Humphries read the New York Times on the internet every day like a big shot. He disdained the local rag. It was a way to get back at his wife, who had moved to this Podunk burg for a job. Humphries was a landscape painter, so he could live anywhere. That’s what Josie said. But what was he supposed to paint around here? A ditch? He stood on the back porch every day and painted pictures of turds for spite. Josie said they were good.
She was all right.
She noticed that Humphries started walking down to the drugstore in the morning and picking up the local paper. She made knowing faces at him. Now that Mr. Mugglewump had survived on the streets, Mississippi was looking okay to her. Humphries cringed and shuddered at her implicit optimism and got back to the paper. He was looking for a story about some local jerk getting assassinated.
On the third day he almost gave up because he didn’t want to give his wife the satisfaction. But he rose in the first smeary light, while Josie was still asleep, and walked to the drugstore. He didn’t have to bring the paper home. Without that clue, Josie wouldn’t be able to guess he was happy. Because he was happy. He was happy being miserable. He was happy that living in Mississippi would give him a great excuse to be a failure.
There were some old codgers spitting in a cup for some reason. Humphries stood on the corner reading about Buddy Wilson, who had owned a struggling poster shop. He was a large fat man who had been found at the county dump, his head nearly severed from his body. Police suspected garroting by banjo string because there was a banjo lying nearby with a missing string.
It was cool out. Humphries’s palms were sweating. He threw the paper in a trashcan and wiped the slippery newsprint on his pants. For the first time, he went back to the house where he had spotted the girl with the gun.
The window glowed. He could see everything from the street. It was like a different place, draped in fabrics, oranges and pinks, full of light and life. The homey smell of bacon was in the air.
A young couple — nothing like the yellow-haired girl with the gun — pulled a twee red sweater over their little white dog. They had a string of white Christmas lights blinking along the mantle, though Christmas was miles and miles away.
The dirty old glider was still on the porch. It was the only thing to convince Humphries he wasn’t crazy.
He had a bad day and couldn’t get any turds painted.
That evening, just before the sun went down, he went back to the odd little duplex. The young couple had put up curtains. The black cat, a fixture of the neighborhood, was back in its place on the soiled glider. The white dog in the red sweater stood smugly on its hind legs between the curtain and the window with its white forepaws on the window ledge, safely behind the glass, staring at the cat with sick superiority.
Cancel My Reservation
1
ON HIS WALK, CHUCK PASSED A CHURCH. HE SAW SOME BIRDS. He didn’t know what kind. They were brown, pecking at something — what do birds peck at? seeds? — on the lawn. He caught himself thinking, They have their mouths open! Indeed, when the birds turned to him with their frozen faces, not eating but not closing their mouths, they looked dumbstruck and evil. But birds have beaks, not mouths. Upon reflection.
He was not good with details. He had even become fat without knowing it. Thinking back, he really couldn’t imagine not noticing that his clothes were so tight, not wondering why he had to wear his shirts untucked and unbutton his pants, why he didn’t wear a belt anymore and his knees hurt so much, why it was hard to rise from a crouch and how come he had so much trouble breathing and broke the toilet seat.
He didn’t know the right name or purpose of anything in nature. He saw a bank of flowers, the kind he wrongly called coolers — grape coolers, cherry coolers, vanilla coolers — bright and cheap as candy, trash flowers, pretty as paper stars or costume jewelry, the kind of flowers you might find planted in black plastic drums near the gas pumps. He saw an embankment of them ashen, crumpled, bubble-gum colors chewed up, sucked out, and discarded by the heat.
His scratchy shirt was long-sleeved and hot. It was early in the morning and already miserable in the sun. Saints used to wear scratchy shirts — hairshirts, right? It was good for you. It made you stop concentrating on your thoughts and opinions, that was probably the gist of it.
He kept walking to the old graveyard.
Used to be you couldn’t go in: too many bums waiting to cut your throat. So said the pro-gentrification forces on local talk radio. Now it was safe to look at the old headstones. They were good for a laugh.
Leak. Hope. Luckie. Shedden. He thought those were pretty funny names to see on tombstones. He planned to jot them down on a pad when he got home. Later he’d show it to somebody for a conversation piece. He was sad to have lost touch with Donny. Donny loved wordplay.
He saw a tombstone that said Stocks. That was only funny depending on the stock market.
Not everything was funny. He saw a black log, dead or burnt, part of a tree that had come through the ground, come out of somebody’s head and knocked aside his granite lozenge. He saw four stubby matching stones in a little parade. Their squat bases said: Mama. Papa. Honey. Me.
One squirrel grabbed a twig from a clump of plants with purple leaves, took the purple leafy twig to the top of a grave to chew.
Angry squirrels romping. Owned the place. Probably had it to themselves for fifty years or something, except for the bums. He guessed the squirrels weren’t so tough anymore. Too bad, you squirrels and bums. The rich people are taking over.
The walk helped him think. Chuck went home and got really drunk and booked a first-class round-trip airplane ticket from Atlanta to LAX and back. It cost nearly a thousand. For sixty bucks more he could’ve upgraded to a plan that allowed him to change his flight or cancel his trip, but however drunk he was he wasn’t that drunk. Not hardly.
2
Donny and Chuck had reconnected on Facebook. At first it was okay with Donny. Chuck made a friend request and Donny complied. He didn’t see why not. Chuck showered him with private chat messages right away.
Hi, it’s Chuck. Remember me Donny
hey man long time hows it been goin
My wife passed away.
did not know you were married congrats
Yes, but she passed away.
sorry
Hey aren’t we lucky we turned out to be the wrong age to be in any wars? At least we got that going for us, haha
That was sad about Chuck’s wife passing away. Donny found out that Chuck had had two wives, and both of them had passed away, which was twice as sad. Maybe it was exponentially sad. Donny couldn’t believe Chuck had married hot-to-trot Shelly Riviera straight out of high school. Donny had moved out of the district halfway through his junior year, but he still remembered the name Shelly Riviera. He wasn’t sure if he was putting the right face and body with the name. He was thinking of some hot girl he had permanently in his head.
Chuck had an estranged son. Donny found out everything about Chuck. His favorite canned soup. Chuck told stories about his two wives and how sexy they had been when they were alive and all their sex things.
Sometimes Donny got hard and secretly beat off, Chuck none the wiser. Or maybe Chuck was egging him on. Who was in charge here?
Soon he didn’t want to see Chuck around Facebook anymore. He was so tired of Chuck and Chuck’s crazy stories and opinions. He was scared of how much he was beating off these days. He was too old for such horseshit. He told Chuck he had a fatal disease and couldn’t chat anymore.