Darlene walks through the open sliding door dragging two trees’ worth of divorce papers. Lord, she is beautiful, even as she harps on me about keeping the door open while the air conditioner is running in the other room. Darlene and her lawyer are setting me up where I won’t have an extra dime for the next five hundred years, and she’s telling me I need to watch my power bill. I follow her into the den, wishing I had a pair of blinders like they put on mules. Seeing her again after two months is killing me. It’s like trying to give up smoking and someone putting a lighted cigarette in your hand.
I look out the window and see Carl Blowmeyer in his backyard, barbecuing what looks like a large dog and staring this way. Blowmeyer is one of many northern retirees who have moved down here to live cheaper and to educate southerners about how to drive on snow. The one or two times each year the white stuff falls, Blowmeyer stands on main street with a Mr. Microphone and tells drivers what they’re doing wrong.
Spring and summer mornings he’s out in the yard with his lawn-mower, Weed Eater, and electric hedge clippers.
Blowmeyer’s grass is cut shorter than most golf course greens. He crawls around his yard on hands and knees to find wild onions and crabgrass. Now Blowmeyer is stretching his neck to see over the hedge, wanting to watch every minute of the soap opera next door. His shorter, grub-white wife stands on a lawn chair. They love my pain.
Darlene pushes empty Dos Equis bottles to the edge of the coffee table so she can spread out the divorce papers. She looks at the bottles and shakes her head. Darlene’s never had a drink in her life, and she used to punish me for my weakness by buying the cheapest beer she could find.
“That beer is six dollars a six pack,” she says.
“I bought it to help out the Mexicans,” I say. “They’re in bad shape down there.”
“Read and sign,” she says. “Stanley’s expecting me back at nine.”
I read. She will get the house, the car, and most of the five thousand in the bank. As far as I can tell, I get the pickup and all the food in the refrigerator.
I finish reading but I don’t look up. I’m thinking about the day we got married and how she looked right into my eyes and swore all that stuff about for better or for worse and for richer or for poorer. And now all those words, all those promises, have come to this.
“I loved you,” I say. “I think I might still. I didn’t mean to kill the monkey. I’d swear on a bible I didn’t.” Once I start talking I can’t stop. I sound like the worst drunk you ever sat next to in a bar.
I am a little drunk. If I’d been sober as a cow I’d have said the same thing—except I wouldn’t have said it.
“I wanted a child,” Darlene says. “You wouldn’t give me a child. You gave me a monkey and then you killed it.”
“Couldn’t,” I say. “Couldn’t. The doctors said it happens sometimes. It’s nothing a man can help.”
“Stanley says you could help it. He says you didn’t want a child, so your mind told your body to kill all those sperm. It’s psychological, something you wouldn’t understand. And then you killed Little Napoleon. Stanley says Little Napoleon was our symbolic child, and you killed him because you hated him. Stanley knows what he’s talking about. His minor at Auburn was psychology.”
I pick up the pen and begin to sign. I’m too much of a Baptist not to believe I’m guilty, even when I’m not exactly sure what I’m guilty of. Darlene is at least partly right. I had hated the monkey. Buying it had been a big mistake, but things had gotten so tense by then I felt I had nothing to lose. She had said she needed something else to love, something more than me. I couldn’t give her a child, so I drove to Asheville. A spider monkey was the closest thing I could find.
She had loved the monkey, and at first even loved me again. It was the Indian summer of our marriage. We were like a family. Every Friday after supper we would go to Greene’s Cafe and eat banana splits, then drive over to Shelby and play putt-putt, just like any other family. I tried my best. I even went with Darlene and Little Napoleon to Stanley’s office for his shots and checkups. But the monkey hated me from the very beginning. At night if I got up to go to the bathroom, it would wait till I started making water, then come flying out of the darkness, grab a calf, and draw blood. It got so bad I just stayed in bed and held it. Now I have chronic bladder problems.
Yes, I hated the little bastard, but I didn’t kill it on purpose. How could I know it had crawled into the washing machine when I went to the pantry to get the Tide. It was probably hiding in the bottom, waiting for me to stick my hand in so it could bite me again.
The marriage was as good as over by the rinse cycle. Darlene took the corpse to Stanley’s office. He is part owner of the pet cemetery, so he arranged the funeral service and the burial. I wasn’t allowed to attend. Then Darlene started what she called “grief therapy” with Stanley, the only veterinarian/psychologist in western North Carolina. After the first week Darlene became a vegetarian. “Animals have souls,” she had said. “To eat one is a barbaric act.”
“What about plants?” I had asked. “If animals have souls, why not plants? Where do you draw the line?”
“That’s exactly the kind of thing Stanley told me you’d say,” she had said.
Three weeks later she moved in with Stanley.
I finish signing the papers. “As soon as this divorce is final,” Darlene says, “Stanley and I are getting married.” She gathers the papers together.
“It’s not too late to give us another try,” I say.
“Yes, it is,” she says, already bored with the conversation.
“I tried to make you happy. I gave up the farm. I wore a tie and worked with jerks so we could afford this house.”
“The farm was going broke,” Darlene says. “You would have been bankrupt in another two years. You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I quit chewing tobacco and started listening to public radio. I increased my vocabulary. I tried not to act like a redneck.”
“And failed,” she says.
“I tried to give you a baby. I suffered indignities. I filled Dixie cups with semen in strange doctors’ offices.”
“I suffered indignities too,” Darlene says. “And it wasn’t even my problem.”
“I loved you,” I say and there’s enough truth in that to make her look away, at least for a moment.
“I’ll prove it,’’ I say. “I’ll change. I’ll quit drinking, become a vegetarian.”
“You can’t change enough,” she says, taking the documents off the coffee table.
“I’ll be friendly to the neighbors. Invite them over to eat salads. I’ll make the salads myself.”
“Not enough,” Darlene says, standing up.
“I’ll buy you a new monkey and I will love it.”
“Not enough,” she says, walking out of the den. “No other monkey could ever replace Little Napoleon.”
“I’ll walk over hot coals. I’ll watch whales.”
“Not enough,” she says from the kitchen.
I hear her car engine and remember one other thing. I hurry through the kitchen. I’m almost outside when I smash against nothing. Then the whole world shatters around me. I fall out on the pavement. Pieces of glass cover my body. I’m bleeding in a hundred places.
Darlene’s headlights are shining on me. I slowly stand up, pulling glass from my skin. Darlene rolls down her window and shouts over the engine. “Not enough,” she says, and drives off.
Blowmeyer runs over with a barbecue fork in his hand, the albino gasping to keep up.
“She shot him,” he tells his wife. “Five or six times.” Blowmeyer is so excited he has spilled barbecue sauce on his pants.
“Go get the movie camera, Lorraine,” he tells his wife. “And call the rescue squad.”
The albino disappears. I ignore Blowmeyer. I lie down on the grass, close my eyes and feel pain cut through the alcohol and the nest of spiders scrambling around inside my head, that other kind of pain, the worst kind.
I don’t open my eyes until I hear the rescue squad wail into the driveway, almost hitting Blowmeyer, who is filming it all.
“Save me a copy,” I tell Blowmeyer as the attendants take my arms and walk me to the back of the ambulance. “I’m OK,” I keep telling them, wanting to believe it. ‘‘I’m fine.”