Ragged Company (36 page)

I walk back through the door. The door that’s a curtain of beads on accounta my brother’s girl likes all that kinda stuff. I push the curtain of beads apart. The light from the TV is flickerin’ all grey an’ white. Snow. There ain’t nothin’ on that channel an’ it’s snow. Movin’ through that flickering light is like movin’ in slow motion an’ that’s the really scary part. It’s all slow motion. I move around the end of the couch an’ I got the bottle in my hand. I step around an’ I see somethin’ in the shadow of the coffee table. It’s darker there an’ the flashin’ light don’t help so I gotta lean in toward it. I gotta squint to see. My eyes adjust to the light. The shadows melt an’ I see Earl’s tiny feet stuck up outta that lard pail. Not movin’.

I wanna scream. But I gotta do somethin’ so I pull him out by the ankles. He’s so small. Light in my hands like a chicken. The top of him’s all covered in my muck. In the snowy flickerin’ light I try to wipe it off his face but it’s slimy an’ slippery an’ all I do is mess it up more. I’m shakin’ again but it’s a different kinda terror now. So I put him on his back on the couch an’ I put my mouth to his an’ start tryin’ to breathe life into him. Fill his air with lungs to make ’em work again. But all I get is a mouthful of puke. Horrible, stinkin’, three-days-of-drinking kind of puke. It makes me puke again. I heave it all over the coffee table an’ I see the spray in the dream flowin’ out across the room, a slow motion cloud of puke. I puke again an’ again an’ I can’t bring myself to put my mouth to his. I can’t. So I try to rake it out of him with my fingers but I’m shakin’ way too much now an’ all I do is wipe it around his tongue, his teeth, his lips. I’m groanin’. Groanin’ from somewhere real deep. Somewhere I ain’t never groaned from before. It sounds real old an’ it scares me. I got him in my hands an’ I turn him over and try an’ slap his back hard enough to make him cough but it ain’t workin’. This is all in that snowy, flickerin’, slow-motion light, an’ time feels like rubber, every second
stretched way, way long an’ outta shape. I’m quiverin’ like a crazy man an’ I put him down an’ reach for the bottle. Some of it spills on the way to my mouth an’ I get all frantic an’ gulp on it real hard an’ real deep. Earl’s not movin’. He’s not movin’. All covered in my puke now an’ not movin’ at all.

I stand up an’ look at him an’ there’s a buzzin’ in my head from the booze an’ from knowin’ that I killed him. I turn my head one way, then the other, not knowing what to do. Desperate. Desperate an’ crazy to run. An’ then I feel it. It starts way down by the bottom of my spine but further inside like in the middle of me. A howl. A fuckin’ howl, all ragged an’ sore an’ old. Old. It comes out of me an’ all I can do is stand there with my head pointed upward at the ceiling, my eyes closed, the bottle clutched in my hand, an’ Earl layin’ there all dead. An’ I howl.

That’s when I wake up, most times. I wake up with my neck stretched back an’ if it’s dark or if the TV’s flickerin’ I don’t know where I am. Not right away. So I gotta slam back some juice to get me right before I can pull it back together. Before I can feel like I can make it another second without goin’ crazy. That’s why I don’t sleep nights. That’s why I gotta wait till there’s some kinda light of mornin’ or even sometimes just mornin’ sounds like when Timber used to head out on his walks. Then I’d know. Then I’d know that dreamtime wasn’t gonna send me to that room again. Then I’d sleep. But now that Timber don’t walk no more, I go without sleepin’ at all sometimes. I just sit in my room on Indian Road an’ drink. Drink until I feel myself numb enough to move around. Drink until there’s enough pressure in my head to keep the dreams away or even keep thinkin’ about the dream.

Two tiny feet stuck out of a five-gallon lard pail. It’s what haunts me. It’s what won’t go away no matter what.

“H
E
’
S NOT SLEEPING
,” I said to Margo and Granite.

“Ever?” she asked.

“Maybe a few hours every night, but that’s all.”

“Have you checked on him?” Granite asked.

“No need. My room’s right next to his and I hear him rattling around. Or when I get up to use the bathroom I see the blue light of the TV under his door. He keeps himself awake.”

“Keeps himself awake? You mean it’s not insomnia? He forces himself to stay awake?” Margo asked.

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Nights have always been our territory. When we were on the street we went our separate ways each night because night was the only time we got away, the only time we had to ourselves, really. So we never intruded.”

“We need to intrude now,” Granite said. “If he’s not sleeping, he’s not very healthy.”

“He drinks all night, too,” I said. “He sneaks bottles in.”

“Why would he do that? No one ever said anything at all to any of them about their habits. Even after the episode at the hospital, no one said a thing about his drinking again. He knows we know he drinks. Why sneak in bottles?” Granite said.

“He doesn’t want to worry us,” Margo said. “Dick is so genuine. Everything he feels comes out on his face or in the questions he asks about things. But there are obviously some things he doesn’t want to face. He uses drink so he doesn’t have to feel them. So he isn’t reminded that they’re there.”

“You sound very familiar with that sort of thing,” Granite said.

“I had an uncle like that. He died. A heart attack during an alcoholic seizure.”

“Jesus.”

“We need to talk to him about it. If he’s drinking all the time—and I smell it on him whenever I hug him—he’s putting
himself at risk. The alcohol poisoning that put him in the coma was a sign of trouble.”

“Yes,” Granite said. “He knows he can drink enough fast enough to kill himself now.”

“It’s not the booze that worries me,” I said. “It’s other things. He won’t spend money on himself. I even have to talk him into buying clothes.”

“You do?” Margo asked.

“Yes. He won’t get himself anything.”

“Just movies, apparently,” Granite said. “Have you seen his shelves? There’re hundreds of titles there, and the majority he hasn’t even watched. He just squirrels them away.”

“That’s because movies are like a drink,” Margo said. “They allow him to get away. Escape. Not think.”

“A stash,” I said.

“Pardon me, Amelia?” Granite asked.

“A stash,” I said. “When you get lucky on the street and you can afford more than the jug you’re working on, you get a stash bottle. You stash it somewhere you can get to it quick when you need it. He had a lot of stash bottles in his digs. Half a jug here, a quarter jug there, a full one sometimes. Movies are his stash bottles.”

“He does love the movies,” Granite said. “It’s like they wake up the little boy in him.”

“The little boy who drinks?” Margo asked.

We looked at each other solemnly.

“Someone has to talk to him,” Granite said.

“Who?” Margo asked. “He trusts you the most, Amelia.”

“No. He wouldn’t think about worrying me with anything. Granite?”

“Me? No. It has to be one of the others.”

“Timber, then,” Margo said.

“No,” I said. “He’s always treated Timber more gently than any of us. He wouldn’t want to cause him any worry either.”

“Digger,” Granite said.

“Yes. I think so. He’s always looked to Digger for a way through things. He admired him on the street. He listened to him.”

“Who’s going to talk to Digger?” Granite asked.

Margo and I looked at him and he nodded his head slowly.

“W
HAT THE FUCK
are you talking about?” I go, wiping the foam from my mouth with the back of a hand. We’re sitting at the Palace. Me ’n Rock.

“Amelia’s worried about him,” Rock goes. “Me too, when I think about it.”

“So you figure he’s using the flicks like a fix? That he’s staying up all friggin’ night, not sleeping, sucking up the sauce and passing out when it’s daylight?”

“We think so, yes.”

“Fuck. That’s normal where we been.”

“You’re not there now.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock. But what I’m saying is, it comes with the territory. It’s a rounder being a friggin’ rounder and just because he’s living in a Square John situation don’t mean he stopped being a rounder.”

“I think we know that, Digger, and none of us have said anything to any of you about how you have to be. We just let you be and do what you choose. But this is different.”

“How?”

“It’s not safe for him.”

“Well, pardon me all to fuck. But how are you to know what’s safe and what’s not? Maybe this is what he needs to do. Maybe fucking with it’s the unsafe thing.”

“Maybe. But we want to offer him a choice.”

“A choice of what?”

“Of dealing with it another way, I suppose.”

“Of dealing with what another way?”

“We don’t know.”

“Egg-fucking-zactly.”

Rock grins at me. “Egg-fucking-zactly, what?” he goes.

I suck back a little of my draft. We been together a long time now and I wonder why it takes him so long to catch on sometimes.

“You don’t know because he ain’t friggin’ talking. And the reason he ain’t talking is because it’s nobody’s fucking business. What he’s got in his head is what he’s got in his head and until he wants to let that go we don’t got a say in how he deals with it.”

“Not even if it’s harmful?”

“You don’t know that. Look at Timber. Until he got ready to let the cat out of the bag, none of us knew what he was carrying around. That was a pretty friggin’ big weight too, but we didn’t know nothing until he copped out.”

“Yes. But we had to go find him. If we hadn’t, we don’t know what he might have done.”

“Okay, maybe that’s right. But we found him on accounta he copped out first. I’m saying, minding your business means minding your business, and Dick ain’t ready to come up with the deal yet.”

“He might if you talk to him.”

“And say what?”

“That we’re worried about him.”

I finish off my draft and wave for another. “
We?
Have I ever looked like the kind of guy who lost a lot of sleep over small-time shit like this?”

“Small-time?”

“Yeah. Small-fucking-time. How’s that line go? You can take the boy outta the country but you can’t take the country outta the boy? Well, same applies to rounders. It’s how we deal with shit.”

“But maybe it’s wrong.”

I suck up a little of the new drink Ray drops and look at Rock. Hard.

“Wrong? Me ’n the boys been handling our shit the rounder way for a long friggin’ time there, Rock, and we’re still kicking. We’re still here. Sure, maybe it’s not the clean, scientific, Square John way, but it’s our way and it works for us. Having a mittful of money don’t change that. It don’t change us. If I had something that was gnawing at my guts these days, I’d be duking it out my
way too. Dick’s a rounder. He thinks like a rounder. He deals with shit like a rounder, and all the friggin’ money in the world won’t change that. Not now, not ever.

“You all think it’s wrong. You all think him having a drink or stewing over whatever the fuck he’s stewing over is bad, horrible, dangerous. Well, all I know is, forcing somebody to haul out into the daylight what ain’t ready for the daylight is a lot more fucking dangerous than leaving it be. Talk to him? Yeah, I’ll talk to him. I’ll walk up and give him a buddy-buddy shot on the shoulder and tell him it’s all good. It’s all fucking good. Let him know I’m a winger. That I’m there. I’ll always be there. Even though he might not be perfect, even though he ain’t sailing a smooth fucking sea, I’m fucking there. That’s what I’ll tell him and if everyone else would just do the same friggin’ thing maybe he’d relax a little. Maybe he’d sleep at night. Maybe he’d ease up on the hooch a little.”

We look at each other across the table. Sometimes money can’t buy shrinkage. Can’t bring worlds any closer than they’re meant to come. Rock just stares at me and nods his head. Oceans away.

I
FIND HIM
sitting on the porch wrapped up in a blanket even though it’s a mild afternoon. He’s staring at the floor, making small motions in Amelia’s rocker, just enough to move it slightly. He doesn’t hear me. I’m standing at the living room window looking out, resting my hands from a few hours of whittling and shaping a piece I started. He just sits there looking at the floor, rocking slowly. Alone. Amelia and Margo have gone on a shopping jaunt somewhere, Digger and Granite have disappeared, and I’ve been in my room for a few hours, so I had no idea of how long he’d been there. I reach into my back pocket and pull out the little notebook I’ve taken to carrying around with me since I started carving again. I scratch down the outlines of things that catch my eye. Scratch them down to remind myself of how they held the space around them, how they breathed. I look at him and start to trace an outline on the paper. He’s like a cloud. The loose wrap of the blanket hides all the angles of his body and it drapes down to the floor, concealing everything but his feet. Those big flat feet. His shoes are worn, deeply sidewalk cut at the back outside edges of the heels, so that they have a skewed placement on the floor. A severe downward slant. Old shoes that look as though they carried the tales and stories of a thousand miles
in their scuff and smudge. Old shoes. The ankles that stick out of those shoes are bony, skinny, brittle-looking. The blanket distorts the shape of his legs and trunk and it’s only at the upper torso that his body begins to show itself again. A sharp jut at the elbow, a small mountain range of knuckles, and the roll of forearm toward the other side of his chest, his other wrist hidden by the angle. His arms are thin. The blanket sags above the elbow, hung from the poke of his shoulder, the slender blade of bone draping the blanket sharply along its length. And then the neck. Sticking out of the trimmed edge of fabric, it’s an old neck, criss-crossed by a ragged tartan of wrinkles on loose, dry skin so that it resembles more a turtle’s neck than a man’s. It folds beneath the chin that’s angled downward toward his chest, a narrow chin, a button of bone that holds the tight angular lines of his face closed. The face. The face that stares at the floor looks as though gravity worked hardest on it, like that magic force gathered itself at that one point on earth, pulling it all downward, the skin sagging, slumped and tired, etched with the crease and cut of wrinkles that aren’t so much ancient as earned, culled from a lifetime of stitching days, hours, minutes together with the slender thread of worry, fear perhaps. His nose hooks slightly at the top of the bridge, a small flat plateau between the eyes marking its descent. The eyebrows are bushy. They seem to hold the cliff of skin that is his forehead in place before it can landslide down his face, pushed by the curled black weight of hair that’s speckled with a flurry of grey. But it’s the eyes that have all the power. The eyes. They bulge somewhat in their sockets, and from the angle I’m standing at, the one I can see perfectly in profile looks full, like a bladder, a filled wet sack of life. Staring at the floor they droop, hanging like tears on the skirt of bone that’s the upper edge of his cheekbones, two small fists under the skin. Unblinking. Unmoving. His eyes hold all of him. They stare at the floor with an intensity a saint might have, a martyr perhaps, or a prisoner who can only see freedom in the patterns in the concrete of his cell. They’re sad, wistful, lonely, scared, and weary all at the same time, and they pull you, even in profile, to the hint of history, the
vague tease of experience and circumstance that shaped this face, this great, sad face hung in solitude over all the ragged miles. I move the nub of pencil slowly as though I could coax the feel of this moment into the paper, not wanting to risk forgetting the texture of the man. He doesn’t move in all that time, not even a blink, and as I fold my notebook and step away from the window to leave him in his shadowed glory, I wonder why he wears old shoes, why he sits alone on a perfect afternoon, why the floor is all the vista he requires, and why this world of money can’t buy him more than solitary moments in a rocking chair huddled in upon himself like a great sad Buddha. I think about all of this as I walk up the stairs to my room and start to shape the man in the chair.