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by Matthew Griffin

  “I know,” I said.

  For a couple weeks after that, he threw up his breakfast before work every morning. He tried to be quiet about it, but I heard him through the walls while I packed his lunch in the gray dawn, the gag and rush, the wet cough as he tried to breathe in the moments afterward. When he came out of the bathroom and I asked if he was okay, he said, “Of course,” as if he didn’t know what I was talking about, and kissed me goodbye, his breath sickeningly sweet with toothpaste.

  On the morning of the strike, he stood in the dirt parking lot with the rest of the scabs, hundreds of other men in the same uniform, the same overalls and gray long-sleeved shirt, indistinguishable from one another but for their size, their relative degrees of exhaustion and stoop, the sun’s pastel light radiating from behind the red brick walls as if generated from the engines churning inside the building itself, and watched as the police and state troopers rushed in and tore the picketers from the gates they blocked, dragged them in handcuffs to the waiting paddy wagons. A few of the men beside him threw rocks at the strikers who dodged the policemen’s clubs. A German shepherd closed its jaw on a woman’s calf and dragged her to the ground. It was over before the sun rose from the smokestack, some industrial byproduct, some molten waste, before the steam whistle blew to summon the workers inside, nothing left but a few sprays of blood turning dark in red dirt among the remains of the old mill town, the company houses and school and playground, the company police station and hospital and general store, built so the workers would never be beyond management’s purview and razed when it was no longer profitable, to free up the extra land and capital when the owners decided to expand. The rubble of their cinderblock foundations still studded the earth, still thudded dully under Frank’s tires every morning, every afternoon. He stepped over them on his way through the gates.

  Inside, the machines hummed and clanged. He lifted each spool from the truck and cradled it to his chest like an injured comrade, he hurried across the concrete floor, he gave it into the waiting metal arms. The rack lifted, the spool spun, the rope unwound. The rack lowered it into the pool of indigo and held it under until it turned blue.

  FOURTEEN

  I’m putting up the Christmas tree. It’s a tabletop artificial one I bought from the dollar store, no taller than my tibia is long, with ‘fiber-optic’ lights, whatever that means, built into it so the tips of the plastic pine needles themselves change from red to blue to purple to yellow in waves of color, each one washing away the one before it. Frank watches them with a bright, blank look on his face, as if he’s being hypnotized, while Daisy sits by his chair and obsessively licks his elbow with such insistence his whole arm moves back and forth to the rhythm of her lapping. I’ve got the opening arguments of the Debbie Drowner trial on the TV for a little festive accompaniment. It’s about time. Took them a month just for the jury selection. Apparently knowing that she’s guilty counts as being prejudiced, which means they had to find twelve shut-ins with very tenuous connections to reality to charge with the task of determining whether she was in her right mind at the time of the the murder—a description to which the defense objects, demanding that the event in question, though it is not, in fact, in question at all, henceforth be referred to as ‘the incident.’

  Debbie sits real prim and proper at the defense table, wearing a blue prairie-girl dress and a frilly white bonnet over her fried blond hair. She’s found God in jail, the news anchors say, and God’s told her to dress up like a pioneer woman. In a tiny box in one corner of the screen, set inside the bigger courtroom feed, they’ve got a panel of religion professors approximately the size of ants debating whether she’s become Amish, or Mennonite, or one of those fundamentalist Mormons that live in desert compounds and think men ought to have as many wives as they please. Her own defense team is the one that asked the judge to let the proceedings be televised. I suppose that’s one thing I ought to thank her for.

  I wrap the pre-lit branches with our old strands of big bulbs, the enamel color on most of which has begun to crack, so it looks when you plug them in as if bolts of lightning were branching through them. On some, the color’s flaked off so bright white shines through in big patches, and a few are completely bare now, look like the bulbs you’d screw into any tiny lamp. The branches sag under the weight.

  “You want to help me hang the ornaments?” I say. We’ve got a box of miniature ornaments for the miniature branches, tiny reindeer and snowmen and glass balls. Frank shakes his head. They’re so small he probably couldn’t pick them up without breaking them, anyway, much less thread the little hooks through their little holes.

  Not guilty by way of temporary insanity, that’s what they’re going for, so the prosecutor’s pacing back and forth—he’s a real infirm-looking fellow, tall and sickly but with ‘kind eyes,’ the newspeople keep insisting, as if they’d personally cast him to generate as much sympathy as possible—talking about how long she drove around with that poor little boy in the trunk of her car, how he rotted so long in his trash bag that when they moved him, the skin of his fingers slipped off his tiny hand, like a glove two sizes too big.

  And it is shameful, how long he was out there, but his skin sliding off doesn’t have a thing to do with it. That can happen in just a day in the hot summer like it was, especially shut up in a plastic bag like that. A whole lot of animals I had to turn away at the dawn of the plastic trash bag; they’d moldered in there so long and so bad that when I lifted the carcass, its hair fell out in handfuls, and the skin on its legs came undone and piled up about the hooves. Once your cells stop working, their membranes bulge and rupture, and the fluids burst forth and sweep through you and get between your skin and muscle, the way boiling water loosens the peel from a peach when you slice a cross in its bottom and drop it in the pot. Close a corpse up in plastic, so all the heat and wet and noxious gases are trapped in with it, and it spoils quicker than ever.

  “Fruitcake,” Frank says.

  “You sound like a fruitcake,” I say, picking up a thimble-sized porcelain basset hound dressed in a Santa outfit. I got it for Daisy, for her first Christmas with us. I write her name and the year on the bottom of it in permanent marker, which is no easy feat; I almost spill over the edge and sully the white fur trim of her coat. I shake the old tupperware container full of hooks until one falls loose from the tangle.

  “That’s what I’ve been hungering for,” he says. “Fruitcake.”

  “You want fruitcake? To eat?”

  “I surely do.”

  “You don’t even like fruitcake. If you liked fruitcake, I would have made it already.”

  “It’s a cake,” he says, “made up of fruit.”

  The wet clicking of Daisy’s tongue resounds from the cavern of her mouth. Frank’s whole body sways with the force of it, while her tail sweeps back and forth across the floor, gathering the dust and dirt and her own shed hair into a barrier ridge on either side of her.

  “You want fruitcake,” I say.

  “Yes, sir. I certainly do.”

  “How much do you think you could eat?”

  “The entire thing,” he says. “I believe I could eat an entire fruitcake right now.”

  I pop the ornament back into its plastic tray, grab his shoes off the mat, and drop them in his lap. I switched the deadbolts on all the doors while he was asleep, so you have to have a key to turn them even from the inside, and I’ve got the only one. If there was a fire while I was gone, they’d burn up, him and Daisy both. It’s a different, probably irrational calculation each time, the equation of risk: subtracting how long they’d be here alone, how long he’d have to leave the stove on or trip and fall and leak his brains out, from the relative dangers of wherever I need to go, the heaviness of the traffic he could wander into, factoring in the intensity of his palsy at that particular hour, how likely it seems that his fingers could grasp the tiny post by the window to unlock the car door. The easiest, cleanest solution, of course—just coming in the store with me�
��he continually refuses.

  He manages to wriggle his foot into one shoe, but his fingers can’t pinch right to hold the laces. He keeps dropping them, and focusing every bit of attention he’s got to pick them up, and not being able to keep them between his fingers. Debbie prays and prays, her head bowed as far as it can bow, her hands clasped to her whispering lips. Finally he has to fold his laces into bunny ears and try to wrap one clumsily around the other, like a child who hasn’t learned how to tie them right. Puts me in too sour a mood to watch. I go to the bathroom and wash the flakes of colored enamel off my hands, blot the sweat from my forehead with a piece of toilet paper.

  He wanders into the hallway and stares silent and grim down it at me, like a ghost. His shoelaces trail loose from their eyes.

  “I’ll shuffle,” he says, when he sees me glaring. “So I won’t trip.”

  “Don’t move,” I tell him when we’re in the parking lot. “Stay right here.” I parked as far from the door as I can walk, to reduce our chances of being seen. Daisy scrambles over the console and into his lap. “And you make sure he doesn’t get into any trouble while I’m gone.” She pauses, accepts her charge placidly and skeptically and with her usual tinge of sorrow, and resumes her licking. I lock the car doors.

  I always go to the store late on Sunday mornings, so the good people of town are in church and out of my way. Now it’s swarming with them. Soon as I step in, there’s two women who’ve parked their shopping carts in front of the corral, chatting away and completely oblivious to the fact that anybody else who might also like to use a shopping cart must now try to squeeze past them to reach one. I grab a basket and take it right to the seasonal aisle, glittering with candy in red and green foil, the shelves hung with tinsel and holly and racks of cheap stockings embroidered in sweatshop factories where the workers kill themselves because it’s the only way to get a day off, and there, at the far end of the aisle, is a bin piled high with fruitcakes, perfectly uniform beige blocks studded with bits of bright red and green and yellow that used to be fruit. I don’t know what you’d rightly call them now. I’ve never liked fruitcake myself. It’s too sweet and too dense. A slice of cake shouldn’t have the same consistency as a slice of cheese.

  I buy half a dozen of them, and the oily teenage boy at the register, as he transfers them from the conveyor belt to the plastic bags, looks at me warily, confirmed in his suspicion that only the decrepit could eat such a thing. Usually I try to pick the register with the handsomest bag boy, even if that line’s a little longer, but there wasn’t much to choose from today. This one’s got stringy hair and rosacea. The handsomest ones must be on vacation.

  “Are these good?” he asks, real stilted, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other while I count the dollars and nickels and pennies out of my pockets, as if it’s somehow inappropriate for silence to exist between two people while one of them is busy trying to provide the other with exact change.

  “No,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says. “Okay, yeah. Great.”

  I hurry back to the car. Frank’s asleep, his head tilted back over the headrest at such a drastic angle I’m surprised his neck hasn’t snapped, and Daisy’s still licking his elbow. She may have worn the skin off by now. The slam of my door jolts him awake. He blinks once, twice, and looks around the car and the parking lot as if it’s taking form from the inchoate primordial mass as we speak. It’s the third blink before recognition wipes the glassiness from his eyes and memory starts to assume the very loosest of shapes inside them.

  “Here,” I say, handing him a fruitcake.

  He holds it in both palms for a second, testing its heft. Daisy runs her nose snuffling and wet along the clear plastic. Then, slowly, with a deftness I thought had long since drained away from his fingers, he tears open the end of the wrapper and peels it back into a neat cuff. Glorified plastic wrap, that’s all it is, just a hair thicker than the kind you buy on a roll to stretch across your leftovers. He bites into the fruitcake like it’s a fried turkey leg, tears out a big hunk and chews it slow, mindful, working hard on the tough fruit bits and the nuts, and then there it is, that same old listening look.

  I knew it. I don’t know why I wasted the gas.

  He smacks his lips together real quick. “That was good,” he says. “Got a right good taste to it.” Even he seems surprised. He takes another bite, and another, and by the fourth he’s not listening at all.

  “I told you I wanted a cake,” he says. “And you tried to feed me cookies.” He shakes his head with great sorrow.

  “Fruitcake isn’t even real cake,” I say. “They ought to call it a fruit brick. A fruit log.” He nods, smiling, and tears off another fleshy bite. I shouldn’t be encouraging that kind of word play. “What made you think of it in the first place?” It’s not the sort of thing they show commercials for.

  “They kept talking on that trial about whether or not she’s nuts,” he says, pumping his eyebrows jauntily on the word nuts. He pushes the final bite out of the plastic and into his mouth.

  “I am absolutely sure no one in that courtroom used the term nuts,” I say.

  He folds the wrapper, real neat, and slips it into his shirt pocket so just the corner peeks out, as if it were a fine silk handkerchief. Daisy surreptitiously sniffs his elbow and starts to licking.

  “You got any more?” he says.

  “Glory, glory,” I say. “Hallelujah.”

  On the way home, I pull over to the Burger Bonanza. I like a little treat after I’ve gone out in the world. A little reward.

  “This calls for celebration,” I declare. “You want a hot fudge sundae?”

  He shrugs.

  “Hot fudge sundaes all around. I don’t even care if you eat it.”

  There’s train tracks cut through the road right in front of the driveway, stick out so high they nearly tear the undercarriage out of the car, and then the line for the drive-through’s wrapped halfway around the building. I park by the big metal dumpster in the corner, so it obscures the general view of our car, and head inside, where I get to wait in line behind eight disease-riddled members of the general public, with their stringy hair and red-ringed nostrils and tired eyes. Looks like a refuge for the homeless in here. The woman directly in front of me is wearing nothing but extra-large sweatpants, the drawstring waistband of which she has managed to pull all the way up over her bosom, then tied the string behind her neck to hold it up as if it were a bathing suit. The man behind me cradles his arm against his ribs. Something’s trying to poke out through his skin.

  As a man herds his children out the door, Frank drifts through like a piece of trash the wind blows skittering across the floor, this way and that. Finally he gets blown against the aquarium, full of plastic seaweed and rocks and without a single living thing swimming in its unnaturally electric-blue water, and stares into it while the last woman in line eyes him suspiciously to make sure he doesn’t try to sneak into her spot. And then, right as I’m about to order, he shuffles up and stands right here, right here beside me, for anyone in the world to see.

  The girl at the register smiles at him. She’s real homely, heavyset, with puffy cheeks the skin of which is stretched tight and shiny, and blond hair almost the exact same sickly color as her skin falling loose out of its ponytail. Her name tag says Lorraine. I’ve never seen a girl her age with that name. Didn’t think anybody liked it anymore.

  I tell her we want two hot fudge sundaes, an order of french fries for Daisy, and two sodas. “Light on the ice,” I say. Otherwise they cram the cup with as many cubes as it’ll take, and you’re lucky if they manage to squeeze any soda at all into the crannies.

  “Lorraine, Lorraine,” Frank says in his singsong voice as I’m handing her our money. She smiles at him. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. The wide crane swings its old ball and chain. I feel her pain: such a shame she’s so darn plain. Lorraine, Lorraine.”

  Her smile doesn’t waver while tears boil up into her e
yes. She stares down at the register and slowly counts out my change, then hurries away to the soda fountain to fill our cups. Frank laughs that high, airy laugh I hate so much.

  “Where’ve I heard that before?” he says.

  “Nowhere. You made it up.”

  She pulls the lever on the ice cream machine, and it lets loose long twisted strands of soft serve she catches in a plastic cup, tilting it around in a circle so the ice cream piles up into a big swirl. When she turns it off, she pulls the cup away real slow and gentle, draws the last strand of ice cream out into a delicate, pointed peak. It flops over.

  “I’ve heard it somewhere before,” he says. “I believe it was a popular song.”

  “You made it up,” I say. “Just to be cruel.”

  I can feel the line of the infirm piling up behind me, the clammy, aching pressure of them. Somebody coughs a wet, hacking cough. Lorraine comes back with our sundaes and our sodas wedged into a cardboard tray. She’s smiling as big as she can, so it pushes her cheeks upward and they squeeze her eyes almost shut, closing off the flow of tears. She’s trying hard, she’s trying her best, not to let them fall. She hands me a small paper bag, its bottom shiny and damp from french-fry grease. I squash it in between the cups.

  “He can’t help it,” I say, patting her hand. “He’s gone mad.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, my gosh. I’m so sorry.”

  “Well. He had himself a good life.”

  She smiles. Young people like to hear old people say they’ve lived a good life. It makes them feel better. Makes them think you can go on living it, even after it’s over.

  “Have a nice day,” she says. Her voice is coiled up tight.

  “You, too,” I say.

  We’re halfway to the door when Frank suddenly cuts around the napkin and ketchup station, makes a beeline through the tables and out the side door to the children’s pen, a big playground of red plastic and foam, with a big tube of a slide that dumps them into a huge pit of plastic balls enclosed in black netting. Makes them look like a bunch of animals in a cage.