The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (29 page)

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Lila said, weeping. “Who
dies?
”

The sky rippled with light and split open like a walnut.

A few weeks later, after a flood of guilt and worry and actual rain, I returned to Val’s grave, which was now covered with mushrooms. I ate them. I’d consumed enough to know the ones to avoid. Sitting by her grave site, recalling her generosity with me from the moment I met her, I thought maybe I should have done a little better by Val. I felt sick about it, and then I understood that I was actually sick. I’d eaten poison mushrooms and was dying.

I lay down over the grave. We, Val and I, were neighbors again. I rocked against the moss and earth to get comfortable, the two of us together, lying as if in bunks, shipmates in the hold of a great vessel. My body would melt into this ground and sink down through the soil and through the bones of Val and on down to the rock, where it would pool and be reabsorbed into the planet. And it meant nothing. All we thought about and did, whether we behaved well or badly, the hard days when we could barely stand up straight and the good days when every sound and shade of light seemed a gift—none of it mattered. Val and I were the waste any kind of life leaves behind, the proof of imperfection that everywhere marks this world like the wounds on this very mountain left from the mining days. I had done not one thing with my life that had real consequence for anyone but the many people I’d disappointed and the one person I’d killed. I lay there, knowing that for a few minutes more I would see the sky, hear the minor havoc created by the breeze, smell my own rank and dying body, and the world would not take any notice. I meant nothing.

“Feeling morbid?”

Clete appeared above me, huge as the sky. He had that talent you can’t teach—how to be wherever it is you’re needed most. He’d come to harvest the mountainside but saved my life instead.

“I ate poisonous mushrooms,” I told him.

He slipped his hand behind my neck and made me sit. He inserted his other hand in my mouth, which made me gag and vomit.

“You’re fine now,” he said, and he was right. I’d taken a short journey in the direction of death, and I’d come back.

I ran into Barnett in a bar later that summer, a couple of weeks after his body had been mailed off to his miserable parents. He slouched on the next bar stool. I didn’t know what to do.

I decided to ignore him and drink my beer. A tap on my arm made me turn. Barnett slugged me on the cheek. I was knocked back but didn’t fall off my stool. Even in the afterlife, he wasn’t what you’d call brawny. He kept pushing with his fist against my cheek. The drunk on the other side of me threw his arm out to catch me. For a moment, Barnett’s fist pressed my head into the drunk’s embrace and held it there.

The bartender nabbed Barnett by the collar. It was a workingman’s bar, and they were quick to take action. Barnett was identified as the offender and hustled out the door.

“You know him?” the bartender asked, setting a free mug of beer before me.

“Kind of.” I didn’t want to reveal that I had recently killed him.

The man who’d caught me, a guy with tiny eyes like they’d been pecked in his face by a medium-size bird, said, “Maybe he doesn’t like your face.”

“That would explain it, I guess.”

I understood at that moment why killers so often poke a hole in their best-laid plans by yapping about it in a bar. It isn’t to unburden the soul but to prove your superior knowledge of the subject matter.

I finished my beer and hiked up toward the house, meeting Clete and Lila and Stu coming down. They were taking the dogs for a walk. Since Val had died, Clete had taken over their care. He conversed with them and had begun reading to them: the Bible, newspaper articles, a book on UFOs, and
Harry, the Dirty Dog,
which was their favorite. He had told them about the source of the water that came from the tap and now he wanted to take them on a hike to a high stream fed by a deep snowpack so they could see it.

“They should know this stuff,” he said, inviting me to join them.

I didn’t talk about my encounter with Barnett until we’d passed through town and started up the trail on the other side of the river.

They were understandably skeptical.

“He hardly had a personality,” Stu pointed out. “No way he’s a spirit.”

“It was Barnett,” I said, although having to put the story in actual words had made it sound unlikely even to me. My jaw hurt, though, which was comforting.

“Somebody or thing popped me in the jaw,” I insisted, reminding them that I’d identified him as Barnett before he punched me. Why would a stranger hit me? What are the odds of that? Ghost seemed more probable.

“So you’re the kind of person,” Lila said, “who sees a creature from the beyond and just goes on and drinks his beer?”

We were on a trail that took us out of the city and into a mountain canyon. A stream bisected the canyon. It had been loud and fast earlier in the summer but was little more than a trickle now. Time was passing. The summer would end. The people who owned the house would come back, wondering where their house sitter and major appliances were. We’d have to move on.

Clete said, “Seeing Barnett is another sign. A major one. Could be you created it with your own brain, but it doesn’t matter.”

“My brain bruised my jaw?”

“The mind is a powerful instrument.”

That set Stu off. “That’s nothing. Someone’s mom in Singapore or Taiwan City lifted a bus to get it off her kid. Her brain squat-lifted a bus.”

“Other people in the bar saw Barnett,” I said.

“Nobody ever lifted a
bus,
” Lila said. “A taxi, maybe. Were there passengers?”

“I made a girl call out my name one time,” Stu said, “just by using my mind and wishing her to do it.”

“You were about to sit on a burning log,” Lila said, turning to us. “He was warming himself at the fireplace and forgot.”

“We ought to make a fire tonight,” I said. “It’s cold enough.”

“I wasn’t talking about
you,
” Stu said to Lila. “You’re not the only girl on the planet.”

“If it was a real ghost…,” Clete began and paused to think.

Stu said, “Why would Barnett’s ghost want to slug you, anyway?”

A conspicuous silence ensued. We all quit walking.

“Who are we to speculate on the motives of the newly dead and/or undead?” Clete asked.

He reversed direction and began heading down the mountain. The dogs had got ahead of us on the trail, and we went back without them.

Stu wore my coat all the time, even in the warmth of daylight. Clete called him “the old you.” As in, “I know you’re ready to sell the dinette set, but what’s the old you think?” Or “If I left it to you and the old you, the dogs would starve.”

The old you got caught selling library books at the used bookstore and was fired.

“I’ve enrolled at Colorado State, anyway,” Stu said. “I can get seven thousand dollars in student loans. Add that to my savings and I can be a student for a year.”

We had a party to say good-bye. Each of us did an imitation of him coming out of his PCP blackout, performances that he loved. When we were out of his earshot, Clete argued that Stu was never the same after the coma.

“I didn’t know him before,” I said.

“He was different,” Clete explained.

Otherwise, the party was pretty much an ordinary night. They smoked dope and drank; I drank. We listened to Stevie Ray Vaughan and the warbling female singer who had been on the boom box when Clete and I first entered the house. She was Lila’s favorite, and we were a democratic crowd.

Six days after he left for college, Stu came back.

“Snafu,” he said, taking off his shoes and socks in the living room to chew his toenails.

I wasn’t quite sure whether he meant some mistake had forced him to drop out, or it was a mistake for him to even try college. I wondered and wanted to ask, but he had locked onto his big toe—the thumb toe—and the time didn’t seem right.

“We kept your room just the way it was,” Lila told him.

We were tougher on wayfarers than Val had been. Usually there were only the four of us, plus the dogs. Clete explained to the dogs the hazards of running off versus the rewards of travel, and then nightly he opened the door and shooed them out.

“They’ll never learn otherwise,” he said.

Ready continued torturing mice in the tub. Clete had determined that the dog climbed from the wicker basket next to the toilet, up onto the toilet seat, up to the tank, and then down into the tub. It was an impressive stunt with a mouse in your mouth.

One morning I found Lila on her hands and knees in the bathroom wearing white panties and the shirt I’d given her on the night we met when I thought she was dead. She was cleaning the tub with the dish sponge. We’d been lovers more than a month. I liked her butt a lot—the whole bottom half of her body. For that matter, everything from the neck down.

“That’s the kitchen sponge,” I pointed out.

She wasn’t really getting up the blood, anyway. Ready had slung this one around decisively. He was a weird dog, and this had become his pathetic ritual of self-worth. We’d hear the frantic scrambling of the mouse and then hateful paws against the porcelain every third or forth night. Stu had commented, “The bathtub is always changing colors,” but we were generally content to toss the dog out of the tub and let the blood wash down the drain while we showered.

Lila liked baths and was not content, but she wasn’t really cleaning the tub, just moving the blood around.

“You need to run some water,” I told her.

“There’s an idea,” she said, scrubbing no harder.

Since burying Val we’d had tension in our relationship. Lila would grip my arm in the night and say, “We should have called for an ambulance. What if she could have been revived? What if we buried her alive?” I didn’t have a good answer. All I could do was remind her that Clete had been with us. “He was stoned,” she said, “and he doesn’t sleep.” I didn’t have an answer to that either, but it comforted me that Clete had been with us.

You really couldn’t do a worse job with mouse blood in a white tub than what she was doing.

“That’s my shirt, you know,” I said.

Without facing me, she whipped it off, buttons pinging off the porcelain. She tossed the shirt in the tub and used it to direct the blood toward the drain. I was torn between the glancing view I had of her hanging breasts and wanting to plant my foot in her behind. We each reminded the other of what was completely wrong with us and couldn’t be fixed. It made me hate the sight of her and also seek her out.

“You want to get married?” I asked right then. I still had the ring I’d found with the metal detector. It was in my pocket.

Her head swiveled around. A glare from the girl in the panties. She went back to the blood.

“I guess,” she said.

The wedding obscured the fact that the dogs had gone out one night and not come back. Clete’s faith in their intelligence kept him from worrying initially. Then we were busy setting up a ceremony. Lila, I discovered, got checks general delivery from her parents. She paid for the license and the justice of the peace, who did the official business, but I asked Clete to say some words.

“We are gathered here to unite in marriage Lila and Keen,” Clete began. “Others may be seated.” Stu and the justice of the peace sat down.

“Any time people gather to witness the joining of man and woman in wedlock,” Clete said, “certain questions come to mind. A: What do we know about these people? B: Why have they decided to make this commitment of a lifetime? C: How in this age of divorce have they found the courage to make the leap of faith it takes to marry?”

He paused, as if to field answers. No one raised a hand.

“A: About the bride and groom, we know nothing. We may know details of their lives, but none of us knows what lies in their hearts. This marriage is a pledge of each to the other, that he or she will plumb the depths of her or his heart. We do not marry because we know the other. We marry because we desire to know the other.

“B: Also a mystery. Commitment is the function of marriage, not a prerequisite. Let’s zero in twenty, thirty, or, health permitting, fifty years from now. These two will have discovered their answer. For the moment, theirs is not to wonder why but to answer the wild demands of their hearts and loins.

“C: More mystery. Consider that the bride didn’t know the groom until two months ago. Consider that the groom’s behavior over the summer has been less than ideal. Consider, too, that both the bride and groom are dropouts and unemployed. You might think it’s an absolutely stupid time for them to marry.”

He paused again.

“But the problem with ‘why’ is that love knows no why. Love knows only
yes.
Only
I must.
Only
this is and must continue to be.
Only
now.
If Romeo and Juliet had been willing to put things off a bit, they could have run off successfully. They were stupid not to. Yet their love wouldn’t have been the great thing it was. Is it better to die for a great love than to live in a tepid one? Love—” He hesitated. The office door was open, and a couple of secretaries and one marshal had stopped to listen. He waved them in. They joined the ceremony. Clete picked up where he’d left off. “Love demands of us not sacrifice because nothing matters but the beloved. It demands of us not promises of fidelity regardless of health or wealth, because neither money nor physical suffering matters in the face of that love. Love demands only one thing: our stupid willingness to give over to it. It’s a dumb thing to do, and it’s the thing which, more than anything else, ennobles us.

“Do you, Lila, take Keen with all the stupid and hopeless love that you can offer?”

Lila said that she did.

“Do you, Keen, take Lila with that same dumb, blind love?”

“I do,” I said.

“By the power vested in this man over here, who will speak presently, I afford to you all the rights and privileges and chores accorded to all brides and husbands, partners and lovers, sweethearts and pals.”