The Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

  Dad sat on the edge of the bed then. He took Joe’s hand in his. With his other hand, he brushed Joe’s bangs out of his eyes. He said, “I promise I will never leave you, Joe.”

  Joe had nodded, forced his tears to stop, but he didn’t believe his father, not then, not nine years later.

  But he did believe his father loved him. His mother too. That’s why he decided he had to talk to them about the sucky.

  Like many parents of thirteen-year-olds, Joe’s mom and dad were incapable of listening to the actual words that came out of his mouth. When he spoke, they both heard a strange and vaguely pleasing sonic dissonance that neither recognized. His mother called the dissonance “a failure to communicate.” His father—whom Joe had learned was once a punk rocker in the 1980s and should have known all about dissonance—just grunted at Joe when Joe tried to tell him anything.

  But this time, his mother squinted at him strangely, and his father shook his head.

  “Is this a joke?” he said.

  “No, not a joke,” Joe said.

  “If this is a joke, it’s not funny.” The dissonance was making it difficult for Dad again.

  Mom said, “I think he may need to see somebody, Danny.”

  “You mean like a shrink?”

  “I mean like somebody who can help him. Do you think this is normal?”

  “I think it’s a joke.”

  Mom rolled her eyes. Always the first sign things were about to get ugly.

  “I suppose his poor grades are a joke to you to? What about that I found a note in his book bag from a girl that was completely inappropriate? That a joke to you?”

  Dad looked at Joe. “Can you believe this shit?”

  Joe didn’t respond.

  “Can you believe how she acts?”

  Joe might have shrugged.

  “Holy Jesus. I’m going to work in the yard.”

  “You can’t hide from your problems all your life,” Joe’s mother said.

  “Then maybe I should just leave my problems,” Joe’s dad said as he was going out the door.

  Joe was left with his mother who had started crying. Upstairs, the sucky began to purr.

  He dreamed about it sometimes. In his dreams, he watched his old bath toys go down the drain one by one. In the dreams he could follow them. His eyes came out of his head and went down the drain too. There were mazes of pipes, then a great belly of water and waste that smelled like chemicals and shit, before the bath toys were diverted back into smaller pipes and rushed along in a current of mould and grime and old bath water to a spout that poked out of the ground in the middle of a vast desert. The desert was always empty, which is how Joe knew the sucky was always hungry and would always be hungry. It’d never fill that desert/belly, not in a million years of sucking. And somehow, this was the part that always jolted him out of sleep, this realization that some places are so empty, all the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to fill them.

  Joe’s mom and dad went out of town on separate trips. Joe’s dad went to the beach to “lay in the sun and read some paperbacks.” Joe’s mom went to her friend’s house in Atlanta. They were going to have some “girls’ nights” and do some “girl stuff.” There were so many things wrong about this situation, Joe did not even try to count them.

  At thirteen, he should have been jubilant to be by himself. Part of him was. But most of him couldn’t concentrate on being jubilant because he kept listening to the upstairs bathroom, just waiting to hear a suck. But the first day, which was Friday, he didn’t even hear a gurgle. When he had to pee, he went in his parents’ bathroom. Their shower was pleasant and never gurgled.

  On Saturday, his friend Roy came over with cigarettes, a six-pack of beer, and two sixth grade chicks, Rhonda and Melissa, both of whom had recently, as if by some arcane female magic, sprouted breasts.

  For a while, amid the coughing and touching and giggling, Joe forgot (mostly) about the sucky.

  “I’ve got to pee,” Melissa said.

  She was the prettier of the two, but less fun than Rhonda, who had already let Joe pop her bra strap and said she wanted a tongue ring for Christmas.

  “Upstairs,” Joe said. “First door on the—” But then he stopped, remembering. “You can use my parents’. It’s in their room at the end of the hall.”

  Melissa ran up the steps. The party continued. Rhonda let Roy look down her shirt. They kissed. Joe was embarrassed and looked at the television where the Crimson Tide was leading Mississippi State by a touchdown.

  A few minutes later, Melissa returned. “There’s something seriously wrong with your bath tub,” she said and plopped down on the couch between Roy and Rhonda.

  “You used my parents’, right?”

  “No toilet paper. I used the hall one. Hey, do you get HBO?”

  “What was it doing?” Joe asked. But he didn’t wait for an answer. He heard it now, rumbling, sucking. Waiting.

  Later, after the six-pack was gone and the cigarettes smoked, and they were all used to the rumbling coming from the upstairs bathroom, Rhonda said, “I hate my dad’s new girlfriend. She’s a total slut.”

  Roy said, “Sounds like a winner to me.”

  Melissa and Rhonda hit him at the same time.

  “Ow. I was just kidding. Sort of. Anyway, that’s kind of like saying the sky is blue, right? I mean, I hate everybody my parents have ever dated. They all seem so . . . I don’t know . . .

  childish.”

  “You’re calling somebody childish?” Melissa said. Her face was drawn and she looked a little pale.

  “I know what he means,” Rhonda said. “It’s like my dad is a teenager. My mom, she’s just, I don’t know, a basket case. She’ll never date again.”

  “So what about your parents, Joe?” Melissa said. “Are they on a romantic getaway?”

  Joe shrugged. He could hear the sucky shifting gears, finding its torque. Its desert must be starving. “I don’t think so.”

  “At least they’re still together,” Rhonda said.

  “For now,” Joe said.

  “Mine are too,” Melissa said. “But I get the feeling sometimes, it won’t last.”

  “Me too,” Joe said. He met Melissa’s eyes. She smiled at him, a half wilted thing that made his stomach flip over.

  “Dude,” Roy said suddenly. “What in the hell is wrong with your bathtub?”

  In Panama City, Florida, Joe’s father, Danny, sat beside the hotel pool with Ralph, a high school buddy he’d started hanging with again since running into him at the Alabama game two weekends ago. Ralph had been the drummer in their punk band, The Bloody Dumplings. Then Ralph had been a skinny kid with rampant acne. Now Ralph was a hulk of a man, red-faced and huffing; his tits bigger than half the women lounging in various stages of undress around the pool.

  But not bigger than the girl Danny and Ralph had been flirting with for the last half hour. Her name was Celebrity and when Danny asked her if that was her stage name or her real name, Celebrity hadn’t even blinked.

  “Both.” She had a crooked smile and one of her teeth was going black.

  Neither Ralph or Joe’s dad asked for elaboration.

  Later, when they were in the room and Celebrity excused herself to the pee, Danny thought about Samantha and shook his head. She deserved this. Hell, he deserved this. Then he thought about Joe, a photograph he used to have of his boy holding a drawing he’d done just for him. Joe’s face beamed with joy, his squinty eyed smile a thing of innocence and beauty. Danny used to keep it folded neatly in his wallet, and when he was having a bad day at work, he’d pull it out and just like that he’d feel better. The photo had stayed with him until about three months ago when he and Joe’s mom had taken a weekend trip to Atlanta. They’d had a huge fight that ended with all of his belongings, including the wallet with the photo of Joe landing in the pool. He dove in after the wallet, the photo, but he never found it. The only thing he could figure was that somehow it had been sucked down the drain at the bottom o
f the pool.

  Ralph found a porno on the television. “You ever done this before?”

  “Nope,” Danny said, mentally letting the photograph fall back into the swimming pool. “But the way I figure it: there’s a first time for everything.”

  Joe’s mother, Samantha, was in a motel room too, but unlike her husband, she was alone. She couldn’t bear to go to Jessica’s house. Jessica and her husband, Rob, were so in love, it made Samantha sick. So she was alone, flipping through an endless litany of channels, wondering what Danny was doing. Twice, she almost called him, but each time she opened her cell phone, she saw the picture of Joe staring back at her and she asked herself the same question she had been asking herself for the last year: was it better to stick it out for Joe’s sake or go ahead and spilt? After all, if she and Danny weren’t happy, wouldn’t that rub off on Joe? Hadn’t it already?

  She opened her cell phone a third time and looked at the picture of Joe taken last Christmas. He was such a frail boy. So nervous. Jumpy. When he didn’t take his ADHD medicine, he could be almost intolerable, but then there were other moments, when he smiled at her so sweetly, she felt full, as if there could be nothing else she needed in the world besides her son’s sweet smile.

  Joe’s parents talked on their cell phones. It went like this:

  “Hello.”

  “You remember the night when Joe was three and we woke him up fighting?”

  “Danny?”

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes, where are you?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Neither spoke. A small window of silence. In Panama City, Danny heard a car squeal off. Then the ocean, lapping against the continental shelf, and pulling pieces of it away, back to the dark, silent centre. In Atlanta, Samantha heard the distant throb of bass from the hotel bar. Earlier she’d seen a group of short-haired kids with dog collars setting up for a show. She’d thought of Dan then, the way she’d found him so cute that first night in Knoxville with his leather pants and faux-cockney accent. When he asked her to go for a walk after show, she felt like she was with Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer. After a while, he took her hand and she looked at his profile and he pretended not to notice as she soaked him up, his almost elf like ears, his blunt, tough nose, the dark of his glassy eyes, the weight of his head, so right.

  “Do you remember?”

  “Yes. I stood at the door. I listened. You promised him you’d never leave.”

  “Yeah. He was so pitiful. My heart hurt that night.”

  “Because you knew it was a lie?”

  “Yes. I knew it was a lie.”

  Danny carried the phone over to the sliding glass door and opened it. The salt air came in and he remembered a time when he’d been a kid, eighteen, and come with his buddies to this same beach. They’d gone out on a night like this one, when the spray of the ocean was in the air like fog and walked for what seemed like miles, passing girls their age in the deep dark, unable to discern their faces, so instead, they watched their forms: lithe bodies stuffed inside oversized sweatshirts that hung over blue jean cut-offs. In the dark, each girl was a girlfriend, a lover, a passionate wife they yearned for in the worst way. A yearning that did not know words and sat, like an ever-expanding balloon in the pits of their stomachs. They never said more than a couple of words to these perfect, invisible girls, and sometimes when Danny was lonely or sad he thought of them, their flip flops thwacking the hard sand, on their way to make some other boy happy.

  He was too old to still yearn for such things, but he did. And this made him feel sick and alive at the same time. Beyond the pool, the ocean sucked the sand back out to sea.

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come home. I’m willing to try again.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to go down to the beach, Samantha. I need to go for a swim.”

  “You’re not coming home?”

  “Samantha . . .”

  “What about Joe?”

  “I love Joe.”

  “What’s going to happen to him? How’s he going to make it without a dad?”

  “Kids do it all the time. I barely had a dad.”

  “I can’t believe I married you.”

  “Look, I didn’t say I was never coming home. I just need some more time.”

  “You’ve always needed something, Danny. Always.”

  He didn’t know what to say to this. It was true. He’d needed love or thought he did. Samantha had given him that. But it wasn’t enough. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come here and fucked Celebrity. Otherwise, he wouldn’t still think of that warm night and those faceless girls.

  He hung up the phone. Not out of anger. He didn’t think he could be angry at Samantha anymore. He hung up because he didn’t have anything else to say.

  “Danny? Oh, hell, Danny. You didn’t just hang up. Shit.”

  Samantha tossed the phone across the motel room and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She always cried best in the shower. It was the only time she could ever really let herself go.

  As she cried, she thought about her tears joining together with the hot water and sliding down her naked body into a pool at the bottom, near the drain. She tried to watch one as it fell off her face, but once it hit the water, it was impossible to know where her tears ended and the water began.

  After his friends left, Joe watched movies. He read his comic books. He walked down to the 7-11 and tried to buy a Hustler. Dude wouldn’t sell it to him. Naked girls always seemed to make Joe less afraid. He bought a slushy instead.

  He drank it as he walked home, enjoying the sweet cherry flavour, until he neared the bottom and the straw made a gurgling, sucking sound. He thought of the sucky and tossed the cup in the road. An eighteen-wheeler crushed it under its front right tire a few seconds later.

  There was a message on the machine when he got home.

  “This is your dad, Joe. Just checking in. I miss you . . .” He hesitated here, as if wanting to say more. In the background, Joe heard the ocean sucking, and he thought the ocean must be the original sucky. “I’ll call you soon,” his dad said at last.

  There was something about his voice. Joe knew from the way he pronounced “soon” that his father wasn’t coming home. And shortly after this realization, Joe had another: he could hear the sucky again. Gearing up for him, breathing out a huge blast of silence, making room in its iron lungs for a great pull.

  Danny walked along the beach for a very long time. His bare feet got wet, and his ears got used to the rhythmic pull of the ocean. A very long time ago, he’d walked this same stretch of beach hoping to meet a faceless girl to hold him in her arms and tell him . . . What? That it would be okay? That she’d love him forever? No. The truth was, he didn’t know or couldn’t explain what made him want the faceless girl or any girl for that matter. Here he was nearly thirty-seven, and Danny had not gained one ounce of insight into what he wanted from women. This, despite being married to one for nearly fifteen years.

  He passed two men smoking reefers, a stray dog, and three women whose hidden faces scrutinized him as he shuffled by.

  He turned to the ocean now, another mystery. There was a moon high above him, and its shine lay on the waves, squirming with every deep pull of the undertow. He thought about Joe. The lie he’d told. Maybe, a voice inside him suggested, the easiest way would be to give up. He’d found the bottom of his life and from here, the only place that looked inviting was the deep ocean. He wondered how far he could swim, and when he finally stopped swimming, he wondered how it would feel to let himself sink, the warm seawater covering him and then soaking into him as he found the undertow and rode it to wherever it was going.

  Three steps in, he began to shed his clothes. Two more and he was naked. Moments later he was swimming, the water warm and salty on his lips.

  Joe sat on the roof, outside his parents’ bedroom, looking at the moon. He wondered why th
ey didn’t come out here on nights like this. Or maybe they did. His parents were a mystery to him.

  Tonight felt pleasant, warm and humid. Joe could feel the air, and he liked that. The moon hung heavy and fat, a pale pumpkin, streaked with wisps of smoky clouds. Somewhere far away, the ocean pulsed. Beats just out of earshot, but Joe knew they were there, just as he knew the desert/belly waited for him and its infinite hunger would never be filled.

  Inside the house, he heard the phone ringing. Grudgingly, he pulled himself from his perch and climbed back inside. The sucky roared. He felt no surprise at this. It would have to happen tonight. All these years. It had been waiting for tonight.

  He picked up the phone, putting his free hand over his other ear, to muffle the noise.

  “Joe?” His mother’s voice sounded very far away, and for an instant he had an insane thought that she might be dead and this was one of those ghost calls they always talked about on the paranormal shows.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry we left you.” Was she crying? It sounded like she might be crying.

  “It’s okay. You’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Mom made a weird sound. A murmur.

  “What? You won’t be back tomorrow?”

  “Of course I will, Joe.”

  An awkward silence followed this statement, and in that silence, Joe read the language of intent, the unspoken dialogue he now saw was the province of adulthood.

  “But Dad won’t,” he said.

  “I can’t speak for your father, but I will say he needs to talk to you himself. I’m very angry at him right now.”

  She didn’t need to say this because Joe heard her voice shaking; he could even picture vividly the look on her face, her eyes locked on nothing, the corners of her mouth edging toward a grimace she could barely control. Or maybe she’d stopped trying now. Maybe it was so over, she didn’t even care to control her disdain.

  “Okay,” Joe said even though it was not okay. It was far from okay. His parents were done, finished, sliced in two. He heard it in what his mother said and what she left unsaid. His mind went to the sucky and then through its great iron lungs until he found that awful gray desert, where not even light or darkness can exist, just the rotten, timeworn colours of no more laughing and despair.