DOUBLE
By Michael Backus
Copyright 2011 Michael Backus
published by Xynobooks, LLC at Smashwords
Discover other titles by Xynobooks at Smashwords.com
I wasn’t always like this.
For our honeymoon, Philips and I drove 500 miles south and west to a farming town of 300 people where, three days earlier, Annie Steel had killed her four children (Gina, Jenny, Nathan, Fern) and herself. When the paper reported the killings, both of us cut it out and rushed home in anticipation of telling the other and something clicked. We decided on the spot to get married.
I drove the interstate half of the trip. By the time Philips took the wheel for the two-lane highways, we were charged, cutting a dangerous swath through the landscape. When she pushed down on the accelerator, the clouds above seemed to part, the front end of the car lifted, wind noise screamed in our ears, children covered their faces as we passed, a rabbit froze in the road, then darted—too slow!, birds panicked and beat the wind with their wings and pickup trucks skidded sideways to avoid us. I unbuttoned her jeans and lay my cheek on the line where pubic hair meets stomach, she bent down and blew her breath on my face, a smell as familiar as my own, drying the sweat. Her lips brushed my eyelids. It felt like flying.
We blew into that town, which was nothing more than a circular collection of houses—like wagons drawn together for protection—surrounded by corn and soy bean fields, believing we were doing something important, that we were getting at basic truths about why people act the way they do, that we had the courage and the insight to look into the darkest places and come out with knowledge.
And that we had answers; that’s the funny part. When I think back on it now, I’m not sure any of it was real. It’s difficult for me to believe a lot of what I remember. It gets harder all the time to be sure about anything.
Then I lose my job, which I didn’t see coming. Though I suspect it might be for the best, I still make a half-hearted attempt to argue.
“Are you kidding me?” I say to Larry, the owner of the cab company.
“There’ve been complaints lately. A lot of complaints.”
“Country of whiners.”
“I have documentation.”
“Yeah?” I say, against my better judgment. “Tell me one.”
“Mrs. Koppel says you threw dog shit at her.”
“Her dog did it in my cab. What would you do?”
“Clean it up?” he suggests so politely it infuriates me.
“Well, fuck me for being human.”
“A lady out on West Avenue says her teenage daughter came home stoned out of her mind and she claimed the cab driver got her stoned. According to the logs, that driver was you.”
“It was her joint,” I say helplessly. “I was just being friendly.”
“A Mr. Cordova called to tell us you chased him into his house and forced him to give you his wallet.”
“He only had three bucks for a four-dollar fare. That’s procedure.”
“Mugging clients is not procedure.”
“Semantic bullshit. I was retrieving a fare, putting money in your pocket, doing what you want me to do, no matter what the book says.”
“He said you went in his fridge, ate his pickles, drank right from the milk carton and stole a bag of home-made tamales.”
“First off, the tamales were greasy and I tossed them. The pickles were good,” I say, then remember why we’re talking. “I was just, well, you know... I thought of it as a tip.”
But by now, I know it’s hopeless and frankly, I’m shocked by the accumulation of details and by the time I leave, I’m actually grateful he hasn’t brought up several other incidents that no doubt were also reported.
I can’t say I’ll miss it. Two years of sitting in the same cab, parked more or less in the same spot in a deserted area of downtown near the train station, waiting for some depressed, drunken college student to call the dispatcher is no one’s idea of fun.
It’s just that the other work occasionally available in town—coffee shop counterman, bookstore clerk, day (never night) bartender—pays less and is far more potentially humiliating than driving a cab. I’d moved to this medium-sized New Hampshire college town out of some instinct, a way of thinking that made sense at the time. I no longer remember how it made sense, just that it did.
Maybe I came thinking I might be able to get adjunct work teaching the occasional film production or history class, but I’ve never felt further away from teaching than I do now. Besides, if I’d done even the most cursory bit of internet research two years ago, I would’ve discovered this college has no film production classes at all and only a single “overview” history class in its most perfunctory form (Edison to Lumiere to Melies to Porter to Griffith to the Germans to the Soviets to sound to Citizen Kane, ad nauseum); a class I swore I’d never lower myself to teach again.
Cab driving was far preferable to spewing easy-to-teach bullshit, a moral stand that was never tested because the college’s Humanities chair didn’t respond to my CV and cover letter which, in retrospect, might’ve been a bit more combative than was necessary.
At home, I sit at my kitchen table and roll and smoke a joint and start in on shots of tequila. I have a pad of paper and a pen, ready to make a list. This is something I used to do. “Write it down” was once my mantra, the first of many steps towards figuring things out, but it’d been years since I could see the point of implementing a process. What have I ever solved this way? Still, I write “My Options” at the top, then underline it twice and follow it with 1), 2), and 3); three seeming a non-intimidating number, but even this is too much.
A couple of years after Philips disappeared, a year after I fled Santa Fe vowing to go somewhere, anywhere, I took a job teaching film at a commuter college in downtown Chicago. Going back to the city where Philips and I had spent most of our life together wasn’t perfect but I had no better ideas.
In the beginning, I liked the relationship with the students. Everything was so on the surface. I was one piece of a much larger machine. Occasionally an eager student might move by on the conveyor belt and I’d impart my bit of knowledge, make my adjustment and send them on. I liked the way students zoomed through my classes. Mine was just one point on the map equal to every other point; not much was really at stake.
And after Philips’ disappearance and the resulting investigation, with a child who was an infant when her mother left (a toddler when I last saw her), I carried myself in Chicago like I had a secret, an impossibly complex backstory too painful to bring to light.
I liked playing the sensitive shell of a man routine. It kept people away while hinting at a deeper, darker and possibly dangerous self. No one bothered me and I was calm and in control in a way I never was the last few years with Philips. I felt like a murderer paroled out of prison after years, someone who had been shaped by violence and ugliness. A survivor. Triumphant.
But somewhere it all disappeared without me realizing it and I became the kind of person I least wanted to be: someone who teaches, someone who can’t do—someone who won’t—and it seemed to me that every single human I met every day understood this.
After years of brooding and holding myself separate, I suddenly found that every relationship in my life was the same. I carried on meaningful 10-second friendships with a variety of people around town—the woman with purple hair at the donut shop where I’d get coffee, the newspaper vendor, the gas mini-mart clerk, the health food store cashier, the blond woman in the Saab next to me at a traffic light.
Finally I quit teaching and left, heading east, vowing to keep as much of the continent as I could between me and Santa Fe, settling in New Hampshire for no better reason than I’d visited the college when I was 18 thinking I might want to attend. And I took up cab driving again, the perfect job for five-minute relationships.
I no longer own the ability to connect with people on a deeper, more satisfactory level; like it’s an organ gone vestigial after 10 million years of disuse. When I see two people together now—and I know how this sounds—I don’t believe it, not really. I think they’re kidding themselves and that they’ll come to understand the way I do, they’ll come to their senses. All love is a delusion and those most in love are in fact most delusional. And as each year passes, I become less a human being than a collection of strange tics, bizarre reactions, unusual ideas, uncommon fears, as if I am developing into a subspecies with a population of one.
I can’t imagine the path I might take to getting close to another person, it is as mysterious as cancer. All life is subtext, I used to tell my students—everything important anyway—but somewhere along the line, I lost the text and I don’t have a clue how to get it back.
Finally I give up on the list altogether and turn on the television. One of my favorite movies is on, the central film in a couple of classes I taught, and I recognize this as a cosmic sign though I’m not at all sure what it might mean. It’s the scene where Martin Sheen walks out into a seemingly endless prairie at dusk, the rifle on his shoulders makes him look like a scarecrow—haunted—watching lightning illuminate an immense, distant bank of storm clouds; a signal that there is another world, another life, but one that’s magically, impossibly far away, like a city in the clouds, like a comet passing the earth.
I snort a bit of the opium/speed mix I get from a former cabbie I know who lives in a survivalist compound north towards Canada. He grows opium poppies out there, dries them, grinds the seedpods to dust—there’s a boiling water/steeping step that I’m unclear about—and mixes it with methamphetamine. It’s a tiny habit I’ve picked up, a real take it or leave it kind of thing, and when I say that, I’m not kidding myself.
I’m old enough to know a real problem when I see it. Old enough to know, but that never helps with the doing. Knowledge is overrated. Introspection is simply a mocking voice repeating the same things over and over but always withholding that single most crucial bit of information; what to do with all the knowledge. For the millionth time, I promise myself that my life starts changing first thing in the morning and even as I say it, I don’t believe it, knowing as I do, but it still has just enough power, along with the opium, to clear everything long enough for me to fall asleep in front of the television.
I dream I’m stoned and falling asleep in front of the television, then I fall asleep and dream within my dream, this time of sitting in front of a different, newer, much larger television in the same room. It has fantastic sound which is something I say in the dream the way a proud new owner might say it. “This has fantastic sound!” I can hear helicopters behind me and the roar of tornadoes in front, birds chirping above and crickets buzzing all around and I’m insulated and pleasantly spinning, completely content.
When I first wake to that druggy blue glow, I’m disappointed to see my same old 13-inch color TV in its usual spot. Then the content of the dream begins to sink in. Is this what things have come to; has my subconscious simply given up? Couldn’t it (my subconscious) try a little harder; would one half-nude teenaged girl lying on the floor begging me to come to her be so out of the question? Or even a nice flying dream, no hard-on required? You get the dreams you deserve, I guess.
This life cannot continue, I say out loud, having already forgotten my vow of the night before, then I laugh at the seriousness of my pronouncement. Yet one more useless declaration. Think of a word to describe an emotional state—despair, cynicism, exhilaration, antipathy, expectation, whatever—and now tell me each of these has its own distinct feeling and flavor and I’ll call you a poor, mawkish fool who’s deluding himself into believing in the “wonder” of his own life. Is this what people mean when they argue that all life is illusion? The triumph of the subjective, life being whatever a person wants to say it is? I say no thanks to that. I trust in my brain-as-food-processor approach, blending all emotions to a fine, easy-to-digest paste.
Maybe it’s not much of a way of living (though I suspect quality-of-life arguments are beside the point), but I figure at least dying will be about the same; just one more thing not to get too excited about. Or it could be the opposite; it’ll be scary as shit and you absolutely fail to control your fear and thus spend the last moments on earth out of your mind and in torment.
But if that’s the truth, then there’s really a very good reason not to dwell on it, no point in going through that more than once, so in a way the opposing arguments come to the same place; the world made up of nothing but gray area (which would make a fine gravestone epitaph: “His world was all gray area.” Much more fitting now than Philips’ suggestion years ago of, “What the fuck are you looking at?” made during a time when she still believed my death would be a bad thing.)
Saying this life has to stop now is exactly the same as deciding I don’t care if it stops. I look for another job or I don’t. Either way. So I eeny meeny minie moe it and pick stop now, then decide I’ll try and think of a way out of this but can only come up with the idea that I have to make a plan, the actual plan will have to follow later. Getting cable is the first thing that comes to mind.
I’m willing to give in to the belief that forces both outside and in combine to create moments of opportunity in a person’s life but I also think I’ve spent a lot of time waiting and it could be I’m just missing them or maybe that’s the way of it. Maybe it’s like waiting for an earthquake, a force of nature, the big one might come in the next ten years or ten thousand; either way it’s not something a person should count on. But it’s easy to simply forget about the possibility of change for years on end. There’s always some reason not to think about it.
So I decide to leave town and then I leave. It is too easy. I’m embarrassed at how small an imprint I’ve made on the town in two plus years. No job to quit, no friends to see one last time, not even a drug dealer to visit before I go. No matter how hard I rack my brain, I can’t think of anyone in town who would do anything other than wonder why I’m telling them this.
The last thing I do is shave my beard, deciding physical change brings spiritual change, and I keep going, clipping here and there, taking too much off then trying to balance the other side until I go all the way, buzzing my scalp until my hair is no more than a shadow on a bald head.
It’s an unfortunate look. Back in the prime of my marriage to Philips, we used to buzz cut each other’s hair right to the scalp then make love, running the tips of our fingers all over the over-sensitive, newly shorn skin; it was like diving into cool, fresh water, like believing that the world was endless and available, like we could blow through or burn down anything in our way.
But in the years since, I’ve gained weight and the top of my head, shorn of all its hair, is now the smallest point of my body and bald, I look hulking, slightly demented, a little stupid in a backwards way, someone other people might step away from in a crowd, the kind of person who has an agenda; a biker, a bouncer, a skinhead. Desperate and sad; showing his weakness by announcing to all the world how he wants people to see him. I feel dense, befuddled, like I don’t have control over myself; like I have no understanding, even after forty years, of my physical place in the world. Stepping outside and feeling the wind on my freshly buzzed scalp, it’s almost worth it.
There’s not really a plan. There’s only one place to go—back to the town where I grew up—but I see nothing to get excited about. Last night, I had about a half hour of pure panic and unloaded everything I own, stacking books and sauce pans and table lamps on the kitchen counter. I could stay. No one knew I was leaving, I was jumping my lease. It’s not much, I thought, but it’s still my apartment. It’s not homeless. What was I going to do? Settle back in the town where I grew up? So I decided to stay and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
But this morning, I knew it was all insane. I quickly packed everything back into my truck and wrote a note to my landlord telling her she could sell my couch and kitchen table set to make up for the lost rent, and I left. There’s still no plan and no real confidence that true change is actually possible, but it’s not standing still. I’ve spent two years in a taxicab, driving in and around this small, snowy town, a couple of hundred miles every day, and at the very least, I won’t be driving in circles anymore. I’ll be going in a straight line.
When your entire world feels like one endless void, you tend to see all manner of things as signs. In three wandering days of travel, I’ve cried in my motel room during commercials for fried chicken and diet cola. I’ve stood high on the banks of the Ohio and stared at the wake of a garbage barge so loaded down, I lost all perspective and got the sense that in fact I was staring at a piece of crumpled paper floating in a creek no more than a few feet wide. I’ve watched the lights of a tractor at night in an immense field so long, I became certain I was seeing something not physical but spectral. I’ve listened to the rhythm of crickets sweep back and forth through the trees like the wind buffeting a huge flag, I’ve seen thousands of ladybugs gathering in the corner roof of a run-down motel porch in what seemed at the time an ominous portent. I’ve watched a house burn in the distance, a tiny lick of flame no larger than a lit match held at arms length.
All of them, if I stare and listen long enough, begin to contain meaning, truth, ideas, knowledge, importance, symbolism; something just out of my perceptual reach, like a word on the tip of the tongue, the touch of an unseen presence. Today feels like that; the sky a fine crystal blue, a New Mexico sky, a sky out of my past. Not this past—this isn’t the kind of sky I ever remember growing up—but a displaced past, 1,400 miles west of here. But what does it mean? Thinking of New Mexico, I can’t see anything but Philips: pain and bullshit, pain and bullshit.
Or maybe not. Any actual residual pain is buried under accumulated layers so deep, I’m not sure it still exists. The romanticism of angst has its allure. I’ve been known to drag out Philips stories as evidence; here’s my life, here’s my pain, I’ve been through hell, I’ve felt fear turning to dread turning to horror; you know, back story as proof of present story. It’s all kind of comforting in a life-at-arms-length way.
Approaching my hometown from the north, I try and order the jumble of memories; there are golf courses and gentle curves in the highway, houses my family almost bought and houses they did; lakes and cemeteries and railroad tracks; there’s the murder diner or was that somewhere else? There’s a house where a son killed his father, or was that somewhere else? Maybe in Philips’ hometown? Places fold into other places. I know it happens but I didn’t think that would happen to me here. Makes me wonder if this whole thing isn’t some version of a mistake. Maybe not a full-blown one, but something you realize years later, when you’ve regained enough spirit to take an honest look at the past.
I’ve put off calling my Aunt Irene each night, so now I’m stuck with the problem of dropping in out of the blue and hoping she and Uncle Eddie won’t mind if I stay for awhile. I’m also hoping they won’t be too shocked or angry at my sudden appearance after ignoring them for so many years. I slowly work my way through the three miles of back roads to my cousins’ place, acquiring along the way an entourage of impatient and possibly intoxicated teenagers bristling to get past me.
When I finally turn off, one of them thrusts out a single finger and I wave back as cheerfully as I can. Teenagers are scary things; I’m increasingly drawn to the “too stupid to live, too healthy to die” argument, but it hardly matters. I’ve reached the age where I’m completely invisible to teenagers, which is (mostly) a relief.
My cousins’ road is exactly as it was. Still dirt, it forms an O-shaped tunnel through dense overhanging trees curving along the edge of a lilypad-choked lake. Up a long incline, the road clears the trees and opens up with their fields on my left and the house and barn down a short hill on the right.
I’m happy to see the silo’s still here, as covered with ivy as ever but missing the old cone-shaped red roof. Did I used to climb to the top and hang off? I seem to remember that but it doesn’t sound like something I’d do. The yard has been cleared of all the hog shacks and chicken coops, replaced by a single aluminum garage that looks like it was pre-fabricated somewhere else and trucked here.
I pull my truck as far from the house as I can and get out and stand behind it, hoping against hope that someone comes out so they can realize who this is slowly, so there won’t be a stunned, I-can’t-believe-it moment at the door. I glance at the barn and think I see a flash of movement, then I’m not sure.
I walk to the front door and ring the bell. No answer. I check the metal garage, it’s empty. When I come out, I’m certain I see someone dart away from an upstairs window in the barn. Someone’s up there. I walk across the long yard. I’m surprised how comfortable I feel here, not just because I grew up so close, but when Philips and I lived in Chicago almost a decade ago, we used the farm as a kind of weekend retreat, something Eddie and Irene encouraged.
“Hullo?” I yell into the barn. “Anyone around?”
Silence.
“I saw someone.”
“Who wants to know?” A thin, reedy male voice that’s familiar.
“Who’s that?”
“Who’s that?” It sounds like an echo.
“Aaron?”
“I asked who wants to know.”
“It’s me. Henry.”
“Henry?”
“Your cousin Henry? Aaron, is that you?”
I hear furniture being moved and locks clicking open. Aaron is my first cousin, three years older, a gap that became troublesome when he hit junior high. We would’ve likely kept this distance through life except he was around for most of the Philips years and the two of them liked each other, so for a period of time, I saw him a lot.
He’s seen his share of trouble. After high school, he’d live at home and work for a few months to save money, then take off without a word to anyone. He drove his old rickety van to Alaska, to the Hudson Bay, up and down the California coast, throughout the Baja Peninsula, all the way down to Belize where he sold the van and took a boat back to Miami. He’s worked on oil rigs in Colorado and on a fishing boat based in Juneau. He spent two years in Hawaii helping a marijuana grower cultivate and harvest his crop, a period of time when he cut off all contact with family and friends. No one knew if he was alive or dead. When he came home, he told everyone he grew green tea on the sides of lush hills. Only Philips got the whole truth.
I know he started a business at one point, a drive-through coffee place set up in the parking lot of a local supermarket, and that it had gone pretty well for a few months before an out-of-control bread truck drove right over it, totaling everything. His finances had been stretched to the breaking point and he’d never gotten insurance for all the espresso equipment, so he only received a small settlement from the trucking company; barely enough to re-start the business. Then he’d gotten ill with a rare inflammation of the veins in his legs and he had to spend all of his savings getting better. Much of this drama was happening about the time Philips disappeared, so understandably, we lost touch.
It seems to be taking forever for him to come down. If he’s been here since his business went under—I pause for a moment, figuring the math—that means he’s been living at home for close to eight years. But maybe that isn’t it, maybe he’s here for another visit. I’d hoped he’d gotten away. When I used to think about him, I always assumed he would be fine, that he’d take a job here or there, meet a woman, the normal trip.
But why is he living in the barn? It’s old, leaning to one side, the wood slats deeply weathered, almost marbled, like driftwood, and inside on the first floor, the place is dirty with a thick earthen smell mixed faintly with a shit odor. There is a car parked inside but it’s completely covered in dust and bird droppings; the kind of layering that might take months, even years.
There’s a short stairway to the left and at the top, a trap door. I vaguely remember a loft up there. It had always been full of hay and mice. I start up and suddenly the door swings open and filtered light comes through.
“Henry?” Aaron’s voice is wobbly-sounding, like he hasn’t used it in a long time.
“It’s me, Aaron.”
“I’ll come down.” The door slams shut and I’m thrown back into darkness. I walk outside, the wind feels fresh and clean. The garden is close to the barn, the sweet corn stalks have a tint of brown and I can see green pumpkins spotting one section. Somewhere above me, an unseen crow squawks over and over; an unpleasant noise that in the circumstances, seems suitably gothic. I begin to wonder if he’s coming down at all, maybe this is how he deals with people now, by ignoring them until they go away.
When I turn around, he’s standing right there and I smile because of how familiar that face is. I smile in spite of myself because he looks awful, worse than awful, with a gaunt, hollow face and pasty skin, a belly that looks almost like a beer belly until you really look and realize it’s set too high to be a beer belly—it’s bulbous, like a growth, and under the belly, his legs are shockingly thin, the wind rippling loose pants over two pipe cleaners.
“Henry.”
“Aaron. God,” I say before I can stop myself.
“I’ve been sick. Didn’t my mom tell you?”
I shake my head, half afraid of what I might say.
“Are you OK?” It comes out squeaky, fearful and he turns away from me. He’s looking at the entrance to the barn.
“Where are Aunt Irene and Uncle Eddie?”
“Florida. They have a house in Sarasota. You didn’t know?”
“No. I wouldn’t know that. I haven’t kept in touch that way. Not about everyday things.”
“Yep. We got the place to ourselves.”
There’s a long, awkward moment while we both struggle to find something to say.
“I’ve been looking forward to the lane. Do you still go down the lane?”
“Yeah, I can still walk,” Aaron says, aggravated. So we start for the road, cross it and begin down the lane, a bright green path running straight through the center of two fields, one of which is planted in soybeans, the other corn. It has an English hedgerow feeling and always has, as long as I’ve been alive.
He moves slowly and within 100 yards, his breathing becomes labored and there’s no chance of him keeping up his end of a conversation. The silence gives me an opportunity to recover from the shock of seeing someone I know so well, almost my own age, this frail and dissipated. What could have done this? How could my aunt and uncle have allowed things to get so bad?
The ground finally levels off and his breathing eases; his snail’s pace is maddening at first, but I get used to the idea that there’s nowhere to go and settle into the rhythm of his slow, lurching gait. He walks like a pregnant woman, leaning back, arms propped behind him, balancing out the weight of his belly. I’m not sure what to say.
“You’ve gotten older,” he says. “Fatter.”
And what I think is, he’s not someone who should be calling attention to a person’s body changes but at the same time—and maybe this is the source of his newfound brutal honesty—he’s so fragile, his body so warped and asymmetrical, droopy around his face and neck, bloated drum-tight around his chest and belly, it would be cruel to respond in kind.
“Yes,” I say in a tone meant to shut down further discussion.
“You’re probably wondering,” Aaron says.
“Yeah, I guess.” I am, about a lot of things, though I’m not sure what he means.
The lane itself is lawn-type grass cut regularly, a soft, smooth path that even Aaron can easily negotiate but lining both sides, they’ve allowed it to grow wild, an incredible tangle of jimson weed, milkweed, the pods hanging heavy and ready for a strong wind, small junk trees like poison oak and sumac, tiny slender green sassafras, a dozen other plants, yellow wildflowers, pitchfork and Velcro burrs; what all of Northern Indiana would look like if the land wasn’t relentlessly groomed and cleared by people. I’ve spent a good portion of my life on this land, but that’s not what I remember best.
“Down the lane” was a favorite ritual for Philips and I, we’d sneak out after dinner, smoke a joint, toss our clothes aside and run around naked, which was always nerve-wracking at first, then liberating when we realized no one was coming down here after dark. We had a whole other life, naked in the dark in these fields, my wife and I, one of many whole other lives we shared. Or didn’t.
As shocked as I am by his appearance, we settle quickly into the familiar, comfortable with silence. I bend down and rip up a two-foot sassafras tree, shake the dirt from the roots and then breath in the rich, root-beer smell. I hand it to Aaron who puts it under his nose as we walk. The lane continues winding into a stand of woods heading towards a third crop field on the other side and a small, weedy lake and beyond that, more woods, all of it belonging to my aunt and uncle.
“Is that the elephant tree?” I say.
“That’s further on,” he says. “It’s not much of an elephant anymore.”
“What about the old beech? I’d like to see the names again.”
“Gone. A few years ago, Dad sold a few of the oldest hardwoods.”
“Shit, really? Why?”
“I don’t know. Money. He sold them to a German company that makes fine furniture; maple, oak, cherry.”
“But beech?”
“In the way.”
“I wouldn’t have known. It’s not obvious.”
“Not now. But at the time...“
“Time, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
We emerge out of the woods, ahead is a large apple tree covered top to bottom with starlings; it vibrates with the force of their wings and their voices. I made love to my wife under that tree, back when we were trying to conceive a child. It didn’t work, but it was the best place we tried. We both wanted that time to be the one, to create a life in that wonderful, perfumed air with fruit blossoms floating all around us.
“Do you hear from Philips?” he says in the calmest of voices but it’s an explosive question, given all that’s gone on and all that I’m thinking about at this moment. But Aaron’s that way with me. We weren’t always close, that three year difference weighed heavily through junior high and high school, but Aaron had the ability to tap into what I was thinking.
“That’s a fucked-up question. No, no one does, as far as I know. Even if she does emerge, she sure as hell wouldn’t contact me.”
“But you’re in touch with Cadence?”
“God, Aaron. Fuck. Shit. No, I’m not. I’m not. Please,” I say, unable to supply complete words to my outrage.
“You’re not in touch?”
“No.”
“How old is she now?”
“We’re going to fucking drop this right now. I mean it. Right now!”
“I was just wondering.”
“Quit your wondering, goddammit.”
“You always curse too much when you don’t know what to say.”
“I think you should worry about yourself.”
He remains calm, his demeanor so infused with weariness, I’m not sure he’s capable of outrage anymore.
“What gave you the impression I didn’t?”
“What’s up with you then? Why are you so messed up?”
“I’m sick. No one told you?”
“You asked me that. No. Who’d tell me? You tell me.”
He flops down on the ground so suddenly, I think he’s collapsed. Then he leans back, stretches his legs out, his arms above his head. Even like this, his belly doesn’t disappear, it’s hard and fibrous-looking, sitting there like a basketball.
“I don’t get outside so much.”
“I can see.”
“Scurvy.”
“What?”
“You asked. It was scurvy.”
“Scurvy?”
“I was drinking, not eating, not going outside. No nutrition, just booze, equals scurvy. Did you know all the termites in the world outweigh all the humans ten to one?”
“What?”
“Kind of makes you think if a certain kind of life visited us, they might just conclude that termites are the dominant species on earth.”
“I don’t care about that. Are you getting better?”
“Better, schmetter. I read a book about a boy who takes off one day, from family, house, school, job, everything, starts walking out of the city through the suburbs, through all the small towns surrounding the suburbs, into the country and he keeps going, drinking from people’s outside faucets, eating apples from orchards, tomatoes and cucumbers from people’s gardens, going until he can’t see subdivisions, can’t hear interstates, he walks until he doesn’t see country stores, until the paved roads end and then the dirt roads…”
Aaron stops, breathing hard with the effort of talking; he sucks in deep breaths to calm himself. Great puffy clouds have rolled in, a few more minutes and they’ll be above us, and further on, I can see a dark line, a storm front like a mountain range rising in the distance.
“And pretty soon he’s no longer seeing houses or any kind of structure but he keeps on and fire breaks drop away, no use for breaks in a place where no one lives and he keeps going until all he can see is trees and sky. That’s all.”
“Yeah? And he’s happy? The book says he’s happy?”
“The book doesn’t know; he’s off the radar screen. I am Legend, the last man on earth, that’s what the book thinks. But it doesn’t really know.”
I sit, then lie down next to him. I desperately wish I had my opium mix but it’s back in the truck and there’s not much left, no more than two snorts. I feel like a fool, a pretender, floating far from home next to the real thing, my cousin, “the last man on earth,” slowly folding into himself. What does it matter if he is getting better or not?
“Aaron? You know where my mom’s living?”
“I was wondering when we’d get to that.”
“Big John Wayne” was how Samuel Dolan thought about his father; looming as large as the trees rimming their yard, standing alone against the gray-green backdrop of boiling clouds, watching the storm approach. His twin brother Sonny thought of The Dude like this too, but Sammy was the one who acted confused on those Saturday afternoons watching western movies on television; he’d see two John Wayne bodies—one on screen, one sitting four feet away—two similar squarish weather-beaten faces, two men who had a familiar forward-leaning stumble of a walk; he’d stare at the TV screen, then back to his father.
Screen, father, The Duke, The Dude. Also known as Arthur Dolan, a tall, strong man with thick hands. Arthur Dolan always told them that John Wayne, The Duke, was six foot four inches tall and he, The Dude, was at least that tall, maybe a bit taller. As tall as The Duke, Sammy would say. Taller.
But it was against the waves of spring storms that The Dude was most Duke-like; John Wayne sitting on their picnic table drinking a beer and watching a dark storm coming in while their mother, the former Franny Malone, a full foot shorter than her large husband, would make the twins go to the basement. They were so proud of him, they thought he was courage itself; not just facing the storm but enjoying the way the trees whipped and the leaves turned inside out and flattened in a sudden gust, showing a winter outline, as if the storm had the power to change the seasons. Storms scared the both of them, Franny too, but The Dude, the Duke; Big John Wayne, AKA Arthur Dolan, was scared of nothing in this world.
The basement wasn’t much comfort with its rough concrete floor, its coal room in the corner blacker than the lightless black all around them, its five-foot ceilings with open beams and the feathery touch of cobwebs no matter where you walked. It smelled like sewer and sometimes bats would find their way into a corner rafter.
Often the power went out and Franny would light candles. They’d stand together listening to the gusts of wind buffet the house—the strain of the wood, the way the glass squeaked when pushed right to the breaking point, the tumbling of garbage cans—counting the space between lightning and thunder: one Mississippi, two Mississippi; then just one Mississippi, the storm moving closer.
The twins thought of it as a giant monster, like from Japanese movies; an immensity that shook the ground as it approached. They’d crawl under the heavy workbench when the creature was standing over their house and they’d get excited and antsy listening to it move away.
When The Dude finally yelled the all-clear, they’d run outside into cooler, drier air. Often there were branches and trash scattered everywhere. Once, the yard was full of balls of greenish ice, which melted when they held them in their hands. Another storm knocked down trees all over the neighborhood, giving them a whole new world to play in; one made up of long trunk walkways and small leafy hiding places, a place in which they could spend an entire day.
Franny liked to tuck them in after a night storm; she never minded when they slept in the same bed, especially since she knew they always did anyway, but it was only after a big scare that The Dude wouldn’t make an issue of it. He didn’t believe children of any age should be sleeping in the same bed; he didn’t understand it either, why any little boy would want to. Most of the twins’ behavior eluded him.
“Sonny and Sammy sitting in a tree.” Sung sweetly in their mother’s low growl of a voice. Sammy scrunched his nose up at his mother.
“Climbing a tree maybe,” Sonny said. “Walking on a fallen one, maybe.”
“But not just sitting,” Sammy said. “Why would we just sit?”
“You sit every day for hours in a tree,” she said, then almost laughed at their horrified little faces. They could get so serious together, like their lives completely depended upon not being contradicted. “It’s just a song, sweethearts.”
She kissed them both until they were giggling. Franny Malone had been an athletic beauty who used to cartwheel across the beach; she’d gained weight through the years but still had a soft, round pretty face and the voice of a longshoreman; hoarse, low, scratchy, sexy when she was younger and in better shape, odd now housed in the body of a plump 35 year-old housewife.
“We want to see the book,” Sonny said.
“The book,” Sammy agreed.
“It’s late,” she said. “You can see the book in the morning.”
“Boo on you,” Sammy said, looking like he might cry.
“First thing,” Sonny said.
“First thing,” Sammy agreed, his good humor instantly restored.
The twins never forgot. In the morning, it was the first words they spoke—“We want to see the book!”—as Franny set up the breakfast table. The Dude rolled his eyes and tried to ignore them by concentrating on his newspaper. He’d been The Dude since grade school, so named because even at an early age, he kept his pants crisp and his shirts ironed and because with long, long legs, suits hung perfectly on his frame.
The twins thought of him as The Dude; they liked that their father had a nickname. Mornings around the breakfast table were The Dude’s favorite time, the twins knew not to bother him but they also understood that he didn’t mind if they tore this way and that as long as they let him read the paper and drink his coffee. These were natural, easygoing times for The Dude who was often confused and restless around his sons.
Sonny stood right in front of him and announced with the utmost seriousness that they wanted to see the book.
“That right Junior?” The Dude said. For no reason that made sense to anyone, The Dude had long made an effort to call Sonny “Junior.” He’d had an uncle Henry who’d been like a big brother when The Dude was a child, but he’d developed a bad drinking problem before he was out of high school and finally got himself killed a week short of his 25th birthday, ramming the same tree on the same deserted stretch of county road on successive Saturday nights, his head impacting the windshield because—incredibly—he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt the second time.
Even The Dude’s mother agreed it was poor judgment to bring her long-wretched and now dead brother into this. But the main reason Franny was against it was because their Henry already had a nickname. He’d been Sonny almost his entire life. One day still months shy of their second birthday, Sonny quit answering to his name and he and Sammy threw violent tantrums if either of his parents tried to force “Henry” on him.
He was “Ohhnee,” more or less, it wasn’t easy to be sure since both twins were still in the early stages of speech and everything they said came out sounding kind of the same. To The Dude’s ears, the name was uncomfortably close to “Annie” and he loudly fought it for awhile until the twins’ toddler stubbornness wore him down. What did it matter anyway? They looked exactly alike and The Dude harbored suspicions that their names had been inadvertently switched many times since birth, a notion that infuriated Franny.
Later, both parents realized “Ohhnee” was actually Sonny’s attempt to say “Sammy”—the twins wanted the same name—but by then, “Ohhnee” had morphed into the far more acceptable “Sonny.” So now, years later, when The Dude continued to push “Junior,” Franny thought he was showing a stubbornness that was distastefully ignorant, with the petulance of a child, refusing to acknowledge that they as parents had been over-ruled. There was no “Henry.” They had a son named Sammy and another named Sonny. And since there were no “Sonnys” in either of their pasts, Sonny was never going to be a Junior. Just deal with it.
A few relatives attempted for a time to call Sonny Little Dude to Arthur’s Big Dude, a name Sonny did like and Franny encouraged but The Dude was never happy with this, wanting to remain the only Dude in the entire world, or at least in the known world of the Dolan family.
The Dude opened a cupboard above the refrigerator and pulled down the thin volume. It was a book the twins always wanted, for the oddest reason, The Dude believed, but he couldn’t see the harm. Not that there was no possibility of harm; he had learned that a person can’t see the ramifications of every action but through extensive browbeating by his tiny tough wife, he’d come to accept that he couldn’t control every possibility. Plus it was just a thin book, a National Geographic volume on the sea written for children with large print and striking color photographs.
It was so peculiar, he thought, their unbridled delight in it. He was put off by the childlike neediness of his, well, children. Yes, he reassured himself. Childlike because they are children. Have patience. And they were beautiful children, he had to admit, more Franny’s physically than his and if her 5’3” frame would no doubt dilute the tall genes of his family, her nearly perfect, round face had made their features more delicate and fine than any in the Dolan clan. And The Dude was smart enough to know that while height was a great thing in this society, physical beauty was even better and with luck, the twins might develop both.
He handed the book to one of the twins. Which was how he often thought of them, twins, Sonny and Sammy being so completely identical to him that he and just about everyone else had trouble telling them apart. Franny never did but The Dude would have to wait for their personalities to begin to separate or for something as simple as a good old facial scar. Nothing wrong with a scar, he even joked about it with them, causing great yelling arguments between the twins as to who would be the first to separate himself with a nice long cut on the face.
“Thanks, Dude,” Sammy said, having fun calling his Dad Dude but also thinking it meant absolute love.
“Daddy,” The Dude said.
“Daddy Dude,” Sonny said. Was this something all parents went through, The Dude wondered? Feeling like a stranger surrounded by strangers in your own house?
“Just Daddy. You’re the only two pardners in all the world who can’t call me Dude. You understand?”
“I like The Dude,” Sammy said sadly.
“Me too,” Sonny said.
“Tough shit,” The Dude said, which came out meaner than he meant it.
“Daddy,” their mother reminded them. “Don’t you see how it makes you both special? Nobody else in this entire world can call him Daddy. Not even me. But everybody can call him Dude.”
“Except us,” Sonny reminded them. Sometimes he was so straightforwardly practical it alarmed even The Dude, who believed he valued such traits in all people.
“I got the book,” Sammy said in a sing-song voice and he and his brother ran outside with it and flopped down on the grass, holding hands as casually as most people walk; sitting with their arms around each other, their legs together, the book between them. They opened it to the first page and both giggled at an underwater photo of a seahorse and “Ewww’d” at the shot of a thousand sea snakes surrounding a boat.
They were working their way to a full-page close-up of a whale’s eye and mouth that looked suspiciously, creepily human and never failed to spook them. Since they could never remember exactly where the picture was in the book, they got more and more excited with each turned page. When the photo finally appeared, they began screaming as they always did.
“Granny Eye! Granny Eye! Granny Eye!” they both yelled, wriggling their legs in the air and erupting into great spasms of laughter. The Dude watched from the porch. It made no sense to him, all this excitement over some ridiculous book. He felt like he should be doing something to stop them or to teach them, but he had no idea what.
Last summer, he’d tried to get them interested in baseball. For two months, he pursued the dream of Sonny and Sammy being the first pitcher/catcher twin combo to make the major leagues. The twins learned to dread seeing their huge father standing holding two baseball mitts, a bat, a ball, and a rubber home plate, though they’d dutifully stop whatever they were doing and march out to the edge of the yard where The Dude had permanently walked off 60’6’’. There was a plate-shaped brown spot in the grass where home plate sat, and at the other end, a piece of old tire cut into a rectangle and bolted straight into the ground, serving as a pitching rubber.
It was a worthy dream, The Dude was sure of that, the kind of thing young boys should aspire too. It was worth pushing them some, they’d be thankful when they were older and playing a game they loved. He had strong and specific beliefs on how baseball should be taught. Sammy got no catcher’s mask or chest protector, not at this stage. He’d learn to catch every pitch thrown if he didn’t have protection.
Sonny always threw from 60 feet, a long throw for a nine year old boy but The Dude didn’t believe in shorter distances, even though the Little League mound-to-home-plate distance was only 45 feet. He said if Sonny practiced at 60, 45 would feel like nothing. It would strengthen his arm. Besides, the major leagues were 60’6” and they were never allowed to forget that this was the goal. Little League, Pony League, Colt League, high school, college were just the means; major league baseball was the end.
He’d say things like, “Catching’s the easiest route to the Bigs, Kiddo. You might get there first but you can get things ready for your brother.” Or, “Remember me. The both of you when you’re up there playing a game you love and getting paid for it. Just remember me. That’s not so much to ask now is it, Kiddos?”
“Kiddo” was never appreciated by either of the twins but since it was their father’s all-purpose nickname for everyone—family and friends and store clerks and gas station attendants and characters on the television, even Franny—they couldn’t very well complain about it. Besides, it wasn’t like Junior, which singled out one of them. He called them both “Kiddo.”
The twins never talked about it, but both of them were remarkably clear-headed about their father’s dream. Sonny was a natural with a strong arm, he might play ball through high school, but he might not too. He didn’t love it. He loved throwing—he could spend hours on the back porch after a wet snow and throw snowballs until every tree in the yard was speckled with white impact marks—but not the playing of the game itself so much.
Too many rules, too much standing around and staying within the lines. And Sammy was less coordinated and so gentle of spirit, he found the violence of sports painful. Not the physical part—he liked wrestling and running into things and he had little fear of pain and blood—but the competition, the way people became angry when they lost, the way The Dude got when things didn’t go smoothly.
Franny sometimes wondered how she married such a dullard, how The Dude could practice baseball every other day for two months and not see how slowly Sonny walked to the rubber, like the entire world weighed him down; or how when Sammy assumed his crouch his knees shook. She made caustic remarks and accusations, but she never really confronted him or stepped in to stop it.
It was Sammy himself who finally did, which was his way. While it was true that Sonny was the boldest and had the quicker mind, he was also more easily confused, but Sammy’s will was unconquerable once he set a goal. He’d plant himself and refuse to budge, no matter what happened. So one day, while Sonny was off throwing baseballs as far as he could, then retrieving them all and throwing them back, as useless an activity as he could imagine (“You can’t teach a strong arm, Kiddo,” was The Dude’s favorite retort, if Sonny complained), The Dude pitched so Sammy could practice catching hard-thrown baseballs.
Sammy didn’t even try to catch the very first pitch, took it right in the gut, forcing his considerable lunch onto home plate. Two days later, it was Sonny on the rubber. First pitch, Sammy dropped his hands again, this time it hit him in the face, leaving bloody seam impressions above his lip. Two days after that, Sonny’s first pitch winged Sammy’s left ear, again drawing blood, and The Dude yelled at him.
“Goddammit, boy! Try!”
“I am trying!” Sammy yelled, near tears.
By the fourth practice session, The Dude had grudgingly switched to tennis balls and bounced five successive pitches off various parts of Sammy before giving up. And that was it, baseball dream over.
The Dude was upset for about a week and avoided the twins because he’d get angry all over again when he’d see them huddled together, but when the week was out, some part of him came to understand he was relieved. Nothing he did mattered to them anyway, he seemed to have little effect on his sons’ lives. He didn’t think two boys should sleep in the same bed and insisted they stay in their respective beds, but the twins paid no mind and simply waited until he left the room, then crawled into bed together.
And he thought children taking baths and showers together was wrong, but they did it anyway. He’d find them peeing side by side, giggling while they wielded the yellow streams like swords doing battle and he’d yell, but they wouldn’t stop. And he often caught them sitting crowded on the toilet seat with their pants around their ankles and he’d patiently explain to them why brothers don’t do such things, but they didn’t listen. When he tried to put his foot down, Franny insisted he install a clasp lock and the twins began locking the bathroom door, which in the end was good enough for The Dude. As long as he didn’t have to see it, he wasn’t the sort to complain.
The Dude’s favorite family times were late night after the news when he’d look in on the twins. Often his wife was there with them and he’d lift the covers and help her out of bed, kissing her on the forehead, then tucking the covers back, careful not to wake the boys and they’d walk down the creaky hallway on light feet holding hands. These were the moments The Dude felt were closest to what he imagined the joys of having a family should be like.
He wasn’t a natural father, if such a thing existed, though he often had to stop himself from blaming the twins. They were relentlessly strange, he thought, all the odd ideas they had, the peculiar ways they bonded, how they were always whispering to each other and giggling over things no one else understood. It wasn’t meant personally, he knew that, but he still took it that way. He believed he loved his kids, though he wasn’t the sort who had an instinctive love of children.