Authors: Tom Franklin
The evening air, crowded with
bats and the bugs the bats eat.
At Uncle Dock’s house, while the dog gnaws chicken bones from the floor next to the refrigerator, the room grows dark around us. I sit with my elbows on the table and light a cigarette. Blow a thin jet of smoke toward the window. Watch cloudy shapes rise and swirl in the Mason jar before me. The love potion. It looks like plain river water, infested with bacteria and sludge from chemical plants. Sewage. I unscrew the lid and there’s a muddy grating, the dog growling softly over his bones.
When I finish my cigarette, I’ll go into the bedroom and sit in Uncle Dock’s chair and press my forehead against the windowpane and spy next door: they’ll be sitting there smoking pot, fat lady and hippie, in love. They’ll toast and toke and giggle, and I’ll giggle too, and so will Uncle Dock when I sneak into the intensive care unit later and tell him how, after getting sky-high, they stumbled into her house and the lights snapped on, how I slipped outside and climbed the fence between the properties and crept through the high weeds of her yard. How I placed my eye against the window and saw they’d taken the missionary position, Patsy Cline crackling on the turntable. How a dusty gray moth flaring in my eyes causes me to tumble backwards into the reefer plants, how I just lie there with my eyes closed and the earth spinning, and the lovers come to the window with a bedsheet covering their bodies, and they frown and whisper, but instead of the fat lady I imagine it’s Diane I see, and my heart lurches murderously, but I don’t move and they don’t notice me lying there, among the weeds, in the darkness.
The bachelor party
started Friday night: a dozen horny drunks careening among the strip bars and the neon smoke. We left guys asleep in their cars and passed out at tables and propped in alleys, until Bruce and I were the only ones left. Just after dawn he hot-wired a Jeep we found in a parking lot and there were all these expensive rods and reels in the back. So we headed over the bridge to Dauphin Island, half an hour’s drive from Mobile, for the shark fishing.
Prissy’s was a tiny dive on the west side of the island, the last stop before the oyster-shell road ended and you needed a four-wheel-drive to go farther. Inviting beer signs gleamed in the windows. The pool games cost seventy-five cents each and we knew Paul, the bartender. He used to work at the chemical plant with us. We were night watchmen. Prissy was his old lady and she owned the bar, but she was divorcing him, and until she fired him and kicked him out, he’d give his friends drinks on the house.
The parking lot was empty and Paul was alone, playing the blackjack machine, when we walked in. Bruce went to get quarters for the pool table.
“Man, where is everybody?” he asked.
I went through the swinging doors to the pay phone and punched up Jan’s number.
“It’s six
A.M.
,” she said. “Where in the world are you?”
I told her.
“
Jesus
.”
“Look—” I said.
But she’d hung up.
When I stepped out Bruce and Paul were playing eight ball. I walked to the pool table.
Bruce glanced at me. “Everything hunky-dory?”
“Swell.”
Paul handed me a beer. “Bruce says you’re getting married, you idiot.”
I looked at my watch. “Tonight.”
“Shit. Why?”
Bruce looked up from the table. “Because the rabbit died.”
Paul lit a cigarette and smoked. His eyes were red. Balls clacked on the felt and thumped as they died in their pockets. Bruce moved around the table, smoking and inspecting the layout of things.
“Nine, side,” he said, and then it was.
Paul drained his cup, then went over behind the bar.
I watched Bruce puzzling at the table, chalking his cue. He shook another cigarette from his pack and lit it and sipped his beer. He was older than I was, and taller. He was an ex-marine, had survived a tour of duty in Vietnam. He’d come home and witnessed the Kent State massacre in 1970. He’d played semipro baseball in Italy after that, been an extra in a spaghetti Western, done acid on a subway in Japan.
But this was all before I knew him.
What we did together was run—he bragged that he’d come in 314th in the ’83 Chicago Marathon—and drink. We met at work and started going to bars together. We’d run in local marathons on weekends, get drunk afterward.
In a few minutes Paul brought over a pitcher of margaritas, a thick crust of salt on the rim. He poured me one and I tasted it.
“I’ve been here for four days without going home,” he said.
“Your shot,” Bruce told him.
Paul nodded sadly. He walked over and, trying to make the four, knocked in the eight ball. We moved and stood on either side of him and Bruce asked him to come fishing with us. Paul said he had to stay, in case the phone rang. Bruce said he was crazy, told him to shut his eyes, for God’s sake. To picture us there on the edge of the island, fishing until the sun went down and the moon rose from the bay, our lines stretched out of sight and heavy with cut bait, the three of us propped in aluminum chairs and drinking cold beer from one of Prissy’s kegs, our rods leaping in our hands as the sand sharks hit, and then the long, exhausting battle of pulling them in. We’d build a giant bonfire out of driftwood, the shark spines lighting up on the sand, the rubbery blue skin turned inside out, the black dead eyes. We’d have to keep sliding our chairs back as the tide closed in and—near dawn—took the fire, an early fog drifting out over the water, the long, mournful foghorns sounding from shrimp boats trolling the bay.
I grew anxious to get there, just listening, but Paul wouldn’t go. He stood wobbling in the door of his wife’s empty bar holding her half-empty pitcher, and as we drove away I watched him until he dissolved and I turned, saw that we were headed west, away from the wedding that was gathering behind us.
When the baby is born
dead, there’s no reason to stay married.
I’m on day shift at the plant. At night I drink zombies at Judge
Roy Bean’s until I think Jan’s ready for bed and I come home and try to fool around. She says no, or doesn’t say anything, just waits until I realize she isn’t going to answer, and I slam the door and go into the den and fall asleep on the sofa with the TV on.
One night, when I come in, she tells me she’s still spotting.
I ask her what she wants to do.
“I want to cry,” she says.
Judge’s is always full of laughing flirting women who’ll let you buy them drinks. I’m on speaking terms with the bartender, and when I go back in that night he says, “Here’s the man with the plan!” and I say, “Where, where?” looking cleverly behind me, and he laughs and starts my tab.
In the morning, the phone next to the sofa rings. I sit up. It’s Bruce—he’s been gone for seven months, since the wedding.
He says, “How’s married life?”
“What day is it?”
“Saturday?”
Jan stands in the bedroom doorway in her white gown. She’s pale, thin, the dark under her eyes like mascara that’s run from crying.
When I hang up, she says, “Who was that?”
I don’t say anything, but she knows.
“That asshole,” she says. “Is he coming here?”
“We’ll go out.”
She hugs herself. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
Bruce arrives on a Triumph. I throw a leg over and he revs the motor and we’re off, Jan watching from the kitchen window, holding herself. Bruce pulls a flask from his pocket and hands it over his shoulder. I drink dizzily and feel the wind lift the hair from my scalp. On the Bayway Bridge we use the hazard lanes to
pass cars, swerve to miss something dead. You can see over the rails to the water below; you could let your fingers drag along the concrete.
We sling through the Bankhead Tunnel and fly through the blinking downtown caution lights, then hit the interstate and ride two nonstop hours to Evergreen, where Bruce leans the bike onto an off-ramp and we roll into a Texaco station. “Got your plastic?” he asks, and I tap my wallet. He pumps the gas, I pay and load the supplies—beef jerky, two six-packs, M&Ms, cigarettes—into the bike’s knapsack. I go around the side of the building and take the pay phone from its cradle and try to think of what to say to Jan.
There isn’t anything.
So Bruce and I peel off, leaving a long thin black strip of tire on the road behind us—probably the only evidence Bruce leaves anywhere. But there’s evidence of me everywhere, on the credit-card receipt in the gas station’s register, a time card at the chemical plant, a bleeding woman in my house, a child’s white marble tombstone.
Back on the interstate I close my eyes and see Jan putting things into a suitcase. She isn’t crying but she looks hollow and sick. She slips her wedding band off and sets it on the nightstand. Then keeps packing.
I remember the last time I saw Bruce, the shark fishing, riding on the beach, half in, half out of the surf. Having to roll up the window to keep the waves from crashing in. Bruce driving the way he drives, better drunk than sober, things appearing before us, malevolent driftwood shapes, sudden boulders, a sofa. Not catching a shark, not even a nibble.
Passing out on the tip of the island, waking up sunburned.
Not remembering how I got home, somebody feeding me coffee an hour before the wedding.
Jan saying, “How could you?”
Maybe I was in the kitchen, maybe throwing up in the sink.
Her bridesmaids there, whispering.
Bruce missing the wedding. No best man.
How back from the long, silent honeymoon, I called Paul at Prissy’s and he said Bruce had quit his job at the plant and set out for New York.
Jan saying, “Good riddance.” My ridiculous sunburned face in the wedding pictures.
Paul trying to set Prissy’s afire and being arrested.
After a couple more hours on the bike, Bruce and I stop under a bridge for a smoke. He says it was too cold in New York; he’d ridden back, decided it was time to get quote responsible. He says he found a job as a hose man in a chicken-processing plant. They killed a hundred and fifty thousand broilers a day. Millions of gallons of blood, Bruce says. It ran into the sewer like a river. That was in Guntersville, Alabama. He stayed there for two weeks, ten working days, a million and a half dead birds.
He met a woman named Patty there. He left her there.
“She was a health nut, a vegetarian,” Bruce says. “Into hiking and shit. But she showed me this one place that I’m fixing to show you.”
We get back on the bike and ride for another hour. Green signs naming places come and go and I doze until he slows the bike. An exit says Guntersville. We pull off the interstate, cut right at a two-lane and Bruce walks the bike up to seventy. We’re leaving civilization, I decide. An hour later he slows and takes a dirt road for a mile, two, the cornfields swelling to trees and the
trees closing in. Past a no-trespassing sign, Bruce turns onto a path I wouldn’t have seen. Vines hang and we creep along, ducking low limbs, parting the leaves with our fingers.
In a clearing we dismount.
“As far as el bike-o can go,” he explains.
“Where the hell are we?”
He grins and tosses me the knapsack, tells me there’s shorts inside. He peels down to his running shorts and stuffs his boots and clothes into the knapsack, puts on his running shoes and takes off.
I haven’t run much since being married so I expect my legs to cramp, but they feel great, never stronger, drumming over the soft carpet of leaves, hurtling stumps and tiny creek beds.
We’ve covered about a mile when Bruce darts right, into a damp pine grove. I follow blindly, not thinking. Another mile passes, the undergrowth webbing, the treetops closing like fingers making a steeple. Behind Bruce I duck and dodge the sudden obstacles he creates, the whip of a limb, angry flurries from a hornets’ nest tipped by his elbow. He stumbles, goes faster. Then, half a mile farther, as we’re more falling than running, fingers dragging along the earth, the trees on both sides of us fly apart, as if painted on curtains.
Unable to stop, I crash into him and nearly shove him into the sky—the sky mirrored in water, a lake, still as perfect glass, large as a baseball diamond, there at our feet.
Bruce steps back and kicks off his shoes. He dives into the water and doesn’t emerge until he’s ten yards out, his arms breaking the surface, pulling him toward the white limestone bank across the lake.