Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  While my brain grinds through this current run of badness, Tricia walks out of the shower with a towel tucked around her breasts and another around her neck like a boxer. This is the thing about motels, for a few days you are rich in towels. We are on the second floor because Tricia believes that mice can’t climb, that roaches are fearful of heights. I like this towel business, and Tricia all dewy from the shower, her face deep pink from a half hour in the exercise room, which in this kind of place is only a duct-taped bench and a weight bar, plus one of those bikes with a big box fan where the wheel should be. Tricia has been working on her pecs because, she says, they are in cahoots with her breasts, which are starting to give her worry. They are learning all they need to know about gravity, she tells me. She is forty-three and expert at fretting. And from Texas, where she used to work as a bank teller, which is tricky as jobs go because it looks like a good job but is really a shit job all dressed up and parked near the money. But just near, not in. We have been together seven months, circuiting dog tracks for three. She won’t marry me because we are too new and because of her one other marriage, which got euthanized at a year, eight months.

  “Can’t we let the dog loose?” Tricia asks. She nudges the crate with her toe, and Tricia’s Blitz sticks out his nose enough for a lick. I added that “Tricia’s” part to his name just to make her happy, her name all over my life. Made him hers even though he isn’t.

  I shake my head, light a Marlboro, watch the water drops gather at the ends of her hair. “Best place is in the crate until race time. You build up their running until they can’t stand it.”

  Tricia takes the cigarette from me, puffs without inhaling. She bends down and sticks her finger through the wire mesh. “Happy New Year, doggy, my Blitz,” she says. Four hours now until Dick Clark lets the ball drop in New York. Out on the highway the cars are lined up, honking, the sidewalks full. We can watch from our balcony, a steady current of noisy drunks, teenagers in heat, Shriners outfitted with diapers and sashes. Tricia’s Blitz whines, scratches, and Tricia pushes another pork rind through the wire. Try finding dog food on New Years’ Eve in Biloxi, much less a motel room. This one was the last, I think, eighty bucks a night, and for that the paint around the door is peeling.

  “Why don’t you get dressed,” I say. “We’ll head out to one of the casinos.”

  She looks up at me, her brown hair drying at the edges. “With what? Think we can stuff these in the slots?” She rattles the pork-rind bag at me like Exhibit A.

  “We have some money. We’ve placed in a few, or did you forget that?”

  “Did you make us some money, hon?” She scratches the dog’s ears with her fingernail, then looks up. “We have to make that last and you know it. You aren’t much good at stretching things out, are you, Jack?”

  I shrug. “I don’t think we’re doing too bad.” I pick up a casino brochure off the TV and look at the photo, all those smart, happy people bathed in money and good luck, like mannequins on a hot streak, trapped in glossy folds.

  “Like that goddamn car,” she tells me. “A little routine maintenance and we might make Texas.” The towel shifts and I look at her white thighs, the tiny purple veins that flower under her skin.

  “We don’t have to spend any money. Just go have a look around, not be all cooped up in here all night. It is New Year’s.”

  “Now you know how the dog feels.” Tricia stands and sheds her towel, her back to me. She pulls on purple panties which she won’t ever let me call panties because, she says, she doesn’t want anything about her to be cute, she’s too old for cute. I watch her bend, watch the sway of her breast from the side, feel the twinge of knowing we will fuck, probably sometime early next year, a few hours off. I like how on this one night in the cold, a year becomes the next, and for those hours you can have something like anticipation of fucking to carry you over into another year or another decade, pretending optimism is this thing that can span a calendar instead of just being space between the links in some chain of daily screwups. And I say “fuck” because Tricia likes it, the only woman ever in my experience, because a professor she had at the community college years back hit on her every day like it was part of the syllabus and told her that the word fuck is a good example of onomatopoeia, like he was writing some porno grammar book and which, really, I hadn’t a clue about. This word is not one I would pick up and keep. But Tricia did and when we are in bed she keeps bringing back her old prof and his old prof ideas about what happens, saying to me, You hear that, you hear it? And I do but don’t want his idea there in the bed with us, some dictionary word to describe a thing that, in my mind, is outside any words, and I try to stamp it out by saying I can’t believe she ever fell for such a lame line from an old guy, and she says that she will make no excuses for anything in her past. Only I think that’s what your sum-total life is day by day, a renewable excuse for your past. What else? If you live well enough, if you place in a sprint stake and put money in your wallet and buy new tires and eat hot food, then all’s forgiven at least till a week Tuesday. We leave a light on for Tricia’s Blitz, CNN so he can hear a voice. The loneliness of dogs is not something I give much worry to.

  The parking lot is all cold bluster pushing paper scraps into comers, swirling leaves into the cones of light beneath the arc lamps. Tricia slips her arm under mine, digs deep in my coat pocket for my fingers. Outside one ground-floor room are young women in thin dresses and boys in fresh haircuts and cigarette smoke and the sound of bottles knocked over. A portable CD player sits angled against the open door, and just outside, sprawled across lawn chairs and chaises, they lounge in the blast of room heat and music, an old Kinks tune kicked out fuzzy through the speaker, priming drunken bursts of song from the bunch of them. I nudge Tricia so she will see what letting go looks like, see what we ought to be like if we could get out of our own goddamn way, and she looks and smiles and roots closer to me. She sees. The whole tangle of them quit their loose-boned “Lola” long enough to whoop at us and wish us Happy etc. and ask if we have cigarettes, they are out of cigarettes, they could kill for cigarettes please oh please. On top of the dog carrier is a whole carton of Marlboros, and knowing this grooves in with their questions and wants (and those girls, those thin white arms) so nicely (click, and a moment is upon you) that I turn on my heel and Tricia’s hand pulls from my pocket just as a question leaves her mouth, “Did you hear what they said on the news?” But I am away from her already, two at a time up the iron steps, into the room, then onto the balcony, leaning out into the wind and tossing down the sealed packs.

  They gather under me, Tricia standing off a ways and cold, hugging herself, her face working out its disapproval. She does not like me giving away things, did not like it in New Hampshire, October, when Blitz placed first in the Tri-State and afterward in the bar I bought a round for everyone because it was a movie thing to do and I’d never done it, never found reason. The tab came to $164.73, a number I have kept like it’s some combination to unlock what is wrong with us, but I knew then and know now that Tricia’s Blitz is five, old for racing, and there are not likely any more wins left in him, and a new dog is a thousand dollars I am firmly without. So I stand there crotch against the rail and knowing that five packs of cigarettes will never add up to $164.73 and tossing them, watching them spin red and white into the raised hands and laughter below me, and for that moment I am the King of Cigarettes and the main thing I love about people and love about me loving people spins out into the wind with those shiny red packs. Tricia can’t feel this, can feel only the cold that seeps into the soles of her shoes, and regards me as if I am tossing money away, which, really, I am. Tricia’s Blitz watches me through his cage, sniffs me, scratches and whines. I save three packs for us, which is plenty enough till next year (three hours away?) and the kids yell up their thank-yous like trick-or-treaters, then disappear back into their light and heat and music, and close the door on Tricia and the blue arc-lamp cold and her question still hanging behind me o
n the stairs. She is shivering, the Gulf winds nervy and insistent.

  “What?” I shout down. “What did the news say?”

  She is quiet, looking up and then past me to the empty sky holding all this cold around us. Black and cold. She feels her hair with her fingertips and I can feel it too, feel how she went out with it wet and how in places it has frozen, how her warming hands unwork the ice.

  “Don’t be mad,” I say. “Tell me.” She won’t answer and I take her silence, standing there like Gary Gilmore and thinking how I like it when she talks to me, how her words fill up spaces and cracks and insulate us from all the ways things turn to regret. In the long car trip down the coast I bought her a truck-stop book, 1001 Jokes for Any Occasion, just to hear her ask me the riddles, tell the little stories of ducks and bars and nuns, to let me bounce my laughing off her words, and her laughing off mine, like we are two banks of a pond rippling back the same disturbance, the little white stone of no money and half the tracks down for winter. Why are the Pilgrims buried in Massachusetts? And I couldn’t know, did not want to know, to take away her surprises for me. The highway rippled under us (the horn still worked then, the headliner didn’t flap), and at night she kept reading jokes by the shine of the dome light when it still worked, too, and I didn’t know about Pilgrims in Massachusetts, only about my hand in the groove of her thigh, my nails tracking the seam of her jeans, thin strands of her hair like moths around my face. Because they’re dead, and the sound of laughing became the sound of moving ahead, of getting through the next town with hope intact while Tricia’s Blitz slept in the rear and thoughts of a next win were still allowed.

  Now she stands in the quiet, waiting for me to make things all right, to make me all right, us. Across the highway the big casino boats are lashed to the piers, docked forever, and their sound wafts across the road—locust clouds of music, deep, low thump-thumps of it and the static hum of too many people crowded together, these swirls of noise rising up like dust devils in the night, and inside that is me and Tricia. Here is what it’s like: the man I saw on TV once making soap bubbles, bubbles inside of bubbles all angle and shimmer, and at the end he took a cigarette drag and a paper straw and filled the middle chamber with smoke. We are the smoke in this inner bubble, quiet and dark around us, noise and heat beyond that, and I know that to get to any other bubble we will have to break the one we are in.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  “Come down.”

  I smile at her, watch the white bursts of her breath, and that is when I spot the raccoon, bipping around the parking lot just behind Tricia, nosing around the green Dumpster, rustling fast-food sacks. My mouth opens to tell her, but that will spook him, send him into whatever patch of woods he came from, and so I watch, quietly, his long shadow moving with him dark along the silvered pavement like something trapped under ice. We are three points on a map—me, Tricia, raccoon—allowing me to fix this moment, my brain tamping a wooden stake into right now, and seven months lie plotted around it.

  “Jack, please.” She lifts the collar of her coat. “Come down before I freeze to death.” Her voice like thin shards of lightbulb glass scattered across a parking lot in Biloxi, and the raccoon drops its yogurt cup, regains its edginess, and slips into the dark: covert, balled, gone.

  Back on the ground, I take her arm and she lets me. We walk toward Beach Boulevard. “What did the news say?” I ask.

  “Awful. In Texas, near me…well, used to be me, these six Mexicans were crossing over illegal and they slept out between the rails and the train got them.”

  We stand at the curb, waiting for traffic to open and let us bolt across. Tricia seems weighted by what the news has told her, what she has felt in hearing it, and her ways of thinking open up to me. In a minute she will tell me that it does not take a lethal dose of imagination to think of waking up one last half second to a lapful of train, a faceful. Like all women, she is a pattern of caring and removal. I think of the best thing I know to say.

  “Bet they were drunk and out, honey. Never saw or heard it, even a bit.”

  She shakes her head. “Just like you, Jack. They’re Mexican so they’re automatically drunk, right?” Traffic is seamless, the cars packets of debauchery and Doppler effect. Cigarettes drop through open windows and spark on the pavement. That quick, this is a fight. She pulls her hand from mine.

  “That’s not what I meant, Tricia. But why did they do it? Trying to stay warm? For good luck? Maybe that’s the worth of superstition, thins out the dumb-asses.”

  Another head shake, frown. “Like you putting Blitz’s silks on at the last minute, like using the same lead every time, like always holding it in your left hand, your lucky dime. Is that what’s thinning us out, Jack?”

  “Ten thousand riding on thirty seconds, I can do a little superstition.” Traffic opens, and for a minute I feel like Moses in Detroit. We start across.

  “So what did they have riding? Their freedom, maybe?” Before we even make the median, she is crying over this, not something she usually tends toward. “They thought the rails protected them from snakes. Jesus.” She wipes her eye with her thumb.

  “Maybe they’re right,” I say. “Maybe it does protect them from snakes. If you have to die, at least be right.” We move into the east-bound lane. Before us, the casinos drone and vibrate, five hundred polyester ladies feeding five hundred quarters to five hundred slots.

  “I don’t want you to be coldhearted,” Tricia tells me. “And I’d rather we live and be wrong all the time.”

  “In that case, we’re overachievers.” As we near the doors, a wet heat spills out along the carpet, the odor of cheese steaks and cologne. Tricia smacks my arm to tell me she loves me still.

  “You really think they were right about the snakes?” She is crying now in that way that is meant only to say how silly crying is. I guide her inside the blare and chandelier light.

  “I’m positive now. Yes, ma’am. Sleeping between the tracks will by God protect you from snakes. What it won’t do is protect you from trains.”

  She laughs, hand over her teeth. She says I am so bad, laughs, says I take the cake, laughs. The rhythm of forgiveness and more than forgiveness: gratitude that I have pulled us back from the edge of ourselves, where we teeter always, every day. I make five bucks’ nickel change and let her feed a machine, her eyes still red rimmed, puffy. I tell her maybe no news might be good news for a while, that we have enough grievousness all our own without listening for more.

  Give me instead, I don’t say, Paul Harvey and The Rest of the Story, give me Ronald Reagan as a college radical, little Debbie Reynolds and her childhood of horrific stage fright. Henry Ford, Douglas MacArthur. That’s the news, as far as I go, the small ways we fail and succeed, all the hidden ironies that get dredged up at family reunions and funerals, making celebrities of us all, finally. And if you are God or Paul Harvey you might find pattern and meaning in it over a course of decades, enough to fill five minutes after the farm report. The rest is just sound to keep a dog company on New Year’s Eve: bottle throwing in the Mideast, the stock market surging, the race for a cure, Nobel winners, bridge jumpers, the president gets caught with his finger in an intern. All of it ends up flung in some recycle bin, and even if you are God or Paul Haney it will never make a pattern and in a month or a year the market will rise/fall four hundred points and carnage will bloom across some other corner of the planet and a newly elected president will appear and we are racing still for another cure or the same. What I need (Tricia, hear what I’m thinking) is Paul Harvey to tell me about us, about a man and a woman and a dog. About raccoons. About a breaking-down car. I need news. I need the rest of the story.

  In half an hour we are out of nickels, a band in the lounge sings Huey Lewis songs, the red carpeting sprouts cigarette burns beneath the feet of women in heels and men in tassel loafers. Potted plants. Waiters in short red jackets. Steaming buffets. Slots and megaslots. The theme of every casino is more. Hope, opulence, money, loss, s
ex, beauty. The noisy commerce of humans getting ahead. Seventy feet past us, Mississippi Sound unrolls across twenty-six miles of manmade sugary beach, the water there silty and brown from the foul mouth of the famous big river sixty miles west—muck, unswimmable even without the cold. We spear a few meatballs and cold shrimp from the long tables, make our exit still chewing, stiff-arming the icy gusts, making our way down the boulevard. The valet parking line of the Copa Casino horseshoes toward the twin towers of the building that loom bright and golden above us, a queue of white stretch limos idling, their tatters of exhaust lingering around the parking lights in a cherry mist. One of the limos draws our attention, a cartoon of a limo, ridiculous in its hugeness, its length all eased out white and shining along the curb, a hot tub bubbling where the trunk should be, tiny satellite dish affixed to the roof. The driver, an Indian man, sits on the hood thumbing USA Today and listening to the stereo, Al Green, through the open front door. He smokes a cigarette, lets it lip dangle, wears a black cap, black jacket, white shirt, a Notre Dame stadium blanket spread across his lap. The car looks freakish in its length. We peer in the window, cup our hands to see past the smoked glass but can’t, and Tricia says you could just live here, never have to leave, and the Indian man smiles as he watches, proud of his car’s ability to stun us. He hops down, moves toward us, and through my fingertips I can feel the low vibrations of the idling car, the engine up ahead somewhere in a different zip code, and I say so to Tricia to get her to laugh, like she did back when 1001 Jokes for Any Occasion could still give up its surprises as regular as mile markers. She smiles a little, leaves her noseprint on the dark glass. The Indian wraps his Notre Dame blanket around his shoulders.