FROM Love Life (1989)
Steve leaves the supermarket and hits the sunlight. Blinking, he stands there a moment, then glances at his feet. He has on running shoes, but he was sure he had put on boots. He touches his face. He hasn’t shaved. His car, illegally parked in the space for the handicapped, is deep blue and wicked. The rear has “Midnight Magic” painted on it in large pink curlicue letters with orange-and-red tails. Rays of color, fractured rainbows, spread out over the flanks. He picked the design from a thick book the custom painters had. The car’s rear end is hiked up like a female cat in heat. Prowling in his car at night, he could be Dracula.
Sitting behind the wheel, he eats the chocolate-covered doughnuts he just bought and drinks from a carton of chocolate milk. The taste of the milk is off. They do something weird to chocolate milk now. His father used to drive a milk truck, before he got arrested for stealing a shipment of bowling shoes he found stacked up behind a shoe store. He had always told Steve to cover his tracks and accentuate the positive.
It is Sunday. Steve is a wreck, still half drunk. Last night, just after he and Karen quarreled and she retreated to his bathroom to sulk, the telephone rang. It was Steve’s brother, Bud, wanting to know if Steve had seen Bud’s dog, Big Red. Bud had been out hunting with Big Red and his two beagles, and Big Red had strayed. Steve hadn’t seen the stupid dog. Where would he have seen him—strolling down Main Street? Bud lived several miles out in the country. Steve was annoyed with him for calling late on a Saturday night. He still hadn’t forgiven Bud for the time he shot a skunk and left it in Steve’s garbage can. Steve popped another beer and watched some junk on television until Karen emerged from the bathroom and started gathering up her things.
“Why don’t you get some decent dishes?” she said, pointing to the splotched paper plates littering the kitchen counter.
“Paper plates are simpler,” he said. “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy paper plates.” He pulled her down on the couch and tousled her hair, then held her arms down, tickling her.
“Quit it!” she squealed, but he was sure she didn’t mean it. He was just playing.
“You’re like that old cat Mama used to have,” she said, wrenching herself away from him. “He always got rough when you played with him, and then he’d start drumming with his hind legs. Cats do that when they want to rip out a rabbit’s guts.”
Steve will be glad when his friends Doran and Nancy get home. Whenever Doran wrestled Nancy down onto the couch at Steve’s apartment and tickled her, she loved it. Doran and Nancy got married last week and went to Disney World, and Steve has promised to pick them up at the airport down in Nashville later today. Doran met Nancy only six weeks ago—at the Bluebird Cocktail Lounge and Restaurant, over in Paducah. Doran was with Steve and Karen, celebrating Karen’s twentythird birthday. Nancy and another waitress brought Karen’s birthday cake to the table and sang “Happy Birthday.” The cake was sizzling with lighted sparklers. Nancy wore clinging sports tights—hot pink, with black slashes across the calves—and a long aqua sweatshirt that reached just below her ass. Doran fell in love—suddenly and passionately. Steve knew Doran had never stayed with one girl long enough to get a deep relationship going, and suddenly he was in love. Steve was surprised and envious.
Nancy has a cute giggle, a note of encouragement in response to anything Doran says. Her hips are slender, her legs long and well proportioned. She wears contact lenses tinted blue. But she is not really any more attractive than Karen, who has blond hair and natural blue eyes. And Nancy doesn’t know anything about cars. Karen has a working knowledge of crankshafts and fuel pumps. When her car stalls, she knows it’s probably because the distributor cap is wet. Steve wishes he and Karen could cut up like Nancy and Doran. Nancy and Doran love “The New Newlywed Game.” They make fun of it, trying to guess things they should know about each other if they were on that show. If Nancy learned that grilled steak was Doran’s favorite food, she’d say, “Now, I’m going to remember that! That’s the kind of thing you have to know on the ‘Newlyweds.’”
During those weeks of watching Doran and Nancy in love, Steve felt empty inside, doomed. When Karen was angry at him last night, it was as if a voice from another time had spoken through her and told him his fate. Karen believes in things like that. She is always telling him what Sardo says in the Sunday-night meetings she goes to at the converted dance hall, next to the bowling alley. Sardo is a thousand-year-old American Indian inhabiting the body of a teenage girl in Paducah. Until Karen started going to those meetings, she and Steve had been solid together—not deliriously in love, like Doran and Nancy, but reasonably happy. Now Steve feels confused and transparent, as though Karen has eyes that see right through him.
In his apartment, on the second floor of a big old house with a large landlady (gland problem), he searches for his laundry. Karen must have hidden his clothes. If he’s lucky, she has taken them home with her to wash. The clipping about Nancy’s wedding flutters from the stereo. He is saving it for her. “The bride wore a full-length off-white dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, dotted with seed pearls.” There’s a misprint in the story: “The bridgeroom, Doran Palmer, is employed at Johnson Sheet Metal Co.” Steve smiles. Doran will get a kick out of that. Before he and Nancy left for Florida, Doran told Steve he felt as though he had won a sweepstakes. “She really makes me feel like somebody,” Doran said. “Isn’t that all anybody wants in the world—just to feel like somebody?”
Steve’s clothes are under his bed, along with some dust fluffs. From the television screen a shiny-haired guy in a dark-blue suit yells at him about salvation. There is an 800-number telephone listing at the bottom of the screen. All Steve has to do is send money. “You send me some money and I’ll work on your soul,” Steve tells the guy. He flips through all the stations on cable, but nothing good is on. He picks up the telephone to call Karen, then replaces it. He has to think of what to say. He cracks his knuckles. She hates that.
Steve stuffs all his laundry into one big bag, grabs his keys, and slams out of his place. As usual, the bag slung over his shoulder makes him think of Santa Claus. At the laundromat he packs everything into one machine. He pours powder in and rams in the quarters, pretending he’s playing a slot machine. The laundromat is crowded. It’s surprising how many people skip church nowadays. But it’s good that there are fewer hypocrites, he decides. Catholic priests are dying from AIDS, and here in town half the Baptists are alcoholics. A pretty woman in purple jeans is reading a book. He considers approaching her, then decides not to. She might be too smart for him. He leaves his clothes churning and cruises past McDonald’s and Hardee’s to see if there’s anyone he knows. Should he go over to Karen’s? While he thinks about it, he pulls into the Amoco station and gasses up. Steve’s friend Pete squirts blue fluid on Steve’s windshield—a personal service not usually provided at the self-serve island. Pete leans into Steve’s car and tugs the lavender garter dangling from the rearview mirror. “Hey, Steve, looks like you got lucky.”
“Yeah.” It was Nancy’s, from the wedding. It was supposed to be blue, but she got lavender because it was on sale. Doran told Nancy that her blue-tinted contact lenses would do for “something blue.” Nancy threw the garter to Steve—the same way she tossed her bridal bouquet to her girlfriends. He thought that catching her garter meant he was next in line for something. Something good—he doesn’t know what. Maybe Karen could ask Sardo, but whatever Sardo said, Steve wouldn’t believe it. Sardo is a first-class fake.
Steve has been banging on the pump, trying to get his gas cap to jump off the top. When it does, he catches it neatly: infield-fly rule. The gas nozzle clicks and he finishes the fill-up.
“Well, Steve, don’t you go falling asleep on the job,” Pete says as Steve guns the engine.
That’s an old joke. Steve works at the mattress factory. The factory is long and low and windowless, and bales of fiberfill hug the walls. Steve steers giant scissors across soft, patterned fabric fastened on stretchers. After he crams the stuffing into the frame, Janetta and Lynn do the finishing work. The guys at the plant tease those girls all day. Janetta and Lynn play along, saying, “Do you want to get in my bed?” Or, “Let’s spend lunch hour in the bed room.” The new mattresses are displayed beneath glaring fluorescent lights—not the sexiest place to get anything going. But Steve likes the new-bed smell there. He likes the smell of anything new. The girls are nice, but they’re not serious. Lynn is engaged, and she’s three years older than Steve.
At the laundromat he transfers the soggy, cold load into a dryer and flips each dime on the back of his hand before inserting it. Two heads, two tails. He slides a dollar bill into the change machine and watches George Washington’s face disappear and turn into dimes. He laughs, imagining George Washington coming back in the twentieth century and trying to make sense out of laundromats, Midnight Magic, and crazy women. The woman in the purple pants is still there, reading her book. He drives off, screeching loudly out of his parking spot.
Karen’s apartment is above a dry cleaner’s, next to a vacant lot. It’s a lonesome part of town, near the overhead bridge that leads out of town. The parking lot has four cars in it, including her red Escort. An exterior wooden stairway with several broken steps leads to her apartment. There’s a rapist in town, and he has struck twice in Karen’s neighborhood. Now she sleeps with a knife beside her bed and a shotgun beneath it.
“Are you still mad at me?” he asks when she opens the door. She just woke up and her hair is shooting off in several directions.
“Yeah.” She lets him in and returns to her bed.
“What did I do?” He sits down on the edge of the bed.
She doesn’t answer that. She says, “When I came in last night I was too nervous to sleep, so I painted that wall.” She points to the bedroom wall, now a pale green. The other walls are pink. The colors are like the candy mints at Nancy and Doran’s wedding. “The landlord said if I paint everything he’ll take it off the rent,” Karen says.
“He ought to put bars on the windows,” Steve says. Lined-up Coke bottles stand guard on the windowsills, along with spider plants that dangle their creepy arms all the way to the floor.
“If that rapist comes in through the window I’ll be ready for him,” she says. “I’ll blast him to kingdom come. I mean it, too. I’ll kill that sucker dead.” She scrunches up her pillow and hugs it. “I need some coffee.”
“Want me to go get you some? I can get some at McDonald’s when I go get my clothes out of the dryer.”
“I’ll just turn on the coffeepot,” she says, swinging out of bed. She’s wearing a red football shirt with the number 46 on the front. Steve thumps his fist on the mattress. It’s a poor mattress. He doesn’t like sleeping with her here. He wanted her to stay with him last night.
Karen flip-flops into the kitchen and runs water into her coffeepot. She measures coffee into a filter paper and sets it in the cone above the pot, then pours the water into the top compartment of the coffee maker. He envies her. He can’t even make a pot of coffee. He should do more for her—maybe get her a new mattress, at cost. Her apartment is small, decorated with things she made in a crafts club.
“You ought to move,” he says.
She laughs. “Hey! I’m trying to lure the guy here. I want that five-thousand-dollar reward!”
“You could move in with me.” He’s never said anything like that before, and he’s shocked at himself.
She disappears into her bedroom and returns in a few minutes wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The dripping coffee smells like burning leaves, with acorns. Steve likes the smell, but he doesn’t really like coffee. When he was little, the smell of his mother’s percolator in the morning was intoxicating, but when he got old enough to drink it he couldn’t believe how bitter it was.
“Did you find your clothes?” Karen asks after she has poured two mugs of coffee and dosed them with milk and sugar.
“Yeah, I had to haul ’em out from under the bed. Some fluffy little animals had made their nests in them.” He reaches over and draws her near him.
“What kind of animals?” she says, softening.
“Little kittens and bunnies,” he says into her hair.
She breathes into his neck. “I wish I knew what to do about you,” she murmurs.
“Trust me.”
“I don’t know,” she says, pulling away from him.
He starts playing with the can opener, opening and closing the handles.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “It makes me nervous. I didn’t get enough sleep. I’m not going to get a good night’s sleep till they catch that guy.”
“Why don’t you ask Sardo who that rapist is? Old Sardo’s such a know-it-all.”
“Oh, shut up. You never take anything seriously.”
“I am serious. I asked you to move in with me.”
She drinks from her coffee mug, and her face livens up. She says, “I’ve got a lot to do today. I’m going to write letters to my sister and my nephews in Tallahassee. And I want to alter that new outfit I bought and clean my apartment and finish painting the bedroom.” She sighs. “I’ll never get all that done.”
As she talks, he has been playing air guitar, like an accompanying tune. He turns to box playfully at her. “Go to Nashville with me today to get Doran and Nancy,” he says.
“No, I’ve got too much to do before tonight’s meeting. It’s about recognizing your inner strength.” She stares at him, in mingled exasperation and what he hopes is a hint of love. “I have to get my head together. Leave me alone today—O.K.?”
Jittery on Karen’s coffee but feeling optimistic, he drives back to the laundromat. He spends half his life chasing after his clothes. Traffic is heavy; families are heading home from church for fried chicken and the Cardinals game. People getting out of church must feel great, he thinks. He has heard that religion is a sex substitute. Karen told him Sardo is both sexes. “Double your pleasure, double your fun” was Steve’s reply. Karen said, “Sardo says the answers are in yourself, not in God.” On TV, the evangelists say the answers are in God. When people bottom out, they often get born again and discover Jesus. That’s exactly what happened to Steve’s father. He sends Steve pathetic letters filled with Bible quotations. His father used to live for what he could get away with, but now he casually dumps his shit in Christ’s lap. Steve hopes he never gets that low. He’d rather trust himself. He’s not sure he could trust anybody, especially Sardo—even if Sardo’s message is to trust yourself. He’s afraid Karen is getting brainwashed. He has heard that the girl who claims to be Sardo is now driving a Porsche.
At the laundromat, he finds his clothes piled up on top of the dryer, which is whirring with someone else’s clothes. His laundry is still damp and he has to wait till another dryer is free. Fuming, he sits in the car and listens to the radio, knowing that his impatience is pointless, because when his laundry is finished, all he’ll probably do is drive around and listen to the radio. “Keep it where you got it,” says the DJ. “Ninety-four-five FM.”
Through the window, he sees the woman in purple pants remove her laundry from the dryer he had used. He slouches out of Midnight Magic and enters the laundromat. Her laundry, in a purple laundry basket, includes purple T-shirts and socks and panties.
“Looks like you’re into purple,” he says to her as he wads his damp clothes into the vacated dryer.
“It’s my favorite color, is all,” she says, giving him a cool look. She grabs the panties in her laundry just as he reaches for them. She’s quick.
“Do you want to hear a great joke?” he asks.
“What?”
“Why did Reagan bomb Libya?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“To impress Jodie Foster.”
“Who’s Jodie Foster?” she asks.
“You’re kidding!” When Doran told Nancy that joke she got the giggles.
The woman folds a filmy nightgown into thirds, then expertly twines together a pair of purple socks. No children’s T-shirts, no men’s clothes in her pile.
“I just had some coffee and it makes me shake,” he says, holding out his hand in front of her face. He makes his hand tremble.
“You oughtn’t to drink coffee, then,” she says.
“You really know how to hurt a guy,” he says to her. “When you say something like that, it’s like closing a door.”
She doesn’t answer. She hip-hugs her laundry basket and leaves.
The red light at the intersection of Walnut and Center streets is taking about three hours, and there’s not a car in sight, so Steve scoots through. He drives back to Karen’s apartment building and pulls in beside her Escort, trying to decide what to do. The small parking lot is wedged between Karen’s building and the service entrance of a luncheonette. After business hours the place is deserted. Karen’s windows look out on the roof of the luncheonette. At night the parking lot is badly lighted. He hates himself for letting her drive home alone last night, but he was too drunk to drive and she refused to let him. Last night, he suddenly remembers, he pretended to be the rapist. That was why she was so furious with him. But she didn’t say anything about it today. Maybe he terrified her so much she was afraid to bring it up. “Don’t do that again!” she cried when she broke free of his clutches last night. “But wouldn’t it be a relief to know it was only me?” he asked. That was where tickling her on the couch had led. He couldn’t stop himself. But it was just a game. She should have known that.
If he were the neighborhood rapist scouting out her apartment, he would hide in the dark doorway of the delivery entrance of the dry cleaner’s downstairs, and when she came in at night, pointing the way with the key, he’d grab her tight around her waist. His weapon, hidden in his jacket, would press into her back. Catching her outside would be easier than coming through the window, smashing bottles to the floor and then being attacked by those spider plants of hers. Steve shudders. The rapist would simply twist her knife out of her hand and use it on her. He would grab her shotgun away from her, as easily as Steve pinned her on the bed last night.
Steve eases into reverse and creeps out of the parking lot. At a stop sign a pickup pulls around him, beeping. It’s Bud.
“I found Big Red!” Bud yells. “He turned up at the back door this morning, starved.” Big Red wobbles in the truck bed, his tongue hanging out like a handkerchief from a pocket.
“I knew he’d come back,” Steve calls over.
“You didn’t know that! Irish setters take a notion to run like hell and they get lost.”
“Tell Big Red to settle down,” says Steve. “Tell him some bedtime stories. Feed him some hog fat.”
“Are you O.K., Steve?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You look like death warmed over.” A car behind them blows. “Take it easy,” says Bud.
Steve takes home a Big Mac and a double order of fries and eats in his kitchen, with a beer. The Cardinals game is just beginning. He feels at loose ends. Sometimes he has sudden feelings of desperation he can’t explain—as if he has to get rid of something in his system. Like racing the engine to burn impurities out of his fuel line. He realizes a word has been tumbling through his mind all morning. Navratilova. The syllables spill out musically, to the tune of “Hearts on Fire,” by Bryan Adams. Navratilova—her big arms like a man’s. He imagines Nancy coming over—in her leg-of-lamb sleeves, her hot-pink tights. She’s always in a good mood. He’s sure she would be an immaculate housekeeper. Everything would be clean and pretty and safe, but she wouldn’t mention how she slaved over it. Steve has noticed that most people feel sorry for themselves for having to do what they have actually maneuvered themselves into doing. His dad complaining about the food in jail. Bud moaning about his lost dog. Karen painting her wall. Or having to get her chores done so she won’t be late to her meeting. When she had to get new tires, she fussed about the cost for weeks. He realizes he and Karen can never be like Doran and Nancy. There has to be some chemistry between two people, something inexplicable. Why is he involved with someone who follows the bizarre teachings of a teenager who says she’s a reincarnated Indian? In a moment, he realizes how illogical his thoughts are. He wants something miraculous, but he can’t believe in it. His head buzzes.
He finishes eating and surveys the damage. His place is straight out of Beirut. The waste can overflows with TV-dinner boxes and paper plates. In the oven, he finds a pizza box from last Sunday. Two leftover slices are growing little garden plots of gray mold. He locates a garbage bag and starts to clear out his kitchen. He’s aware he’s cleaning it up for Karen to move in; otherwise he wouldn’t bother until it got really bad. If she moves in, she can have the alcove by the bedroom for her crafts table. He pops another beer. The Cards game is away, in a domed stadium. He can never really tell from TV what it would feel like to be inside such a huge place. He can’t imagine how a whole ball field, with fake grass, can be under one roof. Playing baseball there seems as crazy as going fishing indoors. He picks up an earring beside the couch.
Then the telephone rings. It’s Doran. “Steve, you crazy idiot! Where in Jesus’ name are you?”
“I’m right here. Where are you?”
“Well, take a wild guess.”
“I don’t know. Having a beer with Mickey Mouse?”
“Nancy and me are at the Nashville airport, and guess who was supposed to meet us.”
“Oh, no! I thought it was tonight.”
“One o’clock, Flight 432.”
“I wrote it down somewhere. I thought it was seven o’clock.”
“Well, we’re here, and what are we going to do about it?”
“I guess I’ll have to come down and get you.”
“Well, hurry. Nancy’s real tired. She had insomnia last night.”
“Are you still in love?” Steve blurts out. He’s playing with Karen’s earring, a silver loop within a loop.
Doran laughs strangely. “Oh, we’ll tell you all about it. This has been a honeymoon for the record books.”
“Go watch the ball game in the bar. And hang on, Doran. I’ll be there in two and a half hours flat.”
“Don’t burn up the road—but hurry.”
Steve puts the rest of the six-pack in a cooler and takes off. He heads out to the parkway that leads to I-24 and down to Nashville. He can’t understand Doran’s tone. He spoke as though he’d discovered something troubling about Nancy. Steve is miles out of town before he remembers he didn’t pick up his laundry. He wishes Karen were along. She likes to go for Sunday drives in his car. He considers turning around, giving her a call at a gas station. He can’t decide. On the radio a wild pitch distracts him and he realizes he’s already too far along to turn around. The beer is soothing his headache.
Steve passes the Lake Barkley exits and zooms around a truck on a hill. The highway is easy and open, no traffic. As he drives, the muddle in his mind seems to be smoothing out, like something in a blender. Early in the summer he and Karen spent a Saturday over here at the Land Between the Lakes. At one of the tourist spots they saw an albino deer in a pen. Later, as they cruised down the Trace, the highway that runs the length of the wilderness, Karen said the deer was spooky. “It was like something all bleached out. It wasn’t all there. It was embarrassing, like not having a tan in the summer.”
“Maybe we ought to get Ted Turner to come here and colorize it,” Steve said. “Like he’s doing those movies.”
Karen laughed. He used to be able to cheer her up like that before she got tangled up with Sardo. Before Sardo—B.S. Maybe he should become a cult-buster and rescue her. He has no idea how much money Sardo is costing her. She keeps that a secret.
Before long, he crosses the Tennessee line. Tennessee, the Volunteer State. For several miles, he tries to think of something that rhymes with Tennessee, then loses his train of thought. Suddenly he spots something lying ahead on the bank by the shoulder. It is large—perhaps a dead deer. As he approaches, he tries to guess what it is. He likes the way eyes can play tricks—how a giant bullfrog can turn out to be a cedar tree or a traffic sign. He realizes it’s a man, lying several yards off the shoulder. He wonders if it’s just a traveler who has stopped to take a nap, but there is no car nearby. Steve slows down to fifty. It is clearly a man, about twenty feet from the shoulder, near a bush. The man is lying face down, in an unnatural position, straight and flat—the position of a dead man. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and blue running shoes and faded jeans. Lying out there in the open, he seems discarded, like a bag of trash.
Steve glides past the nearby exit, figuring that someone has probably already called the police. With beer in the car and on his breath, Steve doesn’t want to fool with the police. They would want to know his license number, probably even bring him in for questions. If he stopped, he might leave footprints, flecks of paint from Midnight Magic. For all he knows, the mud flaps could have flung mud from Steve’s driveway straight toward the body as he passed. But he’s letting his imagination run away with him. He tries to laugh at this habit of his. He gulps some beer and tunes the ball game in over another station. It was fading away. Karen says to trust yourself, your instincts—know yourself.
“You don’t need a thousand-year-old Indian to tell you that,” he told her a few days ago. “I could have told you that for free.”
The Clarksville exit is coming up. “Last Train to Clarksville” runs through his mind. The man lying out there in broad daylight bothers him. It reminds him of the time he fell asleep at lunch hour in the mattress room, and when he woke up he felt like a patient awakening after surgery. Everyone was standing around him in a circle, probing him with their eyes. Without really planning it, he curves onto the exit ramp. He slows down, turns left, then right. He pulls up to the side of a gas station, in front of the telephone booth. He leaves the motor running and feels in his pocket for a quarter. He flips the quarter, thinking heads. It’s tails. There are emergency numbers on the telephone. The emergency numbers are free. He pockets the quarter and dials. A recorded voice asks him to hold.
In a moment, a woman’s voice answers. Steve answers in a tone higher than normal. “I was driving south on I-24? And I want to report that I saw a man laying on the side of the road. I don’t know if he was dead or just resting.”
“Where are you, sir?”
“Now? Oh, I’m at a gas station.”
“Location of gas station?”
“Hell, I don’t know. The Clarksville exit.”
“North or south?”
“South. I said south.”
“What’s the telephone number you’re speaking from?”
He spreads his free hand on the glass wall of the telephone booth and gazes through his fingers at pie-slice sections of scenery. Up on the interstate, the traffic proceeds nonchalantly, as indifferent as worms working the soil. The woman’s voice is asking something else over the phone. “Sir?” she says. “Are you there, sir?” His head buzzes from the beer. On his knuckle is a blood blister he doesn’t know where he got.
Steve studies his car through the door of the phone booth. It’s idling, jerkily, like a panting dog. It speeds up, then kicks down. His muffler has been growing throatier, making an impressive drag-race rumble. It’s the power of Midnight Magic, the sound of his heart.