Ahgottahandleonit

by Donovan Mixon

  Tim jumped and fumbled through his pockets. “Nah, its not sss-so new.”

  Victor studied the distorted expression on his son’s face for a moment before leaning out again from the kitchen doorway. “Yo, fellas, get y’all’s shit and split. I’m serious, I hangin’ with my boy—you hear me? Get outta here. I’ll have to see ya’ll later. Okay?”

  Turning towards the stove, he didn’t look at Tim. It was clear he didn’t want to speak yet, so they waited in silence for the rowdy bunch to leave. His dad had been binging again. The smell of stale alcohol and puff around the eyes and midsection told the whole story—or most of it. Adorned only in the top half of his City Transit bus uniform and boxer shorts, Victor grunted as he moved to and fro in the small space. Tim worried that his father’s arthritis had flared up again.

  They listened to the front door shut with a bang and jangle. As the aimless trio made their way up the stairs, drunken gargoyle giggles emanated from the stairwell through the apartment.

  Tim spoke up. “So, this is it, huh?”

  “What you talkin’ about?” answered Victor over his shoulder.

  The folksy curl of a smile in his dad’s voice almost made Tim laugh. “I mean. This is your new life, the one you left us for? Is it the freedom you wanted? This is it?” The sound of a loud single chop came from the cutting board like a curse word.

  Letting go a long sigh, Victor spoke. “I know that you startin’ to feel your oats, maybe impressed with your own BO and all, but it sounds like you ’bout to open up a can of worms Tim that you bes leave be. So, how did the school year end up for ya?”

  Even having expected the question, Tim felt on the verge of blubbering and blabbering to Daddy just how big a fuck-up his boy had been. And more specifically, he wanted tell him what kind of disaster his son had left in the park. He wanted to know if Victor could help him out of this mess. But he still wasn’t ready to talk about it. Something stopped him cold. Perhaps that something was the fact that he already knew the answer to his question. So he lied. “It went okay. I have to study up for the reading proficiency in September and…”

  Victor cut in with, “Your mama? How’s she doin’?”

  Tim looked at his dad swaying side to side as he chopped. “Wha—?”

  Victor paused and turned his head a little to the side to say, “She gotta new friend yet?”

  “Dad! Were you listening to me, or what? I wasn’t talking about Mom, I was in the middle of telling you…” He folded his arms and sat heavily in a chair.

  “Yeah yeah, I hear you, man. You gonna take the proficiency in the fall. Yeah, I heard you.” At the sound of Tim’s loud exhalation, Victor glanced over his shoulder. “Wh-what? Now come on, Tim, don’t go into one of your sulks on me.”

  “Yeah, yeah—I guess you heard me!” Tim said, mocking his father’s tone. The chopping stopped. Tim could see his father’s eyes in his mind before he even turned around.

  “What’s yo’ problem, boy?” His voice sounded more like a threat than a question. Then, putting down the knife, he pulled up a chair and softened his tone. “What’s up, Timmy? What happened to your clothes? Looks like you been rolling around in the dirt. Did you cut yourself? Is that blood?” Tim could hear the quiet surprise in his dad’s voice. He folded his arms to cover his shirt, sat as still as he could and focused on his sneakers. “Do-don’t call me that,” he whispered, holding himself close.

  “Alright,” Victor said, burping and fidgeting with a dishcloth, like he didn’t know what to do. “Okay, tell me, Tim. Obviously you’re okay, but is—is somebody else sick or somethin’?”

  He reached for a water glass half-filled with a clear liquid.

  Tim watched his dad turn the glass up to his mouth and felt the hope drain out of his body. He was angry now and glad for it, relieved to be pissed. Then he didn’t have to worry about crying. “I’m sick, Dad. Sick and tired of you living over here like this, in this-this—”

  “Hole,” volunteered Victor, looking at his hand, working on a torn cuticle.

  “Yeah, man. You li-living in a ho-hole!” He felt his body start to tremble. He slapped his thighs, half stood, sat back down and blew air through his lips. “And you even know you live in a hole! Why’d you leave us? Like I asked you before. Is this what you wanted? For real?”

  “Aw, man,” Victor mumbled as he jumped up to tend to a pot that was boiling over. “Tim, I didn’t leave you or your sister. Your mama and me couldn’t make it no more. All that stuff I said ’bout being free was just trash talk in the middle of arguing. You know ’bout that. Don’t mean nothin’. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with ya’ll kids. What I need you to do is to concentrate on your studies ‘cause that’s the only thing that will get you up and out of here, out of this life. You hear me, boy? Don’t you worry ’bout me. I’ll be all right. Just need to get my head straight and…” His voice dropped off. He stared at his hands.

  Tim slapped the table. “How you going to do that, Dad—with whiskey or whatever that stuff is? Please don’t go down that road again!” he said with deadly seriousness, shocked at how sorry he felt for his father.

  Recently, Tim had learned that the name Victor meant victorious. But the guy sitting at the table with him, pondering his question, looked anything but a winner: pantless, bloodshot eyes so gorged with hurt and shame that Tim had to look away. Leaning over, he held his head in his hands. He thought, Oh shit, I am so fucked. Like Uncle Gentrale said, the dude’s in trouble. I think he’s in another world and wouldn’t have a clue how to help my ass.

  More than a minute passed before Tim looked up at his dad. When he did, he found a familiar scene. The corners of Victor’s mouth had turned downward, his right eyebrow arched as he glanced at the back of his left hand. Tim’s heart sank because his dad always made the same moves whenever he was about to lie to him. He waited and let him do it anyway.

  “Ahgottahandleonit, son…”

  PASSING DOWN THE PAIN

  Victor stared blankly into space as he chewed, sopping up cabbage juice with wads of Wonder Bread. His mind hadn’t yet registered it, but he was totally focused on some faded Looney Tunes stickers on the wall—hapless Elmer Fudd aimed his oversized shotgun for yet another futile shot at Bugs Bunny, who unsurprisingly showed little concern.

  The imaginary standoff was no match for the very real showdown with his son. After Tim said what he had to say, he ran out of the apartment. Victor’s ahgottahandleonit lingered on a cloud of perspiration. He smiled and mumbled, “Humph, the boy is growin’ up fast.”

  He leaned back on his chair and looked around the kitchen. The tiny room triggered memories of life back on the farm. Most people, living with nine others in two rooms, learn lessons of adaptation and tolerance. But Victor wasn’t like most people. He certainly wasn’t like his big brother Gentrale who would lie down for almost anything. Yes, Victor was different—he had a plan. Thoughts of his brother, together with the effects of the booze sent him into a dark place, a place he usually avoided. He leaned heavily on the table, drool oozing from his mouth as his head began a slow descent toward his forearms. He closed his eyes to the memories, paralyzed like someone unable to move before an oncoming train…

  Little Vic is breathing the soup they called air during the summer in Orleans Parish. He’s on the farm with his seven siblings. They are picking a short crop of cotton, baling hay, slopping the hogs and milking the cows. Brother William has fallen out of a tree and they’re laughing at him.

  Now he’s in the field. The compacted grass is short stacked and spaced evenly into neat rows. Between the cotton plants, the brothers are playing gotcha’ with their sisters.

  Now they are pulling traps from the Mississippi, taking in the largest haul of crayfish he’s ever seen. The brown water is cool—they take a dip even though Papa could show up anytime and there would be hell to pay. The current is strong—they have to be extra careful not to be pulled downriver.

  Thoroughly pissed-off, Tim karate kicked open
the giant metal door of the apartment block. He wanted to shake the image of his half-conscious father sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear. Victor was as sad as his friends were funny. As long as he lived in that hole, Tim figured, he couldn’t expect anything good to come out of the situation. He couldn’t expect any help either. At the sidewalk in front of the building, he leaned upon the cyclone fence to catch his breath. “FUCK!”—he screamed and listened to his voice bounce wildly off the buildings. Lucky those hooded dudes ain’t around, he thought. Interlacing his fingers on top of his head, he muttered to himself, “Chucky, why did you have to push the shit to the extreme? Stupid motherfucker…oh shit, shit,” he said, looking upwards, turning around a couple times. “What the fuck am I gonna do? And Dad? Ugh, Ahgottahandleonit—bullshit!”

  Victor jerked out of his daydream when his plate crashed to the floor. For a full minute, he stared at the greasy mess. An idea pushed through the haze of his thoughts: Check the vodka bottle. As he got down on his hands and knees, his joints played a symphony of pops—and cracks, accompanied by the rock and roll of a saltshaker that found a new place under the stove.

  Exhausted from the clean up, he sat on the floor, took an endearing glance at the fifth, reached for the contoured container and caressed the bottle with the delicacy of a lover. From the way his legs were feeling, his drinking glass, just as well, could have been in another galaxy. Frowning as if in pain, he turned the bottle up to his mouth, undaunted by the vodka dribbling down his stubbly chin. Well, for me anyways, it won’t be the first time to take a swig from the bottle, he thought and passed out…

  Younger brothers, William and Booker are splashing him. Little Vic dives under the surface to escape their assault and swims towards big brother Gentrale. He wants to dunk him from behind.

  Tim pushed off the fence and walked slowly. Something inside told him to get moving. This wasn’t the time or place to have a fucking breakdown. It was midnight and he had to be careful. The sidewalks on this side of town were wider, the trees older and larger, but the forlornness of the gutted out buildings and vacant lots was undeniable. At the very next corner, hooded figures—some urban sentries, others independent entrepreneurs—manned their territory and hawked their pulverized dreams. Never without a beat going in his head, Tim dialed down his rhythmic gait a couple notches at the sight of these dudes. However, not completely—stopping all together would have attracted attention. He made sure to avoid all eye contact and hoped to God that they would be uninterested in the brother in the muddy clothes passing through.

  Just outside the door of the kitchen, piled to the ceiling, sat all of his shit, as Victor liked to put it. The mishmash, consisting of a bed, lamps, chairs, ladder, tool box, dining room set, two trunks, rolled up rugs, tables, suitcases etc. was like an abstract modernist painting come to life.

  Suddenly, the drunk came to and scurried out of the kitchen on hands and knees like a rodent through the darkness…

  Little Vic is on the cool bare earth of the barn now, creeping along on all fours. Unexpectedly his dad enters the barn with landowner McClerkin. Little Vic puts his hand to his chest to quiet down the sound of his beating heart. He waits. They won’t be long and then he can get to his hiding place and back before dinnertime. It’s his turn to bring in the fresh water.

  He’s watching his father closely now. The swagger is absent. His voice is laden with a heavy conciliatory tone. There’s a problem with the six-month audit, a ten percent deficit of cottonseed has to be made up. Standing there in his dirty overalls, his father seems awash in shame and fear. Never returning the white man’s stare, he agrees with the decrease in the family’s allocation of the weekly yield. McClerkin is calm.

  Tim came upon a little commercial strip, its sidewalks lined on both sides with hole-in-the-wall bars. A promenade of stylish night crawlers and bar flies moved slowly up and down the sidewalk as music pumped out of every doorway. In the middle of the street, what would normally be considered traffic resembled a parking lot full of pimped-out clunkers.

  Tim, bouncing to a hip-hop beat in his head, paused to take in the scene. A stray cat found his pant leg and rubbed its body against it. Absentmindedly picking up the pitiful creature that purred lustfully at his touch, he smiled but then realized that he’d reached the limit of any kindness he could extend.

  “Fuck all this shit!” he screamed and slung it into the traffic.

  Victor collapsed onto his knees and elbows about halfway through the passageway until the shock of a large cockroach crawling across his hands got him going again.

  If Baggy had been still hanging around, he would have seen his friend barrel into the living room only to collapse unconscious onto his belly.

  McClerkin is holding a curb bit. Its leather strap hangs limply to the floor. The man is pointing to the ledger in his other hand, but Little Vic’s dad is watching the one with the horse tether. The white man is smiling now.

  Judging from his City Transit shirt, caked with sweat and dust, Victor figured that he’d been out for a while. Leaning heavily on the card table, he pulled himself onto the rocking chair that creaked in protest from his weight. In the middle of this onslaught of fragmented recollections, a vision comes to him: an angry sea at dawn; the words abandonment and betrayal ascend over the horizon in the form of two glowing black suns. The sway of the rocker forces him deeper into his muse.

  Little Vic watches,

  the hand of McClerkin make a slow ascent.

  He watches,

  his father stand perfectly still and let the white man wind the leather strap around his neck. Twice.

  He watches,

  McClerkin tie a knot and jerk his father to the ground. The white man is leaning in close now, whispering into his ear to be sure that not even the cows can hear.

  He watches,

  the breast of his father heave as if he’s having trouble breathing. But the man isn’t finished talking yet.

  He watches,

  HIMSELF, throw a milking pail at the head of McClerkin.

  He misses and runs out into the dusk…

  The memory pushed in on Victor like a stampede and he kicked the floor hard—too hard. The cheap rocker sent him heels over head. Blind with panic, the drunk jumped to his feet screaming, “I didn’t mean to leave you, Pops!” and ran out of the apartment into the stairwell. The door slammed shut behind him.

  Blackness.

  A thick spider’s web caught him on the ear. It wasn’t but a couple seconds of reeling around in the dark before his head found the low hanging beam under the stairwell. All went quiet, except for his snoring that echoed against the stone walls…

  It’s dark. Little Vic trips and falls down an irrigation ditch. Listening for angry footsteps, he sits quiet ‘till the coast is clear. Two minutes later, he’s bringing water to the dinner table.

  Embarrassed to look at his dad, he can barely eat for what he’s just witnessed in the barn. He shakes with shame in his seat for running away, abandoning his father. It’s too late now to make things right, too late to put the seed back.

  Victor shivered and woke himself up. Every bone in his body ached from the dank cold of the stone floor. Remembering the matches in his pocket, he checked himself for bugs—especially spiders—and found the opening at the bottom of the door where he kept a spare key.

  He picked up the vodka bottle again hoping to shake the shame in Tim’s question. Why had he left them? He wondered if the answer was that he was simply one of those people who doesn’t stick around, who gives up and walks away, had always been that way…

  Little Vic is behind the cottonseed barn, placing bags of seed in his hiding place. The air is full of dust and the noise is deafening. Crying, he reaches into the back of the barn, scooping cottonseed through a hole in the boards. Final count, twelve, thirteen sacks of misery.

  He’s running—he’s carrying a pillowcase. Inside—his other shirt, a sandwich and the money from the sale of the seed. He’s remembering h
is trembling hands, counting the dirty cash.

  As if on a rhythmic loop, Tim’s father’s last words—Ahgottahandleonit—repeated in his mind. The harder he tried to push them away, the clearer their form and rhythm became. Like a gas, a pulse escaped from his lips, as if it had become too strong for his body to contain. Explosive syncopated high and low consonants combined into a series of juxtaposed patterns, held together with a lot of wheezy rhythmic breathing made for an infectious groove. He never heard the squeal of tires, the thump of the cat’s body on the hood of the passing car nor the curses that followed.

  “Ahgottahandleonit,” Victor grunted and took perhaps the longest swig of the day. With each burning swallow, he refused his body’s need for oxygen and became more determined to finish the bottle. Why not? He was just another fucking loser who had left his family stranded. The gray eyelid windows looked on sleepily as he completed his mission, wobbled to his feet and made haste to the toilet…

  Little Vic is on the phone listening to his big brother Gentrale tell him that something terrible has happened.

  As if he could dilute the message, he’s holding the receiver slightly away from his ear. Little Vic lets Gentrale’s words hang in the air for a while before he slowly pushes the hook down.

  Tim never saw the cat shoot up the windshield and over the roof of the moving vehicle. It sprang off the roof of the car behind that, fortunately, had already stopped. He didn’t look back as he moved down the sidewalk away from the melee, blending into the gathering crowd. Hands clapping, stepping in time, he had transformed into a lanky wind-up dancing doll—a toy store fugitive on the loose.

  Ahgottahandleonit son…

  Ahgottahandleonit.

  Ain’t ’bout bein’ free,

  It’s ’tween yo mama an’ me.

  Ahgottahandleonit son…

  Ahgottahandleonit.

  You worried ‘bout the whis–ky?

  Don’t think about it.

  Back on the farm, back in the day,