The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

  “You got hardly any time left, Michael. Then you’ll have all summer to adapt to a new neighborhood.”

  “Well, we’re not going with you,” Heather said, “and that’s final.”

  “Heather, you stand up right this instant and go pack your suitcase or I’ll really start kicking ass around here, and it won’t be a damn bit funny.”

  To Michael, Heather said, “Gimme that piece over there, it goes on his leg.”

  At a loss for words, Joe hovered over them, capable of destroying their puzzles with one swift kick and of knocking their insolent little blocks off with one brutal haymaker, yet he could not act. Apparently, to them he was a small irritant, a mosquito buzzing on the outskirts of their action, and they had decided that, if they ignored him, he would soon buzz off.

  Joe said, “I’m gonna start counting, dammit. You kids better pay attention.”

  “We still have a whole bunch of puzzles to do,” Heather informed him.

  Joe exploded: “I don’t believe you monsters! You know what would have happened to me if I had defied my father like this? He would have slapped me unconscious, grabbed me by the ankles, and dropped me down the laundry chute. And you know what my mother would have done? She would have grabbed a chair and beaten me over the head with it. Then she would have snatched a log from beside the fireplace and chucked it at me.”

  “What’s a laundry chute?” Heather asked.

  Joe said, “If you guys won’t do it, then I will.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll pack your goddam bags.”

  Heather exaggerated her typical obnoxious shrug: “It’s all the same to me.” And both kids sniggered. Michael set about finishing their work on the ape puzzle.

  “Jesus, I don’t know why I’m not killing you rats!” Joe stomped into the bedroom. “In my time, if somebody talked back to their folks like that they were boiled in oil!”

  Many moons ago, he had very carefully stored the children’s suitcases in the back of their closet. No longer were they very carefully stored where he had placed them.

  “Where’s the suitcases?” he growled … loudly.

  “We don’t know,” they chimed back … in unison.

  “Well, I put them in your closet. Now who moved them, dammit? I’m sick and tired of every time I try to find something around here, it’s never where I put it!”

  No response from the living room.

  “Did you kids hear me?”

  Vaguely: “Uh huh … yup…”

  “Well, then answer me.”

  “Maybe somebody stole them.”

  “Who would steal such lousy bags? Come on, Heather, use your noodle.”

  “I already did in a bowl of chicken soup.”

  Joe said, “If you kids don’t hop to it, I’m gonna flare. And then you’ll be sorry.”

  Heather pantomimed an enormous yawn and spoke to Michael. “Give me that piece over there, the one with part of his finger on it—no, not that one, the other one … that’s right. Thanks.”

  Joe warned, “I don’t think you guys realize I’m serious.”

  The mouthpiece, Heather, future shyster for both the Mafia and some multinational corporate entity financing fascism around the globe, calmly replied: “We know you’re serious, Daddy. That doesn’t go over there, Michael, it goes right here. This piece belongs over there.”

  “I’m gonna count to three, and if you two little pricks aren’t on your feet and hunting suitcases by then, the first thing I’ll do is destroy all your puzzles. Then I’ll break every toy in your room, especially your Baby Alive, Heather, and I’ll burn all the Mad and Cracked magazines, Michael.”

  Michael looked uncomfortable and started to rise. Heather said, “You wouldn’t dare.”

  With A Little Voice telling him this was no way to commence a kidnapping, Joe strode purposefully into their room, gathered the Baby Alive doll, three Mad magazines, and two models off the display shelf his kids had constructed and painted by themselves, and returned to the living room. “Watch this, you guys.”

  Michael stared. But Heather feigned intense interest in their puzzle. Onto the floor Joe dropped two fragile plastic airplanes that Michael had meticulously painted and decalled, and, in five quick stomps, reduced them to rubble.

  Heather looked up.

  One at a time, using swift no-nonsense rips, Joe reduced the Mads to smithereens and casually allowed the confetti to drift off his fingers.

  Then, their beady, astonished eyes indicating rapt attention, Joe tore off the doll’s head, arms, and legs: pathetic pink appendages clattered onto the floor.

  “That’s for starters,” he said icily. “Now get your spoiled-brat butts in gear and find those suitcases before I actually get pissed off.”

  Hurriedly, they rose, circled Joe without letting their eyes off him for a second, and rushed to do his bidding. Michael found one suitcase behind a stack of games, a pile of filthy Jockey briefs, and a set of blocks and orange Hot Wheels tracks beneath his bed. The other turned up under an enormous dirty-clothes pile in the linen closet. Something rattled inside it—a half-dozen cat turds, hard as marble. But when the kids went to pack, they had no clothes in their bureau drawers.

  “No clothes?”

  Meekly, Michael said, “I guess they’re all in the laundry.”

  “Doesn’t your mother ever go to the laundromat?” Joe was a little frightened by the enormous anger causing his temple veins to stand out rigidly. “Can’t she take even a tiny bit of responsibility when I’m not around?”

  Michael asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. We’re just going.”

  “I still don’t wanna leave,” Michael whispered.

  “You can’t make us,” Heather said. She was close to tears.

  “I’m your father, and you’ll do what I say whether you like it or not. Now, go gather some of your dirty clothes from the linen closet and fill those suitcases.”

  “But—”

  “Go!”

  They went.

  Joe felt almost giddy with power. Never had he treated his children so insensitively. Always, even when he screamed, they had accepted his anger as a put-on, his ferocious epithets as a jest. Today was the first time he had ordered them about in a tone that absolutely meant business. Today was also the first time they had actually raced to do his bidding without arguing the semantics of his case until he retreated from their wizened little sophistical half-brains in total frustration.

  Not such a bad feeling, this: a case could be made for fascism in the family! In fact, Joe experienced a downright sensual blast of heady well-being he’d rarely known. From now on, whenever he wanted a clean bathtub, the Kitty Litter divested of its fecal harvest, or the wastebaskets emptied, he would simply appear on the scene with a hammer in one hand and Heather’s E-Z Bake Oven in the other hand, and start counting to ten.

  “If you want to bring any toys or books, put them in too,” he said gruffly.

  Heather growled, “Boy, are you ever gonna be sorry.” But she packed a Raggedy Ann doll, two Sesame Street coloring books, a box of forty crayons, and a miniature tea set. Michael threw in the chess set, a slingshot, and three Hardy Boys mysteries, and they were ready to haul ass.

  “Take those suitcases down. I’ll be there shortly.”

  Michael said, “I’m hungry.”

  “We’ll eat on the road.”

  “But my stomach’s about to explode.”

  “Okay, make yourself a sandwich. But hurry up.”

  “I’m hungry too,” Heather said. Like condemned prisoners, seconds before the gallows, they would use any stalling tactic, hoping for the governor’s last-second pardon. Which in this case would be Heidi’s arrival and subsequent dramatic conniption, Joe surmised.

  In the bathroom, he confirmed his worst premonitions. The tea box lay in the wastebasket. So she had done it—willfully, callously, insanely deprived him of a small fortune! Or was the empty box a ploy to throw him off
the scent? Suppose she and Scott Harrison had plans to market the dope in secret, get married, and purchase Eloy Irribarren’s land for themselves?

  Using a bar of Dial soap, Joe scrawled a message on the medicine cabinet mirror:

  I took the kids. Screw you

  and Scott Harrison!

  J.

  PS You owe me $100,000!

  * * *

  SOMBRE-AND-FAIRLY-SILENT characterized the children’s mood as they loaded the bus. It was a little like leaving the chancellory bunkers during the final battle of Berlin in 1945. Pinched faces, compressed lips, weary and frightened eyes. Now that he was actually going to make the snatch, Joe felt self-conscious, and rather stupid. He wanted to cop out, call it all a big joke—ha ha. Instead, he slammed shut doors, initiated the crazy sequence necessary to fire up the engine, and, casting but a single backward glance, hit the road. Beside him, Michael and Heather stared through the windshield. Joe beeped nervously. The kids’ heads swiveled; they fixed apprehensive, already-growing-adult eyes on their former home, saying au revoir to their childhoods, to all the cheerful unfettered times of youth. Only when the Castle had disappeared did they face forward again, their hard, mistrustful eyes peering into a future where beatings, street hustling, child pornography, and shoeshine kits waited to forge them as cynical little diablos long before their time.

  Michael leaned over, whispering in Heather’s ear. After he finished his spiel to her, she asked: “Daddy, are we gonna go through the capital?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. I haven’t exactly figured out…”

  Like: Where now, brown cow? To a seaside retreat in a quaint Mexican village? To Dallas or Birmingham or New York City, and a return to the ad game? He would score a mint quick, then fly to Majorca one jump ahead of detectives Heidi had hired to track them down.

  “Well, if we go through the capital, can we stop at the Baskin-Robbins?”

  While he, the responsible parent, worried about detectives, escape, and earning a living, his children concerned themselves with the truly crucial issues in life—namely, ice cream!

  “We’ll see.”

  First off, Joe steered into the plaza, parking in front of Harbinger’s Ski and Sport. Nick Danger happened at that moment to be darkly passing by, casting no furtive glances either to the left or right as he plowed along with his suitcase full of—money? dope? Dead Sea Scrolls?—to yet another mysterious assignation.

  “What are we gonna do in here?” Michael asked.

  “Stay in the car. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “But why are you stopping?” Heather demanded.

  “None of your business.”

  “If you don’t tell us, Daddy,” Heather teased, “I’ll shoot you right through the heart.” She pointed Diana’s revolver—the very weapon for which Joe planned to purchase ammunition in Harbinger’s—at her father.

  “Where did you find that?” Joe snatched it from her, too surprised even to castigate her for pointing a real gun at an alive person.

  “It was on the floor when we got in the car.”

  And therefore must have fallen from his pocket. “Christ on a crutch,” Joe moaned, slamming open a glass door into the sporting goods store: “I should be wearing diapers!”

  Returning to the car, he tossed a box of .22 shells into the glove compartment, and they took off. Heather opened her mouth, but Joe beat her to the punch:

  “Don’t ask, kid. Like I said, it’s none of your business.”

  A silent quarter-mile later, they hit their first roadblock. It consisted of all the usual amenities: two backhoes, a telephone-company truck, a generator, three ninety-thousand-pound prefab concrete four-way sewage pipe connectors, eleven worker-owned pickup trucks, twenty-one indolent hard-hats drinking beer and scratching their bellies, and one large pit emitting noxious vapors.

  Joe braked, fishtailed, turned around, and sought escape from the Chamisaville quagmire by another road. For six minutes they headed due south on the bumpy dirt artery until a fairly extensive puddle, of a fluid somewhat resembling water, blocked their path: yet one more faultily constructed and sloppily interred sewage main had sprung a leak. How bad were the potholes beneath the surface? Pinching his nose, Joe decided not to risk it. No point to bogging down in that hideously noisome pool of excrement, whose fumes, no doubt, would kill them long before a Highway Department helicopter arrived to whisk them away.

  They traveled in reverse for a hundred yards, negotiated a turn in someone’s driveway, and chose another route in another direction. Heading west, this time, they soon found their escape route blocked by a cable TV crew whose trencher had just chopped a ditch across the road prior to laying down cable.

  Asked how long the delay might be, the foreman, one of Wilkerson Busbee’s hippie capitalists, replied, “Aw hell, man. It’s late, we’re all quitting for supper in five minutes. Tomorrow we’re all going to the Hanuman fiesta. So this won’t be done until the weekend.”

  “But I can’t drive across that trench like it is now.”

  The foreman assessed first the trench, then Joe: “I never said you could, man.”

  “Well, then how am I gonna get out of this crazy town?”

  “Did you try Alta Mesa yet?”

  “It’s blocked off by another sewage-line break.”

  The amiable freak scratched his head. “Geez, whaddayou know? How about Route 240?”

  “It’s all messed up south of the S-turn by a convention of backhoes and monstrous prefabricated concrete culverts.”

  “Wow, that’s too bad. Why don’t you try Valverde? That’d get you a little bit south of all the construction down where they’re excavating the underground cables for the high-school-and-hospital traffic light they just installed that doesn’t work.”

  “Are you positive Valverde is clear? Last week, didn’t they yank out an old culvert and forget to replace it?”

  “That was last week. I heard they installed a new one this morning.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Again, Joe backed up, regained 240, and hung a louie on Valverde, another quaint dirt path teeming with rocks and potholes. As they jounced over mounds of ungraded gravel covering the new culvert, Joe gave a cheer: “Free at last!” Ruffling Heather’s hair, he added: “Cheer up kids, I think we made it.”

  But, as always, he was a fool, he’d spoken too soon. As they rounded a bend, an enormous felled cottonwood tree blocked the route. A guy wearing a black widebrimmed Mack hat with a leopardskin band, a red-velvet sheepskin-lined Afghanistan vest on which a monkey had been embroidered, and prefaded Gucci denims, and a girl in a silk granny dress and air-force flight boots, sat on top of the tree sharing a joint.

  “What the hell happened here?” Joe asked.

  The Afghanistan vest shrugged: “I dunno, man. I must of miscalculated.”

  “We thought it would fall the other way.” The girl giggled. “But it didn’t.”

  Joe said, “If it had fallen the other way it would have crushed your house.”

  “Naw, it wouldn’t have hit it, man. That house has got powerful karma.”

  “Why did you cut it down in the first place?”

  “Oh we asked it permission first,” the girl explained. “It said it was okay. Like, you know, it granted us this really beautiful favor.”

  “But why?”

  “Sunlight,” the vest replied. “We got a ton of skylights, but the tree was still blocking out most of the light. Plus, of course, firewood.” He extended his arm, offering the roach. “Want a toke? This is dynamite shit.”

  The transmission complained loudly as Joe jammed the shifting stick into reverse, and wheezed off to search for another of their rapidly diminishing escape hatches from Chamisaville.

  Heather asked, “Are you and Mommy gonna get divorced?”

  “That’s what she implied in her note this afternoon. In any case, she hired Chamisaville’s number-one gunslinger to do the job.”

  “Well, if you guys get divorced, whic
h one are we gonna live with?”

  “Neither. We’ll probably send you to a military orphanage for juvenile delinquents.”

  “Come on, Daddy, be serious. Which one are we gonna live with?”

  “I imagine we’ll split the responsibility. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Michael will live with me and you’ll live with Mommy—during the days, that is. But every night you’ll switch: Michael will go to spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights with Heidi, and you’ll spend them with me. Tuesdays and Thursdays, we’ll do it backwards. You’ll spend the days with me and the nights with Heidi, while Michael does just the reverse. And every other weekend you’ll spend together with me, except in February when you’ll each spend two contiguous weekends together, first with Heidi, then with me. Got that?”

  Heather said, “If you and Mommy get divorced will you marry Nancy Ryan?”

  “Hey, Heather, you know sometimes you’re really an obnoxious little girl.”

  “Well, will you?”

  “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to degrade or incriminate me.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that too much,” Heather said brightly. “I think it’d be neat to have two mommies. Then, after you get divorced, maybe Mommy will get married again, and we’ll have two fathers, too. I hope she marries somebody who isn’t a garbage man, with a real car that starts up every time and has a heater.”

  “I like that. I paid your hospital bill when you were born, I changed your diapers for two solid years, I spent billions of dollars filling you full of the best food money could buy, I took you to the hospital when you had pneumonia and stood guard over you night and day until you got better, I gave you birthday parties and lavish Christmas mornings, I taught you how to bake cakes and cookies, I gave you kitties and puppies to make you happy, I held your hand on the first day of school … and you’d throw me over, just like that, for some creep in a late-model car and a cushy job.”

  “I only call ’em as I see ’em,” Little Miss Wiseass rejoined.

  “What about you, Michael? Don’t you have any savage or ironic verbal daggers to thrust into the quivering belly of your defenseless father?”

  “What’s ‘ironic’?” he asked.