Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

I know I should go up there and talk to her. And what? Apologize? Confront her about Chuck? Wait for her to confront me? What do I say? We’re in a perpetual blind stalemate here; lost. I can see how we got here-after each bad decision, after each failure we quietly logged our blame, our petty resentments; we constructed a case against the other that we never prosecuted. As long as both cases remained unstated, the charges sealed, we had a tacit peace: you don’t mention this and I won’t mention that, this and that growing and changing and becoming everything, until the only connection between us was this bridge of quiet guilt and recrimination. I don’t bring up her insistence on remodeling and her online shopping binge and she doesn’t stare across the dinner table and say, with all due respect, Matt: financial fucking poetry? And on and on we go, not talking-all the way to the incriminating cheating and weed-dealing mess we’re in now.

We’re not husband and wife right now; we are unindicted coconspirators.

It’s almost as if Lisa and I deserve this. Or believe we do. And I don’t think we’re alone. It’s as if the whole country believes we’ve done something to deserve this collapse, this global warming and endless war, this pile of shit we’re in. We’ve lived beyond our means, spent the future, sapped resources, lived on the bubble. Economists pretend they’re studying a social science, and while the

economy is a machine of hugely complex systems, it’s also organic, the whole a reflection of the cells that make it up, a god made in our image, prone to flights of euphoric greed and pride, choking envy, irrational fear, pettiness, stinginess, manic euphoria and senseless depression. And…guilt. Embarrassment. Somewhere a genius economist is factoring the shame index into this recession because we want to suffer, need to suffer. Like the irritating talk radio host who’s been giddily predicting economic collapse for five years, and now is more than I-told-you-so self-satisfied. He actually seems aroused by the specter of soup kitchens and twenty percent unemployment; I’m telling you, the man has a recession boner. Politicians and TV analysts put on leather stockings and whip their own backs like self-flagellating end-times Christians, slathering for payback for profligate spending, for reliance on debt, for unwise loans and the morons we elected, for the CEOs we overpaid, the unfunded wars we waged. We are kids caught lying and stealing: guilty, beaten children of drunks; give us our punishment so we can feel loved, so we can feel something.

And Lisa and me? We constructed our trouble, for better or worse, richer poorer, built it out of mistakes and arrogance and yes, at some level, we deserve this…bottoming out. No other explanation. She deserves an unemployed pothead husband. I deserve a distant, cheating wife.

I stare at the ceiling separating us. She’s up there.

I hear the low buzz of the TV in the room next door. Dad sighs.

I could still go upstairs. And what will I see? Lisa on the computer? Or lying in bed, texting him? Is there the slightest chance she’ll lift the covers and say, Matt, don’t go out tonight? Or the awkward silence, avoiding eyes, me shifting my weight, making my lame excuse and Lisa simply shrugging when I say I’m going out

for milk for the third time this week?

There are always moments in which a person can stop, crossroads where you can change course…there are those moments…until there aren’t any more.

I grab my keys.

I WANT MY DEALERS

To be smarter than they are;

Welcome to Weedland

“Wake up, Slippers,” says a voice I don’t recognize. I snap awake.

“Welcome to Weedland!” Jamie says from the backseat. I look out my window and then over at Dave the Drug Dealer, who is driving.

“You have a nice nap?” asks my sidekick Jamie.

“How long was I out?”

“Half hour.”

It was oddly relaxing, riding in a car with someone else driving, even if that someone was Drug Dealer Dave and his car was disconcertingly just like my own. We met at Bea’s, and since I hadn’t slept in days, I started feeling my head bob as soon as Jamie began a story about “this dude in my math class who wants to get an operation to make himself into a chick, but dude says he ain’t gay and I’m like, what the fuck you mean you ain’t gay, but he insists he ain’t gay, he’s, like, a woman, and I’m like, ‘Dude, until you’re a real woman, you are totally a ram-banger, yo,’ and he’s like: ‘But if I’ve never had sex with a man, how can I be gay?’ and I’m like, Dude, whoa! That is kinda freaky…”

And the next thing I knew Dave was saying, “Wake up, Slippers.”

And I snapped awake here in…

…Weedland, which exists in the last place I would’ve ever guessed, a small farming town an hour from the city, on a little road behind the main street of this endlessly dying wheat and mill town-a town which fell on hard times so long ago the people there are actually nostalgic for the old hard times. These new hard times? Boring. Wimpy. Back in the old bad days, they ate dirt. But they were happy!

I don’t tell Dave that I’ve been to this little town at least five times before, back when I was a reporter. Off a nowhere, two-lane highway, this little shitburg is close enough to the city that it was one of five or six trusty small towns that served the newspaper staff whenever we needed “rural reaction” to stories. We came to Weedland fairly often (without knowing it was Weedland, of course) to write about this agricultural bill’s failure or that wheat embargo, or this local politician’s pandering run for office. Sometimes a story just calls for a random quote by some craggy old farmer and there was always a craggy old farmer to quote here, the sons of other craggy old farmers that my newspapers quoted in the hard-times 1970s, the grandsons of old crags we quoted in the hard-times 1930s. Legacies.

Dave parks along a street of plain clapboard houses, just behind the town’s main street, which is, appropriately enough, called Main Street. The house we walk toward is situated behind a couple of unlikely Main Street businesses-a camera and watch shop and

small engine repair. There are a dozen houses on this block, six on each side of the street. We park behind a red Camaro (so much depends on a red Camaro) and I follow Dave and Jamie between piles of leaves up the sidewalk to a simple two-story with a pitched dormer, a hot tub on the side of the house and an old RV with an electrical cord leading to the back door.

Dave rings the doorbell.

A shortish, roundish, twentyish guy in a backward ball cap answers the door, chattering away on a cell phone (“No way…She did not…Come on…Just my brother’s friend and some cop…No way…Come on…No way…”) and after opening the door he steps back without really acknowledging us; he just keeps talking, into infinity (“No way…Come on…She did not…No way…”) as he pushes through a door and disappears.

“Don’t worry about that guy,” Jamie confides. “Fat fuck thinks everyone’s a cop. I hate that guy.” Jamie is wearing his skullcap again, along with a knee-length black coat and a disarming pair of black glasses (he explained that he’s out of contacts and his mom switched insurance companies to one that has totally worthless vision benefits).

Jamie says again, “Fuckin’ hate him.”

And I haven’t known Jamie all that long, but I’m surprised to hear him say he hates anyone. Maybe all skullcaps simply hate all ball caps, some kind of Red America/Blue America, India/Pakistan thing.