by John McManus
“I did no such thing,” said Victor, astonished to recall renaming himself after all those years. It hardly seemed real. I am Micah, he’d said over and over into the mirror, yearning to swap names with a man who had died of AIDS.
A line came into focus: the one he’d drawn to cleave the present from the past. It wasn’t a line of aesthetic pleasure; it was a line of shame. Horrified by his words, his deeds, his very nature, he’d drawn a line to sequester himself from the people who loved him. Until today, it had seemed structurally viable, because no one had breached it. No one had bothered trying. He imagined a stronger one, the one Albert must have drawn across his own world. That was what people did: they drew lines across their worlds. But Albert’s was a line of capability—a circle, it seemed, with Victor and Sievert trapped inside, and Albert peering across at them.
How wrong the old Yazoo City shrink turned out to have been. The swapping of names had been a metaphor all along. It was all metaphor. What was the shrink called? He let Albert’s speech blur into a droning din. He exhaled. By the time the name of Dr. Dolf Pappadopolous came bursting forth, he had only to conjure his favorite gin label—Bombay Sapphire, words more honeyed to him sober than he’d ever noted drunk—and the spell subsided.
“Please go,” he said, taking his list out of his wallet. He scanned over the ugly words, waiting for a concerned query. If Albert read the card, he might refuse to leave, well up with tears, declare his abiding love.
Here it comes, Victor was thinking, when his friend stood up and offered a hand.
“Sorry for your loss,” said Albert, arm extended, reaching into the space between them until Victor laid his list down to receive a farewell shake.
BLOOD BROTHERS
I FOUND RAY UP IN the mountains at the I-40 rest stop, where I used to cruise sometimes. He was leaning against a wall, albino-pale, with these watery fish eyes. We messed around in a stall for a bit, and then he said to meet him at the red truck by the ravine.
In his truck cab he produced an uncapped light bulb. The Pigeon River roared below us. “Keeps you up,” he said, “as in hard,” and I yelped when it burned my fingers. He barked a joyless heh. We got to talking: his wife was Sheila and mine was Lisa, and his kids were Ray Junior and Angel and I don’t have kids. After we were too high to talk, I guess I told him to start driving. Two days and we were in Lubbock. Now it didn’t matter anymore if the bulb was hot; the burn felt good. Sometimes he’d smack me upside the head, which we both liked.
He asked what I’d do if he broke my arm.
“Go to the E.R.”
“But to me.”
“Break yours back?”
He nodded like it was the right answer. He knew this stuff; so did his wife, who had more sense than to do what Lisa does, which is report me missing. Six days after I’d met him we rolled back into Pigeon Forge to find the cops at my place. “Drive,” Ray growled, so I did. Halfway up the mountain he held a sheath knife to my throat. “You’ve been filming me,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s your wife that called; they’ve seen the film.”
He was giving off this ugly leaden smell, and I could feel blood draining down through me, through my neck. “Thought it was you filming me, Ray.”
Ray looked behind us as if back toward Texas, lowered the knife, and said, “Makes you jumpy.”
“Lisa, she was the one.”
“If you’re a cop, you’re a brave cop.”
He motioned for me to face him. When I did, he put the knife to my wrist and cut it open. My yell came out as a heh like his laugh. He did the same to his wrist and pressed them together. He said it was a bowie knife from the Indian Wars and we were blood brothers. I said, “But what about,” and the loons hollered and he said if you catch it, you get the flu, is how you know.
At his house, a log cabin, a girl was jumping rope. “Call if you get the flu,” he said, but then I left without his number. Back home Lisa ran barefoot into the mud and beat her fists on my chest. “I don’t know,” I told her as she carried on, “I woke up an hour ago outside the hospital.” Next thing I knew I was in the paper, which upset my ma. When I was twelve, she’d had a heart attack, and from that day on she went to church and never smoked. Lisa always told me “You’re lucky your ma’s so young,” but truth is she wasted it on that heart attack. Anyhow she arranged for tests, my ma, and I set off meaning to have them, but on a billboard I saw a girl with black teeth under the words Meth Destroys. Something gunned in me like a jake brake and I decided to go find that girl, get her high. I went to Ray’s and he walked out in his boxers followed by his wife. “You slept?” he said.
“That was a week ago.”
“So you slept.”
“Can I come in?”
There was this Indian in their house, and the four of us messed around while a pit bull watched from a cage. Next thing, the Indian was leading Sheila and her kids away. “I’ll never see those kids again,” Ray wept.
I wondered if I’d missed something. “Is there more?”
“You want to be my bitch?”
“What do you mean?”
He reached over, stuffed my balls between my legs, and said, “My bitch.” We drove across to Cherokee and played slots until we had cash to start cooking again. He had me wear Sheila’s panties when I went out for Sudafed. Law makes you buy just a little at each store, but it adds up. So does the money, and we were broke when AT&T offered ten thousand dollars to let them put a tower on Ray’s land. They disguised it like a pine and birds nested in it like it was any other tree. Ray would come upstairs with these water bottles full of lithium and xylene and lye and say, Go for a bike ride. In my bottle cages it all sloshed around and mixed up while I climbed to Davenport Gap. Up there one day, I entered a cloud that hit me with a spray of mist and then I was opening a bottle, offering my mix to the cloud. Just then, a car sped by. I chased it down the slope and caught it, flipped it off, sped home to Ray.
“Where’s the other bottle?” he said.
I seized up: I’d left it at the gap.
“You drink it?”
“Can you drink it?”
“Well, you’ll die.”
At first I believed I had. “Guess that’s your punishment,” he said.
“Don’t you care if I die?”
“There’s more of you where you came from.”
That kind of emptied me out. “Just kidding,” he said after a while.
“So you think there’s more of me.”
“Well, just fetch that bottle.”
Folks would come at all hours. There was a deputy who bought five hundred at a time and we would listen to his cop radio. One day a dude filed a complaint that his wife had pissed in his mug of coffee. “Call and say we’ll report to the scene,” said Ray.
We piled in, Ray and the cop in front, me behind the grid. The siren screamed as we sped across town. At the man’s house Ray told me, “Stay.” I tried to get out anyhow but I was locked up. Whole hours passed before they came out, chuckling.
“What happened?” I said when they were in the car.
“Filed a report,” said the cop, and then a look passed between him and Ray.
“Did he think you were both cops?” I asked as we drove off.
“Maybe you should beat him with your stick.”
“Replaced our sticks with Tasers.”
“Tase him, then.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Won’t fit through the bars.”
“I’ll pull over.”
We veered off onto a dirt path and then Ray got out. “Stand up,” he barked at me. A wild boar was watching us from the woods. It had come to protect me, but Ray would tase it too. Stay back, I begged it in my head, and Ray lifted the Taser and at the last moment, as I shook, he said, “Just kidding.”
Things got better. We drove to a cockfight and busted it up, then went to another and won some cash. There was a guy the cop told us was Dolly Parton’s brother. He smoked with us and Ray said, �
�Where’s your big tits,” and when he got mad Ray pulled the Taser out and tased him. We took off. The cop got to talking about Dolly and her songs. He said she’d written more songs than anyone in history, thousands upon thousands of them. “I admire that,” he said. “Me, I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs.”
I said, “I bet she’d be having fun if she was here with us.”
I got scared they’d tase me again, but they laughed and the cop started singing. That was around when she got in and rode along with us for a bit. She’d done this deal with the governor called Imagination Library, where poor kids get free books. It was on some billboards we were passing, and Ray’s kids had read some of those books. Why she was in the car, she’d found out Ray’d stole them from her. I thought to warn him but I looked up and the next light was for her road, Dolly Parton Parkway. The cop thought his own fingers were the ones that hit the signal, and I froze and next thing we’re at Dale’s, but if I tell you we watched Dale screw his girl and took his cash and pistol-whipped him, you won’t see how I sat frozen while that bitch stared through me, steering us toward hell. She wanted to show me what happens in hell when you give AIDS to your wife. She had it from her husband, and that’s what her songs were about. She wouldn’t kill us just yet cause it would all be there waiting, come time.
I woke up alone with a note by the bed that said, “Call your mom.” I drove to my ma’s and let myself in to find her at her table, writing. “Knock knock,” I said.
“Hi,” she told me without looking up.
“You copying a recipe?”
“Where’s Lisa?”
“Is it your brownies?”
“Who’s Ray?”
“He’s my blood brother.”
I could see she wasn’t meaning to bake brownies. There were some medical instruments lying around—a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a roll of gauze—along with several pill bottles, like she was intending to put Ray out of business.
“Lisa called here not fifteen minutes ago.”
“So then you know where she is already.”
“She told me she was at Krystal.”
I can’t explain. It was like all women were inside her right then, cussing at me for not wanting them hard enough. I got to feeling she was a cop. I said, “If you’re so naïve, why’d you have that heart attack?” I knew I just needed a hit, so I headed back to Ray’s, but no one was home.
For the first time I went down to the basement and turned the knob. There he was in a chair, wearing a shirt and nothing else, waiting.
It took me a second to react. I jumped and hit my head on the low ceiling.
“Remember when you told me you’d break my arm?” he said.
I shook my head, stammering sorry.
“How would you do it?”
“I know you don’t want me down here.”
“Tell you what, go buy some whiskey. Here’s twenty bucks.”
I stumbled over myself running back upstairs. I knew he’d call his buddies, which was too much to bear. I sped fast through the holler. I ran over a dog and decided it belonged to a boy who told his dad my license plate, so now I’d have to go back the long way while Ray screwed the whole state.
The clerk was a lady I hadn’t seen before, with icy eyes the color of blue Kool-Aid. “Back for more?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Run out?”
She was nodding at me, her curls bobbing along with her nods. “Of what?”
“George Dickel?” she said, and I thought, maybe I’ve got a twin, maybe Ray’s doing him right now and drinking his Dickel.
“I’m an only child.”
“I’m the youngest of ten.”
As she stared through me, I felt more fear than any soldier at war, but she rang me up and let me go. On the way home, the long way, I passed the black-toothed billboard girl and tried to count my teeth with my tongue but I lost count. I recalled finding Lisa on the phone with her friend, giggling about me. She thought Ray was part of her plan but the joke was on her, because I was in love, and I decided then to help Ray get his kids back.
I carried the bottle in and presented it. “Look,” Ray said, gesturing out the window behind me.
I turned and saw the pine woods across the road. “You mad about the basement?”
He shook his head. “While you were gone,” he said, “I realized I hate you.”
I figured Ray was joking, so I laughed.
“That’s what a pussy you are. I say I hate you, and you laugh.”
I set the whiskey down and asked what was going on.
“I got you fucked up and fucked your marriage up and never used a rubber and your ma won’t talk to you, but you keep on liking me.”
“So I should hate you?”
“So I should hate you?” he mimicked in the high voice of a pussy.
“What is it you want me to do?”
Ray shook his head. “Nothing. Stay here. I’m gonna go find my wife.”
He walked out. “Stop,” I called out, tearing up, and he pointed at my face and said, “There’s the problem with you.”
After that, things changed. I started wishing to lose my teeth out of plain spite. I looked around for the billboard girl and found her in Knoxville. Her name was April, and she took me to see some folks. There was a dude that hot-wired cars, who drove me to the Atlanta bathhouse. He left after a few days, but I stayed on. Your body needs dreams, but you can get them while you’re awake. Every few days I bought something to eat from a machine. One day I got sick with fever chills, then I got better. When I finally went outside, two weeks had passed, because that was how long my car had been impounded. The bill was twelve hundred dollars, which meant it was totaled. I walked to Big Lots, found a truck, and hot-wired it, which was the start of not being a pussy. I got on I-75 South. The sun was rising as I reached Miami. I looked in the rearview and saw how the weeks of fasting had sculpted my face, which led me to meet some folks. We drank rum in pools and sang “Auld Lang Syne” and one day I froze up and realized it had never gotten cold.
“It don’t,” said Vince, the silver-haired guy I’d been hanging with, but there’d been others, too; now suddenly we were alone.
“What month is it?”
“March,” he said.
“I had a birthday.”
“Well, happy birthday.” A grin stretched out from either side of his cigar. I asked if he’d seen my phone. “They turned it off,” he said, “remember?”
I felt uneasy as he handed me his. Outside on a deck facing the canal I called the only number I could remember. It rang twice before I got an error message. If I wanted, it said, I could hang up and try again.
“City and state?” the 411 machine said.
I had to grip the railing to keep from tumbling into the water. “Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dr. Lighter.”
They connected me automatically. Each ring was a shock to my chest but I kept holding on. “Doctor’s office,” my wife said.
I spoke her name and she said, “You’re alive.”
“Where’s my ma?”
“We tried to find you.”
“Lisa, come on.”
“It was in November, she—”
I threw the phone in the canal. The number was on her caller ID, though. She could give it to the cops. That’s what I’m most ashamed of: worrying about her caller ID when I’d just learned about my ma.
I never went back in. I walked around to the garage for my truck. Twelve hours later a sign said Welcome to Tennessee. Below those words it said the state was home to Vice President Al Gore. Except that had been years ago, before anything went wrong. I sort of broke down, right there on the shoulder. A cop asked what was the matter and I pointed to the sign. He said get on up the road, so that’s what I did. For several more months I got on up the road to wherever I could. I figured I’d keep smoking till I died, which would happen when my mind ran out of dreams. All I had to do, I realized, was quit dreaming. I would drive through the nigh
t, and when I started dreaming, I slapped myself. One morning I rounded a curve and saw the moon over Mount Cammerer. It had never risen so late before. I decided to start keeping a list of the things it does. I wrote down a whole book of them, which could have broken some ground, but there was no use, so I ripped it up and kept driving. Some preacher on the radio who’d been shouting about patience asked, What will you miss when you’re dead?
I was overtaking a car. It was the stretch where Dolly Parton Parkway loses that name and goes down to two lanes. There was a sign for Forbidden Caverns. I know how it works in those caves, you go through them together in a group. The group gets to know each other and makes friends. What will you miss, said the man, and I looked at the hills and thought, Nothing. Not Lisa, since I can’t stand what I did, and not my ma because she’s gone. As for Ray, my head sent a signal to my foot just as a semi rounded the bend.
I sped up, hoping to crash into it. The driver would live because his truck was so big, but if he didn’t, I’d already hurt plenty of folks anyway. I wondered if my ma would be there when I died, shaking her head along with the Lord. I started to cry. My vision blurred and I figured it would keep on blurring from there into oblivion, but at the last minute the trucker ruined it by steering onto the dirt.
That’s when I drove back up the Pigeon River gorge to the I-40 rest area. Once again I sat there touching myself as families pulled in and their dogs peed and finally a Hummer parked beside me. “You party?” said a fellow in a Braves cap.
His windows had a full tint, so we put down the seats and messed around, nothing special till he pulled a phone out and said, “Know about this?”
“About your phone?”
He swiped the screen and I looked down to see a grid of thumbnail pictures labeled with names. “It’s in order of how close they are.”
I touched one, and the screen filled up with a guy named Josh. 10 Miles Away, it said in the corner. “So it knows where I am?”
“No, it knows where I am.”
“Moon’s about to rise.”
I pointed through the sickly tint of the Braves fan’s rear window. Ten seconds later it began to peek above the mountain.