Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

“So, Fred, what happened out there? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Fred pulled the tube out of the second jug and coiled it, putting it in a plastic bag and putting the bag in his back pocket. He screwed a top onto the jug and wiped his hands on a rag lying on top of the tank.

“Carjacked.”

“Jesus. So, what, they just siphoned the gas?”

“The gas? Fuck no, they took the whole damn truck.”

Fred was now lifting both jugs — five gallons each — and walking toward the door. His large body moved softly, steadily, and I stood to let him pass.

“What’s the gas for, then?”

“Old Golf in storage north of here.”

He walked up the driveway and I followed, and the moon shone down on us both. What would my mother have done had she been the one to find him? I felt certain nothing terrible would have happened — she’d be angry, and perhaps saddened — but I didn’t want to think about it too much. When we reached the end of the driveway I held back, as though crossing the property line would be to cross another line entirely.

“Well,” I said, “better luck this time.”

Fred grunted and continued up the street.

“Oh, funny thing!” I called after him. “I actually took a TV from your house earlier today.”

Fred stopped, turned around.

“That little one upstairs,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“Isn’t that weird? I guess we’re both ‘thieves.’” As I raised the air quotes, my penis caught a cool breeze and tingled, shrinking. “Wait — you know?”

He looked up at his house, then over at my mother’s. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion . He turned and began walking again. “Stay out of my house,” he growled.

I tried to picture Fred’s big, bent frame crammed inside a Volkswagen Golf. It is by the Juice of Saphoo that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning . I pissed, watching Fred until he disappeared, then quickly skirted around to the front door and back upstairs, where Alice had fallen asleep. The candle had burned down and was barely more than a wax puddle on the plate. Its sleepy flicker cast soft, buttery shadows against my lover’s back. I decided against waking her. I decided against telling her, for that matter, what I’d just seen. Fred’s return would have to be a secret. As would his probably empty threat.

I lay awake with my secrets and watched the sky lighten with dawn. Years before the evacuation, the neighborhood had watched in horror as Fred took a handsaw to the two cherry trees in front of his house. What seemed to begin as a trim turned quickly into an apocalypse as even the biggest branches fell. He claimed there’d been some kind of blight, that the trees would be fine. Even my mother was skeptical. For the next three seasons the trees stood naked, their abbreviated limbs reaching vainly toward the street. He dressed them up as scarecrows one Halloween, and some sympathetic trespasser nailed a sign reading “Help Me” to one of them — a sign Fred left up for over a week as a challenge, an accusation. My mother finally asked Kent to go cut them down already, but my brother refused, a man’s land being a man’s land. In the fourth season, small but distinct new growth could be seen. Tiny branchlets poked through the rough stubs and began their journey into the open air. Within two years the trees again resembled trees and indeed looked healthier than they had before, their green leaves greener, their sour cherries darker red. I was standing on the front porch one evening with my brother when Kent nodded across the street and smiled. “See,” he’d said. “That’s what happens when you leave a man alone.”

Dawn was now fully arrived, and in the young light I began to shake. Before long I was sobbing. Quiet at first, tearless, my body shook slowly, softly, as though nudged. But I couldn’t stop it, and the sobbing grew. My head pounded, red lines and flashes appeared behind my tightly closed eyes, and I could feel saliva dripping pathetically from my open mouth. My low cries sounded alien to me, inhuman, and I felt estranged, like an unwanted guest. The shaking escalated and with it the sobbing, and it must have woken Alice, because I felt her arm on my bare chest. I focused my attention on the spot where her skin met mine, the warmth there, trying to get it to spread, to radiate out, and as though from a distance I heard a helpless, teenaged voice ask me what was wrong.

THE RHODODENDRONS HAD WON. They coated the entire neighborhood in a glossy green sheen when they weren’t in bloom, which of course was mostly, and the houses they once sat tamely before they now towered above or concealed behind a bank of mute, triumphant leaves. My mother had remarked that while they used to be the state’s flower, Washington was now the flowers’ state. She made light of it, but I knew she thought something was amiss. There had been cases, she’d explained, of certain species growing fifty, sixty feet, but they’d been isolated, and anyway it would have taken much longer for such plants to grow. How then were we all suddenly surrounded?

Heading down 9th Avenue, I passed house after house I had passing familiarity with, but my memories seemed to have been swallowed up during the general implosion. Where do memories go to die? Was it trauma that locked them away, or had disinterest kept them from forming in the first place? Walking by a house I’d been in countless times as a child, I couldn’t summon the family name or even the name of the friend who’d brought me inside. I couldn’t even picture his face. Perhaps in the vacuum caused by the sudden disappearance of dense civilian life, what remains shifts, reorganizes, compensates for the absence. Anemic infrastructure leading to a blunt, blank metastasis.

I had an urge to break in and look for a left-behind family photo, but my first clear memory, like a guard at the gate, was that they’d actually moved away long ago, the summer between fifth and sixth grade. I tried to picture them packing, their moving truck, anything, but could only see Fred’s van, my brother’s truck. What was wrong with me? The rhododendrons, I decided, were controlling my mind. Very sneaky.

“I’m on to you!” I called out. “Get out of my head!”

“Fuck you!” someone answered.

I looked toward the voice but saw no one.

Having been described throughout my childhood as a transitional neighborhood, Ballard had finally been on the way up when everyone left. Whereas prospective buyers had once been told, “It’s a great investment” when what was really meant was, “You’d be brave to buy here,” it had more recently attracted enough artists and young people to tip the scales, to become interesting, to attract those people who at once signaled the rebirth and the decline of urban neighborhoods: remodelers. Now big, empty, even unfinished remodels jutted up from the rhododendrons like surfacing, war-torn submarines. Walking by them now, I was reminded of how quickly, after the evacuation, I’d exhausted my interest in enumerating the ironies of late capitalism that had brought us to this point. In the wake of all manner of grave threats or cataclysms, the death of irony had been publicly trumpeted throughout my life. It only truly died when it had become redundant.

The construction turned out to be on 58th Street — I saw it from the corner and held back. The activity surrounding the place was in itself daunting. The days of commiserating over drinks at the local were long behind me, and I rarely left the house anymore but to buy a pack of Zig-Zags or trade tomatoes for canned corned beef. It had probably been six months since I’d spoken directly to someone I didn’t already know, and I wasn’t convinced I should start. Why create new ties in a place I should be leaving any day? It would send my mother the wrong message, for one.