You Only Get Letters from Jail (24 page)

“I knew that was the choice he would make,” Marianne said. “I knew you were different. I could tell that even before he stopped the car that day.”

My jeans were soaked in the front and everything smelled like strange flowers and the heavy grass and I realized that all I had eaten was that thick slice of sweet bread and my stomach did a slow turn and I stood up and asked Marianne where the bathroom was and she pointed me down a hallway and I was gone.

I ran cold water into the sink and rinsed off my face and small flecks of grass fell into the water that was pooling around the drain. The cold water made me feel better and I was able to breathe again, and breathing made my stomach drop out of my throat and I knew I was going to be okay. Elbow would explain. It had to be getting late. I could finish up the day here and walk to his house and knock on his door and just say, “Hey, you know what that lady told me?” and I knew he would say, “Man, Marty, not only is she a bitch, but she's a crazy fucking liar, too. Let's egg her house tonight” and everything would be okay.

“Marty, is everything all right in there?” Her voice was close against the door and I tried to picture her on the other side, maybe leaning against it, maybe pressing her ear against the wood to hear if I was sick or crying or still alive.

“I'm fine,” I said, and I thought maybe I would have to convince myself of that fact, but I realized that I was. I was just fine.

“I brought you a change of jeans,” she said. “You can't go home smelling like beer. I don't think your parents would be too happy about that. Why don't you just open the door a crack and I can hand them in to you.”

“I'm fine, really,” I said. “I can just rinse them off here in the sink. It's not that much. They will dry out.”

“Marty, don't be ridiculous. I can wash your jeans. You can wear a pair of my ex-husband's.”

Something in her voice made me realize that she wasn't going to let it go until I at least took them from her, and then I could just tell her that the jeans didn't fit and rinse mine off and go back out to the yard and the sun and finish up this shift so I could go find Elbow and laugh about the bullshit story she had told me. I opened the door a little and she reached around the edge and handed me a pair of faded jeans that were folded so tightly I could see the crease line in the knees. “I'm giving you a T-shirt, too. Just give me all of your clothes. You've been working. If I'm going to wash your jeans, you might as well go home in clean clothes.”

“Really, it's fine,” I said, but she shoved something else in my hand and then I pushed the door shut and stood in the silence of the bathroom. There was a basket on the back of the toilet with small circle-shaped soaps of different colors, and the towels were deep red, and I could smell lilac or jasmine or one of those scents that you always associate with your grandma or your mom.

I set the jeans down and unfolded a black T-shirt. There was a picture on the front, a beaver with wings, and I tossed it aside. I opened up the jeans and looked in at the waistband. They were 33x31s. I preferred 34s, depending on the cut, but these were damn close, and I thought about folding them back up and setting them on the edge of the bathtub and thanking her anyways, but they were too small, and instead I found myself dropping my own jeans to the floor and kicking off my shoes and sliding out of my pair and into a dead guy's pants. I remembered Elbow's joint in my pocket and fished out the wet and ruined paper that was unraveling and spilling green. I thought about flushing it, but I knew half the time that shit didn't work in movies and I could just imagine it never going down with the water and Marianne back in the hallway, asking if everything was all right through the door.

I pulled off my T-shirt and was surprised to feel how sticky it was and how much it smelled like gas and grass and fumes and sweat. It felt good to get it off my skin and for a minute I stood shirtless in my socks and borrowed jeans and looked at myself in the mirror. I ran more water and splashed it across my chest and scooped it under my arms and leaned forward and let myself drip into the sink, then I took my dirty shirt and rubbed my body off and ran some more water through my hair and when I was done I felt like another person and I pulled on the beaver T-shirt, gathered up my things, and left the room.

Marianne was sitting at the table and there was a full beer in front of my empty chair and the mess had been cleaned
and the back door was closed and I could hear the clock ticking in that other room. I found myself wishing that it would go into its overachieving chime to mark a moment of time I could identify, but it did nothing but tick and tock, and I could picture the pendulum swinging. Getting sleepy, very sleepy. I smiled and sat down and Marianne took the wad of clothes out of my arms and went back to the utility room and I heard a washer kick on, the familiar sound of water filling the machine, and I heard dials turning and then she was back and she picked up her beer and looked at me.

“I knew those clothes would fit. I just knew it.”

“They're not bad,” I said.

“Do you like music, Marty?” she asked. “I have a stereo. We should turn on some music.” She clapped her hands together and stood up and left the room. I looked around for a clock, anything to let me know how much time was gone in the day and how much remained. The sun was still bright outside and the shadows did not seem to be lengthening in that way they always do when someone needs to mark the hour.

I heard music, and I could recognize the song, something my parents listened to, something with a lot of guitar, but not the right kind. Acoustic. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't anything I would ever reach to turn up. “How's this?” she called from the other room.

“I like it,” I said. I stood up from my chair and walked around the kitchen. I bent down and looked at the dials on the oven—no clock, just a timer. There wasn't a clock anywhere in the room.

“Do you need something, Marty?” She was standing in the doorway. I could see that she was barefoot and her pants fell over the tops of her feet. Her toenails were painted a bright and glittery purple.

“I was just wondering what time it is,” I said. “My dad wants me to call him when I need to be picked up.”

She stepped into the room and she smelled different. Sweeter, cleaner. For the first time I noticed that she was wearing hoop earrings, simple and silver, and her hair was tucked behind her ears and I could see her cheekbones and how they held the color up high near her eyes.

“It's one of those days,” she said. “One of those days when it feels like it's so much later than it really is. We still have hours. I promise.” She sat down and picked up her beer and started drinking again. “You're not anxious to get back out there and work, are you, Marty?”

In all honesty, I wasn't, and part of me was hoping that maybe she would just let me leave early, call it a day; I'd had too much beer, and there were snakes, and maybe it would be best if I came back first thing in the morning, but now I realized I had made the mistake of letting her hold my clothes hostage and I was standing in her kitchen in a dead guy's jeans and winged-beaver T-shirt and I wasn't going anywhere until she gave me back my clothes, returned me to myself, and set me free.

“You remind me so much of Ben,” she said.

“Ben?”

“My husband. Who died. Your friend?”

“Elbow,” I said.

“Elbow—that's such a strange name.”

“When he fights he swings with his elbows. Not with his fists. His real name is James.”

“Your friend James, he didn't remind me of Ben at all. Too big, too broad. Too much of something in his eyes. But you? It's like I told you. I could tell even before you got out of the car that you were the one.”

I couldn't wait to tell Elbow this conversation. And I would tell him about it as soon as I told him about the first one and asked him some questions and got him to tell me just how full of shit Marianne was.

I smiled. “The one?”

She had to be drunk. I was buzzing on those beers and Elbow and I weren't lightweights. I wondered if home brew had more alcohol and I figured it probably did, since there was no government regulation to control what went into the bottle.

“I knew you were someone I could count on, that's all, Marty. I knew that if you were like Ben on the outside, you were probably like him on the inside and I wasn't wrong.”

I ran my finger over the pattern in the table. All those lines counting off the stages of development in the tree, tracing the pattern of growth, etching the passing of time. I finished my beer and stood up from the table.

“I really have to see how late it is,” I said. I walked past her and toward the room I had not been in before she could stop me. Even over the too-quiet tinny guitar I could hear the clock and I followed the sound.

The room was dark, the curtains pulled, and there was only a thin sheet of light that made the journey past the
drapes and it seemed as if it wore itself out in the process and died just beyond the window. The room had the smell of disuse, dust, and forgetting. I could see the red light on the stereo and the light from the dials and I could make out the shapes of furniture, things on shelves. The clock was one of those big upright grandfathers, solid wood and brass and glass, and the ticking was so loud that the window vibrated a little bit every time the pendulum connected with the full extent of its arc—left to right tick, right to left tock. The face of the clock was behind a pane of glass and I could not read it in the faint light so I looked around for a lamp or a switch and found nothing. I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain.

I pulled back the curtains far enough to let in the struggling light and I realized that the room was full of dust, dust settled on everything, everything hidden. I stretched out my left hand so I could keep the curtain pulled with my right, and I wiped my palm across the face of the clock. I couldn't see anything. I rubbed harder at the glass and then I realized there wasn't anything there to see. There were no hands on the clock. No numbers. Just a blank face and the pendulum swinging beneath it marking the passing of absolutely nothing at all. I let the curtain drop and went back through the darkness.

“Marianne, do you have a clock that works?” I said.

Marianne wasn't at the table and the kitchen was empty. I checked the utility room and the only sound was the washer spinning the water from my clothes. “Marianne,” I called.

The refrigerator was in the corner across from the dryer, so I pulled the door open and reached in to get a beer. The refrigerator was empty except for rows of green bottles on the top shelf and underneath it stacks of sheets. I took a bright green bottle and bent down to look at the sheets and then I realized that they were not sheets at all and the one on top looked familiar, like a pillowcase, like something I had seen before, and even though I didn't really want to, I lifted back the open end and he was in there, there was no mistaking the black-and-white hair, Toby, only this time he had nothing to say to me like he did the first time we had met, and I remembered that moment, too high and thinking he had given me a message, and now I pulled my hand back as though he had bit me, and then I thought about it and lifted the open ends of the other pillowcases, three of them altogether, black-and-white Toby, a dark silver and gray, a tabby marked just like the one my sister had when we were kids. I returned the bottle to the shelf and quietly shut the door so that it did not even make the comforting noise of a click.

The door to the backyard was not closed all the way and I opened it just enough so that I could look out onto the lawn. Marianne was out there with her back to me, and she was bent over and there was a stick in her hand, a broom handle, the bristles stuck out in a stiff row behind her. She was bent over, poking at something, pushing it around in the mowed and dead drifts of grass I had not gone back to rake, and I realized she was tapping at the snake I had run over, lifting it slightly, rolling it over, letting it fall back to the ground.

There was laughter out on the sidewalk, kids playing, and I remembered that there was a world beyond the yard. I heard the steady clip of a sprinkler and I could smell wet pavement, that unmistakable scent of wet dirt and cement. I had not applied to college, my parents didn't have enough money, and I had none at all, but maybe that would change, and part of me wished that I was going to be someplace else next year and maybe I would be—there was still plenty of time for anything to happen. In the distance I could hear a muscled-up car go by, loud and strong like a 351 Cleveland hitting 5400 rpm and blowing dual exhaust, and somewhere closer, in that same direction, I could hear brakes lock up, the unmistakable squeal of rubber leaving tread across asphalt, and maybe something or someone getting hit.

Halfway through the movie, Lenny Richter leaned into me and whispered
this shit is so fake
, and I wasn't quite ready to agree with him. It was by invitation only, the offer to come and watch, almost a sixty-minute ride out of town at this kid named Billy's house, an hour that had taken more like three to travel, since hitchhiking works better as a solitary sport and I had been tied down with Lenny, who didn't want to go it alone. There was a group gathered in a garage out back of Billy's house, all of us standing around, and Billy had hung a bedsheet up on the wall and propped the projector on a milk crate stacked on a folding chair and we all stood there and watched the film from start to finish, no credits, no title, no names, no sound. When the last jumpy frames of 8mm finally spun through the reels, everybody started talking at once, and one kid said
no fucking way
and I checked my watch and saw that
I was close to curfew and decided to walk back out to the main road and chance getting home on my own. I lasted fifteen minutes walking with my thumb out on the empty asphalt before I bent and broke and went to the pay phone at a two-pump gas station, the only lit building as far as I could see in either direction, and I called home, hoping my dad wouldn't pick up, if anyone did at all. My older sister, Charlotte, answered on the first ring and everything from then on was going to cost me.