Mickey Finn Volume 2, page 18
As Rob talked, Margaret stroked his damp forehead. His eyes were closed. His body generated a steady glow of warmth, like a recharging battery. After a while, Rob’s weight grew heavy against her shoulder. He began to snore. And the sweetness of ownership filled Margaret like a memory of Christmas.
Everything is going to be okay, she wanted to tell him. Me and your dad will sort everything out.
The next morning, Margaret fixed scrambled eggs for breakfast, called in sick at work and drove to Rob’s father’s apartment on Monterey Street. It was a two story, eight-unit building with peeling white paint and heat-bubbling stucco and a pair of large, headless V-shaped pylons in the parking lot that looked like they once held the neon marquee of a budget-priced, sixties-era motel. In the ruptured, weed-sprung parking lot, an orange coyote was calmly rooting through a toppled aluminum garbage can.
“Shoo!” Margaret said, shaking her keys. The coyote looked up momentarily from an exploded In & Out bag, twitched his scabby tail, and trotted off toward town. In my own time, he seemed to be saying, I didn’t want to stick around anyway.
“It’s like Revelations out here,” Rob’s dad told her over instant coffee in two matching Styrofoam cups. “We got the coyotes coming down from the mountains, the druggies moving up from Pismo, and those real estate assholes trying to foreclose on everything that moves so they can turn this place into another fucking health food Co-Op, or something useless like that. You want something to eat, honey? I got crackers and Monterey Jack in the fridge. Or maybe coffee isn’t what you need. Maybe I should run across the street to the Shell Station and pick up a couple cool ones?”
He was wearing torn gray sweatpants and a Bermuda Rules! T-shirt. Margaret was pretty sure it was the same ensemble he had worn the day she and Rob had picked him up outside the Men’s Colony. The twisted tattoos on his gray arms were like mottled bruises. She could never tell if they represented a bundle of snakes or a skull-and-crossbones.
“I don’t need anything. I just thought it would be nice to talk. We never really talk when you’re at the house. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
The living area resembled the littered foyer in one of the florescent-lit antique shops along Higuera. There was a white wicker chair bristling with broken stems, an orange osier sofa patched with strips of gray duct tape, and a large sixties-era television-stereo console being used to store clothes and torn-open boxes of breakfast cereals.
To make matters worse, the way Rob’s dad looked at her over his beer bottle made clear that he didn’t know what she meant. And probably never would.
“You’re a good-looking woman, Margie,” he said finally, after expelling a long pent-up breath of Marlboro, gazing at a torn Che Guevara poster on the wall, “but don’t get me wrong. I may have been a crappy dad, but I wouldn’t do nothing to hurt Rob. That being said, there are plenty of ways we could have a good time that wouldn’t qualify as cheating, especially if Rob don’t find out. Like, for example, if you wanna come over here and sit on my lap. I’ve never been much of a talker. I’ll be much better at showing you what I mean.”
The first time Margaret slept with Rob’s dad felt like witnessing a car accident on the street. One moment she was minding her own business, pursuing minor coincidences of thought and movement—the next she was trying to understand where all the noise was coming from. Events knocked around her in unpredictable patterns, someone was falling off the couch. Eventually, a period of soft confusion took over; she pulled on her clothes, grabbed her purse, and staggered out the door. Everything was quick, sudden, unpleasant, irrefutable, over.
But eventually, she appreciated the blunt unmethodical reality of each encounter. It was like commuting on the bus, or memorizing logical principles for a multiple-choice exam.
“The place is always filthy,” she told her best friend from college, Rebecca Santos, who lived in Boulder with her second husband. Every evening, after sex with Rob’s dad, she would sit in the car outside the 7-11, smoking cigarettes with the windows open, and call Rebecca. “Everything, including Rob’s dad, smells like sour milk. I never tell him I’m coming over, and yet whenever I show up, there he is, waiting behind the front door when I knock, like he’s been standing there all day just waiting to surprise me. There’s never any foreplay. He doesn’t say hello or even offer me a drink. Usually, he just fucks me right there on the hall floor and it’s over before I know it, and by the time I do know it, he’s carrying me into the bedroom and fucking me again until I’m so sore I can hardly move. He’s not like a person. He’s like this mindless sequence of events. He’s there and I’m here and suddenly we’re off on separate trajectories, according to laws we can’t control. The laws aren’t very pleasant, either. They don’t give us any pleasure. Though it’s impossible to discuss things like pleasure when it comes to Rob’s dad. What pleases that guy, and what doesn’t, seem all mixed up in his head.”
Way out in Colorado, Rebecca sighed audibly, and enunciated several sharp clicks of her tongue. Everything about Rebecca had always sounded slightly exasperated. Marriage hadn’t changed her one bit.
“Look, Margie,” Rebecca said. “Is this conversation going anywhere? I’ve got kids in the bath and a nice little Chardonnay chilling in the fridge.”
“Of course it’s not going anywhere, Becks. I just didn’t know who else to call. I’m saying that I can’t stop myself, and Rob’s dad can’t stop himself, and I’ve read stories about things like this, these irresistible-attraction type deals, but this affair doesn’t have anything to do with attraction, or passion, or desire. It’s more like I’ve unleashed something I didn’t know was in me. It’s like all the control I once had over my life is gone and I’m being controlled by somebody else. Not Rob’s dad or even Rob, but somebody I haven’t thought about in years. Like maybe my own dad, who I haven’t seen since college. I know it’s confusing; I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. So maybe you should just go get your kids out of the bath, Becks, drink your Chardonnay, and forget I called. I don’t know what I want from other people anymore. I don’t even know why I called.”
That night, Rob was sitting up in bed reading one of her old Glamour magazines and wearing the purple silk pajamas she had bought him three Christmases ago. The purple silk pajamas were the pajamas he wore when he did want to make love.
Margaret stood back from the bedroom doorway as she removed her shoes and stockings. She could smell Rob’s dad’s Salems on her skin.
“I’m taking a shower, hon,” she said, in the sort of clipped, autonomic voice she used to tell her assistant at work that she was going on break. Rob didn’t look up.
“Dad called,” Rob told the magazine. “I can’t figure him at all. I don’t hear from him for weeks, and now I hear from him like every day. He wants the two of us to spend more time with him. He wants to do all the ‘Dad’ things we never did when he was in jail, like go to Beans baseball games, or superhero movies at the Cineplex. He even talked about camping up at Lopez Lake. What would you think of me going up to Lopez Lake for a few days with Dad, hon? Does that sound crazy or what?”
It was the first question anybody had asked Margaret in ages that she knew the answer to. And the funny thing was that she knew the answer even before he asked.
“I don’t know, hon,” she said in a voice soft enough to approach a shy squirrel with a peanut. “Maybe it’s a good idea. In fact, it sounds like something that might be really good for both of you.”
They spent more time together as a family, often within an hour or two after Rob’s dad had fucked her at his place. They attended double-features at the Sunset Drive-In, or took long drives up the coast to Cambria and Big Sur. “I love this part of the country,” Rob’s dad pronounced every few minutes or so, gesturing vaguely at the latest remarkable landscape, such as Morro Rock, or the Los Padres National Forest. “I love it so much I could shoot it in the head, chop it up in pieces and eat it. I love it so much I want to bury it in my backyard so nobody else can find it. I don’t know if you guys ever noticed but love and aggression are really mixed-up forces; personally, I find it hard to tell them apart. I know that must make me real awful-sounding; but it’s just the way I roll.” Sometimes, he leaned forward from the back seat, rested his left elbow on the back of Rob’s seat, and gave Margaret a secret reach-around with his right hand. Margaret rarely pushed him away.
“Dad’s changed,” Rob told her on the way home from his dad’s Monterey Street apartment. “He’s growing more like the dad I knew when I was little. He even laughs at my jokes. He’s also less controlling. Did you notice how many times he said, ‘You guys decide?’ That’s not even remotely like the dad I used to know. When I was young, everything had to be done his way. If he wanted to drive to the hardware store, then Mom and I had to go to the hardware store, even if we ended up sitting in the car for hours. If he ordered a medium-rare cheeseburger, then Mom and I had to order medium-rare cheeseburgers, too. He even left us in the car one night for like three hours while it turned out he was killing some Columbian guy with a plastic fork in a bowling alley. Mom and I had no idea what was going on. When he got back to the car, there were streaks of crimson blood all over his T-shirt, like he’d just come from Art class. His right hand was bleeding through a thick, lumpy bandage of brown paper napkins. “I got bit by a chipmunk,” he told us. He said it totally seriously. Then he drove away using his good hand, getting more blood all over the driver’s seat, the dashboard radio, and even my Social Studies textbook. The part I remember most vividly is Dad taking us through Jack-in-the-Box and ordering three Jumbo meal deals and three jumbo vanilla milkshakes, even though he must’ve known by then that Mom and I hated vanilla milkshakes. And, of course, we had to drink them. We were terrified of making him angry, even though he never did anything violent to us, there was always the possibility, and just the possibility of violence scared us more than violence itself. One way or another, that’s why I still hate going to Jack-in-the-Box. I’m really sorry, hon. I should have told you that story before now. You deserved to hear it.”
That night in bed, Margaret made love to Rob in all the ways that were the antithesis to making love to Rob’s Dad. She kissed him on the cheeks and mouth, stroked his back gently with her nails, and squeezed the back of his neck when she came. When she said, “I love you,” she closed her eyes tightly, cried for a moment, and pulled him down on top of her. She didn’t know why she was crying until she stopped, and when she did stop, it all seemed totally clear. Rob wasn’t his dad. He would never be his dad. He would only be Rob, forever and ever. Good old boring no-nonsense lousy-in-the-sack Rob.
“I love you, too, hon,” he said after a while.
And then he grew heavier on top of her, weighing her down into the bed’s inescapable deepness.
“When I met Rob,” Margaret told Rebecca the next night, after fucking Rob’s dad so hard that they broke his dining-room table, “he was the first man who seemed to care who I was, or how I felt, and I wasn’t sure if I liked being around a man like that. He was always complimenting me about my appearance, and opening doors, and asking where I wanted to go for dinner; it really got on my nerves. Even after we married, he was always doing thoughtful little things, such as bringing fresh flowers from the store, or picking up some watch I liked at Kohl’s, even when it wasn’t my birthday. Even now, Rob’s always asking how I feel, or stroking my back, even when he doesn’t want sex; it makes me so nervous I’m afraid to go to sleep sometimes. Seriously, do you think something’s wrong with me? But Rob’s dad is different. I can’t remember a single nice thing he ever said to me. If I got killed on the freeway after I left his apartment, he could not care less. And the weirdest part is that Rob and his dad are now getting along better than ever. They went to a ballgame last night and didn’t get back until past midnight. It’s grown clear to me that Rob, his dad, and I all exist on different planes of reality. We’re just living our different realities together in the same family.”
Later, when Margaret turned off her cell and went inside, she found a note from Rob scribbled on a paper napkin:
Dad’s in trouble.
Will call soon.
Rob
It was as if Margaret had been waiting to receive this note from Rob all her life.
Margaret was almost relieved to hear that Rob’s dad had been charged with two counts of manslaughter, kidnaping, and extortion, and three counts of the RICO act. It made her realize how little she owed him.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rob said that night at dinner. They were still wearing their court clothes; Rob hadn’t even loosened his tie. He looked like one of those tensely expectant, half-smiling contestants on The Apprentice. “But then again, maybe I do. After all the progress Dad was making, he turns around and blows it on some poor pedestrian who gave him the finger, and now that’s it for old Dad. Mom always told me this would happen. ‘Your dad will always disappoint you,’ she told me, whenever I asked to visit him at the Men’s Colony. ‘He’s a sociopath with no ability to distinguish right from wrong.’ But no matter what Mom said, he was always my dad, and I loved him, and I wanted him around. Sometimes, I imagined him making daring escapes from prison just to visit me on my birthday, and I would hug him and say, ‘Dad, see, you don’t have to be a criminal. You have me and mom, who love you. If you can just stay out of prison, we can all live together as a happy family.’”
That night, Margaret put Rob to bed as if he were six years old.
The trial was postponed twice, and when the hearing was held in early October, Margaret agreed to stay home. “I’ve got to do this by myself,” Rob said mysteriously, as if he were driving off to a difficult conversation with his doctor. “If you’re there, my emotions might get more conflicted than they already are.”
Margaret spent the day looking for part-time jobs online. Every job listing contained links to endless streams of information that didn’t matter to Margaret, such as “personal qualities” and “evidence of commitment,” but nothing about hours, pay or benefits. She posted two inquiries about weekend “data management” positions at CalPoly, cooked and ate an entire frozen sausage pizza, flipped through some old diet books, and called her mother, who was driving to Reno to meet friends from her book club.
“I wish they’d told me how easy it was to attach Bluetooth to my phone,” her mother said. “Now I can talk to people when I drive.”
For once, Margaret insisted on asking about her father, even while a cold, slow silence began to build on the other end of the line. What did he die of? What was the last thing he said before he moved out of the house? When he called Margaret, he had always started every conversation with: “I can’t talk long.” And why did he keep saying that, what was the big hurry? Is his second wife alive? How could I contact her? What did he do for a living before he died? Did he have any pets? Until her mother lost patience and said:
“Please, Margaret. I don’t understand all this interest in your father, who never understood the basic rules of family life, and went running off with another woman just because he liked her legs. If you ask me, he isn’t any different from Rob’s dad, except maybe he didn’t murder so many people. You want to know more about your asshole father? Go read it on his tombstone. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m calling somebody who wants to talk about me and not your father. Then I’m driving to Harrah’s, meeting the girls, and blowing twenty bucks on Keno.”
Almost six months after Rob’s dad returned to prison, Margaret awoke in her empty bed to the raucous sound of birds in the yard. Sunlight was streaming through her windows, sparkling with dust motes and refracted light. Everything in her house was imbued with a fresh, intangible, unfamiliar quality: her gladiolas hanging on the balcony, the clean white triangular vanity table they had purchased on sale at Target, the matching teak veneer end tables, even the high ceilings and cold, orange tile floors. It all seemed like a much nicer, brighter home than the one where Margaret had previously lived. Only someone with taste and sensitivity could appreciate a house like this. Someday, that someone might even be her.
Back to TOC
All Over But the Shouting
Rick Ollerman
I went home with her because I had to. Tammy needed a bigger man to get something back from a smaller man and I told her yes. After obliging her, I’d been given the key to her apartment. She’d neglected to tell me there’d be only one bed and no couch.
She found me on the floor; her package, wrapped in a faded cotton tote bag, sat on the kitchen counter next to the sink. I didn’t know what was in it and didn’t care. I’d done what she needed and now I was out of sight and safe. Safer, anyway.
It was cold on the pressed carpet or I wouldn’t have gone with her. I needed sleep and when she insisted I follow her to the single bedroom, pulling me insistently with the weight of her slender body, I again obliged. I wouldn’t get onto the bed without a shower, though. The sour smell of dried sweat was rank on my body—I would have bathed earlier if I’d had a change of clothes. Now I just wanted the heat from the water and a chance to sleep. Tammy surprised me with a clean pair of men’s shorts as I stepped out of the bathroom, a dark green towel around my waist; she’d removed my other things.
