Fictional Interlude #1
The Last Word
“You can’t imagine what it's like, sitting out front of your own house all night, staring at your own bedroom window, waiting to catch a look at some guy with sticky shorts."
Sean is nibbling on peanut brittle. He brushes the crumbs down among the pebbles and pennies on the floor of Dennis’s car.
The movement feels good. He has a chronic pain in his coccyx from sitting too long. The weakness of his spine is one reason why he and Anabella have stopped taking long drives.
“I can imagine it,” Dennis says. He is taller than Sean and feels cramped in the broken passenger seat that won’t slide back. Earlier, even though he is in his own car, he had gone to the trouble of asking Sean, politely, to switch places. Sean had refused.
"Of course I can," Dennis mumbles. "I'm here. I listen to you. It doesn't take much imagination."
Sean folds the rest of the candy into his shirt pocket and pumps the accelerator.
“Let’s drive around the block a few times. I’m going nuts.”
“What if we miss him?”
He shakes his head. “I’ve got soft pillows. She won’t let him go until morning.” He grips the wheel and presses himself into the seat. “And,” he speaks thoughtfully, “if he leaves Anabella alone in the middle of the night, I’ll find him and put his nuts in his eye sockets.”
He winds the engine until it catches and pulls away from the curb.
“Keck,” Dennis says, quietly.
They grew up here, he and Dennis and Annabella. As teenagers they vandalized the houses, drove on the lawns, rang the phones and doorbells in the middle of the night. The houses of the very people he now depends on for protection from his own kind.
A penitent, he now attends Neighborhood Watch meetings, held in back yards lit by Tiki torches and the afterglow of Weber cauldrons. Mostly he is the quiet one, unable to look past the firelight and into the dark, bounded reaches of fenced yards for fear that he’ll spot his younger self, lurking and sneering like some kind of lone, superior dog.
Annabella says people call him “likeable but simple. In a good way.” A very solid high school woodshop teacher. Can turn you a new leg for an old table but don’t expect him to craft something beautiful of his own design.
He pretends to be hurt, but he quietly agrees. Naming himself loser helps keep his former self at bay. Keeps him dull and ashamed of the old, random anger. The troubles.
Annabella refuses to go to the neighborhood meetings and frankly can’t believe that he does. She laughs about Sean to their friends. She embarrasses him, in front of them, recounting the awful things they had done in high-school. The petty crimes. The arrests. Even of the Christmas Eve they’d snuck into her parents’ hot garage, got blind drunk, puked all over the inside of her father’s pearl-colored 98. Ultimately, they were rousted — mostly naked — by her father’s furious shouts. They tried to clean up the mess but those leather seats never let go of that smell. He reminds her, grimly, that she had completely thrown him under the bus. Blaming him in front of her father, saying he forced her. Telling him she never wanted to see him again. Anything to avoid consequences. She says he was a monster, he says she was a traitor. She calls him middle aged, he wants to punch her in the stomach.
At the meetings, his neighbors complain about the lazy police, congratulate themselves on catching prowlers, and take him aside to whisper that they have seen a strange man going in and out of his house.
Now, without thinking, Sean drives past his in-laws’ place. There is a light in an upstairs window.
“Someone’s up late,” Dennis looks at his watch. “It’s after three.”
“Maybe,” he slows and pulls the car through a tight U-turn. He snaps the lights off and idles against the curb, across the street from the house. “Maybe not.
Ever since Ana’s father died, her mother’s been coming loose. Last time she was over, she sent Ana into the kitchen and told me privately that she had become afraid of the dark. But she also told me that the cat was sneaking out at night, whoring around the neighborhood. Those were her exact words.”
“Did you tell Anabella?” Dennis asks. “No. The old lady told me not to. Ana doesn’t do well with the whole concept of age.” He sighs and rattles the loose stick shift. Dennis lifts a deck of cards from the glove compartment and hoists one leg up over the dash, hangs it out the window. Sean wonders how long ago he had stopped moving his own body so easily.
“The guy’s probably built like a gymnast. Just what a woman Ana’s age’ll tell her friends she thinks she needs,” he stares up at the single light in his mother-in-law’s house. He understands what the old lady means. Sitting in front of his own lightless house, he has begun to grow afraid of darkness.
“Think I’ll get home tonight?” Dennis asks, shuffling the cards.
“We’re fishing,” he shakes his head.
“I could surprise Janice. She loves surprises.” Dennis smiles.
Sean catches the show of teeth, speared by the moonlight; wonders if his friend is intentionally cruel. He pulls the light switch so hard the horn sounds. Guns the engine and takes off down the road. “Like I said, you can’t imagine what it’s like.”
He’s on a road where deadly accidents have happened. A narrow series of blind curves with frequent driveways opening towards distant estates, it leads, eventually, to his parent’s house. He stops when he realizes where he’s going. Neither he nor Dennis has spoken in quite a while. Sean is embarrassed and feels he has to explain himself as he swings the car through a careful U-turn.
“They never liked Anabella. It makes me sick to think that something was drawing me over there.”
“Do they know?” Dennis asks, buzzing the playing cards, single handedly cutting and recutting them.
“No,” Sean waves his hand for empha sis. “I don’t talk to them about her. Not for good news, not for bad.”
Dennis lowers his head, as though he’s trying to keep a bubble from rising in his throat. Sean completes the turn and starts home again. Dennis’ cheeks puff slightly.
“Keck!” he barks suddenly. His voice is whiplike and seems to snap in the air between them.
Sean starts, surprised. The car rocks slightly. “What’s the matter?”
Dennis burps quietly and smiles, embarassed. “Sorry. Can’t stop it.”
“What is that, a nervous thing? You said it before.”
“No.” He replies and opens the glove compartment, puts the deck of cards away. “Just feels good. And it keeps coming out.”
“Keck?” he tries it. “What does it mean?”
Dennis shrugs. “Nothing. I don’t know.”
“You don’t make any sense,” Sean is frowning, thinking hard. “Words don’t simply come out.”
“What about when you asked Ana to marry you?” he grins. Sean’s grip on the wheel tightens. He doesn’t reply. Dennis lowers his voice, steady as a newscaster. “You can’t stop thinking about her, can you?
“I can stop talking about her,” Sean says. “That’s for fucking sure.”
They turn, by mistake, into a cul-de sac. Sean races the engine and cuts a couple of noisy doughnuts with one set of wheels up on the sidewalk. Each circuit he has to slalom around a yellow fire plug. In the process chews up a good piece of sod in the middle of some rancho-deluxer’s front yard.
“I got a wrong number,” Dennis explains on the straightaway.
“Some guy answered the phone with ‘Keck!’. It really killed me. When I told the story I had to imitate the guy.” He puts his hands over his ears, soldiers guarding opposite ends of a tunnel. “Now I’ve got to watch what I hear.”
“Keck,” Sean let’s out, forcefully. “Is that what you want me to say?”
Dennis lowers his hands. “All right!” He grins, pats his friend on the shoulder. “Good man!”
In high school, Sean and Anabella lived in cars — his father’s crisp Caddy or her father’s middle-aged Olds.
They drove to parties and parked out in front, refusing to get out, admitting petitioners to their electric-window court, radio low unless Dylan or Donovan or maybe Grand Funk came on.
They were showing off. Look at us, we’re in love. We’re doing it. They vibrated together while the motor idled — always ready to indulge a sudden, explosive urge to bolt.
They went to movies, drive-ins and parked behind the projection bunker for privacy. They touched each other, smoked dope, drank, threw up in each other’s laps, and left the windows open for the rain to wash away the stink.
They went to state lines north, west, and south just for the mobility, the sheer distance. They went home, kissed for hours in the drive, usually hers, and wept with the weight of pleasure they had in each other.
Sean never imagined that, for her, the night lasted any longer than that. He had the drive home, the time to stand apart and inspect himself; to scrutinize the smoking of the last cigarette, the ringing sensations in his body and even the calm depth of his breathing. He tried to deflate himself with sighs and sometimes he began to tremble so violently that only the steering wheel, firm against his chest, could calm him; that, and the empty seat to his right.
He could love the melancholy that settled in over her absence — simply because he knew it to be temporary.
Sean tries to stifle a yawn, but Dennis picks it up. He exaggerates the stretching. Rubs his eyes. To the east, the sky lightens. Sean lowers his arm out the window, rubs his fingers together and feels sleep and water passing from the air.
They stop again, across the street from his house. It looks larger to him than when they left. A familiar image of Anabella, naked, shutting off the bathroom light and returning to their messy bed, rises again and again in his mind.
“I wonder if he cares that she’s married,” Sean says, grimly.
“Would you?” Dennis asks. Sean frowns at him. “Have you?” Dennis raises his eyebrows.
“Keck,” Sean sighs. There he feels its pull, a meaningless word, balanced at a point of intersection. His life, her life, up ahead, long past.
“What’s the point, Sean. Why aren’t we fishing? What do you want? You know everything. You going to beat on him? What?”
“I want to talk to her.”
“You could do that anytime. Over breakfast, through the bathroom door, in bed”
“What’re you, an idiot?” Sean says. “I want to see him first. I want to watch him coming out of my house.”
“Then what? What do you want to say?”
“Oh my god,” he raises his eyes and pressed against the roof of the car. “I’d like to ask her what she thinks about our marriage, first. Then I’ll tell her what I think of her, throw everything she ever said to me back into her face.”
“You should ask her to go for a drive. She can’t ever resist that.”
“The hell I should. Unless it’s over cliff. Unless it’s to a fucking lawyer!” With both fists Sean pounds the dashboard, delivers three car-shaking blows.
“You could tell her you love her,” Dennis’ voice is low and steady, he has to be making a point of it.
Sean doesn’t answer. Exhausted from driving, talking, staying awake so purposefully, he relaxes in his seat. Rubs his hands on his pants and holds the wheel at ten and two o’clock. Ready to go.
Dennis has turned away and is watching the house.
“Look,” he points.
At first Sean doesn’t see anything unusual. Driveway, garage, curtained windows, neat roof and front door, all mute, traitorous. Then he sees what Dennis sees. A curtain split, a narrow edge which should have been straight.
“This is it,” he says, opening his door. Dennis keeps watching, doesn’t bother to slide into the empty driver’s seat. Sean is looking straight ahead. He sees the curtain close completely. A moment later the front door opens. The inside of the house is dark, but out of the darkness a young man, a boy really, long brown hair, blue jeans, T-shirt with a slash of color and destruction across its front. A bad boy, standing on the stoop. Sean keeps moving, straight for the door. The boy spots him coming. Considers for a moment, pumping himself large, wearing what must be his most practiced look of insolence. He reaches backwards, as if for support, but the door is swinging shut.
Sean sees the movement and hurries. He is across the street, across the sidewalk, onto the lawn.
“He’s so young,” Sean repeats to himself. “Oh, Anabella...”
Licking his lips, the boy backs into the door as it shuts. The weight of his body slows its motion. He might’ve been a stone or a heavy gust of wind. Sean sees his chance and sprints. Reaches the stoop before the lock catches. In the same motion he grabs the back of the boy’s head, throws him into the yard, and crashes into the door, hard.
He feels the resistance and feels it give. The door opens as fast as the carpet underfoot and the friction of its hinges will allow. But Sean stops himself short of entering the house. His house. This house. Instead he squints into the darkness, at Annabella, standing to the left, an arm’s length away.
Sean is cold because of the damp, the fatigue. She’s in one of his long shirts, eyes front, arms straight, hands loose in their holsters. Her heat hits him like a lingering slap.
Young, he thinks. Wishes he was stupid enough, once again, to spit on property, to curse his parents, to let his wife put her hand on the crotch of his jeans and simply pull him, like a cotton thread, out of himself. Won’t look directly at her or raise his eyes beyond the circle of her fire. I love you, he wants to say. I, he wants to shout. We’ve grown too tangled.
She opens her mouth and closes it. He opens his and waits for the skim of his thoughts to slide out.
Then it’s physical. And still, when nothing comes, he presses with his gut, tightens his chest on his lungs.
“Keck!”