Bud Smith: F 250

“Would that make you feel better?”

“It was an investment, ya know. He was gonna sell it for a profit.”

“Nobody’s responsible for anybody else’s life.”

“You don’t believe that. I can hear it in your voice.”

As he turned his face back towards the window, I wanted to slam his face into the glass, push it right through. The blood would come right away. The glass would get stuck in his hair. He’d hold the cut with his hands while muttering curses then slump off to the bathroom while he bled all over the hardwood floor.

Instead, we watched Harpie on the pier. She’d stopped playing her harp and was looking at the house, but I knew she couldn’t see us in the window.

We were invisible.

“Tried to do something good for you,” he said.

“What good could you do, man?”

“Come look.”

He led me down the hall. Trish was gone from the room or sleeping separate from him now.

“Look.”

My guitar was leaning in the corner.

The broken neck was clamped, sandwiched between two pieces of wood. He said, “I know you said not to mess with it, but I did anyways. Sue me.”

He set the guitar down in front of me on the shag carpet. “Well,” he insisted, motioning to it.

I didn’t understand.

“Unclamp the damn thing. Let’s see if the glue held.”

I twisted the knob. The clamp popped off. The wood fell away. The neck stayed in position.

“It worked,” I said, surprised as he was.

“The real test will be tuning that thing up,” he said.

We both looked at it down there, sitting flat on the carpet as if it was a thing of wonder that would, any second now, float up, start spinning in the air, and solve all the world’s problems. I picked up the phone. Listening to the dial-tone, I started to tune the bottom string.

“What are you doing?”

“Dial tone is an f note.”

I put my finger on the first fret, hit the string with my thumb, matched the dial-tone with the note, and hung up.

“An fnote? Holy smokes,” he said. “Never would have guessed.”

That morning, I dragged the last stonesup from the banks of the river and broke them apart with a heavy hammer. Everyone must have been awake, must have been twiddling thumbs, but they were very far away. Only whispers. Only guesses. I stacked stones. I mixed cement. There was no noise. Whoever was talking, was singing, was stirring coffee cups with metal spoons, was doing it beyond the walls of my invisible bubble.

Moss on boulders. Sticks and mud. Bare feet. Small cuts on ankles, on wrists. Fingers burnt from limestone. Water from a galvanized bucket dipped in the rushing river and dumped into a wheelbarrow with a hole. Shovel moved through and through. But I didn’t squint when the sun came through the canopy of the trees. I didn’t worry when I tied in the wall of my friend’s crypt to the wall where his grandfather’s ashes were. I barely noticed either. When the sun ducked behind a renegade cloud, the sweat on my body became a chill across my skin.

I smashed apart a stone on the back of a harder stone and gathered all the chips. I scattered those chips between the inner walls and covered the floor with sharp points to keep away unwelcome animals. Unwelcome others. Unwelcome dreams. I crawled into the crypt and lay down on the chips of stone. Not sharp to me.

I closed my eyes but didn’t sleep. No-one would have stopped me if I did. Low ceiling. There was less and less light with each breath I took. My heart slowed. My lungs were an accordion of heavy breath.

Thinking about things. Pictures in the dark. A football thrown down a dead-end street where we had broken all the street lights. Fireworks shot out of a bottle of Jim Beam. A map of Los Angeles underneath crossed pupils, slacked mouth, words like a roller derby at 3 a.m. Swimming at night in August rain. Racing in the Nissan on a dirt road through darkened pines. Graveyards not like this — rows and rows of crumbled stones. Death, just an inside joke on a Saturday night.

When I did crawl out, all elbows and knees, there were noises in the trees again. Things began to move. Life was returning.

Midday. Cement curing. Job complete … or as close I could complete it. Beside the gap, the door, the entry, I stacked the last of the stone so that Seth’s brother could close off the space after the ashes were placed inside.

Knew I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

Harpie wanted to throw a party.No-one objected. She invited all of the neighbors from the surrounding lake houses, which weren’t many, and encouraged us to call people up from Jersey.

“This area is like a vacation paradise,” she said. “Tell your friends. Plenty of room, here. Saturday night.”

The look in her eye recalled sharks at feeding time. Animals in the zoo, looking at the zookeepers. What you got next?

Harpie leaned against me, her big breasts pushing together. She’d been into the red wine. Her teeth were gray and purple.

“Who wouldn’t wanna get up into these mountains?”

Ron, sat there dimly, drunk, with his dented head. He ignored his wife falling all over everyone as if it was her art. She had a way of talking too close. She had a way of touching a person too much when she spoke. Desperation. I could see it on her. Ron had a way of yawning when she spoke.

For some reason, I was feeling nostalgic. I wanted to be around everyone I knew. I kept picking up the phone and dialing numbers, drinking more beer, dialing more numbers. I called everyone I knew … everyone I could remember a phone number for.

Studio Mike answered on the eleventh ring. I’d been bugging him to come up here for a couple days. Even emailed him our address. “Sorry, bro. I was asleep.”

I said, “Come upstate. Get up here.” I was drunk. “Just come, man.”

I imagined I could hear, inside the soundproof walls of his home studio, his Gilligan hat flopping around over the wires.

“I can’t,” he said. “There’s a band coming in.”

“Alright,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, “Ethan was looking for you.”

“For me?”

“He said he owes you money. I told him where you were.”

“Ah fuck it, whatever. He doesn’t owe me money though.”

“Well, have fun up there.”

I said goodbye.

K Neon came and sat down on the other side of the kitchen counter.

“You alright?” she asked.

“Probably not,” I said.

She leaned across the counter and kissed me on the mouth. I kissed back. June walked into the kitchen, saw us, and said, “You’re both pathetic people.”

“Pathetic?” K Neon seemed offended. “I don’t think so.”

“Really, you both are,” June said, walking back out onto Ron’s back deck.

The night slipped away after that. I kept drinking. Ron and Feral were all about it. The stereo went to maximum capacity, and the beer kept flowing.

I woke up on the couch. My lips were split from dehydration, and crusted drool ran down to my chin. The sun was in my eyes. The clock said that it was two in the afternoon.

Harpie cornered me in the kitchen.

“Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

I didn’t protest. She led me outside and said, “You drive.”

“That’s fine.”

As we went down the mountain, animals scattered at the sight of the truck. Out on the road, we headed farther — towards the highway. She wanted to go to the grocery store and the liquor store. We headed east on the highway.

“You’re friend died?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Ron tried to kill himself, you know.”

“How did he try?”