Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 9

  She wriggled under my hand. “Don’t mess with me when I’m drowsy,” she said.

  We turned onto the skinny state highway that ran back down through the valley. To the west, the land plunged away, and down where the mountains flattened out, the green grid of farmlands looked crisp and vivid as a billiard table.

  We rode for a while, and nobody talked. Marie played with her fingers and mumbled to herself. Outside, the sun was falling fast, letting big shadows pool up in the spaces between the hills. The other cars had their lights on now, and I clicked the knob for the headlamps and got the heat going, too. Marie stuck her hand in front of the vent to feel the hot air on her.

  Heat was something me and Jane had liked to fight about. She could never get warm in our house. It could be the middle of July, and she’d want to shut the windows and put the furnace on. I wouldn’t turn the thermostat past sixty-five, so she’d crank up the burners on the stove and hunch there, scowling, like a cavewoman guarding a coal. Often, the first thing I saw when I came home from work was Jane standing by the stove with her hair full of knots and an old T-shirt sagging close to the cooktop. I yelled at her about it, but that didn’t help. Her nightgown went up in flames two times, and we had to stop, drop, and roll her on the kitchen floor.

  The vinyl groaned behind me, and I heard Barry sit up and yawn.

  “Hey, Barry, does Jane still do that thing where she tries to catch herself on fire with the stove?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” he said. I told him about her two accidents.

  “Doesn’t surprise me. She’s got miserable circulation.”

  “Hey, does she still do that thing of leaving a bunch of snot rags all balled up in the bed? Man, I remember, she’d have so much old Kleenex going, you’d get in bed, and crrrunch! Make you want to puke. She still do that?”

  Barry gave a dry laugh. “No comment,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “I’m sorry,” Barry said. “This makes me a little uncomfortable, to be honest with you. Not fair to convict her without her here to defend herself.”

  “Just making conversation,” I said. I let it go without asking him what I’d really wanted to know, which was whether Jane was still suffering this dream she kept having while we were married. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d had these two-ply nightmares where she dreamed that a man was standing over the bed. Then she’d dream that she’d woken up from the nightmare only to see that there really was a man standing over the bed. At that point, all hell would break loose. Sometimes, she’d jump out of bed and just start running. She hurt herself that way. She’d run into walls. Once, she tore through a sliding screen door. Sometimes the sheets would get tangled around her ankles and before she could even get going, she’d fall hard on her face, and by morning, she’d have a black eye coming into focus. Those dreams had always scared the hell out of me. Jane swore they didn’t mean anything, that it wasn’t what it looked like, a memory of somebody who’d been having her when she was a kid. I wanted to ask Barry if she’d brought up the nightmares in all that consciousness work they’d done together, but I had a feeling he’d have a way of turning it on me and making the dreams my fault.

  The sky was going dark when Marie bent over in her seat and did a strange thing. She leaned her head down and put her lips on the gearshift. She got the whole thing in her mouth and it stretched her jaw open all the way. A ribbon of slobber slid down onto the gear boot and twinkled in the green glow of the dashboard. I waited for her to quit, but she didn’t. She seemed to have fallen asleep like that. I tapped her on the back. “Okay, honey, quit it,” I said. Barry’s head was up in the rearview again, though his face was dark against the lights of the car behind us.

  “It’s all right, Ed,” Barry said. “Jane and I let her do that on long trips. The vibrations relax her. She says it feels good on her teeth.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not safe,” I said. “Come on, sweets, get off of there.” I pulled on Marie’s shoulder, but she wouldn’t give up the shifter, didn’t even stir. Some kids, you could put them in a barrel and roll them down a flight of stairs and they still wouldn’t wake up. Marie’s like that. “Marie, honey.”

  Barry made like he was going to say something, and then he didn’t, and then he did. “Ed, if I may, I think you might just let her stay there. Jane says it’s fine. There’s no harm in it, really.”

  I looked at Marie down there with the gear knob buzzing away in her mouth. A spooky gagging hum was leaking out of her. It was really giving me the Larries. I put my hand under Marie’s jaw and pried her off of the shifter. The thing was, her teeth pinched up a little bit of her lip, and when she sat up in the seat, she blinked a few times, touched the little spot of blood in the corner of her mouth, and started to cry.

  “Yeah, see, Ed, what I was trying to tell you is if you’d just let her—”

  “Barry,” I said. “Thanks for putting your spoke in, but I’d appreciate it if whatever you’re going to say, you’d just shut up with it.”

  “Hey, come on, Ed, you don’t have to get hostile with me here,” he said.

  Marie was taking in a long jagged breath that I knew was going to turn loud when it came back out.

  “I’m not being hostile, Barry. I just don’t need to hear from a goddamn committee right now.”

  Marie went into a long, low wail with a lot of lung power behind it. She did a couple of those, and then she just sat there and whined.

  Barry let a second pass and then he said, “Is she hurt?”

  “No, goddammit, Barry, she’s not hurt.” I rubbed Marie on her back. “Baby doll, you’re okay, right?”

  She huffed and sputtered and shook her head no.

  “Oh, Jesus, yes you are, baby. You’re just fine. Barry, she’s fine. She’s just got a little nick on her lip is all.”

  “She’s bleeding?”

  “Barry, will you please shut up for right now? Okay, please?” I turned to Marie and wiped a tear from her cheek. “Now, honey, how can I dry you up? You hungry? You want a milkshake? You want a goody?”

  “No,” she said, in about sixteen syllables.

  “Oh, goddammit, yes you do,” I said. I was in a mood to break something. I turned on the radio loud and punched the middle of the steering wheel, but gently, so as not to honk the horn.

  A fog had followed us down from the mountains. Fence posts flickered quick and dim in the low beams. Cresting a hill, we surprised a possum eating something in the road. It wheeled around, its eyes glowing flat and yellow in the headlights.

  Barry shifted, and again his head was up between the seats. “Ed, would you mind turning that down for a sec?”

  I did.

  “Sorry. I feel like I should say something,” he said.

  “That’s all right. You said some things already.”

  “No, I want to apologize. It wasn’t right for me to secondguess you back there. Part of me has a way of speaking up when it shouldn’t.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  Barry coughed into his hand. “Hey, Ed, look, I want you to know, I really appreciate this favor of you coming out and giving me a lift. It’s kind of an awkward thing. I mean, we’re not exactly buddies or what have you, but I do think it’s good, it’s important, us getting to spend a little time one on one.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty sweet.”

  He went on. “Like it or not, we are, in our way, a family now, the four of us, and I’d hate more than anything for my presence to threaten you, or in any way—”

  “You don’t threaten me, Barry,” I told him. “I just don’t like you all that much.”

  He went quiet and gave a big sigh. “Wonderful. That’s a terrific attitude you’ve got there, Ed.”

  Barry sank slowly back in his seat. I put the radio back up loud and went fast through the dark.

  ______

  At the foot of a low grade, we came upon a restaurant that was a log cabin with some neon in the windows. Barry had kept up a pouting
silence for about the last forty minutes, which got to me nearly as bad as his nasal, superior voice.

  “Hey, back there,” I said, with determined cheer. “I’m making a coffee stop. Feel like a bite?”

  “Fine,” Barry mumbled.

  I pulled in. Marie and I set off across the parking lot. The night air was thick with the smell of the grease locker by the kitchen door. Barry took his time limping after us. Marie and I found three seats at the bar. The restaurant was a jolly place, with lots of crap hanging from the knotty pine paneling: iron farm tools, framed newspaper pages of football victories, license plates, and several stamped tin reissues of vintage advertisements with grinning, red-lipped black people on them. Wherever memorabilia wasn’t, the locals had stapled up dollar bills scrawled over with marker scribblings. Before I could stop her, Marie reached out and tore one off the square support pillar beside her stool. The cocktail waitress saw her do it. She was a high-waisted girl with a scooped collar showing a big freckled cleavage. I took the dollar from Marie and held it out to the girl. “Open your mouth, and she’ll take your fillings,” I said. “Please don’t call the cops.”

  The girl laughed. She cupped a hand to her face. “Keep it,” she said. I thought I might get a line going with her, but she glided off with her tray, and Barry Kramer hobbled in. He didn’t look at me but sat down beside Marie. He ordered a grilled cheese, onion rings, and a red wine, which came in a little bottle with a screw top. He started eating the pretzels in a dish on the bar while he waited for his food to come.

  In the meantime, the bar was filling up with people getting unwound in a hurry. Some bank-teller-looking women in rayon suits were pouring tequila into themselves and sucking limes. In one corner, a kid in yellow sunglasses had set up a DJ rig, which was playing some bass music, and a buddy of the DJ’s slid out onto the dance floor, each part of his body doing its own jittery urban dance. After a while, the bank tellers teased one another off their stools and went to try to have some fun with the dancing boy, but he cruised past them like they were traffic pylons, gone in his moves.

  Down the bar, a small man in a pink golf shirt was having a beer and watching the television bolted over the back bar. He couldn’t have been much past twenty-one. He looked extremely pissed and Greek, with a long nose and a half an inch of forehead between his brow and widow’s peak. After a while, a big rangy girl came in and sat beside him. He didn’t look at her, though everybody else did. About six two, she was a bleached giraffe in tight jeans and more makeup than a girl her age needed to wear. She put her elbow on the bar, propped her cheek on her fist, and blew an angry wad of air at the little man. The kid sucked his beer and pretended not to notice her.

  “I was waiting for you at the house,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m not at the house,” he said, his eyes stuck on the TV.

  “No shit,” said the girl. She picked up a cocktail straw and used it to root around under her nails.

  Our food came. I chopped up Marie’s cheeseburger into little pieces. She would pick up each chunk of burger and lick it before she put it in her mouth. I’d never seen anybody eat like that before. For her dessert, I got her a piece of pie, which she pried two cherries out of and turned over to me. I ate it in three bites. It was late already, and we still had two more hours of dull, straight road between here and home.

  But Barry took forever with his grilled cheese. He’d slowly drag it through a pool of mustard on his plate, take a bite, and chew it for about ten minutes before swallowing. He eavesdropped on a joke a housepainter three stools down was telling and laughed loud at the punch line. He watched the bartender do a trick where he laid an empty bottle on the edge of the counter and smacked the neck with the flat of his hand so the bottle tomahawked in a high arc and landed in a trash can in the corner. Barry and everybody clapped, except the young couple down the bar. The man’s dinner had showed up. When the woman tried to take a bite of his sandwich, he shoved the plate at her.

  “Knock yourself out,” he said.

  “What’s your goddamn deal tonight, Lewis?”

  “Nothin’. Just thought it might be fun to eat a meal one time without your fuckin’ hands in my food, but hey.”

  The waitress went by, and the boy called out to her. “Hey, Jenny. Your tits look happy tonight.”

  “Yeah, well they’re crying on the inside,” she told him over her shoulder.

  The tall girl glanced at the waitress and then back at the boy. “Let’s go over to Cherokee,” she said. “Don and Lisa are playing cards.”

  “Enjoy yourself,” he said, “and tell that asshole he owes me a compressor hose.” He slapped a bill on the bar and walked out with his beer. The girl rolled her eyes like she didn’t care, but before the door had settled in the jamb, she got up and went after him.

  They were out there in the parking lot when we made our way back to my car. Things had escalated some by then. She had the guy backed up against a blue GMC pickup, her finger in his face, hair flying. I hoisted Marie and walked fast to the car, and the couple went on with their loud words.

  I strapped Marie in. Then I put the seat forward for Barry, but he stood with his back turned, his eyes on the unhappypair.

  “You coming, Barry?”

  He didn’t move. The show was getting good. Barry watched the kid try to sidestep his big girlfriend and get in his truck, but she kept yelling and staying in his way. He shoved her chest and put her on her ass.

  “Jesus Christ,” Barry said. “We’ve got to do something here.”

  “What we need to do is get out of here and let these young people do their thing in private.”

  He screwed up his face at me. “You know, Ed, I feel sorry for you. I really do.”

  The woman didn’t stay down long. A second later, she was up, whipping yards of white arm at the little man. He reached up and slapped her. The sound came to us with a tidy crack, like a baseball striking a mitt.

  “My God,” Barry said.

  He spurred himself toward the kids on his crutch. I got in the car and cranked it, thinking to put him off his mission, but he kept on.

  When Barry was about in spitting range of the couple, he came to a stop, blue light from a flood lamp spraying down around him in a bright cone. At the sight of him, they stopped going at each other. Barry started to speak in a tranquil Mendocino cadence, and for a time, at least, his California magic took effect. The kids shrank into themselves, suffering Barry’s lecture like a couple of ninth graders caught sweating together under the bleachers. That meekness lasted about ninety seconds, and then the boy barked at Barry and feinted with his fist. The kid didn’t reach his Adam’s apple, but Barry scuttled back on his crutch, hiding behind his spread fingers, afraid for his face.

  Yet he didn’t back off. The boy wanded his beer bottle, and Barry held his palms up, playing out some movie in his head where he was the beloved man of peace. In one way, I really did want to see that young Hilfiger golf hick take Barry’s crutch from him and spindle him on it like a ballerina in a music box. But then, if Barry caught a beating, I knew it would make for a long resentment campaign from Jane, who’d surely hold me responsible.

  I lifted Marie out of the shotgun seat and dropped her in back. Then I drove fast across the parking lot and rolled the window down and called Barry’s name. The boy addressed me, bobbing on the balls of his feet in a near levitation of adrenaline.

  “You got a problem, faggot?”

  I smiled at him. “Not at all, shithead,” I said. “Just need to grab my pal, and then you can get right back to beating on your girlfriend here.”

  The boy flung his bottle and it went to pieces on my door. Marie shrieked. A red fog pulsed in my vision, and I was out of the car, going for him. Barry put himself in my path, saying, “No, Ed, Christ, come on,” and I stepped past him. The little Greek was grinning in a fraud of bravery, hoping, I suppose, that his put-on murder face would scare me into forgetting the four inches and sixty pounds he was giving up. The ang
er yawned big and hungry in my chest, and I knew not to let it go too far, just hit him on the nose once or twice. Maybe take his belt off of him and stripe him a little bit. I squared up and raised my hands, and then I was in a dream. It was of a dinner party at Jane’s parents’ house in Memphis. A storm was howling outside and lightning crackled in the windows. I was talking with Jane’s father. “Better knaves than fools, Edward,” he was droning. “Better knaves than fools.”

  I woke up on my back with a pain in my jaw. The little fellow was under me, wrapped around me in a complex whole-body grasp, some wrestling-team science I couldn’t get loose from. His legs hooked both my knees. He had one arm on my throat, and he was using his spare fist to club at my temple. Above the blows and the breaths, and the little pivot noises of our striving in the dirt, was the nasal Klaxon of Barry’s voice, bawling for help, when all he’d have needed to do to put an end to this was ram that crutch nub between the boy’s straight white teeth and lean on it.

  The young shit had me in a helpless way. I couldn’t move or draw a breath. My eyes ran with frustration and pain. I was thinking there wasn’t much to do but lie there and get knocked out, when, lo, I looked down and noticed the boy’s face in a handy spot, right alongside my ribs. I raised my elbow and brought it down. He cussed weakly. I went again, and that second blow threw his master switch. He let out a sigh, and his grip around my throat relaxed. On the third stroke, something gave, and I felt it in my elbow, a queasy collapse, like a raw chicken bone yielding to the shears. The girl was yelling, kicking at me, and then someone pulled her back. By now, a small crowd of concerned citizens had spilled out of the restaurant. I rolled off the kid, and I didn’t hear him even sigh.

  I spat something hot and thick that didn’t clear my chin. I tried to stand, but the man I’d seen behind the bar came and put a hand on me. “You stay put,” he said. In his hand was a juniorsize aluminum bat. I sat in the dirt near my bumper. Barry wasn’t in the crowd and neither was Marie. The tall girl went to her friend, moaning over him, cradling his head. It was hard to look at, how his cheek sagged away from his eye.