Gene and I had dinner together one night. I met him in the parking lot behind the Sun Fresh Market off Southwest Trafficway. I didn’t know then that he was sleeping in his car. Just ran into him there and he asked me if I was hungry. Come to think of it, I said.
A bunch of clothes were heaped in the backseat of his station wagon. An old rusty job with wood paneling peeling off the doors. He had rigged a towel to take the place of a window that would no longer roll up. Laundry day, he said, explaining away the clothes.
We drove out of the parking lot to Mill Street and followed the curve into Westport to a little joint called The Corner. Some bums who might have been hippies years ago stood on Broadway wiping down car windows at a red light while the drivers waved them off. Gene and I sat down and a waitress cleared our table. I ordered a burger. Gene had the meatloaf special.
The Corner closed not long after that. A big For Rent sign hangs above the front door along with the name of some real estate company. I went by it the other day and noticed the table where Gene and I had sat surrounded by other empty tables made all the more empty by the emptiness of the place.
Evening
Fran’s mother sits with me in the kitchen. Her perfume gives me a headache. I stare at her hair all puffy and piled up on her head and bleached so blond it’s almost white. She twirls the lazy Susan with a finger, touches the corner of her mouth, and then goes back to spinning the lazy Susan, her finger skating along on a film of lipstick she rubbed off.
What’s it taste like, your lipstick?
Why would you want to know? What kind of question is that for a man to ask?
I don’t know, it just came to me, I want to say, but don’t. One night, I was walking to the shitter and mortars started coming in. We were always being mortared. This is the real deal, baby! someone yelled. And then, the blasts lifted an eighteen-year-old private into the air, tossing him backward like a rag into all this dirt and noise and smoke; his blood sprayed over my face. I can still taste it.
Where’s Fran? her mother says.
School, I say.
Have you thought of going back to school?
No.
Is it your plan for Fran to do all the work while you sit around? Fran’s mother says. Have you thought about being more than an electrician?
No, Mrs. Lee, I haven’t.
Well, it shows.
I apply a piece of Scotch tape to a corner above the cabinets where the wallpaper is peeling.
Fran’s mother gets up and walks to the sink. I listen to the linoleum creak beneath her shoes.
When do you plan to clean these? she says of the dishes. Or are you waiting for them to pile up to the ceiling?
I throw the tape down and face her. She steps back, a little aren’t-I-clever smirk on her face, and I turn the hot water on in the sink and pour in some soap. I find a sponge beneath the sink and start wiping down a plate. My fingertips turn white from squeezing the plate so hard. A littler harder and it would break. I want to feel it break but I ease up; put the plate on the rack. I start cleaning another one.
You two should get married, Fran’s mother goes.
I keep washing the plate.
You’re living together, she says. Not having a job hasn’t stopped you from doing that. Married, you’d at least be official. It would show responsibility. Now wouldn’t that be something?
I rinse the plate, set it on the rack. I lean on the sink, arms stiff.
I’m leaving, I say.
You’re leaving. Where you going?
Montana.
Montana. What are you going to do in Montana?
Work.
Work. Work here for a change. You think some cowgirl is going to put up with you?
I raise my hand before she says anything more. There’s this nasal termite sound to her voice that chisels into my head. I press my fingers against my eyes. My neck feels hard as a tree trunk.
Fran’s mother stands beside me. I ignore her, work on another plate. She runs a finger over the dishes in the rack and shows me a spongy speck of pizza crust glued to her fingertip.
You can’t do any better than that? she says.
I smash the plate on the edge of the sink and throw the jagged piece still in my hand against the wall. Fran’s mother steps back, her eyes betraying panic, her finger still poised accusingly, and I grab her finger with a fury that fills me with a terrible heat and force it back until she kneels, screaming. A pasty white color washes through her face when the bone breaks, and I feel something break in me and I keep pressing back on her ruined finger, until the bone tears through the skin and into my palm. Her eyes swell like something wide and deep rising out of the ground, bubbling tears, and her screams take on a new level.
I let go of her hand and jam my knee into her solar plexus and put all my weight on her chest. She gags and spits up whatever she ate this morning. I rise up and then drop my knee into her chest, and her neck and face go all purple, and I do it again until I feel ribs crack under my knee. I sink into her chest and down to her spine like falling through ice. Blood geysers out of her mouth and then her eyes roll back. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth like a slug and I smell her bowels. I push myself off her and sit at the table. The silence is almost as loud as her screams. I focus on the hum of the refrigerator. White noise. I take up my knife. My hands shake and at first my throws are way off. Then my breathing steadies and I get my rhythm back and throw it once, twice, three times into the baseboards, the refrigerator humming behind me.
Next day
Rhonda’s not answering, Melissa says, looking at her iPhone. Why isn’t she answering?
The front door swings open.
Hey, Heidi, Mike says.
Hi, Mike, Heidi says.
She plops down beside Lyle, her mop of curly red hair flouncing on her shoulders. The two of them started dating not too far back. She tends bar here on the weekends. Has two kids. Their daddy dealt drugs and got busted. Lyle sells drugs, but hasn’t been busted. I think she can do better. I bought books for her five-year-old daughter. I figured she’d appreciate that. Little picture books. But she started seeing Lyle and I quit the book thing. Maybe books weren’t what I should have been giving her in the first place. But I was with Fran so books seemed appropriate. Neutral. Not too over-the-top is what I’m saying.
I force a smile at Heidi but I don’t strike up a conversation. I’m not really here. Yesterday seems far away and today doesn’t feel like today. I hear Heidi and Lyle talking but it’s all background noise to Fran’s mother dying. That’s how I look at it. She died. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something snapped inside me and she died. It was not me who killed her but something working through me I can’t define. That something left me afterward as suddenly as it had come on and I almost fell asleep in the kitchen throwing my knife. But then the old me came back and I knew I had to clean up the mess left by that something else.
I carried Fran’s mother into the garage and put her in the trunk of my car and covered her with a blanket. Finding a mop, I returned to the kitchen and washed the floor. Back in the garage, I looked for a box of five-, ten-, and twenty-pound weights Fran had bought at a yard sale when she got it into her head she was going to exercise. Dust and cobwebs covered the weights and clung to the hair on my arms, and I felt each hair released when I wiped the cobwebs off.
I put some rope and the weights in the trunk and drove to Troost Lake. Clouds sealed the sky so that no stars shone. I followed Troost Avenue to the turnoff into the lake, and the road narrowed and wound around the lake and my car lights skimmed over the oil blackness of the water and the wet stone walk where old men fished during the day. I parked the car under some trees, opened the trunk, and trussed Fran’s mother up with the rope. She wasn’t too heavy even with the weights I’d wedged beneath the rope. I held her and listened to what I thought was an owl. Shadows rose and dipped above me and then darted away and I could only assume they were bats. I waited for the owl to stop calling. In the vacancy left by its silence, I rolled Fran’s mother down a hill and she splashed into the water and was absorbed into its darkness leaving only ripples that spread into nothingness.