For a year, we got by. We heard reports about Clete, but we didn’t have a way to reach him. About Stu, we didn’t even hear rumors. One night Lila and I went to see a band called Sawed Off and Sewn Back Together at a bar in El Paso, Texas, forty-five miles away. Lila’s sister was there, too, and went home with a Cuban medical student. We had to take Ready with us and leave him in the backseat. He barked if left alone, and the landlord had already given us a warning. I was the better drunk driver and took the old two-lane home to avoid the highway patrol. The road meandered by small towns and cut through a pecan grove. Lila was passed out in the backseat when I drove her sister’s car into an abutment for an irrigation canal. It smashed the front end pretty good on the passenger side, but Lila and I were unhurt.
The accident only temporarily woke her up.
“I’m sorry,” she said to me, “but I can’t keep my eyes open.”
She crawled out of the ruined car and trudged off into the pecan orchard to sleep. After sitting in the wrecked car long enough to count my legs and arms and other important features, I decided to join her. I had to climb over the seat and use the back door to get out. I found her lying beneath the limbs of a pecan tree. I laid my body beside hers. The stars in the river valley were as bright and numerous as they had been on the mountain, shining down on us without judgment or even interest.
I hadn’t thought to see if Ready was hurt. He bled to death while Lila and I slept on the damp earth. That’s how I wound up killing both of the dogs left in our care. But Ready had lived for a year with Lila and me. How can you put a value on that? (Keep in mind that’s seven people years.)
I had to deal with the sheriff the next morning, but I had sobered up and claimed a blown tire. He had totaled an El Dorado one time after a blowout and was sympathetic. The tire had actually blown after we hit the concrete, but I reversed the order. I caught some flack for my expired insurance, but the incident didn’t get me into legal trouble. The abutment was not damaged in any way but the cosmetic, and how good does concrete have to look?
Lila and I got through the towing, the legal papers, and the pet burial. The wreck was an incident that could have been a disaster but wasn’t. Lila’s sister even found an old Isuzu pickup one of her friends wasn’t using that we could drive. But Lila kept thinking about Ready bleeding to death while we slept. She was convinced if she’d stayed awake or I had a brain, we could have saved him. Before long she quit sleeping altogether, which affected her floral arranging. Then one day she told me she had to turn me in for Barnett’s death.
“I’d really rather you didn’t,” I said.
“Not sleeping can make a person crazy.”
I couldn’t tell whether she meant she’d go crazy or that she already had and turning me in would be the proof of it.
“You keep killing people,” she said.
Her list started with Barnett, of course, and included Val, which I had nothing directly to do with, and Ruff, who technically wasn’t a person, and Ready, who wasn’t even a good dog. Logic, however, had little weight in this argument. We talked for a long time. I made several good points, and she agreed to think it over a few days.
But she didn’t sleep again that night and in the morning, an hour or so after she left for work, the same sheriff who had been nice to me in the groves knocked on the front door.
“I hate to bother you,” he said, “but your wife came by and told me you’d murdered a man.”
“I wouldn’t call it murder,” I said, which I realize now was a slip.
It was a friendly arrest but handcuffs are required in such proceedings, and I was pretty down about the whole episode. I plea-bargained my way into this cell for three years with good behavior, eligible for parole after nine months.
It’s been eight months and counting.
It’s an irony, I suppose, that Barnett is in this same prison. He’s a jackal and you shouldn’t give him parole, but he’s the closest thing to a friend I have in here—and he’s a dead man. He tells me things. Like that Stu moved to West Virginia after he left the mountain. He started a Mexican restaurant, got married to a kind woman, and they have a baby. This was Barnett’s way of showing me I’d misjudged him. He’d kept up with Stu while I hadn’t, even though I had the advantage of being alive.
When Clete visited, he arrived in the early morning, strolling down the concrete corridor with the rolling stride of a man familiar with confinement only in the abstract. His head was well above those of the guards who led him, and he sniffed at the prison air experimentally. Despite his years in the van, true confinement wasn’t an odor he knew.
The white scar on his forehead, where I had hit him with the shovel blade, had taken the form of a crescent moon. His eyes were calm, his nostrils wide and pink. He stood straight and walked easily, not with the phony, inflated carriage of incarcerated men. There was no fear in his spine. He was tall and poised, a fully developed human male. Clete was an adult, and I suddenly understood that I had personally been acquainted with only a very few real adults in all my life.
“Even though this place is exactly as I was led to expect,” he said, “it’s also a lot worse. You must be miserable.”
I told him that I was and at the same time it was okay.
We didn’t talk about my keeping him out of prison. Clete is not his real name. I could have gotten less time by divulging it, but neither Lila nor I would do that.
Instead, he said, “You made the right decision saving Ready.” He had told me this before. “You picked the hard road.” I thanked him for that, and he moved to a different subject. “The man’s family,” he said, and I understood he was talking about Barnett, “has moved to Portland, Oregon. His mom and dad and one little sister. A ranch-style house with an unkempt lawn. I rented a mower and took care of it. I would have trimmed the hedges, but I couldn’t find rental clippers.”
I asked him about Lila.
“She’s getting a lot of sun. Her skin is golden. She may move back in with her mother or maybe with me.”
I know you can check the visitor roll and see that I haven’t had any visitors whatsoever. I’m not trying to fool you. It’s just that there’s only so much you can feel, and the rest you have to pretend. I felt for the dogs and Val. To feel for the man, it helps me to have a messy lawn to think about and the presence of my friend.
Clete understands me. He would know that the darkness of this place and the terrifying movement of my life into it have bruised my marriage and maybe even my mind. I hear things through the open window: automobile engines claiming combustion, the human jingle of voices, the shattering of leaves on windy days.
Clete would look me over in these ridiculous overalls, my hair shaved short, and he’d nonetheless recognize me. He’d raise his arm and point.
“K-k-k-Keen,” he’d say.
This is as close as I can come to saying what I’ve learned: you can’t know whether what you’re doing will have good consequences or bad. So there’s nothing to do, I guess, but to obey the law and slough off the responsibility there.
There is one last thing I remember: all the dogs in town barked at us—at Clete and me—when we walked to the party that first night not knowing what we were getting into, that I would meet my wife and think her dead, that we would wind up killing both the pets, that Val would become our friend and die, that we would manslaughter Barnett, that I would get a new name and make a life for myself that I could survive—but it would lead to a drowning, an overdose, pet fatalities, an automotive crash, and incarceration. The dogs barked, and the windows showed their watery light, and we walked fearlessly up the hill and into the best and worst parts of our lives.
Which pretty much wraps things up. The decision is all yours now.
Am I a threat to society?
I await your decision.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The title story is written in memory of Jim Amick.
The author wishes to thank the people who helped with these stories, incl
uding Katie Dublinski, Fiona McCrae, Kim Witherspoon, Peter Turchi, David Schweidel, Steven Schwartz, Connie Voisine, Rus Bradburd, Kevin McIlvoy, Alex Parsons, Charles Baxter, Susan Nelson, Don Kurtz, Gretchen Mazur, Terry Boswell, and Toni Nelson.
The author would like to thank the editors of literary journals who thought enough of his stories to publish them: Don Lee, Bret Lott, Stephanie G’Schwind, Michael Koch, Ben George, Stratis Haviaras, Mark Budman, Carol Peters, David Milofsky, Tom Hazuka, Beverly Jackson, Rusty Barnes, Victoria Barrett, Andrew Scott, Bill Henderson, Lorrie Moore, Tom Bailey, Julie Hensley, Bill Martin, Grace Dane Mazur, and Campbell McGrath.
Publication acknowledgments: “No River Wide” appeared in the Southern Review. “Smoke,” “Miss Famous,” and “A Walk in Winter” appeared in the Colorado Review. “Smoke” also appeared in Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex. “A Walk in Winter” also appeared in The Story Behind the Story. “Miss Famous” also appeared in Pushcart Prize Stories. “A Sketch of Highway on the Nap of a Mountain” appeared in Ink Pot. “Supreme Beings” and “Lacunae” appeared in Epoch. “In a Foreign Land” appeared in the Harvard Review. “City Bus” and “Guests” appeared in Ploughshares. “Almost Not Beautiful” appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review. “Skin Deep” appeared in the Vestal Review, Best American Flash Fiction, Best American Flash Fiction of the 21st Century, You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories, and the Vestal Review Fifth Anniversary Issue. “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards” appeared in Fugue.
Robert Boswell is the author of novels (Century’s Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts), story collection (Living to Be 100, Dancing in the Movies, and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards), a cyberpunk novel (Virtual Death), a prize-winning play (Tongues), and two books of nonfiction (The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak [cowritten with David Schweidel]). A Guggenheim and NEA fellow, he teaches at the University of Houston.
The text of The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is set in Sabon, an old-style serif typeface based on the types of Claude Garamond and designed by the German-born typographer and designer Jan Tschichold (1902—1974) in 1964. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free paper.
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