Flesh and Bone (16 page)

The room smells of burnt coffee and ash. Light from the window falls across the table, outlining the grain in the wood.

“I thought you loved him,” I say.

“I do.”

“What's the problem?”

“You,” she says. “He wants me to send you to your dad.”

“Jesus.”

I haven't spoken with my dad since we left. He's never called and I've never written. He's a stranger. I can't live with strangers.

“I can't do it,” she says. “You're mine.”

“I could stay here with Grandma.”

I want to hit Bobby with something heavy and hard. What kind of man asks a woman to leave her kids? I don't see Mom much, but she's my mom, I know where to find her when I need her.

We sit together in the dining room and smoke and the smoke breaks up and flows along the ceiling to the kitchen, the living room. I get Mom more coffee. I want a drink, maybe a joint. I want to forget that this ever came up.

“It's over,” Mom says.

“I'm sorry.”

“I can't begin to tell you how sad I am.”

“You should call him,” I say.

“I can't.”

“We'll figure something out.”

She stares at me, tears on her cheeks.

“There's nothing to figure out,” she says. “You're mine and I'm yours.”

“Okay.”

“Fine,” she says. “Good.”

It's better now. Not good, but better. We sit together and I figure between the two of us, we have one whole life. I figure that we'll hold each other up and stagger from crisis to crisis like a drunken whore. It won't last long, but it'll last a while and that's all I can ask for, just a little more time, just a little space to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life.

S
ITTING IN
J
OHN
John's room. Sitting on the bed, the mattress soft. Laundry lies all around the floor. Foil covers the window, making the room dim with the one lamp burning in the corner. The world is muted. Colors are dull. The walls seem detached from reality. Oxy makes everything distant, blunted.

“I leave in two weeks,” John John says.

He's enlisted in the Army. He's going to be a soldier.

“I wish I could go with you.”

“I'll be back,” he says. “They give you leave after Basic.”

I close my eyes and float on the liquid high.

“Do you want to keep my car?” he asks. “Just 'til I get back.”

“I'll take care of it.”

John John's mom comes to the door, announcing dinner. Rising with the careful grace of the truly stoned, we go to the dining room.

“It's going to be hard without you,” she says.

“Maybe you'll fall in love,” John John says.

“I don't think so.”

I push the beans around the plate. My hands are numb and I cannot feel my face. Food seems too chunky to eat. I can't seem to believe it's real, not some plastic model meant to be left in a window.

“You won't need to worry about me anymore,” John John says.

“I'll always worry.”

After dinner, I light a cigarette and stand on the porch watching the sun drop into the mountains. Shadows stretch out from the corners and fatten into a solid darkness. Lights flare in the house. John John and his mom sit in front of the television.

“I think I need to go home,” I say.

“You okay?” John John asks.

“Fine.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Promise?”

“I just need to get home.”

“Okay.”

I walk along the road and every step is a marathon. My heart is ready to crack my ribs I drag my feet against the asphalt.

Home now. Mom and Grandma sit on the porch watching the moths kill themselves against the light.

“I thought you were staying the night at John John's,” Mom says.

“John John's in the Army now.”

“Oh.”

“It's like he's dead already.”

“You're being dramatic.”

“I couldn't stay, knowing that he's going away.”

“At least he has a job now.”

“It scares the hell out of me.”

“He'll be fine,” Mom says.

“I need to go to bed.”

“Don't worry too much,” she says. “He'll be back before you know it.”

I lie in my bed and think about John John running through the woods with a rifle, about Lloyd doing pushups, about John John coming home different than the John John that left me here. I don't want anything to change, but then I want everything to change.

“W
E COULD GET
naked,” Zephyr says.

“Not today.”

“Come on,” he says.

He's high and his eyes are filled with blood and darkness.

“I have to figure things out,” I say.

“I thought you loved me.”

“I do,” I say.

“Okay.”

“I'm scared,” I say.

“Man up.”

“It doesn't work that way.”

“You didn't seem to mind before.”

“Only because you were with me.”

“I never left.”

“I think I need to be alone for a while,” I say.

“I don't have time for these games,” he says.

“No games.”

“What would you call it?”

“Confusion.”

He goes to the door and opens it, waiting for me to leave. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. We're done. I tried being honest and now I'm out. Zephyr wants things a certain way. I can't do it. I can't just turn myself around like that.

Out in the yard, I look back at the windows. There's no one there. I'm alone again. I'm always alone. I could walk into traffic now and no one would notice. I give up and go home.

“You're back,” Mom says.

“Yeah.”

“Why so sad?”

“I thought I was in love,” I say.

“And now you're not,” she says.

“I don't know.”

She takes my face in her wrinkled, soft hands.

“You're too young,” she says.

“It still hurts.”

“That never changes,” she says and walks away, the pain of too much time and too little love weighing on her like a yoke of water.

T
HE STREET GLITTERS
in the light from the streetlamps, diamond twinkles, rainbow colored. I sit with my back to the school's brick wall on the corner. No one sees me here except for the red and black fire of my cigarette. Oxy makes me weak and sick. Soon the sun will rise. Soon I'll have John John take me home. Right now, he's curled on the sidewalk snoring.

It's hard to remember why I'm here. It's hard to put the night in order. Things have blurred and run together. There were girls for a while. And they went away. Zephyr gave me head on the backseat of John John's Chevy. I smoked a lot of weed. I drank a pint of two dollar wine. Still I cannot sleep. And somehow, I can't remember how I got here.

“John John,” I say.

Nothing.

“Hey,” I say.

He rolls away from me.

I stand. John John's too far gone for me to wake. I stand and stumble into the street. Cars come by me and
one of them honks, swerving around my staggering hips. I'm coming down enough to know that I'm going to get in trouble if I don't get home soon. I live too far away to walk. I'll never make it. I'm alone and I need help and there's no one here to help me. Out on the highway, I hold out my thumb. People don't pick up hitchhikers the way they used to, but I have to try. I stand on the edge of the pavement and wait for someone going my way. The sun rises over the mountains, bloody as murder, harsh as an absent father. I stand there and hold my thumb out. A blue Dodge stops.

“Where you going?”

“Home,” I say.

“Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

“What's wrong?”

“Love.”

“What's that?”

“Love,” I say. “Can you take me home?”

“Mine or yours?”

“Do you have a bed?”

“Yeah.”

“Yours is fine.”

“Do you need to let someone know you're okay?”

I shake my head.

“What's the point of that?”

“They'll worry.”

“They'll worry whether I'm there or not.”

“Okay.”

I stare out the window.

“Just don't say you love me,” I say.

“Okay.”

“Love's the score you get in tennis when you're losing.”

L
EAVES LIE ON
the lawn in layers of rot and mold. Overnight, a couple of mushrooms pushed through the dirt, soft and pale as bone. I should be wearing shoes, but I'm not. A tattered cloak of clouds hides the mountains and the rain sings through the naked oaks. Cold mist eats through to my spine. A coat would be nice, but the coat's in the house and I don't want to go there right now.

No one moves on the road out front except a small murder of crows. There are no shadows and no sound. Mom comes to the porch dusted with flour from working with Grandma in the kitchen making pies.

“Bill,” she says. “What're you doing?”

What can I say? John John is gone, a soldier now. No one's said anything to me for days. Words hang in my throat like a sliver of bone, of light maybe.

“Bill,” Mom calls.

I turn and walk into the house. Mom puts a hand on the back of my neck.

“Do you miss him?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Bobby,” I say. “Dad.”

Mom stares at me. She shrugs and touches her fingertips to her chin.

“I don't know,” she says. “I miss the idea of them.”

I don't know what that means. I miss the people in my life. I miss the pressure of their voices on my face. What am I supposed to do now? I'm alone. Not that there's nothing for me to do. I can call them. I can go to their houses. But what's the point? Why should I go out of my way to fill the emptiness with company when the company always goes away?

I lie on the couch and let the sadness press me into the cushions. I cannot move. I cannot think. All I can do is wait and hope and listen to the sound of my lungs working, wondering if this is the last breath I'll take. Maybe I'll die here. Maybe dying would tell me how to live with people. We'll see. Someday, maybe, someone will come into my life and never go away.

William L. Alton comes from a split family. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Oklahoma, spending summers in Central Washington with his father. He started writing in the eighties while incarcerated in a psychiatric prison and never stopped. Through his writing he tries to make sense of his own experiences and help others with similar struggles. His work has appeared in
Main Channel Voices, World Audience
and
Breadcrumb Scabs
among others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has published two books of poems,
Heroes of Silence
and
Drowning Is a Slow Business,
as well as a memoir titled
My Name Is Bill.
He earned both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. You can find him at
williamlalton.com
.