My ears were ringing with what you whispered just before I let you out. As soon as the door closed, I backed out of the driveway out into the street, knocking over the garbage cans that sat empty on the devilstrip. The familiar smell of burning rubber became visible under my car as the tires squealed in my effort to escape you, to escape the loudness of your soft voice.I rolled down the window and inhaled the smell of burning leaves. I left you on Long Street, where you told me to drop you, and did not care if you made it back to your house, I just needed to find my way back to The Clark, to Gerry and the boys, to feel the burn of Pall Malls and the familiar weight of a frosty mug of Lisner’s.You were standing outside of the library downtown when I saw them surrounding you. The boys from North Hill. They had their cans of Burkhardt’s and were taunting you for no real reason. I pulled up and flung open my door to you, a stranger, and grabbed the tire iron from the backseat. They scattered and I helped you into the front. You were shaking but your face did not betray fear.

You told me quietly where you lived, and I drove slowly past Goodyear and Firestone through Gooseburry where the Germans lived and into the shiny suburban brightness of the October afternoon, hazy from the leaf fires and the mills.

You remained silent for the ride home, sitting quite still, and this unnerved me. I fiddled with the radio, WADC playing some be-bop number. You reached down and switched off the radio.

You can leave me here, you said.

I slowed, stopped the car. You looked me in my eyes for the first time and whispered it.

You don’t love her. You should tell her.

You got out of the car.

You did not look at me again after you spoke. Not after I dropped you off in the driveway not yours. Now I turn around. Surely you haven’t made it home. With your deliberate steps on uneven sidewalks, careful not to fall and break a hip.

Slowly I drove up and down Long Street. Around the block. All of the streets were empty. Chimneys spewed black smoke. No children played in any of the yards.

I parked. I sat on the curb, smoking, feeling the coming cold of the winter and of my marriage closing in on me.

—————————————————————–

I wrote the story out longhand as quickly as possible with a 30 minute time limit. No editing. I did leave blanks for some of the historical facts, which I later filled in via Wikipedia, Google Maps, the CPFA Wiki and beerhistory.com. The story was inspired by the below photo,
found over @ Big Happy Funhouse.

Betsy stepped onto the porch. She handed me another mug, and I took it from her gratefully as she took my cooling cider from me and lit a cigarette.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked quietly.

I sipped slowly from my mug, knowing that it was hot whiskey before she had handed it to me.

“I guess we rake the leaves back into the stove,” I said.

We had been raking leaves all afternoon. We’d rake them into an old brick stove that the previous owners of the house had built. Once it was full we started the fire and kept raking. We’d sit into the dark with blankets wrapped around us, watching the embers glow orange, until the last of them had burnt to black. We’d unwrap the blankets from around us and go inside. Go to bed.

“No,” Betsy said, “I don’t mean the leaves.” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We could take them to the river.”

“We can’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?” I said, sipping my whiskey. “If we feed them, we’ll have adopted them.”

The crawled over and around my feet on the porch, mewing, lapping milk from the tin Betsy had set out for them.

“You’ve already fed them” I said. “It’s the river or the kitchen.”

It was getting colder. The sun was disappearing quickly behind the dingy buildings.

We had found them that afternoon, crawling around in the leaves inside the old brick stove amongst the trash and branches.

What if we had burned them? Betsy had asked when we heard them crying.

What if we had, I thought.

The story is fiction.

Waiting

He felt fuzzy. Cold mornings always did that to him. Staring at his
reflection, he wondered what exactly he was doing here. Meeting her,
obviously, but why? She knew he hated this, meeting in out of the way
places. Screw secrecy, he thought.

It wasn’t even his type of bar. Too bright, too frou-frou, it lacked the
dirty ambiance of a really good dive. The point of getting drunk was to
get as low as you could, down into the pit. Happy drunks were
irritating, spreading a sunshiny warmth over the pallid sickness of
drinking. He drank to wallow, drawing out his misery with the soothing
warmth of whiskey.

His disease, he reflected and amended it to diseases. She was another
one. He hated her, really. She was cold and demanding, asking more than
he could ever give. Oh, not his soul or anything so prosaically
romantic. She wanted him when she wanted him and when she didn’t, it
didn’t matter. If he died, her only emotion would be irritation at his
thoughtlessness. How dare he die without first being dismissed. He
couldn’t even remember why he bothered to show up.

But, he did know. He was honest. It was one of his few virtues. He
showed up because when they were naked, he forgot about how much he
hated her. It wasn’t love, he knew. It was warmth, her skin on his, the
sloppy tangle of limbs, feeling drunk while sober. No, it wasn’t love.
It was humanity, down deep in the belly where it counted.

Jesus, where was she? Late because making him wait for her was part of
it. Part of their twisted thing, whatever their thing was, he didn’t
know what to call it. Drowning was a good name for it. Losing the
ability to breathe because a primal force was stronger than you. Like
the whiskey, it washed over him and tested him. Like the whiskey, it
seduced him, calling his name in husky tones. Like the whiskey, it made
him feel alive.

It wasn’t sex, though. He’d had enough of that to be certain. Fucking
didn’t do this to you, didn’t turn you around like a cheap carnival
ride. Certainly there were easier, less demanding women out there. Women
who would happily take what he wanted to give and leave the rest of him
alone. Women who didn’t call to him like she did, didn’t make him weak
and dangerous.

He was feeling it now, the combined effects of the whiskey and the want.
It made him dark and a little wild, which only made everything more fun.
She used him, and he used her. In the end, he was still in a pretentious
bar on a cold morning, waiting for her. He didn’t care. He’d get what he
wanted, like he always did. Hate, he reflected, made everything easier.

The lighter scratched, missed, and caught on the next try. He lit my cigarette before lighting his, then placed the lighter on our table next to the red and white pack.

“Thanks for coming to see me,” he said, exhaling.

I shook my head and pulled a hand through my hair. “Been worried about you,” I said.

He sipped his beer.

Kayleen had called me asking me to look in on him. She’s our younger sister and he always was able to talk to her. “This feels different,” she said. “He’s not even there sometimes.”

I poured myself more beer from the pitcher, motioning to his glass. He finished it and held it to the pitcher, tipping it sideways.

“What the hell are you doing,” I asked him, gently as I could.

He didn’t look at me, watched the couple move from the jukebox to the dancefloor they had carved out for themselves between the tables and the pizza girls.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly without looking at me. “I don’t know, Henry.”

What I knew was that after ten years of marriage, his ex-wife showed up again and things got weird. Before that, he was “on call” a lot more than was usual.

“You need a few bucks?” I asked.

Before I finished talking he had already said No, was lighting another cigarette.

Then he looked at me dead in the face.

“I think I still love her,” he said.

“Elaine?” I said. “I thought she was long gone. What about your kids? What about Sal?” I asked.

“I know. I know,” he said, tapping ash into the ashtray.

I looked up at the bandbox, which had turned on when the jukebox started. Barbie led the Kens in a John Coltrane number.

“I love them. And Sal, too.”

When he met Sal his current wife, he and Elaine were still together. They were three years into their marriage, and already things didn’t look good for them.

“Does she know Elaine’s back?”

He shook his head without looking at me.

The Kens and Barbie had gone still and the couple returned to their table laughing. The man pulled a crumpled bill from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. The girl picked up the Parliaments and they left arm in arm.

“Mom and Dad don’t know either,” he said. I knew he was telling me this in confidence, the way he did when we were kids. I’d wake up in my room in the dark when I felt his weight on the bed and he wanted to talk. He would sit there, watching me sleep, until I felt his presence and would wake, groggily rubbing my eyes, to listen to him.

This was more serious than bullies on the playground or a bad grade in a chem lab.

“Oh, Jesus, you’re not doing this, Rog. Tell me you’re not doing this, man.”

It was as if we were sitting in the dark of my room again. He started talking.

He was talking, and it was almost as if I wasn’t hearing him. Pizzas were delivered to tables, were eaten. Bodies passed in front of us on their way out into the rain, or shaking water from their coats as they walked into the steam of the restaurant. Another pitcher of beer appeared on the table. The orange lighter clicked and lit cigarettes.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone,” I heard him saying. “But it’s eating me up and I knew I could trust you. And yeah, actually, thinking about it, I could use a little help.”

“How much,” I asked.

“Six hundred,” he said.

“Holy Christ, Roger. Six hundred. What for?”

”I owe the regular bills, and on top of that, I owe the check cashing place five.”
I didn’t ask him why he was cashing checks. The ash of my cigarette had grown long in the ashtray and I reached for another. Roger stood and walked out the door. I grabbed the pack.

Tony shot me a look from across the bar and I shrugged, grabbing matches on the way out, forgetting the orange lighter on the table. Tony knew I’d be by tomorrow and that I was good for it.

It had stopped raining and the neon shone crazily on the wet pavement in the dark, blurred by beer and talk. Roger stood smoking, looking up at the Y-Bridge, his back to me. I stood behind him, lighting my cigarette with a match. He flinched a little when he heard my boots scraping asphalt behind him, but did not turn to me.

“You remember driving home after Mass? Down Howard and back into the Falls, when we were kids? Before the Bridge?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was just thinking what it must have been like for Grandma, living in North Hill here, after the viaduct crumbled but before the bridge.”

“Cut off from everything…” I offered.

“No. Not cut off. Protected. From the city, from temptations.”

He was quiet, hands jammed into the pockets of his work pants. We stood there in the wet silence of the city, smoking. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.

“Roger, what are you going to do?” I asked.

“You know, when they built the Y-Bridge, this neighborhood changed. That’s when things got cut off, I think. Now the only excitement a lot of these folks get is a jumper in their front lawn,” Roger said.

I shivered and flicked my cigarette. “What are you going to do, Roger?” I wanted to help him, but did not know how. Not now. Not this time.

“I’d like to watch this bridge burn. When I was at Fort Lost in the Woods, they taught us how to blow up bridges.”

He had shut down, then. Talking in the abstract.

“I can get you some cash by the end of the week,” I said.

He just kept staring up at the bridge.

“What about the papers Sal served you?”

“She doesn’t mean it. She’ll be back.”

And I knew he was right. And I knew his heart wasn’t in it. And that he felt paralyzed and impotent and unsure. And that he would keep on like this. And that we couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was a stranger.

I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore, and just stood there in the dark waiting for a body to fall from the sky.

The pool cue felt heavy in my hand and I knew I had chosen well. I let the chalk nuzzle the tip of the cue, then blew on the tip. I chalked my hands on the spool near the window, alive with beerlights and cracked slightly to allow a breeze to blow the otherwise still air of the bar. The smokeaters had stopped working ages ago and the stagnation hung heavily all around.

The lights had come up, signaling lastcall, but the bartender hadn’t officially announced it yet. The jukebox goes off when the lights go up, and the drunks are too drunk to notice. The game at the other table had just ended, and the bouncer swept the remaining balls into the pockets, turned off the lights and thanked them for coming in, dismissively, trying to get them to leave the bar.

I was glad that I had paced myself all night, as I could see the tightly racked balls at the other end of the table without closing one eye. My opponent was not so lucky, I noticed, looking up at him and staring him hard in the face as I shot the cue ball squarely into the waiting triangle.

It’s all geometry and luck. Yes, there is some skill, but when you play pool, you’re just trying to draw a line from the tip of your cue to the ball, and extend that line into a perfect angle to cause the ball you’re attempting to strike to sink into a pocket. Sounds easy enough. But pool is more than geometry. It’s flirting, it’s fighting, it’s blocking out the external noises and hearing only your mind telling your hands tell the balls where to go.

Even without the jukebox, there was plenty of external noise. The two oldtimers at the table behind me had been in the bar since around three o’clock. So, almost twelve hours. They were drinking pint after pint of Bud Lite with the occasional whiskey shot. They must have been in their seventies, but they acted like they were in their twenties, flirting with the pretty girls, dancing with each other. One of them said, “…and that’s what I’m talking about, Dennis. Experiencing God is too painful for most folks. They don’t have the gift of the Divine, they aren’t ready, aren’t prepared. And God wants us to know Him. So He only reveals Himself to us when we are drunk enough to feel only His Love and no other pain in the universe.”

As with the other sounds and distractions, I acknowledged this thought and let it go. I had only now to sink the eightball and I will have beaten this guy, a guy I’ve been waiting to see walk into this bar ever since the last time he walked out fifteen years ago.

He was mean drunk, then, Shane McIntyre, but that was no excuse for his behavior. He had backhanded Imogene, and she was crying when I jumped over the bar. I was working here, then, before I got fired for the drinking. We like you and all, but we need to cut you loose. The drinking’s getting out of hand.”I remember jumping over the bar, though. I knocked over a few of the drinks when I jumped over the bar, spilling them on some of the patrons. He skipped out the backdoor, and I tended to Imogene, who had a cut under her eye. Yes, I called the police, but Shane never did turn up.

Conjuring that image again, Imogene crying, holding my frayed handkerchief to her eye, the door swinging closed behind Shane, allowed me to block all distractions. I felt again the heaviness of the cue in my hand and imagined breaking it across his back, imagined poking it through his throat, the splintered wood making the piercing easy.

“Seriously, it’s time for you to finish up and leave,” one of the bouncers said to me as I sunk the eight into the bottom corner. I nodded at him. He walked away, thanking the other patrons for coming in, herding them out the frontdoor. I went to shake Shane’s hand. Shane took my hand and smiled. I spun him around, wrenching his arm up behind his back, breaking his arm. He fell to the ground. The pool cue was heavy, and it did not break when I thrashed him with it. Before I could crack his head with it, though, the bartender had me in a headlock. I did not fight. I stood in his grasp, limp.

1. Sexy Sadie lolled luxuriously in the hammock, her naked knees painfully exposed to my delicate eyes.
2. J Todd drew a penis in the foam of my Guinness.
3. Heather always was overly dramatic.
4. Spoons rattled back and back on the table gently.
5. Trains crashed across constant tracks out my window soundlessly as Dad drove the Dodge Dart endlessly across the barren-ness that was Iowa.
6. Basketballs bounced painfully from the young boy’s chest before he crumpled on the playground and the bully stood over him again.
7. I’m not quite sure how to say it sometimes, so I end up keeping quiet, listening to the others across the din of the bar.
8. The pool cue felt heavy in his hands and he knew he had chosen well.
9. Fluorescent light floods empty cubes as she made her way to her desk whereupon she discovered she had been locked out of the system and she knew that the cowards had let her go finally.
10. The sand cuddled in around my toes when the water crashed into my legs and I laughed feeling the soft shelled crabs digging their holes under my feet.
11. Charlie Brown shouldn’t kick the football.
12. Dad sounded tired on the phone.
13. The cigarette ash fell into his lap as he tried to understand what she’d said to him.
14. The bathwater had gone cold but she didn’t notice.
15. My ears are ringing with what you whispered.

Kade spoke in quiet tones to Mother and Lina watched from behind the pole, twirling the frayed yo-yo string in her tattered fingers, endlessly fraying it further, so that if it were attached to a yo-yo it would never return the toy to its master’s hand.

Father’s footsteps sounded on the porch above me, the one that was only accessible from his bedroom. Kade and he had spoken only twice since Lina had come to stay with us, and I could smell the smoke from his pipe merge with sweet huckleberries as he paced the wooden boards above my head.

I tried to pay attention to the deer near the wood’s edge as they hovered near the dark. A mother and her fawn had rushed into the wood when Kade pulled up, but had cautiously ventured back out into the clearing to slowly make moves toward Mamma’s lettuce and tomatoes.

The deer where not enough to hold my attention, so that I became restless, playing with the change in my pocket, loosening my tie, rocking and sucking ice from the empty glass which was once full of Mamma’s homemade lemonade.

She (Mamma) became suddenly shrill. I heard her say to Kade that Lina would not be leaving this house in her condition. Not today, not ever, until Kade came to his senses.

Clouds a blanket of cotton-white shielding us from the chaos below. Could almost feel the angry heat burning through the cumulous.

———————————————————————–

Not a full flash fiction today. Wrote this little bit the last time I flew. Figured I’d post something today, as I promised I would post on Mondays, but also wanted to slack off a little, as I want to take it easy on my birthday.

His floor was a mess of ethernet cables and hubs and discarded pizza boxes with half-eaten crusts. The monitor glowed coldly, almost mockingly at him and the Red Hat lampshade box suddenly struck him as funny, and he sat with his legs crossed on the floor an began laughing.

He laughed so loudly he startled Abby from her sleep. He had acquired Abby when James and Shelly had split. Shelly moved to Texas, and James had stayed. They sold the house and James’ new landlord did not allow pets. So Hank kept Abby, a Healer mutt, until Shelly sent for her. It had only been a month, but Hank had grown to love Abby. Now Abby sat on his lap, her paws on his chest, then pushed him down, licking his face.

THE SAFETY OF OBJECTSHis basket was stuffed full, so full that he was having a difficult time pedaling down the street and keeping his bicycle upright. Wrappers from bread he’d long since eaten, bottle caps that jangled when he pedaled, an old lock he’d found just that morning in a car whose windows had been smashed. More things than he had remembered picking up. He pedaled, swerving to avoid people on the busy street on Flatbush. An old woman stepped out of the beauty shop he was at that moment passing, and he turned, smashing into the mailbox near the curb.

His things came tumbling out of his basket. he smiled weakly at her, but she merely scrunched down her hat and scowled at him so that her face looked as if she had just tasted rancid lemons.

Slowly, then, he got his bearings, being disoriented from the fall. His heart had started beating too fast, he thought, and he almost scurried for his things. His things! His things!

“Don’t touch it!” he shouted at a young black boy who had no intention of touching the Mickey Mouse lunchbox from which old baseball cards and GI Joe action figures had spilled.

The old man must have looked funny to the boy, sprawled out on the sidewalk like a thrift shop whose roof had been torn off in a tornado. The boy pumped his skateboard twice, passing the old man kneeling on the sidewalk clutching some of the things he had already began to gather back to himself and he noticed already that his breathing had become more even, his heartbeat more steady. He growled at the boy on the skateboard and picked up a die from a discarded Parcheesi set, two blue jacks and a marble that had come to rest near the mailbox. He began stuffing these objects into the already full pockets of the Army jacket his brother had given him upon his return from Vietnam. The jacks fell out of his pocket, pushed out by the iPod box (sans iPod) and the broken cellphone and the coffee cup he’d gotten in Hell’s Kitchen. He mumbled to himself and looked like Gus, the mouse in Cinderella, as he tried to pick up one more thing before dropping them all again.

Realizing his pockets were full — all four of them — he righted his bike and stacked the national Geographics in the baskets. He was smiling now as he re-fastened the rubberband which had become dangerously close to the edge of the transistor radio on the back of his bike, so that he would have been afraid he might lose the radio had he seen it before now.

The baskets were ready then to accept more of his things. And slowly he had begun to meticulously take stock of what lay on the sidewalk in the bright afternoon sun.

The people on Flatbush walked past and around him without offering to help him pick up his things, but he did not see them and did not want their help.