Dirty Work (2 page)

No wonder she wants to die. If all I had to watch was a soap opera or a rerun of “Dallas,” I’d be ready to die, too.

Whoever was watching the TV wasn’t watching anything good, wherever I was. They were probably watching me. And the first thing I had to do was figure out if I was still strapped down without making it obvious that I was awake.

I decided to do it like there were five brain surgeons watching me. I twitched a little. Gave them a little tremor with my hands there. They could pass that off as a nightmare. They could say He’s having a nightmare, man. Look at his REM.

I didn’t feel any straps.

Lying there like that, trying to fool them if they were there, it reminded me of the second week at Parris Island, and what one guy did to get out of it. He just didn’t get up one morning. He just stayed in his rack with his eyes closed and didn’t respond when they turned the lights on
and started throwing the shitcans around and slobbering like a bunch of mad dogs. He just laid there. On the top rack. He didn’t move a muscle when the drill instructor walked over to him and put his mouth right next to his ear and said Well, loved one. Did you not get enough rest last night? Nobody else said anything. We never said anything where they could hear it. We heard every word he said.

We wish you’d get up with us and go eat some breakfast.

We can just go on ahead and let you arrive at your convenience.

Or should we just send you a tray and let you dine in bed?

Would that be all right with you, loved one?

What did that guy feel when he was lying there that morning, with the lights on bright, with that DI talking in his ear, with his eyes locked shut, and the whole platoon listening? Knowing they were going to take him away, and that he’d never see any of us again?

There weren’t any straps on my hands. I swelled my chest as much as I could. No bullshit bullhide on it either.

I don’t know what he felt. But he stayed locked like that until two corpsmen came and lifted him out of the rack like a board and put him on a stretcher and strapped him down and wheeled him out the door. He never once moved or opened his eyes. We never saw him again. They probably sent him home with a dishonorable discharge. But that was a long time ago. Damn near twenty years. A man could overcome something like that in twenty years.

Maybe that guy was smarter than me. But I don’t like to think about smart along with honor and duty and all that shit, so I quit. You either serve or you don’t. I was pretty sure I wasn’t strapped down. But I wasn’t ready to open my eyes. I wanted to keep them closed and think about Beth. What I wanted was to hear her come to my bed and feel her put her hands on me.

But they couldn’t talk to me and tell me what had happened if I was asleep. So I opened my eyes. That was my first mistake.

K
nowed he wasn’t asleep. Seen his hands twitch. He was laying there listening to everything, trying to figure out where he was. This was the dude that had fucked up them guys down on the third floor the night before. Diva’d done told me about that. And he was big enough to. I started to say something to him then. But I wanted to see how long he’d wait. Wanted to see how much patience he had. Wanted to see how smart he was. Made me grin, just looking at him. Didn’t even want to go nowhere then. Had something to entertain me then, instead of that television they leave on all day and night, talking about they detergent and
douche
bags and I don’t
know what all else. Damn old Rex now, he been eating this here dog food for twenty-seven years, he done lost all his teeth and having to gum it, but that’s a hundred and ninety-two for you and me. Shit. Make me sick hearing all that old crap. Try to sell you anything, night and day. If they ain’t wiping some baby’s ass, they cleaning out they commodes or waxing floors or trying to sell you a new TV so you can watch some more of they shit. Want you to buy a Slim Whitman album. Why don’t they sell the Temptations, or Jackie Wilson? Hell, why don’t they sell some Otis Redding?

He kept on laying there like he was asleep. Didn’t want nobody to know he was awake. I knowed, I could tell. Seen every kind of man they is come in here. Seen every thing that can go wrong with them, too. Just a junk pile, this place. Stick you in here when they can’t do nothing else with you. When nobody else don’t want you, when your family don’t want you, when your mama gone and it ain’t nobody else.

This dude didn’t fit. Except for his face he was a puzzle to me. Whole world’s a puzzle to me, though. Why it’s got to be the way it is. I don’t think the Lord meant for it to be like this originally. I think things just got out of hand.

H
e was a bro and he was looking at me. Studying me when I opened my eyes. Like he’d been watching me for a long time just to see how long it would take. Somehow, his eyes smiled. But I had to suck in a big breath when I saw the rest of him.

He didn’t have any arms or legs, just nubs. Just like
johnny got his gun.

He winked at me, long and slow. Said Hey main. What’s happening? I just shook my head. I didn’t know what was happening. Or what had happened. I felt kind of dizzy, and when I tried to raise up, my head felt like it was spinning.
I felt like I didn’t have any control over my head. So I eased back down on the pillow.

They’d shot me with some kind of shit, evidently, something that would keep me calm and make me be a good boy. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been a good boy already. I wondered if I’d fucked up. I probably had. I do that pretty frequently. Usually about every day. It’s how I get by.

I knew I’d just have to lie there until the shit wore off, whatever it was. It wasn’t a bad drug. It was sort of nicely numbing. I looked at the guy again. He had his head turned, watching me. He had a very gentle gaze. Not hostile at all. I asked him reckon what kind of shit they had shot me with and he said probably cat tranquilizer. I thought about it for a second, then told him I bet it would really make your old pussy purr. He got to grinning, and then I got to grinning, too. I felt kind of loopy and loose. But I also wondered how he could be in such good spirits. Finally he said he was just kidding me, but they had given me something to cool me out, no shit. I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said I’d been a bad boy and didn’t want to go along with the program.

I laid there a minute and wondered what I’d done. I didn’t know if I wanted to find out or not. So I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask that, anyway. I asked a real beauty. Asked him how long he’d been like that.

He said twenty-two years.

I closed my eyes. I tried not to concentrate on him. I tried to concentrate on myself, on my situation, and I tried
to remember all the things all the doctors had said. What if the scar tissue in my head did cause seizures? How did they know I couldn’t live with it for the rest of my life? Haven’t people beat cancer? Survived massive heart attacks, and lived through terrible plane crashes? Sure they have. And they’ll do it again, too. Just because you get a death sentence, it doesn’t mean you have to die. It all depends on the individual person. Everybody’s not made alike. Some people can live through what others can’t.

I was scared. You wake up in a place like this, a place you’ve been trying to avoid for years, and you don’t know what’s happened, or why you’re there … it’s frightening. And alone. That’s the main thing. Alone.

Finally I opened my eyes and looked at him. I told him my name was Walter and that I was from Mississippi. He shook his head and grinned, said his name was Braiden Chaney and that he was from Clarksdale. Said he’d chopped a lot of cotton down at Clarksdale. And he apologized for not being able to shake hands with me.

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I just looked at what was left of him. I couldn’t quit looking at those four black nubs. His head was peeled slick as an egg. He was kind of like a large baby laid up there on a sheet. But he wasn’t a baby. He was about forty-something years old.

I knew I shouldn’t get started talking to him. I didn’t want to get started talking to anybody. All I wanted was to get back home, away from here. Which here I knew by then was a VA hospital somewhere in the South, probably.

But I knew I had to talk to him. There wasn’t any way
to keep from it. I told him I lived at London Hill, and that we used to raise cotton on our place a long time ago. Told him I was an old cottonpicking cottonchopper myself, but that not too many people were growing it now.

He nodded and agreed with me. Said everybody he knew was growing that green stuff now. Said that old shit. Said man there was more money in that old shit than a man could shake a stick at. He said he had some friends, and then his eyes went to moving around in his head. He lowered his voice and said he’d give me something but that we had to wait for dark.

I didn’t know if he was serious or not. I asked him did he mean wacky tobaccy. Left-handed cigarettes. Boo-shit-tea.

That will make you slap your pappy down, he said. He was grinning like a fiend by then. But it looked like he only had about six or seven teeth scattered around in his mouth. From somebody else having to brush his teeth for him, I figured.

We didn’t talk for a while after that. I knew one thing would lead to another. It always does. I wondered what could have eaten him up like that, but I knew. A machine gun, or a mine. Or hell, maybe a claymore. Maybe even one of our own claymores. They loved to slip up on sleeping lookouts and take some white paint and paint the side that said
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
white and turn it around and wake the lookouts up, so they’d pull the string and shoot themselves in the face with about three pounds of buckshot.

But I didn’t want to talk about that. Or rockets, or machine guns, or fragmentation grenades, or exploding beer cans. Those were the last things in the world I wanted to talk about. I just stayed there and didn’t say anything for a while. But he never stopped watching me.

M
y man didn’t want to talk, I understood that. It was cool. Inside he was probably shaking like a cat shitting peach pits. Hell, come in here, wake up like a duck in a different world quacking. Don’t know nobody. I don’t think he even knowed his face was all clawed up. Somebody with some fingernails had laid into him. What it looked like. And they had probably give him so much dope since he was so big his mind wasn’t right yet. So I knew to lay back, just have patience.

Old patience hard after this long, though. Old patience done flew out the window after this long. Lay in here and
lay in here and lay in here. Have to watch all that pussy on TV. Miss America. “Days Of Our Lives.”

Oh Lance, won’t you please come over here and sniff of my magnificent breasts?

Oh Lance, I believe you is bringing me to the brink of a tremendous organism. Yes. Oh, Lance, dolling, oh, oh, oh no don’t put the
root
to me!

Get you some this here love bone.

Wait a minute now, Lance!

You know you been asking for it.

Lance, you get that thing away from me now, that’s a
weapon.
Let’s talk this thing over.

Shoot. Don’t need that. Takes too long just thinking about it. I need to invent me something like a radio show. Go on broadcast every night. Be on FM and be a voice in the little blue lights. Be nice to do something for kids. Have some late show they could stay up and listen to. Have pajamas on and stuff. Cowboy hats. I’da loved to had me some kids. Little old naked babies you could wash in the tub and stuff. Make you so happy you wouldn’t know what to do. Little black asses running around all over the
house. Wonder if the Lord made the black man at midnight. We know You love us. We love You, too. I mean, six, seven thousand years from now … won’t make no difference, will it? Everybody gonna be so mixed up by then that far in the future that they all gonna be the same color by then, ain’t they? Whyn’t You set me down here five or six thousand years later? They won’t even have no damn guns by then probably. And I could move on me some one-sixteenth Polynesian milkmaid from Hamburg with a uncle in New York whose brother was a Jewish guy. Naw, I know, can’t do it. Got to keep us all separated. But how come they ain’t a word in black language for them bad as they word in white language for us? Why didn’t we think us up a bunch of good words instead of picking all their damn cotton? We wasted about two hundred years picking fucking cotton.

I know. I’m a sinner. I have lustuous thoughts every day. Cause they show it on TV. Bob Barker’s got them girls on the tube all the time. Who is that … that Janet Pennerton? Naw, that other one. That poody woody one. She is so fine. One of em done had a baby now she don’t look as fine. What’d I do with that
National Enquirer
that had that picture of her in it? I never did finish reading that story about that little space-boy come in them people’s window had them two little space-puppydogs with helmets on sticking out his butthole anyway. Hell they done got it over there. All the way across the room. I guess the damn nurses been reading it. Well shit. Muse yo self. Spect yo self. Wawa wawa wa.

All right, motherfucker, where’s the damn Percy Sledge album? Getting tired of this shit. Y’all gonna give away
two million dollars
or you gonna show the damn movie? Why hell I done seen that one three times. That’s the guy that gets all them kids in that boat and then rows em all the way across the Pacific Ocean with two stale crackers to eat the whole way over there. I don’t want to see that shit no more. That’s bad as that one the other night where this guy had this rare disease, one of them rare disease movies. Why don’t y’all put something good on? Have to watch some old fat-ass white lady trying to win her a car or something. Trip to Mexico. Won’t put on nobody good like Humphrey Bogart rolling them little steel balls around in his hand. Old Humphrey could get the damn women. Had them women crawling all over him. He was so swab and debonair with them women. I liked the one where he was pulling old Katherine Hepburn around in that boat and got them leeches on him and got the heebie-jeebies every time she pulled one off. They don’t make movies like that no more. If you dumbass Casual Company rejects over there had any culture you’d turn it over there on some National Geographic stuff or something educational. Naw I’m a trump I’m a spade naw you broke the widder what is all that shit about anyway. Play poker like y’all some hot-shit gamblers till it drives me up the wall and bet damn nickels. Bring it over here sometime if you want to gamble. I maybe can’t deal but by God I can play if somebody’d hold the cards for me. I got the money. Naw. Y’all can’t communicate with me.
Y’all ain’t stuck in here. Y’all just got to come in here in the daytime and make a bunch of noise and fuck up my movie watching. Y’all done just smoked too much dope or wrecked your car cause of some dope dependency from some dope habit you picked up overseas and ain’t never come down yet. Ain’t never smoked no dope cause you had to. You just don’t know what it is. Fear. Help you get you some heightened awareness. You know your ass can be blowed off any second, you choose the heightened
perception.
When that trip wire’s like a hair, and you on your knees, and everybody behind you trying to be silent and black and invisible, and they don’t take a step till
you
say that next six inches is clear.…