Home Land: A Novel (15 page)

Authors: Sam Lipsyte

Tags: #Fiction, #Humorous, #Literary

BOOK: Home Land: A Novel

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I wondered then if you had to be insane from rabies to want to enter our house.

The boy returned to the door now, leaned out as though to check the position of the sun. His eyes, light-caught, were Will Paulsen’s eyes.

“She said come in.”

The boy led me to the living room, found his most recent mold in the carpet, lowered himself into it. He worked a tremendous corn chip into his mouth, unpaused his video game.

“First-person shooter?” I said.

“What?”

“The game you’re playing.”

“Yeah, shooter.”

“Looks fun.”

“It’s called Glory Hole. It’s about a guy who has to cap people with all these weapons. To save the free world. But the free world hates him because of something he didn’t do. But he doesn’t care, he’s still going to save it.”

“Have you ever felt like capping people?”

“We already talked about this at school. No, Mister, I don’t feel
like capping people because I know the difference between fantasy and reality. This game is fantasy. Reality is I don’t want to talk to you because I’m playing this game.”

“Copy that,” I said.

“Teabag. Oh my god, look at you.”

There she stood at the edge of the room, Loretta, principal lovely of the Holy Jazz Club Trinity. This may come as a shock, Catamounts, but she looked kind of drab here in her home, her home sweats, just another mommy with a ponytail, nothing like the Jazz Loretta of old, or even the one in Fontana’s window. What I mean is, with her pouched eyes, her flaky skin, she nearly looked like the rest of us. A trick of the lack of light, I guess.

“Come into the dining room.”

She’d put out some cookies, dry vermouth.

“Sorry, it’s all I have.”

“This is great.”

“You’re sweet,” said Loretta.

“What about dumb?”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nice kid out there.”

“My pride and joy. He’s been having some adjustment problems. I’m sorry if he was rude.”

“Adjusting to what?”

“Himself, I guess.”

“It’s funny, he looks a lot like Will Paulsen. Do you remember Will?”

Loretta looked startled, turned away.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember him.”

It took me a moment to suss it out, Catamounts. I’d just figured the kid resembled Will Paulsen because, well, there’s a finite gene pool here on Planet Earth and some kids do. Loretta wasn’t helping, either. She wore this faraway look as though she were conducting some kind of inner fire drill, evacuating the premises of herself in a quiet and orderly fashion.

“Does Hollis know?” I whispered.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Does the boy know?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I was never really close to Will,” I said.

“Me, neither,” said Loretta. “Except for a few weeks. We met at a wedding. Or met again. I’d always had a crush on him, since high school. But he was so off on his own, you know? I think I really loved him, though.”

While she spoke her beauty seemed to rush forth to the surface of her suddenly, frazzled, flush, a late party guest.

Gravy boat! Stay in the now!

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Yes, yeah. Anyway, it was terrible what happened to Will. That hit-and-run. Will was out walking, right? I guess the guy never saw him. But you don’t just drive off.”

“If it happened that way,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“It means what it means. Hollis was out driving that night. Came home with a crushed fender. Said it happened when he’d parked to get smokes. I didn’t know cars bled so much.”

“You could have tipped off the police.”

“The boy needed a male role model.”

“Hollis?”

“He was around. He knew about football. Clock management. The nickel package. The red zone. I try, but what the fuck do these things mean? Anyway, I was a kid myself. I was into Hollis for a lot of money. Pretty strung out too.”

“There must have been an easier way.”

“This was the easier way.”

Things were getting a little odd, Catamounts, and I wondered whether I’d ever summon nerve enough to include Loretta’s story in my update. I’d never considered censoring myself before, but this was heavy-duty revelation. Modes of chicken-choking are one thing,
Valley Cats, murder, deceit, mistaken patrimony, these belong to a darker realm. Or do they? (Note to Stacy: Perhaps this question could serve as an excellent icebreaker on the new Catamount Discussion Board!) Anyway, I worried I wasn’t up to the task, but as you can see, I conquered my fear. An update is an update. The things that happen, even if they didn’t happen, are the things that may or may not have happened.

Does that make any sense?

This will: When I took Fontana’s brass bit from my pocket, slid it across the table, Loretta laid her pale hand on it, her eyes gone moist, dreamy.

“Poor horsey,” she said.

Extrapuffed

GOD SMILE ON YOU, Stacy Ryson.

God grin and frig you with his giant hydrogen hand.

Your decision to delete my latest update from the Eastern Valley Alumni Electronic Forum is a blessing in disguise. Yes, domestic shortliairs of the geological depression, I know I remarked a while back how resigned I was to my erasure from the greater Catamount dialogue, but after logging on to the alumni page and seeing how simple it was to post an item, I guess I couldn’t resist.

Even as I clicked send on the submission form I knew I’d violated some of my Serious Inner Tenets, particularly the one that pertains to my continued reluctance to assume the mantle of hypocritical hypernormative pussy-hearted fuck. So picture my relief, Stacy, when my only karmic payback was your terse little bitch-mail about how all update submissions are prescreened, that mine had been deemed unsuitable for the Catamount community,
which, as you pointed out, includes minors (but not Miners, I gather).

Fair enough, as Principal Fontana would say, and my musings probably are unsuitable for impressionable minds. Heaven forfend they chance upon these outlaw rants, discover too soon all that Sex and Death and Love and Longing out there like glad knaves in life’s lurking spots, or even glimpse the tears and jissom on a sad man’s pajama top.

Better you hide in your bedrooms, junior Catamounts, with your sleek modular desks, your tungsten-coated gooseneck lamps, all that soothing pointillism on the wall. Better you get cracking on those college admission essays, prevarications three-parts stroke and one-part gloat, if I remember the measurements correctly. Don’t forget to mention how much you learned about character canvassing for Glen Menninger last summer, especially after befriending a man named Vinnie, who, though born with terrible mutilations, is an absolute angel on the mandolin!

Don’t forget to note how fortunate you were to be sponsored by your father’s firm on that white-water rafting trip last August. The vistas were magnificent, all those mountain peaks and Douglas firs—what an ecosystem!—and that ghetto boy paddled better than anybody.

Nature is poor people too!

Don’t forget to spell check your essay before you send it off to Bethany Applebaum for a spit and polish.

She’s got connections at Cornell!

Someday, perhaps, a voice will rise among you, a boy or girl with the guts to utter the truth of what occurrences, mighty and tiny, have occurred up to that particular date.

This child will be the Teabag of the new generation, town-shunned, jerk-judged.

Maybe this young bard will seek me out for counsel.

“Listen, boy, girl,” I’ll say, “nobody wants to read an honest
update. It’s Death’s collection notice. Stick to babies, work transfers.”

“But I want to be like you!”

“Don’t be a fool,” I’ll say. “I wanted to be like me, too. Look what fucking happened!”

Today I heard a high whine out the window, peeked out past the AC unit to the alley below. Landlord Pete had his boot on a cat, its neck. The poor thing looked sick. It twitched on the cement. Nearby was a mangle of feathers, beak.

“What are you doing?” I called down.

“Tabby’s done for,” said Pete. “Ate a bad bird. There’s a lot of them around these days. It’s on the news. It’s a virus.”

Pete pulled a knife that bordered on sword, stabbed up the bird.

“This would be the perpetrator,” he said. “The carrier.”

He stood down hard on the cat. I heard a quick shriek, a snap.

“Got the rent?” said Pete.

“I’m really close. A few more nights of work.”

“I’m really close, too,” said Pete.

LATER THAT DAY an ambulance wailed up to our house. I threw on some shoes, rushed downstairs. I figured they’d need bystanders.

My neighbor Kyle was dead on the living-room floor. His roommate Jared stood over him while the paramedics went to work with fists and paddles. One spoke into his epaulet while he pounded.

“Tell me what he took,” said the other.

“Nothing,” said Jared, pointed to some powder on a mirror. “He just did a bump. Jesus, it was nothing.”

Kyle’s eyes popped open, tore around the room.

“What happened?” he said. “Am I dead?”

“This is a kind of way station,” I said.

“Shut the hell up,” said Jared. “Kyle, you’re going to be okay. These guys here saved your life.”

“Thanks,” said Kyle. “You guys rule.”

Then his eyes rolled up funny and he was dead again. The paramedics went at it with the paddles once more.

“Jerks!” screamed Jared. “You’re not doing it right!”

He snatched the paddles away, whapped Kyle’s face with them.

His method didn’t work, either.

I SAT WITH JARED most of the afternoon while men came and took our statements and other men carried the body away.

“It was just a bump,” went Jared’s statement, or part of it. “He’s done mountains of it, fucking Fujis of it.”

The rest of his statement was about how his mother had deserted his family when he was in kindergarten and the last dinner she ever made for him was fish sticks. Jared had bonded with Kyle over how much they both loved fish sticks so how the hell was he, Jared, ever going to handle the frozen-food aisle ever again with all that breaded cod there cold in bins and not break down about the double-crazy whammy of his bad mommy and his dead best friend?

“Hollis Wofford,” Jared added, “he sold us the stuff.”

The men with notepads traded loaded looks.

Maybe the kid was in shock, Catamounts, if that’s your body saying life is not a TV show. Jared shivered and I brewed him some tea, this health brand with a root extract the druids grew to cure dangerous moods. There was a knock on the door and Landlord Pete leaned into the room.

“You better not have mentioned me or Hollis,” he said.

“I was here,” I said. “He didn’t say a word.”

“I didn’t ask you,” said Pete.

“I told them Kyle got it from an old friend,” said Jared.

“Good work,” said Pete. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. You can’t predict. Mysterious ways. Your time is your time. Good kid, Kyle. Nice kid. Let me know. Want something. Call my cell. Take care.”

Jared went to the bedroom, maybe to weep in peace. I stuck around in case he needed more tea.

I guess Dean Longo was on my mind, Catamounts. I hadn’t known Dean much better than Kyle, but I’d eaten the body of Christ with him when we were kids, and later, some mushrooms, mescaline. We’d sat around with tequila and speed a few times, too. Sweet depravity, I did know that, the mania for more, more booze, more weed, more powder, more riffing on the nature of the world. I still detested tongue-cluckers, safety fetishists, comfort-food fucks, even as I sensed myself sliding toward those soft kingdoms.

The bad years before Dean died he lived in the city and I rarely saw him, though Gary did, they shared a place, some studio. They had a band for a while, too, though I believe their principal instruments were the pointy kind, with a plunger.

“Do you think Dean died on purpose?” I once asked Gary.

“I don’t know,” said Gary. “Did he live on purpose?”

That answer screwed with me for a few days, as I guess it was designed to do, but when I finally asked Gary what he’d meant by it he gave me this look like I’d better never ask him again.

JARED WENT TO STAY with friends in Jersey City. The fresh dead move too easily in an old house like this. I went upstairs, fell off early on the sofa in the middle of a ball game. Mikey Saladin roped them to all corners, turned a nifty double play.

That night I dreamed of the Kid again. He was an old codger now, years past his championship prime. His victory over Buttercup in Kansas City was the stuff of forgotten legend. A new breed of professional masturbator had usurped him, men and women with enormous genitals and endless reserve who lacked both the craft and poetry of the old guard.

He’d never gone home, the Kid, never bought that land at the bend in the river, never wooed Wilhelmina, the schoolteacher.

She was dead of fever, or had married an owlish young inventor who’d patented a peanut sheller.

He’d heard both things.

The Kid sat now in a hotel room in Vancouver surrounded by several powerful television producers. The Kid’s plus fours were fallen at his shoes and he sat there in a silk-upholstered chair, stroked, kneaded himself, to no avail. He wanted to please himself, these men. They’d promised money but he was weary. His prick felt filled with wet sand.

“This is pathetic,” said a producer. “I thought you said this guy had the goods.”

“He does,” said another. “He did. He was famous once. My grandfather, when he was a little boy in Kansas City, he met him. He always talked about it. I’m sorry. I should have known better.”

“This is bullshit. Let’s get some heroin. Or hamburgers. Pay the geezer, get him out of here.”

The Kid’s hand went dead in his lap. He stared up at the wooden ceiling fan. Its revolutions were the revolutions of his life, his storied life whose story nobody remembered anymore. He’d beaten Buttercup, the invincible Buttercup, others, too. Choad Leonard. Baby Arm Bartlett. Wee Billy Thomas. He’d bested Gertrude “The Gorge” Mosenthal and White Gravy Drake in Charlotte with a half million in chits on the betting table. Nobody gave a damn anymore. The Jew-hater with the car factory was right: History was bunk.

Days later, coming back from the minimart, I noticed boxes stacked on the porch downstairs. A man walked out of Kyle and Jared’s doorway with a duffel bag on his shoulder, an inflated inflatable woman under his arm.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“I’m Jared’s dad,” said the man. “Just picking some things up.”

“Is Jared okay?”

“He’ll be fine. It’s not the first time he’s lost a buddy this way.”

“Maybe he needs some treatment.”

“He’s getting it. The district attorney’s a friend of mine. I asked him work up some charges, put Jared away for a spell.”

“Your own son?”

“Jared’s a bright kid. He’ll make a fine jailhouse lawyer.”

“What about rehab?”

“Jared doesn’t need to talk about his feelings. He doesn’t have any. He needs to learn about fear in the company of true predators. Over time he will become a predator himself, or perish. Either way he won’t be the pampered brat he is now.”

“Tough love.”

“There’s no love in it anymore.”

The man took his son’s things out to his station wagon. I followed with some bags, boxes, helped him tie down the load.

THE COLETTE MAN was at the Bean Counter. He was marking up his favorite author with a feathered pen. Ashes from his cigarillo fluttered down upon his vintage football jersey. Who was this guy? He didn’t seem the type to live around here. I thought I knew all the types who weren’t the type. They tend to be the types I know.

“Hello,” I said.

“What’s doing?” said the Colette Man.

“Are you taking a class?”

“Come again?”

“All those notes.”

“I’m homeschooling myself.”

Mira was at the counter pouring coffee for a ravaged-looking man in an oil-stained Stetson.

“Milk it up, there, mama,” said the cowpoke.

I knew this voice, its scratch, its lilt.

“Bob Price,” I said. “Holy shit. It’s me, Lewis Miner!”

“Howdy.”

“You know each other?” said Mira.

“We’re buddies,” I said.

“We are?” said Bob.

“We were buddies one night. ‘Zev’s gone odd,’ you said.”

“What?”

“After you read at the Nazi bar.”

“Oh, right,” said Bob. “You’re that fan who tried to force all that blow on me. Truthfully, dude, I thought you were trying to fuck me.”

“I don’t really remember it that way,” I said. “What’s with the cowboy routine?”

“It’s no routine. I’m part cowboy. I was nearly born in Nevada.”

“It’s so weird to see you here,” I said.

“I remember hearing about this town. Maybe from you, come to think of it. Seemed perfect for this book I need to research. It’s called ‘Americaville.’ This place will be the model for the East Coast chapter.”

“Are you working for Don Berlin?”

“Pulling a couple of shifts, yeah. I want to capture things from all angles. Professionals, proles, layabouts.”

“You should interview me.”

“Which one are you?”

“Some of each.”

“I’ll call you if I need you. What’s your name again?”