Exile on Kalamazoo Street (7 page)

“A thoughtful asshole is still an asshole, Bennie. It doesn't change the odor.”

“More clever-writer shit, Chief.” He leaned forward. “Now let me spice up your tea, Chief, for old times' sake.”

I sipped my tea.

“Old times are called ‘old' for a reason, Bennie. That's because people move on from them.”

He extended the bottle toward me.

“Just a nip, Chief?” he said. “I know you want it.”

Perhaps there was a particle of my being that would have taken a drink, but that particle was now too small to matter, like the last dying ember of a fire that isn't going to flame into sudden life.

He grinned and leaned closer across the coffee table, swinging the bottle back and forth.

“Just let me sweeten your tea, Chief, and we'll be back to the old days. You remember the good old days, Bryce? You enjoyed the good old days.”

I looked at his ugly face for a moment and then at the bottle. I leaned forward and his grin widened.

“There you go, Chief,” he said. “Come to papa.”

I grinned and scooted even closer, but then I swung a fist hard and knocked the bottle from his hand and against the brick fireplace, where it shattered. I could smell the whiskey dripping down the bricks.

Bennie eased back on the sofa.

“A waste of good whiskey, Chief.”

I dug into a pants pocket and found a twenty and tossed it onto the coffee table.

“Go buy yourself a replacement, Bennie. Buy two for all I care.” I stood up. “Now get out,
Chief
, and don't come back.”

He gulped his drink and picked up the twenty.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I'll get myself a pint and one for you. I'll leave yours at your door, for the next time. How's that, Chief?”

I stepped across the coffee table and grabbed Bennie by his throat with both hands and put a knee in his chest. He looked awfully surprised. I couldn't quite believe it myself.

“There's no
next
time, Bennie. Do you hear me?” I put my face almost against his. “There's no fucking next time, no fucking more Canadian Club and Crown Royal. There's no more anything.”

“Get the fuck off me.”

I pushed my knee hard into his chest and he coughed. He brought his huge hands up to my arms, but he couldn't dislodge my grip.

“Let me up,” he said, his voice squeaky from the pressure of my hands. Instead I increased the pressure against his throat and he struggled, but could not get free. Adrenaline had given me the advantage. Slowly I relaxed my grip and stood up. Bennie coughed a few times and got up slowly. I expected a fight, but he apparently didn't have it in him. He looked at me a moment, more surprised than angry, and then I followed him to the side door. He stood in the driveway, still massaging his throat, and turned back to me.

“You'll be back,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. “They always come back.”

“Others do, but not me.”

“What makes you so special, Chief?” he said.

“It's not about being special, or not special, Bennie.”

“Then what's it about?”

I thought about it a few seconds. “It's about saving your life, Bennie. Before it's too late.”

He laughed, but it was a nervous laugh and not convincing. Then he walked toward his car. He stopped once and said, “You'll be back, Chief. Trust me.”

I watched him drive away and knew it was the last time I'd have to hear him say that.

* * *

It truly had become the winter of blizzards, a record season of them, the television proclaimed. Another descended ferociously, the wind howling and driving snow horizontally, and I felt concern for the neighborhood boy and his wonder machine when he showed up rather skeptically to once again clear my driveway. He worked harder and longer than before and wore a thick blue scarf across his mouth and lower face, a green watch cap pulled down tightly over his ears. It was slow going to clear the drive. I watched him struggle and then filled out a check for double the amount.

The chirpy letter carrier came to my side door, even though she had no mail for me that day, and complimented me on the state of my driveway while she stamped her feet to dislodge caked snow off her boots. I was sure she thought that each time the driveway was cleared I had bundled up like an Eskimo and worked hard to clear it just to satisfy her, and her rules. That made us buddies under rather false circumstances. I did nothing to discourage what I was sure she believed, and I nearly asked her about the unopened envelope sitting to the side of the refrigerator, but I knew she had not delivered it, so I merely smiled and offered a sloppy salute. She trudged down the sidewalk, which had not yet been cleared. As she struggled to make her way, I wondered, only momentarily, whether I should someday invite her in for a cup of hot chocolate or tea.

Very late in the day the snow went from deluge to a trickle. Soon I could see the familiar and stoic sparrows huddled on power lines, and even a blue jay and several energetic cardinals. Finally a crow appeared, sat on a branch of the tree by the deck, and looked defiantly in my direction. I went to the window, pressed my face against the glass, and waved at the crow as it cocked its black head to one side. I saw its beak open, but I did not hear anything, and then it allowed itself to drop off the branch into a shallow flight across the yard and out of sight toward a frozen lake just beyond a thick stand of trees.

* * *

When I looked out a window at the snow, I wondered whether snow was a frozen river dispersed into more parts than could be counted or comprehended. I knew snow was symbolic enough of something—something capable of whitewashing things, of overwhelming things, coating things and hiding things, and even swamping things. My life had been swamped for a long time as I climbed out of one mess after another, soaked to the skin and shivering, washed up on a shore like so much flotsam from a maritime wreck, masts sticking up bent and splintered grotesquely toward a sullen sky, bodies in my wake. An odd part of me propelled me to the basement. I scoured it closely and found yet another pint bottle of whiskey, this one with even more amber liquid in it than the previous bottle, and once again I sat and held the bottle and looked through the amber liquid as I held it up to the light.

Soon Black Kitty came down the steps and brushed against my legs, and by this time I had opened the bottle and smelled the amber contents and jiggled the bottle to see the amber fluid sloshing like little waves—little amber waves hiding a giant amber river that could jump its banks and drown everything. A watery genie that could seep from the bottle and grow into a giant. I judged that I likely came very close to tasting the amber liquid, but something lowered the bottle so near my lips. Something as unseen as colorless gas compelled my arm to fall. I did not quite understand the force behind that action, but I appreciated it very much and admired it, and this time, instead of going upstairs to pour the amber liquid into the snow, I walked over to the drain in the floor by the washing machine. I slowly emptied the amber liquid down the drain until only a dark stain remained for a few moments around the mesh of the screen.

* * *

Then there were the sharp-edged, prickly days of looking back into the past darkly, and remembering what it was like to be swept along in Willie Nelson's Whiskey River. I bobbed maniacally, the alcohol permeating all cells, to the bone, a man thoroughly drenched, saturated, pickled, like a bloated fish swimming in alcohol, a battered soul drowning, the current too strong to swim against. My willpower was easily swamped as the current took me nowhere, but always downriver, until fate, I supposed, deposited me on shore, half in and half out of the Whiskey River, and here, in this house, in this exile.

I recalled my teaching days before exile, those soggy days. I had written a book that made money, and then a second one, and then I could write no more and teach no more because teaching and writing cut into drinking and wallowing in the river. And so writing and teaching had to go, and then I wrote a third book, an alcoholic book, and then self-exile began because I had begun to believe the world was flat and the Whiskey River was nearing the edge of a cosmic waterfall and would deposit me into the infinite space of the universe.

There was no momentous moment, no Joyce-like epiphany, no snow falling poetically all over Ireland, though I always loved that part of the story. Instead there was a gradual dog-paddling toward a distant, unseen shore, toward oxygen, toward a shore shrouded in fog, but it was there, the shore, and I knew it—I felt it more than I knew it. I was like a wild animal swimming to shore with no more thought than it's shore that must be reached, that if I kept struggling in that direction I might avoid drowning and have a chance to breathe again.

There came an abrupt thaw of several days, the sun a faint yellow yolk in the sky. The sun brightened a bit more each day, and snow melted and water ran off the roof in shiny rivulets, and several times I heard chunks of ice break loose and fall against the side of the house before shattering on the driveway, which looked good and clear thanks to the thaw. Black Kitty sat by the glass door to the deck and watched streams of melting snow rush down the windowpane. He delighted in trying to smack the water as it raced to the bottom of the glass. I made a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast and treated Black Kitty to more of the beloved tuna from a can.

The thaw, which I knew was temporary—the forecast called for more snow and colder temperatures—woke up the bird community in my backyard, and sparrows, bluebirds, and cardinals sang insistently and flitted about in the trees along the bony dead branches. Sparrows huddled as always on power lines, but appeared cheerier, peppier. Often they ruffled their feathers and puffed themselves up like cartoon birds, and then flew off in swift flights of two or three to scour newly exposed yards. After a while there were nearly a dozen crows, or perhaps exactly a dozen—had I chosen to keep a meticulous tally—perched at various levels of the tree whose branches hung over the deck. They all looked defiant and dark and even a little menacing, and I laughed at the thought of a tree full of crows.

I was sure that one of the crows was the defiant one who often sat alone on a branch of that tree, eyeing me coldly, or perhaps regarding itself warmly. I knew I would never quite know which emotion it was, but I was sure one of birds was that crow, and eventually I decided it was the one who sat highest among the crows, as though on a throne for a crow leader, a flight leader. When that one flew away, they all erupted into flight and followed it in a frenzy toward the frozen lake. With the sliding door open a crack, I could hear the collective voices of a dozen, or near-dozen, cackling crows.

The thaw was pushed aside by more snow—light, wet, lake-effect snow—and soon all was again coated in white and submerged in a freeze. Black Kitty curled up against me on the sofa and we watched snow fall and accumulate. But I took it as progress, or at least as promising, that I began to think of the Whiskey River not as a river at all—or as having the qualities of fluid life or being alive in any way—but rather simply as a disease, as death, as a diseased shape-shifter that could alter its appearance to seem warm and fluid and appear to be flowing and glowing and comforting. It was an alcohol Jacuzzi, all the while disguising creeping death and misery and slowly drowning its victims.

I had not drowned, though I supposed it was a near thing at that, and having been washed ashore, saturated, groggy, I might as well have been living by an actual river in a house so close to the river that the crisp flow could be heard, and the snap of rapids slapping the banks could be felt and seen as well, and from every window the river was there, unavoidable, intrusive, demanding, preening, flowing past with the promise of menace and disaster. It flowed and never ran out. It was circular—yes, the Whiskey River was circular—and when a section of it flowed past it did not disappear forever downstream, but circled back, always looking for the chance to jump its banks and engulf its victims.

* * *

The river was not quite done with me, I learned. One day as snow was intermittent and light, my pulse raced and my heart quickened and I began to sweat and feel sick to my stomach. Walking it off didn't help, and I drank water, and then orange juice, and paced a bit more throughout the house. But the symptoms persisted, and soon Black Kitty was pacing with me and rubbing against my legs. I was a moving target and yet Black Kitty kept up with me and seemed to insist on keeping up with me. I tried to focus on something, anything—a book on a shelf, the blank TV screen—to calm myself down. Finally, abruptly, I attempted to sit on the floor by the glass door to the deck and ended up landing a bit hard. There I sat, my face pressed awkwardly against the cold glass, Black Kitty draped across my legs as though all was quite normal.

After a time I pulled my legs up and managed a sitting position as I rubbed the cold spot on my forehead from leaning too long against the glass. I thought maybe I was feeling better, less queasy, but my pulse quickened again, and my throat was dry and my stomach churned. Black Kitty's tail flicked across my face. Outside I saw the defiant crow—
a
crow if not
the
crow—high up in the tree nearest the deck, looking down toward me. But with crows, who knows what they truly are looking at, and what they are really aware of, what they care about? I felt like throwing up for a moment, then that passed, and soon the feeling returned and I did finally throw up, mostly saliva. As I wiped the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand, the crow lifted off slowly from the branch, as if in slow-motion—although maybe it only seemed like slow motion to me, and for the crow it was normal flight and speed—and flew lazily in a circle above the backyard before darting over the trees toward the lake.

I managed to grab a pillow from the sofa behind me and slip it under my head. I sagged heavily against the pillow, which sagged against the side of the sofa, and Black Kitty sagged against me, his tail again flicking at my face like a furry and cool flame that teased and tickled and comforted instead of burned. I lay there a long time, rubbing Black Kitty behind the ears, hearing Black Kitty purr, and soon I really felt as though the last vile dregs of the Whiskey River were emptying out of me and cascading off me and splashing across the floor to the deck door, pooling briefly before finding an exit, and then seeping under the door and onto the deck, flowing off and freezing and turning the backyard into a skating rink.