by John Jodzio
I pleaded with her to take a personal day, but she waved me off.
“I write the thank you’s. I pen the love notes. I tell the spouses sorry,” she said. “There aren’t any days off.”
She was swamped at both her jobs—everyone in Cuffs River kept on dying and cheating on each other and having birthdays and anniversaries and she had to put whatever it was they told her onto a tiny card and stuff it into a tiny envelope. Or fit everything on top of a sheet cake.
“Here,” I said, shoving a drink box at Carl. This was one of the rules—keep him hydrated. If you didn’t, he’d have a seizure where he’d try to bite his tongue off and you’d have to grab his arms and legs and pin him down so he didn’t knock a bookcase on top of himself.
I went to get some paper towels to clean up his mess. I listened to him slurp down the drink box, burp loudly, overemphasize an Ahhhhh. He moved over and started to open another miniature candy bar, like nothing had happened. I ran over and snatched the bag from him. I put it back into the cabinet, snapped the padlock back on the door. He glared at me, pursed his lips and shook his head, but I pointed over to the pile of puke on the floor.
“You really think that is a good idea?” I asked. “Just tell me you do. Tell me all about it, buddy.”
I got down on my knees, wiped up what I could with paper towels and then started scrubbing the carpet with a sponge. Sad to say, but I was used to Carl’s puke by now. The sour apple smell it gave off hardly even fazed me. I tried not to get angry about it anymore. This was just Carl. He was a force of nature and it was better to just resign yourself to that fact.
The first Saturday we biked up to Buena Vista, I had to convince Carl to come with me.
“Why?” he asked. “These are the dog days of summer. The dog days. Way too hot.”
“Turnbull,” I told him. For me, this was about other things, but I knew saying Turnbull’s name was a call to arms for Carl.
“Tooornbill is gone,” he said pointing up at the ceiling in our apartment. “Not coming back.”
“If you let him be gone, he’s gone,” I told Carl. “But,” I said pointing at my heart, “he can live here.” I knew this was a fucked-up thing to do, to play with Carl’s emotions like this, but the truth was that I didn’t want to bike up to Buena Vista alone.
Carl sat silent, mulled it over.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Dog days be damned.”
He still looked reluctant when we got on our bikes, so on our way up to Buena Vista I took him past the spot where Turnbull had driven off the bridge. It was on the road just before the turnoff to the paper factory that made our town smell like burnt toast. The city had put up a cement barrier there on the bridge, but they’d never replaced the guard rail. The metal was splintered and gaping, like a mouth stuck open in a scream.
“See?” I said. “No tire rubber. No skid. When you don’t skid, it means you want it. It means you want whatever is ahead.”
I’ll admit, I’d been thinking about Turnbull a lot lately too. Probably not as much as Carl, who thought about him almost every waking moment. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I thought back on all the times that Turnbull had yelled at me to charge a grounder. How he told me that my footwork was shit. How he showed me to drop the end of the bat to deaden a bunt. Who would do that now? Who was going to tell me what I needed to work on? Was I supposed to figure that stuff out by myself?
Plus there were the postcards.
At our team banquet the week before, I found out that before he died Turnbull had mailed postcards to the team. During the banquet, my teammates and I got together in the bathroom and compared them. Carl and I hadn’t gotten one, but we looked them over as they got passed around. Turnbull was dead and yet here he was, still dispensing his wisdom. The postcards he’d sent out were these old time black-and-white nudes, girls with shy smiles on their faces and mounds of hair covering their crotches. We read the things Turnbull had written on them out loud. Some of his words were positive—simple stuff like, “Keep your head up, Grundahl.” Others were more personal in tone. “Your father is a drunk, Highsmith. The sooner you and your mother ship out of Cuffs River, the better.”
In the note he sent our first baseman, Aaron Blasgovich, Turnbull gave pointed advice.
“Get as much pussy as you can before you die,” he wrote. “Trust me. On your deathbed you won’t think back on your lovely wife. You’ll think back on the nasty whores.”
Carl and I looked at the postcards, laughed at them along with everyone else, but there was no way not to feel left out.
“What about us?” Carl asked me. “Where’s our postcard?”
“Maybe he didn’t have our new address,” I told him, even though I didn’t believe that was the case. “Maybe it got lost in the mail.”
Carl pondered that for a second, but then he started choking on a piece of hard candy I’d given him. He was never supposed to get hard candy, but he’d begged and begged. The problem with hard candy was that Carl always lost track of what he was doing and just swallowed it. This time, I’d made him promise that he’d concentrate on what he was doing, but he’d forgotten. Luckily, I was well schooled in the Heimlich by now, so I calmly came up behind him and pulled up on his ribs. The piece of candy flew across the bathroom and landed on the tile. It shattered into a bunch of tiny red shards.
“Maybe you are right,” Carl said without missing a beat.
Carl and I wore our baseball uniforms every time we rode up to Buena Vista. We were in full gear, stirrups and baseball pants. We had on the black mesh tops with “Kiko’s Heating and Cooling” on the front and our names and numbers screen printed on the back.
On the road there, we rode past the abandoned car factory where my father had worked before he’d split town. He worked there for ten years and then one day he was replaced by a robot welder. Then the robot welder wasn’t cheap enough and the whole company moved to Mexico. Now the factory sat empty, rusted barbed wire running along the top of the chain link.
We rode past that recycling place with all the dead computer monitors in a big pile. Past the place that had that tire fire a few years back that turned the sky black for a week.
After about an hour of biking up hills, zigzagging back and forth up the switchback roads, it flattened out. We came upon the town sign. Buena Vista. Population 64,518. We took a turn off the main drag and rode into the residential area.
Most of the time it was hard to keep track of where we were. All of the houses looked the same. They were all huge and painted beige and they all had neatly cut lawns. I don’t know how we told these places apart, but it didn’t really matter. Maybe I stuck my dick in some of the places with dog doors or mail slots two or three times. Maybe more. Maybe it was twenty. It wasn’t like I was keeping track. I was angry and out for revenge. There wasn’t any sort of logbook that I kept—I just knelt down by the front door of any house that looked safe and unbuckled my pants and put my dick inside and shook it around. If I had to piss, I pissed.
Was I worried about dogs? Fuck yes. Was I worried about people? Sure. That was why I needed Carl as my lookout.
Even though I knew Carl did not comprehend the significance of this act of revenge, I went on and on about it, about why we were here, why this was necessary.
“We are not going to take the hand we were dealt,” I told him. “It is about them having all this and us having shit. Sticking our dicks in these houses is symbolic.”
“For Tornbill too,” Carl would add. Carl had this exaggerated head nod that sometimes took over his whole body and you had to put your hand on his shoulder to settle him back down.
“Yes, of course, for Turnbull,” I said.
The best part of the day had nothing to do with the houses. The best part was riding our bikes back down the hill, knowing what we had accomplished. Revenge is a sweet fruit, and hearing our bikes fly down that huge hill, our spinning wheels whirring loud and constant, it was like a rousing
cheer that was always just a little ways off.
One Saturday, about a month after we started to exact our revenge on Buena Vista, I stuck my dick into a house and met someone. Carl was supposed to be watching the door, but he’d gotten tired. He was sitting on the stoop paging through a comic book, not paying attention.
“Someone touched me,” I told him. “Tugged on it, then let it go. Then giggled, I think.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Not the wind again?”
I had made this accusation before. I thought I had felt some other fingers on me at various times in Buena Vista, but hadn’t ever been able to get any corroboration.
“This time I know what I felt,” I said. “This time it wasn’t the wind.”
I tucked myself back in, started walking back to my bike and then the door swung open. There stood a girl. She was around my age, with a small nose and her blonde hair up in pigtails. She was wearing a track sweatshirt and some running shorts.
“My father is in his den with some clients,” she said. “But I still could go tell him what you just did. I still might.”
At that moment all I could think about was my mom’s face when she picked us up at the station, how disappointed she’d be. I looked over at Carl. I saw he was thinking about getting ready to puke, his lips smacking together. If I played it cool, like this was not out of the ordinary, I might settle his stomach before something happened.
“If you were going to do it, you would have done it by now,” I told the girl.
The girl looked us up and down. It wasn’t hard for her to tell where we were from, what was wrong with Carl.
“I guess you’re right,” she said.
She turned and walked in the house without closing the door. The back of her sweatshirt said “Lily Buns.” She began to walk up the stairs and then motioned for us to follow.
“C’mon already if you’re coming,” she told us.
We tiptoed up the stairs behind her. The air inside her house smelled like lilacs. There were flowers spilling out of vases every-where you looked. She led us up to her room. There was a small fridge up there sitting by her bedside and she walked over to it and pulled out a couple of Cokes and handed them to us. We sat down on the side of her bed. Carl snapped open his Coke and started slurping it down.
“Slow down,” I cautioned.
Carl nodded at me and then his whole body started nodding and I put my hand on him and stopped his nodding. Lily Buns was watching the entire thing.
“Just so you know, my father would kick my ass if he knew you were up here,” she said. “He’s really strict.”
Lily Buns walked over to her closet and got out a belt. Then she took it and hit it on the side of her bookshelf. It made a loud thwacking sound that echoed throughout the room.
“Sometimes my father hits me with this,” she told us. “But then he buys me things. I guess it evens out.”
Her eyes started to fill with tears, but then she smiled and they slid back inside her head. I wanted to say something, say how bad that sounded, how much that sucked that her dad did that to her, but she just kept on talking, not leaving any room for me to speak. I looked over at Carl again; he’d moved over by the window and was looking through her stack of computer games.
“My mom’s dead,” she told us. “Car accident. Six months ago. She was fucking my dad’s CPA. My parents were probably going to get a divorce anyway. But then she died so they didn’t have to. That fucking CPA came to the funeral, made a big scene. He kept on yelling that he deserved to be there too. He ran up and grabbed onto the urn and started moaning and screaming about how unfair life was. My dad walked up and punched him right in the nose. There was this trail of blood that ran right from her urn out into the parking lot where his car was parked.”
Lily Buns paced around her room, picking up things on her dresser, twirling them around in her hands. She wouldn’t sit still; she kept on touching down on furniture for a second and then bouncing back up like she had been shocked.
“I’ve heard about you two,” she said. “Jamie Cavanaugh’s mom complained to my dad about somebody pissing on her rug.”
I looked around. Everything was really clean here. Everything was in its place. Her pillows were fluffed and her bed looked comfortable. It was warm and the lights were low. My arms started feeling heavy. I stood up, shook them out, moved over to the window. I knew I shouldn’t relax. I knew that this wasn’t safe, but it really felt like it was.
“That was us,” Carl said to her. “That piss was his.”
I moved over by her CD rack and flipped through what was there. Lily Buns walked over near me, whispered in my ear. I saw Carl lean in from where he was standing, straining to hear what she was saying.
“Make your brother go wait outside,” she said.
“For what?” I whispered back.
“I want to see it again,” she said.
I looked over at Carl. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed now. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. We hadn’t planned on any of this. We’d been invited in. Some girl was asking to see my dick. This didn’t feel like revenge anymore.
“No,” I said. “We’ve got to get back home.”
She turned to Carl.
“Hey you,” she said. “You want another Coke?”
Carl nodded, but I answered for him, “He’s finished. We’re leaving.”
She ignored me, kept on talking to Carl.
“If you wait in the bathroom,” she told him, “you can have two Cokes.” She took a can out of the fridge and walked out into the hall. “One now. And then the other one if you sit quiet while your brother and I talk. Do you understand?”
I didn’t know what to do. Carl would probably be fine with his comic book, but then again, who knew what could happen with him? Lily Buns set the Coke down in the bathroom and Carl walked in there and sat down on the floor.
“I’m right in here,” I said as she closed the door. “If there’s any trouble.”
Carl couldn’t have cared less about being left alone. He was already chugging that pop, flipping through his comic book.
Lily came back over and sat on her bed.
“So we’re alone,” she said. One of her feet was moving in a circle. Her chest was arched forward.
I scanned the room as I walked over to her. There was a laptop on her desk. She had this science set that was full of beakers and glass things and what looked to be a Bunsen burner sitting on a table on the other side of the room. It looked like it hadn’t been used at all. There were pictures everywhere. One of her in a cheerleading outfit holding pompons up in the air. One of her running in a track meet. Grabbing a baton from another girl.
“Where were we?” she asked.
I didn’t have time to answer because she immediately jumped up and pushed me down on her bed. She straddled me and then she pulled her sweatshirt over her head. She was wearing a light blue bra. She moved her lips into mine. I had gotten some action before with a couple of girls in Cuffs River, but nothing close to this. She pulled her mouth away from me.
“Your turn,” she said. She pulled my baseball jersey off over my head and then she slid off my shoes. She unbuckled my pants. I turned to look at the door, but she spun me back towards her, pressed up against my chest. She started to kiss me hard, smacking her teeth against mine. That is when I noticed the tears. There was no whimpering, just tears, streaming from her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“This is how it works,” she said. She sounded calm; her voice wasn’t shaky at all. She pulled off her shorts. She wasn’t wearing any panties under them. “This is how it works with me, okay?”
Tears kept coming down her cheeks. She looked sad, but angry too, her mouth was twitching, like she was getting ready to yell. I was hard and she grabbed my dick in her hand. She crouched down and put her mouth near it. I let out a little moan.
“See,” she said, “it’s okay. It
’s really no problem.”
Soon though, she was openly sobbing, her shoulders heaving up and down. I pushed her away.
“This is weird, right?”
“It’s okay,” she said to me. “That’s just how I am. It’s fine. You should just lay back and enjoy it.”
I was listening for Carl outside now. I heard him cough. I knew that I needed to get out of here soon. This wasn’t going anywhere good.
“This was a mistake,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I pulled my pants up and started to gather my clothes from around the room.
“No,” she said. “Wait, wait. I can do whatever you want. However you want it.”
She was naked and she grabbed my arm and she tried to guide me back to bed, but I twisted out of her grasp. I had my pants and shoes on now, but I was holding the rest of my clothes in my arms. I opened the bathroom door and grabbed Carl and ran down the stairs and out the front door.
We ran across the lawn. Carl was lagging behind me a little and when he heard Lily yelling at us, he turned to look at her.
“Go, then!” she yelled. “Go on back home with your retard brother!”
Carl stopped running and turned around and stared at her. She had put her clothes back on and was standing there on her front lawn, yelling at us.
“Pussies!” she screamed. “Broke-ass fucking retard pussies!”
A strange look came over Carl’s face. I thought he was going to puke, but instead he ran at her. He was moving in his slow and plodding way and as he ran he let out a low growl. Lily Buns saw him coming and started to laugh.
“Oh great,” I heard her say.
When Carl actually got to her, she easily sidestepped him. He ran past her, his momentum carrying him into their front hedge. He fell into it, his legs kicking up in the air.
“Jesus Christ,” she said before she walked back inside.