The Obstacle Course (10 page)

There are plenty of times when I want to be with my old man, but this time was different. It was like I knew something was happening but I didn’t know what. Sometimes I get this feeling I can predict the future, like looking into a crystal ball or something, and then change it, which would be a good thing to be able to do, ’cause most of the time when I look into the future it doesn’t look all that good, to be honest about it.

I was going in. I never had before, but this time I was going to. I counted backwards from thirty, then I did it again, then I counted ten cars going from Ravensburg to Hyattsville, then five people coming out of the bar.

The Dixie is your typical small-town rum mill. Not that I’ve been in that many, actually I’ve never been in a real bar, I’ve been in plenty of restaurants that serve booze but I’ve never been in a bar that specializes in it, but it looked like what a typical bar would look like, you don’t have to spend your life in them to know what they’re like. There was an empty bandstand set low on one end with an old drum kit sitting up on it, a space in front of it for dancing, tables and booths for eating and drinking, mostly drinking. The bar was against one wall. It had a bunch of dumb slogans on the mirror behind it. The two waitresses were dressed the same, wore their hair the same—real tacky—and even wore the same makeup. They’re probably like the girls in my school who call each other at night to check out what each one’s wearing the next day. It’s like they’re a bunch of sheep. They were kind of sexy-looking, the waitresses, especially the way they were dressed in these pushup bras and low-cut blouses and high heels, until I got a better look at them up close and realized how old they were, as old as my mom or maybe even older. Burt says some of them are hookers on the side, his brother had a piece off one of them once, he said she was pretty good for an older woman. A lot of them are divorced with kids and they probably don’t make enough money working at a dive like this to pay the bills. Just because they’re part-time whores doesn’t mean they aren’t nice people. It’s not their fault.

Considering it was a cold weekday night, business wasn’t bad. Places like this, business is probably never bad. Not when there’s people around who like to put it away like my old man does. Like my mom says, he ought to own his own distillery, probably save a shitload of money. There were twice as many men as women, best I could see. You’ve got to wonder about the kind of woman would come in a place like this, probably somebody married to someone like my old man, trying to do better, even if it’s just temporary.

The jukebox had Jim Reeves singing “Four Walls.” Two or three couples were out on the floor slow-dancing, feeling each other up good with one hand while the other held a drink.

I stood just inside the door, squinting to see against the smoke. I couldn’t make anybody out, the light was too low and the smoke was real thick, like a curtain almost. Real slow, so’s I wouldn’t get spotted, I moved further into the room.

“Hey, you. Boy.” I’d been spotted: the bartender. “You ain’t allowed in here.”

I looked over at him. He was glaring at me, his hands pressed against the bar. He was short and stocky, like one of his own kegs. He didn’t have what you’d call a laugh-a-minute face, either.

“What you doing in here this time of night?”

I looked for my old man but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see any of his friends, either, but I knew they had to be in here, I hadn’t been that far behind them.

“Hey, I’m talking to you. Get your ass out of here now.”

A few people turned our way to see what the hell he was going on about. I walked over to him so he wouldn’t have to shout.

“I’m looking for my dad,” I explained. “Steve Poole? You seen him in here?”

He shook his head. “Come on now, haul ass or I’ll throw your butt out.”

Just then I spotted Fred and Roger at a table on the other side of the room. Roger waved his beer bottle at me. I walked over to them, working around the dancers. There were some women at the table with them but I didn’t know who they were—it wasn’t their wives, I know their wives. Bowler ladies, still in their sateen bowling shirts. One smiled at me but I didn’t pay her any attention, she was old enough to be my mom, who I don’t need any reminders of, not in this place.

“Where’s my dad gone to?” I felt better—at least I was talking to some friendly, familiar faces. I kept looking around ’cause I knew my old man had to be here if his friends were.

The jukebox switched to Ferlin Husky: “Gone.”

“Hey, Roy, what’re you doing in here?” Roger asked me. He was juiced but good, acting real friendly-like. “Steve know you’re in here, son? You ain’t supposed to be in here, don’t you know that?”

“Where’s he at, you know?” I figured maybe he was taking a leak.

“He ain’t here, Roy,” Fred informed me. He was talking like Norton again, but it wasn’t funny this time. Something weird was going on. I didn’t understand what it was but I could feel it.

“I thought y’all came together,” I said.

Roger sighted me over the lip of his National Bohemian.

“He done cut out of here a little while ago.” He grinned this big shit-eating grin like him and me were asshole buddies, and kicked out a vacant chair. “Sit down and have a brew, long’s you’re here.” He called over to a waitress. “A beer here for my buddy.”

The bartender came around the bar like a shot and stood over our table.

“He ain’t drinking beer in this establishment,” he told Roger. He reached over and grabbed me by the collar. “I done told you once, and I don’t like repeating myself. Now get on out of here.” He started pushing me towards the front door.

“I wouldn’t be messing with that boy, I was you,” Fred warned the bartender. He was talking like himself now. “His daddy liable to walk in here and stomp your ass.”

The bartender turned back to him, still holding me in this death grip he had.

“His daddy ain’t about to walk in here right now.”

One of the women laughed, nudged her companion.

“If junior’s cut out of the same cloth, I want some,” she said, looking at me right in the face. She was pretty drunk.

“Shut the fuck up,” Roger told her.

“Well, excuse me.” She really was drunk, her and the other woman, drunker than the men by a long shot.

“And you shut your goddamn mouth,” Roger warned the bartender. He turned to me. “He’s gone, Roy. You’ve got to go on home, son.”

I looked from one face to another. There was something going on they weren’t telling me.

“Go on.”

I walked out slowly, looking in the shadows, thinking maybe my old man would suddenly show up, but he didn’t.

I walked across the dark parking lot, scuffing the gravel with my feet. Maybe he’d got in trouble with somebody there and they didn’t want me to know about it.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a light kick on for a second. I looked over before it went off.

My old man’s car was all the way on the edge of the lot, half- hidden under some low oak trees. It’s a ’53 Merc, red and silver two-tone, real cherried out. He’d just bought it two months before on a repossession, a real good deal, some nigger had got behind on his payments and there was good old Steve to snatch it up. He had deniggerized it, of course, the mud flaps and shit like that, and it was looking fine. He’d even cleaned out the garage so he could overnight it inside.

I walked across the lot towards it. I’d known there was something weird going on, something the men inside hadn’t wanted to tell me.

A woman was laughing from inside the car. The window had been cracked a hair so it wouldn’t get all steamed up inside.

“Jesus! Oh no, no!” She was talking and laughing at the same time. “Oh God, oh God, no!”

That stopped me dead in my tracks. I was pretty close to the car, ten or fifteen feet away. I waited a minute, then I heard some more laughing coming from her. It had a cheap sound to it, like the cheap perfume they sell at the dime store.

Now I was angry. Scared, too, but more pissed off. I’d been lied to, by my old man’s friends inside and by my old man out here.

Quietly, I approached the car. The woman laughed again, and moaned, too. Then I heard a man’s voice. My dad’s.

“Not so loud, goddamnit,” he was telling her, trying to hush her up, “you’ll wake them up clear down to the District.”

“I can’t help it, the places you’re touching me. Anyway, I’m freezing to death out here.”

It was Peg, the woman from the bowling alley. The pizza waitress. I know her voice, she’s asked what we want on our pizza enough times.

“You ain’t gonna be freezing for long, lady.”

There was a moment of silence, then she started laughing and moaning again. I wanted to cover my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear it, but I couldn’t.

“Steve, stop it,” Peg was saying. “Stop! Right now!”

“Are you shitting me?” my old man said. This time they both laughed.

Real carefully, putting one foot in front of the other, I crept up. Bracing myself on the trunk, I looked in the rear window.

Peg and my old man were in the back seat, all tangled up with each other. Her bowling shirt and bra were off, showing her little titties. I watched my old man pawing at them. They were groping at each other, mouth to mouth with their eyes closed, my old man’s pants down around his knees, Peg’s hand pulling at the waistband of his drawers.

Her nipples were standing up real erect. They were long and thin, as long as the first joint of my pinkie. In spite of myself I was getting a hard-on looking at them, how could you not, seeing her nipples standing up like that? Their technique was lousy—I’ve got better technique with the girls in my class I’ve made out with. My mom’s much better-looking than this skinny skag, what the hell was wrong with my old man, what could he see in her?

A sudden chill took over my body. I backed away, not wanting to be seen, and then I was running down Defense Highway past the Peace Cross, running blindly, my feet felt like they were on fire as they pounded the street, there was nothing there, no cars this time of night, nothing moving except me, everything was all asleep, my breath was scalding as I ran with my head down, vaulting the railroad tracks, my eyes blinded with tears from the cold, that’s what the tears were coming from, it was colder’n a witch’s tit out there.

Believe it or not, I had taken a wrong turn. Maybe it was accidentally on purpose, I sure as hell didn’t want to go home. I was on the road that snakes its way through the junkyards, next to where the railroad tracks cut through.

I wished I had a cig. A smoke would’ve been relaxing. It’s always that way, you never have a cigarette when you really need one.

It’s peaceful there amongst all the junk. You can lie up on this huge mountain of rubber and look out over the tracks and the river and think about things without someone getting on your ass. I come here often, sometimes alone, sometimes with my buddies. We roam around the yards, making sure to check that the dogs are caged up, which they usually are during the day, ’cause people come in and out buying and selling junk and you can’t have a bunch of crazy dogs roaming around biting the customers. You still have to look out for the watchman, this crazy nigger that carries a gun and would just as soon shoot you as ask you to get out. I’ve never been shot at personally but I know guys who have, Joe has a cousin, this older guy, who’s got a purple splotch permanent on the back of his right thigh from getting hit with a load of double-aught buckshot in this very yard, ten years ago.

“Shit.”

I heard a dog. It was coming from back in the yard, its feet splattering through the slop.

I looked up. The dog was above me, up on a pile of crates, about twenty, thirty yards away, looking down, its eyes red and wet. He was a big sonofabitch, black as night, part Doberman, part Great Dane it looked like. All the dogs in this yard look like they come from the same bastard litter; big black suckers, the kind of dogs whose balls always seem to be hanging about a foot down, their coats all matted and flea-ridden, drool coming off their teeth which are the size of dominoes. The kind of dogs that’re trained to tear the veins right out of your neck. It didn’t bark like a normal dog would—instead, a low snarl came from deep down inside its chest. It wasn’t warning me, like if I took off it would leave me alone—it was announcing that it was coming for me.

I took off like a bat out of hell, the opposite direction I’d come from, ’cause he had that way covered. Behind me I heard the fucker leap down, landing hard on its big padded feet. I didn’t dare look back but I knew it would be closing on me real fast.

The train tracks were slippery, covered with a thin sheet of ice. I ran down the middle, sliding like a motherfucker on the rotting ties. I could hear the dog coming fast, gaining on me by the second.

Ahead was the high trestle that crosses the Anacostia River, connecting two flat sections of low swampy marsh, a rickety wooden structure that sways any time there’s the least bit of wind, especially in winter. It’s at least a hundred feet high and twice as long. There’s no guardrail; from the ground it looks scary as hell, but me and my friends have been tightrope-walking the tracks for years, not thinking twice about it. We play games up here—who can run across the fastest or who’ll stay on the longest when a train’s coming.

Chicken’s the main game we play. You go out on the track about halfway when there’s a train coming. First you can hear it, from a long ways off, then you see it, a freight train it’ll be, a long-hauler usually, hundreds of cars. The trains have to slow to a crawl when they hit this old trestle because it’s got a big curve in it plus it hasn’t been buttressed in years. It’s a miracle a train’s never gone over the side.

At some point you start running, because you have to make sure you’re off the trestle before the train reaches it, since there’s no escape hatch. It’s way too high to jump off, you’d kill yourself if you tried, and the curve is blind, so the engineer would never have the time to put on his brakes, not with all those heavy freight cars behind him.

I am a master at the art of playing chicken. This is no lie, ask anyone. No matter how much guts another kid has, I can outwait him. I’m fast, one of the fastest kids in my grade, and I’ve got a lot of guts myself, but the most important thing is I’m not afraid of heights, I have no fear of them at all. Some kids, they get up there and realize where they are, one look down and they’re scared shitless, they start shaking and sweating and they have to crawl back off, they’re so scared. This one kid, Jimmy Hauser, he froze completely, it was last summer, he’d never tried it before, he got out to the middle and he couldn’t get back, he sat down and he flat-out couldn’t move. I was
w
ith him and we could hear the train coming and he still couldn’t move. I liked to shit my pants, I couldn’t leave the dumb asshole and I couldn’t budge him either, Jimmy’s this big fat kid, he must weigh a good fifty pounds more than me at least, he just sat there in the middle of the tracks, crying like a baby.