Read We're All in This Together Online
Authors: Owen King
Leatherneck was sitting on a crate, forlornly eating a hot dog.
"Hey," said Frank.
The snake handler sighed. "The chick with the stroller came back through. You were right—totally fucking batty. I tried to
convince her that it might be cool to get a picture of the Squeezer in the baby carriage, maybe even see if we could get him
to wear the Coke bottle's hat, but it was like talking to a television."
"Yeah," said Frank.
There was a pause; Leatherneck chewed his hot dog, raised an eyebrow. "Don't tell me there's something wrong with your picture."
"No, no, it's fine," said Frank. "I was just wondering, well, I got to thinking about your story. About you and the Squeezer
and your girlfriend."
"It's all true," said Leatherneck. "What else you want to know?" He stood up, glanced around to make sure no one was watching,
and disposed of the remaining segment of hot dog and bun by dropping it into a nearby plant pot. He came back and stood in
front of Frank with his arms crossed.
"I couldn't figure how you got him through customs. The Squeezer, I mean."
"What?"
"He's an exotic animal, right? That's not legal, is it?"
"Sure it is," said Leatherneck. "Just had to lay some cash down. It's a different world over there. They don't accept American
Express, if you know what I'm saying."
"What about your girlfriend?"
"She took a hike, got her ass on the first plane back to the States and away from me. I was ready to kick ass. Probably went
home to mommy. Anything else you wanna know, Sherlock?"
"What happened to the witch?"
Leatherneck drew a thumb across his throat.
"You killed him?"
"I'm not saying that I killed him." Leatherneck paused. Even his goatee looked fake, Frank thought, with that fine white line.
"But I will say that Julius prefers the finer meats, as opposed to rats and birds."
Frank felt himself break into a wide grin.
Their eyes met; the snake handler's were green and soft, lake pebbles flashing under clear water.
Frank broke the gaze, glancing at the ink ghost of the old tattoo on Leatherneck's forearm. A small, careful gnome, blowing
a long smoking pipe. The cloud of expelled smoke spelled a word: WOODSTOCK.
"No, you didn't," said Frank, "you didn't kill anyone. No way, I don't believe you." He was surprised at his own voice, and
uttered a nervous giggle, meaning to sound friendly. Although he wasn't exactly sure that he felt friendly to the man who
had tried to pass off the ridiculous story, like Frank was a moron. "And that snake
isn't
from Costa Rica," he added. "No way, Jose."
Leatherneck rolled his eyes. He let his head fall back, so that he stared up at the ceiling. The stubble on his neck was stiff,
and rat black. Bringing his hand close to Frank's face, he gave him the finger. There was a moon of black dirt beneath the
long fingernail. "Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." He said it like he was singing to himself.
Frank took a step back.
The snake handler grunted disgustedly, and sat down on his crate.
Frank plunged his hands in his pockets, searching for the five dollars he still had left. "I'll get another Polaroid," he
said.
"Nope, get lost, fuck off," he said. "I don't need any smartass kid shit." He made a sweeping gesture. "Fuck off. Begone."
Frank walked off, checking back over his shoulder as he walked away: the snake trainer didn't watch him go, just sat chewing
a fingernail and looking pissed. The snake was still curled thickly around the same wooden beam, unmoving, eyeless.
It was after four, and the light was failing. His father had promised to pick him up around closing time at five o'clock.
Only a dozen or so cars were parked in the lot. Another busy shopping day at the Reagan Mall. The wind spun wrappers and leaves
across the parking lot. Frank hugged himself as he crossed the pavement.
The driver's side door of the Impala was locked with rust, but with a wrenching creak, Frank dislodged the back door and slid
inside. The ancient, torn leather of the interior crackled under his weight. There was a pervasive scent of urine.
From the bottom of his backpack he withdrew the zippered plastic bag with the two joints. Stretching out, he lay on the backseat
and fired one up. Frank took a long pull and blew smoke at the dirty felt ceiling of the car.
He had busted an old hippie for lying. It had been a nasty thing to do, Frank thought. Leatherneck wasn't really like his
father, he was just a guy trying to make a living. A part of Frank wished that a cop would come along and haul him off for
possession. On the ceiling of the Impala he could make out grubby fingerprints.
Someone had driven the car, driven it a long way, from dentist appointments to malls to schools to who knew where else. Driven
until the Impala rusted and wouldn't drive anymore. Finally, it had stopped and that was all. Just stopped.
His father wasn't going back to finish his Ph.D., and this car was never driving anywhere again. And that was okay, maybe.
You just had to be honest about it.
A tapping on the glass woke him. It was dark, and it took Frank a moment to remember that he was in the abandoned car in the
parking lot of the mall. He had fallen asleep and now it was time to go home.
He sat up groggily and flexed his hand, which was sore. The joint had burned down to a cinder after he drifted off. His backpack
thumped onto the floor of the car.
The door of the Impala opened from the outside and a man's head stuck itself through. It wasn't his father, but Leatherneck,
the snake handler.
"Oh," Frank said. "Hey."
"What are you doing, brother?" A cigarette glowed in Leatherneck's mouth. His breath was white in the night air. He wore a
tight black winter stocking hat. "It's cold as fuck."
"I fell asleep," said Frank. "My dad was going to pick me up. He had a football game. I must have missed my ride."
"You want a lift?"
Frank rubbed his eyes and shivered. He blinked at the older man. Leatherneck grimaced. "I'm not going to rape you, kid," he
said. "But I'm not going to stand out here, either. Your call."
The snake handler closed the door and walked off, boots jingling.
After waiting long enough to show he wasn't desperate, Frank gathered his stuff and climbed from the abandoned car, not bothering
to close the door. The long black van—that must have been his with the light on—was only a couple of empty parking spaces
away.
Leatherneck pushed open the door for him. "Hop up," he said. Inside, the radio was blasting classic rock, galloping guitar
solos and a charging bass line.
Frank climbed the step. Immediately, he felt his cheeks tightening in the sudden warmth. The vibration of the big-watted stereo
rumbled through the seat. He raised his voice to be heard. "You like a lot of heat, huh?"
"That's how it's got to be for the Squeezer." Leatherneck smiled at Frank and put a hand on the teenager's shoulder. "Say,
I thought I smelled the distinct tang of some domestic bud in the back of that hulk. Don't suppose you'd care to roll another
one before we drive you home?"
Frank laughed. "Sure, okay."
Leatherneck pointed an elbow at the back of the van. "Let's retire to the Enchanted Garden." A homemade wall of plywood separated
the cab from the body of the van. The snake handler slipped between the seats and opened the narrow door set in the middle
of the wall. "Close it behind you," he said.
Frank followed, crouching through, and shut the door as he was told.
The walls of the van were obscured by a small jungle, slick twisted branches and heavy green and glazed leaves, a few small
flowers, all glowing under a low purple light. Frank stood for a moment, startled by the change in environment. The music
hummed through the plywood and filled the tight space. He recognized a long, dark tube lying on one branch, shrouded in foliage:
it was Julius Squeezer, or some part of him.
"Let's fire that bad boy up," said Leatherneck, sitting down on the leaf-strewn floor. He put on his highwayman sunglasses
and rubbed his hands together.
Leatherneck patted the floor. "Sit, sit."
Frank shrugged off his backpack and rummaged through it for the joint.
"So, the old man forgot you, huh?"
"Yeah. He's a drunk." Frank lit the joint. It was like a sauna inside the van. He felt sweat gathering under his shirt collar.
He took a drag and passed it.
"Shit. Forget I mentioned him." Leatherneck didn't sound overly concerned, though.
Leatherneck took a deep pull and hung on to the smoke for a long minute before releasing it. The snake handler cackled. "This
is some fucking schwag all right."
Frank grinned.
"I'll tell you what, my man, you're young to be such a ballbuster." Leatherneck sucked on the roach.
"I didn't mean to. I just couldn't help it," said Frank. "I can't stand lying, you know."
The big man passed the roach. "Well, fuck you very much. I thought it was a perfectly good story."
Frank tried to take in some more smoke, but started to cough.
"It is true that the guy I bought the snake from was Costa Rican. Or half Costa Rican or something. He was foreign, anyhow.
And my girlfriend wished it would bite me. That part was true, too. I will admit, though, that I was the jackass who thought
it was a viper."
"Whatever," said Frank. "It doesn't matter. I can be an asshole." He coughed, once, twice, and caught his breath.
Leatherneck took a fresh hit. A new song came on. "The Allmans," he groaned. "Ah, fuck, I hate dead bands. This just gets
me down."
The coughs were flapping in his chest, but Frank held it in. He breathed deeply; the air was wet and smoky. The good feeling
was already hitting his brain, lifting everything up, brightening the corners.
There was a quiver of movement, a shift in the long shape on the branch.
"This place is amazing," said Frank.
"Nothing but the best for the Squeezer," said Leatherneck. Frank watched Julius Squeezer slither along a branch, rattling
the leaves. The reptile's skin flashed and warped with reflected light, and Frank thought of an old Cadillac, restored, all
the chrome buffed.
"You're a good kid, Frank. Only sale I made all day. You didn't even want a Polaroid. I could see that. You were just being
cool, that's all. Your dad is missing out." Leatherneck blew rings of marijuana smoke.
"He's okay," said Frank, hearing his voice from a distance. The snake whispered smoothly back along the branch. "He takes
me bowling. He's got some good stories."
"Hey, that's something," said Leatherneck.
The snake's eyes were finally visible, yellow flashing purple flashing yellow, as it wound down the bole of a tree, moving
with the effortless consistency of water finding its way. It was real, it was alive. Frank reached out to touch it.
When my wife left me for another man I called my brother Wayne.
"I can't work, I can't sleep," I said. "If I was an essay I would have no thesis, no conclusion. I'd fail a student for producing
something like me." I used to be a history teacher. I was crying.
I had an image of a parade, one of those ragged, snaking affairs that trickles through brick-hearted middle American towns
on the Fourth of July: starting with the fire trucks and the police cars and the harvest float with the pretty girls wearing
costume shop overalls and chewing on big pieces of straw; and then come the war veterans in their pressed blues and top-down
convertibles, and the pomp of the high school marching bands in their white boots and spangles, trombones stabbing and batons
twirling; but after that the procession begins to grow uneasy, because the labor guys are next, strutting and drinking from
paper bags, trying to knock off each other's mesh baseball caps, throwing pennies at the ass of the fat boy with the bass
drum at the back of the band; and following them are the doom-faced Little Leaguers with their stirrups yanked up to their
knees, and the tiny, dazed ballerinas; and their parents keep pace, shoving down the crowded sidewalk like federal agents
in an action movie, snapping pictures and occasionally leaping into the street to grab someone's shoulder and give it a firm
shake of warning; and finally it dwindles to a freak show of uninvited tagalongs, halfway house loonies signed out for the
afternoon and waving around their ice cream cones, street kids throwing snapdragons and shouldering into parked cars to set
off the alarms, and, worst of all, the disciples of the local religious sect, dressed in black ties and handing out intricate
diagrams of the secret universe that lies beneath our own, like the table beneath the cloth; and at the parade's end, there
stumbles a filthy busker, crowing "Love Me Do," over and over again, up and down every street; all of these poor people, growing
blisters and getting sunburned, acting as if they were actually going
to
someplace, and not just to the last stop sign in town. I saw my life dragging on the same way, through years and holidays.
I saw myself marching in a parade that no longer existed.
"I am going to die alone," I said to my brother.
"No," said Wayne.
An ancient sexual episode suddenly came to mind, from college, when we first moved in together. My future wife had come home,
and she was intoxicated, absolutely ripped, out of her mind. Without saying anything, she pushed me onto the couch, dropped
between my knees. Then, as she fellated me, she began to laugh, and then to hum and garble, "Love Me Do."
At the memory, I felt my gorge rise.
"I'm not going to die alone?" I asked. "What, are you coming over to watch?"
"You are not going to die, period," said Wayne. "But I am coming over. To help you pack. We have to go Starke, Florida, to
get a car."
It was Wayne's plan to drive to Starke in his mustard-colored Chevy Malibu, sell it, and drive back to Maine in the mint condition
1974 black Jaguar convertible that was waiting for him. I wanted to know how Wayne could afford a mint condition 1974 black
Jaguar convertible. There had to be a catch, I said. I was a cuckold; I knew about catches.
"Your problem is superstition," said Wayne. "Don't get me wrong. You have a lot of other problems, like your haircut, and
your wife fucking around, but superstition is the elephant in the room." My brother was on the other end of a phone, in his
rented room at the YMCA, but I could see him, relaxing with one hand on his crotch and the other on the rod of the Venetian
blinds, flicking it back and forth, turning the street on and off like a light switch. Wayne could do that. He was overweight;
he was bankrupt, had always been bankrupt, in every sense; he was tattooed and divorced, poorly read and hepatitis-B positive;
he was the last man in the Western world to wear a handlebar mustache with non-ironic intentions; he was my older brother,
and the only human being I had ever known who was capable of existing in a state of absolute certainty, who never suffered
a single misgiving, who never faltered.
"I love you," I told him. I had stopped crying, but now I started again.
Wayne explained that the town of Starke was the seat of the Florida electric chair, and the car belonged to Virgil Pendergast—the
so-called Sportscar Splatterer—a psychopath of no small renown. Four summers earlier the Sportscar Splatterer had run down
three squeegee men in Tampa before a neighbor spied Virgil Pendergast out in his driveway, digging clotted meat from the grille
of his Jaguar. "I woulda thought he just hit a deer or some other varmint," said the neighbor in a newspaper account, "but
I was pretty sure I saw a finger sticking out of the grille." (In fact, it was a thumb.)
Despite having been used as a ram, my brother informed me, the car was hardly nicked. "Pendergast was a superior body mechanic.
Hitting a human being at sixty or seventy miles an hour can really do a number on an automobile, but he did an incredible
job maintaining the chassis. It's a peach, Stan. I'll show you photos."
The genesis of the deal came about in an on-line chatroom for the relatives of serial killers, where Wayne befriended Pendergast's
wife, Yolanda.
"What kind of a place is that to go looking for conversation?"
"I thought I would find some interesting viewpoints."
"Jesus, Wayne, do you even know if that could be considered a violation of your parole?"
"I know that if someone tries to tell me who I can or cannot talk to, it'll be a violation of my fucking civil rights."
I continued to cry.
"It's fine," said Wayne. "My parole officer buys pot from me. We went to see String Cheese Incident together. I'm not going
back to jail."
"I don't care if you go back to jail."
"Hey. Fuck you."
"I can't stop. I wake up this way."
"You want a reason to cry? Cry about the car. I did. This car is a hard-on with wheels. When I saw the photos I cried like
I caught my dick in a zipper."
Several collectors of serial killer memorabilia had made Yolanda Pendergast substantial offers for her husband's Jaguar, but
she didn't want to profit from the murders. Now, with the execution scheduled for April 1, she was holed up in Starke until
the big date. Yolanda's offer to Wayne was to sell the car for half its estimated value on the vintage car market, so long
as he never attempted to cash in on its history.
I wanted to tell my wife about Wayne's latest crazy scheme. My wife loved Wayne. "Why can't you have a little levity, like
your brother?" she used to ask me. But my wife was gone. There was only an empty kitchen to relate the story to.
"Okay," I said to Wayne, "I'll go with you to Starke."
We took 1-95 down the East Coast. It was early spring. We drove with the windows open to try and blow out the dead raccoon
smell.
Before going to prison, Wayne parked his car at the end of a fire road and concealed it in a stand of underbrush. But something
about the four pounds of Northern Lights in the trunk proved irresistible to the local raccoon population, and they chewed
their way into the Malibu's trunk. Three months later, upon his parole, Wayne returned to find the weed devoured—and a half-dozen
overdose victims in various states of decomposition in the Malibu's trunk, (After initially recounting this tragedy, Wayne
had asked me, sounding very casual, "Do you think it's wrong—I mean, morally wrong—to try smoking, like, only a small portion
of a dead body?")
This was not the first time that my brother had been involved in the gruesome death of an animal: as a kid, Wayne had been
something of a prodigy, and he used to fashion circuits from tinfoil and pen parts, and shock the dog. Once, he built an electric
mousetrap and it electrocuted a mouse exactly the way it was supposed to. The smoke cleared, and Wayne and I stood there,
appalled, watching the tiny creature sizzle.
As we drove south to collect the condemned man's car, I thought about the raccoons and the smoldering mouse. Zooming through
Worcester in a downpour, I gazed out at the muddy hills and the needles of the churches. On higher ground, a factory chimney
jutted up, gushing pillows of white smoke. I thought about cremation. I thought about leaving a request in my will for Wayne
to roll my ashes into a joint, and smoke me. Would I become a part of Wayne? Would I drift into the atmosphere and become
pollution? Would I become a piece of someone's cancer? I had a lot of thoughts like these. At rest stop urinals I felt an
urge to push men for no reason, and whenever I saw a skinny woman I imagined what it would be like to kiss her.
And I thought about my wife, and her lover, a man named Albert Michalkiewicz. He was a baker. My wife and I used to eat his
bread with almost every meal: wheels of hard-shelled French country rounds and soft, lumpy asteroids of black rye that lingered
on the palette with soporific sweetness. I loved his bread; he loved my wife. "These things happen," she said.
On my worst night—drunk, but not really drunk—I had called her phone at work after hours and played a complete recording of
"Love Me Do" into her voice mail and made crazed slurping noises.
Wayne punched my shoulder to snap me out of it. "What do you think this is about, Stan? Do you think this is about love? Do
you think she left you because she loves this guy?"
That was, in fact, what my wife told me. "I love another man," she said, and then, "These things happen."
"These things happen," I repeated to my AP American history class when I announced my leave of absence. "But I know that my
wife will get better. These mental illnesses are not the locked door they once seemed to be." A couple of my students were
teary-eyed from the story of my wife's condition, the hallucinations, how I fended her off, how I visited her every day and
brought her coloring books. "But I want you to know that I'm truiy sorry to be leaving you all before the end of the semester.
You're a first-rate bunch of kids. A goddamned first-rate bunch."
"That's what she said, that she loved him." Baltimore was bristling up around the Chevy's windows, miles of windowpanes and
billboards of giant, smiling heads.
"Negative," said Wayne. "That ain't it."
"What, then?" I asked.
"For the thrill of it, Stan. For the screwing-on-top-of-the-chopping-board-and-then-running-around-naked, squealing-and-smearing-jelly-and-powdered-sugar-all-over-each-other,
pigging-out-and-getting-fucked thrill of it. Plain decadence, sib, that's all it is."
He swung over to the breakdown lane and decelerated so I could vomit and not get too much on the side of the Chevy.
"Do you think she's going to want to spend the rest of her life with a man who gets up at four in the morning every day? A
man who could drop dead tomorrow, and if you dug him up in twenty years, he would still smell like yeast?"
We drove in silence for several hours and now I was left to contemplate grave robbing, someone pulling my corpse from a casket.
"Aw, Christ! This one reeks of solidity," said one of the thieves in my mind, a handkerchief clutched to his mouth. That was
what people said about me: "Stan, he's solid. He's someone you can count on." I thought that my wife had grown lonely; or
maybe she just grew bored, which was surely worse. I worked, and I tried, and I always shared the television controller. "Put
him back," said the other body snatcher in my mind, "He's worthless," and I watched the thieves scurry down the garden row,
to the richer tomb of a squeegee man.
At a campsite that night, my brother and I smoked marijuana with a retired couple from Reno who were on their way home after
visiting relatives on Prince Edward Island. "My sister's in a home there," explained the old man. "Woke up one day and her
memory stopped at age ten. Thinks I'm our father and FDR's president."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Why?" asked the retired man. "She's happy. She's daddy's little girl again. Think about it. She's got her whole life in front
of her."
Wayne told them the old nugget about his two-year acid trip, Austin and Belize and the remote Utopian settlement of the deaf
where a couple of corrupt policia had stranded him after a trumped-up disorderly charge. "You don't just go bulling into some
strangers' Utopia, you know? It pisses people off. Even a bunch of very mellow deaf people with a huge organic farming operation.
So, I was on a short leash from the get-go.
"And, meanwhile, all over the place, I'm being constantly distracted by these tiny animals that no one else can see."
"Been there," said the retiree, and then used his hand to demonstrate the way a tiny, invisible animal would come after you.
"Grrr, grrr," he said, snapping his hand at Wayne's knees.
Wayne nodded. "Yup. I hate that shit."
I woke near dawn, stumbled from the Winnebago, and pissed on woodchips. When I finished, almost without thinking about it,
I started to masturbate, still half asleep and propped with an elbow against a birch tree.
A few years before, I had had an affair with the mother of a student. I didn't tell anyone. She was not a pretty woman, not
even remotely good looking. The second time we had sex was on my desk after the school was closed. Her heaving body pinned
me across an open-mouthed stapler. The pain was incredible. After that I ended it.
While I masturbated, I envisioned the same scenario, but this time it was my wife who slammed my back onto the stapler.
The sun, cold and smoldering, slowly ascended the trees. The light fell on me, on the trees, and on Wayne's camouflage tent.
I nerved up and went limp.
I wanted to see Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered to Grant. At some point, years before, I'd had the idea I might
like to write a book about the Civil War, but I never could settle on a subject. My wife thought it was something I could
do, if I put my shoulder to it. Now, of course, I knew better.
We spent the night at a Motel 6 with a plaster statue of Lee in the parking lot, gallant on a rearing Traveler.