“Well I feel a lot better” said Mike, standing on the new porch.
“Haven’t had a headache in about five days”. I giggled
silently at that, and suddenly in the light of all, emotions still
being raw, I felt the ghost of a need to choke Mike to death. Part
of me thought about it, and part of me looked at myself from the
inside, with a kind of indifferent horror.
As a tenant in the
trailer house, he was afforded a kind of special status around the
yard. I say this only in the sense that we tried to keep appearances
in front of him, not necessarily present falsities to the man, but
put everything about our family in kind of a positive light. We
generally held to that no matter how ghoulish the tenant was, and we
only broke the illusion as the tenant was on his way out from being
evicted.
Mike, as it were,
had paid twelve months in advance, having gotten some sort of
settlement for something or other—Marisol and Oxcart would
know—some kind of compensation for past wrongs or some kind of
imagined negligence directed at him from some quarters. It was not
everybody’s business, not everyone’s concern, to know the
particulars.
What we knew, he
did not have a job at present time, kind of whittling away the hours
at his own doings inside his house, what one might imagine, from the
outside, cleaning floors or dusting the furniture and drapes, but
probably something more, in reality, like sitting drinking chocolate
milk or diet soda with MMA tapes playing all the livelong day.
“Well that’s
good” I said, but for the life of me, I kind of wish two or three
more blinding headaches on him, if not for his own sake, then my own
balance or the sake of the family.
This getting to
know one was always such a delicate thing, and I had to be aware
somewhere deep inside that I was not personally invested in this
man’s health; indeed, he was just a companion in the yard to wile
away the hours, and to do that, he could lose almost everything but
his skull and still fill the need, in my own eyes. Selfish, I know,
but I had the feeling what was deeper and more obscure of Mike, had
no particular explanation, no reasoning or decision, but simply
happened, like the horses going crazy on a hot afternoon, or the
rooster yelling at nothing in particular.
What I mean,
perhaps, is that the enigma of Mike was kind of dull, not a Broadway
production or something that explained the great questions of life,
not a contrivance, but just something that simply was there, sitting
idly, like a large boulder that had not moved in centuries. Dull and
defiant of explanation, but as real as the sunrise or sunset, as real
as the death of a wayward brother in an unfamiliar part of the
country.
“I think I’m
gonna paint the porch” said Mike, looking down at the new timbers
stretched across the walking surface.
“You might have
to talk to Deddy about that” I told him. Here he would have to
deal with my parents’ own peculiar tastes, and with the rental
agreement being so vague, it was almost such that one marginally
offensive brush stroke could get him tossed out, regardless of
whether he had paid ahead or not.
He couldn’t have
been rich: he drove an old truck, and dressed pretty plain. Drank
generic brand diet sodas. There was no evidence of money aside from
some lump of cash he had drawn from a court case that he put into his
own rental costs. It was such these days and times, that people were
sort of rich for a few days, and the money filled opened gaps until
it was gone, any amount of money, hundreds, thousands or even
millions, and money did not last indefinitely, but had its own way of
spoiling itself and its owner, in the balance, if were held on to for
too long a time.
The point was, it
would be no good to Mike to offend the landlord, my father, whether
he had some extra ten thousand or so banked away, and he could very
well find himself out of money with nowhere to go: no means.
“I’ll make it
look good” said Mike, “he’ll like it.”
As if summoned by
our conversation, there came Deddy out of the side door with a
five-gallon bucket. He glanced at us nonchalantly and turned his
attention to the yard proper, from the side door to the circle-around
driveway that we shared with Mike. He kind of stood there a second,
vacantly, until something caught his eye, some grasshopper near the
drive, or a cigarette butt, or a bottle cap, and he walked over to
it, bent and picked it up, depositing it in the bucket.
It wasn’t the
usual for Deddy, picking up trash in the yard, but he was still off
of work from the funeral for a few more days, so he had some empty
time. I wondered vaguely if he was so suddenly concerned about
appearances, opting, when given an absolutely clear choice, to clean
the yard: a yard which wasn’t particularly filthy anyway. I hadn’t
known my own father to be so stiff about appearances in years past,
but as they always said when a new thing came along, “it’s a
brand new day, cuz”. I considered for the pass of a breath perhaps
to help him, in his cleaning-up, and opted not to; I made a note to
feel-out the old man’s thoughts on Mike painting the porch. And
yes, that was me inserting myself in the delicate relationship
between landlord and tenant, but I felt I could do both parties some
good as a mostly disinterested observer.
Oxcart was walking
towards the front yard, eyes somewhat down, scanning the ground, and
it said something about the usual state of the yard that there was
not a lot of trash down at that time. What would have been there,
would have been destroyed by the lawn mower, anyway. With three sons
at home, we keep pretty well ahead of most of the usual yard chores,
almost fighting sometimes to decide who would mow the yard, except
for Geffen, who usually stayed in the house, chirping with Crystal in
their dialect, their “girl talk” or whatever.
Keith, Geffen’s
twin, had not been able to be contacted by the family. No one knew
anything about where he was living or even, for that matter, if he
were alive. Geffen might suspect a prison forwarding address, but
Geffen’s radar in regards to his own twin was way off, and
generally based on past mistakes and indifference, and not much else.
And poor Chad they knew was institutionalized and on Limited
Visitation, as per doctor’s orders; they wouldn’t let him out to
come to Andrew’s service.
Grandma and Aunt
Rachel(Oxcart’s sister) were the only two outside of the immediate
family unit that came and put in their condolences, as otherwise, the
family unit as it had been for several years held true to form.
Those without stayed without, generally, and Grandma might as well
have not been there, as well, because she came unprepared and in her
Alzheimer’s haze, thought every man at the funeral was Andrew, even
the preacher that had been tasked to speak.
She gave that
preacher a twenty dollar bill, and no one stopped, no one bothered
arguing the fine points, but let her run as she chose without
dispute, in mismatched clothes, plaids and floral prints, but luckily
her shoes matched, and her socks: she only had a lot of one variety
of sock, so no possibility of mistake. Her attitude towards socks
had been her in fairer weather days, that when something did the job,
she relied on it, and that four good pairs of socks were met with
more of the same on subsequent shoppings. But in the days since her
short-term memory began to fail her, things had went remarkably weird
with her, with mood swings and all sorts of senseless repetitions,
things that would confuse and frustrate a person with an ordinarily
healthy mind.
They were free,
such as it was, to pick up Grandma at their discretion; so no doctor
interference, but the subject with Chad was more severe, even in the
face of short-term memory loss. Indeed, it was felt that in the
throes of Heroin pangs, he was capable in the short-term of that one
vain repetition of dosing himself, and that, with everything else put
to service to that. Thus his presence was verboten and he was
referred to simply as “getting well”: a process that more people
could see to, probably.
So there was Free
To Visit If You Cared, Limited Visitation, and Zero Contact in the
offing, with Aunt Rachel remaining cool to the family, not even
speaking much, but touching Oxcart’s shoulder before and after the
little quaint funeral—maybe that singular act spoke volumes between
them, owing to something in their upbringing, balances owed and old
debts screaming across the chasms of the years, wordlessly reminding
them that they in fact, were family, and all the old days were
somewhere etched into the lines in their aging faces, like a roadmap,
but in no way indicating a direction forward, but marking instead the
past happenings, little hurts and laughter, shared empty moments and
the common worries of a household that had long ago went defunct:
that much they shared between them, without a word.
But Mike was
feeling “alright”, and I told him that was good, without much
offering a fig branch since the nervousness and anxiety of the
unexpected funeral; but assured he had no headaches in a few days,
and must be, indeed, “alright”. Part of me cursed him to
Grandma’s fate, that short-term random quality she had, like a
toaster oven about to catch on fire, or one of the old televisions
with blown tube. It was only half the story, because he was still
Mike, and the worries still that were not uncommon to Mike, but that
withdrawn in a trick of perspective, that he was so indolently calm
about the lack of headaches.
Were I of
consequence in the offing, I would have tasked Deddy to watch MMA
with Mike, maybe, and tossed Grandma in the corner to make
interesting commentary about the whole thing. It was such that Deddy
thought of the appearance of something, for some reason, that
something had wiggled into his ear that made him think of the outward
curb appeal of his own house, and me hoping he had not did a new
mortgage or anything for Andrew’s funeral. Though the specter was
real enough, of debt and burden, the way new births could be debt and
burden, and adult children, whether they travel the country
preaching, or fiddle-faddle around like Thomas, or even the running
gibberish commentary track that was Geffen: all debt and burden, in
the meantime, until balances are redressed in the hereafter, at the
notated White Throne of Judgment, with Andrew getting noted as the
best of us all, that the best was elsewhere and not sitting out front
for the world to gawk and fawn over.
I myself was not
notably bad, but conversely, had not much to my own credit, no acts
of mercy or charity, nothing besides answering my own odd internal
questions about Mike, and that being mostly to mark time. For that
matter, the matter of marking time, I might has well had been a
prisoner in a debtor’s prison of old, but not institutionalized
like Chad with a decided goal in mind, for I had no real goals or
causes of my own, and only for that lack, might I feel in any way
cheated by the universe for a deficit of cause.
And Mike, with or
without blinding concussion-derived headaches, might yet be a
headache for the family, set about on our property, becoming, in some
senses of the words, our problem, and in some dismal respects, a
cause for concern.
But three days
after Andrew’s funeral, whom Mike didn’t even know anyways, and
five days after Mike got assaulted at Bojangles, he proclaimed
himself “alright”, of his own initiative.
