Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (36 page)

Hey, jellybutt, S. Clay
calls to Jim, you fetid son of a homely whore, why don’t you stick
your thumb up your jellybutt and bark for us? Hey, get a load of
Lindsay! Lindsay’s got a pair of tits that won’t fucking quit! Come
here to Daddy, you big-boobed babe, you, S. Clay calls out to
Lindsay, who vows to herself on the spot to befriend and defend S.
Clay Wilson from this day forward to all those multitudes of
people who claim he is probably the world’s greatest walking
talking asshole.

I dig your haunting perfume,
is what Lindsay overhears Jim say to Mary Mississippi once when he
swings her near.

Bald Boy

1

Ralph Crawford’s house could
have been a ship afire as usual, for all the lights blazing from it
as he pulled into the driveway. After Ralph had suddenly felt
compelled to heave his outrageously expensive dinner into the
toilet, he had searched the restaurant high and low for Alice Ann,
who had clearly bolted, but without the car. Who knew where she had
run off to or how. Who cared. Maybe she had gotten a ride home
somehow.

Ralph kicked his way though
the cats lurking in the kitchen. He snapped off light after light
as he made his way back through the house to the bedroom, where in
his most secret inner sanctum he had a little something stashed
for snakebite. At the closed bedroom door Ralph stopped abruptly,
frozen to the spot, his hand on the knob. He placed his ear against
the door. There was no mistake about it. Ralph could hear low
voices, whispery voices, coming from behind that closed door, and
low laughter, too, coming from his and Alice Ann’s bedroom. Ralph
backed away slowly, quietly, down the hallway.

In the living room Ralph sat
down heavily on the couch. He reached up and turned off the lamp,
and then sat there in the dark. His hands shook as he lit a
cigarette. Ralph sat there in the dark and tried every trick he
knew to quiet his runaway heart. He thought about those whispery
voices and the low laughter back in the bedroom and his mind
buckled, filled with a swarm of unthinkable images. Ralph shook his
head violently, tried to create other possibilities, other
conclusions. But Ralph knew the worst. Had he called Alice Ann
Lindsay! Had he been that dumb? But he thought about her all the
time, Lindsay, every waking moment. So maybe he had been that dumb,
called Alice Ann Lindsay and brought this terrible turn of events
down on his own dumb head. He knew what Alice Ann was capable of,
like bringing some tattooed low-rent biker home to fuck in their
bed. His mind roared with that terrible knowing.

Was this rock bottom, then?
Had he and Alice Ann finally sunk to it? Had all their yesterdays
together, all those yesterdays with their incomprehensible yet
relentless logic, added up to this sorry state of affairs? Ralph
reached up and turned the lamp back on. He blinked in the sudden
light and his eyes teared. Ralph let the tears come. He sat there,
his purple face and nose in his hands, and shook with sobs. He
could feel his purple nose running into his hands, and he could
taste his own snot and tears. He gently pressed one painful purple
nostril and then the other, exhaling violently, blowing gobs of
snot onto the new carpet at his feet, then he ground them in with
the soles of his shoes. Ralph picked up a copy of his book on the
coffee table and studied his picture on the back. He turned the
book over in his hands, examining the bite marks. He opened the
book to the dedication page and ripped it out. He crumpled the page
in his fist and tossed it into the fireplace. Ralph threw his book
into the fireplace.

Ralph got up stiffly and
walked over to the fireplace, where he picked up a cast-iron poker.
He tested its heft. He smacked it lightly into the palm of his good
hand. Back in the hallway outside the bedroom, Ralph put his ear
against the door. The sound of voices rose suddenly, followed by
laughter, and Ralph thought that he had never heard anything so
frightening in his life. His heart was jumping as if he had been
running up a hill. His legs were ropes of water. He remembered how
as a boy, when his dad took him hunting, how he would consciously
will himself cold and unrelenting, heartless, every nerve alert,
ready to pull the trigger on anything that moved, or not, ready to
kill anything, or not. Ralph lifted the cast-iron poker above his
head and turned the doorknob slowly.

2

The radio had been a
Christmas gift from somebody sometime somewhere. Ralph had never
liked the thing. It had never worked worth a damn from day one.
That radio was no friend of Ralph’s. It had brought no comfort into
his life. Its sound rose and fell randomly, its tuner roamed all
over the face of the dial like it had a mind of its own, stations
cross-fading crazily with other stations amid screams of static;
its alarm went off when it felt like it. The news that radio had
brought into Ralph’s life was news he didn’t need, news of
airplanes dropping from the sky, families burned up in unexplained
fires, mass murderers on the prowl, news that seeped into his
sleeping brain as he turned in the current of his already dark
dreams and left him at daybreak full of an abiding dread. Sudden
loud laughter from that radio gave him a start; then a voice rose
and faded away, and Ralph was left with an inexplicable but
profound sense of loss, as though he had just heard his dead dad’s
voice again for the last time. Ralph felt on the verge of sobs
again. Ralph smashed the radio with the cast-iron poker, swinging
it like a ball bat. Ralph was the sultan of swat, the Babe Ruth of
serious radio bashing, as he sent blinking, spluttering parts of
that radio over the fence.

Next Ralph attacked that
pyramid contraption Alice Ann had for some unfathomable reason
erected above their bed. He bent the thin hollow metal tubing of
its frame and then bashed the whole shebang onto the floor and
stomped it flat. Ralph beat the abandoned, unmade bed until he was
breathless, dizzy, and coughing. He flopped down on the edge of the
ruined bed, then sat there panting. Ralph felt as though a huge,
cold hand was squeezing his heart. He lit a cigarette with his
shaking hands. He lay back on the tangled, yellowing sheets and
pillows that smelled of their scents, his, Alice Ann's. Maybe if he
simply closed his eyes and let himself drift off, he might get
lucky and not wake up in this world. Had it been a mistake when
Ralph, once upon a time, married the darling, clear-eyed girl he
loved. Had it been wrong for Alice Ann to marry the hopeful,
ambitious boy she loved? Had his and Alice Ann’s days been numbered
from the beginning? How long could he and Alice Ann go on telling
themselves they could still turn out to be the people they had
started out believing they would become? The thought occurred to
Ralph that we are all identified finally by what we do to other
people, and that betrayal is simply another word for loss. He put
those thoughts out of his mind in a heartbeat. Ralph felt as though
somebody had rearranged his organs and his heart was thumping from
somewhere down in his stomach. Suddenly Ralph had the notion that
he was a man without a true human interior, that his soul had no
inner landscape upon which to move.

Ralph got up and hurried to
the closet. As Ralph pushed his way back through the hangers, he
was amazed how just the scent of Alice Ann’s clothes gave him a
little chubby. He got down on his knees at the entrance to the
narrow tunnel he had constructed between the piled boxes of old
Christmas decorations, ruined toys, torn teddy bears, tattered,
outgrown baby clothes Alice Ann steadfastly refused to discard on
the faint chance they might be needed again in this family. On his
hands and knees Ralph crawled deeper and deeper into the starved
closeness of the closet’s darkness, as though he were descending
into the midnight recesses of some Kentucky cave. Ralph felt his
eyes grow large and lustrous. He imagined he could hear the sound
of dripping water and smell a damp, earthy odor not unlike
mushrooms growing rampant and huge in the dark, an aroma that put
him strangely in mind of sex, whereupon he entertained another
little chubby. But Ralph pressed forward, and after a time the
darkness began to feel accommodating and safe and even sweet, and
the memory of the outer world of light began to fade away like some
dim dream from childhood, and Ralph imagined that he was slipping
through some strange ring into another realm. At last Ralph arrived
at that tiny, hushed clearing at the closet’s deepest part. He
could not see a thing in the pitch black, but sight was not
necessary now. Ralph opened that old battered trunk handed down to
him from his dad and ran his hands over the hidden
treasures.

As always Ralph sniffed at
that old shirt of his dad’s, rubbed it over his face, imagining
that he could still inhale that faintly sour, smoky smell he had
loved. He touched the old tackle box that held those elaborate
lures his dad had spent the happiest hours of his life fashioning,
sitting at the kitchen table night after night, sipping whiskey or
beer, tying flies and talking of secret hot spots for fishing that
only he and his boy knew about. Ralph picked up the pearl-handled
pocketknife with the bottle opener and closed his fist about that
precious item. Ralph pictured his dad’s hands whittling with that
old knife, carving, cleaning nails, popping open beers, gutting
fish in the grass of riverbanks, those big hands silvery with
scales, fingers stained with the dark blood.

Ralph’s dad used to take him
fishing all the rime, even in winter. His dad fished for whitefish
mostly, using a belly reel, and pencil-length sinkers and red,
yellow, or brown flies baited with maggots, which his dad used to
keep alive and warm under his lower lip. This was the only thing
about his dad that ever made Ralph’s skin crawl. Ralph had quit
letting his dad kiss him good night because of the thought of those
godawful maggots, which his dad had misunderstood. His dad had
thought it was somehow cute, that Ralph was trying to act too
grown-up to kiss his old dad good night.

Ralph had always imagined he
would teach his own son to fish, that he would show his boy all the
secret hot spots to fish his dad had shown him back home up in
Oregon, teach his boy all the tricks about fishing his own dad had
taught him with patience and exactness and love. Ralph had taken
his own boy fishing just once. Back before things had grown so bad
between them, back when the boy was about four, Ralph figured. All
the boy had wanted to do was throw rocks into the river. The boy
had had his little heart set on bashing some fish. Now Ralph
wouldn’t be able to find any of those old fishing hot spots back
home if his life depended on it.

What Ralph wished the most
was that he had never stopped kissing his dad good night. What
Ralph wished was that he had turned out to be more like his dad,
for all his dad’s faults. Even though his dad had died a drunk.
Ralph was going to quit drinking himself. He meant it this time.
Just as soon as he and his dad polished off the last of that bottle
of ancient Scotch Ralph had paid an arm and a leg for and kept
stashed in the secret inner sanctum. And what Ralph and his dad
could use right now was a little bracer. Whenever he and his dad
were hoisting a few together there deep in the inner sanctum and
talking rainbows, Ralph would take one drink for himself and one
for his dad. Tonight Ralph planned for them to kill that half-full
bottle of ancient Scotch and then that would be it for Ralph. His
drinking days would be behind him. Ralph rummaged through the old
trunk. He ran his hands along the sides and across the bottom and
into the corners. Ralph emptied that old trunk in a New York
minute, tossing his dad’s treasures over his shoulders into the
darkness. But there was no bottle of ancient Scotch to be found.
That hooch was history.

So it had finally come to
pass. The little devils had finally found and violated Ralph’s last
secret place. Ralph closed his eyes and simply sat there listening
to his own breath. He had nowhere left now. He could never escape
the surface of his life. Ralph felt around on the dark floor for
his dad’s treasures, and one by one placed them back in the old
trunk. He came upon the precious pearl-handled pocketknife with a
bottle opener. Ralph opened it and rubbed its dull old blade over
his wrists. Ralph ran the blade slowly up and down his pant leg, as
though cleaning it, imagining his own hands silvery with scales,
his own fingers smoky with blood.

Ralph had come to truly
believe in the existence of evil, and he believed that evil lurked
about the edges of our world waiting for the least opening to
squeeze through, like a rat. Not long before these events, Ralph
had let Alice Ann drag him to a movie called The Omen, in which
Gregory Peck and Lee Remick played a handsome, highly successful
couple who had, because of either pure bad blind luck or an evil
contrivance of fate, ended up raising a child they had thought was
their own flesh and blood but who was in reality the Son of Satan
loosed into this world to fulfill his biblical destiny as the
Antichrist. After much bloody mayhem and murder, the movie drew to
its climax with a wounded Gregory Peck dragging the screaming,
struggling boy toward a church altar in the dead of night in order
to ritually stab him to death and thus save the world from dark
dominion. Ralph had sat in the dark theater finishing up the last
of his buttered popcorn and watching this desperate act unfold with
a profound sense of appreciation.