by Martin Clark
Even though this position grew uncomfortable after several moments—the weakest portions of his lower back were aching—Evers enjoyed the stance, liked it because it was, well, symbolic, indicative, if you will, of his life just now: leading with his groin, a pair of testicles as his trump suit and, in their wake, on his other side, his rear tucked and drawn, secure against rogue Olympian bolts and braced for any mischief that might be worked by the gods’ swift feet. The quintessential Evers. Mary’s essence is captured in the Pieta, L.B.J. regaled the country with the shot of the scar from his gallbladder operation, and Evers Wheeling’s most recent history, if it had to be summed up by a single pose, was best described by his standing on a tile bathroom floor pushing his pelvis forward and balling up his butt with every sinew and muscle he could muster.
Evers smiled, even though he was alone in the room. His single, helmeted trooper, the Il Duce of organs, was poised in front of him, exhorting the rest of his body. For just a moment, Evers thought of his brother and how once, in Key West, in a hot room without air conditioning or screens in the windows, the two of them had fucked sisters at the same time, each pair in a single bed, flashes of gray-white skin in the dark, Marvin Gaye singing, quiet voices and sheets moving. Evers looked down; Il Duce, defiant, stared back. “Dictator.” Evers said the word aloud.
The loins on the run and the task before him caused the rest of his body to appear warped and out of whack. Behind the abominable curve, Evers’ shoulders were pulled back toward the tub, his chin was near his chest and one of his hands was resting on his hip. He was about to pee, hard as it is to urinate through an erection. It is even more troublesome when the person involved is drunk, and Evers was drunk. He was wearing a crewneck T-shirt and nothing else.
“Evers, you okay?” Outside the bathroom, on a motel bed with rough sheets, a dental hygienist named Naomi was waiting to have sex with Evers. Naomi’s parents had given her two other names as well, but he couldn’t remember either one.
“Yes, Naomi, I’m fine. I’ll be out in a second.”
After two futile spurts that splattered the toilet and wet the floor, Evers grew tired of bending Il Duce like a Krazy Straw in an effort to correct the proud ruler’s errant aim. There was a solution, of course. Evers turned and—what the hell—emptied himself into the tub, a larger and more approachable goal. Judge Wheeling finished the enterprise with a sigh—a long, exaggerated ahhhhh exhalation—and a glance down at his feet on the tile; he returned his middle to its normal dimensions.
“How did this happen?” Evers wondered. Two weeks ago, on his way to work, he had seen Ruth Esther English for the first time, a hazy, dim, hungover day of entropy that started in another bathroom and ended when he put a taped-up top full of white tears into a cooler and drove to his brother’s trailer. Two days after that, he had talked to Harry Truman Moran, and now Evers was in a Charleston, West Virginia, Ramada Inn, drunk and rash and mad-brained, pissing yellow parabolas all over the bathroom.
“How did what happen? Are you talking to me? Are you okay and all?” Naomi called from the bedroom. “Evers?” Evers had not shut the door completely when he went into the bathroom.
“I’m fine. I’m coming right out.”
Evers stood with one hand gripping the towel rack and watched the yellow circle around the silver drain shrinking away. A slender, yellow ring remained in the indentation surrounding the plug, and Evers washed it into the drain with cold water. After he turned off the tap, Evers started to think about what Naomi was going to say after he fucked her. That was the correct word—“fucked.” Evers despised “make love.” The term was silly, banana-daiquiri-cum-umbrella silly; it was slick, cheap and evasive. “Intercourse” was all right, and “screw” was acceptable. Perhaps even “do it” would pass scrutiny. Evers had no use for all of the euphemisms coined in stark moments, all of the nervous glosses designed to add a sheen of intimacy to unions which were, during their brief life spans, little more than hedonistic and carnal couplings. Evers liked Naomi, and there was no malice at all in his choice of words, just an instinct to be direct and fair. Lust without the luster. “‘To thine own self be true.’ Shakespeare,” Evers said out loud. He left the light outside the bathroom burning and closed the bathroom door when he returned to the bedroom. No other lights were on.
“A little light makes fucking better, don’t you think?”
“You’re the judge.” Naomi paused. “Who were you talking to?”
“What?”
“Who were you talking to in there?”
“I’ll tell you after we fuck.”
“I wish you wouldn’t always say the f-word. You’re a very nice man, and very interesting, but that word really isn’t very attractive.” Naomi tried to smile a little.
“It bothers you?”
“Yeah, sort of, I guess. It’s so harsh and everything.”
After he fucked Naomi, Evers did not go to sleep. He lay on his side and studied a chair not far from the bed. A light from across the street came into the room through an opening in the middle of the curtains and caused two irregular shapes to appear on the back of the chair. The shapes looked like a pair of fairy silhouettes. One was turned to the side, a profile with a single wing shaped like an inverted “L” attached to its shoulder. The other was facing Evers, with both wings thrust upward like a small, smooth phoenix. The pair held their position on the rear of the chair, flickering more or less incandescent depending, Evers supposed, on who walked past the storefront or porch light or street lamp that created them. Evers felt uneasy; he had not slept with anyone other than his wife since college. He heard traffic passing nearby; the roads sounded wet, so it must have rained since he checked into the hotel. Evers closed his eyes and fell asleep after a lot of effort.
He woke up. He looked at his watch; it was the first time he’d needed to use the glow-in-the-dark digits since he had lit them seven times during a two-dollar matinee showing of A Passage to India. According to the green figures, he had slept for only half an hour. He went into the bathroom, placed a clean towel on the floor in front of the tub, knelt down on the towel, turned on the cold water and wet his face and hair. He combed his hair straight back, using a complimentary Ramada Inn black plastic comb, and he noticed in the mirror that his hair was thinning at the crown. Christ. Evers was more sober now. He drank several glasses of water—too much fluoride—turned off the bathroom light and went back to bed, back to sleep.
And he woke up again; it was very dark in the room. His hair was still damp. He went into the bathroom and urinated again, this time into the commode, through a more helpful organ. When he came out of the toilet, he sat down on the double bed across from the one where he and Naomi had been sleeping. Evers watched her. Earlier, he’d been surprised to discover that she was so fit—trim thighs, a flat stomach and a smooth tightness in her back and arms. She had admitted to Evers that she was forty-two, and that she had a child, who was staying—since it was an odd-numbered weekend—with her nefarious ex-husband, a man named Cleo. Cleo had beaten her once, she said.
Evers held up his hands, palms toward his face, and looked at the skin and outlines of his fingers, trying to get a fix on himself, trying to make sure he was held together; he felt displaced and listless. He thought about what he was doing, and about the woman beside him in a bed in West Virginia. He had met her for the first time several hours ago in the bar at the Ramada Inn, had just walked up and sat down beside her and her friend. “Hi, I’m Evers, and I’d very much like to know your favorite lizard.” Beyond his introduction, Evers hadn’t felt the need to be too assertive or overly clever.
He had talked to Naomi, very intelligently, about things in magazines. In Evers’ apartment above the Coin-O-Matic Laundry in Norton, in neat stacks beside his dresser, he kept a year’s worth of all the major women’s magazines—Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Self, to name just a few of his holdings. Evers read all of these, pored over them at his apartment and hid them between the oversized cove
rs of Black’s Law Dictionary so he could peek at them during especially dull moments in court. He wandered through hundreds of pages on fall fashions, career choices and diet tips because it was important to know what women were thinking. He felt like a pirate buying up maps and charts at a super savings subscription price of twenty-two dollars per annum. Evers the plunderer.
A carpet salesman from Bluefield had solved the problem of Naomi’s girlfriend, and Naomi herself was pleased after Evers offered that he was “a lawyer … well, actually, a judge,” who was thinking about coming to Charleston more often because he had business to attend to. “Could we date some then,” Naomi asked, “when you are up here and everything?”
“I’d like that.” Evers had enjoyed talking to Naomi.
“Me, too. Will you be working as a judge when you come up here?”
“No. I’ll be doing some things on my own time.”
“Are you married or anything?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yes. I guess I am. You either are or you aren’t, and I am.” That was about all Evers could bring himself to say, although he could have said plenty more.
Where is my life going? Evers wondered. He put his hands down and noticed that the silhouettes had disappeared from the back of the chair. He thought of the hot room in Key West, thought of all the bass in Marvin Gaye’s songs. And he thought of his wife, whom he despised. For some reason, Evers began thinking about pinball. PIN-BALL. Bright silver balls banging off little poles with rubber bumpers, steel circles flying through gates and ringing bells, rolling across the painted face of the game into flippers and holes and chutes, making lights flash and blink. Pinball. “Pinball,” Evers mumbled.
“Huh?” Naomi opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Nothing. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up. Go back to sleep.”
“Did you want to talk or something?” Naomi was struggling to stay awake.
Evers smiled wanly. “Thanks. It’s been … a while since I did something like this. I’m trying to take it all in, get used to it, see what I think about everything. I appreciate the offer.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Evers.”
Evers stretched out on the bed, on top of the covers, and closed his eyes. He lay there by himself until he fell asleep.
Evers and Naomi left the motel room early in the morning, just as the night was ending and light had started rising up over the hills into the city. Naomi woke up first, and Evers heard her in the bathroom. They rode together in Evers’ car across the city, across two bridges, talking about hangovers and the songs on the radio. They kissed at the door to Naomi’s apartment, but he did not go inside.
“I hope things work out for you and that we can get together again,” Naomi said.
“I hope so. Thanks.”
“And thanks for driving me home.”
“You’re welcome.” Evers paused. “Thanks for having sex with me.”
Naomi looked at Evers’ face. She swallowed, and Evers saw her neck move. He heard the keys in her hand rubbing and bumping against one another. “Okay,” she answered. “I hope you don’t think, you know, I’m a slut or anything. You being married and us not knowing each other too long. I just liked you.”
Early in the morning after sex qua sex, very little is on your mind and the world is at once primal and linear. Evers wanted to have breakfast—tomato juice, eggs, biscuits and meat—alone in a Naugahyde booth, check the prices of silver futures in the newspaper, then return to his room and sleep in his wrinkled pants and shirt underneath a hint of a headache, his worth affirmed, his face unshaven, his hair twisted and tired.
Evers stopped at a pancake house about three minutes from Naomi’s apartment. His waitress had a name tag and was very kind. She brought Evers a newspaper and smiled each time she ended a sentence. “Let me know if I can get you anything else,” she said when Evers was almost through with his meal.
“How about the power of incantation so I can kill my wife from afar?”
“Would you like anything else with that, sir?” Question-mark smile.
“That’s all right, thanks,” Evers said, but her answer had come without a breath of hesitation, so quickly and naturally that Evers immediately wondered what had actually come out of his mouth. “What did I just say to you?” he asked her.
The waitress had already walked away and did not turn back to answer; she was pouring coffee for two men in suits.
There was a single flower, white and nondescript, in a white glass vase on the table. Obtrusive thoughts of his wife and her misdeeds began to worm through Evers’ mind and interrupt his early-morning reptilian nirvana, so he focused on the flower, on its center and petals, and recalled—the image appeared clearer and clearer in his mind, like a Polaroid photograph filling itself—his parents’ house and lawn in Winston-Salem. Along the west border of the Wheeling lawn was a flower garden belonging to Evers’ neighbors, Mrs. Lizzy Blankenship and her husband, H. Robert, the architect. In the summer, all sorts of flowers appeared in the Blankenships’ garden, the blooms at different heights, here and there in fits and starts of color—yellow, orange and red—surrounded by green leaves and green stems and cut grass. Evers shut his eyes and saw zinnias, roses, hollyhocks, snapdragons, gladioli, delphinia, meadow rue and petunias with soft, downturned petals and beads of yellow in their middles. There were other flowers there as well, some that he couldn’t identify.
Evers left a five-dollar bill beneath his plate and took the flower from the white glass vase. He put the flower in his pants pocket, in the front. He left the pancake house and stood outside on a cement step, looking into a glass window, his eyes just above the red R and E in RESTAURANT, the two letters outlined in black. On the step, near his feet, were three flat tan cigarette butts with singed tobacco pushed out of their ends, one with the filter open and split into webs and threads of dirty, tight cotton. The mind of the cigarette, Evers thought.
The waitress was clearing his table, and Evers watched her. She picked up the paper money tip without looking at it for very long and put it in a large pocket in her apron. The money wasn’t the first thing she reached for, or the last. She wiped the table with a cloth, and Evers could see the water swirls on the tabletop, until they evaporated. He wondered … why … he was watching this woman and her work. He hadn’t thought about it until now, had ended up on the step without really meaning to.
When Evers returned to his motel room, he lay down on the bed and called Pascal. After four rings, a tape from an answering machine came on, and Evers heard Mr. Spock describing a rare telekinetic phenomenon through which certain humanoids can communicate without talking. Pascal the rascal, Pascal the wit. “Will that be all, Captain?” Evers had begun to leave a message when his brother interrupted him. “Evers?” Pascal sounded groggy and distant.
“Hello, brother.”
“Time, please.” Pascal coughed.
“Star date 20:00.6, Captain’s log, supplemental.”
“I recall sleeping for a while. What day is it?” Pascal asked.
“I didn’t know you were a Star Trek fan,” Evers said, ignoring his brother’s confusion.
“I’m not, really. Rudy gave me the answering machine tape a week or so ago for a late birthday present. And the TV show’s pretty good if you’re stoned.” Pascal paused. “Some … some huge acting and hopeless props.” He hesitated again. “I’ve got to wake up. It seems so early.”
“Listen. My wife has fucked me over, and I’ve decided that I want you and Henry and Rudy to go on the trip with me.”
“Call the navy if you want to go on a trip. And I like your wife.”
“I used to. No more.” Evers took off his socks. A black piece of lint was wedged between his nail and the skin of his big toe.
“Where are you?”
“Charleston.”
“Is that my wife?” Evers heard Henry’s voice in the background.
“Shut up,
Henry. It’s Evers. You’d do well in espionage, dumbass.” Pascal cleared his throat. “Charleston, South Carolina?”
“West Virginia,” replied Evers.
“Oh god. How’s the chromosome nondisjunction up there? Lots of people of indeterminate phylum and kingdom?”
“You’ll go, then?” Evers asked.
“Sure. If you’ll pay for everything. I’ve squandered most of our father’s bequest and have no job. But you already know that.”
“Sure.”
“Why are you in Charleston, West Virginia, Evers?”
“I looked at a map and liked the colors of the roads leading here.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m here to see someone.”
“Are you really pissed at Jo Miller?” asked Pascal.
“Yes.”
“You haven’t said anything about it.” Pascal stopped talking for a moment. Evers heard him light a cigarette.
“I know.”
“So where are we going? Where’re the gold cups and doubloons? Do you know yet? We’ll need to know how much to pack.” Pascal sounded more alert.
“I’ll let you know when I find out. I hope it’s somewhere hot and decadent, where we can be clearly American and sit in bars with ceiling fans. I want a lot of angst and boozy exchanges with my brother.”
“Sounds good to me.” Pascal yawned. “So what are you doing now? What’s the deal? Who’s in West Virginia?”
“Jo Miller is a mean, petty, dishonest bitch who cheated on me. She’s screwing some guy like there’s no tomorrow.”
“You were just down here. How come you didn’t say anything?” Pascal sounded upset.
“I found out right after I got back, after I saw you guys and charmed you with the albino sorrow. I go to work on Monday morning, and my life turns to shit. Maybe there’s some symbolism there, huh? And, well … I don’t know. I just haven’t felt like talking about it, I guess.”