My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  Balanced on my heels, toes out over the water, I reached again and caught the edge of the scooper on the half-floating thing, and drew it slowly, slowly toward me. As it got within a couple of feet, it took on the shape and form of a small bicycle, and at last I was able to grab hold of it by the handlebars and haul it onto the deck. Water peed from its joints onto my pant legs—just one of those mini BMX bikes kids rocked at the park to do tricks on and impress their friends, until at fifteen they got a fast-food job and could upgrade to a motor scooter.

  Still uneasy for reasons I couldn’t quite place, I decided to finish a quick circuit around the edge of the pool. From the far side, the kitchen lights, through crooked-armed trees, reflected quietly off the pool surface, pocked here and there with black clumps of leaves. Toward the shallow end, I saw another dark shape, bobbing a few feet from the edge of the pool, like a black towel draped over a kickboard. I returned for the scooper and hustled back across the marbled deck, twirling the pole like a quarterstaff and making ninja sounds for no one, trying to scatter the weird vibe worming around in my belly.

  At the shallow end, I poked the black floating thing with the screen end of the scooper. The feel of it—heavy, firm but giving—made me shudder. I poked again, and saw that the thing was bigger than I’d realized, that the bulk of it was submerged, with just a small black fabric-y part above the surface. A part of me wanted to drop the pole and run right then, grab my shoes, and head for the road, but another part of me—a disturbed, morbidly curious part of me—already knew that this thing in the pool was a person, a dead human being, and wanted to stick around to investigate and find out what would happen next.

  I used the scooper, oarlike, to pull the floating thing in toward the edge, and it spun gently. One submerged part of it hit the bottom of the pool or the near wall, and the whole thing rolled softly on its side, revealing a man’s pale face, eyes closed, mouth halfway open. The pole clattered to my feet as I recoiled, full of terror. “What the fuck!” I shouted to the night. “What the fucking fuck?” I backed slowly away, feverish, unblinking, not really believing what I was seeing, feeling like I was in a dream, and at the same time all too aware of every sensation—the smell of wet birch bark, the zooming trill of trucks on some highway beyond the woods, the slimy, wriggling feel of a slug squashed under the arch of my left foot. Finally, I turned and ran for the house, slipping and sliding on the slick, leaf-covered deck. I dashed through the kitchen into the bedroom where Kori was asleep, the tarantula glued up high to the glass of its tank like a black, severed hand.

  I shook Kori awake, frantic. “There’s a fuckin’ dead guy in the pool!” I shouted. “I swear to fucking God, he’s dead out there.”

  She was half-dead herself and hardly seemed to know who I even was. “What?” she said raspily, covering her eyes.

  Then, before I knew it, I was racing back through the kitchen, out the back door, and down to the pool. Without shedding my pants, I took a flying leap and splashed right in beside the floating man, grabbed him around the shoulders, and heaved him with all my might up onto the deck, but he was so heavy, I barely got him out of the water. He slid back toward me, smashing his face on the edge of the deck with an awful, forceful slap, and sank backwards, into the pool again, all the way underwater. I gripped him from under his armpits and heaved once more. This time I got the top half of him out of the water. I seized his legs and pushed them up on the deck, so that he was lying facedown along the edge of the pool, his right arm draped in. I climbed out and knelt beside him and rolled him toward me, onto his back. His head lolled to the side and dark, foul-smelling water gurgled from his mouth. I shook him. I cried, “Wake up, dude! Are you all right? Are you all right?” This, I recognized, was the lame first-responder script I’d had drilled into my head in seventh-grade health class. My brother Mike had once come across a giant of a man on the Metro in D.C. who’d suffered a heart attack and had slumped over, unconscious, no longer breathing. Miraculously, Mike and another passenger had breathed the life back into him, and an EMT team appeared, took over, and fully revived him. Months later I met the guy at one of Mike’s photography shows. Obviously still grateful, he’d bought up half the pictures in the gallery.

  But this guy was not asleep, not unconscious, not in a coma—he was clearly long gone. His face was slack and ghostly white, his sopping, dark hair mashed and swirled against his scalp. I heard myself gasping and sputtering. Not wanting to acknowledge how helpless I was, I put my hand close to his mouth to feel for breath, pressed my fingers to his neck, and finally gripped his wrist, searching for a pulse. Nothing. His hands were cold, clammy, a little bit slick with an oily film. For all I knew, he’d been in the pool for a week. I backed off a few feet, still on my knees, disgusted by the layer of unfathomable ickiness that was now on my hands, and lashed suddenly by a bout of stinging sadness.

  A new set of shadows swam over the dead man’s face, and I looked over my shoulder and saw Kori’s silhouette close by, maybe ten feet from me. She was barefoot, in just the Bell’s Pizza T-shirt I’d pulled on before heading for Brewskie’s earlier in the night, which felt like years before, from another time. In one hand, she held the world’s weakest flashlight, which she aimed at my face before speaking. “Who … who is it?” she said, haunted and afraid, voice cracking.

  “I don’t know,” I said, whispering for some reason. “Give me that thing.”

  But she held her ground, frozen in place.

  “Please?” I said. “Don’t shine it in my face. Here, let me see.”

  “I can’t,” she said, whispering now, same as me. “I can’t come closer.”

  “Slide it over.” I could’ve just gone to her and gotten it myself, but I was frozen, too, keeping still and barely making a sound, abstractly scared of something sinister that remained hiding in the night.

  “It’s not my uncle, is it?” she asked, lowering the beam from my face.

  “No,” I whispered, trying to readjust to the darkness. “It’s not your uncle.”

  “Is he really dead?”

  “He’s really dead.”

  Kori knelt down and set the flashlight on the ground and gave it a quick shove and it squirted across the deck, past me, right into the pool, disappearing with a tiny ploop, immediately extinguished. I heard it come to rest on the bottom with a tiny tap.

  “Fuck,” I said. I got to my feet and moved away from the dead man, and Kori scampered quickly back, withdrawing toward the house, as though I was the one who’d killed the guy and she feared she would be next. Honestly, I feared her equally. Was this what she did with dudes she was fucking on the side? Bring ’em back to her aunt and uncle’s house, fuck ’em senseless, let the tarantula dig its fangs in, and then ditch ’em in the pool? I wondered how often drowning victims were surveyed for spider venom. But of course, I knew, neither of us intended to harm the other. “We’ve gotta call the police,” I said, hurrying after her, away from the dead man. I caught up to her, put my arm over her narrow shoulders, and ushered her up the steps, through the back door, and into the kitchen.

  My phone had been in my pants when I jumped into the pool and it was as cold and lifeless as the dead dude on the deck. I asked Kori for hers and she told me she didn’t know where it was. It was maybe in the truck, she told me, though sometimes she just left it overnight in its charger at work. I scrubbed my hands off under scalding water in the kitchen sink, then hunted around the room until I found a cordless phone in its cradle by the door to the den. “What are you gonna tell them?” Kori asked.

  “That there’s a fucking dead guy in the fucking pool.”

  “But here’s the thing,” she said very slowly, eerily deliberate. “No one can know you were here.”

  “What?”

  “If you call the police, and they come, and you’re here … Tony’s gonna find out.” Tony was her fiancé, the brawny but gentle-seeming fellow I’d caught glimpses of but had never officially met.

  “This is fucked up,�
� I told her, my voice rising. “This isn’t something to fuck around with. It’s a crime scene. Or something. I can’t just take off. I mean, I touched him. My fingerprints are all over that guy. I mean, seriously, are you crazy? We have to call the police! An ambulance, too. Maybe the guy’s still alive even!”

  “Stop shouting at me!” she cried. “God, what the fuck’s happening?” She retreated to whichever cousin’s room we’d fucked in and slammed the door shut. I could hear her begin to sob.

  Fuck it—I was sure the guy was dead, but I knew that any chance he could be saved, no matter how microscopic, was being squandered with our half-drunk, predawn madness. I dialed 911 on the cordless, and wandered into the kitchen, back to the fridge, with its collage of old snapshots. A dozen Amandas of all ages flashed me broad smiles.

  At that moment, just as a dispatcher picked up, Kori came flying out of the bedroom toward me and snatched the phone from my hand. “I think someone died in my aunt’s pool,” she said into the receiver, suddenly calm. “No, I don’t know who it is. I just saw the body.” She gave her full name, her aunt and uncle’s names, and their address, thanked the woman on the other end of the line, and hung up the phone. “Please,” she begged me. “Please get out of here.”

  “It’s a bad idea,” I said.

  “Cheating on your girlfriend’s a bad idea—that didn’t stop you.”

  “Fuck you. You’re being fucking crazy.”

  “No. I’m not,” she said. “You know what’s gonna happen if Tony finds out you were here, if he finds out what happened?”

  “He’ll kill me?”

  “No. Worse. He’ll kill himself. I’m not gonna hurt him that bad. I’m not gonna let him find out what happened tonight. Your … visit. Let’s just try it. If something really goes wrong and I need to tell the cops you were here, I’ll tell the cops you were here. They’ll understand why we tried to hide it.”

  I felt sick, as torn up as I’d ever been in my life, and also aware that the clock was ticking, the police were on their way. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Would you want your girlfriend to know you were here?” Kori pleaded.

  “No.”

  “Well, think if you were in my shoes.” She paused and then added, desperately, “Look, free drinks for life at the bar.”

  It was what she’d said the moment before—imagining if I were in her shoes, if I had to risk Tasha discovering my treasons—that swayed me. In that moment, I couldn’t imagine ever going back to Brewskie’s, free drinks or not. “Okay,” I told her. “Grab my shoes, will you?”

  “Thank you!” she cried. She hurried off to the bedroom while I stalked barefoot out the back door and down to the pool.

  The tiniest tease of dark-blue morning light played through the trees in the eastern sky. I stood beside the dead guy and went down on one knee and grasped him by the shoulders and shook him with real violence. “Wake up!” I shouted. “Wake your fucking ass up!” But he was dead, he was definitely dead dead dead, his body heavy as a sack of stones. There was no way, I knew, that skin-and-bones Kori could’ve ever wrangled him from the pool—a Kmart store detective could’ve figured that out. There was only one thing to do. My heart brayed. “Oh God,” I said under my breath, and then I lifted with both hands, straining as hard as I could, and rolled the guy back into the pool. He slipped in smoothly, without a splash, like an alligator easing back into the bog after spending an afternoon working on its tan.

  Oddly and powerfully adrenalized, I loped a quick lap around the pool before heading back into the house, scanning the ground—the same kind of “idiot check” sweep I always did before leaving a motel room. It was a good thing I did—the picture I’d swiped from the fridge of junior high me avec crew, poolside, at the birthday party a decade and a half before, sat shinily on the deck by the deep end, among leaves, next to the minibike. I plucked it up, folded it in half, thrust it into the back pocket of my drenched corduroys, and tossed the bike back into the pool. Then I raced into the house. Kori was there with my shoes. “What did you do?” she asked me fearfully.

  “I put him back in the water,” I told her darkly, slipping my shoes on and grabbing my winter coat. “The bike, too.”

  “What bike?”

  But I was already out the front door, trotting past her truck and on down the long driveway toward the road, shirtless, my coat hanging open. I took a left when I reached the road and, a minute later, heard the wail of sirens. I scrambled through a ditch and into the woods, and watched an ambulance and a police car roar past, and, two minutes later, two more police cars and a fire truck. It was then that I realized I’d left not only my shirt but my underwear and socks and favorite hat behind, all evidence of my presence at the house. But there was no going back. I ran along the dirt road until I hit a paved one, took a right, and jogged another mile, past rusty mailboxes and roadkill raccoons, until I washed up on a gigantic empty parking lot and realized where I was—the Meijer’s on Ann Arbor–Saline Road.

  From a pay phone, I called my folks’ house, and my brother Mike answered, having just arrived home for Thanksgiving weekend an hour before, after thirty-two hours of travel from Kazakhstan, where he’d been reporting for a Russian newspaper on Central Asian ethnic conflicts. With a groggy laugh, he agreed to bail me out of trouble and twenty minutes later picked me up in our mom’s battered-but-still-eager-for-a-fight ’89 Aerostar. “What happened to you?” he asked. “You’re completely soaked. Here, put this towel over the seat.” We coasted back across the lot the way he’d come. The sky was turning orange and pink. “You all right?” he said. “You look pretty insane.”

  “I’m fine,” I told him. “Just had too much to drink last night. Way too much to drink. You know. Biggest bar night of the year.”

  *

  Thanksgiving, at my family’s house, is generally fairly easygoing, but not without its traditions. As always, me and my dad put the Lions game on and at halftime muddled down to the basement and into the tiny, spooky, cobweb-filled room under the stairs to retrieve a dozen aluminum folding chairs, plus the four wooden slats which extend our dining table to banquet-table size. I was brutally hungover, and felt rattled in minor, intermittent doses, expecting the cops at any moment to show up in our yard. I kept picturing that man spread out on the deck beside the pool, in his waterlogged black hoodie and jeans, one shoe off and one shoe on, and felt seared with the notion that he was somebody’s son, somebody’s father, somebody’s husband or boyfriend, perhaps, certainly somebody’s friend, and that now he was dead. At times, it was all I could do not to start crying.

  As dusk fell, thirteen of my mom’s longtime meditation students showed up at our door, one by one—the kind, centered, understatedly spiritual folks who, since my childhood, had played the part of my extended family, since we had no blood relatives within a ten-hour drive. Every year, after the potluck feast is over and everyone’s stuffed, we all sit around the living room, playing our family’s 1983 edition of a game called Scruples, where you read ethical questions off of a card and try to guess how each person will respond. “Okay, this one’s for Davy,” said my mom’s good friend Karen Shill in her musical Cape Town accent. “‘You suspect a neighbor’s son of vandalizing cars. When confronted, he admits his guilt, but begs you not to tell, for fear of corporal punishment. Do you inform the neighbor?’”

  I chewed on that for a second. “Yes,” I said evenly. “Let the son of a bitch fry.”

  The house phone was ringing. Since it was already past eleven I figured it was probably for me, and scrambled out of the room to answer it in the garage, which had been converted years before into the meditation hall where my mom taught her classes. Kori was on the line. She sounded shaken. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Is everything all right? What happened when the police came?”

  “I’ll tell you about it in person,” she said. “What are you up to tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to Toronto to see my girlfriend.”

  “Oh. Okay.”
She paused. “What time are you leaving?”

  “Like three. I gotta drive to Windsor, and I’m taking the train from there.”

  “Shit. Okay. Well,” she said, “I’m working lunch, but how ’bout when I get off I give you a ride to Windsor?”

  “Yeah, if you want to. That’s cool.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”

  “Wait, hold on,” I said. “Is everything cool? Are we in trouble or anything?”

  “Jesus.” She took a deep breath. “A guy is dead.”

  “Shit. I know. Look, I know, okay? I’m sorry.” I could see how, from her point of view, my fear of the cops seemed petty, but the dead guy had been dead long before I found him, I was pretty sure, whereas I still had plenty of years ahead of me and didn’t want to spend any of them in prison just for being shady and stupid at her behest. At the same time, a part of me felt shrouded in darkness, like I’d killed the guy myself. Cheating on Tasha was one thing—one fucked-up thing, yes, but just one medium-sized fucked-up thing, and, no surprise, this wasn’t the first time it had happened. But the other thing—pushing the guy back into the pool, no matter how dead he was—I was having a hard time spinning that one to myself.