A. Homes - The End of Alice

I shake my head. “So?”

“Well, they wrote asking if we had anything of yours, and well, I wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to find out from someone else — that would be cruel. We sold your things. The curator himself came to pick up the boxes— very pleased with the haul. And, he assures me that they’ll be well cared for. And, should you ever be released, they’d love for you to come and tell them a bit about some of the items — you are up for parole or reconsideration or whatever it is very soon, aren’t you?”

I nod.

“Well, I just wanted you to know.”

“Should I feel honored?” I ask, stalling, wondering if there’s a way get at what I really want to know — how much they got for me.

“Up to you,” Burt says, standing. He takes his card out from his wallet and, unable to actually hand it to me, holds it pressed to the glass for a minute so that I might memorize it. “Keep in touch,” he says, stepping out of the booth.

A fat old man has disturbed my day, coming to tell me that he has sold my childhood to a museum in Cincinnati.

I stand, and despite all my metallica, my chain-link fencing, I am able to pick up the chair I’ve been sitting on and hurl it at the glass. Plexy, it bounces off, bounces back and hits me in the head. The guards are on me, tackling me from behind.

Burt turns. “Good to see you,” he calls as they’re hauling me off. “And take care of yourself.”

Unchained. Tossed into my cell. The door is locked.

A while later Henry comes and whispers through the slot. “Do something for you? A tiny taste?”

“Why not,” I say, succumbing after a lifetime of abstinence. “Just a taste.”

He slips a packet of powder under the door and instructs me to rub it into my gums. I sleep like a baby.

My yellow truck has gone to Cincinnati.

Sorry for the silence. My parents made me go with them to ‘Washington for the long weekend. Would have written from there, but there wasn’t anything to say. We missed the cherry blossoms, I looked up Abe Lincoln’s nose — it’s chipped — they’re fixing it, paddle-boated around the Tidal Basin, went to National Archives for the Nixon tapes, bought you the enclosed.

Inside the envelope is a vellum copy of the Declaration of Independence. Cruel child. For the first time I have the idea that she might be playing with me, but am quickly distracted by the uneven ink of a note scrawled at the bottom of the page.

P.S. Got ’em! And I wasn’t even looking! Went to the store to get correct-its for the typewriter, and there they were. More soon!

Hallelujah. She has found her man. He is with friends in the five-and-ten, piling bags of chips, comic books, and candy bars onto the cashier’s counter. She hides behind the rack of panty hose and takes him in — her man with his men.

Her boy slips an extra and unpaid-for candy bar into his pocket and her knees weaken. She falls against the rack, knocking sandal-toes to the floor. The boys pay for their loot and leave.

She follows them with the exactitude of a bloodhound. Outside, on the sidewalk, in the spotlight of late afternoon, they work hands, teeth, and jaws, tearing at the layers of foil and plastic that keep them from their prizes. Thinking herself a pro, a watcher extraordinaire, she walks right past them, ignoring them. She goes to the corner, and when the white-flashing man in motion beckons her across the street — walk, walk, walk — she crosses. On the other side, she positions herself near the bank, halfhidden by a leafy tree. From this vantage point, she can see it all, and no one would ever know, suspect, the nature of her interest.

Across the street, the feral pack joyously jams fistfuls of fried, dried, potato, corn frizzle-drizzle doo into their pubescent — hence ever-hungry — chops, cramming the orifice with far more than it can possibly hold. Chunks, giant crumbs of half-chewed food, fall over them like hail, like snow — the phenomena of weather — lodging in the folds of their clothing, using the high absorbency of T-shirts to stain, to permanently mark them with this foul evidence, proof. The boys step backward as if repulsed slightly, then tilt forward, leaning over the tips of their Nikes, their Reeboks, making room for the foul matter, the remains, to fall free. They use the sidewalk as their napkin, their plate, their trough, their ground. They trade materials, passing cans and bottles of soda between them as if mixing the ingredients, preparing equal measures of some serious solvent, drinkable Drano — one part diet Coke, one part Mountain Dew, and a drip of Orange Crush. They swap items, taking a bite, a swig, a handful, and passing it on. They dig deeper into their brown bags and bring out the smaller, sweeter objects, cubes and flats of chocolate, with nuts, with Krispies, crackers, wafers sandwiched in between further layers of chocolate with caramel, with nougat, whipped tufts of fluff.

The feast, the ravagement, the savage hoarding of the tribal reward, goes on until there is nothing left. The bags are empty, the last salty crumbs licked from the wrappers. Garbage, plastic and paper and aluminum foil, is collectively smushed, mushed, compacted in on itself, stuffed into a single brown bag, balled up, crushed, shaped, and formed until it is a bullet, a bomb, a basketball. And then the tall one, the one with the beak, fires it in a swift and daring shot toward the trash can on the corner. Hitting its mark with greater force than anticipated, the bag knocks the top layer of garbage out of the can and onto the sidewalk. Humiliation drives the tall one toward the can, toward community service. He takes a few hurried and embarrassed moments to straighten up the area as several of the town’s residents, who have seen the shot, have seen its failure, the sprayed garbage, walk around with their heads shaking and their glottals clucking. The other two members of the group, unable to support the beaked one in his failure, which they take to be their collective failure, stand to one side, shuffling their feet, the weight of mischance heavy on their shoulders.

“Going home,” one finally says. “Almost dinner. Later, man.” They slap hands and shoulders, butt heads, and kick each other, ending their slapstick routines with long, loud, multisyllabic belches that turn heads up and down the block. “Wondrous,” they say, “Unbelievable,” and then they take off in different directions for the shelter of home.

Ecstasy!

Sometimes I wish she would just stop. Not with me; with them. Sometimes I am so frustrated, so bored, so annoyed at how easily she is taken in, turned on, how she unabashedly sucks up this juvenile grotesque. This is not true child’s play, it has none of the charm of that. The gluttonous, consumptive moods of these boys to men, their constant testing of the limits, how much one can take, is so baldly adolescent, so pathetically pubescent, that it sends me up the walls. How can she be so blind?

I jot the shortest of postcards. Everything! Does not! Require an exclamation mark!

She is not stupid (I hope). She should want more, she should want the very best. I want the best for her. But it is a telling picture, the portrait of her across the street from them, her khaki shorts from last summer now snug in the derriere and in the thigh — she is, unfortunately, no longer just a girl, but also a woman, the body already dissolving from the tenderness of youth to the buttery bulk and sway, the free-flowing flesh of the fullest female. The notion of her crotch being heated, dampened, made warm and wet, by these boys disgusts me. I want it to require something more, something younger, something older, some greater mystery. I hate it when she is so damn obvious. Hate it to no end. I want to shake her, to slide my own gnarled, hairy, and arthritic five thick fingers between her legs and feel the heat, the high humidity, evaluate it for myself, and then bring her to her senses.