You Only Get Letters from Jail (2 page)

I was immediately disappointed.

I had wanted the stuff of movies and TV, the mountain bar, the big men with shaggy beards and leather vests and a band playing loose and loud and a barefoot lead singer and a sea of hats bobbing in time to the kick. I wanted a fight in progress, breaking glass, splintered pool cues, and a lot of ducking punches.

But there was no band, and the men at the bar were old and thick and slow, and what few women I saw didn't look as if they were in much need of having their honor defended. Phillip seemed as disappointed as I was, but he got over it faster and went up to a break in the barstools and leaned in far enough to get the bartender's attention. Phillip was six months older, four inches taller, and thirty pounds heavier, with shoulders built for the football he thought he might someday play. I watched his mouth move with no sound, and the bartender adjusted his greasy baseball hat and Phillip pulled money from his pocket, and two bottles of Budweiser were uncapped and set down in front of him and that was that. No emergency, no joke, no
get the fuck out of here
, no bouncer gripping our collars and
tossing us to the gravel outside. Phillip brought me a bottle, and I swallowed as much as my mouth could hold, and it was over. I had my first drink in a bar.

We found a table in the corner near the jukebox and we both pushed up a chair and I sat back and surveyed the room.

“I didn't know what beer to get,” Phillip said. “I thought I was going to blow it. The guy said, what can I get you, and my mind went blank and I panicked for a second. Then it just came to me. Budweiser. Thank God for all of the fucking commercials.”

Phillip raised his bottle in the gesture of a toast and for a second I was afraid he was going to do it, drink to my mother or say her name or tell me how sorry he was about what had happened, and I braced myself, already uncomfortable and hating him a little bit for doing it now, like this and here, but instead he just held the bottle up by the neck, squinted at the label, and set it back down again. I drank as fast as I could, and hoped that the sooner the bottle was out of my hand, the less chance there would be for Phillip to make that toast and ruin everything. If he said one thing, even put her name in his mouth, I was afraid that I would drop my face to the table and press it to the sticky residue of the last beer that had been spilled and I would not be able to sit up again. It wasn't exactly because I was sad, but maybe just because I had a feeling that even with my mother dead, there would not be a noticeable difference between the then and the now.

“You mind if we sit with you guys?”

I looked up and there were two women standing next to our table, both of them with beers in each hand, and then Phillip nodded and raised his eyebrows in a silent expression of
why the hell not
, and they reached for chairs and moved in next to us, one beside Phillip and the other beside me, and they each put a bottle in front of them and slid the second bottles toward us, and it took me a few seconds to realize that they had bought us beers. When they were settled in and drinking, they both leaned toward us and asked our names, so we went around the table—Veronica, Phillip, me, and Candy.

Candy leaned closer toward me, and I met her halfway. She asked me what I did for a living and I said that I worked construction, and she thought that was pretty great. I had never worked construction, but I had always been fascinated with the guys who did, with their ragged T-shirts and tank tops and tattoos and dark tans from working in the sun, muscular and dirty and smoking and blasting hard music over the sound of their hammers. Maybe I would work construction if I could.

Candy told me that she waited tables in Battle Creek, but she wanted to move to Humboldt and go to school, but she was getting older and there never seemed to be the chance to go. Veronica was her best friend, and they worked together, and Veronica had a two-year-old daughter whose name I did not catch. After a while, Candy got up and put some money in the jukebox, and after she sat back down the music changed to the Eagles and Candy clapped her hands. “I really love this song,” she said. I could picture the
album cover in my mind, one from the milk crate by the old stereo in the living room, eagle wings spread over a desert at sunrise or sunset, blue sky fading to white over a yellow band, and not a lick of a hint to give away whether or not the day is looking to start or finish. I had stared at that album cover half of my life, looking for a sign.

Candy and Veronica liked to drink, and they weren't tight with their money, and the drinking led to talking and the conversation was as easily got as the bottles lining up in front of us. Candy had an open face and a wide smile, and when she laughed she had a tendency to bring one hand up and cover her mouth and look away.

The beer eventually got the best of me and when I got up to find the bathroom, Phillip slid his chair back so he could get past Veronica. I waited for him to follow me down the narrow hall, but he lingered at the table, so I kept walking until the smell of bleach and piss and mildew directed me to the right door and I pushed inside and was amazed at just how steady I could be on my feet.

I was pissing in a brown-stained urinal when Phillip came in. “This is the best time,” he said. He looked at his reflection in the mirror and let the water run in the sink so that he could wet his fingertips and smooth down the front of his hair. We had been friends for five years, and he knew more things than I wanted him to; he had been around when there had been a steady ride from bad to worse, and sometimes I resented him for that, for the easy way that he could move in and out of my house and my life and stay only long enough to stand witness to some
kind of shit going down and maybe eat some of the food out of the cupboards, or an order of takeout, and then he would walk back home to his leather-furniture two-parent slice of existence, and I was the one who had to stay behind and live what he only had to look at.

“I'm a little wasted,” he said. Someone had written
asshole
on the wall with one s. Part of me wanted to find a pen somewhere and correct it. “What do you think of the girls?” Phillip said.

I turned on the sink and washed my hands. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the dark circles under my eyes, and my skin had a shine that I had never seen before. “They're nice,” I said.

“You like that Candy?”

I shrugged.

“You don't want to trade, do you?”

The water got hot, fast, and I let it run so that it blasted the porcelain and the steam rose toward the mirror. “What do you mean?”

“You know, when we get back to the table, I can swap sides with you if you want. Sit next to Candy. You can take Veronica.” Phillip pumped some soap into his cupped hand and lathered up. The soap was a weak green color that looked toxic. “I mean, I'd rather keep Veronica, if it's cool with you, but I figure, hey, your mom just died . . .” He paused for a second. “I mean, you should at least get first choice, you know?” He let the hot water hit his hands and jerked them back so hard that his fingers hit the edge of the sink. “That's fucking burning.”

I thought about Christy calling for me, yesterday? The day before? Time had turned soft and minutes and hours felt stretched and pulled. I was no longer sure if it was Thursday or Sunday or if it had just been five minutes ago that Christy had called to me, Roy, come here and there had been no sense of emergency or fear, just a voice even as blacktop, come here, and we had done what we had done so many times before out of habit, the rolling and the looking at what we would find, only this time it was different, more than different, less than different. Maybe this was what indifferent really meant. And then we had been running hot water, so much so that the steam banked against the wall, taking turns soaking towels and cleaning up. There just seemed like so much to clean.

Phillip pulled a couple of stiff paper towels out of the dispenser and rubbed his hands dry. “I mean, they're about equal. Veronica's got the bad skin and mustache, but Candy's a good deuce, so I think it all balances out.” He wadded up the paper towels, threw them toward the trash can, and missed. He did not pick them up and try again. “You don't mind a fat girl, do you?”

The room was hot and small and there was still steam in the air, and in my mind I could see Candy laughing with one dimpled hand hovering over her top lip.

“She's nice,” I said.

“Yeah, she's great. She's funny, et cetera. It's like that fat girl joke—Hey, why is fucking a fat girl like riding a moped? Because they're fun to ride, but you don't want your friends to see you on one.” Phillip laughed and slapped
me on the shoulder. I stumbled forward. “But you know I don't care.”

Phillip looked in the mirror and smoothed his hair again. “I would settle for a blow job from Veronica. I wouldn't say no to that,” he said.

I didn't say anything. I noticed that the floor was cement and there was a drain in the center and everything seemed to slope toward it, but I was drunk, so I wasn't sure.

Phillip scooped some water into his mouth, rinsed, and spit it back into the sink. He squinted one eye closed and picked at a dry whitehead high on his cheek. “If it's all right with you, I want to keep Veronica. I mean, no offense, but I can close my eyes and she'll feel just fine. Fat girls don't work that way.”

When we got back to the table, there were more beers and the jukebox was stuck on the Eagles, and judging by the stack of quarters on the table in front of Candy, it would be for a while. The crowd in the bar had thinned and emptied, but when I looked at my watch it was blank-faced and I couldn't read it in the dim light.

“Hey, you know what? Roy's grandparents were Nazis.” Phillip leaned back and took a drink from his beer and put an arm around Veronica. “I'm not even kidding. Tell them. Tell them about that time you found the swastika armbands and all that shit in your grandpa's closet.”

It was something I thought I had seen once, and maybe I had or I hadn't, I wasn't sure, and when I tried to remember what I had seen in that closet, and I put myself back in that room, all I could smell was talcum powder and see my
grandma standing at the window, stiff and straight, staring out at nothing in the weak light, her back to me, the tears streaming because I had said it, I had said names, called her things, told her how my mother would disappear every time that she got off the phone with her, my grandmother with her thick accent and twisted language, harsh, guttural, clipped through the phone and for seventeen years I never once remember my mother asking me how I felt—not once—
how do you feel?
Because feelings, she said, were lies. The only truth was in what you could see.

“Were they really Nazis?” Candy asked. “That's crazy.” Her blue eyes were wide and filled her face.

“Did they kill people?” Veronica asked.

“Kill people!” Phillip yelled. His voice put the music to shame. “Probably. Of course. Hey, tell them about that time you had to help your grandma kill all those kittens.”

“Oh my God,” Candy said. She was staring at me with her mouth open. I could see that her lipstick was cracked around the corners of her lips.

“His grandma made him put them all in this sack. This burlap sack, right?” Phillip didn't want the answer to his question. He just wanted everyone to settle in to what he was saying.

“So he puts them in there—there's like what, ten or something?”

“Seven,” I whispered.

“And he has to throw the sack into this pond out on their farm, so he does, you know, puts these baby kittens in this sack and knots the top and throws them out in the pond.”

Candy had closed her mouth, but she wouldn't look
at me. She was staring at Phillip and Phillip was smiling as though this was the funniest fucking story he had ever told, and he was taking his time getting to the punch line.

“The only problem is though,” Phillip took a swig from his bottle and ran the back of his hand across his mouth, “his grandma didn't tell him that he had to weight the bag down. You know, put some rocks in it or something. So when he throws it out there, it just floats on the surface with all of these kittens screaming and trying to swim, but they're trapped in that bag, you know.”

“Screaming?” Candy said.

“Fucking screaming. All ten of them. Roy told me that it was like hearing babies cry.”

“But he swam out and got them, right?” Candy asked. She turned toward me at the table and her thigh touched my leg. “You swam out and got them right?”

Veronica had the same look on her face that Phillip did, and I realized that they were meant for each other and it was perfect that she'd found him.

“There was nothing I could do,” I said.

“But you could swim out and get them,” Candy said.

“My grandma wouldn't let me.”

“His grandma wouldn't
let
him. Fucking Nazis.” Phillip slammed his bottle down on the table and beer foamed and ran over the top.

“What happened?” Candy asked.

“They died,” Phillip said. “What do you think happened? He and his grandma stood there and watched the bag thrash around until they finally drowned.”

“God,” Candy said. She was looking down at the table, and there was something in her voice that made me want to put my hand over hers and let her know that I was just as sorry as she was. “How long did it take?”