The Art of Disposal (25 page)

“Don't get pulled over,” he'd say.

I guess I fell in love with her because she had to walk around the store with me, arm in arm. I'd reach up to get her a can of peaches, and I'd read the labels to her, and I'd pretend that she was my girl. I'm sure to her I was just a nice kid that stayed over at old Jim Hallot's trailer. But she never let on, and if I touched her hand for a bit too long, she'd only smile. She was tall and she had the body of a movie star. At least that's how I remember it. Her hair was long and brown, and from behind you would never know about her face; you'd think for sure she must be a real knock-out.

Her eyes were sunken in, and her mouth had been placed in the wrong spot; just enough so you felt like you were looking at a kind of warped reflection of a beautiful woman in a wavy mirror. She was born blind, and I always assumed the disfigurement and the loss of vision were of the same curse. And I often wondered what she thought about it all, and if it made her sad. She was always smiling, and Grandpa Jim would take her arm and walk her around his wildflowers and help her to smell all the good ones. Sometimes I'd shut my eyes and wonder just who I was to her… a voice in a truck, an arm in a grocery store.

It's one of the biggest mysteries to me, how a person like Shannon can be so positive and see only the good things (so to speak) while some loser with two good eyes and a perfect mouth can drink his life away at the Totsy, and all the while give you sob stories about how so and so really screwed him over, and how he never ever got a fair deal.

Word got around that I sometimes drove Blind Shannon into Rittman to go grocery shopping, and sure enough the high school nitwits were calling her my wife or my old lady, and pushing me around over it. They'd see me with her out in front of Grandpa Jim's trailer, and they'd swerve their car and holler out the window and spray up dust.

There are only two kinds of people in this world. Those who like to build sand castles, and those who like to knock them down.

Then Blind Shannon moved to the city, where the crosswalks talk to you, and you don't need a car to get to the store. I listened to a whole lot of Hank Williams and George Jones, and I fished all alone at Franklin's pond where nobody ever goes. You didn't need any bait, there were so many grasshoppers all along the weedy edges. I moped and moped, and finally Grandpa Jim had enough of it. So he told me he was going to show me something that was top secret, and he even made me swear on a leather Bible before he'd say another word.

We hopped in his truck and drove about thirty miles out to Sidney where he used to live with Helen in a two story house. His brother Jewell lived there now. One time I asked Stella why Jewell lived in the big house and Grandpa Jim got stuck in a stainless steel sardine can.

“Some people just like living small,” she said.

But when I asked Grandpa Jim about it, he was more honest.

“My brother Jewell's got money problems. Wunst Helen died, I didn't need me no big house no more. Made me sad at night to pad around in there. Kept hoping I'd find her in the bathroom, or out in the kitchen. I told Jewell he could move in and live rent-free till he got back on his feet. But his feet ain't been working so good.”

“Couldn't you both live there?” I said.

“Hoo-eee. Imagine that. No Sir-ee. I like my own space. I like my Airstream. Every day feels like an adventure, and I don't even have to drive it no wheres.”

We knocked on the door, and Jewell let us in. He had the same baggy-eyed look that he always had the few times I'd seen him, like he'd just woken up and had no real idea what was supposed to happen next.

Jewell showed us an old banjo with a broken neck, and Jim told Jewell we were off to poke around in the basement for some baseball cards he might've left down there. Me and Jim walked down the basement stairs, and he stopped in the middle of the black mossy room. He went up to the front wall of the basement, where a long metal pipe ran down the length of the wall. Grandpa Jim put a hand on it.

“Know what's in here?” he said.

“Wires?” I said.

“Nope. I dug this basement myself. Well, with a little help from Henry Misner, but mostly I done it all. That was 1937.” Grandpa Jim looked up at the basement ceiling and surveyed the expanse like he remembered how it felt to strike each nail. “Henry died a long time back. Blood clot in the brain. Not how I want to go if I got any say in the matter. He put this here pipe along this wall. And there weren't no point. Henry fancied himself a bit more skilled than he was. Thought it would run water from the kitchen sink, but he missed the mark by a good two foot. I told him to leave it there and I'd find some sorta use for it.”

We climbed up the basement stairs that were nearly as steep as a ladder. We walked through the kitchen and peeked through the arched doorframe that looked out toward the living room. Jewell was in his chair, his back to us. You could see the flickering light from the television.

Back in the kitchen, Jim got down on one knee. He opened the cabinet doors below the kitchen sink. He moved a box of soap. Under it was a screwcap flush with the floor, about the diameter of a coffee cup. Grandpa Jim unscrewed the cap. A black hole was under it.

“There she is,” Jim whispered. “That's the top of that pipe.”

“Great,” I said, still thinking about Blind Shannon.

“You wouldn't talk so smart if you knowed what was in there.” He screwed the cap back on and shut the cabinet doors.

On the drive home, Grandpa Jim finished the story.

“Every year since I built that house, well—until I moved out ten years back anyhow—I've dropped a silver or gold piece right down into that there pipe.”

“What if they fall out the bottom?”

“It don't go nowhere,” Grandpa Jim said. “Plugged up even, right at the floorboards. Great big tube for holding things.”

“What if the house burns down?”

“It won't.”

“How do you know?”

“'Cause God loves me too much,” Grandpa Jim said. “Wunst I'm gone, you can pry her down and get at that money.”

“What about Jewell?” I said.

“I done enough for Jewell.”

“How much is in there?”

“Hoo-eee,” he said and wiped his brow. “There's one of 'em, wrapped up good. Morgan Silver Dollar. Don't let that one go cheap.”

Jewell died, and Grandpa Jim moved back into the house. Then Grandpa Jim died at age ninety-four. I was long gone, across the country, and heard too late. The house had been sold. My Uncle Carl was dead, too. Aunt Stella was still alive, but she was in a room at the nursing home over in Norwalk.

Sometimes I think about all of those silver and gold pieces, sitting in that ugly pipe along a basement wall. I imagine that kids have played right there next to it, and adults have folded the laundry and cursed their rotten luck, never knowing that something precious is right there beside them. I guess it's that way with a lot of things.

I dropped by Marcia's house when I knew she wouldn't be home; when I knew she was front-desking it at Doc Brillman's, and her kiddies were still in school for another hour. Kevin answered the door in a faded blue bathrobe, his hair going this way and that, smelling of booze.

“Don Juan,” he said and laughed. “Now come on in, come on in. Share a wife, share a house. What's mine is yours, amigo.”

“Knock it off,” I said, and pushed my way into the dark house. I had my Beretta with me, in a shoulder holster under my suit-coat, the way detectives wear them. I wasn't going to use it, no matter how bad things went, but it was a nice prop to have along in case I wanted to give him a good scare.

Kevin insisted I have a drink with him. He poured two whopping dollops of whiskey into tall dirty glasses: the kind you used to get in the '80s from McDonald's and Burger King kiddie meals. His glass showed E.T., in the front basket of Elliot's bike, flying across the moon. Mine was Return of the Jedi—the Emperor flanked by two of those ominous red guards.

Kevin raised his glass, tilted his head back, and guzzled some down. I did what I used to do back at Thin Y No's apartment: I tossed the booze right out of the glass, over my shoulder, and wondered how long it would take Kevin to find the wet spot on the carpet.

“So when's the big day?” Kevin said, his face flushed and red.

“Never,” I said.

He looked at me, dead-eyed, mouth open.

“Here's how this goes,” I said. “You don't ever set foot in the Totsy again. I don't know you, you don't know me. And I don't know your wife either. Get it?”

“We had an agreement,” he said, wiping his face.

“I never said a goddamn word. I don't know what Marcia told you, but she's got it all wrong about me. I'm a salesman.”

“A vacuum cleaner salesman?”

I nodded.

“Who the hell buys a vacuum cleaner from a salesman these days?”

“A lot of people. Important people.
Scary
people. I'm gonna do you a big favor and forget that I ever met you.”

“But what about her?” he said. He looked like a tired old beagle, eyes down.

“Get a lawyer.”

He nodded. He chewed at the sides of his lips. “I'll do it myself.”

“I didn't hear that,” I said.

I left Marcia's house feeling pretty swell. I stopped off at the Totsy and had a drink with Bullfrog. We shot five games of nine ball. He won four of them, and had a grand time talking trash. That guy can play pool, all right. He knows where to leave the ball so that you don't have a good shot. That's what makes a good player. Any fool can sink a pool ball; the skill is in where you leave that cue ball after you've made your shot.

I went back to my apartment. At the top of the stairs I saw a pair of legs that ended in black high heels. There was no sense having it out on the landing, so I asked her in.

“No we aren't,” Marcia said, when I told her we were through.

I got a glass of tap water and downed about half of it. She knocked it out of my hand, and the glass broke all over the floor. Just when I was working up some genuine anger, she was right there rubbing on me, and biting my ear.

“Maybe we can work this out,” she said.

“I don't want to.”

“Sure you do,” she said, and pulled me along with her. Before I knew it, we were naked, under my crummy sheets. The room was hot. I could hear the fat cackling hillbilly broad outside, even with the window closed. I crawled on top of Marcia and tried to work myself in. She nibbled on my ears and coaxed me along, grabbing and guiding me. But it just wouldn't work. Nothing was happening. Instead of getting bigger, I was getting smaller all the time.

I got out of bed and opened the window, and I stood there taking in the cool air and the voices of children; and I watched the winking streetlamp that was just starting its shift against an orange evening sky. My arms were itching. I had a sharp pain in my neck.

We sat there awkwardly on the bed. She lit a cigarette and looked around the room, like she'd just noticed for the first time what a dump I lived in.

“We're done,” I said.

She played with her cigarette, and tried not to look at me. There was a different feeling between us, like we were suddenly the strangers we'd always been.

“Your old man knows,” I said. “He came looking for me at work.”

“Oh yeah?” she said.

“He wanted my help.”

“With what?” she said, and blew out some smoke.

“He wants to kill you.”

Marcia laughed and laughed. You'd've sworn she'd never heard anything funnier.

“You've got some nerve,” she said. She stood up and got dressed and gathered up her things. I followed her out to the living room.

“I mean it,” I said.

“You're sick of me, you're sick of me. But don't bad-mouth my husband. I'll find another side project. A real man. A man who can handle me.”

“I feel bad for the poor bastard already,” I said.

She tossed her hair defiantly.

“If I tell Kevin to jump, he jumps. He's a well-trained boy. Good with the kids. I know my little Kev-ee Wev-ee. He loves me. He'd never hurt me.”

She strutted out the door and down the stairs, and I watched her go.

Days passed. I created scenarios. What if Kevin snapped? Killed the wife and kids. You hear about it all the time… “a tasty murder suicide,” as Dan the Man called it, back when he was razzing me about my fat hillbilly neighbors. It got to be so strong of a thought that I would literally turn on the news at night and watch the stories, wondering if and when I would see my old flame being wheeled from her house on a gurney, under a full white sheet.

Back when we offed Eugene the Ukrainian and Griffin Shaw, I did the same thing. Flipping channels, waiting to see what the whole world would say about it. Nothing much, it turns out. They're all just stories with catchy headlines; a way for Joe Schmoe to waste ten minutes while he's shoveling a t.v. dinner down his throat.

Carnage Cabin. House of Horrors…
the body of Griffin Shaw, Methamphetamine Kingpin, found burned up in basement, caged like animal… liquified remains in barrels on property, most thought to be members of organized crime
… Then, when they've wrung out every last tasty drop, it's on to the next story. Give us some fresh death and agony. Give us some guy who drowned in the river. Give us some average saps, shot dead in a mall by a crazed spree killer.
It could have been me
, we think with a secret guilty joy.

I went in to clean the aquarium at Doc Brillman's, thinking a whole lot about Marcia, nervous just walking in there. But some new receptionist had taken her place. I stood there with my buckets and siphons, my shirtsleeve rolled up and my arm dunked into the water. Finally Doc Brillman popped out and asked how things were, and I told him fine, just fine. Then he looked both ways and said, “when you're done out here, come back and see me for a minute?”

“You hear about Marcia?” he said. I was sitting back in the examination room, and we were alone with the door shut. I told him I hadn't.

“Got divorced,” he said.

“Mmm. Too bad,” I said.

“Yeah, well, her husband: he got the kids.”