The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  His father lifted him by the waist of his pants and hefted him into his arms. He carried Conrad the final distance home. When they crossed the threshold, his father shut the door that had been left open. He put Conrad before the stove in the kitchen and rekindled the fire.

  Conrad sat before the blazing stove in a kitchen chair. His father stood nearby, his back against the wall, his hands behind him, the shotgun at his side. He thought to bring the boy a blanket and then resumed his position. He did not speak. As Conrad remembered it, his father did not move. But he stayed there, watching while his son thawed.

  Conrad was sent to bed. He heard the front door open and shut. His father did not come back until after dark, stamping snow from his boots, walking heavily to the bedroom door. The boy’s heart beat so hard that he imagined he could make it out beneath his flesh, hidden but present. His father spoke through the closed door.

  “Pig you have to cook clean through.”

  In the morning Conrad discovered that his father had stolen a neighbor’s pig, a small thing that he had gutted in his arms while he held it like a baby. Conrad found his father’s clothes on the porch, blood frozen into the fabric, and he reconstructed the butchering. His father himself was gone. Conrad would not see him alive again.

  It occurred to him, while he lay sleepless in Abigail’s bed, to wonder about the boy who had been riding in his safety seat when Conrad crashed into the chain-link fence. How had that accident become one of the stones on which the boy’s character was built? The boy by now would be ten himself. He would no longer think another person might share his nocturnal dreams. Conrad understood that he had loved the boy.

  Electricity returned to Chapman before dawn. Abigail made coffee. Conrad had slept little, but his head was clear. The coffee was strong and gratifying. He told Abigail about the walk in winter with his father.

  “I feel better about it now,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked him. “Why on earth would you? Because you know he’s dead? Because he can’t harm you now?”

  This would be what his aunt would think, what his therapist would think.

  “It’s more specific than that,” he said. His father had meant all along to include himself. Conrad understood that now. He tried to explain. “It makes it less personal.”

  Outside, the morning snow fell onto the snow that had fallen through the night.

  A SKETCH OF HIGHWAY ON THE NAP OF A MOUNTAIN

  Let’s forbear the usual drift.

  Billy, the main guy in all this, has trouble of female origins. His dally this time entails no tangible scram. Never up, never in. But the attempt, her name is Karen, carries the same wave, and his old lady gives him the stroll. Which is what sends him to me. Back when I was one hundred per, I was the female organs Billy troubled.

  He comes calling here with nickels in his packet and a plaintiff, he tells me, that still won’t stand, even with a video in the mouth and women taking off their robes right and left on the big scream Mitsubishi.

  “My body,” he says to me, “kept the faith.”

  Did I convention how Billy and I were a pair for ten years? And he, I’m told, pulled the same stunt without me, and couldn’t get it up then, either. Even with my sister, who, I can tell you, has beauty.

  “Why did you take him back?” she asks me.

  I say, “Ten years is a big chump of your life.”

  He arrives on the porch, hands in his golfing pockets, staring out through the mosquito screens at the groves of lemon backdrop and oriental oranges. I live in the citrus desert of Arizona, where, with enough laughter, anything will flourish. Billy used to live here with me. When I push open my door, he turns and stares. No one can believe I live alone.

  “You know,” he says, and his voice is one of those familiar things, like the way some people recall music, “who I am?”

  I go, “Billy,” and wonder how dressed I am for a man who used to be the one I was wife to. His car is clocking out by the porch steps, time running down as it cools. I’m in a nightgown but have a skirt under it, as if ready for the ball.

  “It’s good to see you,” he says, and says more literal things that orbit my ears like the popsicle sticks and candy wrappers that swirm the dense water next to the canal gate. Suitcases lashed to the roof of his car make the picture crystal. He loves me again and he’s got no other bed to rest his buddy, which can, after a workout, have a sour effect, like that bathroom in some car station I can’t remember where, that had a wooden Indian ten feet tall and not made of wood.

  “All of my parts still work,” I say, smiling at what it means and how it must sound to people who cannot, anymore, wonder about such things aloud. Whenever I get irrigated with my life, I remind myself of all they can’t say either.

  Billy shows the teeth he’s been hiding just as the sun dips under the wooden eaves of my porch, making him like that god people talk about. But how often do they see him ablaze on a porch with suitcases tied to his car?

  A zithering rush of movement. And the dizzying things that take us to bed do their work—in the him-on-top-of-me fashion—his cheeks juggling with each ricochet, and the candy going on in my middle like it always has, that memory a part of my gravitation, and it builds and sifts into something almost horticultural.

  It feels so much I scream.

  When I wake up, he’s got the car things in my drawers.

  “I never,” he says to me in that same voice he has, “should have left you.”

  I had sort of forgotten that he fled like a hat from a hive when the wind goes crying through. The memory winces down my atrium until I hear the timer that reminds me to eat. Food is one of the things not to do alone if you don’t have to. We park at either end of the tableau, Billy skinning the plastic wrap from the scheming platters.

  “I’ll cook for you,” he says, which makes me happy and worried for my timer.

  That is a fine day, the day he parks by my porch and disgorges his car into my—what is it when it’s more than a house? And the fellow days are the same—the good bright hallows and lighthearted skew. Nothing gets in the way of how he puts his hands on my round bottles and rubs a small circus. “Sweet Cheeks,” he calls me, which makes me look at the cobbler around my wrist with the letters of my name. “Valerie,” I say aloud, while he does with his mouth’s finger my one thing and then my other, a whole alphabet of pleasure.

  Early one deepening, we watch from the porch as a coyote crosses the swath, a black kitten striving in its mouth.

  “My god,” says Billy. “This place is a wonder.”

  He begins happily dissembling our past, our years in this house—the hawk coughed in chicken wire, the cumulus of rain that throttled the road, the tracing chill of splintered mornings. I pretend to remember more than I hold on to. But the taste of flesh on my mouth when he kisses me is wish-making and longed for, like the satisfaction of eating when you don’t know you’re hungry.

  Even if I can’t frame what I’m missing, I can tell it’s gone, and that makes it mine.

  Billy was driving when the tree came through the window’s shield. He has in his soft place beneath the pit of one arm, a skashing seam, crooked as a burble in a brook. I don’t have mark one on me. Except the smile hidden by my trick of hair. Hair doesn’t have to remember. It goes on like nothing ever tarnished the pot it grows in. Mine is wavy when it gets long, like a sketch of highway on the nap of a mountain.

  It’s a different day altogether when the fireplug—his recent ex—comes and returns his things to the roof of his Dodge. I don’t get it for a while and even help with a few loafs. When it hits me, I’m at the car, divulging a black boom box.

  “Oh,” I say, “you’re moving up.”

  “Out,” he says, “not up.”

  Which makes me think for one monument that I have it all wrong. But, no, on this particular invasion, I’ve got it right.

  Before they go, they show me how people look when they carry on in my bed. A more gentle stack than you
might think. She offers me her bare hand. They disarray me kindly.

  And they sleep, the three of us, in the following light. I dream a dream of waking, and flowers in the room, a set of shiny tools latched to the wall—silver pliers and bullet-peen hammer and a shiny crushing wrench.

  When I really wake, it’s to the scrubbing sound of Billy reaming the tub.

  “Everything is clean,” he says, streaks on his face as he erases me his arms. They have dressed. The girl skates my hand while he holds me.

  Then wouldn’t you if you weren’t me know it? They and the car both papoose.

  It’s not “dravel,” the little gray rockets that make up the road and hurt my feet, but all I have to offer is what’s prattling around in my bag, and “dravel” keeps enlisting. So…

  I stand in my dravel drive-away umbrella a sky as wide and dark as the afterward of a fire—a black with no bottom and yet scarred with light. It’s a cool night and I’m naked, but a steeling warmth comes over me. The green scent of the groves and the canal’s artificial water hole me still. In this fraction of the country, people staple ranches from the desert. They burn crops out of land most people wouldn’t bother tasting. It’s where I below. And where I’ll stave.

  I know I will not come fully to.

  But what I think right now is, This is beautiful.

  I’m unsure that I’ve got it right, what all this means—Billy’s sudden aperture and the hostly gray of the road, the white shaft from the kitchen wind row, the green orange trees, and the way I posture naked and skinflint in the sky’s widening yawn. For tonight, anyway, I’m willing to cast my trademark on faith.

  There’s no shortage of wander in my life.

  It’s a big house and getting around in it can be surprising, like when you discover it’s the next day. Unless there’s evidence, how can you know the difference from one to the next? We all need evidence. We need a life that is evidence-making.

  Anyway, what house this is I know is mine. And that dingling noise is the timer, which means it’s morning and I’m hungry. Even when you’re alone, you’re requested to eat. Or you’ll forget and become so thin even the wind won’t notice. And then nothing in the wide world can move you.

  SUPREME BEINGS

  Father McEwen knew the advantage of his height and used it for God’s work. He leaned heavily on the jamb, filling the doorway. He was nearing fifty and more of his bulk shifted each year from muscle to fat, but he knew how to exhibit himself. In the presence of one who had faltered in faith or deed, he became the immovable object.

  “You haven’t done much with the place, Teddy,” Father McEwen said. The front room displayed only a scarred coffee table and an old sofa losing its stuffing. Across the dusty floor, a television and VCR rested on a metal filing cabinet turned on its side. The calendar put out by the refinery hung crookedly on a nail and hadn’t been changed for two months.

  Teddy Allen squinted at Father McEwen’s round red face as if looking into the sun. “This is a rental,” he said. “Don’t see the point in fixing up what isn’t mine.” He had lived in the apartment two years, since graduating from high school, and the priest’s comment felt like an attack on the whole of his independent life. He wasn’t even wearing his clerical collar, as if Teddy were not worth the trouble. “You want to come in, I guess.” Teddy’s head gave a sharp sideways nod as he spoke and his neck cracked. He was little more than bone, a slash of hair across his head, a faint mustache above his pale lips.

  “Thanks for the invite,” Father McEwen said, stepping in and shutting the door behind him. He liked to say that a priest, like a vampire, should never enter a home without an invitation. People liked their priests with a sense of humor.

  He picked one end of the couch to give Teddy room to join him, as there was nowhere else to sit. The springs, though, were shot, and as he sank into the sofa’s pocket, he slid to the center. His knees rose up to his chest. The cushions exhaled white, fluffy filament, a raveled floss like fiberglass insulation.

  Teddy Allen liked seeing the priest hunched up like a cold man before a fire. His spirits had plummeted upon recognizing the giant in his doorway. Until he moved out of his mother’s house, he had gone to mass every week of his life. He hadn’t retained much, though, and didn’t care to ever go back. Now it occurred to him that he might have some fun at the priest’s expense. Teddy had an appointment in less than an hour, and he guessed the father had come to make him miss it. But Teddy knew that no one on earth could make him miss it. Such certainty can make the worst coward willing to gamble.

  “Want a drink or something?” he asked.

  Father McEwen looked at his watch, though he knew the time.

  “I don’t think a whiskey would hurt me,” he said. “Have you got whiskey?”

  “Everybody does, so why wouldn’t I?” Teddy said and left to fetch the liquor.

  McEwen worked to get himself free of the couch. He dusted the seat of his pants and strolled to the window, which was covered by a soiled vinyl shade. The stains looked to be sweat, but he knew that was impossible. The spring in the roller was busted. McEwen pushed aside the sheet of fabric.

  The afternoon light had just made the turn toward dusk. Children in the playground below huddled around a dark-haired boy who held three oranges. The oranges made Father McEwen wish Teddy would hurry with the whiskey. Thirst exerted real power over him. Down below, the boy spread his arms, and the oranges one by one lifted into the air, cutting arcs above his black hair. The oranges hopped from the boy’s palms as if electrified.

  The window needed washing. What was this grease that settled on glass? Human oils? We leave traces of us everywhere, Father McEwen thought. Teddy’s mother had asked him to make this visit. “He don’t talk to me,” she had said. The misalignment of verb and noun had surprised her, and she repeated the sentence to correct herself, becoming flustered by the betrayal of her own words. “That girl he goes to does some kind of spiritism,” she said. “He sees her every day of the week.”

  One of the oranges struck the boy’s fingertips but bounded free. He tried to nab it, which permitted the others to escape. The first orange lost its shape on impact with the ground. While he was watching the fruit bounce about the children’s feet, Father McEwen realized that Teddy was not coming back. He dropped the shade.

  “Teddy?” he called.

  The refrigerator began vibrating as Father McEwen entered the kitchen, making a hum like a giant insect. The room’s rear door hung open. Except for dirty dishes stacked by the sink, the kitchen was orderly. It did not suggest that Teddy was damaged, as the bare living room did. That room shrieked of omission, of screws loose, a deck a few cards shy.

  On the Formica table, a shot glass with a finger of cheap bourbon awaited him. The glass wasn’t clean. Inside the refrigerator, Father McEwen found a stick of butter cowled by its partially opened wrap, maple syrup in a plastic bottle, a head of iceberg lettuce turning a rusty brown, and two cartons of beer—good German beer—with only two bottles missing. Father McEwen decided to investigate the boy’s bedroom.

  The “spiritism” Teddy’s mother had described concerned a storefront fortune-teller on Division Street, a business that had appeared the month after Browne’s Shoe Repair closed. The big window facing Division was now painted black with stenciled lettering advertising the woman’s craft. Father McEwen had never met her, but he couldn’t believe this kind of bother was serious. The bedroom door swung noisily open, its hinges complaining of abuse and neglect. A mattress lay on the floor at an angle to the walls. The sheets piled upon it gave off a sour smell. A heap of blankets lay like a dog at the foot of the makeshift bed. Peeking from beneath the blankets were the round toes of women’s shoes. These feminine togs relieved Father McEwen. Sex out of wedlock was a sin, but he felt better knowing Teddy was not entirely alone. The smell, more than anything else, discouraged him from investigating further.

  Even cheap whiskey burned the throat in that familiar, pleasurable mann
er. He put the shot glass on top of the stack of dirty plates. Of the ten beers in the refrigerator, Father McEwen took only one, a tithing he slipped into the pocket of his coat.

  Teddy Allen celebrated his deception of the priest with a piss in the open mouth of a neighbor’s trash can. The alley behind his building would take him to the corner of 34th and Palmer, where he could cross the street and wait for the Division Street bus. Normally he walked to Lucinda’s, but he didn’t like the idea of Father McEwen motoring up beside him, lowering the window of that old boat he drove, and beginning in on whatever sin Teddy had committed by running off as he had. He hadn’t lied, really, having poured the man a drink just as he said he would. He’d only committed the sin of leaving things out, of telling half the truth. A partial sin, at best.

  Since he’d begun studying Lucinda’s trances, Teddy Allen’s life had turned upside down, which made the trips to her parlor irresistible. He no longer hung out with his pals, and they had quickly discarded him. His bank account had dwindled to nothing, and he’d had to sell his furniture. He’d even stolen a backpack from an unlocked car, the opportunity too sweet to ignore.

  He first took note of Lucinda one day at the supermarket and followed her about as she filled the little basket she carried. Something in her appearance began gnawing at him, her free hand groping a grapefruit, handling limes, snapping two green bananas from a bunch. Teddy wound up buying a lot of useless fruit that rotted in his refrigerator. Then one of the guys at the refinery mentioned that he had paid her ten dollars to hear his future. He claimed she’d held his hands and slid into a hypnotic state that made her rock up and back until her blouse loosened and revealed her breasts.

  The day Teddy got up the courage to go into her place, she had worn a blouse whose buttons reached her collarbone, each one snug in its buttonhole. Men lied about women all the time, Teddy knew. The guy had needed an excuse to explain blowing ten bucks on a fortune-teller. Teddy had needed a similar excuse to convince himself he was there out of manly lust and not human loneliness. Her window read: