“In on what?” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re telling me you don’t know what he’s pulled?”
I shook my head.
“When I came home from work, he had a moving van up here, taking all his stuff. A lot of my stuff. God knows what of mine.”
I stared at the dark house and wondered what was left in there.
“The coward. He thought he’d get out before I got home. I tried to stop the moving men, but he’d told them not to say anything to me. There he was, hiding behind them. I asked him what he thought he was doing, but he wouldn’t talk to me. I grabbed hold of his arm, but he got away from me. He got in his car and locked the door.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“What do I care? Don’t you understand? He’s left.”
She glared at me. Somehow at that very moment, the beer bottle I had hidden got away from me. Maybe I moved my arm too suddenly, but the bottle seemed to want to leap free from me. It hit the ground and shattered.
My father had moved home to Greensboro to work for a fabric company and live with my grandmother until he found his own place. When we corresponded and talked on the phone, he went out of his way to tell me that nothing that happened had been my fault. He and my mother had been mismatched, he said, as though this would be news to me. He said my grandmother had tried to warn him, but he had been in love with my mother. He had tried to prove as much, to my mother and to himself even, but he had gone about everything the wrong way. He begged me to forgive him, saying things weren’t like my mother made them out to be, not completely.
“Except that you left us,” I said, and there was nothing he could deny in that, although both of us knew it had been inevitable.
When our house sold, my mother looked at other houses, but after considering her finances, gave up and settled for an apartment in town. We did the moving ourselves in a van my uncle rented. Eugene, my uncle, and I moved all of the heavy furniture while my mother and Carrie, my uncle’s second wife, packed breakables and smaller things. All day I put off thinking about what I was doing, dismantling the only home I’d known. I longed to take a last walk through the woods, but my mother kept reminding me the van was costing us money, and we were taking up my uncle’s time.
As always, my uncle was just cordial to me. When we lifted a piece of furniture together, he cut his dark eyes away from mine. When he had to refer to me, it was as one referred to a piece of farm equipment. Although almost six feet tall, Eugene was much the same solemn boy following his father’s orders, grunting a response when spoken to.
When we were finished, we took a breather and sat around the living room of the apartment. My mother and uncle did some reminiscing about how it had been when they were growing up on the farm and when my grandparents were alive. These stories had nothing to do with me, the way I saw it; they had nothing to do with the world I lived in, and besides that I’d heard them so many times I had trouble following them. My uncle complained that they couldn’t get Eugene interested in anything worthwhile. While they talked, Eugene and I sat on the carpeted floor with our backs to the wall, stone-faced.
“My life sure didn’t work out according to plan,” my mother said, followed by a low, breathy laugh. “Even when he was around, Charley never wanted to invest anything in the place. It was the kind of place you had to work to keep up.”
“Charley didn’t care about things like that,” my uncle said. “You’re better off now.”
“I guess I’ll never have my own place again,” my mother said. “I just can’t believe the way he took off like a thief in the night.”
“Don’t talk that way,” my uncle said, “and, well, even if you don’t get another place, you’re better off.”
Again, my uncle was right, in his way. I knew it as well as he did, as he spoke it, but at the same time he made me angry, almost beyond reason. I was choking and could barely hold a breath.
“What do you know about us?” I managed to get out. “What do you know about my father?”
“Watch what you say,” my mother said. “You don’t know as much as you think, and you’re not paying the bills. Everybody else parties while I work, while I suffer. That’s the story of my life.”
“You’re better off too,” my uncle said, without looking at me.
A hand tightened in my chest, around my heart, so firm I couldn’t speak again. I stood and went down the hall to my new room, closing the door behind me.
All of my stuff was in cardboard boxes in a stack by the wall, beside my dresser. The same .22 my father had used to kill the hogs stood in the corner in its worn canvas sleeve. It had come down to me at some point a few years before. I remembered pointing it at my uncle, and for a moment I indulged myself in thinking about the sensation again. A voice inside of me said, “You could have shot him then, when you might have gotten away with it.”
I sat down on the bed. I wasn’t going to shoot anyone, but the feeling was inside me, gnawing at me. My father had always said I’d gotten my anger from my mother, but I’d seen him get angry, too. I was a fine mix of both of them, all right. I’d inherited both my parents’ worst qualities.
I was relieved when my uncle and Eugene left to take back the van. My mother walked outside with them. I could hear her on the sidewalk below my bedroom window thanking my uncle repeatedly. Once again he’d saved her, she said. She couldn’t have managed without his help.
I lay on my bed, on the bare mattress, and stared at the beige ceiling of my new room. I thought more about the day we’d slaughtered the hogs, about the things my father had said when he’d come into my room, when he made me imagine Eugene shooting him. It made me feel miserable all over again. I wondered if I’d grown at all, if I wasn’t the same stubborn, disobedient boy, just like the one in my uncle’s story. I could still see the expression on my father’s face, like he knew the boy my uncle talked about and had no idea how to fix him. That information was not in the book he consulted.
Drained by the long day of heavy, unpleasant work, I tried to doze, but couldn’t. When my uncle and Eugene returned from dropping off the truck, they brought Carrie and some food she’d prepared to welcome us to the new place. They talked a little, moved some of the furniture, and took their seats. My mother came down the hallway and knocked on my door. She asked with her voice lowered, her words spiked, “Are you going to quit putting on a show and start acting like a man?”
I said I wasn’t hungry. Even as I’d said it, I knew I was being stubborn again, but I didn’t want to face my uncle. I didn’t want to spend another minute in his presence.
This time there was no plate coming after our guests were gone. This time there were only the sounds of voices in the parking lot and the television in the living room, then silence after my mother went to bed.
I lay awake staring at the ceiling and the bare, clean walls. My stomach was so empty it hurt. It felt hard, like a smooth, flat stone from my mother’s rock garden, back at our old place. For a long time I lay curled in a ball. By three in the morning I could no longer stand my hunger, and my uncle’s words burned in my ears. I was better off now. I might as well accept it.
I got up and walked through the strange, dark apartment to the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, and there was the food Carrie had brought us on a big platter, covered with plastic wrap. I carried it to the counter, found a fork and a knife in one of the drawers, and sat down on a stool. My hands were shaking as I cut slices of the meat. It was dry and salty, but I sat at the counter in the dark kitchen gorging myself.
That’s when my mother caught me. She must have been lying awake in bed, waiting. She looked tired and washed out by all her troubles, but proud when she flicked on the overhead light, like some long-held suspicion had been confirmed, like she’d cornered the thief himself.
A second later, she looked sorry for me, as sorry as I was for her. She loved me more than everything else she was losing, and she had known who we
were, all of us, from the beginning. My mother hesitated in the doorway, saying, her voice all but given out, that there were beans and cornbread too. Then she retreated down the carpeted hallway of our new home.
CHRONOLOGY
While I work on my mother’s kitchen sink I tell her about the film series. I tell her what the flyer said: Three-Night Historical Chronology Through Film Clips, at the Lyric Theater. I am half under the sink with my legs sprawled across the tile kitchen floor. As I work, I look out at my mother’s feet. She never moves.
“What good will that do you?” she says.
“I’ll enjoy it,” I say. I remind her that I was a history major in college, and I’ve always loved movies.
“Always movies,” she says.
She goes on to say she wishes I was motivated to do a little more with my life. It kills her to see me flipping burgers after she put me through college. The time she spent working hard was all a waste.
“Wouldn’t you have worked anyway?”
We’ve had this discussion almost every day for the last eight years, and I’ve told her I do much more than flip burgers. I’m the head chef at Mike’s Bar and Grill, and I like it. I like being in charge of the kitchen, flirting with the waitresses, drinking a few free cold beers at the bar after work. It’s a good job, unpretentious, undemanding, and friendly.
“When you came in,” she says, “I could smell your breath.”
I tell her it was her imagination, that I never drink in the morning. When I finish with the sink, I slide out from under it, collect the tools, and put them back on the shelf in the basement. My mother stands at the top of the stairs and waits. She wears thick glasses and a gray wig to hide her bald head. It occurs to me on the way back up that she probably hasn’t been downstairs since she was in the hospital the last time.
My mother thanks me for helping out. I say it was no problem, I can help out anytime. In the living room, on the way out, I bump into a table and knock off a picture of my grandfather.
“Leave it, I’ll get it,” my mother says, but I’ve already scooped the picture up. For a moment I focus on my grandfather’s black business suit, tie, and glasses. My grandfather worked in a bank downtown. He was no bigshot, just some little accountant, but he was honest and a hard worker, or so my mother says when she holds him over my head, which is often.
The picture trembles in my hand. Fumbling to put it back on the table, I feel my mother watching me from the doorway to the kitchen. She’s always watching me when I come around. Sometimes I can feel her watching me when we’re miles apart.
“Please don’t drink so much,” she says.
My mother lives on a quiet street. My father died when I was a kid, and my mother worked hard to keep a nice house. As I walk along the sidewalk, I hold my hand above the white picket fence, lightly tapping each picket with my palm. I pass Mrs. Jesse and say hello. She is the woman my mother hired to look in on her every day, to straighten the house, and to do the laundry. She claims to have some nursing training, too. She is in her fifties, short, with cropped black hair. She nods back at me as I step off the curb.
The Lyric is an old theater downtown, but the place has been closed for years. It was replaced first by Studio One, which expanded to Studio Two before it went out of business, and was, in turn, replaced by the crappy Cinema Six Complex by the mall. I haven’t been to the Lyric since high school, the days when I hit every movie the first night it was out. I saw Jaws, Close Encounters, Star Wars, and as many late shows as I could: Rocky Horror, The Song Remains the Same, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I buy an eight-pack of pony-size beers and put them in the pockets of my army coat, just like I did in high school. The ticket box outside is closed, and nothing is written on the marquee, only a faint ghost of the letters spelling out the titles of countless movies, decades of them. I try the door and it pushes open easily. I walk inside past the closed, dusty concession stand.
The walls of the Lyric look like the walls of a medieval castle, with shadowy boxes for imaginary royalty. There are fifteen or so other people, all sitting alone, scattered in different parts of the theater. I sit in the back row. No one is talking, and the only sound is an occasional throat clearing. I’m surprised and disappointed that there’s no introduction, nothing. Suddenly, the lights go out and the film rolls.
There are no credits. The film begins with prehistoric people huddling around fires. Some of the clips are from old black-and-white movies, and others are from more modern color ones. I recognize the ape-men from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey and from Quest for Fire, and I catch a glimpse of Raquel Welch in animal skins from One Million B.C. There’s no soundtrack to this. We sit in silence in the dark theater. It must have been damn quiet in those prehistoric days, too, unless there was a storm or a fire, or a herd of animals on the move.
No film clip lasts for more than a minute, and the clips are arranged chronologically, telling our history. I sip my beer, thinking what a strange idea this is. Soon enough, the people start to get organized. Just like now, some are chiefs and some are workers. We see them picking berries and clubbing animals. Before you know it, they invent the spear and the arrow. They plant their crops in rows. Before long, some of them have built boats and taken to the high seas.
I hear a man down front clearing his throat. He gets up and walks past me, to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom. I’d love to know who’s putting this show on, and why. As the man passes, I hold my beer down beside my leg so he can’t see it. In the old days, I used to line up my empty beer bottles on the floor in front of me and leave them, but I don’t want to get kicked out on the first night, so I will take my empties with me when it’s time to go.
At the Lyric, it’s easy to lose track of time. By the end of tonight’s film, we have raced through prehistoric history, as well as a lot of the ancient world. The Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China go up. The Greek city-states rise and fall. Alexander the Great, portrayed by Richard Burton, conquers lands in the East and the West. The Roman Empire rises. Jesus Christ, portrayed by so many actors it’s impossible to name all the faces flashing by, is hoisted up on the cross. The Empire falls, and western civilization collapses.
The show ends at ten o’clock, and I sit in my seat watching other people get up and file out. I recognize a few of them but don’t know their names. One is a woman who works at Woolworth’s. Another a man who works at the Exxon station. A few nod to me as they pass, and some avoid my eyes for whatever reason. I’m left wondering what it is about the chronology that brought all of us here.
I hang out in my seat to find out some answers. I’ll be here when the projectionist comes downstairs to lock up and leave.
I’m not alone. There’s one more person, a head leaning back against a seat in the first row. It looks like a man’s head.
“Hey, buddy,” I call out, my voice echoey in a way I don’t like. He doesn’t respond, so I get up and start down the aisle to wake him in case he’s fallen asleep.
The bottles in the pockets of my army coat clink together. I glance back at the projectionist’s booth, but the window is dark. Then the lights go out in the theater, except for the exit sign, so I’d better get out while I can. I can tell somebody about the sleeping man on the way out.
Nobody’s in the lobby. One of the glass doors to the street is propped open, so I walk outside, cross the street, and dump my bottles in a trashcan hooked to a streetlight. I sit on a bench and smoke a cigarette. All of the windows upstairs in the theater are dark, and no one is on the street. It’s getting cold, so I push my hands deep into the pockets of my coat. While I’m sitting there watching the dark windows, I can’t stop thinking about the guy asleep in there. I’ve got to let somebody know he’s there. It would be terrible waking up in a theater in complete darkness.
I get up and go back across the street, but now the glass doors are locked. I put my ear to the glass, which is cold, and there is no sound inside. Nothing. I remember t
hat there was another exit behind a curtain near the screen. It opened to a hallway that led to an alley behind the theater. The projectionist must have left that way. Maybe he saw the man down front and herded him out too, or maybe he’s locked in. If so, there’s nothing to be done about it now.
I hike up to Mike’s Bar and Grill. Mike’s is already closed, so I bang on the glass door until a dishwasher lets me in. He’s new, and he doesn’t know me.
“Mike’s gone,” he says. “Everybody’s gone.”
I tell him who I am, the head chef. I show him a time card to prove it. I ask if he’s mopped the floor, and I make an inspection. Then I tell him he’s finished and he can go home. He doesn’t put up any fight, of course, and after he goes, I sit at the bar and drink a few more beers. I watch the street, unable to get the strange chronology out of my mind.
I don’t dream anymore, at least not when I’m sleeping. Sometimes, just after I’m awake, figures gather around the mattress I sleep on. They look like badly drawn charcoal sketches of people. At first I called them ghosts, but now I don’t call them anything. They come and go as they please, and after they’re gone I lie in bed for a while, sometimes for hours. I stare at the ceiling or close my eyes and let my mind wander, which is my substitute for dreaming. I like to let myself wander through history. I’ve done this for years, as far back as college. Any morning I might be in the armies of Alexander, or in the early boats of the Phoenicians, exploring the Mediterranean for the first time.
The phone starts ringing early the next morning. I try to ignore it, but it won’t go away and I finally answer. It’s Mrs. Jesse, and she tells me she found my mother unconscious on the kitchen floor.
I’m rubbing my head, rubbing the charcoal figures out of my eyes. Mrs. Jesse pauses. I can hear her breathing on the other end. She thinks I’m irresponsible, but I love my mother, no matter what she thinks. She says an ambulance came and took my mother to the hospital. She’s not a doctor, she says, but she thinks my mother might be in bad shape.
Dispensations Page 4