by Brad Watson
You can get just about anything you want, these days.
But nobody runs off and gets married anymore. Nowadays, if you did that, you’d be greeted upon your return as if you were declaring, after an unexplained absence, that you’d been abducted by aliens, taken aboard their spaceship, and probed in various humiliating ways.
THE YEAR OR TWO after we woke up was a kind of limbo. I would live out some alternative life, and then come to on a park bench, or in the hospital again, or in my car somewhere, ignition on, engine dead, gas tank empty. I’ll admit that at one point my family had me admitted to East Mississippi. That was ironic, I thought. The old man who hunted lions, Mr. Hunter, was no longer around. None of the inmates remembered him, and no one on the staff would discuss him with me. I’m not sure how long I was in. I may have been used, myself, for a visitation or two. Fuzzy memories, as if from deep dreams. I was disciplined, once, for going AWOL and walking around. I was in a locked, padded room for two days. It was like being inside a white dream, or in a pure fog or cloud.
When I got out of the hospital, I would see other people with these lost, somewhat sad looks on their faces, and I would think that similar things were happening to them. But you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to get them started. There was the fear of the destabilizing admission. We left one another alone.
I went through a brief period when I wanted desperately to see Olivia again, and not just to see her but talk to her, too. But her parents would hang up on me when I called. A couple of times she answered the phone, but she wouldn’t speak after I said hello. And then her mother or father would take the receiver from her, tell me not to call again, and hang up.
I sneaked up to the house one night. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Maybe I fantasized that she’d step outside for something, to take out the garbage or just sit out in the night air looking up at the stars. She didn’t, of course. I crept into the shrubbery near their their living room window and peeked in. Mrs. Coltrane was on the sofa, knitting something, and Mr. Coltrane was watching TV. I crept out and around to what used to be Olivia’s bedroom and peeked in there.
She was sitting on the bed, reading something, dressed in a pink nightgown, her legs beneath the covers. My heart fluttered. I stared for a long time, trying to see what she was reading, before I realized it was that green, faux-leather edition of The Living Bible. Her brow was lined with concentration. She seemed to be moving her lips a little bit as she read. I backed quietly from the window and crept to my car and drove home, to my own parents’ house, and went to bed.
I could see her whole life ahead of her, then, and it seemed kind of simple. She’d been saved, from me and from everything else. She’d been pretty shocked by the whole affair, and wanted to do everything the proper way now. She’d marry, eventually, someone safe and predictable, and kind. Fold herself into her parents’ church. Develop a particularly amnesiac cartography of her past. Our past.
Obviously, I haven’t done that so well. I haven’t wanted to. Even now, when I think of Olivia, I’m looking at her sitting naked and unselfconscious on our creaky old bed in the attic apartment, lost in some thought that is destined to escape her. Maybe it’ll wander in the breeze and lodge itself in some poor thought-crazed head in the asylum down the street, maybe worm its way into the bitter landlady downstairs, maybe squeeze into the head of a scatterbrained cardinal in the pecan tree just outside the gable window. She wrinkles her pretty brow in thought, literally puts a finger to her bottom lip, but it’s hopeless, the thought is gone, never to be aired before me or anyone else in her line of mortal acquaintance. Her pale skin is beautiful, smooth and lightly blue-veined, a barely visible pale blue line at one temple, another across her growing tummy, and one on the back of the hand that holds the finger to her moistened lower lip, which cannot voice her fleeting thought, lost now to her before she even knows it.
I wondered what our lives would really have been like, had we gone on together, stayed married, kept the child, tried to deal with the kinds of things that always work like an underground river to undercut people’s happiness. I wonder if she ever wonders the same.
I DID, ONCE, live out that life. It was while I was in the hospital, early on in my stay.
We stayed married, for a while anyway. Instead of becoming a professional carpenter, I worked a wood-shop job and attended the local branch of the university in my spare time, because Olivia and her parents and my parents convinced me to do so. Olivia stayed home and took care of our child, who was a boy but whose name was Jackson, we called him Jack.
I was good at academics, as it turned out. This surprised me, but pleased me, too. I’d never thought I was very smart. You might think I’d have studied the hard sciences, maybe astronomy, but I chose anthropology, a so-called social science. I wanted to know about people.
The more I studied, of course, the more my sense of who I was began to change. It changed who I thought I was or was becoming, anyway. Olivia clung all the more stubbornly to who she thought I was, or had been. Naturally my skepticism toward organized religion only continued to deepen and grow. I began to lose interest in Olivia, who it seemed to me had no interest in growing, learning, changing with the times. We grew apart. And one day, though she did so kindly and without anger, she took Jack and moved back home to her parents’ house. We were still only twenty-two years old.
She remarried a few years later, to a prosperous local businessman, had two more children, belonged to the newer, richer country club, the larger and more exclusive Episcopalian church in town, and drove a Mercedes station wagon. I was amused to see that.
I eventually finished the PhD and did fieldwork for a number of years in Wyoming on prehistoric settlement sites, then took a job at a university not too close, but not too far from our hometown, so I could visit Jack more easily when he was visiting his mother during holidays from school. He was a sensitive young man, with a forgiving nature, and we were close. I remarried, twice, but neither one worked out. I fathered no more children, though I kept in touch with the daughter of my third wife, a girl she’d had during her first marriage, under circumstances not so different from mine and Olivia’s.
I grew old not so gracefully. I was a little bitter, though I had a dark sense of humor my students seemed to like. I drank far too much, pretty much every night. Stopped and started smoking in what seemed like regular seven-year intervals. I had an old dog, a pound mutt of inconceivable lineage. I died while out on a walk with the dog one afternoon in winter, of exposure, because of a mild heart attack that nonetheless left me unable to get back to my vehicle, parked half a mile away.
When I woke from this one, who should be sitting on the hospital cot across from me but Wendell Sparrow, looking strange as ever, but worse. He seemed to have aged to something like forty or fifty, though he was surely only twenty, just a couple of years older than me. Judging by the white orderly uniform he wore, and his crew-cut, balding head, he was now an employee of East Mississippi. He was smoking a cigarette, in the same famished way, and looked to weigh about a hundred and ten pounds. I couldn’t imagine him overpowering even the tiniest crazy person.
No, he said when I asked, he was a respiratory therapist. They need that in here, too, he said.
“Ever use the machine on yourself?” I said.
“I figure it’ll come in handy, one day,” he said.
“It’s good to see you,” I said then. “Even if it is in here.”
He didn’t answer for a moment, just watched me with a kind of detached or absent look on his ravaged face. I figured he was doing a lot of speed, maybe junk. Or maybe something he could only get in here.
“So,” he said. “How was that?”
“How was what?” I said. And then a little chill ran through me. He was looking at me in that way.
“That was real,” Sparrow said then. “That’s the way it would’ve really been.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute.
“What about the rest
of it?” I said. “All the stuff after the divorce.”
Sparrow put out his cigarette on the floor, dug into his therapist coat pocket for the pack, niggled another one out of it, and lit up, put the pack back into the pocket.
“Yeah,” he said. “Could be pretty much that way. Probably a few minor differences. Might look a lot different at times, along the way. But in the end, not a whole lot.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Gotta go,” Sparrow said, getting up. “So many lungs, so little time.”
He walked out. I never saw him again, after that.
IT HAD BEEN SPARROW, in a perverse concession, who’d driven us on our first date. He drove us around in his mother’s humongous emerald-green Electra 225. I say date, although really it was a contrived, rolling parking session, Sparrow sitting alone up front behind the wheel while Olivia and I made out in the back seat.
I’d begged him. My father was on the road again and my brother had our mother’s car. Sparrow agreed only because he needed to be angry, he hadn’t gotten it all out. I could see his beady, furious eyes watching us in the rearview mirror. He chain-smoked, hardly ever taking the cigarette from his mouth, just sucking hard and burning it a half inch at a time. But after a while the strange rhythms of his driving began to rock us into a kind of submissive stupor. He drove with his left foot on the brake, right foot on the accelerator, so that we moved through the evening like a big green fish swimming in fluid lunges against the current. The effect was lulling, hypnotic. After a while we forgot he was up there, forgot we were in his car. We fell almost into sleep into one another’s kisses.
Later, when we dropped Olivia off at her home, I stayed in the back and Sparrow drove me home in silence, fuming tobacco smoke and rage. I felt pretty good, like a rich man’s son, Sparrow my father’s powerless chauffeur, forced to drive me on a date with his own beautiful daughter.
That had basically been the end of my friendship with Sparrow. I haven’t seen him in decades, now. But the funny thing is that he’d looked kind of like an alien, I mean like the ones in abduction stories. He had the teardrop-shaped head already balding at eighteen, the long skinny neck, the long thin hands and fingers, and his eyes just enormous. Except that Sparrow’s eyes were normally very expressive, very human. Normally, he was just an alien of the everyday variety.
A YEAR OR TWO after all of this, after I’d gotten a little better, I was tending my dad’s bar, the one he opened up after Curtis died in the accident and he lost his job from drinking too much. He bought the bar, and ran a little liquor store in a corner of the building, and I ran the bar, evenings. I took classes at the junior college during the day.
One night when almost no one was in the bar, a weeknight, a man came in by himself and sat on a stool and asked for a beer. I’d never seen him before. He was maybe forty, forty-five. Hard to tell, as I was still only nineteen, myself, legal age in Mississippi in those days, but far from having any view over the nearer horizon.
He was a pleasant man, with a small, pleasant, unremarkable face. He was dressed in what looked like business attire minus the jacket and tie he’d left either in the car or at the house. His collar was pressed but knocked awry. His medium-length, but definitely barbered hair was just the slightest bit mussed up. Mine wasn’t the first bar he’d been to that evening.
When he’d ordered his second beer, he said this was his one night in the year to go out and get drunk.
“I don’t drink, otherwise,” he said. “Just one night a year, though, I go out and I get plastered. It’s a safety valve.”
“Well, that sounds okay,” I said. “Can’t fault you for that.”
“No, you cannot, that’s true,” the man said.
He reached across the bar to shake my hand.
“Monroe Clooney,” he said. “My friends call me Mo.”
“Call me Will, Mo,” I said.
“I will, Will,” he said, and laughed. “Sorry.”
“No, no, Mo,” I said, and we both laughed.
Then Mo Clooney told me his story. He was a civil engineer, made a good living, but he and his wife couldn’t have children, they’d tried, and so about ten years earlier they’d started taking in foster children from the local orphanage. There were mostly boys in the orphanage, and so they decided to take only boys, just to keep things simple as possible. But here they were ten years down the road, and now they had ten boys running about their house, which was fairly large, but still.
“They’re great boys, mostly,” Mo said. “But even so, you got to blow off a little steam every now and then. Hence,” he said, raising his beer, and then draining it. I got him another, on the house.
“Thank you,” he said, as if I’d paid him a compliment. He spilled a little of his beer on the counter and mopped it with his shirtsleeve.
“My boys need a project,” he said then. “Always have to keep them busy. So I’ve decided to buy some kind of old car that they can take apart. Doesn’t really matter if they can put it back together again.”
“They get the ‘exploded view,’” I said. I loved that term. So did Mo Clooney, because he was an engineer, I guess. Most people don’t know it. It’s the simulated photo of something, like an engine, as if it’s just been blown into pieces that happen to be all its component parts, and they’re suspended just inches away from one another, as if in the act of flying apart, so that you can see all the parts separately and where they fit into the whole. Mo Clooney could hardly stop laughing. He probably didn’t get to hear much engineer humor. I knew the term only because I tended to thumb through dictionaries when I was bored sometimes, a habit I’d picked up lately. When Mo Clooney finally could stop laughing, he asked me about the old VW bus I’d parked in the corner of the bar’s dirt and gravel parking lot.
“Doesn’t run anymore,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’ll you take for it?”
I shrugged. “Fifty bucks.”
“Deal,” Mo Clooney said.
He pulled out his wallet, peeled off fifty dollars and handed the money to me, and shook my hand.
“No need for a bill of sale,” he said. “I trust you.” He laughed. “I trust everybody. It was nice to meet you. I’ll have someone tow the vehicle to my house by tomorrow afternoon.”
And then he left, giving me a little wave over his shoulder, and walking only a little bit unsteadily.
Next afternoon when I got to the bar, the bus was gone.
I’d had a thought, when he was walking out the night before, that he was a pretty odd guy, and so I’d gone outside to the parking lot, to see if he was really there.
Or to see if I was, I suppose.
Mo Clooney was there, fumbling with the keys to his car, and then getting into it, cranking it up, and driving it slowly away down the darkened, lamp-lined street.
I’d thought for a moment that he was one of them. But his sense of humor had been too normal, his laughter too real. And the look in his eyes had been so vulnerably human. It seemed filled with a kind of muted loss.
No, I said to myself then, he’s one of us.
CREDITS
Some of these stories appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “The Misses Moses” and a selection from “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” Narrative; “Fallen Nellie” and “Alamo Plaza,” Ecotone; “Are You Mister Lonelee?” The Yalobusha Review and A State of Laughter, ed. Donald R. Noble; “Terrible Argument,” Short Fiction (UK); “Water Dog God,” The Oxford American and Best American Mystery Stories 2000; “Visitation,” The New Yorker and The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010; parts of “Ordinary Monsters” (“Her Tribe,” “Intermission,” and “Going Down”), Bombay Gin; “Carl’s Outside,” The Greensboro Review; “Noon,” The Idaho Review; “Vacuum,” Granta.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the literature and writing faculties and others at The University of West Florida (James, Mary); The University of Alabama, Birmingham
(Sena); Spalding University; Ole Miss and members of the Grisham writer-in-residence committee (thanks, Barry) and the Grisham family; The University of California, Irvine (thanks, Elizabeth); and The University of Wyoming. Thanks to the writers I’ve been privileged to know and work with in these places, for their good work and friendship. And to my family, for love and tolerance.
I’m grateful to the National Endowment of Arts for a fellowship in 2004. To the Taylor family for generous use of the Holmes house in 2003–5. To the Lannan Foundation for a residency in 2006. To the JW Foundation for a brief but crucial time in Tucson. Thank you to Meagan Ciesla for retyping some of these stories and others. To good friends in Seagrove Beach, Fairhope, Meridian, Oxford, Pensacola, Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Boulder, Santa Fe, Phoenix, New York, Laramie, and elsewhere. For reading and responding, thank you to Jon, David, Beth, Rob, Kim, Joy, Cressida, Quentin, and especially Neela, a staunch and generous champion. To my agent, Peter Steinberg, undaunted. To everyone at W. W. Norton, particularly to Bill Rusin, Denise Scarfi, and Rebecca Carlisle for generous and goodhearted diligence and care. And especially to my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, still and always the best. Thank you most to Nell, for love and loyalty beyond what I could imagine.