Glenn Taylor: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

He went to the kitchen for water, but thought better of it. The dog would not hold it down.

He left the garage for the main house. Sam was no doubt in his study. Ace put his hand on the screen door and stopped. He thought better of this too. Sam would advise a trip to the veterinarian’s, and Yellow Dog would not want that.

It was getting dark out.

Ace helped his dog up from his spot between the bed and wall that evening. He carried him to flat, open ground outside the garage and set him down. Eight years back, he’d shown up licked, but on his own four legs. He’d walk out that way too. Ace made sure of it.

Yellow’s hips gave out at first, but he hefted himself back up. Ace hugged him, kissed his white muzzle, and watched him walk away. He knew where the dog was going. Fire had taken a two-story apartment building down the block two years prior. When the rubble was cleared, only the thick front hedges remained. Behind them, the city had let the brush grow wild. Weed stalks and goldenrod grew tall in there, and people walking by dumped their trash.

It was as close to the woods as Yellow Dog would find.

Ace knew it to be a private, peaceful thing, this walk toward death. But he went to the front of the house just to be sure he was right about the destination. To make sure Yellow got there okay. He peered around the side of the porch and saw the dog, his bowels giving out freely by then, walking into the wild brush of the abandoned lot. In there, he could lie down and breathe easy.

Ace waited till morning. Then he collected Yellow Dog and buried him in the backyard.

That night, he didn’t see anyone in the main house to tell them what had happened. Albert didn’t much live there anymore, and there was trouble between Sam and Zizi. The puke needed cleaning, but Ace was out of Ajax and had gone in to ask for some of theirs. He’d slept a little that day, watched TV through the stink as long as he could.

Mansour’s, the family-owned store down the street that stocked Chesterfields just for him, was closed. Ace was a little sore from his Mingo woods-walk with the Blevinses. He put on his comfortable shoes and his fedora, took two twenties from the still-thick Pulitzer roll stuck inside his mattress, and set out for the big supermarket on 1st Street.

He’d never shopped there before. Always Mansour’s, always the same list. Inside Kroger’s, he couldn’t find a damn thing. And when he found something on his list, there were twenty varieties to choose from. He’d never seen so many sardine tins. All colors, fancy names. Where were the cigarettes? Where was the cream chipped beef? There were no store employees in the aisles. Music played, a bad excuse for country, and when the water jets cut on over the produce, he jumped from the spray.

Ace kept looking down at his fingers, gripping the cart handle. All that black dirt under the nails. He’d been digging all morning. It seemed to him that he’d been digging his whole life. ‘Dig to goddamned China by now,’ he said under his breath. A woman with a baby in her cart looked at him funny. He smiled, tried to look like an old man should, but he didn’t care. He’d buried his dog that morning.

He walked to an aisle under a sign that read Brooms, Mops, Dish Detergent, Laundry Detergent, Bleach, Furniture Polish . He couldn’t find Ajax. There was Mr Clean. Windex for glass and Lysol with bleach. Pine Sol. Pledge. Goo Gone. It was the language he’d heard spoken for ten years on television, one he’d never understood. Standing there, he knew that all around him, the people pushing their carts past one another without saying hello, they understood. They all spoke the language of the commercials. They fed their kids Pop Rocks and Lucky Charms and all manner of foods that made noise and glowed neon.

Ace thought to himself how West Virginians had elected Kennedy president in 1960. How, like he said he would, he’d done something about the state of things, the state of people. Now, they were the same as everybody else.

Ace left his cart sitting in the middle of the cleaning supply aisle. He walked to one of the twelve checkout lanes, brushed past a skinny man unloading his handbasket, and said to the checkout girl, ‘Could you point me in the direction of Ajax, Miss? I’d appreciate it.’

‘A-what?’ she said.

‘Cleaning powder.’

‘Aisle nine.’

‘Yes ma’am. I been in aisle nine for a while now, and I can’t place it.’

She grabbed at the CB box in front of her face and spoke something unintelligible into it. Whatever it was she said cut off the bad country music and crackled across the place.

‘Thank you,’ Ace said to her.

An hour later, after he’d used a scrub brush and water bucket to work the Ajax into and out of all seventeen vomit piles, Ace opened the big window of his second story apartment. The place needed to air out. He walked to the television, bent at the knees, and lifted it, sidestepping across the small room. He perched the brown box on the windowsill and caught his breath. Then he gave it a push, stuck his head out, and watched it split and scatter on the blacktop down below.

Sam was in his study again. He was always in the study, reading or writing or drawing rough plans for stage backdrops. Ace knocked at the door. ‘It’s open,’ Sam said.

‘Sam.’ Ace nodded.

‘Ace.’ Sam leaned back in his leather chair and put his feet on the desk. He looked tired. Eyebags and stubble. ‘Have a seat.’ He motioned to a small couch against the far wall.

‘How’s things?’ Ace preferred a hardback chair to an upholstered one. He tried to get comfortable.

‘Good, workin on a book.’

‘Ain’t you already written three of em?’ Ace laughed. Sam joined him. ‘Look, Samuel,’ he said. ‘Officer St Clair said somethin this mornin about the Task Force whatever. The drug busts. Sweep comin through this week sounds like to me.’

‘What are you telling me for?’

Ace cleared his throat. He took a minute to figure how that last question was meant. ‘I’m tellin you because when a net scoops up, things likely get caught in it.’

‘So Albert is a thing in this metaphor?’ It came out louder than Sam intended. For a couple weeks, he’d been having trouble staying bottled up.

‘Samuel,’ Ace said, and he gave Sam a look that reminded him of who he was talking to. ‘If you’re going to do your fake talk, you can head on over to the professor’s lounge at the supper club. They fall for leaky cases of verbal diarrhea over there.’

Sam sighed and put his feet on the floor. ‘Point taken,’ he said.

‘There’s going to be some acquaintances of Albert’s, maybe friends. You just got to make sure it ain’t him.’

‘I know.’ He looked through Ace, at nothing.

‘Alright, buddy,’ Ace said, and stood up. He shook Sam’s hand and reached across the desk to pat him on the shoulder. On his way out the door, he turned and said, ‘And why don’t you get out of this goddamned son of a bitch once in a while. Stinks in here like assholes and oregano.’ There were a few utterances from his past, utterances like this one, that would not be wiped from memory.

Out in the living room, Zizi sat on the dented yellow sectional with the band. They were supposed to be practicing. Flunky Cy had brought over a videotape copy of the 1970 movie Little Big Man . It had just started. A very old man spoke on the film. ‘I am a white man and never forgot it,’ he said.

‘How old is that man?’ Ace asked.

At first they just ignored him. Then, Everette the banjo player said, ‘It’s Dustin Hoffman, man.’

Ace had liked Everette since the time he first let him hold his banjo. The tone ring on it had been made by a Detroit friend of his out of an aluminum torque converter ring from a 1956 Buick transmission. It was pretty. ‘The hell it is Dustin Hoffman,’ Ace said.