Keepers (22 page)

“Help you with something, pal?” said Louis. There was no smirk on his face but
God
! was it there in his voice.

“I don’t know,” I replied, looking at Beth, “can you? I seem to be a little lost.”

Her expression did not change.

Louis smiled at Beth, kissed her, then turned around to face me, taking one of her hands in his as he did: Mr. Nice-Guy About to Help to the Poor Lost Schlub and impress his new girl with the depth of his humanity. “Where are you going?” His voice sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t place it.

I looked at Beth. For a moment I saw something flicker across her eyes—embarrassment? guilt? regret?—then she gave a smile and a short, too-girlish laugh, shrugged, squeezed Louis’s hand, and leaned the side of her head against his shoulder:
My Hero
.

It never ceases to amaze me how the heart makes no sound at all when it shatters.

“Hey, you got a problem, buddy?” Yeah, definitely familiar, that voice, but I suddenly couldn’t give less of a shit about figuring out from where.

I looked at Louis, at his smug, chiseled face and all the self-satisfied arrogance that made his features so pretty, and recognized him instantly: he was every “cool” guy in school who always got the girl, who always scored the winning touchdown, who always got invited to the big parties, and who felt compelled to re-affirm his manliness among his buddies by picking on the skinny geek with glasses who wore mismatched plaid shirts and pants because they were hand-me-downs and hand-me-downs were all his family could afford; he was every goddamned egotistical jock and rich smartass whose family’s position in the community guaranteed him the best clothes, the best schools, the best jobs, everything that most people work their whole lives to achieve but almost never see, so they instead mop floors and assemble cables and haul trash and operate punch-presses that someday will cut them in half and leave them bleeding and dying on the factory floor as the last thing that passes through their mind is an endless list of regrets that jerks like Mr. Chiseled will never know or understand because everything has been handed to them since the moment they took in their first privileged breath and what isn’t handed to them they just take because, well, they’re Special and always have been and the Special deserve to have anything they want, and who cares if it hurts one of those non-persons who mop their floors and haul their trash and get migraine headaches from assembling the ATM machines the Special use to grab some quick cash because they’ve got it to grab and—

—suddenly I had blood on my knuckles and he was sliding down the doors with a nose that looked like a peeled tomato and Beth was shrieking and crying as she knelt beside him and the world surrounding me was colored in crimson.

I took a deep breath and stepped back, wiping the blood on the side of my jeans.

Beth helped Louis fumble a handkerchief—embroidered with his initials, no less—from his pocket to staunch the flow of blood, then shot me a glare that could have frozen fire.

“That was beneath you.”

“Is
he
why you’re always so tired? Have you really been running late every night or do you go over to his place to
rehearse
?”

“Stop it.”

“
Fuck you, you lying whore
!
”
It was the roar of some dark woodland beast, not my voice at all, I didn’t sound like this, I didn’t say things like that, I didn’t draw back my fist again and actually started to swing down at her and stop myself before it got too far, that couldn’t have been me.

The fear in her eyes was more than enough. I didn’t want to hurt her—I wanted to scare her. She’d just broken my fucking heart and destroyed the only happy corner of the sky I’d known, and she had to pay for that. So the fear on her face made me smile, then laugh. I was still laughing as I walked back to my car.

She called out my name and rose to her feet as I closed the door and started the engine. I rolled down the window, put the car in gear, shouted something abysmal at her, and then drove away. I went home, grabbed a cardboard box from the garage, went to my room, and began tossing in anything and everything that either came from or reminded me of her: records and books I’d borrowed, things we’d listened to together or read to one another, a half-empty pack of menthol cigarettes she’d left here, odds and ends, this and that, a pair of crescent-shaped earrings I’d planned on giving her on opening night, the empty condom packets as well as the ones we didn’t use that I’d saved after our first time together, and, finally, the most wonderful Valentine’s Day card in the world:
Just wait until you’re legal
! I crammed all of it into the box, folded closed the lid, and threw it on the passenger seat of my car. I would not let myself stop because I was crying, crying was for weaker men, for losers and four-eyed skinny geeks who’d never fall so deeply in love with a girl that they couldn’t breathe right unless she was in the room with them.

I drove back to the theatre. No one was there but I hadn’t expected there to be. I was looking for the U-Boat.

And there it was, sitting five car spaces down from the front of the theatre. So they’d taken his car. Probably to the hospital to get him patched up. She was probably fussing over him right now as they sat in the emergency room. I wondered if she’d fuck him later or if
he’d
be too tired. I wondered if he’d seen the house yet and met the remaining Its—somehow the image of him petting and holding the animals hurt just as much as the image of Beth screaming into a pillow as he fucked her in the ass—and if you had sex with Beth, you eventually gave it to her from behind; it drove her wild and made her come like gangbusters every time because she thought there was something so “wonderfully
dirty
” about it.

I grabbed the box and marched to the station wagon. She’d locked it up before leaving, but I had an extra set of keys she’d given to me to hold Just In Case. I unlocked the car and tossed the box down onto the driver’s seat, shut and locked the doors, kicked at her tires as if they’d been part of the conspiracy, and threw the keys down a nearby sewer.

I thought about staying right there so I could see her face when they drove back to get her car, then it occurred to me they’d probably leave it here for the night and she’d get it after tomorrow’s rehearsal. After they’d gotten a good night’s sleep. After she’d screamed into one of his pillows as she came.

I once saw a bad martial-arts fantasy film where the hero encountered a man who was soaking his naked body in a barrel of oil; when the hero asked this man why he was doing this, the man—I think he was played be Eli Wallach—said something like: “So that thing between my legs will shrivel into a useless flap of nothing and my testicles will shrink into worthless wrinkled prunes.”

“Why do you want to do that?” asked the hero.

“Because that thing between your legs has a mind of its own, and that mind prevents you from being reasonable. Wars, murders, jealousy, sadness, heartbreak, you name the affliction—it was in some way caused by the mind of...
that thing
. You can’t just take a sword and hack off the whole package, oh, no—if you kill it too quickly it leaves
ideas
in your system, ideas that will eventually find their way to your brain. It has to be killed slowly, so that it doesn’t think to leave its ideas behind. Lose it, and not only will you never know rage again, you’ll be a reasonable man who knows that rage has always been useless.”

I had never been with any woman except Beth, and at that moment I didn’t care if I was ever with a woman again. I felt dirty and stupid and used and broken and small and betrayed. I felt like a slimy little toad. I felt like stripping down to my birthday suit and climbing into a barrel of Quaker State and squatting there until my nuts were the size of raisins. The summer night stank of lies and exhaust and dried ratty lawns and loneliness and dirty secret little passions spent between sex-moistened sheets. Probably
designer
sheets.

Someone down the street was playing “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.” Neil Diamond was crooning on about a hot August night. Usually I was a big fan of his. A bird flew overhead and shit on the roof of my car. I wanted to find Neil Diamond and string him up by his ankles and beat him in the belly with an aluminum baseball bat until his piss ran red.

Afterward, I drove downtown and walked around the square. It was close to one in the morning and what few people I passed were either drunks coming out of bars or homeless people heading to or from the open shelter. We’d look at one another a moment, animated collections of carbon looking for some sign of common humanity in the eyes and, not finding any, moving on. I stopped at Barney’s Saloon and drank however many beers I had the money for, listened to some old songs on the jukebox, and basically did the whole self-pity routine that the newly broken-hearted man is required to perform. I morbidly dwelled on my childhood memories of being a poor, blue-collar, crooked-toothed, skinny, four-eyed dweeb who tried to survive in a town that embraced a man only if he were a White, Athletic, Semi-Articulate, Beer-Drinking Poon-Tang Wrangler who drove a pickup with at least one hunting rifle displayed in the back window; I had qualified only in the first of these prerequisites, and so what friends I’d had were always temporary and transient, kids who were waiting for one of the “cool” people to acknowledge and accept them; then it was
so long, dweeb
and I’d go back to reading my scary comic books (Cousin Eerie and Uncle Creepy were my favorite relatives), listening to my records (I’d always fancied myself being the inspiration for Steppenwolf’s “Jupiter’s Child,” even if they didn’t know it), and dreaming my dreams of Being Somebody Important Someday, Somebody who’d win the Girl of His Dreams and know he was a Worthwhile Person, Somebody whose story would be remembered and repeated often because it was Unique...only after a few beers you begin to realize that you’ve never actually had a plan for going from dweeb to Somebody Important, you’d just been skipping ahead to the happy ending in hopes that, if you envisioned it clearly enough, it would all be waiting for you once the last call mug was drained and you stepped out the door.

I wallowed in this long enough to disgust even myself and left my last call beer unfinished.

I took a small detour back to my car and found myself in front of the Auditorium—make that the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building. I peered through the glass doors into the lobby and wondered if the ghosts of all those old Vaudevillians whose names decorated the wall under the stage still wandered the aisles in there, hoping that Somebody Important would remember them and the laughter they gave, the songs they sang, the fantastic feats they performed: were Russell’s New Comedians still refining their routines, was Houdini planning yet another death-defying escape, did The Three Keatons know that Little Buster’s next performance was going to stop the show? I would have told Whitey about this visit if I’d known where he was.

I started to weep as only sullen, self-pitying drunks can weep and felt embarrassed even though I was alone. I took several alleys on the way back to my car, and drove home by way of back streets the police don’t check.

In the kitchen I put Mom’s morning medications in their compartment and went to bed, where I lay weeping for another hour or so before there was a soft knock on my door and Mom stuck her head inside.

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said in the same clipped, melodramatic way we’ve all said it when we’re upset and don’t want to say
Everything is awful and I just want to die so leave me the hell alone, please
.

She held closed the collar of her tattered blue housecoat as she looked out in the hall toward the stairs. “Well, try to keep it down, will you? Your dad will be upset something terrible if he comes home and finds you this way.”

I stared at her; she stood silhouetted in the doorway like some wisp of dream that lingers in the eyes for a moment upon waking. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize, hon, it’s all right. We just don’t want to upset him. He works so hard.”

“I know.”

She started to close the door, then said: “Is it time for my medicine?”

“Not yet, you take it in the morning.”

“Well, it
is
the morning. It’s after four.”

I looked at the clock and saw that she was right. “Go back to bed, Mom. Take it when you get up again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good boy, you know that?”

Just not good enough
, I thought. God save us from the mawkishness at the bottom of beer glasses. “Thanks, Mom.”

She looked at me for a few more moments, and then closed the door.

After another half-hour I got up and put on my headphones and listened to records until a little after eight-thirty. The songs—some of them were old even back then—wove a curious kind of safety cocoon; this one came out when I was in sixth grade; this one was playing the first time I told so-and-so that I liked her in the eighth grade and she didn’t laugh at me—didn’t
kiss
me, either, but at least didn’t laugh; and this one, this one I always listened to by myself because it struck at something deep inside myself that I didn’t want anyone else to know about because they might make fun of it or find a way to use it against me when they were mad or just feeling mean and needed to take it out on someone.

Around nine I took off the headphones and called the Cedar Hill Healthcare Center, asking to speak to someone in Admissions. As soon as they answered I gave them the same bullshit story about being Marty Weis’s nephew and how I’d tried to visit him last night, cha-cha-cha. It wasn’t hard to sound scared and confused.

“Mr. Weis is no longer with us,” said the Admissions person.

“I
know
that, ma’am, I was just wondering if you could tell me where he’s gone.”

“Mr. Weis was checked out of our facility two days ago.”
Was checked out
, not
Checked himself out
.