The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 21

  He found the Harris Teeter. Open 24 Hours—but closed for the holiday. Half a mile away, there was an Exxon station with a Handee Hugo’s convenience store. Open Till Midnight Every Day—but not today. He passed a handful of other places—CVS, Walgreens, Food Lion, Kangaroo—all shut up and dark. Just after he’d given up on finding something, anything, he came to a BP with a Scotchman Store. Lights on, one car at a pump, two more in the small side lot—open for business. He parked and went inside.

  At the back of the store, he found the toothpaste. Crest and Colgate, both travel-size, the boxes no longer than the width of his hand. Just as well: The mere thought of his original scheme—to acquire planetary quantities of toothpaste—made him queasy. After spending forty-five minutes or an hour in a grimy closet, entwining himself with a skinny boy named Travis, he’d surrendered the right to be petty. Passive-aggressive toothpaste wouldn’t do. He’d have to buy honest toothpaste.

  Travis’s scent was still on him. He could think of no better way of describing it than country boy—hay, dirt, boot leather, soap, talcum powder. Leland kept tasting him, kept tasting the musk of his cock. He wanted to sit on the floor and cry. He wanted to scrub his hands with lye and rubbing alcohol. He wanted to wash his mouth out with scouring powder and toluene.

  Instead, he grabbed the Crest off the shelf, and then, just in case, the Colgate as well. On his way to the front counter, he noticed some flowers in a narrow refrigerated case. Sad gas station flowers. Carnations and lilies mostly, orange and red fall arrangements with silk leaves and twists of dried corn husk, but also some roses, red as winter cardinals, each in a cellophane sleeve.

  If only there were hyacinths. Leland knew exactly one thing about the language of flowers: To ask forgiveness, you gave purple hyacinths. It was something his father had told him, and he’d never forgotten it. He’d given them to Anna Grace more times than he could count. How many fights and lapses and omissions of one sort or another? How many times had he apologized, with or without flowers, even when he was sure she’d been wrong?

  In this case, of course—

  Leland scooped up the roses, seven in all, and went to the checkout and laid his purchases on the counter. On a shelf behind the register there were some fist-sized bottles of mouthwash. Two kinds, blue and yellow—the color of a swimming pool, the color of piss. The yellow would go down like a scourge, flensing the skin from his tongue and throat. He asked for the yellow.

  Driving south toward the beach, he swigged the mouthwash and swished it around in his mouth. It scalded his soft palate and scorched the underside of his tongue. He swallowed, and as it ran down his throat it split him in half. Just as he’d hoped.

  By the time he parked the car at the hotel, he’d just about drained the bottle. He felt queasy and drunk, and he couldn’t tell whether he still had tastebuds. When he got out of the car, he cradled the roses in the crook of his arm and stuffed the toothpaste into his back pocket.

  The restroom at the back of the hotel bar was, luckily, a single-seater. He locked himself in, stepped to the sink, and laid the roses on the vanity.

  While the water ran from tepid to hot, he unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed his sleeves up. Pumping handfuls of white foam from the soap dispenser, he scrubbed his hands, his forearms, his face, his neck. The paper towels turned to mush on contact with water. They were nothing more than they were something—a possible proof of dark matter. He dried himself as well as he could.

  When he got back to the room, he noticed first that the bedside clock read 3:45 and then that Anna Grace hadn’t returned. He went to the sliding doors. The sky over the ocean had dimmed to indigo. The surfers had gone. He stepped onto the balcony and leaned over the railing and looked up and down the beach. No sign of Anna Grace’s tracksuit.

  After stripping out of his clothes, he held his jeans to the light and checked for stains on the knees. All clear. He draped them over the back of an armchair. Everything else—shirt, underwear, socks—he wadded up and shoved into a back corner of an empty dresser drawer. Better to hide them there, he thought, than to discard them in a wastebasket.

  Standing at the sink, he brushed his teeth and tongue twice with each kind of toothpaste. By the time he’d finished scrubbing his gums and tongue for the fourth time, the foam he spat into the sink was pink with his blood. Good, he thought, I deserve to bleed, and then he felt so foolish for thinking it that his face reddened. He watched in the mirror as the color spread in blotches in the hollows of his cheeks.

  He took a shower with the hottest water he could stand. An unasked-for mental picture came to him: Travis on his knees, his head tipped back, his face and bare chest gleaming in the garish light, his eyes closed, his mouth open. Leland’s cock hardened again and found its way somehow into his fist. He tugged at himself a couple of times, but soon let go. Twice in a day? Half a lifetime ago, maybe.

  No, not really. Half a lifetime ago, at twenty-five, he hadn’t been particularly lustful. Sure, he’d once gone to the dirty bookstore in Charleston, but nothing could have lured him back a second time. Men had stood around in the corridors, slouching against the pinball machine or leaning their hunched backs against the walls. They’d stared at the floor, hangdog and apparently sightless, as wretched as the gluttons in Dante’s Inferno. The experience had struck him as an excellent cure for lust.

  And yes, in his room at night, he’d thought about his runner—his first serious crush, a skinny, dark-haired cross-country runner with hairy legs—but he’d been a full-time student, a part-time tour guide, and the divorced father of a kindergartner. As he remembered it now, he’d been so exhausted so much of the time that he’d fallen asleep most nights before a thought or a mental image could turn into a fantasy.

  He imagined himself as he’d been then, lonely and bewildered in his childhood bedroom. He and Anna Grace had been apart for years. They’d swapped out the twin bed of his boyhood for a double, and then she’d left him to sleep in it by himself. The kitchen and bathroom hadn’t yet been rehabbed. The old garage had still stood at the back of the house.

  The garage. Funny: For a year or more at a time, he could forget it had ever existed, and then when he remembered it, it came back whole. Wet and cold in winter, airless and hot in summer. A smell of grease and oily sawdust. Cobwebs in the rafters. A dead freezer, a defunct water heater, a dented water cooler. Three dozen horseshoes from the nineteenth century. A chainless chainsaw, a bitless drill press, a bladeless bandsaw. So much of that stuff had sat in the garage for decades. When Dad started hauling it out and throwing it away, how could Leland fail to see—?

  No. Stop. It was stupid to second-guess himself now. His father had just come out of a dark summer of strange hours and odd rituals—red velvet cake at three a.m., onion soup at dawn, croque-madame at midnight. After the first frost snapped the spines of Mama’s daylilies, Dad rented a dumpster and emptied the garage to the walls. At the time it seemed like a good sign. A fresh start.

  Twisting the tap little by little, he ran the shower hotter and hotter, until when he looked down at himself he saw great streaks of pink where the water had flushed his skin. He turned off the faucet and opened the shower curtain. The movement of the curtain drove eddies of steam toward the clouded mirror. He went to the sink and wiped the glass with a dry towel, clearing an oval space.

  While he wetted the blade of his razor, he remembered that he hadn’t packed shaving cream. Soap would work well enough; his dad had used it every day. Rather than open a new bar, Leland went to the tub and fetched the last bendy sliver he’d left in the soap dish. He scrubbed it between his hands to work up a lather.

  Shaving every morning: a good sign. Sleeping every night: a good sign. Dad had kept on with the red velvet cakes, but in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, he suddenly switched to a rational schedule, sleeping all night, baking all day. He kept his face clean and his fingernails clipped. Once a week, he put a fair amount of trouble into shining his sh
oes—an excellent sign, how else to see it? He cleared even the cobwebs from the garage—and how else to see that, if not as an attempt to tidy the cluttered attic of his own mind? Bundled up in sweatshirts and a windbreaker, he planted hyacinth bulbs for the spring—purple ones, supposedly, though when they came up they were white—and who would do such a thing except in the hope of seeing them bloom?

  The lather had never made it from Leland’s hands to his face, and he no longer had any desire to shave. He rinsed and dried his hands. Naked, he staggered to the bed and climbed in. The sheets were cold against his skin and so soft that he found himself nearly in tears.

  Another unbidden image came to him, one that sickened him as much as it saddened him: his father, kneeling, head tipped back, mouth open. Clothed, at least, unlike Travis—but in this mental picture, Dad, too, was poised to take something in his mouth.

  Garage, video booth. Gun, cock. A devil’s diptych.

  There was no real connection between the two things—he knew that. His father had not shot himself because Leland liked boys. But the timing, the timing. On a Saturday evening, Leland had spent his quarters on porn. The following Tuesday, his father had died.

  Leland’s body lay quite still in the beautiful bed, but his mind was a many-limbed thing, clawing with its sharp nails at the seams of his skull and the flesh of his throat. Nested boxes, each bigger than the one that held it. Boxes within boxes, rooms within rooms, closets within closets. Eight quarters’ worth of skinny boys with hairy legs. Eight quarters’ worth of cock.

  Red velvet cake. The color of raw beef.

  Death is not a library.

  Phallus, gun, bullet, semen. Guten Abend, Herr Doktor.

  Death is death is death.

  In the largest, innermost box, there was a loaded pistol. Leland wondered, not for the first time, where on earth his dad had gotten the goddamn gun.

  Would Leland follow, if he could? Would he choose sleep, rather than a divided life? Would he bury the matryoshka boxes once and for all?

  Not with a gun, never with a gun—but some other way.

  If he could braid the sheets into a rope, would he rappel from the balcony to the ground and walk the two hundred, three hundred, five hundred yards to the roaring sea? If he could stride or swim far enough against the waves and somehow hold himself to the sandy bottom, would he look up through the false sky, the churning surface of the ocean, to the stars? Would he watch the far-away constellations split and double and collide, all the while filling his lungs and belly with the cold brine that would stop his heart?

  Whether he would or not barely mattered: He’d no sooner scramble down a makeshift rope than return to Travis’s grubby closet in the adult bookstore. He got up and put on his clothes and left the room. He went out through the door, like an ordinary man on an ordinary evening.