Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “What’s wrong with your mother?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, genuinely worried. “Tonight was her birthday dinner. She takes a lot of meds. She might need her nitro patch.”

  As my mother continued to caterwaul, “I can’t breathe” from inside, the cop switched off his flashlight, reached in through the open window and removed the keys from the ignition. He dangled them tauntingly in my face and said, “Consider yourself lucky.” Then, he wound up like an outfielder trying to throw out a runner at the plate and hurled the keys over the van and into a forest of bushes that fronted some faceless corporate office structure. So far I didn’t even hear them hit the ground.

  “Thank you,” I said meekly.

  “Now, go see what’s wrong with your mother,” he admonished. “Call 911 if it’s an emergency. Happy birthday, Mrs. Raymond,” he called out grimly through the open window of the van, then marched back to his cruiser, entered it, slammed the door shut, threw it into drive, executed a curving U-turn across the double-yellow and vanished into the Fresno night.

  I rushed around to the back. My mother had her hand planted on her chest. Joy was stroking her hair. Jack had his head telescoped halfway into the back. “What’s wrong, Mom? Are you okay?”

  She stopped her crying almost as abruptly as she had started and spoke in a voice clear as a bell, “Is he gone?”

  “Yeah. What’s up with the histrionics? You could have gotten us all thrown in the pokey.”

  “You told me to fake a panic attack if we ever got pulled over.”

  I coughed a laugh. Then, everyone, including Joy, started laughing.

  “You are awesome, Mrs. Raymond,” Jack said, beaming. “Thinking on your feet, you wily gal.”

  My mother smiled like a little girl hearing praise for her winning science project. “I’m not as dumb as you think.”

  “We don’t think you’re dumb, Mom.”

  She crooked her index finger and pointed it skyward. “I saved us all from going to the pokey.”

  Everyone laughed again. Tremendous relief had washed over the entire van. It had been a long, murderous day, and the last thing we all needed was for me to be hauled in and booked on a DUI.

  I gave my mother a little squeeze before climbing back behind the wheel to confer with Jack. “Fuck, man, that was close.”

  “I hear you brother, I hear you,” he said, also greatly relieved. Jack, seeing me make no move to start the vehicle, said, “Let’s go.”

  “Fucking cop threw the keys out there.”

  “What?”

  “Just wound up and chucked ’em. I think sort of in that direction.” I pointed to the office complex edifice. Jack glanced out the window. “There’s no way we’re going to find them till it’s light.”

  “Don’t you have a spare?”

  “No. They only gave me one set.”

  “Fuck,” Jack said. “And you didn’t think to make –”

  From the back, my mother yelled, “Why aren’t we going? I want to get back to Snapper.”

  I turned around. “Mom, the cop threw our keys away. We’re going to have to have to hoof it back. Okay?”

  “That bastard!” my mother said.

  “All right, let’s get out,” I said.

  Everybody climbed out of the Rampvan. Jack retrieved the Montrachet out of the cooler and the motley four of us walked and rolled the short distance back to the Marriott, Joy leading the way pushing my mother, Jack and me trailing in a solemn silence. To passersby we must have looked like a straggling band of survivors, all that remained of a vanquished army.

  Back in our room, Jack and I, wineglasses in hand filled with chilled white Burgundy, lying on our separate queens, were reminiscing about the brush with the law when we heard a meek knock at the door. I got up to see who it was.

  Joy was standing there, still in her sleeveless black dress. She looked pretty cute. I saw Jack take indecent notice, molesting her with his eyes.

  “Hi, Joy. How’s it going?” I said.

  “Good. Your mom wants you to come in and say good night.”

  “Would you like a little glass of wine while I, uh, tuck my mother in?”

  She nodded up and down.

  Jack leapt up from the bed, found a fresh wineglass and poured her more than she probably wanted and brought it over to her.

  “Thanks,” was all she said.

  “I’ll be right back.” I would have cautioned Jack against even the possibility of laying a hand on Joy, because I knew he had been fantasizing about putting the moves on her since we got on the road. But with his manhood now a disabled veteran, there wasn’t much to worry about.

  I went next door to my mother’s room. She lay supine on the bed, propped up on two pillows, the covers over her. Snapper, snuggled up next to her, perked up his little elfish ears and looked at me threateningly for a moment, growled, drawing his lips back to reveal his fangs.

  “Oh, Snapper, it’s just Miles coming to say good night. You be quiet.” Snapper’s ears folded down to a floppy position and he closed his eyes.

  I eased down onto the edge of the bed. “How’s the tooth, Mom? I saw you rub your jaw a couple times at dinner.”

  “It’s fine,” she said sharply.

  “Did you rinse out with warm salt water like the dentist advised?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But it’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”

  “A little,” she allowed. “But I don’t want to be hospitalized.”

  “No one’s going to hospitalize you, Mom. Okay?”

  Her face suddenly grew introspective. I could see she was trying, in a bold effort to articulate what she was thinking, to assemble words that were darting around erratically in her stroke-damaged brain. “I mean,” she started. “I don’t want to go to the hospital for anything. I’d rather just die.”

  “Well, sometimes you don’t have a choice, Mom.”

  She grew confused, as if she didn’t comprehend that she didn’t have indomitable control over her destiny. “They can’t take me if I don’t want to go,” she said naively.

  I didn’t want to get into an argument with her; I wanted to get back to my glass of Montrachet, which I purposely didn’t bring over to my mother’s room because it would have taunted the demonic alcoholic force that slumbered latent inside her. So, I patted her on the shoulder and said reassuringly, “No one’s going to take you to the hospital. And certainly not for an abscessed tooth.”

  “Oh, that’s such good news,” she said, genuinely relieved.

  “That dentist we saw today was just playing it by the book. We’ll find someone in Portland with a little more liberal mindset.”

  “Just don’t tell them I’m on Coumadin,” my mother advised in a sudden flash of wisdom.

  “Good thinking. I won’t. That was a mistake.”

  She nodded to herself while stroking Snapper’s back.

  “You’ll be in Wisconsin with your sister pretty soon, Mom,” I said.

  “That’s good.”

  “You’re glad to be out of Las Villas de Muerte, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. Every day someone would die in there. It was so depressing.”

  I nodded empathetically, at a loss for words.

  “I appreciate you doing all this for me, Miles,” she started before tears hampered her speech. “I know you’re busy and a big deal now with your book and movie, but I’m worried about your drinking.”

  I didn’t like having to hear about something I knew myself was getting out of control, much less from my stroke-addled, Chardonnay-guzzling mother. “That’s why I brought Jack, to help with the driving.”

  “He drinks more than you!” my mother exclaimed.

  “Well, we sort of tag team it, Mom. He drinks when I don’t and I drink when he doesn’t.”

  Knowing I was playing with her, she forced a laugh. Then the tears started up again. “I just want to make it to Wisconsin without you getting thrown in the pokey,�
� she blubbered.

  “Don’t worry, Mom.”

  “Okay,” she said. I rose from the edge of the bed. She cocked her head toward me and said, with reddened eyes, “Give me a kiss good night.”

  “Mom,” I said, standing over her. “You know we don’t do that.”

  She looked puzzled, groping desperately around in her whorled memory for the meaning of my words. “But we could start now,” she insisted softly.

  My mother had been a dutiful, but unaffectionate, mother, probably because she never had wanted to bear children. The three of us were not breast-fed and we never hugged, as far back as I could remember. When I got to the VA Hospital to pull the feeding tube on my comatose father after a triple bypass had gone haywire and rendered him a vegetable, I remember hugging my mother once he officially was declared dead. I remembered, looking at her in the Marriott’s queen bed, how foreign her rounded, overweight body had felt in my enveloping arms as we silently commiserated my father’s grim departure. I realized only then that moment that we had almost never touched. Headshrinkers had later theorized that this was probably the reason I had such difficulty with intimacy with women: Victoria, Maya, others, and all the one-night stands.

  I leaned over the bed, squeezed her shoulder and said, “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night, Miles.”

  I left her suite feeling sad. My mother, all alone in her hotel room. My mother, all alone in her condo when my brother went to part-time care. All alone in Las Villas de Muerte, staring at her TV, waiting, waiting, all the time she once told me, for one of her sons to come and take her for a drive.

  Getting to the other room, I was assailed by the stink of some serious weed. Joy and Jack were passing a joint and laughing. Joy, who had a wicked giggle–which was nice to see for a change!–was sitting daintily on the edge of Jack’s bed. Jack offered the joint to me, but I shook my head.

  “Doesn’t mix with wine for me. I get the spins. Plus, it makes me extremely self-conscious. If I thought about where we were, this quartet of ours and all the shit that’s happened, I’d have a nervous breakdown.”

  Jack and Joy laughed, a kind of rolling laughter engendered by their being stoned.

  I found my wineglass, moved to refresh it with the Montrachet, but only a dribble came out. “Jackson, you killed the fucking bottle.”

  “Relax, dude, there’s another one in the mini-fridge.”

  I squatted and extracted a bottle of Justin Chardonnay. Opening it with my trusty key ring corkscrew, I poured a healthy splash. “Anyone else?” I said, holding up the bottle.

  Joy shook her head in a tight no.

  Jack said, “I’m good, brother.”

  I lay down on the adjoining queen and sipped the wine. Joy extinguished the blunt in her Altoids tin, and rose. “I should get back to your mother.”

  “No, stay,” Jack said. “Phyllis’s fine.”

  “I’ve got to give her her meds and take her brace off.” She crossed to the door.

  “All right, Joy, sleep well,” I said.

  “Thanks for the herbaceous adjustment,” Jack said, raising his glass.

  The door closed, leaving Jack and me alone. We sipped our wine in silence. Outside, someone dove into the pool and splashed around. Room service pushed a heavy cart clinking with dishes past our door.

  “How’s your cock?”

  “It’s fine,” Jack said. “The needle hole isn’t very big and it’s stopped bleeding.”

  “Good. I was worried about you in that OR.”

  “The question will be when I take it for a test run. Will it rise to the occasion? Will it hurt…?”

  “Will you come blood instead of opalescent seed?”

  “Homes. You’ve got a way with putting horrific images in a person’s mind.”

  I laughed. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

  “Fuck you, Homes. You just got lucky.”

  “Do you believe that fucking cop? Half a mile from the hotel, old woman in a wheelchair, no one on the fucking road, and he was on the verge of getting the cuffs out. Jesus! What the fuck’s up with law enforcement these days?”

  We fell into silence again, then Jack said. “If you want to take a cab back to that joint and do that waitress, that’s cool, man.”

  “Nah. I considered it, Jackson. I mean, she’s pretty cute and everything, but they’re going to be going nuts until the wee hours and you know restaurant people, they’re some of the most intemperate, degenerate souls in the world. We got to find the keys to the car and do some motoring tomorrow.” I turned to him. “And, in deference to your injury, I wouldn’t want you to be here all by yourself imagining me pounding some pretty girl on the floor in one of their private rooms, the two of us dousing each other’s genitalia with some exalted Bourgogne rouge.”

  “Well, that’s generous of you, Miles. Even if you are full of bullshit.”

  “Yeah, I was bullshitting you. I’m just tired. And I’m growing weary of the one-night stands.”

  “But you liked that Spanish chick, didn’t you?”

  “Laura,” I said, pronouncing it phonetically. “Yeah. Smart girl. Passionate as all hell. Grandfather’s some kind of famous lit professor in Spain. Knew Lorca personally or some shit. Mother’s a painter. Hell, my dad sold Laundromats and my mother was a nurse. Imagine having artists as parents? I’d be so much further along in my career if I had.”

  “You can’t think about shit like that,” Jack said. “So, you liked her?”

  “Yeah. I really liked her.” I sipped my wine and grew contemplative, journeyed back to the Just Inn and Laura naked on the fake animal rug in front of that romantic fire. “You know, I don’t mean to get all maudlin and shit, but I think I’m reaching the point I’m just tired of sleeping alone, or watching the chick leave while I’m nursing a hangover and trying to recollect how it all came to happen that a naked woman was in my house or hotel room. It gets dispiriting. It’d be nice to have someone who, you know, got me. Knew when to leave me alone, had a career of her own, paid her half and didn’t expect me to support her…”

  “And knew when to suck your dick,” Jack finished.

  “And knew when to fellate me. Absolutely.”

  “You might have to lower your standards a little bit,” Jack mused.

  “I’m not going to lower my standards. I don’t want to wake up next to somebody who starts babbling about subprime mortgages or how to pull the perfect double espresso.”

  “So, what about Maya? She’s smart. You guys can go on and on all night about wine.”

  “You know, too much baggage, too many scars. And do I really want to live in an area I helped make famous and fall headlong into that hedonistic crowd? Fuck, man, I’d never write another word again in my life, Jackson.”

  I heard gentle snoring. Cocking my head in Jack’s direction, I saw that his head had drooped to one side. I rose, went to the dresser and found an extra blanket and draped it over him. Next, I slowly untied his tennis shoes and removed them from his malodorous feet. He snored away. I slipped out of my clothes and climbed into the other bed. Maybe because we had been talking about her, my thoughts turned to Laura. I could see her face punctuated by those blazing black eyes and those red lipstick-colored lips, hear her Catalan accent…

  chapter 10

  Early the next morning I roused Jack from a deep slumber to help me go look for the keys. He grumbled a bit, but I inspired him to take a shower and get dressed so that we could get the visit with Mom’s brother over with and get back up into wine country.

  “Okay, now you’re talking my language,” he said.

  While Jack showered I got on the computer, tinkered around with Google maps, and then charted our day’s itinerary–assuming, I thought ruefully, no one came down with priapism, we weren’t arrested for a DUI and none of us had to make an emergency dental visit.

  A heavy blue sky greeted us as Jack and I walked out of the Marriott, donned our sunglasses and made our way down East Shaw
in the direction of our abandoned vehicle. It wasn’t even eight o’clock and I estimated the temperature to be in the upper 80s. By the time we got to the van we were drenched in sweat, shirts sticking to our backs.

  We searched the area where I calculated the officer had thrown the keys, a vast parking lot bordered by a dense hedge interspersed with trees. The sun beat down mercilessly as Jack kept muttering, “fucking cop,” and “why didn’t you have a spare made, Miles? That was idiotic!” I theorized at one point that the key ring could be up in the branches of the trees, to which an exasperated and hung over Jack responded, “Let’s just call a fucking locksmith.”

  “It’s 8:30, Jackson,” I said, “there’s no locksmith on call right now. Let’s just give it another hour.”

  “Fucking cop!” Jack yelled, his hangover and sore pecker gripping him like twin lobster claws. “Why didn’t he just leave them down at the station? Asshole.”

  We fanned out again and continued our search for the hurled set of keys. Like trapped flies, we zigzagged this way and that, bent at the waist, scouring the area for the proverbial needle in the haystack. To passing motorists we must have looked like a pair of LSD-tripping hippies anachronistically lost in time. After a futile hour of looking we trudged back to the idled Rampvan, a grousing Jack eager to get back into the rhythm of the road. As we approached the van, something glinted and caught my eye. I stepped closer and zeroed in on the object. I jackknifed forward and burst out laughing.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” Jack said.

  “Check it out,” I said, pointing and motioning for him to come over. I was still laughing, more out of relief than mirth.

  Jack stalked around to the back of the Rampvan where the keys sat perched on the rear bumper, sparkling like a diamond bracelet under the malefic, blindingly bright sun.

  “Fucking cop faking a throw, Jesus,” he said disgustedly. “Must have gotten a good chuckle out of that one.”