“Hey,” Jimmy C.C. said one night, at my door again. He had that hangdog look, the money-asking sag about the shoulders. He needed maybe twenty dollars, he said.
“I’ll give you two hundred,” I said.
“Shit,” he said.
“To paint my fence,” I said.
He paused, pondering this strange idea of exchanging labor for money.
You paint your fence?” Pop said, on a visit.
“Paid the neighbor to.”
“Good,” he said. “Yeah, that’s real good.”
And then, they disappeared, sort of. Somebody had gotten word that J.C.C. was working construction on a contract for the U.S. Army, while others said he’d come by asking for money and mentioned something about going away for a while, to do electrical work at a hospital or install Sheetrock at a university or burn all the trees on the Yucatán Peninsula. The story changed a lot, but one thing was certain: Things were quieter.
Their injured cars remained, four in all, furred in thickening coats of pollen and ash, but it was a haunted house. Cody and the Fake Gray Baby were scarcer, too. Rumors spread. They would be evicted, kicked out, a splinter in the Old Man Winter family tree. Strange cars had been seen. A crime scene van, on a Sunday morning. Crimes against humanity or specific people, it was unclear.
Weeds choked up through the baby graves. Remnants of azalea root stems shot up springlike, green as new money. The concrete column of a birdbath jutted into the sky, bathless. The black sooty heaps of garbage remained cancerous, threatening to darken everything. The few surviving dogwoods did bloom. We would have to postpone selling. The sac was a mess.
But my wife calmed down. She had been lately moved by an encounter with a Filipino missionary who visited our church and who spoke of maggots in her cupboards and children in need of shoes.
“It gives you perspective,” my wife said. “I could do that. Be a missionary.”
I told her I believed we were missionaries already, that we were just really bad at it.
Jimmy Crack Corn remained elusive. Occasionally, he would return from whatever districts of the world he’d been terrorizing and would wave from behind a shrub, where he could be seen urinating in beer bottles. On these furloughs, we could still hear him at night, throwing manatees in trucks or whatever it was he was doing. My wife slept through it now, because she had a new migraine pill that induced a coma. It was better this way, my wife on drugs. Safer, happier. “Jimmy Crack Corn, and I don’t even care,” she would sing, floating off to a happier place.
Since he was around less, there were fewer incidents. In a way, I missed seeing him rape the natural world, but I guess there’s only so much nature to slash and burn.
Last December, we saw him, presumably returned for the holiday, and he was at it again. There’d been talk, relayed by neighbors and screamed by Tina Turner through windows and over fences, that Jimmy C.C. was back for good now, whatever that meant. And then I saw him one night, through distant and growing flame, lording over another fire in the front yard, high and proud and bright as a column of midnight sun. It was a big fire. Too big.
“What’s he burning this time?” my wife asked.
She no longer sounded upset, just curious. The firelight capered around the tops of the trees in a festive manner, and then, driving closer, I saw.
“A couch,” I said. “And what looks like most of their furniture.”
“Oh, good.”
“Maybe they’re getting new furniture for Christmas,” I said.
We pulled into our street and watched him, this shirtless beast of a man in the cold black of this season of Advent, holding what appeared to be a piece of the sofa high over his bespectacled head, his eyes blazing with two lesser fires. He threw the wide, fat cushion through the curtain of flame, and the flames rose higher.
We parked, and went inside, and sat down to dinner.
“Who wants to pray?” I said, the firelight dancing wildly now through the windows.
“Me,” one of the kids said.
“What do you want to pray for?”
“That our neighborhood won’t burn down.”
“Great,” I said, and she prayed, and it was a fine prayer, and I prayed in my heart, too, that we might be like the seed that falls on good ground, that we might grow tall like trees from a book.
“Amen,” my daughter said.
“Amen,” I said.
In the distance, we could already hear the fire engines.
CHAPTER 19
Space Invaders
Hey, man, we got robbed!”
It was Jimmy Crack Corn.
“Robbed?”
“They stole my boy’s bike!”
He showed me where the criminals had come into his garage, where the bike had been. We soon found ourselves discussing rising crime rates, hooliganism in today’s youth, and what Tina was going to do to the wayward youth who had stolen one of their bicycles.
“You own a gun?” he said.
“Pardon?”
“It’s a lot a burglaries around here,” he said. “Man, you got to protect your babies.”
He pointed at various homes where he’d heard of burglaries. Up yonder, he said, and over down yonder, and right over yonder.
Tina Turner came raging up into the driveway in her minivan, screaming.
“I fucking got that motherfucker!”
“Did you get him?” Jimmy asked, and it sounded a lot like maybe she’d run over the kids who’d stolen the bike. She’d found some boy riding the bike, she said, had run him off the road and taken the bicycle back.
“Them bikes ain’t cheap,” Jimmy said. “It’s all kinds of criminals around here. And you know what criminals got.”
I didn’t.
“Guns,” he said. “Almost seem like you got to have one these days.”
I had known J.C.C. was a nut, but not a gun nut.
Was it wrong to be nuts about guns? And could I tell if he had a gun in his pants right then? Because maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. This was his right, as an American, to put or not put things in his pants.
Growing up, my family were not so much Gun Nuts as Nuts with Guns. It wasn’t the guns we were nuts about, but rather the things they helped us acquire, such as food and decorative hat racks. For my tenth birthday, Pop presented me with a Remington 12-gauge pump. “This gun right here can kill a grown man,” he said, which made it sound like we’d been trying to kill grown men for many years without success.
I sometimes wondered if I could kill a man. It’s something I’d thought a lot about, given my childhood fear of a home invasion. Church didn’t help matters, where we were reminded that Jesus would return to earth like a thief in the night. Son of God or not, I just didn’t like the idea of a man coming inside while we slept.
When I grew up, I didn’t so much renounce firearms as leave behind the life that required them. In graduate school, I found myself in all sorts of places where guns had no quarter: research libraries, cast parties, pagan meditation labyrinths, underground contemplation orbs. I felt it was wrong to bring a gun to an open-mic poetry night, even when people were reading Pablo Neruda.
And then I married a woman who had not grown up with guns and could not understand how people who lived with guns close to hand were not just lying around dead all the time.
“Guns in the house, it just doesn’t make sense,” said my wife. “It’s weird.”
“That’s how we always felt about cats,” I said.
They were dangerous, sure, but back then our world was full of danger—drifters, snakes, meat. Now that I was grown up, my life had grown civil. And so when I took up housekeeping with my city wife, there was no talk of firearms. Instead, there was talk of spatulas, of obtaining as many bamboo-handled silicone spatulas as possible. Only once did I bring up guns. There had been a murder near our home. Was it possible that someone might want to come into our home and take our spatulas?
“Maybe we should get a gun,” I said to my wif
e.
She reminded me that she would not feel safe with a gun in the house, and I didn’t argue with her. We were not Gun People. But then, we had children. How would I protect them from thieves in the night? With prayer? With kitchenware?
When we moved to Savannah, it did not take long for us to see that we had moved to a whole city of Gun People. Our first week in town, we noted with regret that the sound of gunfire followed us everywhere, even at the Walmart.
“Oh, that’s the gun club!” our new neighbor said, when we recounted the horror of our shopping trip. “Right there in back of the store.”
“That seems safe,” I said.
“It is!” he said. “They got a wall.”
“Like in Berlin.”
“And they got a bar, too.”
Our new friends were not so much Gun People as Let Me Show You My Gun People and What Kind of Gun Do You Got People, and My Wife Doesn’t Feel Safe at the Piggly Wiggly Unless She Can Stop a Charging Bull Elk in Rut People. At dinner parties, the subject often came up.
“Want to go in the back and see my guns?” a new friend would ask.
Twenty-five years ago, it would have seemed a perfectly normal thing to ask, but now it sounded queer, as though they’d asked me to step into their dungeon and see their collection of gilded maces and monkey skulls.
“Sure?” I’d say, before following him into the back.
Entering the master bedrooms of married people always made me uneasy. I was afraid I’d see things that cannot be unseen, such as tubs of Vaseline or some sort of agricultural harness. These nice people would invariably lead me to their private bedroom nook, where they’d reveal between one and eighteen pistols and tactical rifles.
“Look at this puppy,” they’d say. “It’s called the Basilisk.”
I’d take the weapon and wave it around good-heartedly, so as not to suggest that I think it’s odd to own a $1,500 handgun named after a mythical lizard.
One night, I drank a beer with a compassionate and learned man who held many academic degrees, and he invited me out for a moonlit promenade on a beloved Lowcountry marsh near his home. Before leaving, he stuffed a .38 into his pants. We were in the country, with nothing to see on our walk but barred owls and fiddler crabs. Had there been much gang violence on this here marsh? I was confused.
“Are you expecting an attack?” I asked.
“You never know,” he said.
It all seemed very silly. What were these people afraid of? Being attacked by owls?
There are many things I do not wish to see in my living room at 5:30 a.m., and they generally fall into the categories of Bears, Lava, and Open Windows. It was the last of these that I saw on a morning I shall not soon forget.
“Why is that window open?” I said to my wife.
She hates open windows more than I do, mostly because our neighborhood is home to many creatures my wife believes would like to lay eggs in her face.
“What window?” she said, sitting with the baby.
“That window,” I said, pointing.
She looked, inhaled that sort of terrified gasp that mothers make.
We had been invaded.
It is difficult to describe the primeval dread of seeing that open window, the material evidence of malice in our little sanctuary. Who had come into my house in the night? Were they still there? Were they crouching just beyond the window, looking in?
The only weapons in my immediate reach were candles, a large baby, and several throw pillows. Could these pillows truly be thrown? And why did I suddenly feel naked? Was it because I was wearing no clothes? Or was there something else, too?
“The girls,” I said.
Despite the dreadful closeness of their door to the open window, I found them in their room, asleep. It was a small house, with few hiding places. I checked the laundry room, the kitchen. I checked the oven. Was that silly? It didn’t seem silly. I’ve got nothing against tiny people who might like hanging out in my oven, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something against me.
I put on some clothes.
“I’m going outside,” I said. It was still dark.
What I needed was a weapon, but all I had was a serrated bread knife, which might come in handy if I came across an angry Bundt cake. I extended my kitchen utensil into the dark and crept forward, around the house. The scooter, unmolested. The truck windows, unbroken. The shed, locked. The thieves had taken nothing. Back inside, there were no drawers open, no overturned chairs or muddy boot prints. It was quite possible that one of the children had opened the window, but then none of our children had ever voluntarily lifted anything that was not filled with ice cream. Why hadn’t our throats been slit, our children taken? What if one of them had gotten up in the night to use the toilet and seen the monster? Would one of them be dead now?
And then I knew.
“My briefcase,” I said.
Every day when I came home, I dropped the fat green thing into the chair next to the window. That chair was now empty.
What was in that briefcase?
Nothing. Everything. My wallet, for one. But more than that: my computer. Twenty thousand hours of work. Fifteen thousand documents. A play about a goose. A poem about a duck. My first book, my second book, my third and fourth and part of a fifth, all unpublished, all not worth the paper I had not thought to print them on.
“Oh, no,” my wife said. “Your stories.”
Listen, I got it. I had not lost a leg or a loved one. What I lost was a great deal of literature about waterfowl. I would tell you why it was not backed up, but it is a long, dull tale about institutional policy and sloth. Also in the briefcase: my wallet.
I called 911 while my wife called the bank and wept with a volume she typically reserved for childbirth, and I felt sorry for the nice lady who had to listen to her cry.
I waited for the police.
A small part of me believed that when the officer arrived, he would hand me a tactical shotgun. “Let’s ride,” he would say, and we would confront a gang of card-playing criminals in their smoky den of vice. “We’ve come for the poem about the duck,” the cop would say, as I pumped a shell into the chamber like the vigilante poets of old.
But the officer was a short woman who did not appear capable of administering street justice. She was sweet, understanding, a ponytailed little gnome, like an aging Olympic gymnast who’d been attacked by a law enforcement accessories catalog. She took my statement, supplied a case number, and left. For compassion, I gave her the bronze. The sun rose.
“I’m going out,” I said.
After all, hadn’t Tina Turner recovered her child’s bike in this manner? Could I run a man down, by the roadside? My plan was to drive around and look for my briefcase in a gutter, perhaps soothe my rage by running over a few dogs. But as soon as I stepped off the porch, I saw it. There, in the yard, my empty briefcase. My wife came running, fell to her knees, cried out. I held my bag like a hurt child. Then we saw her blue handbag in a neighbor’s azalea, and she lost it.
“Our things!” she said.
You know how when people in developing nations experience one of those tragedies that are always tragically happening to them, like a hole in the earth opens up and swallows a school of leprous toddlers, and their mothers are on the news wailing in this kind of sickening, bowel-loosening way, and it’s so sad that you kind of want to watch Wheel of Fortune instead? That was what it was like watching my wife cry in the dewy grass. Then the children woke up, came out, and cried with her, unsure of why they were crying. I stood in the middle of the road and watched the flesh of my flesh and fruit of my loins lying in a heap on the sod. A hole in the earth had opened, sort of.
I had failed to protect my things, my people.
“Don’t tell the girls,” I said to my wife.
I come from a long line of hunters and trappers and homesteaders, virile men who would horsewhip other men for no reason at all. When attacked, they did not just sit there. They got on the
ir mules and rode to town and hit people in the head with hammers. It was justice, and that’s what I wanted. To open a good, old-fashioned can of Cold-Filtered Whoopass Ultra. But all I had in my pocket was a Leatherman Multi-Tool, which was really more appropriate for opening a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup. Why were all my weapons designed for the kitchen? It was embarrassing. Maybe I was Gun People after all.
I need some ammo,” I said to a neighbor, the kind of man who I knew might have some extra munitions lying around because he spit a lot and watched television inside a shed in his backyard.
“You got a gun?” he said, surprised.
“Hell yes,” I said, trying to sound like somebody who belonged to the gun club.
My father had brought my old shotgun to me a few years back, in case a lost herd of mule deer ever wandered onto my property, and I’d shoved it under the bed. The gun sort of embarrassed me; receiving it was like being presented with the tiny bra of the first girl I’d ever groped. I promised my wife I’d keep it locked, out of sight.
But things were different now. The morning of the invasion, I pulled out the weapon, pumped it nice and loud. The sound alone would be enough to strike fear into an intruder, alerting him that he was in imminent danger of seeing his own small intestine without the aid of medical imaging equipment.
“Cool!” my six-year-old said.
“What is it?” my four-year-old said.
It was embarrassing that my children did not know what an actual gun looked like. Or was this a good thing? I no longer knew. They reached up, pet its stock like a new puppy. I thought of how close they’d come to being hurt, all of them, my sweet little Hobbit children—it was enough to send the mind into a real Mirkwood of the soul. Did having the gun make us safer? And why did I suddenly desire to own many of them, perhaps one named after a mythical lizard?
“Do you know how to use it?” my wife said.
The World's Largest Man Page 24