Stories (2011) (37 page)

Journal Entries

A week to remember . . .

After this, my little white page friend, you shall have
greater security, kept under not only lock and key, but you will have a hiding
place. If I were truly as smart as I sometimes think I am, I wouldn't write
this down. I know better. But, I am compelled.

Compulsion. It comes out of nowhere and owns us all. We put
a suit and tie and hat on the primitive part of our brain and call it manners
and civilization, but ultimately, it's just a suit and tie and a hat. The
primitive brain is still primitive, and it compels, pulses to the same dark
beat that made our less civilized ancestors and the primordial ooze before them
throb to simple, savage rhythms of sex, death and destruction.

Our nerves call out to us to touch and taste life, and
without our suits of civilization, we can do that immediately. Take what we
need if we've muscle enough. Will enough. But all dressed up in the trappings
of civilization, we're forced to find our thrills vicariously. And eventually,
that is not enough. Controlling our impulses that way is like having someone
eat your food for you. No taste. No texture. No nourishment. Pitiful business.

Without catering to the needs of our primitive brains,
without feeding impulses, trying instead to get what we need through books and
films and the lives of the more adventurous, we cease to live. We wither. We
bore ourselves and others. We die. And are glad of it.

Whatcha gonna do, huh?

*    
*     *

Saturday morning, June 10th through Saturday 17th:

I haven't written in a while, so I'll cover a few days,
beginning with a week ago today.

It was one of those mornings when I woke up on the wrong
side of the bed, feeling a little out of sorts, mad at the wife over something
I've forgotten and she probably hasn't forgotten, and we grumbled down the
hall, into the kitchen, and there's our dog, a Siberian Husky -- my wife always
refers to him as a Suburban Husky because of his pampered lifestyle, though any
resemblance to where we live and suburbia requires a great deal of faith -- and
he's smiling at us, and then we see why he's smiling.

Two reasons:

(1) He's happy to see us. (2) He feels a little guilty.

He has reason to feel guilty. Not far behind him, next to
the kitchen table, was a pile of shit. I'm not talking your casual little
whoopsie-doo, and I'm not talking your inconvenient pile, and I'm not talking
six to eight turds the size of large bananas. I'm talking a certified,
pure-dee, goddamn prize-winning SHIT. There were enough dog turds there to
shovel out in a pickup truck and dump on the lawn and let dry so you could use
them to build an adobe hut big enough to keep your tools in and have room to
house your cat in the winter.

And, right beside this sterling deposit, was a lake of piss
wide enough and deep enough to go rowing on.

I had visions of a Siberian Husky hat and slippers, or
possibly a nice throw rug for the bedroom, a necklace of dog claws and teeth;
maybe cut that smile right out of his face and frame it.

But the dog-lover in me took over, and I put him outside in
his pen where he cooled his dewclaws for a while. Then I spent about a
half-hour cleaning up dog shit while my wife spent the same amount of time
keeping our two-year-old son, Kevin, known to me as Fruit of My Loins, out of
the shit.

Yep, Oh Great White Page of a Diary, he was up now. It
always works that way. In times of greatest stress, in times of greatest need
for contemplation or privacy, like when you're trying to get that morning piece
off the Old Lady, the kid shows up, and suddenly it's as if you've been
deposited inside an ant farm and the ants are crawling and stinging. By the
time I finished cleaning up the mess, it was time for breakfast, and I got to
tell you, I didn't want anything that looked like link sausage that morning.

So Janet and I ate, hoping that what we smelled while eating
was the aroma of disinfectant and not the stench of shit wearing a coat of
disinfectant, and we watched the kid spill his milk eighty-lebben times and
throw food and drop stuff on the floor, and me and the wife we're fussing at
each other more and more, about whatever it was we were mad about that morning
-- a little item intensified by our dog's deposits -- and by the time we're
through eating our meal, and Janet leaves me with Fruit of My Loins and his
View Master and goes out to the laundry room to do what the room is named for
-- probably went out there to beat the laundry clean with rocks or bricks,
pretending shirts and pants were my head -- I'm beginning to think things
couldn't get worse. About that time the earth passes through the tail of a
comet or something, some kind of dimensional gate is opened, and the world goes
weird.

There's a knock at the door.

At first I thought it was a bird pecking on the glass, it
was that soft. Then it came again and I went to the front door and opened it,
and there stood a woman about five feet tall wearing a long, wool coat, and
untied, flared-at-the-ankles shoes, and a ski cap decorated with a silver pin.
The wool ski cap was pulled down so tight over her ears, her face was pale.
Keep in mind that it was probably eighty degrees that morning, and the
temperature was rising steadily, and she was dressed like she was on her way to
plant the flag at the summit of Everest. Her age was hard to guess. Had that
kind of face. She could have been twenty-two or forty-two.

She said, "Can I use your phone, mister? I got an
important call to make."

Well, I didn't see any ready-to-leap companions hiding in
the shrubbery, and I figured if she got out of line I could handle her, so I
said, "Yeah, sure. Be my guest," and let her in.

The phone was in the kitchen, on the wall, and I pointed it
out to her, and me and Fruit of My Loins went back to doing what we were doing,
which was looking at the View Master. We switched from Goofy to Winnie the
Pooh, the one about Tigger in the tree, and it was my turn to look at it, and I
couldn't help but hear my guest's conversation with her mother was becoming
stressful -- I knew it was her mother because she addressed her by that title
-- and suddenly Fruit of My Loins yelled, "Wook, Daddy wook."

I turned and "wooked," and what do I see but what
appears to be some rare tribal dance, possibly something having originated in
higher altitudes where the lack of oxygen to the brain causes wilder abandon
with the dance steps. This gal was all over the place. Fred Astaire with a hot
coat hanger up his ass couldn't have been any brisker. I've never seen anything
like it. Then, in mid-dossey-do, she did a leap like cheerleaders do, one of
those things where they kick their legs out to the side, open up like a
nutcracker and kick the palms of their hands, then she hit the floor on her
ass, spun, and wheeled as if on a swivel into the hallway and went out of
sight. Then there came a sound from in there like someone on speed beating the
bongos. She hadn't dropped the phone either. The wire was stretched tight
around the corner and was vibrating like a big fish was on the line.

I dashed over there and saw she was lying crosswise in the
hallway, bamming her head against the wall, clutching at the phone with one
hand and pulling her dress up over her waist with the other, and she was making
horrible sounds and rolling her eyes, and I immediately thought: this is it,
she's gonna die. Then I saw she wasn't dying, just thrashing, and I decided it
was an epileptic fit.

I got down and took the phone away from her, took hold of
her jaw, got her tongue straight without getting bit, stretched her out on the
floor away from the wall, picked up the phone and told her mama, who was still
fussing about something or another, that things weren't so good, hung up on her
in mid-sentence and called the ambulance.

I ran out to the laundry room, told Janet a strange woman
was in our hallway pulling her dress over her head and that an ambulance was
coming. Janet, bless her heart, has become quite accustomed to weird events
following me around, and she went outside to direct the ambulance, like one of
those people at the airport with light sticks.

I went back to the woman and watched her thrash a while,
trying to make sure she didn't choke to death, or injure herself, and Fruit of
My Loins kept clutching my leg and asking me what was wrong. I didn't know what
to tell him.

After what seemed a couple of months and a long holiday, the
ambulance showed up with a whoop of siren, and I finally decided the lady was
doing as good as she was going to do, so I went outside. On either side of my
walk were all these people. It's like Bradbury's story "
The Crowd
."
The one where when there's an accident all these strange people show up out of
nowhere and stand around and watch.

I'd never seen but two of these people before in my life,
and I've been living in this neighborhood for years.

One lady immediately wanted to go inside and pray for the
woman, who she somehow knew, but Janet whispered to me there wasn't enough room
for our guest in there, let alone this other woman and her buddy, God, so I
didn't let her in.

All the other folks are just a jabbering, and about all
sorts of things. One woman said to another, "Mildred, how you been?"

"I been good. They took my kids away from me this
morning, though. I hate that. How you been?"

"Them hogs breeding yet?" one man says to another,
and the other goes into not only that they're breeding, but he tells how much
fun they're having at it.

Then here comes the ambulance boys with a stretcher. One of
the guys knew me somehow, and he stopped and said, "You're that writer,
aren't you?"

I admitted it.

"I always wanted to write. I got some ideas that'd make
a good book and a movie. I'll tell you about 'em. I got good ideas, I just
can't write them down. I could tell them to you and you could write them up and
we could split the money."

"Could we talk about this later?" I said.
"There's a lady in there thrashing in my hallway."

So they went in with the stretcher, and after a few minutes
the guy I talked to came out and said, "We can't get her out of there and
turned through the door. We may have to take your back door out."

That made no sense to me at all. They brought the stretcher
through and now they were telling me they couldn't carry it out. But I was too
addled to argue and told them to do what they had to do.

Well, they managed her out of the back door without having
to remodel our home after all, and when they came around the edge of the house
I heard the guy I'd talked to go, "Ahhh, damn, I'd known it was her I
wouldn't have come."

I thought they were going to set her and the stretcher down
right there, but they went on out to the ambulance and jerked open the door and
tossed her and the stretcher inside like they were tossing a dead body over a
cliff. You could hear the stretcher strike the back of the ambulance and bounce
forward and slide back again.

I had to ask: "You know her?"

"Dark enough in the house there, I couldn't tell at
first. But when we got outside, I seen who it was. She does this all the time,
but not over on this side of town in a while. She don't take her medicine on
purpose so she'll have fits when she gets stressed, or she fakes them, like
this time. Way she gets attention. Sometimes she hangs herself, cuts off her
air. Likes the way it feels. Sexual or something. She's damn near died
half-dozen times. Between you and me, wish she'd go on and do it and save me
some trips."

And the ambulance driver and his assistant were out of
there. No lights. No siren.

Well, the two people standing in the yard that we knew were
still there when I turned around, but the others, like mythical creatures, were
gone, turned to smoke, dissolved, become one with the universe, whatever. The
two people we knew, elderly neighbors, said they knew the woman, who by this
time, I had come to think of as the Phone Woman.

"She goes around doing that," the old man said.
"She stays with her mamma who lives on the other side of town, but they
get in fights on account of the girl likes to hang herself sometimes for
entertainment. Never quite makes it over the ridge, you know, but gets her
mother worked up. They say her mother used to do that too, hang herself, when
she was a little girl. She outgrowed it. I guess the girl there . . . you know
I don't even know her name . . . must have seen her mamma do that when she was
little, and it kind of caught on. She has that 'lepsy stuff too, you know,
thrashing around and all, biting on her tongue?"

I said I knew and had seen a demonstration of it this
morning.

"Anyway," he continued, "they get in fights
and she comes over here and tries to stay with some relatives that live up the
street there, but they don't cotton much to her hanging herself to things. She
broke down their clothesline post last year. Good thing it was old, or she'd
been dead. Wasn't nobody home that time. I hear tell they sometimes go off and
leave her there and leave rope and wire and stuff laying around, sort of
hoping, you know. But except for that time with the clothesline, she usually
does her hanging when someone's around. Or she goes in to use the phone at
houses and does what she did here."

"She's nutty as a fruitcake," said the old woman.
"She goes back on behind here to where that little trailer park is, knocks
on doors where the wetbacks live, about twenty to a can, and they ain't got no
phone, and she knows it. She's gotten raped couple times doing that, and it
ain't just them Mex's that have got to her. White folks, niggers. She tries to
pick who she thinks will do what she wants. She wants to be raped. It's like
the hanging. She gets some kind of attention out of it, some kind of loving.
Course, I ain't saying she chose you cause you're that kind of person."