Bubblegum, page 13
“Thanks,” I said.
“I can’t decide if I should go back or not,” he said. “To Michiana. If I don’t go back, that’s it for me and Rick, I think. What do I care, though, right? Who the fuck is Rick? More importantly, how was your birthday? What’d you think of that shirt? Did you like the wrapping? I saw the shirt in the window of Sloga Nero’s a couple weeks back and I thought it was funny, but I didn’t know if you would think it was funny, so I didn’t buy it. But then, on Sunday, when I saw the front page of the Herald, I thought, ‘That Jonboat’s everywhere! If I wrap that shirt in this front page, then the kid’ll get a chuckle, at least a chuckle,’ right?”
I said, “Thanks for the shirt.”
“I guess I’ll choose to understand that to mean, ‘Yes, Dad, I liked the shirt. Gave me a chuckle.’ By the way, you know—that whole story I just told you? Not exactly true. We got in a fight, and the oaf did bodyslam me into the lake, and that’s when I remembered I forgot to leave you money, but the fight was about who should pay for bait, which, I mean, since that isn’t really worth getting in a physical confrontation with a friend about, might mean that all the other stuff I told you was kind of underneath it—been brewing for twenty-however-many years, probably—but none of that stuff about the fish’s face or the puking got said, not outright at least. I guess last night, just after I got there, Rick had asked me something about ‘Why doesn’t your son ever come out fishing with us, Clyde?’ and it just built up inside me, that question, like, ‘Is this guy really asking me this question? Who is this fucking guy to ask me this question?’ Anyway, it was mostly about bait, so don’t feel guilty about me getting in a fight to defend your honor or anything. I am glad you liked the shirt so much, though, and while we’re on the topic of it having been your birthday, I’m wondering about that tumbler of water in the middle of the kitchen table.”
Then he asked if it was I who’d left the water on the kitchen table, and, if so, then why had I left the water on the kitchen table, but before I could answer either question, he’d already begun to sarcastically offer a number of reasons why someone who had just celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday might feel entitled to leave water on a table instead of feeling obligated to spill it in a sink and wash its container or, at the very least, rinse its container. He didn’t say container but he didn’t only say tumbler. He named a large assortment of containers—glass, cup, mug, tankard, stein, grail, chalice, etc.—as if he felt that uttering an exhaustive list of names for containers from which one might drink was necessary to bringing his point across with clarity.
When at last he finished speaking, I told him I wasn’t yet finished with the water.
“So finish it,” he said.
* * *
I headed toward the kitchen. My father followed. With my father behind me, especially in a hallway, I always felt as though I were about to flinch, and I knew that if I flinched or even seemed to him to be on the verge of flinching, he’d enjoy my flinching or the promise my being on the verge of it conveyed, and he’d attempt to make me flinch again and again, and so I’d do my best, when my father was behind me, to appear to be casual, even devil-may-care. That evening, in the hallway that led to the kitchen, I extended my arms to run my fingers along the walls.
The walls were warm and their paint was blistered. I pressed down hard and the blisters flattened, though not crunchingly or poppingly as I might’ve expected. It was more like the blisters reluctantly withdrew, like the nosy extras’ heads that stick out of windows overlooking courtyards when lovers’ quarrels end in old romantic comedies set in Manhattan.
Because, I guess, the reaction of the blisters was unexpected, I tried to think of the unexpected word for what I was doing to the wall, the unexpected word for the act of touching. It seemed important to recall the word.
Taction. I got it. Almost instantly. In a hallway with my father behind me, no less. I was sharpening, sharpened, extra-alert—the one advantage to being made to feel jumpy.
And no sooner had I gotten hold of taction than I noticed a short, fuzzy coil of carpet fiber at rest just beyond the slim metal bar that marked the line where the carpeting stopped and the tile began—right there at the threshold of hallway and kitchen. I wanted to tact the coil with a toe, but the movement of my feet as I approached the coil created a vacuum, causing the coil to be sucked between my ankles into the space behind me. I doubted that my father, whose legs bowed widely, made any kind of contact at all with the coil, but I didn’t turn around to confirm this doubt, for fear that my turning might look like a flinch.
However, just a pace from the metal bar—which, owing to a superstition thats origins I can’t recall, I had, for years, taken care to step over, never on—I saw something else: I saw that one of the screws intended to hold the bar to the floor had come up in its hole. I didn’t think to crouch to better fasten the screw, but I realized that in order to maintain the casual, unflinching character of my stride, I would need to step directly onto the bar.
I silently apologized to whom- or whatever one apologizes upon failing to behave in accord with superstition, and did what I had to do to seem casual. The weight of my body caused the bar to flex, which propelled the loose screw from its last bit of threading. The screw became airborne and entered the hallway. Yet I didn’t get to hear what I imagine must have been the small thump it made when it landed on the carpet; I didn’t even think to attempt to hear it. I was far too distracted. Even through the sock, the bar was cold on my sole, and the shock of the coldness caused me to shudder.
My father mistook the shudder for a flinch, and said, “Any second thoughts there, Young Master Billy?”
Though Belt was the name my mother and he had chosen to give me, my father no longer liked that name, hadn’t liked it in decades, and would call me Billy—Young Master Billy if I had just flinched, had seemed to flinch, or had seemed to him to be on the verge of flinching.
“I asked if you were having second thoughts,” he said.
“Maybe,” I told him.
“Maybe’s a shrug. A shrug and a dodge. Maybe’s the sound second thoughts make, son, the pumping of blood in their lily-livered hearts. May-BE, may-BE, may-BE, may-BE…”
Dusk was gaining and the house was mostly dark. The little bit of sunlight that did achieve the kitchen through the sliding glass door was orange and split into rails by the blinds. Each rail widened and dimmed as it traveled away from the door, and the effect on the kitchen was Japanese, especially on the table. Thirteen sun-rails achieved the table and they made the table look extremely Japanese, like the backdrop of a Japanese stage romance, or a paper fan between the fingers of a Japanese actress.
The tumbler I’d forgotten there was half in shadow and the lip at its base bent the edge of a sun-rail. The water in the tumbler’s lit half appeared stale, depleted of fundaments. A blanket of tiny white bubbles on the surface—three and four bubbles deep—was hardly jarred at all by a bubble that rapidly climbed from the bottom to collide with its underside.
“Drink up,” my father said, and brought down his fist, rattling the table, sending more bubbles climbing. He’d never told me exactly what his job as “impeller” at the plant entailed—I think he (rightfully) assumed I wasn’t that interested—but I imagined he pushed heavy things via handcart, or broke those things down, or carted them somewhere to be broken down, maybe with heat. In summer he was often shirtless, barefoot. He strode high-leggedly around the house like a young mountaineer in a fable of derring-do, or a gunslinger high on good paregoric, and although the house shook with his every footfall, his walking occasionally sounded hopeful, an end to something dangerous, the clanging of the change in his pocket silver lining.
He crossed his arms and leaned back on the fridge, worried the hair on his shoulders with his fingers.
I set the cup against my mouth and tilted it.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve taken a certain misguided delight in the tilting of partly filled vessels. Even as an adult—and it’s embarrassing to admit this—but even as an adult, even to this day, in the moment before I ruin it with thought, I believe with all my heart that the vessel I’m tilting is doing more than bounding the demonstration of a larger absolute; I believe the vessel is, itself, the absolute. The way the surface of the contained substance appears to be getting pulled from under by the vessel, even though it’s just gravity doing the usual.
I sipped the water slowly. It clotted my saliva. Dried out my teeth. It clung to the walls of my throat like dust.
“That’s drinking?” my father said. “That’s not drinking.” He clambered around me to get to the sink, opened the tap, and gulped at the stream. “That’s drinking!” he said. He swallowed awhile, then nodded mock-smugly, caught some water in his eyes. “This is drinking,” he said.
I didn’t want to make laugh sounds.
“Okay, Dad,” I said.
He kept drinking and telling me, “This is drinking.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”
He closed the tap. He left the kitchen. Walking down the hallway, he stepped on the screw. He said, “What could this screw be doing in our hallway?” Crouching where he’d stood, he pinched the screw between fingers, then held the screw high and addressed himself to it. “Maybe,” he said, “you thought there was a shortage of loose screws in our carpeting. Maybe you believed there was some kind of shortage of aggravation in the world. Or maybe you’re just a funnyguy, and you think it’s funny. You think he thinks it’s funny, Billy? Do you? Well, tell him. Tell him how we do with loose screws around here. Tell him what we do with funnyguys, Billy. Hey there, Billy, I’m talking to you. Young Master Billy. Hey there. So forget it. I’ll tell him myself. We screw ’em back down. We screw ’em back down where they belong, see,” he said. “See?” he said. “See? You see?”
He kept saying “See,” until I made laugh sounds. Then he tossed the screw down the basement stairwell and went up the street to the Arcades Brothel.
* * *
I can see how you, if you were a more considerate version of me, might have cared about the screw your dad had tossed down the basement stairwell. You might have felt that the screw, despite being just a tiny component of the threshold bar from which it had sprung (from which you had sprung it, however accidentally), was worth more consideration. It might have occurred to you, right on the spot, that although the bar was fastened by two other screws, the tossed one’s absence was straining those two—left, as they were, to do work meant for three—and would eventually strain them beyond their abilities, allowing the bar to curl up on one side and thereby malfunction years (perhaps decades) earlier than it would were it still screwed down in all its holes. You might have even been cognizant of how the tossed screw, were you to leave it stranded in the basement, would likely be kicked into a corner or crevice by some oblivious shuffler’s insensate foot (maybe even your own) and, owing to the basement’s being sealed and sturdy, remain preserved and undiscovered until such a time when a natural calamity or act of war or property developer razed your home and exposed the screw to corrosive heat and cold and moisture, if not birds or rodents or possibly insects with screw-size gaps in their nests in need of plugging. I’m very well able to imagine how you, as a more considerate version of me, might have retrieved the screw from the basement and screwed it back into the threshold bar in order to save both screw and bar from any or all of the fates described above.
So I can understand why you might expect that I would have cared about the screw and the bar, and yet I didn’t. Care, that is. I cared about neither the screw nor the bar. Had either one of them ever spoken to me, I might have cared, and maybe even cared enough, depending on my mood, to spend energy helping them, but probably not. Even when I’m moved by the plight of an inan—which happens less and less often the older I get—I’m rarely moved enough to do anything about it. Nor do I judge myself harshly for that. No more harshly, at least, than I judge myself for spending money and effort on books instead of spending that money and effort to help put an end to genocide in Africa, famine in India, global warming, animal cruelty, child abuse, or any other of the world’s presumably stoppable, certainly diminishable, absolutely unnecessary causes of suffering, including the hunger of the homeless man begging next to the bus stop in front of Barnes & Noble. I hope you don’t judge me too harshly either.
If you do judge me harshly, though, perhaps you’ll find it pleasing to learn that I was bored. I was terribly bored, and perhaps you believe I deserved to be bored. And perhaps you’ll determine—despite my protests to the contrary—that I was bored because I failed to care about the screw and the threshold bar. As much as I would disagree with that determination, I have no better an account to offer. I’ve never once known why I was bored when I was bored. My boredoms always seemed to strike me out of nowhere; they lacked salient causes, which made them hard to cure. My first impulse when bored was to play with Blank, yet since my boredoms, by nature, felt like personal failures—failures, that is, to be not-bored—and since feelings of failure could rapidly lead to feelings of frustration, and feelings of frustration increased muscular tension, which could in turn foster brash and/or clumsy applications of strength (e.g. the slamming of doors, the over-pulling of drawers, the over-scratching of mosquito bites, the snapping of pencil points), I feared that if I, while bored, were to play with Blank, I would do so too aggressively, and possibly harm it, so I’d keep Blank sleeved whenever I was bored.
So I kept Blank sleeved, and went down to retrieve the screw from the basement, not to save the screw from eons of uselessness, nor to grant the threshold bar greater longevity, but only because it seemed the most Curio-safe and readily available approach to killing some time til the boredom wore off, or, at least, til I could get to sleep.
I hadn’t been down there for at least a decade—not since our first washer-dryer combo died and the new one was installed in the first-floor bathroom. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed; even the busted laundry machine remained. The carpeting was rough, the walls wood-paneled, the window wells grimy and leaf-obstructed. Cartons of clothing that used to be my mother’s were stacked along one wall, a couple old computers and some dated small appliances were lined against the baseboard along another, and sharing the wall with the washer-dryer combo was a fireproof cabinet for medical records, insurance policies, property titles, and other such documents. My father’s workbench—a leather tool belt, a drill case, and a pair of plastic goggles all resting on a plank-and-sawhorse table—abutted the wall that was opposite the stairwell and, above it, in a frame, hung one of the original JONBOAT SAY shirts.
He’d gotten it a few weeks after purchasing the first two, saying he thought it could become a collector’s item. Although eventually a couple local shops would start carrying them, the only place to get a JONBOAT SAY shirt at the time was a Mustangs game, and he had invited me to go to another one, and then get some ice cream. I refused the invitation. So my father went to the game without me, and inside five minutes of his departure from the house, I found myself wishing I hadn’t refused. True, he didn’t know Jonboat had apologized (via bags of eighties mall couture) for having given me a possible concussion via beating, but then he also didn’t know that I’d been beaten at all—I’d told him I’d fallen. And maybe another dad, upon having learned that Jonboat had stolen “pissing through a boner,” would have shown more loyalty to his son—maybe another dad would have been outraged on his son’s behalf and thrown away the JONBOAT SAY shirts he’d already bought—but then again, I thought, maybe not. Maybe I was just being oversensitive. Maybe I was just expecting too much. Maybe’s the sound second thoughts make, son. Plus I knew for certain that if my father had known I’d been beaten up by Jonboat, he wouldn’t have stood for it, bagsful of Guess? and Cavaricci or no. He’d have gone to the compound, knocked on the gate, and…then what? Knocked on Jon-Jon’s face? Well, that seemed a little much—but he would have done something. There would have been some kind of confrontation. Some kind of demonstration of his fatherly devotion. And yet, I’d refused to go to a game with him. To go, with my father, to a baseball game, then afterward get some ice cream—I’d refused.
I rode to the ballfield to apologize and join him. I locked my bike to a leg of the bleachers. He was sitting up top, elbows on knees, looking out at the diamond, blank-faced, alone. His wife was gone and his son was insane. It wasn’t his fault, neither one nor the other.
It wasn’t mine either, though.
I unlocked my bike. I rode back home.
* * *
—
The basement was dim, lit by one bulb. I’d have to get on my knees to find the screw. As I was bending to do so, the framed JONBOAT SAY shirt’s fatman seemed to wink.
I leaned over the workbench to get a closer look, and the winking stopped. Probably it had just been a weird reflection. Maybe a silverfish standing on the glass. Nonetheless, it unsettled me a little.
I took the frame off the wall, brought it under the lightbulb, tilted it some, and…there—the winking. No cause for discomfort, much less alarm. Just a shadow effect at play on the glass. I could get the fatman to appear to wink if I held the frame at a particular angle while partially eclipsing the bulb with my chin.
I hung the frame.
No sooner had I back-stepped to confirm it was centered than it dropped to the workbench.
The bang of the initial impact wasn’t loud, but it was paired with a crunch, and instantly followed by silvery tinkling as the frame, glass-first, fell upon the rusty handle of the drill case. Shards blasted everywhere.
The hook the frame’s picture wire had formerly rested in no longer occupied its hole in the wall; it was lying on the workbench by a pile of shattered glass. Maybe it had never been properly inserted. Or maybe I’d let the wire down too hard. Was there even a difference? There probably wasn’t. It certainly wouldn’t make a difference to my father. He’d believe I’d damaged the frame on purpose.
