The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Michael Parker
The Golden Era of Heartbreak

from The Oxford American

AFTER SHE left, the town where we lived grew flat as an envelope. Sound carried: the song of a truck driver showering five miles east. Nothing could block his dirge. Long-distance misery leaking across the fields while he scrubbed away the road grime. He, too, had come home to a top drawer cleared of underwear.

I could hear him night and day, asking her forgiveness, beg your pardon, baby, for the times that she’d arrived home to find him gone. I knew from the rising strings that she’d never come back, that he would never get clean. Those strings: sweet Nelson Riddle arrangements, country meringue from the ’50s. Pinnacle of lovelorn lament. Fine time for misery.

My house filled to the eaves with this song. Moths waved in the soaring orchestration. They dusted the lampshades with it, painted the medicine-cabinet mirror. Up half the night trying not to listen, I reverted to an opinion I had given up forty years earlier, along about kindergarten: globes were wobbly lies. The earth was flat as the muted-by-miles-of-not-much-of-nothing notes of the trucker's song. Nowhere to hide and no escape, just sleep for the lucky and, for me, punishing runs.

After she left, I ran hundreds of miles along those low-shouldered roads. It got to where Mexican migrants would stop work to bring me a cucumber when I slashed past in the lethal early afternoon heat. Then the hospital, where they gave me medicine that turned me into a loaf of bread. The cheerful foreign doc asked me what year it was and I told him pointedly- I mean to say that I got up in his face so close that his pocked scars from a wicked case of acne were craters on a magnified moon-that the major daily of our Nations capital was contaminated because she had scoured its ads in want, want, want-I always got stuck on that word. I said to the doc, Her want spreads spores like anthrax. Say anthrax in one of those places. Is it an irony that registers on anyone but the inmate that you’re in there for behavior interpreted as less than rational, but when you say something crazy-which in that situation seems to me the norm-they shoot you full of more breadloaf? Though I confess I ate the ruffled paper cup that held my pills. I confess I’d have done anything to keep from returning to an earth leveled by her leaving.

She’d been gone for a year and a half and I had not heard word one. I knew where she had alighted and with whom, but had no street address, no lover's last name. Just major metropolitan area with this Rick she met at a conference. Work-related: how I hate having first scoured the want ads that brought us here to this town.

“You could just as easily hate the conference where she met him,” said my sister when I complained about having helped Fran find the job. That was when I was still fool enough to commiserate with family members and worlds-at-large. Back before, one by one, they all turned on me. Went from suggesting acupuncture to signing me up for some extended-stay hospital. People have no sympathy for the brokenhearted because it's what they fear the most. They pretend it's as minor and obligatory as having your wisdom teeth pulled, getting your heart ripped from your chest, having feral mutts tug-a-war the bloody organ in your kitchen while you lean white-veined against the rusty refrigerator, drowning in schmaltzy string arrangements.

So I had no one-only the Mexican migrants who offered cucumbers and water from the bossman's cooler and must have recognized in my desperate stride a fellow alien. The only person I got around to trading words with was the laconic, chain-smoking Deb-or so her name tag read-who worked at the market where I purchased my few provisions. It was a sticky-floored, dirty-ceilinged store which Fran had favored over the chain grocery because after the dogwoods bloomed Deb and her coworkers would take out the magazines in aisle seven and stock it with chilis and tortillas and even Spanish videos for the migrants.

One night I drove over to pick up my stock groceries: Band-Aids, ginger ale, Saltines, bulk raisins, chicken broth, and white rice. I could live off this list for weeks at a time. And had been doing so, and the pounds sweated away in the eighteen-mile runs, and there weren’t that many to leave puddling the road in the first place and so many times in the days after she left I would not have been able to tell you the correct use for, never even mind the name of, a fork.

“Give me one of those Pick Ten tickets,” I said when I had my groceries all lined up on the belt. Deb wasn’t there that night. In her place was a high-school boy. His head was chubby and dripping with red-blond lanks. Used to be, in a town like this you got beat up for wearing your hair long. Now the ones doing the beating are the only ones with their ears covered.

“You don’t want one of them,” said the boy.

So maybe he said want when he meant need-a mistake so many make. I had never been expert at figuring out what I needed until Fran left. Then I knew: I needed her. I needed her groaning first thing in the morning when I set the alarm to the local gospel station and our day began with a mass choir filling even the shoe-strewn closet bottoms with sonic interpretations of the word Jesus. Her tireless interest in the narrative of how we happened to find each other-that miracle recounted, with much attention paid to the extraordinary odds of it happening in this maddeningly flat world-how could I not need that? Each time she asked for it I felt as if I were narrating Genesis. How humans came sweet and innocent up from the earth. I believed I breathed and ate and performed reasonably well at one activity or the other before we met, but in telling that story over and again, in having it received with such lusty anticipation, I came to believe that my life started the moment I met her, the moment we laid waste to those insurmountable odds.

Odds are terrifying if you let yourself obsess over them. In the case of the Pick Ten lottery, I was not interested in the odds. It was a spontaneous thing, asking the cashier for a ticket. I had never once wasted money on such. But I did not care for being refused. I especially disliked being rejected by this boy whose sullen mannerisms implied that the wonder I had known with Fran was nothing more than some sappy song he’d scowl at while scanning radio stations. I believe I did nothing more than push his doughy chest with my fingers. I remember still the squishiness I encountered where I was expecting breastbone. Surely I was as shocked as he was.

“Hole up,” he said. Then: “Dude, what the hell?”

I held out a bill-a twenty, for which he made loud change. He was talking all the while, nervous jumble of words, “What the hell man I was just trying to help…”

Out in the parking lot I was afflicted by my own nervous jumble of words. “Oh, help, right, you were trying to help.” Now I am squatting beside my car in a dark, rain-steamy parking lot, tapping my forehead against the front quarter panel of the old rusty Nissan we bought together, repeating with the zeal of the clock-radio choir these words: I cannot do this can’t do it don’t want to do this without you.

I don’t know for how long: until my nose smashed against the metal and my face went funny-bone numb and I was dropped in a dusty dodge-ball field back of my grade school, lying in the infield inhaling the rubber of the ball that hit me and repeating that strange-to-me-then word I remembered seeing printed across the ball. Voit. Voit.

“What’d he say?” The voice was nasally but curious. Another voice answered, lower but seemingly female and black.

“Boat? Damn if I know.”

“He can’t do it without his boat,” said the nasal-voiced man. “Now what do you think he can’t accomplish without his boat?”

“Voit,” I said-indignantly-and was answered this time with a rib kick. I hit the pavement then. To feign what? Fear? Death? There was nothing left for me to fake. I knew then that since she left I’d faked everything. Or maybe the opposite was true; maybe I did not know emotion until it up and crawled in bed with me right along the same time she up and crawled in bed with her Rick.

I only know I felt more alive, stretched out on the oil-slick pavement, grimacing against the rib-kicks, than I had since she left. When the kicks would slow or cease I would scream, “Voit!” and soon every bone was numb. My arms and legs stung with pavement scrapes. I smelled that smell-you know the one-the smell of earliest physical pain. Hot rain laced with rust.

“Ain’t he about paid?” asked the black woman. Her low, hacking voice concealed a note of sympathy. I wanted to love her for it, but my ribs cried out for more kicks, as if someone had pulled the plug on a song to which I was dancing.

“Not from the sound of him,” said the leader. Obviously he knew need from want. But suddenly a new voice spoke up-“Y’all leave off him.” The cashier? Strange as it sounds, until then I had not made the connection. I wasn’t at all sure this was not something I wasn’t doing to myself, or that the weight of my desire had not provoked some miracle posse to torture me.

I opened my eyes-blinked up at the buggy aureole surrounding the yellow streetlight. The cashier stood above me smoking, but he seemed the least of my problems. The nasal-voiced man was dressed in coat and tie, a terrifying outfit for a man choreographing a beating. The black woman was neither: just a skinny shave-headed boy dressed, like me and the cashier, in shorts and T-shirt.

There was talk among them, profane and incomprehensible. I wasn’t listening. Fran kneeling beside me, ripping leeches from my skin. I protested hysterically. Fran swathing me in bandages, bedding down beside me in the grocery-store parking lot so slick with squashed lettuce leaves and spilt milk.

And then I passed into very familiar territory: boredom. I was exhausted, as I had often been in those days, by my inability to get over the hurt. I knew what I was going to feel before I felt it and it was stifling, sad, for what is death, finally, but not being able to even bring yourself to anticipate a surprise?

“Can I buy y’all dinner?” I said.

Once I heard a teacher say that a sure way to change things was to honor opposite impulses. See where they take you. At the time-I was an impressionable young student with pen poised and mind open-this advice seemed a simple answer to the most difficult question there is: how to get across the room. I wanted to live my life scathed but not bleeding. This was before Fran came and well before she went, ages before such advice on How to Change would have struck me, before I even heard it, as superficial fluff to sell magazines in a checkout line.

Crouched by my car, I remembered that I had never actually tried this tactic, intentionally at least. I was all the time doing things I didn’t want to do, and saying the opposite of what I felt, but that was to me the only possible way to live this life.

In the car the man in the tie introduced himself as Darren. The other one, of the shorn head and confusing voice, went unnamed. The clerk had long ago sighed and disappeared inside the market.

We drove along the river road toward Albemarle Sound. I never named a restaurant, for it did not feel as if we were stepping out for a bite. It felt more like they were driving me to their clubhouse, some cinder-block hut down in the swamp bottom, where they would torture me with country music of the black-hat Vegas variety and perhaps a little later, when the bottles grew light, a stun gun. Out the window I watched Bell Island, where the schoolkids once hijacked the ferry that brought them across the sound to school and rode around the inlet smoking dope until the Coast Guard escorted them back in. Bell Island kept pace with the sunken Olds and I imagined the inside of the clubhouse, the club colors draped over cinder block and flanked with porn centerfolds.

“You going to get along all right without your boat?” Darren said.

“V-O-I-T. Like a dodgeball?”

“What a dodgeball has to do with you breaking bad on my boy Kirk I ain’t even going ask.”

I started in on a meditation about memory, how we all lived in closets cluttered with primal objects of childhood. Rosebud. Fran, come home. In the middle of a sentence I stopped, for we all had stopped-the driver had coasted still in the middle of the road, Darren was half turned to watch me.

I said, to turn it back on them, “I think maybe what happened was that y’all hurt some part of my brain that stored, you know, old stuff like dodgeballs.”

“We ain’t hurt shit,” said the driver, stepping indignantly on the gas. “You were already fried when we got there.”

I fell back into the seat. What could I say? It seemed time to deliver myself to whatever course of action I had set in motion by pushing the cashier in his pliant chest. I thought of a Halloween carnival in grade school, being blindfolded and having my hand plunged into a vat of Jell-O standing in for crushed eyeballs. I believed I laughed a little to myself, a little leak of laughter like air out of a tire which cemented whatever opinion my companions had of me, for they talked in low, brooding voices and I could not even muster up the energy to eavesdrop.

We arrived finally at a restaurant I did not recognize. I knew only that we were headed south, and could feel from the elements, from the song of tree frogs and the lonesome whine of the tires on rough pavement, that we were headed toward the Sound. I spent the last few miles of the trip listening to the road-grimy trucker beg for his baby back. Outside it was deep-country black except for a buzzing streetlight leaning above a pier over the water, casting a thin sheen on the rippling shallows. The establishment-from the low, vinyl-sided looks of it, a modular-unit, short-order grill-was obviously closed for the night. Dry-docked trawlers listed precariously in the parking lot. The scene felt illicit, excitedly so, as if we’d come to score drugs or rob someone. I thought, fleetingly, that I had found something to take the place of my fiercely coddled misery, but was quickly sucked under by those insipid strings, which dragged me to the bottom of the black sound.

The driver had a key to the restaurant. Darren ordered him to bring us beers and fry up some shrimp burgers. He said to me, “What the hell do you eat?”

“Not much from the looks of him,” called the driver from a kitchen, lit only by the lights of freezers he was rooting around in.

“I’m on a diet,” I said. A diet with its own soundtrack. The heartbreak diet.

“The thing about diets is all these people starving to death and these rich fuckers on a damn diet.” This line sputtered out from the darkened kitchen.

“Your point?” Darren said to the shadows.

“Ones that can afford to eat lobster every night going around starving. Bet they ain’t sending the money they save over to Africa.”

The driver brought us beers. I left mine untouched. Darren said, “His point is a good one, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m not rich.”

“You’re just skinny and stupid.”

It seemed time to protest, to ask why we were here, alone in the south end of the county, where not only corpses but corpses still seat-belted into cars turned up in sullen lagoons. But instead I leaned forward and said, “I’m not real hungry.”

“Bring him some coleslaw,” said Darren. He squinted my way. “What's your problem?”

I said, “What do you mean?” though I knew exactly what he meant.

“Going off on Kirk for no reason, beating your head upside your car. Calling out for some damn dodgeball.”

“I guess I’m lonely,” I said. He widened his eyes, as if suddenly I had come into focus for him, and I added, “is all.”

“You ever had anyone die on you?” he asked, wincing slightly, as if it took great effort to send his words my way.

“Yes,” I lied. Maybe this was the worst lie I’d ever told-out of the dozens Fran knew about, the ones that passed undetected. She wasn’t dead; I was dead to her, maybe, but she lived and breathed and was, at that moment, getting on toward bedtime on a Wednesday night in late spring, no doubt moving against some Rick she met at a conference, and the thought of anyone else touching her in the places I’d discovered made me claim now all degrees of suffering as my own.

“You’re lying,” he said. The driver set a huge bowl of soupy coleslaw in front of me, a fresh beer for Darren. He laid out the place settings, lining up the fork and knife with a prissiness that amused me, given our surroundings.

“He's definitely lying,” the driver said, his words lingering as he disappeared back into the kitchen.

From the kitchen came the hiss of frozen meat dropped into a fryer. I tried hard to summon my song, those strings that had driven me out of the house and into the arms of fate; I tried to focus on the trucker's lament, but the tree frogs, the sibilance of fried meat, the buzz of the streetlights kept my song away.

“You think it's all up to you, don’t you?” said Darren.

I thought he wasn’t who he said he was. I thought Fran had sent him, or maybe the pathetic trucker wailing away the hours as he tried to scrub away his sins. My comrade in want, sending his messenger to set me straight. I thought Darren was not real and I asked him just who he was to the cashier. Friend? I said. Second cousin?

He looked through me and repeated: “Up to you, huh?”

I shrugged, mindful of what my shrug suggested: that the weight of the world was not upon me.

Darren shook his head, burped, pushed his chair back, summoned his driver, who had been eating back in the kitchen, as if he knew his place in the world.

“Get the bag out of the trunk,” said Darren. To me he said, “Let's get.”

I rose and followed, queasy from the coleslaw. I was thirsty, too, and exhausted, yet I felt oddly settled. Docility was the answer? I could have apprenticed myself to the migrants, their crooked crew boss, had I only known.

I followed Darren along the pier to its rickety end. I looked to the waters edge, the black sucking sand, beach studded with cypress knees and beyond-a stretch of water poised deceptively as earth. I thought that whatever happened to me then had nothing to do with the slow boy filling in for Deb at the market and everything to do with the times that my vanity had come uncaged in some tavern, dancing with some strange thing, maneuvering her around the dance floor by her hipbones while Fran scrubbed kitchen tiles and tried not to think of that person she did not want to acknowledge I was capable of up and becoming.

“Take your clothes off,” said Darren. I did so without question because I was gone-off on that flight that took me frequently and far back in time: Yeah, but I always came home alone, I was saying to Fran, I never slept with any of them, just a little lip, some here-and-there tongue. Never once betrayed us like you did with him. She did not get to argue the meaning of the word betrayal. I did all the talking, and it took all the energy I would have expended on worrying about what I was being asked to do: take off my clothes for a man dressed like he was about to sell me some insurance.

Darren's driver arrived toting a gym bag from which he pulled a tangle of rope, some handcuffs, and greasy lengths of chain. He uncoiled the rope, surveyed my nakedness with scorn.

“I don’t relish getting wet over his bony ass,” he said to Darren.

“It doesn’t appear to be up to you,” I said.

This made Darren smile. But the driver, once he had me in the water and pushed hard against the piling at the end of the pier, wrenched the cuffs tight and lashed the ropes.

Above us Darren had fired up a cigar to ward off mosquitoes, but the smoke didn’t appear to be working; I heard him swear and slap himself. The driver bound me tighter to the splintery black piling, which smelled of creosote and rotting shellfish. Sound water lapped black and empty just above my shoulders.

“Wait for me in the car,” Darren told the driver, and when he was gone, he said, “You know, you brung this on yourself, chief. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t asked us to have supper with you.”

“No, actually it was the lottery ticket,” I said.

“Either way, you taking some crazy chances.”

I thought that this was a good thing, and almost said so, but I realized just before I spoke that I still did not know who Darren was, or what he planned to do with me. My situation seemed far worse, on the one hand, than it had just hours before, when I had left for the store. Yet there was this other hand. I could not say what it was. Nor was I even sure I wanted to know. Would it cure me, and would being cured mean that I would learn to live my life without loving her, wanting her?

There was a silence, then a puff of smoke arrived from above, seething through the space between the slats, clouding about my head.

“So she fucked you over, whoever she is. And now you get to go around feeling righteous, starving yourself, and beating up on grocery-store clerks?”

I had an answer to this, but he didn’t leave enough space.

“You know something about love, chief?” he said through the smoke. “It makes you scared of every damn thing, you all the time worrying about whether she's going to come back from the store or was I good enough and does her daddy like me and on and on. And at the same time it makes you feel free. That's what it does when it's really cooking, right?”

I waited for a puff of cigar smoke, but there was nothing, only mosquitoes feasting on my cheekbones, my bound hands straining against the rope.

“You saying you didn’t feel nothing like that?”

“I did.” I do, I thought to say, but I didn’t want to give Darren any more ammunition than he could divine by looking at me. He was picking up a lot just looking, and it unnerved me, the way he recognized himself in me, the way he described to the letter the way it felt to love Fran. I did feel scared the whole time I was with her, and yet I felt as free as I’d ever felt. But maybe I was loving her all wrong. Maybe what Darren had described was not love but some kind of copycat ailment with the same symptoms.

“Hell, man, why would you want to feel that way?” Darren said. “Far better to be cooped up in your own head than having to go around scared all the time.”

“Who the hell are you anyway?”

“Me? I’m that boy you broke bad on's uncle. I came down expecting excitement, I guess. Find you banging your head on a car and I know this motherfucker needs to be put out of his misery.”

“That's what this is?”

“This is whatever you want it to be.”

“I don’t think my desire is being considered here,” I said. In answer there came a snort, then footsteps tapping away up the pier. I might have called out, but not to Darren or his driver. Fran. Voit. My trucker, oddly quiet now, as if he’d found some end to his suffering, seen through the loneliness and longing to some sweet levitation.

In time I realized the water was creeping up my neck. I thought of what I knew of tides: They were controlled by the moon, and the moon this night was a pasty scythe's blade floating above a line of loblollies, and seemed too sickly to perform such a feat.

Sometime in the night I began the story of How We Met, and it began at the beginning, and wound its way around facts as stock and familiar as the items I purchased weekly from the market, until the moon moved lower toward the water and a hazy light appeared in the sky.

Watching the sky, water lapping at my chin, I remembered hearing how they’d discovered that the earth was round: A boat had sailed out to the horizon, kept on moving, out of sight, over the earth's curve. Inching my way up the barnacled piling, I saw how they could get behind such an idea.