A Particular Madness, page 14
She looked at me, and I nodded. “Nice to meet you,” I said.
“We used to do some crazy shit,” Danny said.
“Are those rooms finished, Danny?” she asked.
“I was just getting to it,” he said.
“Those crews are due in at three,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m on it.”
I stood. “Well, I better get on my way. Nice seeing you again, Danny.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Hey,” he said as I reached the door, “you remember what we called that arm-out-the-trunk thing?”
“The friend test,” I said.
“Yeah, the friend test. I always figured you’d pass it,” he said.
Chapter 27
I walked into the next semester still hungry for the world. Seeing Danny caught up in a dull marriage and a life of mediocrity motivated me to forge ahead. There were things I wanted to learn, books I wanted to read, people I wanted to know. I was determined to make it happen.
That semester, I enrolled in a class taught by one Dr. Foss, allegedly the most inspiring professor on campus. Normally, she taught only graduate-level classes, but a scheduling conflict forced her into teaching the undergraduate Introduction to American Literature class.
She showed up first day with her arms full of books, no makeup, wearing a plain cotton dress and black loafers. Had it been anywhere else, she would have passed for the cleaning woman or the old lady on the park bench feeding pigeons. But the moment her lecture started, I was swept into a world I didn’t even know existed. It was a feast laid out in front of me.
I read the books she brought—Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald. I read late into the night, ignoring my need for rest, neglecting my job at the courthouse, forgetting family and friends. I filled my notes with thoughts, and I composed long and idealistic letters to Rachael, who had grown increasingly tardy with her responses. During this process, I discovered how powerful narrative could be, how it could make abstraction and confusion comprehensible. This was my new secret weapon. This made me formidable, perhaps immortal. I had to have it, perfect it, and live forever within it. So, I read everything she suggested and more. I took my scattered letters and words and made them whole.
What I failed to do was rest. At times I’d fall asleep unexpectedly, waking on the stairwell or behind the Mercury steering wheel or on the bunk in the basement of the courthouse. I developed tremors and a stammer that would start and stop unexpectedly, leaving me exasperated. My concentration failed, and my stamina weakened to the point that I could no longer sustain my reading or complete my assignments. Finally, my grades began to suffer.
It was during the last week of that semester that I awoke in the middle of the night to a noise. I lay in the darkness listening, trying to identify what it might be. There were occasions that the owner of the flower shop returned for something he’d forgotten, but this was different. There was something alarming about it. I dozed once again but was startled awake once more and left staring into the darkness. A figure materialized in front of me, murky but at the same time familiar.
“Who is it?” I asked, my voice breaking. There was no answer. “Who the hell are you?” I asked again with bravado.
“It’s me, Danny,” he said.
“Danny?”
“Danny, goofball. How many Dannys do you know?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk,” he said.
“About what?”
“About the girl with the big knockers.”
“Cut it out, Danny.”
“Girls like her got no interest in guys like you. I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen. She’s looking for smarts and money. You don’t have much of either.”
I sat up. “Don’t talk that way, Danny. I’ll punch you in the nose.”
“Yeah, you and who else? Have some pride, goofball.”
I heard the door close, and he was gone. I lay down, uncertain whether I had been dreaming. Maybe Danny was right about Rachael, that I’d been fooling myself all this time. But why would he come all this way, and in the middle of the night, to say it?
Unless—unless he wanted Rachael for himself. He’d always been obsessed with her, talking about her that way, and he was married too. So, what business was it of his, unless he was trying to convince me to get out of his way so he could have her? Maybe that was it, the son of a bitch. Maybe he was looking to steal Rachael away from me.
When I arrived the next evening at the courthouse, I had been fired. My check was waiting, along with a brown bag of sandwiches that I had left in the jailer’s refrigerator. They said I had failed to do my job and that they would have to find someone else who could work unsupervised.
The following morning, I received a letter in an envelope that had a picture of the Citadel on the front of it. It was from the dean of students, informing me that I had been placed on academic probation and would not be allowed to enroll the following semester. I could reapply in one year to have my status reconsidered. There would be no refunds this late in the semester, and a letter had already been sent to my parents explaining the reasons for my suspension.
No sooner had I finished reading the letter than the telephone rang. It was Uncle Duny.
“Where do you live?” he asked. “I’m coming over.”
“Above the Bradey Flower Shop on Main. What’s wrong?”
“Did I say anything was wrong?”
“No, but—I thought you were in county?”
“I’m out, legit, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“I’ll be there shortly,” he said, hanging up.
I’d barely gotten dressed when the downstairs doorbell rang. Uncle Duny stood there, looking like he’d just hopped off a freight train.
“Jesus,” he said. “You really do live on Main Street?”
“Just a room,” I said.
“Beats sleeping under a bus,” he said.
“What you doing here, Uncle Duny?”
“You know that crazy bastard Ward burned my building to the ground,” he said. “I got nothing left. You going to let me in or what?”
We climbed the stairs, and I could hear Uncle Duny wheezing behind me. I pointed him to the chair, and he slumped down into it. He dabbed the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief.
“You OK?” I asked.
He pulled out his cigarette makings. “Hell no,” he said, sprinkling tobacco the length of the paper. “I got water gathering up in my ankles and feet. Look like a goddang hippo. The county croaker tells me I got the liver of a ninety-year-old. I tell you, boy, I got no money, no job, and I’m too sick to give a damn. I’m too old and crippled for farmwork, and I can’t run fast enough to steal. I’m used up and no one to care.”
“You got family, Uncle Duny. And you got Mortem.”
He lit his cigarette and studied the end of it. “Damn dog took off,” he said. “Hellhounds got little use for baptized humans. Anyway, your mom tells me you’re going to the university and landed a job at the courthouse.”
I walked to the window and looked down on Main. “I lost my job,” I said. “Been kicked out of the university too.”
“Well, damn,” he said. “We got more in common than I thought. Is your rent paid up?”
“Until the end of the month,” I said.
“Well, that’s something,” he said.
“It all went off the rail,” I said.
“Been there,” he said. “Once, I was selling encyclopedias over in Albuquerque. Made thirty dollars in two days. I was hauling it in. Franklin charm, you know. Anyway, I was fixing to close a deal with this gal, a twelve-volume leather-bound deluxe set, when this cop showed up with his nightstick and threatened to soften up my head.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Don’t know. All I did was show her a full-page illustration of an erect penis.”
“You want something to eat, Uncle Duny?”
“Maybe a whiskey?”
“I don’t have whiskey,” I said.
“What the hell is all those notebooks for?” he asked.
“Just some journal notes I been keeping. My professor said I had a knack for it.”
“Get it from the Franklin side,” he said. “Your grandad could lie his way out of a cattle stampede. Say,” he said, “you still writing love letters to that girl?”
“We’re still writing,” I said. “Trouble is—”
He squashed out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe and palmed it. “Trouble is what?”
“I think Danny is trying to steal her away.”
“Danny?”
“He was here last night, telling me how I wasn’t good enough for her, and how sooner or later she was going to find someone else.”
“Danny Armstrong? That little son of a bitch who runs the Railway Hotel?”
“That’s right.”
“You saw him last night?”
“That’s right.”
“Peculiar,” he said. “Danny Armstrong shot himself in the head a week ago. Train crew found him bleeding out on the hotel register. Dead as a carp, he was.”
Chapter 28
Uncle Duny, being more sensitive than one might surmise, didn’t pursue the matter further. I found some relief in that, because I didn’t understand it all myself. In any case, a man owning a hellhound and scared of being baptized didn’t have much truck worrying about my life.
Having acquired fair cooking skills over his many years of bachelorhood, Uncle Duny fixed pinto beans and fatback as good as I ever had. That night he slept on the floor, and I slept in the bed. I offered the bed, but he declined, saying as how sleeping under the bus had taught him how to sleep anywhere at any time.
Neither of us had a clear notion as to where we went from here, but I could see that Uncle Duny’s health was not what it should be. He’d slowed down some to be sure, no doubt due to his heavy drinking and his uncontrollable appetite, and he didn’t have life direction far as I could tell. If he did, he wasn’t saying. He had a way of just disappearing, showing up again at odd times and without explanation.
I missed going to my classes, which had served to keep my mind occupied. Now, with nothing specific to think about, I thought about everything in the most random and illogical ways. I stopped going out any more than was necessary. I had no interest in seeing anyone, most especially Mom and Dad, now that they would have received the suspension letter.
Sometimes the world would fall about me like a dark cloud, like a weight on my chest that kept me from breathing. I feared closed rooms and large crowds more than anything, any place where there was no clear escape route. It was as if a great hand were pushing me underwater, holding me there as my lungs filled.
On better days I worked on my notes or listened to the radio. But then sometimes Danny would come at night, telling me how Rachael was his now and how I was a bad friend who had deserted him. Asking why I wasn’t there the day he put a bullet in his head. Where was I when it came down to it?
One morning, Duny showed up with a sack of groceries in his arms and a grin on his face.
“Guess what?” he asked.
“What?”
“I got a job.”
“You mean like a real job?”
He pushed the sack of groceries over to me. “With a paycheck and everything,” he said.
“Where? Doing what?”
“Cleaning the courthouse at night,” he said.
I looked at him over the sack of groceries. “You took my job?”
He shrugged. “I knew it was open. Now we can eat, buy gas, pay the rent. Come on, boy, I just as well have the job as someone else.”
And so he paid the rent, bought eggs and milk, and made cornbread smeared with real butter. Duny said it would all work out. Said he found college generally a waste of time, but if that’s what I wanted, he’d let me stay in the apartment until I could come up with a job for myself.
But I didn’t know if college was what I wanted anymore. I had this big hole in my life. I didn’t want much of anything anymore, ’cept to be left alone. I’d been thinking that others were right about me. I’d always be running behind, never catching up.
A week later, when I came home, I found Uncle Duny passed out on the stairwell. He didn’t smell of liquor, but his face was red and bloated, and his shirt was wet with sweat. I put a wet rag on his forehead and waited for him to come around. He sat up and leaned against the wall. His breathing was labored and shallow.
“What is it, Duny?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
He pushed me aside. “Get the hell out of the way, kid,” he said. “It ain’t your business.”
After that, I looked for work in earnest, knowing now that I could not depend on Duny much longer. Three days later, I spotted a help wanted sign down at the gas station. The owner had oatmeal on the front of his uniform when he came out. He said the job was pumping gas and doing oil changes. He said it was cleaning the public toilet every night before going home, that it wasn’t so bad, save for when some bastard missed the stool or clogged it with toilet paper. He said the other guy was filling out notice time and I could come back later if I wanted.
Danny’s visits commenced in earnest again, usually in the wee hours of morning. Sometimes he’d talk, while other times, he’d just watch from the doorway without saying a word. I came to realize at some point that he wasn’t just watching but was making me do stuff with his presence, making me think things I didn’t want to think.
Uncle Duny said Danny had killed himself, and that if I believed otherwise, I was crazier than Danny had been. In some ways I knew he was right, but then there Danny would be standing in the doorway, real as real. I couldn’t stop him.
While Uncle Duny was cleaning the courthouse, I’d write my notes. I’d write things that were happening to me and things that I’d been thinking. It didn’t stop me from thinking them, but sometimes I’d change them up, make them the way I wanted them to be. I had the power to do that.
One night Uncle Duny came home early from work, and I could tell something was different. I’d seen him drunk plenty of times, knew how he walked, and how he talked with his words all jammed up together. But this was different. He sat down on the chair and held his head in his hands.
“What’s the matter, Uncle Duny?”
He looked up at me. “Who said anything was the matter?”
“You want me to fix you some food?”
He coughed and held his stomach. “What did your cooking ever cure?”
“Just an offer,” I said.
“You ever think about dying, boy?” he asked.
“Everyone thinks about it some, I guess.”
“You know, I ain’t never been to a single funeral in my whole life. Even my own mother’s.”
“Why not?”
He lowered his head. “I didn’t want to be drawn into it, I guess. I didn’t want to look at it straight on.”
“Everyone dies,” I said.
He pushed himself back in his chair. “Now ain’t that a goddang insight to behold? It doesn’t make a damn that everyone dies when it comes to your own dying, does it?”
He jumped then like he had a pain, and he took a deep breath. “Damn beans lay up in a man like beer wort,” he said.
“Maybe we ought get hold of someone, Duny. See a doctor or something.”
“You thinking I might die, leaving you to pay the rent?”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.
“Anyway, I’m baptized, ain’t I?”
He groaned and slid his legs out in front of him. The hair on his leg was dark against the whiteness of his skin. I could see the scar on his shin and remembered when that bumper jack gave way and came down on his leg. Duny didn’t even holler.
I sat down on the step next to him, my nose twitching.
Duny took a couple deep breaths, and his eyes focused in on me. “Will you stop,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Twitching like a goddang rabbit.”
I held my nose still with my finger. “It just goes off like that,” I said.
“Maybe you need a carrot,” he said.
“I don’t even like carrots.”
He rubbed at his neck and looked at the ceiling. “It’s the Roland blood what makes you crazy, you know. Next thing you’ll be looking for a cross with wheels on it.”
“Dad says it’s the Franklins who are drunks and ne’er-do-wells.”
“Something is wrong with my insides,” he said. “I can’t go to work like this.”
“I can do it,” I said. “Who knows that job better than me?”
“Suppose no one would know the difference,” he said.
“We need the money, Duny.”
“If you get caught, it was none of my doings,” he said.
I worked the shift without a hitch, staying clear of the night jailer by ducking out the side door at the end of the shift, and I was nearly back to the room when I saw red lights flashing up ahead. As I got closer, I could see the ambulance pulled into the alley behind the flower shop and a cop car parked behind it. The stairwell door to the apartment was wide open, and all the lights were on.
Just as I reached the door, two men came out carrying a stretcher with Uncle Duny on it. He was naked, save for his jockey shorts. His eyes were shut, and his jaw was clenched.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Would you mind moving out of the way, sir?” one of the attendants said.
“Where you taking him?”
“To the hospital,” he said.
“Is he going to be OK?”
“Not if you don’t get out of the way.”
I stepped aside. The cop came out of the door and said, “Who are you?”
