Bixby Had to Go

 

Bixby had to go. I couldn’t tolerate his presence any more.  An annoying boy to begin with, he was growing into a self-indulged, conceited, deeply flawed young man.  As his father, I supposed I owed him some desultory level of love, perhaps even unconditional, but this is not a world without conditions.  I never understood this allusion to a basic, natural instinct to love our offspring.  I watched the nature channel enough to know that lions, prairie dogs and honey bees weed out the weakest, or even the strongest, of their brood.  Jettisoned from the arc.  If not outright killed by the parent, they are neglected and, in so doing, offered up to our not-so-friendly neighbors in the food chain.  It wasn’t my fault that nature’s mutation created a species with no other predators to take us out, besides ourselves.  I was his father; I was his only predator.  

Problem was, Bixby held in a safe deposit box the will that bequeathed him the family estate, bestowed upon him not by his father but by his father before him, by good ol’ granddad.  Maybe my father was trying to take me out of the lineup.  Perhaps this was his final fuck-you in face of these past ten or so years, when I finally gained the upper hand during his infirmity.  Or had gained the upper hand, until now.  It irks me that my destiny can be thwarted by a  simple piece of paper, the weakest element in nature, subject to conflagration by the smallest spark, able to be rendered in half by the hands of a child, even crumpled up and popped in my mouth like a truffle, chewed up, swallowed, digested, and shitted out into the bowl of my toilet.  

But I didn’t have the will. Bixby had it.  Bixby had to go.

Bixby came over at 6:15.  He was supposed to be over at 5:30, but whatever.  His mother fawned over him in the foyer, took has coat and shoved all others aside in my closet to hang it on the good hanger, then flittered off to the kitchen.  By this time I was retired to my office with a gin martini, straight up, two olives.  It was fall and I could smell the dry rot of autumn.  The leaves in my yard were not my leaves, as I cut down my trees years ago.  These came from Mrs. Sutterby next door.  She’s too old and too broke to get her leaves raked up; just lets them rot where they lie from season to season.  I might have arrived at a charitable idea of raking them for her, but Bixby came in and interrupted.

“Hi Dad, how’re you doing?”

“Great son, great!  Been sitting hear listening to the birds, smelling the leaves.  Can you believe how quickly Summer passed this year?”

What?  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, there’s the inside you and the outside you, and never the twain shall meet.  Appearances are everything, and if performed artfully, give you the upper hand until the right moment, and oh how satisfying it can be when you pull the trigger.  But today, this mockery of a Sunday roast with family, was merely a positioning of pawns.

The Meaning of IV

No, IV does not represent the 4^th cantos of my poem, nor the 4^th chapter of my manifesto.  Neither does IV represent the century of Constantine.  It is why I am home today from work, why I sit around uselessly in this quiet, empty house.  Intestinal Virus.  My stomach rumbles and gurgles like the errant plumbing of section IV housing.  I am an upended decanter of ditch water.  Fever and dehydration created the perfect conditions, a lapse of mental discipline, a crack in a years-forged wall of self deception, so I remembered.

I left by way of the back door.  I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in that house a moment longer.  It harbored all the years of my confinement, all of my fears and hate in the shadow of a cruel father and wraith mother.  Why must I become them?  Why shrink in cold, airless rooms?  Maybe I couldn’t believe in myself, couldn’t trust that I could make it on my own, but there wasn’t much else to choose from.  “What the hell, why not?” A rally cry for freedom as good as any other.

I drifted down The Great River road to Beale Street and Bourbon.  I slept in unlocked cars, ate what food was left unguarded, wrote in a notepad while I smoked along the levee.  I drew out a picture of my father, crinkled Kodak paper with spores of mold, but there it was again; his flashing smile coming out of the dark, his white teeth approaching like a line of ghosts.  It made me warm, happy, proud, protected.  What of this father in the picture, who was not my father in the confines of the house, who was not the man he projected for the lens, but who ran deeper than the polluted waters held back by this levee?  Perhaps Bukowski could help reconcile me with my forebear, my template, my mould, the piss pot emptied and waiting to be filled.

Were they really that bad?  They left me with board games but nobody to play with; Sorry and Life and Surgery.  I dressed in costumes of their old 70’s clothes, wide ties and polyester purple trousers and wigs and white boat shoes. 

I had left with a regrettable lack of drama.  No fury towards dad, no accusations or commiseration for Mom.  I patted the dog on the head and began walking.  As I accumulated miles at my back, I began to believe in myself, in an utter lack of infirmity, an immunity to cold and virus, flu and bugs that get lodged beneath the finger nails.  Antibodies.  Parasites.  Latent.  Blooming.

IV represents my fallibility.  IV represents the number of years I’ve been gone.  IV is the number of miles left in a nearly complete circuitous route back home.

Sullen's Fish House

photo by German Chocolate Ladies.

Northern lights flash across the sky like dust blowing over a car windshield. This place is no desert, though. Here we got endless snow and ice cruel as any desert could be, and the people who live here are as cruel as our winters. What pleasures to we enjoy as we wait for it to end? Sit on a frozen lake in a plywood box, staring into a dark hole, waiting for something to bite?

Sullen’s fish house is something else though, about three times the size of your average fish house, strung up with Christmas lights like a carnival drawing us in from the dark. Me and my brother Jay go out there to thaw out. Drink some Jim Beam and spark a bowl. Other bright shiny things draw us there, too; make us warm for a while at least. Then when they get cold we drop them down through the hole to come bobbing up again sometime in the Spring. Spring will never come though, we tell ourselves. It still hasn’t.

Mom don’t like us hanging out there. When we come home, me and my brother come through the back door and let in a drift of snow behind us. I stamp my boots off just inside the door, a pink slush of blood and snow. Jay come in behind me, slams shut the door and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Mom stoops over by the wood stove, shoving in birch logs. “What you boys been up to? Sandy lake still frozen over?”

She knows it would be, but asks anyway.

“Yeah. Sullen’s fish house is all lit up. Nice. Like Christmas.”

“Sullen din’t light it up like that for Christmas, be damn sure of that. I don’t want you goin’ there.”

Sullen has been a buddy of mine since the third grade. Mom don’t like him much. Much of the town don’t like him much, nor his folks neither. The nice half of the town, that is. Then there are those like Jay and I. Something about Sullen makes you want to do what he does, look like he looks, talk the same. His whole family’s kind of like that. His folks’ place was the biggest in town once, but it’s falling apart now like some ruin. Last summer we’d go there to smash stuff in, with Sullen right there beside us, breaking up his own shit.

So I got friends like Sullen, right; I can deal with people like that. Dangerous people, some of them. Funny thing is, he isn’t the one to be scared of. I’d learn over the next several weeks what brought Sullen’s family down from the top.

“You got to watch what those Sullens do.” mom said. I’d learn that the ice and darkness didn’t keep to the lake, but spread from a place closer to hearth and home. ”Got to keep them in line,” she finished, almost to herself.

We knew who to be scared of, the one that called all of the shots and decided when winter and spring would come, when it was time for the ice to thaw, when Sullen’s Fish House would finally go dark and break through the thin ice, drift down through the dark and settle in the sediment.

Mom fed the last log into fire and slammed the stove door shut. “That should be just about enough, now. Spring’s coming.”

Little Bird

photo by mollycakes.

Sunday morning in the family room. I love my wife and kids dearly, but all I can think to myself right now is “Leave me alone.” I announce that I am going to my den now to write, and I slip away to that corner of the house where the windows are small, where potted palms sit on the floor in what little pools of light gather in this corner of the house. At first, I avoid the typewriter perched on the desk. I still use a typewriter. I am a walking cliché. I smoke a pipe, leaf through nineteenth century novels, scratch notes on scraps of paper, and eventually sneak up on my type writer and settle slowly into the wooden desk chair, careful not to spook it. I stare at the keys for a moment, afraid it is going to burst into a flapping of wings and escape out a window. That’s it. My typewriter on the desk is like a bird trapped in a room, panicked, breast thumping, trying to find a way out. My fingers must be gentle with it. Once it least expects it, I clamp my hands around it so that it can’t get away. I stop typing to scribble this metaphor on another piece of scratch paper for later.

There’s a quiet knock at the door. Must be my son. “Come in.”

“Dad, will you play Chutes and Ladders with me?”

“Not now, Sam. Your Dad’s working. Didn’t Mommy tell you not to bother me when I’m up here?”

“Yes,” he says in that little mouse voice that usually allows him to get his way.

“Why don’t you go play with Elizabeth?”

“She’s over at Jacqueline’s house jumping on the trampoline.”

I pull him up into my lap. He’s still in his pajamas. What time is it, I wonder? Why hasn’t Susan gotten him dressed yet? She’s probably down at the computer, chatting with her sister or with her friends from work. Jesus, she sees them all day during the week; why can’t she give it a break on the weekends to get her children dressed? “Why don’t you go get your big boy clothes on and we’ll play in a little bit. I’ve got to do some stuff yet, and then I’ll come out. Don’t knock though. I’ll come out when I’m ready.”

“Okay,” and he slides off my knee, leaves the room and gently closes the door behind him. I smile at this gesture of his, so careful around me, but then I see how like an invalid I have become, tucked away in a closed room, not to be disturbed. How long have they been tiptoeing around me?

I try to get back to my story, but the characters have wandered off, the backdrops faded, and in the world of my imagination I am losing the light. Damn it. But if it hadn’t been Sam, it would have been something else. A loud truck out in the street. A blue jay flashing by the window. I was able to finish three sentences, though, before the little bird died in my hands. I guess I clutched I clutched it too tightly.

It began with a letter. Ever since I received the envelope addressed to me in a hand faintly familiar, I could never return to the old life I knew. I have since burned that first letter, but it went something like this…