Stephen Markley - Ohio

The tape wound around his torso stretched and bit with each step.

He had time to kill— 02:18:24—and the liquor store, coincidentally, lay right in his path. He fingered the shard of torn napkin: Jonah had jotted the phone number on it while they smoked outside the bar. Beyond the urge to drink and get the vomit taste out of his mouth was the urge for something harder. And beyond the urge for something harder was the urge to remember—the worst addiction of all.

Boy, he thought, suddenly looking around, did Ohio look like shit.

The whole state for sure, but stumbling down SR 229 into the outskirts of the city limits, New Canaan looked like the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst. This little stretch of strip mall had lost all its signs, so you could see the ghostly outlines of the vanished businesses as well as all the smaller rust outlines where the screws once attached to the stucco. The rest of the road had all the familiar tumors. House with FOR SALE sign. House with FORECLOSURE sign. The rest for rent yet clearly unrented. Andy’s Glass Shop, closed. Burger King, open. New Canaan Building Supply across the street, closed, FOR RENT sign. Subway, open. Gas station, open, sign burned out, weird old dude lingering by a pay phone watching him. (A pay phone! Still!) Gotti’s Pizza, where Harrington’s dad used to take them after YMCA soccer or basketball, shut down, gone, along with its excellent Hawaiian pie. Liberty Tax, open.

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns—Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron—peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

“Hey-ho!” Bill toasted the night with an invisible bottle.

Passing into town he’d spotted several houses with their ROMNEY/RYAN yard signs still holding on nearly nine months after those two effete, moonbeam-colored Cylons bit it. He spotted other yard signs that appeared, as sure as the seasons, begging people to vote Yes on a doomed school levy.

He streaked for the pay phone, weird old dude trickling into the night with his shopping bag. Bill transferred the phone number from the scrap of napkin to the greasy buttons, each denuded silver rectangle likely a spa retreat for herpes and snot.

“Drugs-d-drugs-drugs-drugs,” he sang to the tune of Sisqo’s “Thong Song.”

He got two rings and a voice on the other end.

“Jonah Hansen gave me this number. Can I get something?”

“Where? And what?” The guy’s voice was light and buzzy, like when a fly drones by your ear.

“Weed preferably. But I’m open to other bad ideas…” His gaze fell on the Dunkin’ Donuts, lights aglow. An employee pushed a mop. He was old and rail-thin, his face an archipelago of scabs, a few still looking open and wet, and Bill could almost smell decay through the glass. He noted a missing a tooth, a single incisor in the top row.

“I got plenty-a options, yo. Where you wanna meet?”

“I was on my way to the liquor store.”

“Perfect. See you in ten.”

A New Canaan PD cruiser slowed as it went by. Of course, he looked to see if it might be Marty Brinklan, but the cop was young, his head a cue ball, his face cruel and curious because this pay phone was likely used strictly for drug deals. Bill stayed on the phone as the dial tone began—just to make sure this oinker cruised on by.

The night knuckled down.

For perhaps the thousandth time in the last twenty-four hours, he wondered what he’d gotten himself into and wandered out of that wonder by singing an old Ben Harrington jam. The one that sounded kind of sailor-songy from the album where he was wearing that imbecilic pork pie hat on the cover.

“Everyone went off to war / Everyone got addicted to dope / Everyone woulda hanged hisself if it weren’t for the price of rope.” He reached a crosswalk, belting it out. A lone car idled at the intersection contemplating a green light. “Everyone got an Ess-Tee-Deeee / Everyone set the banshee free / So now it’s just ole you and me / With our sad, sick revelry!”

At first he thought the driver had simply not yet noticed the green, but the car continued to sit, uninterested in its right of way. He guessed a drunk or a stoner lost in a daze. Surprise tingled his fingertips when he recognized the face.

It was his ex-girlfriend’s goddamned mother. Bethany Kline sat in the lane heading south, so he could see right into the car. With her hands dug into the wheel at ten and two, she wept.

The plastic-green color of the traffic light made the moisture beneath her eyes shine. Bethany Kline looked even more swollen, saggy, and ugly than he remembered. One spent so much time looking at the Botoxed and surgery-perfected visages of movie stars and TV personalities that it was sometimes jarring to just see what an average sixty-something woman, trampled by time and disappointment, actually looked like, let alone what she looked like crying. She hadn’t changed her haircut, still the unflattering midwestern bowl of badly dyed brown. Bangs like a friar. Her eyes were inflamed red wounds. It almost made him angry. What the fuck did she have to cry about?

He thought of her daughter at Jericho Lake wearing a black bikini and Jackie O sunglasses, her skin with both the mocha and the cream of her ancestry. Her taut, muscled build. Lisa Han had cheekbones higher than the moon and a delicate lift to her eyes that betrayed the half-exiled Caucasian in her. For the two keyest, binge-drinkingest, fuckfestingest years of high school, Lisa surprised him, drove him, maddened him. They met when she’d hunched forward at her desk in geometry class, studying a returned test. She’d been the only freshman in the class, bumped ahead a year by the Powers That Will. Bill had been staring at her cleavage, the way her high and tight tits pressed up out of this silver V-neck. She made a sound like “Blargh.” And he looked up.

“Problem?”

“Asian F,” she said, showing him her ninety-one percent score.

It had been game on after that. The first time he’d gone over to Lisa’s house, he had to ask. There were just too many pictures of this beautiful Asian girl with this family of Tupperware-looking white people. Lisa explained how her father had fled after the fall of Saigon, shepherded by distant relatives to Texas. He ended up going to school at Ohio State where he met and impregnated a young woman from his Bible study group. Like good Christians, they married over a baby bump, but Papa was gone shortly after Lisa was born, possibly to return to Vietnam to find out if his family was still alive, more likely just another broke-dick father running away.