Saving Room for Dessert (22 page)

Uh-huh! There it is. There’s number five. That’s the one I refuse to admit or acknowledge. Finally got to it. Sittin’ here
in the MU, thinkin ’bout the Scavellis. That’s the one belongs to me. How long am I goin’ bullshit myself she goin’ come back?
’Cause she ain’t goin’ come back. Woman told me every way she know how. Say it in words, say it with every move she don’t
make. She picked. Got two choices. Her momma or me. And she sure as fuck ain’t picked me.

Six years I been waitin’ for her to show up. And six years she still ain’t showed up. When that shitty little fact goin’ sink
in my burry head? I can piss and moan, bitch and groan all I want ’bout bein’ a nigger orphan but the only thing really upset
me about that is I don’t know where my mommas buried. I know what cemetery, that’s easy. But they don’t mark the graves of
indigents. Don’t even know why that itches my mind, but it does and it’s a motherfuckin’ itch I can’t scratch and I wanna
scratch it so bad, it just won’t leave me be. Can’t do nothin’ ’bout that ’cept get over it. ’Cept it just ain’t right that
nobody know where they buried her. Somebody oughta have a chart or a diagram or something somewhere, got-damn. That ain’t
right. And that ain’t a result of my pattern of behavior either, you McGraw motherfucker you.

But Charmane stayin’ with her momma? That’s mine. I’ll take that. Thing is, now that I take it, now that I admit it, now that
I acknowledge it, what the fuck do I do about it?

He turned to the next page in McGraw’s book that he’d dog-eared, the one where the second test was, the one that asked him
to write a story entitled “The Story I’ll Tell Myself If I Don’t Create Meaningful and Lasting Change After Reading and Studying
This Book,” the test that had stopped him cold. Couldn’t even read that test.

He looked down at the bottom of the page where McGraw had listed the excuses people used for not changing. Every place there
had been the word
he
in the list, Rayford had crossed it out and printed
she
above it.

It was just too hard.

She doesn’t really understand me.

That’s all for other people.

I couldn’t focus because of the kids and my job.

She’s just too harsh; I need a more gentle approach.

My problems are different.

I need to read it again.

Until my spouse reads it, I’m just spinning my wheels.

I’m right and she’s wrong.

At the end of the next paragraph was this sentence: “Instead of asking whether the way you are living, behaving, and thinking
is ‘right,’ I want you to ask whether the way you are living, behaving, and thinking
is working or not working
.”

Got me there, McGraw. ’Cause sure as God made niggers what I’m doin’ ain’t workin’, and everybody can say amen from now till
everybody wake up the same color, she still ain’t goin’ leave her momma to be with me. Why in the motherfuck didn’t I see
that when I married her? Whole time we were in Alabama she didn’t talk to nobody but her momma that I could see. Never once
tried to talk to anybody else, never once struck up a conversation with anybody else’s wife live on that base. What the fuck
is wrong with me—I need a B-52 fall on my head? Wake up in the mornin’ those two be talkin’ like they ain’t seen each other
in twenty years, and keep that talkin’ shit up all day. Damn near have to make an appointment to get some pussy, and this
come as a surprise to me? That she don’t wan’ be with me?

What the fuck they be talkin’ ’bout all the time? I don’t know. Didn’t never know. Ten years of this shit, may as well had
my eyes fulla pepper spray, my ears fulla chain saws, I looked and I didn’t see nothin’, I listened and I didn’t hear nothin’.
How in the fuck could I’ve lived in that same trailer with those two women and not know that I was nothin’ but a ticket to
the commissary and the PX? That’s all they did, talk and shop, shop and talk. They could try on more clothes and talk about
tryin’ on those clothes and what they bought and what they shoulda bought and why they didn’t buy what they didn’t buy than
anybody I ever heard.

And why the fuck didn’t I get that? Didn’t talk to me about that shit. Charmane buy clothes, she didn’t show ’em to me, didn’t
ask me how I liked ’em, how she looked in ’em. She put ’em on for her momma, asked her momma how she liked ’em, how she look.
Fool! You didn’t need a B-52 fall on your head, you needed a whole squadron of them motherfuckers fall on your head. Got-damn.
Was I that stupid? Am I that stupid? Moth-ah-fuck-ah,
I am that stupid
. You don’t see somethin’ right under your nose for ten years, you one stupid motherfucker. So okay, McGraw, gotta give it
to you, you done took a bite outta my mind.

And what excuse am I goin’ use? How this story goin’ end? What am I goin’ be tellin’ myself ’cause I didn’t make any meaningful
or lasting change? Ain’t but one change I got to make. I got to divorce that woman, that’s all there is to it. Payin’ rent
for those two? That’s bullshit. I need proof I’m a fool, there it is. What was the name of that song? I’m a fool for love,
was that it? Who sang that? You a fool for love, William. Double fool. You a fool for a pussy you ain’t touched in six years,
and you a fool for payin’ rent on two places. Stop payin’ her rent, see how fast she grab the yellow pages, find a got-damn
shyster her own self.

“Thirty-one?”

Oh shit. “Thirty-one here.”

“Thirty-one 10–91.”

“Roger that.” Oh shit. How long I been fuckin’ the dog here?

“Thirty-one, you writin’ a report or a book, what?”

“I’m 10–24 on that.”

“What, the book or the report?”

“I’m 10–8, base.”

“No kiddin’, are ya? Think you could find some time to go cool out the mopes on Jefferson Street?”

Rayford sighed, squeezed his eyes shut, and rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder. Not those motherfuckers again. “What’s
the 10–20?”

“I tell you Jefferson Street and you have to ask? Where you think? It’s the all-American boys.”

“One of the wives call or somebody else?”

“The old lady across the street thinks they’re gonna kill each other. They’re on the sidewalk.”

“I want backup from the go. Who’s available?”

“That’s a problem. Reseta’s transporting a juvey. Canoza’s, uh, he’s gotta go pick somethin’ up. So you’re flyin’ solo for
a while. Just cool ’em out, that’s all.”

“Oh is that all? Yes sir, Mr. Dispatcher sir. I will 10–17 immediately and cool them out, yes sir. Thirty-one out.”

“Watch your back, thirty-one. Base out.”

I always do, Rayford thought as he pulled off the parking brake, put it in drive, and headed onto Miles Avenue and backtracked
to within one block of where he’d been—how long ago? He checked his watch. Oh shit. An hour ago.

This time he was heading for Jefferson Street and the properties that abutted the Scavellis and the Hlebecs: the Hornyaks’
backyard, which abutted the Hlebecs’, and the Buczyks’ backyard, which abutted the Scavellis’.

Rayford didn’t know which of these combinations of neighbors was worst. God knows, the Scavellis and the Hlebecs had been
beefin’ about three times as long as the other two. And until about five years ago, the Hornyaks and the Buczyks appeared
to have been good friends as well as good neighbors. Pete Hornyak and Joe Buczyk had played football for Rocksburg High School,
guards on offense and linebackers on defense. Both went on to play college football at notorious football factories, but neither
had graduated, not even with the kinds of degrees football factories notoriously dispense, such as physical education with
an emphasis in playground supervision or recreation direction or summer camp administration or camp counseling, degrees that
weren’t even valid certificates of class attendance because the only classes they ever attended were taught by assistant coaches
and their only textbooks were their play-books and films of their games, their practices, and their opponents’ games.

With banged-up knees, shoulders, and hands from playing sixteen years of football since the second grade through five years
in college—through various dubious schemes tacitly approved by the bodies that were supposed to govern football played by
pretend colleges—and having no marketable skills to speak of, Pete Hornyak got a job driving a truck for a furniture store,
and Joe Buczyk got a job driving a truck for a building supplier. Twenty-five years later, Hornyak and Buczyk were both working
for Home Depot, Hornyak selling flooring and floor coverings and Buczyk selling paints and painting supplies.

They each married the girl of their dreams, former drum majorettes for the Rocksburg Rams varsity marching band. Mary Falatovich
became Mrs. Peter Hornyak, and Susan Syzmanski became Mrs. Joseph Buczyk. They bought houses next door to each other in the
Flats, and for many years apparently happily shared beer and barbecues in their backyards, watched televised football in each
other’s basement game rooms, and even vacationed together in Atlantic City, New Jersey, or Ocean City, Maryland. Rayford had
collected this information over the last six years from reading unusual incident reports and from talking to the patrolmen
who’d written them.

He’d also learned that the Buczyks had two children, a boy, seventeen, a senior in high school, and a girl, fourteen, a sophomore.
The boy was cocaptain of the football team, and the girl, like her mother before her, was a majorette. The Hornyaks had no
children, apparently because either or both had some physical problem that prevented it; if they’d talked about this problem
sympathetically with the Buczyks at one time, they certainly were no longer doing so. Fact was, their last confrontation became
physical when Pete Hornyak accused Joe Buczyk of taunting him that if he was a man he could’ve had children. Buczyk denied
it afterwards, but that didn’t keep the blows from landing.

What started to spoil the friendship, as near as Rayford could figure out, was that approximately five years ago, the Hornyaks
and Buczyks decided, whether by design or accident was uncertain, to get into the dog-breeding business. Mrs. Hornyak’s mother
died and left her daughter, among other things, a registered male Border collie, barely two years old. It so happened that
the Buczyks had two female Border collies of their own, both duly registered with the American Kennel Club. Nature being nature
and dogs being dogs, the two female Border collies soon dropped litters, seven pups each. Registration papers were filed,
ads were placed in newspapers in Rocksburg and Pittsburgh, the Hornyaks got the pick of each litter and ten percent of the
sale price, and the Buczyks sold twelve Border collie pups for a sum of money, the exact amount of which became the start
of the dispute between them.

Now the Hornyaks had three Border collies, the father and two daughters, while the Buczyks still had their two females, the
mothers of the only litters which had produced pups for cash. After the first couple of arguments about who had paid what
to whom, the Buczyks, without discussing it with the Hornyaks, had their females spayed, thus ending the breeding business.
And the friendship.

The other observable fact about these two couples wasn’t anything Rayford could have put in any of his unusual incident reports,
but it was something so obvious he’d have to have been blind not to notice. Rayford had long ago observed about white people
that if you talked to a white woman long enough, sooner or later she’d start talking about what she was eating and why, whether
she was on a diet, had been on a diet, was planning to go on a diet, or why this, that, or the other diet did or didn’t work.
He’d also observed that on the covers of any of the magazines white women bought out of the racks in the checkout lines in
grocery stores there was guaranteed certain to be one headline on the cover about how to lose ten pounds in ten days or how
to eat all you wanted while the fat melted off while you slept. Then there were those tiny books, the fat counters, the cholesterol
counters, the Hollywood diet, the grapefruit diet, the high-protein low-carbohydrate diet, the low-protein high-carbohydrate
diet, the soy diet, the vegetarian diet, right there in the little racks next to the
TV Guide
. Then there were the medical reporters on the local TV news, interviewing skinny doctors who raved about the obesity epidemic
as though fat germs were carried by rats or mosquitoes and the whole population was in danger of being infected. The only
black woman Rayford had ever heard making such a fuss about diet was the queen herself, Oprah, but even she in the last couple
of years seemed to be backing up a notch on her obsession with weight.

When the Hornyaks and the Buczyks were going at each other, it was impossible for Rayford not to notice that Mrs. Buczyk and
Mr. Hornyak seemed to be growing rounder and rounder, while Mrs. Hornyak and Mr. Buczyk seemed to be growing leaner and more
muscular. The first time Rayford had responded to a call from Mrs. Hornyak about a tree problem—almost six years ago—the four
of them seemed in fairly good shape. But over these last six years, Mr. Hornyak had put on at least fifty pounds, most of
it around his stomach and buttocks. Mrs. Buczyk, on the other hand, seemed to have distributed her extra fifty pounds all
over her body, from her cheeks to her ankles. And more than once Rayford had spotted Joe Buczyk sneaking looks at Mary Hornyak
and Mary Hornyak sneaking looks back.

It was another chicken-and-egg puzzle, like the Scavellis. Were they screwed up before their kids died or did they get screwed
up because they’d died? Were Susie Buczyk and Pete Hornyak getting fat before they started selling dogs? Or were they packing
on the pounds because they were trying to eat their way out of the stress that had developed because they’d stopped selling
dogs? And what was behind those sneaky little glances between Joe Buczyk and Mary Hornyak?

“You’re imaginin’ shit,” Canoza said after the last blowup.

“No I’m not. Check ’em out, I’m tellin’ you, there’s somethin’ cookin’ between those two. I don’t think its about the dogs
at all. Or the trees. Or the parkin’ spaces. The dogs, the trees, the parkin’ spaces, they’re all just excuses. It ain’t about
where the cars are parked. Somethin’ else is goin’ on. I think two of those four want the cars parked in front of the other
house.”