by Odie Lindsey
No.
It took a minute to realize that I’d fallen asleep on the kitchen floor. It was dark out, the room smeared by shadow. My spine locked in pain from having been seated too long with my back against the cabinet. I stood up slowly, stretched. Listened.
She was home.
I snuck out into the hallway, and placed the package outside her door. Came back in and bolted the lock.
Ours can be no more than a silhouette of lace drape. We must risk nothing more than a wall.
SO,
with a little knock, good night.
We Come to Our Senses
THE BARS HAVING closed at midnight, we turned to guns. Within an hour, the back deck of Douglass and Willie’s house became a killing field of empty Miller cans and Camel butts. And though we’d only shot one cockroach between the three of us, I’d taken it out hip-hop-style, pistol held sideways. No American sniper could top that shit.
At some point Willie went inside for a beer, then came back out shirtless. A Super 8 camera was tucked in the waistline of his jeans. He said he’d snagged the camera at Thrift City, where he’d gone to ditch his ex-wife’s souvenir spoon collection. Douglass and I grabbed for it but he swatted us away. He said we couldn’t waste a frame of film, then yanked it out and stuck the viewfinder to the port-wine’d half of his face. “Slaughter!” he directed, and Douglass stomped the deck with his roper boots, and roaches sprang from the gaps between the rotting lumber. I took aim and fired the pistol. Though the BB gun proved inaccurate, the hum of the camera motor was thrilling.
Being a film guy, I asked where was our shoot-’em-up soundtrack? Where was Morricone when you needed a decent film score? They didn’t get it.
“Sergio Leone?” I followed. Nada.
I’d started to whistle the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when Darla called, wondering when I’d be home. I cocked the cell phone away from my ear and said, Soon and I love you. I hoped that this was fair, but she was agitated—perhaps on account of her new meds, perhaps not. I tried to muffle the crack of another beer, but the rip of the aluminum set her off. Willie and Douglass shook their heads in judgment as I then indulged her lengthy grievance. They no longer had time for relationships, having decided to spend their post-divorce lives as born-again bachelors. Their ex-wives had both been cheaters, one a turned lesbian.
When I hung up, Willie announced that we were all going out to film a live-action horror movie, then aimed the camera at me for a response. I said, “Go for it, I’ve gotta go home.” Douglass promptly called me pussyman (camera pans to him), and then stood up and asked me when was the last time anybody did anything worth a damn in this little town, like made a film or anything, and what did it say about me that I couldn’t just take one night, one silly night off of playing by someone else’s rules?
“Think about that,” he said, the Super 8 fixed on him for effect.
I’d heard this speech every time we got drunk—only never on camera. I got yet another beer from the cooler and did think about it while they went in the kitchen to gather knives and other horror-flick props. Sitting alone on the deck, the Mississippi swelter lapping me like a dog tongue, I overhead them arguing about Douglass not drinking his Metamucil. Willie asked him why this was. Douglass didn’t answer. “You can’t even taste it in the water,” Willie said, and asked if it was out of spite. No response. Finally, Willie threatened to stop doing their goddamn laundry if Douglass insisted on nurturing a spastic colon.
“That’s enough!” Douglass barked in a hushed but commanding voice, reminding Willie that I was just outside and could hear them. Willie said he didn’t care, and fell silent as if to sob.
I didn’t care. It had taken me two years in Mississippi to make two friends. Two years of pining for the city and holding the move South against Darla. So no small, awkward quarrel would put me off of these guys. I needed them. No matter their addiction to camouflage, their fear of an unseen governmental force, or the way in which they echoed the gummy bickering of an elderly couple, I needed them. What’s more, I thought, I wanted to need them. I wanted to keep shedding the things I held against this place before moving here, if only to find the complicated truth of Darla’s Mississippi.
In any event, having decided that I would in fact stay out and make the horror film, I moved on to imagining Tyrone Power in the 1946 adaptation of The Razor’s Edge: his struggle to resist social code, his mendicant odyssey in pursuit of true enlightenment.
I called Darla, and could hear Law & Order in the background.
“Law & Order, Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Really?” she scoffed.
“Yeah, really. I mean, is this what it’s come to with you?”
“Am I wrong to assume that you’re shooting roaches with a couple of crypto-queer, misogynist rednecks?” she asked.
“Stereotyping them distracts from my point.”
“Which is?”
Which is that back in the city, we watched films like fiends. We went to them throughout the week. We bought them in the discount bin at the grocery, or on the street. We went to festivals, to talks, we held screenings in our dinky apartment. We could hold entire conversations comprised of dialogue ripped from various movies, as reconfigured to fit any given topic.
We created a blog, a couple’s movie-critic blog and website that had been featured in the city’s weekly arts paper, and even mentioned in a few national industry trades. It got so many hits that theaters and script-consulting services bought banner ads. We’d even scheduled studio time and were going to film tiny episodes of our critical selves for public-access television. Our friends and their friends who knew us said it’d be amazing: our informed squabbling on camera. I built a stage-sized diorama that looked like an old television set, the frame a rich mahogany console with tweed beige speaker covers and clunky chrome knobs. We would do our thing inside this console-frame—only, our interior set would be painted black-and-white, and we’d be dressed and made-up in diverse shades of black and white. (Sitting at the oval oak table of our apartment, Darla and I batting around ideas, I got so excited about this that I suggested we review only color films, clips of which would be shown on a monitor between us, in our black-and-white interior . . . all meta-framed by the retro color television diorama, and of course the viewer’s world, and she said that this would be too much, too clever and easy, and for a moment I thought of pushing my concept, really shoving it through her, before I realized she was right.)
Our set, our life together, was like a movie within a movie. I was bursting to build additional dioramic sets, to constantly change our frame. Theater set, drive-thru set, or iPhone set—we would always be inside something else, twice.
Darla never admitted it, but we both knew her talent was leagues ahead of my straight-man role. She was going to knock people out, playing up her drawl and being funny and intellectually savvy and herself.
But her infection went crazy, and her anxiety followed suit. So instead we moved South, to be close to her parents, to this bitsy Mississippi town where the bars close at midnight and are shut on Sunday and where they don’t even have public access and where I never find a job and am constantly sweaty. The old, two-screen theater on the town square has been closed for years, and is rented out by a Southern Baptist start-up. (The marquee is sociopolitical precision: DIRECTIONS TO HEAVEN: TURN RIGHT AND GO STRAIGHT!) Our blog never changes but is still there. I visit it and read the dead past. Her parents go to great lengths to make us appear normal and vaguely class-appropriate for their tastes, reminding us that Mississippi is, as those in the right company say, “more a club than a state.” They cosigned on a house we could never afford even if I had a job. We get cable and a tiny allowance, permitting Darla to wield a work narrative of nonprofit part-timing and progressive volunteerism, with an eye towards whatever state-run, arts-ed position she’ll be nepotized into—and which she’ll be great at.
Law & Order droning away, Darla asked me how old I was, then reminde
d me that her folks were driving up to take us to church the next morning. I love her so, but Christ, how much more sacrifice? Wasn’t I here in Mississippi for her? Had I not left everything for her, my art and community and city and identity, tagging along as she loped home to privilege? Was it really so bad that I was going to stay out and make something?
“You know what, Dar?” I barked. “This is Five Easy Pieces and I am Rayette Dipesto, the waitress, and you are the rich-ass Jack Nicholson character who never feels the gut-sting of not always having everything, every single day of your life. But some of us were born without a net, baby!”
“Whatever, retard,” she said, and hung up.
I looked into the backyard, at this old chrome dog bowl freckled in mud. Willie’s dog, Slump, had died before I even moved to town. Yet his ghost hung around, care of fridge-photos and in doorway floor scar, and in gigs of sprawling video on Willie’s phone. There was the anecdote about the time Slump managed to open the camping cooler, then ate thirty-two squares of Kraft Singles (with plastic wrap), drank a can of Miller Lite, and passed out. The tales of him retrieving live ducklings out of the pond in Town Park, or humping the service dog on the square on Veterans Day. I had come to know Slump as almost a nephew, a dead nephew dog, and I wondered sometimes if I needed a dog of my own, if owning another life would help Darla and me move forward, providing us a whole new history of love.
The boys and I piled into Douglass’s old Bronco, then hit the road with sour mash. I took a drink, said, “Make no mistake, guys. I adore Darla.” They had no reply. I then changed the topic to filmmaking: “You know, Larry Semon was from Mississippi. He was a big motion picture—”
“Ha!” Willie cut me off. “His name was Semen?”
“That would so suck,” Douglass said, and the two of them cackled.
Had I been talking to Darla, or at least to old Darla, we would have worked up our shtick while discussing Larry Semon, the forgotten rival of Chaplin, the recipient of a $5,000-a-week studio salary in the 1920s, who became a fever drunk at the apex of his success and decided to make a slapstick version of The Wizard of Oz, in 1927 (twelve years before the one we all know), with Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man, and with drunk Semon’s drunkard wife cast as Dorothy. A failure so enormous it decimated his career. Died in a California sanitarium, Larry Semon.
But old Darla was not here. The city was not here. The diorama set was not here. It seemed that my only markers of continued growth, of life, were Douglass and Willie, and the film we would make in the Mississippi night.
Douglass stopped off at this boarded-over Victorian shitheap, then got out and snuck around back. He and Willie buy old houses from poor blacks and use Mexicans to fix them up so they can fleece young whites. They started doing so when Douglass was still married to Gina, having bought their first project house care of her VA home loan benefits. Though he and Willie now do quite well, flipping houses all over town, they never update anything in their own home, out of disdain for their benefactress. “Don’t owe Gina or nobody for nothin’,” Douglass says, as if not spending the money he makes exempts his indebtedness to her.
As Willie and I waited, the engine cut and ticking, he confessed that he was worried sick about Douglass. Said he wished Douglass didn’t have to act like such a stupid, stubborn man. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I didn’t. Willie went silent and picked at his cuticles. A minute later Douglass walked back toward us, something big and dark cradled in his arms. He fumbled to open the Bronco’s tailgate, then thunked it in the back.
The stench was a crucifixion of the sinuses. I vomited out the passenger’s window, and began to regret the decision to anger my rich wife. Willie writhed and banged his head against the dashboard. Douglass was somehow unfazed; he laughed, and informed us that it was only a bloated dog carcass. A dead boxer, he said, which he’d found locked in the crawl space when first inspecting the Victorian, its body amid chewed Ziploc bags. He surmised that the dog had eaten whatever it was supposed to guard down there, meth or crack, then OD’d and baked in the heat.
We drove off with our heads flung doglike out the windows. A few minutes later, on a residential street, Douglass cut the headlights and rolled to a stop in front of Gina’s house.
“This is gonna be horrorific,” he whispered, then got out and went for the dead dog. Gas hissed out of the boxer when he picked it up, and a dark liquid ran down the front of his shirt. Douglass cursed God, demanded help. Willie said he had to hold the camera, then raised the Super 8 like a fist. I cursed God, then got out and grabbed the dog’s back legs. The muscles were mush; it seemed as if the beast would crumble from the bone, like decent pork shoulder.
We snuck onto Gina’s front porch heaving with nausea. The dead dog gassed out and made a slick smack when we dropped it. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I knew it was Darla.
Douglass whispered, “Okay, now ram a knife in it.”
“Hell,” I said. “I’m going home.”
He started to argue when the front door flew open. There was Gina, holding us down with a modified twenty-gauge, and clad in olive-green panties and a tan muscle shirt, her dog tags swaying. She had black chevron tattoos on each sculpted deltoid, and she barked commands at us in both Arabic and English.
Douglass cried out for Jesus Christ and calm. From the car, Willie laughed and pointed the camera at us.
“A movie within a movie,” I muttered, staring at the lens.
A legion of cops screeched onto the set. They clubbed us for many minutes and we were charged with alcoholic terrorism.
In the holding cell, Willie and Douglass bickered on as if they were back at home, sitting in twin recliners in front of their television. Across from them I was on my back, on a stainless steel bench, staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking about dogs. About Slump, and the dead boxer. I pictured the latter, frenzied on meth, smashing his head against whatever trapped him in the crawlspace. Smashing and smashing until his dog heart exploded. I could picture his final movements, so very slow in the heat, his last breath leaking out in a whistle.
“Or was it a her?” I asked aloud.
An hour or so later, Willie and Douglass ran out of gripe. In the silence, the jail toilet ran, and we may have even dozed. At some point I looked over and there was Darla, on the other side of the bars, wearing her sky-blue church dress.
“Hey, Dar,” I said.
“Hey,” she replied, her eyes raw from tears. “I’m bailing you out. But then we’re done.”
I begged forgiveness, mentioned Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies. Her mouth turned up a sad kind of smile. As I walked out behind her, fractured and stinking, Willie promised that next time he’d load film in the Super 8, now that we had an idea of what to expect.
D. Garcia Brings the War
HIGHWAY. GET TO drinking. Driving to the cemetery I get to drinking, hard. I look over at the passenger seat, and to Berea: hitchhiker, maiden, at our mercy. She is car-window-framed by tumbling gray clouds that still haven’t decided if they’ll break or not. I look at blond Berea and ask if she’s heard of Petrarch. She asks back if he’s like Bruno Mars. I say, Hell, no, Berea, then take a pull off the bourbon bottle and tell her that Petrarch was this Italian dude who wrote over two hundred sonnets to a woman named Laura. Wrote them over the course of twenty-something years. He was pure, you know. As was she: Laura.
Well, that’s pretty great, Berea says, the Kentucky forest streaking by. Is this, like, a Mexican thing, D. Garcia? she asks.
I punch the gas as Pete butts in from the backseat, yapping that George Harrison and Eric Clapton each wrote songs expressing love to Clapton’s wife, nicknamed Layla. Berea says she knows about Layla—the song anyway—and then Pete corrects himself and notes that maybe it was Harrison’s wife, but either way, it’s romantic.
Jesus fuck, I say, we are not talking about a hippie rock star wife-swap, Pete. Like, Petrarch didn’t even know Laura, man. He saw her like once, ONCE, from afar, and her purity drove him t
o throttle this sort of absolute unknown romance pain love to the extreme. I mean, she was married, had kids—was off-market. But Petrarch kept on loving, he kept on loving the very idea of her—while respecting her enough not to pressure her. His poems like a highway, his love a pure pilgrimage, a mission, a conquest, a Cause, a . . .
Laura! Laura! Laura! I howl. Bang the bottle on the dashboard, take a healthy pull and say, Hell, Pete, Petrarch sure as shit didn’t have to put anything on the radio, or make a pop-culture spectacle out of love.
Berea coos this ethic. She squeezes my shoulder, smiles and caresses the back of my neck . . . but then turns back to fawn over Pete, too. In the rearview I see him roll his eyes at her, which prompts her to reach back between our seats and tickle him, which gets me crazy jealous—and to more of that bourbon. I swerve a little bit to scare her back up front. So then I’m drinking and thinking of Laura when Berea asks: Speaking of music, guys, do y’all have any Toby Wayne in the car? which almost makes me throw her farm-bred, hitchhike, downy white ass back onto the parkway, and which does make Pete respond, No way, Berea, because we totally hate that guy, and we hate pop-country crap in general, though . . .
You won’t believe it, Pete continues, but D. Garcia’s buddy, the guy we’re staying with when we get to Nashville, wrote a song that megastar Toby Wayne recorded, at which point Berea freaks out and says, No way! twice, before asking, Which one? to which Pete responds, Jesus, I don’t know, ask D. Garcia! to which Berea replies, D. Garcia, which one, oh, man, which song, which song?
And she’s so beauteous and porcelain and maidenhead-clean when she begs. I plug another gluggeroo, then go ahead and answer, “Urban Cowgirl.”