Fading Away

by Tom Upton

  “Cold, cold water,” the old man croaked just then.

  Ricky smirked. “You hear that?” he said to me, then turned to the old man. “Dry up and die, you old fart.”

  “Cold, cold water,” the old man repeated.

  Ricky gave me a crooked look.

  “Don’t,” I warned him.

  “Old people go to sleep, and never wake up. It happens. It’s normal,” he said, and seemed to enjoy my discomfort.

  “What happened to you?” I asked sincerely, and would regret even asking.

  He shrugged. “I started to understand things, I guess. You know, they try to teach you right from wrong, but they don’t really want you to know. They want to keep you stupid. And you know why? Because they don’t want you to know that half the things they do are wrong. Like last year, when I had to go to summer school. Remember? They were all concerned about my falling behind, and, oh, they were going to help, and they were going to take care of me. Yeah, right. Then when you go, they treat you like you’re stupid. They even call you stupid. What?-- is that supposed to help? They just don’t know what they do to kids. Not me, of course-- I understand what’s going on; I see their faults. But you take your average kid. He’s trusting and all, and listens to everything he’s told, and believes it, and they end up making him feel he’s not even good enough to go to school. It’s not worth their precious efforts. That’s what they do, every one of those teachers who teach during the summer at school. They tell the parents one thing, and then turn round and treat their kids a whole different way-- as though they’re burdens the teachers have to endure. Well, that’s what they get paid for, right? It’s their job. But they can’t just do it; they have to mess with peoples’ minds. I wonder how many kids they ruin every summer, how many kids never get to go where they’re meant to go, because they’ve been discouraged, because they’ve been led to believe they’re hopeless. It’s not right, I’m telling you, it’s not right. If I walked into that school tomorrow morning I shot every one of them in the head, I’d be doing everybody a big favor.”

  Long before he finished, I had begun to get a sick feeling in my gut. It wasn’t that he was getting excited as he spoke; he showed no passion at all, in fact, but just spoke in a steady, calm drone. That was the creepiest thing about it, really, the way he said the words as though he was reading off the batting averages of his favorite baseball players.

  I knew he meant every word he said. The threat was real. He’d already killed the Greek. He was like a tame animal that tastes blood for the first time, and now he was ruined forever. Every time he passed judgment on somebody now, it would not be enough; he would actually want to do something about it. It was madness. I couldn’t understand how this had happened to him, how he’d had turned into himself and got so twisted up. He wasn’t even like my brother anymore, but some stranger that had invaded the house.

  Before he walked back into his room, and shut out the rest of the world, he paused to look at the old man.

  “You’re on the list, too, Methuselah,” he said coolly, and then closed the door.

  I listened to the hush in the house, then, and wondered what to do.

  “Cold, cold water,” I heard the old man say. At the moment they seemed like the saddest words in the world. For a change, I went to the kitchen to get him a glass.

  ************

  During the following few days, Ricky didn’t mention anything about the school or the teachers or about shooting anybody. He seemed pretty cheery, actually, and whether or not it was all an act; I had no doubts that he was still dwelling on some new plan.

  At night I had dreams about him. I couldn’t rightfully call them nightmares, because they lacked the terror that true nightmares evoked in me. The content of the dreams were disturbing enough, but it presented itself in such a matter-of-fact way that I barely found the dreams disturbing. In one of the dreams Ricky had been wounded by the cops. He was holed up in one of the abandoned factories that were plentiful in our lower-middle class neighborhood. It was bringing him food in a large open room that had once been filled with machinery used in the manufacturing of bicycle parts. Everything appeared in black and white. He was wearing a sleeveless white tee shirt and the large splotch of blood that showed at the side of his stomach appeared in dark gray and not red. The beat-up 9mm poked out from the top of his jeans. He paced around slowly, but not as though in pain, eating a tuna salad sandwich that looked dull and tasteless. Between bits, he droned on how the world was filled with wrong that he planned to make right. He would give his life if he must. He painted himself as some heroic figure on a noble quest. Then, just as the last crumbs fell from his lips, he pulled the 9mm from the front of his pants, aimed at me, and fired. The 9mm bucked in his hand, but made no noise. That was when I’d wake up. I wouldn’t be soaked in sweat. I wouldn’t feel fear or even dread. I wouldn’t feel anything, in fact, as though it all had been of little importance. Maybe I felt this way, I thought, because it all seemed so unreal to me. Maybe Ricky had been right to suggest that I was blind to things that he could see. I suspected I would be better off to go through life so unenlightened.

  Life Along The Okie-Dokie Highway

  June 24

  Dear Winny Girl,

  How is your summer vacation going so far? I hope I am not disrupting your fun with this unsolicited letter.

  First, forgive me for the shakiness of my writing. We are currently on the road, headed hell-bent for nowhere, and the family car is obviously in bad need of new struts. As I write this, I am hunkered down in the corner of the backseat, trying to get as far away from Mike as possible without having to open my door and hang out over the road. I can never tell which of his bodily odors is worse, but all of them combine to create an aroma that at once waters the eyes, congests the nose, and makes me crave badly fried fish. The wonder of it all is that, through his own reek, he can still sit there, head tossed back and snoring like a tornado ripping through an apple orchard.

  My parents, on the other hand, sit quietly-- too quietly, if you ask me-- in the front seat. I honest to God have no idea where we are headed. These family summer outings are so spontaneous and so cloaked in secrecy you’d swear that they were military operations. All I know so far is that we stopped once, somewhere in Indiana, to gaze briefly at an enormous quarry. It is just like my father to think this a fun sort of thing to do-- drive out of the way to stop and look at a big hole in the ground. I don’t know, maybe he thinks it’s the same as stopping to look down into the Grand Canyon, only better because it was all man-made. Really, it’s impossible to know what he thinks, because he says so little. And my mother never does anything to straighten him out; she just sits up there, in the passenger seat, with her crossword book, trying to do puzzles she never, but never, finishes. If my father does say something, all she does is look up briefly, lets out a bored hmmmm, and goes right back to the book. It’s all so bizarre, really, as if I’ve been abducted by a bunch of weird kidnappers who can’t quite make up their mind where they want to take me.

  I really don’t think I could feel any more lonely than I do now--not even if I woke one morning to find that everyone in the world was gone, and I was the last living human on the planet.

  Maybe it all wouldn’t be so horrible if Mr. Stinky-Snorey would stay awake to share this nightmare with me. But, then again, he might just make it worse. He has developed a gift for doing that; he seems to suck the very life force of those around him. Maybe that’s why my parents are the way they are. Frankly I still cannot understand whatever attracted you to him last year. Was it just a phase you were going through, or some kind of temporary insanity? The guy never takes a shower, and since he has started growing whiskers, he chooses not to shave. My God, he doesn’t change his sweat socks until they are good and stiff. And-- when he’s awake-- he constantly complains how he’s so tired, even though he never really does anything. I really can’t see the attraction. You’ll have to tell me sometime. I really need to kno
w, because

  Ohmigod, now what?

  Okay, we had a technical problem there, which is a gross understatement, because what apparently happened was that our transmission dropped out of the car. There was this huge bang, and then dad lost control of the car, which ended up in a ditch. Everyone’s all right, though; my mom, riding in the death seat, still seems pretty bored, Mike finally woke up, and my dad is all pissed off, but at least there was no blood or gore or broken bones.

  About four hours has passed since I broke off this letter, and now I am stretched out on a bed in a hotel room that I am sharing with Mike, who is already fast asleep. We are in some tiny town. I think it’s called John Junction. Somebody should have named it Generic, because of all that businesses that line the town’s main street-- which, by the way, is named Main Street-- the hotel is named The Hotel, the café is named The Café, the barbershop is named The Barber Shop…. Really imaginative thinking, right?

  Anyway, dad talked to the guy at The Auto Repair Shop, and it seems it will take six days to get the parts needed to fix the car, and then another two days to actually fix the car. So I’m pretty much stuck here, in this hotel, whose rooms haven’t been redone since the 1960s. I can imagine the place filled with hippies crashing all over the places, jammed into the beds, sprawled out on the floor, sleeping in the bathtub whose faucet will not stop drip-drip-dripping. The place does have cable, remarkably, but only eight channels, the channels you usually flip past while looking for something interesting, like the Sci-fi channel or HBO. Well, at least, if I’m at all interested, I can always turn on the television to see what the weather is like in Los Angeles or Guam or wherever.

  I am going to sign off for now. I am feeling pretty tired, since we had to walk about six miles to get to this godforsaken place. Tomorrow morning I will walk over to The Bank, and drop this letter in The Mail Box.

  Hoping you’re having more fun than me, and not seeing how you couldn’t be.

  Darlene.

  June 26

  Winny girl,

  Well, I’ve had a couple days to check out this town. Actually it took only an hour or so; the rest of the time I spent shaking my head in wonder. It seems that the town is literally neither here nor there. Half the town, it turns out, is in Illinois and other half is in Iowa. I’m not sure how that came about, but I fail to see the difference anyway. The town is completely surrounded by cornfields, which spread out in all directions so that it appears they never end. I took a long walk out of town yesterday. The sun set before I returned, and for a while I had to walk in the pitch dark, in which all you could hear were crickets and the warm breeze whispering through the young corn stalks. All I had to tell me I was heading in the right direction were the distant dim lights that ran along Main St. It was really quite creepy, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do it again.

  I discovered that the only true action that occurs in the town is when the truckers come into The Truck Stop each evening. They come in one by one, like people coming into a church Sunday morning. They pull their semis in to fill them with diesel, and afterward they park them in an uneven line in the open field out back. Then the drivers stroll over to The Tavern, and don’t return to sleep in the backs of their cabs until they are rip-roaring drunk and can just barely walk down the street without falling on their faces.

  During the day, my parents never leave their room. All they have been doing is fighting. Of course, whenever I see them, they pretend that they haven’t been fighting; they carry on in their usual way, with him silent and distant and her always detracted by small, irrelevant, things, like the stack of business cards on the front desk of the motel or whether or not it looks as though it will rain. But I know the truth; I can hear them through the wall, which is none too thick. They are actually fighting, and though I cannot quite make out the words, it is almost certainly about money. It will always fall back on the old argument, with my father insisting that he can’t afford to send me to private school, not without falling short on cash for other things, like keeping the car properly maintained, and with my mother saying she would be damned if I was going to go to public school-- it might be good enough for Mike, but not for me. So, naturally, when anything comes up, like our car breaking down in the middle of nowhere on one of our stupid family outings, it is entirely my fault. My father will always give me these icy looks, as though he wants to kill me, and sometimes I think he really does. Even those times when I try to talk to him about where I’d like to go to college, all he’ll do is grunt and mutter “Whatever,” and make an excuse to leave the room. Most of the time, he treats me as though I had the plague, probably always suspecting I am going to bring something up that will somehow cost him money. On the other hand, he can be quite warm and pleasant to Mike. Sure, why not? Mike is destined to forego college for a career stacking shelves at Walmart or slinging hash at some greasy-spoon diner. Wherever Mike ends up, my father can rest assured it won’t cost him a dime. Sometimes it’s impossible for me to believe that my father is a high-school guidance counselor. Really, I wonder how many young minds he messes up each year, or does he save that treatment only for his own daughter?

  The day is growing old now. Through the window I can see that it is dark. The dim streetlights have flickered on, and I can hear the loud grinding gears of the first semi pulling into The Truck Stop for the night. I think I’ll turn in early. Maybe Mike has the right idea; maybe sleeping all the time helps you to forget that you have a truly lousy life.

  XOXOXO

  Darlene.

  June 27

  Winny girl,

  Miracles of miracles, the parts for our car came in early. I have been told we might be able to flee this town the day after tomorrow.

  In celebration, dad took us to The Café for dinner. Although the food didn’t turn out as bad as I’d imagined, the company was most definitely lacking. Sitting next to me, Mike shoveled his food in his mouth. He makes slurpy sounds even when he isn’t eating anything wet. He doesn’t even hold his fork like somebody civilized, but grabs it with his fist, the way you’d imagine an ape or an orangutan would if it sat down at a table to eat.

  It didn’t take long for my parents to start arguing. They pretended it wasn’t really arguing, but instead a playful exchange, which didn’t sound the least bit playful to me.

  “Well,” dad said, and you could hear his exasperation, “you could at least consider going back to work.”

  “You know I have to take care of the children,” she said.

  “The children! They’re sixteen and seventeen-- what’s to take care of anymore?”

  Then they went back and forth, with Mike and I the topic of conversation, even though they both spoke as though we weren’t sitting at the same table as them.

  Finally the discussion played itself out, and they fell into a deep silence. Now and then, I caught my father looking at me coldly, as if he were about to blurt out, “And she does not need to go to private school.”

  I made the mistake, then, of muttering, “I never said I wanted to go to private school. I could care less either way.”

  Dad looked at me, all surprised and innocent.

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said.

  “Oh, stop picking on the girl,” mom waded in.

  “I’m not picking on her,” he said, and then looked at me. “Am I picking on you?” he asked, and before I could say anything, he turned back to mom, and said, “See?”

  “Oh, really,” mom snorted.

  We finished eating. As the busboy cleared the table, he cast sly, knowing looks at us, as though he understand that we were the most dysfunctional family on the planet.

  After dad paid the bill at the front counter, we herded through the door. As soon as the warm dusty air struck me, I strayed away from my family, who made a beeline toward The Hotel. Not surprisingly, none of them noticed that I had chosen a different direction, heading
toward the edge of town. The Truck Stop looked sickly somehow, in the waning light of day, with the distant skies purple-pink over the endless cornfields. The building was shabby and the pumps were dusty and rust-stained at their bases and the lumpy blacktop was strewn with candy wrappers and flattened aluminum beers and soda cans and other debris that was unrecognizable. Next to the building, there was a Coke machine, and I bought a can and sipped it as I gazed across the cornfields, thinking I could probably walk and walk and walk and never really get anywhere. There would always be more stretches of road, and on either side, more fields of knee-high stalks. Even if you could walk forever, there was no escape….

  The Truck Stop door opened with a loud squeak and tiny tingles of a bell. An old man wandered outside as though he’d been entombed in the building for a thousand years. His jeans and boots were dusty, and his checkered shirt looked about three sizes too big. He might have been Asian, or part Asian, with a sparse beard that was growing gray, and slicked back black hair.

  “You new to town?” he called over to me.

  I told him yeah.

  “You stay awhile, maybe?” he asked.

  Not any longer than I had to, I said.

  “The truckers come through pretty soon.” If he said it to make small talk, it didn’t sound that way. “They make good money, those truckers, you know?”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  “Maybe you make money, too, huh?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what he was driving at. “Make money?”

  “Yeah, we split fifty-fifty.”

  “Make money doing what?”

  “You know,” he said, and made a gesture like somebody brushing his teeth.