Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

  BENNY WAS HURT by the Bear’s grousing but did with him what he did with his ma when she was down on him: He imagined him laughing. He thought of the night he hiked the hour from his house to the shantytown in the scrub, for some reason yearning to see where the Bear lived. He found him and a dozen other men circled around a bonfire, a bottle glinting as it moved from hand to hand. Their howls and scuffles and shady reputation kept Benny hidden in the bushes, but when he remembered it later, it was as if he’d been right up there with them, waving smoke, spitting into the flames, and roaring after a tug on the jug: Jesus Christ, someone call the doc, I think I been poisoned. The talk was of the old days, this geezer pining for hot water, that one going on about his dad’s truck to people who’d never seen one running. Some got sad and some got bored, so it was a relief when a big bald ape called for a song. Dirty Dick sang a silly one about some Irishmen digging a ditch, then someone else told a joke about two pickers who fucked a farmer’s daughter. Benny looked across the fire to see the Bear laughing like a man who’d needed to, his mouth haw-hawing and tears running down his cheeks. Thinking about him like that now, in their cold, dark camp, made Benny smile all over again. The Bear still had some happy in him, he was sure of it.

  ON THE FOURTH day, the trail dropped into a deep canyon while the road ran high above, clinging to the canyon’s sheer north wall. A trickle of water snaked along the bottom of the gorge, where Benny and the Bear hopped from boulder to bone-white boulder. The Bear told Benny how it used to be a river full of fish and frogs, good eating all. Then he said, But, see, what’s bad on one hand is good on the other, ’cause drought down here proves the lake up there is likely dry too, meanin’ my dream now has the blessin’ of science. Just before the trail began its long climb to rejoin the road, they came upon a cabin standing vacant in a grove of cottonwoods. Everything useful had been stripped from it, but the Bear nonetheless went to work with his hammer and screwdriver and in no time was stuffing twelve feet of wire, some tiny springs from a toaster, and a couple of door hinges into his pack. You know what that is? he asked Benny about a dusty, broken something lying on the floor. A TV, Benny said. What about that? the Bear asked. Computer. And that? A whatchacallit, fan, for hot days. A clearing out back held two graves, one long, one short, no marker on either. If you weren’t here, I’d dig those up too, the Bear said. No, you wouldn’t, Benny replied. I surely would, the Bear said. I’m just too ashamed to do it in front of you. It took the rest of the day to hike out of the canyon. Benny was glad to be close to the road again. He trusted the pavement more than he did the dirt.

  THE BEAR GOT no rest that night. He told himself it was excitement about reaching the lake the next day, but he hadn’t been excited about anything in years. He stared at the stars until his eyes burned, then rolled over and watched Benny sleep, envying the boy’s peace. This mess, the after, was all the kid knew. Life was tough for him now and would be tough for him forever. It sometimes seemed worse, though, for old dogs like the Bear, who had memory, however faded and fading, of what it was like before. There you’d be, marching along, doing okay, when a childhood recollection of an ice-cold Popsicle on a hot summer day knocked you all the way back to mourning again. The Bear spent the rest of the night pondering how many times a man could start over and calculating the dragged dead weight of the past. He’d come to no conclusions by dawn but was cheered nonetheless by the start of the new day, the rosy reappearance of the world being a wonder that never failed to sweep away his gloom and fill his sails with enough wind to get him moving.

  I ALREADY GOT my share spent, Benny said. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I made a list. They were drawing close to the bridge where they’d first catch sight of the lake and see once and for all. The cool morning had given way to a swelter, the murderous sun scorching even the air they winced into their lungs. Me and Ma can do a lot better than the old roof we got now, Benny said. Bitch is so rusted out, the rain dribbles right through. And I want a bicycle, like yours, only with chrome. There was also a dude stopped by the other week who said electricity’d be back soon and he could wire us for it. Said his rate’d be cheaper now than then, when everybody’ll be after him all at once. The Bear paused in the narrow shade of a dead pine and reached under his hood to swipe the sweat off his face. Peddlers been runnin’ that scam since I was a kid, he said. Ain’t no electricity comin’. Benny bent for a stone, tossed it. You don’t know that, he said. A grunt told me he saw lights in houses in Frisco. The Bear started walking again, couldn’t stand the stupidity. If so, it was a rich man, he said over his shoulder. Richer than you no matter how many Krugerrands we find. He and Benny plodded in silence for a bit, through the heat, through the dust, thorny shrubs tugging at their pant legs. Then Benny said, You ever meet a rich man? I’ve seen a few, the Bear said, and it looked as if they died just like the poor ones. Better pickin’, though. Well, Benny said, lucky for us all, the body’s just a shell our souls moan through.

  WHERE THE LAKE had been there was now nothing but a mudflat dried so hard it’d take a pickax to get through. Out in the middle lay the ruins of the town Benny and the Bear had come seeking, half sunk in the crust, a dun hump against the horizon in which the only signs of the hand of man were the straight lines and right angles of concrete foundations and crumbling brick walls. That it? Benny asked after he and the Bear had stared awhile from the bridge. He’d expected houses and stores, derelict cars and faded billboards. The Bear was disappointed too, but didn’t show it. The water ate up most of the iron and wood, he said, but gold don’t rust, so grab your gear and let’s go. They walked out onto the flat, heat rippling around them. Benny raced ahead, determined to reach the town first. When he got there he slapped the wall of one of the buildings and shouted, Mine! Peering into the structure through an empty window frame, he saw more mud, clumps of dead weeds, and a few fish skeletons. Flies hovered over the mess, and the smell made his nose wrinkle. The Bear tromped among the ruins until the footprint of the town became apparent to him. He pointed out to Benny where the main drag had run and the narrower residential streets that branched off it. They found a corroded gas pump lying on its side and a couple of truck tires embedded like fossils in the dried muck.

  305 Willis was the address that had been passed down in the Bear’s family, the location of the house where Grandpa Pete died clutching his fortune. There were no street signs to consult, and the mailboxes had floated away. The Bear was reduced to walking around with one arm held out in front of him like a dowser’s wand, counting on some ancestral polarity to lead him to his kin’s remains. He gave up after an hour and started barking orders. We’ll camp here. Be ready to work at first light. Stop whistlin’. They fetched water from a creek at the edge of the flat and ate dinner in silence. Not that there was any need to talk. Benny found answers to most of his questions in the Bear’s downcast eyes and muttered curses.

  THE BEAR WAS already busy when Benny awoke. Kneeling next to the husk of what was once a house, he broke the dried mud that surrounded it with his screwdriver, then scraped away the dirt he made with his free hand. When he reached the foundation, he began to move along it, jabbing and digging, in search of passage into the basement. As soon as Benny approached, he tossed the kid a chisel and said, Pick yourself a house and go for it. Benny went to the next ruin and followed the Bear’s lead. Stab, twist, stab, twist, scoop. Stab, twist, stab, twist, scoop. They kept to the shade, working on whatever side of the houses the sun chased it to. The Bear unearthed a faucet that still had a hose attached and called Benny over to look. A short time later, he showed him a plastic flower, part of a thing to feed birds.

  Benny didn’t care much about the junk. He had a blister on his finger, and his back hurt from bending. His progress slowed after a while, and finally whenever he knew the Bear couldn’t see him, he quit digging completely and sat against the wall and stared out at the mountains rising hazed in the distance. The Bear was flagging too, until his screwdriver hit something that made a hollow sound. In a fe
w frenzied minutes he’d scraped away enough dirt to reveal the remains of a wooden door. Hey, he called, hey!, eager for Benny to know they weren’t wasting their time. The kid came running, and they yanked at the rotten boards until they gave way, but all they got for the effort was more mud. The basement was full of it, up to the ceiling.

  The Bear had built up so much momentum by now, he couldn’t stop. He and Benny worked together, him breaking ground, and the kid carrying off the muck. After an hour of this they’d exposed only the first two steps of the stairs leading down. Benny took a break, went up and sprawled on what had been the porch of the house. An object half buried in the mud got his attention, its color a brilliant blue that flashed against the infinite drab surrounding it. He wiggled the thing free and dragged it back to show the Bear, who, even after he pawed the sweat from his eyes, didn’t see the meaning of the mangled sheet of siding until Benny pointed out the numbers painted on it: 412. You got the wrong place, Benny said.

  THE BEAR BUGGED then, started punching the mud and screaming, Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! He kicked the siding out of Benny’s hand and stomped off to another house on another street and knelt to dig there in the full sun, stabbing wildly at the earth. Benny returned to the porch and watched him give up on that ruin and move to another, then another. The wind rushed in, and with it the dust, which stung like bees when it hit bare skin. Benny took cover in the crevice he and the Bear had excavated. He hunkered down with their bedrolls and rucks and struggled to keep them from blowing away. A moaning filled the air, violent gusts shook the vestiges of the town, and the light of day was choked down to almost nothing.

  The Bear welcomed the storm. It gave him something to do battle with. He was half crazy and knew it, digging here, digging there, first with a gambler’s determination to turn his luck, and then, finally, merely in defiance of the blow. He swallowed mud; he made his hands bloody claws; he flew from ruin to ruin, stabbing, scraping, and growling. And when the wind ceased and the dust settled, he collapsed in such a broken posture that Benny worried he’d died. He lay where he’d fallen until the first stars showed themselves. Benny ignored him when he finally limped into camp, sat with his back to him and sucked on the last of the soldiers’ candy. You didn’t know how it’d be, the kid said without turning around. Ain’t no shame in that. The Bear stretched out on his blanket and fell asleep tonguing the dirt and sweat off his lips and counting a coyote’s yips. Benny sat up in the busy dark, pretending he was alone, testing how it felt. It was nothing he’d choose, he concluded, but something he could tolerate.

  THEY BOTH WOKE raw and peevish, as if their dreams—the Bear’s of the past, Benny’s of the future—had butted heads all night, warring to a stalemate that left the dreamers stranded in the dreary present with neither nostalgia nor expectation as a balm. After a polite breakfast, the Bear gathered his tools and made ready to go to work. Benny rose to follow, the muscles in his back and legs groaning, but the Bear waved him off. You take it easy, he said, and walked by himself to the town’s main street, where he ducked into the first structure he came to and began to probe the dried mud that covered the floor and to chisel at the walls. Benny got bored sitting by himself, got hot, and eventually scuffed over to join him. He found the Bear pulling wire out of a hole in the ceiling. The Bear showed him how to coil it by laying it across his palm then wrapping it around his elbow again and again.

  They went from ruin to ruin in search of salvage that had survived the flood. Benny had no eye for it, so he waited for the Bear to point him to a spot. If it was a wall, the moldy plaster gave way to reveal a length of pipe. If it was the floor, there, hidden under six inches of dirt, was a stack of plastic funnels or some lead sinkers. It was as if yesterday had never happened. The Bear had his magic back. They scrounged the gas station, the grocery store, and the little Baptist church, then started on the houses. The heat was against them again but didn’t seem so awful today, with all the booty they were piling up. Still, Benny worked himself dizzy and had to lie in the shade for a while. He woke from a surprise nap, and the sun was sinking fast. The Bear was crouched in the street, sorting the haul and stuffing the best of it into Benny’s ruck. Go on and gather some wood, he said. We’ll have a fire tonight. Is it safe? Benny asked. You don’t trust me? the Bear said with a laugh, then tossed Benny two cans of chili he’d hauled all the way up from Bako. They were supposed to be the celebration when they found the Krugerrands, but they’d squeezed enough something out of nothing today to have earned a feast.

  THE BEAR CHUCKED more wood onto the fire, and what was already burning snapped and sparked and spit. He’d just told Benny he wasn’t going back with him the next morning, and tending to the blaze was his way of avoiding any discussion. But the kid wouldn’t be bullied. Why? he asked. What’s wrong? The Bear opened his shirt for an answer, had Benny feel the lumps under his arms and on his neck. Picker cancer, he said. It came on quick and’s been getting worse. You ain’t seen it kill a man, but I have, and I won’t do that kind of suffering. Benny was stripped of words. He sat there and toed the dust, shaken by new vistas of sorrow. I’d hoped to leave you and yer ma something, the Bear continued. The gold’s a bust, but what’s in that ruck’ll trade for a new roof. You can have my bike too, and the trailer and everything in it. And yer gun, Benny said, hand that over too. Ha! the Bear said, lifting the pistol out of his pocket just enough that Benny could see it. I appreciate the sentiment, but I got my mind made up.

  The flames leaped for an instant and caught the two of them staring into each other’s eyes, but then the flickering darkness returned, and Benny was alone on his side of the fire, trying to reconstruct his world without the Bear in it, while the Bear on his side batted away a few regrets. I don’t know what to do, Benny wailed. It’s simple, the Bear said. You follow the road back to Bako. You get a job in town, something regular, no picking. You meet a girl, get married, have kids. You get a house. You get electricity. You hope. Simple. Benny fell asleep eventually, wrapped in his blankets by the fire. The Bear smiled, remembering what it was like to be that kind of tired and to wake in the morning a clean slate. The flames died, and the last of the wood burned down to pulsing embers. The Bear saw castles in them, jewels, and dancing women. At dawn’s first pinking he struck out across the lake bed for the high mountains to the east. A day or two and he’d find what he was looking for, a prettier place to put an end to it.

  ON HIS WAY back, Benny stopped at the cabin at the bottom of the canyon. The graves were shallow, and it didn’t take him long to dig them out. He found nothing in either but bones, bones he dodged in his dreams that night, bones that clicked and clacked and kept coming for him. The second day he got it into his head that he was being tested, the Bear spying on him from the bushes to see how he did on his own. Show yourself, he shouted when he could no longer stand the feeling of being watched, but not a leaf stirred and no silver-bearded mug appeared. Benny walked on, whistling away his disappointment with two Irishmen, two Irishmen and Jesse James and savoring a vision of a hot meal, a soft bed, and a once-dark room livid with incandescent light.

  Sweet Nothing

  TROY POKES HIS HEAD out of the bedroom as soon as I come in from work. He’s got that look, like he’s been up all night and made an important decision. I’ve seen it before. When he was going to study hypnosis and open a clinic. When he was going to move to Berlin to marry some girl he met online. When he thought he had the lottery figured out.

  “Want to go for a walk?” he says.

  Troy weighs 450 pounds. He has no chin, no waist, hasn’t seen his dick in years except in a mirror. The only time he leaves the apartment is once a week to drive to the supermarket, and then it takes him fifteen minutes to haul himself back up the stairs from the carport to our place after paying a kid from the neighborhood to carry his bags.

  And he wants to go for a walk?

  “Around the block,” he says. “For exercise.”

  I’m beat. Still can’t get used to working nights
. It’s the kind of constant fatigue where you feel like you’re floating an inch off the ground, where you see things out of the corner of your eye that aren’t really there. Right now all I want is to guzzle a few beers and hit the hay, but Troy is my only friend in the world, and that should mean something.

  So: “Sure,” I say. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  First come the stairs. Troy clutches the rail with both hands and descends sideways. Two steps, rest. Two steps, rest. I cradle his elbow in my palm.