John McManus - Born on a Train - 13 Stories

Say sorry or I strangle ye.

Lonzoe starts a laughin, wouldn’t stop. I don’t think he meant old Clyde no harm. I knew I’d fall to sleep account of everybody’s half alive and doin things they never would of done inside my head. Woke up in a foot of snow the coldness burned my blood no one’s around. Every morning after black outs when I wake I think of what I can’t remember. It could of been a hundred thousand acts. He could of thought that I was Annie. Scrap of paper in my jeans said Jasper, gone to hide myself at ma’s house well his fingers put it there, it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t Clyde’s.

Every time he gone he come back different. I know how it is down there in Georgia.

Drank some Busch, I drank some Wild Turkey. Where’s the cops, maybe I’ll go down to Georgia too so I can change like Lonzoe is and then we’ll stay the same. The air so cold my sweater mashed that sweater fuzz inside my belly button. Get out. Get out. Poked my Buck knife up there like it’s a cave. I was drunk or else it would of hurt me somethin fierce. The twists and turns inside of it. They wasn’t nothin in that hole, but it must of bled for upwards of an hour.

What a pretty bird, said Leila — the gray and yellow one. Patrick stomped on it, along with all the other babies in the nest. He cleared his throat. The tiger moths all got away, but it was fall, and they probably died later in the month. I don’t know how the birds had stayed frozen all summer like that. I guess they weren’t frozen anymore, really, but thawed and baked and rotted.

Which one?

The one that hopped up like that, she said. Like a pogo stick.

It didn’t hop, he said. That was me.

Leila loved him because of his curls, his locked silver necklace, but mostly his face. It was smooth like an eighteen-year-old boy’s. He would sit in the graveyard sewing chains of Queen Anne’s lace, and he wore them until the sap drained. Make your own, he said to Leila; she liked that too. Once he made one for me, and it lasted eight days.

Leila and I lay below him in a field of grass as he straddled a crooked fencepost and thought of what to say to us. When he held the flask of vodka to his lips, his fingers made a brine-smoothed whelk. Power lines rose like lasers from a distant valley. Take it all in, he said, and I tried so hard my temples ached.

Then Leila had to go out to Tacoma for a few months; her sister had been in an accident with glass. Leila couldn’t afford the phone rates, so she wrote Patrick a letter nearly every day. I sat on crisp leaves on the porch of our old house and read them slowly, and then I took them inside to Patrick and said Read aloud and sank into his voice.

I shot up today. Forgot how it bursts my mind apart, bends the notes of songs. I wonder do you remember either. You have this thing you call your only heart but its twin somewhere wants you to score a gram on Friday night, share it across the continent with me.

Around then was when he first got a job with Manpower, worked all day, built some muscle. Would you leave her if I were a girl? I asked. He had lips like silent eyeballs. You wouldn’t have thought he had muscles; he stood there like a flower petal, smiling. You know the horses drawn on walls of European caves, ten thousand years ago? That was him.

I’d had never entertained the thought until Leila had come along, because he was my friend. We were standing on the back deck of our run-down house where wind stole all the yellow leaves away. The walnut tree bore thousands of brown asteroids, and when Patrick didn’t answer, I was happy: he had deemed my question difficult. We lived up in the gables by the thunderstorms. It was the kind of place where if Leila broke a jar of olives across the floor, they worked their way into deep cracks in the hardwood. The rooms were bright and airy with secret passageways. Stop this, I screamed, holding Leila away from him. You love each other. You looked at her, Leila shouted, and the glasses rattled. Well, this is what happens. Patrick clenched his fist. You wuss, Leila taunted, you wouldn’t know how. It was just some Longbranch bartender she was mad about, but I wished it had been me. When I let her go, she dropped his weed into a bottle of glass cleanser. They screamed in foreign scales I’d never heard before, words I couldn’t understand.

What a hot day for September. I opened all the windows for a breeze. The wind felt best in the living room. When Leila turned over a chair, I saw an electrical outlet we’d never used before, hidden for an entire year. It made me sad — four lonely slits and two round holes, such a noise. They really did love each other, though; you could tell by how they cleaned the glass up together. I had a few drinks in my room. Later, when I came home from buying hydrogen peroxide at the drugstore, I sat on the front porch and saw a green olive that had made its way down through the house, its pimiento forced halfway out. I wanted to eat it, but it was covered in soot.

Leila ran off to go shopping somewhere the rest of the day, so I got to hang out with Patrick. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember the dimple in his cheek twitching when he said it. I knew his face from sixty different angles. Everyone in the past had his voice now.

So he read the letter and the new ones that came on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and I went with him to visit his father, who was a diabetic. I promise we won’t stay long, said Patrick in the car outside the peeling duplex. We didn’t knock. Plastic covered all the furniture, like always. You been doin anything bad with that little girl of yours? Patrick’s father called as Patrick rummaged in the kitchen for the cardboard box of orange-capped syringes. Come in here let me smell your hands.

When he laughed, he boomed like a tuba. I heard the crackle of aluminum foil. There isn’t shit to eat in this house, said Patrick, reentering the living room, and already it was time to go. The car ride home was silent. What if I just don’t have anything to say, I thought, ever. What if that’s just not what I’m meant for. The roads were crowded. If everybody drove a car, no one would have a shadow anymore. Back home Patrick held a pregnant needle up. I wanna take this into N.A., he said, do it in front of everybody. I really, really want to. Like a chain.

He smiled at me. I watched his eyes and watched him breathing; he did it even better than in the dream, when his hair was one inch longer, just enough to blow the wind across his eyes and I said fall was my favorite season and we shaved our one-day beards together in the bathroom mirror with the window open to yellow maple leaves that spun and floated like they had so many ways down.

Can you hear me through the wall when I have sex? said Patrick.

Leila’s gone, I said. You don’t have sex.

I mean did you used to, Patrick said. She’s coming back. She’s not gone.

No, I said, only when you jerk off.

He carved his name in our old kitchen table, and Leila’s name, and half of my name, as much as he could write before the needle was fully blunted.

The letters were piling up. He didn’t pay attention to anything. I could have asked him if leaves were still on the trees and he could have said yes or no. But he was looking out the window when I stole a two-day stack of papers and put them in my drawer. He must not have wanted them. Maybe he wanted me instead. I made sure to look well-groomed and wore cologne each day, black shoes instead of sneakers. I stopped showing him the mail at all; he was always at work when it came, anyway.

The job wasn’t going well for him anymore. He dropped a stack of bricks on someone’s foot; he spilled a bucket of mortar. He picked the wrong guys to try to borrow money from. They asked him why he never ate his lunch. He came home in a sour mood and smoked weed on the roof. Then he got fired and came home at two, just after the mailman. Still no letter? he asked me. I wanted to give him that day’s, that whole week’s, but I was embarrassed to explain why I’d withheld them in the first place.