I didn’t like feeling sorry for myself, but I couldn’t really blame Kitty. It wasn’t that I hated her, even though I couldn’t vouchsafe the opposite.
He never gave you a child
—her mother’s indictment. Kitty never told her about the complicated miscarriage and how that pretty much cut off any possibility. Now Oppie offered all the worries and joys of parenthood—nursing, potty training, private schooling, grooming—compressed into a 15 percent lifespan.
Dropping off to sleep, I was thinking about the abandoned house. It had been strange about the bones around Oppie’s neck, but this was nothing compared to the shock I would get when I checked out the photo I had taken of myself on the portal, the loser shot.
I
awoke in the night to full alertness, stirred by a distant, persistent dog barking. My injured hand was throbbing. Kitty lay slack in Ambien’s embrace and I needed to take a piss. The crickets were still going strong, so I knew it was sometime in the middle of the night. I felt for the bedside clock and squinted at the red numbers in the dark.
2:47—shit.
3:47 I could have handled, 4:47 might have been fine, and 5:47 would have been perfect, but after that sleepless night on the hard ground beside Morphy Lake, 2:47 meant a miserable day ahead.
I went downstairs without a shirt on. Oppie followed and I let him out the dining room slider. The house was quiet.
I lumbered into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. The statins gave me nocturnal erections, so I had to sit to piss if I didn’t want to spray all over the place. I flipped on the light,
plink.
The little voice inside my head said,
Poor Dad
.
My father would wake up for work in the middle of the night and walk down the hallway to the bathroom. There was that second before he shut the door when he would flip the switch, flooding the hallway with light and making me squeeze my eyes shut. The worst part was that sound, echoing off tile every day except Sunday while he started his workday in the dark—
plink!
I used to feel sorry for him for his sadness, for being already unhappy as long as I could remember, for his constant struggle to make ends meet. And I resented him for not being around more, for never taking me to a ball game, for always being drunk on Sunday and most nights after work.
Now that I was married I pitied my father for having stuck around. Why had he worked so hard when my mom had never shown any love for him? She hadn’t even been nice to him.
What made him wake up at an hour when most dads, even those with happy families, were asleep, and what made him get out of bed, walk past mean, crazy, sleeping Mom, come over to my bed, and, while I pretended to sleep, lay a hand on my head … then go into the bathroom, throw the switch, and give himself a shave in the middle of the night?
What made him get going on the first in a haul of chores through a workday that he couldn’t have enjoyed, that nobody could, through long, monotonous days of commute, back-breaking work, and slow, halting, drunken returns?
And then came Fair Oaks, the institution. The one time I had asked him about it, he said it was because he had begun having terrible nightmares and that after a while, even on the brightest days, he couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Dad’s psychiatrist had been an Italian American, the brother of a famous character actor in the movies. Now every time I see that actor in a modern mafia movie, I think of the doctor, placid behind wire-rimmed glasses, prescribing mountains of lithium, four hospitalizations, thirteen bipolar shock treatments. This was before researchers discovered that unipolar ECT was just as effective and fried memory a lot less permanently. But don’t resent the doctor for his orders. He was just trying to jolt Dad out of those nightmares.
Finally, my father’s funeral—devastating, but also a relief. When I had gone past the casket and made the sign of the cross, I heard that noise of the bathroom light switch:
plink
. Now every time I hear it, it’s like the sound of a little coffin shutting.
Poor Dad.
I went into the living room and turned on the TV, muted it. The Golf Network was cycling the same highlights show as when I had gone to bed. My hand throbbed. The couch was hard. The upholstery was cold.
I turned off the TV, went into the dining room, and flipped on the back flood lamps. I pushed aside the curtain and caught Oppie squatting on my practice putting green. I rolled up a copy of
Surge
and threw open the slider, smacking Oppie’s haunches as the final squirt dribbled onto the grass.
That’s when I remembered the photo.
I went to the garage and got the camera from the glove compartment of the Spider. I connected it, woke up the laptop, and opened iPhoto. I had not emptied the memory card in a while.
You have 112 new photos. Download now?
Yes.
I went to the cabinet to pour myself a glass of scotch. Then I opened the desk drawer and took out my stash and papers and rolled myself a joint. While the photos downloaded I smoked. First there were a bunch of pictures of the workers digging the trench on our property line for the invisible fence, then a bunch more shots that Kitty took of Oppie playing on the front lawn. Then the download got to the picture I took at the house, the loser shot.
In the photo—
holy shit!
—a spike of red light seemed to shoot out of my chest.
Oo-ee-oo.
I peered at the photo and tried to make sense of how it happened: had it been digital noise, or maybe the flash reflecting off the zipper of my jacket? It’s not unusual for photos taken in low light to develop artifacts, but this was a straight red spike, and it was right there over my heart, a real
you gotta put dat up on your Facebook
shot.
I needed to show this to someone for a reality check, but if I showed it to Kitty I would have to explain my late-night hike at the campground. I decided I would wait and show Hank Farmer for a second opinion.
I closed the laptop and went upstairs to lie next to Kitty. When I heard a scratch on the dining room slider, I remembered Oppie and went back downstairs to let him in.
I lay back down beside Kitty with my statin erection and thought about the blood tech. When would I go back into the clinic for the next draw? I could probably squeeze one in before the end of the month. What would the blood tech tell me?
Sorry, my car broke down
… ? Would she even remember? Was this something she did to guys regularly, or was she fucking with me specifically?
Except for the goth stuff, she seemed like a typical employee of the valley, another one of those Hispanas who take all the menial jobs at the Lab. They were the new migrant workers, people who race up the mesa every day from forty or sixty miles away because there aren’t any houses for less than a mil on the Hill.
She was one of those women that northern New Mexico is built upon, paraprofessionals, whatever that means, working long days while their boyfriends stay home drunk or go out for irregular day labor and complain about how they can never get a break. It was possible she had pegged me as a potential sugar daddy but then one of those guys whose name was tattooed on her arm discovered the scheme from one of her girlfriends and beat it right out of her.
The throbbing hand kept me up most of the night. Only when the first light of dawn began glowing against the curtains did I finally begin feeling drowsy. I lay there a long time and thought about the house.
Maybe this was one point where it might have been possible to let it go. The house had given me a strange feeling, but it could have remained a quirky accident. The photo could have stayed there on the memory card, unlooked at for months, years, and the bones around Oppie’s neck remained something unexplained, barely remembered, just another paranormal holiday in New Mexico. But I was hooked. Something was already growing inside of me.
I
was jolted awake by the keening of a Weedwacker. I got up to look out the window. My neighbor Ned was edging his lawn in gloves, goggles, ear protection. I looked at the clock—6:20 a.m. This is insane. What kind of asshole weed-whacks at 6:20 in the morning?
I remembered getting up in the night, remembered the photo, and decided to catch a round down at Buffalo Thunder before rolling up on Dr. Hank at brunch for Bloody Marys.
I showered and got dressed. Then I went down to the kitchen and poured a cup from Mr. Coffee, took one scorching sip, and left the mug in the sink. I packed the laptop in my briefcase, loaded my clubs in the trunk of the Spider, and backed out of the garage into the Los Alamos sun.
I was at the light on the corner of Third and Main listening to the idle of the Spider. The opposing pedestrian countdown told me there were only seconds left on my red when an old man stepped off the curb wearing something he’d tailored from a burlap bag, the collar and sleeves scissored out of the bottom and sides, the hem of the sack riding above his bony knees like a tattered miniskirt.
I said to myself,
Great, the sackcloth-and-ashes people are back.
He was a perfect specimen: stringy hair, wild eyes, crazy beard. The old man intercepted a woman jogging on the crosswalk. “There’s blood on your shoes!” he yelled at her, shaking a bag that discharged a little cloud of ashes over her New Balances.
The jogger dodged and the old man swung his fishy eye on me. “There’s blood on your car!” He pitched toward the Spider and I had to look away. The skinny legs reminded me unpleasantly of my dad in a towel coming out of the shower.
The light turned green and I leaned on the horn. For such a small car, it had a solid old Italian air horn, and the old man jumped out of the way.
Here was one of the little disturbing nuisances of life on the Hill that you had to learn to push into the periphery this time of year. What was Pax Kyrie doing back so soon? There were still ten days until the anniversary of the first nuclear detonation at the Trinity site. Sackcloth-and-ashes season usually began around July 16, the birthday of the Bomb, and wound down three weeks later on Hiroshima Day, but it seemed like every year the freaks from Pax Kyrie were coming to town a little earlier.
First a couple of stragglers started hanging out at Ashley Pond with their signs and their leaflets, then small bunches of them appeared around town spouting their holy ramblings, and finally a few hundred of them converged for a “die-in” that tied up traffic. It was pretty funny seeing them lying down on the roadsides in their sackcloths. They looked like a bunch of cavemen who had gotten tired waiting for the bus.
The sackcloth-and-ashers weren’t so different from right-to-lifers. In Pax Kyrie’s skewed perspective, everyone on the Hill was an abortionist. I wanted to propose an epigram for a monument that would greet them at the bottom of the Hill before they made the climb:
Yes, this is the town that built the Bomb. Get over it.
I drove down to the valley. I had the radar detector on, but it didn’t pick up the waves quickly enough for me to decelerate to less than seventy before passing a sheriff’s car tucked behind a knoll at the safety corridor. Lucky for me the deputy seemed to be snoozing.
I slowed down in plenty of time for the tribal police officer at the edge of San Idelfonso and kept it at fiftyfive for the last ten miles to Pojoaque.
Win a Chevy Truck
at Cities of Gold Sports Bar.
Dos Manos Repo 19.99
at Kokoman, and remember,
Don’t take chex from Teresa O Estrada.
At the self-serve car wash, the low-riders eyed me uncertainly. My black Spider was a fly ride, but the cholos couldn’t be sure whether it was macho like a Charger or gay like a Porsche. I hosed off the dust from the miserable camping trip and found a Mexican who gave it a soft shammying for an extra buck, shining the black finish up like an eight ball.
I drove out to the Towa Golf Resort and got my irons from the back. My hand was still tender from the tentstake injury, but with gloves on my stroke was in good form.
On the third fairway there was nobody behind me and I was out of sight of the clubhouse when I reached into the ball pocket of the golf bag and pulled out an Altoids tin. The joints in there looked just like wooden tees: white and thin as nails, slightly tapered at the end. I lit one and smoked.
I thought about the blood tech and considered the possibility of stopping at nine holes and driving to Rinconada to see her. Was the clinic even open on Saturday? I didn’t think I could pull off dropping by without seeming pathetic. Either she had spaced out on her invitation or I had gotten caught up in some bitchy, goth-Hispanic dissimulation:
Fuck you, gringo, if you’re stupid enough to think I’m going to meet your skinny ass in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods on the Fourth of July!
My injured hand started throbbing again, and two pueblo bison humping on the thirteenth fairway threw me into a funk.
I cut the round short, packed my irons in the Spider, and drove the winding road back up 502, passing beneath the billboard for Los Alamos Medical Center.
Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill to Take Mommy to Her Mammogram.
D
own in Henry Farmer’s basement, but don’t call it that. The rec room, the tavern, the lodge, the nineteenth hole—whatever the designation of the week to obscure his disappointment that it was only a finished basement.
Mixing Stoli with V8 in a pitcher, Dr. Hank said, “Ever wonder why there aren’t any real bars on the Hill?”
“Yeah, why is that?”
“We have bars in our homes instead. Los Alamos County has the nation’s most million-dollar rec rooms per capita.” Farmer, who on weekdays doubles as my physician, flipped the power strip on the bar back and three store-bought neon signs illuminated the Sheetrock. “Well, old boy, here’s to trying to quit.”
He poured me a Bloody Mary, but something about seeing those bison humping had left me feeling sullen. “No thanks.”
“What do you mean?”
“I quit.”
“You can’t quit!”
“Why not? That’s the toast, isn’t it?”