Home: Part 19

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

March 1974

 
The first Saturday of spring. Kathy was gone for the day with her sister Holly, and I had just repaired a leaky faucet on the kitchen sink. The faucet had dripped for weeks, water hitting the porcelain just loudly enough to be audible when the apartment was quiet. I was sitting on the sofa admiring my work and remembering Shannon, the woman I had almost married, and how her father had been a plumber. He was short, burly. His hands and fingers were so thick that I often wondered how he managed to use them at all in his trade.

Shannon's hands were different: thin and delicate almost to the point that when we first met I was afraid to touch them though, later, kneading the muscles in my neck they were confident and strong. A dancer, she walked with a grace that had been defined by years of movement and exercise. Sometimes, from a distance, I would watch walk across a room and covet how her legs moved with what seemed to be so little effort.

Her father, Howard, never seemed to trust me in the half-decade Shannon and I were together. Though gruff with nearly everyone but his wife and daughter, he seemed to know that I was only temporary and not worth his investment. "You're not good with tools," he said once as I once helped him install a sink and toilet in the small house he rented to Shannon and me. It wasn't necessarily meant to be an insult, just a statement of apparent fact.

Shannon had just started teaching in the same elementary school that she had attended, her first classroom the same one she had been in as a girl. "It feels so much like home," she told me after her first day. 

I stared at the faucet I had just repaired and though that Howard might appreciate that I had developed enough to where I could use wrenches and pliers fairly confidently. 

Home: Part 18

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

August 1974

 
I didn't know where we were--someplace north of Pensacola, Florida, on a two-lane rode that was as dark as any road I'd seen. There was nothing on the sides of the road but what I assumed were pine trees. The truck's windows were wide open, and the humidity and wind beat against my face in a way that wasn't comfortable but was better than keeping the window closed and feeling just the humidity.  

"Where are we?" I asked at one point.

"Traveling north," Mitchell said. It was his truck: an old Chevrolet with a bench seat that sagged in the middle.

I just my eyes and listened to the radio. Mostly the radio fed us static, but now and then it would feed us gospel music. 

"We're here," Mitchell said. I'd dozed off, apparently, and I needed a moment to come to terms with who I was with and what we were doing.

"We're where," I said.

"Flomation. Flomation, Alabama."

"Flomation?"

"Yep. Sounds like a toilet part, doesn't it?"

"Why are we here."

"In Flomation?"

"Anywhere. Why are we in Alabama?" The humidity in Alabama's night wasn't any less than it had been in Florida.

"There's a bar."

"We drove this far to go to a bar?"

He nodded. "I might know some people."

"What kind of people?"

"Nice people, mostly. They're mostly polite."

He parked the truck in a gravel lot in front of a small, single-story building. The neon sign over the door read "Marianne's." I pointed at the sign. "Who's Marianne--friend of yours?"

"Everyone's a friend of mine," he said. "Come on. Let's get a drink."

The smell of stale cigarette smoke inside the bar seemed flow out of the paneled walls. A couple of pool tables in the back of the room had suffered great abuse. A couple of women were standing around the jukebox, and who I took to be there boyfriends were sitting in a booth nearby. The bartender looked up from his newspaper when we entered.

Mitch gestured toward the bar. "Our lucky night--a choice of seats." The bartender looked at us. "Budweisers," Mitch said.

"I hate Budweiser," I said.

"I know you do. Just have one, and keep the bottle handy."

"What?"

"Long-necked bottles: useful if you get into a fight."

"Mitch," the bartender said when he set the bottles in front of us.

"Gary. Things look kind of slow tonight."

"I like to think of it as peaceful," Gary said. 

"Yeah, peaceful," Mitch said. "I found this guy on the side of the road and thought he might like a place to sit for a while." He gestured at me.

Gary shook my hand. "You a friend of Mitch's?"

"So far," I said. "A lot rides on how the night goes."

"Yeah. I understand that." He returned to his newspaper at the far end of the bar.

"How was Subic City?" Mitch asked.

"Felt just like this," I said. "Hot and humid."

"Get yourself laid?"

"Don't get personal."

"Get the clap?"

"That's personal, too."

He nodded. "The last time I was there, I started dripping before I left and didn't stop for a month. When I finally saw a doctor, he asked how many times I'd had the clap. I told him six, and he didn't believe me."

"That's a lot of clap," I said. "It's an actual ovation."

"Clever."

"You ever thought about using a rubber?"

"I did, once."

"About five times less than you should've." The women at the jukebox must have been unsuccessful, because there was no music playing. They had returned to their boyfriends, and the group of them seemed happy in the booth. The Budweiser had cooled my throat. 

"The doctor said that some of that stuff over there has started to eat penicillin. He said I've got enough scar tissue inside my pecker to nearly close me up."

"And you're proud of that?"

Mitch shrugged. "The price of doing business, I guess." 

"So you've been here before, I take it."

"Yeah. Now and again. Used to run with a woman who worked here two, three years ago."

"And now?"

"And now, I'm just depressed and thought I'd come up here to remember her."

"Christ. You're getting all sentimental." 

"We almost got married." He gestured for Gary to bring us more beer.

"Almost?"

"Almost. Then she met a drummer, and the next thing I knew she popped out a kid that didn't look anything like me. You could say that our relationship pretty much ended then."

"If I didn't know better, Mitch, I'd say that you're about to cry."

"I might."

"Don't pull me into your misery, okay? I didn't get dragged all the way to Flomation to have a bad night."

He looked at me, and I knew that he was on the cusp between disappointment and anger. "Maybe we should play pool," I said.

Home: Part 17

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

June 1958 

My mother kept a small garden on the side of the house. In the spring an assortment of tulips emerged from bulbs she had planted over the years. Each year she planted more to replace those that had grown too tired to bloom. "They give me hope," she once said. "I know that no matter how hard the winter is, each spring there'll be life and color there." Then, later, my sister Cindy and I were assigned the task of planting vegetables when the flowers had faded.

"Not so close together, Cindy," my mother said from her lawn chair as Cindy and I dug holes in the dirt. "Especially the tomatoes. They'll need a lot of room later in the summer." 

"It's never right, is it?" Cindy muttered as she filled one hole and dug another in another spot. I didn't say anything. I was quite happy with my hands in the dirt. I liked the way it felt, its odor. Cindy was at a point in life where she was aggravated by everything my parents said, and I knew she wanted to be anywhere else but on her knees in the garden, our mother giving us instructions from her chair.

"But they're good when they're finally ripe," I said.

"They're tomatoes," Cindy said. "We can buy them in the store and they taste just as good. This is just a way for Mom to keep us busy now that school's out. She's used to having the house to herself most of the time, and we kind of cramp her style."

Cindy might have been right, but I was content nonetheless. "We're almost done," I said. I set a small tomato plant into the new hole Cindy had dug.

When we finally stood to admire our work, I was happy with the symmetry of things, the even spacing of plants. "It looks very nice," my mother said as she joined us. "You two work well together." 

"I'll clean up," I said and began gathering the garden tools. 

Cindy walked away without saying another word, and my mother watched her go. "Thank you," my mother said, and she patted me on the shoulder before heading into the house.

In the garage, I hung the tools on holders above my father's workbench. The garage was dark and musty, and I enjoyed the smells there as much as I enjoyed the smell of dirt. Outside again, I dragged the hose to the garden and watered each plant. Trying to picture how they'd be full-grown at the end of the summer, I wondered if the plants gave my mother the same sense of hope as the tulips did, or if they were somehow different.

Home: Part 16

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for awhile.

January 1958 

The morning after my father broke my mother's tooth, everyone was gone when I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. It was a Saturday, and though I had seen my father leave for work, I expected my mother and sister to be lingering about somewhere. Perhaps, like me, they were not sure of how to act--or react--to the previous night's event and had opted to avoid everyone and everything.

Outside, the sky was gray; snow had fallen through the night. On the driveway, the snow had been etched by tire tracks that seemed now to be half-filled by new snow. Tiger was now curled up on the sofa and staring at me. I sat beside him and considered the palm of my hand where the fragment of my mother's tooth had left a small cut as I'd squeezed it during the night.

Not far from our home was a large field where corn grew throughout the summer. Tiger and I had left the quiet house behind and were walking through the furrows. Away from the houses in our neighborhood, the field was one place where I could remove the dog's leash and let him run. He would sniff through the snow as he put space between us, going only so far before looking back to find me.

Once, during a heavy snowstorm, Tiger and I were in the same field and he stopped running, turned, and stared into a distance I could not see. Moments later a human form appeared, and as it got closer I recognized my father: warm, heavy coat; old-fashioned black galoshes; knitted scarf.

"Tiger!" my father yelled. "Come here, boy!"

Tiger lurched, stopped, then ran toward my father. My father ran in the opposite direction, and Tiger stopped as if confused by what had vanished into the falling snow. I heard my father's voice call again, and Tiger circled a bit before racing away. I stood there and listened as Tiger barked when my father called to him. Then, for a while, I could hear neither of them. I stood where I was and shut my eyes as the snow fell around me, until I heard them both getting closer.

"That dog can run!" my father said when the two of them reached my side. "This is a nice field, isn't it?" He tilted his bare face upward and let the snow fall onto it, and he seemed to stay that way for a long time. He finally wiped his eyes and looked around. "I just wanted to get out of the house and get some air. Took me a while to find where you two had gone--but you picked the perfect place. I've got to go to work later, so I might not see you until right before bedtime. Stay warm, okay?"

"See you, Dad," I said as he patted Tiger's head and disappeared into the falling snow.

The house was still empty when Tiger and I got home. I dried the dog's fur. Eating Cheerios at the kitchen table, I again looked at the small cut on my palm. I was not sure of why I had taken the broken tooth from my father's dinner plate, or why I had clutched it so tightly throughout the night.  Later that morning, though, I would search for but not find that fragment anywhere on or under my bed, and I would wonder which of my parents had crept into my room as I slept and retrieved it.