Her father, Walker J., would insist that he be allowed to memorialize the aborted in his own way, dear, and then light out to ride the back nine at the C.C. of Jackson. Douse himself with Dewar’s and spend the night on his leather-and-tack office sofa.
Whatever. Darla still got a convertible BMW for her sixteenth birthday.
She met the soldier who would infect her over spring break, sophomore year. Throughout our relationship I’ve seen him in every uniformed guy. In every war movie, every tribute, every stupid soldier commercial. Woe, the battle-bruised warrior. The remorseful kid-killer. The one-night-stand hero whose viral dick still dictates our life.
We could have broken his hold early on. All we had to do was lose the condom: In the city, in Darla’s huge clawfoot tub. In the exposed brick bathroom that was roughly the size of my bedroom, its fifteen-foot ceilings and frosted-glass daylight. The tub where she told me the story of that soldier, the twenty-something Army man with the overburdened heart. The one who Darla had wanted to heal, as she’d been taught was a thing to do, as generations of her family’s women had done for their defeated southern men.
Yeah, we were in that clawfoot, lounging across from each other, our arms on the tub lip and knees cocked up, she making sure not to spike herself with the spout, and. . and the wakes of rippled bathwater, the drips off of our elbows as we reached for our beers. . the spatter on concrete floor and wet rings from the icy bottles. . when I realized that we only had to fuck, unprotected. I told her this, and told her, truthfully, that I’d never adored anyone before, and that I was desperate to join her body forever, to charge the field of her mortality and wrest back control. For both of us.
Her refusal to let me is like a snapshot I can’t stop staring at. I still can’t believe she chose that soldier over me.
DARLA stomped back in the bedroom and started throwing on clothes. “What are you doing to help?” she barked. The broken bird remained in a heap on the floor.
“Baby, please don’t be so mad,” I said. “I was only looking out for you. I mean, have you thought about histoplasmosis? That’s the condition Bob Dylan had in the sac around his heart. It’s no picnic of a disease, and folks say it comes from birds. Birds that. .”
As I detailed the havoc of histoplasmosis on her shitty immune system, Darla nudged me aside, mumbled, “I am so, so sorry, bird,” then picked it up, sighed, closed her eyes, and snapped its neck.
I gasped.
She stared at me, eyes welling. “Oh, come on. Didn’t anybody ever take you hunting as a kid? You never winged a bird? Had to take responsibility?”
I shook my head no, horrified.
“Course they didn’t. Why would anyone teach anyone to be merciful?” She held the flimsy bird up, and started to sob. “You think that was easy?”
She walked off and tossed the bird into the master bath trash can, grousing through her tears about life lessons and urban wimps. She then brought the can in and put it on the floor beside me, before going to scrub her hands. (The Waterless Pumice Hand Sanitizer is bolted to the bathroom wall because Dillon Chemical won’t make anything smaller than a gallon dispenser. The sound of her smacking the plastic nipple on the bottom gets me so flustered. She refuses to consider using any other scent besides Dillon’s Bayberry Breeze, even though she knows I can’t stand the smell of it, likewise that there are a bevy of pseudomonacidal, salmonellacidal, fungicidal, and virucidal cleansing scents to choose from. I constantly clean up her vomit, from bedside floor to underside of toilet rim, rarely giving back so much as a stutter because I adore her, and because vomit has no place in love. Still, nothing but Bayberry, Jesus Christ.) She threw her hand towel at me as she marched out of our bedroom. Seconds later, I heard the back door slam.
I stared down at the bird, in state, in its final nest of old floss and tissue. I supposed that given all the violence, Darla had in fact brought it mercy. Deliverance. I had no idea what to do with it — bury it? chuck it? — so I just put the garbage can on top of the oak dresser and looked elsewhere, again.
To be fair, the thing about the birds in the city trees is that there isn’t much protection from the elements. Unlike the lush growth here, those trees are more like sticks with veils of sprig, so spring winds knock the nests to hell. In April, the urban sidewalks are littered with fallen hatchlings, their chicken skin and bulbous purple eyes. The buried trash of an entire cosmopolitan area emerges with the thaw, and next thing you know, there they are.
Darla was back within two minutes, scratches on her face and Dim in her arms. She looked at me, sitting on the bed, and then saw the can on the dresser. She flung the cat onto the floor, where it writhed in the ghosted bird’s scent.
“Follow me,” she said.
“I’m paralyzed. But you should clean those scratches up, quick,” I said.
“Come on, now.”
“You’d better—”
“Now!”
So I got up and followed her, through the living room and kitchen and den, and back to my art studio (the garage). She banged the fluorescent lights on, and shook her head at the burgeoning diorama.
“Darla,” I said. “You can see the progress I’ve been—”
“Tell them,” she instructed, pointing at my village, the landscape of which took up most of the room.
“Tell them what?”
“You know what,” she said.
“How is it that you’re the one from the South, but I’m the one that understands these folks?” I asked. “You can’t just tell. Nobody tells down here. They just smile and pretend like everything’s perfect and gay.”
“Tell them what went wrong with us!” she screamed. “Explain how things got so bad!”
“Well, um,” I said to the unfinished chaotica of small-town façade, to power tool, paint and plywood scrap. I cleared my throat for they: the miniature postal clerks and student-baristi, the genteel abortion doctors and half-painted pastors and proud teenage miscegenators and roadside retriever mixes. “Ahem,” I said, to not one goddamned soldier. “We moved down to Mississippi for the air and the restfulness. Darla has autoimmune issues. Surely you’ve heard of rales or rhonchi? She should really not have a cat. She was stupid as hell when she was younger, but is smarter by sexual default now. And me? I’m a heel who doesn’t understand, who apparently doesn’t have to do anything, ever, and who is therefore the sole drag on her life. The heel outsider with normal blood counts who won’t take any stupid job, and who never meets anybody or contributes to any stupid anything. Who is frozen by the past. Where she loved him more than me.”
I turned to her, “That good, babe?”
“Always has to be about you,” she said, and walked out. “Always, always,” she repeated down the hall.
I stood there, furious and guilty and sweaty, which oddly enough struck within me the desire to complete the pivotal scene from my current project, working title Township, which I hope will reflect a sort of postmodern dialogue with — or as response to? — the world’s largest diorama, the Cyclorama, in Atlanta. Based upon my final day clerking at the Oriental rug shop, and contrary to the Cyclorama’s depiction of the entire Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War, to the entire Battle of the South, really, the focal point of Township is an Ordinary Guy who stands up to Power. It takes place in the rug shop, and can be pictured thusly:
An upscale southern woman is patting her bald, tiny-headed baby, which hangs in a decorative sling over her shoulder. My boss, Mr. Dempster, a wad born of plantocratic stock, is explaining to the lady that an antique Heriz rug is in fact a treasure, despite the toughness of the wool and relative lack of dense Knots Per Square Inch (kpsi). I stand next to a stack of rugs, idle and silent, prepared to showcase another nine-by-twelve as cued by Dempster’s nod. The diorama woman swats and seems to be saying, Well, the rug is lovely Mister Dempster, but all said and done I’m concerned about the central medallion. The piece has to. . She sways, sashays almost as she talks and swats, which is why the dioramic baby is vomiting/has vomited on the parquet floor. Accordingly, this is why the onus came upon me, as clerk, to wipe the milky vomit up.