by Larry Brown
It looked like a bat uprising out there. Like all the bats in all the caves of hell had decided to come out and fly around my house. I grew tired of it pretty quickly. I got my shotgun and started shucking and pumping. Pow! Blow your little ass out of the sky. Blam! Leave a hole for the moon to look through.
Well, I harried them away from the dusk, finally. Blew a couple of holes in a few flocks. How could they hang upside down and sleep? I didn’t care, because I wasn’t with Marilyn any more, and Betti DeLoreo hadn’t answered, and I had about four beers in me, which seems to be the break point for me, when I make the decision to fuck up or not. Usually I do, but to my credit, there have been a few times when I have not.
26
Same evening, a little later, I’d moved the speakers out onto the back porch and I was communing with nature a little. I loved nature and I felt like nature loved me. Why else would they send those fireflies, and doves, and geese that honked like a pack of wild dogs howling down the sky?
Dark was fine with me. That was when the women moved. They were sort of like snakes, or owls, looking to see what they could latch onto in the night. I loved them for that, thought it was a fine way to be. That was the way I was, and I didn’t figure anything was going to change it.
I heard him slowing down on the highway before he got close to the driveway. The distant roaring grew slighter; he was giving himself plenty of room to slow down, taking it easy on his brake shoes. I looked out across the trees and the river and the grass. Catfish were swimming down there in the water. Old turtles that were there when Lee surrendered. I’d seen them, monsters with moss on their heads, pulled up from the depths and clawing against the boat. If you sit down there in a boat still enough, the beavers will come out and sit on the banks and wash their hands and faces.
Yeah, it looked like a night for women. He kept slowing down, coming nearer, and I cranked it up just a little on Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song.” I hated it that Philip was dead, and it had only been a couple of weeks since Roy Orbison had died. My heroes had fallen all around me, had been falling for years. Hendrix and Morrison and Joplin and Croce and Chapin and Redding, Elvis and Sam Cooke, he was dead, too, Lennon and Mama Cass, I didn’t even want to think about the rest of them.
I heard the gravel crunching under his wheels. Coming to take me away. Lights lanced around the side of the house. I heard his alternator protesting a loose belt, and all fell to naught. I sipped my beer. I’d been sipping beer for a couple of hours, waiting on him.
27
The girl looked dead. Damn, she’s dead, I thought, looking at her. But then I looked at Monroe and thought, Surely to God he’s not dead, too. Finally I could see their chests rising and falling. His pants were halfway on, hers were halfway off. The sun was on us again. We were sort of like superstrong vampires who just got sickened by the sun. It wasn’t going to kill us or anything. But it sure didn’t make us feel good at certain times.
They were on the back seat. I was on the front. Somebody was plowing a field on a tractor right across the road from us. It was pretty unwonderful there, and to wonder who else might ought to be with us and where we might have left them and what stages of jail/bail we might have left them in, since I vaguely remembered us having some running mates with us at some point the night before.
I woke them up. Monroe seemed to think that a couple of them might be in the Pontotoc County jail and need our renderings, slim as they were.
We booked, naturally, to the Pontotoc County jail. A large man with red cheeks presented himself at the front door.
“Hep y’all?”
“Yessir, we think we got some friends in jail over here maybe.”
“Name?”
“What’s their names, Monroe?”
She spoke up. “Jerome and Kerwood White.” She was looking sort of anxious, since they were her little brothers.
“White? White. I don’t believe I’ve got them names on my list. Now I believe we had two Whites killed in a car wreck last night. Here it is. Yeah. That them? Jerome and Kerwood? One subjeck twenty-seven, one twenty-five. Dead on impact. Tractor trailer over here on Highway 6. Cut one of em’s head off, I believe. Y’all some kin to the family?”
28
The funeral of those boys was not a good place to be. It was raining, and muddy, and people were beating each other with fists of grief and screaming and blaming the whole thing on God. It was ironic since they’d all come to Him for comfort on this particular day. I saw some lady bust her ass on the church steps, had black bikini panties on, showed it to the whole world. I had several cuts on my head that nobody could explain.
The place where they buried them was down under a hill with white oak trees. It was very muddy. You could see it sticking to the heels of the ladies’ shoes. It was that red clay that lifts out two shoe sizes when you raise your foot. But what made me sadder than anything was all the old wreaths and styrofoam green spray-painted crosses from old monuments and tributes to love piled up against a rusty barbed-wire fence, forlorn and all, wet, funky. Funky funky love. I realized right that moment how different were the different types of love. Love between man and woman, husband and wife, was much different from, say, between son and father, or father and daughter, or brother and sister, or brother and brother, and father-in-law to second cousin. Love for the right person could make you do anything, give up your own life. I knew there was love that strong. I felt it for my children. I looked next to me and saw Jerome and Kerwood White’s mama and daddy holding each other up, staring at those two coffins, and I thought of times in diapers and even before, dates and weddings and visits on the front porch, the first kiss, a little house to start with until some kids came along. What they had on their faces was horror.
I was afraid I knew how it would go. He’d start drinking more, and she’d age quickly. From her loneliness and grief. There’d be a hole in her that nobody’d be able to fill up. Sex at their age was probably not much of a consideration any more. But maybe it was, between them. I hoped it was. I hoped it was an intimate thing between them that would hold them together, his wrinkled old body naked up against her old wrinkled naked body, bodies they remembered from forty years ago. But if it didn’t . . . if that couldn’t hold them together . . . if there were late nights home from the bars . . . her knitting in the living room, so quiet. . . what purpose to their lives any more. Two of the things they had centered on for so long. From diapers to death. And probably drunk when they died.
I went over to them and held them. I cried with them. They didn’t know me. They cried with me anyway.
29
I saw Raoul’s poem. It appeared in the spring issue of Rabbe Mabbe. They’d edited it a little, toned it down, taken some or most of the guts out of it, but Raoul didn’t want to talk about it. He was writing a novel. I said Go for it, motherfucker.
30
I got the kids one weekend and she went off to spend it with somebody, I don’t know if it was male or female. At that point I wouldn’t have put anything past her. I just hoped she wasn’t doing anything adverse around the kids.
Alisha shit on me a couple of times. Alan and I built a big fire in the back yard out of wood crates and things and roasted twenty-seven hot dogs and a pack of marshmallows. We pitched our old tent and carried quilts out of the house and pillows and camped out in the back yard the whole weekend except for TV-watching inside in the daytime. Alisha liked it. We didn’t know if she was retarded or not. There was a chance, they said, but we didn’t know yet. She seemed slow. Slow to focus her eyes, slow to understand words. Slow to learn to use the pot.
At night in the tent I held her to my chest and felt her heart beating under her skin, felt the silk of her hair brushing against my face. You deserve better parents than us, kiddo, I thought. She would try to talk but the words would never come. I must have said Daddy to her five hundred times that weekend, just trying to get her to say it. She never would. But she knew who Daddy was. That was the main thing. She might not
have had that word in her head. But she knew who Daddy was.
Alan did, too. He was my cowboy. I wanted him on Thunderbolt with me and I told myself I’d call Uncle Lou about it. We all slept in one sleeping bag because I wanted them close to me, I wanted their little faces and their little hands on me and I wanted to breathe their little sweet untainted exhalations all night long. I did that. And on Sunday evening at five o’clock I gave them back to their mother and tried not to cry when they went down the driveway, waving back to me through the glass and the dust.
31
Monroe blamed himself for those boys’ deaths. That girl was their sister, but I hadn’t known that earlier. What they’d done was drive their car at ninety miles an hour under a tractor-trailer that was crossing the highway. One skid mark was ninety feet long. The Highway Patrol said that meant they had one brake shoe working. They went 302 feet out the other side of it before coasting to a rest. The entire top was one small pinched thing like a steel suitcase.
I had to go over to the junkyard with them and look at it. Their sister cried softly on Monroe’s shoulder the whole time. I didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know that we’d met them and gotten in with them briefly and rode around with them for a while, and then gone back to our cars and let them go on to their deaths. She seemed to think somehow that it was all my fault. I hadn’t even been driving.
I told them I’d see them later.
32
Marilyn called me again. Betti DeLoreo hadn’t answered yet. I was getting pretty impatient. I wanted to know the news whether it was good or bad. I didn’t mind screwing around with uncertainty, it was dead flat failure I had a problem with.
“Lisha’s got ticks all over her.”
“We had her out in the tent. Put some nail polish on em. What are they? Those little bitty ticks?”
“Yeah. Them little tiny ones. You can’t hardly see em.”
“They don’t carry tick fever. That’s the Spotted Brown Dog Tick.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Trying to write. Enjoying knowing you can’t even think about trying to wring my balls for thirty-eight more days.”
“Well. I’m getting to be pretty good friends with Judge Johnson. He bought me a milkshake down at Burger King the other day.”
“He sounds like a real groovy guy.”
“Oh, he is, he is. He thinks it’s a shame how divorced women get treated in Missippi.”
“What is he, a liberal?”
“I think he’s horny.”
“He probably is. I guess you been shaking your ass at him.”
“Nah.”
“Don’t tell me. You let him look down your shirt.”
“I think I’m fixing to change jobs.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard about a good job the other day.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is it?”
“Up at a woodworking mill in Memphis. They need somebody to eat sawdust and shit two-by-fours. You interested?”
“I’m gonna have you begging for mercy.”
“Not me, baby.”
“You wait and see. You going out with anybody?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”
“What, she some great old big fat thing with great big titties?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Well. I been dating a guy that’s real nice. And for your information, he thought Blue Velvet was a sick movie.”
“Shit. What’d you do, rent it just so you could see if he thought it was a sick movie?”
“No.”
“Boy. I bet David Lynch is just losing his lunch right now because you and your boyfriend thought his movie was sick. You dilbert-head.”
“Well, that wasn’t the only thing you were crazy over. Anybody who’d buy a red hunting hat and turn it around backwards on his head, and wear it like that, get up in the bathroom and tap dance . . .”
“Look. We’ve been over this time and time again. He wasn’t crazy.”
“Then why’d they put him in that place?”
“Because they thought he was crazy.”
“Aha! See there!”
“Look, goddamnit. For the last time. His little brother died. This kid he knew jumped out a window and killed himself. And he was just a kid himself. Now if you don’t think that would fuck somebody up . . .”
“But it was just a book!”
I paused.
“Right, right,” I said, and eased the receiver gently onto the cradle.
33
Some more stories came back in. Some had marvelous rejection slips. Nobody promised their body to me over any of them. I knew that would come later. But I wished they’d hurry up. I still hadn’t legged down with anybody and I knew that my sperm was backed up pretty deep. I didn’t want the heartbreak of prostate trouble.
I tried to write all I could. I tried to put balls and heart and blood into it like a good writer had once told me to do. Sometimes it wasted me, just laid me out. I knew that at least some of what I was writing was good, but I just hadn’t found anybody to share my vision yet. Nobody with any power. Nobody who could say yes or no to publication. I knew about the pecking order, and jealousy, and interdepartmental office memos and the little notes that were jotted with a quick hand. They didn’t know about the careers they were advancing or retarding with their little papers, the numbers of us who lived and died with a stroke of their pens. They didn’t have any idea of the power they wielded. We were a vast unfaced effluvium of authors with unproven work, and there was so much bad that it was hard to find the good in all of it. Maybe they became jaded with it, their eyes turned to stone by the shit that fell before them. Maybe so much bad work had convinced them that it all looked alike, that nothing was going to come from the shit pile, that the quest was already over and they weren’t going to discover the next Hemingway. I felt these things strongly. I couldn’t prove them, but I felt them.
I wondered if the great Betti DeLoreo was somewhere in her high ivory tower, her fingernails painted red, her black mane of hair drawn to one side, reading manuscripts, one load of shit after another. I wondered if she was thinking of me. I knew the chance was small. There were many of us and only one of her. And she was only one cog in a big machine. It seemed almost hopeless sometimes, but I knew I had to keep going on. I had chosen my own path. Nothing could turn me from it.
34
I was in a bar one night and I had been drinking before I got there. I knew I was treading on shaky ground, drinking at night in town and then having to drive myself home. The state troopers nailed people with regularity. It helped to take secondary roads, to be responsible. I had good intentions that were often spoiled by drinking.
The evenings began it. The two or three beers in the late evening, then the false sense of security when night fell. To be driving on the backroads, the cooler in the floorboard. Little music playing. The road just slowly going by at thirty-five miles an hour. But sometimes the road wound to town.
Sometimes you see somebody you don’t like and you know when you look at him that the feeling is mutual. Your eyes meet briefly and then part, like two dogs sizing each other up. And any time later that night when you look at him, he’ll be looking at you. You only have to wait for the liquor to do its work to get your surprise. Your mouthful of fist, if it comes.
That was what I happened to be facing that night. Some fucker with a freaky face. I guess he was jealous of my handsome one, or relatively unmarked one anyway, which was the main difference between us. First off, somebody’d kicked both his front teeth out. And then bit off half of one of his ears. Then they, like, tried to gouge his right eye out with a class ring or something, really grinding it deep into the tissue of his eyelid, so that it hung down halfway over the eye and gave him this . . . freaky look. Man has a problem. You understand it immediately. He won’t go to a plastic surgeon. Whatever in his li
fe led him to his altered state won’t let him repair himself. He’d rather take it out on unscarred people like you, try to make you look more like him. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to turn your back and finish your beer and find another place to drink in that night. Because after he’s given you that pit bull look, you know you won’t go unchallenged.
I knew a few people down there shooting pool. They had some peeled cedar posts propping the ceiling up. Playmates were plastered over the same ceiling. You could look up and see titties of the most delectable types. Small rounded asses reclining over velvet couches, their elegant legs stretched out. Where do they find these women? They’re not out here in the world. I’ve never seen them. They don’t hang out in this particular bar, anyway.
I just moseyed around for a while. It was really pretty dull. I should have been at home writing. But I’d written so much I was temporarily tired of it. And I was hoping I might find some disreputable woman or some cast-off woman disreputable enough to take me in for the night. I knew I had no line of chatter, none. I just couldn’t open up. I knew they thought I was unfriendly, that I had no rap. But it really wasn’t that way at all. What did you say after you said Hi? You from around here? Why did they look so snotty when you tried to talk to them? Weren’t they lonely, too? Didn’t they want some warm flesh to press up against? I didn’t know any of the answers. I’d met my wife on a blind double date. We’d gotten pretty well acquainted in the back seat before we ever got out of her daddy’s driveway.
The young lady who was barmaiding smiled when she came over to pick up my empty.
“Another Bud, please.”