Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  “Okay,” he says reluctantly.

  The car clunks into gear. We’re off into the city, away from interesting women and remembrances of the dead.

  * * *

  —

  The next thing i know, I’m sitting on the floor of my hotel room wearing a complimentary leopard-print bathrobe and taking swigs from a large bottle of whiskey. I can’t even remember when I bought it. That heart monitor sound is still there, at the edges of my reality.

  . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

  Casablanca is playing on the television. There’s Bogart, looking forlorn and gutted. And there’s Bergman, looking beautiful and unattainable. But the longer I stare at the screen—and the more whiskey I take in—the less it looks like Bogart and Bergman. The more I realize it’s actually my Kelly and me.

  We’re at the runway scene at the end of the movie. The plane is waiting. The Germans are on the way. A dialogue balloon appears next to my head: “Had to go.”

  “Sorry.” Kelly replies in a dialogue balloon of her own.

  “Not your fault.”

  “Now what?”

  “I go home tomorrow.”

  “Need a ride to the airport?”

  I look from the television to my phone and realize the whole conversation is just a string of text messages.

  “I’m getting too old for this shit,” Renny says, suddenly appearing out of nowhere. He’s standing by me, holding up my wet and slightly vomit-stained shirt. “Not sure that’ll ever come out,” he said. “You’re going to be wearing San Francisco for the rest of your life.”

  Then Renny looks down at me and, just from his expression, I know I’m a sad sight. He sighs. “Damn writers,” Renny says. Then: “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Renny squats down and places an arm beneath my shoulders and helps me up to my feet. He’s as gentle as a hospital orderly. God only knows how many other sad-sack writers he’s had to help up over the years.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, my words slurring.

  “Just come with me, State College.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But just so you know: I never put out on the first date.”

  “Bullshit,” Renny says.

  After the death of his father, the small house in which Soot and his mother lived grew larger than it had ever been. And it was the empty expanses that had never been there before that filled Soot’s mother with the greatest sadness. Every inch of the house was a place where her husband had once existed. Every chair longed for his shadow. Every room yearned to be filled with his laughter. The eaves of the house howled in the late hours of the night when the wind blew in from the south, moaning and asking where he had gone. And through it all, Soot’s mother made sure that her arms were constantly filled with her son. She hugged him with a compulsive frequency and a singular desperation. It was as though she had never held him before and she might never hold him again. At night, she slept in his bedroom on account of the emptiness that had now come to take up residence in her own bedroom.

  Soot watched her and wished that he could do something to take away her sadness. There were so many tears to be shed now. The sound of her sobbing woke him in the middle of the night as she lay in the bed next to him, asleep, not knowing that she was crying. He lay there, sometimes, and watched her mourn in her sleep.

  Soot wanted to absolve his mother’s sadness. But, more than that, he wanted to hide from his own. He felt it at the edges of his world, the persistent sorrow, stalking him like some raw-boned animal. But it was not sorrow over the death of his father, as he expected. In fact, he didn’t think about his dead father very much.

  It wasn’t that he had not loved his father. Soot knew that he loved his father and, sometimes, he missed him. But, hour by hour it seemed, Soot’s memory gave up just a little bit of what it held of his father. It was as if the death of his father was too much for his mind to hold on to, and so it gave it up, little by little, in the hopes of saving itself.

  And the memory of his father, and his father’s death, was never farther away than when Soot was lost in The Unseen. He could do it on command now: disappear and become The Unseen Kid. And each time he did it, the pain of his loss drifted away a bit more. He came back, each time, remembering a little less of his father. He came back hurting not quite so badly. Being Unseen was saving his life by taking parts of it away.

  There were other distractions as well. People. So many people.

  Every day since his father’s death, Soot’s house was filled with people. Women from the church brought food and condolences. They held prayer circles in which black hands gripped one another and called out for Jesus to become the deliverer that He had promised He would be. There was singing of sad songs and there were promises of justice—both earthly and divine—and, more than anything, there was the promise that God had a plan for everyone and everything and that the last thing Soot’s mother should be was sad.

  “He’s gone on to God,” they made it a point to say.

  To which Soot’s mother offered a nod and a weak, placating smile.

  And while there were those who came and talked of Jesus and peace, there were those who came and talked with angry tongues of earthly justice by any means. Lead among these was Uncle Paul. Paul was Soot’s uncle on his mother’s side. A large man, with large hands and dark skin and a beard like coiled wire, he was the type of man under which the floor seemed to move each time he stepped.

  “This is exactly the kind of shit I’ve always been talking about,” Paul said as he entered the small country home. People gave him a wide, respectful berth because there was no other choice for a man of his proportions and temperament.

  “Hey, Paul,” Soot’s mother said.

  Paul wrapped her in a hug. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I just can’t believe this shit. Right there in the front yard. His fucking blood is right there in the goddamn mud of the front yard!”

  When the hug was over he marched over to Soot, the entire frame of the house shaking underfoot. “And what about you, little man?” he said, aiming his focus at Soot.

  He reached down with his large, black hands and lifted the boy up into his arms. He hugged him gently—in spite of his large, strong stature—and Soot could feel his uncle’s wiry beard rubbing against the side of his cheek.

  “I’m so sorry,” Paul said. “But don’t you worry none, we’re going to fix this. It ain’t going to just get by. He ain’t going to get away with it. I swear to God.”

  “Don’t say that,” one of the older women interrupted. “Don’t be swearing to God like that.”

  “I’ll swear to whoever the fuck I want to,” Paul bellowed. “And if He don’t like it, tell Him to come down here and do something about it. And maybe while He’s here spanking me on my ass for taking His name in vain, the rest of you can ask Him where He was when Will got shot in his front yard by that damn cop.”

  The room was cowed in silence.

  “You hungry,” Soot’s mother asked.

  Paul offered a belly laugh. “Look at me. A nigga my size always hungry.”

  Paul, Soot, and his mother all went into the kitchen and Paul helped himself to the food dishes that the women had brought along with their condolences. “One good thing those old biddies in there are good for is their food.”

  “They’re just trying to help,” Soot’s mother said.

  Paul bit into a chicken leg and grunted an affirmation.

  “This ain’t gonna stand,” Paul managed between bites. “I just want you to know that. That cop what did the shooting, he lives up near Lumberton.”

  “How do you know that?” Soot’s mother asked.

  Paul laughed. “C’mon, now. Ain’t nobody around here that can hide from nobody. County ain’t but so big. They’re supposed to be sending out some investigators to look into all this. But you already know how it’s going to go,�
�� Paul spat. “Ain’t nothing going to happen to him.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. She sounded tired all of a sudden. As if a great weight had just been placed on her back. It was the weight of knowing that no one will seek justice for people who look like you.

  “I know it as well as you know it,” Paul rebutted. Then he looked at Soot. “This is one of those things you need to learn,” Paul began. “Ain’t nothing going to happen to the man that killed your daddy because that’s how the world works for people like us.”

  “Paul!”

  “What?” Paul asked. He was halfway through loading food onto his plate. Now and again he looked back over his shoulder at Soot and his mother. “Don’t tell me you ain’t talked with him about it yet.”

  “Just . . .” Soot’s mother looked at her son. She opened her arms and he went over and let her take him into her arms.

  “If you ever thought you could keep him from it, that decision’s already been taken from you,” Paul said. “Got taken away right here on your front lawn.”

  “No,” she said. She leaned down and whispered into her son’s ear: “Go. I don’t want you here for this.”

  “But Mama,” Soot began.

  “Please,” his mother said. “I need to know that you’re safe. I need to know that you’re happy. I need to know that you’re invisible and hidden and in such a good place that none of this can reach you. I want you to go and come back and tell me what it feels like. Tell me what it feels like so that I can feel something other than the thing I’m feeling right now, the thing I’m going to feel for the rest of my life.”

  Her eyes were slick with tears. Her voice was a plea offered up not only to Soot but to the universe itself. How could he defy her?

  He nodded and, when his uncle wasn’t looking, slipped away into invisibility, into The Unseen, where he would feel safe and happy and forget just a little bit more of his father and his father’s death.

  The last thing he saw as The Unseen enveloped him was his mother’s smile, tinged with sadness, but almost thankful.

  I’m in the back of Renny’s car, half-asleep and staring blankly out of the window, and everywhere that I look I see The Kid. He rides in the passenger seat of a nearby Honda, dead and filled with bullet holes, staring at me. I look away and I find him standing on a corner, he’s holding up a sign that asks for money, and he is dead and full of bullet holes. When we stop at the corner, he comes up to the car and knocks on the window, asking me to roll it down. He is dead and full of holes. What else could I do but look away and pretend not to see him? That, I am starting to see, is what I do.

  We roll on into the shimmering night.

  Renny’s car pulls up in front of the most beautiful home I’ve ever seen. It’s a house so large and sprawling, it looks like it ate another house. I’m still pretty miserable just now, so, as he parks, I’m just laying with my head pressed against the window and my extremities feeling far away and it’s easy for me to think that this is all just a figment of my imagination. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past myself right now.

  But it turns out, I’m not dreaming.

  The Roman columns, the vaulted foyer, the massive windows, the sprawling front lawn in a city that has almost zero front lawns, it’s all real. And it all belongs to Renny.

  I finally lift my head from the window—my mouth hanging slightly ajar in surprise—and look over at Renny. He smiles one of the largest smiles I’ve ever seen and says proudly, “I told you, State College. I went to Harvard. Now you’ve got the meet my Martha. In spite of what you might have heard about her, I love her.”

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “You’ve heard of evil, haven’t you?”

  He snorts a laugh and so do I.

  The interior of Renny’s home is just as stunning as the exterior. Vaulted ceilings. Marble tiles. A large kitchen counter that looks as though it was sculpted—not cut, but sculpted—from a single slab of marble. I feel like I’ve died and gone to capitalist heaven. And maybe I have. The way my head is throbbing just now I wouldn’t put anything past me. But the scent of jasmine wafting through the air makes me believe that maybe I haven’t died just yet.

  A short, vibrant, sixty-something woman who smells of jasmine emerges from the kitchen and greets Renny and me at the door and she doesn’t seem to mind the fact that I’m still wearing only my robe and slippers from the hotel. “Honey,” she says sweetly, kissing Renny on the cheek.

  “This is—”

  “The book man?!” she asks, not even waiting to hear my name.

  “Yes, honey. The book man.”

  Martha claps her hands together in excitement. “That’s wonderful,” she says, offering a handshake. “It’s so wonderful to have someone as respectable as an author in my house.”

  I thank her by accidentally vomiting all over her marble floor.

  * * *

  —

  We’re in Renny’s immaculate kitchen a little later. His wife, Martha, is making us a late supper. I think she’s forgiven me for earlier, which is damned nice of her and I tell her so. “This is damned nice of you, Martha,” I say, holding my head between my hands because there’s a really obese man inside my skull right now and he’s doing a little dance around the inside of my brain.

  “No problem at all,” Martha says. “I can’t sleep most nights anyhow. So at least this way, while I’m awake, I get to actually do something.”

  “Why can’t you sleep?” I ask Martha.

  “Dreams,” she says.

  “Bad dreams?”

  “No,” she replies, “just dreams. Never really cared for them.”

  It’s a profound statement and I tell her so. “That’s a profound statement, Martha. Damned profound.”

  “Your mother will still be dead tomorrow,” Martha says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Pardon you what?” Martha says, looking more than a little surprised.

  “What did you just say?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she says, and her face tightens into a large question mark and I’m left to face the fact that, very likely, I only imagined her saying that line about my mom. I’ve been known to imagine things. I’ve got a condition: I’m a writer.

  “So,” I begin, trying to recover, “how long have you two been hitched?”

  “Too damned long,” Renny says immediately. “Martha fought in the Peloponnesian Wars. Isn’t that right, honey?”

  “Your mother,” Martha says.

  I reach across the kitchen counter and grab a bottle of scotch that Renny and Martha must have paid a fortune for. I open it without asking and pour myself a glass before either of them can say a word. The two of them watch. Maybe there’s pity in their eyes.

  “You got any family, State College?” Renny asks.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “Friends?”

  “One.”

  “Good friend?”

  “Good as any other.”

  “Then you got family,” Renny says. He walks over and pours out my glass of scotch and takes the bottle out of my hand and replaces it with a bottle of water. “What I’m trying to say here, State College, is that I look at you and I see a man adrift.”

  “Untethered,” Martha corrects.

  “That’s what I said,” Renny replies.

  “You went to Harvard and the best you can come up with is ‘adrift’?”

  Renny points an accusatory finger at me. “This man went to a state college!”

  * * *

  —

  Later, we’re standing outside of Renny’s house. It feels like we can see all of San Francisco from here. Even with the mass quantity of alcohol in my veins, I can appreciate how beautiful this city is. It’s a marvel. And the longer I stare, the more beautiful it becomes. The lights glow. The colors grow more sat
urated. I feel like I’m on a vision quest. I feel like I’ve had too many of those special brownies the woman in Colorado put in my welcome bag. I feel like Betty White is on her way over once again.

  The lights of the city become fireflies, dancing over the surface of an ocean. I can’t tell where the city ends and the sky begins. I think that, if I really tried, I could get lost in either of them. I could disappear in both of them. I like the idea of disappearing.

  I think I hear the sound of that heart monitor again.

  But then I close my eyes tight and take a deep breath and when I finally let it go, the sound is gone and San Francisco is just a city again.

  As if he’s reading my mind, Renny says, about driving, “Keeps me busy,” shrugging his shoulders. “You slow down in life and, well, that’s when it all comes to a stop. I’ve always liked driving. So now that I’m retired, I get to drive as much as I want. I get to meet people I probably wouldn’t otherwise meet—people like you. Plus, it gets me out of the house and away from that madwoman.”

  Immediately Martha sticks her head out of the back door and shouts, “Oh yeah? Well, did you tell him you were impotent at forty?!”

  “That’s not what your sister said,” Renny barks back immediately.

  Martha only waves her hand dismissively and drifts back into the kitchen.

  “I really do love that woman,” Renny says warmly. Then: “We’ll put you up in one of the spare rooms.”

  “Thanks, Renny. You’re a swell fella.”

  “Can I tell you something, State College?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “No.”

  “Then yes.”

  “I don’t know much about you,” Renny says, “but one thing I do know is that if you keep this up, you’re going to hit a wall pretty hard. At some point, you’re going to have to face whatever’s chasing you . . . whether you want to or not.”

  “You’re probably right, Renny,” I say.

  “Of course I’m right,” Renny says. “I went to Harvard.”