“Someone sure slept his way to the middle,” I heard Connie whisper to Trish over the coffee machine. “Next thing you know, he’ll be wearing fur-lined gloves with a cushion propped under his little fanny.”
I assumed they were talking about me, as I was the only person at Duckwall-Pooley in possession of what might be described as a little fanny. Curly had been right about these women; they were just as petty and small-minded as they could be. “Slept his way to the middle.” If I were asleep on the job, did they honestly think someone would have me promoted?
“It’s a regular Cutthroat Island around here, and don’t let anyone tell you any different,” Curly would say. “You’re lucky you’ve got someone to watch your back, my friend. They’re nothing but a flock of stupid sheep, and one of these days they’re going to get sheared.”
I’d been at the plant for three weeks when Curly invited me to his trailer for a drink. He lived just outside Hood River in a double-wide he shared with his mother, a woman he often spoke about. “I told Mother what you said about Dorothy’s mouth looking like a gunshot wound and, Lord, she just about bust a gut, she was laughing so hard. She is one funny lady, my mother. Nothing tickles her funny bone better than a knock-knock joke. You know any good sidesplitters?”
Desperate as I was for company, I understood that I was clearly dealing with a loser. Management seemed the perfect career for a person like Curly. I could easily picture him in a short-sleeved shirt, the pocket lined with pens. Someone would ask him to check the time cards and he’d probably say something goofy like “Okey-dokey, artichokey.” I’d tried to straighten him out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
He pulled the pickup into the driveway of his trailer, which sat parked beneath a stand of fir trees. It was a cold night, and clear enough to see the steaming breath of the advancing German shepherd.
“Where’s the King?” Curly asked, kneeling down to have his face licked. “Here he is! You’re the King, aren’t you? The King man, the King of beers. Who’s the King of beers? Who is he? Where did he go?” He affectionately batted the dog’s head with his cuffed fists before saying, “All right now, enough play. Go on, King. Scoot.”
As he was fitting the key into the door, the dog returned to worry its head against the jamb, eager to get inside. “Motherfucker, I said NO.” Curly kicked the dog with his sharp-toed boots, and the animal retreated into the yard. “Didn’t I tell you no? Didn’t I say we’d had enough play?” He knelt then, and his voice became soft and sweet. “King man. Where’s my King of beers, King of the road, King man? Where did he run off to? The King ran off and left his crown laying in the dust. Who wants his crown back? Where did my King go? Who is the rightful owner of this crown?”
The dog advanced, kneeling before Curly, who grabbed him by the collar and kicked him several times in the rear before releasing him. “It’s just a game we play,” he said, wiping his hands on his trousers. “He likes it rough.”
It was the extreme heat combined with a low, foul odor that suggested Curly’s was not a happy home. The smell was of every filthy thing you could think of and dozens more that a decent person could never imagine. The door opened onto a living room, the walls paneled in imitation walnut and hung with framed prints dedicated to the theme of simpler times, when barefoot boys snitched apples off the vendor’s cart. Sofas and chairs were upholstered in red velveteen and protected by plastic jackets tailored for a snug fit. The gold-flecked coffee table supported an ornate cigarette lighter and several copies of Oregonian magazine arranged into the shape of a fan. Plump cherubs gamboled at the base of every lamp, and the royal blue carpet was crossed with a network of runners. It wasn’t dirty or even messy, just incredibly stinky, as if the trailer itself had once been a living, breathing thing but had died about six months before, left to decompose without a proper burial.
“Mother? Are you decent? The number-one son is home.” He opened a door at the end of the hallway, and I saw a thin, shriveled stalk of a woman lift herself from the toilet. I turned my head then, pretending to examine a picture of a spry granddad, spreading his arms wide to indicate the length of the one that got away.
“I thought you were one of those Taylor boys,” the woman said. “I thought you were coming for that big crate of franks. Their father dropped them off, a whole big crate of them. I called and said, ‘I don’t know what a person would do with so many franks. Send your boy out after them.’”
Curly lowered his voice. I could not catch the words, but the tone was one of impatience.
“No, sir, I do not want you to get the stick,” I heard the woman say. “I want those wienies out of my closet is what I want. Call that Taylor boy on the phone and see if he can’t come get them.”
I heard her protest as she was lifted, heard the toilet flush and the sound of water running in the sink. “I don’t have the buns for franks like that. Call them up and see won’t they come.”
Curly opened the door and emerged with his mother in tow, leading her past the kitchen and into a room I knew I did not want to enter. This was one of those times I literally kicked myself for never having learned to drive. What with the money I’d made picking apples, I had enough cash beneath my mattress for a secondhand model. With my own car, I could have made up some excuse and cleared out with no problem. I could have taken his car if only I knew how to turn it on and drive it. While I might stay in a trailer, it was clear that Curly actually lived in one; and it horrified me that he might have mistaken me for one of his own. Was it my clothing? The pallor of my skin? My tendency to let my mouth hang open while bored? People in trailers were canned and labeled much like the apple juice down at the plant, stamped with ingredients for all the world to see: chicken-fried steak, overcooked vegetables, no working knowledge of any major Italian movie directors — the list went on and on.
“Boy, is she tired or what?” Curly said, shaking his head in disbelief as he left the bedroom. “Sometimes she’s just like a clock, if you know what I mean. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.” He rotated his index finger against the side of his head. “You know how it is with mothers. Can’t live with them, can’t fit them into a burlap bag. Hey, did I say that?” He pressed a finger to the tip of his nose as if it were a button labeled REWIND. “Did we come here to relax or what?” He stepped into the kitchen and returned with a six-pack of beer, explaining that we should probably retire to his bedroom, as his mother was a light sleeper. “She can be, oh boy, a regular three-headed monster when she doesn’t get her shut-eye,” he said. “You’re not like that, are you? Are you a cranky old werewolf when you wake up in the morning? I sure hope not, because I’m askaird of monsters.” He chewed his nails and buckled his trembling knees. “I’m askaird. I’m afwaid.”
Whatever Curly’s theatrical fear, it could not begin to match my genuine horror as he opened the door to his bed-room, which served as a showplace for his vast collection of artificial penises. They hung from the walls, jutted from plaques, and stood upright, neatly spaced upon shelves and tabletops. Duplicated in wood, plastic, or fleshy rubber, what they had in common was their substantial size. Some were detailed to include veins and curly-haired testicles, while others existed as a minimal idea. Black or white, buffed aluminum or flesh-tone, electric or manual, the message was the same.
“So what do you think?” Curly said, lowering himself onto the waterbed.
“That’s really some… bedspread you’ve got there,” I said, hoping to focus the attention toward the color scheme. “It’s a real… orange orange, isn’t it?”
“I guess you could say that,” he said, reaching over to stroke something that closely resembled a thermos. “What do you think of my toy collection? I figured you’d appreciate it more than anyone else I know. First time I saw you, I said to myself, ‘There’s a boy who needs a playmate.’ So what do you say, Charlie Brown, you ready to play?”
“Oh, gosh,” I said. “That’s really nice of you to ask… Curl
y. It’s just that, well, seeing that we work together…”
“That’s all the more reason to play together,” he said. “Come on now, Einstein, don’t pull that shit on me. Here, you’ve got me worked up like a freight train.” He ran the zipper of his jeans up and down the track of his fly. “You’ve been coming on too strong to back off now. Don’t play that game with me.”
“Oh, I’m not,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve got… these… damned crabs.” I itched myself fiercely, silently congratulating myself on my cunning. “They’re a real devil to shake, and I wouldn’t want you to catch them.”
“Won’t be the first time,” he said. “Come on now, get your ass in this bed. Curly will find those mean old crabs and spank the shit out of them.”
“That sounds… really… fun,” I said. “Not for the crabs though, I mean… it’ll be bad news for them, won’t it.” I excused myself to visit the toilet. Curly had taken my coat earlier, and I groped around the dark closet looking for it. When I heard him call my name, I grabbed the down jacket and fled out the front door, running down the driveway and onto the dark road.
It wasn’t until I reached a streetlight that I realized I was wearing a ladies’ jacket. It was down, like my own, but this one was pink and the pockets were stuffed with wadded Kleenex. A car pulled around the corner and came speeding toward me. Just before passing, the driver veered off the road and onto the shoulder, and I fell back into a ditch. A beer can landed near my head and I heard the sound of laughter and loud music fade into the distance.
In terms of a warm, safe place, the ditch wasn’t so bad. Huddled there among the decaying leaves and stray scraps of paper, I asked myself how I could have been so wrong about Curly. I’d always figured he was single because he couldn’t find a woman desperate enough to put up with his juvenile personality. Would things have been any different if I’d found him attractive? If he looked like, say, William Holden in the movie Picnic, would I have put up with his overheated trailer and hokey stories? I recalled his collection of artificial penises and understood that the answer was definitely no. After taking on one of those monsters, the next step would involve sitting upon a greased fire hydrant. Before I knew it, I’d turn into one of those middle-aged men who wore diapers and walked with a limp. I knew that I’d worked my final shift at the packing plant. It wasn’t really Curly’s fault, but it’s always nice having someone to blame. If anything, I should be thanking him for giving me a good excuse to quit. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to pack it in and leave town. First, though, I’d just lie in this ditch for a while, wrapped tight in a ladies’ jacket and wondering where I’d gone wrong.
With the Mexicans gone, Hobbs’s orchard had become a desolate place. I limped back to my trailer just after sunrise and stared out the window at the barren trees. The problem with leaving one town was that sooner or later you’d have to arrive in another. I told myself I’d head to someplace exotic, Portland maybe, or Tacoma, Washington, but deep down I knew that once my bags were packed, I’d return to North Carolina. If I could just stay here a little longer, perhaps I could form the emotional calluses people needed to leave their pasts behind them and begin new lives for themselves. It was like waiting for a fever to break, a few more weeks and I might have come out of it. Nothing, it seemed, could break one’s resolve quite like spending the night in a ditch.
I hitchhiked into Hood River to turn in my library books, stopping off at the plant to explain I wouldn’t be needing my job anymore.
“Yale,” I shouted to the foreman over the noise of the generator. “I have to head back East because they want me to teach at Yale.”
“You what?” he shouted. “Who’s going to jail?”
“No, YALE.”
“All right then, just make sure you don’t bend over to pick any soap off the shower floor. We’ll see you when you get out.”
“It looks like I’ll be heading back home,” I whispered to the librarian, handing in my battered, overdue copies of Valley of the Dolls and Rosemary’s Baby. “They want me to teach a couple of classes at Yale, and seeing as picking season is over, I thought, why not?”
“I guess it’s that or starve,” the woman sighed.
I don’t know why I felt the need to present any excuse at all. Except for the original owner of my pink jacket, my leaving affected no one. I’d spent several months there and they had added up to nothing. Seeing as I was not the type of person to make things happen, my only option was to let things happen. I expected opportunity to present itself to me and it had, in the way of a union card and three dozen artificial penises. Things wouldn’t be any different in North Carolina than they’d been in Oregon. I thought of those people on the bus, going from one shitty place to the next, expecting nothing to change but the landscape. Soon I’d be sitting beside them, sharing my potato chips and thinking of them as my kind of crowd.
I was heading back to Odell when I got a ride in a station wagon driven by a man who introduced himself as Jonathan Combs, C.O.G.
I asked what the letters stood for, and he asked me to guess. He appeared to be in his midfifties, a doughy, square-faced man with heavy black-framed glasses and a silver crew cut.
“Go on, guess,” he said. Cousin of Godzilla? I thought. Chunky old geezer? Capable of genocide?
“I can’t begin to imagine,” I said.
“Child of God,” he said. “You’re one, too! Here you had this glorious title, and you didn’t even know it! I even had it put on my checks. Now if the man upstairs would only start cashing them, I’d be in business. HA!” He addressed the roof of his car. “Just teasing, Lord.”
Jon said he could take me into Odell, but first he needed to drop by the studio. I asked what he did there, and he said “I’m an artist, that’s what I do there. Ever met an artist before? We might sometimes act a little strange, but don’t worry, kid, I’ve had my shots and I’ve never been known to bite.”
He pulled onto a residential street and parked before a house decorated with the remnants of Halloween. Soggy ghosts hung from the trees, bloated from the morning rain, and the jack-o’-lantern had withered, its once merry face now resembling that of a toothless, sunburned mummy. “These kind people are members of my church,” he explained. “I told them I was looking for a studio, and they handed me the keys to their basement. Just like that.” He smiled, shaking his head at the thought of his good fortune. “You’ll meet the greatest people in the world living right here in this very town,” he said. “Well, I guess I don’t need to remind you of that. You’ve already met one of them.”
“Who?”
“Me, ya idiot!” He reached for the two aluminum canes lying beside him and used them to support his weight as he stepped out of the car. I followed along, pretending to ignore the unmistakable sounds emanating from his trousers. Either he was suffering a terrible case of gas or he had a pint-size child practicing the trumpet in his back pocket. “You ready to see something amazing?” he asked. “You’d better hold on to your socks because I’m just about to knock them off.” He opened the door to a basement equipped with a washer and dryer. In the far corner of the room sat several large, dingy machines of an indeterminate nature. He turned on the overhead lights and made his way toward a boulder that sat in a tray of rust-colored water. “Taa-daa! How are those socks treating you?” he asked.
I got the distinct feeling I was missing something intended to be obvious.
“It’s jade!” The man’s eyes sparkled. “And I’ve got plenty more where this came from. It may not be the highest quality, but still, it’s enough to make me a rich man ten times over if I don’t mess up and start drinking again, knock on wood.” He sat down and rapped his knuckles against his knees, producing a hollow sound.
I was dumbstruck.
“You want to knock wood? Go ahead, take your pick. One leg’s just as good as the other. He hitched up his trousers, revealing sleek, putty-colored calves. “They’re not real wood, I was just pulling your leg. Ha! How do y
ou like that one! No, they’re plastic and they’re all mine and you can’t have ’em.” He grabbed his knees in a mock gesture of defensiveness.
The man was clearly some sort of a lunatic, not unlike many of the other people who had picked me up hitchhiking, but I knew for a fact that if it came down to it, I’d be able to outrun him. Perhaps that’s why I stayed and listened as he spoke about the many years he’d spent in Alaska. It was one of those places I wouldn’t dream of going. My childhood fantasies of polar bears and smiling Eskimos chasing one another across the frozen tundra had been shattered by magazine articles picturing hardscrabble towns where bearded men arm-wrestled over mail-order brides beneath the harsh midnight sun. If that was the last frontier, they were more than welcome to it.
After his first marriage broke up, Jon traveled to Fairbanks in search of fortune. “But the only gold I found was swirling around the bottom of a bottle.” He lost his left leg when his car overturned, pinning him against a tree. Its partner had been amputated some months later because of gangrene. It was the pockets of air caught between the prostheses and the stumps that created the farting noises whenever he walked.
“So there I was. My legs were yesterday’s news but I still had my hands, and that’s all it took to reach for that bottle. Yes, indeed, the best medicine in the world is made by a fellow who goes by the name of Jim Beam. I was just a dried-up pill, nothing to do but get drunk and feel sorry for myself. And that’s what I did until I met a man who told me I could walk tall even without a pair of stinking feet. A man I happened to meet by accident in the crowded hallway of a VA hospital. A man named Jesus Christ. He happened to be a close personal friend of my wife’s and thought the two of us should meet. Oh, she wasn’t my wife at the time, just another cute nurse with a great set of tits and an ass a man could get lost in. Jesus brought us together. Then he told us to get married and hightail it the fuck out of Alaska, and that’s just what we did.”