Saturday, June 18, 2011

Charlie and Wade

“You’re a real stand-up guy, you know it?”

     “Cut it out.”

     “I’m serious, you are. I tell everybody I know. Old Fatty’s a real hero. A prince among men. I’m damn proud to know you.”

     Wade said nothing. Counting to ten, letting it pass. He had the Serenity Prayer wrapped so tight around his cerebral cortex this past week it would have taken dynamite to get it off. Would have taken more than this, anyway. This he’d heard before.

     “We’ll be there soon enough.”

     The clouds hung low and they’d been fighting the rain all the way down from Plattsburgh that morning. Wade had found his brother the night before. It had taken him most of the afternoon but it wasn’t all that tough. Didn’t take a genius. He knew the kind of places to look. Find the bus station, work his way out in concentric circles through every bar and waffle house until he eventually found Charlie hunched over his drink and his Chesterfields and never once surprised to see him. Didn’t matter where, all these River Valley towns had the same basic layout. The Four Roses in New Paltz, Ruby’s Tap in Maltaville. Wade always found him eventually. He was an old hand.

     “Swear to God I don’t even recognize you anymore, Fatty. You look good.”

     “I am good.”

     “So I see. So I see. Used to be there was a time, you’d come crawling in all beat up. Just beat to shit. Worse than me, even.”

     “That’s true.”

      “You were your own worst enemy.”

     “That was a long time ago, Charlie.”

     “Amen.”

     “People change.”

     “Amen to that, Brother. Amen to that.”

     They were passing through familiar territory, though Wade couldn’t say he ever liked it much. They used to come up here when they were kids. Spend weekends driving up around the lakes, digging for arrowheads in the woods while their father sat in the car and smoked. Sayerville, Hastings, Granite Falls. This stretch of highway always got to Wade, even then. The way the trees seemed to close in all around him. The way they seemed to shut out the sun. Even in the back seat of their father’s Plymouth Valiant, his nose in a comic book and his brother asleep, Wade couldn’t wait to get through it.

     “I guess when they sent you up here they knew what they were doing, huh? Guess they had it all figured out. Would’ve loved to hear that conversation, all of you sitting around the kitchen table. Holding hands. Did they make you pray, Fatty? Would’ve loved to hear that. How’s old Lois doing, anyway? She still bat-shit crazy as ever?”

     “She worries about you.”

     “I doubt that, Wade. I doubt that one sincerely.”

     “Believe what you want.”

     Charlie had a wife downstate who believed in angels and a daughter named Becca he never saw. Wade would get phone calls from them once in a while, every couple of months, usually about money they needed right away or legal threats they didn’t understand. They swung from one emergency to the next, and Wade avoided them as much as he decently could.

     “Oh yeah? And what about you, Fatty?” Charlie turned to his brother. “You worry about me, too?”

     “I try not to,” Wade said, shifting back into silence. Shifting his attention to the taillights in front of him.

     “Goddamn,” Charlie said after a minute, turning away again. “Goddamn.”

     There was a woman waiting for Wade back home, waiting for his phone call when this whole thing was over. Not that this was anything Wade was prepared to bring up now. There had been women before. Some serious. One he had even thought he’d marry, back before things got so out of hand. But that was Wade’s life, his business and his business alone. Some things Charlie didn’t need to know. His new friend’s name was Anne and that was a phone call he was looking forward to making.

     Charlie had a smell to him now, Wade couldn’t deny it. Something inside it was too late to cure, something chemical. The kind of smell that doesn’t wash off. Thirty years more or less had taken its toll. Indestructible blue-eyed boy, trophies on the shelf. They grew up in the same bedroom and now Wade could barely stand it.

     “Charlie…” he said, but Charlie had fallen asleep again already, head back and mouth open, a thousand miles away.


“Eat something, I’ve got money.”

     “Not really hungry.”

     “Eat something.”

     And once Charlie started eating he couldn’t seem to stop. Strips of bacon and fat round sausages, mountains of hash browns and eggs over easy. Corned beef hash. Whole-wheat toast and strawberry jelly. The waitress was keeping herself at a safe distance from him, clutching the laminated menus tight across her chest, handing the food over cautiously when their orders came up. And she was right to be careful. Charlie had a way of going off on people. You had to watch him, you always did. You’d be fine, everybody laughing and drinking and having fun, and he could just turn on a dime. Wade had seen some things. Broken glass and crying girls and blood. Wade had seen some terrible things around Charlie.

     And it was only once they got out of the car, once they sat down surrounded by standard Saturday afternoon families, that Wade realized just how ragged his brother had become. Long hair matted back out of his red-rimmed eyes, accidental beard going gray. Fingernails dirty. Yellow, long and cracked. Old camouflage army jacket caked in dirt, ripped through at the collar. Painfully thin to look at. His brother looked savage, like something dragged out of the woods. Wade studied Charlie and Charlie looked away.

     “Shit, Fatty…”

     He had a bluebird tattooed to the web of skin between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, and that was new. That Wade hadn’t seen.

     “Oh, yeah. You like that? That’s my little California bluebird.”

     “California?”

     “San Francisco, yeah. Was living out there for a while.”

     “I didn’t know that. When were you out there?”

     “There’s some things you don’t know.”

     The waitress came by with the coffee pot in her hand and Charlie pushed his cup across the table towards her. “Please,” he said.

     “So how was San Francisco?”

     “Well, nobody had flowers in their goddamn hair, if that’s what you mean.” Charlie shoveled in another forkful of hash, speared a triangle of toast into the yoke of his egg. “Complicated. San Francisco was complicated.”

     “Complicated how?”

     Charlie looked up from across the table. He shook his head.

     “You’re not really one for letting things lie, are you, Fatty?”

     Wade tried to meet his brother’s stare, couldn’t. Charlie went back to his food.

     “Anyway, not like it matters much. Six months later I was right back here, same old shit. And that part of the story you already know.”

     Wade got the phone call three afternoons before, the phone call he used to get all the time but now only a couple of times a year. The heavy liquid voice of his brother drunk. Car towed in, police up his ass. Some new variation of the same basic theme. This time Glens Falls, and fast. Good old Fatty to the rescue. He’d explain when he saw him. By the time Wade got there, Charlie was gone, and when he found him he didn’t explain a thing. There’d be a time when the phone calls wouldn’t come at all anymore, and that’s how Wade would know.

     “How’s Becca?”

     “She’s, you know…” Wade shrugged. “She’s alright. I guess she’s alright.”

     “Boyfriends, school? Stuff like that?”

     The last time Wade saw his niece she was dressed all in black and he suspected she was high as a kite. Though it was hard to know what counted as high anymore. She was sitting on the couch next to Lois, black hood of her sweatshirt pulled up around her face, staring at the TV and flipping through the eight hundred channels they had without saying a word. He saw her sometimes at the mall in Nanuet, hanging around the Wishing Well with a whole crew of kids who looked just like her. Big heavy boots laced up to their knees, black jeans and black sweatshirts and black hair hanging down over their eyes. Studs and nails poking out of their faces. And she either didn’t recognize Wade or pretended not to. Either one was fine by him.

     “She’s sixteen, Charlie. Who knows how she is?”


“You know, Charlie, it’s not too late. It’s not too late to turn all this around.”

     Charlie pushed his plate away from him and looked up across at his brother.

     “Here we go,” he said.

     “I’m serious, it’s not. I was worse, you said it yourself.”

     “Wade? Wade, don’t start this shit.”

     “Just…”

     “Wade, I’m saying...”

     “Just hear me out.”

     “I’ve…” And then Charlie slammed his palm down on the table so hard the silverware danced and the tables around them went silent.

     “Come on, easy.”

     “I heard you, Wade. Goddamn it, I heard you. Been listening to this same fucking Vince Lombardi shit for… Goddamn it, I heard you.”

     “OK, OK. Eat your food, Charlie.”

     “Goddamn it, Wade…”

     “Calm down. Just calm down.”

     Wade reached about the halfway across the table, but then the waitress was there and Charlie pulled his arm back and Wade let it go.

     “Is everything all right over here?”

     “Everything’s fine.”

     “More coffee?”

     “We’re fine.”

     Out in the grass margins of the parking lot Charlie puked up everything he had eaten. One hand up against a tree, his body fighting against itself. Wade sat behind the wheel of his car, waiting. Engine running, radio on low, looking away. When he was done, Charlie spit a couple of times to clear his mouth, then climbed into the car without a word. He was asleep almost immediately. Wade cracked a window open against the smell and pulled back out onto the highway.


Two kids in a room, seven and ten. One sick and scared, fever, hot and freezing cold. In bed for a week and not knowing what was what. Not knowing one day from another. His mother walking him to the bathroom and him shaking as he sat. He remembered the smell. Not knowing when he was awake and when he wasn’t. Faces coming to him, ceiling, in and out. Mother, father, doctor, ceiling. In and out. Mother, father. Cold palm against his forehead, rings colder than the rest. Shivering and shaking in his NFL pajamas. His brother gone and his parents terrified. Terrified for Wade, terrified for Charlie. Terrified the illness would spread. Forty years ago, and it felt like four hundred. Felt like a thousand. Another life, and two other people. Two other people, and both of them gone.

     He kept a bed now, just in case. He knew the odds were stacked against it ever happening, but he kept a bed just in case. Clean sheets, a change of clothes, a list of people to call. That’s all it was, steps. You do this, you don’t do that. Steady steps in the right direction. Wade could help him if he ever got the chance, he knew the terrain. He had mapped out the terrain already.


“Up here’s good.”

     “Here? Up where?”

     Wade looked out through the windshield and there was nothing. Highway, trees, deep embankment. Somewhere south of Palatine, he wasn’t really sure. They hadn’t passed an exit for miles.

     “Up here’s close enough.”

     Another few hours and they’d be home. The trees would give way to buildings again and the roads would widen out. Car lots and gigantic flags. They’d back on terra firma, they’d be fine. But Wade knew better than to argue with his brother, so he slowed to a stop on the side of the road.

     “Why don’t you come with me, Charlie? Check in, get cleaned up a little? See Becca, why not?” Wade stared out through the windshield, not daring to turn his head.

     “I don’t think so, Wade.”

     “A couple of days, why not?”

     For a while, Charlie didn’t say anything, but then finally he shook his head.

     “I don’t think that’ll work. Thank you, though. No, this is fine.”

     Charlie opened the car door.

     “At least let me take you into town.”

     “I’m good, Fatty. I’m good.”

     “You need some money?”

     Charlie said nothing. Looked down at the bluebird tattoo on his hand. Wade reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

     “Well, shit, Fatty. You know me…”

     “Here, take it. It’s, uh…” Wade took everything but twenty dollars, folded it over and handed it to Charlie. “Not sure how much is there.”

     Charlie nodded, saying nothing. He took the money and put it in the breast pocket of his camouflage jacket.

     “I’ll get you back.”

     Charlie opened the car door, and for a minute Wade thought he was going to run, but he didn’t. He just sat there, staring out through the windshield at the highway ahead. The door eased closed again.

     “What’re you going to tell them?” He asked finally.

     “What’s it matter? Tell them I couldn’t find you, I guess. Tell them something.”

     Charlie nodded, opened the door again, and this time he climbed out. 

     “I’ll be seeing you, Charlie.”

     “Don’t doubt it.”

     Wade tooted the horn as he passed his brother on the side of the road, and Charlie shot up a little wave. A few seconds later he was gone.


Sunday, April 17, 2011

Like a Train

Last time I saw him alive he was wired, he was flying. Last time I saw him alive we were sitting across from each other back at The Cattleman's. He had just come through a real rough time with some girl I'd never met. The kind of rough time that guts you from the inside out, rips all your directions right off the map. At least that's how he described it. He was reeling.

He sat in the red naugahyde booth, pouring salt out all over his bacon and eggs, stirring sugar into his tea. Staring out wounded and amazed. This girl had hit directly home. She hit home in a way he hadn't wanted and couldn't have expected. He never saw it coming, and swore he would have run ten miles in the opposite direction if he had. This girl ran over him like a train.

He was looking worse for wear, no question. Long hair dirty and hanging loose, nails cracked and hands shaking, thin as a whippet. I saw the waitress sizing him up as she approached the table, the laminated menus held tight across her chest. He was sweating in the air-conditioned cool of the place, he was thumping the table with one knotty fist, and she didn't want any trouble. Last time I saw him alive.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Serious Girl, Pt. 1

They met only briefly, when they were both on their way somewhere else. He was lost, he'd be the first to admit it. Trying to make the best out of a bad situation. He didn't speak the language, which to him sounded like someone dragging a stick across an old picket fence. It had this strange chopping rhythm he couldn't begin to attach any real meaning to. On top of that, the maps were a mystery to him. He'd been lost before. He'd driven through rural Mexico on half a tank of gas and gotten though alright. But this was a different story. Here he couldn't really negotiate the day-to-day. He thought he had North and South worked out, he was pretty sure he had at least that much, but then he'd hit the side of a church when he was expecting the riverbank. He'd find himself standing in the middle of a park somewhere miles off-course. The novelty of the situation was wearing perilously thin.

Most of the others had thrown in the towel already, retreating into the relative safety of CNN and the hotel bar. They'd drink down huge glasses of cheap pilsner and local rum and watch looping reels of disaster footage until it was time to stagger back to their rooms upstairs. He could see why, he wasn't blind to the appeal of giving up, but he wasn't ready yet. So he zipped up his jacket and headed out the door.

The city had a real problem with fires, she explained. Every few blocks and there'd be another monument to some poor guy who went up in flames. She'd translate it for him and he'd do his best to keep up. The Catholics set fire to the Protestants over here, a few yards from where the Turkish t-shirt vendor was standing now. Down the street the police set fire to the Jews. The Nazis rolled in and set fire to pretty much everything on that side of the river and then the Russians came in and torched all the bridges. The Americans never set any fires, she told him. They never needed to.

She was tall and thinner than he could fathom. She had spent some time in Chicago a long time ago, she said, but she was too young to know what a long time was. She had a real flair for self-dramatization. She wore a blue raincoat and strange chunky shoes, made her eyes up like Cleopatra. She drank gin out of the bottle she carried around in her bag and he suspected she was insane. She had this way of keeping him at a distance without keeping him away. He knew what she was doing but he didn't quite know how, and he didn't mind as much as he might have. They met at the castle gates. Met where they first met, where they always met.

She had a brother. She had a mother. Had he ever been to Chicago? What was his wife like? He hadn't mentioned a wife. She reminded him of a girl he knew a long time ago. A girl he used to go to the movies with once upon a time. They'd sit in the back rows of Cinema Village, holding hands and sharing a pack of Camels. Back when things were like that. But that girl was as all-American as the day was long, Boston cheerleader with a broken nose, and this girl was anything but.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Coeur d'Alene

He climbed out of the Chevy with a gun in his hand I recognized the weapon immediately it was the one his Dad brought back from the war. Climbed out of the car with this dazed look in his eyes and kinda stood there staring up at the house for a while he knew she was in there and he looked insane. Looked like an old dog, to tell you the truth, like some old dog been kicked in the ribs one time too often. Chevy's engine ticking over, cowbirds circling high up in the sky above. He stood there with that gun in his hand, didn't know what to do.

Her brothers stood together behind the screen door. Her mother screamed "GET DOWN!" and hid praying under the bed but she didn't she just stood there. Just stood there at the window upstairs. Stood there in the room where she grew up, where she hung posters on the wall, where she spent hours talking to her friends on the telephone, where she studied herself obsessed and uncomprehending in the mirror on the closet door. Room where she first let him in. She stood there with her white fingertips pressed up against the glass. Stood there staring down at him. Stood there still half asleep in her pajamas and she couldn't hardly breathe.

He saw her like she knew he would. His eyes stung, his heart kicked inside his chest hard, kicked inside one two three. He knew he was coming apart. He called out her name but the brothers inside just stared. Big country brothers one hand firm on the door. Now he was there he was lost, her mother still screaming from under the bed.

He blinked. Heard the screen door open and blinked again. He remembered the weight in his hand.

Good Job So Far

How did this happen? What's going on here? One minute you're sitting behind the wheel in an Albertsons parking lot and the next minute you're on your knees in a hotel corridor pleading like a child? Is that the idea? One minute you're pledging your love like Johnny Ace and the next everything's zooming away real fast in the rear view mirror? What's the matter with you, anyway? How old are you? What're you thinking? I'd be lying if I told you I liked it, Buddy. I'd be lying if I told you I was impressed.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

From "The Tourists"

By five o’clock Howard was blasted and Bill wasn’t far behind. Not so blasted they couldn’t talk, couldn’t make sense, but blasted enough. The two Canadian girls were whispering to each other and one of them, the darker one, laughed. They were young. Kids really, younger than Bill’s own daughters. They would have laughed, too.
“Another pint?” Howard leaned into the girls. “Can I buy you ladies another pint?”
“No, thanks,” said the darker one. “Thanks, we’re good.”
“Thanks though,” said the other one.
This was their only night in Dublin, their last night in Ireland, and Bill was glad. Howard was enjoying it, it was more Howard’s speed, but something about the place made Bill uneasy. He felt a little deaf here, like he was always just missing something.
The sun poured in through the windows, and the light made the pub look tatty and old. The walls were an ugly red, like fingernail polish. It was in all the tour books, they recommended the place for its preserved Georgian atmosphere, but it just depressed Bill.
“So what’re you ladies doing here?” Howard was asking them. “What’re you studying?”
“Anglo-Irish Literature,” the lighter one said. “Irish writers.”
“Joyce,” the darker one said. “Mostly Joyce.”
“Hey, that’s great,” Howard said. “That’s great. Can’t understand a word the guy says myself, but still…Cheers!”
Howard drank down his mostly empty pint and set the glass on the bar. He looked for the bartender.
“Are you planning on going back home?” Bill asked them.
“I am,” said the lighter one. “In the fall. But not Beth, she’s staying.”
The darker girl, Beth, nodded earnestly.
“I am home,” she said. “This is home.”
“Well…good luck,” said Bill.
The city looked damaged to him, and he couldn’t imagine anyone staying who could leave. He’d seen a lot of really fucked up kids, ugly beyond their years. He saw kids begging on the street. Everybody was wearing nylon track-suits and cheap gold plated jewelry. He saw lots of Chicago Bulls jerseys, number 23. These kids dressed like the inner city black kids back home, like rappers he saw on MTV. There were other jerseys for teams he didn’t know, Celtic, Newcastle, a lot of Manchester United. His younger daughter, Sarah, had asked him for a Manchester United shirt and a claddagh ring. He’d bought the ring.
Howard was telling the darker girl about Sligo, how they had just come from the “Wild West.” The darker girl smiled politely and nodded.
“That’s Yeats Country,” she said. “That’s where Yeats is buried.”
“That’s right. I believe I read that.”
“It’s beautiful up there.”
“It sure is. It sure is that.”
Howard signaled to the bartender for another round, and the two girls let him. He was hovering between the two girls and they had parted their barstools to make room for him. Bill was happy to stand off to one side.
They were from Toronto, they told Howard. Beth said she hated it there but Jenny said that she missed her folks. Beth rolled her eyes when Jenny said that, and the gesture just drove home how young these girls were.
“Here you are, Sir.” The bartender set down four new pints of Guinness on the counter and Howard paid him.
“We’re a couple of cowboys ourselves,” Howard said. “From out on the open range. Billy here’s from California and I’m from Texas.”
“Where in California?” Jenny asked Bill.
“Hollywood,” Howard jumped in.
“The San Fernando Valley,” Bill amended.
“Oh, I’d love to go there,” Jenny said. “I know it’s tacky, but I love all that stuff. The Chinese Theatre, the Walk of Fame. Star Maps. What do you do out there?”
“I’m an assistant school superintendent.” Bill said.
“Oh,” Jenny said. “Like High Schools?”
“Well, High Schools and other schools.”
“What do you do?” Beth asked Howard.
“Me? I’m a lawyer, oil and gas,” he answered. “I’m yuppie scum. I’m a capitalist pig. SOO-EEE!”
Howard laughed and the girls laughed with him. Beth rolled her eyes again.
After another two rounds the Canadian girls left and Bill was feeling a little sick. It had been a while since he’d eaten anything and this Guinness was giving him a headache. The pub had filled up considerably and the air was blue with cigarette smoke. It was starting to get dark outside.


Three months earlier, Bill had been watching a video with his wife when the phone rang. When he picked it up it was Howard, and Bill couldn’t have been more surprised.
His mom died, Howard said. He was drunk, Bill could hear it over the phone, and his mom had just died.
“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that,” Bill said. His wife looked up at him, wondering what happened, and turned down the TV.
The point was, Howard went on, there was an inheritance. Nothing big, nothing lavish, but some. Let’s blow it, he said. Let’s go to Ireland. It’s time we took a trip to the old country. I’ll look up some relatives. C’mon.
Bill took the phone out to his deck and closed the glass door behind him.
“Howard…” he started in his reasonable voice, in the voice he used with his kids.
“Billy, come on, no shit it’ll be good. My treat.”
Bill could see the orange glow in the sky above Los Angeles. He tried to imagine where Howard was calling from. His living room, probably. In front of the tube, probably playing a western with the sound off. Bill leaned against the railing and watched the last traces of sunlight disappear in the West.
“I don’t know if I can just drop things, Howard.”
“A week, ten days, something like that. In and out. But come on, at least consider it.”
“I don’t know if I can consider it, Howard. This might be a bad time, we have budget meetings. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Exactly! That’s all I ask, think about it. When’s the last time you took a trip? I mean a real trip? What the hell, Billy, you’ve got summers off. Jesus, listen to yourself. Budget meetings. This is the time to act. LA’ll still be there when you get back. We’ll go drive around the countryside, drink whiskey, do all that shit. We’ll have a blast.”
He kept meaning to mention it to Catherine, to introduce it as one of crazy Howard’s crazy ideas, but he kept putting it off. Finally, a week after the phone call and late one night, Bill just said “Howard’s invited me to Ireland for a week. Whaddya think?”
“When?”
“Soon,” he said. “I told him I’d think about it.”
“Well,” she said. “Why don’t you go?”
He had to admit he wanted to. He had been counting on Catherine to talk him out of it, and when she didn’t he had to admit he was tempted.

Howard grew up in East Texas while Bill grew up in Kentucky and only moved West later, in the late Seventies. They kept in touch in a casual way, a phone call every few months, an ironic postcard. Their intense friendship during and right after the war had simmered down over the years into something more manageable.
Back in Vietnam they both drank, they both drank a lot. It was something that bonded them together, even when everybody around them drank themselves into an uneasy and jittery sleep. Inevitably they’d end up the last two at the bottle or the warm case of beer. They’d sit and smoke and drink. They’d listen for explosions and hear only motor scooters zipping down the streets.
After they got home, Howard had a habit of going off. He’d smash up his house, he’d move without warning. He couldn’t blame the war. Howard and Bill spent Vietnam in offices, staying out of trouble. It was all paperwork and headaches. He didn’t know what it was. Bill worried about Howard. He hoped he would settle down, get married and have some kids. Come to ground in the same way Bill had.
But that didn’t happen. Instead Howard became very rich. His father had left him his firm, and to everybody’s surprise Howard was an excellent, cunning, lawyer. He never had the wife, or kids, but he did have a string of girlfriends that Bill and Catherine would sometimes meet. It was quite a life.

When they were in Sligo they found the family Howard was looking for, buried in a run-down plot in the ruins of an abbey. The plots were all around the ruins. The two men were surrounded by walls and walking on graves. Howard ran ahead like an excited school kid, checking the names on the tombstones and moving on to the next plot. Bill would lag behind and look at each one. He’d read off whole families buried beneath him, stretching back over long periods of time. Children, parents, grandparents. There were mementos on some of the plots, weathered beyond immediate recognition. Rosaries, coins, a walking cane. He’d look across the stones and see Howard leaping around like crazy, calling out names.
“O’Brien,” he’d yell. “McGoldrick. McTeirnan. Here it is, man! Holy Shit!”
They were staying in the Abbey Hotel that night, in separate but adjoining rooms. They’d been pretty lucky about that. In Dublin, though, they were sharing a room. They ate dinner there in the hotel bar that night. It was a nice surprise, they both had the lamb and it was delicious. Between the two of them they had managed to finish off two pints before the food had arrived, and finished off their third along with the dinner. They ordered coffee and sat at the table for a long time.
All through the meal Howard had been telling stories of his girlfriends and of their particular ways and habits. Bill had met a few of them in LA, when Howard was in on business. They were all young and stunning to look at, almost embarrassing to look at, actually, and they all disappeared after a year or so. Howard didn’t seem to mind this much.
“Suzi, she was a firecracker. She was a real handful.”
“I don’t think we met Suzi.”
“No, come to think of it, you probably didn’t. But I’ll tell you, Billy, she was a real handful all right. She was a marine biologist.”
“In Texas?”
“Shit yeah, in Texas. She was studying microbiotic shrimp in the Gulf. Something like 40,000 different kinds of microbiotic shrimp floating around out there. She was with some group out of LSU, typifying all these shrimp. Sounds boring, maybe, but I’ll tell you…” he leaned in across the table. “She was a wicked little thing.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Twenty-six years old, and full of imagination.”
Bill turned away from Howard’s leering face and looked around the bar. It was just about all old men, white haired and red faced old guys drinking and watching sports highlights on the TV.
“So what happened to Suzi?”
“Oh, shit, you know. Went back to New Orleans with her shrimp, I guess. Went back somewhere, anyway.”
“And now?”
“Just looking, Billy. Just lying in wait.”

That night Bill dreamed he was home in California and on his way to work. He was sitting behind the wheel of his Toyota, the radio was on, and he had just passed the Calabasas turn-off on 101. His briefcase sat on the passenger seat next to him. A big red and white Safeway truck was steaming along in the passing lane ahead of him, and a sporty little Volkswagen was cruising along beside. The sun was out and the sky was blue. It was springtime.
When the sporty little Volkswagen pulled up ahead of Bill’s little Toyota, he could see this was trouble. The road wasn’t too crowded, but crowded enough, and there was no room for rash little Grand Prix maneuvers. The truck wasn’t going to let the sporty little Volkswagen in, he couldn’t even see it. Bill thought to slow down his own car, to put as much room between himself and this jerk as possible.
The Volkswagen disappeared in front of the truck, and for the briefest of seconds Bill thought he’d made it. The first blush of relief came over him even as he heard the crushing sound of metal and cement. The truck just ate the little sporty Volkswagen up. He saw the sparks and the fire as the truck jackknifed in front of him. He saw other cars smash into the side of the truck and create a bigger wreck. Cars were smashing into each other at 70 miles an hour. Bill hit the brakes of his Toyota but he was still going fast, too fast to miss this, and so he did his best to brace himself against the oncoming impact. The last thing he saw before he woke up was a big black tire, soaring through the air towards him, spinning slowly against the clear blue sky.

Monday, February 14, 2011

San Francisco, 1989

You remember how we ran out screaming that one night? Ran out from the front seat of an old broken down Toyota and it must've been May in nothing but our skivvies and into the black churning (roaring, relentless and unforgiving, it was like running into a fucking train) northern Pacific, somewhere south around Sloat, both of us drunk on Mickey's Big Mouths and a leftover pint of bourbon and happy as lords? I swear I doubt I'll ever forget it, though the edges get blurry. Kings of our domain, such as it was. You remember how we laughed at first, laughing at how goddamn cold the Ocean turned out to be, how huge the bastard was, all up-close. Laughing but goddamn scared underneath. At how very damn unpacified it was. Pacific my ass.

Had all these Kerouac visions of the moment but when the moment came I was shocked, I was scared, and you were laughing but you were scared too. And that night we all got home safe, though we probably didn't deserve to. Drove back home with one eye squinted, radio on and all the windows down. Drove back home smelling the eucalyptus from the trees.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

First Day Out


“No drugs...”
“No, Ma'am.”
“No drinking. Is that going to be a problem?”
“No, Ma'am.”
Mrs. Lopez sat at her desk, and Bobby sat in a cold metal chair across from her. Her desk was crowded with a computer, phone, and an overflow of paperwork. A clear plastic cube held pictures of her kids in their communion outfits. As she spoke she pointed her way through some Xeroxed forms with a ball-point pen. Bobby nodded along with each point she made.
“No firearms.”
“Yes, Ma'am. Not a problem.”
“You run into anybody from the past, anybody with a record? You call me. You talk to the police, about anything, speeding ticket or anything, you call me. You get arrested, detained, whatever, you call me. You don't call me, you'll be in violation of parole and you go back to jail. You're with me?”
“Yes, Ma'am.”
“Here. Sign here.” She pointed to the Xeroxed photocopies and Bobby signed the forms.
“Listen to me,” she said, looking up at him from across the desk at him for the first time. “You get one chance, and I'm it. I've got a hundred and fifteen cases on my book, OK? I'm supposed to have sixty. So please, do not give me the opportunity to ship you back. Because I'll take it, believe me.”
“No, Ma'am. Absolutely.”
Mrs. Lopez took a second, looking over the forms one last time.
“OK. We'll see. Here...” She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and took out a disposable plastic piss-cup. “Down the hall to the right. You'll see where. Fill it up, hand it to the desk. I'll make some calls.”
Bobby took the cup.