by John Jodzio
Copyright © 2010 John Jodzio
Soft Skull Edition 2017
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available.
Cover design by Kelly Winton
Book design by Sarah DeYoung
eISBN 978-1-59376-669-6
SOFT SKULL
1140 Broadway
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The following stories were previously published in a slightly different form in the following publications:
“The Bog Body,” Rake Magazine; “Flight Path,” One Story; “Mail Game,” In Posse Review; “Gravity,” Florida Review; “Make-a-wish,” Pindeldyboz, reprinted in Big Ugly Review; “The Dojo” and “Vessels,” Pindeldyboz; “Monarchs” and “Shoo, Shoo,” MNArtists; “Kalispell,” Minnesota; “Inventory,” Bullfight Review; “The Barnacle” and “If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home,” Opium Magazine; “Whiskers,” Five Chapters; “Alejandra,” Barrelhouse; “Colonel Cheese,” NatBrut; “Sleepy Mom,” Tin House Online; “Sugarfoot,” Yemassee.
FOR KATE AND THEO
CONTENTS
Colonel Cheese Is Closed On Mondays
Sleepy Mom
Sugarfoot
The Ear
Willem and Trudy, Deuce and Me
The Bog Body
Flight Path
Mail Game
Gravity
Make-a-wish
Monarchs
Everyone Prank Calls The Clown
Kalispell
Vessels
The Deadsitter
Inventory
The Barnacle
Homecoming
Protocol
Shoo, Shoo
The Egg
Whiskers
The Dojo
Alejandra
If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home
The Girl with the Gambling Mother
COLONEL CHEESE IS CLOSED ON MONDAYS
We lock the doors and pull our liquor from our purses and backpacks. Jake gets the whippets from the walk-in fridge. Cesar yells “Watch this!” and rips a Raleigh phone book in half. It’s Sunday night. Colonel Cheese is closed on Mondays.
We’re still in our work clothes, black button downs and red suspenders. There’s pizza sauce ground into the carpet and the high chairs need to be uncrumbed. The singing robot bears up on stage are still hot to the touch. I pour tequila into a blue raspberry slushie and my assistant manager, Tom, hooks his arm through mine.
“Alexa,” he says, “fifty bucks says you can’t eat a pound of butter in two minutes.”
I’m twenty-six. My ex-fiancée, Michael, called off our wedding six months ago. A few weeks later, fueled by grief, I won a nacho eating contest. Since then I’ve been hooked, spent my weekends traveling up and down the East Coast eating massive amounts of food as quickly as I can. Next weekend, I’ll drive to Charlottesville to try to eat ten pounds of ham in ten minutes. After that I’ll be in Vermont seeing how fast I can shovel two gallons of cottage cheese down my throat.
“I liked it better when you painted landscapes,” my mom tells me. “I liked it better when you painted meandering rivers and limestone bluffs.”
Last weekend I boxed up my oils and brushes and stuffed them into my storage space. For now, I’m done with nature; for now I’m done arching my hand carefully across a canvas to embellish a ripple in a creek or to make the evening sky ache with ochres and umbers.
“No one ever chanted my name when I painted landscapes,” I tell my mom.
Tom slaps a fifty-dollar bill on the table. I waitress like a lot of other people waitress, to afford to do the thing I love which won’t pay the bills. That used to be painting, but now it’s hearing people cheer as I push potato skin after potato skin down my throat.
“Are you gonna puss out?” Tom asks.
Last week Tom bet me fifty bucks that I wouldn’t take the garbage to the dumpster wearing only my bra and panties. The week before that, he bet me I wouldn’t swallow one of the bottom feeders in the aquarium. I can’t tell if Tom doesn’t think I’ll do these things or if they’re just things he’ll pay to see.
“Bring it on,” I say.
Most of us at Colonel Cheese are newly single. Most of us are angry about that fact. Linda’s boyfriend broke up with her because she tried to change him. Tom’s wife left him because he’s Tom. Jake’s girlfriend caught him tonguing the back of Linda’s knee in his pickup. I brought my wedding dress to work and set it on fire in the parking lot. The dress melted more than it burned; left a speed bump of white goo on the asphalt I drive over each day when I come to work.
Tom sets the butter down on the table and everyone gathers around. All of us wear nametags with fake names when we work. Right now I’m wearing a nametag that says Josie. Linda’s nametag says Constance. Cesar’s wearing a nametag that says Jason B. even though there is no other Jason’s, fake or otherwise, who work with us.
“When you get bitched at with a name that’s not your own the bitching doesn’t stick,” Linda told me when I first started.
I stare at the butter. It’s only been out of the fridge for a minute, but it’s already sweating.
“Go!” Tom yells.
I finish the butter in ninety seconds; slap my hands down on the table. Tom forks over the fifty. Everyone cheers.
“Time to dance!” Cesar yells.
Jake dims the lights, Tom cranks the sound system. Cesar grabs my hand to pull me onto the dancefloor, but I wave him off. A few Sundays ago, he tried to kiss me, but I slid my lips out of the way before he could.
“I’m not ready,” I told him.
But now I decide I am. I stand up and shuffle my feet across the carpet, move slowly toward Cesar. I build up a bunch of static electricity in my body. When I get close I reach out my finger and touch it to Cesar’s chest, watch it crackle with light.
SLEEPY MOM
My mom has narcolepsy so she bought a student driver car with a steering wheel in the passenger side seat. Whenever she drives anywhere, I ride shotgun. If she falls asleep while she’s driving I’m supposed to elbow her awake. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes when she nods off instead of hitting the brakes I press down on my gas pedal and drive over to the strip mall where my ex-girlfriend Sadie works.
Sadie just got her license, but I’ve got six months to go. Sadie works at Elaine’s Boutique, a crappy jewelry store that sells shitty silver pendants and fake gold chains. No one goes to Elaine’s so most days Sadie’s new boyfriend, Eric, stops by to keep her company. Sometimes Sadie and Eric do their geometry homework, but mostly they snort Sadie’s Ritalin and kiss long and hard like their tongues are a geometry problem they don’t ever want to solve.
“Quit going there,” my friend Jason keeps telling me. “Remove yourself from the equation.”
I adjust the focus on my binoculars, watch Eric snake his hand up Sadie’s shirt. My mom gently snores in the seat beside me, drool welling
in the corner of her mouth.
“But that used to be me,” I tell Jason.
My dad used to drive us everywhere, but he bolted three months ago. He sends us a letter every few weeks. His last letter said he was working on a fishing boat in Alaska. The postmark on the last letter was stamped “Cleveland,” so we don’t know what to believe.
“Cleveland or Alaska,” my mom says. “The only thing that matters is he’s gone.”
This morning my mom and I drive to the grocery store. She makes it three blocks before her eyes slide shut. I drive the rest of the way. As I angle the car into a parking spot, Jason calls.
“Party at Clare Lowalke’s tonight,” he says. “Can you get the car?”
I look over at my mom, fast asleep, her face mashed against the driver’s side window, her mouth wide open.
“No problem,” I tell Jason.
I ask my mom if she wants to go to the Valley-Hi. It’s a shithole drive-in outside town that’s somehow hanging on.
“Wow,” my mom says, “that would be lovely.”
My mom takes a bath before we go. I stand outside the bathroom door listening to her sing. If she stops singing it means she’s drowning. If she stops singing, I need to rush in and pull her out of the tub. She’s only stopped singing in the bathtub once. I ran in and pulled her out of the tub right before her face slid under the water.
“We should do this kind of thing more often,” she yells to me through the bathroom door. “We should make this a weekly thing.”
“Absolutely we should,” I say.
- - - - - - - -
On the way to the movie, my mom zonks out. I drive over to Jason’s and pick him up.
“This is insane,” he says. “What if she wakes up?”
“She won’t,” I tell him.
After I park the car I roll down the passenger side window for my mom. We walk inside Clare Lowalke’s house, buy a cup for the keg. Everyone here is older than us, juniors and seniors, but they all know who I am.
“You’re the kid with the sleepy mom, right?” one guy asks. “Does she smoke a lot of weed? Is that why she can’t stay awake?”
I know Sadie’s around here somewhere. I ditch Jason and wander around the party. I find her in one of the back bedrooms, passed out in Eric’s arms. I wrote her another note explaining how special we were together and how special we could be again. When I set the note down next to her on the bed, her eyes snap open.
“What in the fuck?” she says, crumpling up the note and chucking it at me.
“I thought maybe we could talk things over again,” I say. “I miss you.”
“Maybe you’ll understand this best,” Sadie says, curling up in Eric’s arms and closing her eyes.
After I drop Jason off, I poke my mom awake.
“You slept through the whole movie,” I say.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she asks.
“You looked so peaceful,” I tell her. “You look like you needed the sleep.”
I want to say something about Sadie, about how I’m going crazy over this breakup, but I don’t. I keep my mouth shut, my hands at ten and two.
“How was the movie?” she asks.
“Really sad,” I tell her.
The next day my mom and I take the car to get the oil changed. She falls asleep and I drive over to the strip mall one last time. While I’m sitting in the parking lot watching Sadie a young mother brings in her baby into Elaine’s Boutique to get her ears pierced. The kid’s maybe a year old, dressed in a pink frilly dress. I watch through my binoculars as Sadie props the baby up in the piercing chair. The baby’s face is so damn happy, smiling and giggling, but then the piercing gun rifles through her ear and the baby’s face is transformed into an angry red ball.
Sadie’s a pro. While the baby screeches, she holds out a mirror in front of the baby’s face. She whispers, shh, shh, look, look, little one, look how pretty. Soon the baby sees the jewels in her ears and the tears slide away. I find a sad song on the radio and I put the car in drive. I scream out the lyrics as I speed off. Now matter how loud I sing, my mom doesn’t stir at all.
SUGARFOOT
A week after his stroke, Nelson took a crowbar to the padlock on the barn door. He found Corrine’s Andalusian and slipped a bridle over the horse’s head. He tucked himself against Sugarfoot’s flank and they made their way down the red rock driveway and into the trailer attached to his idling pickup. By the time the sun rose, they were halfway across Kansas.
When Nelson stopped for gas outside Topeka, he left a voice-mail with the woman from Camp Courage, telling her he had the horse for the sick kids that he’d promised. After the call, he took Sugarfoot out of the trailer and pranced him around —the horse had that strange, bouncing gait – it looked like he hated for his hooves to even touch the ground. They were a pair. Nelson’s left leg dragged behind the rest of his body as he they circled around a blinking sign advertising fried chicken and cheap cigarettes.
Nelson was dying. Or he wasn’t. No one could decide. The night doctor at Mercy said one thing; the day doctor the complete opposite. Back and forth, those jackasses, one telling Nelson to put his affairs in order, the other telling him that he’d live twenty years with certain dietary tweaks. Lab tests, scans of his head and heart, a week straight of being prodded and poked.
“How about now?” one of the nurses asked, pressing her thumb into his thigh. “Feel anything now?”
Nelson was sixty-two, too surly to be micro-managed, tired of wasting time fretting over the certainty of uncertainty. That last night in the hospital, when Corrine did not visit, Nelson yanked the wires from his chest and the IVs out of his arms and limped out of the hospital doors and down the white line of the county road all the way back home.
Nelson stole Sugarfoot out of spite. He stole the horse because he and Corrine had some good years living in a cabin in the shadows of the Tetons and then two months ago she’d come inside with a handful of cherry tomatoes curled in her blouse and told him she was leaving.
“Is there someone else?” he asked.
“Nope,” she told him, dumping the tomatoes into a colander and turning on the faucet. “There’s only us.”
Corrine was ten years younger than him, skinny, still good-looking. Over the next week, Nelson stalked her. One afternoon he followed her Jeep to the Super Valu and watched her come out of the store with an ear of sweet corn and a can of soup. The next afternoon, he tailed her to the stables and watched her canter Sugarfoot over the show course.
One night, Nelson followed Corrine and her best friend Josie over to the Riverside Lounge. After three hours, the women skittered outside. Nelson slid lower in his seat, but Corrine noticed his truck and tromped over.
“I asked for space,” she yelled. “It’s a simple goddamn request.”
“Space is bullshit,” he snapped. “I never agreed to it.”
“If you could see yourself right now,” she said, “it wouldn’t be such a mystery why I left.”
After Corrine stormed off, Nelson drove home. He drank straight from a liter bottle of Don Rico and passed out on in the rotted wicker chair on his porch. When he woke up the next morning, he couldn’t feel the left half of his body.
The next time Nelson and Sugarfoot stopped was outside Des Moines. Nelson took his hunting knife from his pocket and sliced up a Granny Smith, fed it to the horse with his good hand. He went inside the truck stop and paid for a shower. As he stood under the hot water he pressed his thumb into his thigh, over and over.
Nelson kept hoping there was something inside his body that simply needed to be reset, that one morning he would wake up and everything would be back to normal. He dried himself off and parted his hair. His new face was hard to grow accustomed to—one side of his mouth falling away, the other side set in a wincing grin.
While he ate his dinner, he paged through the brochure for Camp Courage. It was full of bald kids with ravenous eyes traversin
g the trials on their horses, able to forget their circumstances for a bit.
When Nelson finished his dinner, he walked out of the truck stop and saw the gate of the horse trailer swinging in the wind. Sugarfoot was gone. At first, Nelson thought he’d had another stroke, that he was hallucinating. He kicked around the bedding, knelt down and burrowed his hands into the straw, like that damn horse was hiding somewhere under there.
When he came out of the trailer, Nelson saw a woman stand-ing on top of a dumpster. She was staring out the highway, her eyes tracking each car that sped past. The woman’s bangs were cut straight across her forehead and her body was swimming in a thick wool sweater. There was a cigarette housed behind her left ear. She glanced at her watch and then refocused her gaze on the road.
“Someone stole the horse I stole,” Nelson yelled up to her. “Can you believe that shit?”
As he walked closer, he could tell that this woman had been crying—her mascara tributaried down her cheeks and then disappeared down into the neck of her sweater.
“I heard some kids giggling a while back,” she said, finally looking down at him. “Maybe there was a whinny in the middle of the laughter.”
In the dim light, Nelson followed Sugarfoot’s prance marks out of the trailer, but they disappeared when the ground turned to blacktop. He stared out toward a stand of trees in the distance as the woman climbed down off the dumpster and stood next to him. Her arms were thin and fingers bony. She placed one of her hands on Nelson’s bad shoulder. He couldn’t feel it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t happy it was there.
“I’m Ellen,” she told him. “And I’m thinking that it’s best that I’m not alone right now, okay?”
Nelson huffed down a path worn through the switchgrass. Ellen thought the kids had taken Sugarfoot this way. Nelson fanned a flashlight in front of her feet like he was an usher guiding her down a darkened aisle.
“I ran inside to buy cigarettes,” Ellen told him, “and then my fiancé Steve just drove off. No warning or nothing. When I get back to the gas pump, there’s no car and no Steve. He did this to me one other time after we got in a fight. This time though, we were getting along just fine.”