I come from a place where you save leftover fat in a coffee can for biscuits or eggs or a gravy base. I come from a place where men go from one mother to another right after high-school and where their babies walk fat-headed towards another dead end life. I come from a long line of killers and whores and boozehounds but this is America and I’m sure that’s the case for most of us. At least the ones from the harder-strung places where there wasn’t much else to do but kill, whore, booze, and howl.
Tailgates and Tomatoes
They were nowhere close to being old but they weren’t young anymore either, though he had looked it since he was twenty four, carrying age in his eyes and his gait, but she still didn’t look it. Especially since she knocked off sticking needles in her face, which is something she had never needed, but that had been her way. She never saw herself as the world saw her and he saw himself exactly as the world saw him. Things like that just draw contention.
They had not seen each other in seven years and before that seldom saw each other after their divorce though they lived in the same city. Well, after she got back from her tryout year in Marble Falls. Turns out, Texas has everything but your family in it.
They were sitting on the tailgate of his truck. She was wearing a black coat and black jeans and black boots up to her knees. She had started wearing black because of him and kept it on over the years. Most of her personality at one time came from him. He figured the rest she probably had taken from her next husband. He was wearing a Chimayo coat like Dennis Hopper in The American Dreamer. He had a closet full of coats he had seen in movies. He laughed to himself. Him in bright red. Her in his color.
He pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from inside the pocket of his coat as well as a white lighter. He had heard once from a girl at a bus station in New York that white lighters were bad luck. She said each member of the 27 club was found with one. At one time it had been his dream, some even called it his mission, to join that club, but he was no longer twenty seven and he wasn’t about to listen to some Canaanite from New York City. That place was just another lost dream.
“I didn’t know you smoked.” She said looking at him funny.
“I don’t. But I’ve always tried.”
He had smoked about half of one before he snubbed it on the bottom of his boots. He could feel a damp spot on his sock where the wet ground had come in through a hole in the sole. The stitching on one side looked like a miniature cowboy’s mouth and the shaft quarters had tears where they met the crown, but you could only see that when he had a leg up on a knee or how he sat now on the tailgate with his jeans caught behind the knees. Everyone poked fun at the boots but he couldn’t get rid of them. He had bought them three weeks before she left, and like his life, they stayed right there.
“You might have fooled the world,” she said, “every picture its seen of you, you’ve got one in your mouth.” He breathed something like a chuckle through his nose. She grinned a perfect picket fence.
“Maybe I thought I had something to prove.” He said.
“You’ve never had anything to prove.”
“Maybe not. But I always thought I did.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“Do people change?”
She never knew anything about people, least of all herself. Most of the follies of her life had been because of that fact. He pretended he knew people. There were a hundred magazines where he had said it was his business to know people, and maybe he did, but it didn’t save anyone and it sure as hell didn’t save him.
He looked at her and he knew she knew he was doing it. She looked at his neighbor’s dying garden and the tomatoes that had been chosen through by deer and pillaged on by hornworms. She looked anywhere but at him. She never had been able to meet his eyes when he looked at her like that and as utterly lonesome as it used to make him feel, it gave a strange comfort all these years later. If she could have looked him in his eyes as he washed her with his own, it might have killed him to know he had suffered for something that never existed. It had been a persisting fear, and at times he felt it fact, but as she followed a yellowthroat across the sky he had at least some small exoneration. It was funny, him not knowing if that was the right word.
She sat there, her hair still thick and dark with eumelanin, some grounded bird who had lost just about everyone she loved. She often thought she had come back from Texas just in time to watch everyone die. For a while she thought about going back, but she couldn’t run from their deaths just like she couldn’t run from herself and at least here, the earth had known the shape of their feet. Texas had never known them.
It started with her grandparents, as was nature’s way. Then her own parents, nature’s way or not, that had a way of turning someone back into a child. She had never felt correct or sure about anything. She called them three times a week to ask questions about everything from mechanic advice to taxes to tears. After they passed, she felt like she would never be correct.
She married to get away from herself again and she married a florist. When he heard the news it bothered him to no end. Marrying a man of flowers. A soft-handed man touching her feet, the backs of her ears. Granted the career he himself fell into no longer required daily scarring or wear and tear, but he went and found them in spite of this. He wasn’t a man who could die with the same skin he had been born with. He thought this alone made him into a man or at least the type of thing a man should be, but as he got older he found that women and men had even different ideas on that. He wasn’t sure how they could hold much opinion on it, him being an expert on the subject, but knowing things for certain didn’t stop women from disagreeing nor did it stop men from changing their opinions on what they held as fact because of it. At least out loud, to get them to break their impenetrable silence.
She was married for three years and he had a feeling she might never have loved the man, but he had also once thought that she loved him. He wasn’t impervious to being wrong. But she had loved her son. And she had loved her daughter. When word had gotten to him about what happened two years ago every grudge he had against her slipped away. He remembered being drunk when he heard. And he remembered crying for her. He knew the tender fragility of her heart and he knew that it wouldn’t be too long before he would cry for her again. It pained him to think the closest thing to family at her funeral would be him, even though she was the only remnant he had of family he had as well. Neither thought was good. But she was here. She had survived.
“What are you working on now?” She asked, looking at him again. He just shook his head and put another cigarette in his mouth. Then he put the cigarette back in the box and tossed the whole thing over his shoulder into the bed of the truck. Before his career even seemed like a possibility, the idea of it was all he could talk about. He had discovered his want for it when they had been married and it quickly turned into a sour taste for her. He knew it, but he couldn’t stop talking about it. A boy doesn’t know that having passion for something turns people against you. He lost everyone before he figured it out, and then it became somewhat sour to him. If not the thing itself, then the way things were.
He thought about asking her about her children. He didn’t want to, and he knew it wasn’t right for the situation, but sometimes the need to be polite overrides many things, including logic. Many people gave up their lives before their manners, but before he could ask, she began to speak, and he had been thankful until he heard the words.
“I bought some of your books.”
He felt embarrassed. Nervous to hear her speak on the thing that had driven her away. One of the things. He replayed the motormouthing of his youth and her disdain for it and he was at a loss for words. He remembered this face she used to make.
“I never could finish them.” She said.
Now it was him who couldn’t look at her. He nodded and wished he hadn’t thrown the cigarettes so he had something to do with his hands.
“I didn’t like the wives in them.” She said.
A flash of sadness blew across her eyes like a sheet of ice sliding off of a tin roof. It was a different hue of sadness than the constant color they were usually painted. A sadness of what ifs. What if she had stayed? Or what if my children were alive.
“Honey.” He was surprised at the word. “There aren’t any answers there. Trust me. I’ve spent most of my life runnin’ them ifs down. There’s only tired there.” He felt a burning sensation fill his nose like a pocket of fumes in a heat chamber and before he knew it he was crying. He wasn’t breathing hard or sniffling, but tears dripped down each cheek. Two of them that felt something like loss and something like inevitability. He wiped them away but made no effort to hide them. The only times he had ever cried had been for her, and he wasn’t going to deny himself.
He slipped out a sort of laugh and she laughed too though nothing was funny. Accept maybe the fact that they were sitting next to each other. Or that he was wearing a coat that didn’t seem so ridiculous to him before and seemed silly as elf shit now. The American dreamer. Yeah, he thought, that’s me.
She got up from the tailgate. The suspension barely moved. She touched his knee before heading to her car. As quick and as meaningless as a kiss from a dove. So light you wonder if it happened at all.
“Be seein’ you.” She said.
He nodded. As she pulled away he would have, once, wondered what she meant by that or if she meant anything at all, or if she left so abruptly so that he wouldn’t see her cry, if she left so she didn’t have to watch him cry. But that was once and all he wondered now was
which books?
