The Ravaged, page 4
Jack takes a swallow and somehow keeps from grimacing. He has tasted some great Chilean red wines before. This isn’t one of them. “That is horrible,” he says. “I’m really sorry for your loss.”
“Time is all we have on this earth, Jack. Never take it for granted. Up to you how it is spent. You can wake up angry at the world every day and blame yourself, blame others, drown in self-pity. Or you can do things that make joy. Help others. Only so many breaths, heartbeats, morning views of the sun to be had.” She holds up the clay cup. “This is what you need. Let you see your pain. Sort your troubles. Open your mind. You need to feel. To realize.” And she takes another sip.
Realize what? Jack wonders. Feeling—he gets that, as a sort of rootless tingling stirs inside him. And he tells Fabiola, “I lost my mother nearly five years ago. Just before she passed, she told me to run. Run and never look back. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time. Skip to a few years later, and my wife became terminal. She fought hard. She was a very strong woman. But in the end, pancreatic cancer was stronger. All I’ve ever known is hard work, loss, and how to earn a lot of money. Mucho dinero. But here’s the thing: A few months ago, I found myself coming home to an empty house. All that I had worked to amass no longer mattered. I was, and still am, alone. So here I sit before you, not knowing where my life has gone. Everything has passed me by.”
“Evaporado,” Fabiola tells him.
Taking another sip of the dark maroon liquid, he watches with idle curiosity as the baked-earth walls begin to expand and contract, as if he were inside a living, breathing organism. And he tells Fabiola, “Yes, it has evaporated.”
“Mothers always know,” she tells him. “When I met Esteban at the Fiesta de San Pedro y San Pablo when I was fourteen—a festival in honor of the town’s patron saint—my mother told me, ‘He will bring you pain someday, but he will be a good provider.’ My mother, she always had that sixth sense. Esteban asked me to dance. I accepted. He asked me to marry him. Again I accepted. We wanted a child. Had a boy. Before he was eighteen, he gave us a grandson, and next thing I know, I have three generations of men. It was beautiful.”
Listening to Fabiola reminds Jack of his own love. Sarah, his high school sweetheart. Long blond locks and piercing emerald eyes. Soft, creamy skin. He is lost in the memory of her, can even detect her flowery-fresh smell. He notices that the stone floor is beading up with sweat. Some distant corner of his mind finds this odd, and it occurs to him that he is babbling incoherently. Fabiola and whatever she gave him to drink have loosened emotions and memories, fragmented images and sounds and thoughts and words he has not discussed or even thought to speak of, with anyone, ever. He has kept them bottled and sealed like small-batch Kentucky bourbon.
“When my wife passed, it caught me by surprise. I watched her fight so hard for months, and I watched days drop from the calendar. I found her the best hospital, the best doctors. The best care money could buy. All the years we had together, ended by a rampant division of cells in her body. That’s how the doctors explained it to me.” Jack stops to compose himself. Then he tells Fabiola, “And every time a roadblock came up, my Sarah, she’d forge her own route and fight harder. Then her fight was over, and I wasn’t prepared for that day.” Wiping tears from his cheek and snorting mucus, Jack says, “We have a son. His name is Duncan. It kills me, but he’s an off-again, on-again addict. And of all the professions to earn a degree in, he becomes an electrician. He’s way too smart for that. I mean, I went to an Ivy League school. Not Duncan. Nope, he went to a community trade school. Became a journeyman. But he has issues with addiction. And then there’s our daughter, Megan. She was adopted. But she committed suicide. Things just weren’t right in her head. She had some loose wires—lot of awful things mashed up there that Sarah and I didn’t know about. She . . . she did some horrible things that could have shed a bad light on my family.”
Jack feels the lightness of his cup. Craves more. Fabiola sees him looking into the empty vessel and grabs it. Goes back to the counter, picks up the bottle, fills Jack’s cup. Brings it back and hands it to him.
He nods. “Thank you, Fabiola, you’re too kind.” He sips more of the sweet taste that has created a world of illustrations in his brain, shards of forgotten truths. And with the walls heaving and the floor taking on a wet sheen almost like heated tar, he thinks of those boys. Their faces. So young. Seeing his daughter in court. He tells Fabiola, “You know, I paid big money to keep my daughter out of the papers. Keep what she did away from the news. I went out and found her a place that would hospitalize her and care for the sickness she had. But as I said, she was adopted. She wasn’t my blood. And you can’t control the outcome of something you never created. People who aren’t your own have different ways about them, unknown to you. That’s what my mother tried to warn me about before the adoption went through. See, how this happened was, Sarah had lost our second child. And she couldn’t do it again. She could not go through all that. But those kids, Megan had babysat them. They trusted her. And who wouldn’t? She was such a beautiful girl. She could have had a wonderful life. But something wasn’t right up there. And a person never knows the why when they decide to do what she did. You just never know what that child’s bloodline was. My mother was right. Megan could have had mass murderers or rapists or psychos in her real family’s tree. Like everything in life, it was a gamble. Turns out, it wasn’t right.”
“What wasn’t right?”
Talking aloud. Outside the boundaries of himself. Tingling in his fingertips. He feels the vastness of galaxies inside him. His words loud and deep, the bass tones rattling his bones loud enough to hear.
“The big problem was not being around enough—always at the office or traveling on business.”
“Who wasn’t around?”
“I. Me. I wasn’t really around. I mean, I was there when I wasn’t traveling. And in the courtroom, I was there for everything, but I was always busy. Buried myself in my work. Reading reports, facts, and figures. Had documents to review. But my wife, she dealt with that. She dealt with Megan. I paid the court costs. But I was working, always working. It’s all I knew to do.”
Sipping her wine, Fabiola tells Jack, “Mi marido—my husband—he wasn’t around much. Always he work at the mine. Long hours. Early to bed on Sunday night to get to work on Monday morning. Unless there was overtime. He took it. Always. Sleep in his truck between shifts. Not come home. Always told me, it’s not safe, but it’s a good living. Before leaving, he would say, ‘remember the insurance and the pensión that goes to you if I do not return.’”
Jack feels the sudden weight of grief, thinking of how much he worked. How much he missed. He is realizing just how closely he followed his mother’s example. She held down three jobs to raise him, working morning to night, then working half the night too, day after day. But she never seemed to miss anything. If he needed her, got hurt or sick at school, she was there. Baseball games, graduation, she was there.
“Time, Jack—it’s all we got. It’s how you spend it. I never took it for granted. The holidays. The birthdays. My men. I think about those things. Brings a smile to my face. Waking up every day, knowing I have each of them in my heart, in my actions, in my mind. What I do now, I help others.”
Jack wonders, who has he ever helped? His business created jobs, turned into a huge franchise. He revolutionized pharmacies. Came up with the drive-through, added groceries and one-hour photos. Sold those ideas off and came up with new ones. He donated to other organizations. That was a tax write-off. In the end, it was all about making money. Scratching each other’s back. Doing favors. He never met the people the donations helped. Never knew the faces. The names.
Why? Why is he realizing all this now? After these years. Is it a reckoning?
“It took near twenty-four hours before I learn of their death—of the mine blowing up,” Fabiola tells Jack, who is staring at the floor. The stones have grown slicker, almost molten. The walls continue to heave and sigh. On the wall above the bench, Fabiola’s family has bloodshot eyes. Tears run down their faces and drip onto the bench. Jack’s fat, soft palms are damp. And he closes his eyes. Squeezing them tight to keep them in their sockets.
Seeing the wine open passages within Jack, Fabiola tells him, “My brother-in-law come here to tell me of the explosion. The mine owners, the supervisors, never told nobody nothing. They waited. Racing around to figure out how to handle the situation. Then a radio station picked up on the news.”
Taking another sip of wine, Jack tells Fabiola, “Growing up, during my teenage years, every day after school I washed dishes at a diner in town. My mother worked three jobs. She worked at a bakery in the mornings. Then a diner during lunchtime. It was the same diner I washed dishes for. Then she bartended at night. She always kept all her loose change from the tips she earned in an oversized glass pickle jar at the front door until she filled it up. Then she had it counted at the bank and she’d take us out for supper. ‘My boy,’ she called me. I was her favorite. She’d take us out for hamburgers, french fries, and vanilla floats. That is where my work ethic derived from.”
“And your father—he was absent?”
“My father went crazy after his brother died in a car accident. Driving downhill, the brakes went out on my uncle’s old Plymouth—slammed into a limestone wall. My father worked in a mill in Ohio. And he began to drink a lot. My mother started to call him ‘Adolf’ because he would come home in these fits of rage after work and he would rant about the unions. Talking about the working man getting screwed and how bad the conditions were where he worked. He’d take all his anger at the world out on us. Then one evening, he threatened my mother with a pistol. But only once. That’s all it took—one time. My mother packed my brothers and me up the next morning after my father left for work, and we left Ohio for Kentucky. She was a good mother. Didn’t take any shit from anyone. She raised and mothered us, worked and provided everything we needed. She never asked my father for a dime, not one cent, and she never allowed him any contact with us.”
Laying his empty cup on the table, Jack is shivering and shaking, wanting to scream, gritting his teeth. Wanting to break down. His limbs have drawn tight. An aching begins in the soles of his feet, travels all the way to his jaw. His right hand pulses with pain as he rocks back and forth in his chair. Is he having a heart attack? Fabiola sets her cup on the table, reaches for Jack’s hand. Looking at her, he doesn’t see Fabiola. What he sees is divine—someone he has not laid eyes on for years. His mother. Her face. Her smile. Hands touching his, she tells him, “It’s okay. Let it out, Jack. Let it all out.”
And he does.
ANNE
Hands grip her shoulders, shake her body awake. Lids part. Eyes open. Anne feels as if she hasn’t slept in weeks. The adrenaline dump left her body in a fatigued state. Her blurry field of vision contains an outline with Nick Cave locks slicked back, flaming red-rimmed glasses that glow next to the phone light by his face.
“Anne?”
Anne’s groggy brain hurts, her neck is tight and stiff, and her ankle aches with every beat of her heart. Feeling like a punching bag in Mike Tyson’s training camp, she says, “Trot?”
“No, it’s Santa fuckin’ Clause. Fuck yes, it’s Trot. We gotta git.” Trot stands, looming over her.
“Fuck you. Get that light outta my face.” Balling her fists into her eyes, she yawns and asks, “What about the dog?”
Kicking her feet with the side of his boot, Trot says, “Dog? What fucking dog? Come on, up off your ass, greenhorn.”
Pulling her legs in, Anne says, “What the fuck, man? Give a girl her space. Damn dog chased and attacked me.”
“Well, there’s no call of the wild waiting for us, so hurry the fuck up. ’Cause we do have a ride to the outskirts in Bristol.”
“Bristol?”
“Yeah. Train don’t stop around here much. We gotta motor. Ride won’t wait all night.”
Working her way to her feet, Trot smiling. “What’s with the black eyes?”
“Black eyes?”
“Yeah, on top of everything else you told me, your eyes are black and there’s some crusty blood rimming your nostrils.”
Recalling the rage. Mitch coming at her. Spinning her around. Headbutting her. The skillet. Body dropping to the floor. The blood puddling around his outline. “Mitch,” Anne says, remembering the scuffle. “Fuck!”
“Yeah, in your text you did mention you killed Mitch.”
“He caught me lifting Dad’s money. Headbutted me. It was intense.”
On her feet, Anne wrestles with her pack. Her ankle is sore, but she can walk on it. Trot steps behind her, helps her get her arms through the straps, turns her around. Hugging her, he says, “He’ll be fine. Can’t worry about that now. We got brighter futures ahead of us.”
Walking out of the shack, Trot says, “Must’ve broke your nose. Sounds like he deserved a little cast iron upside the head. Always was a fucking hothead.”
Making her way to the outline of a vehicle, hearing a putter and miss of the engine, smell of fuel and exhaust fumes heavy on the air. Anne’s fingertips are ice cold and painful to the touch. Index and middle fingers gently trace her features. “Shit!”
Walking beside Anne, Trot asks her, “Really think you killed him?”
“He attacked me. I hit him in the temple with a number eight skillet. Dropped like he was paralyzed or some shit. It was so insane. Didn’t know what else to do—I just ran.”
“Self-defense. What he gets for fucking invading your personal space.”
Walking in the dark toward the bass beat thumping so loud it rattles the license plate, dirt and pea gravel sloshing like coleslaw beneath their feet. Stopping at the car, opening the door, they get Slayer’s “Angel of Death” blaring from the stereo. The kid behind the wheel of the Ford Probe with a crinkled right fender and duct-taped trunk is named Pistol. He dropped out of school at age sixteen. Is now twenty-one, still doing the same dumb shit he did at sixteen. Hanging out with the younger crowd. Scoring them booze. Selling them weed or hash. Trying to get his single-eyed snake wet when he could, trying to be Scott Weiland cool. He wasn’t ugly or obese. Just odd with hair like the lead singer of Green Day before they won a Grammy—uneven strands shifting in all directions. He had this shy but friendly demeanor. Blue eyes and an athletic build. He wears a faded Rancid T-shirt, black jeans, and matching Vans slip-on shoes.
Anne takes off her pack, sinks down into the back seat. Trot slams the door, which rattles as if it might fall off its hinges. Pistol turns the music down while Trot gets in the front seat, and eyes Anne in the rearview. “Hell happened to your face? You look fucked up.” He shifts into drive.
“Spat with my brother.”
“Siblings. They’re the worst.”
The Probe’s headlights cut through the pudding-thick night. Houses swish by. Pistol takes the highway out of Johnson City to an old back road. Glancing at Trot and then making eye contact with Anne in the rearview, Pistol tells them, “Could’ve crashed at my place till morning if needed. Got a comfy cushioned couch, spare bed, air mattress. Cabinet full of booze. Plenty of weed.”
Trot tells him, “We’re good, dude. Told you, we’s hopping a train.”
“Some Huck Finn shit—I get it. Rad!”
Trot stares out the window while Anne sits chewing what length she had left on her chipped nails—wordless, each waiting for the other to reply.
Anne meets Pistol’s glancing eyes in the rearview, fake laughs. “Yeah. Huck Finn, only it ain’t no damn boat we’re hopping.” Pausing, she spat a piece of nail onto the back the passenger’s seat. “It’s a fuckin’ train.”
“I feel you, little lady, I feel you. More like some Dean Moriarty shit.”
“Dean More-what shit?”
“On the Road, by Jack Kerouac—the Beats. Where he travels ’cross the country with his friends. Great fucking book. Should stop at the first bookshop you find and buy a copy.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
Trading suburban landscapes for country landscapes and farmhouses and pastures, twenty minutes later Pistol pulls to a turn out off the side of Pleasant Grove Road. Shifts into park. Reaches over and shakes Trot’s hand, who slides him two twenty-dollar bills.
“Safe travels, brother.”
“Appreciate it, Pistol.”
Unlatching the door, Trot steps out into the cool night air. Anne pushes the seat forward, grabs her pack, feeling Pistol’s eyes undressing her. She steps from the car, looks in at Pistol. He tells her, “Don’t forget that book.”
Not caring for the way he keeps eyeing her, she tells him, “Why don’t you go feel someone else up with your eyes, you fuckin’ creep.”
Embarrassed, Pistol shifts into drive. Holds up his hand, flies the middle finger. “Screw you.”
He speeds off down the road, leaving Trot and Anne standing out in the darkness of crickets chirping and dogs barking.
“Did you have to be such a bitch?”
Overhead, the sky is clear, with Orion and the Big Dipper and an airplane blinking. “Fucker was making me sick, molesting me with his eyes. Talking about some damn Jack Kerouac—probably some kinda cock book or something. You got some weird friends.”
A full moon guides their steps away from the road to the woods, where they walk through some brush, then stop. Trot tells her, “He’s an acquaintance, just making conversation. Everyone you meet ain’t like your family. Pistol’s a good dude. First person I met when I moved here.”
