by Barb Johnson
Dooley sways on Jeffrey’s deck, staring into the blue of the pool water, his heart pounding, the buzzing in his head a constant ohhh. He’s got a little something for those bees, though. He kicks off his flip-flops at the pool’s edge, turns his back to the water and lets himself fall in, jeans and all. The water looks soft, but it’s not. The big blue hand of it slaps hard against Dooley’s back, and for a minute the shock of the slap and the sting of chlorine override the buzzing, giving Dooley a little peace.
He loves the pool, how he can put his head under the water and watch the slow motion of his paddling arms. He wishes everything in life could be slowed down the way it is in the pool. It would be great if everyone could roll over and float when they got tired of paddling out there in the world. Dooley’s always wanted a pool, and he sees now that having one is just as nice as he imagined. How many things turn out that way in life, just as nice as you think they’re going to be?
When his legs feel too heavy to kick through the water, Dooley hooks his elbows over the side of the pool and stares through the French doors into Jeffrey’s empty kitchen. If he could just sit down inside there, away from the glare and the heat, maybe Dooley could gather his thoughts, which is hard to do with all the buzzing in his head. He listens to see what the bees think of the plan. Go on ahead, they buzz.
He hauls himself out of the pool and squishes over to the kitchen door. From his soaked pocket, he pulls his Swiss Army knife and goes right to work prying the retainer molding from one of the panes in Jeffrey’s hundred-and-twenty-year-old back door. Suctioning the glass to the palm of his wet hand, he pulls it free and reaches in to turn the deadbolt. Once he’s inside, Dooley puts the glass back in and the molding back on, something he hopes will show Jeffrey that he means no harm.
The second he steps into Jeffrey’s kitchen, Dooley feels a plan hatch inside him. He’ll be Jeffrey’s roommate. He can watch over his house, maybe make him something tasty right here in this elaborate kitchen, which, from the looks of it, Jeffrey doesn’t spend much time in. Dooley guesses that, theoretically, you’d want to get to know somebody before you asked him to move in with you, but his recent experience has illustrated for him that you can’t ever really know someone. You can’t even know yourself. If it turns out that Jeffrey doesn’t want to get to know Dooley or have a roommate, then fine; Dooley will go back to sleeping in the bed of his truck.
The appliances in the kitchen are beautiful and perfect. So clean. Dooley wonders if anything bad could ever happen to someone with such a kitchen. There’s an old-fashioned, stainless steel toaster on the counter. When he pushes its black handle all the way down, the toaster’s interior brightens. Dooley can feel the heat of it, hear the hot, buzzing heart of it. He bends over and rests his chin on the counter and studies the face of the man on the shiny surface of the toaster. He makes a game of trying to look at both of the man’s eyes at the same time. If he can do it, he decides, then his heart will stop, and it will all be over. At first, the man in the toaster looks confused and sad. When Dooley picks up the appliance to study the face more closely, the man looks surprised, and Dooley throws the hot thing into the sink. Pink cushions of blister inflate on the tips of his fingers, and he presses them into the cool fabric of his wet jeans.
He clumps over to the little bar and snatches a tumbler off a shelf. He means to fill it with water, but his hand chooses bourbon instead. Bourbon always makes him throw up, but first there’ll be a struggle not to, and that’s the best part of any day. He pours a tumbler full and sniffs it, and the bees go all quiet and peaceful. The bees love bourbon. Dooley takes a big gulp and works on forgetting the man in the toaster and the look of surprise on the poor bastard’s face. He turns from the bar, and heavy-legs it through the house in search of the bathroom, where he hopes his new roommate will have something for pain. Something faster than bourbon.
Ohhh, the bees warn him. Ohhh.
Dooley weaves through room after room until a bathroom appears. It looks like something right out of one of Tina’s decorating magazines, all wainscoting and claw-foot tub, tiny soaps and candles. On a hook near the door is a silk bathrobe, the kind Dooley has seen in movies but never actually touched. The whispery fabric makes Dooley want to be dry, to have the silk next to his skin, to feel not just comfort but pleasure again. He wrestles to get loose from his wet clothes and nearly takes a header into the sparkling tub. Free of the soggy mess, his skin throbs with gratitude as he slides on the robe. It smells like his grandfather’s talcum, like a life of clarity and ease. Already things are looking up.
When Dooley turns around, there on the double vanity is a mother lode of relief. According to the label on the bottle of Oxy-Contin, Jeffrey Mathers has chronic back pain. Dooley shakes a 20 tab into his palm. He doesn’t have back pain, he’s just sad, and he needs the little chemical erasers to clear the unpleasant pictures in his mind. When the erasers wear off, Dooley knows, when the picture fills in again, a hot, idling sadness will be parked right in the middle of his chest. There’s not one place he will ever go without it again.
Dooley bends down and digs in the pocket of his soaked pants until his blistered fingers snag on his Swiss Army knife. Placing the tab of Oxy on Jeffrey’s stone countertop, he uses the knife to shave the time-release coating off. He needs some relief, and he needs it now. Once he’s removed the coating, Dooley pops the pill into his mouth and chews slowly, dropping the knife and a few extra tablets into the robe’s pocket. He weds the drug to some bourbon and sends them both on a honeymoon to his stomach. He waits to see if he’ll throw them up, but he doesn’t. He’s committed.
He puts the bottle of medicine back where he got it. In the bathroom mirror, a tired man with a soon-to-be-ex-wife stares at Dooley like he knows him. The man’s baby is gone, gone for good, straight up to heaven where all children go when their little hearts explode. What the man’s wife said is true: “You’re going to hell,” Dooley informs the man in the mirror. “Directly to fucking hell.”
He grabs his tumbler of bourbon and leaves the bathroom wearing the fine silk robe. Jeffrey’s house is like a maze, and Dooley stumbles through it in search of the living room. For a while, he goes in circles, as though he’s trying to exit a complicated cloverleaf of interstate highway. When he finally makes a successful turnoff into a large living area, he sits down in a Sharper Image massage chair, the kind he’s often sat in while Tina shopped at the mall.
The room is spinning, and he closes his eyes against the whirling scenery and presses his face against the contoured surface of the chair, whose fabric feels like skin, but not delicate skin, not like a baby’s cheek or the inside of a woman’s thigh. Not like the burned tips of Dooley’s own fingers. He gives one of the pink lozenges of blister a lick. It tastes like stupidity.
When he opens his eyes, light is beaming in through the leaded glass of the front door, and it hovers over Dooley’s head like the old spotlight at Don Quixote’s where his band used to play. The bright shaft looks dense enough to slow him down or stop him, but he can put his blistered hand right through it, like a ghost entering another dimension. The bees hate it. They start up on Dooley so loud that he pulls the Oxy tabs from the pocket of his robe and stuffs one in each ear then tosses another one in his mouth, where he grinds it with his teeth and gives it enough bourbon to get it where it’s going fast.
The room’s light seems attached to a dimmer somewhere, and color fades from everything except for a bright flashing on the periphery. The pulsing at the edge of the room hums. Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh. It’s made of bees.
Dooley can’t think of what else to give them.
He roots around for his Swiss Army knife, and it’s there in the robe’s pocket, exactly where it’s supposed to be. A sign, Dooley thinks. He never finished clipping his toenails the day Tina laid the bad news on him, the day everything turned upside down.
Now the nail on his big toe is long, freakishly long, like you’d see on a dead man if you dug him up after a couple of year
s. It occurs to Dooley that maybe this is the source of the bees’ worry. He pulls his foot up to cut the nail with his knife’s little clipper. Several times he hauls it up onto the edge of the chair. Each time he gets it close enough to work on, though, he loses his grip, and the whole operation just falls apart.
What Was Left
On the way home, Pudge scoots off the sidewalk to the street, where his neighbors’ cars line the curb. He stands behind the truck everyone calls Big Red, waits for a swarm of schoolkids to cross up at the corner. He doesn’t need any comments from the rugrats. Once they’re gone, he braces himself against the truck’s tailgate, leans over and heaves until just before his eyes pop out. He lifts his spinning head, wipes his mouth. Studies a muscular man dismounting from a white truck. LAFLEUR’S WINDSHIELD MAGIC is stamped on the door like a dare. Do you believe in magic?
This Lafleur guy glides over to Big Red and lays a chamois cloth on the hood and a little toolbox on top of the chamois. Pudge fakes a steady walk to the front of the truck and leans against an oak tree next to the passenger-side door. There’s a hole in the windshield. Bright cracks filled with light blast out from its dark center, flash in the low morning sun. It tears straight through Pudge’s eye and sets fire to his brain. He’s still drunk from last night. But not drunk enough.
“How’d you get to doing this?” Pudge asks Lafleur, whose triceps moves up and down like a jaw chewing as he mashes some kind of paste into the dark mouth of the crack. The guy looks across the hood at Pudge and then back at the windshield. Pudge fires up a cigarette and nods. Lafleur keeps quiet. Pudge inhales, holds the hot smoke in his lungs. Waits. Nothing. He’d been smoking a joint a minute ago, hadn’t he? Or maybe that was yesterday. Or earlier this morning. In any case, he has the munchies now. He hitches up his pants. It’d be nice to get back a little of the weight he lost. Just enough to give his pants some traction.
This Lafleur guy looks familiar, but after a certain age, everyone does. It might be they went to school together. Pudge was the fat kid with the drunk parents. No point bringing that up. He takes the cigarette from his mouth and looks at it. It looks right, but it tastes like shit, and Pudge replaces it with a stick of gum. A couple of his teeth holler about the sugar, but the chewing drowns out the noise soon enough. To steady himself, he imagines bacon. A whole plate of bacon.
Once his head’s right, Pudge pulls away from the tree and leans on the hood of the truck. Used to be you had to just live with it when your windshield got a crack. But now these guys can make the cracks disappear, and people are willing to pay cash money for it. “I mean,” Pudge says to Lafleur, who still hasn’t opened his mouth, “I was thinking about getting into a new line of work. You know, a career change. I just thought to myself that fixing windshields looks to be pretty interesting.”
“It takes a certain touch,” Lafleur says. He digs a small key from the pocket of his chinos. Pudge watches the key fit perfectly into the lock of Lafleur’s plastic toolbox. “It looks easy,” Lafleur says in a warning kind of tone, “but it takes a certain touch.”
“Well, I’m pretty good with my hands,” Pudge says, swallowing a belch.
Lafleur looks up at Pudge and then back at his work. Says nothing. The man knows how to concentrate, that’s for sure.
Pudge imagines himself mashing secret sauce into windshield cracks. He’ll get a shirt with his name on the front and the name of his business on the back. He can call it anything. Working with his hands like that, he’ll have to get some suspenders. Won’t be time to haul at his pants all day, and a belt just squeezes the life out of you. He’ll get a cell phone and an office, maybe. Funniest thing happened at the office yesterday…Pudge will have to fix his truck and hire a helper to drive it until he can get his DWI straightened out. And the helper can handle the paper end of things because paper tends to get away from Pudge. The main thing is he’ll be legit. A little cash will get him out from under the VA. And he’ll give Deysi money to take care of their kid. Maybe then they can all tell Deysi’s boyfriend, Junior, adios.
Pudge imagines sitting with Luis and telling him the truth at last. I’m your old man, he’ll say. Or maybe your dad. Deysi calls her father Papi, so maybe Luis would like that better. Pudge isn’t a deadbeat dad. He’s more like an undercover dad. He sees Luis every day, and recently, he’s started hanging out with Deysi’s boyfriend, who’s a jackass, just so he can keep an eye on things. But Dad? Deysi told Luis that Dad died in the war a long time ago. Luis is twelve, nearly grown. Why blow it for the kid is what Pudge figures.
He shifts his weight forward on the truck, works his eyebrows around to show Lafleur that he’s interested, that he’s a quick learner. He tries to breathe through his nose, exhale downwind. There’s a bottle of Wild Turkey inside him that hasn’t burned off yet. He studies the spider legs of the windshield’s crack. A deadly spider the size of Pudge’s hand. “That’s a big one,” he tells the guy. “You’ll damn sure need some magic to make that thing disappear.”
“That’s what I mean about taking a certain touch,” Lafleur says, staring hard at the center of the crack. “Some guys would walk away from this one.”
Pudge wonders how much it will cost to get his new business started. He’s feeling a little drifty, and it might be that he’s already asked, so he keeps quiet.
“And you can’t teach that,” the guy is saying when Pudge tunes back in. “A man has it, or he doesn’t.” Lafleur screws some kind of suction cup over the crack. “Getting in is kind of steep,” he says. “Take fifteen hundred just to get started.” Lafleur looks over at Pudge. “Cash.”
Pudge is glad he kept quiet and didn’t ask about the cost twice. “Well,” he says, “that’s doable. Completely doable.” Pudge sees that he might be able to pull this off after all. “Maybe a little discount for a veteran?” he tries.
Lafleur reaches into his box of tools. “Is that what that limp is about, the war?”
Pudge nods. “Sure is.” Not exactly a lie. Almost nothing is exactly a lie.
Lafleur wipes at some paste that dribbled on the glass. “Well, I gotta get fifteen hundred, irregardless,” he says.
Pudge tenses up a little at the thought of what all he’ll have to do once he’s in business for himself. He’ll be his own boss, sure, and all the profits will be his, but so will all the headaches. There’s bad checks, for one—no, he won’t take checks. But there’s always the helpers not showing up or showing up loaded. Pudge pulls in a deep breath, hoists his wallet from his back pocket. There’s the joint he had going before. He covers it with his thumb. “You got a card?” he asks the man. “I’ll have to move some money around before I can get you the whole fifteen hundred, but I’ll give you a call tomorrow or the next day. I got a little business venture’s about to pay off.” Pudge traded a guy some antique coal grates for a set of steel rims, and those sell pretty easy. And he can maybe sell the radio out of his truck, which is up on blocks again.
Pudge takes the guy’s card. It’s as white as his truck. “Calvin Lafleur,” he reads—he’ll need cards, too, he guesses—“I’m Pudge Morris.” Pudge is careful to wipe his hand on his pants before he offers it for shaking. “When’s a good time to call?”
“When you have the money,” Calvin Lafleur says, tapping at the cell phone clipped to his belt.
Pudge nods. “All right, then. I’ll most definitely give you a call in a day or two.” Pudge turns and trips over a tree root. His own feet. A caterpillar. Something.
Later that afternoon, in his room over the Latin American AA, Pudge pulls a tallboy from the refrigerator and sucks down a few swallows. He’s got cottonmouth from the joint he finally remembered to get out of his wallet. His black garbage bag of laundry is packed pretty tight, but Pudge is out of quarters. Not enough time to get to the Bubble and run a load anyway. He excavates the bag for a shirt to wear to his party tonight. Pudge’s sister, Belinda, tricked him into dinner at their mother’s to celebrate his birthday. Pudge hates parties. “You do
n’t hate parties,” Belinda informed him. “You have a phobia, and the best way to get over a phobia is to confront it.” Belinda teaches psychology at the junior college. There’s not much anyone can say that’s news to her.
It looks like this might be a good year after all, though. Pretty soon, he’ll own his own business and then he’ll sit Luis down and tell him what he should’ve been told a long time ago. My dad’s a businessman, Luis will be saying in no time at all. And it’ll be true. Luis is a sharp kid, and Pudge can’t believe he bought Deysi’s story about how his father died in the war. There wasn’t any war going on when Luis was born. Maybe they don’t study wars in the sixth grade, or maybe Luis doesn’t like history. In school, Pudge wasn’t much for history, himself. Same thing happening over and over. Who wants to read about all that crap?
Pudge tunnels under his mattress to see if he left one of those Van Heusen button-downs under there. Squeezed between the mattress and the box spring is the best place to keep a crease on those shirts. Belinda gives him one every year, but they tend to disappear on him. He needs to wear one tonight to show his sister that her efforts to civilize him haven’t been wasted. “I just need a little seed money to get the business started,” he’ll tell her. “So I can do better. You know, for Luis.” Belinda rakes in a fair bit of coin teaching psychology, so she might be good for some cash. His mother generally gives him a twelve-pack of beer and cash if she has it. Pudge won’t get the whole fifteen hundred tonight, but it’ll be a start. The important thing is he’s got a plan. T minus fifteen hundred and counting.