Troy Weaver: Witchita Stories

My sister is sixteen and she’s already at that stage in life where she’s bringing over guys that look like Fonzie or Vanilla Ice. Some have tattoos, some have scars, some smoke cigarettes and listen to music that sounds like it’s been ground up and shit out through a ripped subwoofer. You take a little walk one day, maybe down to the neighborhood park, and when you come back home, you find these dudes there with their t-shirts rolled up to show off their stupid tats, smoking cigarettes and kissing your sister on the front porch. Some have greasy hair, pulled back in a ponytail. Others have buzzed heads and goatees, and wear leather jackets and work boots. It is summer now, both parents at work, and my sixteen-year-old sister is too busy with her greaser on the porch to give a shit about what my brother and I are up to. She’s the oldest, I’m the youngest, and my brother is lost somewhere between. One time she fed us macaroni and cheese, another time she fed us nothing. Today it is peanut butter licked from a spoon. Sometimes we spoon the peanut butter and dip it in the sugar bowl, but not today because somebody forgot to put sugar on the fucking grocery list. It’s the hottest kind of summer in the Midwest.105. The humidity here will make you want to crawl into a freezer and lock the door. Don’t worry about killing yourself; it’ll be worth it. Just remember: that pedophile on your front porch won’t always be there. But your sister will. Yes, she’ll always be there, and until further notice she loves you the best she knows how, which must be enough, and you’ll try loving her just the same. As for that peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth? Keep it there. It will be something to come back to when you’re hunting for nourishment later on in life.

When he was in high school, my brother had this friend, a big redheaded dude with gnarly freckles. The first time I met the guy was late one night in our basement. He cracked the storm window sneaking in. There was another guy there too, but he looked more like an anorexic skeleton than anything, and besides, I knew him. This other guy, though — man, he was scary, with this wild hair and pale skin and loose clothes all black. His t-shirt said something about Cradle of Filth, and had this guy, just as pale as he was, staring out at me through scary dead eyes, no pupils, all white. I think I was twelve, I can’t remember, but I’m sure I was no more than thirteen. I’d never even given a thought to what these types did in their spare time. Now there was no question about it. This big guy, he showed us a hole in his shin that looked infected, claiming it was the result of driving a nail in with a claw hammer. That’s the way they all were. They wore their self-inflicted burns and cuts like they were notches in a bedpost. I never understood it, the cutting and burning, not yet. I had my demons too, though, and they weren’t any less destructive. I threw my television out my bedroom window one day just because I couldn’t find a decent show to watch. I stole road signs and decorated my room with them. I despised anybody who asked any questions, about anything, and I kept all of my brother’s secrets. So this big dude with crazy red hair, I believed him when he told us about the nail in the leg, doing it just so he could go on feeling something. Later on, he moved on to not wanting to feel anything and pulled some pills from his sock, a whole fucking bottle, and crushed them up on a gaudy Christmas cookie tin. They took turns snorting between drags from shared cigarettes. Then things went fuzzy, chaotic, and I stood there, the loner, watching the sweat drip from their earlobes, wondering whose heart would be the first to collapse beneath the weight of the god-awful boredom of this place.

My brother has this friend who only comes over when my parents aren’t home. One day I walk in and they’re watching porn together in the living room. Nothing gay, they’re just watching. I try running up to my room before they notice me, but this friend of my brother’s drags me down the stairs and pins me to the floor. My brother has disappeared, he’s not there all the sudden, maybe he had to piss, and this friend of his is holding me down, saying: Watch it! What are you, a faggot? Fucking watch it, you queer! Look! Holding me down and prying at my eyes with his fingertips. You fucking pussy, look at the big fucking cock on that dude! You like that, don’t you? Look at her twat, you faggot! And it seems to last forever. Whole lifetimes pass before me. My shoulders hurt, my eyes burn, and I feel like I could truly and honestly kill somebody at this point, anybody and for no reason at all. Finally, the kid flies right off of me, as though wind-lifted, and he looks all about the room, stunned. And I’m confused. What happened? But now he’s on the ground, and my brother’s on top of him, this kid’s shoulders pinned now beneath his knees. What the fuck! That’s my little brother, you fuck! My brother hits the dude. Fuck you, you fucking— He hits him again. Fuck! He spits in his face. Then, literally, and it’s just like the movies, my brother picks this dude up by the shirt collar, drags him across the carpet, and throws him off the porch. He slams the door and looks me in the eyes, face red, gone blotchy. Go to your room, he says. I look at him, tears in my eyes, lips aquiver. Go to your room! I look at him again, hoping he sees I’m begging not to go. Go , he says, mouth movements slow and dramatic, and he steadies his eyes on the tits bouncing on the screen. Go on , he says. Get the hell out of here.

Later that year, after I’d turned fourteen, this same friend of my brother’s, the one who’d pried my eyes to watch the videoed fucking, lived in our garage for almost two whole weeks. I guess they’d patched things up. He was only sixteen, a dropout, homeless now that his parents didn’t want him anymore, and I guess my parents felt sorry enough for him to let him stay out in the garage on one of our old couches. I honestly don’t remember seeing him all that often. He’d pop his head in, maybe eat a sandwich if we had the ingredients, and when his two weeks were up and gone, I thought: Thank god I never have to see you again. But maybe five years later, I recognized his name in the newspaper accompanied by a nice little mug shot. Formal charges had been brought against him for the murder of a young girl with a shotgun — not in Wichita, but down south somewhere. And now, I wonder if he knew, years earlier, sleeping in our garage, that he’d be a convicted killer someday. You know, when he grew up and started considering career options for his life.

I used to go fishing when I felt like the world was sucking me down. I’d grab my tackle box and pole, grab a hat and fill an empty pop bottle with water, take off to where the street ended and became open fields, and go off knowing I’d just have me and my lonesome to deal with for the day, feeling content to live inside the empty rooms of my head. Sometimes a neighbor kid a couple years older than me would follow me out there. Sometimes I’d ditch him, sometimes he’d find me. This kid was annoying, that’s for sure. My brother didn’t like him much either. In fact he shot him with his BB gun when he was fourteen. And a few years later, when we were all a bit more mature, I received a tennis racket across my face for that little metal ball. I ditched him this time, the bastard, and took a different route altogether. When I got there, the smell of the lake was like breathing through an old unwashed sock, algae all over the place. I sprawled out on the bank, staring into the sun, fishing pole and tackle beside me, wondering, as my brother had told me, if this was really what a woman’s womanly parts smelled like. I remember this vividly, this contemplation. And years later, when I got old enough to stick my nose down there and fumble around for myself, it took me back, that first waft, to the peaceful loneliness I’d experienced as a boy with a fishing pole, laying out across the weeds in the hot summer sun.