Scraps & Chum (3 page)

I bet she’s staggering around back there in Dallas, laughing inside that bloody husk she got as a body now. I bet she’s laughing hard as I used to hit her.

No Humanity left.

Maybe she’s right.

Because here I am.

SIREN

The first morning I heard it, I thought I had left the television on overnight. You know, that extremely high-pitched whine, almost on the edge of hearing, yet audible on some peripheral plane. The sound of an electrical component silently sucking juice from an outlet.  I wiped the jeweled crust from my eyes and reprimanded myself; I could not afford to be so negligent these
days. Electricity
cost money
and my wallet was thin, especially wi
th gas prices so high and me
having been let go by the school.
I rolled over in bed and saw the empty bottle of Black Label tipped si
deways on the floor. Had I finished
the whole damn thing last night? I didn
’
t even rem
ember making it to the bedroom.

The whining sound did not sit well with the heat peppering the backs of my eyes. W
hiskey dries me out
, gives me pimples to boot, but mostly makes my eyeballs flame up. Problem is once I start drinking it I don
’
t stop.

I rolled out of bed, intent on
finding the source of the whine
.  When I was a little boy, a friend of mine had a dog whistle that emitted a similar tone. He
’
d blow it and nearby mongrels would howl and look at us longingly before barking and finally whimpering, begging us to stop the torture. This was the sound I heard that first morning, as I threw back the blankets and stared at the blue sky outside the window. It persisted as I held my head and stepped over the pile of clothes on the floor
and ambled to the living room.

“
Ow,
”
I said to whatever ghosts might reside in my home, and hit the power button on the cable box. I was walking toward the bathroom when I realized I could still hear it.
“
Ugh.
”
I returned and hit the power button on the television this time. The TV turned on, an annoying talk show, so I shru
gged and turned it off again.
I headed once aga
in to the bathroom,
convincing
myself the distant high-pitched wail in my ears was actually just my head playing tr
icks on me.

You
’
re hung over,
take a shower and you
’
ll feel b
etter
.

I did regain a semblance of humanity
as the hot water beat into the back of my neck, the pulsing behind my eyes slowly disappearing. I let the water pound my face and head, and drank big gulps of it as well, hopin
g it would hydrate me
.

Thoughts of the previous night
’
s writing session came back to me. The story I had been working on was still unfinished, and I was clueless as to where it was going. It seemed I
’
d been writing some version of it
for years, though I only had twenty
pages to show for it. The story was boring, unimaginative, and stagnant.
That I was able to get the twenty
pages out of it was a pathetic moral victory. I had not been able to write anything of merit in some time, and my last novel had gotten less than stellar reviews. A review in one of the more notable literary magazines said it felt like McGovern (that
’
s me) had employed a new method of writing while
lobotomized
.

It
’
s hard to teach English to high school students when they know you
’
re a joke. Even harder to keep teaching it when you tell them they
’
ll never amount to anything.  The district frowns on such truth.

After the shower, I dressed myself and sat at my computer, looking over what I had written the night before. It wa
s pitiful,
so I sighed and deleted the entire thing.
“
I
’
ve read
better shit on bathroom walls. Read better stuff by that Davidson kid.
”

I dwelled on Davidson. O
ne of my former students
who
had sold his first story to a magazine I
’
d bee
n rejected by repeatedly.  It was infuriating; t
he kid couldn
’
t spell his own name. But e
ditors stop
ped caring about prose l
ong ago;
nowadays
they just want
tropes that sell
.

I tell myself that anyway.

Frustrated, I went to the kitchen and rifled through the cabinets until I found
what I was looking for: a bottle of aspirin and some Bagel Bites. I put the coffee pot on and rifled through yesterday
’
s mail. Nothing but bills I couldn
’
t pay now that I
’
d been fired.

That was when I realized I could still hear the hitch-pitched whine in my ears.

                                                                         
II
Over the
course of the next day
I convinced myself not to go on a bender. I wrote a little, hated it all, deleted it, and then watched bad talk shows. T
he whine remained.
And what
’
s more, it got louder.
I checked every electrical component in my apartment but could find no source for the sound. By the second day the whine was making me irritable and I felt like those dogs from my youth, shaking my head to rid myself of the annoyance, sticking my fingers in my ears for a brief reprieve. Unfortunately, my finger
s did nothing to block it out.

On the third day, the sound was
too loud,
simply grating, and I gave up trying to write
or understand the
slang and memes on the talk shows,
and walked down the road to O
’
Connor
’
s Pub. The sound followed me
like a loyal dog
,
slowly
and
steadily getting louder,
like car brakes squealing across town. I glanced up at the power lines and transformers as I made my way to the pub, but could find nothin
g that might betray its origin.

It was inside the pub that I first realized something was truly amiss
.  S
everal patrons
were
pressing their fingers into their ears.
I took a tattered stool
at the bar and
motioned Pat O
’
Connor over to me.

“
Hey there, McGovern,
”
the Dubliner said
.
“
Been a while since I
’
ve seen you. Working hard or hardly working?
”
As he spoke he gave his head a slight shake, an obvious testament to the uncomfortable effects of the sound
that was somewhere in the air.

“
Pat,
”
I said, glancing around the pub,
“
do you hear that noise?
”

“
Does the pope shit in the woods? Yeah, been hearing it for a couple of days now.
Damndest thing. Any ideas?
”

“
Not a clue. But I
’
m glad I
’
m not going crazy.
”

“
I think it
’
s the power lines,
”
he suggested.
“
Or that new complex down the street . . . they got that free internet set-up. Uses all them cables and whatnot. That
’
s probably what it is. Damn annoying. I
’
m gonna call the electric company if it don
’
t stop soon, give them a piece of my mind.
”

“
Yeah,
”
I replied, knowing full well that such connections did not create irr
itable resonances.

A pair of twenty-somethings walked in, wearing jeans three sizes too big and t-shirts with marijuana leaves on them. They sat next to me at the bar and one of t
hem waved for Pat
’
s attention.

“
Muthafucka!
”
the bleached-blond one said,
“
Yo, Pat, you got the windows o
pen or sumptin. You gotta shut
’
em. My ears are killing me, yo.
”

Pat told the kid that the windows were all closed. 

The kid
’
s friend, an angry-looking man with a shaved head and sideburns that met under his nose, sl
ammed his fist on the bar.
“
Fuck
, man,
this shizzle is givin
’
me a straight-up headache. I can
’
t hear myself think or nuthin
’
.
”

Blondy pretended to swat a fly for emphasis.
“
For rizzle, my nizzle.
”

My ears, hurting though they already were, seemed to throb a bit more at such poor English. I was unaware that I was
staring at them until the blond
addressed me.

“
What up, Pop? I look funny to you or something?
”
He turned to his bald friend, said,
“
Yo, dog, check this muthafucka out. Like he
’
s mesmerized by my beauty an
’
shit.
”