powers as exhibited in horror movies. Seated in a nondescript armchair, her lovely brown limbs swaddled in tennis whites and a maroon-and-yellow rugby shirt, Heidi was reading the newspaper. Classical music issued from the stereo. On weekdays it would have been James Taylor, or Laurindo Almeida and Salli Terri, or Gary Burton, or the MJQ. But on Sundays it was always Chopin, or Debussy, or the Brandenburg Concertos. Only when everybody had left the house could Joe play his funky old blues records: Reverend Gary Davis, Pink Anderson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Big Bill Broonzy.
Joe fell head over heels into his buffoon pose. “Hey everybody, the prodigal returns! How come nobody was out to blow a fanfare when I came in the drive?”
Heidi said, “Hello, Joey, how are you?” Confirming his worst fears that he was a goner, her voice sounded like frosty fricatives squeezed through the wringer apparatus of an old-fashioned washing machine.
“Well…” Joe slumped into a wooden chair at the table they used for eating. “I guess everybody knows by now that our good friend Peter Roth blew it last night.”
“He called,” Heidi said. “I tried to get you at the bar, but they said you had already left. Then he called again this morning.”
“Well, what’s his frigging excuse?”
“They had a fight, he and Julane. I guess this time it was a really bad one.”
“They always have fights. How could that stop him from coming? He spent twelve thousand of my dollars for that cocaine. There’s a mini-industry awaiting his arrival.”
“This time it was worse than usual.”
“What’s ‘worse than usual’? They threaten to divorce each other every Tuesday.”
“I’m only repeating what he said, Joey. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you call him up and find out for yourself?”
Her voice sounded so tight that if it were wound one more time it might snap out of her head in a great snarl of springlike vocal cords, a laryngeal Slinky gone amok.
Joe said, “You sound terrible, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“No, wait a minute, don’t be stupid. It’s not ‘nothing.’ You sound weird.”
“If you don’t know—oh, Christ, I don’t want to talk about it, I really don’t. It’s too dumb.” Lurching up from her chair, she whipped her lovely blond hair around like a colt, and, tears in her eyes, fled into the bedroom. Heather scorched her father with a smug, accusatory look of doom.
“Wait a minute—!” But the phone rang.
Peter Roth said, “Where the hell you been? What’s going on out there?”
“I was waiting at the goddam bus station for you to arrive.”
“All night?”
“Hey, Peter, do me a favor—”
“I called at one o’clock to save you a trip in to town, but you’d already split. Heidi said no sweat, she could find you and warn you off. I call again at eight o’clock this morning and it’s like talking to the morgue out there. She says you never came home. What’s the matter with you, shmuck, you lost all your sense of class? If you gotta take chip shots at another pussy, don’t you have enough decency to be a little less blatant?”
Joe flushed angrily. “Uh, Peter. I was supposed to pick you, and a certain-little-commodity-which-shall-remain-nameless-on-the-telephone, up at the bus last night.”
“What can I tell you? I hit her, she called the cops, I spent three hours in jail.”
“You hit Julane?”
“Yeah, I still don’t believe I did it. I spent two hours, though, baking a meatloaf. So what happens? The bitch comes home with her mouth full of garbage and starts laying it on me. I couldn’t take it, I got mad. She grabbed the meatloaf and chucked it at me. I spent two hours working on that meatloaf! It had chopped onions, bread crumbs, the works. It was a piece of art, and Anna Magnani here, with a rose tattoo for brains, picks it up in her bare hands, burns the shit out of her fingers, and throws it at me!”
“Did she hit you?”
“Whaddayou mean, did she hit me? I boxed Golden Gloves; I played basketball at Temple. I got moves like Earl the Pearl. Did she hit me?” he reiterated scornfully. “Jesus Christ, Miniver, whaddayou take me for, bush league?”
“So what happened to the meatloaf?” What he really meant to ask was: “What happened to the cocaine?”
“Whaddayou think? Her dog ate it. I comb him every night. I tweeze out all his ticks. I take him for a walk on his leash every morning and every evening, and the ingrate sees a meatloaf skidding across the linoleum, he grabs it and gobbles it down!”
“But that’s no reason not to—”
“I blew up. I went berserk. I started to beat the dog, so she opened her fat mouth and really lathered me in scum. I was shocked. I turned around and said, ‘Call me that again, sewer lips, and I’ll kill you.’ So she called me that again, and what could I do? I hadda slug her!”
Joe said, “But that’s absurd.”
“Tell me about absurd. I almost broke all the knuckles in my right hand on her jaw. I also broke her jaw. And I loosened, it must of been, I dunno, maybe five, call it an even half-dozen, teeth.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t either. I’m sittin’ there on the floor, holding my hand and vomiting, cause it hurt me so bad, and she’s over in a corner hollering for the cops in this hysterical high-pitched scream—I never heard anything that eerie. Like a banshee. And the dog’s over in a living room corner cowering with meatloaf crumbs in its jaws. Not to mention that on its way over there it knocked the stereo off the coffee table. It was a Ufer, the best rig on the market. I had Banashak speakers. The system cost me over a grand.”
“And you spent three hours in jail?”
“The neighbors called the cops. They actually showed up thirty seconds later. Last year our place got hit by a band of junkies, I arrived home just as one of the little glueheads was going out the fire-escape window with the TV. So I called for the gendarmes—they arrived three hours later! But my wife screams for a pig because I broke her jaw, and the place is crawling with uniforms before I can even properly crucify Lassie over there in the corner.”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“Get a divorce, what else? She said I’m a brute. You know what she called me? A ‘mentally retarded orangoutang’ with an ‘anemic dick.’ I couldn’t believe it. We used to hang around South Philly eatin’ Pat’s cheese steaks. I even held her hand in the
Rodin Museum!”
Joe mustered his courage and said, “Peter, what about out here? What about the, uh, present you were bringing me? Plus you promised to help us build a house, remember? We were gonna catch a thousand trout.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like you’ll be building many houses out there in the immediate future. Man, that woman was hurting. What’s the matter with you that you could be so clumsy?”
“Listen, you don’t know what’s going on out here.”
“I got ears,” Peter roared. His wonderful belligerency buoyed Joe despite the writing on his own wall. “I’m a sensitive human being, maybe even an artist, I know when something stinks like week-old halibut. I talked to a funeral home this morning. Heidi sounded about an inch and a half east of suicide. How could you be such a prick?”
Joe said, “So you’re not coming?”
“I broke the lady’s jaw. She ain’t only threatening a divorce, she wants to sue me. I wish the dog had choked on that meatloaf!”
“But … but what about the stuff you were supposed to bring?”
“What stuff?”
Talk about obtuse! “You know, the gift you planned to lay on us.”
“Gift? You mean the cocaine?”
Ouch! “Hey, man, do you have to shout it out on the telephone?” Joe checked in all directions, expecting tommy-gun-toting G-men to burst out of the woodwork at the mere mention of the dope.
Peter laughed. “You think they got taps on our telephone? Man, are you paranoid. What have you ever done to warrant their professional scrutiny? Joe, you aren’t even a medium-sized fish in their lexicon. In fact, you ain’t even a perch or a stickleback!”
“Hey, I’m sorry but I’m very nervous. This is hairy stuff. I also happened to invest my life savings in the project, so naturally I’m eager to recoup the investment plus. I need the bread for a closing in nine days.”
“So you’ll have it. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t have the wherewithal for making that money. It was supposed to arrive last night.”