by D. Foy
“For whatever it’s worth,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes were mascara ruined by tears. “You didn’t have to tell them that.”
“I’m really sorry.” I tried to put my arm around her, but she shrugged me off and turned away. “Look,” I said. “I’ll tell them I was lying.”
“All you know is little and mean.”
“I’ll make it up,” I said. “Just tell me what to do, and I will.”
“Go to hell.”
And with that she ran up the Haight, past the bowling alley, past the Mickey D’s, and melted into shadows in the park.
“You may think you got over good,” Tina said, up in my face for added effect, “but Karma’s going to get you.”
“You know what you guys are?” Basil said to the girls. “A couple a type-1 morons. Now that,” he said with a slap to my back, “was some kind of joke.”
“I told you not to tell her.”
“It was a joke,” Basil said, and slipped a lemon-drop in his mouth. “Forget about it.”
The old leather dude was still yammering at the passersby. “I ask you,” he shouted at one woman, “if Death Valley is below LA or to the west of LA, and you don’t know. You don’t know anything. You’re just Mrs Motor Mouth. And you’re a messy housekeeper, too!” Then he saw me gaping and said, “You want to know a secret, pal?”
“What’s that?”
“Dead men are heavier than Sunday afternoons.”
“Yeah?”
“Them and wedding vows.”
Dinky, gazing up through the gridlock of muni-wires, still hadn’t said a word.
“Tell him, Dink,” Basil said.
“Tell him what?”
“That she’ll get over it.”
“We must always remember old Tom’s wondrous words of wisdom,” Dinky said, smiling. “There’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won’t fix.”
AUGUST IN THE CAPAY VALLEY IS STRAIGHT-UP death. What water doesn’t touch, the sun destroys, the nut trees droop under coats of dust, and the hillsides big with jim brush and sage fret with the shadows of buzzards, and hiding sparrows, and mice. And yet, even so, from a ruin of drought you can walk into corn so dense it might be a wall of scrumptious hair. With dusk the heat resolves—if only faintly, the sky’s on you still—until at last night emerges and sleep becomes something you think could be real. That’s the rattler’s hour, then, time of the skunk, time of the owl, some Achemon sphinx with wings of blood-stained eyes.
For the month since I returned from Portland I’ve been trucking crops most days and nights to outfits down in Sacto and the Bay, Oaktown mostly, and the veggie quarter south of Frisco. I live in a trailer on cinderblocks, now, with one pair of boots, a pair of cutoffs and two of socks, and an old wool sweater nabbed from Sally-Alley. And save the nip here and there I take with Thomas the Tattooed Whiskey Man, I’ve quit with the drinking and smoking both. As for the folks who roust me some nights, when the bongos beat and the jug goes round the flames, well, they say I talk in my sleep about a girl by the name of Avey.
It’s hard to believe I lived that other life. Not that this one’s all that different. I’ve got nothing to my name but the letters it’s made of, them and my rags and the copy of Fear and Loathing I stashed in my ruck the day Super got us to the lake. A host of black birds ten thousand strong will rise from a field like a cloud from myth, and it’s no more to me than dishes in my sink. I hit the peak of a rise on the road to look down windrows gold as my mother’s gold ring, wider and farther than I can tell, and if I don’t feel bewildered, it’s because I’m numb.
Any boob with sense can see me for what I am. I could care less. Yet when I think on that night, up at Dinky’s cabin, waiting for Super to return while Lucille told Hickory I was Satan in the guise of a drunk, how I’d always wanted Lucille for myself but couldn’t, not, she said, because I never tried but because she wouldn’t have me, how her scorn made me do things no human should have done to a person they called friend, how if Hickory knew what was good she’d get as far from me as her legs could go—when I think of that night from here in the endless quiet heat, I feel I’ve drunk a bucket of blood. Where Lucille got that stuff, I will never know. Not a snatch of it was true, not the parts that mattered. And besides, what difference did it make, so long as she never tried to load Hickory up with poison? That’s how it went: I woke from a nap with a tampon in my tea and her saying she’d found it in some jam.
“It sure does look like one to me,” I said. Dinky had sunk back into his pillow. Hickory was glaring. “What exactly did Lucy say?”
She dipped her rag in the basin and sponged Dinky’s brow. “You could’ve told me you were just about anything,” she said, “and I’d have believed you.”
I’d hoped she’d ask me to explain, or even not to explain, that whatever had happened happened and nothing she or I could do would change it, that even if we could it wouldn’t matter, because none of it had happened between us. I wanted her to trust in the promise of the man I was trying to give her. But she dropped her rag and left.
Dinky was snoring. A faint glow had crept into the room. Through the window I watched the swaying trees…
One of the girls had slapped in another disc, I couldn’t quite make it out, a wheezing melody, country-like, the lyrics scarcely patchy… learn how to steer… spill my beer… Hickory and Lucille were talking—“come back”—“fucking nightmare”—“just those Doritos”… I slipped toward the landing and cocked my head.
“What if they can’t get the truck?” Lucille said.
“They’ll get it.”
“That old man scares me.” One glass clinked on another. Something plastic bounced on the table, a lighter or a cup. The couch springs creaked, then the wooden rocker.
“Dinky,” Hickory said, “told me you two used to have a thing.”
“You think we should be worried about him?”
The music played on… I don’t like riding on the passenger side…
“I am a little curious, though,” Hickory said. “Why’d you leave him?”
“You ever meet someone who’ll never say what it is they want? I mean, even when they know it?”
“He says you left him drunk in a fireworks shop. Down in some dirty town in Baja.”
“He says that about every woman he’s ever had. But really Dinky left himself.”
“You and Basil are… Well. You guys can be pretty harsh.”
“Buddy Time,” Lucille said. “I know, I know. It’s hard to understand, especially if you haven’t been in it long.”
The gnome at my feet was irking me to hell. Everywhere I turned found me challenged by some scrap of carnival, mannequins and clowns and gnomes. You had to wonder what the Wainwrights were about, this family full of tightlipped babbitts who thought they were cool every time they stuck some doll with a boner on their mantle.
“It’s funny, you know,” Lucille said, “how sometimes things just happen.”
“I’m tired of things just happening,” Hickory said.
“How things can happen and you don’t understand them till after it’s too late?”
“And that’s if you’re lucky.”
“It’s like when I had that shitty temp job out in Walnut Creek that time,” Lucille said. “Ten or so years back, I guess, the summer before I got out of State. I’d taken on this temp job down at Blue Boss Insurance, to make up for what my parents wouldn’t cover. Opening mail and photocopying and stuff. There were four of us there, me and this girl named Chiffon-Latrese, and two other bimbos from Antioch. About every three or four days, this guy’d call on the phone. He was a quiet kind of guy. He didn’t have any business with the company, that’s not why he was calling. He just wanted to hear a woman’s voice, he said. It didn’t take long to figure out he wanted more than that. Really he was calling to hear our voices while he beat off. He never said that’s what he was doing. I just knew it. You could hear him over the line doing his thing, it w
as kind of loud, and he’d breathe real hard, you know. The thing is, he never said anything nasty to me or anyone else. Two of the girls, the bimbos, they wouldn’t talk to him. He’d call and they’d hang up. Only Chiffon-Latrese would talk to him. And me. We felt sorry for him, I guess. Every time I answered it seems like I’d end up talking to him until he was through. You get tired of reading magazines, you know? Chiffon-Latrese, though, she was like me. A temp. Which means after about a month or so she got shipped off to some other shitty hole. Some days the guy would call up and ask me to tell him about my sisters. Some days it was the other women in the office he wanted to know about, what they were doing, that sort of thing. I could always hear him, too, going at it, I mean. But after a couple of weeks he started getting weirder. He asked me to call him names. ‘What kind of names,’ I said. ‘Dirty names,’ he said. ‘Insult me.’ So first I told him he’s a good-for-nothing jerk and an asswipe besides, and what did he do but groan and ask for more. I called him a dirty bastard prick and he groans again and starts in with the heavy breathing. I called him a fucking douchebag fuck. I called him a cocksucking piece of dickweed. I called him everything he’d ever read in the Penthouse forum, and then some. I was probably getting off on it all more than he was. It was sort of out of hand, I guess, when I really think about it. It had got to the point where I was practically screaming at the top of my lungs when his voice kind of shuddered, and he hung up. The two bimbos were staring at me. It made me think how creepy I must’ve been. I mean, I was enjoying all of that, you know? It wasn’t for about a week or so that the guy called me back. But you know what he does? The first thing he does is ask how big my feet are. I told him I was a tall girl. My feet are bigger than most girls’ feet, I said, but they fit my body. He said what size. Ten, I told him, they’re size ten. But they fit my body. And then he hung up. Three days later he calls again to say he’s been dreaming about me every night, says he’s dreaming about my feet. He’s been having sex with my feet, he says. I ask what he means by with my feet and he says he’s been sticking his dick between my toes after I go to sleep, but that’s okay, because that was how we’d planned it. Meaning, in his dream I’d told him the whole thing was cool with me but just to wait till I’d passed out. He asked me if that’s okay, that he’s been dreaming about me, and I tell him sure, that’s okay, why should I care what you do at night. The next time he called, another two or three days’d gone by. He asks if I think he’s a pervert. Well look what you’ve been doing, I say. So I am a pervert, he says. Sure, I say, yeah. But that’s okay. It’s not like you’re stalking me or anything. But I’m a pervert, he says. Everybody’s got their thing, I say. And he says, Yes, but I’m a pervert. Then he hung up, and I never heard from him again.”
“People do things,” Hickory said.
“But you know what?” Lucille said. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I mean, if you really want to know, I thought there was something wrong with me. I kept taking his calls. It’s like I actually enjoyed talking to him. And when he stopped calling, I missed him. I even got depressed, you know? Every day I’m answering the phone hoping it’s my quiet little pervert. One day, after a couple of weeks, I pick up and there’s a guy on the end who sounds exactly like my man. I was so obsessed with the whole thing, I’d brainwashed myself into thinking it had to be him. And so in this disgustingly breathy voice I said, I’ve missed you, baby, and the guy says, Who is this? Turns out it was just some schmuck calling about his reimbursement. That’s when it hit me. You’re the one who’s pathetic, Lucille. You. Fucking pathetic.”
The girls were quiet then. I went back to Dinky. His breathing was still bad, and he was sweating and gibbering again, this freaky thing after that. The wreck must’ve busted him up inside, the way he carried on. Sure, he was sick before we’d got here, but not like that. Or maybe he’d always been sick but just never said. Or maybe he’d never said because he wanted us to see for ourselves, to say something, maybe, as if we cared, to console or advise him—it was there before our eyes, wasn’t it, plain as a bomb going off?—or maybe just to ignore it altogether, anything so long as it wasn’t this elephant-in-the-living-room type scene we all made light of in that lily-livered way of ours, when things got too heavy for anything else. He wanted something pure, I imagine, something he could count on.
I sat down beside him, wondering what I could do to make it go away. Spittle had pooled at the corners of his mouth. I wrung out the cloth from the basin and placed it on his brow. Once again he began to weep. I looked away, out toward the advancing dawn, and watched a list of stillicides trickle from the eaves…
A sphere of glass filled with plastic snow. A withered hand clutching the sphere until it slipped and shattered on the marble floor. Rosebuds across a carpet, yellow, white, and red…
Downstairs I paused in the landing this side of the door, and peered around the corner. Hickory lay on the couch, fooling with a Rubik’s Cube. Lucille had propped herself up by a bourbon at the table to doodle on a napkin.
“It’s pretty bad, huh?” Lucille said.
“You saw him yourself,” Hickory said.
“But you don’t know him like I do. I’ve seen him this way a hundred times.”
“Still.”
Lucille slapped the pen down and gulped at her drink. “Maybe the phone’ll start working.”
“Maybe,” Hickory said.
“He shouldn’t have let himself get that way.”
“Maybe we should try and grab some sleep.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“I could use some of that.” I went to the table and poured myself a shot. The girls wore faces so thick they could’ve been spirits from an ancient play. At a low, nearly subliminal volume, Black Francis with his half-scream/half-croon kept repeating his line. It is time, it is time, it is time for stormy weather. “Is that some kind of joke?” I said, and killed the sound.
“Ode,” Lucille said.
“What?”
“It’s supposed to be ironic,” Hickory said.
“You’re just pissed,” Lucille said, “because of that time Black Francis said he wanted to cut your ponytail off.”
This was true. We’d gone to Smarts, this trendy LA hole you could spot a handful of stars in any given day. One night we found Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, and Ethan Hawke playing pool together, drunk as goons in a depot. The night in question we’d run across Black Francis—AKA Frank Black, AKA Charlie Thompson—hiding in a corner, scowling with his porcine eyes. I had a ponytail then, like Lucille said. What Lucille did not say was how I’d whipped it into Charlie’s face and told him I had to take a shit.
“Black Francis,” I said, “is a pudgy glob of snot with a tude.”
“You,” Lucille said, “were just too much of a puss to say anything to him. Basil would’ve kicked his ass.”
“Basil would’ve eaten his ass clean out if he’d thought it would get him somewhere.”
“He’ll kick your ass the second he gets back and I tell him about all the smack you’re talking.”
“He can eat my ass, too. Just like you. Eat my ass.”
“Maybe you children could save it?” Hickory said.
“Don’t look at me,” Lucille said.
“She sure as hell isn’t going to look at me,” I said.
Hickory started toward the stairs. “I’m going to lie down.”
Lucille and I sat there twiddling, furious in our ineptitude.
“We’re pretty sorry, all right,” I said.
“All I want is to get the hell out of this dump.”
“Whatever I’ve done to get on your bad side, I’m sorry.”
“Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?”
“Have it your way. But remember. You’ve got to deal with it till we’re gone.”
“You’ve got nothing, AJ. No life, nothing. If I thought otherwise, I’d say you make me sick.”
I shuffled across the room like a freshly spanked child and stopped before a pen
ny on the carpet. Old Abe’s face in copper profile must’ve done something to me, because from out of nowhere, like some cat in a game show from Mars, I was swirling in a vortex of happenstance and quirk: Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were slain on Fridays, in the presence of their wives, both were shot in their imperial skulls. John Wilkes Booth was hatched in 1839, Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939. Lincoln had a gofer named Kennedy, Kennedy one named Lincoln… Yes, yes—and the hip bone’s connected to the leg bone. One bygone Christmas, before the looney tunes had stepped up to conk her, my grandmother gave me a two dollar bill, a Pet Rock, and a book of disco dance steps, including the Bionic Boogie, the Weekend Two-Step, and Le Freak. Last year, on Christmas Day, in a drunken tango down Waller Street with a girl named Date, I fell to the walk before a makeshift sign of bamboo and cardboard, its words scrawled with a paintbrush in the hand of a child: On December 24th THIS DATE PALM WAS STOLEN BY A SHORT WHITE MALE WITH SHOULDER LENGTH BROWN HAIR MERRY X-MAS DIRT BALL! And Lucille Ball’s all-time favorite show was M*A*S*H, and Amos Alonzo Stagg, AKA The Masher, invented the football dummy in 1889. Scat of the opossum, a beast that plays dumb when scared, is called werderobe, scat of the otter, spraints. The Yokut Indians used dust of spraints mixed with a liquor derived from the coffee bush to rid minds possessed by an odious spirit from the lands of thunder song and rattles. And while Jelly Roll Morton died believing he’d been cursed by a voodoo witch, Hippocrates ushered medicine from the realm of muddled superstition. Love is superstition, superstition, danger. Danger is an owl in the night.
SPC Stuyvesant Wainwright, IV
B Co 16th En Br
Operation Joint Endeavor
APO AE 09789
5 Feb 96
Dear Andrew Jackson Harerama vanden Heuvel
How are you my night-owlish friend? I’ve not heard any news from you since before you took on that job at State. Write to me and tell me what your plans are for the future.