Made to Break (16 page)

“Everybody was in the same room,” he said. “Six or seven of my great uncles and aunts and fifty thousand cousins.”

“Baloney,” I said.

“Try staying up for five days of drinking and snorting,” he said, “before topping it off with a funeral. See how fast you come to.”

We were hanging at the Mallard, waiting to play pool. Down the bar Dinky and some other boobs were deep in a game of liar's dice. Basil took an ice cube and bopped it off our friend's titanic head.

“Hey, O'Connor,” Dinky shouted to the bartender.

“Now what?” O'Connor said, cramming his brush into a glass.

“We thought we'd agreed to 86 that blowhard next time he started up with his shenanigans.”

Basil leaned over the bar to better yell at Dinky. “Just making sure that sack of concrete you call a head was still hard enough
for me to knock around at pool, Dink. Serious,” he said, back at me. “I was eight sheets to the wind.”

“But that didn't keep you from making a good show for the familia, I'll bet.”

“Three tornadoes in a row—blam, blam, blam—one right after the next.”

“So how is it then you're still around to tell the tale?”

“Hit every house but ours, cross my heart. Motherfucking Godzilla could've smashed through the walls, having it out with Mothra, and I wouldn't've heard dick.”

It wasn't until an incoherent rant had broken through my dreams, like a siren in the distance, that I suspected something wrong. Avey nuzzled into me, the smell of her restful, kind, and mumbled that Lucille ought to shut it. The world was suspended in haze—the rose-patterned linen, the vase on the floor, the print of a goat on a craggy spire, gazing toward a stretch of valleys and arêtes. I wanted to stay in that haze, for a while at least, and in the shelter of Avey's hair, but the storm raged about us, and the voice went on.

“Get down here, you guys,” Lucille was shouting. “Hurry!”

Avey shuffled along beside me, drowsy at the rail. Then we saw the carnage, and snapped sober in a beat. Half the front of the cabin had collapsed into the living room, crushed by a giant pine.

Lucille looked as we'd left her, a drink in this hand, a smoke in that.

“Murphy's Law,” Avey said.

“What?” Lucille said.

“Whatever can go wrong,” I said, “will.”

The tree hadn't crushed the living room alone, but most of the deck, besides. Good thing for us old Granddad Wainwright had had the wits to hire craftsmen, not the jerks you see today,
wobbling round some rafter fifty-feet up, guzzling a frosty as they slice off their ruined hands. None of that, though, meant we could stay.

“I guess they haven't made it back,” I said.

“I only wanted to have a good time before my life was over,” Lucille said, crying. “Nothing big or fancy, you know?”

“Put on your jacket.”

“What?” she said.

Avey made her way to a pile of clothes near the hearth and picked out Lucille's jacket.

“Come here,” I said.

“What?” Lucille said, rooted to the spot with her washed-out face. I stepped through the wreckage and hugged her as she cried like you do when you don't know who you are.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry. Can't we just, I don't know…
go
?”

“Let's get your jacket on,” I said. “We'll get your jacket on and fix a little something up for your belly.”

“Promise me you'll get us out of here.”

“Put your jacket on.”

“Promise me, AJ.”

“If Basil and Super get here soon,” Avey said, “we stand a chance of hitting Berkeley in time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.'”

“Did either of you happen to bring an umbrella?” I said.

“By the door,” Lucille said.

“I'm going out.”

“Maybe we should check on Dink,” Lucille said.

“Let him sleep,” I said. “You two head upstairs and kick it till I'm back.”

North and south the road lay slick with mud, worse in the light of day than I'd imagined it last night. With Lucille's absurd umbrella, semé with smiley faces—yellow, naturally—I went the
way of Basil and that freak of a man, hoping round the bend to meet some crew, but found just more desolation. Long minutes passed before a figure appeared at the end of the road, who, it didn't matter: I wanted news from the world, that was all. But the harder I looked, the greater it seemed the figure to be more beast than man, Sasquatch meets the Scarecrow. It was only after I'd decided to take cover that a man called out, and I knew that it was Basil.

“Where's Super?” I said.

My pal sat down with dangling arms, his feet, both bare, a mass of sores. “That old fucking fuck,” he said. “He tried to take a razor to my ass.”

Basil unhurt that I could see left me unsure what to say. “So then you never made it to his wheels.”

“I said I needed to rest. But you know what he does? He starts in with one of those psycho rants. When I told him to cut the crap, dude came up with a razor. And that dog of his. Turned into frigging Cujo.”

“He was helping us. He needed your help with the truck.”

Basil picked a twig from his foot. He was virtually in tears. “A hundred times I tried to tell you.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, AJ,” he said, “I'm fine. In just a second here I'm going to jump up and sing in all this rain.”

“You must've really pissed him off.”

“Attacked him with a hatchet's all.”

“Dude, he took you down and laughed. The man's a vet for Christ sake.”

“He's a psychopath is what he is, AJ.”

“I don't know.”

“Go ahead then, tit. Believe what you want. All I know is he and his beast came at me like gangbusters.”

“And then he let you skate.”

“The old caveman combo.”

“Let's just hope he comes back.”

“He does, it won't be to bring us flowers.”

“He liked us, Baze. He did me and Dinky, at least.”

“Goddamn it. Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it.”

“Think you can make it to the cabin?”

“I am so very fucking done, AJ, you don't even know.”

I got Basil to his feet and his arm round my neck. “I forgot to tell you.”

“Don't even mess with me, okay?”

“A tree kind of smashed up the cabin.”

“Goddamn it. Godfuckingdamn it.”

We limped up the road. Minutes passed before we spoke.

“You're a good guy,” Basil said.

“I try.”

Before the spectacle of the cabin, Basil's face went rubbery and helpless and gleeful and sour, none of it for long. A face of horror took him, then, and then again he began to weep.

“You guys polish off the hooch?” he managed to say.

“We got some hooch, I think.”

“Because I want them to find us like a jar full of top drawer fucking pickles.”

“The old man's coming back, you know. He said he was coming back.”

My friend was shaking now, too, nearly uncontrollably, his feet might've been stuffed through an old-school grinder. He gazed up at the cabin and shook his head.

“Looks like Godzilla came through here,” he said.

“It's true,” I said. “Him and Mothra both.”

IT OCCURRED TO ME AS WE MOUNTED THE STAIRS that Dinky wouldn't have to engineer a story for his grandfather about the window Basil smashed. The birdcage was there, caging a bird that was dead. I scooped the cage up with Lucille's umbrella and tossed them in the mud.

Inside, with no lights or music to make a cheery fiction, everything was cloaked in grey—dripping water, trembling prints, shadows and slime and shit.

“So now the power's cut, too, I take it,” Basil said.

“Yup.”

“Where is everybody?”

“Last I checked the girls were upstairs in bed.”

“I just want to go home.”

“We need a plan.”

“But we can't go home. Because we are fucking stuck.”

“I say we take what we can carry and go.”

“Like a pack of tittysucking rats.”

“I'm serious, dude.”

“Denial ain't a river in Egypt, Jackson.” He looked at me now with gravity I'd never seen. For the first time in his life he was trying to be real. “You smell me, or what?”

I sat on the bench and lit a smoke and handed it to Basil, then lit one for myself.

“I wish to God I couldn't,” I said.

“And I wish to God you could understand me for once. You know that?”

“No, I don't. I've got no idea what you mean.”

“Of course you don't. You never do, and never have. You've never understood a thing about me.”

“We get ourselves out of here in one piece,” I said, and grinned, “I promise we can go to counseling. How's that sound?”

“I love you, too,” Basil said. “So,
so
much.”

Lucky for us he'd remembered to bring his suitcase in before Dinky and I wrecked his Cruiser. We stripped our clothes and argued over who'd wear what. Basil pointed at my shriveled up dong and asked how I'd gotten a shroom to grow in my crotch. I called him a rich boy. I called him a monkey-fucking banana dick. Then I put on one of his dress shirts, with the French cuffs and polka dots, and a red velvet vest over that, and lo and behold, I looked like a numbskull in the hand-me-downs of his brother the mime. Basil went to see about the girls.

In its way the earth had gone quiet, the solemn trees, the heaving sky. Veils of rain continued to fall, the lake was hidden, there was only mud, only trees and sky. But soon a woman cried out, and soon another began to scream, Lucille louder than Avey at first, though presently they were wailing as one, cries with pain enough to rend the hardest man, ah, exactly what we needed. Hardly had I thought to investigate than Basil stood beside me again, his face as long and blue as ever a face could be.

He lifted me off the ground and squeezed till I lost my breath. I could feel him shaking, his whole body in tremors, ambushed by a life of hurt. It was only some years later, or so it seemed, that he gave in, his voice a boom in my ear, nothing comprehensible. Shaking and sobbing, he just held me tight.

“He's dead, AJ. I went in to see him… He was just
dead
.”

Basil said that, and his face dropped away like a coin off a cliff. I fell dizzy with pictures of catheters and cotton and chromium rails, and screens above flowers and sirens, too, host after host, and widowers and widows, the injustice of their eyes, and needles, and hoses, and smocks, and tubes…

A hand lay on my brow, cool as a spring, I could smell Avey's breath and hair. We lay on the bed we'd slept in, a cheap coverlet scratching at my jaw. An old chiffonier stood across the room with its small brass tub of imitation flowers. Next to it was a smattering of novels from the World's Best Reading and a painting of Jesus in a dime store frame. Lucille was perched on a cedar chest, her arms around her knees. Basil sat beside me, with a smoke.

“Are you okay?” Avey ran her fingers through my hair, they were light and soft.

“Where is he?”

“Sssshhhh.”

I looked into her eyes. I nuzzled in her hair. “I'm okay. I'm fine.”

Basil went to Lucille, he held Lucille's hand. They were silent.

“Where is he?”

“In there,” Lucille said.

For a moment the room seemed crooked, everything floaty with mist. Then it cleared, and I was on my feet, steady as could be by Avey, her hand on my leg.

There was a door.

I went in. By the bed I got down. I got down on my knees. But I did not look. Not at him, his face. I couldn't. For a long time I sat that way…

His face. Not his face…

No can. Maybe never, maybe not never, not knowing when, maybe never…

Laid there, he, it, he, a cold stiff thing, stretched out like a dummy, CPR, a hand, not like his face had been, not jaundiced, not sweaty and pained, hands of a workman never done work, no not. And fingers, thick, blunt at the tips, where thick hard nails were growing still, no, not growing, not life, never again, not, no, no pulseless mush but veins, and blue cording, and thickish veins, ah, heavy, ah, like ugly crappy wire. Little blond hairs not vanished, no not, no not, and thousands of hole-dots, and lines connect dots, not color in, no not, no not, no not, design, no design, no not, never, nothing, no, where wrinkles there, and cold, so cold, hand in hand, so cold, so cold, no not, not, not, not think meat, not think friend, not friend, not think, no not, no nothing there, nothing, no, not, no, no, no, no, not, no not, no not not, not, not. And you will look, now, yes, you will look. At him. At not him, at not it but him, but Dinky, look at him, no, look at him, yes, you, now, yes, because, because, because. And there, yes, and there now, and there. And it's okay, you are there, you are fine, it's okay, it is okay, everything's okay, it is…