The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (27 page)

“You weren’t really trying to kill him,” Val said. “You were just upset.”

“It felt like I was trying to kill him.”

“Then that’s who you are,” Clete said.

Stu spoke. He was sitting normal again. “The guy I get dope from sticks a gun barrel in my mouth every time I buy. To remind me what he’d do if I rat on him.”

“
Every
time?” I said.

Stu nodded. “Some people won’t deal with him for that reason.”

“Bad business practice,” Clete said.

“It tastes like oil,” Stu said.

Our conversations felt like more than talk, as if we had made ourselves into a crew held together by something greater than happenstance or geography or the luck of free housing. I had the feeling we mattered as a group. Only to us, I guess, but I was happy with that.

I was happy.

I found a metal detector among the kid’s toys. Since I couldn’t work and needed booze to stay sober, we hit upon the idea of combing the run under the ski lift for coins. The first day Clete and I found over nine dollars and barely made headway up the mountain. The lift was running, taking summer tourists up for views. Some of them tossed change down to us. We actually got most of the cash that way. The remainder of the summer was defined by this mountain we had to sweep. It gave us a goal and a direction:
up.

We came home that first day tired and exuberant, bearing a frozen pizza (the oven was gas and hadn’t been sold) and a six-pack. Screaming started as soon as we entered. We found Lila towel-wrapped in the bathroom screeching at the tub. Ready was bouncing his long nails on the porcelain, yapping. The terrier had carried a mouse into the tub where it couldn’t escape and then tortured it to death. A mouse head lay by the drain, and Ready’s bloody paw prints made the tub a crime scene.

Clete got toilet tissue and picked up the rodent remains.

“Good boy,” he said to the dog.

Lila was too grateful to complain about our ogling her thighs and a portion of her hip where the towel parted. She even agreed to watch a movie with us after her shower, one of the videos that Stu had stolen from the library. Clete went to hook up the extension cord, and I hunted for the tape. When I couldn’t find it, I sought out Stu. He was sitting on the cooler on the back porch smoking a joint, wearing my old coat.

“Where’d you get that coat?” I asked him.

“The Goodwill store behind the fire station.”

“Find any drugs in the pockets?”

He eyed me suspiciously and then began thrusting his hands all over.

I didn’t want the coat back. It was an important part of the life I’d left behind. While he was searching, I asked him about the videotape.

“How did you know?”

He’d found one of my trademark blimp-shaped joints.

“Never mind,” I said. “Where’s the movie?”

“I took it back,” he said proudly, still rummaging. “Sneaked it back in. They never knew it was gone.”

I suppose I pursed my lips.

“You know how a library works at all?”

“There’s a fucking book in here,” he said, meaning the coat.

Lila suggested we go to a bar. We didn’t have any cash left from our day of detecting, so I took the elaborate Mickey Mouse clock from my room—which didn’t work anyway without electricity—and we headed down to the secondhand store and then on to the Blue Board Tavern—a splintering hardwood bar that used to be a laundromat and still had a wall of dead dryers in the back, each staring out with its one enormous eye. The clock brought seven dollars.

The tables in the Blue Board were the color of ballpoint ink. We claimed one and started talking.

“I moved to this town because it’s too small for me to turn tricks in,” Lila announced. “People would talk.”

“A sensible plan,” Clete said.

“I live in fear of becoming a whore.”

“Everyone with any judgment does.” He then described my plan for self-improvement. I could sense myself rising in her esteem, but she directed the conversation back to Clete. She wanted to know why he had come to this place.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

She gave him a look and maybe I was giving him the same look because she seemed to think of me as an ally. She and I got up and marched out into the street. A shower had passed over while we were drinking. The streets were slippery and glistening. The air was fresh and free of smoke. Without any warning, she took my hand and we walked to the middle of the town’s empty thoroughfare, our eyes on the mountains.

Her hand in mine opened a window in my head, and a damp wind blew right through it. Above the paltry row of buildings, a forest ascended the mountainside, the trees green and vibrant. At the open end of the box canyon, the sun had dropped out of sight, but sunlight spotted the high trees, lit a distant waterfall, and colored the rock faces. What had we been thinking? The sky was shot through with turquoise and the last yelps of sunlight like a gaudy stone on a gold band.

“He’s got us on this one,” Lila said softly.

She clung to my hand as we went back into the bar, aware that we had been mutually grazed by the speeding, startled sensation of what it was to be a living creature.

“We won’t forget again,” I said as we made our way to the table.

“If we ever fail to look at those mountains,” Lila said, “without realizing they’re there, we should have to cut off our arms and legs and gouge out our eyes.”

“You’d have to change the order,” Clete said. “The arms shouldn’t go first.”

He had the bag of mushrooms on the table, dividing them into three equal parts.

“Doing this in a public establishment doesn’t trouble you?” I asked.

“I picked these this morning, while you two and the rest of the mortal world were asleep,” Clete said. “Anyone watching will just think we’re earthy types.”

We ate mushrooms and washed down the grit with beer. Lila surprised us with money of her own and bought pitchers. It occurred to me that Clete couldn’t be sleeping much, as early as he was getting up.

“I sleep inside myself while I’m awake,” he explained.

That pretty much got him rolling. He declared and philosophized, his mouth full, his brain brimming with thoughts and theories, observations and sidebars. We all talked excitedly for a while and then settled down to our communal swallowing and a happy gulping silence. The conversation, even after it was over, kept a good feeling swinging among us like the movement of a rocking chair after the person is up and gone.

Then Clete began afresh. “People want you to believe you treat a disease by identifying it and then killing it off with the right poisons,” he said. “That requires a belief that the sickness and the person are two wholly separate entities. That’s like thinking the clouds don’t belong to the sky but are just happenstance passing through.”

We nodded or made appropriate grunts. Now and again I’d realize that Lila and I were still holding hands.

“People who think about the world aren’t usually violent, which leads me to assume that violent people don’t consider the world around them,” Clete said. “I knew a woman who liked to pretend she was the star of her own television program to the extent that she wouldn’t swear because there’s no swearing on television. She’d only have sex with the lights out. Everything she did took her to the next episode, and she’d think about how the show should end, editing her day down to its hour format.

“My point is, she may have been sick but she wasn’t violent. As long as she imagined an audience and the Nielsen ratings hinging on her actions, she had to behave. Is that sickness separate from who she is, or the product of who she is?”

I started in on this teacher I had in high school, a delicate young woman who spoke so softly you had to strain to hear any portion of her speech. It was work to catch a single word. She walked around the room while she talked, and every head would follow her. She was easily the best teacher I ever had. After the winter break, she came back with a microphone and a speaker that hooked to her belt. We didn’t have to strain to hear her, and it didn’t take but a couple of class periods to understand she was no better teacher than the others. It was the quality of our attention that had been different.

“I was in that class,” Clete said. “We read
Macbeth
and
Catcher in the Rye
and watched that
Romeo and Juliet
where Juliet does partial nudity. Miss Axelrod. You sat directly in front of me, and one day you had a condom stuck in your hair.”

“Was it a Mr. Microphone?” Lila asked. “I had one of those in middle school.”

“Another one of our teachers used to confuse me for my father,” Clete said. “He was old and I don’t think he was ever very bright, and he had taught my father. Now and then he’d call on
Everett,
as if I had become my dad. Which makes me think about that feeling of being transported, and how the weirdest thing—a kid like me sitting at a desk—can transport you thirty years, back to when you were young and had a brain and most of the time a hard-on, likely as not, for some junior girl in a short skirt you were supposed to be teaching.”

This reminded me of the girl I dated when I worked construction who liked to call me Daddy while we were in bed.

“I remember her,” Clete said. “Her family raised minks.”

“What’s your real name?” Lila asked me. “It can’t be Keen, can it?”

“What does ‘real’ mean?” I shot back.

“What does ‘name’ mean?” Clete put in.

“What does ‘mean’ mean… mean?” Lila said.

What a night that was! We swept out of the bar and up and down the lighted streets, our arms linked in Gene Kelly fashion, smiling and shuddering with the joy of being the people who got to inhabit our very own bodies. Nighttime rinsed the light out of the sky, and we found ourselves on the bank of the dark little river that cut through the side of town opposite our house.

“Fish know water,” Clete said, and we entered into a somber and wondrous bout of nodding. Lila and I may have wept a little.

Then we one by one began to add to the river from our own churning stomachs.

“I had no idea I was getting sick,” Lila marveled. That set the tone for our happy retching. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings,” she said. “If I’m pissing you off with this puking, just say so.”

Clete found a tree we had to look at, a big winding thing with branches and leaves and a miraculous balance.

“It just erupts out of the earth,” Clete said. “It goes up. What it means to be a tree is to send limbs up and roots down.” He dropped to his knees and touched the base of the tree. “This is the center, right here. Touch the tree’s heart.”

We got down and fondled the bark.

“I had a boyfriend,” Lila said, “who had a dog-and-pony show with a guitar at this café on weeknights. Not real singing but funny-talking kinds of songs about getting a life into which some rain must fall or fixing your car with chewing gum and spit. I took him for granted so much he wrote a song about a girl who cuts off her own nose.”

“To spite her face,” I said.

She shook her head. “To make her breathing holes bigger so it’s less work to inhale.”

We followed a crooked path that ran along the river, which was a shallow and fast-moving affair that made a gorgeous noise. We began hearing things in the river’s music, voices and shouts and engines running. The rush of water seemed to give off sparks, which meant we were hallucinating but it didn’t feel that way. It seemed instead that the river must always spark into the night air but usually we fail to see it. We were witnessing the daily miracle of moving water on a planet that was moving itself, spinning through the dark marvel of space.

We came upon a sandy bank often used as a party spot, and an actual voice called to us.

“Pussy,”
the voice called. “Here, pussy, pussy.” Ratcheting laughter followed, and Barnett stumbled onto the path. “You’re all pussies,” he said, “especially him.” He tried to look over his shoulder and nearly fell.

Stu lay on the bank, flat on his back, either sleeping or passed out. He was wearing my coat, which made me feel oddly proud and responsible, a little jealous, possessive, and nostalgic. I was feeling a lot.

Clete stepped off the path to put his ear to Stu’s chest, while Barnett did almost the same thing with Lila’s breasts, thrusting his face against her chest and clacking his teeth. She pushed him away and I took a swing at his chin, smacking him on the side of his head. He collapsed in such a complete fashion, Lila and I burst out laughing.

“He respires,” Clete said of Stu. “But we’re going to have to carry him home.”

“What about this one?” I pointed at Barnett.

Clete bent over him and slapped Barnett’s cheek. Barnett didn’t rouse. Lila gave him a sharp kick to the ribs. He jerked and moaned, but he didn’t wake up.

“He’s the one who kind of raped me,” she said to Clete and at the same time took my arm. She was explaining why I had slugged him, as if I’d known all along and acted out of gallantry.

While we were contemplating what to do, a crescent moon appeared above the dark line of the mountainside, and a coyote loped by on the opposite bank of the river, pausing to stare at us while we stared back at it, and then it continued on.

“Was that a wolf?” I asked.

“Coyote,” Lila said. “I used to see them by the side of the road every morning when I worked at a bakery down valley. I’ve never seen one this close to town.”

“It might have been a dog,” I said.

“Or a vision of god,” Clete said.

“I got fired from that job for stealing éclairs,” Lila said. Then: “Why would god stare at us like that?”

“To remind us we’re human,” Clete said. “And he’s human.” He nudged Barnett’s face with the round toe of his boot. “We can’t leave him to the elements.”

“Sure we can,” Lila said. “Especially if god’s got his eye on him.”

She didn’t want to wait alone with Barnett for fear he might come to. She hefted Stu’s feet. Clete gripped him under the arms. They carried him off. I stayed with the inert Barnett, watching the stream, listening as its noise receded and a deep quiet settled in, a silence like I had never heard before. I couldn’t even hear the thoughts in my head.