Big Bad Love (20 page)

We made it on over to the beer joint in good time, considering we'd been messed with by the Troopers of Control, the most motivated, energetic, dead-set-on-catching-folks-like-me highway boys ever farted in a cruiser. There were lots of other folks over there. I latched or tried to latch onto what appeared to be a woman but turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl and got told right quick by her brother, who was large, that she was underage. He was like seventeen himself. It made me feel old.

I wandered around for a while. I started having a sinking spell. It helped to hold onto posts and stuff. And a whole lot of stuff happened that I don't remember. People kept handing me beers. I guess old Thomas Slade was paying for them, but I don't remember. I never did find out, though, since that was the last time I talked to him. While passed out on the seat, late that night, going home, I woke up, saw some lights, heard something hit, and then we flipped over about eight times. I kept rolling around from the seat to the floor. Things were flying and hitting me in the head. I guess some of them were old Thomas Slade's Patsy Cline tapes. He had about nine of them.

I woke up again as some firemen were pulling the truck apart with the Jaws of Life. There was a long wrapped white bundle on the ground that was Thomas Slade. I, miraculously, was not injured much. Five-inch cut on my wrist, three-inch cut on my forehead. Thomas had his spine broken and his head crushed, and I saw that he wouldn't be cutting any more pine trees, or writing any more beautiful poetry.

I was getting pretty sick of death. It canceled a lot of checks. It snuck up on people who thought they didn't have time for it, laid families to waste who had just bought a new house. It caused problems miles down the road for children and everybody else. I didn't know what I was worrying about it for. It was going to get me one day, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. Death was going to put the bite on everybody, even if it did sometimes bite before its time. It got Raymond, and I knew he wasn't ready to go. It made me sick for it to get Gardner, just cruising on his Harley before his marriage. It made me sick, death did. I'd buried lots of my own. I was afraid I might have to bury Alisha. I was afraid they might have to bury me. I didn't want Alan to see that. I wanted him to go out to Uncle Lou's and stay a few weeks, learn to rope and ride, trim the horses' feet, how to brush their hair so it's most pleasing to them. I had a whole lot of faith, but I hadn't been to church in a while. God probably didn't recognize me because He hadn't seen me in so long in His house. I felt sort of slime ball, sort of scuz bag, sort of piss-complected puke. I felt like I'd make almost anybody barf. So I skipped town for a few days.

It wasn't any better down the road. This place I checked into charged thirty dollars a week rent. But I thought I might really get into the underside of life there and find something
to write about. I was sort of undercover. There was a small wading pool out back where guests could sit around in their lawn chairs and drink beer. I did this several evenings. Most of the people there were old, like they didn't have anywhere else to go, or maybe it was just a decrepit nursing home. I didn't know what I was doing there with them. I had a home of my own, so why was I sitting around drinking beer with a bunch of old people? Looking at leaves in a wading pool? I knew I needed to go home and check my mail. But I could hardly bear to go back to my loud empty rooms.

After I'd been there two days I saw a fight. Two old guys who couldn't do much, just pushing and shoving at first. But they were cussing plenty. If they could have fought as well as they could cuss they'd have both wound up in the hospital or the morgue. They were filling the air with oaths that reeked of filth and vulgarity. It nearly embarrassed me myself.

One of the old guys shoved the other old guy down and that ended the physical part of the fight. I looked at the loser. He was sitting on the ground, trying to get up. The victor was walking away. He was swaggering a little. You could tell he thought he was hot shit on toast. I didn't know what they'd been fighting over. I didn't want to know. I just wanted the old guy who'd been pushed down to stop cussing so much. He was slinging one motherfucker after another one to the point where it went past ugly. I knew God was up there hearing it. I put my sunglasses on.

After a while the old guy on the ground got up and went inside. I kept sitting there drinking my beer, looking at the
leaves in the pool. It needed cleaning really badly, but nobody seemed to want to do it. I damn sure didn't want to do it.

I vacated the place a few hours later, wondering when things would come to some kind of end. I was restless and couldn't stay still. I wasn't happy at home and I wasn't happy away from home. It looked like there was nothing to do but
go
home. So that's where I went, a little reluctantly.

I stayed drunk for a few days and didn't really notice a lot of what was happening around me. The phone rang a few times, usually while I was in bed. People would try to talk to me and I would try to talk to them, but we couldn't understand each other, so I'd hang up. I lost track of the days. I didn't know if a particular day was Sunday or Saturday, or Tuesday. I went to the refrigerator once to see if there was anything there to eat, but there was nothing there, so I crawled back to bed. I left beer in the freezer compartment and it froze and burst and ran down the front of the refrigerator. I put more beer in, overslept, and it froze and burst. I knew I'd have to sober up sometime and clean it up, but I wasn't ready to yet. I wanted to get that drunk over with and let things go back to normal if they could.

I tried to write a poem about Thomas Slade while I was drunk. The poem was no good. I tried to write two other poems, about Jerome and Kerwood White, while I was drunk, but they were no good either. I rode around drunk, walked around drunk, slept and woke up drunk. I wrote drunk, ate
drunk, washed my hair drunk. I watched television drunk as a boiled owl. I went over to Monroe's house drunk one day to see him while he was at work and his mother didn't appreciate it worth a damn. I knew better. It was just that drunk had done me in. I considered going to see my mother drunk but I knew that wouldn't do, either. I thought about going to see Marilyn drunk, but I knew that would just reinforce her belief that I was nothing but a drunk. And I thought about going to see my uncle drunk, but I wasn't too drunk to know that he'd probably haul off and knock the hell out of me, things being what they were and sacrifices being as valuable as they were, and all the shit I'd blown to him about blah blah blah. I wound up just going back home drunk, drinking some more, and going to bed.

I had a nightmare that night. I was drunk in the nightmare, with a whole lot of other people who were drunk in a large log pen. There were hogs walking around. They had caught all of us out on the highways drunk. The hogs had been in the trailer of a drunk truck driver. All of us had been sentenced to death. Society was going to be rid of this problem with no qualms. We were being killed one at a time, and the whole world was watching. Some were shot, some were hanged, some were stabbed with long sharp knives. Two guys in front of me got it with axes. There were bodies left and right. Whoever was in charge of the thing was selling beer in there, too, just to see what would happen, I guess. Everybody was sober by then, and the beer stand wasn't getting much business.

They had a huge slave chained to a tree stump in the line I
was in. The people went forward one at a time, after handcuffs were put on them. The slave rested on his axe handle until their necks were across the stump. Then he swung it and grunted and the bloody head of the axe flashed through the air and there was a loud
THWACK!

They led me to the stump. My toes were squishing in blood. They handcuffed me and forced me down on the bloody wood. Splinters dug into my throat. I tried to move but they held me down. I turned my head sideways toward the slave. His feet moved, and he grunted, and bloody mud splashed from between his toes.

I woke at daybreak. Nighthawks were calling softly in the stillness, and it was cool. I got up. There was one can of frozen orange juice in the freezer compartment, frozen beer all over it. I ran the water in the sink until it got hot and then I thawed the orange juice out partway, holding it under the running water. I found a pitcher, opened the can, and put the yellow lump into it. I took a steak knife and tried to chop it up into smaller pieces. I measured out three cans of hot water and poured them in and stirred it, my tongue so dry I couldn't lick my lips, or bear to. There were some ice cubes in the trays. I filled a glass with cubes and poured the orange juice over it and got my cigarettes and lighter and went out to the front porch in my underwear and sat in a chair.

Fog was lifting off the river. Crows were rising from the
fog. Cars with their headlights on were going down the highway. The trees were mantled with mist, standing dark with their heavy rafts of leaves. I drank some of the orange juice, and it was like a parched man two days in the desert being offered a drink from a well. It was that good. I lit a cigarette, and the smoke hurt my lungs. The things I did to myself were stupid, and without reason, or for reasons that I only imagined, slights I imagined had been done by the world, never my own fault. I knew the kids were sleeping somewhere, their eyes closed, their breathing shallow. In sleep their long lashes were easy to see, faces I'd kissed again and again.

I put my face in my hand, and I cried, and promised myself that I would try to do better, for me, for everybody, for the kids especially. I hoped the promise would last.

The money started running low again, due to drinking and smoking too much and being a generous guy with drinks for drunks who had no money. There were people I knew who could make their way to a bar with no money, but sit there and drink by careful and calculated cunning. I couldn't do it, but I knew plenty of people who did. I decided to write interesting stories about them, stay home, drink less. But when I got to writing all those drinking stories, it made me want to get drunk myself while I was writing them. So what I wound up doing was writing them in the
bar,
with my pencils and notebook and papers all spread out everywhere. And I'd sit
there and smoke and have cigarette ashes thumped all over everything, be smoking like a fiend, scribbling all these words. They knew I was trying to put out some good stuff and nobody messed with me. They were proud of having me write in their bar. They didn't know any published authors. But they knew one unpublished author.

There was a little chickadee who started working in there. My heart sank the first time I saw her, because I knew I could never have her. She was just too good for me. She had long brown hair and she had on a jogging suit bottom with a red striped T-shirt over the top. She had a shy way of smiling when she talked to the other guys around the bar. Her beauty broke my heart.

I was deep into some things about two guys fresh out of the penitentiary and some other guys moose-hunting with secret dopers in the Great Pacific Northwest and another little thing about dead children who got up and walked at night, when she came over and asked me what I was writing. This was after she had seen me do this for a couple of nights in a row.

“I, uh, I'm writing some stories,” I said, and shielded my work with my hand. “Could I get another beer?”

She smiled her shy little smile and got the beer for me, smiling while she was reaching in the cooler, smiling when she put it up on the bar in front of me. I laid two dollars on the bar. She took one and pushed the other one back.

“Happy Hour,” she said, and I looked and it was four o'clock.

“Thanks,” I said. I folded the other dollar and put it in her jar.

For the next thirty minutes I wrote. I heard a couple of carpenter types come in a few times and wonder aloud what that motherfucker was doing over there in the corner, but I didn't pay any attention to that because it was to be expected. I'd paid for my space and I figured I could use it like I wanted to, as long as I wasn't dealing dope or selling insurance. I was trying to decide whether or not to let a story have an ambiguous ending, and also fretting over tone and symbolism in one particular piece, when she came back over.

“You're Leon Barlow, aren't you?” she said.

I just barely looked up. I knew I couldn't get over with her. “Yeah, I'm him,” I said, and looked back down at my papers.

“You know Monroe, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“He's the one told me you wrote. He was talking to me the other night about you. He said you were a real good writer.”

I didn't say, Well, the world's out to fuck me. I said: “Well, I haven't had anything published.”

“I'd sure like to read some of your stuff sometime. I love to read.”

I looked at her. That sweet little mouth. Fine little ass. Smooth skin I knew like my hand had never felt. Marilyn's was lumpy and had scabs on it, stretch marks and cellulite and pones on her feet, plus she stunk up the bathroom something terrible. I figured this dainty thing didn't even have to shit but just farted little fragrant poots when she had to. I
didn't know what a real dick would do to her. Probably kill her. I looked back down at my work.

“I don't let nobody look at my stuff except Monroe,” I muttered.

Alisha died right after that. They said it was crib death, SIDS, but I don't think that's what it was. I thought it was punishment to me for giving up my wife and my family and all the wrath of God howling after me all the days of my life to the ends of the earth. I wanted to go out into the forest and live like a madman with leaves for clothes and live in a hole in the ground and throw rocks at anybody who came near.