by John Jodzio
Even though it’s vague, the mention of “your” and “girl” in the same sentence in regards to Eric makes Lisa blush.
“Uh-huh,” Eric nods.
Terry frisks Eric first. Then he pats her down. His hands are strangely soft and he smells like oranges.
While the two men chat, Lisa wanders over near the pond. She kneels down and picks up a rock off the ground, hugs it to her chest. The sun went down two hours ago, but there’s still some heat from the day held inside. Eric hands Terry a manila envelope and Terry hands him a duffel bag and then they get in her car and drive back to Tampa.
“Totally easy, right?” Eric says.
Eric tells her he is going to make her prawns for dinner but when they get back to his apartment he notices there are lights on his living room he didn’t leave on. He gets twitchy, scanning the street for any strange cars. He sees he missed a call, checks his messages.
“Everything’s okay,” he says after he listens to it, “but I’m gonna need to take a rain check on dinner.”
Lisa knows if she opens her mouth now, whatever comes out will sound needy or disappointed. Eric peels off three one-hundred-dollar bills from his wad, pushes them into her palm.
“Thanks for tonight,” he smiles, kissing her cheek.
Lisa gets up the next morning and finds her father in his recliner moving his pencil around his crossword. He’s not very good at them, but he read something about them staving off dementia so he gives it his best shot.
“What’s an eight-letter word for pouring forth?” he asks.
They’re close enough to the ocean to have the birds but not the fun. They’re close enough to the beach that the birds carry things back from there to show them exactly what they’re missing. A few days ago, a cormorant dropped a beach towel in their backyard. Last week, a seagull dropped half of a corndog on the patio. In the past six months, they’ve thrown away three deflated beach balls, two spatulas, a pink wig.
“How about ‘effusive’?” she says.
Her dad arches his shoulders up for her to rub. When she doesn’t do it right away, he clears his throat.
“Effusive works,” he says. “So far.”
He fills out the crossword like he fills out his days—cautious at the beginning, then with much more abandon. She often hears him rumbling around in the kitchen late at night. It sounds like shopping carts banging into each other, his cane smacking the stove, the refrigerator. She waits until all the noise has died away, when he’s passed out in his recliner, and she carries him off to bed. He weighs next to nothing now, bends over her arms like a bolt of cloth.
“It’s not a jaunt, it’s a journey,” he told her recently, “full of starts and stops to select our roles.”
The roles they’ve settled on are these: He’s the crotchety old soap opera star who feels the world has done him terribly wrong. Scared and broke, but unable to cop to it. She’s the trapped daughter who drives off in her car with no intention of returning, but who always turns around before she reaches the state line.
His days are still full of frustration, jaw clenching, things that he cannot accomplish. The jar of pickles out of his reach. An imaginary mosquito always buzzing around his ankles. The way they communicate best is by him shaking the ice cubes in his empty gin glass and her filling it up.
After he finishes his crossword, they start his physical therapy. Lisa pulls and contorts his body into paperclip shapes. Each day she does this she finds he’s stiffened, less pliable. She limbers him up with towels warmed in the microwave; treats his body as if it were day-old bread wet heat might soften.
“My slow trudge to sludge,” he says in his gravely news voice. She presses him into a small package, his thighs up to his chest.
“Screw you,” he grunts. “Screw you and yours.”
“Right back at you,” she says.
“You are killing me,” he says. “Every damn day of every damn day.”
They have their routines and the routines do what routines always do, take fear out the equation, tell your insides you’re okay, make you able to corral your breath when your breath tries to run away.
“Just leave me to die,” he says. “Put me on a burning raft and set me adrift on the ocean current.”
“No money for a raft,” she tells him.
“Then sell that body of yours,” he says. “It’s passable enough.”
“It’s a buyer’s market,” she responds. “You’d need more than I got.”
They could go on like this all day, back and forth like they were in some black-and-white talkie, clipped speeches about just how hard it is to put one foot ahead of the other, how happiness is always slightly out of reach. Even though noir always calls for you to keep on walking until you disappear right off the edge of the screen, she stays put. She thinks it’s sad to know the exact strength of every fiber of your body—your heart, your lungs, your legs.
A week later, Eric asks her on another date.
“Same deal as last time,” he says. “Except this time the dinner actually happens, all right?”
Lisa picks him up and they drive through the swamp. Eric asks her some more trivia questions. What state, full of milk and honey, was the destination in The Grapes of Wrath? What’s the main vegetable in vichyssoise? This time the ride seems shorter—maybe because she actually knows how far they’re going. While she drives, Eric nods off. Halfway back home, Lisa sees a man standing in the middle of the road, flagging her down. At first she thinks his car has broken down, but there’s no car anywhere around. When she gets closer she sees the moon hit the man’s skin and she realizes he’s naked. The man is weaving back and forth across the road, like he’s drunk. She screeches to a stop.
“Shit,” Eric yells, awake now, pulling a gun out of his jacket pocket. “What are you doing? Shit, shit, shit.” Eric waves his gun around, looking for any movement in the brush, thinking this is a trap, thinking that dudes with machine guns will step out of the desert darkness and riddle their car with bullet after bullet.
Lisa stares at the naked man. He’s about twenty-five feet away from her, breathing heavily through his mouth. He’s young with shoulder-length blond hair, clean shaven. She watches as he pulls a lighter from his palm and flicks it and his body goes up in flames. She sees the man crumple to his knees.
It takes her a second to register what has happened. She opens her door to get out and help him, to throw her jacket over his body, something, but before she can get out Eric reaches across her body and pulls the door shut.
“Drive,” he tells her in a voice that seems much too calm.
Her father had a job a few months back, reading audio books, but he got fired. He has a perfect voice for reading anything—spy novels or travails of sappy love—all of the publishers tell him that, but lately he’s too morose and stubborn.
“He’ll get more work if he stops talking about death in between takes,” his old agent Twyla told Lisa. “And if he stops being so damn pedantic. He’s acting like he’s Orson Welles or something.”
His agent, Twyla, retired to St. Pete and she comes over to their condo every Tuesday night for dinner. She’s going through menopause right now, full of hot flashes and gland puffiness. Twyla likes her dad, remembers the good times. After the accident, she could have dropped him as a client, but she stuck it out. She kept offering him up to casting agents, always hung up on them when they asked—Who? or Isn’t he dead?
They’re like an old couple, recasting themselves in stories long past—Twyla as the pretty young agent who talked like a sailor, her father as the up-and-comer who had a shot to be a leading man.
Sometimes Lisa wraps up little presents for her father to give to Twyla. Last week, her father gave Twyla a pair of earrings shaped like butterflies.
“What is in the box?” her father asked as he signed the card. “So I can pretend I know.”
“Butterflies,” she said.
Lisa didn’t bother to clarify. She’d rather have him think th
ere was something alive in there, that once the bow was loosed, something amazing might flutter out.
Lisa doesn’t sleep much for the next few days. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the burning man, flopping and spinning around on the road. The morning after it happened, she drove back out to the swamp. She couldn’t find a body, no burn marks on the tar, no evidence that anything actually happened.
“Did we break up?” she asks Eric after she finally gets a hold of him after a week of calling. “Do I need to find a new dealer?”
“You were a car,” Eric tells her. “You were some fun for a day or two.”
Lisa scours the newspaper for any information about the burning man. They run a missing person piece on a man named Christian Eccles who looks like the man she saw. He battled schizophrenia. His mother, Ingrid, was quoted in the story. She looked up Ingrid Eccles’s address and called her. She told her she was a reporter, made an appointment to talk.
“I’m going to see his mother,” she tells Eric.
“Let it go,” he says. “He was crazy. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Will I ever see you again?” she asks.
“Sometimes the beauty of something is its utter convenience,” Eric tells her.
Before she meets Christian Eccles’s mother, she drives her father to have breakfast with Twyla. More than anything her father wants to get his license back. That’s the thing he misses the most. He’s gone down to the DMV and taken the test three times in the last year, but his hip always gives out on him halfway through the test and he has to quit.
Ingrid Eccles is a small woman, her brown hair pulled up in a misshapen bun. There are lots of doilies in her apartment, lots of pictures of Christian, a good layer of dust covering everything.
The pictures of Christian hang in chronological order on her living room wall, the naked youngster on the shag rug, the boy holding the baseball bat, the teenager with wings of hair feathered over his ears.
Ingrid can’t sit still. She makes lemonade, puts out a plate of cookies.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” she tells Lisa.
As he ages, the pictures of Christian get fewer and fewer. In the last one, he looks off the rails, his mouth held in a sneer, his eyes watery and distant.
“They were having trouble figuring out his meds,” Ingrid says when she notices Lisa looking at that picture. “At that point he hated any sort of camera being around him. Ever since he was fifteen there were signs. The drugs helped for a while, but then not so much.”
Lisa holds a napkin underneath her cookie. She wants to ask Ingrid if she feels relieved he’s gone, but she knows it’s a horrible question. She eats her cookie, shakes Ingrid’s hand, tells her thank you.
Later that week, Lisa is eating dinner with her dad at a seafood place near the wharf, a place with a signed picture of her father in a frame up on the wall. He’s dressed up, she’s not. They are an odd couple, her in paint-splattered chinos and a raggedy T-shirt, him in a slate-colored suit. The owner keeps coming over to their table, asking if everything is all right for “Mr. Turner.”
“Twyla called me today. She heard they might resurrect my character on Sunset Beach,” he tells her. “There’s scuttlebutt. That’s what she told me. Scuttlebutt. I would have been on a deserted island all these years. Shipwrecked or some shit. I come back pissed off and out for revenge.”
When they get home, Lisa goes up to bed. Later that night, she gets up and finds her father asleep in front of the TV. His legs are propped up on a chaise lounge. His cannonball video is paused and he’s frozen there on the screen. The picture is old and blurry and you can’t really tell what is happening, so Lisa grabs the remote from off the coffee table and clicks forward a couple frames. That does it; it moves her father out of the haze. She sets the remote back down on the coffee table and leaves him sitting there, a man held in mid-flight, a man with no pinnacle and no nadir, a man unaware of the ground below.
CHET
My older brother Chet died after he got bit by a sick elk. It was a horrible death, lots of moaning and black puke and weeping styes all over his back and chest. Nothing, not any of the doctors at the hospital, not shitloads of morphine or the tenderness of the nursing staff, nothing could ease his pain. Poor Sick Chet. Poor Poor Sick Sick Chetty. That’s what we all said.
Chet got bit on our annual hunting trip. The elk that bit him was one I’d shot but hadn’t shot well enough. Chet got to it before me and he knelt down in the switch grass to field dress the beast. While he was unsheathing his hunting knife, the elk reared up and chomped down on his thigh, right through his Carhartts. The elk keeled over immediately after that, like that bite was his last wish.
At first, Chet shook off the pain. He gulped blackberry brandy and revenge-stabbed the elk in the face about fifty times—it was only on the drive home that he started to look green. I knew something was wrong with him when my dad asked us if we wanted to stop at the strip club in Lake City and Chet said he thought it might be best to skip the strippers and head straight home. I knew something was especially fucked when my dad and I dragged Chet inside the strip club anyway and he fainted before he even saw one goddamn tit.
Chet’s newlywed wife, Flor, stood vigil by his hospital bed the entire time. Flor was Panamanian and she often wore her hair in pigtails and her dresses were embroidered with tiny flowers on the bodice and sleeves. She’d only been married to Chet for two months, but most nights she slept on a cot next to Chet’s wasting body, feeding him popsicle chunks and dabbing his forehead with a damp washcloth as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Unfortunately, one morning she started to puke. It was regular yellow-brownish puke, not blackish puke like Chet’s, but I was still worried for her. By then, I’d fallen under the spell of her dark eyes and loved the pragmatic way she stood by Chet’s bedside as he fought his way though chill and fever, pain and fear.
“You’re not sick,” the doctors explained after they’d examined Flor. “You’re pregnant.”
Flor told Chet the news immediately, thinking this bit of wonder might provide him some sort of extra will to survive this horrible elk-biting disease.
“I’m with child,” she explained. “Which is a beautiful thing, right? A baby!”
Chet was in a coma by then. He hadn’t spoken in a week, but after Flor told him about the baby we heard him mumble, okay, okay, okay. We milled around his bed for a while after that, excited, hoping for more, hoping for a small signal he was still fighting. Unfortunately, those were the last words Chet ever spoke. A few minutes later his body seized up, every muscle in his arms and legs tightening and braiding, his torso bucking up and down on his bed. The doctors rushed in with a crash cart, but it was useless. Flor buried her head in my shoulder and sobbed.
“It was like he was waiting to hear about the baby before he said good-bye,” I told her.
II
Five years might be a long time for some people to grieve, but it isn’t for me. I still tear up every time I think of Chet. It’s just how I’m wired. I end up thinking about Chet a lot because I can see his gravestone from the cafeteria of the power plant where I work. Sometimes I’ll be eating a grilled cheese sandwich and I’ll accidentally glance down at the graveyard and think about how Chet liked grilled cheese sandwiches and my eyes flood with tears. I can’t help it.
A bunch of my other relatives are buried in that cemetery too. It’s about two hundred yards from the power plant, overlooking the river. It’s extra ominous because steam from the turbines billows over it and because there are always craggy old fishermen on the shore below, casting their lines into the murky bilge. It’s great fishing if you like bottom feeders—suckers, carp, the occasional gooch that’s taken a wrong turn from the gulf—all of them love the soupy water, all of them love being nearly boiled alive.
Today at lunch, I eat a chicken salad sandwich Flor has packed for me. My Uncle Jimmy, who also happens to be my boss, is staring out at the river with his binoc
ulars. Jimmy is my mom’s brother. Truth be told, this is kind of a family-run power plant. My Aunt Joan works in human resources, my dad was the plant maintenance coordinator until he retired last year. After Chet died, we got Flor a job in the childcare center, where she works with Uncle Jimmy’s twin daughters, Elaine and Erica. Some people might call this nepotism, but we call it taking care of our own. And that’s what we do, even when our own are total dumbasses like Allen, my first cousin, who works in the turbine control room and who, about two to three times per year, knocks out the entire power grid east of the Mississippi.
“Uh-oh,” Uncle Jimmy says, passing me the binoculars.
I look down at the cemetery to see what he’s uh-oh-ing. The old priest from town, Father Hollenbeck, is down there trying to dig up Chet’s grave again.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I say.
It’s the middle of August, 102 degrees. I was hoping to stay inside the air conditioning today. I was planning to take a restorative nap after playing some computer solitaire, but instead I holster my taser and tromp past the cooling towers and then over the catwalk that runs the length of the outtakes. I pass by Vince, Uncle Tommy’s bastard son, in the guard shack.
“Didn’t I tell you to radio me if Hollenbeck showed up again?” I ask.
“He said he was gonna put a hex on me,” Vince says. “He held up his cross and muttered a bunch of Latin shit. I’d much rather just have you pissed at me than him.”
When I get down to the cemetery, Hollenbeck’s wiping his brow off on his vestments. The man’s nearly eighty years old, but he’s digging like he’s twenty. He’s already reached the top of Chet’s casket. I see the gouges on the lid from the last time he did this.
“Sure is hot out, huh, padre?” I say.
Father Hollenbeck turns toward me, the sweat rolling down his forehead and catching in the folds of his face. He’s getting worse. Last week, he walked into the produce aisle of the grocery store, pulled out his dick, and rubbed it all over the Bibb lettuce. I heard the church was moving him into assisted living, a place with large orderlies and locked doors, but he’s obviously not there yet.