The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (24 page)

“I had a fling,” Laura said. “Right after I moved to Denver.”

“It’s none of my business,” Paul said.

“The resemblance isn’t entirely a coincidence. I think I picked someone who looked like you.”

He nodded and waited while the urge to speak his heart passed. But then he had nothing to say.

“I’m still driving the Mercury.”

“I noticed.”

“My dad likes it because I let him smoke. He’s a handful.”

“Maybe you should move back here to help,” she said.

I can ship my furniture from anywhere,
he thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead, he shook his head.

“I don’t like being with him. He doesn’t have anything to offer now. He isn’t
him.
He looks like my father and occasionally sounds like my father, but he’s just some…”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“It drains me. Even just driving him around.”

She raised her hand and plucked a fleck of foam rubber from his hair.

“You know what I’ve missed?” she said. “That coffee table you made with the crazy legs.”

“Not another like it in the world.”

“That’s not why I miss it.”

Her son called from his room, and she got up. Paul followed her as far as the hall.

“I should probably go,” he said.

She turned to face him. Her posture was perfect, hands at her side, her eyes open and blue.

She said, “You know how to find us.”

On the drive home, the Mercury slowed down of its own will.

This car has no master,
Paul thought.

The engine invented a new automotive emotion, a faint whispering weep. The wheels measured their revolution. The fluttering lids of the car sent its shaky light out over the neighborhood. The crack in the windshield made the houses at the far end of the street seem to lean forward. Tree boughs bent in the windless night. Blades of grass stood at alert. A tire swing twisted almost imperceptibly to reveal its startled O.

Paul gripped the dimpled steering wheel with both hands, and the seat slipped loose, nudging him forward. Windshield wipers that had not worked in a year began their metronomic sweep. In the dark of the desert evening, the residential street held its breath as the Mercury drifted to a standstill.

A wooden door on a shed opened with an interrogative creak, posing a question Paul could not articulate. The air conditioner suddenly came alive. A porch light practiced self-illumination. The crack in the windshield took the light and made colors on the glass. Paul looked for a person at the shed door or on the porch, but none appeared. The engine murmured and his heart raced. He perched on the edge of the seat, witness, he understood, to a break in a material join. A gap, a breach, a
lacuna.

Beneath the window of the house, beside a swarm of orange hose, a large-leafed plant lit by the porch bulb revealed its drooping stalk and the brown movement of death that inhabited it. Paul had a moment to think of his father’s wilting body before realizing it was the plant his father had pointed out. They were on Calgary Street.

He twisted the knob on the air conditioner until it stopped its racket. The car immediately began to roll forward. His seat slipped back into its groove. The Mercury eased him past the dark staring houses. These residences did not whisper to him. The parked cars did not sigh. The limbs of the mulberry did not break their ancient silence. The peaked window above an oak door, the painted flamingos on the wide lawn, the spires of picket, the timber of telephone pole, the long ramble of gutter, the red upturned wagon on a concrete drive—they did not speak to him. He heard them nonetheless.

The Mercury did not let him hurry. He chose not to question its wisdom. The windshield wipers continued their dry squeals of astonishment. If he felt his heart actually expand, what better explanation could there be for the long history of that venerable metaphor?
Hearts can swell,
he thought. One’s father may speak the truth even as he settles into death. One’s mother may see in a coincidence the opportunity for redemption. One’s own child may have the blood and genes of another man. Reason may live in things that are not rational.

Passing the elementary school, an errant and joyous sprinkler sent a splash in the car’s path. Even these windshield wipers, he thought, relentless in their obsession with clarity, have something to tell him. Something about seeing. About transparency. He knew he could not explain his vision—a million stars pricked the vast dark above his car—he could only experience it.

The Mercury died at the curb of his parents’ house. The radiator offered an exhausted sigh. Was it possible to have compassion for one’s father by means of compassion for one’s car? He had no answer. How was he, measly and suddenly ecstatic creature that he had become, to answer questions that should be posed to a tumult of mountains or deferred to the deep expansive seas?

He did not thank the grass as he sprinted across it, but he stepped lightly. The door met his grasp, swinging slightly to his reaching palm. The room’s icy atmosphere carried with it the air conditioner’s solemn greeting. He stepped into the house in which he had been raised, whose carpet—even now—cushioned his every step.

“I’ve had a vision,” Paul announced.

His father in his easy chair did not move. He was sleeping. The house, dark except for the muted television, held to a respectful silence. Paul knelt in the uncertain light beside the chair. He took Edmund Lann’s hand. The carpet pile flexed beneath his knees. The wall of shelves began to squeak and bulge, its cubicles faintly changing shape. Beyond the room, out in the dark, a car horn sounded encouragement, and the great enduring nation of the wordless silently applauded.

Paul put his head next to his father’s to whisper in his ear, but he did not know what to say. He could stay here and care for his father. He could help his mother. He could marry his wife and raise their son. He could build the things he needed to build. Is this what the world was telling him?

Finally, he said, “Father, what should I do?”

The man did not respond, but the recliner cooed as it fell gently back, unfurling until it lay flat and soft and ready, like a tongue.

Assignment 1: Happier Time

As much as anything really happens, this really did.

It was late spring. I was in that drifting age between the end of college (sophomore year) and the beginning of settling down (the penitentiary), and I had taken to the mountains where my friend Clete said the air was so thin you could skip the huffing and absorb it directly through your pores. Clete was living out of a green VW van that had broken down at a scenic overlook a few miles outside the Colorado ski town of Apex. He had taken the tires off the van to keep it from being towed. Perched on the cliff, it looked primitive and vaguely prehistoric.

The Greyhound driver pulled over for me.

“Don’t get too close to the ledge,” he warned.

Evidently I hadn’t concealed the fact that I was stoned.

Clete sat on the metal railing eating a combination of trail mix and Alpha-Bits from a plastic pouch. He was a big guy with brown hair in bangs across his forehead, a ponytail in the back. His body had an imposing quality, not just because of his size but owing to the confident way he moved through the world.

“I’ve got a kilo of shrooms,” he said by way of greeting, leading me across the highway and up a muddy path.

In the shade of pines, he moved a fallen branch and dug up a bag of psychedelic mushrooms. He kept them separate from the van in case some law officer decided to search his home.

I spread my coat over the grass. The coat was blue and bulky but light—insulated by air—made of a petroleum product impossible to stain. It had so many pockets I’d forget about some for months at a time only to discover an old joint, a dime bag, a novel I was halfway through. The coat dated back to my last visit home. I got distracted on the way, a six-hour drive from the university, and arrived three months late. My parents still had my Christmas presents wrapped in elf-and-reindeer paper. The whole time I was there they complained about their lousy holiday. (As you know, I haven’t seen them since. A person can only apologize so much.) The coat was one of my presents. A man could cross the Arctic in such a coat. It had become my organizing principle. And it was all the luggage I had.

Clete and I plopped our butts on it.

“I recommend this much,” he said and passed me a handful of mushrooms.

It was a hot day, and we stretched out in the shade. Through the trees, we had a view of the highway, the beached van, and the green gorge beyond the railing. Clete and I have been friends for decades. We first met when we were seventh graders. My mother had grown tired of driving me to school when the bus stop was just down the street. Clete was on one knee when I arrived, his chin in his hand. “Spermatozoa are living creatures,” he said, “and we make them.” I did not know his name, and he didn’t know mine. We’d seen each other at school, but we’d never spoken. “They swim, they wriggle, they
seek.
”

“Is this where we catch the bus?” I said.

“That means we have some sense of God in us,” Clete said. “I feel it.” He put his hand over his crotch. “It’s like a bright, tickling light.”

We’ve been friends ever since.

“They’re kind of gritty,” I said, referring to the mushrooms.

Clete shrugged. He had spent the morning in a wildlife center watching a film on lions. “One.” He counted with his fingers. “They sleep twenty hours a day. Two, the females do the hunting while the males snooze. Three, when pursuing prey, they attack the smallest and slowest in a herd—the baby wildebeest, retarded zebra, gimpy antelope. Given this evidence, what do you think the movie was called?”

I pointed to a couple of girls in short pants bicycling past the lookout point, but Clete couldn’t be discouraged. When he got philosophical, there was no stopping him.

“Lion, the Noble Beast.”
He paused to let the irony sink it. “Then I got to thinking how kings just lie around on their royal furniture and tax the peasants. Maybe lions
are
nobility after all.” Clete had never been what anyone would call a good student, but he could be specific in ways most of us couldn’t. “Take lime popsicles,” he continued. “Do they taste anything like actual limes?”

“Have you been eating these all day?”

“I sampled while I was harvesting.”

“You
picked
these?”

“They grow,” he said. “Right out of the ground.”

“Mushrooms can be poisonous, you know.”

I studied the remaining mushrooms in my hand, torn between the idea of a bargain high and the possibility of dying.

“I took a library book with me,” Clete assured me. “They’re perfectly safe.”

“So,” I said, eating another but chewing more slowly, “you’ve got a library card.”

“Everything we have, even the rain, comes from the earth,” he replied. “Except for meteorites and certain toxic gases.” He returned the bag to the hole and used the branch like a broom to disguise the topsoil. “I know where there’s a party,” he said.

We hiked down to the VW. The van had no side windows or seats in the back, just a long floorboard he had covered with foam rubber and shag carpet. I tossed in my coat, Clete locked up, and we headed toward town on foot.

“Where are the tires?” I asked.

“Hidden.” He needed six hundred dollars to rebuild the engine. He didn’t have a job but was saving money anyway. “Walking back and forth to town is good exercise,” he said, “which saves on doctor bills and money that would have gone toward gas if the van was running.”

“We’re making a profit just walking along,” I said.

“Picking mushrooms saves on drugs and groceries.”

“How much actual cash do you have?”

He stuck his hand in his pocket and counted the small wad of bills, plus a few coins. “Twelve dollars and forty-eight cents, but this is a buffalo nickel. I’m saving it.”

“Twelve forty-three then,” I said.

I felt the most inside our friendship when we walked together as we did that afternoon, making plans and bumping shoulders, eating magic mushrooms from our fists, hoping we wouldn’t get poisoned.

“I’ve got about fifty bucks,” I told him. “I’d have more but I gave this woman a necklace when I broke up with her.”

“The one with the parrot?”

“How was I supposed to know it wouldn’t come when it’s called?”

“Parrots don’t know what they’re saying,” Clete said. “They just copy sounds. Humans are the same. We talk in the vague hope of finding out what we mean.”

When we reached Apex, he showed me the library and a bakery that set out day-old pastries in the alley.

“Fires are good for forests,” he said.

I smelled the smoke then. The flames were fifty miles away, but the box canyon that held the town had a roof of smoke. It had a purifying odor. I began to feel tall and rubbery and ready for the next thing. We walked a long distance. At some point, it turned out to be evening. Stars swelled from the dark center of the sky to the toothed ridges of the mountains. All the heat fled the air and I thought to ask, “Where we going?”

Clete pointed to a dark house up the hill. A girl named Val was dog sitting for a family spending the summer in Scotland. It was her party. The house had a peaked roof and plank porch. The windows showed a waffling brightness like the memory of actual light. Some kind of Mary Chapin Carpenter warbled inside, and I had a momentary fear of live music.

Clete didn’t knock. The front room held maybe twenty candles. A boom box sat on a high table, its cord connected to an extension that trailed along the floor, out a window, and across the lawn to a neighbor’s outlet. Clete ejected the tape, which drew applause from guys lounging on the furniture.

“I have
Texas Flood
in my coat,” I said.

“You’re not wearing your coat.” Clete lifted tapes from the scatter on the table and held them next to a candle to read.

I wandered into the kitchen. A bone-thin woman, who turned out to be Val the dog sitter and hostess, was mixing a drink by flashlight.

“Thirsty?” She handed me the drink she was making. “Whiskey and ice is my specialty, and it’s all we’ve got.” She dipped into a plastic cooler for more ice. “These glasses are real crystal,” she added, “but they’re monogrammed. I’m afraid to sell them. It’s a small town.”

“I could sell them for you,” I said. “Nobody knows me.”

“That’s so sweet.” She’d spent the upkeep money the family had left on dope. Once the electricity was cut off, she sold the appliances. She was down to the blender and Toast-R-Oven. “I have to keep the phone on for when they call from Dundee,” she said. She had trained the dogs to bark into the receiver. “I got screwed on the refrigerator.” She had traded it to a guy at the bakery for a cooler of sandwiches. “Never do business when you’re hungry,” she advised. Her mouth was small and almost circular, like a split cantaloupe. She noticed me studying her mouth and kissed me. “Who are you anyway?”

I told her I was Clete’s friend.

“Thank goodness,” she said. “I need his help.” She took another crystal tumbler from the cupboard and filled it with whiskey. “Clete doesn’t take ice for some reason.”

“He doesn’t want to get spoiled,” I explained.

She took the drink to Clete and grabbed his arm, leading us to a room with wood paneling, leather furniture, and no windows—a den. People sat around in candlelight studying a guy in a big chair who was staring out of eyes as distant and hollow as those tunnels that go under bodies of water. Val shone a flashlight on him. He didn’t blink.

“What do we have here?” Clete asked. He knew the guy, whose name was Stu.

A bunch of them had snorted PCP, but Stu had done twice as much as anyone else. Now he wasn’t moving.

“Someone egged him on,” Val said.

She turned a nasty gaze on a guy sitting cross-legged on the couch. His head was narrow in the middle like a partially imploded can. He spoke.

“From now on he’s not Stu, he’s
Stewed.
” His laugh was sniggering and ratchetlike.

Clete asked Val for the name of the laughing man as if he weren’t right there. She answered with the single word “Barnett.”

Clete leaned in next to me but spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. “We may have to teach that one a lesson.”

Barnett quit laughing and drank from a tall glass of something green.

Clete addressed the entire room. “Who, if anyone, knows what PCP is?”

A guy with a headband said he thought the active ingredient had something to do with the manufacture of fluorocarbons.

None of us liked the sound of that.

Clete wanted the full list of Stu’s symptoms.

“He’s grown really quiet,” the headband said. “
Pensive,
I’d say. And he doesn’t move.”

They all looked at Stu but didn’t know what they were seeing, as if they had entered a cult and weren’t permitted to understand what was staring them in the face: an unconscious man with his eyes open, sitting upright and rigid in an armchair.

Clete wanted to know how long he’d been like this.

Val checked her wrist. “Oh,” she said, “can it really be ten p.m.?”

“It’s ten to twelve,” I said, showing her. She had confused the hands on her watch. A murmur made its way around the room. Several people counted with their fingers. Stu had been comatose for six to nine hours, depending on which of his fellow travelers you trusted.

Knowing the time earned me credibility in that crowd, but it made me wonder how long Clete and I had walked. I was certain the sun had been up when we started.

Then I asked, “Is there any of that stuff left?”

Barnett answered. “Stewed sucked up the last of it and licked the tray.”

“He doesn’t smell so good,” Clete noted.

“Is there a hospital in this town?” I asked, adding, “I’m new.”

“There’s an on-call doctor,” Val said. “He doesn’t like this kind of thing, though.”

Clete held a stubby candle right up to Stu’s face, staring hard into the wanky eyes. Clete said, “Wilt thou be made whole?”

It got the ratchety laugh from Barnett, but Clete was dead serious. One time in Oregon he asked a highway patrolman who had pulled us over for driving without lights whether he didn’t “relish the dark world.” We spent what they called a cautionary night in jail, but everyone was very nice to us.

Stu made a sudden shuddering movement with the top half of his body. He raised one arm from the chair and held it aloft. Pointing to our hostess, he said, “V-V-V.”

Val, as if to encourage him, tugged at her short skirt, wiggling her butt against her leather chair. The place had great furniture.

A tremor passed through Stu’s arm and made his hand dance, as if he had discovered something miraculous or gotten electrocuted. His face contorted with the effort of speaking.

“V-V-
Val,
” he said at last. His eyes settled on Clete. “Cl-Cl-Cl-
Clete.
”

“Cluck like a chicken,” Barnett yelled.

Clete turned to him. “You should get down on your knees.”

A girl in a tube top and cutoffs called out, “You insensitive bastards!”

We waited for her to follow up, but she just crossed her arms and pulled her feet up onto the couch.

“She can’t mean us,” I said to Clete.

Stu’s trembling finger indicated one person after another, moving around the room, naming the witnesses. He included the dogs, the big blond retriever, Ruff, and the yappy white terrier, Ready. When he came to me, who he didn’t know from Adam, he said, “K-K-Keen.”

That’s how I got this name I still use. To call it an alias is only technically correct.

Eventually I went off to explore. The candlelit house had wild, watery shadows on its walls, a fickle stream of bouncing light and insistent waves of dark, like scales of light on an actual stream. A breeze would agitate the candles, and the walls would become the wide chopping sea. Human forms at the base of the wall, their heads upturned to watch the dreamy business, seemed to be praying. Some of them touched my shoulder or the soft places above my hips and said forgettable things about the brilliant, rocking light.

Later, I got hungry and found a jar of maraschino cherries in the cupboard. I filled my mouth, sweetness trickling down my throat. I thought I might hunt down a bed. In the stairway, I came across the body of a dead girl and swallowed one of the cherries whole. She lay on her back, her head higher than her feet, staring through an open skylight. There were no candles on the stairs. I had to let my eyes adjust. She was dressed in a green tube top and nothing else, but the body seemed innocent, her skin as soft as the cherries that pressed against my tongue.