Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

  And as soon as you realize that they are going to die, no matter what you do, you run for the door.

  Let me make sure you understand this. You should have stayed on. Even though it would have been five dead instead of four, you should have stayed on.

  A train makes a bus seem like a very small thing. The school bus barely slows the train. It tears through the bus, leaving remnants of glass and flesh on either side of the tracks. All you hear is the groaning of steel, the cries of anguish, the sickly sounds of souls escaping from healthy, eager bodies.

  Don’t you look away now. Don’t you dare. See the carnage. See what you have wrought, the effects of a careless mistake. See their faces. Say their names . . .

  Matthew Litton

  Kevin Funderburke

  Ann Lawson

  Demetria Thomas.

  Besides the names, I see the parents’ faces. Their righteous anger still sends chills down my spine. How do you defend the indefensible? How do you tell a parent that their only child died because of your impatience? Does impatience sound better than carelessness? What about foolishness? Does it even matter? Shouldn’t I have just stayed on the bus? At least then I would have never had to see the faces of the parents, heard the names of the children like an endless chant in my head.

  Is there a heaven for people who make mistakes that can never be fixed? That’s what I told the parents. I would fix it if I could. I would do anything. But they didn’t listen. And I couldn’t fix it.

  Can you?

  Sucky

  When Joe was three years old, he pointed at the claw-foot tub in the hall bathroom and said, “Sucky.” His parents laughed. His father was proud, his mother vaguely worried that her three-year-old already used the word “sucky.”

  When he’d been four, he tried to tell them. They’d listened to him then. They listened and smiled and told him he had a great imagination and one day he would do something important like write a collection of poems or an article on tax reform that would win the Pulitzer Prize. As he got older, and was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia—“a damn fatal one-two punch,” he’d overheard the doctor tell his parents when he didn’t think Joe had been listening—his mom and dad said less stuff about poems and Pulitzers and more stuff like, “College is something you have to work for, Joe” and “The world is a cruel place to those who can’t read.” Joe could read. That wasn’t the problem. But it was hard work sometimes because the words turned over on themselves and wouldn’t ever quite straighten out for him and look like words were supposed to look, so much so he began to think of reading as something like walking through a minefield. Every word was a potential bomb. And when he took the tests, those stupid, computerized comprehension tests, he felt like his brain was floating in the middle of some far away ocean possibly getting pecked at by seagulls or sized up by sharks, while the rest of him was sitting in Ms. Fosett’s second period, staring glass-eyed at a computer screen.

  When he’d been seven, he’d tried to tell them again. He even got Dad up there to listen to the drain as he flipped the valve. The noise that usually sounded like a monster trying for all it was worth to suck the whole world through its tiny mouth hole, gurgled softly, nearly silent, like clear spring water sliding through a gap in the rocks.

  Dad frowned. “It’s time to stop being afraid of the bath tub, Joe.”

  Joe nodded, pretending he understood. But he didn’t.

  When he was ten and his mother mounted a showerhead over the tub and Joe took his first shower, he was reaching for the soap and slipped. His bangs had been longer then, and even though he managed to catch himself before he cracked his head open on the porcelain basin, some of his hair dangled dangerously close to the sucky. He heard it throttle down and inhale, a great, heaving, asthmatic groan. His bangs pulled against his scalp and he felt his head going down. He screamed and jerked himself up, cutting his head open on the tub’s faucet. There was a lot of blood and more screaming. For the next several days, he was allowed to bathe in his parents’ bathroom.

  The sucky got worse. As he neared his thirteenth birthday, he heard it all the time. Sometimes he even found items in the bathroom missing. He lost a toothbrush, a roll of toilet paper, a sock, a page he’d torn out of his sixth grade yearbook showing Madeline Buckhorn’s ass in a pair of tight blue jeans, half a deck of Magic: The Gathering trading cards, and a Victoria’s Secret catalogue he’d swiped from the mail and hidden in the bathroom before his mother ever knew it came. He decided to talk to his parents again.

  By this point, they had their own problems. Joe often wondered if they were going to get a divorce. Samantha, his mother, seemed to be forever rolling her eyes at Danny, his father. Danny never seemed happy about anything and frequently their disagreements spilled over into full-fledged fights.

  Sometimes, after they thought Joe was asleep, they screamed at each other. He caught snippets, mostly, but he was smart enough to put them together. He might have had a “deadly combination” of ADHD and dyslexia, but he could think just fine. The snippets mostly went like this:

  “. . . just want a little space. Is that too much . . .”

  “. . . you’d be better off with somebody else . . .”

  “. . . ever since that woman started working there . . .”

  “. . . I do the dishes. I vacuum the floor, but that’s not good enough . . .”

  “. . . go away for a while. I need space. Room . . .”

  “. . . are you going to drink another whole bottle tonight?”

  “. . . space. Just gimme some goddamn space . . .”

  And worse. Much worse. When it got really bad, he covered his ears because he was sure he would hear his father slamming the door shut and leaving them. He’d been afraid of that almost as long as he’d been afraid of the sucky, ever since he woke up to a brutal fight one night when he was four. He’d cried and cried until his parents both came to check on him and reassure him they would never leave him.

  “But, I heard daddy say he was leaving and never coming back,” Joe said.

  Dad sat on the edge of the bed then. He took Joe’s hand in his. With his other hand, he brushed Joe’s bangs out of his eyes. He said, “I promise I will never leave you, Joe.”

  Joe had nodded, forced his tears to stop, but he didn’t believe his father, not then, not nine years later.

  But he did believe his father loved him. His mother too. That’s why he decided he had to talk to them about the sucky.

  Like many parents of thirteen-year-olds, Joe’s mom and dad were incapable of listening to the actual words that came out of his mouth. When he spoke, they both heard a strange and vaguely pleasing sonic dissonance that neither recognized. His mother called the dissonance “a failure to communicate.” His father—whom Joe had learned was once a punk rocker in the 1980s and should have known all about dissonance—just grunted at Joe when Joe tried to tell him anything.

  But this time, his mother squinted at him strangely, and his father shook his head.

  “Is this a joke?” he said.

  “No, not a joke,” Joe said.

  “If this is a joke, it’s not funny.” The dissonance was making it difficult for Dad again.

  Mom said, “I think he may need to see somebody, Danny.”

  “You mean like a shrink?”

  “I mean like somebody who can help him. Do you think this is normal?”

  “I think it’s a joke.”

  Mom rolled her eyes. Always the first sign things were about to get ugly.

  “I suppose his poor grades are a joke to you to? What about that I found a note in his book bag from a girl that was completely inappropriate? That a joke to you?”

  Dad looked at Joe. “Can you believe this shit?”

  Joe didn’t respond.

  “Can you believe how she acts?”

  Joe might
have shrugged.

  “Holy Jesus. I’m going to work in the yard.”

  “You can’t hide from your problems all your life,” Joe’s mother said.

  “Then maybe I should just leave my problems,” Joe’s dad said as he was going out the door.

  Joe was left with his mother who had started crying. Upstairs, the sucky began to purr.

  He dreamed about it sometimes. In his dreams, he watched his old bath toys go down the drain one by one. In the dreams he could follow them. His eyes came out of his head and went down the drain too. There were mazes of pipes, then a great belly of water and waste that smelled like chemicals and shit, before the bath toys were diverted back into smaller pipes and rushed along in a current of mould and grime and old bath water to a spout that poked out of the ground in the middle of a vast desert. The desert was always empty, which is how Joe knew the sucky was always hungry and would always be hungry. It’d never fill that desert/belly, not in a million years of sucking. And somehow, this was the part that always jolted him out of sleep, this realization that some places are so empty, all the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to fill them.

  Joe’s mom and dad went out of town on separate trips. Joe’s dad went to the beach to “lay in the sun and read some paperbacks.” Joe’s mom went to her friend’s house in Atlanta. They were going to have some “girls’ nights” and do some “girl stuff.” There were so many things wrong about this situation, Joe did not even try to count them.

  At thirteen, he should have been jubilant to be by himself. Part of him was. But most of him couldn’t concentrate on being jubilant because he kept listening to the upstairs bathroom, just waiting to hear a suck. But the first day, which was Friday, he didn’t even hear a gurgle. When he had to pee, he went in his parents’ bathroom. Their shower was pleasant and never gurgled.

  On Saturday, his friend Roy came over with cigarettes, a six-pack of beer, and two sixth grade chicks, Rhonda and Melissa, both of whom had recently, as if by some arcane female magic, sprouted breasts.

  For a while, amid the coughing and touching and giggling, Joe forgot (mostly) about the sucky.

  “I’ve got to pee,” Melissa said.

  She was the prettier of the two, but less fun than Rhonda, who had already let Joe pop her bra strap and said she wanted a tongue ring for Christmas.

  “Upstairs,” Joe said. “First door on the—” But then he stopped, remembering. “You can use my parents’. It’s in their room at the end of the hall.”

  Melissa ran up the steps. The party continued. Rhonda let Roy look down her shirt. They kissed. Joe was embarrassed and looked at the television where the Crimson Tide was leading Mississippi State by a touchdown.

  A few minutes later, Melissa returned. “There’s something seriously wrong with your bath tub,” she said and plopped down on the couch between Roy and Rhonda.

  “You used my parents’, right?”

  “No toilet paper. I used the hall one. Hey, do you get HBO?”

  “What was it doing?” Joe asked. But he didn’t wait for an answer. He heard it now, rumbling, sucking. Waiting.

  Later, after the six-pack was gone and the cigarettes smoked, and they were all used to the rumbling coming from the upstairs bathroom, Rhonda said, “I hate my dad’s new girlfriend. She’s a total slut.”

  Roy said, “Sounds like a winner to me.”

  Melissa and Rhonda hit him at the same time.

  “Ow. I was just kidding. Sort of. Anyway, that’s kind of like saying the sky is blue, right? I mean, I hate everybody my parents have ever dated. They all seem so . . . I don’t know . . .

  childish.”

  “You’re calling somebody childish?” Melissa said. Her face was drawn and she looked a little pale.

  “I know what he means,” Rhonda said. “It’s like my dad is a teenager. My mom, she’s just, I don’t know, a basket case. She’ll never date again.”

  “So what about your parents, Joe?” Melissa said. “Are they on a romantic getaway?”

  Joe shrugged. He could hear the sucky shifting gears, finding its torque. Its desert must be starving. “I don’t think so.”

  “At least they’re still together,” Rhonda said.

  “For now,” Joe said.

  “Mine are too,” Melissa said. “But I get the feeling sometimes, it won’t last.”

  “Me too,” Joe said. He met Melissa’s eyes. She smiled at him, a half wilted thing that made his stomach flip over.

  “Dude,” Roy said suddenly. “What in the hell is wrong with your bathtub?”

  In Panama City, Florida, Joe’s father, Danny, sat beside the hotel pool with Ralph, a high school buddy he’d started hanging with again since running into him at the Alabama game two weekends ago. Ralph had been the drummer in their punk band, The Bloody Dumplings. Then Ralph had been a skinny kid with rampant acne. Now Ralph was a hulk of a man, red-faced and huffing; his tits bigger than half the women lounging in various stages of undress around the pool.

  But not bigger than the girl Danny and Ralph had been flirting with for the last half hour. Her name was Celebrity and when Danny asked her if that was her stage name or her real name, Celebrity hadn’t even blinked.

  “Both.” She had a crooked smile and one of her teeth was going black.

  Neither Ralph or Joe’s dad asked for elaboration.

  Later, when they were in the room and Celebrity excused herself to the pee, Danny thought about Samantha and shook his head. She deserved this. Hell, he deserved this. Then he thought about Joe, a photograph he used to have of his boy holding a drawing he’d done just for him. Joe’s face beamed with joy, his squinty eyed smile a thing of innocence and beauty. Danny used to keep it folded neatly in his wallet, and when he was having a bad day at work, he’d pull it out and just like that he’d feel better. The photo had stayed with him until about three months ago when he and Joe’s mom had taken a weekend trip to Atlanta. They’d had a huge fight that ended with all of his belongings, including the wallet with the photo of Joe landing in the pool. He dove in after the wallet, the photo, but he never found it. The only thing he could figure was that somehow it had been sucked down the drain at the bottom of the pool.

  Ralph found a porno on the television. “You ever done this before?”

  “Nope,” Danny said, mentally letting the photograph fall back into the swimming pool. “But the way I figure it: there’s a first time for everything.”

  Joe’s mother, Samantha, was in a motel room too, but unlike her husband, she was alone. She couldn’t bear to go to Jessica’s house. Jessica and her husband, Rob, were so in love, it made Samantha sick. So she was alone, flipping through an endless litany of channels, wondering what Danny was doing. Twice, she almost called him, but each time she opened her cell phone, she saw the picture of Joe staring back at her and she asked herself the same question she had been asking herself for the last year: was it better to stick it out for Joe’s sake or go ahead and spilt? After all, if she and Danny weren’t happy, wouldn’t that rub off on Joe? Hadn’t it already?

  She opened her cell phone a third time and looked at the picture of Joe taken last Christmas. He was such a frail boy. So nervous. Jumpy. When he didn’t take his ADHD medicine, he could be almost intolerable, but then there were other moments, when he smiled at her so sweetly, she felt full, as if there could be nothing else she needed in the world besides her son’s sweet smile.

  Joe’s parents talked on their cell phones. It went like this:

  “Hello.”

  “You remember the night when Joe was three and we woke him up fighting?”

  “Danny?”

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes, where are you?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Neither spoke. A small window of silence. In Panama City, Danny heard a car squeal off. Then the
ocean, lapping against the continental shelf, and pulling pieces of it away, back to the dark, silent centre. In Atlanta, Samantha heard the distant throb of bass from the hotel bar. Earlier she’d seen a group of short-haired kids with dog collars setting up for a show. She’d thought of Dan then, the way she’d found him so cute that first night in Knoxville with his leather pants and faux-cockney accent. When he asked her to go for a walk after show, she felt like she was with Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer. After a while, he took her hand and she looked at his profile and he pretended not to notice as she soaked him up, his almost elf like ears, his blunt, tough nose, the dark of his glassy eyes, the weight of his head, so right.

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes. I stood at the door. I listened. You promised him you’d never leave.”

  “Yeah. He was so pitiful. My heart hurt that night.”

  “Because you knew it was a lie?”

  “Yes. I knew it was a lie.”

  Danny carried the phone over to the sliding glass door and opened it. The salt air came in and he remembered a time when he’d been a kid, eighteen, and come with his buddies to this same beach. They’d gone out on a night like this one, when the spray of the ocean was in the air like fog and walked for what seemed like miles, passing girls their age in the deep dark, unable to discern their faces, so instead, they watched their forms: lithe bodies stuffed inside oversized sweatshirts that hung over blue jean cut-offs. In the dark, each girl was a girlfriend, a lover, a passionate wife they yearned for in the worst way. A yearning that did not know words and sat, like an ever-expanding balloon in the pits of their stomachs. They never said more than a couple of words to these perfect, invisible girls, and sometimes when Danny was lonely or sad he thought of them, their flip flops thwacking the hard sand, on their way to make some other boy happy.

  He was too old to still yearn for such things, but he did. And this made him feel sick and alive at the same time. Beyond the pool, the ocean sucked the sand back out to sea.