Given World (19 page)

“You are such a fucking awful liar.” She doesn’t contradict me, but it does occur to me that maybe she isn’t lying. We stare each other down for as long as we can stand it. I will not for a second admit I could be wrong, and she knows that I know it’s a possibility. This is something new to me, being held to account by someone with her ducks, if not in a straight line, at least in a loose formation, and I am not good at it. I want an out, and this time she doesn’t have to give me one.

But she does. “He reminded me of you too. Those crazy little ears.”

“Fuck you, Lu. You and your cat.” I can barely talk, but screaming is a clear and present option.

She comes behind the bar before I can get away and grabs me by the arms just below my elbows, leans her forehead into mine and says, “It don’t mean shit if it doesn’t hurt, Cookie. Don’t let him go.”

“Don’t. Tell. Me.” I pull away from her and back up against the basement door. “How to remember him. You don’t know a fucking thing about it.”

She stands there with her hands still open, her eyes bright and wide. “I’m trying to help, Cook.”

I laugh, knowing it’s the cruelest thing I can do. “Now, that is fucking funny.”

She backs away, hands up in front of her now, unconsciously fisted in a boxing stance, almost a crouch, protecting her rib cage, her belly. “Hey,” she whispers, “it’s me, your stand-up guy. Remember?”

My teeth are clenched. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you so much.” My teeth feel like they will always be clenched now. Like this is permanent, this grinding pain.

I watch her go and try to find a way to blame her. Turn Janis up on the jukebox as loud as I can stand it, unhang the beer signs, and wash the filthy windows so actual sunlight can get in. My jaw aches. I don’t care.
Take
another little piece of my heart. I don’t fucking care.

•  •  •

Lu stays away for a short while and then sashays in one hot September afternoon like she’s been showing up at exactly this time every day. She brings me a burrito, with one bite out of it. I shove her quarters for the pool table.

“Rack ’em.”

She lets me win, but barely, and does it so slyly I can pretend it was an honest game. Then she slaughters me; takes no time to run the table and banks the eight with six of mine still out there. She lets me break the next one so she can reteach me how.

“Getting sloppy, Cook.”

“I didn’t have you here to keep me honest.”

“Is that what we called it?”

“Maybe.”

“What else you got?”

Nothing. I’m all out.

•  •  •

In late October, on a Sunday, I am watching half a block of the Tenderloin go up in flames on the TV. The wind has been blowing hard since yesterday, and now the fire is creating its own small storm. The sky is completely black with smoke, blocking out the sun. It looks like a bomb went off and we can smell it here, four miles away, and a drizzle of cinders is already beginning to fall on this hill. The fire trucks can’t get down the alleys, to get the ladders up to the windows and broken fire escapes. For some reason the fire hoses don’t fit all the hydrants. Something explodes. A water main breaks. People jump. Others are caught in the hallways and stairwells and their rooms and burn, for real.

Lu calls to tell me she can see it from where she is too, somewhere south of Market, in a bar. She tells me the job is gone and the little cat is gone and the little room is gone, and she just needs a small loan to get a bite to eat and maybe a tiny fix, to get well.

She says, “I didn’t set this one either, Cookie.” She tries to laugh. I try to laugh with her.

I say, “I know. Stay right there. I’m coming.” But when I get downtown, I can’t find her anywhere. There’s just a small pile of ashes on the sidewalk in front of the bar. I think this must be the last place she stood. I crouch down and rub some of that ash between my fingers, feeling for teeth, pieces of bone.

I
finally get that God isn’t going to quit taking my people and leave myself wide-open. This time I do not even want Frank to attempt to glue me back together. I want whatever is the opposite and know just where to get it. Go looking for the Cajun (right where I left him) and make him take me down to Buchanan to see what the fucking attraction is. Smoke from a small steel tube until my lips blister. I can’t get high enough. Keep the job for a month, maybe two, but then just stop showing up. The owner (I hear) sends Andy to look for me, thinking maybe I’ll turn up at the back door at Harbor Lights, but that’s the last place I’m gonna go.

I move back into the flat on Capp Street, and every time the Cajun goes to hit me I step into it. The taste of blood is the realest thing I can imagine. I hate the dope—hate the high—but it’s cheap and easy, and I don’t have to remember anything or anyone.

The house comes down around us, more or less. Holes knocked through the walls, windows broken by anything handy to throw. We try to keep it down, and to the back of the place, where the neighbors aren’t so nosy or so uptight as the ones in front. The guy upstairs is a drunk, only, and minds his own business. Most nights we hear him come home late and an hour later hit the floor when he falls out of bed.

He isn’t going to say anything.

The people over the fence complain only when the Cajun gets out his saxophone and plays it in the yard. I don’t blame them. He sucks. Couldn’t play a scale to save his life, and thinks he’s John Coltrane. Sometimes they throw bottles, the neighbors do. The Cajun flips them off, throws the bottles back, and plays louder.

He still works, and I have some money saved, so sometimes we still eat. Sometimes we’ll end our binges on a weekend and go up to Potrero Hill to play softball. Someday I’ll find photos: both of us smiling, his arm wrapped proprietarily around my shoulders, my ball cap pulled down low. Someday I’ll run into people we know, who will say, “We always wondered what you were doing with that guy.”

“I wondered myself,” I’ll say, but I’ll be lying. I know exactly what I’m doing.

One bad night’s next morning, about two months in, he takes me to the farmers’ market, by way of apology. I manage not to think about Cole, watch a hundred people try not to notice the black eye, and when he starts yelling at me for taking too long to pick out an avocado, I walk away and hide in a carport up the hill. If it weren’t for the shiner, I could have stood it, but with it, and all those people knowing, there was no way. I watch from my hiding place as his truck goes by, and don’t know what to do next. The bar seems a pretty clear choice, though, once I consider my options.

It all comes to a screeching, non-cartoon halt when I come home later, lit just enough, to find a trail of lingerie in the dining room and a young hooker with a paring knife waiting for me in the bedroom. The girl is scared, and I mouth the words, “Don’t fucking talk. Where is he?”

The girl points to the bathroom. I hold my hand out, whisper, “Go.” The girl hands me the knife, handle first, and leaves with our bedspread wrapped around her.

When he comes back, he is not the least bit ashamed—he’s livid, self-righteous, a prick, as usual. “Where’s Angel?”

“Went to poop and the hogs got her, I guess.” I can’t do Lu’s delivery, but I can feel her there, so close behind me there’s no space between us at all. Dumb thing to say, regardless.

He hesitates; almost has the good sense to know something’s up. I never talk back. But he’s too high, too practiced at what he thinks comes next. When his hand goes up, I get him across the belly. I’m not going for the kill, just a semi-deep flesh wound, one all-encompassing payback.

I call 911. “Send the cops too,” I tell the dispatcher. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to want to take me to jail.”

Before they get here, I grab his saxophone, stand over him, hold it up and say, “You don’t know how to
play
this.” He moans. I try to feel sympathetic.

The public defender does his job and gets me mostly off on self-defense, though an argument can be made, and is made, either way. The guy is good, and the jury doesn’t really give a shit about the perp or the victim.

I do a couple of months, and when I get out go by to thank the lawyer.

“Plans?” he asks.

“See if they’ll let me work at the bar again, I suppose.”

“You have a place to live?”

“I know someone who’ll let me crash for a while.”

“Getting high much?”

“Nah.” I tell him what my counselor says. “Jail’s a fairly effective intervention program.”

“So I hear,” he says, and nods. “What ever happened to that guy? By the way.”

“I hear he went home and tried to kill his brother.”

“Paying it forward?”

“Something like that.”

He asks me where I’m from. Originally. I say Montana. He wants to know if I have people there. I say I do.

“You ever think getting out of this city might be a good idea?”

“Nope. Never thought that.”

“Really?”

Really. I don’t even know if I’m lying. Maybe people will quit asking me impossible questions. Maybe he’s right, and I should get out of here. I know the way. I know that highway still goes.

For a while I sleep on Frank’s couch, and occasionally crawl into bed with him when I can’t get warm. We try making it a few times, but my knees keep slamming shut, like my hip bones are spring-loaded. I know I’m driving him crazy, so I go. He says I don’t have to but he’s wrong.

I get my job back, tending to the masses. For a long time no one asks where I’ve been, but when someone finally does, I say, “Was I gone long? Did you miss me?” She cocks her head, gives me a quizzical look and half a smile. I say, “You can’t miss me if I won’t go away.” Still smiling, she shrugs and nods, takes her beer to a table by the front door.

God, I’m funny.

I dig in, maintain, decide I’m going to get my shit together. I see Frank. I don’t see him. He lets me do what I want and I don’t judge him for it. He says that’s good of me, and we laugh. Time, it goes by. It’s a process. I remember almost every day that makes up this time. One day a letter comes, from Gail, in Montana. I can’t place her and then I can, and it is just a flash: a seventeen-year-old love-stricken girl patting me on the head. Me growling, or something comparable. She says now she is forty, and she feels her life slipping away. She sends newspaper clippings that talk about Senate hearings, POWs, and MIAs.

A mismatched cadre of senators and congressmen are convinced the government has information about soldiers, still alive and held captive in Vietnam. I don’t know. For what? She tells me in the letter that they’ve created an office to collect information, inform families, keep track of these things. There are “family meetings” in different places around the country, where you can go and hear about the progress they’re making, the people they’ve found, all of them dead and in pieces.

There’s a meeting in Seattle next month. She wants to know if I want to meet her there. Yeah, right. Only if they bring Mick to it. Alive and whole.

I write back, say thank you for the information. She’s still in Montana, teaching in Great Falls. She sends a bracelet with some other guy’s name on it. MIA 1971. I send her a postcard of the Pacific Ocean, say, “This is where I am now. This is where I came to forget. I can’t help you. I can’t help either one of us.” I don’t tell her I recently went to jail for stabbing someone, though if I did, it might make her stop writing.

Against my better judgment, I go to the library and do more research. They are compiling a list of missing soldiers with descriptions of where they were last seen, what they were doing, what probably happened to them. Plane and helicopter crashes. Many drownings, which I did not expect. Hardly anyone went missing in the tunnels. Mick was always special that way.
Not like the other dogs.
He used to say that about Cash when Cash did something goofy, like collect rocks or bark at them. He probably didn’t think it applied to him, but it did. He was nothing like the other dogs.

I read about the tunnels, how the guys went in with nothing but a pistol, and the blade of a bayonet to check for booby traps. They had miners’ lamps, which made them perfect targets. But in Mick’s case, no one heard a shot, an explosion, a cry for help or of pain, nothing. He went in and he didn’t come out. At least not where they were waiting.

A few years later, when they were done with the Red River Delta and Hanoi, the B-52s headed south to carpet bomb Củ Chi, from where we’d been getting our butts kicked for a long time. Tết and all that. Mick was gone, somewhere, by then. Or he wasn’t, and became part of the carpet. Or maybe he’s in Saigon playing Russian roulette, waiting for Robert De Niro to come and take him back to the Smokies. Or the Rockies, their long-lost cousins to the west.

•  •  •

In spite of Gail and her letters, I’m being really good, getting a little cocky even, thinking, again, maybe I’ll go to college and get out of booze and babysitting. So, of course, some whacked-out patron I’ve cut off vaults the bar and knocks me down the basement stairs. To remind me not to be so goddamn sure of myself. Frank comes to collect me.

Something in me wants to slap his sweet face and so-nearly-contented loneliness. I don’t know if that’s what kind of girl I’ve become, but at least I know I don’t want it to be. He puts ice on the bruises and gives me brandy.

“For medicinal purposes,” he says. I smile because I know if I do, I can have anything I want. And what I want is to want this, to be here, trying the best I know how, to match love with something like it.

I can cook a few things, and do: spaghetti, tacos, pot roast. Most nights I come home after work. Sometimes I go ride with Frank in his truck and help with the papers. We finally make love in the back of the truck, on a pile of newspapers and a sleeping bag he keeps in there. My tailbone bruises, and the bruise feels like something real. I like it. I like Frank. Mostly I like seeing a single image of the world.

But this goddamn smile. It feels like it’s painted on. My skin feels like it’s painted on.

Gail won’t stop writing. It’s like she’s throwing bricks.