“You’re a good boy, Laertes. Fortinbras said so on the hump. We’re sorry you had to learn that way.”
“Was he really that much trouble?” Lucille said.
“We never did know the meaning of that word.”
“I only meant,” Lucille said, “he didn’t mean any harm.” In her voice I heard desperation. The time had long passed for rudeness with the geeze who for some crazy reason had kept on coming back. “We just want to go home.”
“The sooner we get to the wheels, the sooner you’ll not be here.”
“So,” Avey said.
No one had to probe her gist. Her gaze had wandered toward Dinky’s room. Basil hit the bottle. Lucille picked her lip.
“We take it that’s where you’re weeping for the Wainwright boy,” Super said.
“How is it you plan to get him out of here?” Basil said.
“We can help,” Lucille said. She looked at Avey.
“You two help Basil,” I said. “We’ll get Dinky.”
“What,” Basil said, “you think he somehow lost a hundred and fifty pounds?”
“I can carry my half,” I said, “if he can carry his.”
“We can carry him and his coffin if needs be,” Super said.
“AJ,” Basil said as he drew near. “You really think the old man’s square?”
“He takes us into town, I don’t care what the fuck he is.”
Basil looked out through the ruins, his features hardening. “Right,” he said.
Pink Champagne Bitch lay by Dinky, next to some bottles and a tray full of butts. A wad of bubblegum stuck to the nightstand. A pair of socks poked from under the bed. There was a wet and stinking pea coat, two shitty sneakers, a bag stuffed with underwear and shirts and a worthless belt. And shaving cream, and toothpaste, and lotion, and a pack half-empty of Camel Lights, and those stinking awful clowns.
When Super pulled down Dinky’s blanket, I expected eyes like pinballs staring through the cold. But someone had come in and put a ski cap over his face, which I removed and placed on my head. And his face was cold, and his eyes were pinballs, blind as pinball chrome. Maybe that was good. Who could say what Dinky saw on the other side? Maybe little nymphs with paper wings, or hobgoblins and beetles and fire and heath, and the flesh of sinners peeling from bones. And anyway, who the hell really cared? I only knew what he wouldn’t be seeing, what he’d never dream again. Not the tsunamis of December or the tippy-tip toes of a gorgeous ballerina. He’d never once, not ever again, see a hatchling from its egg, a leaf on a breeze, chocolate on a shelf in the sun. Women would fight with their men in tenemental gloam, and trout would flop on the fishmonger’s board. And masons would trowel, and strippers dance, and bankers bank, but Dinky, he wouldn’t know it, because, turning to dirt like a rabbit in the woods, he wasn’t any more now than the dream of the dreamer dreaming. If only it were easy as saying, Arrivederci, pal, and good luck. I’ll toss one back when there’s land in sight. Goddamn, but one thing’s sure — there’s not a stitch of glory in death.
“How far did you say it was to the truck?”
“It ain’t. You take his feet and we’ll get his head.”
I didn’t think it right we cart Dinky off like a sack of dirt. We had to wrap him up first, at least. That’s what I told Super, and he agreed. I took down the blanket and rolled him. He was heavy as a block of steel. And all along his backside, ankles to groin, his skin had mottled up in a swirl of purples and blues. It looked as if he’d been lying for weeks in a pool of wine. The flesh beneath the hair on his legs was cool. I could’ve been holding a chunk of moldy pipe.
“That’ll happen to the best of them,” Super said, gesturing at the color.
“What is it?”
“Everything that made him a man.”
Super mashed the last of his smoke into the palm of his hand and stuck the butt in his pocket. He got down on his knees and laid a hand on Dinky’s brow. My friend’s face lay motionless and dull as that of some first-man staring from a wall of ice. When Super rose, two buffalo nickels lay on Dinky’s eyes.
“Every man is turned to destruction. And sooner or later every man hears, in his distracted globe, that old voice calling out, Return, ye children of men, return.”
I remember stumbling over the mannequin and falling to the couch, Dinky’s toe an inch away. I remember the crow through the trees, and the sprig in its beak. I remember Basil and Lucille in Super’s truck, too weary to care for the monkey on its beads…
We laid Dinky lengthwise, down on the bed of broken dolls. Super hobbled to the cabin, returned with blankets and bags. He kicked his tires, bound with chains, then got behind the wheel. Avey wrapped me in her arm, she took my hand, she kissed me on the cheek. I’d forgotten how good that could be, just a kiss. It was raining again, and somehow I felt free.
IV
IF THERE’S ONE THING I HATE MORE THAN clowns, it’s riding in the back of a truck. The last time I’d done that was twenty years past, in Texas, through fields of cotton in the sun, me and my terrier Biscuit watching the dust go swirl, the astonishing skies, the rows of green on either side, fanning to the ends of vision.
Distance will confuse. You were there, and then you weren’t. In the moment of sense you make about the difference between the space of then and now, it’s all changed, now has been snatched away, it’s like everything else, an act of colossal dupery, now is then and then a silly idea. There was sense, and there was nonsense, and neither had had any mercy. You think you saw a bird on a post, but the road paid out, and the bird disappeared. There you were trying to puzzle up what little it had shown while sorting through the whim of recent thens—what could have been a snake in the road or coil of twine, a man in the shade with a flashlight or hammer or gun — the creature with eyes like topaz, the way they followed you and your dog, wary but detached, its head revolving as you sped by. Then the head shrank, the eyes ebbed to phlegm, to murk, till flatness too had eaten them up, and, again, before you could sort out the mess, it was all just a spot on a line, distressingly significant, distressingly empty, a place holder of sorts for what amounted to yet another of your ideas of the way things are, some hole of wonder in which you could ponder the worth of your mind — did reality need it, did your ego need it, was the thing you’d seen still there once you couldn’t see it, did such a matter matter, really, because after all, the way things are has nothing to do with how we think.
A cur bounded up from the ditch, and Biscuit, having flung herself at it, tumbled away in a flurry of dust and hair. It took some time for this to make sense, too. I couldn’t say what had happened, even after I’d turned to beat on the cab. My uncle drained his Coors and nudged my toad. He swung to the shoulder and placed his hat and slid from the door and wiped his pants. I shouted what happened, I cried, and back with my dog, I got in the dirt and slobbered on her hair.
“My head’s just about as empty as that can there,” my uncle said, “but I can tell you now. There ain’t but one way to handle a thing like this.”
A breeze swept through the fields. The cotton groaned. I never saw him come or go, and yet my uncle stood above me with his gun, his mouth a penciled line. Then my old toad took the gun and ordered me away.
“Leave her,” he said, his baldness felloed with light.
“Please, Dad.”
“I said leave her.”