Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

I was thirty-nine years old and living with my mother. I hadn’t had a good year.

“What was your last good year?” my friend Owen asked me. “Nineteen ninety-two?”

He wasn’t doing too well himself, but he managed to come over once or twice a week to eat whatever we had lying around.

I made some comment about whatever it was we were watching and he said, “What do you like? Do you like anything?”

“He likes to complain,” my mother told him. “He likes to make trouble.”

I liked to complain. I almost choked.

What did I like? I liked my dog. I liked hunting in the woods. I liked target shooting. I liked my kid, when I was first getting to know him. I liked women who weren’t all about money or what I planned to do with my future.

“It’d be different if you ever got laid,” Owen said during a commercial. My mother snorted.

“Hey, you’re the one with the hand in your pants,” I said.

“Now he’s going to tell us about Stacey,” my mother told him. But I didn’t say a word.

My kid was down there in Stacey’s house a thousand miles away. I was supposed to send checks but otherwise not come around more than once or twice a year. I mean, try to cram a whole year’s worth of family time into one week. Maybe it’d work for you but it didn’t for me.

Stacey said the kid was asking where his dad was, and that if I wanted to see him I had to send money. It got so I let my mother answer when she called. They’d stay on the phone telling each other stories about me. “You think that’s bad,” my mother would say.

A guy in Basic told me that girls who weren’t good-looking were the smart move because they were more grateful and weren’t as likely to run off with somebody, and that made sense to me. I met Stacey at Fort Sill and liked her family better than her. I was a 71 Gulf, which is like a clerk, hospital stuff, administrative. She was, too. I’d be dropping off discharge batches and she kept her head down when I teased her, but I could see her smile.

We went out for a year and five months and then we got married and had a kid. She was always saying she was going to move out but she finally did the deed when I pushed her down the stairs. She was all like “You coulda killed me,” and I was like, “Hey: you shoved me first, and there was a railing, and there was carpet.” She said, “You don’t shove somebody at the top of the stairs,” and I said, “Well what did you do to me?” And the cop who showed up was a guy who had a crush on her in high school and he was all, “You can’t be with this person. You want to press charges?”

He’s standing over her while she’s crying at the kitchen table and I’m in the den thinking, Why don’t you rub her fucking back? And she was all Miss Generous: “No, just get him out of here. I don’t feel safe.”

Out here in the fucking sticks you don’t meet anybody. I went to this singles’ social in the basement rec room of the church. You had to fill out forms so they could match people up. These two women were running the thing. They asked if I could read and write. When they saw my face they said it was just a question on the form.

But then I always reminded myself I didn’t have it so bad. Our next-door neighbor’s nineteen-year-old had some kind of thing, muscular dystrophy maybe, and they told her kids like him only lived to be about twenty-one. When she came over for coffee with my mother, she told us to pray that his heart muscle stopped before his lungs, because that’d be a less horrible way to go.

I had all kinds of jobs. If it was some fucking thing no one else wanted to do, I did it. I worked in a hospital laundry. I washed pots and pans. I separated metals in a scrapyard. I drove a shuttle. That job had a little pin that came with it that said Martin, for Comfort Inn . Whenever I said stuff to my mother like I could see why my dad walked out, she’d go, “Where’s your pin? Don’t lose your pin.”

I started thinking I should just go off the grid. You know, if I wasn’t using anything or spending anything, I didn’t need to make anything. I’d grow my own garden and shit. In the winter there’d still be rabbits and deer. I’d work out. Read a book. Improve my mind, unlike the other fucking imbeciles around here.

“Who says you’re not using anything or spending anything?” my mother said when I told her. “ Somebody’s cleaning out the refrigerator every two days.”

“That’d be your friend Owen,” I said. “Your TV pal.”

“ My friend Owen?” she said. “He doesn’t come over to see me.”

“Well, I never asked him to come over and see me,” I told her.

“So why’s he come?” my mother said.

“Because he’s a fucking bum , like me,” I told her. “ ’Cause he’s got nothing else to do with himself.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “Don’t get excited.”

“Don’t get excited,” I said.

“Don’t get excited,” she said. “Put that down.”

The Comfort Inn was my last job. I took two days off to go to my grandmother’s funeral and they never let me forget it. The week I was back even when I did a good job on something all I heard was You never told anybody you weren’t coming in, you didn’t let us know we were supposed to cover for you, you left us holding the bag. I’m working and the supervisor’s just standing there running me down instead of doing his job. I finally told him that kind of horseshit was all well and good but, you know, it was pretty unprofessional.

You get lonely, is what it is. A person’s not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It’s not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It’s a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.

There was this girl Janice who I saw a lot at the store. I started talking to her, because it seemed like she was always out, and I was always out. I went to the library a lot, or the store, and I’d see her. She seemed like a good person, and when I was with her I found myself thinking maybe I could do this or maybe that. Sit down at a restaurant with someone and eat like a human being. Take her back to my place and maybe watch a movie or something if my mother would ever fucking leave the house.

Naturally this Janice had an ex-husband who was a cop. But as far as I could tell she didn’t see too much of him.

I didn’t need to be near any cops. The last thing I needed was somebody running a check on me.

My mother and Owen didn’t know about Janice. They didn’t know I had a plan all worked out. That asshole here hadn’t completely given up.

One of the times I saw her in the library she was taking out like three DVDs about Milo and Otis. I said to her, “So you like dogs, huh?” and she said she did. I asked if she had one and she said yes to that, too. I told her I had one and she asked what kind and I told her. She said when she was leaving that maybe she’d see me walking it and I told her that maybe she would.

I went over there twice with my dog and couldn’t get myself to go up to the front door either time. The second time I was talking to myself and it still didn’t work. And while I was standing there my dog took a dump on her sidewalk.

I walked the woods for however many years and know the area better than anybody. Down the end of the logging road where people went to park, on the edge of the state forest, I hid a bag, a big duffel, that had a sleeping bag and two knives and one of my rifles in it. One of the knives was really more like a machete and ax combined. I had some bug spray in there, too. I thought it would be like a survival bag, if it came to that. I had it all in a big plastic garbage bag to keep it dry. Then somebody stole the whole thing.