Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  But maybe I was born not knowing squat, just like the rest of the world. Maybe I was nothing special until that moment I stood gawking up at black-attic heaven and received from on high a piece of glass disguised as county fair cotton candy. Had I stood a little to the left or shut my trap I would have grown up to be like my parents or Milly. Instead I carry within O pink hurt everlasting. I breathe, I bleed: invisible harm done with every doggy-dog pant.

  Overstock rum from the restaurant flooded a weekend way back when. Seems like forever ago, but it was after Milly got her license, which she’s only had them six months so it must have been spring. Milly came by the house that Saturday. Overstock oysters roasted in foot tubs; there must have been twenty people from the restaurant, which led me to wonder was it even open or had they called an overstock strike. Me and Milly sneaking sweet rum punch and eavesdropping: heard one man say about his wife smack in front of her that all she ever did in this world was sit around and wait for books to come out in paperback, which Milly thought was funny but which got away with me so bad I begged Milly to go to ride. Which she agreed to only if I’d hunker down when she got whistled at, which I agreed to.

  Wasn’t much whistling, wasn’t much hunkering. Mill took back roads through that neighborhood called Stairstep, where houses hang half off the ridge like they’ve been left there by high water. I could have got offended — Mill not wanting to be seen with me — but the main thing was we get up there and find Dogman.

  We wound up Japarks, too fast past the unfinished church, skimpy tithing having left the roof a patchwork of shingle and tin. I used to ride up there on my bike when I was little and the church was an ancient ruin to me then, back in my junior archeologist period when all I wanted to do was dig up buried cities, cannonballs, dinosaur bones. What cured me finally was a program on public tube which told how these archeologists dig for years sometimes and don’t uncover much but a broken vase. Vase the narrator pronounced in the snooty-ass British manner — vozz — which, hell, I guess I would call it that too if it took me a year to dig one up.

  — I wonder what do they call that style of architecture, said Milly, inclining her whole body toward the church.

  — Run out of money, I said.

  — That particular style you just mentioned could describe this entire town.

  Milly’s all-of-a-sudden prissy diction made me picture her marrying a recruit in a few years time just to escape from our town. One day on base she’d blink awake on her dribbly pillow to stare at pink scalp beneath crew-cut stubble, hair running in feathery arrows like bones of filleted flounder and Milly hating fish. But I could not stop and feel sorry for her. Not when we were on our way up to see Dogman.

  — Slow damn down some.

  She sped up until we passed a car she thought she knew. She whistled, I hunkered. From the floorboard I watched Mill’s foot hesitate in a float between brake and gas before she decided she couldn’t be seen with me and heeled the gas. I came out of my crouch. It’s all vanity. On a personal quest, what do you care if someone spots you with your weird little cousin? Vanity or vengeance one, I decided, thinking of Mama and Daddy and how they thought they were getting over with their overstock parties, how many ways they’d found to make those binges sound rightfully theirs: food going to waste, low wage and long hour, customers getting gouged. That last one I loved best, them taking pity on the poor customers not while at work but at home and only when there’s a makeshift holding tank, Daddy’s beat blue pier-fishing cooler, full of lobsters for them to tong at and name crazy names. In my head I started writing a song called “People Got Their Wrong Wrong Reasons,” which Milly interrupted the very first stanza of.

  — We ain’t going to see him tonight.

  — And why aren’t we?

  — Too damn dark, she said, tossing her tongues-of-flame-licking-headrest hair.

  But we did see him, or I did, no thanks to Milly, who did everything she could to drive him away. I had to reach over and crank the car off so we could coast up the logging trail at the end of Japarks. The Astro rocked to a stop in a little lake swallowing the trail. To reach land we had to do splits. Milly kept up a bitchy stream I wagered my parents could hear over the Apache war cry album they loved to throw on around this time of the evening. It was bad dark out, limbs-clawing-you-before-you-even-know-you’re-up-on-them dark, Milly shadowing me after those first wet steps through the backhoe-tread puddles. Plainly she was a vehicle; the camel had kneeled.

  I pushed on through the dark, Milly siamesing me all the while, which cut down some on what I could pick up from that side. I was thinking all sorts of things like who do we owe, for what, how much, and why was it that I out of everybody — Milly and her horny boys, Mama and Daddy and their vengeful coworkers — got chosen to see good in the dark.

  We came around a bend where the lights of the town glowed beneath and there he stood, so close that I could see the pipe cleaners curling out of his suit-coat breast pocket, white padded wires bent into tiny walking sticks. I could see the rusted buttons of his overalls and hear the hooks rubbing against them when his chest heaved with shallow pants, the whiskered face skin which in that little light was the up-underside gray of washed-ashore fish. I could see his hand draw into the curl of a run-over paw.

  Seeing him made me want to gargle up some great strange yell. Quick, something inside me said, hook me up to a hot machine, one what sucks up the blood unleashed from that swallowed piece of pink. I turned to Milly to see did she hear, for I couldn’t tell if I’d cried out or dreamed such a cry, but Milly was not there. I clutched my chest, for I could feel it inside, hot salty river running wild.

  THAT WAS THE END of me going to see Dogman with Milly. For a while that was the end of me going up there at all, but knowing that he was out there, that every night half the town was out stalking him, making up all kinds of hokey lore about him — that he was hybrid offspring of a Fice and a woman from down around Garland, that he was escaped mental, that he was a hermaphrodite and did his dog routine to cover up nature’s cruel error, that he bit Reggie Boyette to the bone, that he was Sue Talkington’s uncle — drew me back up the mountain.

  I could find him every time. I could leave the house doing everything it’s possible might not allow me to locate him — wear flip-flops and gym shorts and that’s all in an ice storm, take the loop over Beaucatcher Mountain which it’s five miles around that way, crash through the bush like a backhoe — here he would still be waiting on me. No, I did not ever try to talk to Dog. No, I did not try to feed him tainted burgers from the Sonic or inquire as to his day job. All that concerned me in those days was that I could walk straight up to him.

  Which I could do always, which nobody else could do, and which, this got around. Big-haired girlfriends of Milly’s came rumbling by the house, their boyfriends’ low Camaros idling like off-cycle washing machines out by the curb. Milly all of a sudden did not mind me sitting prominent in the sprung seat of her Astro, out the window went the system of hunker when whistled at. Vanity. She never said word one to me about what she’d seen up there that night; turned out she needn’t, since I heard it all from everybody else and it was all wrong, wronger even than the reasons that caused her to repeat it. At the overstock parties the restaurant people would draw me aside to ask how did I do it, where was Dogman that minute, let’s get up a posse and head up there now. Vengeance! Beat down people seeking someone to beat further down, and that the sad history of this world and my own mama and daddy a part of it, furious at me for not fingering a crude map in the bowl of overstock chocolate mousse held out to me one night, which they planned to carry up the ridge and illuminate with Tiki torches so that later, in the short-tempered steam of their kitchen shifts they could have that creepy hour to bring up and brag about. Wrong-reasoned people of this earth tugging and gnawing at me! How could I watch them turn Dog into the kind of anecdote trumped up to while away the tick of a time clock? What could I do but give up Dogman entirely?

  Thi
s I did to become those three most invisible and untalked-to things on earth: a younger cousin, a quiet kid with braces and scruples, the teenaged son of your host at a party where tables are crammed with pricey things to slurp and chew.

  Then Chester. Smoke from Chester. But how come Chester and not the fifty pounds of mahimahi liberated two weeks previous and broiled in shifts that kept the house smelled up fishy for a week? Why Chester? Who Chester? I had managed to stay away for six months during which not once had Dogman been spotted. Milly had given up searching. She’d started going out with a boy home from boot camp, my prophecy come true, though I did not relish being right. Obviously she’d outgrown Dogman, did not speak of him, didn’t speak to me at all. For a while people would bug me about it, but after a few weeks of my shruggy smiling back they left off.

  Then smoke sending me upstairs, away from daddy demonstrating butterfly techniques on a piece of Chester did not fit into the pan. Smoke sending me up to where those pink blankets stretched into the dark angled eaves like the curve of this earth, where I hunkered, wondering, Why Chester? Who Dogman?

  Scene of the crime. Often I retreated here, despite its dangers — sentimental bric-a-brac from some earlier innocent time neatly boxed and shoved into corners, utter and airless isolation of the stripe not healthy for a soul likes to go around feeling like he’s a universe of only, and of course the acres of pinkness beckoning. Lay me down to sleep. I thought I could escape there, but smoke rises and Chester smoke, hell: it’s only purpose was to hunt me down, root me out, send me off on my final journey. Why Chester? No real reason except for my random time done come. Oh I could claim it was the name Chester triggered something deep and significant within, I could up and decide the senseless slaughter of some cow they named a sliver of was what got away with me that day. The truth was, as usual, way less sexy: number come up.

  As for Dog, well: Dogman was Dogman. Every town had one: the man who crows like a rooster at first light, the woman who pushes a grocery cart crammed with cats whose flea-ridden house has to be fumigated by neighborhood decree. They’re everywhere. They ain’t right. Heard recently of a woman down in Garland who shows up in Family Foods wearing on her head a pair of sheer panties across which is Magic Markered the word Head. Dogman’s just another one of these. Not right in the head. Man thinks he’s a dog.

  By the time I got through settling big questions, Chester smoke had driven me down out of the attic. Back in the kitchen, two crooked fingers of smoke settled in front of my nostrils. I slipped out the side door while everyone was loading their plate with bloody slabs and in no time was up the hill past the church ruined or unfinished one, didn’t matter, immaterial, couldn’t tell, so socked in by Chester smoke.

  There’s big moon up there that night, all the yard art of upper Stairstep lit by it, scum water glowing green in birdbaths, satellite dishes tilting their wide mouths to the heavens. I’d never been up there when there was this much moon, never seen Dogman on a night so bright. I tried to abandon myself to that sixth-sense semaphore but nothing came, everything was blocked, Chester smoke canceling out everything. There was a rustling below, voices rising above a throaty chorus of cars. Next hairpin I looked down to see a line of folks coming up the trail, each of them carrying a candle in a bag of sand. Overstocked from the restaurant of course. I heard my mama’s blue curvy words, my father’s whiskyed ones, all of them climbing to the rhythm of spoon against fishnet knee. Crouching on the shoulder of a switchback, I spotted Milly sliding out of the car with her boyfriend in tow. In that praise be quiet that comes whenever the Astro is cranked off, Milly turns to him and says, We’ll see him, we’re going to see him this time, my little cousin can find him every time.

  Would he show for such a little cousin like me? My senses were dulled by Chester smoke, the burnt smell of him, the carboned taste of him which I didn’t take bite one but still this purloined meat had somehow ended up rank within. Chester, too, in the bellies of those fools following me. Dogman come on and show yourself so I can turn you over to them and go damn home.

  But he didn’t. Chester smoke thickened the higher we climbed; it rose off the hillside until the whole forest was on fire with it, and I ran from it and into it too. Seeing me run, they followed: vengeful workers, big-haired girls, Mama, Daddy, Milly, and her skinthead ticket out of here. Half the town was behind me when I tripped and fell to the ground.

  That pinkness within: something too dangerous to let back out, better to let it settle. But what with all the running it had begun to bloat up big as Chester, and besides, what had my suffering brought me but the ability to see good in the dark?

  Up there on the ridge, moon hitting me like spotlights, I mashed my fingers to my face like a baby’ll do you. I found my lips and parted them. Fingernails tapped teeth, grazed stalactite tonsil. What the rest of them found when they came around the bend was a boy making noises known neither to dog nor man, trying to bring up that piece of pink but in the process flushing Dogman out from a cloud of Chester smoke.

  Couple Strike It Rich on Second Honeymoon

  A COUPLE, WRETCHED IN LOVE, in a car, on an interstate. On a muggy Saturday morning in October they left behind the city where they lived and headed west. Their history was more ragged than most: they had been together for two manic years, bruised themselves silly during an endless third, were apart for a year, and finally, because they could not let go of each other, were together again in a car, on an interstate, headed toward a loosely planned weekend of reconciliation.

  This city, which held their entire history, was in the middle of a state offering both mountains and coast. There was debate about which would be the best backdrop for their reconciliation. Kevin said it was up to Ann, but he knew that being a nonnative of the state, Ann would let him choose in the end, and she did. Once, years ago, Kevin had agreed to spend the weekend with a girl whose father owned a condo on the side of a ski slope; on the way up the mountain she had broken up with him, and because he wanted badly to have a free place to stay while he slid unskillfully down a blanket of man-made snow, he had allowed himself to finish out the weekend, sleeping on the couch, listening to his ex whisper late at night to some unspecified party on a telephone whose cord reached just barely beyond the closed door of the condo’s lone bedroom. It was the kind of scenario one admitted to only when half drunk, and it never made the kind of “can you believe I did that” story he hoped it would. Kevin had long regretted the stupidity of his choice, and it seemed to him if he chose now the same range of ancient mountains, his greedy miscalculation might be wiped clean from history.

  Since Ann had announced her intention to give them another try, Kevin had thought a lot about history, and he was reminded of it by everything she said or did, like the way she was rifling unsatisfactorily through his tape box for something that, according to her, they had not heard four hundred times. To alleviate the weight of before, Kevin reminded himself that Ann was not the woman he had fallen in love with and that this was a grand thing, a redemptive glorious fact that would save them this time around. He looked at her hair streaming out of the window and congratulated himself on learning to love not who she was when he first met her but the woman she had become to him as he navigated all sorts of treacherous currents in his own psyche, and he had told anyone who would listen to him that this was what real love was, a frequent and vigilant gauging of your own reality, constant calibrations to include your lover in the world that would surely overwhelm you if you let it remain yours alone.

  At thirty-two, he was a little old for such a realization, but he waited tables for a living.

  “Think you’ll ever tell me to get a real job?” Kevin said.

  Ann looked up from the tape box, ahead toward the first soft smudge of the Blue Ridge instead of at him.

  “Not unless we were to get a washer–dryer.”

  Because of his tips, Kevin could always be counted on for quarters, vats of them greasy with the oil of someone else’s fingers. He did not lik
e to touch them. While Ann was gone he had found a machine at the supermarket that would convert them to grocery money and he had devised ways to get them from pocket to bowl to plastic bag to machine without soiling his hands, but he knew, now that Ann was back, that she would insist on keeping them loose for the Laundromat. Surely there were other more important things to consider about her return. Like, for instance, the coupling that awaited them after they passed the daylight away and found a motel and ate a quick dinner and returned to their room for the hours of reconsummation he’d dreamed of nightly for the past twelve months.

  “Sometimes I feel like what happened to us could have been so easily avoided,” said Kevin.

  He could tell from the way Ann watched a busload of schoolkids pass by in the next lane that she was not happy with this line of thought. He had tried not to bring up their rupture, but it did not seem possible that they avoid their past entirely, especially this weekend during which every word, every touch, had the potential to take them backward instead of forward. In her silence he began to sulk, terrified that she would tell him to turn back, forget about it, trip’s off.

  “Ninety percent of what happens to people could be easily avoided,” she said.

  So why even say such a thing, is this what she meant? What difference did it make now that they could have avoided their fate? Instead of avoiding it, they fell helplessly and headlong into it, and it was as messy and tortured as these things get, filled with accusations of betrayal and third parties and countless phone calls ending in hang-ups and doorbells rung at 3 a.m. There were witnesses called to corroborate alibis, letters steamed open, journals read, and underneath all this was an energy that reminded the both of them of the crazed spontaneity that characterized their first weeks together. In fact, it felt so much like their particular manner of falling in love that they both found ways to prolong it, needling and provoking long after that point when other couples might have shut down, given up.