Lunsford’s Boy (part 2)

We stopped at Walmart.

With a case of beer in hand, I checked out at the register manned by Rose’s father. She was more beautiful than he was handsome. He wore an unruly grey tuft of hair on his upper lip and had knuckles that bubbled out from their sockets—boxer’s fists, my father would call them. Nathan was waiting in the car. I took my time letting him ring me up. I didn’t know how a girl like that could come from a scrub like Mr. Dungan.

 

Walking inside the motel room, I’d half-forgotten about the broken heater. We kept our bundles on, only removing our hats and gloves after the second beer. The night had dropped fifteen degrees during our trip from The Parlor to Walmart to Suzie’s Bed Stay. Nathan was messing with my dad’s knife. I watched sat on top of the cooler.

“Maybe we should throw in some beers before they sweat out the cold?” he asked.

“No. The room’s probably colder anyway. Careful with that—it could cut diamond.”

Nathan ran his fingers over the flat of the blade. “Quite the piece. You ever use it on anybody?” he kidded, slurring his words as he went.

“It was Dad’s.” I regretted admitting it immediately.

Nathan carefully placed the knife back down on the bedside table.

“It’s fine,” I said, “you don’t have to stop.”

The boy meandered over to the case, plucking out another Bud Lite. He cracked it with his forearm and sucked from the neck. It was his fourth. Nathan’s eyes were streaked red and wet. It hadn’t occurred to me that four watery drinks would work him over like this.

“So tell me about the girl,” I said.

He smiled that thin-lipped smile of his and threw his hands out wide, spilling from the bottle a little and said, “Well, she’s the prettiest thing you ever saw. Man I could just swallow her up in these arms and have her forever. It’s love Mikey boy—love. I had her in geometry freshman year and I made shapes from the points of the freckles on her shoulders. That’s about the most geometry I managed that year.”

“Does she have a name? Or is she just a ghost?”

“Perhaps it’d be better if she was a ghost. Her being a ghost might mean I might’ve already had her fully—fully and now it’d be over. But she isn’t a ghost. I love her man—I love her maybe the way you loved Ms. Lunsford. You loved her right?”

“I do,” I said.

“That’s the way I love Rose—that’s her name—Rose—Rose Dungan—not after a month but a flower and a flower sprouted out from that piece of dirt Mr. Dungan at the Walmart. You know Rose from The Parlor. How do you reckon a rose could come out such a spit of soil?”

“How fully have you had her?”

Nathan came close to me and looked about as though the room was bugged and spoke with quiet restraint and a grin, “I had her fully. Many times. During the summer Ma would have me clean out the rooms and Rose and I would steal one for a time. That lasted all summer. But doesn’t mean I have her the way I want—fully, fully—to be able to say she’s mine. You know?”

“Sure,” I said. Nathan staggered standing with a mostly empty bottle in hand. I was unable to tell whether he’d drank it or if he’d merely spilt most of his beer.

“Course you get it, it’s why I like talking to you.” 

“Tell me the details.”

“You know what she looks like—brown hair, perfect smile—”

“No, I mean what you like about her.”

“Well . . . she’s really smart and—”

“Nathan, you don’t get it. Give me the grime. I want to know stuff no one else could. What do you like about her when you guys—”

“Are together?”

“Fuck—I want to know the dirty parts of your fucking. Parts and pieces of her you like.”

It wasn’t sexual what I wanted; when discussing fucking it normally never is. I was jealous and wanted Nathan to embarrass himself. What I really wanted was Rose. What I wanted was to be young like Nathan. I wanted to be young and have a girl like Rose and redo the latter third of my life. At twenty-five my life had two thirds to go, but I didn’t think of it that way. It seemed that youth was behind me and belonged to thin boys like Nathan who got to be with girls like Rose. I wanted his full head of hair and to have smooth, un-callused hands to hold and be held. Nathan’s youth pitted him higher than me in my mind, and I wished to level him to the dirt and filth I subjected myself to because I was jealous and made in pieces that resembled a former me but was new and different and a little less than it ever was because a body loses forty thousand skin cells a minute, so a twenty-five year old body has experienced an inconceivable amount of those tiny losses and I wanted what was already gone, but that was impossible—the closest thing to do was to replicate youth in someone else and somehow destroy it in any small way—leveling. “Give me the grime,” I repeated.

“Well, I’ve never told anyone before,” he paused, “I like feet. I love them. Rose has perfect feet. They’re small, well kept. She keeps her toe nails trimmed and un-polished. They are perfectly lined and folded with this brilliant little arch to them. I’m not sure if I’ve always liked feet this way or if it was only after realizing hers were perfect. I don’t know. Hers are perfect to hold. I just love them.”

Nathan finished his beer. I cracked two more.

 

Ms. Lunsford had nice feet. Unlike Rose she had to keep her toes painted. She was insecure about a big toe nail which she’d once lost and hadn’t grown back correctly. She kept them baby blue or oxblood depending on the season. She loved foot massages but I only gave them when I wanted something in return. I would rub them, digging my thumb into the mounds of her foot or neck of the big toe whilst I spoke whimsically about my father or absently about my mother, or droning on how it could’ve been different if I’d finished school and went to college, or moaned about my hair—all things that pitted me as sad or wounded, suggesting that she ought to take either blame or some responsibility for my pain. I tried exhorting her into feeling guilt so she could pamper me with sex or sympathy or flattery or anything else that validated my experience whilst positing Ms. Lunsford as culpable for it.

We spent the first day of our first summer together sat beneath a red cedar tree, staring out onto a field of blossomed blue bells. I held Ms. Lunsford’s feet in my hand as she held Lucca in her arms. He purred with every warm gust. Bits of hair came away in tufts and I enjoyed seeing the black and brown strands of hair float away like the flesh of dandelions into a field of green and lavender. Her feet were cool to the touch. The land seemed impossible with so much color. As the clouds moved in herds across a cornflower blue sky I was desperately afraid the whole world would slip away from me piece by piece like Lucca’s tufts of hair. I held Ms. Lunsford’s feet a little tighter, and told her a story of my father beating me for failing to reel in a five foot lemon shark on our last trip to Georgia. It was a lie with elements of truth; we had gone to Georgia; he was frustrated at my inability to fish, but he had never hit me—not once. It was the worst sort of lie. Funny enough I don’t remember her exact reaction, but it must’ve worked for we made it a few more summers without the world coming to pieces.

I told Nathan what Ms. Lunsford’s feet were like to hold. I told him the same story about my father I’d told Ms. Lunsford. I told him more lies about my father, all making him worse than he really was. I had Nathan affirm my pain and guilt him into telling me about his father. The worst thing to be said about Mr. Walter from Nathan’s telling was his absence. He wasn’t there when Nathan came back from school and was gone before he went to it. Mr. Walter spent more time at the hair salon than at home. He wasn’t there for the fights between the son and mother. Mr. Walter’s place in the household became an absence that the mother and son existed around without discussion. Family meals at the dinner table were avoided because it was likely that Mrs. Walter would put out a plated meal for her husband just for appearances sake. The closest they were to a family was at church on a Sunday. Mr. Walter insisted on their attendance and the son and wife, knowing that the illusion of family is better than nothing, were more than willing to attend with the father/husband. Mr. Walter had inexplicably started keeping hair in his office—all bagged and labeled by name in a desk drawer. Mrs. Walter started crying late afternoons in the kitchen, whereas before she did this exclusively in the confines of her bedroom where she could still be heard but not seen. There’s something about seeing it, he said of both the kept hair and mother’s crying.

By guilting him into giving me the grime, I’d successfully levelled Nathan from his former position of which I was jealous, but now I did not know what to do with the procured information.

“Did he hit you?” I asked.

He was silent for a second, “No one hit me.”

“Somebody had to.”

“Why?”

 

When the neighbor’s lover finally came over it was lesser than the previous night’s, somewhat tame in comparison. As I was sat on top of Lucca’s box Nathan was slumped against the front door. When the two finished he asked, “What’s in the ice cooler?”

I looked down at my seat, saying nothing. He left a few minutes later, stumbling out into the night. Soon after that the door slammed behind the exiting man, jolting me awake from my half-sleep. I didn’t wait long to dash behind the building to see her shower. This was thwarted by an SUV who was parked near my car on the other side of the skip. It was the same SUV from two nights ago. 

After going back inside, I dragged the cooler into the bathroom and plopped it down in the tub. I opened it up with my eyes shut and dumped the previous night’s clothes into the remnants of Lucca along with the pictures and papers still inside the pockets. The retched smell balled itself up in my throat. Gagging, I closed the lid and left the shower. In bed I thought of Ms. Lunsford’s feet, Nathan’s gangly frame on top of Rose, huffing dumbly away, and Lucca’s flesh drifting off in a wind after his hair and out onto a field of green and lavender.

$53.03

Nathan’s father came over the next day. He stood handsomely with his hands shoved inside the pockets of his smart-looking pea coat. His muscled arms showed through the woolen sleeves. I wanted to smack him, but I thought it best to invite him inside instead. He wasn’t having it. Mr. Walter told me off for having his son over. A boy has no business with a man in a motel, Mr. Walter said. Admittedly, and I said this to him, I hadn’t thought of how it looked from the outside—hell, I didn’t feel any older than Nathan was, I just hadn’t thought about the logistics from another’s perspective. There wasn’t a word on the drinking, nor of anything that might’ve been said or done—it seemed a matter of principle that stirred Mr. Walter’s business at my door. A blanket was wrapped around me. The sun burned away mid-sky for the first time in days right behind Nathan’s father. I let the blanket droop a little. Nathan’s scoop about the hair and Mr. Walter’s tendency of absence made it easier to endure the father’s telling off with a bit tongue; reservation is made easier with a little bit of dirt on the antagonist. 

He left like he’d come—abruptly catching me in a haze, and I didn’t bother seeing him off fully. I let the door close. Warm air filled the room a little. I returned to bed and was in and out of a dream in which I drowned a bee in a pool. 

Mrs. Walter kept a small office about the size of a broom cupboard on the left side of the first floor. That afternoon I paid her a visit with every intention of apologizing. She greeted me with her usual grace, offering me coffee, pop, water and a nibble to eat—all of which I politely declined. Assuming the lack of knowledge about my meetings with Nathan on her part, I pretended my reason for visiting was to inquire about the broken heater. For this she professed many apologies and persisted on many more offerings, including a home-cooked dinner at hers and for Mr. Walter to come and fix it immediately. The last two things I declined for the same reason. Though she insisted that her husband have a look at the heater. Finally, she asked if I’d like to move rooms. This, too, I declined. I wonder if she knew that her husband horded hair in his desk. Maybe she did. Maybe she reasoned some people have it worse—some people keep worse things hidden.

 

On a day with a bit of luck already, I didn’t want to ruin it by waiting for the golden hour. Instead I drove to The Parlor. Zach, the limp-handed boy, wasn’t there—another piece of luck. Rose served me at the bar. She’d shaved her head. I said it made her even more beautiful, like a model you’d see on the runway. She blushed and brought me over a coffee without my asking. Watching her move about The Parlor like I’d watched Ms. Lunsford for all those years in the house, I realized how little the two had in common. Without the hair the former was nothing like the latter. This was epitomized by the way each navigated the space they occupied. Ms. Lunsford would move in single bends and slow twists like a snake slithering through the underbrush. On the other hand Rose was all in points and individual cogs that moved in turn with other cogs. Her hip would bend around another server’s passing tray whilst Rose held her own tray over both their heads, collecting a ticket off the bar with her free hand. It looked messy and yet economic. Less elegant but more enamoring. More taxing and absentminded. It was her youthful agency to simply get things done that carried her through; she thought less and did more. I admired her for it. 

Each table in The Parlor was full and constantly being resupplied with new patrons. At one stage there were a few parties of two sat with other parties of two at four-tops. In between running dishes, tickets and orders Rose and I cut small chat back and forth about the weather, discussing all things we’d be doing if we could—sailing, drinking outside, mountain climbing—and deciding that we should enjoy it while it lasts because it only meant that there was to be a cold snap soon. 

After a few hours of pushing Brussel sprouts and bits of pork across a plate, waiting as the restaurant’s clientele dissipated, Rose came up to me and asked, “Think you could do me a favor?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“Maybe it’s too forward,” she said apologetically. 

“No, no, whatever it is it’d be a pleasure.”

“Are you busy later? If so, it’s totally fine.”

“No, I’m free for,” I said, glancing at a clock on the wall for dramatic effect, “the rest of the day in fact.”

“Great, great. I was wondering if maybe you could pick up a few drinks and meet me after I get off? But, like, if it’s a total inconvenience don’t worry about it.”

“Honestly I’d love to. Of course I will. It’d be great. What time are you off?”

“Eight.”

“Perfect, I’ll be back then.”

She smiled a smile that could strike a weaker man dead—all lips, very sincere. Too many smiles like that would’ve made me a broke man. I tipped as much as the meal cost and left The Parlor.  

Outside the homeless woman wasn’t there. I thought, maybe she too has a place to go on a day like this. I drove home during the golden hour with the sun coming through the passenger side window in a red haze. Some of the sky was streaked purple and the way the swirling clouds passed through it made those clouds seem velveteen. I wondered how many favors Nathan did for Rose before those summer days at Suzie’s Bed Stay. It didn’t matter all that much, a hungry fish should risk a bit of luck when food’s baited to him—something Dad used to say—but I was curious.

Nathan waited outside my door. His yellowing eye had been re-bruised but I didn’t bother asking how it got mussed. I panicked a little, looking around to make sure no one saw me letting him in. I told Nathan about his father’s visit. He looked confused but I thought he was playing dumb. I insisted on his leaving. “It’d be best for both of us,” I said flatly before going into the bathroom.

I pulled the cooler from the tub, letting it smack down onto the tile. I took only the time to wash my more intimate parts and dried myself just as quickly. Nathan was still in the room when I walked out.

“Listen,” I said, pulling on my cleanest pair of underwear, “I didn’t mean to make it seem as though I was kicking you out. I just mean us to be careful for a bit. Isn’t there anywhere else you can hang out?”

He fiddled with the knife on the table. “Do you know where my house is?”

“Nathan, I just don’t want to make things worse.”

“We live at the top of the field behind the motel,” the boy pointed behind me towards the bathroom with the tip of the blade. “The summers are great out there. There are these birds that make music in the morning. I stay in bed listening—listening until there’s no noise in the house, until everybody’s gone and it’s just me and those birds. And then I have the whole house to myself. I like the emptiness. But when time comes to where they’re coming home soon I go wait out the rest of the day in the trees, walking, just walking. I only go back when I have to.”

“We’re friends, you and I, but they can’t understand that right now.” After pulling my sweater over my head I took the knife from him and placed it back on the table.

“What about winter? What about when it’s too cold to wait it out? What do I do then?”

It was already past seven and I still had yet to buy alcohol for Rose. “I have to go. I’ll be back in a few hours. You can stay here, but if someone comes, please, just hide.”

“And what about when I go to school and have to explain things? What do I tell them? What can I say about a black eye that people don’t already assume? And how do I tell them that whatever they do they’ll just make things worse?”

With both my hands I cupped the back of Nathan’s head with his face towards me. His skull felt small and he seemed so impossibly young—impossible in relation to me, for no matter how much I wanted to be that young again nothing would bring me back to where Nathan was. It didn’t seem fair. Ms. Lunsford’s science class posited that evolution and the human biological processes are the closest things to perfection—a perpetual cycle of rejuvenation to ensure survival. But I felt far from perfect and I couldn’t see how making a person in pieces that is constantly replaced by older and lesser pieces constitutes perfection. That is unless perfection doesn’t guarantee fairness. 

Nathan’s busted lip had scabbed over green and his eye was swollen a bloody purple. I held the boy’s head like a chalice and said, “You have to promise me that you’ll stop letting him do this to you.”

“He doesn’t do it.”

 

Mr. Dungan wrung me up for a case of Bud Lite and a twelve pack of bottled Smirnoff Ice for his daughter. His register had the longest line of the three open but it felt good to have one over on somebody.

In Walmart’s parking lot there was a crowd of picket sign-wielding, small business owning protesters. It was a lot of the same people from the Millfield’s protest a few months back in Louisville. I was at that one. Though, this one was just an inconvenience to me. I was already late and it took ten minutes just to navigate my way through the crowd and all the reporters and the crowd’s crowd which was bigger than the other two groups combined. On Monday, Millfield’s was tearing down my house and I could be certain that there’d be no protestors then, something else that wasn’t fair.

The decision to buy the alcohol for Rose hadn’t been made but was simply a matter of due course. She’d decided what I’d do the minute she asked. This was how I liked my life to go. With Ms. Lunsford it’d been no different. She made all the decisions; I just simply went along with them. When she’d decided to leave me—I was left. When she wanted to visit her family without me—I stayed behind. When she wanted the cat—I bought it a bed and treats and toys before we even had him. When she offered me her home, I’d already long since packed my things. When she made a series of small sexual gestures, I’d already reciprocated and the first motel room was simply a culmination of my reactions. I suppose my whole life had been that way—a series of reactions to other people’s decisions.

It no longer bothered me that Nathan had had her. She was new now. She didn’t have any hair and appeared to me someone different from who she was—someone totally her own. Beforehand, when I imagined her with Nathan, I saw a long-haired girl pinned beneath a thin boy with a yellowing eye. She was no longer her and I was grateful that she no longer belonged to him. 

As I pulled into The Parlor this was affirmed. She no longer belonged to Nathan but another—Zach. The little shit had her propped up on an SUV as he leant on his elbows which were rested on her bare knees. Pulling alongside the two, I rolled down my window. I handed Zach the Smirnoff Ice. 

“Do either of you know Nathan?” I asked.

Zach shook his head as Rose responded, “Who?”

“Nathan Walter. Do you know him?”

“Oh, well, we once had a class together—that’s about it, but his dad does my hair.”

I didn’t bother looking at Rose. She’d once again become someone new, someone I didn’t care to know. Zach was about to thank me when I peeled off, tires sucking at the wet tarmac. I thought once again about fairness and how they’d gotten one over on me, and then I briefly thought of Mr. Dungan. I reckoned in some ways this was all fair.

 

As I parked behind the motel a man was walking towards the lot from the field. He wore a black pea coat. I didn’t leave the car until the man entered through the far end of the fence. I followed him around the building at a distance and up the stairs. From where I stood it appeared that he knocked at my door. It was Nathan’s dad. Someone let him in and he disappeared. It was only when I walked up to the door myself that I realized he’d entered the neighbor’s room. I retreated to mine. Nathan was still there.

“You should probably go,” I said.

He didn’t respond. His eyes were wet. The lovers had started almost immediately. Their table bashed into the wall.

“I can’t do this right now. Nathan go,” I ordered as I walked into the bathroom.

Closing the door behind me, I saw that the cooler’s lip had been opened. Lucca floated in a little bit of water, half concealed by the soaked clothes. He’d lost most of his hair and it floated about his swollen white flesh. Despite his engorged body his bones seemed to have shrunk. Perhaps it was an illusion created by his balding but he seemed much slighter than he once was—much less. Lucca’s left eye was open. Ms. Lunsford used to love that his pupils were so very rounded, so very human. Now his pupils took up the entire eye, making them completely black. 

The mirror shook on the wall, almost falling off, as Mr. Walter dug into the woman next door. I could hear, “Stop . . . Stop, just ease up . . . Bryan, fucking stop . . . Stop.” The table continued to beat against the shared wall and the mirror still shook without falling. I closed the lid to Lucca’s box and turned just in time to vomit into the tub. Sick gushed up my throat, tearing at my esophagus, leaving what felt like little splinters. 

Soon they stopped. Silence ensued. I waited a little longer before returning to the room.

“Nathan, get out.” 

“What the hell’s your problem?”

“You don’t owe me anything and I sure don’t owe you shit. So, please, just leave.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“This has to stop. Get out now.”

“Where am I supposed to go, huh?”

“Home. Go home. Just go.”

“That’s what your problem is. You can’t deal with anything. You just expect things to go away or else you just hold onto them.”

“Please,” I said.

“You’re sick, you know that?”

“I’d go home if I still could.”

“That’s your fault. Everyone knows Ms. Lunsford left you because you got too old for her. That’s not your fault, but losing your home—that’s on you.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“And—”

“Get the fuck out,” I screamed, digging my nose into his cheek. Using my weight, I pressed his back against the door. 

“Leave,” I said, having regained my composure, drawing my face away from his slightly.

“Why is there a dead cat in the cooler?” Nathan asked.

His hands unclenched as I walked away and over to the bedside table. I picked up the knife. “My dad used to take me fishing down in Georgia. His favorite things to catch were sharks—lemons, bulls, nurses—you name them. The best way, he insisted, was chumming. He’d have me gut mackerel and slice the wings off stingrays—two things that bleed quite nicely. We cut them up and put them in a bucket and we’d walk into waste-high water and pour out the gore and let the blood fill the space around us. We’d take a few steps back and cast out into the muss with a big chunk of meat baited on the line. This was his knife, the one he had me use. Each time I took the old lady down to Florida I insisted we fish for shark. She didn’t like it any. Couldn’t stand gutting or dismembering a stingray. Mostly she couldn’t stand how easy it was for me to do it. But we’d go out anyhow, and she’d watch, letting me be my father for a little bit, cutting up fish and using them to bait bigger fish, using his knife to do it. He wasn’t so bad. She just didn’t like it.” 

“Mike, you’re fucking twisted.”

I pointed the knife at him from the other side of the room, “You never were with Rose were you? She doesn’t even know who you are. She knows your father though.” I wanted him gone, but I didn’t want to have to hurt him, not physically at least.

“It’s better that you’re alone. I think you prefer it that way. You’ll die that way.”

“In fact,” I spoke a little louder to be certain that the neighbors would also hear, “he’s fucking her right now next door.”

Nathan’s face seemed to swallow itself; his lips sucked into his mouth, over his teeth; his eyes withdrew into their sockets; his cheeks hollowed; the boy thinned before me, becoming lesser, lesser because of me. “My dad’s the good one,” he said.

Nathan opened the door and the door swallowed him further as he disappeared into the dark. The cold swept through the room, dusting everything with a slight chill. I expected Mr. Walter to crash through any minute as the wind and son had done before him.

With the knife still in hand I dragged the case of beer over to the door and held the blade at the door’s gut, ready for whomever might come.

For the next hour there were no more doors opening; not the neighbors; not my own. 

 

The last few months of living with Ms. Lunsford dissipate into a collection of small moments in the recesses of my memory. One of these moments might’ve not been the last time we had sex but in my mind it was. It was the fourth day of heavy snow. We’d been stuck in the house for the last three of those days, unable to work or escape to The Parlor. It was only late afternoon but it was already dark. Ms. Lunsford and I tried having sex. For us sex had become a matter of friction—a certain intensity had to be maintained in order for me to sustain an erection. It wasn’t always easy for her to do this, sometimes it’d hurt, and I didn’t like it one bit, but I didn’t stop; that was the kind of role she’d assumed in our relationship, always letting me hurt her more than I wanted to. 

I had become the bad guy. I didn’t want her to realize this if she hadn’t already, so I still played on guilt trips and was good enough to her so she didn’t have the reasons she needed to leave me. 

That last time we were together I had a particularly difficult time staying up. When I was aroused we threw ourselves into throws of friction but it was only a matter of minutes before I wilted again. The sheets over us held the warmth between us.

“It’s starting to hurt,” she said.

“I can stop.”

“No. I want you.”

“But if it hurts—”

“No,” she said, “Please.”

Closing my eyes, I tried to force a concentration of blood, a transference of warmth, but nothing worked. The minute intervals of sex became thirty second thrusts. The white pained windows started to give against the weather, cold seeping in. My shoulders barred the brunt of the chill, keeping Ms. Lunsford beneath me. 

“You can’t, can you?” she asked.

“I can.”

“If you can’t, it’s fine. I—”

“No, I will, just give me a sec.”

I pulled from the past, thinking of the warmer moments of us, settling on a time where she was bathing on Siesta Key beach. It was a week day in the spring. Only a few other beachgoers were about. She wore a black bikini, undoing the strings to sun her back and shoulders. The sand burned. We ran back and forth from the safety of our towels to the water to cool off. We were brown, and warm, and young, and happy, and together and there was more ahead of us than behind and we had not failed at anything yet, so all there was to worry about was getting from the towel to the water and the water to the towel, evading the burning sand. 

“If you can’t, you can’t.”

“Is it still hurting?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Kitchen.”

“Why?”

“For a glass of water, jeez.”

“It’s not a big deal. It’s too cold anyway.”

“I’m just getting a glass of water.”

“Babe, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not. I’m thirsty.”

“Don’t be like that. Talk to me.”

“I’m just thirsty.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Fuck, I can’t just get a glass of water? Go back to bed. I’m fine. Go . . . Wait . . . Don’t cry . . . What’re you crying for? Come back . . . Come back . . . Don’t just walk away. . . Don’t fucking walk away . . . Hey, hey,” I shouted, throwing the glass against the refrigerator, it smashed on impact. Ms. Lunsford walked in quick strides back over to me, treading over the glass shards without care. She stood a foot shorter than me, hardly coming up to my chest. Bare shoulders trembling, she glared up at me, shoving her right palm into my chest. Then with both hands she pushed me again, and then again a little harder. She wrapped her small hand against my throat, squeezing just a little before pushing off, jolting my head back. 

“You feel that? Do you fucking feel that?” she asked through her teeth and proceeded to push against my chest again. “Does it hurt yet? Does it?”

Bumps rose all over her flesh. Her face was alive with color. I merely shrugged my shoulders.

“You’re a fool, Mike. And you’re cruel. It doesn’t hurt because you’re a fool.”

She pounded my chest three more times before storming out of the kitchen. The broken glass reminded me of crushed ice. She left blood in the shards behind her. Leaning against the wall, I heard the door slam. I thought it had been from the bedroom but a few minutes later when I returned to bed she wasn’t there. I rushed to the front door, flinging it open. The cold came through at once. It snowed lightly. Ms. Lunsford’s red footprints made a trail through the white, going out as far as I could see, so small was each foot and step they could’ve been made by a child. The white stretched out as far as the wall of the black bones of trees whose pointed heads met the grey-lit sky. 

My running was slowed by my footfalls coming through the snow to above my ankles. I raised my knees as I strode, following Ms. Lunsford’s delicately trodden path, yelling her name as I went, which was lost in gusts of wind. Soon her pink naked body became visible. She had stopped in the middle of the field. Her legs were thin and her torso slight. I collected her in my arms, pulling her close. It was as much to keep her warm as myself.  I fixed her arms to cover her breasts and piled her legs over one another. My mouth chattered violently. Unable to speak, I ran as fast as the cold and snow-stricken world would let me. My knees felt like they were made of china-glass, ready to shatter at any moment. I tried imagining Floridian heat beating down on my back; I thought of Siesta Key; I thought of Ms. Lunsford and her black bikini; I thought of my glass knees; I pumped my knees as high as they could go, picturing her bloodied snow prints, running as fast as the world would let me, carrying her all the way inside. I tossed a hot towel around her neck and the bed sheet over her body as the shower warmed. I stuck my hand against the burning heater unit in the bathroom and proceed to rub her legs down intermittently. We sat in the shower, water beating down against her back as I plucked the bits of glass from her feet. We stayed in there until we’d emptied the hot water tank. 

She was alright the next morning, but I was still shriveled, pissing blood, battling a cough that wanted to take a lung from me. This went on for three more days until the snow stopped.

-$4.45

It was after six beers that the neighbor’s bed started creaking. It was a slow creek. This time they made love less violently and without apologies, something I’d wished I had the opportunity to do at least one more time. I sheathed the knife, clipping it onto my belt. I wondered how much it’d take for them to break and tear down the bed. I wondered how much it’d take for them to tear down my home. The only still standing remnants of my former life was soon to be destroyed and there was little one could do but to consider the bad things that had once happened there and perhaps try to think it might be for the best. But somehow those bad things that had once happened seemed better than the now—at least we had options then, I thought, at least back then we had choices. There were two days to be had before they blew through the house. It was Sunday, I thought, I can at least choose to say goodbye.

I carried Lucca’s box out of the motel. The smell of rot disappeared once my nose was made wet by the cold. There was a light snow coming down like little white leaves, floating and gently padding the earth. 

The SUV was once again parked on the other side of the skip, rocking side to side. I had difficulty unlocking my car’s door with the cooler in my arms. I tried placing it down but it slipped and tumbled to the ground, spilling soiled water, wet clothes and Lucca’s hardened body onto the black tarmac. I wanted nothing more than to scream. I wanted to scream until my throat was ripped raw and my jaw dislocated. I wanted my scream to fill the empty field and reach up to the house at the very edge of the hill and into Nathan’s room where I believed he too wanted to scream. I didn’t. Instead I marched over to the swaying SUV which creaked at every tilt. The windows had a slight tint. Ducking over to the passenger side, I peered into the car. The front two seats were empty but I heard moans from the rear. In the back two people were fooling around. A bent pair of bare knees were the first thing I saw and then the back of a head making its way down a stomach. The girl’s head was buzzed, and immediately she covered up her chest. It was Rose. Zach’s head shot up. The two kids clambered into the front seats. One of their limbs bumped the horn as they went. The SUV kicked to life. The wheels spun in a squeal before gaining traction on the icy pavement.

Once the car was gone I collected Lucca in my arms. He was stiff and I was afraid his limbs would snap at the slightest bend. Not bothering with the cooler, I placed the cat down on the backseat. He seemed to be made of clay—grey and hard and utterly lifeless. 

I went back inside the motel where a settled silence made way for the slow churn of a ticking clock—a clock that beat against time like a small hammer against a metallic skull ready to shatter—a slow steel ticking. I ran my tongue over my cracked lips. They tasted like pennies. I pulled a chair over to the wall, pressing an ear against it, and waited.

 

Like an ear, a shark is made mostly from cartilage. We learned about sharks in Ms. Lunsford’s class. The students’ favorite part were the videos of the sharks ripping apart sea lions. The sea lions took little notice of a dorsal fin waning too close to shore. When one sea lion was alone enough for the camera to zoom in, getting a last shot of the animal staring at the shore towards the rest of the sea lions, that’s when the shark struck. Sometimes that final before death shot lasted a minute. The attack was never surprising; you expected the shark to come. You knew the shark would come. The bite, the first bite when the sea lion thinks squirming will be enough, doesn’t quite come like lightning. The attacks didn’t manifest themselves in the viewer as a surprise but guilt, as though you’re the one ordering the sea lion to death. In all the videos we watched none of the other sea lions helped, nor did we expect them to. The other students sat fascinated with the first real end that most of them had seen. The one video that wasn’t met with cheers was one that ended with survival. A sea lion had slipped the grips of an older great white, the former coming away with a missing flipper. The cameraman followed the wounded beast to shore. He dragged his red ragged side across the sand, falling farther and farther behind the pod. That sand must’ve hurt getting stuck in the mess the way it did. The video lasted too long. The class hadn’t wanted to see an ending where the shark was disappointed and old and the sea lion was alone and in pain; we preferred clear winners and losers; that’s all most had known up until then. For the sea lion, living through the mess was worse than dying from it, or so we thought. A small girl with glasses stood up and left the room, biting back the water works. I explained all that the students probably felt later that week to Ms. Lunsford, but at the time all she could do to console us was to say, “Sea lions’ flippers are mostly made of cartilage, just like the sharks.” Still they preferred the guts and the dead rather than the merely wounded, the whole lot of them. That stuff didn’t interest me because I’d seen messes like that before on fishing trips with Dad. 

 

An ear is made mostly from cartilage, so it shouldn’t have hurt, but after a few hours my ear was bruised from taking the weight of my body leant against the wall.

The woman was a ghost—a ghost laying with a man whose face I could not forget. I supplemented the phantom with Rose and Ms. Lunsford, cycling back and forth between the two. Every time I heard a noise—both real and imagined—I shot right out of the chair, nearly tipping it over. As with anything one’s waiting to hear, you imagine it before it even comes. I wasn’t sure what I was actually hearing and what I was making up in my head. The ring of a cell phone, giggling,  the locking and unlocking of a door, a hissing showerhead, a murmur, a name, a whisper, the rustling of sheets; all these things I may’ve conjured partly from hope, despair and anticipation. Each new sound brought me to my feet, somehow validating my efforts even after recognizing its invention.

  As the night settled I had to keep track of the real things around me: the wall was solid, the bathroom’s pipes beneath the tiles hummed, the steel tip of the knife, the creak of the chair’s legs, the tales of feathers poked out from the bedsheet that for days had scratched my back, marathon bar wrappers discarded on the table stained with chocolate remnants, a spilled pile of clothing in a small bundle like snake’s shed skin and a blistered ear made mostly of cartilage pressed against a wall, listening to a room of sounds and people that might’ve not really been there, at least until they started again. That sound—the sound of flesh encroaching upon flesh—was unmistakably true, cutting through the wall, filling every corner of the room.

 

The videos shown in class hadn’t bothered me as much as the actual gutting and slicing business did. Dad showed me the correct way to gut a mackerel in order to bleed it the best, and how to take apart a stingray in threes without mussing up the flesh too badly; both jobs had to be done with the bait still alive as to preserve the flesh. It’s a matter of pressure and single strokes, he’d say. Dad would place his hand over mine and cut into the fish with me. It was the most we’d touch. Sometimes I purposely did a poor job at preparing the bait just so he’d help me do it. I never let on to the knots in my stomach when ripping through a fish that I was having a hard enough time holding steady. I’d repeatedly tell myself that the stingray’s wings were made of cartilage.

 

I could hear them perfectly fine, clear as my own breaths. Lips against lips and skin pressed against skin. The creek of a wooden table cracking against a plaster wall. The shedding of clothes. Murmurs. Garbled gasps for breath. Small pleas to stop. These sounds were real; I knew so because they frightened me. I thought of a shark ripping into a seal, wondering how the latter would escape and if it’d survive its wounds. I wondered about these things and how much more the frail plaster wall could take before cracking at the weight of the rocking wooden table and if the man was telling the woman he loved her or if he simply muttered sheet thin compliments in her ear and in turn she loved him because at least he knew he didn’t—at least he knew something about himself.

What was either a glass, bottle or lamp was smashed against the shared partition, causing puffs of dusts to cloud out on my side of it. Then there was another crash, and then another. The woman whimpered on the other side as the man hurled insults at her, mostly implicating that she was crazy and little more than a whore.

 

Ms. Lunsford told me about mouthbrooders a few years after biology class on one of our first trips to Florida together. We were on Captiva Beach and I was quartering a stingray’s wing. There were a few other people, mostly families, dotted around us. She was sat behind me, periodically covering my eyes with her hands, teasing me, telling me to be careful. In turn I bit at her fingers, not hard but enough. She started drawing her fingers the closest she could to my mouth, pulling them away last minute. When I finally got two I held them there in my teeth, staring back at her, grinning all the way. A young girl was digging sand with a red plastic shovel a few feet in front of us. 

“Is this what’ll happen if a shark gets me?” she asked.

“Or a barracuda,” I replied mumble-mouthed.

“Very reassuring.”

“They’re mine now.”

“Oh, they’re yours?”

“They’re mine. They’re my babies.”

Ms. Lunsford laughed. That’s when she told me about mouthbrooders—fish that carry and hatch their eggs in their mouths. The shoveling girl was working hard and some piles of sand were flung our way, hitting just before our feet.

“I’m a mouthbrooder then,” I said.

“You’re the mother?”

“Course. These are my babies.”

She tried tugging her fingers away slightly. I bit a little more firmly.

“I want to be the mother,” she said. The young girl finally hit Ms. Lunsford in the leg with projectile sand. We both laughed. “I want one,” she said.

I let her fingers go. “I could do that to you,” I said, scooping up sand in a hand and lightly tossing it across her thighs.

She dusted off. “I don’t think it’s the same.” 

I wanted to see her smile. “Course it is. You can have my fingers in your mouth if you want. Just mind the ray juice.”

“Most people here probably think I’m your mouthbrooder.”

“No,” I said, sprinkling more sand over her.

When we got back to Indiana I bought Lucca for us.

 

I was on my feet now, moving across the wall with my ear still planted firmly against it, following the shouting couple as their argument unraveled throughout their room. More things were broken. More things were said. And then came the smack of flesh against flesh. Silence swallowed us, balling itself up in my throat just like the smell of Lucca’s rot had done a mere few days beforehand.

Their door flung open, whacking against the outside wall. I thought it was over, but the girl followed the man out of the room, hurling out insults wildly—verbal shrapnel splitting and spitting towards the back of Mr. Walter. I waited a minute or so longer to follow them. The whole lot was padded in snow.

They were behind the motel and passing through a hole in the fence and out into the white field. I let them get even farther ahead before following their footpaths. In the black it was impossible to see. We three went up the hill one after another blindly. I trod in fallen steps of snow made before me, listening to the girl’s slurred berating of Mr. Walter.

“I’ll fucking kill you . . . I’ll follow you all the fucking way to your house and I will tell her everything . . . You piece of shit . . . I hate you . . . I hate you . . . You’re fucking evil . . . I should’ve never come . . . You know what I’ve done to be here—to be with you . . . I hate you—”

My pants were wet with snow and my hands were iced. There were no stars. The little light there was shone from a sliver of banana moon, illuminating only the next few snow-trodden steps and my hands that were stuck like claws. My awareness of the cold had diminished half from tiredness and half as a method of survival, concentrating my remaining cognizance on the girl’s voice and the sheathed blade that beat against my hip with every high-kneed step into the dark and up the hill. We were drawing close enough to Nathan’s house that the porch light burned as a candle wick on top of the hill, barely lighting the bending horizon which in the night seemed shaped like a massive tortoise shell protruding from the Earth.

From the dark came a shattering yawp—a barbaric yell less than animal but more than human. The world fell behind me because of it. The whole past became a shadow or a dream that one struggles to recall upon consciousness. I marched on and on and on and on up the hill until I fell upon a lightly satin-robed girl lying in her own snow angel. She was unconscious. I took her up in my arms. My hands ached where they touched her neck and under-thighs but she warmed them a little. I held her there and saw her for the first time. She was completely new to me, un-similar to anyone I’d known. I took the perfect stranger back down the hill, letting the porch light behind us dwindle to the faintest star and then diminish before totally receding into the swallowing white world.

 

I’d have liked to think that tearing down a house was much like a funeral. That there was some decorum involved. That people would show respect in reducing a body to dirt or a house to rubble, and that there’d be moments of silence in doing so. That it’d be a matter of reverting the body back, reducing to its beginning. A house taken apart piece by piece in the opposite way of which it was built. I would’ve hoped this was the case in the dismantling of my own home, but in reality they do not start where it’s finished, they crash through the easiest way. They might come through the roof, or a wall, ideally they might remove its foundation if possible, letting it collapse upon itself like a doe with its knees shot out, standing over its own grave. There was no decorum in bulldozing a home as there was in the burial of a body. Unlike the latter the former would not be performed by those who loved it, but instead by strangers who whilst doing the job they might be laughing about their own lives, laughing because at the very least it is not their own home that’s being destroyed.

I thought about this as I rummaged through the girl’s already packed bags after I’d tucked her into bed. Piece by piece I removed clothing, draping them over the shivering girl—knit sweaters, coats, sun dresses and underwear. There were smaller tokens of a past life that I also unpacked; some objects with a certain practicum like a tooth brush and hair dryer, and others with a more insular value such as pictures of other young beautiful people and a second place medal and a small ceramic pot inscribed with the initials N.G. This is how one should take apart a life, I thought.

The motel room was exactly the same as mine except the bed sat on the adjacent wall. Besides some discarded Walmart bags in the corner and a few empty bottles strewn about the nightstand, her room was barren. Her hair sprawled across the pillow in black vines. She had a sharp nose and slight mouth. She appeared young. It was only the girl’s hair, very beautiful and full and oak-dark, that reminded me of Ms. Lunsford. I could see why Mr. Walter was losing it all for a girl like this. The amount of which she’d packed suggested that she had left from where she’d come for good. And the fact that her bags were knotted shut with everything that was her life might’ve suggested she was to be gone soon again. It was easy to project one’s own fleeting youth upon her. 

I evened out the piled clothing and sheets across her body. She wreaked of vodka. A purple ring had risen around her neck in a bruise. I pulled the sheets a little higher to cover it.

Clenching and unclenching my fists, I could not shake the icy twig-brittleness in my finger bones. The sheathed knife weighed at my hip. I blew hot air into my cupped hands, something to control the warmth there, anything to make it better.

 

When examining my life it is easy to do so in the manner of a funeralgoer—a manner in which there is respect for the deceased and an unrelenting adherence to sentimentality. As the funeralgoer one sees my life in a series of small moving vignettes that play from the end towards the beginning. One first sees a balding man clutching a knife inside a motel bathroom belonging to a girl who reminds him of another as he stares into a mirror. Then comes a scene of a man in a bed with a cat on his chest as he breathes, watching the cat slowly rise up and then down as the day fades through a small window, slipping into night and then day again. There’s a man pinned between the legs of a woman in pain who lets him work his way through her because she can’t reconcile her own guilt over making this man from a boy who once was afraid of her. She does her best not to cry. One thinks a part of her truly loves him. One thinks she knows this. One knows she’s still waiting for him to do something wrong so she can justify leaving him. There’s a boy holding a woman’s feet on a beach. One only sees the feet and the hands and a shadow under which the two sit as though the voyeur sits perched on a branch in the tree that makes the shadow. The sand burns in the unshaded parts of the beach. The feet and hands move to stay in the shadow made by the palm tree so to keep out of the sun and off the burning sand. A boy slices into a fish. A woman watches, wondering what else there is in the world besides a boy slicing into a fish. A boy cries in front of a woman for the first time. She holds him near to her chest, imploring him to say what’s wrong. He says it’s his father and that he can’t quite remember what he looks like, only seeing glimpses of him in memory. They never kept pictures in the house so the boy has none. He cannot quite explain that it isn’t a new absence but instead one revealed. The woman has the boy look into a mirror and says that he resembles the father. You’ll see him every time you look at yourself, she says. The boy lies, claiming that this makes him feel better, resolving never to cry in front of her again because most people will never understand, most people only care to understand what they do not fear. A boy stands naked in front of a woman. It is the very first time a woman has seen him naked. He is thirteen. That first turns quickly into many firsts for the boy. A boy saws into the wing of a stingray. He has cut too close to the body and guts seep out. The father looms over, not bothering to berate him but instructs him how to do it better on the other wing. A small boy with thin wrists and short fingers steals his sleeping father’s knife and takes it into the shower with him. A tooth is slightly wobbly. He digs the tip of the knife into his gum and works it between the gum and the tooth as someone would work a car-jack jacking up a truck or saw into the wing of a stingray. After a little squirt of blood he holds the tooth in the dead flat of his hand, planning to bestow his loss upon his father. There is no documentation of infancy so there is no reference to the boy as a baby besides a dress kept from a dead mother. You see a dress without a body and it is enough to explain the rest away. This is my life as one would bury a body—a life small enough to fit on the back of a receipt paper—but in reality my life deserves less than a funeral, it deserves to be demolished as my house was about to be—my life deserved a bulldozer. I was never a body to be buried. I was never a victim. I was the one holding the knife. I cut into stingrays and a woman and a gum line and I wanted to be called innocent. I was capping my delicate, doe-like knees above my own grave, letting the foundation of my life collapse onto itself. In reality I was the procurer of my own pain. I bled myself and chummed for sharks.

Naked, I weighed my life this way with the knife in hand in front of the mirror.

I left the bathroom and stood over the girl. She was turned away from me but I could hear her teeth chattering like the quick tapping of a typewriter. A shoulder was exposed. I placed my free hand on it. Her flesh didn’t feel like anyone’s I’d known. It was new. I wanted nothing more than to be allowed to become familiar with the way her skin felt against my palm. I wanted nothing more than for her to become a memory. 

With her skin being completely her own I needed to further dispel any notion of her as a surrogate for Ms. Lunsford. I ran my fingers through her hair, gauging how easily the girl was to stir. Deciding she was conked out, I balled her long black hair up into a fist, pulling it taut like strings on a violin. I put the knife to her hair near the head and slowly sawed through it as my father had shown me to do so through flesh. 

With a wad of hair limp in my hand, I walked around to the other side of the bed so to face the newly short-haired girl. On my way around the bed I stepped on small shards of glass that stuck into my foot. There was nothing of the woman left in the girl.

I bagged up the loose hair, tossing it onto my pile of clothes, and sat on the edge of the bed. An arm hung out of the sheets, extending towards me with an open palm. I placed a finger on her palm to see if she’d hold it. She didn’t. Soon I traced over the lines in her hand. Some lines were ribboned and made helixes that fell into other lines which ended at other helixed lines, some falling off the hand completely or ending at the start of a finger or yet another perpendicular line. It was a constellation of intersecting paths. I thought it wasn’t so different to the randomness of how time works, falling onto itself, going nowhere but backwards with every moment maintaining the possibility of reminding you of those moments already passed.

After a few hours I returned to the bathroom with a bit of glass sinking deeper into the sole of my foot.

 

I let the water run some. The knife was placed on the sink. I knew what had to be done. The girl would come to soon and I needed to show her that I was hurting also, that we could run away together and do something with the little we had left. There were small towns like Corydon sprinkled across America. We could hop to one after another until we made it down to Florida. We’d pick towns with their own versions of The Parlor, without Walmart or Millfield’s. Ones with churches that we’d try out. I would have to explain Lucca, hairless, rotting in my back seat, but she seemed like a girl that would understand such a bad thing—she’d get it without having to say it—she’d have grace through all this mess. She’d probably even help me bury him. 

 

A body loses over a million skin cells per minute. It is a method of self-preservation—a method that slows with age. My twenty five year old body, as reflected in the mirror, was a culmination of an inconceivable number of tiny losses over the third of a life. It was a lesser body than its shapelier, more finely cut predecessor ten years beforehand. It was a body in which its rejuvenation had already begun its slowing with the loss of hair. It was a body that had once excelled physically. It was a body that a woman bore into this world and never had the chance to love very much—a woman with a now decayed body whose been surrogated by the memory of an unworn dress and then replaced by another woman who loved my body in a way she knew how. It was a body that she’d dug her nails into when we made love—nails that scraped away more skin cells than a minute could. I wondered how much of it she took all together. 

 

The knife had a curved wooden handle and grey blade. Dad insisted what was great about that knife was how little pressure had to be applied in order to cut right through the cartilage-made wing of a stingray to make bait. 

Skin is tightly wrapped and sewn like cellophane over a body, keeping all the things inside. It is not like cartilage. I stepped into the shower with the knife. Blood from my foot pooled with the water, tornadoing down the drain. Sunlight peered through the textured glass window. It was impossible to see out of it.

 

When we first started Ms. Lunsford used to insist we showered afterwards. She didn’t like going home with the smell. She told me I scrubbed too hard; this was the same with the soap, the shampoo and my tooth brush. She said I’d soon lose layers of skin, my hair and rub away my gums near the tooth. Sometimes she insisted washing me herself. Doing this she’d then tease me, berating me and shame me where she thought I could do better; a smaller buttocks, bigger biceps, less broad shoulders, a thicker cock. It gave her great pleasure to do so. Her favorite part was washing down the middle of my back, a part that I couldn’t reach. She’d scrub there, and with Ms. Lunsford’s free hand bracing my arm or shoulder, with my own hand on top of hers, and she’d say, “You couldn’t do this without me.” I smiled without her seeing. 

 

In the several minutes I’d spent in the shower I reckoned I’d lost over a few hundred thousand skin cells, but in the grand scheme of things it seemed a small loss.

I’d have to apply less pressure with the blade against skin than the wing of a stingray. I knew it’d cut more easily than cartilage. With my hand clutching the knife’s handle between my shoulder blades, the blade’s tip reached down to a part of my back I couldn’t reach otherwise. It was there I made the incision, pushing down with the slightest bit of pressure, parting the skin two inches just parallel to the length of my spine. It stung. Blood spilled down and between my legs. 

Getting out the shower, I placed the knife back onto the sink and turned to see the wound. It was a slit no wider than the thickness of a penny and no longer than the upper-half of my forefinger, but it bled relentlessly. So much blood for such a small wound.

I’d planned to wait until she was awake and then I’d show the girl my wound. That’s when my life would once again rearrange itself into something familiar but new, shedding what had passed a bit at a time. 

I was hardly dry when Mr. Walter knocked at the door. Afraid this’d wake up the girl I rushed to the door without a towel, staring through the peephole. He knocked again and said, “Fuck, listen, I apologize for last night. . . I was up the whole time, thinking about you, baby. We can get out of here. Listen, I’ve decided, let’s do it. Let’s get gone for good. Leave this all behind us—you and me.” He made to knock again but I slammed my fist into the door before his could meet the wood. His head recoiled as though I’d swung at him. I glanced back at the still sleeping girl before flinging open the door and tackling Mr. Walter, putting him on his ass. He recovered quickly and made for the staircase. I didn’t reach him until the bottom of the staircase. We tumbled down the rest of the way, crashing onto the concrete, landing gridlocked in a mess of limbs and strangled necks.

Determined not to let go, I grappled with him, finally straddling Mr. Walter’s chest, pinning his upper arms with my knees. He clawed at my knees and thighs, taking skin and cells but that didn’t matter. I dug my bare ass into him. His legs kicked and squirmed and thrashed about but my weight had him. I punched him with alternating strokes across the cheeks and chin. I jabbed down at his forehead which immediately cracked a bone in the middle of my right hand. 

“You can’t go around just hurting people,” I yelled. “You can’t hurt people like that.”

With my right hand out of commission, I pressed my forearm down on his throat. Through the choking and screaming I made out snippets of what Mr. Walter said, “Please . . . God . . . Please . . . Oh, God . . . I won’t tell a soul . . . No one . . . Please let me go.” It was too late. People were outside their motel rooms watching a shark pummel a seal. Mrs. Walter was watching too, so close her khakis were splattered with blood. She said nothing when I looked at her. I knew it was soon to be over. The town would know what I’d done there. The girl’s door was now shut and though I couldn’t see through those front windows with so much sun beaming down on our violence, I knew she was watching—terrified. She probably didn’t see a seal and a shark but instead two sharks, fighting over a meal. If only I could tell her the truth—that this wound was for her—that none of us were made mostly from cartilage—all of this hurt. The man’s head was smeared red and already bluing beneath the eyes. I palmed his face, pulling it close to mine and spat near his nose. I thought about the girl. I thought about the gash on my back. I wondered what Ms. Lunsford would think. I imagined how Lucca felt before he died. I thought about the knife. I was glad I had left it on the sink.

My nudity apparent, I stood and covered myself with my broken hand, and without looking directly at Mrs. Walter I said, “He’s not good for Nathan.” 

I proceeded to make the slow crawl back to my room, leaving red behind in the snow. I sat near the window and watched the motel’s guests help up Mr. Walter. Mrs. Walter was already gone. I imagined her going up the field and back to Nathan. I hoped he was somewhere else. The scene in the motel’s lot was inaudible but he seemed to shake away any and all of the people’s inquiries. I hoped the cops wouldn’t be called, even if it was to conceal Mr. Walter’s shame. Though it was unlikely legal action was to take place, it was over for me in Corydon, everyone would find out some way. It was only a matter of time through heresy that the incident would become a series of atrocities. A town like that has its own ways of imprisonment and punishment. Even if Mr. Walter was stricken down with me, I was done for in Corydon. I’d be shunned as Ms. Lunsford had been. I had already seen what it could do to somebody and wanted no part of it. It was time to go. I let a few hours drip by as I collected my things. Soon I snuck outside, leaving the opposite way of the girl’s room. 

 

The closest thing I ever had to a brother was a stray cat Dad once brought home after finding him sulking through The Parlor’s pisser. There isn’t much to remember about him. He only lasted two weeks and spent most of the time in the lawn before Dad clipped him coming home late one night. I don’t remember much else besides finding little blood spots of his all throughout the house but not him. Dad told me that he hit him drunk, he told me the truth. He told me that cats go away to die. That it’s a noble thing. He kept saying how brave the cat was to die away from us like that. It was the closest he’d come to admitting guilt or regret. Dad must’ve eventually found the body because soon the blood spots stopped coming up.

I found the same sort of blood spots years later when Lucca was on his way out. They were everywhere. Them and the balls of thick hair blowing through the house like tumbleweeds. That was all I needed to know that he was doing the noble thing, dying away from me, sparing me. This was grace, I thought. After I found the body I wrote a long letter to Ms. Lunsford. It detailed the thing about grace and the story of my father’s stray cat, along with a few other stories she never knew—things I’d never said. It was a long letter that jumped around, disregarding chronology entirely. It was the most I’d done to figuring things out the way she asked me to the day she left. I addressed the letter to her parent’s place in Florida. I never sent it.

The letter was still somewhere in the house, unless Nathan had tossed it or had found it and brought to me—well, if that was the case it was in the dump. Regardless, there was a day left before they’d tear it down, and maybe I could find the letter, and maybe I could send it. 

I sped down the road canopied by fruitless trees as Suzie’s Bed Stay fell away to the slight curve of the Earth, heading towards the house. With the windows down cold air whipped about the car, clearing out Lucca’s stench. The cat, dead on the backseat, had it good, I thought. He’d lived as long as he could and died. That’s having it good. That’s having grace. 

As I turned onto Franklin St. I saw Nathan coming down the right of the road. He was carrying a backpack with his head down and didn’t notice as I rolled up next to him. Along with the cut eyebrow, his yellowed-eye had been re-bruised. 

“Nathan, listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of it.”

His head shot up, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Well, is it true?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is my dad fucking Rose?”

“Shit, Nathan, no, he isn’t.”

“But is it him? Was it him next door?”

“Yes.”

His lips drew tight, receding into his teeth. His eyes shut, his head lifting up towards the sky, he said, “He isn’t supposed to be the bad one.”

“No one’s dad is,” I said.

“You don’t get it.”

The boy and me in my car were dead in the middle of a thin road in a town that barely a thousandth of a single percent of the country could recognize by name—a town that was soon to be swallowed by companies—a town and road easily collapsible, easily replaceable and both could be found in the ass of any state with enough dirt to fool some folk into thinking you can make a decent life out of soil. We could’ve been anybody on any road in a town like that. It seemed silly to care so much for a boy who could’ve been many. But honest to God I would’ve rearranged the whole damned world around him if it would’ve made any of it any easier. 

“The truth is my dad never beat me. Not once. But that doesn’t mean he’s a good guy,” I said. “Do you understand?”

“My dad never beat me either.”

Nathan started to walk away but I drove idly alongside him.

“Do you need a ride?” I asked, not wanting to ask if he knew what’d happened.

“No, I’m heading home.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a lift?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Where you coming from?”

“School.”

“I didn’t know they did school on Sunday.”

“It’s Monday,” he said.

My stomach jackknifed itself. It was too late, I thought. Monday was the day they were tearing the house down. It was over. My face was wet. I wiped it away with my backhand.

“Are you sure I can’t take you home?” I asked.

“I’m certain.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m afraid of you.”

As I drove I didn’t bother to watch him blend into the horizon. I knew he’d soon be gone. I went along the road, wishing, wishing I’d lied to him. 

I drove past The Parlor, St. John’s Church, the duplex I lived with my father in, Tarpon Park two grocers, homes of friends I had in middle school. I made circles around neighborhoods and parks that I’d once known and frequented and even made passing detours to places that I’d only ever driven by that weren’t anything special to me—set pieces of a staged backdrop of a former life. The only thing each building and place had in common with the next was that each was completely their own, each containing its own identity and lives, utterly different from the next. I made laps of Corydon to say goodbye, to swell myself with memories and let them go as they came. I won’t deviate into the places I receded to within my mind that afternoon, there’s need for it—that would put a knife to a scar, but I did understand a little better why cats go away to die, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with grace.

My back stung pressed against the driver’s seat. I tried sitting a little away from it. I imagined blood spidering out from the cut, soaking my shirt.

 

When I’d still thought it was Sunday I had supposed I would bury Lucca in the fields around my house. The Earth was not short of dirt to bury a cat. I had fantasized that I would stand at the center of the field, facing my tombstone grey house, and survey the land around it. The trees at the edge of the plain were snowing their browning leaves and the yellow and golden heads of more trees carried beyond the initial wall. The sky was impossibly blue and yet without an ocean for miles. The longer grass swayed and bellowed at gusts of wind, a night-vision green field moving and flittering at once. The house, soon no longer to be my home, sat in the middle of this small world. I imagined this and thought it’d be okay for them the take this home once Lucca was returned to the soil on which it stood, but in reality they’d already taken the house. In reality all it probably took for them to do it was two swipes of a wrecking ball and three goes with a bulldozer. In reality the only present likeness of my home’s demolition to a funeral was the cement and brick dotted about the gravesite—a house scattered in rubble, now remnants of a past life.

 

Pulling into the Walmart’s over-expansive parking lot, I reckoned there were more spots than cars in Corydon to fill them. There weren’t any protestors, nor any patrons’ cars. I sometimes wondered how they managed to survive in a place like that, but they had and they did.

I used to joke with Ms. Lunsford that we could’ve been anywhere in the country while shopping in that Walmart. It’s all the same, I’d say. Her rebuttal was insisting that we were there and that’s why we couldn’t be just anyone anywhere, because we were there. We couldn’t hold hands, or at least knew not to in public, but she smiled in a way that let me know she didn’t mind being there, exactly where we were. As I walked into the Walmart, I couldn’t decide who was more wrong, or if either of us were wrong at all.

I nabbed a gallon of water, a few ready-wrapped sandwiches, bandages, a map of America and a shovel. I pushed my cart through the aisles at random, sometimes repeating ones in which I had already been, and let myself leisurely come through the maze until I was spat out into a row of registers. Mr. Dungan wasn’t manning any of them. I picked the one with the longest line but the prettiest girl. She chewed gum and sucked and snapped bubbles as she swiped through my purchases. She looked nothing like the girl at the motel or Rose. She didn’t remind me of Ms. Lunsford, I wasn’t sure if anyone ever would again. The cashier had a little nose and rounded cheeks and wore glasses and had a tattoo of vines or tentacles crawling up her neck. The skin around her fingers was chewed raw. I wouldn’t have thought her a day over eighteen, yet here she was working on a school day with a tattoo that seemed to choke her. She was young enough to be the daughter of a man like Mr. Dungan, too young to drink, too young to have made too many bad decisions, too young to be really held accountable for anything by the world, and yet old enough to be hurt or disappointed by it. She lived a small life like all of us, and yet here the two of us were, at some sort of crossing of paths. The world moved around us in many directions, none of which cared about our particular cross over. 

She rung me up at $36.46. She told me to swipe my card.

“It says it’s declined,” she said.

“Could you try again? . . . Try again, please . . . Can you run it as credit? . . .  Could you try it again . . . Try again . . . Try again . . . No, try it again . . . Try again . . . Try again.”