Troy Weaver - Witchita Stories

I saw him at the gas station the other day. Nothing has changed. People who use, you can spot them a mile away. His skin looked like ancient, tattooed parchment, teeth all rotten, and he only put two dollars’ worth of unleaded into his car so that he could get to wherever it was he was going. I felt his defeat seep into me. Driving away, I kept thinking, I should have said hello. I should have said hello. So I pulled around, drove back into the gas stall and cut the engine. He was just sitting in his car, rolling a cigarette or a joint, I wasn’t sure which, and listening to Mariah Carey on the FM dial. I walked up and knocked.

He rolled down the window. Who the fuck are you?

Troy , I said. Troy Weaver. We went to school together. Maize High School.

He looked at me with this blank expression — he didn’t remember me — and then he said, Yeah, I remember you . It was a cigarette he was rolling. He lit it, blew the blue smoke through his nose like an untamed bull. I have to go. Then he turned the radio up even louder. It was nice seeing you, he hollered, and drove off. I just stood there for a minute, thinking, I should have just said hello.

Turns out my grandmother didn’t die in the mental hospital. She spent some time in a mental hospital, but didn’t die there. She was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. They would strap her in and shock her into not hearing voices anymore, at least for a while. The reality is she died in a Salvation Army homeless shelter. Fasting remains her cause of death. And here I thought, all this time, that fasting was supposed to be a good thing, a holy thing, something that gets you step by step and inch by inch closer to god. I don’t know — I don’t believe it anymore. Suffering is still suffering. I don’t find any virtue in it. So, tell me, who was it? Who was there to save her from the voices in her head? Other voices, I suppose — voices named after angels. Well, they found their purchase, didn’t they, the fuckers.

The midget of my middle school years, the one I thought had died after his numerous surgeries, with his rat tail and his huge prescription glasses, is still alive. Imagine, all this time I believed he was dead. Apparently, what really happened is, he just never came back to school. He was home schooled. And then the rumors happened. I’d heard from somebody that he died, believed them, and even briefly mourned his death. I’ve spent all these years thinking he was at home with the worms and ghostly in the night, stalking behind headstones and scaring groundskeepers.

Thinking back, I realize how strange it is that I never heard a single word about his funeral. No, he’s a rapper now — goes by the name of Salty Faulty — and he’ll outlive the upcoming dust crops and global warming and bomb blasts so long as these words are not burned from this page. God made him ugly to elevate him above us. I mean, I’m sure through all these years that have quietly passed between us he has never even once thought to himself about my death. No, he’s better than that. He’s probably the type of person who puts absolutely no stock in rumors, however true they must be.

I used to hang out with this guy a couple years older than me. We rode the school bus together from fifth grade all the way up to ninth, maybe even tenth grade, and then, when we were out of school, both failures, never having made it to college or even a good job, all we really ever did was get drunk with our friends and try scoring with the ladies.

But mostly we drank.

He was renting this house with two or three other dudes in one of the historic parts of town, with its old houses, huge trees, and rickety power lines, and all we did day after day was soak our livers in Bud Light and whiskey, from noon until we fell asleep there at night, the smell of sweat, puke, and asshole never quite distant enough for comfort.

Though the women were few and far between, there was the occasional party girl that would swing by to visit one of the guys. Not me, though, I usually took a back seat to such endeavors. I used to tell myself that it was because I had more respect for women than those guys, but I’m afraid I was lying to myself. I was just too shy to ever try to get up in a girl’s skirt, let alone unbuckle her pants.

One night we helped this girl down the street move her things into a big U-Haul — she was moving to Kansas City to live with her fiancée — and in return for our help she bought us a couple of cases of beer and some pizzas.

We all got blasted playing beer pong.

It was late and people were dropping off like flies. In fact, I think I was the first one out — down for the count on one of the two couches in the living room, using three or four books under my head as a pillow even though the real pillow was right there on the floor not even two feet away. My shoes were still on. My eyes were closed. My body was spinning. I felt like puking but kept my throat tight, forcing it all back into me, and when the roller coaster ride was over, I fell asleep tucked into a ball.

I couldn’t tell if it was a dream or not, but I heard a girl panting, flesh smacking flesh. I opened my eyes. It was dark, completely dark, and I couldn’t see anything, even after my eyes had adjusted, so I just lay there and listened.

Then I heard a girl’s voice: You have to stop. It hurts. And then: Stop it. Please, stop it.

It wasn’t a dream, but I was too drunk to stand, too sick from drink, but I tried to say something, anything, but it came out all muffled and slurred and half-thought in the first place.

Shut the fuck up!

I did, I did shut the fuck up, and then crawled back into my hall of silence, but I could still hear the flesh on flesh, maybe five minutes of it, progressing with each second into a pounding muddle of sound. She kept saying: It hurts. Please stop. And his response was: I’m almost done. Seriously, hush, I’m almost done. Doesn’t it feel good? It feels good, doesn’t it? Fuck, just stop moving like that, I’m almost done. Seriously, give me a minute. And she kept saying: Stop. Please. Stop it, I’m too dry , but he didn’t listen, this friend of mine, nobody listened, and I never said a thing about it, not to anybody, until now. But what else can I say or do to make anybody feel better about this? How can I take away the pain and help heal any wounds?

I’ll say this: I’m sorry beyond words, I’ve never felt more ashamed, but when the time comes, and I hope it does, I hope this “friend” feels all the pain, and all the shame, that he’s created.

A few years back, I read in the local newspaper that one of my brother’s friends, the one with red hair who infamously jammed a nail into his shin with a claw hammer, had died. He was around the age I am now (28). Apparently living life was just too much for him. A few months after the funeral, which I didn’t attend, I ran into our Seminole friend at a gas station. He was wearing eye shadow and had a pink streak in his hair. He said: I always knew it would happen. He was miserable. He was clearly sad. They had all been really close friends growing up: the newly deceased, my brother, and this gothic Native American fellow. Instead of a eulogy, they played that Pixies song that’s at the end of Fight Club , you know, when Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter hold hands and watch as the world literally crumbles around them.