ZEE NOVAK
KEADY UNIVERSITY, APRIL 2014
Early spring, that’s when I first thought I might love him. That time of year when, in Indiana, each afternoon the sun came out to melt the previous night’s snow. Curious buds poked their heads through the topsoil into the suspicious heat, only to be rebuked at night by sudden frosts. I was waiting tables at Green Nile, slinging weed here and there to friends. Cyrus was still answering phones at Jade Café, hanging out at the library, at Lucky’s Bar.
We’d been living together for a year, not long after we’d both graduated, me a semester before him even though he’d started school before me, spending our time dating whoever was in front of us, drinking a lot. This was a year before Cyrus got sober, before Gabe and AA, before I osmotically stopped drinking in solidarity, to make things easier for Cyrus. Making things easier for Cyrus, I realized only much later, had begun to take up a lot of my energy.
Once a week, Cyrus and I would go to this guy Jude’s house off the highway. Cyrus found Jude’s post on Craigslist saying he needed some yardwork done, that he could offer fresh groceries in exchange. Intrigued, especially at the possibility “fresh groceries” might be a euphemism for something more exciting, we got in touch. It turned out “fresh groceries” literally meant fresh groceries. Every Saturday we’d get a little high and go over to Jude’s house ostensibly to do yard work, but really to let Jude sit in his underwear in a rickety lawn chair drinking a beer and watching us pretend to do yard work.
He never touched himself, never touched us either. He’d just lay there in nothing but dingy tighty-whities and sandals, watching us. The work was beside the point. Once the lawn was mowed and the hedges trimmed, he’d just have us pull nails from stacks of old boards, dig and fill big holes in the yard. It was the watching-us-work that did it for him, whatever it was. And in return, after our weekly hour, he’d take us to his kitchen where he had shelves and shelves of grocery items— rice, lima beans, peaches in syrup, mostly scratched, dented, expired—and let us load up a few paper shopping bags.
He said, one of the few times he said anything more than which pile of logs to move, which two-by-fours to paint, that he was a wholesale grocery distributor for a few of the local supermarkets. That he sometimes managed to bring “stuff like this” home. Cyrus called our Saturday visits to Jude “grocery shopping.”
“Like volunteering in a co-op,” he’d said once on our way to Jude’s house.
“Except sexier,” I added.
“Oh my god,” said Cyrus. “Yeah. Are we doing sex work? Is this sex work? Are we selling our bodies?”
“Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies,” I said, smiling. “That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.”
Cyrus rolled his eyes, asked, “And what would Zee Novak say?”
I laughed: “Zee Novak says free groceries are free groceries.”
So every Saturday we went, worked under Jude’s creepy but ultimately unthreatening watch. He was a shrimpy guy, not too much older than us but already balding, wispy blond hair over a perpetual wince, the sort of crestfallen man who looked like he’d been getting short-shrifted for a lifetime and had given up complaining about it. All sinew and pale white, it seemed like this hour of watching us work in the sun might be the only time all week he spent outdoors.
This particular Saturday we arrived a little later than we normally did. Cyrus had traded some of his scrips for a fentanyl patch and spent the previous evening like a chemist, dissolving the patch in alcohol, then evaporating the alcohol over an old glass chessboard.
“Sixty-four tidy doses!” he beamed, holding up the chessboard once his tincture finished drying. He took such pride in being “good at drugs.” I could take them or leave them; my mom was always fucked up on some combination of prescriptions and ayurvedic snake oil, benzos, and traditional Egyptian remedies based on the Book of Thoth.
“You know they could diagnose and treat diabetes?” she’d say of our ancient Egyptian ancestors.
“So can we,” I’d think but not say.
Still, Cyrus’s enthusiasms were infectious, so we each licked two chessboard fentanyl squares and drove over to Jude’s. The feeling started floaty, like I was hovering an inch above the passenger seat of Cyrus’s car, which was itself hovering an inch off the road. Then, it was like wind lifting us up, like wind lifting off a leaf, like the wind saying its own name—that uncanny and light.
Jude’s house was a tidy ranch home just off the highway. He came to the door before we knocked, wearing, as ever, nothing but his loose tighty-whities, buttery yellow around the crotch and waist, and sagging from his groin as his blotchy pale skin sagged over them. He walked us through his house, where two blond dogs slept cramped over each other in a wire living room kennel, and out to his backyard. There were wind chimes hanging in front of every window in the house, but on the inside, like low-tech burglar alarms. Some windows had multiple sets of wind chimes, wind chimes even hung from the blades of the ceiling fan in the living room.
“What’re the dogs’ names?” I asked Jude, trying to make conversation.
“The big one is Noah. The loud one’s Shiloh.”
The dogs looked like brothers. At a glance they seemed the same size, and neither one was making a sound. Cyrus shot me a quick smirk.
In the backyard, there was a massive stack of logs, and a cartoonishly large axe leaned against a great tree stump.
“I’m having some friends over for a bonfire tonight,” Jude said. “I need that chopped into firewood.” His pink nipples were nearly invisible, almost as pale as his skin. “Quickly.” Without another word, he pulled his lawn chair into the shade of the patio awning, put on a pair of headphones, and began watching us.
The air was thick; I was already sweating from the fentanyl. A light breeze made my clammy arms feel extra cold, the way chewing mint gum makes water taste cool. Cyrus looked at the wood, then at me, and asked, “Have you ever, uh, chopped wood?”
We both laughed.
“What do you think?” I said.
Cyrus shrugged.
“People way dumber than us do it all the time,” he said, picking up the axe.
“I don’t know that intelligence is the success variable here,” I said. Cyrus was tall but the axe was giant. It made him look slight.
“Here, hold this,” he said, balancing a triangular log on the stump, holding a finger on its tip like a football.
“Excuse me?” I said. “Hold this here with my finger, my finger on my lovely hand, which is still attached to my lovely arm? Like Lucy from Peanuts? While you swing at it with an axe?”
Cyrus paused.
“Damn, maybe we are too dumb for this.” He laughed.
“Or too high,” I added.
Jude was watching us from his chair, unmoving. From somewhere he’d procured a can of Coors Light, which was sweating, unopened, at his feet.
I took the axe from Cyrus and set the log up on the stump. It felt kind of deliciously elemental, like the whole heft of it had just been shot out of a volcano, or pulled from a magical stone. Most of my days were spent tapping food orders into point-of-service computers at work, thinking about playing drums without actually finding time or occasion to play them. The axe had a drumstick’s simple sense of purpose. Hold this, hit that. I brought it behind my head and onto the wood. Clumsy, but I did chip away a little corner piece of the log.
“Kindling!” Cyrus shouted, excited. “You made a kindling!” For all his oscillating between self-loathing and self-pity, Cyrus always seemed sincerely joyful at his friends’ most banal successes. Even then.
“We’re a couple of regular Johnny Appleseeds,” he said.
“And there’s our big blue ox,” I said, nodding over to Jude.
Cyrus furrowed his brow, then nodded:
“You’re thinking of Paul Bunyan,” he corrected.
“Hm?”
“Paul Bunyan had the giant blue ox.” Cyrus was always doing that, correcting people. Even while stoned on fentanyl. Even on the whitest shit imaginable.
“Man, shut up,” I said, bringing the axe back down on the wood. The sun was weaving in and out behind the clouds. Jude adjusted his crotch, cracked open the beer.
Slowly, Cyrus and I made messy work of the logs. It felt like we were controlling geometry, bending physics to our will. Occasionally, sparrows would come into the yard around us to peck at the soil.
“Li’l worm gobblers,” Cyrus said idly, which made us both laugh way harder than it should have.
After we’d been at it for fifteen, twenty minutes, Jude shifted a bit, called out, “Hey!” He pointed to a rubber tire in a brush pile in the corner of the yard. “You guys can use that if you want,” he said.
Cyrus and I looked at the tire, then at each other, then back at Jude, perplexed.
Jude sighed, stood up, walked dramatically over to the tire. With exaggerated effort, he lifted it and placed it down on the stump.
“You put the logs in this,” Jude said. “Then you don’t have to collect them when they split everywhere.”
His voice was weirdly baritone, like hearing a small bird sing like a tuba. He sighed again in extravagant exasperation and went back to his chair. His back was streaked with oily white suntan lotion skids, barely visible against his pale skin.
“Thanks,” I called to him, standing a couple logs up within the tire, then stepping back so Cyrus could swing. He brought the axe down on a log, hard, and it fractured neatly inside the tire.
“He was right,” Cyrus said in mild surprise. “Cool.”
“I still can’t figure out if this is fucked up,” I said. “Letting him watch us like this. Are we doing an ethical compromise?”
“That’s a you question, Zee,” said Cyrus.
“What’s that thing about money being the externalization of all man’s capacity?” I asked. “How do groceries fit into that?”
“Look at me being a capacious man!” Cyrus said, grinning, bringing the axe down hard.
“For canned beets and mushroom soup,” I said. “That’s…better? Than money? I think?”
Cyrus had stopped listening. An arc of sweat had formed around the neck of his green T-shirt, making a little brown parabola beneath his Adam’s apple.
“You think we could lick a couple more squares when we get home?” he asked. “Without getting pukey?”
“I don’t know. I’m still feeling pretty good.”
My brain felt like a flooded orchard. All the flowers—gold, indigo, white, violet—just floating along the water. Cyrus heaved the axe again. Each hard crack of the wood felt momentous, like it was announcing a great person’s birth. One of the dogs inside had begun barking at the cracking wood.
“Shut up, Noah!” shouted Jude, annoyed to be broken from his observant trance.
“Wasn’t Shiloh supposed to be the loud one?” I whispered to Cyrus. He just smiled, brought the axe down. It thudded dully and bounced out of his hand. I saw it sitting on the grass, but it took a beat to comprehend something was amiss.
“Ah, are you okay?” I asked Cyrus. The axe had struck the rubber of the tire, then sprung free from his grip.
“Shit—” he said. I looked down. The axe was lying on the grass by his left foot, but peering over I saw his blue canvas shoe was torn open, purpling.
“Oh fuck,” I said.
Shiloh or Noah was barking uncontrollably now. Jude shot up.
“What happened!” he asked. Running over to us, catching sight of Cyrus’s foot, he said, “What…what is that?”
“Fuck,” said Cyrus.
“It’s blood, Jude!” I snapped. “Do you have—can we use your bathtub?”
Cyrus had gone pale. He was moving his head to look at his foot from different angles, almost incredulous, studying it like, what’s the trick? What’s really going on here?
Jude led us quickly back through his house to a bathtub, Cyrus leaning on me and hopping along on his good foot. A wooden wind chime hung in front of the bathroom mirror, doubling itself in the glass. A smaller one dangled from the towel rack.
“It honestly doesn’t even hurt,” said Cyrus, stunned, staring at his bloody shoe.
“That’s not a good thing,” I said, shooting him a look to remind him we’d been licking potent pain meds designed for the terminally ill.
“Shit shit shit shit,” Jude said, who in his ludicrous underwear looked like a boiled chicken.
Cyrus said, “I should take my shoe off?” asking it like a question.
“It’s probably going to look worse than it is,” said Jude to himself, more wish than assessment of observable reality.
Cyrus sat down on the toilet lid and held his feet over the bathtub. He looked some combination of stunned and high. So was I, to be honest. The flooded orchard in my head was a roiling ocean now, the flowers all lost under the fuzz of sea foam. Jude was pacing between the bathroom and hallway, staring down at the little carpet trail of blood and muck we’d brought in, shaking his head.
I helped Cyrus take his shoe off, a ratty blue canvas Vans sneaker that was torn open just below the toe, wet with a purple-black throb of blood. I slid it off gingerly. Cyrus winced, and—there’s no other way to say it—I poured it out. I was shocked at how much blood there was, how much hadn’t been absorbed by Cyrus’s sock and the shoe itself. It seemed to violate some physics principle, how the shoe could have held that much blood plus a whole foot. Jude gagged theatrically behind us. Cyrus smiled a little—
“Okay, that did hurt,” he said, inhaling through his clenched teeth as I pulled off his wet black sock. Somehow he was still grinning.
“Do you need…gloves? Gloves? I have some gloves, somewhere,” Jude said, recovering from his gags, disappearing into the hallway eager to have landed upon an excuse to leave.
A dog was barking. I turned on the bathtub faucet. From the hallway, Jude screamed, “Noah! Shut! The! Fuck! Up!”
“You know, in Islam, Noah’s this totally messed-up prophet,” Cyrus said, eerily nonplussed. “His neighbors ignore him when he tries to convert them, so Noah asks God to drown them.” I gently pulled his foot under the stream of water, which turned pink-red as it went down the drain. I could finally see the gash—not much bigger than a quarter, but it seemed deep.
“I think we might need to go to the hospital, Cyrus,” I said.
He wasn’t paying attention.
“The whole thing is nuts,” Cyrus went on. “I think Noah was like, Methuselah’s grandson. Just asking God to kill basically all of mankind. And then he lived to be a thousand years old.”
“Cyrus—” I said.
Jude emerged in the doorway with a pair of flowery garden gloves, crusted with dirt.
“Are these”—he paused, realizing the answer to his question before he asked it—“anything?”
The hole in Cyrus’s foot was weirdly round to have come from an axe. I said so, then added, “I guess I don’t know what an axe wound is supposed to look like.”
“Do you really think we need to go to the hospital?” Cyrus said. “It looks like the blood is maybe slowing down.”
He was right. The hue of the water circling the drain now was more a soft pink, like the frayed edges of a sunset.
“Yeah, I think it is too,” I said. Then, to Jude, “Do you have any gauze? Or bandages?” Jude disappeared swiftly again. The wind chimes hanging in front of the bathroom mirror rattled with the wind of his exit.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” I asked Cyrus. “It’s up to you.”
“Not unless I’m going to like, die, if I don’t,” he said, then added, “though it would be hilarious to hear you try to explain our foray into lumberjackery.”
I laughed a little. We probably should have gone to the hospital—for weeks, maybe months after this, Cyrus walked with a little limp. The wound never really healed, just kind of plummed and flared over into a dull ache that according to Cyrus never fully went away, though he hardly ever mentioned it. In that moment though, sitting in the weirdness of the situation, in ridiculous Jude’s ridiculous bathroom, I just laughed and turned the water off. The gash was pink, pink turning slowly to red, but not gushing anymore. My ears were ringing with the sound of a gong not struck for years. Jude emerged with an unopened roll of paper towel under his arm and, in his hand, a circle of gray matte duct tape and a tube of Neosporin.
“Really?” I said at Jude’s assortment of first aid. Cyrus giggled. Jude was still wearing nothing but his underwear, hadn’t used the excuse of his exit to throw on some basketball shorts or a T-shirt, anything more befitting the urgency of the situation.
“I’m not a fucking nurse,” he snarled. “And I need you two to leave. People are coming over in a couple hours and now I need to clean all this mess,” he said, gesturing toward the blood-stained carpet. “I don’t care if you go home or go to the hospital,” he said in a high-pitched whine, “but I need you gone.” He handed me the paper towel and I ripped it out of the plastic packaging, used it to pat Cyrus’s foot dry.
“Do you have any coconut juice?” Cyrus asked Jude. Then to me, “That’s a thing, right? Coconut juice is the same thing as blood? Or blood plasma? When you drink it?”
I shrugged. Jude said, “I’m not a Trader Joe’s either. I might have some dried coconut for baking, maybe.”
“That should work too,” I said, based on nothing, mostly wanting Jude to leave us alone, which he did. I filled Cyrus’s gash with Neosporin, then wrapped his foot in the paper towel, gingerly, though he still didn’t seem to be in any great pain.
“Now we definitely get to lick more squares when we get home,” Cyrus said, grinning.
I squeezed his calf a little and looked up at his face, which was unaccountably calm, if pale. He looked chipper even, probably at having a new excuse to take more fentanyl. Something delicate released in my chest, like a gold ring dropping in a bowl of milk.
Jude emerged with an already-opened bag of sweetened shredded coconut, handed it to Cyrus. Cyrus shrugged and began happily munching pinchfuls of the coconut as I duct-taped paper towel around his foot till half the roll had been used up. The makeshift cast I’d given him was almost cartoonishly thick, the size of a basketball, but what else was I going to do? Jude was still standing in the bathroom doorway, occasionally looking over his shoulder to shoot death stares at his dogs.
“We’ve probably earned some extra grocery bags this week, no?” Cyrus said to Jude, smiling.
I looked at Cyrus, then, following his lead, said, “Oh yeah, and probably some cash for new shoes. And real bandages and gauze.”
Jude stared at Cyrus, then back at me. It was impossible to feel intimidated by him, standing there as he was in his sallow underwear. Still, he was trying with all his might to summon some long-forfeited sense of menace.
“How much to get you guys to leave and never come back?” he whispered, deliberately, trying to make each individual word sound like a threat.
“I think probably a hundred dollars,” Cyrus answered quickly.
“At least,” I added.
“Yeah,” Cyrus went on. “Maybe even like, one fifty. I’m gonna need new shoes for sure.”
Jude hissed—I remember that so clearly, he audibly hissed—as he left the bathroom.
“You know,” he shouted from down the hallway, “this is going to cost me too. Your carelessness. I’m going to have to buy cleaning stuff for my floors. My dogs are freaking out.”
The dogs were silent. I shot Cyrus a stifled giggle, which he returned. Jude came back with a pile of crumpled money, not stacked in any way. It was mostly fives and ones.
“This is one hundred and twenty dollars,” Jude said. “Leave.”
“I want that wind chime too,” said Cyrus.
“What?” asked Jude.
I looked at Cyrus, whose face was suddenly dead serious.
“That one,” Cyrus said, pointing at the big chime over the bathroom mirror, a half-dozen wooden tubes cut at different lengths suspended from a carved cardinal the size of an apple.
Jude squinted at Cyrus, staring him down for a beat, two. Cyrus maintained eye contact while slowly squeezing a little pinch of shredded coconut into his mouth, chewing it. Wordlessly, Jude reached up to the mirror and took the wind chimes down from their hook, looking over his shoulder as he did it, as if to avoid seeing his own face. The chimes sounded in his hands, their delicate plunky clinks an odd sonic consequence of Jude’s furiously thrusting them toward Cyrus.
“Now leave,” Jude said.
Cyrus laughed, took them into his hands, and actually said “Incredible” out loud before hobbling up onto one foot.
I grabbed the pile of cash and helped Cyrus hop, one-footed, to the front door. Shiloh and Noah were standing at attention within their kennel, looking like carbon copies of each other. Each time Cyrus hopped forward, the chimes jingled a little, and at each jingle the dogs perked their ears, again and again, as Cyrus bounded, grinning, out the door.
That night we bought a bunch of liquor with the cash and invited some friends over to our apartment. Each time someone arrived and asked about Cyrus’s foot, which he’d left embalmed in my paper-towel-and-duct-tape cast, he proudly retold the story. Each time the story repeated, it got a little creepier. Jude’s underwear eventually became a thong. In addition to the wind chimes, he’d had raw bacon taped to his walls. The two kenneled dogs became ferocious mastiffs trying to eat our faces off. I always kind of admired Cyrus’s imaginative retellings, like he was trying to workshop in real-time how he’d eventually write the story. I loved his enthusiasms, his haplessness.
“Wait, what was the coconut for again?” asked our friend Zain, cracking up.
“So the dude never even put on a pair of sweats?” asked Eleni.
“You should bring him some coconut juice when you go back next week,” snickered Sad James.
Everyone licked the chessboard, laughed, chimed the wind chimes, which I’d hung from a corner of our living room record player. We all drank, passed around bowls of this and that, sang, laughed some more. At some point I made my way back to my bedroom to pass out while the room was singing along to an Of Montreal track, the vocals cheerily pleading, “C’mon chemicals, c’mooon chemicals!”
When I woke up the next morning, I walked out into the living room to find it emptied of everyone save Cyrus, who was passed out, half-snoring, still sitting up on the couch with his bad foot balanced on the coffee table like a trophy. The outer layer of his paper towel cast was dirty now, ashy gray visible through the duct tape. Near the toe, a wet red circle, small as a cherry, was just starting to peek through.