by Larry Brown
I never finished that one, either.
17
The check from my uncle came in the mail. It was $1,143.68, and it was made out to me. I booked. Salad tomatoes, some movies, couple of cassettes, shrimp, some oysters, couple of sirloins, beer, whiskey, some blue jeans, a belt, two shirts, some underwear, some Collins mix, garbage bags, a broom, Spic ’n’ Span, a cigarette lighter, The Sound and the Fury, Hot Water Music, Jujitsu for Christ, Child of God, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Old Man and the Sea, some barbecue bread, socks, a TV Guide, fourteen typewriter ribbons, some of those little chocolate-covered cherries, some kids’ clothes, a little blue squeeze giraffe that squeaked when you squeezed it, a little baseball and bat and glove, some rubbers, some toothpaste, some English Leather, some fingernail clippers, some shampoo, Slim Jims, barbecued pigskins, some Jimmy Dean smoked sausage, catfish, some seafood sauce, two reams of paper, some correction film, four dozen manila envelopes, some ink pens, a new Writer’s Market, a new band for my wristwatch, some rolling papers, a fanbelt, some brake shoes, a sending unit for my oil pressure gauge, G and A guitar strings, and some charcoal.
It was kind of like Christmas.
I hauled all that home, called my ex-wife and told her I had some stuff for the kids she could pick up at my mother’s, told her I was fixing to write her lawyer a check for two months’ alimony, hung up, sat down, wrote the check, addressed an envelope, considered writing him a letter, didn’t, licked it shut, put a stamp on it that I steamed off one of my returned envelopes that the postal employees had let edge through the cancelling machine, and walked down the driveway whistling and put it in the mailbox.
When I stepped back in the house there was still some of the money left. Provisions had been laid in. I was ready for the siege. I opened a beer, took a swig, put on Johann Pachelbel’s Kanon and listened. My uncle had caused all this. And he was out three cows over it. Later that night I called him and thanked him, and tried to explain the enormity of what he had done for me, how he had given me at least sixty days of freedom and time to write, but all he said was don’t mention it.
18
Couple of days later it was her on the phone. I asked her if she’d gotten her mon.
“Yeah, I got it. Where’d you get it?”
“That’s all right where I got it. You don’t need to call over here and get nasty with me just because I made your alimony payment on time.”
“I ain’t being nasty with you. I know where you got it anyway.”
“You don’t neither.”
“I bet I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Don’t do it.”
“Do too.”
“Well, where’d I get it, then, you know so much?”
“Your uncle gave it to you. He sold two cows and gave you the money.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your mother.”
“Goddamn it.”
“She tells me everything.”
“I bet by God she won’t after I get through talking to her.”
“What you so pissed about? I got a right to know what you’re doing.”
“Not any more you don’t.”
“Did you make it home all right that night?”
“What night?”
“That night I talked to you. I don’t guess you remember it, you’s so drunk. Couldn’t hardly walk. You gonna have a car wreck and kill yourself one night. Or fuck some old haint and get AIDS all over you. Then what’s your kids gonna do for a daddy?”
“I wasn’t aware that they had one now other than biologically speaking.”
“Other than biologically speaking? You are so full of shit, Leon, do you know that?”
“Are you through bending my ear? Cause if you ain’t, tough shit. I’m through talking to you. I got your damn alimony paid so I don’t want to hear another word out of you for two months. You got that?”
“Sure. Less one of the kids gets sick or something.”
“Yeah. Well, call me if that happens. I want to know if they’re sick.”
“I mean to pay the bills. You got to pay the doctor bills, too, you know.”
“I know, Marilyn. Now anything else? No? Bye!”
Fuck you. Goddamn couldn’t write while I was married to you and now I’m having to listen to you while I’m divorced, trying to work over here. Shit. Get me so goddamn upset I can’t even do anything for thinking about all the shit you get me upset about. Call over here and mess up a whole day’s work because of you. Didn’t even mention the stuff I got the kids. Just wanted to worry the hell out of me for a while. Probably told them you bought it yourself. Be just like you.
19
I wondered if the great Betti DeLoreo would write me back. I wondered how high up she was. It was entirely possible that she might be fat, fifty-eight, and gap-toothed. She was probably married and had grown children. She might be bulimic, or lesbian, or have no legs. What did I mean imagining these things about people I didn’t even know? I did it, though. I imagined what she looked like. I imagined her flying down from New York and pulling up outside in a white stretch limo and getting out, flashing a lot of leg, telling the driver to wait, coming in, Leon? Yes, Leon darling, yes, and then pulling off her fur and having this cleavage like Jayne Mansfield. I actually sat at the typewriter and did that. I did that a lot. Usually while I was under the influence of Uncle Bud.
20
I got drunk one night. Actually several nights in a row and it scared me. When I came to, I believed I had been on a “running drunk” for two days. It was the first time that had ever happened to me, and I’d always said it never would. Now I had done it, and it hadn’t seemed that hard.
I. curled up there in my bed the next morning and thought about it. This is what brought it on. You’ve got your art and you’ve got your precious life and where does that leave room for them? I rolled over, closed my eyes, mashed my face into that pillow. Trying to keep that old sickening straight truth from pushing in. If you’s worth a shit you’d act right. Stay home two or three nights a week anyway. You just love to run drunk. Ain’t nothing going to help it. You can fix it for a while and then it’s all going to come back. Sooner or later. You can straighten up for a while till things get better and then gradually you’ll get off into it again. Why she left you. Look how long she stayed. And you just threw it all away. Think about those fat little faces. That little one cutting teeth, crawling, whatever. You a sorry son of a bitch. Probably don’t even know how old they are. Yeah . . . Alisha’s . . . twenty-one months . . . Alan’s four years three months.
I sat up in the bed. Had the sheet up over my legs, like I was going to get up with it wrapped around me like guys you see in these TV movies or even real movies where they don’t want their dicks to be seen, but it’s really ironical when you think about it, like two people who have been slamming each other’s bodies naked for two hours are suddenly going to get up and wrap sheets around them.
Yeah, I was sorry. Sorry as hell. Sorriest sumbitch ever shit behind a pair of shoes. But one thing in my favor was that I wouldn’t rather climb a tree and tell you a lie than stand on the ground and tell you the truth. No sir, you could trust me to do what I said. I had a lot of things wrong with me, but lying wasn’t one of them.
That old sunshine was burning in on my head. I had a bunch of pimples on my legs, or maybe not pimples, just these little red irritated spots from wearing long pants all my life. Man wasn’t meant to wear long pants, but my legs are so skinny I can hardly bear it.
It was hot as hell. Again. My head was hurting, and I had about two truckloads of guilt on me. They’d already backed up and dumped. Right on my head.
The day didn’t seem worth getting dressed for. So I flopped again.
21
It was hotter than before when I woke. Sweat had matted the hair on the side of my head. The pillow was damp with it. It seemed to be about two o’clock in the afternoon. I
knew the mail had run.
I lay there and thought about it. What good would it do to get up and go see? The motherfuckers weren’t going to publish any of it.
I got up and showered. I looked out the window. My neighbor’s corn in the field next door was being burnt, parched, withered. He was having a rough time of it, too.
I went down and checked the mail. Water bill, light bill, phone bill, and somebody wanting to give me an AM/FM radio worth $39.95 if I bought a quarter acre of land in some resort area in Arkansas for $6800. Nothing from Betti De-Loreo. But at least nothing had come back. Yet. I had fourteen stories on their way to or back from various editorial offices across America.
I went back to the house, opened a beer, and sat down at the machine. I sat there all afternoon waiting for it to say something to me, and it never did.
22
I wanted to write a story about love one morning. I liked love and could hardly do without it, but I didn’t really want to write a love story. I mean not a bodice-ripper. So I started writing a story about a lady whose husband had died and left her with two children. He had been killed in a tragic pulpwood-cutting accident, mashed flat by a falling pine tree, and now he was dead and gone, fresh dirt heaped over his grave. The lady, whose name was suddenly Marie, couldn’t even afford to buy him a headstone. He, the lately deceased husband, who didn’t need a name, had not taken out a large life insurance policy to provide for his family’s future in the event of a sudden and unexpected death. As a matter of fact, one night after a long day of pulpwood cutting only two weeks before, he had told an insurance salesman who had come by to see him that he didn’t have time to listen to that shit, and would he get the fuck out the door. Two weeks later, pow. Flat as a pancake. The kids were grabbing hold of the doorknobs hollering Biscuit, Daddy, biscuit. Marie didn’t have any skills, couldn’t read. Plus she had a nervous condition that made her head shake very slightly. She didn’t know what she was going to do, how she was going to provide for these two children, who needed Pampers and other things.
She tried go-go dancing for three nights, locking her sleeping children in the car in the parking lot. But it was no good. She couldn’t concentrate on her rhythm, thinking about the kids outside, whether they were awake or not, crying, thinking they had been abandoned. So she had to turn in her G-string. She drove home through the night, gripping the steering wheel “so tightly her knuckles whitened,” wondering what she was going to do. The kids continued to sleep in the back seat, secure in the knowledge that their mother would take care of them.
Marie rode around for a while, wondering why her husband hadn’t had enough sense to buy life insurance. She didn’t even have dog food for their dog.
At this point I realized I couldn’t help them, realized I wasn’t a writer, and threw it away, which scared the shit out of me.
23
I was sitting on the porch drinking a beer about sundown. Nothing was good. My life was rotten. My ex-wife would have a yoke around my neck for the rest of my life, and if I happened to remarry one day, her hate would be doubled. I didn’t know if I could take double hate. Nothing I could ever do would be able to repair the feelings that had been stomped on. I had promised before God in His church to cherish her always and I had not honored that promise.
I heard a car turning in the driveway, saw headlamps coming up even though it was too early for them. It was Monroe. The evening gloam was upon us. It was gloaming time. We would be Gloamriders in the Sky.
He shut off the motor and got out with a beer, stuck his arm back in and turned off the lights. He got up on the porch and sat down beside me in a chair.
“What’s up, man?” he said.
“Not much. Just sitting here watching it get dark.”
“You want a beer?”
“I’ve got one. You need one?”
“I’ve got one. You want to go ride around?”
“Suits me. Let me get some more beer.”
“I’ve got plenty. Just come on and get in.”
I got in. We rode down the road.
“What do you hear from your old lady?” he said.
“That she hates my guts.”
“That’s nothing new, is it?”
“No.”
We rode for a while. Drank a while. He had some Thin Lizzy and he plugged old Philip Lynott in and the evening gloam began to turn purple and be immersed with beautiful gray-lit white clouds that rolled high up in the heavens and began to slowly unfold like gigantic marshmallows or mushrooms until the beauty of it just made me shake my head. I was alive, he was alive, the snakes were in the ditches, the deer were beginning to ease out of the woods, the beer was cold, he was free from his old lady, I was free from my old lady, both of us were just free as birds. We’d both been through the woman trouble and we knew what it was. It was a heartsick and a fuckup and nobody could warn you from one to the next. Lose one, get another one. One day loves you and then another day years apart hates you. You bastard. You sorry son of a bitch. Oh yes, baby, do it make me come. All them words out of the same mouth. Tsk, tsk. Be my only baby. Get up and fix it yourself.
“We in the gloam, old buddy,” he said. “We definitely right in the middle of it.”
It was true. James Street had given us the phraseology. The wind was sweeping our hair. We had the windows rolled down, arms stuck out. It was warm. Life was alive, and real, and we were not putting a whole lot of poisonous emissions into the air. I felt about as good as I’d felt in a while.
“It’s a gloaming, all right,” I said.
He kind of snickered over there at the steering wheel.
“Let’s go fuck up. You want to?”
“Fuck up? Where at?”
“Ah hell, we can just go fuck up uptown if you want to. I don’t care. Just anywhere.”
I lit me a cigarette. I’d been cutting down.
“Ah hell. I don’t guess I better go fuck up. I think we fucked up a lot the last two nights, didn’t we?”
“In a row, buddy roe. In a row. That’s why I want to get out so bad and fuck up tonight. See if we can’t make it three in a row.”
“Boy, I was fucked up last night.”
“I know it. I was, too. Do you remember us even going home?”
“Naw, man. I was too fucked up.”
We rode some more. The stars couldn’t make it out yet, not yet, but they’d be peeking before long. Night was going to cover the land. Everything that slept in the woods would wake up then, the coons from their lairs and the rabbits that feared everything. I could almost see the beavers’ heads cutting the ripples up Potlockney Creek. I wanted woman-flesh. I mean, as good as that was, I wanted long hair in my hands, and breasts on my chest. And I was aching, awful, didn’t want him to see. So I said: “Yeah. All right. Let’s go fuck up.”
24
We woke up hot. Out in the middle of the woods. Why we do these things I don’t know. It seems so easy when you first start out. Couple of cold beers, little smoke. Ain’t going to hurt nothing or nobody. Just going to pass off an enjoyable evening. And wind up almost dying before you get home.
He wasn’t in the car. He was out on the ground. Lying in a patch of sunlight with ticks crawling all over him. It was nine o’clock. He was fucked for work. And would have to call in.
Bark and stuff were stuck to his face when I woke him up. He couldn’t believe where we were. We’d had no nooky, neither of us. The nooky was all at home asleep. We had some vomit dried on us, real regular pickup guys. Swinging Singles. We were as bad a fuckup as a screen door in a submarine.
He didn’t want to get up. Wanted to just stay there on the ground and sleep. Said he could make it if I just moved him into the shade.
25
I was sitting on the back porch the next evening not doing a damn thing. Drinking a beer. I’d said fuck it for the day. I’d hammered some stuff out, but I didn’t know for sure how good it was. It felt good, but I wasn’t certain. The world at large had a pretty narrow-minded
conception of everything. Some rootintooter from Chillicothe might get ahold of my stuff, and not have on his favorite pair of crotchless panties that day, and that might cause him to reject my work. I didn’t know. I knew editors had to be human, but I also knew that some of them had to be square, uncool, unreceptive to cool new work. I also knew that plenty of them were actively looking for the next new voice. I just didn’t know how to find them. They didn’t have names that I knew, and the names they had, I didn’t know how to find.