You Only Get Letters from Jail Read online

  “I’m fine, really,” I said. “I can just rinse them off here in the sink. It’s not that much. They will dry out.”

  “Marty, don’t be ridiculous. I can wash your jeans. You can wear a pair of my ex-husband’s.”

  Something in her voice made me realize that she wasn’t going to let it go until I at least took them from her, and then I could just tell her that the jeans didn’t fit and rinse mine off and go back out to the yard and the sun and finish up this shift so I could go find Elbow and laugh about the bullshit story she had told me. I opened the door a little and she reached around the edge and handed me a pair of faded jeans that were folded so tightly I could see the crease line in the knees. “I’m giving you a T-shirt, too. Just give me all of your clothes. You’ve been working. If I’m going to wash your jeans, you might as well go home in clean clothes.”

  “Really, it’s fine,” I said, but she shoved something else in my hand and then I pushed the door shut and stood in the silence of the bathroom. There was a basket on the back of the toilet with small circle-shaped soaps of different colors, and the towels were deep red, and I could smell lilac or jasmine or one of those scents that you always associate with your grandma or your mom.

  I set the jeans down and unfolded a black T-shirt. There was a picture on the front, a beaver with wings, and I tossed it aside. I opened up the jeans and looked in at the waistband. They were 33x31s. I preferred 34s, depending on the cut, but these were damn close, and I thought about folding them back up and setting them on the edge of the bathtub and thanking her anyways, but they were too small, and instead I found myself dropping my own jeans to the floor and kicking off my shoes and sliding out of my pair and into a dead guy’s pants. I remembered Elbow’s joint in my pocket and fished out the wet and ruined paper that was unraveling and spilling green. I thought about flushing it, but I knew half the time that shit didn’t work in movies and I could just imagine it never going down with the water and Marianne back in the hallway, asking if everything was all right through the door.

  I pulled off my T-shirt and was surprised to feel how sticky it was and how much it smelled like gas and grass and fumes and sweat. It felt good to get it off my skin and for a minute I stood shirtless in my socks and borrowed jeans and looked at myself in the mirror. I ran more water and splashed it across my chest and scooped it under my arms and leaned forward and let myself drip into the sink, then I took my dirty shirt and rubbed my body off and ran some more water through my hair and when I was done I felt like another person and I pulled on the beaver T-shirt, gathered up my things, and left the room.

  Marianne was sitting at the table and there was a full beer in front of my empty chair and the mess had been cleaned and the back door was closed and I could hear the clock ticking in that other room. I found myself wishing that it would go into its overachieving chime to mark a moment of time I could identify, but it did nothing but tick and tock, and I could picture the pendulum swinging. Getting sleepy, very sleepy. I smiled and sat down and Marianne took the wad of clothes out of my arms and went back to the utility room and I heard a washer kick on, the familiar sound of water filling the machine, and I heard dials turning and then she was back and she picked up her beer and looked at me.

  “I knew those clothes would fit. I just knew it.”

  “They’re not bad,” I said.

  “Do you like music, Marty?” she asked. “I have a stereo. We should turn on some music.” She clapped her hands together and stood up and left the room. I looked around for a clock, anything to let me know how much time was gone in the day and how much remained. The sun was still bright outside and the shadows did not seem to be lengthening in that way they always do when someone needs to mark the hour.

  I heard music, and I could recognize the song, something my parents listened to, something with a lot of guitar, but not the right kind. Acoustic. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t anything I would ever reach to turn up. “How’s this?” she called from the other room.

  “I like it,” I said. I stood up from my chair and walked around the kitchen. I bent down and looked at the dials on the oven—no clock, just a timer. There wasn’t a clock anywhere in the room.

  “Do you need something, Marty?” She was standing in the doorway. I could see that she was barefoot and her pants fell over the tops of her feet. Her toenails were painted a bright and glittery purple.

  “I was just wondering what time it is,” I said. “My dad wants me to call him when I need to be picked up.”

  She stepped into the room and she smelled different. Sweeter, cleaner. For the first time I noticed that she was wearing hoop earrings, simple and silver, and her hair was tucked behind her ears and I could see her cheekbones and how they held the color up high near her eyes.

  “It’s one of those days,” she said. “One of those days when it feels like it’s so much later than it really is. We still have hours. I promise.” She sat down and picked up her beer and started drinking again. “You’re not anxious to get back out there and work, are you, Marty?”

  In all honesty, I wasn’t, and part of me was hoping that maybe she would just let me leave early, call it a day; I’d had too much beer, and there were snakes, and maybe it would be best if I came back first thing in the morning, but now I realized I had made the mistake of letting her hold my clothes hostage and I was standing in her kitchen in a dead guy’s jeans and winged-beaver T-shirt and I wasn’t going anywhere until she gave me back my clothes, returned me to myself, and set me free.

  “You remind me so much of Ben,” she said.

  “Ben?”

  “My husband. Who died. Your friend?”

  “Elbow,” I said.

  “Elbow—that’s such a strange name.”

  “When he fights he swings with his elbows. Not with his fists. His real name is James.”

  “Your friend James, he didn’t remind me of Ben at all. Too big, too broad. Too much of something in his eyes. But you? It’s like I told you. I could tell even before you got out of the car that you were the one.”

  I couldn’t wait to tell Elbow this conversation. And I would tell him about it as soon as I told him about the first one and asked him some questions and got him to tell me just how full of shit Marianne was.

  I smiled. “The one?”

  She had to be drunk. I was buzzing on those beers and Elbow and I weren’t lightweights. I wondered if home brew had more alcohol and I figured it probably did, since there was no government regulation to control what went into the bottle.

  “I knew you were someone I could count on, that’s all, Marty. I knew that if you were like Ben on the outside, you were probably like him on the inside and I wasn’t wrong.”

  I ran my finger over the pattern in the table. All those lines counting off the stages of development in the tree, tracing the pattern of growth, etching the passing of time. I finished my beer and stood up from the table.

  “I really have to see how late it is,” I said. I walked past her and toward the room I had not been in before she could stop me. Even over the too-quiet tinny guitar I could hear the clock and I followed the sound.

  The room was dark, the curtains pulled, and there was only a thin sheet of light that made the journey past the drapes and it seemed as if it wore itself out in the process and died just beyond the window. The room had the smell of disuse, dust, and forgetting. I could see the red light on the stereo and the light from the dials and I could make out the shapes of furniture, things on shelves. The clock was one of those big upright grandfathers, solid wood and brass and glass, and the ticking was so loud that the window vibrated a little bit every time the pendulum connected with the full extent of its arc—left to right tick, right to left tock. The face of the clock was behind a pane of glass and I could not read it in the faint light so I looked around for a lamp or a switch and found nothing. I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain.

  I pulled back the curtains far enough to let in the struggling ligh
t and I realized that the room was full of dust, dust settled on everything, everything hidden. I stretched out my left hand so I could keep the curtain pulled with my right, and I wiped my palm across the face of the clock. I couldn’t see anything. I rubbed harder at the glass and then I realized there wasn’t anything there to see. There were no hands on the clock. No numbers. Just a blank face and the pendulum swinging beneath it marking the passing of absolutely nothing at all. I let the curtain drop and went back through the darkness.

  “Marianne, do you have a clock that works?” I said.

  Marianne wasn’t at the table and the kitchen was empty. I checked the utility room and the only sound was the washer spinning the water from my clothes. “Marianne,” I called.

  The refrigerator was in the corner across from the dryer, so I pulled the door open and reached in to get a beer. The refrigerator was empty except for rows of green bottles on the top shelf and underneath it stacks of sheets. I took a bright green bottle and bent down to look at the sheets and then I realized that they were not sheets at all and the one on top looked familiar, like a pillowcase, like something I had seen before, and even though I didn’t really want to, I lifted back the open end and he was in there, there was no mistaking the black-and-white hair, Toby, only this time he had nothing to say to me like he did the first time we had met, and I remembered that moment, too high and thinking he had given me a message, and now I pulled my hand back as though he had bit me, and then I thought about it and lifted the open ends of the other pillowcases, three of them altogether, black-and-white Toby, a dark silver and gray, a tabby marked just like the one my sister had when we were kids. I returned the bottle to the shelf and quietly shut the door so that it did not even make the comforting noise of a click.

  The door to the backyard was not closed all the way and I opened it just enough so that I could look out onto the lawn. Marianne was out there with her back to me, and she was bent over and there was a stick in her hand, a broom handle, the bristles stuck out in a stiff row behind her. She was bent over, poking at something, pushing it around in the mowed and dead drifts of grass I had not gone back to rake, and I realized she was tapping at the snake I had run over, lifting it slightly, rolling it over, letting it fall back to the ground.

  There was laughter out on the sidewalk, kids playing, and I remembered that there was a world beyond the yard. I heard the steady clip of a sprinkler and I could smell wet pavement, that unmistakable scent of wet dirt and cement. I had not applied to college, my parents didn’t have enough money, and I had none at all, but maybe that would change, and part of me wished that I was going to be someplace else next year and maybe I would be—there was still plenty of time for anything to happen. In the distance I could hear a muscled-up car go by, loud and strong like a 351 Cleveland hitting 5400 rpm and blowing dual exhaust, and somewhere closer, in that same direction, I could hear brakes lock up, the unmistakable squeal of rubber leaving tread across asphalt, and maybe something or someone getting hit.

  SNUFF

  Halfway through the movie, Lenny Richter leaned into me and whispered this shit is so fake, and I wasn’t quite ready to agree with him. It was by invitation only, the offer to come and watch, almost a sixty-minute ride out of town at this kid named Billy’s house, an hour that had taken more like three to travel, since hitchhiking works better as a solitary sport and I had been tied down with Lenny, who didn’t want to go it alone. There was a group gathered in a garage out back of Billy’s house, all of us standing around, and Billy had hung a bedsheet up on the wall and propped the projector on a milk crate stacked on a folding chair and we all stood there and watched the film from start to finish, no credits, no title, no names, no sound. When the last jumpy frames of 8mm finally spun through the reels, everybody started talking at once, and one kid said no fucking way and I checked my watch and saw that I was close to curfew and decided to walk back out to the main road and chance getting home on my own. I lasted fifteen minutes walking with my thumb out on the empty asphalt before I bent and broke and went to the pay phone at a two-pump gas station, the only lit building as far as I could see in either direction, and I called home, hoping my dad wouldn’t pick up, if anyone did at all. My older sister, Charlotte, answered on the first ring and everything from then on was going to cost me.

  Charlotte was seventeen and had been pretty, but not beautiful, but this was the summer she had discovered Fleetwood Mac and something about her had changed. My dad started making rules, more rules than ever before, asking things like “Where have you been?” and everything was a privilege and bedroom doors had to be left open and phone calls were monitored and, as Charlotte liked to say, “privacy was part of the old regime.” I did not really know what she meant by that, but I sensed there was a battle brewing, and my dad may have had more power than Charlotte, but Charlotte was smart and quiet as a sniper, and sneaking out had become her specialty.

  “Find another ride,” she said on the phone. I was leaning forward, trying to cut the wind that had picked up the second I decided to leave Billy’s house. It had been Lenny’s invitation that I had ridden in on, and I should have figured that the first time Lenny ever found anything good to do, it would be at some place out of town, out the back roads, where the air felt fifteen degrees cooler, and it would finish up hours past the time when there would be any real traffic passing by to get me back, and Lenny would ruin the whole thing halfway through for me anyways by pointing out that everything was probably fake. The other guys had stayed behind at the house, Lenny with them, and talk had been loud, and there had been a lot of clapping and shouts, and by the time I started walking down the driveway, the decision had been made by everyone else to watch the film again.

  “I can’t get a ride, Charlotte. Please,” I said, and I knew that begging wasn’t the way to Charlotte’s heart and if I stood a chance at getting picked up it was going to come on the back of George Washington, several of him, and probably a Lincoln, too.

  “Dad’s home,” she said. I thought about hanging up then, walking back to Billy’s and joining the second viewing, or maybe by then it would be the third and I could just quit trying and get caught up in the mix. “But he’s been talking with Johnnie,” she said, and I knew she meant “Walker,” but she didn’t need to say it; it was our code for drunk.

  I relaxed the phone into my ear and felt its warmth and could see my dad in his armchair, the footrest kicked up, the TV on, the glass empty. The wind took less than a minute to turn from gust to sustained and I felt the edge under it and knew the August night was false and the summer was packing to go. “I’ll pay you,” I said.

  “Stay where you are,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  Billy lived out in what we called “the country,” out beyond the city-limit signs, signal lights, stores, and food joints. All we had passed was the one gas station, a skeleton building that offered basic necessities at sky-high prices if what the window signs said was true. According to the cardboard square taped to the door, it kept limited hours, was closed on Sundays, and pumped only one kind of gas. Everything that qualified as civilization was in town, a trip by car, too far to walk from here, and if you didn’t have a license you were trapped once you got from one place to the other. I couldn’t imagine what Billy might do out here for fun, and then I thought about the film, nothing but corn syrup and food coloring Lenny Richter had said, and I felt nervous and pulled as tight as the fence wires that lined the two-lane blacktop and hummed in the wind.

  The only other sound was the bugs beating themselves blind against the single overhead fluorescent that lit up the lot. It was a sickly sodium light, too bright and artificial, and the cloud of insects swarming made strange shadows on the cracked cement below. I could smell wet grass, irrigation, farmland, and creosote seeping from the railroad ties that served as the borders between asphalt, fields, and road. In the distance, a dog barked and barked, over and over again, a tired and monotonous sound, and there was no shout to quiet down, no has
sled owner opening up a door and forcing it to come in, and I wondered what purpose a dog like that served if there was nobody to pay attention. There could have been a thousand things to bark at and nobody to teach it about real threats. In the movie, the girl had dark hair, and she was thin, and she was standing and bent forward onto the bed, and I could see her spine rising up, bony and knobbed, and her skin was pulled tight, her head away from the camera, with just her shoulder blades looking out like hollow eyes. Above me, a bat circled, clumsy and big, and I watched it until its path took it out of the arc of light. I tied my shoelaces, retied them, sat on the curb and chucked rocks, counted moths, listened for a car to come from the distance, and finally it did, the first and only car to come down the road, my parents’ Dodge Royal Monaco two-door hardtop that I recognized from the engine whine when my sister drove, the 400 Lean Burn V8 held in full restraint under the hood, and the left hideaway headlight door stuttering like the engine to open up.

  Charlotte had the heater on and the music loud and I wondered how she had crept the car out of the driveway, but the very fact that she was there confirmed that she had gotten away with it, and I was happy to slide in and pull the door shut and fold myself toward the warm vents in the dash.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  There were no cars on the road, no headlights in either direction, just house lights, and they were scattered few and far between, set back in the distance, as sparse and dim as city stars absorbed by the night. Charlotte signaled as she left the parking lot, though there wasn’t much reason to, and then we were swallowed by the fields on both sides of the road, the staggered fence posts, and even though I had been walking in the dark, I did not realize the immensity of it until it became a throat hold around us and even the broken yellow line was lost beyond the one good headlight.

  After the accident, I would wonder if I saw it coming, the shift in shadows, the sudden definition of a shape, a thickening in the air like a premonition, because when something goes terribly wrong there is always a before and always an after, but the moment itself is vague and hard to gather, and time jumps like a skip in a record and so I tried to remember the before, tried to trace what happened during, but in the end, it all came down to after and we were spun hood up into a dry drainage ditch, the broken headlight suddenly finding its too little too late and pointing straight and strong at nothing more than wide open sky, the windshield shattered and fracturing the night into a thousand webbed pieces, and Charlotte bleeding from her nose and me with my mouth open to say something but instead everything just hung quiet and still.