“High-quality cuts …”
“… stained mahogany like you wanted,” they said.
Wendy sat in the cab of the flatbed truck and taught me how to play with it until we figured out how to drive. The owner of the truck refused to teach me, saying he “didn’t want anything to do with this”—he just wanted the money I gave him. Wendy and I drove around the block and drove around the block, making a joke twice about Should we see if this fits through the McDonald’s drive-thru? After the driving lesson, we pulled back into the cemetery, where the men were ready to nail the box together on the flatbed.
Wendy said, “I’ve got to hurry up and decalcify the sprinklers,” and walked away in the other direction of the men, hiding from them. “I want them to focus,” she said. “I care about your piece,” she said, reminding me of Carol. For the time it took to build The Headstone, she worked in the office hut or at the opposite end of the cemetery. She stood facing the fence holding her weed whacker. In the binoculars I could see her ears wiggling while she talked to herself.
Father John crossed paths with her one day when he needed to use the phone in the office. He walked up to me under my apple tree after.
“Why’s she so familiar?” he said.
I said, “Cause she’s lived here all her life.”
“Then what’s her name?!” he shouted.
“Wendy,” I said.
“Don’t recognize it. I never forget a name. There’s no way she’s lived here all her life.”
“Pretty sure she has,” I said when he was a hundred feet away.
I went back to painting the twat on the mannequin’s vagina with the little paint kit I’d demanded and a porn picture for reference.
For dinner, we drove Wendy’s truck to McDonald’s or to the Taco Bell that Carol and I first made out in the parking lot of. Once, we picked up Darron and went to the sub shop for a threesome dinner. Darron was the happiest I’ve ever seen him.
He said, “You must feel so alive!”
I said, “Ach.”
Wendy said, “I know I do!”
“It’s that New York state of mind!” Darron said. “I could never live there, but it’s got that energy! John’s always had that.”
“John! That’s your real name?” Wendy said.
“Oh, you know him as H.C.?” Darron said while lightly smiling like it was a nerdy fan club meeting.
We ate on our subs and chips while our lower bodies shifted when they had to.
“So you don’t have kids, or?” Darron asked Wendy.
“No, I don’t,” she said.
“You ever had much boyfriends, or?” he asked.
“No, never. I’m not opposed to it though, there just isn’t a great pick in this area.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I think I’ve thought about teaching in Texas maybe this year or next year. Once school gets out I’ll apply. I need to stir things up,” he said, and I grunted, proud of him.
“And there are a hell of a lot more people giving their hats and jean jackets away to thrift stores down there,” I said.
“You’re right!” Darron said.
I looked at Wendy to tell her about Imitation Cowboys, but she was staring sad-eyed at a mother breastfeeding her infant lump at the table next to us. I squirmed in my seat and squeezed my sub harder between my hands. I gestured toward the mother, “The baby eats milk from the breast, and the adult eats ham from the sandwich,” I said.
Wendy huffed a little laugh.
Darron wiped his mouth and tossed a ball of napkin on his tray, “It’s a what-you-eat world,” he said, sighing.
I bit in.
Patty had her hands in the sink with bubbles up to her elbows when I told her and Darron about the piece. (Patty loved the white plastic flower earrings that Darron had picked out from the Salvation Army for my cross-dressing, and when I walked in the kitchen she yanked them off her lobes and hid them in the dishwater. She got compliments from the mailman, her van folk, and even from Father John, but did her best to remove them when I happened by. To remind me again and again of the fact that I was wearing them optimistically outside my apartment as Carol cooked turducken for Scott Harp.) Darron was doing pull-ups on the pull-up bar he’d screwed to the kitchen/den doorframe.
“Isn’t that grotesque or somethin’?” Patty said when I described the part of The Headstone where there’s the boulder on Carol’s head.
“What’s grotesque is what Carol did to him,” Darron said, and she nodded like he’s right.
Father John came in from the TV room to get a toothpick, and he handed one to me—the equivalent of handing me a cigar.
“So the, ah—the loose ends? They all been thought of?” he said.
“That’s what I hired you for,” I said.
He nodded, accepting my answer.
“I just wonder if the hole is gonna hold up on the road or crumble in a little,” he said. “Them dirt walls could collapse. We could put a sealant down, but that’s not the look you’re goin’ for, I’d assume.”
“Well, stick a couple shovels in the cab of the flatbed so Christmas and Charlie Quick can clean out any crumbles once I get to New York,” I said.
He whistled with a smile.
“You sure got ’em wrapped around your finger,” he said, and star lines shot out from his eyes—the same ones he had with Jenny.
And that’s when I knew: I had succeeded in becoming a man to him.
And it didn’t feel like anything.
I lifted the smoky phone receiver to call Christmas to tell him the plan. Darron came down off a rep to put a hand on my shoulder as the line was ringing, “I’m so proud of you! This is inspiring! I knew you’d grown.”
I shook him off—“Quit bein’ so close,” I said.
Charlie Quick answered the line.
“Thank You,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “This is The Haircutter.”
“Is it?” he said in his accent, pleasantly surprised. “You alright?”
“Where’s Christmas?” I said. “I got a new project.”
Charlie Quick put the phone down and I heard him say, “Haircutter.”
“HAIRCUTTER!” Christmas shouted and came on the line. “What is it?!” he said.
“You’ll see it,” I said. “But I don’t think it’ll fit in the gallery, so what do we do?”
“Is it a large work?!” he squealed like an XL sow fitting into an L dress.
“It’s a sixteen-foot cube,” I said.
“I’ll rent a space!” he said.
“And I need two sets of stairs built that can go up each side of it sixteen feet high and then a scaffolding platform thing up there sixteen feet long for viewers to stand on so they can look down into the piece,” I said.
“Yes, we’ll take care of that. And I’ll send out a crating team—what’s the location?”
“Leave me alone!” I said. “I’ve got everything taken care of. I’m showin’ up with it, okay? And I want the opening the night I get there. Okay, so just get it set up so we can sell this thing. We need another half week and then I’ll drive the piece out in two days. So the seventeenth.”
“Why don’t we get a two-prop helicopter to fly it here?” he said, like I was a little toddler he’d just found playing with its wiener in a sandbox.
I said, “I’m sick of your funny business! I’m doin’ this right and then I’m gettin’ the hell out of that flim-flap crap! You dang ruined my life with all this bullshit! And I want my hairboard back—how much is it?”
Christmas hysterically laughed.
“Shut up!” I said.
“Oh, oh, oh,” he said like the backwards of Ho, ho, ho. “My apologies!” he said. “The Hairboard, privately, would sell for roughly $X,XXX,XXX.XX.”
“$X,XXX,XXX.XX!” I said. “How’s that?! I thought it was $XXX,XXX.XX!”
“Yes, it was. I purchased it for as much to set a price for your future works. Now—the open market value would p
robably be much more, which is why The Hairboard isn’t for sale yet. Any time your works reappear on the market the value will jump significantly. Do you want a lesson?”
“You! I thought the Weinsteins bought it!” I said.
“I traded a house with them to pretend they did.”
Charlie Quick came on the line and said, “Don’t tell anyone he told you that.”
I said, “Ach! See this is what I mean! I don’t get you fancy people! Keep The Hairboard! I’ll make a new one! Just get my party ready!”
Christmas said, “This is what I live for! All I need is your artist’s statement and a description of the piece.”
I said, “My statement is the piece. It’s called The Headstone. It’s a coffin thingy.”
“Tell him what’s inside,” Darron said.
“It’s a cube. Open at the top. Stained mahogany. Something’s inside,” I said.
“Fantastic, Haircutter,” Christmas said.
He gave me the address of the space he’d rent in case we didn’t speak again. Darron wrote it down for me.
“Tell him the concept!” Darron said and I stomped on his foot, “That’s enough!”
Christmas said, “How are you holding up?”
I said, “Shut up!” and hung up.
You’ve got your hillyass cemetery. You’ve got a fake mahogany box big enough to look like it’s up to no good. It’s as tall as the trees around it and as tall as the hill it’s snug under. You’ve got a large steel ramp with a CAT backhoe on it; you’ve got the head of the CAT filling the box with dirt. The sun beat down on Father John’s team of six hired men. Meadowlarks met in the sky above them to shoot the breeze about why this was the first real art piece I had ever done. Crows walked into the dank depths of bushery to smoke cigarettes talking about how they wish they could be inspired to do something so artistic. The hired-men’s machinery whirred. I paced the cemetery, held to it by gravity. I saw myself pass through a puddle in which the heavens were reflected. The fibrous cosmos existed behind that shield of sky like the depths of the tar-sticky soul that say, “This isn’t that good of an art piece and you know it.”
Once the box was brimful and tightly packed with dirt, the CAT excavated a clean hole—fourteen-feet-by-ten. The sinkhole Carol and I got stuck in. The men dangled in rest, and their belt buckle names burned to the sun’s promiscuous touch as I inserted a ladder into the hole like Darron did when he rescued us. In order to lid the box for transport, I wanted the men to cut a hole in the lid around the ladder so it could stick out like a straw.
One of the men (Bob) said, “Why don’t we just put the ladder on the flatbed and you can put it in once you get there?”
“Because I want to sleep in the box at truck stops on my way out to New York,” I said.
Another man (Kurt) said, “So why don’t you just put the ladder in yourself when you get to the rest stops?”
“How am I even gonna do that without a hole in the lid of the box, Kurt?” I said.
Father John had his arms crossed listening like a gorilla judging his band.
“Men!” I shouted. I pulled a ruler out of my back pocket and used it to talk with, “I want any of you to tell me the last time you tried to put a ladder into a box twenty feet off the ground at a fuckin’ truck stop. Now listen up—I will need a sixteen-foot ladder to even get on top of this box. Then I will walk across the lid and pull back a tarp that covers the ladder hole. Then I will climb down the ladder into the hole and I’ll sleep in there for my artistic shit. Okay?”
“Should the ladder hole be round or rectangular or square?” someone (Dale) asked.
“That’s a great question,” I said. “Let’s go with square. A metric system square.”
The more complicated it was, the better it felt for them.
I turned to Father John, “Also, someone get me a dead bird with flies swarming on it.”
The final step was to put Carol’s “body” in there and then drop a boulder on her head. At the family dinner table we all decided to do it as a ceremony, which I said was going to be called The Mannequin Ceremony. The mannequin lay on the floor by the front door, overhearing us. So let it hear. We would do it the day before I left for New York, and after the ceremony we’d lid the box and chain it to the truck, then we’d all go out to the Blue Bear to dance. The Mannequin Ceremony was our first family plans since Darron and I were children and we went to the zoo where I rode a tortoise like a fat kid on the best day of his childhood. I would’ve been uncomfortable with having plans again, but things were different ever since Carol and I fell in that hole, and I wasn’t going to argue with Difference anymore. It was smarter than me. It was gonna do what it was gonna do. It knew.
“Now listen here I don’t want y’all to yap at Wendy about Carol. She knows she’s dead and that’s all she needs to know. Don’t mention one word of it,” I said.
My family all bobbed their Adam’s apples swallowing and giving each other glances.
“You don’t wanna tell her the truth?” my mom said, and Darron stomped on her foot under the table.
Darron said, “We’ll do whatever you want us to, big bro. No talkin’ Carol, we got it.”
That night, I brought the mannequin to bed with me and called it Girly. I didn’t kiss it, I just laid in bed with it, seeing if it could make me love Carol. It fell off the bed in the middle of the night, waking me up. I looked over the edge of the bed and it was facedown smiling at the floor. I saw the rear end of its painted twat and I jacked one to Wendy.
The day of The Mannequin Ceremony, I had on my good forest green belt and my collared shirt with the ducks flying on it. Wendy honked outside my house in the afternoon, earlier than she was expected.
I went out to her like, “What’s this all about?”
She was wearing blue jeans and a grey T-shirt. She leaned over to roll down the window, “I’m taking the day off.”
“Okay?”
There was a plastic Hy-Vee bag on the truck bench. I spied some makeup and a brand new curling iron in it. Under the plastic bag was a purple dress spread out to not get wrinkled.
“I was wondering if you might want to run out to my farmhouse with me,” she said.
I imagined there being a dead mule deer in the living room that would make Wendy scream and clutch onto me like Carol, so I said, “That sounds so fun.”
She said, “I’ve always wanted to show it to someone. And since you’re leaving in the morning—who knows if you’re coming back.”
I knew sure as hell that I was coming back so we could F and make L, but I didn’t tell her, so I could come back knocking on the door to Room 104 like Jesus in a crack of thunder.
“Yeah, who knows,” I said.
We took the freeway out to Rasmuss Pass and followed some off-the-beaten-paths to a shitty dirt road that pointed at the house like a witch’s finger. The house had colorless shutters and sat mute like it had Alzheimer’s.
Wendy said, “This was all crop,” talking about the fifty-acre front yard we were driving up.
“How ’bout them woods?” I said.
To the left of the house began (or ended) a heavy wood.
“I never walked far into them,” she said. “But I always wanted to.”
Wendy killed the engine near the side door off the kitchen.
She said, “The chicken coop,” and pointed at a decayed chicken coop in front of the truck.
We slammed the doors and field birds rose up off the yard like dust.
“We never used the front door, it was always this yard door,” she said. “This house was built in 1886.”
The kitchen had stone walls and a woodstove, and a couple of Amish-looking instruments to make god knows.
“My parents were so religious they went to church every day, so we lived off the land,” she said.
Standing in the kitchen you could shoot the fireplace in the sitting room on the other side of the house.
“Back there is the sitting room,” she sa
id and walked toward it. “My mother would sit in her orange chair and my father would sit in his green one.”
There were dead rodents in the fireplace and dead birds on the floor. Wendy didn’t scream and clutch on to me—she didn’t hold her hands up like a tour guide—she went around checking things like a criminal checking a safe-house while she talked.
“They watched this show called Miracles Found that had a number on the bottom of the screen for you to call if you had a miracle. I was always outside doing stuff, or up in my room listening to the radio, but sometimes it was so cold I’d sit by the fire to knit. ‘Today, on Miracles Found …’ This was all before they lost their minds, after that it was different.”
My eyes sprung out of my head and into the asylum she’d brought me to.
“Lost their minds?” I said.
She pointed at the ceiling and there was a big hole in it.
“Then they left when I was twenty-four,” she said.
She guided me upstairs and the steps creaked like they were breaking.
“Today, on Miracles Found,” she said again, under her breath.
The hallway was short with a steep wooden staircase at the end.
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