The Empire of the Dead (17 page)

Mil found him in a hole in the backyard among screwdrivers, wrenches, and a dying yellow flashlight. He lay twitching in mud.

I jumped in beside him. Rain spattered his face. “Dad? Dad?” I said.

His mouth hung slack. He was freezing, his overalls soaked. Mildred crouched above us on the lip of the pit. “Dad, look at me!” she barked. “
Look
at me!” His eyes drifted up then sank back down. “What's he doing?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“Fuck, Frankie, what do we do?”

“Guh … guh …” Dad said. He was skinny, but his weight caused my shoulder to spasm.

“All right,” Mildred said, swatting wormy wet hair from her eyes. “Stay with him.”

“Where
you
going?”

“Up to the house. Here.” She pulled a lighter and a hand-rolled cigarette out of her pocket. “See if this soothes him a little. Hell, who knows?” She lit the cigarette, took one long puff, and handed it down to me.

“What
is
this stuff?” I said. Back then, pot was still a rare little item in Nowhere, Texas.

“Just try it.”

Dad couldn't hold the joint in his mouth so I passed the smoke beneath his nose. His eyelids fluttered and his face
did
seem to soften. Mildred tossed a Baggie into a tree. “I'll be back with someone,” she said. “When you hear us coming, get rid of that thing, okay?”

“They'll smell it.”

“Well shit, Frankie …”

“Okay, okay, just go.”

She slogged off into the dark.

I rocked my father, fanning him with the smoke, looking for signs that he knew me.

Do you know what it's like when the man who made you no longer registers your face?

It was hard to move my feet: stuck in my neighbors' waste. Is anyone finer than a Shit Man, I wondered, staring at my father's open mouth. Cleaning up after others. Purifying. Isn't that what the body does, moving its bowels: casting itself from itself?

“Uh,” Dad said. “Guh.”

What would I tell my mother? If I'd done what she'd asked, could I have prevented this? Crazily, I remembered Mrs. Hollins in class, saying the lake of shit in Hell was set aside for the flatterers. The ones who lied.

* * *

Last call at Derrick's. Mildred sipped her beer.

“I should have realized how hard the last few years have been on you,” I said.

“Well, you had your own thing to do. Your drawings and stuff. No biggie.” She sniffed. Her hands shook. “It's just that I miss the sweet old bastard. The way he used to be.”

“I know.”

“Frankie. What I'm afraid of?” Mildred said. “I'm afraid I'll be a lunatic, too.”

“No.”

“Maybe it runs in the family?” She cackled sadly and squinted through the smoke-haze. “What
is
that twaddle—wonder if they've got any Janis on the box? Not fucking likely.”

“Sure they do. It's her hometown.”

“Right. She's the biggest star this goddamn place ever produced—”

“Well—”

“—and they treated her like crap. You hear she's coming back? High school reunion. Next month. Janis may come. She said so, in
Rolling Stone
. Can you believe it?”

“Really?”

“TJ High. Thomas Fucking Jefferson!”

“So
that's
why you got on the bus.”

She laughed. “No, no. I didn't know nothing about it. I read the interview on the way down. But if she really
does
come … man, I've got to find a way in there.”

We drained our mugs, toasting Dad, and then walked six blocks to the Wayfarer. A full moon rose above hissing blue refinery flames. On the way, Mildred pulled a flask from her macramé bag. At the motel, I made arrangements for her with a man at the front desk. He was bald, wore a wife-beater, and flashed forearm tattoos proclaiming eternal love for someone named Slit.

Mildred's room was next to mine. We said good night and I stood in the parking lot inhaling what little breeze there was, staring off into the dark, where, not far away, Louisiana sank into syrupy
swamps. The hookers had fled to the trucks. A profusion of grays tainted the sky, streaked with yellow and green.

I was here because I wanted to be an artist. Damn you, Sandro Botticelli!

The television in my room didn't work. Neither did the radio. The carpet smelled of foot powder. I peeled off my shirt. I reached beneath the lamp shade—bruised with tobacco stains—and switched off the light. Through my window screen I heard Mildred slurring “Piece of My Heart,” exactly the way she used to sing to Dad to get him to sleep.

She slept in. I spent the morning strolling, sketching, taking notes. When I returned to the motel, around noon, Mildred was sitting in her open doorway in a fraying nylon lawn chair dressed in the same outfit she'd worn the night before. She was smoking. She had a black eye and a jagged cut on her forehead.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did one of these truckers take you for—”

“Some asshole over at the breakfast place down the road. Showing off for his friends.”

“Why?”

“He said I looked like Janis.”

“You do.”

“And then he said they didn't want no white trash ‘round here and he gave me a pop. Probably didn't help that I called him Shithead.”

I didn't phone Mom with this news. Instead, I told her Mildred was settling in just fine. Yes, yes, of course, I'd keep an eye on her.

“My guardian angel,” Mildred joked.

Days before the first stroke—a thunderhead in the brain, one doctor said—Dad had been reading St. Augustine for a Sunday school class he attended each week. We found a marked-up copy
of
Confessions
in his study while he was in the hospital. The angels were “pure form,” said the book, and they arrived in a blink. Their “perfect task” was to gaze at the face of God.

If I interpreted Dad's markings correctly, what bothered him, as it troubled the saint, was the Fallen Angels. Were they
born
with a sinful nature or did they spurn God within a few seconds of existing? In the margins, my father had scribbled, “Their tumble from Heaven, covering the span of the cosmos, must have taken thirty seconds or less.”

I imagined Dad shoveling shit, squatting prayerfully in a pit hollowed out by an angel's impact with Earth: feathers floating in air like arteries tangled in the back of a brain.

After his third stroke, he regained the use of language, more or less, and spoke of visitations.

“Ain't he just like a Texan?” Mom said. She was born in Oklahoma. “Them ol' Texas boys always
did
take sternly to church.”

He described a sort of heavenly pep squad. When I pressed him for details, he handed me another book from his Sunday school class: Henry James Sr.'s
The Redeemed Form of Man
. On the title page, beneath the author's name, Dad had written, “American Original.” Then he pointed me to a passage he had underlined in red:

I remained seated at table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning-flash as it were—“fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake” … some damned shape squatted invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.

What did these words mean to my father? Why
in red
? I looked up at him. “American Original?” I asked. “They're all around us,” he said and then he simply nodded, as if now—an ignorant Okie, like my mom—I knew all I would ever need to know.

In six weeks I'd filled two sketchbooks. My throat was always sore (the air smelled of sulfur). I planned to leave Port Arthur soon.

In the meantime, I got a job waiting tables in Derrick's. Mildred washed dishes at a place called Dusty's. Right away, with a combination of chutzpah and cracked charm (people either wanted to kill her or kiss her), she made friends with folks who had pull on the high school reunion committee.

In an interview on
The Dick Cavett Show
, Janis confirmed she planned to return to Texas. Mildred and I watched the interview one night on a jumpy RCA set in the motel lobby.

In the afternoons, walking to our jobs, we'd cut past “Thomas Fucking Jefferson.” The high school was a physical afterthought to its football stadium. On the television show, Janis said the school was staffed by people whose only goal was to buy a new car each year. “What's happening never happens there,” she said.

After work, I'd hear Mildred singing in her room as she stirred her Scotch and sodas, and think of Dad—his early convalescence, before I'd left home. He enjoyed the sounds of our voices. It didn't matter what we said or read to him as long as we kept a steady cadence.

He especially liked newspaper stories on the space race. He signaled his excitement with birdlike hand signs, his palms gyring up, his fingers fluttering wings. Eventually he'd fall asleep and I'd assume his rounds in the Honey Wagon, circling town in the truck with a stack of overdue job orders.

I redesigned leach beds, pumped out waterlogged tanks, poured root killer into clogged-up drains, advised homeowners about bacteria to put into their tanks to eliminate sludge. I didn't like the work, but by sundown I felt good to have done it.

I thought my father and I might talk about Dante—after all, we had angels in common—but he didn't take an interest in my schoolwork. One day, Mrs. Hollins said the holy pilgrim had climbed out
of Hell on the Devil's body toward Mount Purgatory. The turning point, where he left the Evil Realm and moved toward Heaven, was Satan's anus. Like excrement expelled from the body, Dante flowed through one tunnel after another, increasingly purified until he saw the face of God.

As I repaired my neighbors' plumbing, I pondered the labyrinths of the upper and lower intestines, the mazes of brain and heart.

One night, Mom went shopping for supper and I was reading to Dad. A sharp smell forced me to throw back the bed covers. His bowels had let go. Soft masses of shit smeared the sheets and his skinny white thighs. Down the hall in her room, Mildred heard the groaning. She appeared in the doorway. The smell staggered her. With one hand she covered her mouth and nose, stepped into the room, and helped lift him into a sit. We peeled off his shorts. She went to the bathroom and readied five or six wet cloths. Together, we swabbed his legs and his withered penis. We tore the linens off the bed. While I sanitized Dad with rubbing alcohol, Mildred wadded up the leaking mess and took it to the basement, to the washing machine. Throughout the ordeal we hadn't said a word. We didn't look at each other or Dad's tear-streaked face. For days, he had registered little, but now he was clearly upset. Shame—the last emotion to vanish? Maybe, swabbing our father, Mildred and I bonded on some unspoken, unspeakable level. We felt Dad's wordless horror as well as the necessity of what we were doing. But afterward, we drifted to our separate rooms. We never spoke of the incident. Our mother didn't mention it, either, though she was the one who eventually retrieved the sheets from the washer and must have guessed what happened.

One afternoon, a week or so later, I came home from a particularly nasty job at the Methodist church—waste had backed up from the downstairs toilets—to find Dad in front of the television watching John Glenn. “He saw something,” Dad said. He made his little hand sign.

“What do you mean?”

“Out the window of his space capsule. Something he couldn't explain. Thousands of flashing lights.”

“What do the experts say?”

“Frank,” Dad said. He placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “This is way beyond the experts.”

A week before Thomas Jefferson's reunion, TV trucks began to appear in Port Arthur. The reunion's chief organizer, a rather snippy young woman, went on a local television program to say, “This is
not
a reception for Janis Joplin. I'm getting just really tired of hearing about Janis Joplin and all the really nasty things she's said about Texas and the kids I went to high school with. There are 566 other members of TJ '60, and the reunion is for everybody to have fun, not just for Janis Joplin.”

“Bitch,” Mildred said. We were sitting in the motel lobby. She was sipping vodka from a Dixie cup. She wore Day-Glo eyeliner, a string of plastic pearls, and jeans with a peace sign sewn across the butt. She turned off the television, stepped into the parking lot, raised her fist, and shouted at the truckers parked along the gravel strip, “Janis Power!”

The day Janis got to town she gave a press conference in the Petroleum Room of the Goodhue Hotel. Mildred and I watched it live on a black and white set in the Pelican Bar, down the street from the high school. Junkers cruised past the school, full of boys. I sketched them as I drank, watched Janis, and glanced out the bar's tinted windows.

Later, a journalist named Chet Flippo said Janis wore enough jewelry that day for a “Babylonian whore,” and the room stank of the peroxide in her hair. She made a crack about the press table. It was covered with a big white cloth. “Looks like someone's about to serve the Last Supper,” she said.

No one laughed.

A local reporter asked her, “What have you been up to since 1960?”

“Trying to get laid. Stay stoned.”

“Right on!” Mildred shouted, sitting beside me. People stared at her.

“What do you think of Port Arthur now?” asked another reporter.

“There seems to be a lot of long hair and rock,” Janis said. I'd seen none of this. “Which also means drug use, you know.”

Mildred toasted the screen, but it seemed to me the cocky star was a very hurt soul, still stuck in the tenth grade. It wouldn't do to mention this: Mildred and I would probably fight about it.