The Shaft (6 page)

    
Just Jonathan. Hey you, shithead. Yeah, you.

    He thought now that everyone possessed another name, an alternate face. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the flip side of a person you thought you knew five-by-five. Sometimes it wasn't pretty. Some people spent lifetimes not seeing the ugliest aspects of those closest to them.

    Bash was talking about beer, deftly manhandling the truck's stick shift and correcting whenever they began to hydroplane or slide ass-backwards in the slush. Jonathan hung on.

    '… how you say, interesting local breweries close by the city. That's the single aspect of provincialism I enjoy. Regional beer. Can't wait to introduce you to Quietly.'

    'Who's she?'

    'No. Quietly Beer.' Bash was a good comedian; he paused to let it sink in.

    'Quietly Beer.' Jonathan couldn't stop his face from breaking an honest smile. It felt unfamiliar. It almost hurt. 'Quietly Beer?'

    'Absurd, ain't it?' Bash was grinning like a talkshow comic. 'You haven't let Jesus into your heart, or anything dumb like that, since the last time I saw you. Have you?'

    'No. I like beer fine.'

    It was wine Jonathan could not bring himself to drink any. more. He had invested the last parts of his twenties in carefully cultivating a casual taste for basic wines. He enjoyed knowing what to order when restaurants did not have his first choice. No longer, not now. He did not drink wine anymore because…

    'Gotta give you the skinny on Quietly Beer,' Bash was saying. 'You'll laugh till you cough up a lung.'

    Jonathan nodded. The smile set on his visage like drying cement. The smooth, velvet undertow of memory dragged him under and tried to drown him one more time. It had made him weep on the bus, and locked his throat shut just now.

    Jonathan did not drink wine anymore because…

    

    

    It was one of their last Dinners from Hell, and it was going badly. Too many ossified silences.

    Jonathan thought you could always tell married couples in restaurants. They're the ones not talking to each other, paying more attention to their plates than their partner's eyes. Ditto for established relationships - the ones heading at high speed for the septic tank of spoiled human emotions.

    This goddamn meal will cost fifty bucks, exclusive of tip, Jonathan thought, and Amanda has got her brat knob turned up full crank. She doesn't care. And neither of us can taste the food.

    Tonight Amanda ran her full menu: She was getting old. She was getting fat, wasn't she? She wasn't making enough money. Jonathan didn't care that her job in home mortgages was not paying enough and never would. Jonathan didn't care about anything but Jonathan. Nobody had ever truly fallen in love with her, her alone. Nobody ever would. She was closing fast on thirty and had not yet reproduced. If Jonathan cared he would have done something by now. She hated her entire fucking life.

    And -
oh yes
- Jonathan didn't really care. Did he?

    At which point he was supposed to protest that yes, he gave a damn. Several damns. His concern had ruined his meal.

    But she cut him off, certain he cared not at all, and by the by, I've been thinking a lot about suicide lately.

    Forever unspoken, her accusation was that she was nailed to a cross she loathed, and Jonathan was the guy holding the hammer and spikes. Amanda despised culpability, even for her own lot in life.

    He knew what was coming out of her mouth next.

    'You don't want to hear this shit, Jonathan. Why don't you just tell me to fuck off?'

    Too goddamn easy. It was exactly what she wanted. If she could goad him into saying those words, then he could be blamed for terminating their relationship. One more little death. Amanda's view of a hostile and destroying world devoted to crushing her would be reinforced another degree if she could successfully drive someone as tolerant as Jonathan to the boiling point of rage.

    Amanda was an on-off smoker, a knuckle popper. She picked at scabs until they bled anew.

    Jonathan would never give her the satisfaction of easy rage. Allowing her to piss him off would not solve any of their problems. He told her this.

    'Oh, great. So you're saying that I'd be happy if I could make somebody who cares about me give up. Terrific.'

    His hands vised shut on air. It was like trying to build a computer from ectoplasm. Or fuck tears.

    
No,
he told her. But it seemed as if she could only be fulfilled if life was as miserable as she persisted in believing it was. She nurtured her unhappiness because it was familiar turf, and bitching was easier than actually doing something, taking action. He expected her to snap back with the usual rejoinder:
Never mind, Jonathan; it's no big deal, right? You don't care, you don't understand and you never will.

    Instead, she tossed half a glass of white Bordeaux in his face. Maybe she had been watching too many movies that week. A bit of televisual melodrama.

    He spluttered while she stomped out. Ambient conversation in the restaurant switched instantly off.

    The atonic white wine seeped past his eyelids with a disinfectant sting. He heard Amanda walk away while his eyes flooded. Everyone was looking, all right. Somewhere behind him he heard a laugh, abrupt and feminine. Then came hushed whispers. None sounded sympathetic.

    He had not let Amanda's party line gnaw at him.
Congratulations. You won. Big fucking deal
.

    He mopped his face. Their waiter brought a fresh napkin. Jonathan ordered a cappuccino. Maybe he could sit here until all the witnesses finished their meals and went home. Five minutes later he was drier and no longer blushing. The cappuccino tasted like barium. He overtipped.

    He walked all the way home, fifty minutes of putting one foot in front of the other, thinking, then brooding, then fuming.

    When he used his keys to unlock the deadbolts he found the security chain latch engaged. He smiled to himself. Then he kicked the door brutally just to the right of the knob, snapping the chain and tearing the screws from the lintel like pimentos blowing free of a thrown hors d'oeuvre.

    She would be expecting him to tarry guiltily by the bedroom door. They could exchange more meaningful silences, more useless apologies, and proceed with the erosion of their lives. One more day paid up in pain and wear.

    Jonathan did not stop at the threshold.

    He grabbed her by the throat, gripping her neck with the same familiarity her pussy had enclosed his cock. He was remembering a time when, dinner completed, they would be making love by now, laughing, wrestling, sharing. She thrashed and made a noise but he was stronger and she was badly positioned.

    Then her frightened eyes saw what was in his hand. He had brought it from the kitchen.

    He had never struck Amanda and did not strike her now. She yelled for him to take his hands off. Then she focused on the weird light in his eyes and shut up for her own good, like a trapped cat resigned to an oncoming beating.

    Jonathan knew what she was thinking:
Go ahead. Do your worst. You'll pay later. In guilt.

    Almost perfunctorily, he asked her just who the hell she thought she was. Holding her tight to the pillows by the throat, he emptied a one and a half liter jug of Rhine wine, ice cold, all over her. It gushed from the bottle, foaming from her mouth and nostrils and soaking her hair.

    Amanda tried to scream.

    This was what it had finally come to. Making her feel pain in response to the tiny agonies she thoughtlessly manufactured and dispatched to sting him every time they spoke. She did it automatically, almost without malice. Jonathan's response, now, was automatic in the same way. Robotic. Almost inhuman. Someone else was at work here, using Jonathan's skin as an envelope.

    He made her hurt because he could no longer make her feel pleasure. Any emotional response was better than the arid vacuum of stress and the slow poison of their decomposing love.

    She sucked huge, husking breath in watery gulps, sobbing and quivering on the bed. Jonathan left the wine jug on the dresser intentionally. She would be forced to touch the awful thing, feel the memories of her humiliation, if only to start the jug's journey to the trash dumpster.

    He had lost control at last. No doubts here. A big door had slammed and now they were on opposite sides of it. It was time to leave. Only an imbecile - or an even bigger masochist -would have needed a brighter GO light.

    In concept, his act was dazzling. Never again would Amanda be able to look at a bottle of vino without remembering what she had brought down upon herself. But the effect had reversed on Jonathan unexpectedly. Now wine would remind him endlessly of what he had done to her.

    Beer reminded him he was no longer drinking wine.

    

    

    '… maybe a third of the suburbs to the east and south of Chicago are what they call dry townships, can you swallow that? One place you can buy liquor; two blocks away it's against the law. The local heat has beefed up the open container violations, all that kinda horse piss. The public issue is 'decency.' The bottom line is cash flow. Y'know - guilt, wrongness is the stalking horse. The paper tiger. What they've really got big boners for is-'

    'Tribute,' said Jonathan. His throat had unlocked. 'Your money in their pockets.'

    'Rightee-o, Felix. But I'd never seen a dry township until I landed in this corner of the world.'

    'What do they have instead? You don't have bars and liquor stores, what do you fill all those empty lots with?'

    'Churches, my man. Loads of God condos. Come Sunday you'll think you're celled up in a Pavlov ward, for all the ringing bells you'll suffer. Enough to drive you straight into the embrace of the demon alcohol.'

    'Which you have to sortie out of the dry township to buy, yes?'

    Bash grinned. Jonathan had rarely seen individual teeth so large. 'Now you're getting some notion of how this place functions, my son.' He stomped brakes and skidded to avoid a darting mongrel. Wet, ragged, freezing and starved, the dog shot a look of feverish panic toward the truck that reminded Jonathan of the wino in the bus depot. Maybe this was the bum's lost mutt. Dogs often assumed the traits of their masters

    
There you go again. Running.

    He had not mentioned Amanda to Bash yet. He could predict Bash's feelings on the topic:
You enjoy eating that brand of cow patties,
he'd say.
Good old Jonathan softens up and goes no, you're not being a bitch, darling,
Bash would say.
You fall for it every goddamn time,
he'd say. Then he would yell that he gave up doing guilt a long time ago.
Guilt doesn't exist,
he'd say.
It costs too bloody much and you never have anything to show for it,
he'd say.

    Not mentioning Amanda was another kind of flight. Running away could be a cleansing, declarative Act. Also cowardly - a child's response to a grownup problem.

    Vehicles wallowing in snowbound lanes honked in the night. Water diffused the passing streetlamps into bold splashes of primary color.

    Without noticing, Jonathan had begun rubbing his palms heavily along the legs of his pants.
Out, damned guilt
. His feet were roasting inside of his Justin boots as Bash's heater blasted.

    The streets that ambled past the truck windows were dark, icy, sinister. The truck thrummed, wipers squeaking. Bash kept eyes front.

    Jonathan cleared his throat, which seemed coated with a double scoop of thick gunk. 'So. Anyway. What do they call a district where you can buy liquor legally? A wet township?'

    'Ho, ho, ho. I can see you're really gonna love it here. Near as I can reckon, the newspapers call them 'depressed neighborhoods.' They roll over to Division Street and shoot tape of derelicts whenever they need to emphasize our civic need to contravene urban decay.'

    'Downscale?'

    'Strictly.' Bash rubbed his lip with his index finger, as though miming brushing his teeth. 'You know that when winos freeze to death they turn black? No matter what color they were when they were alive. Weird. Like bones in an archeological dig. Spring thaw always unmelts a hundred or so every year - sterno and ethanol drinkers who sat down on a curb or a bus stop bench and got covered up by snowfall. When the snow goes away, you see loose clothing washing along the gutters when the sewers overflow. Some of 'em just melt right out of the clothes they were wearing.'

    A glance in any direction confirmed that the snow here could bury or erase nearly anything. Jonathan saw featureless dunes of hard-packed snow, weeks old, with car bumpers sticking out. Sometimes the snow lifted the automobile from the street, like a glacier on the rise. It was simple to envision corpses, heatlessly entombed beneath the unyielding drifts of white.

    In the surface streets, gray slush. Black ice. Oil-slick colored frozen puddles, and the waffled grain of a thousand thick-treaded tires. Fangs of snaggletoothed icicles depended thickly from every eave, dripping venomously tinted water. They fattened like stalactites, broke free and plummeted to the ground to assimilate into the frozen Arctic topography, to evaporate and rise into the filthy air. To condense again into new icicles.

    'How the hell do you live in this?' said Jonathan.

    'Stay indoors. Drink a lot.' Bash negotiated the first of several narrow turns. 'It's really odd to watch the locals when snow season starts. They try to pretend nothing important has changed. They're determined. And they go sliding around in their bigass cars and crashing into each other at intersections, and the expressions on their faces never changes. Like this is all some act of God and it's not their station to comprehend.'