His room looks empty when he gets back to the Kellogg, but this doesn’t bother him either. Rodney takes off the green suit and returns it to its spot in his closet. He stands there in his underwear for a little while then puts on his work pants, changes his undershirt, lies gently on the bed with his hands behind his head as he looks out the window.
There wasn’t much time to grab his things from his girl’s house this last time they broke up, before she came back from her job. Her brother stood in the living room watching him.
“C’mon, man. You know I won’t take nothing isn’t mine.”
“I know it,” his girl’s brother said, arms crossed over his chest. “But she asked me to. She said to stand here and supervise, so that’s what I got to do. She’s my baby sister.”
“You don’t have to do nothing you don’t want to,” Rodney said. He kicked a box across the floor but regretted doing it. It wasn’t her brother’s fault that he had to watch. Things just hadn’t worked out between Rodney and his girl, that was the problem.
Most all he has now are clothes and most of them are ratty. Olive work pants the city gives him, a bunch of tee shirts. Rodney mows grass in parks and vacant lots, around abandoned houses. He has a hot plate in his room, on a table next to his bed because he likes to cook lying down. There’s a pine closet that sticks out from the wall by the door and his bed is angled so he can look out the window. His girl had a TV and she paid for cable. Rodney kind of misses watching what was on each night, most of all in the summer after mowing was finished. He misses lying on the couch with his girl too, even though he won’t let himself miss her. Most of the time it’s more comfortable to be alone, that’s how he sees it. Rodney’s legs are hot and he doesn’t like being shut up in a room with somebody else whose legs might also be hot. They’d make things worse for each other.
His room at the Kellogg has a big window, which is what he watches after work now, the downtown buildings reflecting the last light of sunset. And then the fluorescent lights of the offices pop on after a while. It’s a drowsy happiness this gives him.
In the morning he sits outside on the edge of a flower box and waits to be picked up and taken to where he will work for the day. Rodney has mowed for the city a long time, fifteen years or more. The man Rodney works with has learned a lot about him over the years, but even he doesn’t know Rodney’s mother was a white lady, that she came from Hastings and moved east to work for Mutual of Omaha in the fifties. She held more than a few jobs for them, over three decades, all clerical, before there were computers on every desk. Rodney’s father worked at Mutual too, that’s how they met. He was a custodian. They lived together for a few years in the Leavenworth neighborhood. It wasn’t such a great place to live, just as the Kellogg isn’t now, because there were junkies on the sidewalks and slumlords let most of the houses go to shit. But the people who lived there would let you be. They wouldn’t hassle you for doing things differently than most folks wanted you to. Rodney knew this. He understood.
His father left when Rodney was thirteen years old, but he came back to visit most weekends, even when his life was running short, living alone by then in some innavigable parcel of land north of Cuming, south of Ames, east of 40th, west of the river. The man died and was buried during the three years Rodney was away in the army. Rodney could have had a furlough to return for the funeral, if he’d requested one, but he didn’t. His mother had moved back to Hastings by that time too, since Rodney was in the military and she’d retired early. She was fifteen years older than Rodney’s father. She worked a long time even after she retired from Mutual, simple stuff she was used to doing with insurance forms, for a while at the hospital in Hastings, a few years after that for a shyster lawyer.
Rodney wished someone would have been there to meet him when he came back from the army, but it wasn’t a big deal. In those days men had to drive up from base after serving, which was from Arkansas in his case. He rode with a few guys he knew who were heading his way, another from Omaha and a couple from Sioux City who had the car. They stopped at the dog track in Council Bluffs because the two with the car wanted to gamble.
The family of the other guy from Omaha was waiting outside. That guy wanted to give Rodney a ride. “C’mon, buddy. Get in the car,” he said, but Rodney shook his head and jogged after the two from Sioux City who were entering the track. “I’ll find a ride,” Rodney yelled back. “I’m going to bet some.”
Rodney did like to watch the greyhounds run. That’s what he did for a few hours, even after the guys with the car decided to head on. He sat inside the smoke-dense building with a smattering of other men who bent over their laps to study the odds. Rodney distracted himself by watching the greyhounds pound the earth on the other side of the glass, those long dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit along the rail. They went around the track and then back into a box.
He hadn’t thought about it in real terms until then, that his father was dead. It made him sad that his dad died young—he didn’t even know what had done it. Rodney wondered if he was a man then, since he no longer had a father. If that’s what would do it.
During an intermission he walked outside and across the parking lot, jumped a fence near the interstate and jogged across the bridge to Omaha. He was in fatigues still, a rucksack sagged over his shoulder. Rodney couldn’t keep his breath running over the bridge and had to stop every so often to look down at the river, as if he were lost in a strange country, a new man in a lonely and desolate place.
It was that summer Rodney found the job mowing. Then there was the man he worked with to talk to if he wanted. And he’d see his mother a few times each year until she was unable to travel. And then he met his girl, although that never lasted as long as they thought it would.
Rodney and the other man work this afternoon in an overgrown lot on Park Avenue. This is still his neighborhood, his part of the city. First they roll the mowers off the trailer, then tilt the blade houses up to unwind grocery sacks and wire fencing from the blades, then they put on goggles and gloves, spray bug repellant that smells like bleach on the fabric that covers their legs and arms. Rodney surveys the yard through blustering clouds of mosquitoes, looking for objects that might break the mowers—pieces of metal, chunks of lumber, a broken suitcase—and for bodies that have been dumped. He’s heard stories about corpses hidden in the weeds, girls with skin coal black from decay, their shirts torn off, skirts pulled up over their hips, but he’s never come across one.
The address of the house is spray painted in big orange numbers across the front. This house had a fire, a long time ago by the looks of it, and was abandoned. Through a hole in the roof Rodney sees the charred frame of two-by-fours and what looks like an exercise bike missing its wheel, the slow drift of white summer clouds churning in the sky beyond the hole in the roof. Closer to the house there are empty bottles of booze, aerosol cans, containers of isopropyl alcohol meant to jumpstart cars that folks will drink if they’re cold enough. Homeless people live here in the winter, in houses like these, leaving behind piss stains and soiled clothes that can’t be worn anymore.
After starting the engine, Rodney drives towards a wall of weeds and pushes it over with the mower, then, as he circles the yard, his tires etch a concentric pattern into the undergrowth, jigsawing around the fixtures, a fire hydrant, a light pole. The engine jumps under his seat, straining to turn over as it chops weeds and grass and beer bottles and whatever else is in there, stirring up dust and ten thousand furious insects.
Rodney keeps thinking that he would like to have sung the hymn right for the old woman at the home. He doesn’t feel bad about lying, about saying he’s a gospel singer, but he would like to have sung to her the way the hymn was meant to be sung. As he kills the engine after mowing up to the foundation, Rodney thinks that maybe one day he will sing to her, or to someone else, to the lowdown woman in the room next to his who caterwauls the blues every night. He used to sing all right and might be able to again. It doesn’t make a lo
t of sense to him, sitting on top of the mower, watching the bugs settle back to the earth, but maybe one day he’ll sing again.
(Tamara Jones)
Aaron met Tamara Jones outside a liquor store in Omaha. It was just a come-on. She walked out and Aaron took her picture. She laughed at him at first. He charmed her with persistence.
She kept a room in a boarding house and that’s where they went to drink. They had some beers and screwed. It wasn’t anything special.
Tamara sang along with the albums she played the whole time he was there. She only ever stood up to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, or to flip a record. She laid naked on her bed and wailed disconsolate incantations, tilted at different keys, half-notes, trying to exorcise the slow undulations of her blues.
It really bothered Aaron the way she did it.
Bad Faith
1
It was after a show at Sokol Underground. I’d been driving up to Omaha once or twice a week that semester and having a few drinks near the back of the room while the bands played. Nothing serious. Not like some girls. Just a g-and-t or two in that smoky basement venue under the gymnastics club, listening to the bands. I bought their albums, stuck their pins to the strap of my bag then drove back to Lincoln when the show was over.
Things changed when I saw the Zapruder Films. A couple of guys from the band invited themselves over to my friend’s place for drinks. She talked me into going too and it wasn’t such a big deal. I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time. My friend Allie was tall and buxom, a blonde in a skirt and banana-yellow tights, with a blue headband. I was the opposite of her, short, but was trim enough to get noticed. Me and Allie knew each other from high school, back in Aurora, the town we grew up in. The guys from the band were named Sammy and Eric, and they both played guitar. They’d known each other a long time too, had met in junior high homeroom and started listening to the Ramones. “The rest is history,” Sammy told me, though I hadn’t asked him about it. Their band wasn’t well-known. I’d never heard of them anyway. They weren’t very good and were just opening for Malkmus because their drummer was the kid brother of a guy who used to play bass for Pavement. Something like that. I wasn’t really listening.
The four of us watched Fargo and drank screwdrivers in Allie’s apartment. There weren’t enough glasses to go around so Sammy drank his out of a cereal bowl. Monopoly was pulled out of its box but we didn’t end up playing. It was too much trouble to count out money. We just watched the movie and laughed about each other’s accents. The Zapruder Films were out of Boston. They drawled in ways different than we did.
Then Allie and Eric kissed for a while, rubbing each other’s jeans while Sammy and I sat on the couch across from them, pretending we didn’t see what was happening, like we were very interested in the movie. I think of this whenever I see William H. Macy on TV now—how I sat like a mouse next to Sammy while Allie got on his friend.
Allie took Eric to her room. She grinned wildly at me as she closed the door, leaving me alone with Sammy.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a girlfriend, but there’s an agreement in place.”
I said, “Oh.” I didn’t really understand what he was saying.
“I’m not supposed to do anything below the waist,” he explained. “Otherwise we’re good. She understands what goes on out here.”
I hadn’t wanted to do anything with Sammy, but when we started kissing it wasn’t such a big deal. It was sexy the way his tour scruff scratched my lips and how the calluses on his fret hand tickled the skin of my neck. His long curly hair and days’-old clothes were permeated with cologne and sweat, cigarette smoke. It was cliché, I knew this, and it caused me to vacate my senses.
Sammy pulled my shirt off and teased me in ways no one had before. With the guys at the dorm it was more like they were tuning a radio, but Sammy knew what he was doing. He somehow knew my body.
I wanted to draw the line somewhere, to stop him before he went below my waist—like his girlfriend had made him promise—but I couldn’t overcome the fluency of his experience. He pulled off my tights and panties so he could go down on me. But before I’d even felt his tongue, he changed course and was on top, working around my fingers to push his thing inside.
“Don’t,” I said. But he insisted. Maybe he was egged on by my objection, by the fact that, even though I was wet, he had difficultly working his way in.
I tried to stop it from happening, by constricting my muscles, by clenching myself tight, but I was slick and his member designed for this action, long and sleek. It still burned as he wormed inside, and in those few minutes he held out before coming on my stomach. Allie and Eric, I learned later, watched from her bedroom door. She told him I was a virgin and they joked about that as Sammy humped.
The part I felt bad about was how I betrayed myself by getting wet. I tried to explain to Sammy how I hadn’t wanted to do it, once it was done.
“Why were you wet then?” He laughed in that spiteful, mocking way guys do when they think we’re being stupid. “Don’t lie,” he said. “You were wet. That means you wanted to. Everyone knows that.”
After Sammy turned his back to me and fell asleep, I convinced myself that what happened didn’t count as my first time because I hadn’t wanted him to do it. It was like an examination, asexual, unloving, and nothing more. I fell asleep then too, believing this.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I regained my senses, in the kitchen at breakfast with Allie and the two guys from the band. My dress was stretched and hung loose from my body, my legs bare and shoeless, my tights and sandals stuffed in my purse.
Allie’s impish face told me more than I wanted to know. She was giddy for me. And from the way Sammy grimaced as I sat across from him, avoiding eye contact, I knew that I’d come to a breaking point with my old life. I couldn’t say anything to him. He’d changed me and everyone knew it.
It was after breakfast, with the Zapruder Films on the road again, that I told Allie what happened.
“We were watching,” she confessed. “That’s pretty much how it’s supposed to go. Don’t turn yourself into a victim.”
On the drive back from Omaha I decided to leave school. My father came to rescue me after I called and asked him to. He helped load my things out of the dorm into his Park Avenue. It would have been too embarrassing to have him watch me pack, to have my Amazon roommate edge by in nothing but a towel like she’d done on move-in day, her hair dripping wet from the showers, my father’s forehead flushed and sweaty. So I packed first and waited by the dorm lobby door. I leaned against the radiator and searched for his Buick, my face pressed against a freezing pane of glass until the tip of my nose ached. When I ran to his car I could feel the hot spots on the back of my jeans where the metal of the radiator had touched my legs.
2
Chadron Gutschow steadies himself at the top of a ladder. He unscrews a burnt-out light bulb then drops it into a plastic sack. Alex hands him a different bulb from another sack and Chadron winces when the bare bulb he’s screwing in illuminates. He says, “It’s going to be a long weekend,” and laughs with his roommates as he rubs his eyes.
The doorbell interrupts them, Chadron on the ladder. Jeff opens the door to reveal Chadron’s wife Amy on the other side. The men stare at her for a moment, they grin dumb. Amy wears jeans tucked into snow boots and a puffy black coat. This house belongs to her and Chadron, it’s her name on the deed, in fact, but she’s been gone eight months, in the Twin Cities, and has in many ways given up claim to this house. Even so, she looks pissed to see these two men standing in her living room, her husband out of sight.
“Where are you, Chadron?”
“Up here,” he says, humped over the top of the ladder. He’s a tall man. His hair self-cut with scissors, choppy and short.
Jeff closes the door after Amy comes inside and follows behind her. Chadron climbs down and then the three men circle her, their proximity somewhat accidental. Chadron worries how Amy sees
them, as she looks them over. He and his roommates all look similar, the rough haircut, their uniforms from the animal testing facility—green tee shirts, off-brand dungarees, velcro tennies. At the plant, it’s their job to exercise the subjects at a fenced-in area they call the Dog Shit Factory.
This is the Friday before Christmas, so Jeff says they should celebrate. He goes to the kitchen to dig in a cabinet. “The first round is on me,” he laughs, cracking the seal on a bottle of Kessler while Alex pops ice cubes into glasses at the sink.
Chadron waits for Amy to say something. The two of them alone in the living room. There’s different furniture now, polyester sofas from the Salvation Army, a wooden chair that sits in the corner. Since she paid for it, Amy took their furniture with her to Minnesota when she left.
“You came back,” Chadron says, holding his hand out to shake hers. Tears build in his eyes.
“I won’t stay long.” Amy walks past Chadron to the kitchen. “Just in town to visit my folks,” she says. “And to take care of some business.”
In the kitchen she sits with Alex and Jeff. Jeff leans into the table and drips tobacco spit into a Gatorade bottle. An odor of wintergreen fills the house while Chadron watches them from the living room.
“Only two bulbs this time,” Alex says, looking at the ceiling. He has a dark complexion. People in high school wondered if he was a gypsy. “This is Jeff,” he says to Amy. “I’m Alex.”
“Get in here,” Amy says to Chadron, pointing to the empty seat. After he sits, there’s a drink in front of each of them.
“Don’t forget to throw in.” Jeff looks at Amy while he taps the brown plastic Kessler bottle. “We all chip in for booze.”
Bad Faith Page 12