Bird-Self Accumulated. Don Judson
seemed determined to forget this incident altogether. He pulled up next to the stone wall and climbed happily out of the car and pointed to the house.
“This is it,” he said.
“Home sweet home,” he proclaimed with an expansive flourish.
None of it felt that way. You only had to look across the unbruised lawn and neat checkerboard flagstone patio to the house itself, all great rising shingled sides of weathered wood and fine cut glass, to know that if anyone were to come along they would understand Cheech and myself right away to have been puked up in the exact wrong place. I didn’t know what to say. A smell of flowers came up mixed into the heat of gasoline. It was all I could do to keep from gagging. Things didn’t seem all that much better out in the country.
“Oh shit,” I wanted to cry.
But Cheech was already standing inside the doctor’s foyer punching numbers to deactivate his alarm system.
I was astonished. He’d walked right in.
“Karin,” Cheech told me, meaning his girlfriend. “Guy used to be her stepfather.”
Behind him, further back into the hallway, the ex-stepfather’s paintings and jewelry and television sets were neatly stacked.
“We’ve been here about three times,” Cheech explained, “since the family went on vacation.”
The entire house was a mess. I wanted to check the bathroom cabinets but Cheech insisted on a tour to point out all the places he and Karin had been doing it. These places included beds and couches and end tables. They had done it in most every room and even the sink. The thought of that, of Karin sweeping silverware and plates from the counter as Cheech hoisted her over its edge, left me dizzy. I remembered her from coming into the Hilltop one afternoon for a drink: she looked to be a person who could have you moaning two weeks into an icehouse.
People had actually stopped playing pool.
“My, my, my,” some of the boys said when they saw how she was inside a pair of pants with a zipper running down the length of her hip. It was a zipper they’d wanted to believe themselves right then and there to have fumbled and cried over night after night.
Now I thought I sat down from the idea of her in a sink only it must have been the codeine because when I looked around I wasn’t sitting at all but standing instead in the cellar where there was a game area. Cheech was gesturing all around. Then he turned and left. After a minute music came from the living room. There was no hurry is what it seemed he’d said. We could load the ex-stepfather doctor’s belongings into the car later. There was no hurry at all.
Only something had changed. A sudden shift in the geography of my high. I could no longer stand still. I walked to the second floor expecting lights and cymbals and the sound of God. Instead there was a room filled with rifles. They were beautiful. One of them looked to be the kind used by snipers. I took it down and found some bullets and went to a window.
All of this took place as if I were inside a dream.
The ocean still buzzed.
My legs were weak.
There was a fan which someone had broken and a night table by the window with a long silver mirror on it. I sat cradling the rifle in my arms. Through its scope, one mile away, toward the lake, everything appeared to be neatly and exactly framed like a toy. I watched for a while as salesmen, housewives, and visitors to our region drove their station wagons or sports cars down and around tiny, wooded hills. It was as if we had all climbed inside a diamond together. I could smell those people! Every hair plastered against their wet foreheads. The sweat as it dripped or ran down faces, dark, then pale—across shadows thrown into small, quick bursts of light.
My finger was right there on the trigger. It might have been exactly what I’d been waiting for, but I’m not sure. I remember taking a deep breath.
Nothing moved.
All the clouds sat above the grey sludge of our famous lake. The sun was a piss yellow ball. It sat there too.
Then, finally, downstairs the music went off. I heard Cheech snoring. Snoring! Who could guess, I’ve heard people say on many occasions, what the fuck that dude is even thinking. Once, just after he’d returned from Vietnam missing a kneecap and some other parts of his leg, Cheech tried to set an Italian on fire. It was at a gas station. The Italian’s girlfriend had that hot look about her with big hair and jewelry and so the Italian, who thought Cheech worked at the station, said, Hey gimp—how about it.
That was a wrong thing.
He did not understand Cheech’s kneecap lost in a tunnel where it had been blown up while he crawled and crawled after the enemy. Can you imagine that, moving and moving into something about which you have no idea? Cheech could, and so he put the nozzle of the gas pump right inside the window of the Cadillac where the Italian and his girlfriend with big hair sat.
This all took place during a time when it seemed that every week on television you saw another Saigon monk burn themselves in protest. So when Cheech soaked him down the Italian still tried to look hard, “Hey,” he said, but he must have been thinking right then about those Buddhists. How they bent the air. And died folded inward like kerosene flowers. Because as soon as Cheech showed a book of matches the Italian was over his girlfriend and out the other window.
What is there to know in this life anyway?
That day we robbed the doctor turned out to be a good one. I went and woke Cheech and we put the jewelry and televisions out on the flagstone patio then loaded them into his car. By then my high was finally running down and when we got back to town an edge seemed to be off everything and we’d made some money so there were drinks and a few laughs together. There always were with Cheech. I thought of him as a person who knew me better than most.
But in 1975 he was to hold a pistol to my head and make me show him where John the Chink and I had hidden our crystal meth. The gun looked so amazing there in his hand it made me cry.
“Shut up,” Cheech said.
At first he only slapped the barrel across my face but then a fit of some kind seemed to take hold and the gun went off four times.
“Don’t worry,” he insisted after the ringing had stopped and I’d told him what he wanted to hear, “nobody’s been shot.”
The idea seemed to disappoint him.
Although I haven’t seen Cheech since, I heard from Karin that he might be down south. They’d been married and when things began to go wrong and after he’d robbed me and some other friends and disappeared, she got an unsigned postcard from Key West, Florida. Karin talked to me about all of this one night on Dexter Street. She was drunk and played with her wedding ring a lot. After a while she asked me to go home with her and I did, though it wasn’t about revenge, and besides, by then I’d become a person who could barely stand the thought of someone else touching them, and none of it really mattered anyway.
IN SECURITY LOCKDOWN: PRISON, 1981
When Boo-Boo stabs Morris Boyle I am reading a news magazine that someone has smuggled onto the wing. It is an article about a dog who uncovers a grave of several small bones wrapped carefully in bits of waxed paper. The dog is not a police dog but only one which happens to be digging by a gazebo in a neighbor’s garden. Also recovered are: three black candles, tufts of hair, a ring and two decks of playing cards. The woman who owns the gazebo and the gardens has lived alone for as long as anyone can remember.
She tells a story which begins: Before you knew me, a stranger, a religious man of cosmopolitan background. . . . It is a ridiculous story, and no one listens to her. This is in a part of our country cut off and burned dry by a drought of several years so you’d imagine its trees to hang like sticks from the sky above the old woman, and the sky itself absurd and the dog as they stand there surrounded by reporters, she already having been recorded as feeling herself to be the victim of a cruel, if ultimately harmless, high school prank.