I got back on the highway and passed two other exits before getting off and finding the same thing. Main Street was lined by barren stores with For Rent signs in the windows. Abandoned houses on the outskirts had foreclosure signs slapped on the doors. The word itself made me tighten my fists on the steering wheel. Church glanced up at me nervously. I wheeled past collapsed barns and stone wall-bordered weed-choked fields.
We were looking at the days of the dust bowl gangsters again. When your average citizen was losing everything, they were forced into desperate, mad actions. Bank robbery attempts were at a thirty-year high. A husband and wife team had tried to take down my local bank and been wiped out by six cops in the parking lot, a couple thousand bucks in hand.
The media replayed the surveillance footage for weeks. Just before they’d been cut down the couple wore expressions that said they wanted to take the whole thing back if only anyone would grant them a do-over. My old man wore the same expression on his deathbed. I looked in the rearview and thought I was getting there fast.
I did what I usually did. I wrote in my head. The words drifted in and out, the music of the language singing in my ear. I edited as I went. I had visions of what should be happening. There ought to be a hot teenage girl hitchhiking along the side of the road. She would bring me wild pain and nights of burning glory and ultimate redemption.
She would mark me with her teeth and I would battle the demons from her past. Maybe a dirty cop who was hounding her just to squeeze information out of her about her drug lord ex-boyfriend. I’d have to be smarter than everybody, sharp enough to take care of the cop, the boyfriend’s killer thugs, the boyfriend who raised piranha, kept a stable of whores, and who’d act friendly to me at first before pulling out a straight razor. He’d slash open one side of my face and maybe take an eye, but I’d overcome because I was pure of soul. The hitchhiking honey with the breeze in her hair and the gams that didn’t quit would love my scarred and brutalized face anyway.
I didn’t have much but I still had the urge to write. The stories went on and on. I wondered if that would ultimately save me or only doom me further. Was I finally going to write my masterpiece or just hack out an angry vapid potboiler because friends of mine had made money writing angry vapid potboilers?
I checked off the topics and narrative elements that were hot in publishing right now. Vampire tween romances: When you got down to it that was pretty fucking creepy, really. Centuries-old teenage vampire males sexing up sixteen-year-old sophomore human chippie gals. Then there were the Christian metaphors couched in heart-tugger tales about women having to raise the spoiled children of their condemned sisters about to get the chair on death row. What else, what else. Zombie mashups with classics of literature. Nobody took them seriously, not even the millions of people who bought them.
The hit authors showed up on daytime talk shows explaining how their characters had whispered in their ears and the books had written themselves. One bestseller called it a divine cathartic expulsion. She claimed God had moved through her body and into her fingers and had tapped out her novel about a werewolf waitress who falls in love with the sous-chef. Her next book was about an alien who comes to earth to coach a pee-wee football league and gives up his homeworld to court a divorcee with a chip on her shoulder. The audience went wild. The host had tears in her eyes.
Maybe God should stay out of the Sunday literary supplements. Maybe he ought to stay up there on the cross and keep doing his own thing.
I didn’t have a laptop anymore but I’d brought along a bunch of legal pads and pencils. In truck stops I drank coffee for hours while I filled page after page with a furious angular script I had trouble reading. I slept at the rest stops with Churchill on top of my chest. I sometimes woke up with Church shivering, and I knew I’d been talking or crying in my sleep. He picked up on my mood and shook and groaned. It sometimes took me half an hour to get him calm again.
I’d get behind the wheel once more and drive the black roads leading me back into the shadows of my own past. It wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I knew it was going to all be another big mistake in a lifetime of gaffes.
I drove with one hand in my pocket. I’d fondle the unloaded gun and think about going on a rampage of some sort. But I couldn’t figure out what kind. Who would I take hostage, what would my demands be? How much money would be enough? Where would I want them to fly the jet? Which of the quirky bank patrons and employees was I going to let go first? The elderly old man with the heart trouble or the pregnant Korean lady? What kind of food would I ask for while the negotiations were going on? I hadn’t had New York pizza in ten years. I imagined the SWAT guy pretending to be a pizza delivery kid, a stack of pepperoni pies in his arms, the top box empty except for a semi-automatic. He’d dump the boxes and point the weapon and scream for me to put my hands up.
And all I would be able to do was look at the wasted pepperoni pies on the floor, my mouth watering.
The thunderstorms started to hit in Missouri but I bulled my way through hour after hour while the rain smashed down. Even with my wipers on extra high they could barely keep up with the torrent. Visibility was practically nil. Flares lined the highways where fatal pileups had occurred. The state patrol beckoned and diverted traffic through the hills and hollers of Appalachia. Cinder block houses and hammered tin roof trailers dotted the grubby landscape. They still let their kids play barefoot in the flooded meadows and thickets. Every fourth shotgun shack for a hundred muddy miles had an underage girl with long wet hair and a bare midriff on the porch, waving a highball glass at me.
Maybe I was passing up salvation. Maybe I needed to pull over and find someone nearly as bad off as I was. The girl wouldn’t know the truth. She’d be a sloppy but fun lay. We’d get wasted on moonshine with too much radiator fluid in it. She’d be secretly pleased with my Yankee accent. She’d think I was the one who would get her out of this town and take her someplace else where she could shine in the bright lights, be a model or actress on Broadway. Her father would chase me with a ten-gauge and I wouldn’t run all that fast to get away from him. They shot horses, put rabid dogs down, drowned starving cats, butchered hogs. This might be the place to get done right.
On the wrong side of a washed-out bridge somewhere in southern Illinois I was forced to hole up in a place called the Sweet Pea Motel. Church and I laid together on the double bed and watched cable and ate from the candy machine. There was a diner next door that charged extra for delivery in the storm. We had fried chicken and BLTs and fresh apple pie. The delivery kid was drenched head to foot but looked happy to be getting the extra buck per order.
The storm continued but Church and I didn’t mind. We were living better than we had in weeks. Z’s cash came in handy. I was stupid not to have cleaned out the pockets of the two other punks.
Having maid service was like being taken care of by a loved one. I took hour-long hot showers. I ordered pay-per-view movies. I’d forgotten how much I liked to sit back and just watch a flick. Church did his business six inches outside the motel door and the swirling rainwater immediately cleared it away.
I scrawled on the legal pads. I didn’t even know what I was writing. Maybe it was a novel, maybe a journal. Maybe it was a manifesto. Or a love letter. Or a suicide note or my last will and testament. The pages filled up and I didn’t reread them. When the writing was good it felt like bleeding onto the page. That’s how I felt now. I slept deeply without dreams.
The emergency newsbreaks told of mass flooding. Rivers overflowing, whole towns being washed away. I walked over to the diner through a swirling two-foot-deep vortex in the parking lot, holding Churchill in my arms. The waitress and the cook were husband and wife and lived in back of the place. They had the same worried look stamped into their faces every time I saw them. They were in danger of losing their business, their home, their livelihood.
The delivery truck couldn’t make it through one morning and provisions started running low. But they still managed to have fresh pie. I ate happily. So did Church. The waitress sat with us and stared out the window with terror in her eyes. She patted Church’s back until he went to sleep in the booth beside her. His snores were loud but not loud enough to cover the sound of the relentless, endless rain.
Back at the Sweet Pea Motel I kept writing. I think I went on for a few pages about the drowning world, but I couldn’t be sure. I watched more movies. I sat glued to the news and saw volunteer workers filling sandbags at the edges of various murderous rivers. Three states were declared disaster areas and the National Guard was sent out to aid the citizens.
On the fifth day the ceiling bloated and began to leak through. The manager brought me more ice buckets and waste pails. I spread them around the room under the worst of the drips and the hard ticking and ringing was like being surrounded by a dozen clocks counting off the wasted hours.
I began toying with the gun. I loaded it and unloaded it. I fit ammo into the speed loader so I could snap all six bullets in at once. I kept writing.
The storm became metaphor. It was literary technique: As below, so above. When the hero suffered, so did the rest of the world. My hand cramped up and I sat on the edge of the bed massaging my fingers. My knuckles cracked as if someone was taking a hammer to them.
I wondered if the methers in front of the pawn shop were in my book. I wondered what I was saying about my wife. I could imagine my mother’s values and my father’s lessons filling paragraph after paragraph. Would the story end with a tidal wave washing away the Sweet Pea? I thought Church standing on the roof riding it like a surfboard would make for a hell of a cover. Novels with covers that had dogs on them almost always sold a ton of copies.
On the seventh day the rain stopped and the sky started to clear. The waters slowly began to recede. The news showed the president helping to pump water out of a homeless shelter’s basement.
The diner was completely out of food by then. I was living on the vending machine snacks. It took another three days before the highway reopened. The delivery truck came through. I got to have a last BLT and slice of pie. I settled my bill at the motel. My car started on the first try.
I rolled the windows down and Churchill hung his head out and caught some sun. We hit the road heading east. When we were between towns, without another car in sight, I pulled the. 38 and held it out the driver’s window straight up in the air and fired it like a starter’s pistol. The recoil wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been expecting. No man should ever have a gun without firing it at least once, just to know what it felt like.
Now I knew.
New York, I’m coming home.
At around midnight I parked in front of my brother’s house on Long Island and watched him through his huge bay window. He was ten years older than me and looked at least five years younger. He’d never had to watch his weight. I had more grey in my hair. He refused to go for glasses. He held the newspaper at arm’s length and squinted and pretended he was still nineteen years old. He turned out the lamp and went up to his bedroom, and after an hour he shut out the light and the house went dark. I got out and took a piss on his neighbor’s lawn and Church took a shit. We got back in the car.
My brother’s prostate must’ve been bother-ing him. He got up several times during the night. At least once he came down to the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of him at the refrigerator. In the pale yellow glow he appeared dissatisfied and restless. He made himself half a cucumber sandwich. My brother was big on half-portions. He’d eat half an orange, drink half a bottle of water, chop a tomato perfectly in half for a salad and then wrap up the remainder carefully in plastic.
My thoughts kept flitting. I wondered how many photos of us he had in his house. I wondered why he hadn’t found the time to visit the old man or Ma right before the end. I wondered why I’d called him after my marriage went bust. It was the last thing I should have done.
I crawled into the back seat and got under the blanket and did my best to get comfortable in the cramped space. I wasn’t ready to face him yet. Maybe I never would be. This might be the worst misstep yet.
Church climbed on top of me and stretched out on my stomach. He missed my fat belly. For him it had been like a waterbed.
My brother had appeared in a lot of my fiction under a variety of guises. He was the villainous father figure in at least two of my novels. He was sometimes the best friend whose expression of disappointment eventually leads my protagonist to betray him. I’d written about the love I’d felt for him when I was a boy and he’d ride his ten-speed around our hometown with me on the handlebars, coasting into the corner stationary and buying me comics. Presenting me to his girlfriends and telling them how smart and talented I was. I used to show him my early stories and he would critique without criticizing. He would encourage and compliment. He would write inspiring notes across the top of the loose leaf pages: You’re going to go all the way, kid!
I slept a few hours and then got up and turned the dome light on. I pulled out my wallet and looked at the picture of us when we were kids. I was seven, he was seventeen. We’re both grinning like crazy. We’re at the beach. He’s muscular with a resigned air of power and hepcat cool. I’m cheesing it up with my front teeth missing. He looks like our father. I don’t look like anybody.
Our falling out was still a few years off. When I became a teenager his affection for me faltered. He grew hypercritical. He became domineering, overbearing, teasing and down-right nasty. He seethed and hissed at me. I wasn’t athletic. I couldn’t catch a football. I didn’t lift weights. When we played basketball in the driveway he was always eager to throw an elbow into my bulging gut. He talked about making me stronger and healthier. He acted like an angry, frustrated parent. I brought home straight As but they weren’t straight enough. I was too slovenly, I was already gaining weight. I didn’t get outside enough, I read too much, I watched too much TV, I wasted money on kid stuff like comic books. He got his own apartment and I’d ride my bike over there and knock on the door. I’d see the blinds flutter but he wouldn’t answer.
I still didn’t know why it had gone so wrong. Maybe he had his own premonitions and visions too. Maybe he saw what lay ahead of me and hated me for it. Or himself. Maybe he’d been warning me all along, and I just hadn’t listened.
We’d seen each other at weddings and funerals but he’d never visited me out west and I’d never been to his house on the island, even though he lived in the same town where we’d grown up.
The sky began to lighten to a purple blur. I pulled away from the curb and drove through town with my hackles up. It looked familiar but didn’t feel that way. I had that same nervous feeling you got whenever you were lost in some unfamiliar city. Everything put the shits up you. You looked at the faces on the street and wondered which one of them might make a sudden dash for your car and smash the windshield with a brick. You wondered if you might be reading the street signs wrong or heading down a one-way going in the wrong direction. You read about assholes driving the wrong side of the expressway for miles and miles until smacking head-on into a freightliner. Everybody’s always stunned that it could have happened, but all you have to do is come home to find out how. It’s the same feeling. That you’re doing something wrong but you can’t put your finger on it.
The sun climbed. I passed my parents’ house. What used to be my parents’ house. My brother and I had sold it after our mother died. I spotted a few moderate changes here and there but was surprised it still looked practically the same after all this time. I could imagine my father sitting on the stoop watering the lawn. I could see my mother trimming her roses, wearing men’s working gloves, a kerchief tying her hair up. A smear of mud across her forehead from where she’d wiped sweat away with the back of her hand. My old man occasionally swinging the nozzle of the hose and flicking water at her. Ma shrieking like a little girl, Dad laughing loudly.
My brother in the driveway, his head under the hood of a car. Three drops of oil splashed on his tight T-shirt. Thick black veins twisting up his powerful forearms. Every so often a car full of girls would drive by and stop at the curb. They’d wave and call to him and he’d trot down to the street and lean in the window and smile, cool as could be, hip, virile, in charge, and the girls giggling, and he’d pinch one of their chins between thumb and forefinger and leave a dash of oil on her face. They’d drive off to some party and he’d finish up on the car, slam the hood shut, wash his hands with pumice stone, put on a fresh T-shirt, and then follow after.
I was there in front of the house long enough for an angry face to appear at the front door. I remembered the guy from the closing. He’d been freshly married then. He and his wife were ecstatic about buying their first home. I left a bottle of wine on the counter along with the extra sets of keys.
Now he looked like he was ready to defend the place with his life. If anyone dared to step foot on his property he’d grab up a shotgun. His eyes burned like twin lakes of flaming gasoline. He’d hold the bankers at bay, the police, the SWAT teams, the communists, the alien hordes, the barbaric populace of disintegrating cities. I thought I should’ve done it myself. I should have mined the yard. I should have held out at the front window with a rifle in my hands. I should have protected my home. I should have fought for it. I should have died for it.
I gave the guy a little salute.
He glowered and rushed out and started to run at my car. I didn’t know what troubles he had on his mind but there must’ve been plenty of them. Maybe he thought I was a bill collector or a process server. Maybe his wife had left him and was sending her lawyer around. Or maybe he recognized me after all and wanted me to take back the house and everything that went along with it. Busted water pipes, termites, damp rot. County taxes, hazard insurance, backed up cesspool. I stomped the gas pedal and ripped out down the street. He fell in behind me and sprinted a hundred yards before he finally took a tumble and lay on the asphalt sucking wind. I almost went back to lend him a hand. Or to drive over his throat.
I killed most of the day. I don’t know how. I circled town going nowhere, looking at nothing for hours. We had lunch at another fast food place. Church enjoyed his burgers. I knew I wasn’t doing him any favours by feeding him that shit, but he loved it. He slept and I circled some more, drove down to the bay, then north to the sound, then out east to the lighthouse. We walked along the beach for a while. I think I wrote some more.