by Brad Barkley
“Well, but it’s not real,” I say. I kick over the cup, and the leavings of a milkshake pour out. “That’s more real. A milkshake. You can understand a milkshake, get your brain around it.”
She nods. “When that man fell, I thought for a moment I’d killed him.”
“He fell because his legs are screwed up. They always have been, I bet. At least he knew what it meant when he fell, why it happens.”
“You don’t know that, Curt. He might cry every night of his life. He might put his fist through walls.”
“He might. I’d even say he should. But it does no good, for him or us. There’s no proper response. Hell, there is no response, proper or not. I don’t have one, do you?”
She shakes her head.
“How about you?” I shout across the lawn. “You have one?” The kids look up from their fishing and then away from us. The wind picks up, our breath coming in white mists.
“Why don’t you come with me to work tonight,” I say. I take her hand.
“You never ask me.”
“Well, I am now. It’s a party. Come be with me.”
She nods. “Okay.”
We stand for a while longer before we go. I leave the milkshake cup where it is.
That night at Kmart, Rhonda right away starts in talking with Lisa, feeling her distended stomach, asking her about breastfeeding and epidurals. It’s like she wants to meet this head on, these moments I only want to avoid. With everyone pitching in we finish the floors by midnight, and then the boys and their wives and girlfriends, so practiced by now, start the music and the beer and the snacks all flowing through the store. We sit in the snack bar and drink beer, careful not to spill on our clean floors. Rhonda sits up close to me, the way all the girlfriends do, as if they can’t get enough of being close. A couple times I see Rhonda staring at the swelling in the front of Lisa’s dress, and I know she is thinking about wanting to try again. The thought of it seems impossible to me, and for a minute I’m afraid—afraid that Rhonda is moving on, getting past this without me.
After everyone is nicely buzzed, Wilson suggests a game of hide-and-seek, while some of the others start riding bikes around the store. I find a public radio station playing Irish music, and I try to pull Rhonda out onto the floor, to show off the moves we’ve learned. She resists.
“C’mon, Curt,” everyone shouts. “Hide-and-seek.”
I look at Rhonda and shrug, then go to the breaker panel in the stockroom and snap off the lights. I leave the power on to the appliance department, so that out in the store the only light is the faint blue glow of the TV sets. The Irish music echoes across the store while everybody runs off to hide.
“Hey, you’re it, Curt,” Carlos shouts back at me. Rhonda puts her arm around me.
“I’ll be it with you,” she says.
“I’m no good at this,” I shout across the store. “Give me a hint.”
All is quiet, except for the fiddles and flutes of the music playing, a faint static hiss. The store in the dark seems huge and empty. Here and there I hear the suppressed laughs of Lisa or Tammy, one of them out there in the dim aisles. Soon, a bike horn honks, echoing across from the sporting goods department.
“There’s your hint,” Wilson shouts, and everyone laughs. Soon the others pick up the joke, and we hear the electronic beep of a talking book from the toy department, a rubber duck squeak from infants, the bike horn again, louder and faster this time. Rattles shake, pop guns pop, a bell rings, a toy piano, a Talking Elmo…all these noises, all at once, like, I think, the ghosts of children, playing invisibly through the empty store. Then I am holding Rhonda as if to crush her.
“We don’t have to look,” she says. “Baby, we don’t have to.” She turns me a little, in time with the music, pushing my hands into place.
“Come on, dance with me,” she says. “Balance and swing. We need the practice.” The music is a fast reel, and I pick up the pace of it, twirling her faster and faster in the dark, pivoting on my foot. I try to think of all that Phil told us, all his empty cheer. I try to put my weight into the spinning of it, the way he showed us, closing my eyes and leaning back, feeling Rhonda do the same. The sounds of the bike horns and bells and rattles and toys grow louder; they are shouting to us, impatient for us to come find them.
“Keep going,” Rhonda says. “Give me your weight. Go ahead. Give it.”
Another Perfect Catastrophe
rodeo tricks
We’re cruising down Dickson Street in the ragged vinyl buckets of my Pinto, and Sugar is chattering around a mouthful of peaches, telling me I’d better back up, he has just spotted a beret. I keep driving.
“Reed, you have to stop,” he says. “Think of Bobby Seale, Sergeant Barry Sadler. Hey, Pablo Picasso, man.” He tosses his fruit cup out the window, steals a Camel off the dash. “You saw it, right?” he says. I nod, sigh, pull over, and brake. Already he is hovering at low-middle on my happy-with-him gauge because he has again made us late picking up Lyndsey at the Hen House, and the back wheels of my Pinto are scraping from the weight of the acetylene tanks he buys to make more of his large, homely sculptures. His words, not mine—he likes to say he is of the large-homely school. He welds the sculptures without ceasing, finishes one and starts the next, lets them rust away in the basement, in the attic, scattered around the yard.
So we’re late and I’m torn because a feed cap is one thing, but this one really is a French beret, dark blue and new looking, which you have to admit is not something you see on the street every damn day. So I back up, wait for traffic to thin. We sit while the radio bounces out an old Donna Summer tune, then a commercial for the Hairport. The road empties and I throttle up again, hear the shush of wind and pavement as Sugar swings open the door, leans out, and just beyond his knees the sidewalk blurs past and he is yelling, “A little left, Reed, a little left,” then reaches and snags the beret, knuckles an inch from the asphalt. Dirt and styrofoam whip around the floorboards. I ease back into traffic.
“Man, we nailed that sonofabitch,” he says, slams the door, pries gum from the beret, and all I can see is Lyndsey and the several ways she gets irritated, twirling her hair, shaking her wrist so her watch slides down, chewing her lip. She is all about promptness. She expects things to be on time. Sugar slaps dust from the beret, tries it on. He tilts the rearview to check himself. Except for underwear, he never washes the clothes he finds before he wears them, and thank God underwear is a rarity. Mostly it is shoes, hats, T-shirts, the odd pair of pants. His latest T-shirt, minus a sleeve, advertises the Page High Girls’ Field Hockey Team. The back says, GIRLS KICK BUTT! He found it along Route 36, on the way home from the parts yard. He won’t drive because of his logging leg (he calls it), which has hobbled him going on twelve years now. I don’t mind, so Lyndsey minds for both of us, but what she would never let herself admit is that it was truly a righteous grab, that I never let the Pinto dip under ten mph, that to someone watching we looked better than any rodeo trick rider, better than Tex Ritter or Monty Hale hauling a woman into the saddle. Lyndsey doesn’t know these names. None of the movies she likes feature horses or gunplay.
I check my watch. “We missed Lyndsey,” I say. “She’s home by now and way pissed.”
He fans his smoke out the window. “Hey, really, it’s my bad, and I’ll tell her that.”
“I think she knows that, Sugar,” I tell him. He nods, adjusts his beret. It covers the bald spot in his graying red hair.
“You need to marry that woman,” he says. “All signs indicate that this is your last chance. And she’s a good one, Reed, so don’t blow it.”
“I know,” I say. The back wheels scrape. “I’m trying not to.”
the generation gap
What I don’t say is that he is the biggest chance that I will blow it. And you can’t blame Lyndsey, can you? Sugar (his last name, his only name) and I are thirty-five, the both of us, Siamese twins joined at high school vandalism. Lyndsey is twenty-three, and I remember what t
hat felt like, how you hit the exit door of state college and the ink on your diploma is still moist and you feel like you can step along the next forty-some years without the least stumble if only you are bright enough to avoid any deep woods and keep to the bread crumb trail that runs from your dorm room to the nursing home, about eight feet away. A few years will show you that the ones who tossed those crumbs ahead of you are only parents, bosses, teachers—all manner of fallible fuckups. But at twenty-three you don’t know that yet. There’s your generation gap, in ten words or less. Not the Lilith Fair or websites or nose piercings or sexual stamina or hair loss. Only that chasm in understanding. What else you don’t know at twenty-three is that if you hurl yourself down that path, along the way all you will ever find is what everybody else has found before you, all you will see is a tree stump in a glass case, the rings labeled year by year.
At home Lyndsey is shoving chairs and a coffee table around the room, rearranging the house that Sugar’s parents gave him when they retired to Puerto Rico. Last month she repainted everything. The house is out away from town down a dirt road, which is a good thing given the pipe bombs, but lately Lyndsey has been showing me photos of split levels and two-car garages in the weekly real-estate circular. Cul-de-sacs, planned communities, etc. She would like to have neighbors, bushes, fluoride in the water, backyard barbecues—all the normalcy she missed out on growing up. She shops for houses on the Internet.
Lyndsey has put the dog out in the yard, tethered to the clothesline, and I watch through the window while Sugar unloads his acetylene tanks and rolls on the grass with the dog in the cold and walks around looking at his latest sculpture, which he is making from tractor parts and the soup cans he blows into shards. He likes to blow things apart, then weld them back together, and this makes in those sculptures a kind of tension I like, even though I do not much care for midnight blasts and the balls of flame he sends into the treetops. The dog is a bloodhound named Ernest, who Sugar found and named (drunk, he will try to explain this) after The Importance of Being Earnest, saying that he didn’t think Oscar Wilde would mind the borrowing or the misspelling, and that anyway Mr. Wilde shouldn’t have taken the title as it would have been, with the altered spelling, perfect for Ernest Hemingway’s autobiography, though I may be confusing the story—but somehow out of it all he managed to name a dog. He used to have a goldfish named Wuthering Heights, and a mynah bird named Absalom, Absalom.
The dog knows how to sniff out money, the way airport dogs can sniff drugs. Sugar bought a training manual and educated the dog to find greenbacks, paper money, and then he will turn him loose in the neighborhood and on a good day Ernest will bring home a few singles and sometimes a five or a ten, and we have no idea where he finds them, only that he is determined to find them and does. This for Lyndsey is exploitation, and she has a fervent sympathy for animals in the manner of all people who have at some time or another been gravely disappointed by human beings. When I met her she was VP of the local PETA chapter and even once stood with others downtown across from Vogel’s Furs, naked under a blanket with a sign indicating she would rather be naked than wear fur, which would be my preference for her as well if you could separate the politics from the nakedness. Which of course you never can. We argued about this right after she moved in last August, and I took the position that training a dog to hunt money is not even in the neighborhood with meat eating and fur wearing, but when you are a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in finance, your thirty-five-year-old construction supervisor boyfriend is pretty much wrong on everything. So we avoid the subject. I do love her.
It has grown cold, early November, and I head out with Lyndsey to split wood in the backyard. Sugar is under the carport, his torch fired up and sending down a waterfall of orange and white. He limps as he walks around the sculpture, looking for the next place to spot weld a fragment of soup can. Lyndsey has on one of my old flannels over her blue jeans, with leather gloves cinched tight around her wrists. The girl can cut some wood, keeps her hair tied back. If you ever want to fall in re-love with your POSSLQ, let her wear flannel and do hard work. I watch her a while, stack the wood, take the sledge and wedge when she tires and we trade. Sugar hammers on his sculpture, the sound ringing through the cold.
“You pretty much trust him, don’t you?” Lyndsey says. She wipes sweat from her face with her sleeve.
“What do you mean?” I say, though I know exactly where she’s headed with this.
“Well, he’s over there using a hammer, a torch. He isn’t setting himself on fire, he isn’t getting killed.”
“Thanks for the update.”
“You don’t have to take care of him, Reed.”
“I know that.”
“You do and you don’t. I think you feel guilty about him, and you know that’s not healthy.”
When she starts using words like “healthy,” it’s usually time to let the argument drop. I swing the sledge, miss, say nothing.
“We could move out of here and you’d still be his friend. I would, too. We don’t have to stay here.”
I swing again, lay the wood open and wet. “Listen, I like living here. We don’t pay any rent. Sugar is a good guy.” I shrug. If you want your language to fail, try explaining your male friends to your female mate.
“What is it you do all day with him? I mean, besides dig clothes out of trash Dumpsters?” I work only six months of the year, during heavy construction season. The rest of that time is downtime, nothing time, which I would not trade for anything.
“The street,” I tell her. “Sugar would never go diving some Dumpster. He says that fate hands him his wardrobe.” She knows all of this and only uses reminding as a way of shaming me with the details. When she first met Sugar she went right along, saying that he made her laugh. Sugar has always been like a big toy, and when the batteries finally go, most are done with him. He gets old, Sugar does.
“Yeah, fate hands him most everything else, too,” Lyndsey says. She adjusts her bra strap. “You’re both too young to just quit your lives.”
Sugar leaves his carport and starts walking around the yard, within earshot. We fall quiet, but I know this argument has only gone underground for a while. Sugar has his welding helmet tipped open and is walking around in circles, studying the ground as though surveying it. Say what you like, the boy does have plans in his head.
He walks over toward us, smiles at Lyndsey. She used to say he was handsome before his bothersomeness erased it. The welding helmet hangs over his face like part of some bird costume. The helmet when he found it (on Industrial Boulevard, leaning against a mattress) was missing its dark eye guard, so Sugar glued in a square of blue plastic cut from a soda bottle. The plastic leaves his vision wavered, like standing in the deep end, but he claims this makes for good sculpture.
I motion toward the carport. “What’re you working on?” I know the answer already.
He shrugs. The helmet falls down and he pushes it up again. “New sculpture. A Perfect Catastrophe, I call it.”
I grin at him. This is an old joke. All of his sculptures, since the start, have had the same title, only with different numbers.
“Another Perfect Catastrophe,” I say. “I’ve lost count.”
“Fifty-seven,” he says. Lyndsey looks back and forth between us as if we are speaking in some elaborate code, which, I guess, we are.
“Hey, Reed, I need lumber,” Sugar says. “I mean, I ordered some and need to go get it. I need a ride.”
Lyndsey turns and shoots me a look, one of those little signals of anger or lust that will make of us finally a couple.
“How soon?” I ask him.
He laughs. “Hey, it’s like that old joke, you know, guy says I need a board, salesman says how long, guy says a long time, I’m building a house.”
I laugh with him, at the joke and at the way he compresses every joke, his life, everything in it compressed, hurrying toward nothing.
economics 101
That night in th
e bedroom, Lyndsey practices tai chi. She does Needle at Sea Bottom and Waving Hands Like Clouds. This relaxes her and focuses her both, she says, much the way TV and beer does me. I do Remote Control and Doritos while I watch her. I hate to be predictable, but I go with what works. On Friday nights I watch Lyndsey on the eleven o’clock news, when she does the Wall Street Wrap-up, three minutes of local stocks and investing tips sandwiched between the weather and sports. I like how she seems on TV, so distant and so much there all at once. I like how dressed up she is, her hair and makeup done, and how smart, talking all of us through graphics of the Dow and NASDAQ. She gave me another little signal to watch for, and some Fridays (not every) just when she says, “Back over to you, Bill,” she gives a little twitch of a smile and then her full-kilowatt blast right behind it. Wouldn’t see the twitch if you weren’t looking for it. That little gesture is for me, to say that she is thinking about me and loves me, right there with the camera and half the town eyeing her. I bend close to the TV every Friday to watch, and if she does it, I shout like I have just won the state lottery.
Right now she’s moving in slow motion, doing White Crane Spreads Wings. She is half-naked as she practices, wearing blue sweatpants, her hair still wet from the shower. She told me once that she is locating her internal self, her centeredness, that tai chi means “the grand ultimate fist.” I wonder at this, how she finds her center by making her insides a fist. She grew up with a father who lost jobs the way other people lose car keys, and a mother convicted eighteen times for shoplifting. I would make my innards a fist, too, I think.
I watch her in the dark, lit by the blue of the TV, her nakedness in the cold light, her slow movements like storm clouds in a nature film. She hates the TV, but right now it renders her beautiful. After finishing with Fair Lady Works at Shuttles, she sits on the bed beside my knees, points the remote at the wall behind me, and turns off the tube, a decent bank shot. She clicks on the light. We are about to talk.