by Don Bajema
“Quieres mas cerveza?”
No response. Eddie’s voice gives away nothing. His own tone encourages him. He hasn’t gotten on his knees in this strange new world yet.
“No? Entonces. . . .”
He hunches over the cooler, grabs the side handles and begins to walk it to the station wagon.
The four men don’t move. The man who offered the gun exchange squats down on his haunches.
“Amigo. Una más, por favor.”
Eddie puts down the cooler next to the station wagon. He lifts the cooler into the back. Eddie’s eyes meet Diane’s; she blinks in desperation. Eddie tries to smile, but his lips only grimace.
Eddie walks, two beers in hand, across the campfire, directly to the man rising from his squat and hands him a beer. Eddie raises his beer to the three of them.
“Salud.”
He laughs and returns the gesture. Eddie looks him in the eye and says, “Buenas noches, y adiós.”
Turning his back, grabbing a camp chair and folding it as he reaches the station wagon.
“Sí, adiós,” says the man and he begins to move backward out of the campfire light. His companions leave with him.
In the dark, one of the men begins whistling. The three of them walk loudly, two speaking with animation and laughter in sentences no one can make out. The sounds fade.
Eddie gives Diane and David orders. The sound of it is strange; the energy behind it is both affectionate and absolutely final.
“Lay down on the floor in the back seat. Don’t move. Don’t look up. Don’t do anything no matter what you hear.”
Eddie senses that he may never say another thing to them. Eddie leaves before they can think of it.
The truck starts up. The muffler begins to grumble down the hill.
“We have to pack. We have to get out of here.”
Julie can talk.
“They’re between us and the highway,” she realizes out loud. “I don’t care. We have to get out of here.”
Adrenaline amplifies the gin in John and he fires four shots into the night sky. Exactly the wrong thing to do. Panic on display.
He pulls shells out of the box and tries to cram them into the cylinder.
“John. . . . Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
She’s hysterical.
He’s dropping shells on the ground and managing to fire off four more rounds into the surrounding brush.
A shot from down the mountain side. Three echoes and the truck’s gears winding higher.
“Julie, where’s the keys?”
She pounds her pockets. Eddie runs to the driver’s door, jerks it open. No keys in the ignition. She’s screaming.
“Where’s the goddamn keys?”
He’s muttering. The shotgun’s jammed.
The truck stops.
“OK, Julie. . . . ” A hard sentence comes out of Eddie’s mouth. “They’re coming back.”
His voice sounds deadened and flat. John is reduced to near convulsions, his hands shaking, the gun falling. He picks it up. Dirt fills the jammed chamber.
Two more shots echo from below, louder and closer. Eddie runs to the back of the station wagon, yanks out the cooler, runs to the fire and douses it in a hiss of smoke. He kicks the embers of the wet pile.
John is defeated. The gun is hopelessly jammed and he’s too drunk to solve it. He slumps, his shoulders drop, his head is down. He’s thinking about himself, what he’s done, where he is, what he is. He can’t move. He’s about to cry.
Julie is moving in silence. She frisks her husband, going through his pockets. No keys.
Eddie is suddenly warm. He sways inside, his soul getting a glimpse of everything. Nothing can reach him. A weight so dense he can’t be moved. The message the desert whispered to him in what seems like a lifetime ago is the closest thing to love he’s ever felt.
“I’ll already be dead before I see anything happen to them.”
He grabs the camp shovel, its blade folded down, the pick sticking out at a right angle. He tightens the blade down, twisting the hand screw on the short handle. He walks out into the brush, listening for their steps. He crouches beside their path.
He waits, hearing their footsteps crashing through brush below. Eddie decides to use the edge of the shovel blade. The pick might get stuck in the bones of their faces.
WHEN RELATIONSHIPS GO BAD
Eddie’s mind has become a prisoner. The battle for his soul was lost before his age had two digits. The remainder of his life becomes an anguished search. In the dark. In strange terrain.
It is understandable that he would eventually lock himself up, hiding from these cities filled with cannibals, like vultures, up to their necks in the chest cavities of the fallen dead, their spasms twitching to music they try to call their own. Obscene gyrations and thrusts in doorways and on street corners. Everyone thinking they’re on time, bopping to the rhythm, nodding with the bass, mouthing the words, thinking that’s enough to own it, to have made it, to be it. On hands and knees, the vultures grin down on your face and shake hands before turning you over.
Eddie seems safe inside himself. A red stain rings the walls of his prison cell. His fingers bleed as high as he can reach. I have been made to understand that he will forever be denied parole. So he wrestles around in there with his fear one minute and the guilt for dirty fighting the next. I don’t see any way out. They see right through him. You probably have a better story than his. They’ll probably believe you. You get along better with the others anyway.
I still get time in the yard. They let me out on cold days. I shiver in the wind like an ice carving. Eyes are grey and sightless; cannibals walk past me without comment. I just stand here . . . waiting. Feeling myself going numb, until the season changes and a smell comes from me that fills the air with this year’s progression toward complete rot. Then feeling returns, and each nerve ending screams. The impulse is to go north to the ice, to freeze and be numb again.
But they smile, encircling my bent shoulders in their arms, pushing the plate in my direction, testing the bathwater, boiling the tea, making the bed, setting the alarm. Locking the door quietly, telling me they’ll come back. In warm sleep, the body gains strength and wakes. I hear the key in the door. Their faces peer at me, patient and infinitely understanding like nuns above reproach. Vicious in their tolerance, and spiteful in their understanding. Thinking I don’t recognize this love as something feeding itself on what there is to hate in me.
I walk outside. Hands in my pockets, head down, walking and thinking, walking and wondering. I witness an underdog. I hear insults following him down the street. I wonder about Eddie. How he’s doing. Is he still making it worse for himself?
In a park, I watch in the pale dusk, children abandon each other. That night I make it to the edge of town where the bars and clubs hold the wicked and the chaste, mingling in an unholy and inevitable attraction. I hear the snide, witty condemnation that seems unarmed, and watch it blow a hole right through the innocent person not quite up to understanding the words snaking out of the hipster’s broken mouth. Parked cars shine with predawn dew, and in their windows my eyes look a lot more tired. Another loser begs for a quarter to make the bus.
This is a battlefield without honor. It evaporated from the trenches, the camps, under the blaze of Christendom’s ground zero.
You don’t get a quarter. Please don’t make a fool of yourself seeking mercy. Here we kill children as a matter of course.
I keep walking. A dog lifts its tired head and lets it fall back in the dust again, as if it knows there isn’t much use in aspiration. The hollow sound of my footsteps blows away with the trash. He jumps and howls in an afterthought behind me.
Then one of you helps the cranky lady off the bus, and a lonely kid hears his name ca
lled to him across a barren street. An ancient black gentleman in suit and tie tips his hat, turns the corner and passes me. I hear horns climbing, a warm percussion surrounds me, something genuine happens for an instant in the slightest nod of our heads timed with something we can’t understand.
I find it worth living in these simple human gestures, carrying the assurances of shared centuries, the potential for dignity, the promise of something more than the waste around us. The nod of one stranger to another. These singular moments of communion in every church in the world, formalized in the minds of philosophers from every echoing palace throughout time, and failing in every eon.
Wars are fought to retain the nod of one man to another. We call it by other names. We demand allegiance to it — prayer — torture in its name. It has to be disguised, distorted, and defined to fit the need of the commandant. Made into a flag, or symbol, or sentiment fed back to us, to fatten us for the sidewalk. Giving us names and identities so that we can recognize each other. All systems operate to replicate your shadow, to give you company. This single demand of those who rule or who have ever ruled to do this, to duplicate what once was you, is the proof that it takes strangers to dignify the world, to make it safe.
As I near my cell, the reverberation hits the deep keys. I stumble and apologize into my jacket cuff. The door swings open and I reclaim my life, giving the commandant my regrets but I won’t be serving chocolate tonight to those educated friends yawning on the living room couch. All of them comfortable, pretending the halls were built for them, that the towers above them aren’t dwarfing them, and the dogs outside aren’t waiting for a lot more than the scraps no one can really afford to toss in their direction.
A woman is sharpening her feelings for me, grinding her glinting angry woman’s broken hearted blade, mouthing incantations. The blade snaps between rib and cartilage. I stagger in circles.
A grass fire burns down the prison farm. The well runs dry. The livestock go mad in the heat and run off. Parasites eventually drive them to blindness. They run in the ashes, tongues swollen, kicking crazily in the air.
We try to be good. We adopt what we associate as good. Grass fires burn down our communities. The wells run dry. We go mad in the heat, killing and running through the night. We go blind. We fight in the ashes. Tongues swollen from repeated lies, we whip ourselves bloody. We move to Salem and the trials begin.
Nobody notices. It’s not on the news. All communication becomes complete fiction designed to intimidate. It works like a charm. The Christians win it all and it turns to shit in front of them. Their children begin to revolt. Infections decimate millions, the rest turn to brutal methods of what they see as self-defense. They snap at each other across the dining room table. Spit sputtering in invectives in the disagreement of the moment’s entertainment.
It gets quiet for a few hundred years. Small groups of tribesmen begin to communicate, resulting in blood feuds. The night falls.
YOU’LL RUIN THAT BOY
My parents left the trailer park behind. For weeks we’d heard about a place called California. A place where a lot more was possible. Oranges. Beaches. Summer all year long. California for us meant moving into a housing tract populated by ex-military families.
Fathers were guards at K-Mart, Fuller Brush salesmen, owner-operators of big rigs, fishermen in the tuna fleet, gardeners, awning salesmen, supers at Lockheed. Or like my father, they were still sailing in fleets around the world, afraid to come home.
In school I made friends with other boys who missed their fathers. Boys who knew they’d see them six or nine months later when the fleet came back to port. We rotated between houses where a man was home, trying to see what they looked like, what they might expect of us.
The Monroes from Texas lived a couple houses down the street. Lyle Monroe became one of those fathers. Lyle always did what he wanted to most of the time. He drank when he wanted. He slept when he felt like it. Got into more women than he had a right to. He was scary, which we as boys interpreted as some organic link to the vindictive, jealous Father in the clouds who for generations had been sending the men in our families to hell. A man of physical strength and nasty disposition who especially despised education and the things that came with it, he broke horses and worked as a prison guard.
He stood over me. His eyes searching my face for the fear I was hiding from him.
“You’ll ruin that boy.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. What could I do that would ruin his boy? Robert Monroe was beyond ruining. But there are times to keep your mouth shut, and in a canyon alone with Lyle when he’d been drinking was one of them. I was surprised he didn’t already know that his boys Robert and Grant were indestructible. The only ruination in their future was whatever they brought down on someone else. But Lyle was in a telling mood, not a hearing one. He stood up straight, almost to his toes. He shook his head and clenched and unclenched his fists. He turned his back to me.
The sweat in his shirt patched between his wide shoulders. He was the kind of man no one could reach, a dangerous mystery to everyone, including his family. His brothers were similar. Lyle was the eldest, each one meaner than the last. The youngest, Boomer, came through town twice a year and slept for the night in the garage. Lyle warned us away, telling us that if we went in there, Boomer would rape us for sure. We peeked under the garage door, watching him laying on the floor masturbating in a drunken stupor. Lyle would always give him two days, then run him off. The two of them in the front yard, bashing on one another’s head until Boomer staggered off, screaming threats.
I thought that Lyle was going to walk away, that his comment about my effects on his oldest boy was a passing bit of alcoholic insight, lost and forgotten. He was likely to just start walking, or he might whirl around and slap my face. It had happened before. I waited.
His hands hung like hooks, knuckles thick and callused. He could have been a tall man but he was compressed with a psychic weight that pressed down on his shoulders like Blake’s God. He turned slowly; his eyes narrowed with the impulse to hit me. I stood looking up trying to determine the correct response to appease him. That morning, I had knocked his son’s front teeth out.
I had my reasons and any of them were sure to make it all worse. I had already been naked in bed with his daughter. And I lusted for his wife.
I didn’t really know what having his wife would mean beyond a fascination with her loose curves, her generous lips, the greasy black hair, the deep cleavage of her breasts, the darkened alley between her legs. Her smile and her warm voice. Her quiet ways and her secret rumbling laugh. Her loneliness. There was really nothing I could say.
She ran through my dreams unencumbered with the weight of the guilt she inspired in the daylight hours. Her dark voice speaking a language I could not fathom, but engendered such a need to follow that my waking hours were filled with memories of the sight, smell and sound of her. It was something beyond love and there was no way to tell Lyle that I couldn’t help it. It was impossible to explain how it led to the fights I had with his son.
He walked back toward home without saying another word, as though he was stating what was preordained, and there was no point in trying to change it.
I was trying to change it though. Between fits of violence, I would try magic. Just a week before, I had one I was pretty sure was going to work. I prepared it gradually over most of the spring, plotting the celestial chart, timing my requests with the phases of the moon. Making sure I asked each of her children on the day of the month corresponding with their birthday. It took an effort to line her five children, oldest to youngest, under the full moon in the back yard. The eldest daughter stood bored and bound by her promise after hours of pleading. Grant and Little Lyle had to be bribed, Robert threatened, and the youngest daughter was in love with me. I put my hands on their heads each in order of their birth saying nothing. Their eyes c
losed, the boys snickered and stood still. It was as though they’d been hypnotized. I hurried down the line, lingering on each skull as long as I dared. I cupped their faces and my fingers shook. The thought of each smooth orb passing between her legs and into my hands somehow intended to lessen the vast distance between her and me. The eldest daughter’s face compressed with a hunch about this ritual. I trusted that it was beyond her imagination. She would not let the thought take shape. It was right there in front of her.
“Eddie, you are so damn weird.”
The ritual ended. In the days that passed, nothing happened.
But the pressure built until I caved in Little Lyle’s ribs. I bulldogged Grant’s neck in my arms and flung him to the ground. I attacked Robert and knocked the air out of his chest. An older boy came to his defense and I hit him with a power I didn’t ask for, didn’t want, and loved more than anything in the world. I had access to something wrong and undeniable, something bad that no one seemed to have a defense against. The kid went across the street and started screaming that I was crazy. I faked a slap at Robert’s ear and drove my other fist at his chest. Robert ducked; I caught him in his face. He dropped holding his mouth and his fingers turned red. He sputtered what a “thon-of-a-bith” I was. I got him to his feet and tried to get him into the canyon before he could get home to show Wanda the damage. He followed me for a few steps, then his tongue felt the hole where his teeth used to be. He freaked. I watched him walking home, each step like he was stamping out a fire in his path, his hair electric in anger.
I was ruining him. I transformed my best friend into a player in my rituals. My friendship with him was based on the beauty of his mother. I had nightmares at night and my heart pounded when I woke up. There was no excuse for me.