by Kyle Minor
My father calls me, sick with the news. “That trucking company was a good thing,” he says. “Your brother could make a good life with a company like that. You learn those skills, not many people have those skills. The trucking industry is what keeps this whole country afloat. The whole economy. All of it is dependent on those trucks. He’s pissing it all away.” Uh-huh, I say, and mean it. He is right, my father, and he is almost always right, and soon indeed this new thing will end badly the way all the other things end badly. But I want to say that everything ends badly. Don’t we all of us live under the shadow of death, that end of all ends, and isn’t life too short to give fourteen hours a day to a trucking company when you could be standing under stage lights making somebody you never met before feel something? What’s khaki pants and health insurance compared to that? All night I stay up thinking about it. My child stirs in his sleep in the next room, and I hear some ghostly echo of my brother’s voice calling me childish. Sometime the next morning an airplane flies over our house in the direction of Canada, and I wish my brother Godspeed to Ontario.
4.
Another death, and another and another. A college mate from Indiana, a girl, gets on the back of a motorcycle at a party. The driver is a seminarian. When they left the party together, they were laughing. At some residential intersection, a newly licensed sixteen-year-old runs a stop sign and hits them broadside. She flies through the air. He impales his lower body on the bike handle. Her heart stops as she hits the ground forty feet away. His legs are broken and his scrotum ripped open. She dies. He walks with a cane.
Another. In Florida, a meter reader, my friend when I was a preacher. He marries a woman, develops leukemia, she leaves him, he dies. In Indiana, a vagrant crawls into the dumpster where I used to throw my trash as an undergraduate. The garbage truck picks up the dumpster in the morning with its mechanical arms and empties its contents into the back of the truck. The sanitation worker pulls the compactor lever, and the man is crushed to death. The lone African-American professor at the seminary holds a memorial service for the vagrant, and hundreds gather to validate the significance of his life.
In Florida, my uncle Jerry visits my parents’ house with his new girlfriend. They make noises like they might get married. She doesn’t seem to mind that he is twenty years brain-damaged from his own accident with a city garbage truck. She doesn’t seem to mind that he still complains every few hours about losing the love of his ex-wife and his children. She seems to love him. She flashes a ring. He’s bought a house. She has a jewelry business. They’ve bought a commercial building. Everyone hugs goodbye. My uncle and his girlfriend drive home, four hours north. My father says everything’s going to be all right now. They’re going to be all right.
The next evening my uncle locks himself in his bedroom. He puts his head on his pillow. He puts a pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger. She knocks on the front door the next morning. She knocks but no one answers. She knocks and bangs and yells. She kicks at the door. She breaks down the door. She finds him weirdly white, a hole in his head, a pool of blood beneath the bed, whatever wasn’t soaked up by the mattress as it drained from the hole in his head. My parents drive up. Some people from my uncle’s rural church arrive to help clean the bedroom. They carry the blood-soaked mattress outside. My father goes into the bedroom to clean the blood and brains from the wall and the floor, but he cannot. Other men go inside to do the job, but they cannot. In the end a tiny middle-aged woman from the church takes a mop and some rags and a bucket full of water and bleach, and in the end, she scrubs most of it by hand.
I’m there with my parents and the woman who would have been the widow but who was not the widow, through the initial grieving, through the funeral, another funeral, and my father says surely this is as bad as life could possibly be, surely this is the last of the funerals for a while, it better be, we have to take care of each other.
He calls my brother on the phone so many times that my brother stops answering when he calls, and then he worries what it means that my brother won’t answer the phone when he calls. I call, and my brother answers, and he says he’s off the gig from California, he’s not getting paid, keep it to yourself for now. The rich bandleader won’t return my brother’s phone calls. He emails to say my brother has to deal with his business manager. My father runs down the business manager on the phone in California and quotes the labor statutes and threatens all means of legal and public relations related remedies, and the business manager says she’s not going to deal with somebody’s father, and my father says the rich bandleader gets a business manager, doesn’t he?, well then my son has a business manager, too, and you’re talking to him, and then he gets a corporate real-estate attorney writing letters just to be more threatening, and the bandleader’s business manager quits, and my brother gets paid, and this rich bandleader who hired him with such urgency and dismissed him so casually tells my brother he has intimidated the business manager unnecessarily, and that he is taking food from the mouths of the bandleader’s children, and my father feels better at all this news. See?, my father says, it’s getting better. This season of death and despair is over, and we can get back to the business of taking care of each other, and that’s what we have to do in this world, take care of each other.
A skinny black cat, a stray, moves into our garage, and my wife begins to feed it. At night, the cat prowls. We hear her at night with the neighborhood tomcats, and soon she is pregnant, and my wife feeds it and feeds it, and the cat grows fat and less weary and lets my wife pet it. Our own baby cries all the time. The cat gives birth to three babies in our garage. One day I have our baby by myself all morning, and all morning he will not stop crying. They used to call this condition colic, but colic seems too benign a word for what this constant crying does to the nervous system of an adult. The only thing that will quiet him is to put him in the car and drive him around town until he stops crying. In a state of agitation, I take him outside and put him in the car seat and start the car as quickly as I can and back out the driveway, but something doesn’t feel right, some little wobble on the driver’s side. I stop the car and open the door. One of the baby kittens is crushed under the front wheel on the driver’s side. It is still alive and mewling. One robin-blue eye is popped from its socket. The other kittens come toward the crushed kitten. The kittens are crying. My baby is crying. The mother cat arrives from the woods where she was foraging. The mother cat is crying. I want to move the car off the dying kitten, but I am afraid I will crush more kittens. Nobody has punched me in the kidneys, but that is what it feels like in my back. I’m doubled over, smelling the kitten. I vomit in the grass. There is a pressure in my sinuses. The mother cat is licking the dying kitten, pushing at its head, pushing its eyeball back toward the socket too crushed to hold it. Cultivated people manufacture their own words for moments—right?—but all I hear is a buzzing, and in my mouth the taste of pennies triggers the sense memory of Ralph Stanley’s voice singing “O Death,” and there’s the smell of amniotic fluid somehow and something in the muscles at the back of my arms and legs like when bigger boys used to beat me in the locker room with those puke-green walls when I was twelve, except now I’m responsible for the baby crying in my car, and I’m responsible for this kitten now dead under the wheel of my car.
I call my wife, and she is in a meeting, and sends her assistant, who brings me a Coca-Cola and offers to move the car and offers to move the dead kitten. All afternoon, the mother cat stands over the dead kitten. When my wife gets home, she feeds our baby. Then she takes a shovel and buries the dead kitten. For three days afterward, the mother cat stands over the place where the kitten is buried and paws at the ground and cries for it. She hides her other kittens in the wooded lot by our garage and doesn’t let us see them anymore. She takes our food, but only when we are not around to see her take it. She gets skinny again.
The phone rings. Kentucky. My wife’s nineteen-year-old nephew. His mother and father have separated. He’s with
his father in the ramshackle house in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest. He has locked himself in his room and won’t come out. He has ingested nothing but Jack Daniels for three days. He is prostrate confessing his sins to God. He has been found passed out, dehydrated. He has been taken to the hospital. The phone rings. The boy again. He has been taken to Arizona. Some kind of cult deprogramming facility where they cast out demons. The phone rings. He has escaped the facility by foot. He has been found under an overpass, dehydrated. The facility won’t keep him if he doesn’t want to stay. The demons haven’t been successfully cast out. They’re sending him home to his father and the ramshackle house. The phone rings. The boy’s father was in the shower. He didn’t hear the boy go out. The boy went up into the clearing on the hill with the shotgun. He put the shotgun in his mouth and he pulled the trigger. He took one of his drums up there with him. They found his body up there with the cracked drum skin. “Would you please tell your wife?”
I tell my wife. We pack our things and drive straight to Kentucky. At the funeral service, the preacher mixes together the bitter ingredients that make sweet biscuits, then eats a biscuit, and says the sweet life is made of bitter parts.
There is an argument about flowers after the service. The boy’s maternal grandmother doesn’t want anybody from the boy’s father’s family to take any of the good flowers home. Blame is in the air, and the smell of biscuits. After the service, we go back to the ramshackle house. The boy’s mother’s pink piano is missing. The boy’s father says he and the boy hauled it out and threw it off the porch and took an axe to the wood. There is some talk about the axe splitting a tension string and the string cutting a stripe the length of a forearm. Inside the house, shellacked wasps have been affixed near the eyes of all the mother’s Precious Moments figurines. In the bathroom, the boy’s father grinds up methadone pills and snorts them in lines. His pupils are pinpricks. I ask for the bathroom. I feel full of death and want to purge. I shit and wipe and throw the paper into the toilet and the toilet stops up. The boy’s father comes into the bathroom and says it’s all right and plunges the toilet and makes the shit and paper go down. He says it’s all right again, then goes outside in his overalls and leans against the building and smokes a cigarette. The bottle of Jack Daniels is in his hand, and I wonder: Is that the bottle? Is that the one the boy took into the bedroom?
In the farmhouse down the gravel road from the ramshackle house, the extended family gathers for what will be the last time, though we don’t know it yet, how this fissure was one fissure too many, and so many of us have young families and maybe we don’t want to infect one another, and maybe this extended family has become suspect on grounds of infection, although, to me, the taint is on everything, here and everywhere else, too. I ought to be paying attention to my wife. It’s her family. But all I can pay attention to is the ratcheting up of the tension inside myself, the grief upon grief upon grief that stacks up so time gets distorted and I can’t remember which death came first, or which in what order, not even now while I’m committing these things to paper.
In Kentucky I try to call my brother, but we are in a hollow the cell phone companies haven’t valued enough to send a signal. I drive into town to call my brother, but the battery runs out, and none of the local convenience stores sell the right charger. So many times I have called him because I was worried about him, but this is the first time I have called him because I need him to be worried about me. Back at the farmhouse and the ramshackle house, everyone says the same empty words they always say about heaven and God and the way all things work together for good. I have heard them so many times, but now what they mean to me is that life is empty of meaning so people must tell themselves stories about how and in what ways everything means.
These words don’t seem to comfort anyone so much, anyway. All the men of my wife’s family are outside pushing the lawnmower or building a dam for the creek or whatever kind of physically vigorous thing they can find to do to keep death or the news of death at arm’s length, and the children are running around with the dogs, and the women are in the kitchen baking things and cleaning things, and one of them is whistling to ward off silence. That’s the only reason I can figure for her whistling.
Night can’t come soon enough, and when it does, I beg my wife to drive tomorrow to my brother’s house in Nashville. She says let’s go now and we’ll buy a battery in Lexington and call him from the interstate. We arrive around four in the morning, and he greets us. He is waiting for us. He has known his share of trouble like we have, and now he offers his bedroom. He has drawn the curtains and he has pulled the nightshade. My wife and child lie down in his bed and go to sleep. My brother and me go upstairs to his studio. We throw our bodies onto those beanbag chairs where we’ve thrown our bodies before, under similar circumstances. There is a documentary on the TV about stone altars in Indonesia, and we watch it with the sound off. The pattern randomizer bounces lines and shapes across a spectrum of bright colors on the monitor beside the TV. All around us, the chalkboard walls and the soundproofing foam and the guitars and the keyboards and all the rack-mounted gear and the computers and the mixing consoles, and next to me, my black bag, with my laptop and my red Cheever book to jump-start language, all the tools with which we’re supposed to make meaning or offer pleasure or at least make somebody feel something, but where are we supposed to start finding any of it?
There is nothing but sadness in Nashville, except maybe this one thing we both can say but don’t say aloud: My brother loves me, and I love my brother. No more deaths, I don’t say. No more suicides. Not me, not you, not anybody we know. No more thefts. No more drugs. No more embezzlements. No more phone calls. No more trouble with women. No more deaths. All night we lie fifteen inches apart on the beanbag chairs and don’t say anything at all. I want both of us to be all right. I want all of us to live forever.
FIRST, THE TEETH,
WHITE ENAMEL SET INTO PINK MOLD-INJECTED PLASTIC, set on the table next to the hospital bed, and he says, “Gin”—that’s my mom, his daughter—“can you get me some of those white strips?” because he’s worried his teeth have yellowed.
At issue is the nurse, the pretty young brunette who has been taking the teeth out, at my grandmother’s request, and putting them back in, when she leaves, at my grandfather’s request. The old man is shameless as regards the pretty girls. He asks me if I saw the pretty nurse, and I say yes, and he says, “She’s right purty,” and I agree, and I know he’s wishing my little brother was here instead of me, because they have that in common, the eye for the ladies, the dwelling eye.
“He’s coming,” I say, “in two days. He’s flying in from Nashville as soon as he can wrap things up at work.”
“Why is he coming?” my grandfather says, and I know right away what he means. He means, Am I going to die? Is that why you’re here, flown to Florida from Ohio?
“He’s coming to see you,” I say, and not because we don’t both know what’s happening, not because I’m humoring him, but because my mother is in the room, and I can’t say what he wants me to say and what I want and don’t want to say, which is: He’s coming to see you before you die. He’s coming to see you because he loves you, because he’s your favorite and you’re his favorite.
My mother is in the room and she can’t bear to hear things like that. She’s not given to much truth-telling, not out loud. She likes to keep things nice, and for all these years I’ve thought she was wrong, but not today. Nobody knows one right thing to say, and neither does she, but she knows how to stand at the edge of the bed, right up near her father’s head, and touch him, and put her face close to his. She knows to say, “I forgave you a long time ago,” when he says he’s sorry for all the things he’s done to her, and she knows not to make a list, not to catalogue the times he pulled the curtains off the wall or threw sharp kitchen utensils in drunken rages or let wild men into the house where his daughters slept at two in the morning. She knows not to mention all the h
orrible women he met at honkytonks, or the beatings he gave her older brother and sister, or the way he made my grandmother so angry she’s still trying to get even, even now, fifteen years after everything got calm and easy for the first time since they were too young to be married and got married anyway.
“Why is he coming?” my grandfather says, again.
“You can understand what he’s saying?” my mother says, to me.
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s because he doesn’t have his teeth in,” my father says. “Bill, do you want your teeth in?”
He nods his head, says yes.
But no one knows how to put his teeth in. There is a tube of adhesive by the bed. I think maybe I’ll try to put his teeth in. A volunteer summons my parents to the waiting room on the other end of the floor to consult with the doctor. My mother says I should go get the nurse, so I leave the room and go looking, but she’s somewhere else, maybe taking a break, or taking someone to the bathroom.
I have my mother’s cell phone in my pocket, call my wife in Ohio and tell her about the teeth, and she says, “You have to put them in. You have to just do it.”
“I don’t know how,” I say, and it’s true. But it’s also true that I don’t want to do it. I’ve been touching him on his chest, and sometimes he’s been grabbing my hands, and my face has been so close to his face that I’ve been taking the full stench of his decaying organs into my nostrils every time he exhales. One time I was walking in the woods and came upon a pile of dead opossums, killed by something bigger and left for some reason I don’t know. Every time he exhales I can smell those dead opossums times ten or maybe twenty, a truly noxious odor I don’t know anything to do about and can’t turn away from out of shame at showing any sort of embarrassment or weakness or, really (to be honest), selfishness.