Wigford Rememberies

by Kyp Harness

  “Ah!” says Buzz dismissively, swatting Raymond’s story away with his hand. “That’s when ya know you’ve had a good night of it, if you don’t know how you got home!”

  At this point the room erupts in laughter, and Jack shouts out, “That’s right, Buzz, that’s right!”

  “Sure,” Buzz says. “I’ve had plenty a nights where I wasn’t sure how I got home, but more ’n that, I couldn’t remember where I’d been to get home from in the first place! Now that’s what’s called havin’ a good time—and you can’t get all bent outta shape just ’cause you can’t remember exactly the way you got back, Ray.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess you’re right, there, Buzz,” Raymond says meditatively, looking down gravely at the floor.

  “Shit,” Buzz says, “my method is first thing you wake up, get outta bed and go to the window and make sure your vehicle’s still in the driveway—not halfway down the road in the ditch somewhere,” he says, leaning towards Raymond and whispering in a gesture of exaggerated confidentiality, “like it’s been the case different times for me.”

  “Right, Buzz, right,” agrees Raymond, puffing at his cigarette.

  “Of course, the next step after that,” Buzz offers, “is to check the car for any dents or blood stains.” He winks, at which point Raymond and the rest of the men chortle, Elmer weighing in with his rumbling laughter.

  “How’s that girlfriend of yours doin’, anyhow, Ray?” George inquires

  “Oh, just the same, George, just the same,” Raymond replies and throws the lower half of his body into a spasmodic approximation of orgasm that sends the rest of the men into hysterics. “Yep, she’s a-puttin’ her out and I’m a-takin’ her in!” he cries above the laughter. “The truth is,” Raymond offers, “she’s just like the rest of ’em—they’re either buildin’ ya up or they’re tearin’ ya down.”

  “Ain’t that the truth!” Daddy Jack affirms.

  “They only got two settings on these women,” Raymond asserts, draining down the last of his beer and lighting another cigarette. “They’re either bein’ bitchy or bossy—and the fuckin’ ya get ain’t worth the fuckin’ ya get!”

  The men voice their approval of this latest witticism and Raymond suddenly blinks his eyes, an expression of disbelieving surprise coming over his features.

  “Well—I’ll be god-damned!” he exclaims. “I don’t believe it!” and Webb at the other end of the room feels a sinking feeling drift down into the lower reaches of his stomach as Raymond’s eyes, tiny and bleary yet laboriously focusing, rest definitively upon Webb standing nervously along the counter at the far end of the kitchen.

  “I’ll be god-DAMNED!” Raymond pronounces, his mouth curling up into an amused, increasingly satisfied grin. “If it ain’t my old pal Webb! Hey! Webb!” he calls with false bonhomie, his arm reaching out to Webb. “My old buddy! How’s it hangin’, pal?” He strides across the room and extends his hand to Webb.

  “How are you, Raymond?” Webb says, smiling in an attempt at affability, his heart beginning to beat violently in his chest.

  “Webb here’s my ol’ pal!” Raymond declares to the room at large. “My good buddy!” he calls out, reaching up to throw one of his muscled arms around Webb’s shoulder.

  “He’s a phot-awww-grapher!” Harley chimes in.

  “That’s right! He’s a goddamned good one, too, ain’t ya, Webb?” Raymond says, looking up and studying Webb’s flinching face with concentration. For a moment, Raymond simply stands peering up at Webb silently.

  “But what’s most important is that Webb here, is a goddamned good guy,” pronounces Raymond. Webb looks down upon the smaller man, sees Raymond’s profile from his higher perspective, and feels dread flowering out from the pit of his abdomen as Raymond’s restless, aggressive geniality comes stabbing out of his body in increasingly sharp gestures and words.

  “And what I wanna know,” Raymond demands of the men, “what I wanna know is why this good pal of mine—and this goddamned good guy—doesn’t have a drink in his hand like he deserves!”

  “Well, shit, Ray,” George explains. “He had a beer last time I looked.”

  “That’s right, George,” Webb assures him, lifting his beer from the counter and holding it up. “It’s right here.” Webb smiles.

  “Ah! Bullshit!” Raymond exclaims angrily, waving his hand and shaking his head. “Bullshit! Is that all you got, George? Is that all you got to give to Webb who’s come all the way down from the big city to see us?”

  “Well,” George comments laconically, “there’s some liquor over there on the counter. I suspect if you think he needs a better drink, you’re free to mix ’im up one yourself, if you want.” George grunts, raising his beer to his lips.

  “Damn right I’m gonna fix somethin’ special up for Webb,” Raymond vows, striding purposefully over to the bottle on the counter, twisting off the cap, pulling out a glass, his cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “Hey Ray,” Jack calls out. “How’s it workin’ out over at the foundry? Heard you got on steady over there.”

  “Ah it’s fine, it’s a fuckin’ job,” Raymond notes, squinting his eye from the smoke of his cigarette. “What the hell, the boss is a prick, the pay’s shitty. I’m workin’ my balls off to make someone else rich—like I said, it’s a job.”

  “That’s it, that’s it,” says Buzz, now slurring a bit, his eyes narrowing as the night wears on. “Can’t say no more ’n that, eh? It’s a job. Same as me—I get up, go to work, come home, watch TV, sleep, same fuckin’ thing day after day. I’m just like a machine, a robot. Turn over the money to the wife every Friday and what do I get? A carton of cigarettes and a case of beer a week,” he observes sombrely as he studies the end of his cigarette before he brings it to his lips and takes a long drag.

  “Yep, that’s the drill,” says Raymond, putting the finishing touches to Webb’s drink. “But one thing for sure—we got a fine drink for our ol’ pal Webb, here,” he proclaims, holding up the glass and displaying it for all to see.

  “Here ya go, Webb, drink up,” he says, handing the glass to Webb, who takes it uneasily. “Have a good drink, pal, you deserve it,” Raymond insists, looking up at Webb. “Let me see ya take a good long haul on that drink I made special for ya.”

  Webb sips at the drink, feeling the hotness of its potency scald his throat, sending shooting sparks through his chest.

  “That’s no gulp!” Raymond says angrily. “What’s the matter, don’t ya appreciate the effort I took in makin’ ya a special drink? Take a big gulp!” he orders forcefully. He remains staring up at Webb, his brow furrowed with severe disapproval. He brings his beer to his lips and sucks its last few drops with impatient fury.

  “C’mon! Let me see ya haul off and take a big gulp of it!” Raymond sneers, bringing his cigarette to his lips but just holding it there without taking a drag, studying Webb with rapt attention.

  With all the men in the room now absorbed in his plight, Webb brings the glass to his mouth and drains as much as he is able, his throat nearly gagging with the awful bitterness of the liquor, his mind invaded by an unpleasant, encompassing feverish fog. Tears start in his eyes as he brings his head forward and surveys the room through a sudden blur—Buzz, Harley, Jack, George, Russ, Ol’ Harrison and Elmer all looking at him with detached, almost scientific interest, bereft of pity or concern—and Raymond, nearest, grins malevolently.

  “Might as well finish ’er up now, Webb, why not?” he says, dragging on his cigarette now burning down to its filter, and Webb sips at the remaining liquid in the glass. “Or don’t ya like me, Webb? We’re good pals, eh? Don’t ya think?” Raymond remarks. Webb merely stares blankly at him for a moment, frozen. “Don’t ya like me, Webb? Ain’t I a good pal of yours?” Raymond asks angrily, almost hissing the words through his teeth. Webb tilts his head back, draining the remainder of the alcohol.

 
Raymond looks grimly over the room as a strange silence settles upon it. He pulls his cigarette pack from the back pocket of his jeans and lights one, exhaling the smoke thoughtfully as he shakes the match out.

  “Nope—I don’t think Webb likes me too much,” he announces to the room. “Nope—I don’t think ol’ Webb likes me too much at all,” he says almost sorrowfully, yet deeply angry that this should be the case.

  “Nope,” he shakes his head, frowning with consternation. “I don’t think… that Webb… is any kind… of a friend… of mine.” He looks down in stern contemplation of this fact, then remarks, “Fuck—I need a beer.” He strides to the fridge, helps himself to a beer, then storms from the room.

  After a moment, George turns to Russ and asks, “How’s that new car of yours workin’ out, Russ? Got ’er broken in yet?”

  “Yep, we been workin’ ’er pretty good, no complaints yet,” Russ replies, his fingers interlocked over his sizable belly.

  “And did you get the four-door or the two-door on that?” George asks.

  “Well, we got the four-door,” Russ explains, gesturing, painting the picture of the car in the air with his hands. “We thought of goin’ with the two-door, but what with gettin’ in and out, and havin’ to go pick up Ernestine’s mother, who as you know is gettin’ old and of course could always sit in the front seat if need be when we take her to and from church each Sunday, but anyway, I think she’d be just as happy, or happier, if she sat in the back seat, so why not get the four-door and make it easier for her to get in and out of the back seat?”

  “Well hell, Russ,” Buzz smiles, winking mischievously over at Elmer. “You get a new car every year anyway, don’t ya?”

  Russ bursts into good-natured laughter. “Nope! That ain’t me you’re thinkin’ about, Buzz!” he hoots. “That ain’t my league!”

  “Well you then, George, you buy a new car pretty much every year then, don’t ya?” Buzz asks as Elmer chuckles gently.

  “Oh no, I don’t buy ’em every year, no,” George coughs, looking away.

  “Well, seems to me you just got a new one, and it’s no more ’n a year that I bought your ol’ car off you when you were gettin’ a new one,” Buzz insists argumentatively.

  “Well shit anyway,” he says wryly, shrugging. “If I had your kinda money, I’d sure be gettin’ myself a new car every year too.”

  “Oh bullshit,” George remarks, reddening somewhat as he takes a long swig of his beer.

  “No! No bullshit,” Buzz says emphatically, shaking his head from side to side. “No bullshit! I’d do the same goddamned thing!” he insists. “But I don’t think,” he says, looking slyly sideways at Elmer, “I’d be sellin’ my old car before I fixed the shocks on ’er!”

  George looks quickly, sharply at Buzz. “You’re gonna bring that up again?”

  Buzz drinks from his beer and smacks his lips, looking about the room. “Nope!” he says. “I ain’t bringin’ it up—I’m just sayin’, though, I coulda had the same make of car, the same year, from a place on Indian Road in town here, for a lot lower price than what I paid you, without the extra money I had to spend gettin’ the shocks replaced.”

  “Well then, you’d have been probably better off goin’ with that deal then, wouldn’t ya?” George declares angrily, his eyes blazing as he snaps at Buzz. “No one was stoppin’ ya from buyin’ the one here in town, were they?”

  Buzz raises his palms to George, as if fending him off.

  “Hey! Hey! George relax! Shit!” he says, apparently astonished by George’s vehemence. “Hey! It’s no problem! No problem!” he says, his eyes glinting up at George from where he sits in his chair. “You don’t have to get so goddamned ugly all’s I’m sayin’.”

  “I know what you’re sayin’!” George exclaims furiously, his face reddening, drops of saliva spraying from his lips as he speaks, his body tensing as he stands before Buzz. “And if you think I’m gonna…”

  “Well—are we ready to go home now?” a female voice inquires, and at that moment everyone turns to see Mona Hendricks standing in the kitchen doorway, all alike taken by surprise as no one had been aware of her presence.

  None more so than Webb, who suddenly finds himself falling against the wall he stands by for no apparent reason, and whose attention until that moment had been focused on the sight of the tiny drops of saliva spraying from George’s lips as he shouted angrily at Buzz. In Webb’s mind these drops of saliva had come to represent an unnameable yet infinitely overpowering and infinitely horrifying aspect of existence; the drops of saliva were but minute manifestations of an awful and awesome ugliness, which one is always in some manner conscious of on a day-to-day basis as a sinister force blighting all that could be good or uplifting in life, yet which one is able to bear on that level until the moment when one is forced to confront it, to contemplate it in all its complexities and implications, whereupon it immobilizes and repulses one to the core of one’s being, literally sapping one’s will to live.

  A cold sweat breaks out on Webb’s forehead as he stares helplessly about the room: as he sees Elmer’s tired, wan face now more serious as he observes the byplay between George and Buzz; as he sees the wrinkled, morose expression of Ol’ Harrison; as he sees the elderly Uncle Zeb now hunched over, his frail, veined, sickly white head—like an infant’s—almost bobbing down to his lap; as he sees Buzz with his hands upraised in his all’s I’m sayin’! gesture, his squinting, arrogant eyes, his features expressing all the contours of obsequious hostility; as he sees Daddy Jack gazing on with an amused grin frozen on his face; and as he sees, with some surprise and distress, Harley staring directly up at him, snickering with scornful glee, his lips twitching with sardonic mirth as he observes Webb once again collapse against the wall.

  The pitiless contempt in Harley’s eyes becomes somehow joined with the drops of saliva from George’s lips, with the memory of the sound of Raymond’s sneering, self-pitying voice, and Webb is overtaken by an instantaneous and awful sense of necessity as he suddenly rushes forward and jogs around the kitchen table as the whole house around him tilts like a sinking ship. He brushes past Mona in the doorway, stumbles through the screen door into the warm, still summer night, sprints into the utter blackness and with a painful yet liberating sense of relief, bends over almost double and delivers the contents of his stomach into the sightless void of the backyard night.

  He stands coughing and gasping, strands of his emission still clinging to his beard as he turns, and through watery eyes looks back at the house, sees dimly through the window into the golden light of the living room, where Raymond and Nia sit in apparent deep conversation.

  The window becomes another light that spirals around, dizzying him. As he looks up, the stars and the moon, too, drift and shift about the sky as he stumbles on the uneven earth, his stomach lurching, collecting itself for another purging. His ears, though muffled and encased by their ringing, suddenly discern a tinkling, trickling sound nearby, and he makes the concerted effort to turn and see a man standing with his back to him, urinating against the tire of a truck. The man zippers up, turns and strides towards Webb, heading back to the house.

  “Hey pal,” Buzz says, laying his hand on Webb’s shoulder. “You all right, partner?” he asks. Webb, utilizing all his power to remain upright, nods mutely. “Take it easy, eh, partner?” Buzz advises, patting his back as he strides towards the house, adding, “Keep smilin’, eh?” as Webb convulses in the first throes of his next upheaval.

  “Well, I guess we’d best be gettin’ home too,” Maxine is saying as Buzz re-enters the kitchen.

  Elmer rises, muttering, “Yep, I suspect so.”

  “Gotta do the chores in the mornin’, eh, Elmer?” Buzz asks.

  “Nope, no chores to do anymore, Buzz,” Elmer pronounces as Maxine puts a light jacket over his shoulders and Mona emerges from Janey’s room with the two boys who’d been slee
ping with Janey in her bed, the two kids still sleeping yet shuffling along, half-held up by Mona’s hands.

  “You want to take one of them?” Mona asks her husband, and Buzz lifts the younger boy up over his shoulder like a sack of wheat.

  “Well so long, happy anniversary,” they say to George and Martha. “See ya later! Take it easy!” and the people begin emerging into the night.

  Elmer and Maxine walk to their car, Maxine heading to the driver’s side.

  “You ain’t drivin’ anymore, Elmer?” Buzz calls out across the yard.

  “Doctor don’t want ’im drivin’ anymore at night,” Maxine says as she gets into the car, “since he lost the sight in his one eye from the stroke.”

  “Oh, that right, eh?” Buzz remarks as he puts his son into his back seat and gets into his car. “Well, night then.”

  “Night,” says Maxine in a sing-song voice. “See ya later!”

  “See ya later,” says Mona, starting the car, and Buzz slams the door on his side. The dogs come tearing through the night to bark at the cars as they start up the laneway following the silvery-gold pathway of their headlights’ gaze, each individual stone of gravel illuminated and passing swiftly out of sight as all around the large, black-purple night stretches out to infinity, not even a few pinpricks of light on the horizon, the dogs passionately barking the cars all the way up the laneway, yet giving up their pursuit a surprisingly short distance away from the property—their barks getting fainter as they reluctantly stop and simply stand barking on either side of the road, bidding their strange farewell as they fade shrinking into night, swallowed by the darkness.

  In the darkness of his car, Buzz lights a cigarette, exhaling disgustedly and shaking his head. “That damn George,” he remarks after a moment. “He knows just as goddamn well as I do that those shocks…”