Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

I remember picking up sticks.

That was one chore as a kid. Another was clean the garage. That was the worst one. You had to take all the bikes out of the garage. There wasn't much outside of that woods we lived in back then, except the moon, which was ours. I wanted too much. We had a gravel road that went from the woods to town. Night came and town was dark, boy, and no one was out. No one locked the doors. Everyone had a vacuum cleaner and a carpeted basement. Yes, a lot of beer to drink. Some packs of cigarettes. Some Marlboros, boy. Yes, there were no palm trees, but they were up in the moon. The moon was ours and Ohio was ours and we were boys in a woods and Dad would be happy to take a walk after some beers and stare up at that moon. The crazy man he was.

Or even go for a drive real slow or real fast down that gravel road to the lake. Have a few beers and sit at the end of a pier and watch the water and the moon rock, while I just sat there thinking crazy talk. But the point, the real point was taking everything out of the garage and sweeping it out. Taking the bicycles out, and the buckets, and the garbage cans, and the recycle bins, and the rakes and the shovels and the hockey stick and the basketballs and everything and then once it was swept out you had to wash the garage floor. The other chores were mowing. Also, weeding the brickwork and weeding the crab apple trees.

Yes, there were chores there to do on a Saturday. We were a family there in Ohio. And you? What chores? Who did you do them for? Now the sky, oh I still don't have that down!

Not looking at it. I haven't got that to a science. It's all up in the air to tell you the truth. It really is. But what could be more important than that sky now, boy? You should have had your hands on some of the beautiful girls I had my hands with and theirs on mine, but that's another story. The point is I got that postcard, and now I have a typewriter and chores because I am going to tell you about the truck and those little black dots of tar on the bottom sideboards of the truck which are really plastic, and on the wheel wells, which are plastic, too, and on the bumper especially, but there aren't tar balls there so much as little holes where the metal is rusting under the holes in the plastic of the bumper. I have turned off the spigot. I have plunged my hand into the bucket of soapy water. Your hand. I wish I could see your hand. See them both and hold onto them for a moment. I don't care if you are a man or a woman. I don't care how beautiful you are or how fat or hairy or strong, I don't really care. I've had fake ones and little ones and big real ones and mother's ones and all of them all over the world and licked a chest too and I tell you what, it's just as good to be doing chores now and taking care of this truck that I have to take care of and I'll tell you why, but you have to know that those holes in the bumper and those tar spots are like stars and I'm under the sky. It's a nice enough sky. I see spinning things up there. I see a man in the clouds standing over a typewriter. I see myself up there standing over the keys of this typewriter. I hear the music taking me places and keeping me on the ground and singing the golden heart of man singing to the point where he's feeling what he started singing and he won't stop feeling it and it's coming through.

But how on the ground can you be with your head six-feet-nine inches off the ground. Don't kid yourself, I'm not on the ground. I'm not even having a face except when I look in the mirror, and that's who? Go look at yourself. Who do you see? What'd you lose? What is the brightest you remember being? What are we forgetting?

I think he's singing about lost love, that singer. Or about wanting to meet everyone he's ever met again all over. That's it! Isn't it? How we met all those people, and how many of them stayed with us? How many of those people we met are with you right now? I get the rag and with my shirt off I feel like my brother Carl. I feel like Carl with my shirt off and my fat belly newly fat and my chest covered in a pattern of chest hair that looks like an Eagle with its head to the side and outstretched wings. We are in the neighborhood now. That ranch, where I used to live, that place I treated like a shithole. There were never any chores there. But this neighborhood, this culde-sac, it comes ready-made to rent with chores. We are washrag in hand. Starting to wash the wet truck. The world isn't good enough for you. But we always start washing the hood first, don't we? The windshield next. Then the roof of the cab. Here's the thing. You're not supposed to get water into the inside of the truck. Not of your brother's truck. Not when he's not here anymore. The thing is you are supposed to show that there's something to this! This isn't lying around under a palm tree with your shirt off and some young person to rub lotion on her or you. The thing to this is to show you care about this thing that is your brother's, now that he's not here anymore under this sky. If I can get in there and really get this clean, I can show him something somehow about how I feel about my brother. Oh, no I haven't told you that the postcard had a palm tree on it that that editor sent me. I cared enough to keep the truck. I sold my own car. I owe money on this grey Ford that is Carl's. Who wishes I could hug him around one more time and say I won't go on that stupid adventure? Maybe I wish I could undo that peyote ceremony that took me off the planet but I'm still on the planet. What I have to do is get these little balls of tar off. I wouldn't let the bank take the truck back. It's not new. It's a Ford. It's in good shape. I turn the hose from the spigot back on and rinse the hood and roof and the rest of the truck I get wet. I soak the dishtowel again in the soapy water and pull it out and start working on the bumper. It's pretty new. Carl put a brush guard on it and a cover on the back of hard diamond patterned spray-on-coating-over-metal and it's done right. Catherine is still with the Spaniard, Manuely. Jewely is running off and I keep calling her back, making a scene with no shirt on. The music is playing loudly. My mother, I speak to. My father is still so young looking. I have a job teaching freshman English. My pancreas is fine. I don't drink. At the bar I drink tonic water. I smoke cigs. I drink coffee. AA. I shout in English class. I see women. I mow the yard. I do chores. I go to Wyoming and ride horses with the boys in Bondurant. I'm going against my instincts. As a kid I always wanted whatever chore my brother chose first on Saturday morning at the wooden table eating eggs with mother and Dad. She got remarried this summer and my brother with the biggest heart in the world went to the wedding [two years ago plus] because I said I was going and my sister said she was going.

The wedding was in Hawaii and we were the last ones to show up, as per her travel arrangements made for us. Our mother was fake crying speaking to all her friends when we got there. My brother smuggled some pot and he and our sister had been drinking since we landed and we were waiting to get on the ferry. He was taking bong hits out of a little plastic bomb looking device on the ferry outside up on the top of the ferry above the water, which has dolphins under the surface and fish and sharks and whales. Oh, my mother was wearing a silver grey cloth around her and standing on the luau grounds and fake crying with her hand on her heart. I forgive her and want her to find happiness. Maybe she has. My brother, all of him, so big and with such true brown eyes, Carl, he showed up and we were all standing there and she wouldn't even acknowledge his presence. I wish you could see him. Know him. Maybe you do. And if not, this is just a goddamn book. It's not everything. Find God. Find love, Find America. The oldest child, the son, and she wouldn't even notice he was there. The wedding was a quarter million dollars and she never acknowledged he was there and she was going to get all the money and keep it and there was my brother like a boy who rode his motorcycle all over the earth and carried his heart with him and always had a beer and a hug for anyone and would throw his arms up in the air and mean it at any rock-and-roll concert worth being at, like he was on a roller coaster, and who would do anything for anyone, and there she was marrying this Jewish doctor (and if we know one thing from Christ's story, it's fuck doctors, anyhow! Jew or not Jew. This isn't about Jews. I'm saying eat shit, Doctors. Except my cousin. Wink to you.) she cheated with, even after the chores and seeing her naked and being a kid and being her and being Dad and being boys, and she couldn't care less she was trying to find her happiness and having a tenth of a million dollar wedding in Hawaii. I know I said a quarter mil and then said a tenth of a mil. Sue me. And of course she cares. It was half a million dollars! It's all a wreck and it is what it is. Well, I can't tell you what that did to him, but he isn't here anymore and the truck is and I'm scratching the balls of tar through the cloth going against my instincts and really trying to do something one hundred percent for once. Really, I'm trying to get every little star of tar off the truck. I was all around the truck at the plastic parts at the black little dots that remind me of stars and of decay and I think of my brother and I try to clean everything for him to show him I care so much for him in a way I never showed him when he was here because I always half-assed everything which is why my name isn't in lights. I was always the one to half-ass everything and skip off and was a screw-off and he was the one who did things right and learned them all until he had them down by heart. I call the dog again. A car drives by with a girl. My shirt is off. She drives by. I keep to the chores.