The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  She’s a black base-born and she wants Death! we shouted.

  Quilby’s eyes fairly started out of his head. She is God’s creature, he said, throwing off his coat then loosening his cravat. And you shall not harm her.

  The two men, prodigiously embroiled in fisticuffs, grappled at each other, vying for the pistol. Adela worked furiously to extricate her wrists and, once free, pulled down her gag, crying, No you shall not! rushing toward Percy. And we, en masse, ran as one toward Death, wedding our wee bodies with hers, until her, our, their fingers wrapped about the pistol.

  O Adela, though we now know the Why, that How is known solely by those individual fingers which pulled the lone trigger. We only know presently, and indeed knew then, that he20 looked more elegant in death than we ever knew him to be in life, or even when we first had collaboratively imagined entangling him.

  We, no longer the children we have been, have never forgotten that, no matter what shade the skin, the blood is always red. And for this denouement, we beg you, Adela, to forgive.

  Finis.

  Accidental

  At Black Creek, the water is the color of tea, mosquitoes bite and sand soaks through our motel towels. I look for snakes—water moccasins—the man I met at the Super 8 in Picayune says you can smell them coming. I don’t smell anything but my mother’s Oil of Olay on my face. In the water, just like on her skin, it smells of sweet almonds. Though my legs are already lesioned with bites, I swim to where it’s deepest, where the branches of broken trees swirl. Afternoons like these, I wish I lived in the time of Mark Twain, floating down the river in a canoe, reckless about insects and reptiles, armed with a shotgun and a short life expectancy.

  After our swim, he drives me to the Flea, empty except for us and the two hags that run it. I’m not saying I’m better than them, but I do have all my teeth. I slip between the racks of forsaken clothes—shrunk, stained, pilled—and use a bent comb on my wet hair in a warped mirror at the back.

  Out front, he asks me where I want to go next. He has dull teeth beginning to brown, and though he isn’t bad-looking and offers to buy me lunch, it’ll be best if he doesn’t know where I’ll be staying while I’m in Hattiesburg, so I ask for a ride to the graveyard rather than a local motel.

  He looks at me sideways because no one new has been buried there since 1926, but even the long dead need a social call, and there was something downright elegant about mourning in the nineteenth century: the baroque epitaphs where death comes in sleep, by icicle, through a glorious, perilous fall from a swing. On the drive there, he plays the radio too loud, and I’m glad of an excuse not to talk. Coming to Mississippi to track down my father is a gamble, but I am not relying on luck.

  As soon as his car pulls up to the graveyard, I shoulder my bag and hop out.

  “Hey, if you could—” he strains through the passenger window with a ducked head, cigarette dangling from his lips, a freckled hand leaning on the gearshift.

  But I am already standing more than a couple of steps away from the curb on the steaming cemetery grass. “Appreciate you,” I nod and walk off. My mother says leaving is my art form, but I think I’m losing my flair.

  The graveyard is hilly and dotted with Confederate flags. Masonic squares and compasses etched every five stones or so. I sit down with a book by an Esther and wait for my underwear to dry.

  Two hundred years ago, if a family member died, I would have had to prepare their body. The flesh would have literally come into my hands, and I would experience their death with all my senses. I would have to wash and dress them, plug their orifices, prop their mouth shut, rouge their cheeks, and arrange them on a bed as if they were asleep—as if in a few hours they would wake up and ask me something, or ignore me where I was sitting drinking coffee. But after a few hours I would see that their eyelids were unwilling, and would feel the torpidity in their face so that then I could be past avoiding their death and into the full heart of grief.

  I myself have only seen one dead body. The woman was my age, my height, my build. Both of us had brown hair, both did a brief stint in real estate, both dropped out of community college. She left school after a year, and I stopped midway. I am an only child, and she was the oldest but an only child for the first nine years. We both loved to swim and each once lived by the water, she in Cape May, me in Pensacola; as kids we took swimming lessons at our community rec centers since neither of our mothers could afford anything private. The year before she was killed, she took surfing lessons in Costa Rica; I took one ten years ago in Galveston with my stepbrother, Hank. In court for vehicular manslaughter, I didn’t look as the woman’s sister spoke of the family’s online memorial page, after prison I watched the page fill and in one photo, I swear we have the same jacket.

  Here’s where we start to diverge. She was newly divorced and had no children, while I had a baby at fifteen and never married. But when I stood near her still-breathing body, waiting for the ambulance to come, I felt we were interchangeable. It could’ve been me in her blind spot.

  Near evening, I hitch a ride to a motel along the highway. But some people are not as decent as the freckled guy. Some people are encouraged by my size, since as a small woman, even at thirty-seven, from far away I could look like a child. And so some people force you to reveal as you pretend to root in your bag for a tissue with your left hand, the little pistol that you are now holding comfortably in your right. These red-thick ballcappers need to sense that, as my mother said when she gave me the gun, that you wanna use it, that you’ve been waiting to use it on any motherfucker dumb enough to be dumb. These people, you see, can only understand humanity at gunpoint. As I walk away from him down the highway, the driver calls me a cuntfaced bitch out his window, detailing my impending bodily harm, but I think he now knows that I too have fears, hopes, dreams.

  I go to see a friend of the family, or it would be more correct to say a friend of my father’s, and am pleased to discover that Lonnie has a new wife. We sit on his unelevated porch outside Hattiesburg, my hand over my cup to keep out the bugs. It is hard to tell what is hotter, the air or the coffee.

  Lonnie’s new wife, Carly, is highlighted blond with nails pearled pink: they gleam lilac in the edging sun burning our shins. Though he’s old enough to be both of our fathers, she is suspicious, and I’d like to reassure her that I have no designs on Lonnie, who even at the age of sixty-seven likes to go downtown to the old train depot and busk, singing Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, some Woody Guthrie. His long hair grows out from the bottom half of his bald head like an evil monk. He’s ugly, which is why he always wears aviators. Says it makes the ugly rugged.

  He doesn’t understand what I am doing here. “This is not your South anymore.”

  “No, but I have come,” I say, “to borrow it again. I’m only living in Virginia at my mom’s while she’s sick, and once she’s doing better who knows where I’ll be?”

  “How’s your boy? How’s Levi doing? Is he rising to the occasion?”

  I think about my son while I sip my coffee. “He’s having a hard time with it, so I can’t say he’s much help. He doesn’t like hospitals.”

  “How old is he now?”

  “He’ll be twenty-two in October.”

  Lonnie grunts. “That’s what comes of not having a father figure.”

  My eyes meet his. “By that you mean Hank?”

  “I mean any man.”

  “Well, I’m okay with hospitals, and I’ll be back there soon enough. After I find Dad.”

  “That’s what you come to Hattiesburg to find?”

  “That and a land without a mall.”

  When I was a kid I lived with my father every summer, which I associate with blackened hot dogs, mothers threatening to break their children’s legs, rain-sad bean bags in the plastic ruin of back yards, unicorn and Elvis icons on tilted shelves, ghost stories told on rusting merry-go-rounds, sunburnt stallion men named Bubba shoveling potato salad, and peeing in the basement of the Lodge after passing th
rough a gauntlet of suck-cheeked old men in trucker caps. It was a hellish kind of heaven. I wore what I wanted (hot pink, white cotton T-shirts, bikinis); ate what I wanted (cereal, pepperoni pizza, chocolate milk shakes, chicken fingers, ketchup sandwiches); and played all day (spies, kickball, tag) and stayed up till morning reading all night (Anne of Avonlea, James and the Giant Peach, Island of the Blue Dolphins).

  Lonnie and my father played baseball together at the Lodge. On those weekends, my father and whatever woman was holding court would bring me to the games in the back of their pickup truck beside two coolers of beer and box wine. At night in the parking lot, win or lose, I would lay in the truck bed sucking back sodas and eating candy, watching as the drunks mooned each other until I passed out sugar-drowned under the stars.

  My father was a nervy man who leaned more toward a domineering antagonism than violence. Most of the time we got on, as long as I didn’t talk too smart. I saved confessionals for my mother. Sometimes in the mornings I would catch him looking at me while I lay in the hammock reading, one dirty foot thrown over doing the rocking, and he’d shake his head as if wondering whose kid I really was. But I had his brown hair and brown eyes and his Sicilian skin that went gold in the sun.

  “Do you know where he is?” I ask Lonnie. “His phone’s been disconnected.”

  “Well, he ain’t dead . . .” Lonnie waits, “but he might as well be. It’s been hard to keep in touch. He missed the wedding, said he’d been in the hospital. Of course that’s the drinking. You know how he goes through his phases. A few months back I saw him at the golf course. I’m guessing he still lives off Old Highway 49 with that woman”—he turns to his woman—“what’s her name? Kathleen? Darlene?”

  “Kim,” Carly says, recrossing her legs.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  My father has been married three times. To my mother, then to Hank’s mother, and to my mother again. Problem is, he and my mother are still married. I explain to Lonnie that my mother keeps mailing the divorce papers that my father promises to sign but somehow never does. Before she got sick, she hired a process server who had no luck and tried to get a court order to have the notice published in the paper, but the judge denied it, saying she hadn’t done enough to find him.

  “So now she’s sent you,” Lonnie says.

  “I have a better chance of finding him than anyone else,” I say, picking a gnat out of my coffee.

  “But what does it matter now?” Lonnie asks.

  “Ever since she got sick, it’s been bothering her, keeps her up some nights. I think she just wants to be done with him. She says it would give her relief.”

  “I can understand that.” Carly nods.

  Lonnie shrugs. “Maybe he’ll want to marry that Kim instead.”

  Kim is a frosted, compulsive tanner who’s about sixty. She and my father stay in whatever town until the last casino kicks them out, and then they pack up their camper, and it’s on to the next. For eleven years, he’s been dragging around this toxic woman who breaks up his every relationship except with their two dogs.

  At first, I tried to befriend Kim. When she sent me a silver bracelet for my birthday, I called to thank her, and she told me that my father had begun drinking again. I sighed and said: “I am gonna kill that man.” When she got off the phone she started bawling, telling my father I said I wished he were dead. Ten minutes later, he called me up yelling. How easily he believed it.

  We turn to look at the wind chimes on Lonnie’s porch floating out a stain-glassed tune.

  “You wanna stay here while I drive Carly up to Memphis to visit her kids?” he asks.

  “I’m all right.” I put my emptied cup down. “I was thinking I might stay near Hank.”

  “That boy’s the last thing you need.”

  “That boy is forty. And Dad . . . Dad must be seventy now. This could be the last time I see him.”

  “Might could be,” Lonnie says, his eyes trying to tell me something I cannot know yet.

  But he needn’t worry. When I go looking for Dad, I don’t go expecting to find a father. We have no relationship, only a joint claim on a past.

  We are the children of the white sands, though we are no longer children and seem to know less. On the walk from my motel room to Hank’s truck, his eyes light up like I’m something to see and I’m fifteen again, unfilled in all the right places.

  Hank’s on a buttload of painkillers and a new antianxiety. He complains his shoulder’s acting up, so he drives with one arm; the wind thinning what’s left of his auburn hair. He doesn’t know where to put me because he’s back with his girlfriend, so he’s driving me to a motel near him in Slidell.

  Says he’s gotten fat and likes it. Says when you’re fat, food tastes better. I listen to him explain that he still cheats on his girlfriend. Even though now he makes a concerted effort not to. Of course, Hank would never use the word cheat.

  “I’ve never called her my girlfriend,” he says in the truck outside the motel whose broken sign holds a piece of notebook paper saying $29.99 A Night.

  “I’m sure that’s how she knows she’s not,” I say.

  “We’ve had lots of talks about my issues,” he says. “It’s not something I keep secret.”

  I tie my hair back. “Good for you. Lemme have a few of those painkillers before I go.”

  “For what? I know it sounds crazy, darlin, but I’m not as bad as I used to be.”

  I shrug. “I have sore armpits. Maybe it’s arthritis or breast cancer.”

  “Baby, that’s anxiety. I’ll give you one of these other things.” He opens the faded gym bag that sits between us.

  I swallow one dry then open the passenger door. “Do you think, if things had gone differently, we could’ve been happy together?”

  His eyes down, he shakes three pills from a plastic sandwich bag. “Wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. What’re you doing tomorrow?”

  “Going out to that trailer park in Gautier Lonnie told me about and see if Dad’s there.”

  “Why didn’t you rent a car at the airport? You short on money?”

  “Why, you got some to lend me?” I climb out of the truck.

  When I look back, he’s staring at me. “Don’t tell me you’re hitching. From Virginia? Lucinda, that’s not okay.”

  I smile at my name. He’s the only one who doesn’t call me Lucy. “I flew into New Orleans then got some rides the rest of the way.” I shut the door and walk up the motel’s concrete steps. But on the balcony, I stop and dangle over. “Hey.”

  He puts down the window. His green eyes are dreaming. “Hey.”

  Inside his face is the face I knew. “Come up here.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says.

  “You have to,” I say.

  Morning. Unquiet at the motel. My brain vigilant and my body consumptive. It does not help that I wake with the train. Between four and five A.M., the locomotive’s blare casts a pall over any optimism I might have been storing up for the coming day. Lying next to Hank in the dark morning of the night, I imagine all the ways my life could’ve gone, which turns into thinking about the best way to shut off my brain. But I would never do that to my son.

  I get up and look at the pictures in my wallet. The first is of Levi. He’s little here. Maybe six or seven. The picture has a white border and is sunlight saturated. He’s wearing a red life jacket and behind him is a gold radiance of lake. The edges are curling, one corner bent having spent 730 days under my pillow.

  Levi might have green eyes like Hank, but he has his own face. Though he’s about to be twenty-two, long and lean, a hood always over his head, he still has the penitent soft regard he had when he was eight. At that age he was a boy who couldn’t fall asleep until the grown-ups did, who tried to stay awake because he was afraid of the moon.

  We’re not close. At this hour I can admit that. I’m barely his mother in more than name. I know he’s a good kid even if he gets high listening to r
eggae, believes in government conspiracies, and is considering joining the Marines. Even though he’s at that age where the smallness of his compassion pinches.

  Hank sleeps like a teenager who’s still growing. Around six, I wake him up so he can get home before his girlfriend leaves for work. He rushes into the bathroom and runs the sink. I hear violent splashing.

  After last night’s pills, my color feels high and my scalp tight. There is a taste in my mouth I don’t like. I want to take a cold shower, change my underwear then pack up before the knock of housekeeping and be on my way to Gautier.

  Hank comes out of the bathroom saying he needs to pick up coffee because he and his girlfriend are running low. The motel light does bad things to his hair. I don’t say much because I am remembering the rules of the way this goes. He sits, busy packing his gym bag until he gets up to hug. His hug makes me smell of him. He’s always worn too much deodorant.

  When I go into the fluorescent-lit bathroom he comes to the door but not so I can see him. “Aren’t you leaving?” I ask my face under the gray film over the mirror.

  “Are you upset?”

  “Why would I be?” I look older today.

  “I just don’t know that I could have ever given you what you want,” he says into the door frame.

  I tie my hair up for a shower and flip on the overhead fan.

  “You need money?” he asks. “I don’t like you hitching. I can give you some money for a rental. How’s three hundred?”

  I almost laugh. “Don’t worry about me.” I pull a stiff, chlorined towel from the rack and lay it across the top of the toilet.

  “You think I should send some to Levi? I’m doing all right now.”

  “She’ll be late for work if you don’t hurry.”

  Even with the shower and fan I can hear the door slam.

  When I was fourteen my father married Hank’s mother, and moved in with them.

  In June, I came for my visit. Hank was the star running back on his high school team. He barely fit through the door but was as yielding as he could be. And he was pretty. No one else would ever say they couldn’t stop thinking about me.