Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  After he’s gone Junior and I just look at each other for a few moments. Then we both burst out laughing.

  “What the fuck,” I say, wiping at my eyes.

  “You wanted to have a singular experience,” Junior says. “I’d say that’s exactly what we’re in for.”

  We stand there smiling at each other, Junior’s hands light on my hips, and despite what he knows about my ambivalence the whole day has this great feel to it now. We find that shaded washout, and with the ground mats and a blanket it’s comfortable enough. Junior is careful, and good. After, we lie there exulting in our nakedness, laughing and sharing wine out of the mess kit cup.

  This is one of our favorite games lately: I make guesses about the lives of people we see in passing at fast food restaurants, on the highway, at the coffee shop, and Junior, with his special insight, tells me how close I came. Here’s what I come up with for Ralph: as a high-level executive for the Federation of Payday Loan Companies, he basically made money, and lots of it, off other people’s poverty, which in turn means that he is at best a man of dubious moral fiber. But he did always feel a little uncomfortable about how he made his living. And like many people who had the capacity to become better human beings but lacked the motivation, the announcement of the end of the world sent Ralph into a paroxysm of guilt and repentance that was partly genuine and partly a hedge against the possibility that there was an afterlife where scores were being tallied and punishment doled out. So he literally cashed in his retirement fund and spent two weeks giving it away, in increments of $100, to people outside payday loan joints in New-ark and Jersey City. He was mugged several times for his trouble, but managed to keep just enough to get him to Arizona, where now he hunts snakes and contemplates the universe and waits with some trepidation for the end of all things.

  “How’s that?” I ask.

  “Pretty good,” Junior says. “You had the advantage of knowing a few details already, though.”

  When we gather our stuff and return to the ranch house Ralph is already there, cleaning what looks like six or seven snakes of various lengths. He cuts off the heads, peels the skin off in one long piece, guts the bodies and washes the meat with liberal doses of well water. While he’s working Junior and I get wood and brush together for a fire. Junior gets it going just in time, as the canyon has fallen into late-day shadows that hint at how cool the night will be.

  Ralph goes into the house and returns with a small iron skillet. There’s an old T-shirt wrapped around the handle that serves as an oven mitt. After the fire has died down to embers, Ralph cooks the snake meat in batches, sitting in his camp chair, leaning forward and tossing the meat every few seconds with a practiced flick of the wrist. I get out some bread and borrow Ralph’s knife to cube the pineapple we got at the Circle K. Junior pours wine for me and opens warmish beers for himself and Ralph, and before too long the three of us are sharing what is without a doubt the most haphazard meal I’ve ever eaten. I have the only plate, which came with the mess kit; the two of them hold their bread in one hand and pick snake and pineapple directly from the bowls. The food is surprisingly good. We freshen our drinks and build the fire up again and sit around talking as night falls.

  Junior confesses the Instant History scenario we concocted earlier.

  “Not too far from the truth,” Ralph says matter-of-factly. He put in his teeth to eat and they’ve taken ten years off my estimate of his age. “Except I’m not foolish enough to stand outside a check-cashing joint giving away money. You know what kind of people hang around those places?”

  “People driven to desperate acts by poverty?” I say.

  “Exactly,” Ralph says. “Sarcasm noted and accepted, by the way. No, I made sure my family was comfortable and then gave most of what I had to a few charities. It’s a funny thing, giving money away to improve a world that’s just around the corner from not-being. But what else can you do?”

  “What about this family?” Junior asks. He already knows the answer, of course; he’s asking more for my benefit, and for conversation’s sake. “What’s the story there?”

  “They’re very angry with me. My wife and oldest daughter, in particular.”

  “Justifiably?”

  “You want to hear the story and decide for yourself?”

  Junior rests his beer in the dirt and gets to his feet. “For that we’ll need something a little stronger,” he says. He goes into the house, reemerges with a half-full bottle of SoCo. Ralph fills his cup and hands the bottle back. Junior offers it to me but I shake my head no, and he takes his seat again and wraps his free arm around my shoulders. He kisses me once behind the ear, and I relax into him.

  “Okay, so,” Ralph says. “Long version or short?”

  “Whichever paints you in the kindest light,” Junior says.

  “That’d be the short version,” Ralph says with a laugh. His dentures are freakishly straight and uniform, like two solid bands of ivory. “As you already know, I worked as a suit for the public relations outfit of payday loan companies. Only job I ever had as an adult. Married to Beverly, Bev, for forty-one years. Two kids, both girls, both grown. Natalie, the one who hates me now, is married and gave us two grandkids, Zach and Jocelyn.”

  Ralph kicks at the fire. The flames surge and sparks dance into the air. “Sarah, our younger daughter, who we call Newt, never had any interest in getting married. She teaches high school art and sells her paintings on the side. She was just here a couple of weeks ago, visiting.”

  “So Sarah . . . Newt . . . isn’t angry with you?” I ask.

  “Nope.”

  “Why?” Junior asks. This, apparently, is a detail he wasn’t aware of.

  “Because she understands. She’s not going either.”

  Oh, shit. Junior takes his arm from around my shoulders and leans back in the chair, his hands behind his head. “Ah,” he says, “I get it.”

  Ralph smiles at him over the fire. “Do you?” he asks.

  “You’ve chosen not to Emigrate. What more is there to know?”

  “The ‘why’ doesn’t interest you?”

  “The ‘why’ is irrelevant, because no matter how compelling it can’t be reason enough to stay and die,” Junior says. I wince. I can hear how drunk he really is, and long experience tells me this isn’t going to go well. “You are something of an anomaly, though, I’ll admit. You’ve got grandchildren, and most everyone with dependent children or grandchildren has elected to Emigrate. By the same token nearly everyone who has elected not to Emigrate is either Ostrich Society—and that doesn’t seem likely in your case—or simply doesn’t believe that C1998 E1 is going to collide with Earth.”

  “What makes you so sure I’m not Ostrich Society?”

  “I find it hard to picture you blowing up an Emigration Registry.”

  “Fair enough,” Ralph says. “So that’s all you’ve got? Either I’m a militant crackpot, or I’m too dumb to realize this is really happening?”

  “The statistics back me up,” Junior says.

  “Well I do hate to skew the numbers. I was a big numbers man myself, when I was still working. But no, I am neither a member of the Ostrich Society, nor do I have any doubt about the fate of the planet or anyone who decides to continue clinging to its surface.”

  “And yet,” Junior says.

  “I plan to continue clinging.”

  “I see why your wife is unhappy with you,” Junior says.

  “Unhappy isn’t really the word. Unhappy means you sleep on the couch for a couple of nights.”

  “I can understand how you feel.” I’m talking to Ralph, but I’m looking at Junior.

  “Can you?” Ralph asks. “Because I’m not really sure I understand it myself.”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “I mean at first glance it doesn’t seem to make much sense,” Ralph says.

  “It doesn’t make much sense at second or third glance, either,” Junior says.

  Ralph smiles at me. “We’re both in
the doghouse, I take it.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Junior says to him.

  “You’re right about that, son.”

  “And you know, maybe that’s the real problem I’m having with this,” Junior says. “I ask why, and you shrug your shoulders and smile and say, ‘Gosh, if I knew I’d tell you.’ Not good enough.”

  Ralph takes another drink. “I don’t mean this to sound rude,” he says, “but what makes you feel like you’re entitled to an explanation? It’s my choice. You’re free to do what you want.”

  “I’m sort of a special case, when it comes to this particular topic,” Junior says.

  “How’s that?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  Junior looks at Ralph for a minute, then smiles. “Okay,” he says. “For starters, I’m primarily responsible for the fact that you have a choice about whether to stay on Earth or Emigrate. If not for me, everyone’s stuck here.”

  Ralph gives Junior a quick once-over, takes in the cutoff shorts, the week’s growth of beard, the eyes rheumy with booze. “Okay, you’re right,” he says. “I don’t believe you.”

  Reluctant as I am to be involved one way or the other in this conversation, I pipe up: “It’s true.”

  Ralph looks to me, eyebrows raised, and I nod. It’s hard to tell if I’m lending credence to Junior’s story, or if Ralph just thinks we’re both crazy now.

  “But that’s not the only reason this pisses me off,” Junior continues. “It gets better.”

  “Okay,” Ralph says. “I’m listening.”

  But Junior demurs for a moment, staring into the fire and sipping at his beer.

  “Go on,” I tell him. “No sense stopping now.”

  “I’m just realizing that you’re the only person I’ve ever told,” Junior says to me. “Not even Sawyer. He probably suspects something’s up, but in this case not even he can really know. It’s probably the one thing in all the world that Sawyer doesn’t know.”

  “You’re losing me here, kids,” Ralph says. “Of course I’m a little drunk. But still.”

  Junior turns back to him. “I’ve known about the end of the world since I was born,” he says. “Date, time, circumstances.”

  “Huh,” Ralph says. He drinks more SoCo.

  “But even that’s not all of it,” Junior says, really warming to his topic now. He stands and paces in front of the fire, beer in hand. “Don’t you want to know how I came to have this knowledge?”

  “I am curious, I’ll admit.”

  “I hear a voice,” Junior says. He jabs an index finger against his temple. “Always have. It tells me things. Sometimes mundane things. Sometimes terrible things. How fun is that?”

  Ralph stands and moves his chair closer to the fire. “Not much, I’m guessing?”

  Junior eyes him. “You’re skeptical. Understandably. If you’ll give me just one more minute, I’ll tell you something about yourself that will erase all doubt.”

  I know what’s coming, of course. Junior gets the faraway cockeye-look and after a few moments comes back and talks to Ralph: “In the winter of 1951, you climbed the snowpile in the municipal parking lot they used as a snow dump during your childhood in Bridgeton, New Jersey. It was late winter, March, and so the pile was quite tall, almost forty feet. The kids used it every year for king of the mountain, for sledding, but the weather had been warm the previous week and when you got to the top you sank right in to your armpits. Stuck fast.”

  And Ralph is stuck fast now, standing rooted to the spot, staring at Junior.

  “You struggled for a while until you got tired, which didn’t take long. Then you sat still and yelled for help but no one was around to hear you, it was just an old abandoned parking lot that technically wasn’t even within the city limits, and as the hours passed your voice gave out. Night fell, and fortunately the weather was still unusually warm or else you would have frozen to death. By now the police were looking for you, but no one thought to check the snowpile even though everyone knew that kids frequented the place during the winter; many of the adults in town, in fact, had played there when they were young. So who knows why it didn’t occur to anyone. There you were, unable to move, buried so tight you could take only half-breaths, and you cried because you believed you were going to die.

  “But of course you didn’t die. You were found by another group of kids the next morning, and by noon you were in a hospital bed sipping cocoa, with heated saline warming your veins. But think back, Ralph, if you will, on the feeling you had late in the night. Now imagine having that same feeling every day of your life. Imagine being born with it. And you’ll have some idea of where I’m coming from.”

  His anger now dissipated, Junior slouches over the fire, poking at it with the toe of his boot. For a while no one says anything. Out of the corner of my eye I catch Ralph looking at me again, and I turn my head to face him. He looks absolutely stunned.

  “He did the same thing to me, a couple years back,” I tell Ralph. “I know how you feel. Take a few minutes.”

  Ralph puts the cup to his lips and drains it, then sits down again and stares into the fire. After a while I stand up and put my arms around Junior’s waist and press myself into his back. He rubs my hands with his.

  For me at least, the silence is starting to get a little awkward. It feels like a rift has formed and the good humor the two of them shared is history. I’m thinking of begging off to bed. The chill hinted at earlier has now settled into the canyon, and while Junior is keeping the front of me warm, my back, turned toward the night, is quite cold. Plus the wine has given me a dirty, headachy buzz that’s not going to improve if I drink more.

  Then Ralph finally speaks. “I’m going to need a lot more of this,” he says, holding up his empty cup.

  It’s only mildly funny. It’s not even really a joke, just a wry little aside from an old man sitting in the desert, thousands of miles from his family, waiting to die. But for some reason it sets us to laughing. It starts off slow, a couple little chuckles, then gathers momentum until we’re almost paralyzed by it and soon we’re not even laughing anymore at what Ralph said, this laughter exists for its own sake, it seizes us and drains us and feels so very good, and by the time we all gather ourselves again Junior has gone into the house and returned with a fresh bottle and Ralph stokes the fire and we talk and drink for what seems like a long while. We’re only quiet once, when we hear coyotes howling close by, but then the sound stops and we go back to talking and at some point, happy and drunk, we turn in.

  The next morning I’m awakened early by a hand shaking my arm. It’s Ralph. Junior is still asleep next to me.

  “What is it?” I ask, rubbing a crust of dried drool from the corner of my mouth. “Is something wrong?”

  Ralph shushes me. “Everything’s fine. I just want to talk to you. Alone.”

  It’s very cold outside the sleeping bag, and very warm inside, but there’s an urgency in Ralph’s voice and so I crawl out. Junior rolls toward where I used to be, but he doesn’t wake up. I find a sweatshirt, and Ralph hands me a cup of coffee without a word. I try a sip and despite a few tiny grounds floating around it’s strong and good and, most important, warm.

  I follow Ralph outside, where a new fire is burning on the remnants of last night’s blaze. There’s a small saucepan suspended over the flames by a scorched metal grate. Inside the saucepan is more coffee at a full boil.

  “How long have you been up?” I ask, warming my hands in the steam.

  “Not sure,” Ralph says. “I don’t really keep track of time out here. Haven’t seen the need.”

  “Did you sleep at all?”

  “A little.”

  My hands start to sting, but when I pull them away the moisture from the steam cools instantly, and I get a chill. “What’s the plan, here, Ralph?” I ask.

  “We will ostensibly be gathering saguaro fruit for breakfast,” he says, lifting a small metal pail. “We w
ill in actuality be talking about my past, and your future.”

  “Oh. Okay,” I say. “But no rattlesnakes.”

  “No rattlesnakes.”

  “Let’s go, then. I guess.”

  We head to the far end of the corral, Ralph in the lead, and step out through the gap in the fence. We walk a few hundred yards down a gravelly slope. Despite Ralph’s promise of no snakes I keep my eyes trained to the ground, ready to bolt, imagining there’s one under every rock and bush. The sun begins to emerge from behind the buttes just as we reach a stand of saguaro, and within a few minutes it’s high enough to warm us as we work.

  We gather fruit for a long time without a word, and at pretty much the moment that I begin to wonder if we’re ever going to have this talk, Ralph says, “You know I was lying to you kids, right? About my wife?”

  “No,” I say. “She doesn’t hate you?”

  He laughs. “Oh, she hates me. I was lying about why.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me put it this way: She doesn’t hate me because I’m not going. I’m not going, because she hates me.”

  “Why would you lie about that? What difference would it make to us?”

  “Well I was trying to throw my lot in with yours, in a way,” Ralph says.

  “Back you up. I felt like I’d be weakening your case if I stuck strictly to the truth: that as a result of my wife’s deep, abiding hatred, I’ve decided to commit suicide by comet.”

  I stop harvesting fruit and stand up straight. “So you don’t feel the way I do after all,” I say. “Like there’s some bond you have to Earth that you can’t bring yourself to break.”

  “Oh, I do,” Ralph says. “That’s why I came to Sedona. But that wouldn’t be enough to keep me here on its own. Especially if I had something else to leave for.”

  “Ah, I see now. Defend me in front of Junior, then try to convince me in private to go along with him.”

  “After seeing the two of you last night, sure. Not that it’s really any of my business.”

  “No.”