Out of the Woods: Stories

Two-Eleven All Around

When she locked me out I didn’t mind that much because things were drifty from the start. She didn’t like my drinking and I did not go for her Prozac and police scanner. Her kid was a pain in the ass, too. As much as I tried to get along with him, he was already what he always would be — a sullen little punk who liked the couch.

What happened was I came home drunk and she wouldn’t let me in. She didn’t even answer the door. It was night and I thought I was doing good by coming home before the bars closed, but it didn’t matter to her. She’s from right here in Casper, and they are a tough people. She sat hunched over her police scanner, not moving an inch. You’d think she was dead but I knew what was going on. She’d got on her high horse and was riding out a sober binge on antidepressants. She did this the same way other folks went on vitamins and health food, sort of a homegrown detox. I could hear static on the scanner, a steady sound like fast water until she squelched it and strangers spoke into the house.

At one time I tried to get into it, being a scanner-head, thinking it was something we could share outside of drinking, fighting, and sex. I even memorized part of the ten-code, what cops use on the radio. I never understood why they talk in code, though. A guide to it comes with the scanner, so it’s not like they’re fooling anybody. And saying ten-four instead of okay does not exactly save time in a crucial situation. My favorite was two-eleven all around, which meant that the subject was clean, with no warrants against him in the city or county. The lucky guy was free to go.

Nothing me and her did together was right except in the boinking department. It’s not like she had a great body or nothing, just average, but it was attitude more than anything else. She’d do whatever came down the pike and not feel guilty later. Me, I’m all for kinky sex, but sometimes thinking about it is better than the doing. My best is in the afternoon, doing it regular while thinking about the weird stuff.

Funny thing about that scanner, though, it sucked her away from sex like getting religion. She’d sit froze over it for hours, patched into a world of good guys and bad guys, like a video game except they were real. You hear the dispatcher call a cruiser with an address, and after a few minutes the cop says he’s there. Then you sit and wait until the cop comes on the air with the subject’s name and checks for outstanding warrants. Weekends were busy, especially on a full moon, just like us and sex in the old days.

Every few months, she’ll go on Prozac, coffee, and the scanner, then get mad if I got hammered. It wasn’t really fair but I understood she had to take time off from drinking, because when she was on safari, you better keep bail money handy. I could tell what she’d been up to the night before by the dents on the car. One thing, though, she didn’t wake up with the regrets. She never called around to see if she did anything she should apologize for. To me, that made her a full-blown alcoholic while I was just a drunk.

The Prozac always made her lose weight. She looked great but couldn’t have an orgasm. She said it was the Prozac that did it, but since she was on it, she didn’t mind. It bothered me a lot. It got so bad I was jealous of that scanner. Jealous of men who would never touch her. Jealous of voices in the dark.

She never gave me a reason to feel that way. It was my trip, not hers, and it went right to my father. He never drank a drop. He always held a job, and he lived in the same place all his life. What he did, though, was tomcat around with a different woman every day of the week. He made me cover for him when he slipped off to see his Tuesday girlfriend. Then on Wednesday he’d go bowling out of the county. Thursday he’d see a widow in town. He lived like a rabbit mostly, and you might say I had a few moms. These days I’m as loyal as bark to a tree.

Early on I asked her how many men she’d been with before me, and let me tell you, it’s the stupidest damn thing you can ask a girlfriend. I know that, but I did it anyway. I’m the kind of guy who’ll do the stupidest damn thing at the worst time. If a guy’s got no nose, I’ll tell him he’s lucky his eyes are good, because he damn sure can’t wear glasses. Sometimes I’m surprised I ain’t got shot yet. I always figured that’s how I’d go, killed at night by a stranger. Casper is that kind of town.

She didn’t say anything for a long while. There’s a time period when you can tell that people are making up a lie, but hers stretched on so long, I knew the truth was coming. Then it hit me that she was maybe counting up, and that number was something I did not want to hear. I wanted to shift to another channel. Just squelch her answer and move to someone else’s life.

Finally she looked at me and said, “What year?”

Well, that took the wind out of my sails, like getting kicked in the grazoint. And right there was where she was at — you ask a direct question and she’d answer with a question. She’d have made a great spy. She never gave a thing up. You could ask her if it was raining and she’d say, “Outside?” then not understand why I’d fly off the handle. We mainly lived at the top of our voices, even in the sackeroo.

The night she locked me out, I hid in the dark, watching her in the house. She’s a big-boned woman who got pregnant young, quit school, and works as a waitress. Never got a nickel of child support. I guess you could say the breaks went against her, and getting mixed up with me might be one of those breaks.

Sometimes I watched her kid, which was easy because all he did was play video games. I couldn’t get him to throw a baseball or football. When I was a kid, my father wouldn’t do anything with me and now this boy wouldn’t either. Sometimes I wondered if she was just using me to baby-sit, but I don’t think so, no more than I used her place to sleep. Her kid wasn’t that bad. He went to school, cooked for himself, and listened to his mother. He despised me, and who could blame him. I was just another stranger roaming his house and sleeping with his mom. I was the enemy.

I stayed on the porch until I got sick of listening to the scanner’s static. The house just sat there, dark and hard and locked. It was her house. Everything in it belonged to her, even her kid. My own boy was two thousand miles away, back home in Kentucky. The way it works anymore is you don’t raise your own kids. You raise someone else’s while a stranger takes care of yours, and then when that doesn’t work out, everyone moves along to the next person with a kid. It’s like two assembly lines moving in opposite directions. At the end are grown kids who haven’t been raised so much as jerked up.

You come to expect dealing with ex-husbands who don’t like you and kids who know full well you ain’t their real daddy. And you know your kid’s going through the same damn thing. Right now there’s some somebody living with my ex and wishing my son was out of the picture. That’s why I’m nice to the kids of women I meet. It works out in the long run, and maybe someone’11 be nice to my boy. He’s fourteen and smart. He can be anything he wants to be.

The bars were closed and I walked an hour. I was between drunk and sober, which makes your mind go strange ways. At thirty-five years old, I was out of work with no place to sleep. Sometimes I don’t think I’ve done anything to leave my mark in this world. I’m the kind of person the world leaves a mark on.

A patrol car cruised me but I stayed cool, and the cop probably made me for what I was — another poor bastard tossed out by his old lady. The second time he passed, he didn’t even slow down, and an idea hit me like a ton of bricks.

I cut down a few streets to an old industrial building that was getting renovated into an espresso joint. There was rubble lying in the street that looked like giant bread crumbs. I picked up a chunk and stood there a long time, thinking everything through, then I tossed it in a slow underhand arc through the plate glass window. It made a beautiful sound that rang along the empty street like music.

I leaned against a lightpole and waited. There was a grin on my face you couldn’t wipe off with a chain saw because I knew the police would come and ask for my I.D. And I knew she’d hear it all. She’d hear the cop read my last name and ask for a 10–29, which means check for wanteds. A minute would go by and the dispatcher would say, “Subject is two-eleven all around.” And she damn sure knew the truth of that. I wasn’t wanted anywhere, city or county, not even at home.

The cruiser came down the street, the candy rack on top flashing, no siren. I stepped away from the pole and held my arms away from my body and the cop put a light on me like a poacher jacklighting a deer. There was no sound but my breath. The door opened and the cop came toward me, walking slowly in case I was hopped up on crank. I stood there waiting in that streetlight’s glare with broken glass at my back and garbage at my feet and the whole galaxy over my head, and suddenly I knew damn sure what would happen one day.

I’ll have my own place and a job. It’ll be late at night and I’ll be asleep. Someone starts banging at the door. I stagger over in my underwear and open the door and there’s a stranger standing there, two or three strangers. Behind them in the street is an old shitbox out of Detroit, jacked up in the back. These punks are outside my door with patches of hair on their young faces, wearing boots and sleeveless shirts to show their tattoos. I face them with my beer belly and think that even though I live alone in a little dump, dirty and cramped, it’s still my damn place, and I’m willing to go down defending it. It’s all I’ve got and it’s not even really mine, just a rental, but I live here. You don’t mess with a man in his own place.

I stand there in the night and look at these criminals, because that’s what they are — there’s nothing two-eleven about them. The street is empty and I’m alone. I don’t want to show how twitchy I am on the inside so I say, “What the fuck do you want?”

And one looks at the rest with a sneer, and says, “See, I told you.” Then he looks at me and says, “We’re just hunting a place to flop, Dad.”

It hits me who I’m looking at, a ripping that starts in my throat and runs to the soles of my feet. I can barely breathe. I hold onto the doorjamb to stay steady while I stare at this boy.

There’s a part of me that wants to say, “Get a look, son. Burn this in your brain, boy. See the grime along the molding? See the empty beer cans with cigarette ashes around the holes? See the beat-up furniture and the dirty sheets? Take a good look, son. Take a picture because this is where you’ll wind up at, and you don’t want it. You do not want this.”

But I don’t say it. I never gave him anything before. And now I can’t even give him this.

Instead, I open the door wide.