The Art of Disposal (43 page)

I went back to Shannon's house, took a shower, packed my things, and told her it was time for me to go. There aren't any grand love stories: only brief moments. If you string enough of those moments together, with the same person, year after year—there's your love story. Tuesday night dinners, loads of laundry, television shows, and looking around the house for your missing car keys.

She had a good life there at her community in the city. She had a Perkins Brailler typewriter and a teaching job, and a German Shepherd. Ours was a chance meeting. Sometimes you do a thing for a little while and then you let it go again, right away, just as soon as you've rolled it around in your palm to see how it feels.

I gave Shannon the small wooden elephant I'd bought in New York, and she felt its curves and tusks and tortoise-like feet, and she said it was beautiful, and she told me she'd put it on her writing desk back in the city.

I got in my car and sat behind the wheel with the engine running, and I waved to her even though she couldn't see me. She stood there, in a long white robe and blue sunglasses, and I went in reverse down the driveway.

My very life was a miracle. But a part of me wished that I'd never been found in that snowdrift, under a pine tree near a house on fire. I could've faded back into the nothingness, clean and new, untouched by this world. I understand it: the news stories of poor souls pulling their cars to the side of the road on a tall bridge, putting the hazard lights on, and jumping back into that warm inevitable darkness. Seven billion miracles. Eight billion miracles. Eleven billion miracles by the end of the century. Let's be honest: the planet could use a few less miracles.

I drove and I thought; empty land and frail wire fences stretched out forever along both sides of the car.

I thought about the guys whose warranties I'd voided. The most mysterious force in the universe is life. When you take it away, where does it go? How did it get there anyway? Where did it come from? Once it's gone, is it gone forever? It's here inside of me, but for how long? And why do I deserve more of it than the eight-year-old girl I saw on the news, dying from acute myeloid leukemia? Who's slicing the pieces of pie, anyway—and why are they so uneven? I'd like to give that poor little girl my piece of pie and take her crummy one. In a world of genuine miracles, there wouldn't be any sick little girls at all.

I drove and I thought. When I stopped for gasoline, I stopped at stations that were small and lonely; the kind where the wind spins the numbers and rattles the signs, and the eighteen-wheelers blast by like screeching monsters on some flat alien world. It's a wonderful thing having no set destination. One place is just as good as another, and no one is waiting for you. I'd had enough of the road, so I stopped in a little town called Sugar Valley and got a room.

The motel was tucked way back off of the highway, behind a restaurant, near the dumpsters, and the room was crummy. But what do you expect for fifty-nine dollars in the rural Midwest? It had a bed and a shower, and that was all I needed.

My eyelids weighed ten pounds when I was driving, but once I got into that motel room and took a hot shower, I couldn't force them shut again. I kept thinking of Emily. Wondering what her new old man was like. Wondering what her kids were like. Maybe she really loved them. Maybe she didn't.

I kept thinking of this one night that I hadn't thought about for years.

We'd been lying there in bed together, getting worked up for the main event. All of the lights were off, but you could still see the room, still see each other, in that inky purple light that is always there if you just wait long enough for it.

She had this habit of talking about stressful things—credit card bills, insurance premiums, her deadbeat sister in Minneapolis—right when we were about to make love. It drove me nuts. I hated it. Usually, I'd listen; go along with it. Let her talk it out. Figure I'd get what I wanted eventually. But on this particular night, she made it clear just how much easier things would be if she was with a guy who made a lot of dough.

Well, that did it. I got up and flipped on the lights and pulled on my t-shirt. She told me to stay, and said she was sorry, and then she stomped off and turned on the faucet in the bathtub, and I could hear her crying in there. That really rubbed me. I paced around, listening to her sobs coming through the closed door, mixed with the sound of the running water, and I just knew she expected me to go in there and try to make things right again. That's the thing with women: after they stick the knife in you, they want
you
to apologize for being so bony and gristly and hurting their hand.

I mostly thought of the good things about Emily, like she was an angel who'd slipped right out of my dirty hands. But maybe right that minute she was running the tub water again, crying while her new husband lay in bed with his hands behind his head, staring up at that inky ceiling, wondering if he'd crawled into the right box.

I sat up and stared around the motel room, and I knew I wasn't going to fall asleep any time soon. I closed and rubbed my eyes, and I saw Greedy Pete Bruen in the trunk of Eddie's car, and the look of joy on Carlino's face as he pushed the button to start the crusher. Then I saw Doc Brillman, standing in front of that tank full of cichlids, looking at the thermometer, taking a pH reading with a strip of yellow paper. Who was working the front desk now? And could I ever contact the office and have Doc Brillman forward my charts to some new doctor?

I didn't feel quite as sick as I used to, but things change. Ever since Dan the Man died, I'd been checking my “limp-nodes” at least once a week to see if they felt all right. But the more you check them, the weirder they feel—and I didn't know how they were supposed to feel anyway. I didn't even like the fact that they were there at all.

I clicked on the television: an old-fashioned box that was bolted down to a swiveling table. I flipped channels, and for a little while I watched a show about corvids: crows and jays and jackdaws. Crows are so smart that they practice deception, pretending to bury their loot in an obvious spot if someone is watching them.

That made me think of a trail I used to walk on, back when I lived with Emily. Every day, in the early morning, a long-haired cat would come shuffling out of the trees and weeds that framed the trail, and he would take his spot, always the same spot, and sit there and watch the people walk or jog past, and sometimes visit with them if they approached with an outstretched hand. Most of the people I meet are far less noble, less friendly, less intelligent, than that cat.

I flipped channels again and caught the end of a
Burns and Allen
. George Burns was so comforting standing there talking to the camera, cigar in hand, that he seemed like an old friend. I thought of Eddie, and I wondered if he'd found a decent cigar shop somewhere, or if he was still smoking the gas station cigars he loathed.

I put on my jacket and went to the motel office, and I asked the night desk guy which way to the nearest 24 hour convenience store. An image of two ice cold cans of beer danced through my head, and I couldn't shake it. The store was just a mile and a half up the road, so I walked.

On the way back from the store, turning off of the highway and onto the darker road where the motel was situated, I saw something odd coming toward me: one bright white light, floating about six feet in the air, bobbing up and down. Down closer to the ground, accompanying it, were a series of red lights, flashing and scrolling like there was some small emergency.

At length I could see that it was a dog and a man. The dog had a bike light clipped to its collar, and the man wore a headlamp of the sort that I used to wear to go out to the outhouse on summer nights.

The stranger slowed down when he neared me, perhaps fearing me even more than I feared him. I heard a snorting and grunting, and a small tan dog appeared, pulling hard on its leash. The man was still a vague shadow, looking somewhat like Abe Lincoln.

“Hello,” I said to break the spell.

“Hello,” the man said. His voice was so deep and smooth that he could have been on a coffee commercial.

The dog was a pug; it pulled up close to me and tried to climb up my leg. I dropped down on one knee to facilitate the dog, who quickly scaled my bent leg and started licking at my face.

“Hello,” I said to the pug, “and what's your name?”

“Rhoda,” the man said for her.

“Rhoda,” I said. I looked up at the man. “A good friend of mine had a pug named Barney. They're something else.”

“Napoleon kept a pug,” the man said.

“Is that so?”

“They're one of the oldest breeds,” the man said.

I stood up and studied the man. Tall, dressed in black; a white shirt, a black tie. He looked like an Amish man, as rigid as a hymn book. But the lamp on his head gave him the look of an alien visitor who'd just landed on this planet.

“George,” I said, stretching out my arm.

“Jacob,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it.

“Are you a preacher?”

He laughed. “I'm a carpenter.”

“You're Amish, right?”

“Mennonite,” he said.

“Do you believe in electricity?”

“You don't need much faith to believe in electricity,” he said. “It's right here, all around us.”

I leaned down and scratched Rhoda's ear.

“She likes you,” Jacob said. “I have three of her puppies left.”

“You breed them?”

“When I'm not churning butter.”

I never knew a Mennonite could be so sarcastic. He handed me a business card.
Jacob's Handmade Furniture: Old World Craftsmanship Since 1998
.

“That's my address there. Just up the road a mile.”

“Tomorrow morning?” I said.

“See you then,” he said, and he and Rhoda wandered off, a series of flashing red lights and a wide triangle of white light scanning here and there along the road.

The next day, I found Jacob out in his backyard tinkering with a motor. He wiped his hands on a rag, and we shook hands, and his wife stepped out on the porch and said hello. Aside from her white bonnet, there was nothing different about them at all. I saw an orange extension cord running from his garage, an electric jigsaw, and some other power tools. It wasn't the idyllic setting I'd imagined the night before. A wheel-less pick-up truck sat on blocks, and the yard was weedy. We walked to the barn, which sat in a pleasant meadow with pockets of bright yellow flowers, but the barn itself was white and old, and looked like a mouth of diseased and missing teeth.

“You go to Church a lot?” I said.

“Twice a week,” he said.

The pug pups were in a boarded up section of the barn, inside of a large cardboard box. Some heavenly beams of sunlight shone in on them through the missing slats, and you could hear them whining, and you could smell the fresh hay. For a minute I felt like one of the wise men, or the little drummer boy.

“Take your pick,” Jacob said.

“How old are they?”

“Ten weeks.”

After a few minutes, I picked the smallest one.

“Sometimes the runt's the best of the litter,” Jacob said.

“How much?” I said.

“Just want 'em to go to good homes is all. You'll take good care of him?”

“I'll love him like a son,” I said.

“These here were a one time thing. Long story. Wife's friend at work had a male and we had a female, and the friend said we should get 'em together. Said we could make eight hundred a piece on each puppy.”

“Eight hundred it is,” I said, reaching for my wallet.

“No, no,” Jacob said. “You see, the first litter: we sold 'em all. Then we had this second one here. Well, long story short, her friend from work: I don't like her. All she cares about is money. I never wanted to do this thing at all. She wanted to turn us into a puppy mill out here, and that's just not my thing. I told her this was it, and that I'm giving away the last three of them. I feel bad enough already. People should be adopting. Too many dogs and cats need homes as it is.”

He handed me the puppy, and we walked back to the house. His wife invited me in for a cup of coffee, and she served some of her homemade coffee cake, and she found a nice cardboard box and a towel for the puppy. I offered them money, and they refused. When I used the bathroom before I left the house, I placed a thousand dollars on the counter near the sink, under the glass soap dispenser.

I drove and I thought, and I headed south. The puppy was mostly quiet, and the times that he did make noises, the noises were sweet. It grew dark, but the horizon still burned with a line of solid orange and yellow, and there were ghosts on the sides of the road. I sped past Max Finn, Ricky Cervetti, Dan the Man, Frank Conese, and Thin Y No. Near a pale-green water tower, I saw Mr. Nelson Scott, checking the time on one of his pocket watches, and when I stopped to fill up my tank, I saw Griffin Shaw, gaunt and sallow, standing near a pay-phone.

I drove and I thought, and when I'd find a good motel I'd stay for three or four days to give the puppy some stability; a floor to walk around on. That pug made me happy. It slept by my side. It made me think about Thin Y No's pug racket, and Barney, and I could hear Dan the Man laughing, and I could see him walking down hallways and opening doors. There are so many ghosts along the edge of the road, and there's not a car built fast enough to blur them.

Now I live in a nothing-and-nowhere town in Central Florida. It's got a nice downtown stretch, and they have quaint parades and pie-baking contests, and it all suits me just fine, and makes me feel like I've stepped into an episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
.

It's been a year since I helped Carlino and Bullfrog kill Frank Conese. I check the online papers to see if the newly restructured Conese Family ever makes the news. But they don't. There was a lot of fuss at first over the slaying of Frank, and speculation over who would take the reins. But then it got quiet again. That's a good thing for Carlino. The less attention, the better.

I like my new town. I like the way the swamp trees sag like they've just heard some terrible news, and I like how life is lived at half the speed it is up north. I do a little bit of fishing along the canals and small lakes that dot the whole area, and there are catfish and bass, and the people are friendly. There are signs that warn of alligators along the canals, but I've yet to see one anywhere near town.