Don't Make Me Stop Now (15 page)

“Women always leave me in the winter,” said Sanderson. He tossed his cigarette into a neighbor's yard and jerked the window up against the chill.

“Maybe you ought to move to a more southerly clime, chief,” said Walter.

“I ought to send that fucker my gas bill is what I ought to do. Many miles as I've put on this car lately making my rounds, seeing if he's showed up yet. I ought to make him pay for an oil change at least.”

“Make his ass pay is right,” said Walter.

Sanderson said, “I knew a girl from New Orleans, she told me it gets cold down there. Real wet cold, too.”

“There ain't no escape, is there?” said Walter. “You take your chances. It's a risk, every time you hook up. Like you're
taking your life in your hands every time you unzip your drawers.”

Sanderson started to point out that it was not exactly your life you took in your hands every time you unzipped your drawers. Instead of arguing with Walter, a thorough waste of his precious time, he let himself consider the old boy, seriously. Why had he asked him along to ride shotgun in the first place? He told himself that he did not want to be alone and that he thought having someone along for the ride, a witness, might prevent him from doing the things he woke up each morning having already done in his sleep.

But he and Walter were members of the same club—broken, bitter-hearted ex-lovers refusing to move right along. Walter's wife had left him, too, though Sanderson did not care much for that wife. Carolyn was her name, or was it Carol? He knew Walter from work, and Carol treated all of Walter's work pals like they were responsible for all the things Walter failed to do: come home on time, call when he was not going to come home on time, stop at the third drink, stop by the store on the way home from the bar for milk and diapers, make more money, lose some weight, make her feel that something special she had never felt with anyone else except some boy in high school she could never have snagged. Sanderson thought Walter was better off without the bitch,
but he would never have told Walter so, because Walter's bitterness over losing her kept him on call for ridiculously necessary excursions like the present one.

“I know exactly what kind of car the motherfucker drives, too,” said Sanderson, as if they had been talking about him the whole time.

“He's here?”

“Not yet. He'll show, though. Tonight's the night.” Sanderson had to believe that tonight was the night, for he had this problem with timing. It was off in general, always had been. He'd been born this way, according to his mother, who had him in a hallway of the hospital. Chronically off kilter. The woman he loved used to make him feel so bad for it — she told him once that she left him because she was tired of waiting for him to do the things he claimed he was going to do.

“Hold up,” said Walter. He reached in the side pocket of his bomber jacket and pulled out an envelope. It appeared to be some kind of bill, probably unpaid if he knew Walter.

“What?” said Sanderson.

“Little trick I learned from my own extensive tour of duty in the jungles of heartbreak,” said Walter. “See, whenever you feeling like pulling something crazy, you write down exactly what you're about to do and why. Then you put it away for a while, come back to it when you're settled.”

Sanderson thought this too pathetic to acknowledge. He wondered where a guy like Walter would pick up such a lame and useless tactic. He looked over at Walter, drawing lines on the back of his envelope, and wondered if the poor son of a bitch wasn't better off miserably married to Carol.

“We got two columns here,” said Walter. “One's for the things you hold him responsible for. The other's what she done. You got to be able to separate the two.”

“Why?”

“Because they're two separate things, man. Let's start with him.”

Sanderson stared at the blinking coming from her bedroom for a long time before answering.

“What do I hold him responsible for?”

“Correct,” said Walter. “Give me some ways he's screwed up your life. Go ahead and start with the obvious if I were you. Numero uno: he's boning the love of your days on this planet.”

Sanderson rifled through the drift of bills and receipts on his dash for an open pack of cigarettes. “If it's okay with you, Walter,” he said, “I'd rather work my way up to that one.”

Walter shrugged. “Hey, it's your list. Maybe you're right. Start with the small stuff.”

None of it was small to Sanderson. He made his list in his
head, silently, lovingly, and was not shocked to discover that he held the party in question responsible for crimes and misfortunes of many years.

1. Flunking out of college.

2. Two DUI's in the past five years.

3. Stupid feeling I have when I'm around my family at holidays and it seems like there's something I'm supposed to say to claim my kinship to them or make them understand who it is I am, but I don't know the right words and so they pretty much just ignore me. I open presents and eat turkey and get the hell out of there quick.

4. Acid reflux.

5. Failure to do much besides laugh and nod when guys at work like old Walter here start in talking shit about spades and homos.

6. Bottles. Bottles hidden away in crawl spaces and tire wells and toilet tanks of the houses where I used to live. Empties that if lined up in a row would run from Richmond to Shreveport. All the money I've wasted on drink and right now the tepid backwash in this bottle I hold in my hands and I blame you too for me liking this particular drink a whole lot better when there was a whole lot more in it.

And another thing: Surely he was the one who had handed Sanderson the coffee laced with bourbon on the night of the fire. Who better to dose him with the very medicine which caused her to leave Sanderson in the first place? He did not see a face, just a gloved hand holding out a Styrofoam cup with a little steam whistling out of the hole in the lid. Some stranger handing it over to him in a moment of need — this was the story he told anyway: that he drank it down in the shock of watching his porch cave in and by the time he realized what it was he was drinking, the alcohol bubbled in his bloodstream begging more. Too late by then, needed more to stave off the tremors, plus the stress from watching his house go up in smoke. His own brother, who had bailed him out of jail and picked him up off the floor of his kitchen and signed him into rehab three times said to his wife that night of the fire, Hell, let him have it, what else has the guy got now?

He thought about how easy it was, the fire. Leave the fire door open, the comforter close on the hearth. In his story to the fire chief he was lying on the floor by the fireplace, went out on the porch for more wood, wasn't gone but a second or two, and when he came in the comforter had caught fire to the couch, the whole room was smoke and then flames, he barely managed to get Coot, his dog, out of there alive.

Well, he did leave the room. That part of it was true. Left the edge of the comforter in the firebox and left the room to shoo Coot outside and when he came back he had the bottle he'd bought earlier in one hand and the cup of coffee, still hot from the drive-through, in the other.

“Well?” said Walter.

“Let's go with her first,” said Sanderson after a pause.

“Whichever. Shoot.”

But Sanderson made the same silent list. What he could not bring himself to say aloud was this: that she was making him feel like he had taken some medicine intended not for him but for someone who maybe gave a damn, and this medicine had acted on parts of him he did not know he had. For this he should be grateful?

Sanderson cranked the car, slid it into drive, eased away from the curb. His quiet, careful movements made the low idle of the Ford sound surreptitious. He felt like he was getting away with something until he remembered what he was letting her get away with.

“Let me think about it some while we drive,” said Sanderson.

“Naw, man,” said Walter. “Big mistake. Don't go thinking about it. You ain't done nothing but think about it night and day. Tell me about it, I been there, all I could think about
was her. Ate slept and drank her for months. I tell you, it was hell.”

“Carol left you for someone else?” Sanderson knew the answer to this: who would have Carol? She hung on to Walter long as she did for just that reason, because he was all she could get, and when she figured out he was just going to take whatever she gave him she left him.

“No,” said Walter. Almost a whisper. “Won't nobody else.”

“So you don't know what this is like, buddy.”

“Well,” Walter started. Sanderson looked over and down at him. He was slumped in the seat; the shoulder harness seemed the only thing keeping him from melting onto the floorboard. He appeared dejected, humiliated to be confronted with an aspect of suffering at which he was not expert. Kicked out of the club.

They were quiet all the way back to the bar. They chose a seat in the dark this time, way back by the jukebox. Away from Cynthia, a matrimonial near miss from Sanderson's younger, wilder days, who refused to serve him no matter his current pitiable situation. Sanderson had to order from Ed, her husband, who would serve whisky to a six-year-old. Ed seemed to like Sanderson better drunk than sober. Less of a threat? Earlier they'd been sitting at the bar and Hollis Edgerton from work had ambled in with his darts team and walked right up
to Sanderson, swept his shot and beer back out of reach and said, “Hold up now, Sandy, yo, what the hell is this?” Walter had dragged Hollis down bar where their whispers carried: girlfriend left him, some other fucker, house burned down. Let the poor boy be. Hollis had apologized, hadn't heard, man, shit, bro, sorry to hear it, he'd tried to buy him a shot of Wild Turkey and for his trouble had gotten hammered by Cynthia who said for all the bar to hear that buying a drunk a drink is a fucked up way to be somebody's friend no matter what he'd been through. Sanderson smiled at her as she blasted Hollis, took note of her concern, translated it into desire. He saw himself behind her, her elbows splayed out across the bar, bangs in her eyes, her jean skirt hiked up over the metal drink cooler so shiny so cold to the touch. She must have read his thoughts, for the look she gave him told him to go home and forget all about it, fat chance, don't hold your breath, when hell freezes over, all these tired sayings one right after the other, on and on in one quick scornful look in his general direction.

Ed served Walter, and Walter bought two of everything, claiming that he was Noah about to climb aboard his ark. Sanderson made him punch up not once but twice the only song that worked for Sanderson anymore, Otis Redding's “I've Been Loving You Too Long (to Stop Now),” and he waited for that meteoric moment when Otis begs his darling,
I'm down on my knees please don't make me stop now
. They drank the hours away in their dark corner. People in the light, friends of Sanderson's, nodded his way, offered sympathetic frowns, raised their bottles. After a couple of drinks, Walter went to the men's, and Sanderson got up and walked slowly to his car.

Alone in the night and the Ford was floating, taking the streets between the bar and her house so knowingly he hardly had to steer. As he took corners, his new life, which he'd managed to collect since the fire — clothes and cans of food, a tent, a Coleman stove — shifted about in the backseat. He'd been living in his car. There were plenty of people willing to take him in, lend him a guest bed, considering his circumstances, but he preferred the martyrmobile, itself a gift from a car-flush uncle. He liked not having to talk to anyone in the a.m., liked the fact that in the Ford the bar was open twenty-four/seven.

“Bingo,” Sanderson cried as he swung onto her street and spotted the beat-to-hell Toyota pickup in her drive. The bike sculpture was lit up from the porch light left on, no doubt, for her lover. Studying it, Sanderson felt himself become it: parts ancient and rusty, other parts shiny and new, past and present welded into something altogether different that did not work at all.

He inched the Ford into the drive, and as his bumper
nosed the trailer hitch of the pickup, he felt an odd lifting, strange and sudden and unsettling, and when he realized what it was — joy, pleasure, maybe even bliss — he shook with a silent, tearless crying. Drunk, cold, smelly, his woman left him for somebody else, his house burned to the ground, and what did he feel but oh so free and happy.

He knew he ought to stop right then and there. Toss an empty into the yard, maybe fuck the sculpture up somehow, let her know he was still alive and not well. Then bolt, head over to Umstead Park, set up his tent. Maybe there were some nurses camping out over there tonight. A threesome of nurses who would cook for Sanderson and wash his clothes in a creek and dry them on stones by the fire while the four of them warmed themselves in his new domed tent.

Problem was, he'd burned his house down and she had not come back. He had taken a drink, which was far worse a fate: a domicile wasn't so hard to come by as a liver. He missed his high school yearbooks and his Mott the Hoople albums, but this was all about sacrifice. He'd lit a fire to his old life, watched it rise above the rooftops and blow away, and there had not even been a single phone call from her. He kept looking for her to break through the crowd the night of the fire. He was wrapped in a purple blanket, some neighbor lady's, and he kept looking for her to break through and join him up
under the neighbor-blanket. Soon after the breakup he had managed to get to her good friend Debbie with his side of the story, and the day after the fire he called up Debbie to give her the news. She'd heard already. I am so sorry, Sandy, what can I do? No mention of Her. Sanderson had to finally suck up and ask: had anyone told her?

“Oh, she's out of town,” said Debbie. “Went somewhere with that guy.”

“What guy?”