The Desperates

by Greg Kearney

  “You don’t think that guy would actually kill Binny,” Edmund says.

  “He won’t kill him at Julio’s, I don’t think. If he brings him home and does what Binny said he was going to do — What did he say Burt was going to do to him? Bury him under the bed?”

  “Put him in a box on rollers under the bed.”

  “Right. I wouldn’t put it past the guy. There’s pathology there. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  He doesn’t want to think about it. “Hey,” he offers, trying to smile flirtatiously, but feeling instead like a rotting, daggertoothed jack-o’-lantern. “Are we — on a date right now? Is this our first date?”

  “One sec,” Jim says, breathing deeply, hand on heart. “What was your question? Oh, right. Umm, no, we’re not on a date. At least I don’t think this is a date. Do you want this to be a date? I don’t care one way or another. What would make this more — date-like for you?”

  “We could order a pizza,” says Edmund. They both rock with laughter: eating pizza while on crystal! Edmund tries to remember the last thing he ate. He only poked at the fancy glop at Lila’s house. Before that …

  Jim advances the crack pipe again. Might as well add to the library of drug memories. It tastes awful. And … his head is going to explode.

  “My head is going to explode, Jim!”

  “I know. It’s great.”

  They sit. Edmund is flammable. His lips, his fingers, his chest: flaming. His face knits itself inward with the unexplainable images that rip through his mind: mean neon, rash pink, vile yellow; towers of teeth, a grain of wheat, tap shoes that tap upon a lesion. And then, more or less, it’s over.

  “Weird,” Edmund says. “Scary, but fun. Hey, did we ever fuck? I honestly can’t remember. I know I’ve seen you naked, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you hard, and I recall smoking a joint with you once with dried cum on my face.”

  Jim looks at Edmund, reaches for his pack of cigarettes. “You’re shitting me,” he says. Edmund offers a confounded face. “Yes, we had sex,” Jim resumes. “We had very nice sex. Twice, actually. The four of us did.”

  Edmund can only continue to look at Jim blankly, unsure of why Jim is suddenly referring to himself in the plural, worried that he might be on the brink of drug-induced psychosis.

  “You, me, Ross and Dean,” Jim says, slightly annoyed. “We had some nice four-way action, summer of ’91. We were all hanging out at Woody’s, we were all HIV, lamenting our pariah status sexually, and we decided to have a four-way.”

  Edmund thinks back. He can only barely recall Dean’s jeaned leg bouncing on a bar stool at Woody’s. And Ross — that was his name, Jim’s lover — he can remember, drinking a Stella, looking, with his yellow hair, beaky nose, sharp cheekbones and deep tan, like Martina Navratilova. He remembers Jim’s big hand on Ross’s knee. And something about a wine bottle. Laughter, and a wine bottle. They were naked, in a blue room, with a wine bottle.

  “Did somebody — Did somebody sit on wine bottle?”

  “Yeah. You did. It started as a joke and then it got really hot.”

  “Isn’t that odd — I can see the wine bottle in my mind, but I can’t see myself sitting on it. What else did we do?”

  It’s Jim’s turn to think back. He smiles slightly.

  “We did it all. Like we used to. There wasn’t a condom in sight.”

  “There wasn’t? I don’t remember that.”

  “Nope. There was no mutual JO or any of that bullshit. We fucked. You loved Dean, I loved Ross. There was no head trip, no jealousy. We had a great time. And we had a great time the next time.”

  “Yes! That was at our house, I remember. We kept popping porn VHS tapes into the VCR, stacks and stacks of tapes. And the next time, I remember we —”

  “There was no next time. Ross came down with toxo and it was pretty much game over. He was fine, and then he wasn’t. That was probably the last time we were out socially. All that fall and winter it was one thing after another. I didn’t sleep. You know how it was.”

  “It was … hard.” Edmund cringes at the inanity of his response, but he’s struggling to listen to Jim. Here is a chance to gab deeply with a comrade at last, to speak and grieve and heal and become young again!

  “Gosh,” he goes on, “thank you so much for this opportunity to talk and grow. I really feel like you and I are making courageous choices, really hitting out and knowing and — it — my quote unquote pain — I think I can now understand my pain as — a — an enormous — headdress, that I can finally remove.”

  “I’m sorry — your ‘headdress’? I don’t think I’m following you.”

  “I’m butchering this, aren’t I? I’m sorry. My main point is that I know both you and I want to — renew, and kind of start over and be young again, so to speak.”

  “Be young again … Yeah, no. No, I have zero desire to be young again.”

  “No, I don’t mean young young, I just mean … young.”

  “Nope.”

  “Not young, so much as … you know … fresh.”

  Jim laughs a mechanical laugh. “Fresh. Like, Julio fresh?”

  Suddenly Edmund feels emotionally pedestrian.

  “Ed,” Jim continues, with therapeutic restraint, “it sounds to me like you’re looking for a big, edifying moment that is never going to happen. We’ve been through a lot. There’s no getting over it. There is no renewal. Ross kept coming into new ways to suffer. PML — you don’t get over watching your lover’s mind go to mush from PML. We do what we have to do to get by, and that’s how it’s going to be.”

  Jim’s sentiments don’t sit well with Edmund; he doesn’t believe Jim is truly this resigned and threadbare. He’s observed Jim closely all day and night, and he has seen the glint in his eye upon the first hit of meth and crack, his veiled delight at the pairing of psycho Burt and psycho-seeking Binny: Edmund can tell that Jim secretly wants to feel fresh.

  Jim, with an exhausted resistance, slow as a centipede, hauls his hand to Edmund’s heart. Edmund looks at Jim’s hand on his chest. His heart is racing and he feels anxious, but he knows that’s probably the crystal and the crack.

  “I forget what you’re supposed to say when you do Tantra,” Edmund says.

  “Don’t worry about it. You can’t really do Tantra when you’re fucked up.”

  “Please? Can we try?”

  “Okay. But it’ll be anticlimactic. You’re not going to feel ‘renewed.’”

  “Shh. I’ll decide that, thank you.” They touch each other’s galloping hearts. They close their eyes. Jim speaks laconically of an emerald green light, emanating from Edmund’s chest. Edmund opens his eyes, but he doesn’t see any light or anything.

  27

  SHARY WAVES THE BABY, ICY and silent in its Santa hat and jingle-bell booties, in front of Teresa’s face. Misty is a nice-looking baby, Teresa tells Shary, but as she studies her small body she feels no special connection to her, no twang of understanding that this baby is her first grandchild. She doesn’t really know Shary. Her mind is so focused on her younger son’s redemption and her own death. She hasn’t had time to consider the grandchild milestone. A previous version of Teresa would have been excited about grandparenthood. Teresa tries to ape this previous version of herself for the sake of her son and his zippy, twiggy girlfriend.

  “How much did you say she weighed at birth?”

  “Eleven pounds. Eleven! It was crazy painful. I have no hips. You can imagine.”

  “Dallas, were you there in the room with her?”

  “Dal had a hockey game in Vermilion Bay, so he couldn’t make it. My mom came to see me. And my friend Dar.”

  “Did you guys win?” Hugh asks Dallas.

  “Five to two,” Dallas says after a gulp of Export.

  “Nice one,” says Hugh.

  “Dallas, you did not pick a
hockey game over the birth of your first child,” Teresa says reproachfully.

  “What? She said it was okay.”

  “Read between the lines. No woman wants to give birth all alone.”

  “Really, it was okay,” Shary says, manically tamping down her bangs with her fingers. “He had the team to think of.”

  “Yeah,” Dallas says. “It was special circumstances.”

  “How much more special a circumstance than the birth of your first child?”

  “I wasn’t there with you when you had the boys,” Hugh offers.

  “You were there in the waiting room. And that was the seventies, anyway. If you’d said you were going to go fishing instead I would’ve set you on fire.”

  “There will be lots of time to make new memories,” Shary says, still tamping. “I lost a lot of blood and almost died, but I’m feeling stronger every day and I don’t pass out anymore when I stand up too quick.”

  Dallas is giving Teresa his stock look of angry confusion. “I’m not a deadbeat,” he says. “I’m paying for everything. I hold her. I’ve changed her.”

  Teresa smiles weakly at Shary. She is quite pale, now that she mentions blood loss and Teresa gets a good look at her. Teresa feels a leap of empathy for the girl. Whatever young hope Shary may still harbour for her impending marriage, she probably already knows that Dallas, like his father, will never be a source of empathy or conversation.

  “Is Joel at work?” Shary asks Teresa after a long lull.

  “I don’t know. Joel — has had a falling-out with the family,” Teresa says shakily.

  “He never fell out with me,” Hugh says.

  “Well, he never fell out with me, either,” Teresa snaps, scratching at her Annie wig, finally pulling it off and dumping it in her lap. “I was trying something, so he wouldn’t end up — I don’t want to talk about it. Shary, Joel is … special needs, I guess you could say. Not retarded, but vulnerable. Very sensitive. I’ve made mistakes with him. I’m still making mistakes with him. With both my boys.”

  Hugh goes to the kitchen for a new beer.

  “What mistakes did you make with me?” Dallas asks. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing, Dal,” Teresa says.

  “Aw!” Shary says, tilting her head against Dallas, who startles slightly.

  “You’ve done just great in so many ways,” Teresa continues. “A homeowner at twenty-five! I’m very proud.”

  “All the insulation was asbestos,” Shary says. “We had to get hazardous materials guys to come over to take it out and dispose of it.”

  Teresa is caught by Shary’s words. Asbestos insulation. She sees herself hacking away at the walls in the attic years ago, making Joel’s new room. Fibrous white dust everywhere. Was that her exposure, the cause of her lung cancer? What did she know about asbestos? Did anyone know about asbestos in the early eighties?

  Joel. Joel, growing up, lolling in that attic room all those years, breathing it in. What has she done? Will he go like her? She can’t think about it. She doesn’t know for sure that she was hacking away at asbestos. Other, safer stuff can also make fibrous dust. Jolie is fine. He will be fine.

  “Owning your own home is a great accomplishment,” Teresa says finally when she sees Hugh back with his beer. “I’m proud of you. Joel needs some help when it comes to things like that.”

  “No kidding he needs help,” says Dallas. “He’s — Well, I won’t say it. Still can’t believe I once had to share a room with him. I think it’s like a betrayal when you’re going along, living in a house with your brother, and then it turns out he’s been gay all along. It’s like, narc! Right? I mean, let him be gay or whatever, but don’t lurk in enemy territory, right?”

  “There is no enemy territory in this house,” Teresa says.

  “I know, I don’t mean enemy. But we shared a room for a long time. How do I know he wasn’t checking me out?”

  “That is disgusting, Dal,” Shary says, laughing, swatting him on the arm. “That is all kinds of wrong. You know, in high school I worked for a veterinarian, this really, really nice, old lesbian lady. So good with animals. Even the most anxious dog would just go limp in her hands. She had that special touch, you know? Anyway, she retired shortly thereafter, moved to the east coast. I heard just recently that she’d died. The sad thing was that, when they finally found her in her house, they said she’d been dead for approximately two years. Isn’t that the saddest thing? Two years she sat there, rotting away, and nobody’d given her a second thought, all that time.”

  Teresa suppresses a laugh. “I’m not worried so much that Joel is going to go like that — he’s a people-pleaser, he’ll always have someone around — as much as I am that someone is going to take advantage of him or hurt him.” She crumples slightly; her husband pats her on her bald head.

  “I had a domestic that was two gay dudes a few months ago,” Dallas says. “Great big dudes, too, like wrestlers. One of them hit the other one with a bowling trophy. We asked the one dude if he wanted to press charges, and he starts crying and talking about how him and his buddy ‘love hard’! Oookay … We got out of there in a hell of a hurry.”

  Teresa has a vision of her older son, in uniform, responding to a “domestic” involving her younger son, who is fat and bearded; Dallas arrests Joel for no reason. Teresa motions at Hugh to help her stand. “I need to lie down for a little while,” she says, smiling at her son, his girlfriend, and their ghostly baby.

  She leaves the bedroom door open to eavesdrop. Collapses on the bed.

  “What a fighter she is. So strong. I can’t even imagine. I could never be that strong. I’d just throw up my hands and jump into my grave.” The baby moans slightly. “Oh! Someone’s hungry!”

  “Jeez, is she gonna whip ’em out right here?” Teresa imagines Shary undoing her nursing bra, and then the shocked look on Hugh’s face. His intense modesty — she’s seen him barefoot, let alone naked, maybe a half dozen times in their marriage.

  “Mr. Price — Hugh — breastfeeding is the most natural thing in the world. You’re a daddy, you know that!”

  “Yeah, but in the living room? Do you whip ’em out when you’re walking down the street?”

  “When I’m feeding Misty, my breasts aren’t breasts, they’re — feedbags.”

  “That’s right. I don’t mind a little squirty-squirt from the ol’ feedbags myself, eh, Shary?”

  “Dallas! Oh my goodness! Squirty-squirt is so private!”

  “It’s just my dad. We talk about that sort of shit all the time. Don’t we?”

  “No, we do not. You remember wrong. I wouldn’t even talk about that kind of thing with a — a doctor.”

  Teresa lifts her head off the pillow. Silence. It’s true: he doesn’t think about that kind of thing.

  “Anyway, I know your mother is sure glad you guys made it down. How come you didn’t come sooner?”

  “It’s a busy time. I don’t like driving far on winter tires. Shary has the baby. I’ve got a lot on my plate. But hey. I’m sure we’ll be back.”

  “You’re sure you’ll be back? This isn’t a restaurant. These are hard times. Your mother could go at any time.”

  “Or she could be fine for months or years. She doesn’t need us, anyway.”

  “That’s not so. You need to be here. We need you here.”

  “God, shut up about it already!” Dallas’s voice gets closer; he must’ve stormed out of the living room.

  “Dallas, where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “Are we leaving? Should I put Misty in her travel thing?”

  The front door bangs against the walkway wall. Teresa hears her son’s Trans Am start up. That’s what he’s always done when he’s overwhelmed: he drives around. She lets her head fall back on the pillow.

  “He’s so upset about everything,
Mr. — Hugh. You know how Dallas gets about serious things. His work is hard that way. I try to shield him from serious things at home. I was scared to tell him I was pregnant. He doesn’t like things with emotional meaning.”

  “Well, he better get the hell over that. He’s twenty-five. He can’t run away from something like this.”

  “No, he can’t. You’re right. I don’t know what to suggest. I know that a long relationship isn’t about happiness at the end of the day. It’s about … Well, I don’t know what it’s about. I’m sure you do, though.”

  Teresa listens for Hugh’s answer. He doesn’t say anything.

  “Sorry, what were you saying?” he says.

  “About what marriage is made of.”

  Teresa has a coughing fit. When she stops coughing, she hears Shary say, “Aw.”

  “So, I guess you have homecare coming in now,” Shary continues.

  “No, I do not have homecare coming in. I’m taking a leave of absence from the mill. We’re doing okay. We’ve got it covered.”

  “I’ve talked to Dallas about staying with you to help out. But I know that the baby would probably be a distraction. She can be quite vocal, that’s for sure.”

  Misty is not a vocal baby; she has only made that one, tiny moan since their arrival. Just how far, Teresa wonders, does Shary go to shield Dallas from serious things? Does she drug the baby so it won’t annoy him?

  “How do you know when she’s done feeding?”

  “She lets go and dozes off. There we go. Did you want to hold her?”

  “That’s okay. Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  Hugh has come to Teresa’s bedside. He sits.

  “Hey, you. You sleepin’?”

  “Not really.”

  “I was thinking — that — it would be nice — if I went over to Donald Tait’s and got Joel and brung him home for dinner. Would you like that?”

  “Maybe, yeah. But he won’t want to come. He hates me now.”

  “He doesn’t. Who could hate you? It’s Christmas. He’s crazy for Christmas.”

  “Says who? He was crazy for Christmas when he was six. This year he’s mad at me, for good reason. So I know that I probably won’t see him again.”