Made to Break (15 page)

“We're pretty sorry, all right,” I said.

“All I want is to get the hell out of this dump.”

“Whatever I've done to get on your bad side, I'm sorry.”

“Payback's a bitch, ain't it?”

“Have it your way. But remember. You've got to deal with it till we're gone.”

“You've got nothing, AJ. No life, nothing. If I thought otherwise, I'd say you make me sick.”

I shuffled across the room like a freshly spanked child and stopped before a penny on the carpet. Old Abe's face in copper profile must've done something to me, because from out of nowhere, like some cat in a game show from Mars, I was swirling in a vortex of happenstance and quirk: Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were slain on Fridays, in the presence of their wives, both were shot in their imperial skulls. John Wilkes Booth was hatched in 1839, Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939. Lincoln had a gofer named Kennedy, Kennedy one named Lincoln… Yes, yes—and the hip bone's connected to the leg bone. One bygone Christmas, before the looney tunes had stepped up to conk her, my grandmother gave me a two dollar bill, a Pet Rock, and a book of disco dance steps, including the Bionic Boogie, the Weekend Two-Step, and Le Freak. Last year, on Christmas Day, in a drunken tango down Waller Street with a girl named Date, I fell to the walk before a makeshift sign of bamboo and cardboard, its words scrawled with a paintbrush in the hand of a child: On December 24th THIS DATE PALM WAS STOLEN BY A SHORT WHITE MALE WITH SHOULDER LENGTH BROWN HAIR MERRY X-MAS DIRT BALL! And Lucille Ball's all-time favorite show was M*A*S*H, and Amos Alonzo Stagg, AKA The Masher, invented the football dummy in 1889. Scat of the opossum, a beast that plays dumb when scared, is called werderobe, scat of the otter, spraints. The Yokut Indians used dust of spraints mixed with a liquor derived from the coffee bush to rid minds possessed by an odious spirit from the lands of thunder song and rattles. And while Jelly Roll Morton died believing he'd been
cursed by a voodoo witch, Hippocrates ushered medicine from the realm of muddled superstition. Love is superstition, superstition, danger. Danger is an owl in the night.

                  
SPC Stuyvesant Wainwright, IV

                  
B Co 16th En Br

                  
Operation Joint Endeavor

                  
APO AE 09789

                  
5 Feb 96

                  
Dear Andrew Jackson Harerama vanden Heuvel

                  
How are you my night-owlish friend? I've not heard any news from you since before you took on that job at State. Write to me and tell me what your plans are for the future.

                
I got a Christmas card from Jacquelyn and she said you weren't seeing each other anymore. But that was two months ago. I'm sure things may have changed by now. I wrote Basil about him breaking up too and said we could be 3 bachelor amigos when we get back. But I'm sure your situations will have changed by then.

                  
Life here in Bosnia is usually boring but occasionally dangerous. The first American just died yesterday—the papers/news media are filled with speculation as to how. Military intelligence has informed us that he went out to take a shit (right off the road). He was squatting down and saw something in the ground. He took his Leatherman pocket pliers and poked at it. The medics found half his leatherman embedded in his brain! Lovely, huh?

                  
Yesterday I spent all night day burning shit. 9-1/2
hours to burn 1/2 barrel of shit and piss. It is a smelly, shitty detail but somebody has to do it. Ha ha. We pour diesel into the 1/2 barrel (which sits below the bench in the 3-seater latrine) and stir it up. Then we light it and stir it constantly. Sounds like fun, huh? I can't wait for a job with a desk, buddy!

                  
Buddies forever,

                  
Stuyvesant

It was all too horribly true…

I had no money, I had no power, Lord of the Latrines I was, Prince of the Pubes, credentials alone to have got me elected President of the Cult of the Fool. How does such a man break out like wild dogs, much less like a parakeet? How does such a man give his ghosts the bodies they've lost, much less make them bleed?

Next to the bath, the cabin had two upper rooms. Dinky was unchanged, mumbling his flow of applesauce and bile. I groped my way into the second room, fixed on purging myself and the girl in it of the germs that kept us low.

Tweet, tweet, tweet, my darling, tweet, tweet, tweet!

And the moments, dear, look how fast, look how lithe and fleet!

MOST NIGHTS I LAY ON MY COT PICKING PETALS off imaginary daisies and conjure visions of those hours with Avey May Jones, of how as she melted to my words it struck me she'd grant my wish at last and give both body and words to me in return, if not forever then for what was left of that one sad night. All my life I'd dreamed of finding her. For all those days and all those years she'd been the knot of my dreams, my honeyed lump of winter mud, my mud song, simple, warm. I wanted to get stuck in her, all right. I wanted to stay that way forever…

I told her what had happened the time I came home to find Roper and Lucille. I told her what had happened at the Trophy Room, too, when Dinky and Basil had opened their can of fucked-up worms and set high the bar of mutilation. Then I told her the story of my wicked worthless life, of everything I'd thought I knew myself to be, who I was and where I'd been, and where I'd wanted to go and be. Had I tried to present myself as anything more than pitifully pitiful, she'd probably have abandoned me on the spot. However foolish I'd been till then, I was smart enough in those few moments to know my limits. The only thing worse than denying you're pitiful is to act it while you are.

“Nothing I told you tonight was the truth,” she said. I'd just
finished up my tale of squalor and abuse. “About myself, I mean. When we were playing Truth or Dare.”

“Not even your name?”

“Naming something is the fastest way I know to screw it up.”

“I don't think I believe that.”

“Name a thing, you strangle it.”

“You must've had a reason.”

“I grew up in a dusty little town with a state mental hospital and a Boss Hogg-type cattle baron. My dad worked for the county fixing potholes and signs.”

“Bet your mom dug that.”

“Dead people don't dig anything I'm aware of.”

“Before that, I mean, if there was a before.”

“I never knew one way or another how she felt about anything. And what I do remember isn't much fun.”

“I guess that's the problem, huh? How much we need our memories, but hate ourselves for the needing and having both?”

Hickory went to the bureau with Dinky's family photos. When she turned back, I knew she was going to spin a yarn.

“We lived at the outskirts of town. Out by the hills. There weren't many houses there. Just a couple of adobe bungalows and a big metal barn they used for storing hay. Daddy did side work for the guy who owned it. He was an old guy with a bunch of cars Daddy fixed on weekends. Anyhow, one day when I was six or seven the school had a bomb threat. Somebody called up and said they were going to kill every kid in town, and they sent us home. I'd gone in through the back, by the garage, to scrounge around the kitchen for something to eat. But just as I was turning on the TV I heard voices from the back of the house. Most days Mom was never home, she had a part-time job some place, I don't know what or where, so at first the voices scared me.

“I snuck around the corner. You know how you get when you're a kid and something breaks down your notions of the way things are? No one had ever been in the house during the day except for my mom. But this was a man's voice. I didn't know whose it was. I just knew it wasn't Daddy's. The man was laughing. Not loud. Soft, but different than Daddy's kind of soft. The hallway was dark. Up and down the walls we had these family photos, all the usual thieves. Most were people I'd never met, old men and women with eyes like eyes in daguerreotypes. I'd seen them all so many times it'd got to where I didn't notice them any more. But that day all I could do was stand beneath them, watching them watch me with those eyes.

“I can't remember how long I stood there while the man kept laughing. It never got louder or softer. Every once in a while the woman said something I couldn't understand. It didn't sound like my mom, though, though I knew it was her. I must've done something, maybe scraped the wall, because my dog Blinky-Doo started barking, and then he came trotting round the corner. That's when the man stopped laughing. ‘Is someone here?' he said, and my mom said, ‘Hello?' but I didn't answer.

“Next thing I heard was a mumble of whispers and scratchy sounds. Blinky-Doo was licking my face. Then I looked up, and my mom was there with messy hair and her face all smeared, wearing an open robe. The man I'd remembered seeing before, at some store in town or just on the street. He had hair all over his belly and chest. His shirt was unbuttoned, and he had a mustache, that much I remember, too. I thought he was going to say something, but he just looked at me till after a while he left.

“‘They made me come home early,' I told my mom. ‘You little sneak,' she said. ‘I wasn't,' I said. My mom's eyes, I realized, were glued to my dress. It was hot and wet, and so was the carpet. ‘If
you don't tell your daddy what you saw today,' she said, ‘I won't tell him what you just did.'”

“I hate people,” I said. “Sometimes I do.”

“I never did tell him.”

“If I ask you something,” I said, “will you tell me?”

“Depends.”

“What did they call you, your mom and dad?”

“The name on my birth certificate says Avey May Jones. But the day I was born, when I was still in the hospital, the nurse who brought me out to Daddy said,
She's the sweetest little mud patty I've ever seen
, and Daddy said,
Hello, Mud. I'm your daddy
. From then on out it's been Mud.”

“She said that? That's like, I don't know, like stuff from fairytales and film.”

“Like stuff that happens in little towns with insane asylums and slaughterhouses.”

“She really said that?”

“I can only guess it's because Daddy's half-black. His mother was the only black woman in Ft Smith married to a white man. That's how they came out here. Nobody could stand it, her practically being made into a whitey.”

“My name is Mud,” I said. “I like that.”

“You like it?”

“Like is not the word.”

We were on the bed. She was holding my hand, without fear or pretense, as if really and truly it was something she'd wanted as much as I. Her breath smelled like bourbon and ginger and peach and smoke, the soul of an antique dream. I could see the smallest hairs above her lip. A vein ran along her jaw, just below her ear, in her evening-colored skin, the faintest pulsing blue.

“What?” I said.

I know it couldn't have really been that way, but that's the way
I imagined it, or thought I'd imagined it, because I thought I imagined she kissed me. Her breath smelled of mountains, then, and of butterfly dust, and of the feathers of quiet birds. The sound of her heart came up through her mouth, I could taste it, too, the sound of her heart, a morsel of chocolate, laughing. She took my face in her hands, she held my face as though at any moment it might explode. Her hair fell across my face, and she closed her eyes, and I felt it again, the first time since forever, brand-spanking-new. That goddamned girl—that's what she did—she made it all feel so shiny and new.

We didn't know it then, or maybe we did, fuck it, but we were only using each other, hiding in each other the fates of our broken selves, all those years of hope and dread.
Call-notes of dark sobbing
, sang Rilke. And that's what it was, that love, impossible to swallow…

I ran my hands along her neck, her shoulders and smallish breasts. A tattoo circled her navel, a sun with rays of purple and black, and I made a circle over that. There was only the wind and rain…

The clock on the stand said 4:32, Wednesday, December 31st, New Year's Eve: the beginning of an end, the end of a beginning, more than ninety hours since any of us had known a wink of sleep.

Avey and I were silent with our new misunderstanding, which was all we could ever have been…

The smell of us was strong in that mountain air, my breath on her neck, dying…

My having made this girl had only put us further apart. A pinhead of black had crept into my bowels, but then the sandman came, and I was taken with a sigh…

THE SUN HAD RISEN BY THE TIME THAT TREE slammed through the cabin, but neither Avey nor I had heard it. I thought of disbelieving Basil's claim to've slept through those tornadoes in Kansas, after the funeral of a chain-smoking cousin.