by Greg Baxter
We ate breakfast, a real feast – a dozen eggs hatched a hundred yards away and scrambled into very yellow huevos rancheros, a whole foot-long roll of ground country sausage fried in patties on an industrial skillet, a loaf of toast. I still didn’t have an appetite, and my mother looked upon my plate with disappointment, suggesting, without a word, that I had grown too skinny. It was true, and I could see my mother was weighing the risks of approaching the matter. No doubt the first sight of me in a year had been shocking: thin and green-grey, suddenly bald after quitting medication, and bird-legged. After breakfast, I gave my mother something of mine to read – a new essay just published in an Irish journal. I hoped, perhaps, that it might speak to my new attitude toward intent, my lucky torment – the lucid and lyrical substance of flesh in mid-rot, a song of self in dissolution. She read too silently, so I went for a shower. I checked myself in the mirror. I examined my body. The muscles in my arms were gone. I flexed and became winded. When I was out of the shower my mother said nothing of the essay, except, Have you started smoking?
We had some more coffee on the back porch, a wooden platform David built that is as wide and nearly as long as the trailer. From it, the yard drifts downward. A garden, an old barn, a greenhouse, another road. Little interrupts the serenity. A flushed toilet, and the shallow sewage lines gurgle toward the septic tank. Gunshots. Dogs barking or howling. From time to time a neighbour flies up or down the road in his battered Suzuki SUV, a fourteen-year-old on thrill rides. He, Dustin, who is my size but doughy and boyish, has no father and his mother is in jail for selling crack. He lives with his grandparents. He’s got no friends. He explodes fireworks and shoots inanimate objects. He paid us a short visit nearly every day, mainly to eat scraps and tell nigger jokes – he was, quite obviously, half black, but his grandparents told him he just tanned well. When he went by that morning he honked and my mother waved.
The sun was out but the day was hazy. A chicken hawk began to circle and my mother screamed at it a dozen times to get the hell away – she speaks with animals. It hid on a treetop and my mother shrieked, I see you, you sonofabitch! It shot off. When enough time had passed and it had not come back, we let the chickens out and fed them carrots. You hold the stalks tightly and let them peck, and when there is not much left they peck your fists and wrists. They are immensely healthy-looking animals – glossy and fat. Very calm, for chickens. Sometimes one hops on your leg, or shoulder, and squats for a while like an aloof and overweight potentate. When they had eaten all they wanted, we fed the rabbits.
I watched my mother tend her garden. The chickens followed her like lieutenants attending a contemplative general around a tent on the eve of battle. She is both sad and youthful, like a lovesick teenager. I know that she has regrets. I dream that I may somehow make up for the potential she threw away – she was endlessly creative and intelligent, but she sacrificed. The story is an old one, but your mother is your mother. You love her pain like you love your own. The blonde colouring in her hair was old, and an inch of grey roots was showing. She wears thick glasses because her work, refurbishing houses with David, is too messy for contacts.
My mother has always been at home around violence. She has, from time to time, a maniacal blood-temperature. Once, our cat, a poor, declawed thing we transplanted from San Antonio to Conroe after the divorce, was killed by a handful of Dobermann pinschers that belonged to a neighbour. They were in the middle of eating it when my mother walked up behind them with a .357 and, without shouting, not angrily, shot two of those dogs. She called the neighbour and told him to come pick them up. When he threatened to call the police, she dared him to. He relented. Another time, when I was eleven or twelve, a cousin hid a bag of weed under my bed. In the middle of some night he crawled through my window to retrieve it – but it had already been discovered. My mother woke and called him into the living room. She beat and bloodied him with her bare fists. Years before that, at a youth soccer game in San Antonio, some father got irate about some penalty, and ran to his truck to get a weapon – in my memory it was a crowbar. Everybody scattered but my mother. She stood between the man and the referee and told him if he hit her, he had better kill her, because she would chase him to the ends of the earth and get revenge. Not one man came to that referee’s aid.
Her work selling insurance, after the divorce, took her to far-flung homes in the rural wastelands of east Texas, and sometimes I went with her. We often encountered frothing and outraged guard dogs. They would gnaw on fence posts as she approached – I was too afraid to leave the car, but she would step through the gate, kneel, speak to the dog, and at once it would fall under some spell of love and pacification. The owners would say, I’ve never seen anything like that. Soon the dogs would be lying at her feet, and the owners would be writing cheques. I try to remind her of these things, and she pretends they never happened.
The last time I visited, we took David’s guns out – he has dozens: pistols, shotguns, rifles – and shot at targets in a junked-out section of the farm. My mother sat on a frayed folding chair and held the ammunition, drinking iced tea. It was bright and muggy. David and I were all pretty bad shots, and my mother made mock-encouraging remarks when we missed. David said, Okay, Frances, let’s see what you can do. She took the rifle, complained about the glare, hitched into a forward-leaning stance, and hit everything. The beer cans we had placed on tree trunks and cardboard boxes flipped and bounced and tumbled off their perches, one after another. I guess we’ll have to move them farther back, she said.
The subject of the end of my marriage was avoided until it could no longer be, and later that day, perhaps it was the evening, I delivered a brief and abridged confession of my sins. She listened with a studied dread, nodding at times but mostly still. Reliving past horrors, I suppose. If I had thought about it, I would’ve abridged the story further, though it was already more of an excuse than a confession. I had been forthright with everybody else. I desired contempt, because I was beyond it, so great was my self-loathing. But with my mother I merely wanted it over.
I had caused her enough pain already. Between the eighth and ninth grades, I left her and Conroe to live with my father in San Antonio. I withdrew myself from her life at a time when she had nothing but an ignorant and loud-mouthed second husband and a family that was too religious to console her. It is easy to excuse the cruelties of children, since they cannot comprehend the weight of them on other people, but I have always understood and used the weakness others have for me. Though she is considerably more content with herself now, and with David, she has harboured the belief that I left because I loved my father more than her.
At the time, she knew I was in trouble at school, failing classes, getting in fights, but she did not know the extent of things. I was getting my ass kicked almost every day. And when I was not getting my ass kicked, I was hurrying from classroom to classroom, taking back-routes, trying to keep out of sight. All this came about, or at least began, because of something I said. One day during an off-season football practice – we were, in fact, playing baseball – I, without thinking, using a term my uncles used to refer to me, called a black kid boy. Perhaps I knew what it meant and used it anyway. If I was a racist then, I wasn’t aware of it. He punched me without any conversation, no taunts or intimidation. It was a jab that caught me on the cheek. There was a jolt, but it had not hurt – that struck me as totally impossible. Thinking of it now – no wonder, he was a few inches shorter than me and not as broad, and he was thirteen. Nevertheless I was terrified. A coach, from the other side of the field, told the black kid to leave me alone, not out of concern for my safety but because I was a puny waste of time: if you’re going to fight, he told the kid, pick somebody who’ll give you one. Nevertheless, the kid attacked me again. He punched me six or seven times. I was too scared to run, and I never raised a hand to defend myself, not even to cover my face. The kid walked away to finish the game. I hoped he had bored himself. I remember pins and needles in my arms and legs, no
t from fear, not precisely, but from a realization a thousand times more abominable – that I had not considered, and wouldn’t consider, the possibility of punching him back.
When the game ended he came at me once more. Again I did nothing. For about a week this continued. I’d be ambushed by fifty students who wanted to see the spectacle of the Boy Who Would Not Fight. The black kid eventually tired of giving me beatings, but just as soon as that crisis had gone by, another ten started. It had become obvious to everybody that I would not raise a hand against them. For months I was a punching bag, and humiliatingly it was almost always by boys smaller than me. Large galleries watched like a talk-show audience, just laughing, coaxing. Once, in a scene reminiscent of a gruesome Mafia docklands execution, three kids – this time they were much bigger – led me to an isolated spot, far behind the football field, in the middle of a school day, to beat me up. I did not beg or whimper, but I did not struggle either, nor try to run away. They began to push me around. While the ringleader watched, the other two tried to incite me. Ten minutes passed. The leader asked me if I knew why it was happening. I said nothing. I had stopped wondering what the reason was; all that consumed me was my inability to respond. These fights took place wholly within me. The two lost interest, but the third grew so angry at my inaction that he struck me anyway, just once. That too did not hurt, but I shat myself. A hard and giant turd, cleanly, was in my underwear. After they walked away, I pulled my jeans down, lifted it out in my palm, and left it in the street.
The vice-principal, in his office, once told me, For God’s sake, defend yourself! I told him I didn’t want to get detention. Detention! He slapped his forehead. On a weekend trip to San Antonio, that summer, I told my father I wanted to move in with him. He told my mother. Cowardice after cowardice after cowardice. And even now, back in east Texas, I am whipped, now and then, by a paroxysm of those memories. Sometimes I begin to perspire and must get up and walk. If not for my mother, I would never come back here. I would never drive through. I would never take a flight that flew over. In San Antonio, entering high school, I decided to stick up for myself, not because I wanted to, but because the truth of my nature was too tight around my neck. I got in a few fights, which did not last long, just to get over the fear of punching. Then I joined the swim team, grew a few inches, and nobody wanted to fight anymore. I used to lie in bed some nights and dream of killing. I still do. When I think of it, my heart grows lusty. I would like to beat someone to his death. Just to get the cowardice out of me.
On the evening of the 28th, my cousin Chris arrived. We were out back drinking beer in the warm night, and it seemed that we heard him from a very long way off: a high-pitched four-cylinder whine – overworked, threatening to evaporate – shattered the high countryside quiet, the silence over the treetops. It had rained for many days before I arrived, and the roads should have been impassable for a two-wheel-drive, but my mother explained that Chris simply buries the gas and flies down the gorge and up it.
It had been years. We shook hands – his hands are gigantic, almost cartoonish, like his father’s. He wore amber Ray-Bans. We put a few extra chairs in the living room, and we were all on top of each other. Chris and I were nearly the same person for a long time, when I first moved to Conroe. I was in the fifth grade and he was in the seventh, and we went to different schools, but we spent every evening and weekend together. He hated school and would never finish. He was an inventor, and took apart and rebuilt electronic devices – radios, microwaves, televisions – and drew schematic diagrams to understand them. If someone had figured out a way to interest him in school, he’d have become a professor. But now he installs car radios in a small Texas town, and talks without conviction of a plan to start his own business. I would like to say this doesn’t disappoint me, that one life is as admirable – or pointless – as the next, but sitting with him while he drank coffee and talked about his sick child and his plans to install a new septic tank I was reminded of the hopeless dreams and phantasmagoria of our childhoods – another old story, but how poignant they seem to us when we are made of them. He left after a third phone call from his impatient wife, and we heard him struggling up the gorge, and the high-pitched whine of the engine trailed away.
Later that night I took my computer out to work on edits to my story. David put on some music, something called Celtic Woman. He’d seen the ad on television and called the phone number. I tried to force it out of my consciousness. My mother picked up the magazine with my essay in it, scanning it again.
Do you mean everything you say in it? she asked.
I suppose, I said.
She frowned. She told me I was, as a child, always badly hurt by the insults of other children, that I was predisposed to long sulks and grudges. And it made her sad to see so many heads in the pillories of my unhappy onslaughts. It seemed too much like revenge to her. I felt it was the opposite of revenge – or that if revenge it was, the actors had enacted it upon themselves. My wrath was not directed at them but at myself for idolizing kings and princes of a corrupt world. I had, at last, and for good, cast myself into exile.
She remained suspicious. After all, I was rewriting, right in front of her, a story for publication in the US. I had explained to her, earlier, that I disagreed with the edits – I’d been asked to transform a story only I could write into a story anybody could’ve written. I was adding motivation, explanation, blatancy, all to confirm the editor’s presumptions.
But I am finished fighting. To commit an act of violence on art or abandon it: it is the same thing. I want to eliminate art from my concerns, so that I rid myself of small thoughts. I will live and create wholly. A man who does this – and perhaps I will never be this man – re-emerges from the fraudulence and carnage asymmetrical, ugly, and contradictory, and lives as a totality, himself. I love the disfigured, the monstrous. All the books I admire are ogres – flawed, imbalanced, savage. They enhance me. Everything else reduces me.
Hartsfield International, Atlanta (II)
My last six hours in America were spent at a bar in Terminal A, right next to the gate for San José, Costa Rica, as though I needed a reminder of the world’s cyclical nature. I waited hopefully for Jake, but he never showed. My flight was at eight, so I’d miss the New Year. I suspected, for no reason whatsoever, that there’d be a party on the plane. But in case there was none, I was having my party at the bar. Midnight in Dublin was seven o’clock in Atlanta. I convinced the bartender and a few of the people beside me – two were Irish, on their way to Costa Rica – to count down to seven o’clock. The bartender was beautifully flirtatious about everything. She told me she liked working in airport bars better than bars in the city. She loved to see the people go by. We had no champagne, so she poured soda water into cheap white wine, as I suggested.
The hours passed rapidly. People surfaced and sank. A girl my age from Canada sat beside me for a while. She read my palm. She was drunk, and spoke with her face very close to mine. A Costa Rican man gave me his card, and told me to come visit him. A businessman returning from Germany told a story that nearly put me to sleep. At seven, we, whatever congregation of travellers we were, counted down loudly from ten. Nobody had the same time, so we picked a moment out of thin air. The people in the gates around us, waiting, stopped what they were doing to observe.
6
The Sound of Water on a Body
1
It was the end of April, not suddenly, not gradually: a taxi, some night, and the air was full of raindrops – tiny magnifications of city light calcifying over Dame Street, and they did not even seem to be falling. I was rolling past the Central Bank. Along the footpath pedestrians hailed the emptiness, all drunk, some standing in the middle of the street. It was three a.m. I cracked the window and the mist spat in – either that or get sick. I moved in and out of consciousness. It was entirely true that I was the dream of somebody no longer alive.
The driver, who said nothing, went out of his way to stop at yellow lights. A f
ew times he braked so violently I had to catch my food from sliding off the seat. The radio played country, and this seemed to utterly dissociate the car from the night, as though we were not at all on the road but a maid on a pig flying over the moon – and just like that I was the dream of Bulgakov, whom I had been reading. The sensation was over before I knew it. We slowed at a roundabout, and the car was on the road again.
I am many dreams. The new year is one. The city is another. My office. A room in the Irish Writers’ Centre. Some days I am my gargling Vespa, floating past traffic down Capel Street. Other days I am the 128 bus – jammed on Amiens Street like a crooked headstone in an old, overcrowded cemetery. I am the days that elongate at their edges, heading for summer. I am the dream of a thousand wretched little houses, my cramped and hideous estate. I am the books I teach, and the stories of my students. I am not separate from these things, nor within them. I am not above or behind myself. I am what I sense.
I’ve been taking the bus more often. My scooter was stolen, wrecked, and recovered, and is in and out of the shop – the mechanics and I are arguing over the definition of a wobble. I live beside the terminus – a yellow pole stuck in some gravel by a cul-de-sac, surrounded by cranes, an empty, half-finished office installation, temporary walls, rubbish, and other construction – so I get my pick of seats. I bury myself in reading for an hour – I am gone – and when I see the Custom House I pack everything into my bag, turn on some music, and wait for my stop.
2
In the park beside St Patrick’s Cathedral, where junkies and the homeless assemble among bright manicured flowers and green lawns, and parents bring children to play beside the fountains, I met Clare and we drank a few bottles of beer out of a paper bag. I’d come straight from work – all week I’d done nothing but watch little tasks go by – and found her on a bench, legs crossed, reading a short story, looking like she was born for such distractions. It was Friday, and she wore a yellow coat and large, black, square sunglasses. I sat down and put my hand between her thighs. This was the first time we had met like this, but there wasn’t much point taking it slowly, since it wasn’t going to last long. She hoped to enjoy some of the cool sunshine, but by the time I arrived it was cloudy and windy. There was a ladder in her black, translucent stockings. Oh well, she said, opening one of the beers. She is blonde and small – five foot two or three, yet somehow terribly formidable – and though she is beyond the petty obsessions of her own happiness and unhappiness, she has very pretty green-blue eyes that turn downward, and this gives her a constant expression of suffering someone else’s loss. She has a PhD in economics and a crooked front tooth.