Last Call for the Living (13 page)

“Why did you ask me when I was born?” Charlie finally asked.

“I don't know.”

“You don't?”

“Tell me 'bout your momma?”

“My mother?”

Hicklin nodded.

“I don't want to talk about her.”

“She 'bout forty year old?”

Charlie didn't answer. He was fidgeting, broadcasting his nervousness.

Hicklin looked into his eyes. “She got a fake eye, don't she?”

Again Charlie said nothing. He took a long pull from his beer.
How did he know that?

“I'll be goddamned,” Hicklin said after a ponderous beat.

Without a word Charlie gulped down his beer. He was really developing a taste for the stuff, thinking of it as liquid aspirin. The buzz came quickly and his aches subsided, along with the anxiety. He fished around in the cooler and found the blue-and-white label. Popped the top.

Hicklin sat there smoking, watching his hostage.

“Tell me 'bout your daddy,” he said.

“I never knew my father,” Charlie said. “My momma said he died a long time ago.”

“He may have well did.”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“'Cause we just a bunch of bastards in this here house.”

“Why don't you let me go then? I won't say anything.”

“You won't say nothin'?”

“I swear.”

“There's the door,” Hicklin said, pointing.

Charlie eased off the edge of the chair as if to leave, but Hicklin eyed him dispiritedly. Apparently the offer of freedom had been rescinded. Charlie settled back in the chair.

“Here,” Hicklin said, holding a cigarette toward him.

“I don't want to,” Charlie said.

“I'll show you how.”

Charlie shook his head.

“It's bad for you. Gives you cancer.”

“What's cancer?” Hicklin said. “Just another name for the same thing—
death
. Anything that gives you
that
should be given a goddamn award. Take it.”

Charlie took the cigarette and the plastic lighter, studying them like a survivalist would tinder and flint. It took him a couple tries, rolling the tip of his thumb across the spark wheel. He lit the cigarette and puffed, smoke filling his cheeks although he was hesitant to inhale. He tried mimicking Hicklin, holding the cigarette between his fingers, but the smoke tasted terrible. Charlie tried again, sucking a drag down deep into his lungs. He coughed instantly, a jag that had his eyes watering and his insides swapping real estate.

He held out the cigarette in a last act of defeat.

Hicklin staggered over and took it. Patted Charlie on the back.

“Not for you, huh?” he said. “Least you can say we tried.”

Charlie took a sip of beer, thinking he might vomit. His eyeballs felt like dice on a craps table.

“That's nasty,” he said.

Hicklin lit his next cigarette. He took deep drags, smoking with real feeling. He studied the tip, blew on it so it glowed red. Flicked ash on the floor.

“Wonder what the first person who smoked thought to say?”

“Probably the same thing as me,” Charlie said right before another round of hacking.

“I mean, who thought to roll up some tobacco in a stick like this?” Hicklin continued. “Light it and suck in the smoke and let it out, over and over like we do? Who thought to do that first? And why?”

“I was just thinking about that.”

Hicklin seemed pleased by this.

“They say the Chinese were the first to use rockets,” Charlie said, meekly at first, but when Hicklin cocked an interested ear toward him he went on. “Just gunpowder and fireworks, pyrotechnics in the beginning. But they had the idea to use that powder to get stuff up in the air. Someone back in China had to stare at some gunpowder and figure you could launch a cannonball with it. A couple leaps intellectually and technologically and we're putting people on the moon, running satellites around Jupiter, building space stations.”

“You some kind of scientist?” Hicklin said.

“I like rockets.”

“That what you study in school?”

“Sort of.”

Charlie closed his eyes to stifle a wave of nausea. He wondered if his old life was waiting for him out there? Like he could still inhabit it. Find a door in Hicklin's cottage, open it, and there it would be—his old, normal life.

They sat for a while in silence. A manic voice on the radio announced a motocross event. Next a woman read a weather report for East Tennessee. Hicklin's mood turned solemn, as if an unwelcome memory had suddenly dropped in.

Hummingbird appeared with a flashlight. She turned it on and off, playing the light across the walls, in the throes of one of her manic episodes, Charlie recognized. There was a stark hunger in her eyes. The nerves in her face two-stepping along to their very own
Danse Macabre.

Hicklin didn't pay attention at first. Not until she shined the light in his eyes, wanting to antagonize him. Hicklin shot her that look he'd perfected in prison, suggesting a cut throat and an unmarked grave. It seemed as natural to him as a smile or a frown.

When Hummingbird didn't stop, Hicklin got up calmly and snatched the flashlight from her hands, unscrewed the cap and took out the batteries. It was as effortless a motion as unloading the magazine of a handgun. But Hummingbird grabbed a battery from Hicklin's hand and threw it over his head. Then she turned to Charlie.

“I fucking hate you,” she shrieked. “I hate both of you sumbitches!”

She turned and ran. The bedroom door slammed. Moments later they heard her crying.

Hicklin got two more beers from the cooler. He was very drunk, a little unsteady on his feet. Charlie eyed the bedroom door, then the front door.
Maybe when he falls asleep?
The cottage smelled sour, mildewed, the air heavy with smoke of all kinds. Hicklin handed him a beer and sat back down.

“Why did she do that?” Charlie said.

“Because she's in love. That's why.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

Hicklin laughed.

“Nah, she ain't
my
girlfriend. I think she's sweet on
you,
Charlie.…”

“Me?” Charlie said, incredulous.

“I think she's got a crush on you.”

Charlie felt sick to his stomach. His face must have betrayed this, too. Hicklin winked and laughed again, slapping his knee good-naturedly.

“What's the matter? Never been in love before?” Hicklin said.

Charlie was too embarrassed to answer.

“No little girlfriends to play with your rocket, Mr. Scientist? Not like Hummingbird plays with it, huh?”

Hicklin's words were laced with scorn. His demeanor changed, as though a curtain had been pulled apart. A passing cloud obscuring the sun.

“I been in love,” Hicklin said, as if he'd been asked. “Loved men
and
women. People who done time, real time, know love better than anyone.”

Charlie shook his head.

“I can't imagine murderers and thieves and rapists being very loving.”

“You'd be surprised,” Hicklin said, his mood still far from agreeable. “Convicts understand love, sex, power, fear, death better than most people. They get distilled within a prison population. Get more intense. I've seen love between two convicts as heavy as any married couple … seen fear come off a person like vapor. Watched men die with a big bad look in their eyes. You know what the
panopticon
is, son?”

Charlie could feel Hicklin's eyes on him, gauging him. Hicklin looked as though he were about to burn down the woods. His words seem to form in a pressure cooker.

“Well, do you?” Hicklin demanded.

Charlie shook his head.

“The panopticon is a prison. A prison where they see you, but you don't see them. And they always watchin', or at least that's what you think, because you don't know one way or another if they is watchin' and it just makes you crazy. Do you know what it's like to be watched? I mean really watched. Stared at.
Studied?

“I'm not just talkin' guards and video cameras and such. I mean jobs, paperwork, receipts, bills, insurance claims, doctor visits, taxes, satellites up in the goddamn sky. The all-encompassing gaze. And someone's always watchin' and you don't know when or where or who, but there is no escaping it. I spent twelve years being watched. By my own friends, my brothers, by the niggers and beaners and screws.

“And maybe, just maybe, somebody's watching us, too, everyone on the planet. Earth like one big panopticon for the aliens or whatever the fuck might be out there. All I knew was stick with my own kind and use my hate liberal-like.”

Charlie tried to follow Hicklin's speech, thinking back to the rants of customers at his teller window, lonely people full of opinions with plenty of time to waste. He finished his beer and got another from the cooler. Hicklin gestured for one, too, Charlie noticing that Hicklin's face was beginning to resemble a fogged-up windshield. Charlie was starting to feel pretty good himself.

Sensing the threat had passed, he said, “The banks know a lot about people.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Like how?”

“They know how much money you have,” Charlie said. “They know your credit score. They know where you live. Your telephone and Social Security number. They know who you write checks to and how often and for how much. They know when you use your ATM card. For some people a debit card's all they know how to use. You can follow them day and night, just by their spending habits.”

“And you've done it, ain't you?” Hicklin said.

“Done what?”

“Watched 'em.”

“Yeah.”

“And they didn't know it.”

“No.”

Hicklin sneered, as if his point had been made. He raised the beer and drank, dribbling a little down the front of his shirt. Didn't notice or care. He leaned back into the recliner, his eyelids beginning to droop.

Charlie left Hicklin in the living room. Stumbling into the bedroom, Charlie had to reach out to the walls for balance. He found the mattress and plopped down in a drunken heap. Later he heard Hicklin talking to himself. A slurred monologue, like that of any derelict under a bridge. Charlie strained to hear what was being said.

He thought he overheard his mother's name once or twice.

Spoken aloud with the most peculiar of emotions.

*   *   *

They spent their
nights in the trailer. November in Jubilation County. A hard freeze that lasted for weeks. Lucy tended to the place as best she knew how. Washed and folded his clothes. Kept the kitchen tidy. Not much money to go around. At least he put a stop to her tricking. Guess he couldn't take it anymore, she thought. Made her love him even more. He hit her occasionally, open handed, and she figured that was a sign of respect. If he really wanted to hurt her he could.

He disappeared for days at a time. She didn't dare leave the trailer because he'd told her not to. Sometimes he came home chapped and tired. A reflective vest, jeans and boots caked with mud. He'd show her a couple hundred dollars. Let's go to the store, he'd say. Then they'd shop like real couples do. She tried to be smart with her allowance and buy the things he liked. Sliced ham. Steak and potatoes. Beer. Lucy never bought herself anything without his permission. She ate what he ate and fought the urge to buy a television or some new clothes. One time she heard the expression “pins and needles.”

She realized that's how she walked around him.

But it felt like love.

At night his friends would come over. Men she'd never seen before who became regulars in their trailer. He treated her politely but firmly in front of them. They never so much as looked at her. She was used to it. Lucy figured it was her eye. They drank beer and carried on. She ironed clothes in the bedroom, hummed old hymns to herself. Still hard not to overhear all that talk about race and politics.

But sometimes the conversations turned serious. Talk of guns, amphetamines, cocaine, gas stations, prison. She figured it all for just that—talk.

Sometimes on a Friday night after a case of beer he and his friends would get loud and rowdy. They'd wrestle. Tempers flared. One time Hicklin punched a guy so hard his nose split down the middle. She spent two days sopping up blood from the couch and rug.

Other times Hicklin and his friends would hop in the one man's pickup truck, take off into the night. Lucy might not see Hicklin for three days. She never asked for an explanation. Was never offered one, either. She was often too afraid to talk to him. But her fear melted away when he took her in his arms. Got up inside her.

Then it felt like love.

Christmas. Lucy made him fried ham sandwiches. Canned apples with syrup. Hot coffee. After that he started coming home cleaner and more frequently. He always had money. And one day he surprised her. A brand-new television. A Betamax. A cast-iron teakettle. A brand-new pair of jeans that almost fit her. His friends still came by. Hardy, wired looking, tattooed. Men who drank bad luck and pissed it out.

Every night was the same. Beer cans filling the trash barrel. Talk about a lot of things she tried to cover her ears from. A couple of his friends, new and old, looked like jailbirds. Lucy always wondered if he'd been to prison. She once found a business card for a bail bondsman in the back pocket of Hicklin's jeans. He was reading books now. One day he came home with a bench press. He lifted weights in the backyard, even lifted through a bitter cold winter. He ate more and more. He bulked up, almost unrecognizable, from one winter to the next. She liked the muscles.

He disappeared into the night.

His friends would come by on their Harleys. Pick him up. They looked serious now. Mean as hell. She heard Cullman, Alabama, mentioned. Conyers, Blairsville, Antioch. “Score” and “brothers” became permanent additions to his vocabulary. Three, four, five days gone at a time.