The night she locked me out, I hid in the dark, watching her in the house. She’s a big-boned woman who got pregnant young, quit school, and works as a waitress. Never got a nickel of child support. I guess you could say the breaks went against her, and getting mixed up with me might be one of those breaks.
Sometimes I watched her kid, which was easy because all he did was play video games. I couldn’t get him to throw a baseball or football. When I was a kid, my father wouldn’t do anything with me and now this boy wouldn’t either. Sometimes I wondered if she was just using me to baby-sit, but I don’t think so, no more than I used her place to sleep. Her kid wasn’t that bad. He went to school, cooked for himself, and listened to his mother. He despised me, and who could blame him. I was just another stranger roaming his house and sleeping with his mom. I was the enemy.
I stayed on the porch until I got sick of listening to the scanner’s static. The house just sat there, dark and hard and locked. It was her house. Everything in it belonged to her, even her kid. My own boy was two thousand miles away, back home in Kentucky. The way it works anymore is you don’t raise your own kids. You raise someone else’s while a stranger takes care of yours, and then when that doesn’t work out, everyone moves along to the next person with a kid. It’s like two assembly lines moving in opposite directions. At the end are grown kids who haven’t been raised so much as jerked up.
You come to expect dealing with ex-husbands who don’t like you and kids who know full well you ain’t their real daddy. And you know your kid’s going through the same damn thing. Right now there’s some somebody living with my ex and wishing my son was out of the picture. That’s why I’m nice to the kids of women I meet. It works out in the long run, and maybe someone’11 be nice to my boy. He’s fourteen and smart. He can be anything he wants to be.
The bars were closed and I walked an hour. I was between drunk and sober, which makes your mind go strange ways. At thirty-five years old, I was out of work with no place to sleep. Sometimes I don’t think I’ve done anything to leave my mark in this world. I’m the kind of person the world leaves a mark on.
A patrol car cruised me but I stayed cool, and the cop probably made me for what I was — another poor bastard tossed out by his old lady. The second time he passed, he didn’t even slow down, and an idea hit me like a ton of bricks.
I cut down a few streets to an old industrial building that was getting renovated into an espresso joint. There was rubble lying in the street that looked like giant bread crumbs. I picked up a chunk and stood there a long time, thinking everything through, then I tossed it in a slow underhand arc through the plate glass window. It made a beautiful sound that rang along the empty street like music.
I leaned against a lightpole and waited. There was a grin on my face you couldn’t wipe off with a chain saw because I knew the police would come and ask for my I.D. And I knew she’d hear it all. She’d hear the cop read my last name and ask for a 10–29, which means check for wanteds. A minute would go by and the dispatcher would say, “Subject is two-eleven all around.” And she damn sure knew the truth of that. I wasn’t wanted anywhere, city or county, not even at home.
The cruiser came down the street, the candy rack on top flashing, no siren. I stepped away from the pole and held my arms away from my body and the cop put a light on me like a poacher jacklighting a deer. There was no sound but my breath. The door opened and the cop came toward me, walking slowly in case I was hopped up on crank. I stood there waiting in that streetlight’s glare with broken glass at my back and garbage at my feet and the whole galaxy over my head, and suddenly I knew damn sure what would happen one day.
I’ll have my own place and a job. It’ll be late at night and I’ll be asleep. Someone starts banging at the door. I stagger over in my underwear and open the door and there’s a stranger standing there, two or three strangers. Behind them in the street is an old shitbox out of Detroit, jacked up in the back. These punks are outside my door with patches of hair on their young faces, wearing boots and sleeveless shirts to show their tattoos. I face them with my beer belly and think that even though I live alone in a little dump, dirty and cramped, it’s still my damn place, and I’m willing to go down defending it. It’s all I’ve got and it’s not even really mine, just a rental, but I live here. You don’t mess with a man in his own place.
I stand there in the night and look at these criminals, because that’s what they are — there’s nothing two-eleven about them. The street is empty and I’m alone. I don’t want to show how twitchy I am on the inside so I say, “What the fuck do you want?”
And one looks at the rest with a sneer, and says, “See, I told you.” Then he looks at me and says, “We’re just hunting a place to flop, Dad.”
It hits me who I’m looking at, a ripping that starts in my throat and runs to the soles of my feet. I can barely breathe. I hold onto the doorjamb to stay steady while I stare at this boy.
There’s a part of me that wants to say, “Get a look, son. Burn this in your brain, boy. See the grime along the molding? See the empty beer cans with cigarette ashes around the holes? See the beat-up furniture and the dirty sheets? Take a good look, son. Take a picture because this is where you’ll wind up at, and you don’t want it. You do not want this.”
But I don’t say it. I never gave him anything before. And now I can’t even give him this.
Instead, I open the door wide.
High Water Everywhere
Zules drove slowly, the headlights of his eighteen-wheeler dull against the fog. He’d driven in rain for two days, and it was hard to know where the road left off and the land began. The moon and stars were gone. He was running heavy through Oregon, following the Lower Callapooya River to avoid weigh stations on the interstate.
Over the trucker’s channel came a report that a dike had broken. Zules switched to the local police band and heard a cop’s voice telling emergency workers to evacuate immediately. The river wasn’t just spilling over the top of the dike. Pressure had torn a hole through a weak spot and water was surging across the bottomland.
Zules steered to the shoulder and stepped out of the truck. Blown rain stung his face and arms. He cranked down the trailer legs and unscrewed the hoses that held the brake and electric lines. He worked fast, smashing a finger in the darkness, paying no more attention than if he’d nicked the handle of a tool. He didn’t feel right about leaving his load, but without its extra weight he could beat the coming water. He climbed into his truck and pushed hard through the gears. The land reminded him of a tabletop, and he was heading for its edge.
When he reached a roadblock manned by a state trooper, he knew he’d outrun the river gushing through the dike. Zules slipped his hand into his shirt pocket and touched the small gourd his mother had given him for luck. It was dry.
He drove to Crawfordsville, got a room, and reported his abandoned trailer to the county sheriff. Zules was so tired he was wide awake. At the motel lounge he ordered bourbon and branch. The only customer was a woman slumped at the bar with her eyes closed, both hands around an empty glass. She lifted her head.
“Don’t mean to bother you,” Zules said.
“You didn’t,” she said. “I was just testing my eyelids for light leaks.”
Zules told her about losing his trailer. She listened as if his story were common. Her clothes were wet and muddy.
“It rained every day for two months,” she said. “Then started raining twice a day. The clear-cut let water run off the mountain. This whole town’s on one slow drown. I’m sick to death of it. My store’s got four feet of water in it.”