The Nirvana Blues (44 page)

Gum? “Where'd you get that gum?”

Heather shot right back: “It's Trident, Daddy. It's sugarless, and you allow us to have that.”

“It better be Trident. Because if it isn't—” Then he noticed Heather's grotesque fingernails and gagged. She had Magic Markered them every color in the rainbow. Joe bawled, “What in Christ's name did you do to your fingernails?”

Heather pouted, inspecting her hands. “Get off my case, Pop.”

“What are you trying to do, grow up to be the dreamboat of every male chauvinist pig in America? When are you gonna learn to play soccer? Next thing, it'll be Barbie and Ken dolls!”

“All my friends say my fingernails look pretty.”

“All your friends got their taste in their assholes. Now come on. Leave the bike here, Michael, we're already late.”

Eloy Irribarren was seated in a sunshine-flooded chair beside his door, smoking a cigarette. He waved. “Buenos días.”

“Can't stop, Eloy. Gotta rush the kids to school—they're late.”

“I'm gonna turn over my garden today,” the old man called. “This is perfect weather.”

My
garden? Joe's heart sank. Maybe on his way back from school he should stop at the county sheriff's office and beg one of those irresponsible thugs to drive over on Monday morning two minutes after the closing to evict the old man (and his dying dog, and his dying horse, and the rest of his ancient barnyard charges) before Eloy got the impression Joe was a soft touch who'd let him and his herds, flocks, and gaggles stick around ad infinitum.

Even contemplating a move that vulgar gave Joe the willies. Every winter newspaper across the nation published gruesome stories about how a ninety-year-old woman named Mildred Polinski, living alone and on welfare, froze to death during a cold snap because the landlord kicked her out, or the gas company turned off her supply. This summer, AP and UPI would run stories featuring Joe Miniver, the Beast of Chamisaville, who kicked a sick, eighty-three-year-old man off his property. And that man (a member of an oft-exploited minority group) was found two days later in a ditch, dead of (a broken heart and) exposure. Militant Chicanos (allied with AIM, the SCLC, and the NAACP) would publish Joe's mug shot in all their newspapers: “Here's the honky who done it, bros!” When the Socialist revolution triumphed, his photograph (or wax replica) would be installed in the Bigots Hall of Fame, along with George Wallace, Sheriff Rainey, and George Lincoln Rockwell.

“Hey,” Heather exclaimed, “there's a note on your windshield.”

“I'm not blind, I've got eyes.” There were two notes, actually: Joe stuffed them into his pocket without taking a peek.

In a hurry?—trust the Green Gorilla not to start. It had not been cold last night, but that made no nevermind with the cantankerous vehicle. If even a slightly chill mist had settled on the hood, Joe was in trouble.

He cranked over the engine for a minute—the battery immediately threatened to conk out, so he swung into phase two. Locating a can of Quik Start in the glove compartment, Joe banged open the hood, removed the air cleaner, gave the carburetor a double squirt of the pressurized ether, jumped into the truck, and she coughed right up. He depressed the accelerator for a moment, warming it up, then tumbled out, replaced the air filter, slammed down the hood, returned to the truck, and only then remembered that he had no reverse.

Heather cared little if she never got to school. But Michael nervously twitched his fingers and licked his lips. Little sores festered around his mouth; everybody always cautioned him not to lick his lips. Of course, the more you asked him not to, the more self-conscious he grew, and the sores multiplied.

Delicately triple-clutching his way into first, Joe said, “Michael, put some Chapstick on those sores.”

“I forgot my Chapstick. But they don't hurt, honest.” Michael's main task in life was to try and put everybody at ease by assuring them his mini-leprosy really didn't hurt at all.

“Check out the glove compartment. Maybe there's a tube of bacitracin.”

They lurched forward and rocked over the irrigation ditch. By swinging wide and skimming past the woodpile, an old clothesline, and the back of Eloy's truck, Joe managed to forge a circle and head out in the right direction. Unaccountably, Old Duke, the inventor of canine lethargy, suddenly scrambled erect, barking and snarling, and furiously chased them—slaloming between geese, ducks, wayward turkeys, and flea-bitten tomcats—down the driveway, ordering them never to return.

Heather asked, “Does that dog bite?”

“He's a killer.” Absentmindedly, Joe reached in his pocket for the notes. “Two days ago he ripped my pants to shreds before I finally beat him away with a log.” Unfolding the larger paper against the steering wheel, he turned it around so the message was rightside up. “They say last year he attacked three little eight-year-old girls skipping through the back field, killing two, and putting the third in the hospital for a month and a half with one leg chewed off at the knee, and her left arm severely mangled.”

“You're full of it, Daddy.”

The note said:

Dearest Joe,

After the way it has been with us, I don't see how you can wind up making love with that woman. I know you are a free person, and also a grownup adult, but you must be very careful with her—she has so many negative vibes. And she is the sort that takes energy from you but doesn't give any back in return. You are such a lovely person and I would hate to see you hurt by her. You're not a self-destructive person, but she is. I'm sorry if I bothered you by coming over last night—I didn't mean to intrude. When you love somebody it's important to let them have their own space. And if you love someone, you should support them in anything they choose to do. So I'm sorry I cried last night, that's not like me at all. I just hope you are careful, and that I am able to see you soon, for you make me so happy when I am with you.

I miss you terribly,

Nancy

PS Sasha is “critical” still, but listed also as “stable.”

He unfolded the other, slightly more cryptic, epistle:

Miniver, you keep it up,

and you're dead.

At nine on a school-day morning, Heather now actually had the brass balls to ask: “Daddy, can we go to school by the Seven-Eleven way and stop for an ice cream?”

Joe snorted, facing her almost admiringly. Where had she gotten the panache? “You're nuts, Heather. After a healthy breakfast of Cocoa Puffs and what—Kool-Aid?—you're asking me to feed you an Eskimo Pie, a Fudgsicle, a Super Tango, or a … what are those enormous things called, the really hideous, fat, cone-shaped, grisly, blue-colored blobs?”

“Malt Crunch Bombs!”

“Never. You kids are sick. By the time you reach your teens you won't have any teeth, all your hair will fall out, you'll have rickets, sickle-cell anemia, and beriberi.”

“Well, at least we need lunch money,” Michael noted.

“If I give you lunch money, you'll probably ditch school at noon, trot up to the plaza five and dime, and blow it all on Jujyfruits, Pop Rocks, and Gatorade.”

“No we won't.”

“Bullshit. That's what I always did as a kid.”

“Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O!” Heather rolled her eyeballs.

A second later, Michael drew Heather into a whispered conference. Emerging from the huddle, Heather said, “Daddy, if you're not gonna live at home anymore, will you at least come over tonight and wrestle?”

One lesson years of parenting had taught Joe was never,
ever
tell kids outright, unequivocally, “Yes.” Because they'd hold you to it come hell or high water. They would make you feel so damned guilty about promising something you couldn't deliver that you'd wind up delivering something you had never meant to promise. The cardinal rule, in answering kiddy requests, was: Always Equivocate.

Joe said, “We'll see.”

Heather never gave up. “Well, if you can't come for a wrestle, could you at least drop by and play us some songs when we go to bed?”

“I dunno. Maybe. Can't say for sure.”

They lapsed into a brief silence that Heather killed. “Daddy, do you believe in the Monkey God?”

“What? Who says?”

“Don't get a hernia. I was just asking.”

“Nobody in this town just ‘asks' a question like that.”

Michael said, “Everybody's talking about the unveiling on Thursday.”

“Who's everybody? What do you mean?”

“Oh … just people in school,” he said evasively.

“We had monkey cookies at lunch yesterday,” Heather reported self-righteously.

“Monkey cookies? At school?”

“In art all this week we had to draw gorillas and chimpanzees and spider monkeys,” Michael informed him.

Joe was shocked: “They're not supposed to teach you religion in the schools.”

“Are Hanumans religious?” Heather asked.

“Hanumans…?”

“What
is
a Hanuman exactly?” Michael wanted to know.

“It's God disguised as a big monkey,” Heather replied. “And if you don't believe in him, he punishes you with a stomachache, or takes you to the devil.”

“God doesn't look like a monkey,” Michael said. “She's crazy, isn't she, Dad?”

“God knows karate, smarty-pants.” Heather displayed a feisty fist. “He could knock your teeth out with one little chop.”

“No he couldn't, could he, Dad? There's no such thing as God, is there?”

They had been over this a dozen times: Joe never knew exactly what to say. “Well,
we
don't happen to believe in God. I mean, not like there's an actual person up there, you know, an old woman with white hair and a long flowing beard—”

“God's not a woman!” Heather said. “He's a man!”

“Nobody knows for sure. God could just as well be a woman as a man. I mean, if there was actually a God at all…”

“Then he could be a monkey if he wanted to, couldn't he?”

“Don't interrupt, Heather, or I'll karate-chop
your
teeth down your throat.”

“But you just said—”

“Heather, shuttup. I haven't finished what I was saying.”

Arms folded stubbornly, she couldn't resist further needling. “Well, what you were saying was dumb.”

Joe said, “Jesus, I hope they pass the Equal Rights Amendment and draft you to go fight in Nicaragua.”

“What's the Equal Rights Menendent?”

“It's a law that says women have just as much right to do anything that men are doing. It'll probably even force us to rewrite the Bible so that God is a hermaphrodite.”

“What's a maphrodite?”

“A half-man, half-woman thing.”

“With a penis and a vagina?”

How did he get into these things? “I don't know, I suppose so.”

Michael said, “Then God could fuck himself.”

“Or herself.”

Heather said, “Somebody painted a monkey with a halo over its head in the girl's lavatory yesterday.”

“Forget the monkey. God isn't a person, or an animal, or a real being at all. God to me is just a word to mean the essence of everything human. It's a metaphor for the … for the personality of humanity, I guess.”

Blankly—he'd lost 'em, but fast—they muttered, “Huh.”

“But you don't want to go around telling people there is no God,” Joe said. “They might not understand. Also, many folks believe in different interpretations of God, and they get upset if you claim there is no divine critter up there, punching buttons, concocting plagues, guiding wars like a maniacal three-year-old. The whole concept is such a philosophical mare's nest that the best thing to do is lay low. Don't worry about religion until you're old enough to start drinking.”

Heather said, “Well, what about the Hanuman?”

“Forget it. It's a false idol.”

Michael said, “Tofu Smatterling came up to me yesterday and said if I didn't say I believed baboons were holy, he would punch me out.”

“What did you reply?” Joe asked angrily.

“What could I say? He's bigger than me.”

“All this monkey talk is pernicious garbage. Forget it.”

A beat and a half later, Heather opened her fat yap again. “Everybody says you're fucking a monkey-lover.”

He should have exploded. Instead, he sagged, at a loss for words.
You dug this grave,
his brain said.
Now lie in it.

Embarrassed, Michael said, “You're really dumb, Heather. Jesus Christ.”

Joe moaned, “Leave her alone, Michael: I asked for it. Now do me a favor and shut up for a minute, okay?”

Heather said, “Before we shut up, can I ask one more question?”

“All right. But just
one.
”

“Okay. What about angels?”