John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

I set the whiskey down and asked what was going on.

“I got you fucked up and fucked your marriage up and never used a rubber and your ma won’t talk to you, but you keep on liking me.”

“So I should hate you?”

“So I should hate you?” he mimicked in the high voice of a pussy.

“What is it you want me to do?”

Ray shook his head. “Nothing. Stay here. I’m gonna go find my wife.”

He walked out. “Stop,” I called out, tearing up, and he pointed at my face and said, “There’s the problem with you.”

After that, things changed. I started wishing to lose my teeth out of plain spite. I looked around for the billboard girl and found her in Knoxville. Her name was April, and she took me to see some folks. There was a dude that hot-wired cars, who drove me to the Atlanta bathhouse. He left after a few days, but I stayed on. Your body needs dreams, but you can get them while you’re awake. Every few days I bought something to eat from a machine. One day I got sick with fever chills, then I got better. When I finally went outside, two weeks had passed, because that was how long my car had been impounded. The bill was twelve hundred dollars, which meant it was totaled. I walked to Big Lots, found a truck, and hot-wired it, which was the start of not being a pussy. I got on I-75 South. The sun was rising as I reached Miami. I looked in the rearview and saw how the weeks of fasting had sculpted my face, which led me to meet some folks. We drank rum in pools and sang “Auld Lang Syne” and one day I froze up and realized it had never gotten cold.

“It don’t,” said Vince, the silver-haired guy I’d been hanging with, but there’d been others, too; now suddenly we were alone.

“What month is it?”

“March,” he said.

“I had a birthday.”

“Well, happy birthday.” A grin stretched out from either side of his cigar. I asked if he’d seen my phone. “They turned it off,” he said, “remember?”

I felt uneasy as he handed me his. Outside on a deck facing the canal I called the only number I could remember. It rang twice before I got an error message. If I wanted, it said, I could hang up and try again.

“City and state?” the 411 machine said.

I had to grip the railing to keep from tumbling into the water. “Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dr. Lighter.”

They connected me automatically. Each ring was a shock to my chest but I kept holding on. “Doctor’s office,” my wife said.

I spoke her name and she said, “You’re alive.”

“Where’s my ma?”

“We tried to find you.”

“Lisa, come on.”

“It was in November, she—”

I threw the phone in the canal. The number was on her caller ID, though. She could give it to the cops. That’s what I’m most ashamed of: worrying about her caller ID when I’d just learned about my ma.

I never went back in. I walked around to the garage for my truck. Twelve hours later a sign said Welcome to Tennessee . Below those words it said the state was home to Vice President Al Gore. Except that had been years ago, before anything went wrong. I sort of broke down, right there on the shoulder. A cop asked what was the matter and I pointed to the sign. He said get on up the road, so that’s what I did. For several more months I got on up the road to wherever I could. I figured I’d keep smoking till I died, which would happen when my mind ran out of dreams. All I had to do, I realized, was quit dreaming. I would drive through the night, and when I started dreaming, I slapped myself. One morning I rounded a curve and saw the moon over Mount Cammerer. It had never risen so late before. I decided to start keeping a list of the things it does. I wrote down a whole book of them, which could have broken some ground, but there was no use, so I ripped it up and kept driving. Some preacher on the radio who’d been shouting about patience asked, What will you miss when you’re dead?

I was overtaking a car. It was the stretch where Dolly Parton Parkway loses that name and goes down to two lanes. There was a sign for Forbidden Caverns. I know how it works in those caves, you go through them together in a group. The group gets to know each other and makes friends. What will you miss, said the man, and I looked at the hills and thought, Nothing. Not Lisa, since I can’t stand what I did, and not my ma because she’s gone. As for Ray, my head sent a signal to my foot just as a semi rounded the bend.

I sped up, hoping to crash into it. The driver would live because his truck was so big, but if he didn’t, I’d already hurt plenty of folks anyway. I wondered if my ma would be there when I died, shaking her head along with the Lord. I started to cry. My vision blurred and I figured it would keep on blurring from there into oblivion, but at the last minute the trucker ruined it by steering onto the dirt.

That’s when I drove back up the Pigeon River gorge to the I-40 rest area. Once again I sat there touching myself as families pulled in and their dogs peed and finally a Hummer parked beside me. “You party?” said a fellow in a Braves cap.

His windows had a full tint, so we put down the seats and messed around, nothing special till he pulled a phone out and said, “Know about this?”

“About your phone?”

He swiped the screen and I looked down to see a grid of thumbnail pictures labeled with names. “It’s in order of how close they are.”

I touched one, and the screen filled up with a guy named Josh. 10 Miles Away , it said in the corner. “So it knows where I am?”

“No, it knows where I am.”

“Moon’s about to rise.”

I pointed through the sickly tint of the Braves fan’s rear window. Ten seconds later it began to peek above the mountain.

“Here’s a dude looking. See the green dot?”

I took the phone and stared down at Ray, at his inimitable fish eyes.

To appear calm, I stopped breathing. Ray’s skin was pale as ever. I guessed he hadn’t found his wife.

“Hit ‘chat,’” the guy said.

It occurred to me to type, “hey,” which floated up the screen in a yellow bubble. Seconds later came the response: “Sup?”

“Say ‘looking.’”

“Not much,” I wrote instead, and then “Horned up” chirped onscreen.

The guy grabbed the phone from me and typed with both hands. I watched the moon rise and shrink while my gut did the opposite. “Dude says come over,” he exclaimed.

I had always thought people were idiots when they talked about natural highs, but I’d just never gotten jealous enough to feel one until then. “I’ll tail you,” I said. He was too fucked up to notice me pocket his phone. I followed him as far as the Newport exit, where I fell back. As soon as he’d passed it, I got off. I figured I had till morning before the account froze. Several miles from Ray’s house, I pulled into Hardee’s. Five guys had green dots: Clay, James, Anchovi, Just Lookin, and Kid.

Kid was Ray, twelve miles off. I checked my own profile: I wasn’t the Hummer fellow, but a mixed-race guy called Tyrone, twenty-one, headline reading, “Don’t fall in love with everyone you see.”

I ordered a hamburger. A journey faced me with infinite directions that led out twelve miles apiece. To confront Ray, I had to try each one, on roads that twisted in on themselves so many times — but suddenly Kid was ten miles off.

I hit the button again and it said nine. He was coming home.

I thought of that AT&T phone tower, disguised as a jack pine, and how readily Ray had agreed to it. He must have already been Kid, even back then.

When they handed me my burger, I thought I might puke, but something in me reached out and devoured it and it revved me up with gas for the first time in days. I channeled that power into the engine and took off toward Ray’s. It felt good not being a pussy. Five miles, said the phone. The radio preacher was saying we’re made of dust and it won’t take much air for the Lord to blow us away. One lung of the Lord, said the preacher, is bigger than the world. I pulled up to Ray’s. The phone said seven again, as if he’d rigged up some decoy. I had one too: I looked like Tyrone, unless Ray had put a green dot in my head.