What I really waited for in those seconds, I know now, was the smile. Would he smile or not.
“Yeah, I just… hit my head. I got to get home. Don’t feel well.” He stopped walking and I stopped my car. “You know where home is?”
“Yours?” I said out my window.
“Uh-huh. Mine.” His voice, I remember, was higher in register than I figured for his size and it sounded injured. He was alone. Where were the other trash men?
The one good thing about him was that his eyes weren’t wild and he wasn’t smiling.
“No, sir. I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“S’okay. I’ll find it. You need to go find yours.” He lifted his arm to point ahead as if he knew my home was down the street. He took a step closer to the car and I got a good look at his face. At the corners of his mouth, a white congealed spit seemed to keep his lips from moving fluidly. A step closer and I could see that the spit almost looked like webbing. When he spoke, his lips slicked with blood, it spread and striated but held fast.
“You need to get home.” Close now, his breathing was stertorous. He sweated profusely. And though there was no glee in his eyes, they were wide and white with suffering.
He reached inside and patted me on the shoulder and he said go on as if a finish line lay ahead and I was almost there but that he would never make it. I drove on, my house just up another two blocks. In my rearview mirror I saw the trash man bend over, hands on knees, shaking his head side to side like he adamantly told the street no.
Every trashcan toppled into the street. Five houses before mine the man who I only knew as a retiree living alone stood stock-still in his robe holding his bundled newspaper in both hands. His front door gaped open and his head turned with my car as I passed. He didn’t move but for his head. The cool autumnal breeze that had whipped the nurse’s hair ruffled his robe around his legs. After passing him, in my side mirror I saw he still looked at my car, jaw agape, unmoving.
A fully dressed woman lay flat on her face in the yard across the street from my house. God, it must have been Mrs. Fleming. I couldn’t remember what she did, I want to say something at UT, maybe in the Spanish department? That doesn’t seem right. She tutored me in Spanish some in grade school. She left for work at about seven forty five every morning. We’d always exchange waves as I left at the same time. It looks like she was walking to her little grey wagon like she does every morning, keys out, and collapsed facedown in her yard. One of her legs was bent at the knee like she was taking a nap, but her arms weren’t visible underneath her. Her purse lay a yard past her head. Her woolen skirt flapped up onto her buttocks revealing tussled, and soiled, undergarments.
Any other morning I would have run over to see what was wrong, or I would have run into the house and yelled out at Mom that something was wrong over at the Flemings’. But this morning… everything everywhere was already wrong so yelling about one thing across the street seemed pointless.
My concern then was what would be wrong at my house.
Mom and Martin were used to me being out of the house early on Friday mornings because they’re game days (today is homecoming), and the marching band always got together before school on early Friday mornings to practice new routines. In this case, it was the one we were going to do at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Mr. Yancy, the band director, was all excited and so were we all. We didn’t mind early rehearsals while having New York on our minds.
But I haven’t told Mom and Martin that I’ve been kicked off the squad. To keep up appearances, and delaying reality, I got up early and, instead of just going to sit in my car somewhere as I’ve done the last couple of Fridays, I got it in mind to drive up to Mount Bonnell. I had to tell them and was going to today because I knew Mom was trying to get time off and book a flight and hotel. Not Martin, though. He was to stay in town with Johnny and said he was going to watch on TV from his folks’ place on Thanksgiving. I doubted he would. He’d make a point to watch the pre-pre-game football nonsense, grown men in suits tossing the ol’ pigskin around a studio-sized gridiron, yucking it up like the overpaid idiots they are. But I knew Johnny and Grandma would sneak into the back room to watch.
I got up early and made like I was going to band practice but instead went up to Mount Bonnell to smoke my crappy weed.
This is why I got kicked off the squad. The crappy weed.
Mr. English was not only my AP English teacher but he was also my advisor, so when Coach Numbnuts had me by the elbow in one hand and my pipe in another as we marched into his office, his face fell, more from fatigue than from disappointment. A little of both. Maybe disappointment that he had to deal with such petty little things instead of revising his big important novel.
Coach Numbnuts is a moniker Bass first applied to Assistant Coach Weir. There was this Oklahoma-committed lineman who declared kicking off was easy and that kickers were pussies. Numbnuts gave this lineman several chances to kick off at practice, each one shanking like foul shot from the sky. The last hit Weir in the balls so hard that he fell down and didn’t talk much the rest of the season.
We were all trying to work it out, but as of now I was off the squad. Maybe, just maybe, I could get back on. Numbnuts wasn’t so mad much as he said his hands were tied. If he didn’t report the incident, he’d be fired. The incident: He found my reeking pipe in the pocket of my jacket in the locker room in front of my locker. The jacket didn’t have my name in it, but he stood on the bench in the locker room before practice and held the jacket up in the air and threatened to cancel our parade trip if somebody didn’t fess up right then.
His hands were tied.
I fessed up.
This is what I’d hoped to see: Mom’s and Martin’s cars gone and Johnny on the porch with his backpack waiting for me to pull up to take him and his nosepicking friend to school. But Mom’s car was still there, and Johnny wasn’t, and if I wasn’t scared before, and I was, now it was official and now it was really real because as out of touch with my family as I’d become, it, whatever was going on, had touched my family, my home. My bowels got heavy and that awful adrenal buzz hit me again. Johnny wasn’t there waiting for me with that put-out look of his. A look I now wanted to see more than just about anything.
I pushed open the ajar front door. It creaked and moaned in a way it never had before. I remember thinking at that time of acute stress that this was a joke, the creaking door, somebody’s putting me on.
Please somebody say they’re putting me on.
Martin’s always out the door before me, off to his job as a commercial real estate inspector. When the economy dove in 2008, he started his own business. You had to give it to Martin; self-made. An asshole, yes, but a formidable salesman. Maybe his assholishness paid dividends there. Type A personality. A for Asshole.
So Martin wasn’t there as expected, his car gone. The silence of the house on a busy fall Friday morning jarred me. And the overall tenor of the house, the darkness, a pall over everything. That morning it felt like the very air carried an extra charge, that in it floated newness, stardust. Something was wrong here and I braced against what it could be.
It’s not a big house, a well-appointed fifties ranch style, original wood floors throughout, with three bedrooms, two baths, an open galley kitchen great for entertaining (talking in Martin-speak now), newish deck, updated windows, a utility room and mudroom off the kitchen boasting a big yard for midtown, enjoying a canopy of large old live oaks and cedar elms.
Martin, a couple glasses of wine in him before dinner, told me he’d bring me into his inspecting business, it was going so well. Hmmm. Let me think long and hard on that one, Marty. He hated it when I called him Marty. He glared, took a pull on the white he and Mom drank before dinner 2.5 times a week.