John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“Maybe,” he said, leaning against the counter. Using the pressure as a sort of belt to free up his hands, he retrieved the Discover card. It felt like a divine gift for that one to go through. He looped the grocery bag around the pants hand and headed home, smoking with his right hand until he saw a ruddy-faced blond man by his apartment stairs. The adrenaline of recognizing Albert Alfsson felt like a hit of pure cocaine.

“You’re home,” Albert said. He seemed younger than he should be.

Clutching his waist, Victor approached. “Who are you?” he said, falsely.

“You seem kind of peaked.”

“I’ve got food poisoning,” said Victor, going for the stairs.

Albert followed him in as he hurried to the couch. “It’s been hard to find you.”

“I’ve been designing a museum.”

“Let’s get down to brass tacks. Your mom didn’t have many folks caring for her. I was there a lot. I read her rites.”

Victor sat on the couch. He put his head in his hands. Albert’s words were fading in and out, and it was hard to follow his drift, at least until he held up a paper.

I have a whole new life , it read in Victor’s loopy scrawl. We were immature kids. I don’t miss you. I never loved you .

“This is a copy. My lawyer has the original.”

“I thought Sievert was lying,” said Victor, his skin clammy.

“Sievert’s a Christian.”

“If you kept it—”

“Your mom kept it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I needed Mary to explain why you’d said those things.”

“Take the house,” said Victor at once, as if that would cancel out a decade of his behavior. “It’s yours.” His fingers were tingling again. He wished Albert would hit him, slap him silly. Those fucked-up fantasies, the hook-nosed villain: his mind had known it should be punished for what he’d do. It had sought preemptive redemption, Victor thought, as his body hummed with a nearly electric vibration and silvery specks blotted out Albert’s handsome face.

He awoke to Albert pressing a compress to his forehead. He’d been laid out on the couch. All these years later, blond fuzz still dotted Albert’s sinewy arms.

“Are you awake?”

“Please go away,” Victor said.

“Do you want to hear her answer?”

Shaking his head, he could see movement in the far left of his vision. He had left the TV on mute. It was showing a close-up of the stricken face of Ruth Fisher, the brittle mother in Six Feet Under . Albert would leave, he thought with a thrill, and he could rewind the DVD and watch what was happening to Ruth.

“She said, ‘A pediatric psychiatrist warned us he’d be this way.’”

Now he sat upright. “The house is yours,” he said again. Albert could raise boys of his own in it, teach them the Bible, slap them. Anything to shut him up.

“She knew it’s not your fault. She pitied you. She used to drive down here and watch you from across the bar.”

“Albert, stop talking.”

“I want to sell it on your behalf, set up a trust. Do you know what that means? A trust like Sievert’s?”

That was when a wild idea grew in Victor.

“You don’t even have a twin,” he said. “You and Sievert are the same.” Sievert had liked Victor because Sievert was Albert. Sievert had posted that letter to himself, locked himself indoors, gained weight and lost it.

“Oh, come on. Don’t be stupid, Micah. You watched us play ball. We saw you every day, sticking those pliers up your nose.”

“I did no such thing,” said Victor, astonished to recall renaming himself after all those years. It hardly seemed real. I am Micah, he’d said over and over into the mirror, yearning to swap names with a man who had died of AIDS.

A line came into focus: the one he’d drawn to cleave the present from the past. It wasn’t a line of aesthetic pleasure; it was a line of shame. Horrified by his words, his deeds, his very nature, he’d drawn a line to sequester himself from the people who loved him. Until today, it had seemed structurally viable, because no one had breached it. No one had bothered trying. He imagined a stronger one, the one Albert must have drawn across his own world. That was what people did: they drew lines across their worlds. But Albert’s was a line of capability — a circle, it seemed, with Victor and Sievert trapped inside, and Albert peering across at them.

How wrong the old Yazoo City shrink turned out to have been. The swapping of names had been a metaphor all along. It was all metaphor. What was the shrink called? He let Albert’s speech blur into a droning din. He exhaled. By the time the name of Dr. Dolf Pappadopolous came bursting forth, he had only to conjure his favorite gin label— Bombay Sapphire , words more honeyed to him sober than he’d ever noted drunk — and the spell subsided.

“Please go,” he said, taking his list out of his wallet. He scanned over the ugly words, waiting for a concerned query. If Albert read the card, he might refuse to leave, well up with tears, declare his abiding love.

Here it comes, Victor was thinking, when his friend stood up and offered a hand.

“Sorry for your loss,” said Albert, arm extended, reaching into the space between them until Victor laid his list down to receive a farewell shake.

I FOUND RAY UP INthe mountains at the I-40 rest stop, where I used to cruise sometimes. He was leaning against a wall, albino-pale, with these watery fish eyes. We messed around in a stall for a bit, and then he said to meet him at the red truck by the ravine.

In his truck cab he produced an uncapped light bulb. The Pigeon River roared below us. “Keeps you up,” he said, “as in hard,” and I yelped when it burned my fingers. He barked a joyless heh . We got to talking: his wife was Sheila and mine was Lisa, and his kids were Ray Junior and Angel and I don’t have kids. After we were too high to talk, I guess I told him to start driving. Two days and we were in Lubbock. Now it didn’t matter anymore if the bulb was hot; the burn felt good. Sometimes he’d smack me upside the head, which we both liked.

He asked what I’d do if he broke my arm.

“Go to the E.R.”

“But to me.”

“Break yours back?”

He nodded like it was the right answer. He knew this stuff; so did his wife, who had more sense than to do what Lisa does, which is report me missing. Six days after I’d met him we rolled back into Pigeon Forge to find the cops at my place. “Drive,” Ray growled, so I did. Halfway up the mountain he held a sheath knife to my throat. “You’ve been filming me,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s your wife that called; they’ve seen the film.”

He was giving off this ugly leaden smell, and I could feel blood draining down through me, through my neck. “Thought it was you filming me, Ray.”

Ray looked behind us as if back toward Texas, lowered the knife, and said, “Makes you jumpy.”

“Lisa, she was the one.”

“If you’re a cop, you’re a brave cop.”

He motioned for me to face him. When I did, he put the knife to my wrist and cut it open. My yell came out as a heh like his laugh. He did the same to his wrist and pressed them together. He said it was a bowie knife from the Indian Wars and we were blood brothers. I said, “But what about,” and the loons hollered and he said if you catch it, you get the flu, is how you know.

At his house, a log cabin, a girl was jumping rope. “Call if you get the flu,” he said, but then I left without his number. Back home Lisa ran barefoot into the mud and beat her fists on my chest. “I don’t know,” I told her as she carried on, “I woke up an hour ago outside the hospital.” Next thing I knew I was in the paper, which upset my ma. When I was twelve, she’d had a heart attack, and from that day on she went to church and never smoked. Lisa always told me “You’re lucky your ma’s so young,” but truth is she wasted it on that heart attack. Anyhow she arranged for tests, my ma, and I set off meaning to have them, but on a billboard I saw a girl with black teeth under the words Meth Destroys . Something gunned in me like a jake brake and I decided to go find that girl, get her high. I went to Ray’s and he walked out in his boxers followed by his wife. “You slept?” he said.