Authors: Harvey Smith
I almost laughed at her, thought about smashing her body with the rusted bicycle in her yard. “No,” I said. “I work for the owner of the house.”
She stared at me, sullen now as I crossed Dad's narrow porch. The child in the diaper scratched violently at the sores on his belly. Reaching down, the woman yanked his hand away.
Looking at the little boy, disgust and sympathy warred across my thoughts. Lowfield was full of his kind, born into a world blighted, following the wake left by their parents, swerving and miserable, only to bring up their own offspring a couple of decades later, often sooner. I turned away, dropping them into an unmarked grave somewhere in my head.
The house was small, maybe 800 square feet. It sat on a plot of land that was barely larger than the house. The porch creaked under my feet. At the far end, away from the front door, I pushed a lawn chair out of the way. Holding one of the pillars supporting the porch roof, I leaned out and looked down the side of the house. A chain link fence ran around the back yard, where I could see pieces of a Frisbee scattered like shrapnel after a blast. Several plastic chew bones protruded from dried mud at odd angles. They reminded me of news footage...cops excavating human remains from an overgrown backyard.
The neighbors never suspected anything. They said he was just a normal guy.
A length of very thick, knotted rope rested in the corner of the yard like a serpent stuffed with newborn kittens. All the grass was gone along the fence and two ceramic dog bowls lay upside down in the dirt.
I peered into my father's bedroom. There were no curtains on the window, but the glass was warped and filthy with dust and streaks. I might as well have been trying to look into another world. The dim space beyond was barely visible, swimming as I shifted.
The front door was unlocked. I tried the handle and pushed the door open. Pausing for a second, I called out into the living room. When no one responded, I entered. The house was quiet and the air inside had a different quality, still and dry.
My father's things were gone of course, the rooms stripped bare. Without furniture, it was bigger inside than I remembered, bigger than it seemed on the outside. The interior smelled like pine-scented cleaning chemicals and I laughed softly, the sound of my laughter surprising me, disturbing the dead atmosphere.
He worked in the plant that created the chemicals. Maybe they used the chemicals to clean up the blood.
I had visited my father in this place over Christmas just after he moved in. He seemed oddly content. The man was living alone for the first time in his life. He got my mother pregnant when she was a teenager and subsequently he always lived with me, Brodie and his various wives...always with a succession of wives. Living alone in the last days of his life suited him.
That is, until he blew his brains out.
Visiting for the holidays that year, I was shocked by how much weight he'd lost. This was months before his death and he looked bleached out. The house resembled one of the hunting lodges I remembered from childhood. It smelled of fried bacon, coffee and cigarettes, and it was littered with girly magazines and gun catalogues. Awkwardly, I had presented him with a Christmas gift. Buying gifts for Dad never brought me any joy, but I felt guilty when I failed to do so.
Taking it, he looked concerned. “I didn't get you nothing.” He took a slug from his premixed whiskey sour and set the glass down on the kitchen table. Losing so much weight, he looked wiry. Combined with his small stature and his years working outside, he was leathery and elf-like.
“That's okay, Dad.”
As soon as I said this, his concern vanished. Ripping into the package, he tore it to shreds and dropped the paper at our feet. He pulled out the t-shirt, which was folded around a card. A stack of gift certificates bulged beneath the front cover of the card; hundreds of pre-paid dollars to the chain stores in the area...cafeterias, a Western-style clothing outlet, an automotive parts shop, a drive-through liquor store. I knew Dad would use them.
The t-shirt depicted two deer, lamenting a target-shaped birthmark circling the eye of one of the deer. Dad had come to mind as soon as I saw the shirt.
He blinked, confused. “I think you got me this same t-shirt last year. Ain't this the same one?”
As soon as he said it, I realized it was true and embarrassment flooded me. “I guess it is,” I said. “Sorry…I just forgot. I thought it was funny.”
He looked uncomfortable, studying my face with concern before turning his attention to the gift certificates. He draped the t-shirt over a chair at the kitchen table and forgot about it.
“Hot damn, boy. I love the food they got there.” He held up the slip from the cafeteria then from the parts store. “…and I need some new tires. I can barely see the goddamn treads.” He cocked his head and looked up at me, one eye bulging larger than the other as he broke into a grin, which was the closest he ever came to thanking anyone.
I smiled back at him, but my stupidity nagged me. There was something pathetic about buying him the same t-shirt two years in a row. We just couldn't connect, not even over something as scripted as a Christmas gift. Not over anything.
I stood blinking in the dead air of the house, fighting to pull myself back into the present, back into the world. I walked into the kitchen and looked down at the rickety dinner table, half expecting to see the shirt hanging from a chair.
I saw him sitting there, near the end, drunk and munching on a candy bar, muttering to himself. The lights in the house were off and Dad sat in the dark, lit by the streetlight that fingered in through a kitchen window.
I stared across the space, half seeing my father and half seeing an empty room.
All the dishes had been removed from the sink and the cabinets were empty. Someone had made an effort to clean up the counters, but they were so old and scarred that the effort was largely pointless. There were no curtains around the window over the sink. I leaned close and looked out through the screen, filthy with dead insects and spider webs.
The back yard was trashed. Muddy pathways cut back and forth in patterns that only made sense to a dog, orbiting tall tufts of dallisgrass. Leeched of color by the sun, a pale beer can stood half-embedded in a fire ant mound, leaning to the side like a haphazard smokestack. Several lawn chairs were scattered about, one of them on its side. Most of the weaving had rotted away from the aluminum frames and the fringed edges blew in the wind like hair from a dried skull.
I rifled through a couple of empty drawers before drifting
out of the kitchen. Nothing but tiny, pinched mouse droppings.
In the empty bedroom, a spot on the wooden floor had been scrubbed practically white, where the bed must have been.
The cleanest spot indicates the dirtiest deed.
I started to laugh, but the sound caught in my throat.
Kneeling down, I knew this to be the place where my father had finished himself, the exact point in space where Big Jack sat, weeping and raging, cradling his beloved pistol as he rocked back and forth. I touched the floor softly, running my fingers over the old wood. As I traced the outline of the bleached spot, I heard my father speaking in a low tone, next to me. The words were meaningless, unintelligible. He sat there as skinny as a circus freak. I recalled his expressions in life, the way anger, confusion and fear had often moved across his face, as they must have just before pulling the trigger. I wondered what his voice sounded like inside his head. His thoughts, or a caricature of them, spun and fell and floated through my mind like feathers in a dark and empty grain silo.
*****
The pistol on the kitchen table was a Browning BDA,
manufactured in 1983. Entirely black, it was the snubby compact model, holding a 7-cartridge magazine loaded with hollow-point rounds. Like a family of nested dolls, the slugs were stacked inside the magazine, snug within the grip of the pistol. The gun rested on a rag streaked with oil, with the words FABRIQUE NATIONALE HERSTAL visible along the length of the barrel. On the table nearby, sat a cup half full of whiskey sour and a coffee mug, speckled with droplets of blue paint reminiscent of a bird's egg.
The house was quiet, with no air conditioning. All the lights were dark and many of the windows were covered. Over in the corner, between the ancient refrigerator and the counter, the floor creaked as Big Jack adjusted his stance. The joints in his toes cracked as he lifted the heels of his boots to get a better view out the high kitchen window. In the dimness of the house, only his face and one hand, gripping the window ledge, were illuminated. It had been almost a week since he'd washed or shaved, and his chin and cheeks bristled with whiskers. His nails tapped on the sill as he studied the yard.
From his vantage point, he could see more of the alley and the neighbor's yard than his own; sagging chain link fence, clumps of weed and muddy trails where nothing grew.
He shook his head from side to side. Oh, man, he thought, Daddy woulda hated to see that. Just hated it.
At one corner of the yard, a thick rope lay coiled in the mud. He had taken it from a co-worker's fishing boat almost a year earlier, borrowing it for some task he couldn't remember now. He tried to get a glimpse of the dog where it slept against the wall during the day, but he couldn't see it.
At the table, he fell into a chair and took a gulp from the plastic cup. It collapsed under his calloused fingers then popped back into shape as he set it down. When he stopped moving, the house was quiet except for somewhere down the street kids were yelling at one another, their voices faint and brief. Taking up the pistol, he held it in both hands, knuckles yellow-white against the black metal. It was cold, leeching away the heat from his skin. Sighting down the length of his arms, he held the gun away from his body, pointing it at the wall then making a quick correction and aiming at a badly tilted clock hanging five feet off the floor. When he toggled the safety off, the clicking echoed through the old house. The muscles in his arms tensed, ropy and lined with veins. His skin was dark, freckled in places and long-tanned from working outside. A deep sigh escaped him.
He pulled the gun close and flipped it around, closing one eye and straining to see down into the barrel. Swaying a bit, he caught a beam of weak light from the window over the sink, but it wasn't enough to illuminate much of the deep, perfect bore. Looking at the barrel, pistol profile, he contracted his brows and ran his tongue across his teeth, pushing against the enamel. The etched lettering was barely perceptible as his thumb slid back and forth along the surface.
Outside the front door, someone took a couple of heavy steps across the porch. Big Jack jerked his head toward the front of the house, just as a stack of mail shot through the slot in the door, sliding to the floor.
“Goddammit,” he said. Caught by surprise, his voice was raspy. Stock still, he listened as the footsteps retreated.
He dropped the pistol onto the cloth and stood. Made with the last packet of mix he had, the whiskey sour was no longer cold, but it lit up his mouth and burned as it went down his throat. Cup in hand, he made his way to the door. In front of the pile, he used the toe of his boot to separate out the mail. He squatted and looked it over, a collage of overdue bills, junk offers and coupon fliers.
A pained expression crossed his face as he picked up one of the bills, dropped it, and picked up another. He rubbed his mouth, eyes wide and bloodshot.
A table stood against the wall with a fat county phone book resting on the lower under-shelf, spine toward the wall so that the ratty pages faced him. Someone had written his name, HICKMAN, on the spread of the pages. An old phone was positioned on top of the table, but the cord had been yanked from the wall. Grunting, he braced himself on the table and stood up.
He moved closer to the front door, stepping on the scattered mail and looking past the edge of the curtain. Tomorrow was a workday, or he thought it was. It might have been the middle of June and he winced thinking about how many days of time-off he'd taken. He tried adding it up, but couldn't. Whirling in place, he sent envelopes skittering across the wooden floor, his steps shaking the house.
Back in the kitchen, he lit a cigarette with trembling hands and smoked. Squinting his eyes and looking off to the side, he tried to work it all out. One hand crept through a wide hole in his t-shirt, fingers clambering along his ribs as he stared toward the refrigerator. When the compressor kicked on, it startled him.
He took a drag and transferred the cigarette to his left hand. Holding it with two fingers, he chewed at the edge of his thumbnail. Eyes still cut to the left, he spat a piece of skin out away from him.
The sun had started to set. Stubbing out the cigarette, he reached for the pack and lit another one. The lighter clinked as he snapped it shut and jammed it into his pocket. The refrigerator shut off again, leaving the house in silence. He reached up and wove his fingers through his hair then pulled hard, rocking in place so that the kitchen chair threatened to buckle.
He tried to say something, but made an
urking
sound.
Reaching out with his right hand, he clutched at the pistol, dragging the cloth around it and picking up the entire bundle. The weight felt good under his palm. Pushing his chair back from the table, he rose and staggered toward the bedroom.
*****
I realized that our long struggle had ended, that there would be no resolution; none that made sense. My father had made me and then he had unmade himself.
Rubbing my face, I imagined a great nothingness outside the walls of the house, a hissing television on a dead station. It had eaten up the world, causing every single thing to fly apart until nothing was left but a shimmering, buzzing void, dissolving my mother and all the missing pieces of her mind, my lost brother and even the fresh corpse of my father, barely human by my understanding of the word.