Snapper

by Brian Kimberling

  “To Mr. Bacon’s house,” said Darren.

  “Without asking me?”

  “You don’t like it anyway,” he said, and obviously this was a serious character flaw on my part. “Puts you to sleep.”

  “I would prefer Mr. Bacon not to get arrested,” I said.

  Things that did not occur to me at the time: that a pound of marijuana must carry a substantial price tag, that it was a tremendous amount for personal consumption, or that selling it was how Darren earned his living after graduating with a degree in sociology.

  The Brotherhood grew out of the Secret Ninja Coalition. We reached an age when calling one another by codenames became embarrassing. It was not, however, embarrassing to leave a pair of cigarettes crossed beneath the windshield wiper of a friend’s car you came across at the riverside or the mall. It was embarrassing to stage sword fights with broom handles on a pedestrian overpass above the Expressway, but it was okay—essential—to inscribe the books we exchanged. Shane still does it, though now he just writes, “Read this.” We gave up our childish ways, and instead did lots of noble shoplifting from faceless fascist institutions like Walmart and the grocery store.

  Flynn was the first to defect. He was bookish like the rest of us, but he had hard-working blue-collar Republican parents who taught him to hold down a job and watch his bank balance. While the rest of us were making plans to hitchhike around Europe he went and got a good job. Nowadays he’s very successful. He plays golf and other things that don’t bear thinking about.

  Peter went through a long phase of stealing car stereos, sometimes shooting a troublesome dog with a teargas gun he found in an antique shop. At other times he has gone through a chess phase, a strip club phase, and a gambling phase, which ended his first marriage. I don’t know what he’s into or what’s into him now. He builds porches and decks for rich people in Kokomo. Flynn says he drinks beer on his lunch breaks.

  What I am getting at is that a group formed from mere proximity outgrew itself as each member developed in his own peculiar way. Shane would come over with a plan to build a microlight airplane from a lawnmower engine and a couple of “very big kites,” but somehow one day the rest of us couldn’t go along with that kind of thing anymore.

  As a Secret Ninja, Darren pouted whenever he wasn’t on Shane’s team for whatever we played, always fought with the Dungeon Master during D & D, and as a brother he sulked any time anyone went anywhere without him. This was okay—every band of brothers needs a Grumpy Dwarf, and any group of outlaws needs one petulant sort who initiates all the scrapes and misadventures. Every Last Supper needs a Judas, too.

  Partial deafness has some benefits: I can sleep through anything. Screeching babies in public places do not trouble me at all. What I can’t forgive Darren for is the blasphemy against the Brotherhood: the suggestion that my childhood and adolescence were not in fact charmed, that he and I and the rest of us were just fallible beings like everyone else who gave one another the elbow once we were grown up. Of course that is true, as events continue to prove. But at least the rest of us tried. Sometimes Professor Matt and Doctor Colin even find the time to check Facebook.

  Shane has, as always, an alternative theory. He thinks Darren was more dependent than anyone else on our mutual camaraderie. Everyone else had some other interest, whether poetry or science or chess. Thus, when we drifted off to separate universities, Darren was left alone, foundering in bad company. By implication, when Darren came to stay in my house after the stabbing I should have been aware of his general lost and wayward condition; I should have offered a more brotherly hand to help him up.

  This is why Shane and I don’t talk much about Darren.

  Darren got Alan’s cats stoned, too. I had always thought his technique an urban myth until I saw the result. Allegedly the skin of a cat’s ear is sufficiently thin and porous to absorb the toxins from a plume of smoke blown directly into it. More important—the myth goes—the cat’s system has no way to expel these toxins, so the cats remain stoned, as it were, for life. Once Darren had moved in, Alan’s cats grew increasingly paranoid and liable to sudden starts. Calvin, a tabby, had been a formidable mouser, but his kills went into freefall. He had trouble chasing balls of yarn.

  Darren did such things fairly often. Again, it’s an urban myth that if you feed Alka-Seltzer to pigeons they will explode. Darren was disappointed when that failed to happen. It is true that antacids are usually fatal to birds, but they do not burst dramatically apart. What happens to them is analogous to my own brain hemorrhage as I lay on the marble floor of the Old Courthouse. The fluid—in my case blood, in pigeons, carbonated water—builds up within a confined space until the pressure of it crushes neighboring organs: for a pigeon, gastrointestinal things, for me, the brain. There is a slim-to-vanishing chance in each case that the fluid will find some point of release. A pigeon might be fortunate to drain his toxic cocktail through a ruptured cloaca, for example, corresponding to the human anus. My blood had the good sense to burst my eardrum from within.

  He began making short trips into town, returning with a bag of CDs, some sandwich ingredients, and a box of beer. He would then treat himself to a three- or four-day Bob Marley binge that was no different from his previous routine. That is, he woke up, got stoned, had a nap, got stoned again. I did appreciate his contribution to our household beer requirements, though.

  “I’m growing dreads,” he announced. He hadn’t bathed in several days. His wiry brown hair looked like the nest of an incontinent mourning dove, and he wore a gray sweatsuit every day so that he looked like he belonged in an asylum.

  We clashed again when he had been there for just over three weeks. I still thought he ought to handle his own convalescence in any way he saw fit, short of illegal deliveries to my house. If anyone was entitled to live in a self-induced haze for an indefinite time, it was Darren. Nevertheless, I suggested that he might benefit from going out now and then, taking an interest in Hickory, finding his way into a social life, perhaps meeting a girl—he was convinced his scars would work wonders—even applying, perhaps, for some kind of undemanding part-time work.

  “I know when I’m not wanted,” he seethed.

  “I didn’t mean that at all,” I said. “Do whatever you like. My house is your house. Just a suggestion.”

  “You don’t have a social life,” he said.

  I was inwardly reeling myself: a week after arriving in Hickory, fresh from a whole month with Lola, she had announced on the phone that she had met a folk singer from Boston. I noticed that I was getting older.

  “You don’t go to bars,” he continued.

  I got up at five a.m. most workdays, and a bar full of undergraduates, even or especially pretty ones, did not appeal. What if I spotted a delicate redhead like Lola across a crowded room?

  “Fair points,” I said. “I’m not trying to get rid of you. Just a suggestion. When you’re ready to plunge back in, plunge.” I winced, thinking I had probably used the wrong verb, but Darren said nothing.

  What followed was the sort of uneasy routine I suppose estranged spouses endure, or perhaps overprotective parents and their rebellious and insolent children. I knew he wanted to watch something on TV when he said he didn’t care, we could watch whatever I liked. If I switched it he sulked out of the room, and if I left it on he reminded me every few minutes that I didn’t have to watch it at all. If I asked where something was, like the mayonnaise, he said, “How the hell should I know?” and if he ran out of beer, he said, “I’m out of fucking beer,” placing the problem squarely in my lap.

  He never cleaned or washed dishes. I didn’t mind that either, at first. Rick and Alan were hopeless, too, but at least they made perfunctory expressions of guilt about it. And obviously Darren never cooked.

  We had a household ritual on Sunday mornings, when I didn’t work, and Rick and Alan were invariably hungover. Darren was generally still asleep. When I heard Rick and Alan stirring and groaning—usually on the living room couch
or floor where they had passed out—I’d go to the kitchen and slide a whole stick of butter into a skillet that I put on low heat. Once the butter had liquefied I slid a few cinnamon raisin bagels into it facedown. Rick or Alan or both would hover over my shoulder and say they felt their arteries hardening already. The butter seeps into the face of the bagel before it begins to fry, sealing it in, and the outer shell of a bagel is more or less impermeable. The result is the most delicious ring of fried butter ever made—the bread itself is incidental, a sort of delivery mechanism for concentrated organic grease.

  Darren had never bothered to get up before, but now he appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  “What, I don’t get one?”

  “You’re not hungover,” I pointed out. “This isn’t breakfast, it’s medicine.”

  “Smells foul,” he said.

  “You can insult my mother or my manhood, but not my fried bagels,” I said.

  “Those are my bagels,” said Darren. “I bought them yesterday.”

  “We’ll replace them,” said Rick.

  “That’s not the point,” said Darren. “You took my bagels without asking.”

  “Maybe you should smoke your morning joint, Darren,” I said.

  “Screw you.”

  “You had a pound of marijuana delivered to my house without asking,” I said. This was news to Rick and Alan, by the way.

  “Oh, it’s my fault.”

  “I didn’t say that. We can replace your bagels.”

  “Do you know what it’s like for me?” he said. “Do you know what it took for me to go into a grocery store, where every black face reminds me of Frank? Where I suspect every other customer?”

  Nobody had a ready reply for that.

  “You told me to get out more. I got out. I bought some bagels. And you stole them.”

  “You go out sometimes already, Darren. You get your CDs and things.”

  “Screw you.”

  He stomped back to his lair, and a half hour later he offered me some of his joint. He did that frequently, always saying the same thing: Shall we share a peace pipe? I always declined. I’m not opposed, but as he observed, it puts me to sleep.

  We didn’t resolve the bagel thing, and the next day I nearly died. You can see why I think violence is stupid. Not senseless and tragic, not avoidable. It’s mere vandalism inflicted on people. It’s like someone working out that two and three makes eight.

  There is a small post office inside the Old Courthouse in Hickory. Indiana has hundreds of grand old courthouses that are impractical for modern purposes; Hickory’s is one of the few put to some use other than that of underfunded, underused local history museum. There are restaurants and shops in there too. You enter a handsome limestone facade through immense Corinthian columns, and above you the tiled roof sports alternating Dutch and Victorian gables—the whole thing is probably a copy of some Bavarian manor or château on the Loire, though I don’t know for sure. Many of those old courthouses are. Once inside the floors and walls are all brown, gray, and white marble, with paintings and busts of past Hickory dignitaries peering at you from every wall, and you could see they had made sure to disapprove of you in advance. Turning right from a circular central hall you mount twelve curved marble steps to the post office wing, a long low counter on the left-hand wall.

  I had finished work and gone to the grocery store to replace Darren’s bagels. I thought of buying him forty or fifty of them but that seemed like the kind of passive-aggressive stunt he would pull, so I just bought one replacement pack. As I walked home I saw Darren cross the street to the courthouse and vanish between those Corinthian pillars. After his insistence that buying bagels was some kind of triumphant defiance of his misfortune I wondered what in that courthouse was worth braving, how he screwed up the courage for that imposing place when he was cowed by a homely grocery store. I know now, or at least surmise, that he visited the post office every three or four days when he made those trips to the record store. He sold his dope the same way he obtained it, courtesy of Uncle Sam’s postal network. He wasn’t caught for a few more years, and by that time he was dealing on an industrial scale. Frank will get out of prison before Darren does.

  I didn’t know that yet, and at the time I was simply puzzled. I followed him in, and it occurred to me to ask if he wanted to stop for a beer in the sports bar that had recently opened downstairs.

  By the time I got inside, however, he had retrieved a package from the counter and he met me at the top of those twelve curved stairs. Like the parcel that came to the house, every inch of this box was taped several times.

  “Is that more dope?” I said.

  I don’t think that he shoved me from fear of discovery, though I admit that was not the most perspicacious thing I could have said. I do not think he shoved me out of hatred or anger, either. What I saw in that ruddy scrunched-up face and in those severely hooded eyes was mere lack of recognition: as though he didn’t see his friend, or even another human being, but a sort of inanimate obstacle. The most expedient path of removal for this obstacle lay in the reverse trajectory from whence it came. It was not an act of aggression so much as a miscalculation, as though he were dialing the wrong number.

  I felt a pressure in the middle of my chest, not hard, but as though he were trying to pat me on the back and had got it all wrong.

  I seemed to fall into and away from the vaulted marble ceiling at the same time: a slow dream fall, but I didn’t jerk awake before impact. I did the reverse.

  I had ear and hearing tests for years afterward, and I was always assured that somehow someday the damage would heal. I think Dr. Yamani knew better from the first. He sat with me for the half hour after I came to, until Alan had been reached and rushed to the hospital. I think the doctor could have put a nurse on this task, but he didn’t. Several hours had passed, and I was safely out of danger. He sat next to my bed surveying me with that perfect mustache and a face both shrewd and jolly, and he began to tell me jokes. They weren’t very good jokes, but I was severely concussed and probably didn’t need to laugh too much.

  “An Indiana boy went to Harvard. I went to Harvard, myself, but I didn’t like it very much,” he confided.

  “An Indiana boy went to Harvard,” he repeated. “And he stopped a tweed-clad professor in the street.” Dr. Yamani cleared his throat to attempt an Indiana accent, but he sounded exactly the same.

  “ ‘Excuse me,’ said the Indiana boy, ‘Can you tell me where the library is at?’ ”

  Dr. Yamani cleared his throat again, though his Harvard accent was no different, either.

  “ ‘Here at Harvard,’ replied the professor, ‘we do not end our sentences in prepositions.’ ”

  Dr. Yamani paused for effect. I knew the punch line, but I started to laugh anyway. A man from Damascus was telling me jokes about Harvard in a Hickory hospital while my brain leaked out of my ear.

  “You want me to continue?” he said.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  “So the Indiana boy says, ‘Fine. Where’s the library at, asshole?’ ”

  I doubt that constitutes orthodox medical practice, but I was grateful to Dr. Yamani for it. He eased my return to a world that had changed dramatically since I had left it, so to speak. By the time Alan arrived my mind was so disengaged from what had happened that I was simply thinking of food. Rick had gotten Darren and his things—I doubt Darren was eager to stay—out of the house instantly, somehow, and once at home I preoccupied myself with how to rearrange the room (mentally, that is: I stayed in bed for several days). I got a hurried, worried phone call from Lola, which cheered me up.

  When the sergeant detective came to see me, I was in a reasonable frame of mind. I told him I fell.

  XI

  Bone

  I keep a human thigh bone on the coffee table in my living room. It gets me in trouble sometimes. My landlady threatened to phone the police when she saw it, but I told her I had already done that.

  I am neither morbi
d nor superstitious, but I can’t see how I will ever get rid of it. This bone is a sort of albatross I didn’t shoot. I didn’t even find it, technically. I took a dog for a walk through a graveyard.

  She was a big German shepherd with a brain the size of a chickpea. She belonged to a guy I knew who was traveling for a week. I took her twice a day to Rose Hill Cemetery, unleashed her, and watched her bound off and away between the headstones. She needed a lot of exercise, and in decent weather I’d just wait twenty minutes or a half hour with a book I had brought. I read Pride and Prejudice in several installments sitting on a flat marble slab commemorating someone named Elizabeth Bennet. Kia would give me just enough time to wax wroth with Darcy over one thing or another, and then her choke chain would jingle nearby. I had to shut the book and stand up fast to avoid prodigious slobber down the side of my face.

  So it went for several days, until she showed up with a big brown stick in her mouth that turned out to be somebody’s leg.

  Both of our lives were pretty grim. Although I was skeptical of her intellectual abilities, I had time for Kia, which her owner rarely did. In fact, three months later he sold her for this reason. I had that time because I was unemployed. Financially speaking it would not be long before I started sharing her food.

  Descending a marble staircase headfirst meant I couldn’t work the same job, and I didn’t have transferable skills. Imagine a whole pillow somehow stuffed into your left ear. When I hear a bird, I have no idea where it is. I had developed a rudimentary version of the same echolocation technique some blind people use to navigate their surroundings—but suddenly I lacked the auditory equivalent of depth perception or peripheral vision or both. Even now I have a lopsided understanding of my surroundings. I have learned to nod and smile convincingly during conversations with short people in crowded places.

  I didn’t have Internet access and I never answered my phone, because it was sure to be my parents, fretting. I had sold the Gypsy Moth for scrap metal when the transmission failed and I was told the cost to replace it. A taciturn grease-ball gave me fifty bucks and towed it away with a sneer. Two months later I saw her pulling into an AutoZone—I still hate that guy, but I like to think she’s still out there, finding new ways to embarrass her current owner.