As the row of cars creeps forward, I drift back to one of the daydreams I’ve been having lately, the farewell one where I douse myself with gasoline, then hand Jill the gold-plated lighter the guys at work gave me when the company forced me into early retirement. “Fire when ready,” I say, standing at attention, flipping her a little salute. Fantasizing myself as a brave orange fireball is damn near the only thing that makes me hard anymore; but today, for some reason, I crank it up a notch, and the flames in my mind leap across to Jill’s hair, then onto the house, and finally to Jerry. Whoosh! In less time than it takes Larry Fedder to burn a burger, the only thing left of the fucked-up family that lived at 124 Belmont is ashes.
Not that I really would, but I can’t help feeling the way I feel, even with the new combo Doc Webb prescribed the other day. I even told him about the commercial, but he dismissed it as postretirement depression. “Just quit watching it,” he said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
He was standing by the window in his office, staring at the car dealership across the street. “It’s like that anthrax scare,” he muttered to himself.
“Well, what about the Zippo?” I said. I hauled it out of my pocket and held it up, a final attempt to convince him that I’m a troubled man.
He glanced over his glasses at the shiny lighter, then checked his watch. “Bernard, you shouldn’t smoke,” he said. Then he handed me a little grab bag of samples and showed me out the door.
I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but I do know my problem has nothing to do with powdered germs or free pills. The poor fuck didn’t know what to do, so he was just trying to fluff it up and make the whole ordeal seem like it was happening to somebody else. Everything is too complicated when you’re alive, even for the experts.
. . . . .
I PULL UP TO THE SPEAKER AND GO HOG WILD WHILE GRABBING for the sun-bleached antacids I keep on the dash. I order enough junk to tear me up for the rest of the afternoon. The Chevy is missing a little, and my plan is to take it out on the highway and blow the carbon out of it after we put Jerry to bed this evening. “There is a difference,” Jill says out of the blue. Though I know better, I ask her what the hell she’s talking about. “Between big and fat,” she says.
“Big and fat,” I repeat slowly, waiting for the goddamn punch line to smack me upside the head.
“Yeah,” she says, “I mean, the way I see it, big is like that Arnold guy in the movies, but fat is like your aunt Gloria. So I’ve always wondered why they call you Big Bernie and not Fat Bernie.”
I tear off three of the crumbly Rolaids and chomp them while staring at the little amplified speaker protruding between the giant photos of the Chocolate Rock and the Dilly Bars. Even if I ate everything on the menu, I’d still be hungry. White foam begins to bubble from my mouth. I look like the rabid dog in the horror movie that Jerry made us play over and over last winter until Jill finally rigged it to look like it broke in the VCR. “Maybe you better sleep in the other room tonight,” Jill says, scooting over next to the door.
A station wagon loaded with kids in bathing suits is ahead of us in the line. One little guy in the back keeps messing with us, making gestures with his tongue that kids his age shouldn’t know anything about. “Maybe we oughta take him home with us,” I joke, making a feeble attempt to turn the lousy day around. I’m kicking myself in the ass now because I bitched so much about the mother-in-law’s half-dead chicken. “Many kids as that woman’s got, she wouldn’t even miss him.”
“I think he’s eating his own shit,” Jill says, and then sticks her big sunglasses on so nobody can see her.
“Oh, Christ, Jill,” I say, “what makes you say stuff like that? The kid’s just playing around.” I make a goofy face at the boy just as he turns around to grab his ice-cream cone. I think back to when Jerry was that age. It makes me feel like shit, thinking it, but there are days when I’d give anything just to be able to prop him out on the curb like a broken appliance for the junk man to haul away. And almost like he can read my mind, Jerry starts making that hacking sound way down in his throat that he’s been making all summer. It’s the type of noise that makes you grit your teeth.
“Not the kid, you idiot,” she says. “Jerry.”
Whenever I figure it can’t get any worse, it always gets worse. Because I try to follow the rule that we don’t talk about Jerry in his presence, I decide not to say anything. Besides, I can’t stand the thought of another argument. We’ve been at it for months. Her latest bitch has been over this old car I’m driving, a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet with big fins that I traded my pickup for so I’d have something to drive to the cruise-ins they put on around here in the fast-food parking lots. It’s just an excuse to get out of the house, but Jill’s always ragging me, pretending to be jealous of the skanky whores who hang out in the custom vans.
As I pull up to the window, she starts in again about the car shows. “There’s no reason you can’t take Jerry with you,” she says.
I get so sick of explaining it. “Hell,” I stutter, “what good’s that gonna do you? I mean, even if I was screwing around, Jerry wouldn’t know the difference between a piece of ass and your mom’s false teeth.” I immediately hate myself for saying it, for breaking the rule, for even reacting to the crazy bitch at all. Still, there’s no way I’m hauling Jerry to a car show, not even in handcuffs.
I pull the car up and there’s the girl that works the window, the one with the twisted chains of baby blond hair and the perfectly calibrated gap between her white teeth. She’s like that song about the angel that gives head, and I almost blurt out, Look, Jill, an angel at the Dairy Queen, but I catch myself. This girl can have any man who buys a milk shake. She’s the type of girl that ends up in one of those damn commercials, tormenting the shit out of every old geezer with cable.
The girl grabs my money in a huff before I can even ask her to sack up the Blizzards. This afternoon she’s chewing purple gum, and the way she blows bubbles reminds me of Jill back when we were young and horny, before we lost the map that takes you to places like that. “Hey,” I say, turning to Jill, “that girl is the spittin’ image of you back when you carhopped at the Sumburger. Remember that?” But it’s one of those memories that makes the present only that much more unbearable, and Jill just shakes her head, sinks lower into the seat.
While we wait for the order, I listen to my son try to swallow his tongue and go over the whole fucking mess for the thousandth time. Two years ago, on the night before Jerry was supposed to board the bus for boot camp, he went to a party out in the sticks and never came home. Three days later someone threw him out of a car in front of a hospital in Portsmouth, fifty miles away. We were sitting in the dayroom of the wing where Jerry was transferred after he came out of the coma. The young doctor on duty walked in and stuck a video in the TV. It was that old commercial with an egg frying in a skillet while a voice-over explained that this was your brain on drugs or whatever. I’d seen it a hundred times. They used to play it on the tube back when Jerry was a kid as a warning to stay off the shit. I couldn’t believe they still used it. “What about the marines?” I asked. “Shit, he’s already AWOL, and he don’t even have his uniform yet.”
The doctor was crouched down trying to shine a light into Jerry’s eyes. He finally shook his head and turned the flashlight off. On the TV, the egg began to pop and sputter in the little pan. The doctor stood up and handed me a card from his coat pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “Tell them to call me if they have any questions, but I’m pretty sure they won’t want him now.” Then he turned and hurried away.
“Look, they’ve got the same microwave we’ve got,” Jill said that day at the hospital, her voice skipping like one of her old Wayne Newton records. She was trying to pick pork and beans out of Jerry’s hair while he made another attempt to walk through the wall. We’d already planned our golden years—a new camper on Rocky Fork Lake, a hot tub in Jerry’s old bedroom. Then three weeks later, poor little Delbe
rt Anderson came to work blowing off about his perfect son, the one that built the telescope for the senior citizens, and I broke his jaw with my lunch bucket. The company had me up front signing my papers before the blood was even dry on the break-room floor.
The blonde hands me the Coneys, the fries, the melting Blizzards, but she doesn’t see me no matter how big and stupid I smile. While I’m still checking the sacks, a jacked-up Camaro full of boys pulls up behind us. They all look like the same model: matching earrings, shaved heads, little goatees sprouted around their mouths like hair around a poodle’s ass. They begin honking the horn, and the blonde tells me to move on, that I’m holding up the line. “Sorry,” I say, and pull forward without any ketchup.
In the rearview, I see one of the boys say something that makes the girl laugh; then I watch in disbelief as she raises her shirt to show her tits. “Holy shit,” I say, stopping the car. “Jerry, damn boy, turn around and check that out.” For a moment, the girl’s breasts are framed in the window like some advertisement for a new double-scoop sundae. They glow in the blazing sunlight, and I think of soft, precious metal. But even though they’re beautiful, it’s really her smile that takes my breath away. I’d give anything just to feel the way she feels right now. It’s the kind of feeling that people never realize they’ve had until years later, when it’s no longer possible to feel it. “Jerry,” I say again, turning around to look at him; but all he does is curl up his lips and make that damn duck sound again.
“Jesus Christ, Bernie, what are you doing?” Jill says.
I don’t answer. The boys in the Camaro have noticed me staring at the girl, and one of them starts imitating Jerry, squishing his face up and hanging his head on his chest. The girl is still laughing, but she’s pulling her top back down. And though I know that two years ago Jerry would have been right there with them, making fun of the retard, I set the emergency brake and haul my fat ass out of the car. I stand there for a second, pulling my shirt down over my white belly, wondering what I’m supposed to do now; but just before I lose my nerve, one of the boys calls out “Porky,” then another squeals, “Oink, oink.” Taking a deep breath, I walk back to their car and start kicking the shit out of the side panel. Believe me, I’m just a big tub of lard, but when the driver jumps out, a tall boy with big teeth and barbed wire tattooed around his skinny arms, I knock him down with one punch. I’ve never hit anyone that hard in my life, not even Delbert Anderson.
Suddenly, the world lights up, as if someone peeled the skin off my eyeballs. I look up at the sky, startled by the giant bloom of blue. But fuck, it’s only my sunglasses. I’m so pumped that it takes me a second to realize they’ve fallen off my face, and when I stoop over to pick them up, the boy tries to bite me. I reach down and grab the front of his shirt. My sweat splatters his shiny head like greasy rain. I pull him up off the pavement and smack him again, busting his lip open. By this time, the others are out of the car yelling shit, but keeping their distance. I realize then that they’re afraid of me, and I run at them. I grab the one that was making the stupid faces and bang his head against the hood of the car. A wave of dizziness rushes over me, and I let go of his skinny neck. Teeth marks burn my knuckles. A few drops of blood stain my shirt. I wobble for a second in the heat, then head back to the Chevy and flop down behind the wheel.
Jill’s squished up in the corner like she’s afraid I’m going to hammer her next, but I just sit there sucking the steamy air through my mouth. Jerry is still making the duck sound, and I finally turn around to look at him. Even after all this time, he’s got that angel dust glaze in his eyes, as if torching his brain is the only thing he’ll ever remember. His face and neck are broken out in a bumpy red rash from where Jill tried to shave him this morning. His white T-shirt is soaked with slobber, stained with his grandmother’s watery gravy. Every time Jerry attempts the duck, his tongue pops out and spit runs off his chin. I fumble around, then pull a napkin from one of the sacks of food and wipe his face. When my hand brushes against his jaw, his eyes close like a puppy’s.
The other boys are helping the driver back up. They’re talking big now, strutting around like they’ve got shit in their pants. I stick my head out the window and growl like a dog. Then I give them the finger. The girl in the window yells, “Fat motherfucker!” I turn back around and blast my horn, hold it down for a long minute. “My God,” Jill says. “Oh, my God.” She’s holding her hands over her ears.
“Hey, Jerry,” I say, “you wanta drive?” I drop the Chevy into low, and rev the engine until the Dairy Queen’s windows are rattling. The customers inside are staring at us and I wave at them. In my side mirror, I see the manager approaching cautiously from behind and talking on a cell phone. Suddenly, gunk breaks loose in the carburetor and a huge puff of black smoke shoots out of the tailpipe.
“You’re going to jail,” Jill says.
I laugh and pull out fast onto High Street, burning rubber, honking the horn. “Slow down!” Jill screams. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I slide the Zippo from my pocket and squeeze the small metal case, rub it between my fat, sweaty fingers. It has two dates engraved on it, like a tombstone. I toss the lighter out the window and shift the Chevy into second gear, then stomp the gas pedal and squeal down the street. People hanging out on their porches point at us as we rocket past in third. An old lady grabs a little girl up off the sidewalk. A siren begins to whine in the distance.
Suddenly, happiness rips through me like a sword. Reaching over, I grab Jill’s knobby knee, but she shoves my hand away. “Kak, kak!” Jerry squawks, as he bounces forward against his restraints. I dig a hot dog out of the sack and tear the wrapper off, cram it in my mouth. In the rearview, I see a police car coming up fast behind us, all of its lights throbbing. The trees, the signs, the entire world, start to bend backward as we race up the highway. “Kak, kak!” Jerry goes again, and I almost grit my teeth. But then, ramming the gearshift into fourth, I start over.
BLESSED
I WAS ON THE PHONE ONE DAY, TRYING TO UNLOAD A HOT four-wheeler to a deer hunter I knew over in Massieville, when Tex Colburn knocked on my door, introduced himself like he was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners or State Farm. I knew who the fucker was, but I decided to play dumb, just stood there looking at him. He pulled his big hands out of the pockets of his leather jacket, lit a cigarette. “I need a second-story man,” he finally said, out of the side of his mouth. I’d heard he talked like that, like he’d watched too many old gangster movies.
“What the fuck’s that?” I asked.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head. “What I got to do, kiss your ass? I need a fuckin’ partner.”
I glanced over his shoulder, saw his shiny new Mustang parked behind my rusty Pinto. My wife and I had just had a baby, a son named Marshall who constantly needed Pampers and formula and all that other baby shit. We were barely scraping by, and so, though I knew it was always better to work alone, I accepted his offer. Tex Colburn was serious business: front-end loaders, jewelry stores, vintage cars—high-priced stuff that people actually commissioned him to steal. Me, I was pinching push mowers and breaking into mom-and-pop groceries out in the sticks. Hooking up with him was big-time.
I ran with him for over a year and made more money than I’d ever dreamed a thief could make in southern Ohio. My wife and I moved into a fancy apartment, bought a new Monte Carlo, put down a hundred on the Super Lotto every Saturday night. Dee soon lost the baby fat, and I started bringing home a porno two or three nights a week to help rekindle our former fires. For every new position she mastered, I bought her another Longaberger basket. Finally I’d begun to enjoy a certain illegal prosperity.
But then, before my son was old enough to talk, I was nearly killed falling off the roof of Burchwell’s Pharmacy in the middle of a rainy night in Meade, Ohio. My first coherent thought after landing on the blacktop with the crowbar still in my hand was that Tex would leave me for the law to find. Then I felt him snatch the tool fro
m my hand, and my second coherent thought was that he was going to finish me off first. That was his way—never leave anything to chance. “Please, Tex,” I managed to say, as I lay flat on my back, staring up at the black sky pouring down on me. Waiting for the blow, I suddenly thought about all the hogs I’d knocked in the head with a sledge at the meatpacking plant I’d worked in right after high school. It was the only real job I’d ever had, and I’d held it only six months, but it seemed as if, lying there helpless behind the drugstore, my life was coming full circle. I was going to die the same way I’d slain all those animals.
Instead Tex surprised me with something like compassion, grabbing me under the arms and dragging me to his Mustang. A few minutes later, we were pulling up outside the big glass doors of the ER at Meade General. Though I could still move my toes, my legs were numb, and every time I took a breath, hot nails of pain shot through my lower back. When he stopped the car, I gasped, “Tex, can you help me inside?”
He snorted and flicked his cigarette out the window at a big potted plant. “Don’t push your luck, you shit-for-brains,” he said. Then he turned and stared into my eyes until I had to look away. I opened the door. “Don’t say anything,” he warned.
“I ain’t stupid,” I said.
“We had a good run,” he said. Then, leaning over, he shoved me out onto the concrete and drove away.
An orderly in a white outfit finally came out and led me inside. Though my injuries were severe—a broken collarbone and two crushed disks in my back—the doctor on call that night turned out to be a god. Twelve hours after getting to the hospital, I went home with a bottle of his religion. I never even had to see him again; he’d just phone in the Oxy ’scripts whenever I called and complained. I was cashing in three, sometimes four ’scripts of 80s a month. Because the Oxy was time-released, I learned to lick the coating off the tabs and chop them into powder, then snort them for a quicker delivery. If I was too far gone to handle the razor blade, I’d just chew them up before swallowing. My head became a perfect holiday, my nerves foamy little buds of milk. The Oxy filled holes in me I hadn’t even realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.