Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  And why am I still waiting? And don’t I have a paper due tomorrow? Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord oh, Lord, please don’t let him have seen me sweet Jesus in the camellia bush, I prayed.

  Buzzzzzzzzzz.

  “Alice? You okay? Did you fall?” he called out, sounding concerned.

  “Uh, fall? Fall? Um, no … just trying to, hold on a second, I wasn’t expecting you, I was…,” I stammered.

  “I know. Sorry I’m so late. It’s the weirdest thing. I was going to call you, but I thought you saw me with the guy in front of your house?” he yelled out, sounding apologetic, hopeful.

  “Guy? Um, no.”

  “Yeah, you were standing in the window, I waved at you?”

  This sounded like, pardon my French, a crock of shit.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen,” I sang out.

  “You were standing there, kinda looking out at the rain?”

  Am I actually buying this? I mean, I have had about fourteen Cokes with this guy and talked to him on the phone seven (very entertaining) times, and though he may be kind of weirdly cute in an outsider/hobo sort of way, what do I really know about him?

  “There was a bunch of people walking out of the church, and I was right in front of your house, by the gutter, with an old man? Does any of this ring a bell?”

  “Oh, well, yeah,” I called out. “I mean, some. The church people do. I mean, anyway,” I said, getting up, rearranging my shirt, adjusting my belt, going to the door, inching it open. “I’m sorry, come in.”

  I opened the door and there he was, in ripped-up Levi’s and old brown pointy-toed cowboy boots and a mother-of-pearl snap-front Western shirt, his long hair loose to his shoulders.

  “Oh, my stars, you’re wet!” I screamed.

  “I know!” he said, laughing, looking down at his jeans clinging to his legs like paint. He was beyond soaked; he was positively sopping.

  “What am I thinking? Please, come in!” I said, leading him into my place. “Do you want to dry off? Let me show you the bathroom. It’s right back here, through the kitchen, well, of course you can see for yourself this is the kitchen, it’s a pretty tacky one, but as you can see unlike some college girls I do use it and anyway all the way back here’s my little bathroom it’s really a closet but it has all the working parts and it’s all yours and you can feel free to use those towels on the rack there, they aren’t just for show or guest towels or what have you, well, they are, but they’re for times like this, because, well, you’re the guest I guess, that is to say they’re clean, and you’re wet, you know? Anyway, um,” I sighed, winding down.

  He was really wet.

  “Would you happen to have a hair dryer?” he asked.

  “Oh, gosh, no, I don’t. Sorry! That’s totally abnormal, especially for a girl, right?” I said, stammering. “But my hair’s stick straight, and I just wash it and let it dry and that’s it, give or take a tube of gel and the ponytail du jour, that is,” I blathered. “One time I got a perm, and it plum washed right out the first time I took a shower. Mama’d like to have kill me. I think she paid nearly two hundred dollars for it or something, isn’t that just something? Mama didn’t think so! Anyway, I just never use a blow-dryer, to tell you the God’s honest truth.”

  Why could I not just shut my mouth?

  “It’s okay, really,” he said, leaning on the door.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but, oh! Maybe I could borrow one from my neighbor?”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said, hanging off the door, holding on now to one of my good, white towels.

  “Okay. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Alice?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to shut the door now, okay?” he asked, smiling.

  “Oh, good Lord, of course. Just pull me down from the noose when you come out.”

  “Will do,” he said, laughing, and shut the door. I heard the lock click in the knob.

  I went into the main room.

  Sat on the love seat.

  Moved to the other love seat.

  Took my hair out of the ponytail.

  Put it back in.

  Sat on the floor.

  Noticed the soft cheeses were hardened; the charcuterie was curly around the edges.

  I took Ono no Komachi and slid her under the love seat.

  Breathe, Alice, breathe! Why was I getting so asinine about some loner science geek with a significant height impediment and a crucial promptness impairment? When that gentleman is finished soiling the good linens, you are going to promptly show him the door, missy! I admonished myself.

  Twenty minutes later, Liam came out with sexy, curly hair on his collarbones and a very damp V-neck Fruit of the Loom T-shirt untucked from his wrinkled Levi’s, his soggy boots squeezed between two fingertips. “What’d I miss?” He laughed.

  “Well, about an hour and a half, to start,” I quipped.

  “About that,” he started, and then told me what happened. “First, I shouldn’t tell you this, but I changed clothes about twenty times before coming over here, like some kind of freak. I mean, guys aren’t supposed to care, right? Then, speaking of blow-dryers, you’ll love this: I have to blow-dry my hair for, like forty minutes to get it right, because it gets all curly when it’s rainy and it looks horrible, so I have to dry it and dry and dry it like a motherfucker so I don’t look like a girl. My dad always told me I looked like a girl when I was growing up. His favorite thing was to call me ‘girlie.’ Drove me nuts. Anyway, so then finally get out of my place, but I leave the piece of paper with your address on it at my house, but I’m already late and I’m pretty sure I remember the street, so I just keep driving, and I figure I’ll see your car since it’s so memorably hideous—no offense! Where’d you get that thing? The pinstripes alone will blind a person. Anyway, I’m speeding like a bat outta hell, and I practically spin out at that intersection by AM/PM, you know the one, right? That place is Grand Central Crackhead-ville. Anyway, this guy pulling out of AM/PM gets all pissed at me and flips me the bird and starts following me down P Street and wanting to start some road rage drag race or something. Crazy, right?”

  In no point in this story was there a moment for me to interrupt, comment, or so much as reply to a question. I simply listened, nodding, looking back and forth between his pale, pale eyes and the rain streaming down the window, my green eyes like the automated peepers on a Japanese cat clock.

  “Finally I just slam on my brakes, turn down an alley, and totally lose him, but by then, I’m halfway to downtown, and then I have to circle back up to midtown, and then I’m fucking beyond the beyond late, if you know how that feels, and so finally I get here, and sure enough, your car is parked right out in front of your place, which I couldn’t miss if I wanted to—seriously, what the hell is that? That car is some funny shit! Anyway, now I’m thinking I’ve got it made, that probably you live in this house because A, your car’s in front, and B, it’s a pretty white Victorian and it looks like the kind of place you’d live in and, C, there’s all those ferns hanging from the porch and you’re from Mississippi and the ferns remind me of some house in the Deep South and then bam! I see you standing in the window like some goddamned Scarlett O’Hara waiting for my arrival, and I’m thinking, Damn, this is your lucky day, Liam!”

  Good thing he thought it was his lucky day, as it clearly was not going to be his lucky night. By that time, I was starting to regret opening the door. His hair was still curled around his collarbones in the most appealing way, but his mouth was moving in a way that reminded me of those hungry baby birds, blind still, gulping for food, who don’t care if they get it from their mother or an upturned trash can. They’re just hungry.

  “So then, I get my statement paper and the flowers and I hop outta the truck and I see all those people coming out of t
he church, and one of them, this stick-up-the-ass lady, asks me, ‘Are you here to pick him up? He said his son was coming to pick him up.’ And I look down and there’s this old dude and he’s just lyin’ in the gutter right in front of your house! You didn’t see him? No? Really? No? He was just lyin’ there, old white dude, jeans and boots and Pendleton? Nice Pendleton, too. My dad used to wear that kind. You know the plaid kind that’s kind of blended together, not the real sharp plaid? That kind. So anyway, he’s lyin’ there with his GD hat on his chest like he’s takin’ a nap! But, man, you could smell him a mile away. Whooooeee! I know that smell like, well, not like the back of my hand, ’cause that don’t make no sense, but like something—I can’t think of right now, ’cause that’s a smell I know. The old dude reeks of whiskey. Like he’s sweating it. Like he’s breathing it, you know? Like he pisses it and bleeds it. Whiskey’s something you can’t mix up with other smells, you know? No? I know whiskey. I could smell whiskey from a mile away. I could smell whiskey in a field of three hundred angry skunks. I could smell whiskey if I was lying down face-first in fresh tar. I could smell whiskey, well, you get the idea. Anyway, there’s this old dude. You really didn’t see him? That’s weird. Do you wear glasses? Anyway, this lady, she’s just plowin’ right ahead, sure I’m this old dude’s son, and she’s insisting that I take him home right now. She doesn’t even let me get a word in edgewise. Don’t you hate it when people do that? And she also says that he is, quote unquote, not getting credit for attending the meeting because he did not attend the meeting; she was there the whole time and he did nothing but come in and sign his name and walk right out and apparently drain the contents of a cheap bottle of his, quote unquote, preference. Can you believe that? She says, ‘His preference.’ Like she’s talking about his favorite food or his favorite side of the bed. I’m telling you, I was not a fan of this lady. She’s just like the person in school who sits in the front of the class and raises their hand every goddamned time, even when the teacher has already called on them.”

  That person would be me, I thought.

  “Well, hell, I tried to tell her a few times that I was not this old dude’s son, but after a while—get this! The old guy, he starts puttin’ his hand on my arm, ’cause by now I got him sitting up on the curb by my truck. He starts sayin’ to me, ‘Son, son, thank you for coming, son!’ Crazy shit! But kind of sad, too. Because, you know, I really felt sorry for the guy. I mean, he wasn’t a bad guy or anything, he was just really, really drunk. We’ve all been there, right? So I figured I’d start off slow—I asked him if he knew where he lived. I asked him if he could walk home. The lady—she was kind of hanging around with a few other people from the meeting—she came back over and asked me straight out if I was going to take him home. I told her, ‘Yes, I will take care of it.’ But even that wasn’t good enough for her! She told me she was going to stay there to, quote unquote, see that I took my father home or she was calling the police! Man, I didn’t know what to do. I mean, who knows what this old dude did to these people. Probably nothing. Though they were seriously something pissed at him. But he didn’t seem like a bad guy to me, really he didn’t.”

  I had nothing to say, it seemed. I wondered why he hadn’t simply walked the ten steps to my door to at least let me know he was preoccupied with saving a drunk.

  “Let me tell you a story, okay? You don’t mind, right? I remember once when I was about ten, my dad didn’t come home one night. Now, this was not an unusual occurrence. My dad didn’t come home lots of nights. Sometimes he didn’t come home for weeks at a time. My mom just did what she could until he showed up again, and she never asked questions, you know? But she got a phone call this time. I remember it was real early in the morning. She told me, ‘Liam, you got to go downtown and get your dad.’ Now, this was in Laynesville, Missouri, a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. There was one little nothing hotel, and I can’t think of any reason my dad would be at the hotel. I mean, what do I know? I’m, like, ten or something. Did I say that already? No? So I got dressed and walked into town, wondering the whole way what I was going to find when I got there. It was a long walk. The day was starting by then and people were starting to go to work, or get off night shifts, head to school, open up the café, the postman starting on his rounds, you know, everybody and anybody. And I’m walking into town to go get my dad. And the hotel is right in the middle of town. It’s an old-fashioned building, just like every other building in Laynesville, with a low brick front and a big glass front with LAYNESVILLE HOTEL printed across. And underneath the printing is a kind of wooden bench under the window, and on that bench is my dad, tattooed as he is to high heaven, in—get this—only his tighty-whities and his cowboy boots, with his pistol stuck in one boot, snoring away, shit drunk.”

  Liam started laughing, almost uncontrollably, tears welling up in his eyes, his face going red. I laughed right along with him, but inside I felt like someone kicked me right in the middle of my chest.

  “And I gotta go inside the hotel, into the lobby, wake him up, get him up on his feet. That was no easy thing, let me tell you! Because believe me, he’s as drunk as he was when he passed out there, whenever the hell that was. My dad’s missing clothes are nowhere in sight, and no one is offering anything to spare. I’m ten and I’m wearing polyester slacks and a polyester rainbow striped polo shirt, so nothing I’m wearing is fit to be shared. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that I have to prop him up, staggering all the way back home, in the light of day, back through town, back through the rich neighborhoods, across the proverbial tracks, past not one but two buggies full of shocked Amish, back down the country road, back to bumfuck nowhere to where we live in someone’s rented basement with a hose coming in through a tiny window above the kitchen sink as our only running water. Just like that, with my dead-drunk dad, in his boots and undershorts, I gotta walk all the way home. How humiliating, right? I remember one of the Amish men saying something nasty to me, and I got all pissed off and started throwing handfuls of rocks from the side of the road at the back of the buggy. My dad thought that was the funniest thing he ever saw. It all seems funny now, actually. But it’s not.”

  He stopped talking then, drawing his knees up to his chest, resting his chin on them, suddenly looking about ten years old. I wanted to touch him but didn’t dare. Mama taught me—don’t lay a hand on a man in tears. Mama was like that. She didn’t mother me much. You could say I was an unmothered girl—she didn’t keep me from being devoured by Papa, she didn’t mind laying all the weight of her personal crisis at my tiny feet, but every now and then she’d tell me a thing or two, like “Never touch a crying man; just leave him be.”

  And so in a moment like this, when Liam was crying, I held back. I knew a man broke open could mean one of two things: too tender, too mean.

  I wanted to touch him. I knew the wounds were falling out of him right there in front of me, but I didn’t know yet that I was willing to pick them up and put them in my mouth, that I was willing to devour them one by one until he was free and I was holding down all the pain for the both of us.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath, poured himself a glass of sake, and continued what somehow felt now like a confession, like a long-winded, tenderhearted apology.

  When he spoke again, his voice was so quiet I had to lean it to hear him, the rain falling hard enough now to drain out the strange, velvety sound of his sorrowful voice.

  “To tell you the truth, that old dude tonight reminded me of a hell-of-a-lot-more-decent version of my dad, and I didn’t want that snotty lady to call the police on him, and he just kept telling me, ‘You’re a good son, son. Thank you, son.’ So I just folded him into my truck and took off. Did you hear me tear out? It turns out he was at least halfway sober enough to direct me to where he lives, which turns out to be a halfway house in Alkali Flats. I thought about going home after that and just calling you, and I probably would’ve if I’d realized how much time had passed, but I really
wanted to see you. It’s all I could think about, all night long. Oh shit, the flowers!”

  He ran back out to his truck then and brought in a bouquet of delicate purple wildflowers mixed with sage and rosemary that I stuck in one of the now-empty sake bottles.

  We sat on the floor and talked for what seemed hours about the things that people who are going to be lovers talk about—the best and the worst of themselves. We told one another all the pretty stories: all the details that painted us in our best, shining glory. We told one another all the terrible stories: all the details that revealed the most fragile, damaged corners of our wounded souls. I turned the mixtape over two or three times.

  “That’s quite a tragedy,” he said, looking up at the bookcase.

  “Indeed,” I agreed.

  “You’re the only girl I know who uses the word indeed in regular conversation, you know that?” he asked, brushing his thumb across my lower lip, which was just a tiny bit chapped from all the lip stain.

  I may have nodded.

  “It must break your heart, huh?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The books,” he said in an almost whisper.

  “Indeed,” I said, smiling, then started to cry.

  In the wide world of people roaming their lives, looking for love and answers, there are certain people—people who have been to hell and back, lived to tell the tale—who recognize in one another at once someone who has survived brutality, who wears that same scrappy oblivion disguised as survival on their sleeve. When you live through a childhood made out of cruelty, a childhood of raised skin, of hungry nights and the tender, awful ache between the thighs, you cannot help but display it: the mark. We both had it: Liam recognized it in me and I in him.

  I tried to hide my face, screwed up with tears. Liam turned my chin, kissed me.

  I turned, kissed back. We rose and walked across to my bed. And I even reminded myself, during that first heavy breath, that fall to the bed: do not close your eyes.