High Lonesome

Carriba

SOMETHING DROPPED, MAYBE A SHOE OUT THERE ON THE polished clay where they’ve made a path near my south window. There was no sidewalk so they walked a path through the old St. Augustine grass as white trash would do. The woman, Minkle, wants something more with me probably. She’d be out near my window provoking something, that might be what the sound was. I saw her nishy once when she was wet out of the shower but don’t think it wasn’t offered. She was laughing. I was right under her window. Her brother, the one who killed his father, was in the room beyond her petting the bobcat their horrible mother Blackie had brought up last week. Note the door between their rooms was open. They have a brother named Ebbnut. He stays back in Carriba with Blackie and has fattened within the last year, since the shooting of the father, into a great neckless artillery shell. I would guess Minkle wants my attention now because she is pregnant and the man has quit dating her, that lawyer with cultured looks who used to sit the bench for the university basketball team, in his Volvo.

Or she might want to fight again. Right after that window episode I walked straight in her house past Modock with his bobcat, slammed the door, and beat her up while she was still in the towel. Not badly, but she knew it was due and just took it. Then I came out and sat down, asking Modock what he thought about that, son? He was only now eighteen, stroking that squirming swamp cat he pretended loved him.

Modock wouldn’t raise his head.

I say What of it? Get me a beer, you gloomy little saint.

He went and got the beer, bobcat in his arms.

Yes, a good deal was owed me and I liked to call it in from time to time. What began as charity becomes a battle. Life’s old tune. Before I could get a good toss of the beer over my lip, however, here comes Minkle in her jogging outfit from her room. Bap, bap, she’s into my face with her arms and the beer’s flying away one direction, my spectacles the other. I recall Modock rising, get this: so the beer wouldn’t get on his bobcat. Sure, into his vow of nonviolence, lifelong, after the patricide.

Minkle got me a good sight more than I’d got her. I’m a gentleman, for godsake. Of which, as trash would say, she’s hardly no lady. I just took it, looking for my glasses more than even dodging. I let her beat herself out.

You can’t hurt me, I said. Then I began laughing. But she was red and nearly weeping in the face.

Hit me some more, wench. Do out this farce. You don’t even understand the word, do you?

She began crying then: I’m sorry. I showed myself because I’m so sad, so sad. It wasn’t to mean nothing, she spluttered.

You an old man, said Modock.

Take a joke, she said.

I’ll eat that pussy right off you, I grinned.

Attaboy she smiled through the tears. We were all familiar again.

Modock looked away. This boy might be a hero, even in the national papers, but by God he was dull. You get this American specimen nowadays that’s either shooting somebody or stone boring.

You hear what I said, Modock? That’s how old man I am. Put that pussy on my head and wear her down the street like a hat. Hey. I nudged his shoe with mine. You got no honor? I be disrespecting you big sisser. All he could do was look pained and stroke that frowning bobcat, staring out the window as if there were some help out there.

I believe you sisser got some new big bosoms trained out of her from the gym. Got them thigh muscles now. She be a roving clamp, son.

I’d guess the two were separated in age by one of their father’s longer penitentiary sentences. Minkle must be thirty-five. In this town, away from Carriba, she had risen in the world. Modock was going nowhere.

He used to wear a python around his neck, down in Carriba. He had a girlfriend too, around his neck when the python wasn’t, when I first met him.

Things were much tenderer and more awesome then, and I was a journalist sent down to cover the debris of misery after the killings. Now I am no longer a journalist and am relatively poor. It was the end of my career that way. I had never covered murders and had never worked a story in my home state. Murder is not interesting, friends. Murder is vomit. You may attach a story to it but you are already dishonest to the faces of the dead, in this case Modock’s father Henry and two policemen Henry had killed with his shotgun on the town square. I knew I had no place arranging this misery into entertainment, a little Hamlet for busy-bodies and ghouls. Nor could I add my other hyena’s worth to our already mocked and derided state, where I lived and worked and hoped. Doesn’t this sound noble of me? The fact is I have turned into a geezer and elected alderman of the town here. A booster, even. Around age forty-five there might be a pop and a hiss in your heart, and you are already on your way, a geezer. Nothing is good or like it used to be, not even nookie. A great gabby sadness swarms over you. You are an ancient mariner yanking on the arms of the young. See here, see here.

Modock’s distress, sitting there on the couch with the python draped around his neck, his gruesome high school sweetie pressing him to marry her, get a car and a job and some money, threw me into action. Come on, die with us, real close to us, the sweetie and Modock’s dreaded mother Blackie might as well be screaming: It’s lonesome, come on pretty thing and die with us, snuggle up there. Modock is pretty. Put a good sweater on the boy and he’s instantly in a movie about the right side of the tracks. I saw him as a freshman here at the university, look of a teenage saint on him — those pained green eyes — first in his family at a college ever. I told him to get out of the place and live near me five hours upstate, in this little gem of a burg. He shocked me by accepting.

Now they’re both here, he and Minkle, in that modest brown wooden rental next to me in this white subdivision, mainly red brick and ranchy, of the Eisenhower years. Wide streets and combed curbs with the dogs sleeping away blissfully in their rabbit dreams. Briefly he improved. He had work at the Whirlpool plant and the manager, a pal of mine, gave him a Subaru cockeyed on its frame from an old wreck, so Modock goes forever leftward down the road whichever way he goes. He had his old hound, Beaumont, and I brought him over some books and pictures. His grades were not bad down in Carriba High although he detested the place. Everybody had airs. I noticed even the weather-woman on television seemed to threaten him with airs.

Son, I said, Can’t you see the bod on her, those nice smacking lips?

Nobody dressed like that talks about rain, he said.

But the slope, the promise of that hip on her.

You wear you pants around you head.

He was the son of a prisoner released three times to kill again, always pleading self-defense. Always innocent somehow, this man. An altercation on a back porch — somehow the gun discharged, hell of a thing. He wrote songs in prison. His lawyer, a former gubernatorial candidate, showed them to me. Untamed broken heart, Manslaughter One/Miss My Daughter and Tiny Sons. Henry, forever getting a bad deal, just wanted to sing. If he could just quit killing people and get some private lessons. I saw a photograph of him and Modock smiling together, arms across shoulders, a guitar hanging off Henry’s neck. It was a good one, not cheap. Henry’s hair looked suddenly arisen in oil and hope. Henry and Blackie divorced and remarried several times. She told me she had “been” with Henry the night before his last rampage.

Henry seems to have been one of a very rare breed in whom marijuana, which he used frequently, induced a murderous psychosis. Two young well-built patrolmen had lately been “bothering” him. Or not. Henry had a case of policemen bothering him just about forever. The two cops “shook him down” in front of his friends in a restaurant on the square. He was free of dope. But in a few minutes he walked out to his white camper, perhaps toked-up (although the state toxicology lab pronounced his body free of drugs, Blackie said he was never free of drugs) and set upon the policemen with a twelve-gauge loaded with buckshot. He killed both of them, although there were two bullet holes in the window of the camper, which I examined. Then he went home, where, as the beloved Robert Frost said, they have to take you in. But he went home brandishing the shotgun and wanting to kill everybody. A younger cousin stood in his way and Henry leveled on him. The cousin, a hunched skinny man with homemade tattoos crawling all over his arms (in prison, they use old-timey carbon paper and a needle to do this upon themselves; there’s plenty of time), said this to Henry:

Well, Henry, go ahead and do what you have to do.

What you have to do. Imagine. I loved the steel of this, my friends.

I talked to a black policemen about the incident and Henry.

Well, Henry’s in heaven now, he said.

In heaven, after killing five men?

He’s in heaven.

But I can’t figure why he was allowed even on the streets of here, I said.

This earth were not his home.

You forgive him?

There ain’t no other choice.

Henry Modock was fifty-three when he died. He had got himself against the wall of the rented barracks compound where they all lived — he sometimes, when in good with Blackie. He continued to rave and to brandish. His son was somehow now in the camper. Henry pointed the gun. Modock rammed him against the wall of the barracks. Henry howled in agony, his last. The boy carried a nine-shot.22 revolver behind his leg. Henry, even in his parlous state, leveled the shotgun one more time. Modock shot him nine times, to death. One guesses it was in essence suicide, this act, but Henry went for the nastier patricide. Consistent with the riot of self-pity forever in the heart of most killers of his stripe. Legacy of the son with bloody hands. Taking you with me, boy. I love you that much. Squeeze on up here for a hug, it’s lonesome and deep here.

Why’d you make me shoot you, Daddy? You knew we loved you, said Modock.

This statement went out over the national wire along with the other ghastly events of that afternoon in Carriba. The big slick men’s magazine in New York called me. By the time I arrived the bodies were five months old.

Around the room sat Ebbnut, Blackie, Modock and python and high school sweetie, and one of Blackie’s sister alcoholics, Pearl from down the road. The women were well into the beer. On the counter of the sink was four pounds of bleeding hamburger defrosting in pink webs over the brown-veined porcelain. Blackie thought I looked Filipino and this idea was hilarious to her and her mate, shrieking away. But the boys moved me. Ebbnut reminded me exactly of an old high school chum who had gone far on the trombone with merry diligence and very small talent. Modock, lean and hungry, startled and sad at the same time if you could tell by his green eyes, was flat-out pretty. He seemed not made for this earth either. He hardly spoke. I withered, already impertinent, an obscenity.

My whole professional life reared up in my mind. I was a hag and a parasite. I was to be grave and eloquent over their story, these people I would not have spat at unless three people had been murdered. They were to get nothing. I was to get fame and good bucks, provided I was interesting. A great sick came on me. Already I was looking at leaner but better years.

Minkle was not in the house. I believe she was currently over in Hattiesburg failing at something menial. Her ex-husband was in prison. Her grandfather, Blackie’s Pa, had been in prison. I had already seen him while tracing the new whereabouts of the Modocks. He was a little man out cutting a huge lawn around a tiny box of a house. You know: we’ve had our troubles, he said. He was worried about Blackie’s drinking problem. Blackie was currently worried about the $15,000 insurance on “my husband’s” life. She was also screaming at the police, who would not return the clothes of “my husband.” For some reason she wanted back the clothes he had on when he was shot. When something was owed Blackie, I noted she struck the formal tone “my husband.”

I saw them five times and at no time did anybody commiserate with the families of the dead policemen. They listened to a police-band radio for home entertainment, even still. I noticed police-band radios were the hottest item at every pawnshop in town. A running battle with the police was a fact as manifest as wallpaper. I’d noticed the same about some bikers in Pensacola I wrote about. Take away the harassment and dogged persecution of the police and the folks had little cause to exist. I suspected Blackie was a looker at one time but she was fast turning dry, blotched, and yellow, with dark teeth through which she issued this astounding promise: When I get my husband’s insurance money I’m gettin’ me a good gun. We need us a good gun.

I nearly dropped my pencil. Modock was silent, as usual, with his sweetie pressing up to him, whispering about money, job, and car. Modock had a deep curious thing going with his ma, as most of us do, but these were Mississippi criminal Irish and among them Mama Love often kills, one way or the other. I began glaring at Blackie as the likely source of it all, or much of it. She caught on to this, got drunker, and I left with her spitting a much meaner and more poisonous laughter, as if I’d just kicked over her rock and she was lying all twisted and naked beyond my heels. Among the dispossessed you find an insane loyalty in family members that does not exclude murder of their own. Go ahead, Henry, and do what you have to do.

I told Modock if he stayed here he would die. He should live in my town and give the line beginning with him another whole chance.

Blackie, way in the background, had somehow heard me. I heard the shriek.

Nevertheless, in two weeks, he was at my door, behind him Blackie in a smoking Pontiac belonging to her mate up front who was too drunk to drive. Little Ebbnut was in the backseat with his kind smile. The car filthy with oil and dust over mud. You could barely read the tag when they turned and left. Pearl River County. Modock had said only, I’m here. Blackie called out the words that still rang, in her hag’s shriek, I see where you live! See where you live, Filipino!

I asked Modock, there with his bag and hound Beaumont on my front porch, where his sweetheart was. She’d barely left his hip when I was in Carriba.

Put her away from me.

And came right here.

Like you said. Get a new life.

It was June and I rented the house next door, a lesser brown box in this old exurb, not ranchy at all. More chicken-houselike but squared into four rooms inside as if by a child with a ruler. My wife was soon muttering, no surpise, since she’s from mother stock who’s narrowed the world down to one gallstone. But neveryoumind, I took her off to Paris, gave her a Gold card, put us up in a fancy hotel that was Gestapo headquarters during the Occupation, and climbed her like an alp while she grabbed the curtains. She came back dripping with history and stayed actually mute and tender toward the world for a couple weeks. Thing that saves us is that the house is enormous and I don’t see her for days. She deeply resented having to cook the one night for Modock, and I would pay for it, I knew. Please, please, punish me with silence, I begged her with my eyes. She panted back to her great leisure room where she has three-hour phone conversations with her kin about how many people they have told off today, barks of victory spilling out now and then like canned soundtrack. Great God, and here I was already going from upper to flat middle class, in some fear. They gave me a class in journalism at the university. It was hard being smooth and unneedy when I applied, but I had a name and I’d once witnessed for a prof there who stayed out of jail.

I was eating with my cronies at a downtown pizza and pasta bar when something hit me hard in the back of the head. Then I heard the pop of a shoe, a sneaker on the plank floor, and saw a body in a jumpsuit hastening away, with girl hair on top of it. This was Minkle. I’d never seen her before and here she’s popped me among friends in a town absolutely strange to her. She turned, about twenty feet away, not looking even faintly like Blackie or the rest of them, and waved as if we’d been bosom chums since rocks and water. I had no idea who she was, but she hollered over.

I’m here now. Come on in the house. Don’t be a stranger.

As if I could sense who she was and she knew I could. And she was right. I was baffled a little by the blow to the head, but she couldn’t be anybody else.

Soon afterward, it was at Kroger’s, where I enjoy watching others’ wives, a hard rod came in my ribs at an aisleturn. This hurt. It was Minkle at the end of a mop who’d rammed me. She had a broad smile on.

Uh-oh! Watch out now!

I was in misery and didn’t smile at all. I don’t think I said anything, just covered my ribs with my hands where it hurt, seriously hurt. Then she was gone, with a giggle.

There was a vast chemical spill in Carriba years ago, from a plant that packed up and left. Downtown, a man walked the streets wearing bright universal orange tape around his knees. He said it was to keep alligators away. A policeman I spoke to over the phone told me that the town was run top to bottom by a conspiracy of homosexuals. Henry Modock had wandered freely here. Several claimed he was the nicest man they’d ever met, almost. The town drug dealer worked from a roadhouse and was straight out the worst man I’d ever looked at, a grim, giant-stomached muskrat with no shirt and enormous fat red feet in sandals. He was holding the youngest of his infants while his wife raised an ungodly din back in the living quarters. The man may have been furtive but it could have done him no good. He wasn’t even a modern criminal. He belonged in the line of psychotic white trash straight from the days of Mike Fink. Feet dyed by the pirate river. I heard he was sly and stayed out of prison because “he done good turns now and then for the police.” Yet he was arrested within the week on big drug charges. Everybody knew what he did and where he was. You’d get directions to Benny Harp, the drug dealer. Sure, the town had its mansions and fine people. A former governor had built a Spanish mansion here. I spoke to two of these prosperous good boys. Both of their wives had gone mad within a week of each other. Another told me he deeply feared the ocean. It was an hour and a half away. Yet another shot his father-in-law out of a tree stand, thinking he was a “wolfbear.” Straight across the Mississippi River in Louisiana was a north-south rough rectangle seventy miles long besotted by petrochemicals for generations. It had the highest incidence of cancer in the nation.

So now Minkle. It was not clear for a while whether she’d moved in with Modock to save him or herself.

She had a job at Wal-Mart and had begun wearing hosiery. She came up on that northern path they had made in the yard, almost under my window, to get in her car, a plain Ford given over by her prisoner ex-husband. She had a clean face and new shoes. Then she ran in the streets in the evenings, with a radio in her head, just like a coed. I saw her disappear down the hill, all shoe soles and butt, in her jogging Speedo. She was getting an overall suntan, perhaps at a gym, and in my indifference I watched the woman change from plain to outright fetching. In my patient geezer lechery I did admire her. She was a good big sister to Modock. The place was cleaner and there were flowers around. The hound got washed once a week and began to appear sleek and noble, with a nice leather collar and vaccination tag on him. I think even his posture improved. He would stare out at the street like a perfectly adapted suburban philosopher, rich in black and tan.

I was out getting the paper in the drive early on a Saturday, didn’t see it, and bent down to a bush where it might be hidden. She was in the bush and whapped me upside the head with my own rolled newspaper.

Lookin’ for somethin’, neighbor?

You’re a rough one, aren’t you?

Can’t you take it?

I reached over and yanked down her Speedo bra, then slapped her mildly.

Good morning, I said.

She set herself right, not as shocked as she might be and a smile coming up.

I brought you some rent. She had money in her hand. I looked at it and was puzzled, then all at once touched. It was green and black cash, somewhat wet in her palm, twenties I guess. You could feel the hours in it, the earning, like the money of a kid at a lemonade stand.

When you get on your feet—, I started.

We on our feet.

Very well.

I almost didn’t take it. Maybe I wanted to own them a bit longer.

Modock’s not going to college, is he? I said to her.

No. But I am. He’s swore nonviolence. Too many persons around give him trouble.

What does he do after work over there?

I have to open a big can of whupass on bro now and then, get him out of that stare, not eatin’.

You beat up Modock?

I get his attention. What he did, there’s not many like him in the world, you know. But he’s got to unbrood himself and move on.

There was a man in town who had killed his mother. Her death was a drunken accident in a car he drove through police roadblocks with his mother, eighty, as a passenger. She was thrown from the car. After his arrest they watched him for suicide. Only a mattress in a windowless room at the hospital. We all expected him to go to prison. It was the worst thing one could do, this matricide, and prison would not touch the guilt, we imagined. I suppose we expected him to crumble and seek hell. But mourning has its limits. I would guess there might come a day when you do not murder yourself with grief, you have become a part of it. You are the definition of grief, and you keep moving, a monster beyond atonement, a shadow of guilt on the wall to your neighbors. His sister wrote the judge a moving letter. The man did no prison time. He is simply doing time there in the grocery store. People, including me, do not know how to look at him even when we say hello. He is the permanent bottom line of horror, maybe even another breed.

I wondered should this man and Modock meet. Should they form a rare club.

But Modock worked and came home. He was looking thin and sorry. They told me he was neither good nor bad at work. His boss said this odd thing: Modock doesn’t want to know or remember things. Every day it’s like he just first came on the job. He didn’t mind being shouted at. He never laughed at a joke.

They had been in town several months before Modock missed a day of work. I noted his leftward auto at the curb around eleven and went over. The house was dark and Modock sat on a far chair in boxer underwear with a bar of light across his eyes. The eyes seemed out on stalks away from the grave and emaciated face. They seemed cracked with light inside. Modock had become a haint of his former self. He scared me. I got him a glass of water and felt heat coming off his body from his fingers. He said he had been throwing up a little. The old television was not on, only the hum of the refrigerator was heard, aggressive, a raw and odd tune here.

Black girls, he said. Two black girls at work found out what I did with my daddy. They said I had taken the hell from him and now the hell was in me. I was hell and I was in hell and there was forever a mark on me, which I already knew.

Now you’ve just talked yourself into a case of the flu, boy.

I don’t have the flu.

Your pa was begging you to shoot him. Like he was on fire and couldn’t stand it.

I was doing all right until somebody said it, them girls.

He wanted company in hell but don’t give it to him, nor to your mother.

I’m not having a new life.

Sink then. Call your mama and get another lease on the old shit.

Blackie in fact had been calling me for a while, always something, but unbearable when she was drunk. The police would not give back “my husband’s” camper or his clothes or Modock’s gun, either. She’d go down and raise hell at the station. But now she wanted to sell her life story for a great deal of money. I would write it. I’m afraid not, I told her. She then told me I’d better watch out for Modock. No, I won’t, I said.

In a week I saw the car over there, rammed up to the porch. Ebbnut was around, assisting something with a burred tail, moving it into the house. This was the bobcat, still muddy from the swamps near Carriba. Modock wasn’t moving out as I’d thought. They’d brought more of Carriba to him. Poor Ebbnut was even more swollen. Some say depression among the poor shows up instantly as fat. The boy was not only neckless but nigh to growing another face across. Blackie, of course, was lean in her alcoholism. Already she had married another wretch, a man who stayed behind the wheel. Modock had had three other stepdads while Henry was in prison. This one didn’t even cause a ripple. He seemed merely frozen in the act of valet. Imagine the bite of such love as he could wrest at evening from each day’s journey.

I suddenly thought of my own case. I had wanted a great woman but then I was not a great man, always in this swoon of brooding. Even my aldermanship was a stretch. I did not care that much.

Frozen at the wheel of this my old Mercury of a body, driven up on foreign shores, weary of the music from my ancient radio, beyond me barely intelligible voices in odd rooms, an eye out for the leap of the unexpected. It was ever thus. I was never firmly native to anywhere. Yet ravenous for the unexpected. Half amazed that others even bother to carry on.

I at last danced with Minkle. I saw her alone at that discotheque two art queers began with one’s grandfather money. It was an instant failure and I felt sorry for the fellows. They thought a revival would be all the rage. But not here. Only Minkle and a few others came. She was dancing with one of the owners under great speakers full of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. There was a billiard table lit in the corner and big dying ferns of all nations set around. Big pulse, a raised platform for styling where sad queers offered themselves up to the lonely passion of the Pet Shop Boys. One grabbed a silver fireman’s pole and expressed himself around it, dying as if rammed by heaven.

I walked over and popped her a stout one against the head. Drunk and in blue jeans, I was not recognized at first. But then she held her head and smiled. At last I was Bob Bubb, famous old son of her orbit. I was down in the bottoms with the boys, lanterns and dogs on the hunt for a screaming bobcat, or painter as they called them down Carriba way.

Oh oh you’re so extreme I want to take you home with me.

I went flailing around the beat, another sad old married like most of the queers in this town.

We danced something out, god knows what, but I was earnest, earnest, wanting out and up so badly. All this weight we get in time. It isn’t that childhood was any better, it’s that it was so much lighter.

I whispered to her I wanted to be crucified upside down like Saint Peter over her naked form. Of course she didn’t hear me. Or maybe she did. When the tune stopped she tore up my hair with her hands and cracked me across the back of the head with an elbow. My hair was ruined and flared-out like Stan Laurel’s, I saw in the mirror. My fly was unbuttoned and Minkle corrected this. She had on a tie-dyed T-shirt. I had felt sorry for her, out there with that gay fellow. Give her a break and let her dance with an alderman and former journalist. I was a worthy, many respected me. She was rising.

Now she had a job at the university television station. She helped produce programs for welfare mothers that educated them for the mainstream, a government project with a heartwarming acronym attached run by a shady parasite who kept a car phone in his bass boat. The sparse crowd of collegiates out on the floor reminded me she was taking several classes.

You’ve done well, Minkle, with your talents here, I said.

You mean barely high school?

I mean the Carriba situation. A place develops its own luck, you know. A family from Carriba lived near me when I was growing up. Terrible things were always happening to them. Car wrecks, cancer, fires. Boat explosions. Saying all this made me sober, I swear. There was something true about it that cut through nine drinks and brought on a brightly lit melancholy.

You know it wasn’t but the one thing, she said.

The one thing?

That Modock was worth coming here for a fresh start. Well I went on and interpreted that I might be worth it too. You gave us that.

Modock doesn’t seem—

Modock is dying, man. He’s either going to make it or he’s not. I believe he almost has to die and get better. Or not. I know it.

He could talk to a doctor, I guess. Tell it to a group, I said.

No. One of those days one of them would say to him: I know how you feel. Then I’d go up there and tear into them and want our money back. It’s in the blood, man. My mother Blackie beat up several doctors.

When I left the disco, walking, I was drunk again and melancholy both. I wandered to the front window of an auto parts dealer chum of mine, as if he’d be open. He was marrying the ex-wife of a rich doctor. I wanted to explain to him how important friendship was in this cold universe. I wanted to explain to him that what television and bad American movies had done was to make us doubt that others even existed except as a shadow play. That virtual reality and cyberspace would complete the job. That you could not be sure that you were at your own father’s funeral. Or think the woman squirming under you was only good if it would make a good movie. Or doubt that there had been any football on a live field because there was no replay. As some GI in his first firefight in Vietnam was supposed to have hollered out: Where’s the soundtrack!? That the poisonous excuse for all bad on television was that: But it’s true. I was hammering on the glass doors, wanting my chum to be in and talk this over. When I turned around, in front of the grocery store in his apron with meat stains on it, there under the fluorescent lights having a cigarette, was the man who’d killed his mother.

I rushed home and woke up my wife. I pulled the gown back down to her waist and gave her a massage, in terrible grief. We have to love each other, I said. Even if we don’t want to, we have to. Cling to a buoy even though half of it’s shot away.

I love you too, she said. Leave me be, midnight poet.

But I was back in the disco the next night as if to complete something unfinished. That ’70s music. During Vietnam I was in Korea in the army around the 38th parallel. In bell-bottoms, beads, and bandanna wrap, a buddy and I used to give the finger to the Koreans across the valley who rolled out artillery from their caves every morning. That was some bad dope. We had been listening to the bulletproof Hendrix.

For the longest while even fewer people were coming in. Some of them were even more pathetic than the other evening. I sensed they were trying to be queer but hadn’t the moves. I loved it, racing through vodka martinis and huge onions.

I waited and waited and waited, staring at the baroque mirror at a man who was dwindling into something else. I would bark out involuntarily sometimes, as if with Tourette’s syndrome, saying No! No! Perhaps I had taken on some of Modock’s grief, was now a barking dummy for the killer son. I hadn’t meant to, but I kept erupting, as if somebody was there accusing me. Finally the whap on the back of the head came, but not so hard, even some tenderness in it. I turned and it was Minkle, but she was accompanied by the long-haired lawyer, young and blond, pretty vacant in the face.

She put her hands around my neck and dragged me to her. Next I knew my head was turned and she was pouring a kiss down my mouth, a tongue in there. It was ten years since I’d had a kiss like this. My wife used to be good at it in her throes. But hell, I knew what Minkle was up to. She was kissing a man of importance to mark the fact that she had classy friends.

During the week, she’d get in his car evenings and give me a pout as she nestled in his Volvo. I’d hang at the window there. She meant some kind of low irony I didn’t understand. I wasn’t angry or jealous. I just despised the obvious deal being struck here. The urgency of her rise, the flat coy look on the ex-jock now Volvo lawyer.

It is the sadness of Modock’s old hound I want to address here. In the next few days, displaced by the bobcat, he lay next to the steps in full mourning. Hounds are mournful anyway, but he was in clear further distress. He even came over to visit and get some affection, as he’d never done before. In his eyes were both the mourning of the world and the unexpected torture of Modock’s neglect.

Inside, the bobcat was all cleaned up. Modock made much over it. Pretending it was getting all homey. Any fool could see its eyes looking out for every crack of egress. Modock was back at work and may have been a little ruddier. The few visits I made made me angrier.

Your mama can’t be here so she wants you stroking that cat, which is her, which is Carriba, I told him. What about Beaumont?

He didn’t answer.

Beaumont’s not wild or mean enough, is he? He ain’t got that spitting beauty to him, what? You suffering all over that cat, stroking away, running round after its poopoo. This makes quite a story. Only you can’t see it.

I’m not a story. I’m people, he said.

Well, months, and we went on. Minkle ran home glistening, a bit more stylish every week. She picked up fast, only she was copying things a bit young for her, like two bows in the hair, blue jeans with the knees out. Once I felt for her so much, watching her that way, I started crying a little. And I had never stopped the involuntary barks, the looking around as if there were somebody there on my case.

She got pregnant, the guy stopped coming by, and she showed me her nookie at the window. She cheered up some after the fight. But the hound Beaumont now was emaciated and weak with grief. Modock was a killer but he was not cruel, that I knew of. I took over the hound. Can you believe it? The hound brought the wife and me closer together. She made over it, gave Beaumont special scraps, and he got some hope in his eyes. It had been ages since she’d nursed anything. My word what you find just stumbling around. Both the hound and I were getting some, with wild and tender goodwill.

At the school was a little man who had followed the civil rights struggle and written several books about it, a white man. He had a name and esteem, but in the hall I attacked him for being a civil rights junkie with his eye on the main chance, a part of the modern university industry where all the grants and prizes were. I accused him of living off the grief of better men. That he was a tick. At the end of this, with several students around, I began barking, No! No!

They let me go.

Amazing but that very afternoon I came across a stanza from Charles Simic that buried right into me, although I never read poetry. Simic had been on campus, a friend urged the book on me, a page blew open at my window.

I tell you, I was afraid. A man screamed

And continued walking as if nothing had happened.

Everyone whose eyes I sought avoided mine.

Was I beginning to resemble him a little?

I had no answer to any of these questions.

Neither did the crucified on the next corner.

Even so I was not doing well. I reread the stanza, even more afraid, and regarded the stack of letters on my desk. I should have been flattered, these magazines begging me to come back to their world. Assignments in grave astounding places all over the world. I had almost nothing left in savings. Yet I felt unable to move.

I went over to Modock’s angrier than ever and didn’t hear the protest inside before I yanked out the screen door and the bobcat was through my legs. Modock might be weak but he was fast, up the hill of the house across the street, a big hill, right after the creature. But beyond the house, I knew, was a valley of deep kudzu, old tall stricken trees, and this went on for a half mile. I could hear Modock’s screams, and then his weeping, like a tot who’s lost everything, over the hill. It was an hour before he came back, and he was ripped bloody by thorns, and green at the knees where he’d been crawling.

So he got sicker again. I was the villain. He became crazed, sitting by the phone all hours after work. He expected somebody to call. About the bobcat. Some person who’s a fair person, he told me. Minkle and I stared on, horrified.

This can’t go on, I said. I’d never seen Minkle, the jogging optimist, in real despair. But now she was square in it, all pregnant and stunned.

So it could not go on, could not.

I made a couple of calls that night, in my own study, after reading the Simic again. My people with your people, the business. At suppertime the next evening I told Modock and Minkle to be present and ready. Midnight.

His name was Ferdinand but he was called Ferd. A few minutes before midnight he took off his apron very positively. I saw hardly a hint of doubt or even concern in his eyes. He had cut some flowers that were waiting in the refrigeration bin where they sold them. He tamped a few Clorets into his mouth, and I could tell his hair had been recently combed. Ferd wasn’t a handsome man, but he had a good smile. The thing that shocked me was that he thought I had been friendlier to him these couple years than I was aware of. He counted on me as a pal, just by my minimal greetings. I felt very unworthy but this didn’t last long. Too many days now, I had been a barking worm, grimness wrapped around my head like my old bandanna of Korea. It was time to move and do.

We were admitted in the front door by Minkle. I looked over at Modock in the chair, so skinny and petrified with fear.

This is Ferd, the guy who killed his mother, I announced him.

Ferd held the flowers, and I swear, became handsome in his delight.

Sure, I’ll marry you. Seen you ’bout, he said.

Now look. I want the three of you to mix and talk. I’ll be off months doing stuff I’ve got to. Get in there, and by fuck, get along.

Either way you want it, I’m there, said Ferd. Have the baby or not I’ll love it like it’s my own, said Ferd. I’ve many times thought I could be a powerful father.

Well, said Minkle, looking at me. This don’t seem like it’s in … very good taste.

Taste? Taste, I swore at her.

Even so, the look she was giving Ferd, ignoring me, was not a bad one.