by Habash, Gabe
“I miss you, too.”
On Friday, I wait outside the Honky Tonky in the dark for twenty minutes. In order to keep warm and pull down my anxiety, I take a lap around the parking lot where, close by, the rape happened. In the inside pocket of my coat, there’s a pair of scissors I bought from Pharmart for the occasion. It’s what I did to be conscientious. I keep putting myself in these situations, I keep asking for it. I tell myself if he’s not here in thirty seconds, I’m going home. The only thing that stops me is my vivid hope of defrocking another evil Oregsburg educator. I walk back to the door and look inside.
Silas is sitting at the bar with his back to me. The whole place is a lot smaller than I thought. I approach quietly, trying to see if his posture indicates threat, but then I realize there’s a huge mirror behind the bar, and he’s using it to stare right at me. He puts his head back and drinks, like one of those people who look up their skull and flutter their eyelids, challenging the dead.
“I’ve been waiting for a half hour,” he says as I walk up.
“Sorry.”
He pats the stool next to him, and after I sit down, he sniffles and burps. “I’m on top of the world!” he shouts. Everything about him is in bad taste, but he’s got a black talent for burying it. The bar’s lit mostly by tons of red Christmas lights slathered over the wood panel walls. The only other light is from the lamp over the mirror, and the cigarette machine and pinball machine in the corner, near the hallway for the bathrooms. He asks me what I want. I don’t answer. Silas has the bartender give me what he’s having, whatever that is. Everything is red.
“Drink it,” he says.
I put the tiny glass up to my mouth and swallow and exhale loudly.
“Like a Gila monster, whoo-ee!” he says, laughing, putting a cigarette into the lowest hole of his face and lighting it. “Tell me something, were you late because you were wrestling?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m glad you came, even if you’re not so punctual. I’m glad we’re here together.”
In the mirror, he squints while he sucks the cigarette, and puts the ashes in an empty glass next to his drink. There are nine or ten other people in the bar, some in the booths over my shoulder. No women.
“Do you bring other students here?”
“A few. Fewer and fewer people are taking my class every year, so I have fewer to pick from. Let me get you another.”
“I don’t want another.”
“Either you loosen up or I’m liable to have no fun,” he says, threat sticking up like wire in his voice.
“Fine with me.”
I make eye contact with him in the mirror, where I have the sinking feeling he’s been waiting to see me look. “You chew your fingernails, yeah?”
“What’s going to happen to Pervis?”
“Well, I’m going to fail him. I haven’t decided what else.” He abruptly stumps out his cigarette with half the tobacco left in the paper. “Do you know why fewer people are taking my class?”
“Jazz is a dying art form,” I say, also trying out: “people appreciate fewer things.”
“That might be right. But I don’t think it’s the reason.” The glass in front of me is refilled. I swallow it to keep him talking. “You don’t have to drink the whole thing like that.”
“Muh.”
“Language is so interesting. It’s like the mouth. The mouth is what you learn to lie from. Do you know, it had to be six or seven years ago. A person was going around pretending to be a medical examiner for insurance companies to get into people’s homes. He would show up on their doorstep and just guess an insurance company, if he got it wrong he would just mumble something and leave.” He drinks the remainder and his glass is refilled. “But if he guessed right, and he got a trusting person, he’d get into their house. It happened four times. He took out fake forms, sat at their kitchen table with them and asked them questions about their medical history, but this is all leading up to the real reason he’s lied. They’d get to the part of the exam where he said he needed a blood sample, and he used the same unsterile needle on each of the four people (two women and two men) he fooled, and then he had them urinate in a cup. He took the blood and urine with him and then left. I’m not even talking about music. It’s just so interesting. Do you like the music we’ve listened to this semester?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Tell me why you like jazz.”
“I like it because you have to pay attention to figure out if it’s good or not. I like concentrating.”
“Which was your favorite?”
“Miles Davis.”
“That’s a little bit disappointing. But. I guess no. It’s not. Everyone’s favorite is Miles Davis. It’s like saying Shakespeare is your favorite. Miles Davis beat up women pretty bad. Do you hear that when you wrestle?”
“I don’t hear anything when I wrestle.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders, and I become more nervous. “I like you, there’s something about you.” My glass gets refilled. I have a flash memory of them showing us Fail Safe as third graders, and half the kids who weren’t asleep crying in fear at the ending.
A song ends and another one starts. “This is the Small Faces. It’s ‘Green Circles,’ is the name of it.” Whenever the conversation momentarily sags, I start to bring up Mary Beth, but he won’t let me, or I’m not ready to bring her out between us, I’m nervously protecting her. He dumps the rest of his alcohol into his body, then puts his coat on. “I have to make a phone call.”
I watch him go past the pinball machine, around the corner. Immediately, I snap my finger at the bartender a few times until he notices.
“Hey,” I say, “listen to me. Does that guy, does he bring students in here?”
“You’re a student? You’re trying to give me trouble?”
“No.”
“Then shut the fuck up.”
I begin to reach for my scissors but realize I can’t do that, I can’t do any of that, and so I make it look like I’m reaching for the nearby cigarette pack the whole time. The bartender leaves me alone. I get nauseous, not just because of the alcohol, but because I’m tired and sick of the way everything keeps failing to add up. Silas has no bag. He wore his coat to make a phone call. There is no evidence. I go after him, but when I turn the corner into the little hallway, the pay phone is vacant. I walk into the bathroom, which is half the size of my room in McCloskey, one urinal and one stall. The stall is shut, I can see black shoes on the yellow tile. At the urinal, I fake it. I don’t go, I’m too scared, so I just stand there and listen. On the ceiling, a big animal is stretched over the whole room. The bathroom is quiet except for the Small Faces coming through the door, they say “green circles” over and over while I wait for what’s going to happen, but there’s not even a shifting on the toilet or a rustle of fabric. And so I flush the empty trough and pretend to wash my hands and leave. At the bar, I get a water and drink it. I pay taxes, a fractional speck of a cent, to feed Fink now. I pull a splinter out of the wood. I think about walking my empty glass into the bathroom and kicking the stall door open and hitting him in the head and face with the glass until he admits he killed his wife. I think about using the scissors after the glass is broken into pieces too small to continue using. But then the song stops and another one comes on and I don’t know what it is. And what always stops me stops me.
“Etta James,” Silas says, approaching and zipping his fly. “Do you do inquisitive things like bend over while urinating to study the stuff coming right from the spigot?”
“How was your phone call?”
“Let’s get out of here. Why don’t you come over, I have something to show you.” He puts his cigarettes in his coat.
“O.K.”
In the parking lot, he leads me to his truck. During the ride, he turns on the radio so we don’t have to talk. His driving is normal considering how much he’s had to drink.
As we near the driveway, I say, “Is that your house?”
Like in Shane’s truck, I experience the feeling of approaching something unaccountably large. A reality stands just beyond the skin of my eyelids, and another reality lives inside. Somewhere between is the truth, on a vast, invisible plane of banshees. When we get to the side door, he says, “I’ve been having a problem lately with lost keys.” He grunts as he bends down and pushes aside a rock and takes a key from underneath.
The door leads into a living room. Two recliners and a couch, a small television in the corner. The rug is a thick Oriental. I glance through the entryway, on the other side is the kitchen. “There’s a thing in here,” I say.
“Litter box, it’s over there.”
“Where’s the cat?”
“She doesn’t like visitors.”
“This is a nice house.”
He waves the compliment away and sits down in one of the chairs. There’s a black case on the floor. He bends down and unclasps it and removes a gleaming trumpet.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit in the other chair. He’s between me and the door. I’m not to see the back half of the house, the more personal rooms, but I scan the walls for an oil painting that could have eye holes in it.
“Take off your coat if you want.”
“I’m O.K., I get cold easily.”
“Are you from someplace warm?”
“Idaho.”
“Aren’t you used to it?” His menace casually dallies around the room. It’s quite evasive and I can’t decide whether he goes at the top of the psychopath ladder, also containing Fink, possibly Nephew Shane, who also might be dead, and Frank Florence, or somewhere near the bottom, with the idiot Kryger. When he puts the blowhole of the trumpet to his face, I distinctly see his tongue circle it in a wriggling fashion. He starts playing something that’s very good and also sad, and I take it I’m not supposed to ask questions. A songbird is born with defective vocal cords and so cannot sing and so dies without a mate, unsuccessfully.
“Come here,” he says.
I don’t move. He gets up. My back is pressed into the chair. He gets right on top of me, his hand touching my neck, and he puts the trumpet in front of me. “Do you know what my favorite note is? E. When you hear it, you can sense the other notes on each side. It’s like a note of omission. A ghost note. Play it.” And then the hole is in my mouth. “Press your lips medium hard.” I try to pull my head back but it hits the headrest. His fingers press down on the first two plungers and lift on the third. “Medium hard.” A line of his leftover saliva runs inside my lips. I push and experience what must be the lowest grade of feeling, because it’s nameless. A note comes out, it falls out into the house and over the entire deprived countryside. “Keep pushing, just like that,” he says, and moves his fingers around, and through my pushing and his fingering, he plays a dancing series of notes, his hands in front of my face. I close my eyes and find them wet.
“There, you just played an arpeggio.”
He goes back to his chair and sits down. “Can I offer you a glass of water?”
I wipe my eyes and say, “Does it smell like smoke to you?”
“I know what you’re doing. I’m not stupid.”
“Why did you invite me here?”
“I’ve watched you in class. During the listening you have this … impenetrable concentration.”
“That’s all? That’s all?”
“Because you seem like someone who treats things seriously. You seem to me … to be an ideologically greedy person.”
I can picture a sentence I underlined in the homework reading that applies to this situation, but I can’t quite remember it so I say, “I’m just trying to get the truth.”
He rolls his malignantly beautiful green eyes. “What’s the truth? What’s that in your pocket?”
“To get you to admit that you killed your wife.”
“I’m under no obligation to answer that.”
“I’m not like everyone else. Who wants to know the answer.”
“Why are you trying to get me to admit that?”
The answer is for Mary Beth, she’s the entire reason I’ve crawled into this hellhole, but am I in love with Mary Beth or am I just using her as an excuse? The milk’s slopped all over my fucking skull, and what I say is at least mostly a lie, which is, “Justice. Law and order. What’s right and all that shit.”
“Well, now you’re getting into theory and—”
“Oh! I don’t give a shit!”
He mime-plays some notes on his trumpet, I can hear them clicking. “Let me ask you something. Say I did kill my wife and then say I admitted to it, you get me right now to admit to it, but also say that I tell you, and you are somehow blessed with the divine knowledge to know it is true, that I will never ever for the rest of my life, not once, commit a bad deed, that in fact I will commit more common good deeds on a day-to-day normal basis for the rest of my life, however many more years that is. I live quietly in this house, I teach my class, and I don’t bother anyone. Is it still ‘what is right’ if all that you’re really doing by getting me to admit to murder and locking me up forever is preventing me from living another few years that no one’s really going to notice? Doesn’t that seem like a waste of time? What’s the point? What you’re changing is so minor that it doesn’t even register. All this effort, and for what?”
“Shut the fuck up! Answer the fucking question.” I put my hand in my coat on the scissors.
“I didn’t kill my wife. O.K.? I didn’t do anything. Anything. It was an accident.”
The end is coming. Here it comes.
“Do you remember a student named Mary Beth? A girl in your class named Mary Beth?”
This is the part where I feel myself ready to make the final push, to rush at him and stab him in the body and skin with the scissors, the moment he remembers her and I can intuit the wrongdoing in relation to her, Mary Beth, and to the dead wife, whose name no one’s even mentioned. I can take the plunge. Kill him in his house as divine sarcasm, a feat so troubling they wouldn’t even find me before I at least finished up in Kenosha. Then they probably would. I promise I am not unhinged, this is a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. The cusp of a murder is not widely divergent from the cusp of anything else, but I can only speak for my own experience. And it prances along my mind’s sorry, no-good terrain that my time with Silas is not so widely divergent from my time with Shane, but if those both ended in murder, the first would be for passion and vengeance and the second would be for self-defense. Either way, nobody’s taking me down the goddamn rabbit hole. My fingers go around the handle of the scissors in my pocket.
He sighs and rubs his eye. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“She took your class last semester, you bozo.”
His eyeballs shift to the top left corner, the coordinates of recall. “Yes, maybe. Pretty?”
“Well, she’s also smart, and—”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. My class doesn’t test brains.” He looks right into my face, blinks, then says, “But I can see you’re very loyal to this person. This wasn’t even your idea, was it?”
“Listen—”
“Maybe I was off about the ideological greed. But in any case, can I tell you a story about loyalty?”
“Lis—”
“Can I tell you a story?” When I don’t answer, he reaches down into his trumpet case and pulls out a flask, which he finishes. “One time, a long time ago, a man knitted my wife some socks and sent them to her. He was a boy she had grown up with. It struck me as so obscene, so obscenely intimate, and I lost it watching her unwrap it and how she lit up, I was sick over it, but I did not let her know what I was feeling. They were fuzzy green. She grew up with him in Canada. The lure of the neighbor boy next door. She was Canadian. I’m very drunk, but I’m not sorry. Are you listening? I drive up there, drove. I went to his house. Took hours. He never sent my wife anything again. Not a letter. She never found out, she thought she’d done something wrong. And I said, ‘Honey, that
is just the way some people are. You have done nothing wrong.’” A little bit of drool tips out of his mouth’s corner, which he wipes away. “The lesson is, you have to learn how to keep quiet about the things that are most important to you.”
It boggles the mind to see someone who’s never wanted anyone else’s forgiveness. It’s thoroughly unbelievable but it’s true, it’s a self-protecting flaw that he can sense sitting in his chair, fingering his cranium where the tissue should be but isn’t. I say, “Can I use your bathroom?” and look at him hard, but he’s not even slightly rattled by encroachments into this territory.
“It’s right down there.”
I go into the bathroom and lock the door. I turn the lights on and run the water and rub my eyes and very carefully look for any signs or evidence, for what I can report back to Mary Beth. I inspect the wallpaper, the toilet, the mirror, the sink and counter, under the sink and counter, the floor, I climb on top of the toilet and look at the ceiling, then I pull back the shower curtain, I finger the tiles and the bow of the tub, and I find nothing. Nothing at all. I step over the rim of the tub and get on my hands and knees with my face at the drain, and when I pull up on the little silver disc it rattles. I can see maybe three inches inside. In the brown rusting pipe is a wet old nickel. I toss the drain top against the tub and it bangs loudly. I go over to the toilet and unzip my pants. I don’t lift the lid, I just piss all over the toilet and the floor and the wall.
I take out the scissors and hold them in my hand for my walk out. I open the door and go quickly around the corner with them ready, but he’s not in his chair. There’s a dragging sound around the corner, in the kitchen. I open the front door and leave.
I walk fast up the driveway of the either sad widower or wife murderer, to the road, which isn’t lit at all. I’m not sure whether I trust anything he’s said.
I get home mainly by feel.
IN MY ROOM, I turn the desk lamp on and take out four pieces of paper and begin writing all I know, and I do not stop until I’ve filled all of them front and back. It comes easily, and thankfully I forget everything else outside, outside of letters on blue lines. The words and sentences fall out of me so that only afterwards am I aware of the actual writing, the process of mind to hand to pen to paper, it seems like the thoughts travel directly to the page from my head, as if I’m inventing a new way of expression on the fly, something no one’s ever seen before, as though I could be writing with my toes or by putting the pen in my mouth and bobbing and articulating all over the page.