Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  “The Bodies”

  When Good Stuff got older he stayed put in Oklahoma.

  When he stayed put, his wordless singing let him go. It swaggered down the road, a body wandering outside his body. Ungrasped, he felt heavy but firm. He felt the need to build.

  “His Fourth”

  The radio.

  Good Stuff, a creaky old man. His head a hundred shelves of memories of singing songs. He lived alone inside a stuffy rowhouse he’d mostly built himself. The Jackley boy, who lived just down the street, came by every Sunday afternoon to listen to him play because his parents, who he never disobeyed, declared it Christian duty.

  The Jackley boy was scared of Good Stuff’s crumpled brow and smashed-toad eyeballs, disgusted by the spit bubbles he blew when he spoke. But he’d sit on the porch, close his eyes, listen to the old man play from his rocking chair, and pretend the songs came from somewhere else. From the mountains, or whatever worlds stretched behind them, the worlds his daddy had explored.

  When the boy showed up the first thing Good Stuff did was tell a love story the boy wouldn’t understand. There was always music in the love story, and he’d cap it with a two-part saying:

  “Music ain’t the tool of the devil. The devil’s the tool of the music.”

  “Music’s made of love. But love ain’t made of music.”

  “Music don’t make the world smaller. Just makes you bigger.”

  Then he’d ask the Jackley boy to fetch his guitar, and he’d play and sing with words. He thought he’d miss the wordlessness more than he did. Mostly he thought of Sunday afternoons, of looking forward to them.

  One Sunday morning Good Stuff woke and felt someone’s arm laying on him heavily. His tired heart fluttered. Daring not to touch it, he kept his eyes shut, thankful to whoever had walked into his house and climbed into his bed and thrown his or her arm across him like a lover’s. He felt the surging of an old and stupendous feeling. When that feeling crested an hour later, he looked. It was his own arm, as senseless as a ham.

  He carried his arm all day like the thing still belonged to someone else, setting it down tenderly, rubbing the skin slowly. Good Stuff didn’t get the feeling back until lunchtime. He found himself conflicted by his arm’s return. He stood on the porch and got to thinking about what it might feel like to be someone else.

  The Jackley boy came by. Before telling a love story, before playing, Good Stuff asked him what he did on the other days of the week when he wasn’t here being so good-hearted visiting with an ugly old man.

  The boy looked up from drawing stick animals in the porch-dust. “I like to listen to the radio.”

  The radio, who hadn’t heard about the radio? Good Stuff knew the radio came from nowhere but at the same time from towers in Chicago. He knew something about Chicago. He patted the boy’s little elbow and said, “Can you bring me a radio, son?”

  “My daddy can.” He sped straight home.

  Mr. Jackley brought the radio over, the boy tagging excitedly along, wanting to help carry it, wanting to watch his daddy carry it. A dozen neighborhood kids saw Mr. Jackley hefting the beautiful bulky contraption down the street. They dropped their sticks and tops and jump ropes and followed, and before long were crowding up Good Stuff’s porch, being noisy, roughhousing, too excited by the radio to get the willies from Good Stuff’s misshapen face.

  Mr. Jackley, a quiet veteran who’d served in the trenches, was sweating from exertion. He said good afternoon and removed his hat and set up the radio in the doorway. It was the size and shape of a liquor cabinet. The neighborhood kids all crouched low. A stillness spread among them. Good Stuff knew something big was about to happen but at the same time acknowledged that he’d never believe it until he saw it. Mr. Jackley turned the knob.

  Music squeezed out as if from a magic room. The darkest room, the darkest magic. Good Stuff shivered, feeling it all over.

  The neighborhood kids looked at the radio, through the radio, and into the invisible big-band orchestra. The musicians sounded a thousand miles away but also right next door and upstairs.

  The Jackley boy grinned up at Mr. Jackley.

  Mr. Jackley knew his boy was looking at him but he looked at Good Stuff.

  Good Stuff wasn’t looking anywhere.

  When the song ended, Good Stuff flopped out of his rocking chair and onto his arm. His face jerked into pain and then straight out of it. The nearest kids hurried to help him up. He said, “Keep it playing!”

  They listened to tunes until the news came on. All the neighbor-kids left.

  Mr. Jackley guessed Good Stuff had broken his arm, and decided to call on the town doctor after he brought the radio back. He shook Good Stuff’s hand lightly, put on his hat, got the radio ready, and lifted.

  As he and his boy left the porch, Good Stuff said, “I been wrong all my life. Music don’t make you feel more. Just makes you feel how much you keep missing.”

  Good Stuff raised his arm. He strummed the air with it. It was blue.

  On the way home, the boy whispered to his dad, “But what’s he been missing?”

  Mr. Jackley set the radio on the street outside his house, needing but not wanting to rest before heaving it up the steps and through the front door. Inside, his wife cooked chili, pregnant again. Their blind cat napped under the porch. Mr. Jackley looked down at his son. His son looked back with love, even though he didn’t know what love was or how it worked, where it came from, when it left you, how to know if it had stayed.

  Mr. Jackley wanted to muster up enough to match this look. He couldn’t.

  He said, “Ask him next week.”

  They both looked over at Good Stuff’s. The porch as empty as the street.

  The boy got scared. “Can we ask him now?”

  This Mr. Jackley could do.

  They left the radio at the curb and walked back. The front door was open some.

  What they couldn’t see was that Good Stuff lay behind it, bunched up and on his head, one ear mashed to the floor. He’d fallen on his other arm. From this position he contemplated the many ways in which he could still be busted. A cause, he was certain, for thanks. The way he saw it, love had always come to him like a thing remembered. Known and new. And now the radio! It received what it was given, and what it received it gave. It gave to those who gathered round. What was far was now. The difference was, with enough money he could buy it, he could keep it close.

  How close?

  He tried to shake his arms. Both slept.

  The boy knocked.

  A church-like hush hugged the three of them.

  The boy imagined Good Stuff’s answers as songs that sounded sad but made you happy, and Mr. Jackley imagined daily ways to be on the other end of however many of his boy’s loving looks were left, and Good Stuff imagined being one big wordlessness, being not what it came out of, but what came out.

  Their quiet sparkled like warm static. They listened to it last.

  Mutt-Face

  Feeling puny, the mutt-faced cowboy drove his truck through moonlight to the Mexican biker bar. He was a grubby Anglo with fat cheeks, otherwise lean, and he gunned along the country road with both windows down because neither would roll up. Every car he passed was packed with women. Some singing, big eyes pinched. His heart sputtered.

  He hadn’t been in a spell but the biker bar had stayed the same, stinking something fierce of bleach and lemons. Dark wood, dull light, rancheros howling. Everybody carrying on like they came from no place in particular, like they had no story other than the ones their bodies were saying right then and there with a mess of leaning, dancing, and laughing, with a mess of empty cans and bottles.

  He took a stool and met his face in the mirror behind the bar. His mutt-face. Splotchy, chewed up, and smeared by the dopey grin he couldn’t quit. He tugged his cowboy hat lower.

  His orders kept the bartender moving. He had decided to drink himself big, so big that the bar cranked up and revolved around his bigness. So big that nagg
ing things inside him, mostly memories, pretended to be puny. The bigness in him got bossy. It changed breeches.

  Go on now, said the bossy bigness. Take a look-see.

  He turned to his right and saw a large gal looking back, her lips like tomato halves, her cleavage like a canyon. Fill that canyon, said his bigness. The bar whirled behind her, flashing with female bodies. Bikes roared. Her face, a field aglow with makeup, was changing. He stared into her changing field, listening, imagining—filling up with bigness.

  Then the biker beside her stepped up, the size of a jukebox, his eyes as dead and ugly as the Rio Grande, and the cowboy’s bigness drained. The biker put on a pair of sunglasses like he was loading a pistol. Suddenly lonesome, the gal looked away.

  The cowboy returned to his can of Tecate and added salt. He did not feel big. He felt the shoulder-tap he knew was coming, and when he turned, the biker slugged him off his stool. So many legs, some long and naked, and the biker, calm, was speaking, repeating himself. They stomped the cowboy’s hat. Someone uncapped a saltshaker and poured it on his face, saying, “Qué sabroso,” and they dragged him out the door and kicked him, but not enough to crack his bones.

  He just lay there, feeling the moon on his neck. The door closed, muffling the laughter of women. Why you smiling at my woman, the biker had said. The bigness had no answer because the bigness skipped town and jumped the border.

  When the burning in his eyes went out he pulled himself up and toward his truck, parked against a patch of prickly pear. Got no friends in there, he thought, meaning the bar.

  Got no friends, shouted his bigness, from across the border it had jumped. It sipped a margarita, matter-of-factly. Women, neither.

  The cowboy wiped gravel from his cheek and had himself a long look in the rearview: the irascible open-mouthed grin, the grin that was there whether he was puny or big, soused or sober, delusional, down in the dumps. The grin one saw instead of him. And now some broken teeth and a busted lip.

  He wrenched the rearview off the windshield and tossed it out the window. After several tries, his truck started, wheezing.

  The moon had risen from the mountains. Swollen and low, it lit the valley. On the way to his crummy rented bungalow on the rural fringes of Mesilla, the cowboy bumped over the Rio Grande, smelled its sour and curdled reek through stuck-open windows. The smell was sad, so deeply sad that he thought for sure it’d kill or shrink his smile, but he touched the corners of his swollen lip and found them raised, idiotically defiant—a defiance without ground, without a resistance to properly define it, even. How about that. Sighing, he turned onto his country road and accelerated and smashed into a pecan tree.

  The windshield folded closed, like a book. The moon came in and had its way with all the shattered glass, twinkling merrily. His nose dribbled blood. When thinking came back he thought: On purpose? Dogs were barking, hungry.

  Then his door swung open. A crooked abuelita in a black dress snatched his hand, guided him out. She led and he followed, wobbling. Her grip was strong and dry. She didn’t walk, exactly, she waggled her rump and floated, tugging him past a dried-up yard and blooming barrel cacti and withered scrub oaks and old standing engines, spaced out in her yard, looking like bird baths.

  He watched her waggling rump and pretended she was fifty years younger.

  A woman, clucked his bigness, before returning to the foreign bar.

  Inside the adobe home the light was hard and orange. She took him through a sitting room cluttered with skinny shelves and curios: suffering saints and virgins, prayer candles, smiling suns and moons and skulls. From the carpet rose a thriftstore stink.

  She sat him in the dining room, in a fold-up chair at a fold-up table. She floated, without clacking, across linoleum and into the kitchen. He dabbed his bloody nose with a sunny-colored cloth napkin. Plates clinked. Portraits adorned the walls, broad ones with fancy frames, spaced out in sequence. They had as their subject the same woman through time, from a self-assured sixteen-year-old to an alluring, busty thirty-something, ending on a pocked and silvery specimen of late middle age. The skin on the faces hardened as the cowboy followed the portraits from beginning to end; then softened as he backtracked, traveling through time with his gaze. Only the eyes and mouth were consistent: fierce, harried. The fierceness came from being harried. The mouth unsmiling, an iron bar.

  The cowboy realized that these were not photographs, but paintings. He also realized he had lost his hat. “Nuts,” he said, because his hair was thinning, and his hat was how he hid this fact from himself. The hat was a Stetson, which made him a cowboy. But that wasn’t true, and boy, did he know it.

  The abuelita reappeared, cradling a bowl with hands as big as oven mitts. In the bowl was a steaming hill of chile con carne. His place was set: fork, water glass.

  He blinked hard, hoping to herd together his senses. “Thank you,” he said, “this is a generous gesture, but I tell you, it’s unnecessary. If you lend me your phone I’ll use that phone to phone a friend and hitch a ride, and be on my way.”

  She shook her head, which was how she let him know she knew he had no friends. A motorcycle ripped by outside. He was still very drunk.

  “Truck’s a friend.”

  “Eat,” she commanded.

  He ate, hardly pausing to chew, and even cracked the knucklebones to slurp marrow. Soon the bowl was empty and he was full, feverishly warm. When she cleared his dish he tried to stand to help her. He couldn’t. He’d been tied to the chair with twine.

  She sat herself at the opposite end of the table, staring at him in the way that old folks have of trying to turn what they see into somewhere else, somewhere they’ve been before, way back.

  The mutt-faced cowboy wriggled at his bonds. A pair of hands clamped his shoulders, heavy ones. He smelled bleach and lemons and knew the man behind him to be the biker that had broke his teeth, the biker who had covered ugly eyes with sunglasses.

  The abuelita opened her mouth and her voice was like a knife across a stone: “You were smiling when you were born, dogface.”

  “Please don’t call me dogface.”

  “Dogs obey.”

  “All right: I’m a dogface.”

  The biker undid his bonds.

  He stayed there, got used to it. Every morning he filled the old standing engines, which were, in fact, birdbaths for grackles. He dusted the curios on the shelves, straightened the portraits, and peeled potatoes. At night he slept on the porch swing out back near the chicken cages and dreamed of beautiful senoritas wrapped in immodest shawls made of darkness. Their lips shining, they’d touch his skin, join their bodies to his. At the end of these dreams the lights would go on and the shadow-shawls would disintegrate and the women would stand revealed as women from his family, sisters, aunts, and cousins, naked. It was embarrassing, but he woke with erections.

  The abuelita fed him well and did his laundry. When he ate, she watched. Sometimes she licked her lips, and he was amazed that she had retained such powers of salivation. But he remained polite. Her mouth glistened, ashy gray.

  Every day after lunch the cowboy would lay out on the same swing and have a nap, aiming to dream of senoritas he didn’t know. But he never dreamed during naps, and when he woke in the late afternoon the biker would be standing beside him, smoking a cherry cigarillo and wearing shades. Dogs over the fence behind the chicken cages would be barking madly, keeping at it all day. The cowboy and the biker never said anything to each other, and on account of the biker always wearing shades the cowboy wasn’t sure where the man was looking. At the Organ Mountains? The range was rocky and huddled, purple at the closing and opening of day. Its peaks looked like a gathering of unattractive women.

  Its peaks are no such thing, said the bigness. They’re teeth. People been eaten, there.

  But the cowboy could now ignore the bigness. All this time he didn’t think about his stomped Stetson or his thinning hair. He never thought about his dopey grin because there were no mirrors in the abueli
ta’s house, only painted portraits. He didn’t even think about being puny. Lean, satisfied, he spent time just considering, easy-like, how every day was made of parts and how every part followed the other. Then he’d fall asleep.

  One month went by. After a lunch of enchiladas, the cowboy woke from his dreamless nap. A drag of a day, the mountains looking tired and dusty. Overworked women. The biker standing by, smoking, and for the first time he offered the cowboy a cigarillo.

  The cowboy sat up, the bony knobs of his back rutting against the swing-slats. His face felt like the mountains looked. “Why not,” he said, and realized those were the first words he’d said out loud in a month.

  They were also the words he pretended to live by. An awful sadness poured on into him, taking the shape of the Rio Grande, surging in its sick and clotted way, all bigness on the far bank, impossible.

  “Why you smiling at my woman,” repeated the biker.

  “At everybody’s women,” said the cowboy, “come from a family of them—moms, aunts, sisters, cousins, spinsters, ladies, widows, a fine and loving family, feeding me and dressing me and making me out to be something big, saying I could have anything and be anyone. Be anything and have anyone, boy! See the cities, they put them anywhere!” He licked his lips. They were sweet with artificial cherry, dry with hot smoke. “So I got to leaving Georgia. Was fixing to be anyone and have anyone without them, and the women I knew gave me blessings and bank accounts and pieces of pie for the road. Next thing I know I’m turning my back to weepy goodbyes and blasting through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, seeing cities, wild ones, and landing in Texas, buying boots and a hat, talking different, working orchards and farms, nuts, tomatoes, tripping through canebrake, tearing my breeches, and always every night phoning up my family women so they can feel good reminding me: Be anyone and have anyone, boy!” The cowboy laughed hard and short, like a man who had stepped on the face of death. “And now I’m in New Mexico. Picking pecans. Making up my life with all them womenfolk out of earshot.”