Arkansas

by John Brandon

  You go into the screened back room, which Thomas has claimed and strewn with half-eaten bowls of cereal, and tell him you care for him very much, and he seems to take this as an unavoidable development, as something to be weathered.

  The morning before you and Thomas and Tim and the nurse are set to move to Little Rock, the U-Haul almost full in the mud driveway, the Goodwill bags huddling in the hall, the kitchen bare except for the coffeemaker, the sun still hidden but casting the rugged horizon in soft pink, you stick your head into the den, where Tim spends his nights, and for a moment he appears cured. His expression is closed up, as if after weeks on end of chasing, he’d lassoed his mind, corralled his intellect. His mouth is shut. His good eye is staid. He looks grumpy, a mood you haven’t seen in him since he went to Hot Springs. He doesn’t look over at you. You bid him good morning and he remains still. It’s like he’s refusing to be interrupted, ignoring you. The thrill that had leapt into you leaks out. It finds the floorboards and finds the cracks between the floorboards and is gone. Tim is dead. You see the pillow. It rests primly on the seat of a rocking chair, but it’s rumpled in a permanent way. Thomas’s huge fingers have disfigured it. You go through the house, front to back, no need to hurry. Of course, Thomas is gone.

  You sit at the kitchen table and wait for the Asian nurse to present herself. You listen to her shuffling around in her room. You want coffee, but it seems a complicated procedure, getting the pot going. It’s very quiet, but you only hear one bird outside, and not an enthusiastic one.

  When the nurse comes into the kitchen, she is startled by the way you look at her. She thinks she’s done something wrong. She touches her American clothing here and there, wondering if she’s missed a snap or a zipper. She is American in her dress, but walks and sighs and kneels down like an Asian woman. You tell her to sit. You tell her she is being relieved of her duties, by no fault of hers. Tim has passed away, you say. “We’ve lost Tim.” You don’t know if it’s because she’s Asian, or if it’s because she’s a nurse, or because she spends a lot of time in the homes of strangers, but she seems like a particularly discreet person. She won’t ask questions. You can give her a bunch of details or none at all. Whatever words you say to her, she’ll act like those are the most appropriate, tasteful words that could’ve been said. You tell her only that Tim was from a faraway town and that his body will be returned to his family, that he is locked in his room, that you don’t wish to call the proper authorities until she has packed her things and cleared out. You tell her you’ll give her a ride to the bus station or the train station or anywhere she needs to go.

  “To the market will be fine,” she says. “I get a ride from there.”

  You nod, but she does not stand up.

  “All right I make tea?” she asks. “Every morning I make tea.”

  “Make enough for me,” you say.

  You can count on one hand the number of times you’ve had hot tea. You know when one of them was: the day you met the boys. At the hotel that morning, there were tea packets and little cookies on the counter. The hotel had an English theme. The tea was called Earl Grey. Until you put the powdered creamer in it, it tasted like nothing.

  You drop the nurse in town, then hop on the interstate to Little Rock, wanting, as much as anything, a drive, but knowing you can find out a thing or two. The right lane is full of sluggish semis, but the left lane is wide open. You rocket out of the hills, reel in the soybean country, speed the city skyline into view.

  You hit the boys’ condo first, knowing Thomas won’t be there. You climb up the stairs and try the knob. Locked. You dig out your keys and study them one by one. You have eighteen keys on your key chain and can identify maybe nine. You recognize the key; it’s got a bulldog on it. It slides into the knob, but the lock won’t turn. The locks have been changed. You put your nose to one of the slim windows that flank the door. Thomas didn’t stop here. He didn’t take anything with him. You see piles of the boys’ clothes inside, bags of chips, movies from the video store. Even some cash. In a recliner, you spot a neat stack of brightly colored boxes. Board games—some brand new, some lightly used, some the tattered games the boys had brought with them from Magnet Cove.

  Next you visit the boys’ investment guy. You know him from when the boys’ got their first rental house; you’d come down here with them to oversee the deal. He’s your age, this investment guy, but wears shoulder-length hair and a beret. You remember thinking he must be pretty good at his job, to get away with looking like a B-list beatnik. When you walk past his secretary, she protests half-heartedly, not looking up from her computer screen. You poke your head in and there he is, same beret, same beat-up boots under the desk. He gives you a rapid series of nods, letting you know with this gesture that he was sort of expecting you. He gets off the phone. He offers you a chair, but you decline it.

  “I apologize,” he says. “I can’t recall your name.”

  “Quite all right,” you say. You don’t offer your hand. “I’m worried about the boys,” you tell him. “I need to know if they’ve done anything strange lately, as far as money’s concerned.”

  The guy pulls a loud breath in through his nose and blinks protractedly, a way of answering your question affirmatively. You take a glance around his office. He likes a band called Phish. He went to Northwestern University.

  “I’ll be honest,” the guy says. “They’ve gone against my advice. It’s Thomas who’s been calling, and he’s defied my advice quite a bit.”

  “Buying or selling?”

  “Selling. Selling everything.”

  “Everything what?”

  “The rentals, the stocks, the silver. That lake out near Benton. I suppose they’ve got a whopper of a scheme cooked up. They won’t tell me. I think I did something to piss them off.”

  “What could you have done to piss them off?”

  “I’ve pissed plenty of people off in my day,” he says. “Only on occasion have I known why.”

  You take a step backward and allow your weight to rest on the office door.

  “I saw a movie where John Candy wears a hat all the time.” The guy points at his beret. “He says, ‘A lot of people hate this hat. The sight of it enrages them.’ Of course, his wasn’t a beret.”

  “Did they sell the condo? I put it in their names.”

  The guy nods. “That was the last thing to go.”

  “The sale is finalized?”

  “As of two days ago, yeah.”

  “And where’s all the money now?”

  “In some account I don’t have access to. I’ve been relieved of duties.”

  You look at him and he looks at you. It feels like you’ve got the exact same expression on your faces.

  “When did this sell-off begin?”

  “Almost two months ago. Thomas kept saying time was of the essence, so I didn’t get the best price on a lot of it.”

  “Thomas said ‘Time is of the essence?’”

  “He said ‘Hurry the hell up.’”

  So, Thomas had begun selling right after Hot Springs. You wonder if his original plan was to take Tim with him. Once he became convinced his brother was hopeless, the plan changed. They were both gone for good. You think of darting over to Magnet Cove, but Thomas won’t be there. The aunt might be, but what’s the use of harassing her?

  There’s nothing else to say to the investment guy. You’re still gazing at one another with a look of forced amusement, a false boys-will-be-boys look. You bring your weight off the door and pull it open.

  “I seriously doubt you’ve pissed many people off,” you say. “Irritated them? Yes. Pissed them off? Not likely.”

  You leave the building and wheel out of the parking lot toward the interstate. A couple blocks up, you pass the Barnett Building, the building you took the boys to the top of when you handed them the reins. You feel yourself hardening toward Thomas, and softening toward Tim. You wish you could have Tim’s body cremated and go to the top of the Barnett Building a
nd let his ashes blow all over Little Rock. You wish you didn’t have to drag him through your house and down your steps and across your yard and bury him in the woods.

  You are taken under. You don’t know what is taking you under, but you are aware of the sinking as it happens. It pulls you part of the day, then most of the day, then around the clock. You are unable to scold yourself with the correct phrases, unable to find a tone that you will respond to. When you attempt to talk yourself up, it comes out in an urgent whisper, a whisper from the next room, something you wish you could ignore, something you pretend to ignore out of spite. You lose your old talent for registering emotions only in your brain, for not letting badness invade your guts. It invades and invades. You don’t struggle against the pull, afraid of sinking faster. You don’t surrender, either. You stiffen up inside. You are untrained for this sort of fight. You’ve never had children to disappoint you, never had a woman break your heart, never had a ton of money and lost it all. You wonder if it’s a midlife crisis, want it to be a midlife crisis. It isn’t. You have no desire for a faster, newer sports car, no desire for a trophy wife or a woman of any kind, no desire to play the music of your adolescence at high volume, no desire to improve your appearance. And no desire, you realize, for heirs, no desire to secure the future of all the grubby green paper you squeeze out of the world.

  You lay your mattress down flat in the U-Haul, where it had been packed along with most of the rest of your stuff, awaiting a ride to Little Rock, and get whatever sleep you can. Your dreams are of a city, a city like Little Rock but not Little Rock. The streets are canals, like in Venice. There are no bridges. The only way to get around is by small, oval-shaped boats, which are rowed by children. The children keep tiny books in their pockets and burn the hours reading, their legs draped over the edges of their boats. These children have no use for money. They give you a ride only if they like the look of you, if they are touched by your begging. They never take you where you want to go. Sometimes they just paddle you to the other side of the canal. You spend your fitful nights in the U-Haul struggling to get to the other side of town and never getting there. You sleep less and less. When the sun goes down, it seems it will not return.

  You carry the television back inside, set it on the floor, and, from time to time, sit and stare at it. What you see on the screen is comforting, but you can’t follow it. You can’t construe the morals of the sitcoms, can’t tell cops from criminals, can’t tell anyone’s age. Even commercials become obtuse. You don’t know what anyone’s laughing about, what anyone’s being sly about. You can’t find your radio anywhere. It’s packed under an avalanche of lamps and curtains and toasters and tools. The Cardinals’ first-baseman is hitting tons of home runs, half a dozen a game. He’s breaking every record. He’s muscle-bound, barely limber enough to swing the bat, but every time he connects, it’s out of the park. Is this baseball or a show about baseball? You think about smashing the TV, but can’t bring yourself to do it. You nudge it roughly with your leg as you walk by, knocking it sideways.

  Whenever you walk past the coffeemaker, it regards you accusingly. It doesn’t understand what’s wrong with you. It thinks you’re lazy. If it knew you at all, it would know laziness wasn’t the problem. The longer you go without running the pot, the less chance there is that you will ever do so. You don’t like to look in the cupboards. Tim had about a week’s worth of food left when he died, and this is what you subsist on—rubbery slabs of baked chicken, dried fruit, miniature chocolate bars. At the rate you’re going, you can make this food last a month.

  One day you’re walking past the phone and it begins to ring. You stop and stare at it. It’s a timid ring. You answer the phone and it’s a guy from U-Haul calling. He wants to know what happened to the truck, if you ever made it to Little Rock. You tell him everything’s peachy, that his truck’s in good hands. He informs you of the late fees you’re compiling, informs you of some of the processes that will grind into motion as a result of your delinquent account. Contract. Grace period.

  “You can send somebody out to get the thing,” you tell him. “Of course, he’ll have to unpack it. You can always charge me for the retail price of the truck—that’s another option. But do not, under any circumstances, call this phone again. Call this phone again, you’ll be sorry.”

  You take your mattress and box spring out of the U-Haul and stack them in your patchy, muddy yard. You begin keeping a fire. At first you gather fallen branches and kindle them with unread newspapers, but the branches and papers run dry. You lug boxes from the U-Haul to burn, pieces of furniture, bundles of towels, boxes of cereal, wooden hangers. You keep one chair, a dining room chair, and set it over near your bed. You bring the bags of Goodwill stuff from the house and burn those.

  You come across the rest of the poetry books, the ones that weren’t burned. You read each book unhurriedly, and upon turning the final page, toss it in the fire. The books burn hot and fast, almost making sparks. The wisdom you fail to pry from them is released into the breeze. There is a guy named Vallejo who believes he’ll die in Paris, alone, and doesn’t seem upset about it. There’s a guy named Donald Justice who says he’ll die in Miami. He says the ground in Miami is black marl. You can picture it swampy or sandy, but not black marl. Is he lying? Are poets allowed to lie?

  When Tim’s food runs out, you eat whatever turns up in the truck, whatever food you’d packed. You eat hard, tart pears from a tree at the back of your property. They taste awful. You can eat two or three bites of one before you throw it in the fire.

  The moon is the same night after night, then suddenly it’s a sliver.

  You begin to stink so badly that the smoke from the fire doesn’t mask your odor, that running a hose on a rag and wiping your armpits has no effect. It’s an ancient stink. It’s not unpleasant.

  Most of your mail goes to the fire, but a letter from U-Haul catches your eye. It says NOTICE on it. You open and read it. It’s vaguely threatening, but still businesslike. The next day, you get another letter from them, almost identical to the first. The print is bolder and it says NOTICE in red this time.

  You find that you cannot imagine the future, not even the near future. Your days are more or less the same, but you can’t see tomorrow. The present has been beyond your control for some time, and now the future is gone, too. You have only the past—snapshots, growing clearer by the day. These are your memories. They don’t move. They don’t try to make you feel any certain way. They haunt you. They replace your dreams. You wake each morning with dew in your hair, missing the wizened, rowing children. There are so many snapshots that if you stacked them and flipped the edge with your thumb they’d appear as coherent episodes, like cartoons.

  The daytime hours lose meaning. You notice that every day a bee appears, lands on whatever’s handy, then buzzes on. The bee completes an enormous lap each day and you’re part of that lap. You wish you could leave flowers out for him, like milk for a stray cat. When the bee visits, you know the day is more than half over.

  When you discover your baseball in the U-Haul, you spend the sunlit hours of an entire day throwing it as far as you can and walking and finding it and throwing it again. You follow it into the woods, near the spot where you buried Tim. You imagine that if you dug down to find Tim, his body would be gone, taken somewhere better. You imagine that if you dug him up, he’d stand and walk back into the house, no hard feelings. Anything is possible except that Tim’s body is right where you left it, dead as ever, pale and crushed and newly found by insects. Tim is a side of white meat. There is no Tim. At the end of the day, you kneel down by the fire and roll the baseball into it.

  You get another letter from U-Haul, this one with even bigger red letters that say FINAL NOTICE and LEGAL DOCUMENTS ENCLOSED. You slip the envelope into a plastic file case, then deposit the file case in the fire.

  You notice your driveway has hardened. The mud on the tires of the U-Haul is like cement. It hasn’t rained. You realize it then. Since you
began living out of doors, not one drop has fallen. Of course, that very evening the clouds roll in. They waste no time. As soon as the sun goes down, they open. You pull a big comforter and part of a tarp over you and manage to sleep.

  You come across your radio. It’s a worthless plastic box. You burn it.

  Your bed and your body begin to smell like mildew.

  There are no more holes in your snapshot memories. You can see everything you’ve done.

  Whatever’s wrong with you, you can sense it’s burning off. You’re running out of body fat and out of possessions. It’s burning off slowly, and there’s nothing you can do to rush it.

  A guy shows up, looking for antiques and oddities. Someone at the market told him there was a shop down here.

  “Was,” you tell him. “Closed now.” Your voice is grainy.

  The guy wears a T-shirt advertising a band called Shirt of Apes. The T-shirt has a pocket and in the pocket is a bottle of aspirin. The guy doesn’t seem at all disappointed to find the shop closed. He’s young, a teenager.