Boonville Read online

Page 5


  “When I heard Lisa was goin’ to prom with Todd, I reminded him how bad it would hurt to get hit again, this time without pads,” Billy Chuck said. “‘Take a Morning Starr or Sequoia Cooze to your own yup-fest,’ I told him.”

  He wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve, getting the spit this time.

  “I was all-league honorable mention that year,” he said, taking a long pull from his can of Coors Light.

  “That’s sweet in a Neanderthal kind of way,” Lisa declared. “How come you never told me?”

  “Strong silent type,” Billy Chuck answered, ordering more drinks for all of them.

  The bartender, Melonie, set another round of beer and whisky in front of them. She was pregnant; tired eyes, sand-bagged posture, inflated body encased in jaundiced skin. Her hair seemed to have been carefully styled and then slept on. She wore a T-shirt with an arrow pointing to her stomach that read: “This one better make money.” Her mouth moved wordlessly as she took care of the orders, whispering advice to her unborn in the language of reluctant mothers. The men in the Lodge avoided her eyes.

  “Sides,” Billy Chuck said, “It don’t look good with you turnin’ out to be a dyke.”

  “Will you stop with your homophobia?” Sarah pleaded. “Just because we don’t date anybody from Boonville doesn’t mean we’re lesbians. It means we have standards.”

  “Guess I hit a nerve,” Billy Chuck said. “You better bring that up at one of your clit-chats, if you get past exchangin’ dildos.”

  “Fuck you,” Sarah said. “I haven’t seen a woman near you since that prom. If anyone’s gay, it’s probably you. Why don’t you take it to the other end of the bar, Big Man?”

  John looked to where Sarah was referring, an empty stool near a television tuned to an endless chase scene, no outlaws or cops, just cars following each other across terrain that resembled a Hollywood back lot. A man wearing a Confederate flag bandanna stood at the bar by the open seat, fingering a bundle of butcher paper with one less finger on his hand than the national average. Blood seeped from the package, forming a puddle on the bar. He was delivering a soliloquy on the merits of his smoker, stating he could make jerky out of anything: deer, bobcat, raccoon. A woman was sleeping with her head resting next to the mess. Two men holding beers racked their memories and math skills to figure out which of them had “got” and “kicked” more ass. They debated whether a piece of ass should be counted twice if it had been both “got” and “kicked,” or if that constituted a separate category. Meanwhile, a woman in pink overalls climbed onto her barstool to dance to her “all-time favorite song.” No expert, John guessed it was Dolly, Tammy, or Reba. Something aside from bleeding meat smelled pungent.

  “Just joking.” Billy Chuck backed off.

  There would be plenty of nights to drink alone, John could see him thinking. This didn’t have to be one of them.

  “You used to be able to take it,” Billy Chuck said, still pushing.

  “I can take it,” Sarah replied. “I’ve been hearing that shit since before I had any idea what sex was. Assholes coming on to me and crying lesbian because I said, ‘No.’ I’ve had enough of insecure men and their tiny dicks.”

  “I know you’re not talkin’ about me ’cause I measured myself this morning,” Billy Chuck said, “That must be the way it is at the Waterfall, Aslan with his Ecstasy and eight-year-olds. ‘Father of the New Children.’ Talk about a ‘new age,’ happy birthday, there’s a six-foot-ten hippie corkscrewin’ your ass.”

  “Fuck you, Howdy,” Sarah cursed. “You’ve never been to the Waterfall. You don’t know what goes on there. I meant Boonville, you and these rednecks.”

  Sarah swung her arm to include the whole bar. John’s head rolled dizzily trying to follow her gesture. He tried to control the visual insubordination by focusing on the pool table, but too much motion surrounded it, lights and laughter, players and pool cues. Uh-oh, he thought. Head spins. His stomach churned with the recollections of vomiting in half-forgotten bathrooms, tile and porcelain, splattering alleys with his insides; car bumpers, bushes, dress shoes. Unsettling short orders wavered somewhere between his pancreas and the back of his throat, minestrone and milk, egg yolks and escargot, okra and octopus. It was familiar territory, as common as sticking his finger down his throat to get it all out. John was a puker. He tried to think of cold water and light breezes. But the odor of rancid meat wormed its way from the Siberian end of the bar, snowballing its fragrance with everything else sour and unwashed in the Lodge. John looked to his new friends for support, but they were deep into their discussion, justifying their animosity for each other. He shut his eyes, fighting his reflex to gag.

  Why didn’t I stop at three? he asked himself.

  “Don’t wag your finger at me, bitch,” Billy Chuck said, oblivious to John’s plight. “You don’t know Boont from bullshit. Lisa’s grandpa and mine drank in this bar when it was called the Bucket of Blood, logged these forests with plain old axes and saws. When the tourists have gone off to ruin someplace else, me and Lisa will be here doin’ what our families have always done here: try to get to the next day. Where you gonna be? Smokin’ dope in some other town? Talkin’ shit in some other therapy group? You came with the Volvos and you’ll leave with them.”

  “Don’t worry, Billy Chuck,” Sarah promised. “I’ll be here.”

  They stared at each other, beauty and the beast bickering with no fairy tale ending in sight. A trucker sucked in his gut, strolled over to the pool table and placed a stack of quarters beneath the far rail. One of the cars on the television crashed and caught fire. Someone burped for a solid five seconds. A couple opened a bag of pork rinds and began munching. The man with the missing finger was showing Melonie a bloody hoof. The song on the jukebox wound to a conclusion and Pink Overalls climbed off her stool.

  “I’ll be here too,” John said.

  They were the first words John had spoken in some time and nobody seemed certain they had come from his mouth. Billy Chuck was the first to laugh. Sarah and Lisa joined in with a few others who had been eavesdropping. Someone bought him a drink. John again became more concerned with the state of his stomach and the ricocheting of the pool balls. But despite nausea and the unpleasantness of the conversation, something had told him that this was in line with a larger picture; Grandma had led him here for a reason. There was nothing for him back in Miami but the man he had left behind. Boonville was something he had to endure. He had the feeling he was going to be here for a while, a good long while, and eventually he would belong as much as anybody else. Then he could decide to leave.

  “I’ll be here too,” he repeated, emptying a shot glass.

  “Damn straight! It takes more than bulls to have a rodeo,” Billy Chuck whooped, thumping John between the shoulder blades, almost causing him to expound further and less articulately. “A toast! To the new age of new locals, anyone after us is a tourist. No hard feelings.”

  “Call me a bitch again,” Sarah said, “my knee’s in your crotch.”

  “Don’t call me an asshole,” Billy Chuck replied. “In this age of equality, I ain’t afraid to punch no woman.”

  “Yeah?” Sarah said, her sternness giving way, clinking Billy Chuck’s beer can with her own. “Sounds like all we can ask for.”

  She chugged the rest of her beer. Billy Chuck followed suit. Lisa ordered another round so they could all drink to the truce. “Tequiler to seal her,” she said, licking the fold of John’s thumb and dosing him with salt. After swallowing the firewater, Sarah popped a lime in his mouth. John bit hard, then spit out the peel. He heard everyone claim “no hard feelings.” His eyes were heavy. He drooped low in his stool, beer held well below his knees, legs akimbo, room rotating to the baseline of the Wurlitzer. He snatched at a lyric, what sounded like: “If I get stoned and drink all night long, it’s a family tradition.”

  “Bahl hornin’!” Billy Chuck whooped.

  Then somebody said something and there was a cheer and the bar was a
ll motion like a fire drill or a hurricane warning and he was being pulled outside. He didn’t think he could stand alone. But he had a new family and Billy Chuck was promising that nothing would happen to him as long as there was air in his lungs; Daryl could go fuck himself. John wasn’t so sure about the air in his own lungs or Billy Chuck’s sudden fraternity or who this Daryl was again and what was everybody hollering about. With each step less steady than the last, but all bringing him closer to the pulsating mob, he crossed the length of the Lodge’s parking lot, wiggly beneath the night’s sky. The fresh air was helping his stomach, but more than anything, right now, he wanted Christina. Not the woman who cared about what make of car they drove, but the carefree Christina who had made him feel safe and loved. He couldn’t believe she wouldn’t be in his bed tonight, giving purpose to his life. No more worrying about what’s for breakfast, comments about his marketing strategies, arguing over who was hogging the covers. No snuggle-bunny.

  Billy Chuck slapped his face and pointed to a figure across the street by the post office making a stamping motion with his leg, bellowing a chorus of moos. John was about to search for change and a telephone to call Christina, when he noticed the guy next to him breathing heavily and doing the same thing as the man across the street, pantomiming a farm animal. “One day, them Kurts brothers are going to kill themselves doing this,” a voice prophesied. And the two men ran toward one another, eating up the eighty yards of asphalt between them, throating low-pitched cowcalls and gaining speed, until in the center of the road, on one of the hyphens of yellow that John could see would soon to be covered with blood, they collided with a butt of heads. There was a resounding pop. The brothers staggered, paindrunk. And collapsed.

  The crowd applauded. Men exchanged money. They weighed comparisons of past exhibitions. A group bowled cans of beer at the Kurtses from a cooler in the back of a pickup. Others threw open bottles that smashed in the street and covered the two men with foam and fragments of glass. Some couples kissed as if the New Year had arrived. Then, as rapidly as it had assembled, the horde reconvened inside the Lodge, leaving the Kurtses unconscious in the middle of the road with the noise of the crickets.

  “What was that?” John asked whoever was keeping him from falling down.

  “Oh,” a female voice replied, “That’s something the Kurts do.”

  “No it ain’t,” a voice disagreed. “They’re tryin’ to stop the tourists from comin’.”

  “We should help,” John mumbled.

  “Damn straight!” the second voice confirmed.

  And the last thing John remembered was lying down next to the Kurtses in the center of Highway 128 and the coolness of concrete against his face and pebbles digging into his rubbery cheek and holding somebody’s hand and an ache in his knee and the smell of beer and the warmth of bodies and wondering what Christina was doing at this exact moment and if Grandma was rolling over in her grave for being buried in Miami instead of Arizona or right here in Boonville and wanting to cry and a soft kiss on his lips and being amazed at the darkness of the night and the brightness of the stars and somebody saying, “I hope that’s not a fuckin’ car.”

  3

  John’s grandma had always smelled of gin and vaginal infection. He remembered crawling onto her lap as a child, careful not to spill her drink, getting a big whiff and then gagging like he’d swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. The scent of heredity. As quickly as he could, he scrambled away from her to hide. From the closet in his bedroom, he could hear her calling to him, “What’s the matter, John? Come back to Grandma, my love.”

  As John awoke, that same smell bit at him, producing memories of holiday dinners, family squabbles, and the first time he had oral sex. Noon sun slashed at his eyes. He realized he was outside on what must be the porch of Grandma’s shack, crumpled into a wicker love seat. He shoved his fists into his eyes and rubbed them as two 20-foot squirrels flanking his position came into focus, wearing the same carved expression he had modeled on Grandma’s lap. His stomach surged.

  After going for the Big Spit, John felt ready to face the squirrels. He imagined how pitiful he must appear to them, red-eyed, unshaven, encrusted in what he hoped was his own vomit. The squirrels were definitely frowning. But aside from their totemic silence, there wasn’t much else in the front yard of his new domicile. Grandma’s cabin was situated in the middle of a hill, trees rising left and right, madrone, redwood, fir, pine, land sloping ahead of him toward a wire fence covered with brambles of blackberry bushes, then dropping drastically to give him a view of the valley; across to the east were hills of scrub oak; a receding fog bank covered the north; to the south his sight line was obstructed by forest. Down in the flat, he saw an airstrip, a field of horses, a school, a cluster of houses, and part of a small town. Boonville.

  His head was pounding. But all things considered, he thought, it wasn’t such a bad thing to wallow in your excrement—a certain womblike quality—the way he had felt as a boy discovering he had wet his bed, warm and safe, as long as the morning air didn’t get between him and the pee-soaked sheets. But then he moved.

  Lifting from the love seat, pain shot through his body, tearing at joints and nerve endings, screaming for him to sit back down. Even his hair hurt. He limped to the shack’s front door, which he found to be locked. Fuckup number one, he had failed to get the keys from Grandma’s friend Pensive Prairie Sunset. He tried a Bruce Lee entrance, a flurry of kicks and karate chops to the midsection of the door, yelling, “Why, why, why!” But his kung fu was no good here. The outburst made him feel nauseated. He tried another approach, through cracked lips pleading, “Open sesame.” Both strategies failing, he sent Plan C into action, the standard “find an open window.”

  Circling the cabin, John saw Grandma’s shack had five windows, one each in the bedroom and kitchen, two curtained picture windows in the living room, and one small screen window partially open in the bathroom that he could squeeze through if he could find something to stand on. He also discovered Grandma’s Datsun was parked behind the cabin, smashed and missing parts; gone were the headlights, hub caps, hood, bumper, grille. To compensate for their loss, a mountain of steel had been stacked on the roof. Coming closer, he realized the sheets of metal were road signs, some still attached to their posts.

  “Hmm,” he said, calmed by the alcohol still flooding his bloodstream. “This, I don’t remember.”

  He tried to open the Datsun’s door, but it was locked. All doors were locked, including the trunk, while his possessions remained where he had put them in the backseat. He spied the keys dangling from the ignition and an empty whiskey bottle in the passenger’s seat.

  Dilemm-o-rama, John thought, staggering off in the direction of a rock planted at the base of a shrub. He dug the stone from the dirt with his fingers. Unearthed and in his hands, it felt as heavy as a mountain. Wasn’t there a parable about burden, involving a boulder, a saint, and a bottomless chalice? Or was that the beginning of a dirty joke? Unable to distinguish Bible stories from borscht-belt humor, John carried the stone to the Datsun and hurled it through the driver’s side window.

  The car started on the first try. He steered it to the cabin’s bathroom wall, set the brake, then climbed on top of the car roof and road signs, reading the warning beneath his splattered shoes, “Deaf Child Near,” and tore away the window screen. He slid open the window and hopped into the opening. There was a moment of precarious equilibrium in which John was balanced half in and half out of the bathroom before he tipped the scale with a wriggle, dropping to the floor on his head.

  He was tempted to lie there on the linoleum, let the day go by, but a miniature squirrel sculpture he had knocked off the window sill glowered at him. He got to his feet and flicked on the light switch. They were everywhere, bathtub, toilet tank, medicine chest, hallway, kitchen, living room, coffee table, bookshelves, bureau, nightstand, various widths and heights, well over a thousand, all with a look of sour disapproval. Squirrels, squirrels, squirrels. Jo
hn suppressed a scream, hurrying to open the rest of the cabin windows, hoping fresh air might change the squirrels’ expression, or more accurately, his own.

  Then he piled his belongings from the Datsun into the center of the living room, sweating 120 proof and flaking hardened gastric juices. He didn’t feel all there. Or maybe he was “all there,” but with more of himself on the outside than he was used to. He looked through his luggage for a towel to take a shower, deciding that the best thing about being hung over was the totality of effort it took to conquer simple tasks. Moving at half-speed, there wasn’t enough energy to expand your focus beyond survival, causing you to disregard those obstacles that persuaded you to get swacked in the first place. It was the after-effects of alcohol that helped more than intoxication; John had wanted to get back to basics, to separate the neurotic from the necessary, and now he could accomplish that goal, wash, unpack, try not to vomit, and feel like he had put in a full day.

  In the bathroom, the water trickling from the shower head was brown and smelled of sulfur. Enamel had been eaten away in spots from the tub’s bottom. Rust stains circled the drain. The sliver of soap in the soap dish was an unnatural color. It took a while for the water to get hot. When John finally entered the spray, it had the effect of smelling salts. Nose espresso, he thought, trying to convince himself that tourists paid top dollar for this kind of free-flowing mud bath.

  Toweling off, he negotiated all odors with a splash of cologne Christina had given him. John didn’t like cologne, believing natural scents were sexier. He thought he had left it behind, taking only his toothbrush, travel toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, comb, and a few hotel freebies of shampoo and conditioner from their bathroom. Somehow the cologne had made the trip. Today, it was a welcomed accessory. He wished he had snared some of Christina’s other products accidentally-on-purpose, a moisturizer, an exfolient, shaving rasage. He wouldn’t know where to buy some of that stuff. You might have to speak French to get it. They weren’t going to stock it in Boonville.