Squirrel Eyes (6 page)

8

      We left the Frontier after that. Taylor wanted to hit a couple record stores, but I wasn't much in the mood for shopping (and broke as I was, I figured it would just depress me even more), so I left him to it and went back to my mom's house. 

Mom was engaged in her favorite hobby – smoking cigarettes – and working on a quilt. I sat on the couch and watched
Murder, She Wrote
with her for awhile, though my attention was mostly on her quilting. Her fingers moved through each stitch with almost no variation in the range of motion, the routine differing only when she'd pause to take a drag off her smoke. One of those times, she noticed I was staring at her.

"You got something you want to say?" she asked. 

"Not me."

She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. "I sure wish you'd move back here." The crumpled butt continued to smolder, putting out a terrible stink. 

I pointed at the ashtray. "That's still burning."

"You could have your old room back," she said, crushing the butt fiercely and snuffing it once and for all. "I'd hate to lose my sewing room, but I'd do it."

I hadn't told
her
that I was giving up the filmmaking thing, either. "I'm thirty-four years old, Mom – somehow I doubt moving in with you would do much for my self-esteem."

      "Aaaa," she grumbled. "I like having you around."

      "I don't know," I said. "Do you have a gun I can borrow?"  

      "Don't start that shit," she said, pulling another cigarette from the pack.

      I went out back then, partly to avoid starting that shit, but also because the concept of moving back in with my mom was something I really didn't need to think about and I could tell she was ready to give me the hard-sell. 

The yard hadn't changed too much over the years; Daniel had cut down the big cottonwood tree, fearing that it would fall on the house, and while Mom didn't do as much gardening as she used to, there was still a small plot filled with tomato plants and cucumbers and whatnot. The waterfall and pond were still there, but the pump hadn't worked in years; what water was left in the pond was stagnant and mossy. 

I wandered over to the garden and plucked a radish the size of a golf ball from the ground. Brushing the dirt off, I chomped into it. The thing burned like a snakebite – my eyes started watering like crazy and I huffed and puffed a bit before tossing the rest of the radish into the bushes. I turned the hose on and gulped water, spotting Mom's gardening implements – including her shovel – as I did so.

      Leaving the water running, I tossed the hose into the garden and picked up the shovel. It was the same damn shovel we'd had when I was a kid. Touching it was like that scene in
The Dead Zone
when Christopher Walken shakes hands with Martin Sheen and sees the apocalypse – only I was hammered with visions of Tonka trucks and miniature waterways and lunar vistas overrun with multi-colored Major Matt Mason dolls – and Kelli and Gina in their bikinis. 

I held the shovel up, sighting down the cracked and gouged wooden handle like a samurai examining his sword. The shovelhead itself was rusty in places, dented and scraped. 

      I turned to look at Gina's house. Of course, it wasn't Gina's house anymore – hadn't been since I was about eighteen. I had no idea who lived there now. I walked to the wall and stared into the yard. The swimming pool had been removed, but the hole remained – sort of a sunken area of the yard, grassed-over, flowers and other plants encircling the perimeter. There was a bench at the bottom of the hole with a small shade tree nearby.

      Gina and her family moved away shortly after Gina had made a suspicious and prolonged "visit to her grandmother." She was sixteen, I guess, and a boy – some meatneck-type – had been spending a lot of time over there, especially when her parents were out. One day the boy stopped coming over. A couple months later, Gina went off for that quality time with grandma. It was pretty obvious what had happened – for one thing, I've never seen anybody as embarrassed and unwilling to talk about their vacation as Gina was. 

It was right around that time that I started dating Kelli.

      I picked out a spot near the old apple tree and gave the shovel a good stomp, driving it into the soil. Turning that shovelful aside, I dug in for more, every mound of earth bringing another surge of memories. I'd cleared a hole about eighteen inches across and maybe a foot deep when Mom hollered at me.

      "What are you doing?" She was standing at the edge of the patio, cigarette between her fingers. 

It was a question I think I'd heard a million times while engaged in this same activity; the answer always seemed obvious to me. I stopped digging, wiped my hands on my pants and thought about it for a second. 

"Just ... looking for something."

      "Well, don't dig up my whole damn yard," she said, flicking her cigarette into the grass. "And don't forget to turn the hose off when you come inside." 

She disappeared into the house, leaving me to ride out yet another flashback moment. They were the exact same words she used when I was a kid, I swear to Christ.

      I went back to my digging, hauling out another six inches of dirt. Then the shovel hit something hard – not a rock, but some sort of solid object. I got to my knees and cleared the loose dirt away, revealing a tiny
arm
jutting from the ground. I recognized the hand; the index finger pointing at me accusingly, the others bent. 

It was GI Joe.

      Excited, I ran to the gardening tools and scrounged up a trowel, then hurried back to my excavation. I began carefully digging around the buried soldier. 

He'd been badly mutilated – both legs and one arm severed, but I was able to identify the remains. It was Real Hair Joe, the one with the flocked hair and beard. I had given him a shave at some point; the razor blade had gouged furrows into his plastic cheeks.   

      While I knew this Joe, I couldn't recall how America's Movable Fighting Man might've suffered this terrible fate. Daniel was always screwing around with my stuff when we were kids –
he
could've been behind it. He always had expensive toys, things like radio-controlled airplanes and ham radios, stuff I wasn't allowed to play with. I think he liked my toys only because he didn't feel bad about breaking them.

      I thought about Daniel, and his auto parts, and how successful he was. The auto parts store was a wild hair he got up his ass because he didn't know what the hell else to do with himself. I've
always
known what I wanted to do with my life, ever since I saw
Night of the Living Dead
, anyway. I often wondered if it isn't easier to be one of those people, like Daniel, who don't have the slightest idea; kind of flounder around for awhile after high school, maybe attend college long enough to realize they don't want to go to college anymore, then stumble into something that becomes their life. 

Then it struck me: maybe I'd been doing that very thing without even being aware of it, and I didn't have a fucking clue what was going to become my life. Or worse yet, that this was it.

      GI Joe and I sat by that hole for a very long time. I remembered to turn the hose off before I went inside.

9

      That night, I tried looking Kelli up in the phone book. The first listing I went to was the one that used to read
E.L. Dayton
, and the address. I spent a lot of time staring at that listing when I was sixteen, running my fingers over the ink and imagining the lust-filled missives I'd send to Kelli now that I knew where she lived. Finally acting on those fantasies, I sent one letter to her – more of a note, actually: it was written on a piece of paper about the size of a gum wrapper. In it, I suggested (in a roundabout manner, mind you) that I'd be more than happy to lick Kelli's feet — the most polite, vaguely sexual act I could muster the nerve to offer. I spent hours tossing in bed the night I mailed it, wishing to God that I could somehow retrieve the letter before it went out, scheming as to how I might lay in wait for the mailman outside Kelli's house and snatch the letter as soon as it was deposited in the mailbox. I sweated it out for three days – frantic as a murderer who knows the law is about to swoop down – before Kelli, adrift on an inflatable raft in Gina's swimming pool, told me she got my letter and would be happy to take me up on the offer. And I
did
make good on that one, thank you very much (of course, it didn't happen until we'd started dating).

      The listing now read:
Mrs. E. Dayton
.

      Hoo boy. So Kelli's dad was dead. Or at least I took the listing to mean that – it doesn't seem, if they had gotten divorced or something, that it would be worded that way –
"Mrs."
– does it? 

      The next listing that rung a bell was
Kendra Dayton
– no address, just a phone number. Kelli had a little sister named Kendra, and since the only other person I could think of named "Kendra" was a porn star, I assumed this must be the sister in question. There was no listing for her older sister Donna (whom I used to torment by calling "Donna the Dead") or for Kelli herself.
Great
, I thought,
she must be married
. Or she had moved away. Or maybe she and her dad had been killed in a boating accident or a plane crash or had simply beaten each other to death during one of their frequent and heated arguments.

      I decided the best approach would be to call Kendra – she always kind of liked me, for some reason, and it seemed less terrifying than talking to Kelli's mother. However, I also decided there was no way I had the guts to make that call tonight, so I watched some more TV with Mom (which might seem like a poor substitute for making the phone call that could potentially alter the course of one's life, but these things just don't happen all at once). This time it was one of my favorites,
Emergency!
Firefighters Gage and DeSoto were called to the aid of a guy who had eaten two loaves of unbaked cinnamon-bread dough that his mom was making for his birthday, causing his stomach to swell up as if he had swallowed an antelope. 

I wish I could tell you how Gage and DeSoto handled the situation, but I couldn't keep my mind off of Kelli and the idea that I might – with any luck at all – be speaking to her within the next twenty-four hours. This of course led to the contemplation of other acts I might soon be performing with her, which suddenly made me feel very uncomfortable about being in the same room with my mother. I considered hitting the sack, but it was only 9:30, and being terribly guilt-ridden about the loathsome and degenerate thoughts I was having at Kelli's expense, I somehow got it in my head that if I went to bed that early, my mom would think I was, you know –
up to something
. In her sewing room, yet. Besides, with all this TV-watching, I could see I was already in a rut after only being in town one day.      

It was late enough that Taylor would be due at work, and there wasn't really anybody else I could think of that I wanted to see (or, to be honest, anybody that I cared to have know I was in town), so I piled into Mom's boat-like Grand Marquis and went out on my own. As prone to cower in fear as I'd become, I found myself driving around the block about three times before I finally got pissed off enough at my foolishness to head for a specific destination. 

      I wound up at Jiggy's Tiki Room, a swank little hipster joint downtown. Parking the car, I sat behind the wheel for some time, struggling with the urge to scram back to my mom's place. It was that miserable LA dread again – the feeling that I had no right to interact with other humans, to make them suffer my worthlessness just so I might have a beer or dinner or shop for a book. 

"God
damn
it!" I yelled, banging the steering wheel sharply. After glancing around to see if anyone had heard, I entered the bar.

      It was a slow night, and I couldn't decide right away if that was a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it meant fewer people who might sneer at my detestable presence, but it also meant fewer people to
distract
those who might sneer at my detestable presence. How does this whole self-loathing thing get started, for God's sake? 

I slunk to the back of the place and took a seat at a booth beneath a gigantic moose head, then furtively checked out the other patrons. 

Seated nearest me were a couple of guys – obviously regulars – talking Australian-rules football and sipping garishly decorated drinks the size of paint cans. At the bar, a pink-haired girl I recognized as a professional dominatrix (we hadn't been officially introduced, but I knew who she was through seeing her at parties and the like) laughed half-heartedly at a joke told by a squat, fat little fellow who would no doubt be punished later for his lousy attempts at humor. Near the front of the place, four rockabilly guys sporting DAs and wallet chains played pool and kept the jukebox fed. At the moment, it was achingly spilling forth
Salome
by the Old 97s:
It's over now/And so are we/My blood's turned to dirt, girl/You broke every part of me....
 

      A waitress approached my table. She was about five-three, shapely as hell, with short dark hair and dark eyes and big, kissable lips rendered even more so by the bruise-colored lipstick she wore. I hoarsely ordered a hard lemonade. 

My eyes were riveted to the waitress as she strolled the joint, delivering drinks, emptying ashtrays, wiping up spills. At one point, she went to the end of the bar near the cash register, beneath the giant, smoldering Tiki-god, and took a seat, lighting a smoke. If a pair of lungs had ever befouled themselves in a more magnificent manner, I'd liked to have seen it. It crushed my soul when she disappeared into the back room for what seemed like hours (but in reality was probably only a fifteen-minute break). 

During her absence, I contemplated making that phone call to Kelli's sister but was spared the decision by the return of the waitress. She made her way to my table again, asking if I needed another. 

"Naw, I'm all right, thanks," I said, certain I'd embarrass myself if I drank any more. 

As I watched, enrapt, this vision of splendor walking away from my table, it suddenly hit me –
I was crazed with lust
. For the first time since Alison dumped me, I actually felt like having
sex
with someone – I know there's that whole thing with Kelli that had driven me to Albuquerque in the first place but that had attained such lofty status in my mind that it didn't even seem like sex anymore – it was something more akin to winning the Olympic gold in gymnastics or being chosen as Playmate of the Year. 

But what I wanted (and wanted
with this waitress
, right now, right here on my table) was a serious bout of no-holds-barred, ass-slapping, hair-pulling, buttocks-biting
fucking
, the kind that leaves you drenched in sweat and shaking like you just squat-pressed 350 pounds.

      Just as suddenly, I realized that the whole idea made me feel guilty as hell, and I hadn't a clue as to why. I finished my lemonade, threw a couple bucks on the table, and went home.