More of This World or Maybe Another

by Barb Johnson

  Jerry Beatty and some of the other boys from Pudge’s class are standing around the table in their regular clothes. A stack of plates sits next to a pile of matching napkins, and little weights hang on the tablecloth to keep it from flying up. It’s a very fancy party, and Pudge feels proud to be wearing a suit.

  “Hey, Pudge!” Jerry calls out and waves Pudge over. Pudge adjusts his tie like he’s seen men do. “Excuse me,” he says to Deysi, who’s walked out behind him and isn’t really talking to him exactly. He says it in case she was fixing to.

  “What’s with the suit?” Jerry asks. “Somebody die?”

  Pudge wonders if this is about his mother and his father and their fighting. Sometimes the police come. Once, an ambulance. He keeps his mouth shut, raises an eyebrow like Big Luce does when somebody’s being a smartass.

  “Dearly beloved,” one of the other tough boys starts and then all the boys are laughing. Pudge laughs, too, in case the joke isn’t about him.

  “Hey, Spud,” Jerry says to the slow boy from their class, the one with the big, wide eyes and the flat face. “Have another hot dog, why don’t you.”

  The boy keeps his eyes on the table, tells Jerry he’s full. One of the tough boys loads up a hot dog and holds it in front of Spud’s face. “Come on, Spud,” Jerry says. “However many hot dogs you can eat, I bet I can eat one more.”

  The kid looks terrified. Any minute now he’ll pee his pants, which is the result Jerry’s after.

  “You too scared to bet somebody you can’t beat?” Pudge asks. It’s like a whole different boy is working Pudge’s mouth. Or maybe it’s the man that the suit has made Pudge into.

  “Shut up, Fudge,” one of the tough boys says. “Jerry’s not talking to you.”

  “Cuz he’s scared, I guess,” Pudge’s suit makes him say. Like it’s a suit of armor and not a hundred percent polyester.

  “Ohhh,” the boys all say. “Look out!”

  Pudge’s hand crosses the table to take the hot dog.

  “Okay,” Jerry says. “Okay. You first.”

  Pudge finishes the first hot dog easily. Spud moves away from the table but watches from across the yard. Pudge begins to clear the plate of hot dogs that Mrs. Beatty has just set out next to a basket of toasted buns.

  He watches his hands swim like a couple of fish back and forth between the plate and his mouth. The fish are so quick that Pudge has to swallow without chewing to keep up with them. He checks to see if Deysi is watching this moment, the best moment of his entire year. She’s not. Several girls are admiring Deysi’s new earrings, giant silver loops her mother sent for her birthday. No one knows where Deysi’s mother is, only that she sends things now and then.

  The tough boys begin to laugh. They punch each other on the arm. Jerry Beatty might win at sports, might always be the teacher’s favorite, but today he will have to admit that nobody can beat Pudge Morris in an eating contest. Pudge’s mouth is still working on hot dogs nine and ten when Jerry’s mother comes out with a jar of relish. “Who ate all the hot dogs?” she asks, searching the boys’ faces. “Now there won’t be enough for everybody.”

  “Piggy-piggy-Pu-udge, Piggy-piggy-Pu-udge,” all the boys chant. Mrs. Beatty looks right at Pudge, and Pudge twists away, his mouth overflowing with evidence. When he turns, his eyes meet Deysi’s.

  Without even swallowing, Pudge takes off running for the Laundromat, where he hopes Big Luce will have extra clothes for him. He doesn’t want to look at the unlucky suit for another second.

  On Monday, several of Pudge’s classmates make snorting pig sounds in the lunch line. “Save some for the rest of us!” Jerry Beatty yells from the back and everyone laughs. Even Spud, whose pig snorts seem the loudest. No one’s allowed to leave the lunch line, but as soon as Pudge gets his plate of food, he walks directly to the garbage and dumps it. In the bathroom, he closes himself in one of the stalls. He makes a fist and pounds it against the cinder-block wall in 3/4 time. “Carpal-metacarpal-phalanges-and-trapezium-trapezoid-capitate-and,” he says, smashing each of the twenty-seven fishbones of the hand that grabbed all those hot dogs, the hand that has made so much trouble for him.

  Pudge’s father likes everyone to sit down to dinner together. The only problem is that there’s no telling when his father will be home. He hasn’t gotten a job yet, and now Pudge’s mother has started to complain again. On top of that, Belinda cries all the time because she’s cutting teeth. Aunt Alma said it really hurts.

  It’s nine o’clock. Pudge’s mother and Belinda are lying on the couch asleep. Pudge is lifting weights. After Jerry’s party, he decided to step up his routine to twice a day, before breakfast and before dinner. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and he’s hungry.

  He can hold both eight-pounders over his head, can raise and lower them, one and two and three and four. He still can’t get the twelve-pounder in the air with just one hand. Once, when he was mad, he got it over his head. When he tried to jerk it up a second time, he lost his balance again but caught himself before he fell into the closet door. He’s getting there. Last night he made a twelve-pound wish and walked through the light of the snack machine at the Laundromat.

  He’s tired, and he’s lost count of the lifts he’s made. The good smell of dinner and his missing father are starting to get on his nerves. He goes into the kitchen for a drink of water and takes a peek at the macaroni and cheese warming in the oven. He wants to open the door and snap off the wave of burnt cheese that’s curling over the edge of the casserole dish, but his father will know it was him. Pudge’s right hand is sore from this afternoon’s pounding, so it’s his left hand he smacks with the meat tenderizer that he pulls from the kitchen drawer. Carpal-metacarpal-phalanges-and. The battered fish of his hands are hungrier than ever. They swim, confused and determined to the handle on the oven door, which suddenly stands open so that Pudge can sniff at his dinner. The fish swim around the back of the casserole, bite off a crust of cheese and swim back to Pudge with their trouble. And then they move on to the pantry, where the only food that his father won’t notice missing is a small can of Crisco. The fish dive in and jump out, each time carrying a gob of slick food to Pudge’s face. Eat. Eat. Eat. Until the hungry mouth of the distal phalange is sucking along the bottom seam of the can. And Pudge is full. And queasy.

  Pudge’s father rolls in at about ten-thirty, and he’s happy and talkative like he is sometimes. Luckily, Pudge’s mother wakes right up, tucks Belinda into her high chair and goes to the oven for their dinner without complaining.

  “I was talking to Hernandez,” his father says to the room. “Not the one who shot What’s Her Face’s-father-the-ice-cream-man, the other one. What’s his name?”

  “Arturo,” his mother says. “The other one’s still in prison, I think.”

  “Well, Arturo is talking about setting up a little seafood shop, using it as a front to run numbers. You know what that means?” Pudge’s father grabs his mother and pulls her onto his lap, smooches on her neck. “Do you know what that means, little girl?”

  “Arturo’s wife is gonna have a house full of fish stink?”

  “No, wiseass. It means we’re gonna be rich because Arturo needs a supplier for the fish part of the operation. I fish. And this one right here,” Pudge’s father says, pointing at Pudge, who’s sitting down waiting for the macaroni, his head throbbing, his stomach heavy, “this one can really fish. Right? Twenty-seven in one day, he and What’s-Her-Face caught.”

  Pudge nods. He sees his future: stabbing worms with hooks, pulling fish from their families, hitting them in the head. Saying sorry, sorry, sorry to his father all the livelong day.

  In her high chair, Belinda moans a little.

  “You want to help your old man make a mint?”

  “Yessir,” Pudge says, though he doubts he’s said it right. Saying things too loud or not loud enough always means trouble. He makes a wish right then that Aunt Alma will kidnap his family before any of this happens.

  “Well,
don’t be such a baby about it,” his father commands. “Say it like you mean it.”

  “Yessir, I’ll help,” Pudge says again. Maybe the right way, maybe not.

  “Well, I sure don’t want to put you out or anything. I mean, I’d hate to keep you away from the feed trough and your singing career.” His father runs his hands up his mother’s dress, and his mother squirms and slaps at him. Maybe a play slap. Maybe a real one. It’s hard to know at first. “A big star like yourself,” his father says, “won’t need to learn to do an honest day’s work, I don’t guess.”

  “Sorry,” Pudge says. Belinda starts to cry just then, and Pudge tries to talk over the crying. “I could help after chorus. And on the weekends. That’s when the fish are best anyway.” Pudge doesn’t look at Belinda. His father doesn’t take his eyes off of her.

  Pudge’s mother pulls at his father’s shirt. “She’s teething,” she says, and Pudge hopes she won’t say the other, but she does. “And she’s tired. If you’d come home for dinner at a reasonable hour, she could go to bed. We all could.”

  Pudge’s father jumps up from the table and grabs Belinda by one arm and carries her like a rag doll to the bedroom. Pudge and his mother follow, but not too close. “Who took this fucking lid off?” he yells.

  Pudge runs in behind his father. “It fell off,” he says, dodging his father’s backhand. His father pulls the lid from behind the footlocker and slams it down over the chest. Inside, Belinda cries her screeching scared cry.

  “Look at this,” Pudge says and pulls an eight-pounder out from under the bed. He does a couple of curls with it.

  Pudge’s father punches the lid of the footlocker with his fist, yells, “Shut up!” The fist goes up over his head and then wham! Shut up! In just a minute, he’ll pull the lid off and use that hand on Belinda. Pudge is sure of it.

  “I can lift the twelve-pounder, too,” Pudge says, and his father looks up at last. Pudge bends and pulls the twelve-pounder out and, with one hand, swings it up into the air as fast as he can to show that twelve pounds is nothing, that Pudge knows the meaning of hard work.

  Belinda goes on screaming. It’s like she’s trying to get their father to hit her.

  Pudge watches all twenty-seven fish of his father’s closed hand bounce off the lid of the footlocker. Carpal, metacarpal, phalanges, they jump and dive until they finally break through. When they surface again, there’s bleeding. Shut up! Shut up! All together those fish dive into the footlocker—over and over they dive—until, out of kindness, Pudge aims the twelve-pounder at their suffering and swings.

  Killer Heart

  Dooley and Tina are fighting. Or not fighting, Dooley guesses, but discussing. That’s what Tina calls it, anyway. They have most of their discussions while their three-year-old daughter, Gracie, is at her grandmother’s across the lake. Today Dooley decides that if he shows a positive attitude and keeps his comments to a minimum, they might be able to wrap things up in the next little bit. There’s a show about the Louisiana black bear coming on in half an hour, and Dooley hopes he won’t have to miss it.

  “It’s just that you’re so impulsive, Dooley,” Tina says, shifting to the general list of his faults. She’s pacing back and forth, back and forth, like a little engine that’s powered by fussing.

  Tina keeps a record of old mistakes handy on a constant loop, one finger always hovering over the play button. During any dispute, when she’s through with what is currently troubling her, she presses that button and everything stored on the loop begins to replay. In their house, the past is never over. The good news, though, is that once Tina gets to the Great Loop of Faults, it usually means the discussion is coming to an end.

  “You never think things through,” Tina goes on. “There’s never a plan for anything.”

  “Maybe so,” Dooley says in his upbeat, fight-ending tone, “but everything in the world can’t be planned out, Tina. Gracie wasn’t planned,” he says, “and aren’t you glad we have her?”

  Instead of ending the discussion, this seems to wind Tina up even more. She starts back in with his faults, reciting one after another as though she’s building a case. Dooley leans back in his big blue recliner and goes on clipping his toenails. He wonders if maybe he can get one of those prefab storage sheds for the backyard. He needs a place he can go to be alone and play his guitar as loud as he wants. If he soundproofs it, he can use the little shed as a recording studio.

  Dooley misses his music, and he hasn’t been able to make Tina understand that driving a forklift all day, picking up crates and moving them from one place to another, makes him feel trapped and lonely. He didn’t move to New Orleans to drive a fucking forklift. A couple of months ago, for his twenty-second birthday, Dooley sat in with his old band. He told Tina that he wanted to start playing with them again, and the selfishness of this wish is one of the many items stored on the playback loop.

  Tina heaves a sigh, and Dooley imagines that she’s finally going to put the brakes on. That’s when he’ll get up from his recliner and go to her. He’ll pull her close, hug her head to his chest so she can hear that his heart is still full of love for her. “Baby,” he’ll say. “I’m not built for arguing. You know that. I’m built for love.” And he’ll say he’s sorry if he made her sad or mad or frustrated, depending on which she is. That part always requires a little guesswork. Or maybe today Dooley won’t be at fault. Sometimes, fussing is just Tina’s way of working something out in her head, and when Dooley apologizes, Tina will say, “No, baby, that was just me blowing steam.” Every now and then, Dooley knows, staying home with Gracie makes Tina feel like she’s missing out on things. He isn’t the only one who’s made sacrifices for their daughter.

  As Dooley is getting up to go to his pacing wife, though, she says something that knocks him back into his recliner.

  “Gracie’s not yours,” she says.

  Dooley searches Tina’s face to see what she’s up to. “Not mine, how?”

  “Not yours as in Toby Tidwell is her biological father.”

  “Fuck you, Tina. That’s not funny.” Dooley eases forward and perches on the edge of his chair. He feels a toenail clipping under his hand, sharp and painful, but he doesn’t move. Not even a little.

  Tina goes to the desk in the kitchen and pulls some papers out of a drawer that Dooley could’ve opened any time he wanted, though he never has. Why not? Tina is crying now, and she puts the papers in Dooley’s hand saying, “Sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”

  Tina’s mother paid for Tina and Dooley to go see a genetic counselor where they and Gracie were all given DNA tests. Tina read on the Internet that a DNA test would show if Gracie had inherited the going-deaf gene from Tina’s family or if she’d gotten Dooley’s genes on that score.

  Looking at the results, Dooley can’t be happy or relieved that Gracie has been spared a future of progressive hearing loss. The report says there’s a 99.9 percent chance that Toby Tidwell—when did he get tested?—is Gracie’s father. Dooley wants to go get fucking Toby Tidwell and string him up by the ankles. Bleed him like the pig he is. Toby Tidwell got busted up in a tank accident while practicing whatever people in the Army practice, so Dooley will have to wait till he gets out of Walter Reed to bust Toby up himself.

  “Tina,” Dooley moans, shoving the papers between the arm and seat cushion of his recliner. He wants to ask if she’s in love with Toby Tidwell now or if this is all in the past. Does the past cancel out Tina’s love for Dooley? Dooley’s love for Gracie? Dooley can’t tell. Nor can he tell what the numbers and letters on the DNA test mean for him and his little family. The swimming equation is just too hard to follow. He needs some air.

  Jumping up from the recliner, Dooley jerks open the back door, flies down the steps and scrambles across the lawn. He shoots past the place he’d been thinking of putting his music studio and doesn’t stop until he reaches the back fence that separates his long, narrow yard from his neighbor’s. Up close like that, Dooley can see through the gaps between t
he fence boards into his neighbor’s yard where a pool shimmers in the late afternoon light. It looks peaceful over there, a little slice of heaven, where no one ever argues, where no one keeps secrets or lies. Dooley has never heard a single sound from that house, never heard splashing or conversation on the deck. Maybe no one even lives there. One thing is for sure, though: You can’t tell what’s going on just by looking. Earlier this afternoon, Dooley had been a man with a wife and a child, and he bet he still looked like one, too.

  Dooley and Tina agree that they should take a break. Dooley will get an apartment, and Gracie will stay in the house with Tina. They’ll see what happens after that. Dooley doesn’t want to move out. He doesn’t want his daughter to stop being his daughter, but he isn’t sure he wants Tina to go on being his wife. At first he’d thought, It’s just a piece of paper with numbers. It doesn’t change a thing. But every time he asks Tina if she’s going to tell Toby Tidwell that Gracie is his baby, she sends a question right back: You’d want to know, wouldn’t you? That paper, those numbers, he realizes, are going to change everything.

  Tina says they have to prepare Gracie for when Dooley moves out. She says maybe they should sit down as a family and talk to her, but Dooley says no. He’ll tell her himself.

  “You’ve done enough, thank you very much,” he says to Tina.

  “Well, why don’t you just put a scarlet A on me, and we can call it a day,” Tina fires back.

  She’s hurt, and Dooley’s glad of it. He decides to take Gracie to the mall. She needs shoes, and Dooley guesses he can tell her the moving-out stuff over lunch at the food court.

  “Are you going to let Gracie call Toby ‘Daddy’?” he asks Tina when he tells her his food court plan. But everything is I don’t know, Dooley, I don’t know with Tina. He wants her to say of course not, that Gracie will only ever have one daddy, and that is Dooley. Always and forever have disappeared from the scene, though, and it looks like divorce is coming in to take their place.