Big Jack Is Dead (3 page)

The smell of burning plastic crossed the room, cloying and unpleasant. She closed her eyes, holding the baggy and smoldering cigarette in place, repeating the process several times. The tip of the cigarette made twisting, expanding holes in the baggy. Finally, her hands fell, the bag slipping to the ground like a parachute shredded by hot shrapnel. She opened her eyes and smiled, groggy but happy.

“Come here, little Jack,” she said. “Come here, my baby.”

He crossed the room and continued walking until he collided with her body. Ramona rocked gently, settling back against the counter. Draping one hand over his shoulder, she lifted the other to her face, taking a drag on her cigarette. Ruffling his hair with a leaden motion, she exhaled smoke down around him, the soft cloud settling over him like goose feathers after a pillow fight.

Jack closed his eyes and buried his face against her belly where it was starting to swell with his little brother Brodie.

Chapter 2

1999

The last night of the conference, one of many for work, at a sidewalk restaurant with people I met earlier in the day. Sitting at the end of the table, eating and listening, knowing I would never see any of them again. The light in the sky falling through shades of blue, deepening toward the black eye of the trout lying dead on my plate, staring up at me.

A Tuscan place in a neighborhood where all the businesses are called firms. Indigo clouds, shot with five more minutes of silver. Watching the last pigeon of the day as it waddles between the tables, hustling for scraps. Everyone goes quiet when it hops up onto an empty deck chair in a portly act of athleticism. Laughter and another sip of mineral water.

After dinner, I walked several blocks to my car, the wind pushing bits of paper past me along the empty street. Dark trees punctuated the sidewalks in perfect rows, a circle of cobblestones around each tree. At a deserted intersection, the air was alive with the shrieking of birds. They dominated a tree near the corner, a screeching mob. I couldn't see anything within the leaves, but the sound was unrelenting, juggling bodies throwing themselves at one another through the branches. A dark shape flitted up out of the foliage into the night sky. Another dropped from the darkness overhead and was lost in the leaves.

Halfway across the intersection, I noticed the man on the park bench. He looked homeless, around fifty, though it was hard to tell. Mouth slack, eyes half-closed, body slouched back on the bench. A steady rain of bird shit fell down on him from the limbs overhead.

How do people end up being such disasters?

I stopped in the street, afraid, but wondering if I should do something.
I imagined him looking up quickly, lurching to his feet, running at me.
He stared ahead without moving. White clots fell down from the leaves,
plipping
from his shoulders into his lap, smearing as they streaked his jacket and got lost in his wiry hair and beard. Some of the shit hit his face, forcing him to blink, but otherwise he made no effort to move. The birds continued with their shrill cries and hidden movements.

Before looking away, I was struck by something. It took me a minute to figure out that beneath the beard and the filth he resembled my father. Roughly Dad's age and height, there was also something else, something about his expression. Pressing my lips together, I walked to the far sidewalk, heading to my car.

A couple of hours later I sat at a kitchen table with some friends. Jean and Micheline were putting me up during the conference. Micheline's sister, Clarisse, was also with us and another couple who were visiting from France.

I lifted my drink and rested the cool glass against my mouth, staring into the darkest corner of the room. In my thoughts, the birds still cackled and thrashed within the tree. I saw the homeless guy sitting on the bench and felt my stomach turn.

Conversations played out around me in broken English. Someone had thrown a lacy drop cloth down over the table, which was stained with the coffee, orange juice and cigarettes; years of familial tracks. Smoke churned in the air around us, slowly migrating toward an open window at one end of the room. Jean and Micheline had two kids who were sleeping in another part of the house. Earlier, I'd watched Micheline and Clarisse carry them off, lifting their little bodies from the couch and moving them slowly into the other room so as to avoid waking them. The kids slept through it, hair matted with sweat and limbs hanging limply.

Simon and Marie, the other couple, were smoking cigarettes. We'd gotten high earlier, but my buzz was gone. Partially-filled glasses of white wine and a few beer bottles stood clustered in the center of the table like a flooded city. I let out a sigh and rubbed at the scar cutting through my left brow...what a social worker once called “an act of adolescent curiosity, conspiring with adult negligence.”

I'd driven up the coast to speak at a conference in Point Reyes. It still seemed strange that people paid me to talk about
social apps for creating team culture
. In my view, people just did what they did. They were born somewhere, grew up and took shelter; they felt happy, sad or angry; they fought, fucked and in general tried to get what they needed. That was the end of the story, the only speech the world would ever need. But traveling put everything else on hold and the conferences took me to interesting places. Two years before, in Hamburg, I stayed in a hotel that was an industrial cathedral. Every square inch was white or glass. The building itself was a work of art and had won some modern architecture award. It was situated down the street from a modern design museum and adjacent to a harbor full of tankers that seemed like a miracle of engineering, cleanliness and efficiency compared to the shipyards on the Gulf Coast, where I was raised. A company put me up there for a week in exchange for a one hour speech and a couple of interviews with the local media. I'd never been so comfortable; everything was sleek and clean and quiet. Sometimes I thought about that place as a way to relax.  

Sitting at the table, I traded my attention between zoning out and studying Clarisse. She laughed a lot, leaning forward over the table every time she did, revealing the olive skin on her chest. She was attractive…fleshy, with cocoa eyes and lips that turned up in sharp corners.

“Are you sleepy?”  

I shook my head. “No, I'm good.”

“Li-ar.”

I smiled. “Okay, maybe.” We were talking quietly against the background noise of another conversation. Her English was good and it was impossible not to love her accent. Staying with Jean and Micheline, I'd been around Clarisse for several days, chatting, eating dinner and taking a couple of walks. Despite trying, we hadn't managed to get one another into bed. We came close once when the others went out and left us to watch their kids, who were something like four and five. Feeding them, Clarisse and I flirted and played around in the kitchen. Just as we started prepping for nap time, the younger child looked down at his plate, confused, and vomited all over the table. Before that instant, playing faux family was fun and we both seemed furtively aware that we would be fucking as quietly as possible while the children were napping. The vomit ruined all that.

The conversation at the table turned political and Jean and his friend Simon started to argue. Dull heat rose up through my chest, but I stayed quiet. Simon spoke in broken English for my benefit, ranting against some aspect of French government I didn't understand. Jean argued with him, sometimes lapsing into their native tongue.

While the two men were spitting at one another, I made eyes at Clarisse. Micheline and Marie looked bored. After a while, everyone fell quiet.

Clarisse's eyes darted to mine for an instant. “Uncomfortable silence is good compared to political bullshit.”

“Oui,” I said.

She laughed and everyone at the table relaxed.

Jean and Simon smoked and made small talk, giving themselves a break and trying to show that everything was all right. Simon rose after a while and drained his glass. He patted Jean on the back. After they said a few words to each other in French, Simon leaned close to me and shook my hand. He said goodbye in sing-song English and I couldn't help but notice that several of his teeth emerged at crazy planar angles. His breath struck me like the winds of Hell. I sat there, shaking his hand and smiling, but somehow his teeth brought back the smell of a rotting bird that I found under my house as a kid. My dad forced me to pick it up in my hand and carry it out to our garbage cans, which were wrapped in chicken wire to keep the raccoons and cats out.  

Simon nodded and let me go, as Marie kissed the others and started collecting her things from the table. My stomach rolled because I couldn't help but visualize her tongue sliding into Simon's fetid mouth, past his tragic teeth. Everyone said goodbye for a while and then Simon and Marie left. Clarisse and I sat looking at one another across the table while Jean and Micheline cleaned up. They gathered up a bunch of glasses and bottles, carrying them into the kitchen.

I looked down at a spot on the table, studying a stain for a second before looking up at Clarisse. She smiled at me, coyly. With the others out of the room, I stood up and reached across the table for her hand. She took mine in a way that was clumsy and intimate, reminding me of elephants linking trunks on some nature show. Near the open window at the end of the room, I sat on the wide sill, leaning back against the stained oak jamb. There were no sounds coming from the kitchen; the house was quiet. Pushing a potted plant into the corner of the window box, I made room for her and she sat down demurely, settling in opposite me and easing her shoulder against the other side of the window. We faced off in profile against the dark skyline beyond, with one of my legs drawn up.

I brushed the hair from her face. Her eyes and the tilt of her head told me that she approved. Leaning forward, we kissed softly in the light coming through the panes of filmy glass. Her mouth tasted like several good things at once…wine, lipstick and burnt flesh. We kissed harder and I closed my eyes while she probed the inside of my mouth blindly with her warm, wet tongue.

Chapter 3

1974

The alarm went off at 5AM on Christmas Eve. Big Jack lay comatose, unfazed by the buzzing. Ramona opened her eyes and blinked each one independently like some kind of white trash lizard. Sitting up slowly, she let the covers fall away from her nightgown and began shaking her husband in accordance with their morning ritual.

“Get up, Jack. You gotta go to work.” Her mouth was dry and sticky. She paused, slipping into a daze and drifting toward sleep even though she was sitting up. Her eyes snapped open in alarm and she shook her head to regain clarity. She spoke again, louder. “Jack…get up, honey. It's five.”

Big Jack groaned as Ramona continued to shake him. He cleared his throat and threw aside the covers, revealing his naked form. His arms and face had been sunburned a deep ruddy color, but the rest of his body was as pale as PVC pipe. He lay on his back with his belly flattened out like a vanilla pudding, rippling with his waking movements. Patches of very dark hair were scattered across his body. He sported a five-inch erection as hard as the tires on his truck and as pink as an eraser. Reaching down, he scratched his pubic mound.

It was still dark outside. The room was completely black because the windows were covered with aluminum foil. This allowed Big Jack to sleep through the day whenever he was pulling graveyard shifts at the plant. The window-mounted air conditioner kicked on, creating a lulling hum.

He reached over and took Ramona's wrist, pulling her toward him across his naked body. His eyes were still closed.

“Come on, Jack,” she said. “Go get in the shower. We ain't got no time for this.”

“It's Christmas Eve,” he said. He mumbled the words so badly that it took her a second to make them out. He maintained his grip on her wrist, tugging her closer. The rest of his body was slack and relaxed, but his grip was unbreakable.

Ramona resisted for one final minute then let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, all right, all right.” She pulled her panties down and climbed on top of him with an angry commotion. The old bed was battered to the point of dilapidation and rolled under them like a raft.

Big Jack still hadn't opened his eyes. Once she was astride his body, he probed upward with his erect penis, blindly, making adjustments with tiny thrusting motions. She reached down and inserted it roughly, then began to ride him. It took four or five minutes for Big Jack to climax and he nearly fell asleep a couple of times. Moaning once, he barely increased the intensity of his bucking. Head tilted backward, his mouth hung open. As soon as his orgasm subsided, he relaxed completely and drifted back into sleep.

Ramona rolled away from him wordlessly, stepping down onto the carpet and making her way to the bathroom. When she returned, she stood by the bed and shook Big Jack firmly. Her eyes burned in the darkness.

“Get up,” she said. She raised her voice. “
You're late for work.
”

His eyes jerked open and he sat up, fully awake. “Well, goddamn, woman…you want me to get fucking fired?” He looked up at her and shook his head violently to clear it. “What the fuck would you do then, huh?”

“I tried to wake you up at five, Jack. You're the one who wanted to do it.”

Ignoring her, Big Jack slid across the bed and made his way to the shower. “Make some coffee,” he said as he passed.

After showering, Big Jack dressed for work in less than five minutes. He wore the same jeans all week. They smelled like greased metal and were covered in industrial stains and burn marks. A thick welding shirt covered the t-shirt underneath. He owned half a dozen of the welding shirts. Each time one of them was too tattered to wear, Ramona went out and bought an identical replacement.

He sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking as he gazed out the window. There were enormous goggles on top of his head and his work boots sat on the tiled floor next to him. His socks were peppered with holes. The window opened onto a small gap between the houses, so Big Jack mostly stared at his neighbor's aluminum siding. “I wish Daddy hadn't sold that place,” he muttered.