LIFE NEAR THE BONE (2 page)

The apartment was shaping up. Looking good. He rubbed his palms together in contentment. In the living room he'd gotten rid of everything but one kitchen straight-backed chair, an unadorned fruit crate from the Safeway, and his precious copy of
Walden
.

In the kitchen he'd thrown out everything but one plate, one knife, one pan. He ate from cans mostly so what was the point of owning dinnerware and drawers full of silverware and cabinets full of cooking utensils? He saw his landlady scuttle to the Dumpster and take the electric grill and the popcorn popper. Crazy old bitch. Frivolous, frowzy pack rat.

His bedroom was a spare cell now and he loved it. It was a helluva chore to lug the bed from the apartment down the stairs and out back to the Dumpster, but, sweating and swearing, he'd managed. The floor was immensely more comfortable after a few nights. He hardly ached at all anymore when he woke. He thought the Spartan idea converged well with Thoreau's philosophy so he incorporated it into his new life modality.

He had the phone company disconnect his telephone at week's end. Greg kept calling and the job agencies too. What a fucking nuisance; what a bore. He didn't need a job. His needs were too few to demand a real income. When the unemployment check ran out, he'd apply for welfare. If they wouldn't let him have it, he'd go on the streets. It meant nothing to him one way or the other.

Thoreau said: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Jeff embraced that to mean he must let the world flow past. In the apartment, on the street, wherever he found himself, it didn't matter. He carried solitude with him like an envelope in his pocket and no one could divest him of it ever again. They didn't even know he
had
it!

He patted his shirt pocket as if solitude really was a thing of dimension and weight and it belonged to him alone.

It was not until a month later that Jeff found the quote that would change his life and get him down to the nub of existence. He'd still been searching for the place next to the bone, scraping and scraping away society's frills until he could feel the knife screeching somewhere far off in the dim nether reaches of the fog that had come to surround his days.

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

That is what he came upon in his diligent study and when he found it, he knew then he was nearly home free through the twilight of his ignorance. He heard clarion bells ringing on the reading aloud of that sentence. He shivered with anticipation at the coming understanding that crept forth from the dark corner shadows of his barren apartment. That understanding, when it took him, would rend the foundations of his misery and bring him down to the bone, down past the slime and corruption--the gate!--of flesh that barred the way.

#

"Hello, Mrs. Whipshaw."

"Jeff, how nice of you to visit. Won't you come in?"

The old woman who had nabbed the grill and the popcorn popper from the trash Dumpster let her tenant inside the dank, bird-shit-splattered living room. A white cockatiel flew through the air in protest, wings flapping wildly.

"Pay no attention to Potto. He's a spoiled brat and isn't used to polite company. Hush, Potto! Behave now."

Jeff declined to sit in the newspaper-covered chintz chair Mrs.Whipshaw gestured he take. He stood with his hands behind his back, smiling the stiff smile of the Buddha, the smile of the Inscrutable. His gaze flicked around the room and soon his smile evaporated, replaced by a sneer of disgust. White smears of Potto's crap covered the drapes, dripped down the neck of a brass table lamp, lay in dried yellow-streaked plops on top of the furniture. It looked as if an insane painter had come, and in a frenzy, swung a wet brush around and around to create a barbarous nightmare of interior decoration.

"I haven't seen you out of your apartment in ever so long," Mrs. Whipshaw said, shooing the contentious bird from her shoulder.

Jeff watched the cockatiel closely to see where it might light down. It hung upside down from the silent dust-layered ceiling fan and screeched at him, one eye cocked in his direction. "I haven't been out much," Jeff said, once reassured the bird was not coming to him.

He felt a nausea rising and had to swallow bitter gorge. It tasted of the kidney beans he'd consumed the night before.
Sickening. Eating--an odious habit. Made people into worms. Scoop it in, shit it out, round and round she goes, where she stops no one knows...

Jeff crossed the room, his eye trained on the bird, as he came for Mrs. Whipshaw with the one knife he'd saved for cutting tough meat.

Disposing of the bodies. Now Thoreau never gave advice about that sort of thing. Damn odd. He knew about everything else, you'd think the man would have left some sort of road map. Jeff had to ponder the situation for two days before he could decide what to do. He had Mrs.Whipshaw and Potto cooling in the huge freezer she kept, strangely enough, in the spare bedroom of her ground-floor apartment.

He had the occupant of the other downstairs apartment, punky-looking George with the orange and green blotch in his hair, stuffed over double at the waist in his broom closet. (Cluttered, cluttered. Baseball mitts, bats, skates, pool cues, bowling balls, smelly running shoes. Much too cluttered for anyone sane.)

He had James, the quiet law student, in the bathtub in apartment on the second floor. He sat shriveling like an old potato with a radio in his lap. Pity it wasn't a law manual, though what good that would do him now Jeff couldn't guess.

He had the Danju sisters waiting in their beds. Nice girls. Not a bother in the world, but the way they lived, unbelievable! Frozen dinner trays growing mold, magazines littering the carpet, thready dust balls and trailing spider webs and filmy bikini panties hanging everywhere. It was enough litter to turn the stomach. It took Jeff all night just to get their apartment under kind of control. He cursed them with every name in the book, nice girls or not. Anyone living like a pig needed to be called a swine.

Old man Shorer was no trouble at all. He was all bent and crippled by arthritis. He couldn't run, he couldn't even crawl, not toward the last. Cried, though. Cried like a fucking baby. And him old as the hills, didn't make proper good sense to Jeff, but there it was. A man who chose to live with a cat that scratched out shit-ball litter every time he used the box had to be some kind of nut to begin with. Everyone knew you could get terminal diseases from cats. Jeff had saved Shorer a prolonged and, no doubt, much more painful death.

Now to dispose of the bodies. Without Thoreau's help. Without his wisdom and guidance.

And to return the apartment house--the entire building--to neat, impersonal harmony. It would take boxes and boxes of Glad trash bags, dozens of cardboard boxes from the Safeway. A wheelbarrow!

Yes, he would
need
a wheelbarrow.

He hoped the Dumpster wasn't full tonight. He would be taking numerous loads to it. His heart sang with freedom he was at last seeing the very edge of the pristine bone, a flicker of purity, and it was a glorious glimpse of paradise Heaven itself.

#

He heard the pounding of feet coming up the stairs before he ever heard knocking on the door. He was tired, sweaty, needed a shower cold and long. He peeked through the viewer and saw the intruder into this place of calm and peace was the treasonous poster man, Greg.

Figured.

Jeff wore only a pair of grimy shorts. His hair stuck out on end as he'd been sleeping. And not washing. He was covered with dirt and smudges that looked like tar or oil. "What do you want now?"

"What do you care? You vamoosed for a decadent lifestyle, didn't you? You want to be featured on 'The Rich and Famous' one day, don't you? So why would you care?"

Greg cleared his throat. He looked like a weasel caught in a hole. The criticism, however exaggerated, was a little too close to home. "Did you…did you find work?"

Jeff chortled unpleasantly. "Go away, Greg. I have nothing say to you." He left the room and disappeared into the darkened hallway.

Greg followed close behind. "Jeff, wait. I really mean it. I'm still worried. How are you paying the rent? Are you eating? I could help, you know. I haven't really abandoned you."

"No rent. Mrs. Whipshaw said so. Dear old lady, dear bird lady." Jeff went directly into the hall bath and stepped in the tub. He slipped out of his shorts and threw them on floor. He turned on the shower, drew the curtain.

The shower curtain snapped open and droplets of water flew in the air, spotting Greg's face. "No, you won't. Don't you dare. You stay out of my business affairs. You're no longer in my life, remember? You wanted your fucking posters and your soft cushions and your steak and potatoes. Remember?"

"Jeff, can't you talk with me without fighting? Can't you see your way clear to be reasonable?"

Jeff shut the curtain. He sudsed down his body and scrubbed himself hard with the washcloth. Finally he said, in as sane and sensible a tone as he could muster, "Let me get through and I'll take you on a tour of my new orderly world. "

Full of misgivings, Greg lowered the toilet seat and sat down to wait. This time he had to do something before he left. This time it was absolutely imperative he not leave Jeff alone with his warped delusions. He had known him too long not to try to help.

Jeff finished bathing, dried, dressed himself quickly in jeans and shirt and sneakers.

"I've seen the place, Jeff. You got rid of everything. This looks like a prison."

"Not a prison, a sanctuary. A man has to begin at home. Then . . ." he glanced slyly at Greg. ". . . he branches out."

"I don't think you're going to find very many followers. Not many people want to join a cult that denies all possession." Greg laughed easily, but soon quieted when Jeff walked past him to the front door. "Come on. I want to show you how I've hacked at the chaos and brought it under supervision. I want to show you what can be done when you simplify your life, when all the extraneous is ruthlessly cut away down to the very roots where the trouble lies."

Jeff took his friend to Mrs. Whipshaw's freezer first thing. They walked together through the scrupulously cleaned empty apartment to the spare bedroom.

Less than a week passed after Greg's visit before Jeff wandered through the silenced apartment house in the middle of the night saying good-bye to his perfectly balanced world.

People had come to inquire. Mrs. Whipshaw's son screamed that he'd be back with the police. He would see his mother, goddamnit, if he had to bring in the National Guard to do it. She never would have left town without telling him, he claimed from the bottom of the apartment steps. Don't tell him she would.

The boyfriend of one of the Danju sisters left without a squawk, but as he went to his car, he kept squinting suspiciously over his shoulder.

Two law school students stopped by to ask why their friend had not been to classes. Sick? They hadn't heard from him. Too sick to call them? Contagious? Wasn't that funny, though, he always seemed in such good health.

Yes, it was time to go. As much as he hated to. He had invested a ridiculous amount of time in creating order, in simplifying the complex. It was a shame, terribly unjust, that he must flee what was an almost perfect creation.

Ye t...yet... An apartment house in the center of a seedy district inside of an abhorrently chaotic big city was no real place for him, anyway. He needed his own Walden Pond. He needed to escape to the wilds, sequester himself away from the mad, chattering, bruising world.

With the money Greg and the apartment dwellers had on persons or in their possession, Jeff took a bus from Houston to the dry West Texas town of Midland. Once there, he hired a taxi driver to take him into the desert.

"Where?"

"Where no one lives," Jeff said, waving money in the man's face.

"Are you nuts? How are you gonna get back? No phone there, buddy. Nothing but snakes and tumbleweeds, sand and cactus. You can't go out there."

"A friend's meeting me later in his car, if it's any of your business. I'll come back with him. Now will you drive?"

He drove. For two hours. Blabbering all the way, bitching about the heat, the absurdity of this, the kooks he ran into, what a job.

Jeff ignored him in favor of reading, for the dozenth time, from
Walden
. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew where the bone glistened most cleanly. It was not in the woods where Thoreau had hidden away himself. It was not in the mountains where shady towering presences safeguarded the timorous. It was not in the lush valleys where Nature rioted and the senses were overwhelmed.

It was in the plain open desert, the place man had not yet desecrated with his two-bit palaces and his glittering signs, and his bubbling, stinking tarmac laid end to end forever and amen.

It was here in the steaming heart of untrodden, forgotten land, that Jeff Castain knew he would find the ultimate simplification. He wanted that more than breath itself.

This buddy of yours don't show up in time, you could have a sunstroke out here without water. I tell ya, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen," the cabby complained. "I don't like it none-a-bit. I ain't gonna be responsible for you dying out here, you know, a hundred-five in the shade, if there
was
any shade. I been trying to talk you outta this, ain't that right?"