Further Joy

by John Brandon

  He waited another twenty minutes, then couldn’t help checking on the brains again. They were still drifting in the right direction, however slowly. A couple more inches, getting past the couch now. He didn’t want to hound them, didn’t want to drive himself crazy checking on them, but he felt nowhere near sleepy. He went over to the front door and disengaged the deadbolt. He opened the door about halfway, wondering if a gust of wind was going to blow it closed. He needed to prop it open. He went and grabbed the Russian novel off the floor near the TV and rested it against the foot of the door. The chilly air was washing in slowly from outside, smelling as clean as glass, the darkness out there enormous and fair.

  Mitchell awoke on the couch, staring at the ceiling, the silvery dawn everywhere in the high corners of the condo. He felt rushed, startled to have fallen asleep, and he stayed put until his pulse calmed. His throat was dry and his neck cramped, but he felt great. This was the first morning of whatever came next. He felt different, confident. He was better, he could tell. He got himself to a sitting position and then rose to his feet and wheeled around to face the front door. It was still open. The novel was sitting at a different angle than he’d left it, the door not even touching it, thrown all the way open against the outside wall. He walked through the doorway and out onto the steps and stood with a hand on his hip, looking up and down the road that wound through the complex. Nothing was amiss. The air was brisk. Cars were in driveways, newspapers lying here and there. The world could not have been in better order, could not have been more credible.

  Mitchell picked up the big novel and took it back inside with him. He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Bet’s letter. He would throw it away later. He wanted to savor that moment, maybe make a little ceremony out of it. He knew what he would do, after he opened the spare room door wide and opened the window in there so it could air out. He was going to get in his car and zip over to Thewlis and buy a sleeve of bagels and some cream cheese and a jug of orange juice. And he was going to pick up a newspaper, not one of these outpost rags but the paper from Albuquerque. He was going to sit on the front steps and rattle the pages and find out what was going on in the world. He would find out what fun was to be had over in the city this week—bands playing, special exhibits at museums. All the things he’d gotten used to doing with Bet but that would probably be more fun without her. He would make a shopping list and pick up a cheap grill. He had a steamy shower ahead of him. Maybe he’d jog. Maybe he’d take a nap in the afternoon and then attend a happy hour downtown somewhere.

  Mitchell strode down the hall toward the spare room, a man rightfully reclaiming a portion of his home. He would hang a couple pictures in this hallway, and he’d get mats for the bathroom and for in front of the kitchen sink. He filled his lungs easily and pushed the door all the way open and stood inside the moment, his body blocking the light from the hall. He was conscious of standing in the direct center of everything he knew, a divide of some sort.

  First the smell hit him, the woody stench of protein. The hum was in his ears, but the world was full of such sounds—water in pipes, electricity in wires, the tunneling of insects. Mitchell could keep himself from looking directly down for only so long and when he did he saw them. The moment assumed its shape. The brains were without luster and stationary and very much alive, like always. Mitchell heard himself snort. He felt his throat tighten. He squeezed the doorknob until his forearm began to quiver and pain shot through his wrist. It felt like his soul was lost out at the bottom of a canyon somewhere, like anything could be happening to it. He knew by now he could expect no explanation. It wasn’t simple blood that was coursing through his veins, and he thought he might not be able to stop himself from putting on his work boots and stomping the brains into a fucking puddle. He stood stiff, not moving a muscle, his fingernails cutting into his palms.

  Mitchell staggered to the kitchen. He ripped open Bet’s letter and yanked out what was inside. There were two items, neither, in fact, a letter. One was a photograph and one was an invoice Bet had printed up that showed Mitchell owed her half the first month’s rent and security deposit she’d paid on the condo. Mitchell laughed aloud. It wasn’t from a lawyer, wasn’t anything official. She knew he’d never pay her; she wanted to make him feel small, wanted to have the last word. The photograph was a picture Bet had taken of Mitchell way back when they’d first met, back in Chattanooga that first weekend. Mitchell was hanging off the balcony of a downtown bistro, trying to pluck a blossom off a pear tree. The entire time they’d been together, Bet had used it for a bookmark. His hair was thick in the picture. His back was straight. He was trying his best to win an enchanting woman but he knew it was okay if he didn’t. He had the look, in the photo, of a person in possession of a reserve of charm, a person who believed that if he was patient and alert he would get everything he needed.

  Mitchell was called into another temp agency and an old lady who should’ve been retired told him there might be a position for him at a plant that processed raw paper into lunch bags. She couldn’t guarantee anything. The old lady had to run his background check and he had to sign some forms.

  “Where are you from originally?” she asked him.

  “Tennessee,” he said.

  “Why don’t you have an accent? I can tell people by their accents.”

  “Do I not have one?”

  She shook her head. “What part of Tennessee exactly?”

  “Chattanooga.”

  “You definitely ought to have an accent.”

  “I used to,” Mitchell said. “I remember it. When I first moved away everybody said I had a drawl.”

  The lady looked at him warily. “That’s bad news, losing your accent. That’s an important part of a person.”

  Mitchell had been up most of the previous night. Keeping his wits about him and clinging to his generous spirit had not been the correct program, he’d decided—that much had been proven. Instead, under cover of darkness, stomach growling and eyes red, he’d carried six of the brains, stacked three on top of three in a plastic wash basin, off the rear of the complex’s property, past the spot where he’d burned Tom Spelher’s papers, and out to a modest, ragged ravine with a dusty arroyo at the bottom of it. He’d tossed the brains one by one into the dark drop, and heard the dismal, moist-sounding thud each made when it found the rocks. Then he’d thrown down the basin too.

  “But I wouldn’t trade the traveling I’ve done,” Mitchell told the lady. His voice sounded poor and forceless, so he cleared his throat. “There’s a cost, but you also learn about yourself. I wouldn’t trade all the one-of-a-kind experiences for anything. I can’t imagine what I’d… where I’d be without them.”

  The lady nodded. She’d begun flicking through a sheaf of forms.

  One brain Mitchell had kept inside. It was still in the spare room, for now. He could participate in this tribulation, could have a say. He could put the thing in the freezer or cook it in a pot. He could lob it down into the ravine with its compatriots, to be feasted on by buzzards. He could just leave it be, his prisoner. The brain had to wait now, like he’d had to wait.

  The light filling the windows of the temp agency was harsh. It glinted off a mug full of metallic pens on the old lady’s desk. Mitchell still hadn’t eaten. He felt mostly calm. He tried to sit up straight in his chair, tried to look eager and capable. He smiled at the lady, wondering what she thought of him, wondering what her hopes were for the days to come.

  SKYBOUND

  I

  SAN JOAQUIN

  He had sped westward in an access of instinct, fleeing to the far edge of the country and then backtracking a hundred miles. He was forty-five and had enough money to last him a few decades if he lived frugally. He could do that. He could live frugally. He was leaving a few friends behind, but he had often dreaded talking to them as their lives grew less manageable and more joyous. There was a sandwich place he’d miss on weekdays. A radio station he missed in the evenings that played a
ll types of music, punk rock and Brahms. And an uncle he would begin missing at some point. He did not own a gun, was no more a criminal than most in his profession. It was a profession of using advantage, which he’d done to the last. He felt no rush of pride at beating the underworld bureaucracy and did not think of himself as cool. He was cool in that he didn’t need other people the way most did, but he was uncool in that he felt able to put himself on a categorized budget and adhere to it for years to come. He chose for himself a dusty town which was a great shopping mall surrounded by farms.

  After a week he attended a prayer group founded by a couple who’d won the lottery and then blown all the money. The prayer meetings were held in a building the couple had been unable to sell off, a farmhouse on a busy street. They’d adorned the inside of the place with paired photographs—pictures of places in different parts of the world that looked exactly alike. A sprawling mini-storage facility in front of a retention pond, low chain-link fencing snaking everywhere: India and Florida.

  He attended a Catholic church for a time, returning to his heritage, and as before it didn’t feel that anything was taking place at the masses that wanted his presence. He tried a Buddhist temple, and nearly tried a synagogue.

  He lived across the street from an ignored tourist attraction, an estate once owned by a poet/statesman/farmer. He got the idea that this man was known more for the company he’d kept than for his deeds, that this man was adept at leisure in a way the rich no longer were.

  He missed weather, which was nothing now but a breeze and a brush of clouds. There was no guarantee of winter. He had a fireplace and split wood and many copies of the local newspaper, and for all he knew they might just sit there and sit there.

  He was wealthy, in the important way. He drove a seven-year-old Honda and subsisted on second-rate sandwiches, but he never again had to work. He had slipped from the machine, he who had oiled and exercised its sharp little parts since before he could drive a car. He who had of course come to depend on the machine.

  The sky was splendid out here but it went on and on dumbly. He had succumbed to prayer as the handiest crutch. This is what he’d wanted—this escape. He still wanted it, but in the hollowing way you wanted something once you had it.

  The members of the prayer group sat with exemplary posture around a big black table that seemed a few inches too high, and this made them seem like businesspeople at a meeting, like people from his old life, except that they were hammering out spiritual details instead of contract points. There were Bibles lying about in many translations. He could not discuss his situation, so when it was his turn to address the higher power he prayed in a general way for everyone he used to know, changing their names. He prayed for the men he’d ripped off, though they didn’t need it.

  II

  THE MIGRATION

  Men had taken back up the time-honored practice of stepping out for smokes and never returning home, and it seemed all these men were hiding in Oklahoma. Deadbeats from the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont, even the bustling sarcastic northeastern cities, either resting here or losing heart for the road. And some from the West, unraveling the sorry destinies they’d manifested, punishing themselves, wanting a place whose recommendation was its very lack of recommenders. These men had wanton meanness to vent and many were out of cash. They had, in the only matter that matters, failed. The latest trouble was someone had stolen an ancient piano from Second Baptist—or not just someone, the thieved item weighing as much as a prize steer. The empty space in the congregation hall where the instrument used to sit now looked like a corner of some ghost town saloon, and the Sheriff couldn’t push it to the side of his mind. He couldn’t remember names lately, couldn’t pick up melodies. The removal of the piano was a brazen and planned act, bordering on a pointed affront to his office. Before all the boarding houses had filled the Sheriff had always had a suspect mated to any crime, and then he could attempt to prove the suspect innocent and often he was successful and often happily so. He didn’t know any of these new drifters from the Sultan of Brunei. He didn’t know what they would or wouldn’t conceive of in the name of fun, didn’t know what profit-seeking enterprise they could or couldn’t carry out.

  The Sheriff had a pair of deputies, junior and senior, though the titles didn’t indicate differing prowess or promotion due to merit. Gil had been in the job a year longer was all. Gil’s daily talent was for brewing perfect coffee and Tommy was a former track star. They wrote tickets, maintained order weekend nights. Trivia junkies, the both of them. The Sheriff gave them a hard time, but they were decent deputies, loyal and even-handed. They could both grapple tolerably well. The Sheriff and his crew hadn’t solved a consequential case in months, so at the end of June, to shake his outfit by the collar, he snatched the jar of cash off the shelf above the coffee pot and told them there’d be no dinner outing this month. This was the money that built up from swearing, from the meager wagers the deputies were always making, from the floors of their cruisers. The money wasn’t going to a restaurant this month, the Sheriff told his men, but to old Teaford, the mystic who lived up in the driest corner of the county. Gil managed to betray no reaction at all and Tommy smirked. “We been running up the middle long enough,” the Sheriff said. “It’s time for a flea-flicker.” The Sheriff was pulling a stunt, but in truth he had always believed in curses and ghosts and the like. He believed certain ranges lost, certain families luckless, certain women septic of soul from birth. They would ask Teaford about the piano. That was the play the Sheriff was calling.

  Teaford had an austere stucco ranch house pinned down to the worst corner of the worst rangeland in the area. On one side of his house there was a struggling watermelon patch and on the other a lone oak tree. He emerged before they’d made it to the front door and led them around to a square of concrete at the back of the house that served as a patio. Teaford had a long braid resting on his chest and he clung to it with two hands like someone clinging to a rope. He was wiry of limb, of course, and his fingernails were longer than they ought to be. The Sheriff gave the pertinent information about the case and handed him the money that had been in the jar, upward of sixty dollars, and then Teaford donned a headband and slipped a vest and some gloves out of an ornately decorated leather sack. He provided paper and pencils and asked the Sheriff and his deputies to write down their full names and whether they were born during the day or the darkness and also the birthplace of their mothers. Teaford explained that his desperate-looking land was rich in its way—it contained a Breach, and this Breach provided the vision and he himself was a mere vessel. The Sheriff and his men already knew this part. There was a deep chasm out on the property somewhere and Teaford was going to lower himself into it—over fifty feet, he told them.

  They walked over a few shallow yellow hills and along a dragged-down fence, and suddenly there it was: a deep quiet flue straight down into the prairie. It was blue inside and then black. It didn’t look like the work of nature nor of man. Teaford had rigged a simple harness inside, something like people used for rock climbing, and he strapped himself into it and descended with little ceremony out of sight. He had uncapped the pipe he used for talking to people up on the surface and the Sheriff and his guys went and stood around it.

  “What do you reckon he had us write that stuff down for?” Tommy said. He was leaning away from the pipe, whispering.

  The truth was, the Sheriff hadn’t appreciated that part, hadn’t liked turning over personal details, but this excursion was his idea so he’d gone ahead and done what was asked. He’d put down correct information, and that now seemed an odd choice. “I expect we made his holiday card list,” he whispered.

  A wind kicked up and whistled in the pipe. The Sheriff tested the ground with his boot and it wasn’t as hard as he’d expected. The sky was vacant and still. After a few minutes they heard noise coming from the pipe, Teaford jostling around in his harness. Then they heard him hemming and hawing, mulling something over, and then it was quiet a
gain. Gil got out his cigarettes and the Sheriff shook his head, motioning for the deputy to put them away. But the Sheriff was feeling impatient himself. He felt a pang of regret about giving Teaford the dinner money. He had hoped to make a point, but the point already seemed labored, standing as they were in the middle of a remote field waiting for clues from a crazy person down in a well.

  “Do you know who used to play it? The piano player at the church—was it a man or woman, young or old, or what?” Teaford’s voice, resonating up through the metal pipe, was thinner and less grave than it had been up above ground, like he’d fallen out of character.

  The Sheriff lowered his head toward the pipe and said usually it was the Parmalee gal. She was early twenties, a student at the junior college.

  There was another silence, and the Sheriff wasn’t sure whether he was rooting for or against Teaford.