All Bones and Gravity

FULL STORY

All Bones and Gravity
By Kevin White

When I came out of jail my old friend John Grant picked me up at the corner down near the county dumpsters and across from the in-town offices of a rock quarry that I had stared out at through my little window for all those months.

“You look good,” he said.

I didn’t have much to say.

“Grant … thanks for comin’ by.”

“Fuck, man.”

That’s all he said back.

To cheer me up he rambled his red Ford pickup around the gravel driveway at the dead-end where the jail and the dumpsters nuzzled together and he peeled out with his foot all the way down to the shiny pedal and we tore out of there almost as fast as the pigs had thrown me in. He took me for a good meal at a diner on the top of the hill just up the street from the jail.

We reminisced about the days before they threw me in.

The day before they hauled me in Grant and I had sat in this same restaurant, him trying to comfort me, and I suppose that’s why he brought me here again. But this time it was uncomfortable because of the memories.

Voices had whirled, tons of voices had mumbled, bounced around the sponge inside my head, their miniature gibberish and their whispers united in a low buzz. Some of them were really insistent and that could be heard in their tone, though the volume was as muted as the others and the language indecipherable. I had spent the previous night in a maelstrom of drunkenness, drunken 2003. In the morning I had rolled around in bed as if wrestling against invisible men: the owners of the voices? Then at the restaurant with Grant I couldn’t keep my head erect and the field of my vision morphed into a frosted window or maybe more like the smoke of a distant forest fire. Waves of entropy curved inward and crashed in sequence as my whole view became muddy and now and then it became clear again.

“Maybe you should just drive, man … to Mexico or something,” Grant had said.

I didn’t ever respond, being despondent from my hangover and the guilt: thick, heavy guilt of the kind I used to get every morning-after, but that time it was worse. My brain and my sinuses had swelled inside my skull, like driving up a high hill and feeling the pressure in my head ramp up, but it just stayed there at the breaking point, and I wished it would just explode and I could be done with it.

“But I killed someone’s dog,” I had said.

I couldn’t get over that fact; forget the damage to property and the third DUI.

“I killed a dog!”

Grant had brought me the newspaper article and I had felt like that was a really cruel but necessary thing for him to have done.

* * *

So now I was out of jail and I felt a little beside myself that we were still so close to the jail and so we left the diner after just an iced tea and Grant proposed the idea that we should go see his lady.

“Where does she live?”

“Beyond the bridge, outside town.”

“Oh yeah Steve used to live down there. He was a good guy.”

“Good guy. Yes.”

We strolled back to the truck. I stood impatiently by the rusty door until he unlocked it and I jumped in, and after that shuffled through the CDs that he had strewn on the carpet. The disks were all scratched, some worse than others, but I found one of David Allan Coe that I felt like hearing and I slid it into the grinning mouth of the player.

“Doesn’t work,” said John.

“Motherfucker … nothing works.”

He laughed at me and, though annoyed, I had to laugh also.

The bridge was on the other side of the hill from the diner. You could get there too by worming around the little valley near the jail, past the greenhouse where I used to work and then down the mill road by the river. But we were already on the four lane highway that led directly to town.

The bridge sat down the hill from the diner and on the other side of the water a bluff peered over the green summertime water like redoubts in an old-time battle, back when men actually saw other men on the battlefield and the soldiers wore uniforms.

“Down below this hill, man,” said John.

“Splendid,” I said, like the voice of some character I’d read in the jail’s library cart.

The Ford noodled around into a gravel drive just off the end of the bridge. The driveway wound down and back under the bridge and we bounced like mustachioed men on horses, down that potholed drive where two troughs of eroded gravel crouched alongside a great hump, an island of dandelions in its middle.

“Here we are,” as we rolled up to this Victorian house on the other side of the bridge, down in the floodplain; some old rich motherfucker must have built this place and then abandoned it and now all these college students and hippies just lived there together.

We parked in front of a gray oil tank and underneath a clothesline. There was a sick barn off to the right, overrun by vines and a little patch of woods that climbed its way back up the other side of the bridge.

“This is where she lives.”

“Jane?”

“Oh hell no, didn’t you get my letters?”

“No. Who writes letters?”

“It’s Mary now.”

And we went to the door. Mary met us at the doorstep, but Grant kind of shoved his way past both of us and into the foyer, not saying hello.

“You must be Michael,” she said. I smiled and nodded.

“I know so much about you already … John really looks up to you.”

I introduced myself and didn’t respond to the words about John looking up to me. I didn’t know why he would. And I really couldn’t say anything like John has told me so much about you because he hadn’t really talked during the seven minute drive and I hadn’t read his letters.

“Care for a drink?”

“Uh no thanks,” I said and instantly regretted it but I didn’t have a chance to take it back.

She led me through the foyer, John long gone, and I saw this wooden throne with two flat arms, circular at the front, and behind those a high back with a mirror implanted and four decorative pegs above it for coats. Only thing that hung there was a plastic grocery bag with a lump inside it. The foyer was long and dark and besides the chair there were only dust bunnies in the corners and I saw an intricate spider web on the trim above an archway.

“This is a neat place,” I said.

She smiled and took my hand and led me into another room straight back shotgun to the back of the house where there was a great-room. There I saw like a half-dozen guys and girls, some of the guys with beards and a few seemed normal, but not so entirely attractive in any real way, and girls, some of whom dressed like college students and some like flower children.

She went into the adjoining kitchen and got me a drink without asking what I might want and I went around playing the name game with all the beards and the flower skirts and observing the tits and the asses and the muscles on them. That was the last I saw of that bunch and after I'd decided I had nothing to say to them I followed Mary into the kitchen.

“Here’s some strawberry wine,” she said when she saw me, “all we have right now.” She shrugged and smiled.

“That’s OK,” I said, “thank you.”

“You want anything to eat?”

Without waiting for my response she put on a display of all they had in the kitchen and then she left me there because John had just reappeared and he interrupted her and told her to come upstairs with him. They climbed up a creaky back staircase that came off of the kitchen and told me to come up after I finished. John just stared at me over his shoulder and winked and I got the chills.

John looked different, by the way. He was working on a beard – poorly – and his clothes were rattier than I’d remembered and his eyes were smoky and like he was hiding something.

I sat the wine down on the counter and left it there. I rifled through a pantry cabinet that Mary had left ajar and I found some pecan halves and placed the bag on the table. In the fridge I found some bread and some cheese so I made up a cheese sandwich. There I also saw some iced tea in a pitcher and I took the pitcher out to the table for my meal of pecans, cheese sandwich and iced tea, and I swigged the tea from the pitcher. I sat alone at the table, peering through a window at some overgrown bushes where, if the bushes had been trimmed, I could have seen the flow of the river. The pecans were rather old and hard but I couldn’t complain because they didn’t have pecans in jail. When done I left everything on the table and, as an afterthought, I just took the pitcher back to the refrigerator where I paused for a minute and had this crazy idea or recollection that I should piss in the pitcher as a joke. But I didn’t do it.

After this I turned around and surmounted the creaky stairs and discovered that there was only one room up there in a loft over the kitchen. The room was triangular and it sprawled down under the eaves like a Cape Cod. As I opened the door I saw Mary and John stretched out on a full-size bed. I plopped down on the bed also, the temptation being too great because I’d been on a cardboard crate for nine months.

“So Michael I hear that you’re a painter,” she said with a great smile.

“Uh, well … I guess,” I said, “but you could more properly have called me a drinker.”

At that John got up, said he had to go see about something, and mumbled as he descended back down the whining stairs and left us alone. I loosened up a little and Mary resumed talking to me.
She really wanted to know if there was any sex in prison. I said it wasn’t like that and, besides, it wasn’t even prison. She said that John and she were really intrigued by my addiction and the fact that I’d done time but that John would be too shy to ask me all the details and I just tried to answer her questions when I could although the whole thing confused me. Then she began to tell me some story about how she and John had discussed getting married in Colorado and wouldn’t I like to come along for some purpose.

After a while John came back and said to me “let’s go on a ride,” and I followed. Mary stayed reclined on the bed. I saw that she had her hand against her leg way up under her skirt. She waved goodbye with the other hand but didn’t say anything. We went back to the red truck and I climbed back into the cab and when we sat down he reached into a knapsack and gave me a joint and one for him and I thanked him and off we went for a ride. We rode clear into the next county toward Fairfield, which was one of those old towns where everything looks so much like an American Legion post and they probably still have parades on Labor Day. During the ride I just daydreamed of Mary masturbating on that bed.

You come into Fairfield through the flood plain of the Monahala River; we drove through the basin and the truck scaled up a steady incline on the other side, lined with stately trees. Out of nowhere came the factories of outer Fairfield, more than half of them shuttered. The naked structures sat there, guts hanging out, bruises all over, no one or no official having shame enough to arrange a burial, or at least to cover them with a sheet. After the cement corpses came the crossroads, with its general store on one side and a similar building on the other side where there was a diner called Sawhorn. We turned right at the crossroads onto High Street and, within a thousand feet, High Street splits into a fork-n-the-road. Jutting out into the fork was the Triangle Bar. That’s where Grant stopped.

We went into Triangle, catching the cigarette smoke as we went. John lit one up and we sat at a bench. There were two rows of benches and that amounted to the only seating in that little dark bar. We both had hamburgers and beer and consumed them quickly.

On the way back from the ride we found we were passing a line of cars with their lights on and an alarm sounded in John’s head and he whipped around in the median and headed back towards town behind the parade.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

John said, “you’ve heard of wedding crashers how ‘bout funeral crashers.”

This made me laugh and I went along with it.

We rolled up in front of the columns at the funeral home. Saw the black hearse outside and we walked up and let ourselves in through a heavy wooden door. Come to find out it wasn’t the funeral yet, but it was a wake for some old woman. I think we went through the wrong door in John’s impatience. Anyway for kicks Johnny decided we should wait in line to see the old lady and afterwards we happened upon the undertaker on our way out and John mentioned to him: “You done a good job on that one.” And I thought the undertaker should have at least winked and smiled but of course he didn’t.

Then we actually – actually – went to the luncheon for the wake. It was in the social hall on the other side of the building. There were two unused parlors adjoining the hall and I sat down in one of them as John went to get a plate.

To my left, near the door from the parlor to the social hall, a beautiful woman approached. She had light brown skin. Her breasts were jug-like: big nipples, I expect. She had a long neck and long black hair showed around her skimpy dress. Her body curved below her breasts past a slim stomach and out to wide hips. Her thighs were long and elliptical. Her toes and her fingers were slender. It was like she wanted to pick up guys.

She said, “Auntie Mae was a good woman.”

“She looked good,” I said.

I daydreamed that she sat on my lap, played with my lips, then slid down, her loose vagina slinking along my leg … but that didn’t happen. While I daydreamed she got bored and walked off, maybe realizing she didn’t know me after all. When she left I found that I had to pee.

So then I walked around that social hall behind the funeral parlor looking for the bathroom and when I found it and got in the stall I started daydreaming and getting all choked up thinking about my own death and the songs that I wanted played when I die.

* * *

That was then.

Today I am a pallbearer at John Grant’s funeral. Poor guy died of an overdose out in Colorado. Wife came in one night and found him hunched over between the toilet and vanity, face white like an albino. I don’t know the other bearers; they’re all friends from Colorado I surmise.

The funeral director says “follow me” and we militarily carry it out the side door of the church to meet mourners at the graveside, which is in the same yard as the church. The body patters down, crowding into the low end of the box, all bones and gravity, as we climb down the stairs trying not to catch one another’s heels.

After the graveside I finally approach Mary and she says to me, through her tears, “You come and be with me tonight.”

I look down at my feet and the dirt and I can’t decide.

© Kevin White 2008