Train Wreck Girl (7 page)

You're tending bar in the worst of dives. It's all ancient beer signs and bad lighting and chipped linoleum and torn vinyl seats. You're by yourself, doing your best to keep the joint clean when Brother Joe walks in with his buddy Paddy. You haven't seen Joe since the morning after Sophie stabbed you. You haven't seen Paddy since you were in high school.

Paddy is a moose of a man. When you were a kid, he was a giant. In your mind, he ducked when he walked through doorways. Now, with age and perspective and yourself grown to full height, he's less of a giant. He's barely two inches taller than you. Still, Paddy and you would be the two tallest guys in most rooms. Paddy has so much hair on his face that it's hard to find any skin there. On his left shoulder, he has a professionally done, full-color tattoo of a woman. Below the tattoo is the word “Tina.” Full color, professionally done, too. Below that is a homemade, chicken scratch tattoo that says, “is a whore.”

One time when you were a kid, you worked up the nerve to ask Paddy about Tina. “She's a whore,” Paddy told you. “I would've made that more clear, but I'm left-handed.”

It took you a long time to get his joke. You thought and thought on it. Finally, you saw Joe give himself a homemade tattoo and you knew what Paddy had been talking about.

Brother Joe looks exactly like he did the last time you saw him: leathery skin, stringy muscles, hair gray from age and dirty blond from the sun. As always, he's wearing a collared shirt. It's a bowling shirt, but he still looks sharp. Brother Joe always does his best to look sharp.

Paddy and Brother Joe had both been in the Vietnam War. They hadn't known each other then. They both spent the decades after the war working manual labor and drinking to forget. When you were an adolescent, they usually took you to the bars with them.

You didn't drink.

Anyway, seeing Paddy and Brother Joe finally makes you feel like you're home. These guys are your childhood. To most people, they're white trash guys. Most bartenders would see two guys like this walk in and the bartenders would try to remember if that baseball bat or pistol was still down by the cash register. To you, these guys are heroes. Especially Brother Joe. He's the guy who pulled you out of the foster homes and made you feel like you had a family, even if there was only one other member in said family.

It's never a mystery what these guys are drinking. You pull two bottles of the cheapest domestic beer, pop the top, and set them in front of Joe and Paddy. “If it ain't the Machete Monkeys,” you say.

“Fucking-A,” Paddy says.

“I thought you were dead,” you say to him. Because you vaguely remember a phone call from Brother Joe back when you lived in Kill Devil Hills. Something about Paddy and a motorcycle accident.

“He just smells that way,” Joe says.

You smile. Now you really feel at home.

No one comes into the bar for some time. You hang out and chat with Paddy and Brother Joe. You talk about the things you always talked about with these guys: women, Florida State football, drinking stories, Vietnam, women. When Paddy and Joe are six or seven beers into the afternoon, a group of women about their age walk in. You stroll over and serve them. A margarita, a gimlet, and a Tom Collins. They ask for a menu. “Sorry,” you tell them. There's no food in this dive and you wouldn't want to serve it if there were.

You keep chatting with Brother Joe and Paddy. One of the women is giving Brother Joe the eye. She has hair so blonde it's almost white and a tan so dark that, in the bar light, she looks like she could be from India or something. Paddy gets up to play pinball. Brother Joe pats you on the arm. He says, “Watch this, Danny. I'm gonna score with this broad.”

That was Joe's M.O. way back when you were a preteen and Joe'd take you with him on a Saturday bender. You'd go to his favorite bar, Barnacle Bills. He'd make sure everyone knew you were his kid brother and not his son. He'd drink and tell stories and feed you, then try to “score with a broad.” When you first started heading down there, you'd bring a book and go out onto the rocks of Port Canaveral and read while Joe tried to work his magic. Which wasn't magic. He'd always stumble out a few hours later, drunk and alone. He did woo the women at first, but he never knew when to stop drinking and he'd hang with the women until he got ugly. You started putting your bike in the back of his truck so that you could split when he tried to pick up women. You hoped that, without you around, he'd quit drinking earlier and actually score. He almost never did.

So now with Joe looking across the bar at that one woman and her smiling at him, you feel like you're back in 1982.

Joe smiles to the woman. He says to you, “See that broad over there. She's pretty hot, huh?”

You nod, though that woman is not hot. You never went in for those skinny, blond beach chicks.

Joe says, “She might be too good for me, right? I'm just some drunk asshole in a bar. I mow lawns for a living. Why would a broad like that want a guy like me?”

“Don't run yourself down, Joe,” you say. “You're a good guy.” Also, you're thinking: that girl's nothing special.

Joe says, “No, it's true. I'm a drunk and I'm an asshole. But I will pick up that broad because I know something that no one else in this bar knows.”

“What's that?” you ask, even though you've heard this speech a thousand times. It's classic Brother Joe. You wait for it. Joe looks around as if he's giving out national security secrets.

He stage whispers, “She took a big shit this morning.”

You laugh.

Joe smiles. He says, “I'm not kidding. All these fuckers in this world around us, they think they're better than a pair of white trash bastards like you and me. Because they own the houses they live in and have money and good jobs and parents and shit. And we don't have any of that. But we know this, Danny. We know that they all get up in the morning and take a smelly shit and they hate the way they smell inside. Just like you and me. They're no better than us. We're just a bunch of fucking monkeys sitting around eating and shitting and trying to get laid. Don't you ever forget that.”

You never have forgotten that. You've tried to forget, but you haven't forgotten. Now, you're a little happy about it. Other people can keep their money and families and things. You have Brother Joe and monkeys and the world on a toilet. God bless that fucking guy.

Joe grabs his beer and walks around the bar. He pulls up a stool next to the blond woman. She flips her hair over her shoulder and looks down at the bar like she's being coy. Within five minutes, Joe and the woman are talking and laughing and doing shots.

You try to keep busy and give them space. You wash some glasses. You wipe the linoleum bar. You dust the bottles in the well. You fill the ice bin. You keep your head down and work.

The cow bell on the front door bounces off the glass. You look up to see who's walking in. You can hardly believe it.

It's Libra.

She saunters in like it's nothing. Like she's been here a thousand times. She's wearing her winter clothes: pink parka and gloves and everything. Last you checked, we were still in Florida in the springtime. Things are making less and less sense.

Libra sits in a stool away from Joe and the women and even Paddy and the pinball machine. You walk up to see what she needs, even though you're certain that she's dead. You saw the corpse.

Libra reaches under the bar and snaps her leg off her hip. She slams the leg on the bar and says, “What the fuck, Danny?”

And the night sweats come back.

Bart told me he'd take me to Joe. I knew what he meant, but I was still down for it.

He picked me up at work at around one-thirty. I'd been working at a metal shop that was about ten blocks from the duplex Bart and I lived in. Bart wanted to check it out before we hit the road.

I introduced him to my boss—a guy named Duane. Duane and I had worked together out at the Space Center a decade earlier. He'd been working in a crane about fifteen feet away from me one day inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is the warehouse where rockets are built. We were indoors, but about five hundred feet off the ground. It was a one of a kind type situation, working in there. You heard all kinds of crazy statistics about that huge warehouse, like that you could fit Yankee Stadium and all its parking lots on the roof of the VAB. Or that the VAB had more square footage than Vatican City. Crazy things like that. I don't know if any of it was true. It was a weird joint to work in, though, because you'd have to work higher than anywhere else locally. Like, if you built a condo on Cocoa Beach, you generally wouldn't get any higher than about seven stories, but when you were up seventy or eighty feet, there'd be a pretty mean wind blowing in off the Atlantic. It'd be easy to lose your balance. There was no wind inside the VAB. It was easier to walk the beams there. But if you fell, you fell five hundred feet, not eighty. The result of either fall would probably be the same, so I guess it shouldn't have mattered much to me.

Only, one day Duane and I were working. He was safe in his crane and I was out on the beams, welding. I leaned over a little too far and my tape measure fell out of my tool belt. At first, I tried to reach for it and almost lost my balance. It freaked me out. My heart started racing. I could feel my blood fill with adrenaline. I squeezed my thighs tight on the beam and breathed as slowly and deeply as I could and I watched that tape measure fall and fall and fall for what seemed like forever. The whole time, I was thinking: that's me. That's me falling all that distance. And that's the difference between falling eighty feet and falling five hundred. You're gonna die either way. Either way, you're gonna think about dying for the rest of your short life. But five hundred feet gives you a long time to think about dying.

I finished welding that beam, walked over to Duane, said, “I quit,” and rode the elevator down.

A few years later, Duane opened this metal shop in a warehouse off Brevard Avenue and found a way to keep his feet on the ground, too. When I got back to Cocoa Beach, Duane was the first guy I went to see about a job. He hired me as a freelancer. I could use his tools and he'd pay me by the job. Most welders wouldn't work like this—because you didn't get benefits or workman's comp and it was tougher to make good money—but I worked faster than most welders and I appreciated being able to make full-time money without having to work full-time.

Plus, Duane paid me under the table. In cash. There was no record of me working there, so I felt like I'd be harder to find, should the Flagstaff police come looking. Which I guess didn't matter because the wheelchair dude had already found me. He was sitting outside the shop in his van when Bart came by to see me. I knew this because Duane had told me. He told me that he knew the wheelchair dude was after me for something. Duane said that, if I didn't do something about the wheelchair dude, I was going to have to find another job. He told me that the wheelchair dude made him nervous. I knew the feeling.

Bart came inside the metal shop. I showed Bart the things we were making. Some kind of cellular phone sub station antennas. Bart asked, “Are you still doing sculptures?”

I pointed to some over by my work station. “Nothing special,” I said. “Just something to keep me busy while I'm waiting for supplies and shit.”

This wasn't exactly true. I worked on those sculptures every day. They were the most important thing in the world to me. I don't know why I always downplayed that, always acted like they didn't matter.

Bart walked over to the biggest of my sculptures. It was about sixteen inches high and thirty inches wide and six inches deep. I'd made it out of galvanized wire cloth and some strips of sheet metal and straps that carpenters use to brace trusses against hurricane winds. There was a bull, kinda, and a sort of horse looking thing and some fucked up looking people reaching for the sky. A total rip-off of Picasso's
Guernica,
only I hadn't seen
Guernica
for a few years and just went by memory, so maybe people wouldn't even know what I was ripping off. I think there was enough of my style in it to make it distinctive, too. I was actually pretty proud of that one. Bart said, “You could probably sell this for a decent amount of money.”

“Nah,” I said. “It's crap. Let's go.”

Bart tried to take the sculpture with him, but I told him to put it down. And, anyway, we didn't have a lot of time. We had to make it out to north Merritt Island and back in time for Bart to drive his four o'clock bus route.

Bart drove deep into the swamps and orange groves of Merritt Island, to that weird, rural redneck moat that surrounds Kennedy Space Center. We turned onto a dirt road lined by retention ditches and citrus trees. Wind blew through the groves, kicking up that smell of orange blossoms. An ibis fed on insects in a freshly mown section of grass. I hung my hand out the window of the car and let it float up and down. It was all white noise and peace. I felt like I was a world away from civilization out there.

At the end of the dirt road was an ancient little chapel and a little graveyard. Bart parked the car. We got out and started walking.

Of course, all that was left of Joe was a sorry little slab of a tombstone. Not even a tombstone, really. A grave marker. The kind that you could run the lawn mower right over. Which I guess would be cool with Joe, because if there was one thing Brother Joe hated, it was running a weed eater. I'd hate to think that sister Janie would've bought a big ass tombstone and doomed a new generation of guys like Joe to run a weed eater.

That was the first thing I thought about when I saw Joe's grave marker, too: oh, good, no one's gonna have to weed eat around this shit.

The second thing I thought was: oh, shit, he's really dead.

The next thing I did was laugh. Not long and hysterical. Not even loud. Just that little quick laugh that I always let out when I saw Joe after not having seen him for a bit.

Because, in my mind, it's crazy, but I kept thinking that maybe it wasn't all true. Maybe he didn't really have that heart attack. There was something about that story that I never believed. How does a forty-fouryear-old guy have a heart attack? Especially one that kills him? And what kind of cause of death is a heart attack? Doesn't everyone's heart attack at the end? Isn't saying someone died of a heart attack the same thing as saying someone died of death? It didn't make sense. Why should I believe it?

I'd first heard the news back in November. I happened to call Joe the day after it happened. Some broad I'd never met answered the phone. She had this rough, lifetime smoker's voice. I wondered what bar Joe had picked her up at and how long she'd been around. I asked for Joe and she said, “No, honey, he's dead.” Just like that.

She gave me the details, but it all seemed unreal. I didn't want to believe it. And part of me didn't believe it.

But here I was, standing over Brother Joe's grave marker. Reading it. They even got his name right: Joe Cully McGregor. None of that Joseph shit. He was never a Joseph. Not even on his birth certificate. Just Joe.

And the marker was here in the cemetery of St. Luke's Episcopal Church. Joe was right there with the rest of my family. My dad's marker was there. My mom's. My oldest brother, who died in Vietnam before I could get a chance to know him. My grandparents, who were old memories before I was born. McGregors and Cullys stretching back to the late eighteenth century. All gathered around under these ancient live oaks and the hanging Spanish moss and the shadows of the old chapel. That's it, I realized. It's just me and Janie now. There were six of us when I was born. Now there were two.

I don't know if it was tougher to see Libra mutilated and dead on the tracks or to see nothing left of Joe but a grave marker. I don't know which was worse. Or maybe they were equally bad. Just different. I don't know.

Bart stood next to me. I wondered if he'd ever brought a forty out here and poured beer on Joe's grave. That old tribute kinda thing. Probably not. Bart dealt with death all the time at his second job. He probably knew how to deal with it. Better than me, anyway. Better than always running from it and denying it. I don't know. At least Bart knew not to say anything until I did. Not to make a joke or pat me on the back or anything. He just stood there until I said, “You're not the one who picked up the body, are you?”

“Nah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It happened during the day. I work nights.” Bart knelt down and picked off the grass that hung over the marker. “I think Joe made it to the hospital, anyway. I think he died there.”

“That's too bad,” I said. I don't know why I said it.

Bart and I stood there for a little bit, just looking at Joe's name and “1955-1999.” Too young to die. Too old to die young. Finally, I said, “You think you could hook me up with your night job?”

“Really?”

I nodded.

“Sure,” Bart said. “You could probably start next week.”

I took one last look at Joe, then walked away. Maybe picking up dead people would help. Maybe it was exactly what I needed.