Creamy Bullets (10 page)

“Baff-room,” his father then said. He pointed a frail hand at a gray brick building. David pushed him in that direction. He noticed then that he could hear his father’s breathing through the little speaker, brittle and hoarse. They tried the door to the men’s room but it was locked. David knocked to see if someone was using it and a string of grunts answered his query. His father looked wearily to the women’s door. “I don’t care,” he whispered.

David tapped on the door before pulling it open. “Girls?” he called awkwardly into the empty space. He pushed his father in and opened one of the stalls. “Stand or sit?” David asked him. His father was already unzipping his pants and trying to stand. David locked the wheels on the chair and gingerly grabbed under his arms and tried to pull him up. He found it more difficult than he expected. Dead weight, he thought to himself. His father braced against the toilet paper holder and David moved behind him into an easier position. He heard his father urinate in the toilet. He thought about the times his father shamed him for wetting his bed as a child. “You’re not a young man until you stop that nonsense,” his father had told him. “I guess you’re a baby until then,” he would say with a smirk. He heard his father sigh and slowly zip back up. David helped him back into the chair. He wished someone were there to help. His father looked pitiful and slack the way he sat in the chair now. He crouched in front of the wheelchair and tried pushing him into a better posture. The girl in the red bikini came in and saw them this way.

“Oops,” she said, and backed away.

“Wait,” said David, but she was already gone. He unlocked the wheels and pushed his father back outside. He saw the girl dart into the men’s room and heard the door lock. He grabbed the door handle but didn’t pull. It felt warm.

He went back into the women’s room and washed his hands. “Sorry,” he said to the wall, wondering if the girl could hear him.

He came out and saw his father scooting back in the direction of the picnic area. “Hey,” he shouted, and was surprised at how angry he sounded. He jogged to his father and stopped him. “I want to keep going,” he said. He turned the chair around and watched his father’s hand drop helplessly away from the motor control. The sound of the crackling speaker mixed with the sound of the hot wind through the trees. It sounded like a small fire. David reached over and found the volume knob. He turned it up until the speaker squealed. He thought his father said a word underneath it all. “Don’t” or maybe “Damn it.” David laughed a little before turning it down. He looked back at where the reunion was and saw that nobody was watching them. He pushed the chair in the direction of the water. There was an empty dock a little ways down, swaying like a mirage.

“I have some things to say,” David started. He was glad he didn’t have to look at his father’s face as he spoke. “When I turned sixteen, I decided I wanted to kill you, or something like that.” He caught himself backing away from his words as soon as he said them. His father didn’t respond though, so his confidence came back, like a tide crashing into sharp rocks. “I wanted to poison you at first but I didn’t know how. One time I put firework powder in your soup but you just got sick and went to bed early. Do you remember that?”

The speaker filled with heavy breathing but no words.

“The next morning I was in the kitchen and I thought you were dead because you usually got up earlier than I did. I sat there and I ate about five bowls of cereal in a row. I thought if I could finish the whole box of cereal and you still hadn’t made it out of bed, then you were probably dead. But then you came in right before I finished and I just started crying and ran to the bathroom and threw up all the cereal. The bathroom really stank because you threw up in there too that morning. You just yelled at me and made me clean it all up.”

David stopped a moment, wiped some sweat from his forehead. He took a napkin from his pocket and dabbed his father’s forehead too. He looked over at the bathrooms and saw the bikini girl, watching them and talking on her cell phone. “It’s getting fucking hot,” David said. It was the first time he swore in front of his father. He started pushing again.

“Didn’t you ever know you were a shitty dad?” David asked. “I want you to answer that question.” His father started to say something but was stuck, dry-mouthed, on some hard consonant. “It’s a yes or no answer,” said the son. “Well, I thought you knew the answer. You always had the answers back then. You were never wrong.”

They were getting far away from the reunion. He looked back and saw Paul running in their direction. He pushed the wheelchair faster.

“About a month after that, I was going to suffocate you in your sleep. I walked in your room one night with a pillow. I even had duct tape so I could tie you down first but I started to worry about someone finding the duct tape with your hair on it or something. I was going to ask Paul to help but I never did.” He looked back and saw Paul talking to the girl by the bathroom. “Paul did pretty good for himself,” David said. He stopped and turned the wheelchair 180 so his father could see Paul and the girl, just far enough away so they looked like small blurry shapes. “Paul did pretty good for himself,” David said again. “I never really knew what I wanted to do. I felt stuck because I was preoccupied with killing you.” David turned his father’s chair back toward the dock and started toward it again. They were silent for what felt like a long time. “I didn’t know I was going to do this,” David finally said, and more long silence followed.

By the time they got to the dock, David’s mouth felt dry and his father seemed to be dozing off in the heat. David knelt down on the end of the hard wooden dock and reached a hand into the cool water. He splashed his face and let some of the water get into his mouth. He swished and spit back into the river. “So I killed someone else,” said David. “I thought that would help me over the hump, you know. Like, I could just imagine that it was you or something. But it didn’t really work that way. I still feel stuck. That was ten years ago.” He walked over to his father’s wheelchair and pushed it to the end of the dock. He was lying about the murder but he wanted his father to be scared of him, to feel fear in that same sick way he felt as a kid. “If I stand behind you here, do you see what that feels like? You don’t have far to go. You’re stuck now too.”

His father’s hands started to shake wildly and the volume was turned up on the little speaker. “Sorry,” the voice said. It screamed on top of the feedback like an awful bird. “Sorry,” it repeated.

David backed away and started crying. His eyes were blinded by tears and sweat and he couldn’t see. The sound of his father’s wheelchair crunching over the wood made him cry harder. “I’m sorry, too,” he answered quietly. He wiped at his face in a panic and started hyperventilating. He couldn’t hear anything except his own grief. When his eyes were finally able to dry, he saw his father steering his wheelchair back off the dock and onto the trail.

David sat there on the dock, wondering if he should go after him. The sun moved behind a cloud and the pounding heat let up for a moment. David thought he heard a splash behind him but saw nothing when he turned around. He looked into the water, concentrated on it. After he jumped in, he struggled to paddle in place. He scanned the water for any living thing. Something to save him.

Songs for Water Buffalos

S
hane received word the week before that Raul had died.

“How did Raul die?” I asked.

“The letter said he died from swelling of the body,” Shane said. He picked his nose a little as he said this. He seemed mostly puzzled about it.

Shane and I worked the evening shift at the music store. I’d only known him for a month but already I found him noble for being a sponsor of a starving kid in Bolivia. He wasn’t married and he didn’t have children of his own, so maybe it wasn’t hard for him to do. He wanted to make himself more useful now that he was thirty, he told me before. Twenty-five dollars a month is what he’d been sending.

“It’s weird,” I said, “you and I couldn’t live off twenty-five bucks a month.”

“That’s because we’re American,” he said with a bit of antagonism.

I asked how long he had been sending money.

“Only about six months,” he said.

I wanted to say something about how odd it was that his kid died even though he had a sponsor. I wondered if an extra five bucks a month would have helped. I also wondered if maybe Raul’s real parents or grandparents or whoever got Shane’s money spent it on other things instead of food and medicine. Maybe it was spent on cigarettes or beer. I kept quiet and didn’t say any of this. That would have been thinking out loud and it wouldn’t have been considerate of Shane’s current mood.

“I got a thank you letter from him just a month ago,” he said. “He did a drawing for me too. There was a bunch of brown kids and a white guy standing in the middle. I guess I must’ve been the white guy.”

Libby was working too. She was standing over by the listening stations, restocking CDs. There was some crazy rock-rap remix playing through the store’s sound system but she could still hear some of what we were talking about. She was young and idealistic. Her tight pink dreadlocks sprang wildly around her face as she bobbed her head to the beat. Whenever she smiled, her freckles lit up like stars against the smooth cocoa of her face.

“I have a good idea,” she said. “We can raise 250 dollars and buy a water buffalo.”

I watched her face to see if she’d explain but she seemed to think we knew the value of a water buffalo. Instead of saying Great idea! or Okay! I said, “Why?”

“A needy third-world family can benefit greatly from having a water buffalo,” she said. It was like she worked for some kind of Water Buffalo Company or something. I thought she might pull out a pamphlet at any second. Shane actually turned the music down a little to make sure he was hearing her.

“They can produce milk for a family to drink or sell and they’re good for pulling farm equipment and eventually having calves too,” she said.

“What do you mean by calves?” Shane asked.

“Baby buffalo,” she explained. “Sometimes another family will have a buffalo of the opposite sex and they can breed with them and share or sell the calves. If we get ten people to donate $25, we can really make a difference,” she said.

I almost laughed when she said we could make a difference. It just seemed like a weird concept. She was always saying shit like that though.

Shane pulled out his wallet and I, swayed suddenly by the mood of good will, started writing a game plan.

A week later, we’d racked up $150. Libby had printed up a big color photo of a water buffalo and propped it up by a makeshift donation jar by the registers. I got the feeling people thought it was a joke. They probably thought we split it up at the end of each day. Our manager, a guy named Rod who wore those tinted prescription glasses and silk shirts, didn’t seem to mind. Or at least he wasn’t going to say anything to Libby, who he often thought about as he masturbated in his office.

“Nice buffalo display,” he told her. He stared at it for a long time, in deep thought. Shane and I watched him with interest. We thought he might finally donate. “Is there any way we can utilize this to promote a CD?”

Shane and I cringed a little.

“What’s that?” asked Libby.

Shane and I tensed up more, fearing an anti-capitalism tirade about to happen.

“Maybe if people bought the new U2 album we could donate a couple dollars to the bucket,” said Rod. It was evident that he was trying to sound like he’d thought about it long and hard. “They have a song about a water buffalo, don’t they?”

“What are you talking about?” grimaced Libby. “We’re not doing this to sell units.” She said
units
like it was the root of all evil. “The best thing you can do to help with this, is give some money,” she told him.

Rod got a little defensive. “These
units
, Libby, are what make your paycheck possible. And if you asked me more nicely, I probably would donate something.”

I can’t remember what we had playing on the sound system while this was happening, but whatever it was ended and the store didn’t so much as fill with flat silence, as suffocate in it.

Shane and I went out that night and drank some beer at the Black Bear. It was the kind of place filled with picnic tables and benches instead of regular tables and chairs. They had a hundred beers on tap and a clientele consisting mostly of bike messengers. I’d been a regular customer for ten years, ever since I got a fake ID at eighteen. When I turned 21 I started using my real ID and the bartenders just laughed about being duped for so long.

Shane had invited Libby to join us but she was going to some sort of women’s book club meeting. She’d been plowing through a 500-page Margaret Atwood novel all day at work.

“Maybe we should organize a benefit or something,” Shane suggested. He was one beer ahead of me.

“Who would we get to play for a water buffalo?” I said.

“Are you kidding me? We could get all sorts of bands. Just have Libby ask them. Who can say no to Libby?”

“What do you think about Libby, anyway?”

Shane finished off his third porter and looked around before answering. “She’s cool. But she can be kind of preachy too, I guess. Like when she bosses people around at work.”

“No, I mean, do you think she’s cute?”

Shane scooted his empty glass to the edge of the table and shrugged. He took his time to think of an answer though he already knew it. It was something he thought about a lot. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of the dreadlocks though. I like the pink, just not the clumps.”

“I heard that stuff is made out of fertilizer.”

“What, dreadlocks?”

“Yeah, like some kind of poop.”

Shane thought about this for a second. He looked around and nodded toward a forty-ish guy with dreadlocks wearing a Clash t-shirt. “You should go ask that guy over there,” he told me.

“No way, man.”

“I’ll buy you a beer if you do.”

I got up without saying a word and walked over by the guy. He was hanging out with two girls that I’d seen in the record store before—Gwen Stefani wannabes. I leaned over and asked them if I could borrow their salt. I walked back to Shane.

“You didn’t ask him,” he said.

“I didn’t have to ask. I smelled.”

“Nice,” he said. “Nice and covert. Was it poopy?”

“Like a day-old diaper,” I said.

Libby walked in just then. She spotted us, gave us the thumbs up, and went to the bar to order a beer.

“Why don’t you just take a good whiff of her hair when she gets over here,” I said to Shane.

“Shut up,” he said. “No more poop talk.”

She walked over with a pint of local beer, lemon wedged on its lip.

“How was the poop talk?” I asked. “I mean, book talk.”

“There were only three people there this time. And no one even read the whole book.” She squeezed a little lemon onto her tongue. “You’d think that literacy was dead or something.”

“It is,” I said. “Anyone that reads books is a rebel.”

“You don’t read books,” Shane scoffed.

“I’m not a rebel,” I said.

Shane got up to get more beer for himself. “Want another one?”

I shook my head as Shane started his squeeze to the bar.

“We were just talking about the water buffalo,” I said to Libby. “Shane wants to help set up a benefit. You know some band guys, don’t you?”

She listed off eight band names in a row, only a couple of which I’ve heard of. I nodded and raised my eyebrows like I was impressed. I could see Shane coming back with his beer, slowing behind her, crouching down with his nose out. I wondered what she smelled like too.

The Ugly Mug Café was kind enough to let us do the fundraiser in their space. It was a large room, big enough to hold a hundred people. It was nearly full.

A band called Hand Over Fist was playing first. Shane and I were working the door (five bucks a head) and Libby had a table in the corner that neatly displayed information and photographs of water buffalo. She also made buttons and t-shirts with water buffalo on them just for the occasion. People seemed more interested in the oddly fashionable image of the buffalo as opposed to its actual humanitarian benefits.

Rod came up to Libby’s table and enthusiastically launched into a business idea that would, he said, “pay for a hundred buffalo.” Libby listened considerately as Rod laid out his ideas for water buffalo bags, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, baseball caps, designer jackets, lunch boxes, action figures, mouse pads, pillows and so on. “To go along with the buttons and t-shirts,” he said. “You could donate thirty percent to the water buffalo foundation or whatever they’re called.”

Libby’s patient smile turned to a grimace. “Thirty percent?”

Up on the small stage, Hand Over Fist’s grinding emocore was plodding to an end. The singer rolled himself into a fetal ball behind the tall bass player, howling the last of his vocal cords away.

Shane nodded in Rod’s direction. “How many restraining orders do you think he has?”

“I heard he got one from Liz Phair.”

“Really?”

We took money from more people as the second band set up. They were called American Heritage. They had CDs with artwork lifted directly from the cover of the American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition. They had a good following and played a weird kind of Bruce Springsteen meets Radiohead alt-rock. Out of the four guys in the band, two of them had either gone out with Libby or they were her cousins. I wasn’t really clear on which.

Libby came over and worked the door with Shane as one of her friends took over the water buffalo table. I went outside to get stoned with the drummer of Hand Over Fist. I’d seen him in our store a few times but didn’t really know him. “These guys suck,” he said about American Heritage as we exited.

“Good set,” I said. “The people of Tanzania thank you.”

“The what?” said the drummer. He impatiently tried a number of keys on the back door of the band’s van before finding the right one. We climbed into the back and scooted cases and gear to make room for our smokeout. He pulled a classy J-shaped pipe out of a toolbox and started packing it. It looked to be carved from wood. The sort of pipe that Sherlock Holmes would toke from. The drummer inhaled the first hit and passed it to me with great care, his face reddening.

“I shouldn’t be gone long,” I said. The pipe felt good in my hands though, like a saxophone. I felt like Charlie Parker.

I walked back in during American Heritage’s last song. I didn’t realize I was gone for nearly an hour. Rod was working the door by himself as Libby and Shane hopped excitedly near the front of the stage. “We got ourselves two buffalos,” Rod told me. He held up a Swisher Sweets Cigar box with money sticking out on all sides. I gave him the thumbs up and smiled with eyes half-closed. He could probably tell I was baked. Libby ran over and gave me a hug when the song was over. She said something to me but I was distracted by her dreadlocks bouncing on my cheeks. I swallowed her scent and imagined my body melting into hers for five beautiful seconds.

As we loosened, I was blindsided by someone wearing a horned Viking helmet. It was Rod, celebrating the night’s success too enthusiastically. The manager of the café, a former prison guard named Hector, thought we were fighting. He came over and pulled Rod off of me and told me I had to leave. “No, no, no. He’s cool,” said Rod, offering to help me up. Hector crossed his arms and served us a cold hard frown. Libby walked back to the stage and started talking to the American Heritage guys as they sold CDs to a couple fans. The last band, The Vikings, were setting up. They were the kind of group that dressed up in Nordic war attire and clomped through a short set of songs that they turned into epic improv freak-outs. Shane came over to me and asked if I saw American Heritage.