Ashes ashes, p.14
Ashes, Ashes, page 14
“An angel.”
“My hat …”
I dart back into the hallway and head in the opposite direction of my room, stepping on every gap possible. She’ll love me again. She’ll love me again. She’ll love me again. No, she won’t. She’ll love me again. Just as I glance up and spot the exit sign at the end of the hallway, Candice calls my name. I move as fast as I can, a shuffle-almost-speedwalk, toward the door. Seconds later Candice is standing in front of me next to a cross-eyed behemoth in scrubs.
“Where you going?” she asks.
“I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t say—”
“You can’t keep me here.”
“Heath, I really think it’d be wise—”
“Don’t you get it, lady? I’m not sticking around.”
“I’m pleading with you. Let us help you. Whatever’s going on, we can fix it, you and I. Maybe not right away but in time.”
“I’m going far away. Siberia or Somalia or maybe Toledo. Somewhere. Don’t worry, you’ll never hear from me again.”
“Heath, you also need medical attention. Those injuries—”
“I have business to take care of, people I need to visit.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Heath.”
“You would if you ever met them.”
“Heath—”
I’m already down the hallway and through the exit door. They follow me to the elevator, and I go in. When she tries to step in next to me the behemoth holds an arm out in front of her. The elevator door closes.
I get off on the second floor and take the stairs the rest of the way in case they’re waiting for me on the first, scheming to snatch me up and strap me into a wheelchair. I pass the reception desk and shove my way through the revolving doors.
Freedom. It’s so goddamn goopy-hot out the nurses are smoking right outside the doors so they can dip back in as soon as possible. I tilt the hat forward, right above my eyebrows, and start away from the hospital. I shuffle through the heat-haze of the parking lot, past some rundown single-family dumps, between two brick buildings (a dry cleaners and a salon), and reach the sidewalk along Highway 210, which cuts Brainerd in two.
There’s no real reason why the things that happen happened, your fault or not. Most times they’re your fault. Most times they are. But the reason something happened is really just another something-happened looking for another reason for it to have happened, onto infinity, all that. Whatever. So, like, long before Monica’s decision, the decision, I was a boy who left Miss Bonnie’s place to revisit the house of my childhood torture. And before that I was a boy who didn’t know I needed to revisit the house of my childhood torture, because I didn’t know quite that it was torture. And before that I was a boy who didn’t know how much I’d someday love and hate and miss Miss Bonnie, because I didn’t know her from any pack-a-day in the county. And before that I was a boy up in that cold grey garage loft, one of many probably, being tortured and not knowing it. These things happened.
He was tall and had a long brown ponytail and wore work boots, plaid, and jeans with oil-stained knees. In the loft was a cot, a bunch of quilts, a space heater, and a shade-less lamp in the corner. “Until I fix the truck engine,” he’d say when I asked how long he was staying. He liked to laugh, his belly jiggling over the top of his jeans, his face contorting like he was having digestive problems. At the time, I was just taking the dare of drinking his “good-boy water” (vodka, I have to guess because the smell has always made me gag), then just waking up on his cot in the loft as the mini-fridge motor below groaned like one long pulled root, the groan just a whisper out of the frigid dark, “Hush,” like even it was in on the secret. At the time, it was just a game like any other you can’t win until it’s over, when I spat and then chomped down on my tongue to rinse my mouth with the taste of iron, just a game I needed to win if I was ever gonna be as tough as he was. Real tough. Boy, was I lucky to have him.
The torture began long after I escaped it, when I finally put it together that Cynthia the Rat hadn’t kidnapped me. She’d rescued me. Then the occasional musty odor of sawdust and clammy jeans began to stir up that No, no, no, please don’t, please anything but, or the occasional No, no, no, please don’t, please anything but began to stir up the musty odor of sawdust and clammy jeans, pick your poison. Then I could relive the event with a terror and rage that fit the experience.
I decided to return to that house, walk into the garage, beat him to death with the first tool I put my hands on. This was the only time I ran away from Miss Bonnie’s and even this doesn’t really count because I was only gone for the afternoon. It was August. Fourteen years old, a year away from my driver’s permit, I stole her car. I imagined the garage walls at my former foster mom’s house armed with mauls and hammers and chainsaw chains and shrub clippers. I imagined Uncle Bob old and feeble even though it’d only been four or five years.
Sure as shit, there he was in the garage. He wasn’t alone. With him was some little boy then living in the house. Uncle Bob didn’t seem to recognize me, at least not until he had the knife in his hand. Then it was like he’d been waiting for me, like I wasn’t the first man to return to him with revenge on the mind, jaw taut, eyes narrowed. He bought me and the boy sunflower seeds and Mountain Dew, brought us fishing. I didn’t drink the Dew. I didn’t wanna pee over the side of the boat like he and the boy did, laughing about how they were poisoning sunnies. Afterward, he (the little boy called him Robbie) drove us back to his sister’s house and parked the boat in the grass next to the driveway and carried the string of fish into the garage and slung them down on a card table and showed us how to filet them. During the demonstration, he called me Heath. I told him when I showed up that day that my name was Barney. Prick.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it, not when he had his back to me as he monkeyed with the finicky boat motor, not when I sat in the back seat, right behind him, and stared at the seatbelt dangling to his left, an immaculate right-there-for-Christ’s-sake noose, not when he handed me the filet knife and said, “Now it’s your turn, Heath” like I wasn’t thinking, You son of a bitch. And he: Stick me back if you’d like, it’s only fair. And me: Son of a bitch. And he: What are you gonna do about it? Stab me if you’re so bent up out of shape. And me: Fuck you, you nasty son of a bitch.
I just stood there, deader than the bass, and handed him the knife back so he could cut the head and tail off, grind the scales off with the dull base of the blade, and so on, saying, “Heath, pay attention. Pay attention, Heath. What are you looking at? The loft? I can show you what it’s like up there later if you’d like.”
I drove back to Miss Bonnie’s. My siblings watched me and Miss Bonnie in the back yard as I buried my face in her sleeve and wailed. She didn’t say a word about the stolen van. Not that I expected her to, the way I was blubbering, humiliated by how pathetic, weak and cowardly and stupid, I was. Her affection deepened the pain. Like, imagine a boy who’s allergic to the peppermint ointment his momma rubs so tenderly on his sternum. Every kind word made me squirm. All those years with her and I still couldn’t square her unconditional loving with my boyhood of park benches and back alleys and dive bathrooms and liquor-soaked sofas. My survival and contentment should’ve, by the rationale of everything I’d ever known, meant nothing to her, yet meant everything.
I’ve seen miracles. The first was that I told Miss Bonnie what happened in the loft, and over the next few months the terror and rage that accompanied those memories weakened. The second was that she treated me no differently after learning how pathetic, weak and cowardly and stupid, I really truly to-my-core was.
That should’ve been it. I should’ve turned the corner. I should’ve grown. Maybe I did, just a bit. But I couldn’t stop the wheels from turning, my brand of consciousness too rich for my own blood. The terror and rage found new memories, new fears. An incessant mind. The fact that I desperately needed to find and kill Bob instead of find and thank Cynthia is all Dr. Granger would ever need to know about me.
The mall isn’t far. I slog across town, slouching a few degrees deeper after each stoplight. Eight fast food places. Four liquor stores. Three grocery stores. Two pharmacies. One porn shop. Drivers gawk at me, truck engines rev, kids on bikes call me a faggot. The sky breathes into the coal sun glistening, and I stare at it because if I don’t Dr. Granger’s son will die in the Iranian War when he’s twenty-three. I can save him from dying in battle if I stare long enough. If I stare long enough, he’ll develop an aggressive form of prostate cancer later in life but the doctors will catch it early, never mind the farm boys in their mufflerless trucks or the bigots on bicycles. Still, there’s a seventy-percent chance that Monica will overdose on prescription pills at some point in the next decade and she may or may not have the type of friends around who will call an ambulance or rush her to the emergency room to have her stomach pumped, so I must keep staring, staring, staring, at the sun until I have to close my eyes. Then I almost walk into the street. A horn honks at me, the honking and the burning of my eyelids two sensations paired together like a screeching demon yakking hellfire on me. Let’s say Hell exists.
The night before the murder, Monica called. I took the call out on the sidewalk in front of Miss Bonnie’s. For the past week Monica had been telling me she was sick, and I kept asking her how she was, if she needed anything, how her tummy felt. When she told me why she couldn’t see me, what she’d done, how she’d come to her decision, all of it in one long, sloppy, stalling confession, I didn’t say much. My blurry vision was a mystery to me. It turned out I hadn’t blinked for at least a minute and was trying to see through tears. Eventually she said goodbye, claimed her mom was calling her name. I didn’t hear anyone in the background. I dropped my phone on the concrete.
I couldn’t go back inside. Instead, I paced around the block, whispering to myself, “She killed it. She killed it. She killed it,” like I’d have forgotten about it all otherwise. This “it” had no flesh I could caress one last time, no final breath, no sex, no name, no heartbeat—according to those highway signs infesting the stretch of highway between here and Sibley, there to comfort moralizers with fish stickers on their cars and crucifix tats on their lower backs—had no essence except for what I dreamt up in the blood-black clouds that night, nothing for a eulogy but me whispering “She killed it,” no proof of having lived save the fact that a thing like it can be killed.
I’m dragging my feet now. I’m starving but I might puke if I eat. It’s not quite pain, except the numb isn’t quite as numb as it was a few blocks ago. I smell the mall before I see it, fryer grease and popcorn.
Monica doesn’t wanna see me again and doesn’t wanna leave with me and doesn’t daydream about me the way I do about her, and she wouldn’t endure for me what I have for her. And later on when the man who will become her husband and who will father her children and who will drive them all back to Sibley for Thanksgiving and Easter asks her if she’s been with anyone else, she’ll lie and tell him he’s the first or say it was nothing, say the boy was nothing, say the boy was just a mistake she made when she was a flighty child with a reptilian brain. I’d have done better to stay dead.
Now she has no reason not to rat me out and tell her dad that she, no shit, didn’t help me kill Miss Bonnie and so Doleman will be free to lock me away and keep me from Travis’s daughter just in case she changes her mind and loves me again, which she won’t. She doesn’t love me, she doesn’t love me, she doesn’t love me. And the only reason she hasn’t already told her father that I killed Miss Bonnie without her help is that she pities me.
So how many could I take with me if I got back to the shotgun? She’d be mad at first but eventually (after ten or twenty or fifty years) she’d see the blessing of my rampage, that I’d unshackled her from her family. By then I’d be so far out of her life she wouldn’t remember my name. Or maybe she’d remember me fondly wherever she is, remember the unshackling, cherish her liberty. Romance is dying a hero to the woman you love.
I yelp and slap myself twice, the flush smacks stinging. Adrenaline jolts up my spine and I open my eyes. On the bench in the shade behind the mall sits a couple. They’re my age and they’ve been watching me. They’ve probably seen everything. Their disbelief disappears when they break into laughter. I walk toward them, and they stand hand in hand and scamper off to clear the bench for me. I sit down, lie on my side, loosen the robe’s belt to let some air in, and tilt the hat down so it covers my face completely.
“You’re a good boy, Heath, with a good heart,” Miss Bonnie would tell me.
I was born for one purpose, to be the pastor and reader and sole mourner for that unnamed heart or beating nonheart or thoughtless, dreamless, faceless, screamless, fleshless organism whose soul existed only out of that lessness that proved it had existed in my own, that proved I ever had one to begin with, a soul.
“What’d I tell you? You can forget about all that now. All those old places where you slept,” she said.
A gravedigger too. With my phone I butchered the anthill in the crack between the sidewalk and the lawn, gouged deep.
“You won’t run from my place, sweet boy. Nope,” she said.
It doesn’t matter where you draw the line. Almost dead is the same as alive, almost alive is the same as dead, unborn, and you can’t undo a thing once done any more than you can recast the hex to rid you of it, undo striking someone with a strength you didn’t know you had, dropping her to the kitchen floor.
“Nope. You’re gonna remember this one above all those other ones you didn’t run away from for no reason,” she said.
Home, home, home, home.
“Home,” she said.
***
I wake up on the bench to Monica saying, “But why, Heath?”
“I killed her.”
“Why?”
“I killed her.”
“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”
My skin is clammy, my pain an achy pulse. Miss Bonnie’s robe is open wide, and the breeze is hot and moist. I can’t have been sleeping long because the shadows behind the mall are just as they were when I fell asleep. Some Samaritan tucked a ten-dollar bill into the pocket of the robe. Score.
As I stumble into the air-conditioned mall, I smell Groucho’s Pizza, basil and sausage grease. My stomach groans. I go right up to the heat lamp where fresh pizzas steam and sweat and I tear off half of one and fold it over and walk out. A cook behind me yells, “Dude?!” I bumble as quickly as I can to Macy’s on the other side of the mall, scarfing down gobs of cheese that scald my mouth. I hold the pizza behind my back when I think I’m gonna puke in a center island trashcan. I swallow the vomit, keep walking, devouring the rest of the pizza by the time I reach Macy’s. I lower the hat on my brow. This way no one will get a look at my face while I’m perusing the men’s section for a t-shirt.
Three years ago, Miss Bonnie spent the first weeks of spring talking up the majesty of the Mississippi River, then surprised me and my siblings with a day-trip to Itasca State Park. From there the river begins its twenty-five-hundred-mile trip down through the States. She drove us from one podunk scat-castle town to the next, crooning all twangy to the oldies station, disregarding Chubby, Ren, and me as we elbowed one another in the ribs. In the seats behind me Toby Genzel licked the window and wrote notes in her saliva and Mariah pen-sketched cruciform Jesus, shredded abs and all, on her thigh.
I must say, given all the hype, I was disappointed. It was like the headwater rocks and the squirrelly eddies between them actually decreased in size as I got closer. And the whole place stunk of rotting animal carcasses. Whatever, we took off our shoes and socks and walked stone to stone across the water. On the way back to the car for a hot nap in the van, I saw the doe, swollen, rotten. I couldn’t fall asleep. It wasn’t the van’s scorching polyester. It was Monica.
She has this quality of seeming from a distance complete and graceful and in control of herself, exactly who she is, was, will forever be, though up close she’s like me. She yawns and sneezes and coughs and farts and thinks thoughts as dumb as I do sometimes. The idea of Monica wouldn’t have gotten me this far fucked up. And only the real thing can save me now, the thing that napped on the plaid living room couch at Miss Bonnie’s, drooling onto Toby’s baptismal blanket that Toby’s grandma finished knitting days before she had her last stroke and that Toby left for Miss Bonnie as a token of her gratitude. I drew the shades and brushed Monica’s hair out of her face and, using the blanket, dabbed away drool.
Three years ago, though, there was just the idea of her. When Valentine’s Day came around, Miss Bonnie told me I was blushing. She asked how she was supposed to help me introduce myself to my crush if she didn’t know the girl’s name. I didn’t want help. Anyway, Monica already knew my name, if little else about me.
“Does she like you?” Miss Bonnie asked.
“No. Not really.”
“No?”
“You’re blushing, too, Miss Bonnie.”
“I’m just so happy for you.”
I wanted to buy Monica chocolates. I asked Miss Bonnie if Monica preferred dark or milk chocolate.
She laughed. “Why don’t you ask her?”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “And how do I make sure she knows they’re from me?”
“You gotta talk to her.”
“That’s crazy.”
At the grocery store in Sibley was a special aisle full of cards and stuffed animals and chocolates. At the end was a bucket of rose bouquets.
