The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  Assignment 3: Family

  Most nights we sat on kitchen chairs in candlelight immersed in some form of inebriation, and talked. The roof over the back porch had a leak that should have been fixed, but we liked to sit on the softening planks and breathe in the odor of the rain-sweetened wood. The morning sun dried it out, and the afternoon rain softened it again. The porch was like a great dark lung that would, days before the end of our summer, collapse.

  One night on the porch has stuck with me. Clete got us going. “This man has to raise a boy who isn’t his own son but his brother’s, and the brother died because of this boy in a boy-caused auto accident or house fire or poisoning incident that kills the parents but not the boy. The man who has to raise him one day gets the hiccups and to get rid of them he drinks water upside down.”

  “Standing on his head?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what kind of story it was.

  “Like this.” Clete got a glass and demonstrated, bending at the waist and drinking from the opposite rim.

  “That really does get rid of hiccups,” Lila put in. Several of us were on the porch.

  “The boy watches him drink this way. And you have to understand that the man hates the kid because he’s ruining his life. He doesn’t want some diaper-needs-changing kid hanging around. Also he blames the death of his brother on the kid. He doesn’t act outright mean to the boy, but it slips out.

  “He sees the kid drinking this way and he encourages him. ‘That’s the way to drink,’ he says. The boy goes around all the time drinking upside down. The man thinks it’s funny to see this kid drinking upside down. He takes a mean pleasure in it.”

  “Insensitive bastard,” Lila said. Stu and Val and some others were there, too.“But what this does,” Clete said, “is give him an outlet for his anger. It lets him get to know the boy. He feels sad for his brother and for the boy. When the kid is old enough to go to school, the man tells him, ‘I was only fooling about drinking that way. You don’t have to drink that way.’ But the boy says, ‘I like to drink this way.’ The man says, ‘Kids will make fun of you if you drink that way.’ The boy says, ‘I know, but this is the way we drink.’ He raises a glass of water in toast and they bend over and drink upside down together, and the screen goes black.”

  “This was a movie?” I said.

  “He’s kind of a smart kid for kindergarten,” Lila pointed out.

  “They could be in some remote place where school starts later,” Clete said.

  “It’s a beautiful story,” Val said. “It’s perfect just the way it is.”

  “It is a good story,” Lila agreed.

  Lila’s respect for the story made me want to tell one of my own. I was drunk enough to just start off and see where it would go, but right as I opened my mouth I remembered a girl named Eve I used to know. She was a pal’s girlfriend—beautiful girl with hair so pale we used to say it was the color of spit, and who was diagnosed with brain cancer and given six months. I visited her in the hospital after her surgery and she asked me to be one of her pallbearers. It’s a hell of a thing for a living person to ask, especially a pretty girl no older than you with bandages on her head.

  “Sure,” I told her. “Doesn’t look like you weigh too much.”

  That got a laugh out of her.

  But she didn’t die. Instead, she dumped my friend and got together with a guy who robbed convenience stores. They put together some money from their various robberies, and when she finished chemotherapy they moved to Alaska. I saw her once long afterward at that same high school reunion. Her hair had never grown back and she wore a scarf over her head, but she was still beautiful and married to the robber, who sold cars now and they had a summer cabin on the Oregon coast.

  “What a time we had for a while there, huh?” she said to me.

  We wound up sitting in her car and somehow started kissing. We had never done that before. I pulled my head back just a millimeter or so and spoke softly.

  “They said you were going to die.”

  “Disappointed?” she asked.

  We kissed some more. Maybe she wanted me to take her to bed, but that didn’t happen, which led to my story petering out in a nondramatic fashion.

  “I remember her,” Clete said once he was sure I was through. “She never did die.”

  “That’s a lovely story,” Val said.

  “That robber guy,” said Lila. “He thought it was just an adventure with a dying girl. But it was his whole life.”

  Anybody can go to a bar and hear some character complain how the world has never lived up to his potential and his own nowhere life is everyone’s fault but his own. All you have to do is sit on the wrong stool. To get to the good stories, you have to make an effort. You have to become a regular part of someone’s life and keep mostly to yourself so when you offer a word or answer a question she can see you’re giving up something to talk to her. She starts to trust you, even owe you. You can’t just sit next to a woman and expect this stranger to unfold her life like a shirt she’s asking you to wear.

  What I’m saying is, this was the first moment I thought Lila might like me.

  Stu started in on a dream he’d had about deep water, a dental assistant, and walls in a room that flapped like the loose vinyl roof of an old car. I have opinions about other people’s dreams. They tend to be like paintings by surrealists who don’t have any goddamn imagination.

  The dream ended badly (by which I mean it was tedious). He tried to redeem the story by wrapping his feet behind his head, which reminded me that he wanted Lila as much as I did. He didn’t even have to get up from his chair, and just sat like that.

  In situations like this we relied on Val to have a kind word, but even she couldn’t comment. She did save him, though.

  “I had a boyfriend who could bend his thumb flat against his arm,” she said. “Like this.” She bent her thumb flat against her arm.

  Lila touched her nose with her tongue, inserting the tip in either nostril. We had to hold a candle up close to see, and we must have singed her hair. There was that burnt hair smell.

  I told them about my idea of what makes a tragedy and how there really weren’t many. A death (you can’t have a tragedy without a corpse) could qualify only if it didn’t once make you think: I’m glad it’s him and not me.

  Val disagreed. “We’re all tragedies,” she said. The assertion made her stand up and cross the porch. She sat on the ice chest, right across from me, and patted my knee. “But you told it really beautifully.”

  Clete took it a step further. “The real question is, What would you kill for? What would it take for you to claim the life of another person?”

  “I’d never kill anyone,” Val said. “Not for anything.”

  “Then that’s who you are,” Clete said.

  “I tried to strangle my boyfriend when he wouldn’t quit whistling,” Lila said.

  “Well,” Clete said.

  “That can be irritating,” I put in.

  “You weren’t really trying to kill him,” Val said. “You were just upset.”

  “It felt like I was trying to kill him.”

  “Then that’s who you are,” Clete said.

  Stu spoke. He was sitting normal again. “The guy I get dope from sticks a gun barrel in my mouth every time I buy. To remind me what he’d do if I rat on him.”

  “Every time?” I said.

  Stu nodded. “Some people won’t deal with him for that reason.”

  “Bad business practice,” Clete said.

  “It tastes like oil,” Stu said.

  Our conversations felt like more than talk, as if we had made ourselves into a crew held together by something greater than happenstance or geography or the luck of free housing. I had the feeling we mattered as a group. Only to us, I guess, but I was happy with that.

  I was happy.

  Assignment 4: Accepting Responsibility

  I found a metal detector among the kid’s toys. Since I couldn’t work and needed booze to stay s
ober, we hit upon the idea of combing the run under the ski lift for coins. The first day Clete and I found over nine dollars and barely made headway up the mountain. The lift was running, taking summer tourists up for views. Some of them tossed change down to us. We actually got most of the cash that way. The remainder of the summer was defined by this mountain we had to sweep. It gave us a goal and a direction: up.

  We came home that first day tired and exuberant, bearing a frozen pizza (the oven was gas and hadn’t been sold) and a six-pack. Screaming started as soon as we entered. We found Lila towel-wrapped in the bathroom screeching at the tub. Ready was bouncing his long nails on the porcelain, yapping. The terrier had carried a mouse into the tub where it couldn’t escape and then tortured it to death. A mouse head lay by the drain, and Ready’s bloody paw prints made the tub a crime scene.

  Clete got toilet tissue and picked up the rodent remains.

  “Good boy,” he said to the dog.

  Lila was too grateful to complain about our ogling her thighs and a portion of her hip where the towel parted. She even agreed to watch a movie with us after her shower, one of the videos that Stu had stolen from the library. Clete went to hook up the extension cord, and I hunted for the tape. When I couldn’t find it, I sought out Stu. He was sitting on the cooler on the back porch smoking a joint, wearing my old coat.

  “Where’d you get that coat?” I asked him.

  “The Goodwill store behind the fire station.”

  “Find any drugs in the pockets?”

  He eyed me suspiciously and then began thrusting his hands all over.

  I didn’t want the coat back. It was an important part of the life I’d left behind. While he was searching, I asked him about the videotape.

  “How did you know?”

  He’d found one of my trademark blimp-shaped joints.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Where’s the movie?”

  “I took it back,” he said proudly, still rummaging. “Sneaked it back in. They never knew it was gone.”

  I suppose I pursed my lips.

  “You know how a library works at all?”

  “There’s a fucking book in here,” he said, meaning the coat.

  Lila suggested we go to a bar. We didn’t have any cash left from our day of detecting, so I took the elaborate Mickey Mouse clock from my room—which didn’t work anyway without electricity—and we headed down to the secondhand store and then on to the Blue Board Tavern—a splintering hardwood bar that used to be a laundromat and still had a wall of dead dryers in the back, each staring out with its one enormous eye. The clock brought seven dollars.

  The tables in the Blue Board were the color of ballpoint ink. We claimed one and started talking.

  “I moved to this town because it’s too small for me to turn tricks in,” Lila announced. “People would talk.”

  “A sensible plan,” Clete said.

  “I live in fear of becoming a whore.”

  “Everyone with any judgment does.” He then described my plan for self-improvement. I could sense myself rising in her esteem, but she directed the conversation back to Clete. She wanted to know why he had come to this place.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  She gave him a look and maybe I was giving him the same look because she seemed to think of me as an ally. She and I got up and marched out into the street. A shower had passed over while we were drinking. The streets were slippery and glistening. The air was fresh and free of smoke. Without any warning, she took my hand and we walked to the middle of the town’s empty thoroughfare, our eyes on the mountains.

  Her hand in mine opened a window in my head, and a damp wind blew right through it. Above the paltry row of buildings, a forest ascended the mountainside, the trees green and vibrant. At the open end of the box canyon, the sun had dropped out of sight, but sunlight spotted the high trees, lit a distant waterfall, and colored the rock faces. What had we been thinking? The sky was shot through with turquoise and the last yelps of sunlight like a gaudy stone on a gold band.

  “He’s got us on this one,” Lila said softly.

  She clung to my hand as we went back into the bar, aware that we had been mutually grazed by the speeding, startled sensation of what it was to be a living creature.

  “We won’t forget again,” I said as we made our way to the table.

  “If we ever fail to look at those mountains,” Lila said, “without realizing they’re there, we should have to cut off our arms and legs and gouge out our eyes.”

  “You’d have to change the order,” Clete said. “The arms shouldn’t go first.”

  He had the bag of mushrooms on the table, dividing them into three equal parts.

  “Doing this in a public establishment doesn’t trouble you?” I asked.

  “I picked these this morning, while you two and the rest of the mortal world were asleep,” Clete said. “Anyone watching will just think we’re earthy types.”

  We ate mushrooms and washed down the grit with beer. Lila surprised us with money of her own and bought pitchers. It occurred to me that Clete couldn’t be sleeping much, as early as he was getting up.

  “I sleep inside myself while I’m awake,” he explained.

  That pretty much got him rolling. He declared and philosophized, his mouth full, his brain brimming with thoughts and theories, observations and sidebars. We all talked excitedly for a while and then settled down to our communal swallowing and a happy gulping silence. The conversation, even after it was over, kept a good feeling swinging among us like the movement of a rocking chair after the person is up and gone.

  Then Clete began afresh. “People want you to believe you treat a disease by identifying it and then killing it off with the right poisons,” he said. “That requires a belief that the sickness and the person are two wholly separate entities. That’s like thinking the clouds don’t belong to the sky but are just happenstance passing through.”

  We nodded or made appropriate grunts. Now and again I’d realize that Lila and I were still holding hands.

  “People who think about the world aren’t usually violent, which leads me to assume that violent people don’t consider the world around them,” Clete said. “I knew a woman who liked to pretend she was the star of her own television program to the extent that she wouldn’t swear because there’s no swearing on television. She’d only have sex with the lights out. Everything she did took her to the next episode, and she’d think about how the show should end, editing her day down to its hour format.

  “My point is, she may have been sick but she wasn’t violent. As long as she imagined an audience and the Nielsen ratings hinging on her actions, she had to behave. Is that sickness separate from who she is, or the product of who she is?”

  I started in on this teacher I had in high school, a delicate young woman who spoke so softly you had to strain to hear any portion of her speech. It was work to catch a single word. She walked around the room while she talked, and every head would follow her. She was easily the best teacher I ever had. After the winter break, she came back with a microphone and a speaker that hooked to her belt. We didn’t have to strain to hear her, and it didn’t take but a couple of class periods to understand she was no better teacher than the others. It was the quality of our attention that had been different.

  “I was in that class,” Clete said. “We read Macbeth and Catcher in the Rye and watched that Romeo and Juliet where Juliet does partial nudity. Miss Axelrod. You sat directly in front of me, and one day you had a condom stuck in your hair.”

  “Was it a Mr. Microphone?” Lila asked. “I had one of those in middle school.”

  “Another one of our teachers used to confuse me for my father,” Clete said. “He was old and I don’t think he was ever very bright, and he had taught my father. Now and then he’d call on Everett, as if I had become my dad. Which makes me think about that feeling of being transported, and how the weirdest thing—a kid like me sitting at a
desk—can transport you thirty years, back to when you were young and had a brain and most of the time a hard-on, likely as not, for some junior girl in a short skirt you were supposed to be teaching.”

  This reminded me of the girl I dated when I worked construction who liked to call me Daddy while we were in bed.

  “I remember her,” Clete said. “Her family raised minks.”

  “What’s your real name?” Lila asked me. “It can’t be Keen, can it?”

  “What does ‘real’ mean?” I shot back.

  “What does ‘name’ mean?” Clete put in.

  “What does ‘mean’ mean… mean?” Lila said.

  What a night that was! We swept out of the bar and up and down the lighted streets, our arms linked in Gene Kelly fashion, smiling and shuddering with the joy of being the people who got to inhabit our very own bodies. Nighttime rinsed the light out of the sky, and we found ourselves on the bank of the dark little river that cut through the side of town opposite our house.

  “Fish know water,” Clete said, and we entered into a somber and wondrous bout of nodding. Lila and I may have wept a little.

  Then we one by one began to add to the river from our own churning stomachs.

  “I had no idea I was getting sick,” Lila marveled. That set the tone for our happy retching. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings,” she said. “If I’m pissing you off with this puking, just say so.”

  Clete found a tree we had to look at, a big winding thing with branches and leaves and a miraculous balance.

  “It just erupts out of the earth,” Clete said. “It goes up. What it means to be a tree is to send limbs up and roots down.” He dropped to his knees and touched the base of the tree. “This is the center, right here. Touch the tree’s heart.”