by Barb Johnson
He checks a few other likely spots for a shirt, but it’s no use. All the bullshit Van Heusens have gone off somewhere. Probably to a martini bar Uptown. Pudge goes with his lucky Saints jersey, which he drops into a sink full of soapy water. He shooshes it around in the suds, then blots it with a towel and pops it into the microwave for a quick dry. He watches the jersey spin in the invisible heat waves. It’s sleeveless and that might be a problem because Pudge has his name tattooed on his arm, and his sister just hates it. She’s always laying her psycho hoo-ha on him about it. Says his nickname, Pudge, has shaped him, tied him irrevocably to the pain of his childhood or some such shit. She always uses ten-dollar words to show off her college education. Anyway, his nickname is the only thing his old man left him, and it’s just a name. A person is not a name.
Besides, Pudge isn’t even fat anymore, not by a long shot. And he hasn’t been since he got out of the Army, which was quite a while back. That was a good time, when he was in the Army. Pudge still wears his dog tags as a reminder of those sunny days. He likes the sound of the thin metal tablets clicking against each other, and how he can read his name, the one he never uses, with his fingertips. It’s like the Clayton Morris of the dog tags is someone separate from himself. Someone wise who watches over him. If he hadn’t slipped in a rock climb during boot camp, Pudge probably would have gone career military. But they turned him loose because his knees were trashed, and the army won’t keep what it can’t use.
Now Pudge yanks his jersey out of the microwave and tosses it in the freezer to cool off for a second. The last tallboy in the refrigerator goes in his pocket for the trip. He meant to hold off drinking so he could have his wits about him when he laid out his business plan for Belinda and his mother. But it takes a fair amount of alcohol to enjoy the love of his family.
From the stairwell of his mother’s apartment building, Pudge hears a grenade go off. Pots and pans hitting the floor upstairs. Women screaming at each other. His family.
“Where’s the casserole I left?” Belinda is yelling.
“How the hell should I know?”
“Because, Mother, I only left it here two days ago, and I told you it was for Pudge’s birthday dinner.”
“I don’t think that was two days ago. Couple weeks more like.”
“Oh, Mother!”
Belinda got this “Mother” business from her girlfriend, Carolyn, her life partner, who comes from a well-to-do family. They both say lovely a lot, too.
When Pudge walks through the door, his mother puts the argument on pause for a few seconds. “Hey there, Sasquatch,” she says. Pudge hasn’t shaved in a few days.
The arguing goes on for a little more, and then there’s just the sound of the TV. The yelling leads right where Pudge knew it would: the casserole’s still not there.
“Hey, Mama. Hey, Belinda,” Pudge says to the opposite sides of the ring. Belinda answers with her eyebrows, which go up like two black flags. Look out, they say, trouble ahead. Pudge is pretty sure she’s doing her count-to-ten-calm-down thing. She’s told him that when she’s upset, she names the ten Canadian provinces to herself. It calms her. That makes sense. The Canadians are a calm people. Pudge likes to think of bacon when he feels bad.
He goes into the refrigerator for a tallboy, stands there sipping it, waiting for Belinda to get herself right so he can tell her about the windshield-repair business. He counts to ten a couple of times, then pulls out his wallet. “Check this out,” he says. He tries to make it sound like he just discovered something fascinating. It’s all about tone with his sister.
Belinda squints at the card. “What’s Lafleur’s Windshield Magic?”
Pudge can feel success coming toward him, and he opens the door to it. “That’s a business I’m—”
“Pudge, honey,” his mother calls from her big blue chair in the living room. “Bring me a beer, would you?” Pudge can see the back of his mother’s nearly bald head. Wheel of Fortune is on. His mother loves Wheel of Fortune. Pudge looks at Belinda. She’s put the card on the counter and gone back to digging in the freezer. She probably thinks she’s going to find the birthday casserole. Belinda never can believe that things just disappear. Shirts. Birthday casseroles. All the paperwork of the world.
Pudge gets a beer for his mother. Puts a spare in his pocket.
“Cashback!” his mother yells at the TV when a C lights up on a ten-space thing. “Crashtest!” when an R follows. “It’s crashtest, you dumbass! Crashtest!”
Pudge sets her beer on the TV tray by her chair. Plops onto the couch.
“Mother, please,” Belinda whines from the kitchen. She’s got a whine like a beagle howl. Irritates the crap out of Pudge.
“What are we going to eat?” Belinda asks. “Y’all can’t just sit in there and get drunk. Tonight is supposed to be about celebrating Pudge.”
Pudge looks for evidence of presents. Nothing but three balloons tacked to the wall next to a banner: Happy Birthday! No shirt-sized packages with bows. No envelopes. Money generally comes in an envelope.
“Crackhead!” his mother hollers. “Look, Pudge, it’s crackhead!”
Pudge nods as he gets up and strolls over to the kitchen. “You want anything?” he calls back to his mother.
He pulls up a stool at the island that separates his mother’s living room from the kitchen. Belinda has given up on the freezer and moved to the lower cabinets.
“Fucking grease on everything,” she complains to no one in particular. Belinda’s got two settings: complain and instruct. She doesn’t need an audience for either one.
While his sister’s face is buried in the cabinet, Pudge takes the opportunity to get up and pull a couple more tallboys from the vegetable bin. His sister’s head snaps out of the cabinet, and she shoots him a look. He shrugs at her. Slides the Windshield Magic card off the counter and puts it back in his wallet. He’ll have to keep his eye out for a better time.
Back in the living room, his mother throws her hands up in disbelief when a contestant asks to buy a vowel.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What’s he wastin his money on vowels for? Any moron can see the word is crackhead!”
“See?” she says when two A’s appear on the board.
Pudge sets a fresh beer on his mother’s TV tray. Before she opens it, she undoes one of the two bobby-pin X’s on top of her head. Rewinds a string of hair. Puts the bobby pins back. The twin X’s look like giant stitches meant to keep what’s left of his mother’s mind from spilling out.
“Crus-ta-cean!” a man on the game show says like he’s reading from the pronunciation guide in a dictionary. The audience goes crazy, and the winner jumps up and down. Punches the air in victory. He’s a man about Pudge’s age, dressed in a three-piece suit. Got him a military-style haircut. Pudge tightens his ponytail. His hair is going the way of his mother’s. It might be he should cut it all off before it gets there.
“Crustacean?” his mother snorts. “What kinda dumbass word is crustacean?”
Pudge tries to think of a way to get the windshield conversation rolling again.
“Hey,” he calls to Belinda, “you want me to pour you some of that wine?” Belinda brought a lovely bottle of wine in honor of Pudge’s birthday. Pudge and his mother only drink beer. While Belinda’s head is in the cabinet, Pudge knocks back his entire tallboy. There’s no way he’s going to be able to get through this night without a serious buzz.
“I don’t want to drink on an empty stomach, Pudge,” Belinda says. She’s kneeling next to the cabinets, taking out crusty pots that have no lids. “Somebody’s got to keep their wits about them here.”
“Why don’t we just order pizza?” he suggests. With the food problem solved, he could sit at the table with Belinda and his mother. Lay out his business plan.
“Is pizza your idea of a birthday dinner?” Belinda barks. She gets up from the floor. “I’ll make you a list for the grocery store.”
What Pudge wouldn’t give to be able to kneel lik
e that and get up again. Belinda looks down at the circles of filth on her knees and heaves a Sweet Jesus!
“You go pick up a few things,” she tells Pudge, poking her head into the moldy heart of the refrigerator, “and I’ll make you a proper birthday dinner.” Spoiled food flies out of the refrigerator like gravel behind a spinning wheel. Pudge moves away from the garbage can.
“Pizza’s good…” he says.
“Pudge?”
“Well, I’m on my bike.”
Belinda pulls her head out of the refrigerator and does a quick study of Pudge’s face. “No reason you can’t take my car, though, huh?”
Offering her car is a trick, Pudge knows. Belinda has somehow found out about Pudge’s most recent DWI, and now she’s trying to trick him into confessing. He turns back toward the TV and watches the winner climb into his brand-new Chrysler. For a few seconds Pudge tries to imagine what it must feel like to sit in a new car. Everyone cheering for you. And there’s your wife and kids jumping up and down in the clothes they bought especially for this moment.
“Okay then,” he says, “gimme the damn keys.”
“How many beers have you had?”
“Look, do you want me to go, or not?”
“Not if you’re drunk. You can’t afford to get another DWI.”
She’s onto him, all right.
Pudge retreats to the living room. “Well, let me know when you decide what I need to do.” He pulls the spare beer from his pocket and hands it to his mother so Belinda can see it’s not for him.
“Belinda, let your brother alone, would you?” In her chair, their mother twists her torso toward the kitchen. “Just give it a damn rest.”
“Nobody would have to go to the store, Mother, if you hadn’t eaten the fucking birthday dinner.”
This malarkey could go on all night. “Hey,” Pudge says with his fascinating-discovery tone. “Did I tell y’all about the windshield repair business that—”
“I never ate any birthday dinner,” his mother huffs at Belinda.
Belinda slams the refrigerator door. She puts one hand on her hip. Jabs a finger in their mother’s direction. “Right, Mother,” she squeezes through clenched teeth, “the casserole just disappeared.”
Pudge’s mother rocks her upper body in an effort to rise from her chair. Once she’s up, the extra momentum shoots her straight into the coffee table. She grabs at her shin. “Goddammit!” The remote goes flying off the arm of the chair and tips over her fresh beer on the TV tray. Pudge gets to the beverage before much is lost, mops the spill with the hem of his jersey, then guzzles the remains. Nobody’s looking at him now.
“You always did have a smart mouth,” his mother hollers. She staggers toward the kitchen, pecks at the air in front of Belinda with two fingers scissored around a cigarette. “Your problem, missy, is you don’t know when to shut it.”
Belinda and their mother have been having this exact same fight pretty much since Belinda could talk. Pudge has never understood how the same words can make them just as mad every single time. It’s one of the things that depresses him about life. He turns his attention to the TV and tunes out the fight.
While watching a girl cut up avocados on the TV, Pudge decides he should call Deysi. He should tell her…well, he never knows what to tell Deysi. He could talk to her back in the day, but not anymore. That Deysi’s gone. Back in the day, she’d sit on Pudge’s lap. Reach in his shirt and grab his dog tags. She’d run her finger over them and say his name, Clay-tone, with a Spanish accent. She said his name like she knew what all Clayton Morris could do in life. If he could call that Deysi, that back-in-the-day Deysi, he’d say, “Get ready, girl. Clayton Morris is gonna rock your world.”
“Pudge, honey,” his mother calls from the kitchen table. How long has she been over there? “Come look at this.” Her voice sounds tired, froggy, like she’s been crying.
Pudge looks over to where his mother and his sister have settled in at the table. There’s a photo album between them. It’s time for the meaningful birthday moment. Nothing says meaningful to Belinda like pictures from Pudge’s childhood.
There wouldn’t be a better present in the world than never having to look into the piggy eyes of his younger self. But that’s not the way the happy birthday dinner goes.
“This is him and your father, that bastard,” his mother’s saying when Pudge gets to the table. “Wasn’t Pudge a cute baby?”
Pudge catches sight of his porky bald baby self balanced on the hood of a car, one hand on his father’s shoulder. His father is a greasy teenager whose acne-covered face is pulled up in a sneer in case anyone was wondering what he thought of the whole deal. This teenager, this father, is whittling, and the knife blade is just a hiccup away from the accordion of fat on Pudge’s leg.
Belinda pours the last of the special birthday wine into a blue plastic cup. “That’s a lovely little outfit he’s wearing.” She and Pudge’s mother lean in to get a better look. No one mentions the obvious; no one says a word about how baby Pudge looks just like a Shar-Pei puppy.
This silent pity makes him thirsty, and Pudge goes to the refrigerator for a beer. No sign of dinner. And still no presents, no envelopes lying around, either. He pulls a couple of twelve-ouncers out of the fridge and then leans on the counter and drinks one down. Pow! He crushes the empty can in the sink. A smile of blood forms where a fold of aluminum slices into his palm.
Pudge’s legs shake. He reels away from the sink, wraps his bleeding hand in a stiff dish towel. No telling what all it’s mopped up.
“Oh, when was this taken?” his sister asks. There’s not a picture in there she hasn’t seen fifty times.
“That was…well, hell, I can’t remember. Pudge? Come look at this thing and tell your sister where you were.”
If he doesn’t walk over there, Belinda will start in with the beagle howl. No birthday money in that. If he can just get her past the pictures, she might remember about the presents. And then Pudge can pull out Lafleur’s card and tell about the business. He straightens himself and slogs through the pile of spoiled food around the trash can.
Even from five feet away he knows what the picture is. So does Belinda. Everyone in the whole neighborhood knows. Even his mother, but she forgets it over and over. Making Pudge say it is Belinda’s way of forcing him to “embrace his pain.” That’s one of her projects for him, that pain bullshit.
“Looks like a birthday party,” he says, trying to keep things light. He closes his eyes, imagines Belinda flipping to some other picture.
“Well, son, we can all see the birthday hats. Whose party was it?”
“What a lovely cake!” Belinda says.
The beer has stopped working. Pudge can feel the sixth grade roaring straight at him. His legs tremble. He wonders if maybe they’ll fold, and he’ll be spared after all. It would feel good to just collapse, hit his head really hard, maybe even lose his memory.
“Pudge?”
“What?”
“Whose birthday?”
“Spud Dejarnette.”
“Spud?” his sister repeats. “Oh, is that the party when…”
“What?” his mother asks. “When what?”
“Kinda funny story now,” Pudge says. He swirls the remains of his beer. Takes a swallow, but it won’t go down his tightened throat.
“Funny? It must have been horrible!” his sister corrects.
“Is that the party when what?” his mother asks. Pudge wonders if she really can’t remember or if she’s just giving Belinda what she wants.
“You remember Spud, Mother,” Belinda says. “The little special needs boy?”
Pudge’s mother searches the ceiling for a memory.
“Well, he invited Pudge to his birthday party. Poor old Pudge was so fat back then. Didn’t have a friend in the world. Remember?” Belinda takes a sip of birthday wine. “Well, it came time to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and all the kids were around that lovely cake singing. Pudge sneezed right when th
ey got to the ‘dear Spud’ part. And farted. Loud.”
“Holy shit!” his mother says and looks from Pudge to the picture.
“That’s not even the worst of it,” Belinda says excitedly. “Snot went all over the cake.”
All. Over. The. Cake. That’s how Belinda says it. His mother shakes her head in disbelief. Pudge doesn’t hear what comes next because he’s down the stairwell and out on the street before Belinda can move on to his tattoo and the marked-for-life speech that comes after that. He doesn’t know how to fight, but he does know how to leave.
Pudge pushes his bike in case his sister is watching, in case he falls. He’s jittery and mad and not sure he can ride. Once he’s out of sight, he hops on the bike and heads for the Bubble so he can check on Luis before he goes home. A while back, somebody ditched a Beemer across the street from the Laundromat, and that’s where Luis hangs out at night. When Pudge turns down Palmyra Street, though, he smashes into the side mirror of Big Red. His dog tags flip up and crack hard against his teeth. Somehow his foot gets caught in the spokes. He slides, palms down, across the cement, the bike attached to his foot.
Why get up, Pudge wonders when the sliding ends. Why not just let the night finish him off? He waits for a car to come along and do just that. The street is dark and empty, and, after a while, Pudge has to admit that there’s nothing to do but go on. He sits up, brushes his hands against each other. Street crud rains from his shredded palms. When he tries to stand, his ankle won’t support him. It’s like he’s got a rubber foot down there. A floppy cartoon foot. His right index finger is cocked out at a funny angle. He tries to bend it, but it’s like his finger is finished doing what Pudge wants. He starts hopping toward the Laundromat.
He’s a little juiced from the adrenaline of his fall. The more he hops, the more juiced he gets, and it’s like all his sleeping circuits fire up at once. Every one of them sends his brain the same news: his ankle hurts like a motherfucker.
While his body gets back in touch with itself, his mind bounces around in his skull. Right when he sees the Laundromat, a memory shakes loose in Pudge’s brain. There’s something about how the snack machine inside is throwing light out into the dark street. All day Pudge has been trying to remember how he knows Lafleur. And now he does. Lafleur used to be engaged to Pudge’s friend, Delia, who owns the Laundromat. And now Pudge remembers Lafleur getting Milk Duds from that exact machine. A long-ass time ago. Still, it’s a connection, a leg up. Pudge will show Delia the Windshield Magic card. If she says Lafleur is on the up and up, Pudge is going to get busy selling those rims, maybe see if somebody needs him to rewire something. He’s good with electricity.