Thor Garcia was born in Longbeach, California, and has lived in Prague since the mid-1990s. His books include The Citypoet & Other Stories.
Thinking back, it seems I can actually remember my first day in Bay City.
It was about 10 o’clock at night, say, the end of January 19—. I’d driven since the afternoon, seven or eight hours up from Windy Tree. I’d spent the night before there at my brother’s, sitting around with him and some of his people. I’d hit the road the next afternoon, racing the sun in full free-fall. It eclipsed me an hour or two out, then I’d stopped at one of the classier roadside burger joints, of the type with plastic walnut tabletops and gold handles on the bathroom doors. That had left my stomach crammed with a four-dollar plate of fried cheese potato skins; a side of fries; Pepsi in a glass, with ice. And a lot of ketchup.
My car was full of sand, socks, and three or four boxes of my best and greatest record albums. Everything else was about exactly 100 percent on the dot. My dollar-green sportscoat had brown patches on the elbows. My t-shirt was cuffed up and the color of peach paint. My pants, brown, flared at the ankles and seethed with white checks. The shoes: Spang maroon wingtips. My hands smelled like gasoline from all the fill-ups. I was halfway through a pack of new cigarettes.
I punched the car lighter and stoked up a fresh one, clean and lean and from one of the very top advertised brands. I had wanted it this way, I remember thinking – just like this. Smoke curled around my face and I blew more through my nose. I sucked again and blew, loving each tasty millimeter.
The city was finally coming up. I’d seen all the signs.
I recall steering leisurely, but also with a certain rapt surety, as I shot through a brief mountain pass. The road seemed to pause, ever quite so slightly, before suddenly surging to the left. My concentration ambled, but did not wander. It seems I had an inkling about what was coming.
I careened out of the pass, whipping over the nubbled highway surface.
A sheen of sweat lightly lathered my face. The radio was off. I’d nixed the tunes back near Converse Bay. A cruel trade-off, granted – but one against which I dared not quibble.
I recall these things with vibrant alacrity, and the agenda that lay behind them. I had wanted to keep my mind clear. Keep everything peeled, keep it perked. Keep the bubbles shining. Keep the desktop clear, the papers in their right stacks. My notion was to vacuum it in, each and every micrometer. ALL OF IT. Because each second was beyond totally crucial.
I was jack-knifing into Bay City, the world trailing after me. The beginning and the end of many, many things.
I keeled ahead, drumming across the lanky highway.
I saw my hair flutter, ever so swiftly, as I risked a final lightning glance in the rearview.
MY LAST LOOK BACK.
Then suddenly.
Bay City just fucking emerged.
She busted out from behind the cover of those cresting, sloppy hills. She tore away that veil of blank nightness – and erupted. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like it was what she was supposed to do.
LIKE SHE WAS WAITING FOR ME.
Bay City.
She was straight ahead, filling up half the gamut before me. Wall to wall, side to side, up and down. I hurled into her flickering gold gulf, an aching burning racing up the back of my neck.
I torqued into a torrent of twinkling skyscrapers. I saw lights and bridges and warehouse paddies, starboard and leeward. Cola billboards, whiskey signs, a tower of giant shining pantyhose. Ads for the people on the six o’clock news. All of that.
This is it, I remember thinking. This is the one.
The city and I: A conflagration in the happening. In the happening now.
In the mix.
I was 23 years old. Twenty-three – and I wanted it straight like it came. I wanted it straight, I wanted it deep, I wanted it lengthy. I wanted it ponderous, blue and heavy. I wanted it fast like karate and steep like the Poconos.
I wanted to screw it on. I wanted to screw it all the way over.
Nothing more, mind you; but not a filthy crumb less.
Or let me put it this way: I wanted in. And I wanted it now.
Things hadn’t always gone right. Heck, heck no. But they weren’t supposed to, they never did. There was always a shakedown, and there had always been. A tall man standing there with unflinching lips and waterless eyes, shaking his head, a sheaf of unknowable documents in his hand, giving him the legal right. He was the devil dog, the bastard in bastard’s clothing. He would always be there. That was the way it went, the world over, and no one got away, no one had a prayer. The ones who thought they did were wrong. The worst type of wrong.
I was past thinking otherwise.
Yet how can I say to you? From what perspective may you best discreetly discern?
Now was time.
Now was time for the grope and the run and the stabbing thrust toward the green water.
Now. Not a chance of it later.
Grope and run and stab. Grope and run and stab. Winner take nothing; loser taking even less.
I looked around savagely, drinking it all in as fast as I could gurgle.
The city was cloaked in her darkling robes. She seemed oddly moody, a shade petulant. But that classy lady sparkled too, yeah, she was bright. The bitch couldn’t hide it – not from me, not on this night.
Ah, I say to you! I was not mistaken when I ascertained Bay City was glowing with the force of some unquenchable interior furnace, some white-hot core which leached far into the extremities to burn and burn against the gloom.
I could tell it even then, that first feckled night – just driving into Bay City for the first time.
Remember, I was coming in from the south highway. That road doesn’t carry you above or below her, like some, but throws you smack into her, neck-to-neck, face-to-face.
She was spangles and cheroots, Bay City was – all uptown horns and downstreet shifteyes. She was left-of-center, right-on-top, and flush down the middle. Everything up front and all at once. Brass and tacks and show-time. Hanging wires and sharp canny cornices. Feathery pouches and blunt, angular curbsides.
I was just driving in there, into Bay City. No one could say a damn thing about it. Bay City. I was taking that woman on. I was rattling her chain and she was straightening her whip, tracing it across the ground with a wet, svelte hiss.
The intensity was high, I remember it being very high – it was a tango, a mambo, a two-step, a tete and a tete.
I whirred down the window and took a whiff. Sultry Bay City gushes wafted around my left arm: Warm and voluptuous and thick, but with a gilding of the bitterest cold – the residue that glided in from the ocean and the various bays which bloomed on her every side like glittering wings. I snorted, taking in a good deal of exhaust and fumes, ripe and pungent – along with the unmistakable aroma of steak on the fry, a scent of peppery falafel.
Bay City!
I was getting in. I felt it for sure then.
At that moment.
I liked her look, from the get-go I was liking Bay City.
Her press was no good, certainly, this was true. It was said she was filled with crude murderers and half-wit bandits, chockablock with predatory jades and eponymous ruffians, booted no-jack hustlers who found their solace in perversion and perving – who drew on the puerile vigor of the innocent foolish for their vile and craven sustenance.
This could not, of course, be doubted, and I did not do so. My people had warned me in this regard, repeatedly and with looks burdened by a dozen formless but ferociously loquacious fears: DON’T GO – STAY WHERE IT’S “SAFE.” You don’t know what you’re getting into. Those people will skin you like a Thursday night tripe, and won’t even notice when you’re gone. YOU DON’T HAVE A JOB.
But suffice it to allow me to declaim: I didn’t care. And I did not care. Not a damn penny whit.
I felt it inside, this feeling. It was there. It was every which way.
Bay City, hah. I would bash the bitch before she sucked my blood.
I’d decided it long beforehand. It was my premiere testament, my opening foray. I had declared it months in advance. There would be absolutely no turning back.
That was the one bargain. The one I had made with myself.
The way I looked at it, the gig was simple, basic. A question of execution, as based on general principle. Like a walk-on tryout for porn movies or such. Beer for the ballgame. A kiss for grandma. A boxful of labrador puppies.
I’d laid it all down way ahead of time.
Even if she turned on me, I would never let Bay City take me for a blind sucker.
Yes: She had industries and executive suites; tramps, trollops and troubadours; Chinese and stuntmen and art deco; drug war and turf war and sex war; poets and prelates, primates and prefab; football teams and baseball; dogs in the park and sludge-on-the-seas; grey-templed men; FBI field offices, Securities and Exchange Commission, Ad Hoc Offices of the Ex Officio; nuclear and Navy Intelligence; Armenians and Irish, Turkmen; shrimp burritos, advanced sharkskin; engineering software conglomerates.
All of this. And all of this.
I had one thousand two hundred dollars, but my balls hung like gunnysacks.
I saw my off-ramp and veered toward it, pumping the gas then letting off. I rode the thundering reverb, my every sensor tuned to the pinging hum of my pulsating V-8 Thunderbird, Gold Series.
I was coming in. Deep in now.
I was socking it to Bay City, I was knocking her left and right. Right from the go-gun I had her on the run.
Suddenly there were curves. The off-ramp flung me around at a 320-degree angle. Then it plunged, rolling steep in an awful hurry.
I jerked the wheel left. My teeth clapped. I struggled to keep the car from skating the highway rail. I yanked the wheel with most of the guff I could bring to bear.
I hit the brakes. There was a squeal followed by a squall, but no impact. Only minor skidding and a slight bouncing. Then it straightened, yeah, she went candid.
And there I was.
In.
All lights vanished as I vroomed ahead, still on a slight fall. I slid into a cavern of concrete, tons of metal and girders and implacable cement on all sides.
Then I was out of it. And then I knew I was really in.
I was there. I had landed.
The stoplight read red. I hit the brakes. My vehicle brayed and did as commanded. I checked myself, glances over both shoulders, fore and aft, reverse and counter. I was out of breath.
Reflexively, I lit a new smoke. I took a look around.
There wasn’t much. Tattered old houses and apartment blocks, row after row of them. A few trees and strips of sidewalks, bus benches, billboards shrouded and peeling. Very dark too, hardly any streetlights at all.
Suddenly, I had no idea where I was, or why.
Then I remembered. The light changed to a most pearlaceous green. I gunned the Bird, rearing myself forward, whirling into the lurking melee.
My breast mottled over with joy. I was in Bay City at last. Stalking armored in my gold thunder fowl, probing for the vortex of the action.
The plan was to bunk up with some buddies, Steph and Andy, pals who’d been living in Bay City for a year or more. They were my advance guard, the recon crew, the research team. They had said it would be fine if I stayed at their pad for a few weeks – that is, until I secured my own digs, and began the project of my fortune.
I followed the directions they had given me. A left turn, then right, another left, another right, then onto a broad main thoroughfare.
There was action here, lots of it, and I liked it. I was in now, and this what it meant: Liquor stores, people walking around in a haze of dull neon. A maze of sidewalk café tables and chairs, bums and trash of all kinds. A ratted purple sofa, half in the street, half on the sidewalk. Cardboard boxes, a gaggle of skateboarding kids with goatees. Designer purse stores with merchandise from Europe on all the major intersections. And there, to the right – a few nice fires, in a few nice trashcans.
I gandered some frolicking neon: 24-HOUR RUBBER GOODS.
I gulped it all in. I rinsed out, gargled, gulped again, and felt my eyes get bigger.
A dark swirling figure spun into the street, directly in front of me.
Bam!
I slammed the brakes.
I saw it to be bearded, a man, deeply tanned or possibly dirtied. An odd cap sat on his head, Santa Claus-style, with a long swinging element to it that hung almost to his shoulders.
But it was his hands that drew my immediate attention.
There was something flashing and silver in one of them. The fellow gestured at me crazily and made a kind of leaping motion, up and down, up and down. A patchwork of grimacing lines getched around the opening that was his mouth.
He darted toward me.
It was all happening very quickly. I could not help but think: O God, O God, here it comes, here it comes – the unleashed fury-hell of which I had been warned.
And so very, very early.
I saw it clearly. In terrible, vivid, color focus. Here he was coming.
I saw it all in less than an instant: This fellow would rip me from my vehicle.
He would knife me first, surely, then drag me off and rape away at me frenziedly in some alleyway. I would beg him NO PLEASE NO. But it would mean nothing, to him. He would slap angrily at the back of my neck, as if I were some loose red-headed woman – his loose red-headed woman. I would shriek and cower as he pulled my shirt from my back and lashed me with enraged swipes. Onlookers would hoot down from the apartment blocks, giggling and turning up the television as my assailant pounded away, clubbing away into oblivion all my tender beliefs and chivalrous instincts.
I’d be lying there. He’d take my car, loot it, sell it, spill my record albums into the streets. Punks would look them over scornfully, then ramble them over with their skateboards, gleefully yelping as the vinyl splintered and the priceless covers tore. He’d try on my clothes, only to discard them as fraudulent garbage he couldn’t be bothered with. He’d hogtie me, truss me, bloody me, leave me freezing and utterly shattered, wishing it had all been a dream – my youth, schools, my foolish craving to come to Bay City, everything.
There would be no police, no figment of an officer until it was far, far too late. That was a given, and darn tootin’. If I was lucky, I’d be able to call the police myself, crawling bloody from the alleyway, trailing an intestine, begging disinterested bums for a quarter.
Oh, it was coming. I could see it so clearly. He was almost at the door.
I jerked around and looked for the lock. It was UP.
UNLOCKED.
Why, why?
My annihilation was so very close now.
Forward he raced.
Closer.
CLOSER.
Ah, shit. Oh shit shit. Shite. Shi’ite. Poopy poop. Poopy pee poopy.
Here he was. Here. I could almost feel his breath at my ear, hot and rather mildewy. Smelled like a week’s worth of onions and cream cheese, mixed in with a crate of cheap appleberry wine. But that knife of his would surely be the sharpest of all.
And still he came.
Then I almost laughed. The guy jumped back, stood still, and took a deep drink – from a silver can of beer. He danced off to the other side of the road, whining and waggling his hands at something else, cackling at the moon and whatall else.
I swooned, then crumbled.
No, no murdering fiend here, friend. Indeed. Just something slothy and baggy, with his teeth curled in the mud. Just a born crow who couldn’t fly anymore. Just some old crust, some neck-deep fly fisherman with no top for his convertible left out in the tornado.
I gunned the car and sped through Bay City, lights of all colors and kinds raining down upon me.
A few more twists and turns and I found Steph and Andy’s neighborhood. It was a hilly and steep place, but the parking was surprisingly easy.
I stomped the emergency brake and got out, whipping shut the door with a crack and a boom. It was different out here – cool and quiet and comfortable, the houses old and in the style of Victorian castles, cast in soft blues and browns, red bricks and white trim, many with yellow bulbs in the porchways. Corner Irish bars and laundromats winked gamely from the top of a nearby ridge.
I took another look around, drinking in mouthfuls of the air – Bay City air.
Yeah, I thought. I could do with this here, like this.
It felt right, I could feel it inside me. I was getting in.
Check that – I was already in.
I found the number and climbed two flights of rickety wooden stairs. The steps were covered with a multitude of dead bugs, but I didn’t care. I would take all the dead bugs in the world at this point. In fact, I would demand them.
I rang the golden bell. Steph and Andy opened the door together.
Both were beaming.
Me: “Is this the fuck pad?”
Indeed, they said.
And in the next second I was inside that bright and warm place. It was a two-bedroom number, kitchen and fold out futon-style couches together in the main room, a window view of a wood and brick house on the catty-corner.
Steph and Andy had two fresh six-packs of beer in brown and green bottles – according to the packages, brands from Alaska and Ireland.
Hello, hello, Bay City!
Immediately we drank a few down. Steph stepped over to the stereo and yanked the trigger on some key Pooh Sticks. And there we were all of a sudden, talking and drinking them down and blasting the Pooh Sticks.
Andy quickly went into a story about the lesbians who lived next door, one of whom was a reporter for one of the local papers.
“I’d like to fuck her,” Steph said merrily. We had a few good laughs about that.
In due time they laid down some rules for me: NO SMOKING in the apartment, only on what they called “the porch,” and no loud music after 11 o’clock, except on Fridays and Saturdays, when you could go till midnight but no more. Sure, I said – sure, no problem. After that they both said they had to get to sleep.
Work in the morning: Steph taught computer-training downtown; computer-data input for Andy at a longshore shipping company, Procurement Dept.
Okay, for sure, I said – and the same goes for me: Sleep and then looking for a job and an apartment, first thing in the morning.
They shut the doors to their bedrooms.
And there I was alone – in Bay City.
I soon saw that five beers remained.
I cracked one of the Alaskans, stood around awhile, then walked over to Steph and Andy’s bookshelf. A bunch of bologna on it. These guys, I said to myself. What the hell was going on over here? There were things up there like oversize paperbacks by 37-year-old lit-seminar graduates, going on about sex with a cousin and mom’s drinking, stories about blind girls dreaming of Mozart while romping with Isaac the professor’s German shepherd. And the rest of it. Also, there were a seeming great many thin cartoon-type volumes about ways to kill your girlfriend’s cats, and joke politics and various pranks, how to put bombs in mailboxes, etc.
I walked out to the “porch” for a smoke. It wasn’t really a porch, but a kind of landing at the top of another rickety flight of stairs. Nothing but chipped paint, a few cracked wood planks. Splinters. I lit and looked.
Bay City – she was chains upon cris-crossing chains of lights, veritable trellises of lights, white and yellow and orange, bits of pink popping there and again. Office towers stood staunch and blocky amid the mist-foggy fray, bathing in sultry ochres, simmering aquamarines, burning lavenders. Solitary red lights blinked atop a good half dozen of the buildings, who knew what for.
I took it all in – her, Bay City, the one. I felt myself gently swaying as I stood and gazed on her. I was in now, or close to it – very, very close.
I looked up and saw the sky to be swimming with all manner of helicopters, airliners and single-engine bi-planes. And there, over to the left – a police searchlight. No, two police searchlights: one on some blown-out ghetto building, one aimed at the ground – probably on some punk thug who deserved a beating, by some cops who deserved to give it.
Love it, I thought. LOVE IT.
Bay City, I sneered. You bitch. You lying whore sack of come. You four-on-the-floor mother-cunt. Come on, you filthy bitch. You cheap whore. You dirty lying two-dollar strumpet.
Come to daddy.
I looked Bay City over. People were out there in her, running through her legs, streaming through her hair, scampering through her dank and wondrous jungles. And she was humming, Bay City was, I could hear it, even at this hour: A hanging hum, a whispered whir, a rousting about; clanging and hoots.
All kinds of folks were out there. Maybe they didn’t know it yet, but I was coming for them.
Me, I was coming. A new shriek across their horizon.
Excitement purred and throbbed within me. I would meet some of these people. I would meet them and put their necks to the stone.
They would be evil and insane, and I would expose them. They would be kind and generous, gracious of intent and exacting of mind, and I would hoist them onto my shoulders, shouting invective at all comers, throwing elbows at anybody who tried to stop me. They would be dried like broken-off forlorn roadside wood husks, shriveled on the inside and ravaged by rot. I would fluff these to the side from the outset, deny them any specter. They would be tender and tingly – and we would tangle, together, raw, till the red moistness of dawn.
And I saw it: Someone would hand me a million dollars and thank me for the honor. A man would take a picture, and it would be of me. It would be printed in 300,000 copies of a glossy magazine, and delivered to the doorsteps of discriminating idiots.
Me. Me in there.
I sighed. Bay City. You filthy lying worthless dog-doing she-slut. You cheap slattern whore. You dirty dyke. You wench. You filthy no-good lying head-jobbing queen of fuck-fuck.
Come to poppa.
I walked back in and opened another beer. I drank it down while flipping through some computer magazine that had Steph’s name on the address label.
I wrenched the top off one more beer. I’d originally favored the Alaskans, but all that was left now was the Irish. A bitter brew, most certainly. I downed a long suck.
There was just one left now, one beer. Hell, I thought, I’ll pay those guys back later.
I drank it. I sat on Steph and Andy’s futon-couch and drank it, and then, still sitting there, I lit up a smoke. Hell, I thought, those guys won’t notice one smoke in here, so long as it’s smoked in peace.
And I did smoke it in peace. I ashed in one of the empty bottles.
Steph and Andy had left blankets out for me. I was tired, my head spun. I unfolded the futon-couch. I was in Bay City. I looked at some drawings of dead cats, and passed out.
Munger dropped back in the afternoon and we rode together. The road led to a hill, then leveled out on a long plateau. It was clear and hot up there, the sun blasting down, the weeds fringed white and gold. Just a few lazy clouds, laying about like wasted ladies.
We came past a shack. A kid in a white t-shirt was out front, fifteen, fourteen years old. Watching us, a stick in his hand. It was very quiet. Nothing much but the squeak of our wheels, the knobs of the tires against the road, a bit of a breeze.
Suddenly these two dogs erupted from beneath the shack. They snarled and woofed, tearing across the dirt at us. We stood on our cranks and began to pedal. Most dogs you’d meet were harmless, but still you tried to outrace them. There was a feeling that something could go wrong if you let them get too close. But nothing ever had before.
The dogs clicked along the pavement. So fast they had made it to us. They were right up next to us, right there in the road with us. I kept expecting one of them to jump, to try to take a snap at my calf or whatnot. That’s the sort of thing you were always worried about. But they never did.
One of the dogs was medium-size and brown, some kind of a shepherd mix, I guessed. He flew past me and went neck and neck with Munger, who had stretched out a lead by now.
The other dog was little and white, shorthair, probably some kind of a puppy. Maybe just small. He was running smack next to me, shoulder to shoulder, trying his hardest to keep up. He had these little black spots on him, about the size and shape of raisins. He looked over at me from time to time, his little tongue hanging out.
I saw a car coming at us in the other lane. It was a good ways off, but it was coming. I saw it rocking up and down over the road surface. It was brown, a station wagon. When I saw it I didn’t think anything too special – just another car.
There was a honk. I flicked a glance over my shoulder. A car, right back of us. He wanted to pass, he didn’t want to wait. Another honk. I nudged over to the farthest edge of the road. Ahead, I saw Munger do the same.
This wasn’t unusual. The roads there don’t have much of a shoulder, making so that sometimes you had to scootch over to the lip of the pavement if somebody wanted to pass. But normally the guy still had to swerve some to avoid you.
I didn’t think it could possibly happen. It seems like there should have been too many variables that should have prevented it. I thought something would stop it before it got that far.
I looked at the pup. We had eye contact. His tongue flopped out of his mouth.
Right as the car came up behind, the station wagon rolled past the other way. It was like that, exactly like that. The little dog couldn’t do anything.
It was very noisy, the sound of two cars coming up on each other like that.
From the corner of my eye I saw the little white dog disappear under the car, as it came up from behind us.
Then both cars were gone, completely sped away.
It was quiet again, the only sound the clicks of my rear wheel turning.
*
There wasn’t as much blood as I thought there might be. Some was coming down the pup’s nose and out his mouth. There were black smear marks on his fur, from where he’d been smashed along the road. He was lying there on the highway. His eyes were closed.
Munger picked him up and carried him by his two front paws over to the roadside. He lay him down beside some bushes and weeds. We stood and looked at him.
I got jumpy. All over my body I could feel my blood whipping through the veins, the arteries, where ever it goes. It was almost like I could hear the blood plunging down between my shoulders, roaring around my chest. I felt drops of sweat on my cheeks, sweat rolling from the top of my head down onto my eyelashes.
We hadn’t done anything wrong that I could tell, but somehow it felt that we had. Somebody had to be responsible for this. I looked in all directions to see if anyone was coming, coming to check things out. But there was no one.
Munger said maybe the little dog wasn’t dead. He bent down over the little guy. Maybe, he said, maybe he could hear him breathing. He wasn’t sure, but maybe. Maybe he was still alive.
I didn’t like that. If he was alive, I didn’t know how we could help him. There was no way, we didn’t have anything. But anyway, he couldn’t be alive.
I asked Munger what he meant.
He said he’d heard of such things. Like where something very young, like a puppy or even a child, gets hit hard but manages to survive. Car crashes, a fall from the tenth story, run over by a backhoe. They get knocked out by the impact, but because their bodies are still undeveloped and lightweight, not a lot of bad damage is done. Something to do with the bones being soft and not fully formed, in which case they don’t break or damage the internal organs.
Maybe, I said. But it had looked to me like the car’s fender had hit the pup smack on the back of the head. But as I say, there was no obvious indication that his head had been crushed or anything.
I looked around, still expecting to see somebody coming. But there was no one.
I saw the other dog that had chased us, the bigger brown one. He was standing up the road a piece, snuffing at the ground.
Munger tapped me on the shoulder. He wanted me to check to see if I thought the little pup was alive.
I got down on a knee.
I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell. Maybe there actually was a little breath coming out.
But – maybe it was the breeze, or some sort of amplification of the breeze, through the ear holes of my helmet. Maybe I was only thinking it. The rocks and gravel were pressing against my knee. I told Munger I didn’t know.
Finally it dawned on me. We could see if the pup’s heart was still beating. That would let us know for sure.
I bent back down. I put my right hand around the little pup’s ribcage. It was warm, even hot. Fit in my palm perfectly, a little smaller than a softball.
But I couldn’t tell. It didn’t seem like any heart beating. There was some kind of beating going on. But it seemed like it might be only my own blood, thumping through my hands. After a while, my thoughts of it got all mixed up. I couldn’t tell anything from anything.
Munger tried. But he also couldn’t say for sure. He said it was possible the pup was still alive, but the position he was in was preventing the heartbeat from getting through to us. Something to do with gravity and angles and the way blood flows in a body. But he didn’t think it would be right to move the pup again, because that could injure him more, if he really was still alive.
I looked around. It had gotten late in the day. It was turning purple on one side of the road, and pink on the other. We got on our bikes and rode away.
In my last year of school I faced a vacancy in my apartment. A tall brown-freckled blond girl not long out of high school ended up moving in. Her last name was German and she worked in one of the clothing shops in town, trying to save money so she could enroll in the university. I met her for coffee and we agreed on it, shaking hands there in the café.
Her mother arrived with her the day she moved in. I helped carry in her trunk and boxes; her stacks of second-hand dresses; the plastic milk crates containing her music cassettes; these little cut-glass jars she had, filled with spices and incense and dried-up flower petals; and a two-foot plastic yellow wristwatch, which she immediately hung on the wall. There were also containers of various art supplies. The mother declared that her daughter loved to paint.
The mother and I sat in the kitchen talking over coffee. The mother had a frizzy, dried-out sort of look. Her eyes were watery, she sighed often. She’d probably been complaining the last couple years about how tired she was. I pictured her wearing a hair net to her work, at a bakery or shoe factory somewhere. Things would have happened. She would have relationships with a certain type of bleary older man. He would move in from time to time, then out. He would generally be traveling light. He would be the sort with a mustache or goatee, until the day he would shave it off, making him look like he’d just been released from prison. He’d always be turning up in a different used car; he’d continually be surrounded by used cars. He would talk about the cars, about the men he was trying to sell them to, the problems that were involved, various parts of the cars, mechanical difficulties.
An image flashed of the mother licking her lips in front of the television. The room was dark. In front of her was a water glass and a bottle of wine.
We talked. She tried to be skeptical about her daughter moving in with me. She made a point of asking a few questions: What town was I from, what subjects was I studying. Did I work, what were my “long-range” plans.
I did my best to reassure her. I told her I was rarely at home, and that when I was, I preferred quiet. I had to study a lot, I said, because I was behind and taking extra courses to catch up, which meant a lot of time at the library and computer labs. And yes – I had been working a part-time shift, taking cash at a parking lot downtown.
The mother left. The girl worked in her room, hanging her calendar, unloading her trunk, whatever else she did. I walked up to the store for a twelve-case of beer. The girl was giddy. By midnight I was asleep, naked on her sheets, sweating and exhausted after three ejaculations.
We carried on like that for some months. On the one hand, I appreciated what seemed to be my good fortune.
Even today, I continue to maintain she was essentially good. It was probably impossible for her to be anything else, at this juncture. She was a ripe and ready fruit, but like so many of them, bruised in spots. She had a clearing complexion and a bouncing energy, a gymnast’s type of energy. She couldn’t sit in one place for very long, but she never seemed to move very far. She was fixated on particular rock stars, mostly British.
She said one day that she’d had her “first date” on her thirteenth birthday. She smiled as she said it. She was vague. I remembered the girls like that from high school. How they had so suddenly slipped away from their existence as one of the girls, to assume a kind of mythic stature, draped in a mixture of longing, loathing and rumors of birth control. One day they would disappear from the school, never to be seen again. You might hear a story later about how they had wound up in Arizona.
In the sunlight from the window, her hair was nearly transparent. We spent sweltering afternoons in her room, the drone of news radio crackling on and on. Wars in Africa and floods in St. Louis, Tennessee tornadoes and the car wrecks of drivers from Gardena.
There were difficulties. I began to be troubled by some of her characteristics, which included drinking coffee from a cup the size of a small bowl. She was always making pasta dishes, which she would never throw out but leave sitting in the refrigerator, sometimes for a week or more.
We never went out together in public, and never once did I see her lay a brush on her paints. She had slender hips, a beautiful long back, hardly any breasts at all. I answered a great many questions, mostly of a technical, mechanical nature. Sometimes she smelled. She said it was infections and viruses, of the kind exclusive to women.
The end came quick. It was a combination, but mainly I felt things were getting too comfortable, too sit-on-the-couch. So fast it had happened – I didn’t like that. Also, every time I looked at her I was seeing a bit more of the mother here and there. Nothing very specific, and maybe it’s unfair to look at somebody that way – but I was seeing it.
There was yelling one afternoon and I walked out. I went to the park and sat a couple hours, talking and drinking 40-ounce bottles of beer with a few of the local bums. They told me a bunch of lies. One of them, for example, claimed to have had two consecutive wives from Yugoslavia. Both blonds. He said they had been great and jealous lovers, but neither would tolerate his socks on the floor. Neither. It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard of.
I returned to the apartment. Me and the girl had a talk, after which she proposed, in her way, to make things right. I let it happen, for a few minutes – but I was tired, I was fed up. I pushed her hand away. It upset her. She ran out, tears in her eyes.
A couple nights later I came home and found her sitting at the kitchen table. There was also a young man there, someone I’d never seen before. Lord, how I hated to see that. There was shouting. This was my house. A chair was pushed over. They left.
She took scissors to a few of my shirts and left them in a shredded pile on the floor. She scrawled a little note, leaving it beneath the shreds.
Munger had got his money saved and gone to Portugal, for at least a year, he said. I was living in a place newly carved into the hills, and had started work at a small establishment. Mary was a girl who also worked there. It started at one of these Saturday work parties. People standing around outside at the barbecue, then sitting around with the music inside as the beer dwindles and it gets dark. People starting to leave together in groups. Then there you are kissing this girl next to your car. You look around in the middle of it and the night is so fine and clear, so warm and tree-smelling. Here is this girl, laughing at everything you say. You get in your car and follow her over to her apartment.
Mary was Republican. She would talk about it, she was always talking about it. The internship she’d had in Washington a few years ago, something they were saying in the papers, the friend who had dated – or was still dating – a Congressman. Her brother who was hoping to join the FBI.
Mary. Oh, Mary.
I never took her to a restaurant or movie, we never went to a bar together. But she never applied sanction or guilt, she never flung it, she never made a mention. It was only all over her face – in the way she held it as if to say everything in the world was nothing if not always 100 percent completely fine.
At work, I rarely acknowledged her. There was plenty of talk already, those people didn’t need anything added. I would maybe nod and say “hi” to her, that would be all, yet end up driving over to her house that night. Or she would call to ask if she could come over. If it was late enough, I would almost always say yes. My roommates would be in their rooms, meditating in front of their computers, working on their photography. If they happened to see her, I would play it off as some kind of crisis that needed my intervention. My roommates would always buy a story about a Republican girl with a crisis. I would tell them it also involved her Christianity.
But I don’t think I’ve ever been in as bad a shape as when I would sit around at my apartment, wondering why Mary hadn’t called for a few days, or sometimes as long as a week. And getting really frustrated the times it was only her answering machine that picked up when I dialed over to her place. If I called and she herself answered, I’d immediately hang up.
One Saturday morning, I just went over there. It was humid and overcast, the streets still black and wet. She was tentative and crisp toward me, but I convinced her to drive us out to the beach. I must admit, I was saying some funny things, and that had helped. I was badly hung over, there’d been next to no sleep, and you can say some pretty funny things to the right person when you’re in that kind of shape.
We stopped at a gas station. I bought a newspaper, a styrofoam thing of coffee. Then we went out to the sand. Mary had a diet cola. We sat there in our jeans and our shoes off. I smoked one cigarette after the other, flipping through the paper and saying hardly anything, waiting for the worst of the shakes to pass. I could feel her staring at me, watching everything I did, but I don’t think I looked her way for almost 40 minutes. She sighed, kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. Once she got up, put her feet in the water, and came back with some broken brown seashells. She said the water was cold. I giggled but didn’t say anything.
I came to the racing forms. I started reading her off the names of some of the horses. It wasn’t much funny, but Mary was laughing.
I leaned over and kissed her with a full cigarette mouth. I stuck in the tongue, wiggled it around. I pushed in extra saliva, breathing through my mouth. I wanted her to get all the cigarettes that she could.
She met me full on. She didn’t back down. She grabbed me around the ear. She kissed me heavy, wrapped her mouth around my tongue and pulled it in. I rolled on top of her. I pressed the back of her head into the sand. I fell between her legs and kissed her on the beach.
My dick started to rise, my head started to pound. I was breathing hard, I was running out of air. Behind me I heard the roar of the surf. Ahead of me, cars whistled by on the highway. I went dizzy. Two boys walked by, one of them whipping a stick in the sand. I rolled off and had a laugh.
I led the way to the liquor store. I got a 12-case of cans, three large bottled beers, more cigarettes, a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. We went out to the pier, past the restaurant and the line shop, out to the very end. I felt loose and sweaty walking out there. Black spots blipped on and off in my eyes.
Mary refused one of the large bottles but took sips from one of the cans. I started to drink. We sat on the wood stumps and talked. Fishermen were casting on both sides. Some of them left, new ones came to take their places. I finished the bottles and started on the cans. I jogged off to the restaurant to take pisses. Maybe I lectured her for a time, could have been about anything, but I don’t think it went on too long. Then it was over and Mary was laughing again at what I was saying, looking at me in her way. I was always finding her staring at me, no matter where we were, no matter what I said. But the beer was good, the cigarettes tasty. I didn’t mind.
I was standing against the pier railing and she crawled under my arms and kissed the corner of my mouth. Her breath was warm against my ear as she whispered. I kissed her for a while, lit a smoke, kissed her, took drags off the cigarette, kissed her, drank some beer, and kissed her again.
The sun was going down, we’d been there all day. Mary said she was getting cold, shouldn’t we go. I said no, the sky was going pink, it was too beautiful to go.
A black guy and white guy couple were fishing near us. They’d come later in the day. They had beards and overcoats and a rusted old blue Coleman cooler. They may have been bums, I don’t know. They saw us kissing and started in with some comments. We laughed and joked with them. I kind of shocked myself when I said we were in fact getting married. Mary didn’t look at me when I said that, just nodded her head like it was true and laughed at the two guys. I looked at her standing there, jean fabric tight over her thighs, bare feet in low black heels.
The guys asked for spare smokes. I gave them out. I gave them beers. The black guy took out a fifth and passed it over. It was whiskey, third of the bottle left. I lipped from it and more went down than I meant to. The guy saw it. The look on his face said he wasn’t happy, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d been saving it for later. I felt sort of bad about that. I passed them out more beer. Then the guys started telling stories, amazingly funny ones. We were laughing so much. I don’t remember anything they said now, only it was so funny.