Right after the first pothole Robert’s showers began to change. He showered less and he stopped using any soap. The soap bar stayed in his dish, round and smooth as it was the day it came out of the package. After a couple of weeks it was twice as big as the bar in his wife’s dish, and it was only a matter of time before she came at him.
“What’s the deal, Robert? This is unacceptable.”
He was dripping wet, stupidly aware that Caitlin had been standing right outside the glass shower door looking at him. For how long he didn’t know. Perhaps since the very moment he stepped in.
“Unacceptable? I’m not following you.”
She had opened the bathroom window, perhaps to cleanse the place of him. Her onslaught, coupled with the rush of brisk air, threw a shiver over his back. He reached around her, grabbed a big towel and covered himself.
“It’s unacceptable when someone acts deranged.”
“At least you said acts.”
“I’m not so sure that’s what I meant. This behavior is deranged.”
He didn’t say what entered his mind at that moment, because he was afraid to.
If you want to see really deranged you should have seen me the other day at the car dealer’s.
But maybe he didn’t have to say it, maybe Caitlin already sniffed something was up. She had the nose for it, she knew who she had married – and she certainly took enough opportunity to remind him of it. Who could blame her? For years there had been Feeney, with his wallet badge, beer face and holster bulge – not the worst of them by any means - and then there had been Caitlin. Justice has its ways.
She had to get to school early – some appointment with the guidance counselors – but the argument wasn’t over by any means. She would nail him later in the corridors of his home, much as he pictured her nailing one of the punks she taught, or attempted to teach.
“You expect me to sleep next to you. You expect me to put my…”
That was after pothole number two, which came in the third soapless week. He could almost see her Freudian wheels turn. She was developing theories about him. Caitlin taught American history, but her minor had been in psychology.
“I know what it is. It’s the dirt. You feel it creeping over you, don’t you?”
“I’m due halfway across the country by noon. Do we have to solve this now?”
“We haven’t solved it for fourteen years. Now it’s seeping out of you, like effluent.”
“What do you mean we? You never lived in a cage. They never slammed you against a stone wall and rammed a…”
“I’m the one who took the chance – on you. I bet my whole life, my children’s lives…”
“Our children. I was around for that, I still am, and I pay my way too. Unless I can’t count, I pay their way too.”
“Don’t shove your paycheck at me. I make one too.”
His hands were like ice as he wrapped them around the suitcase handle. But he wanted to stand up to her, even if he had to stage-play it.
“Then don’t shove your face at me. Like a guard,” he said. “I don’t like guards…”
“I know what you want, Robert. You want me to wash your mouth out with soap and water. Wash the dirt out. Well I won’t. I’m your wife, Robert. I’m not your mother.”
Then she told him that her “guidance counselor” appointment had really been with the school psychologist, her friend and confidante, and that it was so totally clear he was “overdue” for therapy. “Therapy or else,” Caitlin found the nerve to say, screaming and hounding him out the door, embarrassing him in front of the car service driver.
He hated car-service vehicles, with their stale decanters and squishy, fishtailing rear ends. To Robert a limo was not a luxury but a necessity. After two flats in a month he didn’t trust his own car, shiny and new and ultra-tech – his gift to himself for beating all the company numbers - not in the winter, not when he really had to be somewhere on time. When they went to skimpy, low-profile tires they must have written off Greater Boston, where the winter roads were like pothole landmines.
“All I do all day long is put on new Michelins and Continentals,” said Darrell Sitka, the service rep they gave him at the Benz dealership when the first rep left and went over to BMW. “Believe me, it isn’t you or your driving. Everybody’s blowing out once or twice. But it’s a good thing you bought the tire insurance. Short money, that’s what this tire insurance is. Short money.”
It was hard to listen, or act like he was listening. The first day Robert walked through the showroom and stared at Darrell through the glass office door he nearly crashed into it, forgetting there was any glass at all. On the desk was a paperweight, and there was no mistaking the name on it. It was one of those squares of chrome honoring the employee of the month, the name embossed in big type.
His time in the juvenile stir had taught Robert to strike first and fast, even when your opponent was bigger. And in this case, fatter. Darrell Sitka was built like a sofa, thick-framed and florid. He bulged and sagged and looked like he sat on his ass all the time. The air around him had the gagging reek of onions and on the desk was the oily wax paper from one eaten sub sandwich and its unwrapped mate.
“It wasn’t just the tire,” Darrell Sitka said, studying the paperwork through glasses set halfway down his potato nose. “You needed a new rim too. It had a chunk ripped out of it like a torn paper plate. You must have hit that pothole like a rocket.”
“You’re Daniel Sitka’s brother, aren’t you. Do you know who I am?”
Darrell Sitka kept his eyes glued to the yellow invoice sheet. With a finger that was bratwurst-thick he tapped the keyboard of his terminal. “You want to see the rim? I had them save it in the shop.”
Robert stood over him, small and tight as a squeezed trigger. There was a row of car keys on hooks. He could grab one and punch with the little blade, like a shiv. “Do you know who…?”
“You’re my customer,” Sitka said, finally looking up at him. “If you want another rep instead of me I can ask.”
“You’ve got the same goddam face.”
“I said do you want to see the rim?”
The sourness came into Robert’s mouth from deep in his gullet. It came as though the sourness had a life of its own, a will. The taste of soil that was black and wet. Sharp pebbles, worms, grass. He put his hand to his mouth. He wanted to spit it all out in Darrell’s face.
Darrell stood up, big as a barge. The blood beat in Robert’s temples and he found himself sizing up the span from his shod foot to Darrell’s crotch.
“Mind if I get by. Why don’t you sit down and relax. It’s a rim, not a limb. You’re too worked up.”
“Where are you going?”
Sitka stood there, neither inching forward or back, a hair’s distance from colliding with Robert.
“To the shop, to get the evidence. It’s customer service, you want that, don’t you? I’m serving you. Now let me by.”
He came back with the rim and held it under Robert’s nose, pointing out the deep gash in the edge, holding forth on the dynamics of road stress. Robert cut him off, grabbed the invoice and walked away. He had to piss so bad he practically ran to the restroom. Afterwards he hit the soap dispenser as usual, two times, two squirts. The instant the soap slicked the palm of his hand the vomit came up his gullet. He couldn’t rinse the gob off fast enough, and whether it baffled him or not made no difference. Getting the ivory goo off his skin, every last trace of it, was all that mattered. He felt like a man turning into a werewolf. Then when the soap was eradicated and obliterated – rubbed away so hard his skin was red and sore – then he felt like Robert again.
Caitlin had her weapons, her ways to throw everything back at him. She changed character on him and kept a dirty house.When the dust-mounds became bizarre and he complained, she jumped on her pulpit. “You like it? Now you know how your body feels – to me.”“No one notices but you.”
“You think they don’t. They all work for you. They’re afraid to say.”
Then she switched tactics and played the lust card.
“Will you join me – in the tub?”
Robert ran out of the bathroom. Ran like a chicken from the bar of Dove his wife held in her hand.
“Danny’ll get you. You called his little sister a whore, and he’ll get you.”It was July, two weeks into summer vacation. No school till after Labor Day, the tail end of the baseball season. Robert leaned on the window sill and listened to the horseflies make that angry zooming sound, little fighter planes on the attack. He stared out the screen through the fire escape grates, down at the wide, ragged lot steaming in the sun, the weed-blades soaked and bent from a thunderous cloudburst that hadn’t cooled the air one degree. Across the lot was a fortress of blunt brick buildings studded with fire escapes exactly like his own. On the second building from the left a cellar door opened and out poured a ragtag platoon, seven in all, one of them toting a boombox that grew louder as they shuffled deeper into the weeds.“Danny’ll get you. You can’t stay inside all summer. If it isn’t today it’s a week from today. Danny never forgets. For what you said about her, his sister …he’ll make you bleed like a pig.”
Robert squinted into the window screen. One of the Sitka twins was at the head of the pack, a mitt tucked under his arm. On the outside, the bastards were so identical Robert – and everyone else – still had trouble telling them apart. You had to be close enough to see the moles, the blackheads on the noses. Or hear them talk. But Daniel was colder and wilder; in a game he’d slide at you and cut with his big legs – or throw at your head. This Sitka was Daniel and not Darrell, Robert was pretty sure of it. The mitt he carried, that was Daniels’s yellow leather. Darrell’s was saddle color, a russet.
As Robert began to move, he went through the possibilities. Mouth full of blood, punched-out eyes, the kick in the balls that took your breath away. These things, they came and they went. But you could stare at the grates on the fire escape for fifty years and they’d only stare back at you. Whore, whore, whore. The word was there on every step of the staircase, waiting to taunt and punish him. Wishing he had zipped his lip. But he kept going – down the stairs, out the cellar door, out into the weeds. He hadn’t even meant anything. It was just a moment, it was just a word, she was just a girl, it was the fucking summertime.
“Hey, kid…”
Daniel didn’t even run at him. Rhino charging a deer. He just stood there wagging his fat finger. He stood there - like King Kong - right in the center of the part they called “the field,” where they threw and caught, where the weeds were shorter and the ground was studded with rocks. Even at this distance he threw a big shadow, and Robert didn’t break stride, walked right into it.
“I take care of my sister, kid.”
Why the kid thing? Daniel knew Robert’s name. He’d said his name for years. Since goddam kindergarten.
Robert wondered how it would start – with a punch or a kick? Where it would come – high or low? He wondered if it would break his nose. There were six others there in the field, his friends. Shuffling and gloating, smelling blood, he could sense it. His friends.
“I didn’t mean what I said. I just said it. I’m sorry…”
“You will be sorry, kid. You will be…”
“You weren’t there. You only heard…I’m sorry…”
Daniel’s fat hand shot out and locked on his collar. Robert heard cloth rip. He blinked and winced. He braced for the thunderbolt.
“Show me how sorry, kid. Show me.”
Daniel yanked his neck with one hand and pushed with the other. Robert wound up on his knees in the dirt.
“Now you be the whore, kid.”
He unbuttoned down below and stuck the thing right in Robert’s face, pushed it against his lips.
Robert had a split-second where his mind said no, never. But in the next split-second the no, never was gone, and Robert opened his mouth, just opened it.
The moment his mouth tasted Daniel’s skin, the thing pushing its head between his teeth and tongue, Daniel pulled it out and stuffed it back. Then Daniel reached down and slapped him across the mouth. The slap cut like a scythe, went through Robert’s whole body and down to his toes. Even the weeds seemed to shake.
Daniel turned to the shufflers, the friends, and pointed down at Robert.
“The whore, there she is, you saw it.”
A few of them cackled. Robert saw it in mime, like a silent movie. He couldn’t hear it, couldn’t even hear the boombox. His ears thundered with the slap.
“Every whore gets paid, kid. So here’s your pay.”
He leaned on Robert’s neck, threw his whole weight into his arm, pushed down until Robert’s face was in the dirt.
“Now eat, kid. Eat your pay.”
Daniel grabbed a clump of the stuff, a handful chocked with grass and rubble and earth slime. He slammed it into Robert’s teeth. “Eat it, chew it. Let me see it go down your throat.”
Except for the slap, Daniel never hit him, never hit him once. He knelt there, making Robert eat dirt until he started to puke it back up. Then Daniel stood up, turned, kicked more dirt into his face and moved off – slowly, taking his sweet time, letting the scene sink in with the herd.
At that moment Robert was one living, breathing being. But his right arm became another – a separate creature driven by its own motives, pursuing its own goals. His right arm shot out, swiveled like a reptile, found a fist-size rock and stiffened around it.
None of them had ever let Robert pitch, even for kicks. He never expected it. No speed-ball, no stuff. He was small, he was no thrower.
But the right arm on this day belonged to another Robert, he could feel him, swelling and flexing, bigger and more savage than he himself was or could ever be. This was a Robert who dwelled deep in the earth, far beneath the puddle where his vomit seeped into the soil and fed the worms.
From somewhere outside his head he watched the underground Robert stand, cock the arm and release the rock. It flew at a velocity that was unthinkable – on a straight-line course that was just there in the air, pre-existing, the way a railroad track is just there in the ground. The track ran from the fingers of the throwing hand to the back of Daniel’s skull. There the rock crash-landed – with such force it would soon be noted and named. Exhibit A.
When the police came it was Daniel’s face they pulled out of the dirt.
But Robert wasn’t there. In the commotion he got away and ran to his building. And from the window he peered through the dark steel rods of the fire escape, watching the blue lights and glinting badges . He watched the mother and the sister too, kneeling and pawing at the body on the ground, slathering their spit and tears over the face.
The twin Darrell loomed over them, pacing and stalking, like a new Daniel risen from the weeds.
Flights like this made Robert understand why they called it The Redeye. The plane bumped and slapped all the way in from San Diego, like a flat-bottomed boat in a confused sea. Sleep never came; booze only made him jumpier. When they had downed three vodkas apiece, his seat-mate, his own sales guy, poked a finger in his face and said, “this might get me fired, but I’m telling you anyway. You smell like a goat.”After San Diego the walk through the Logan Airport dawn was a trek through some stretch of Antarctica. He finally found his Benz, disguised as an ice-mound on the exposed upper deck of the garage. He battered the windshield with a scraper until there was a hole to see out of and he swung out for the office, squinting to read the signs, which changed every time the Massport bastards re-did a terminal. Passing Suffolk Downs a billboard caught his eye, his red eye. When his gaze went up his left front wheel went down, way down, with a loud whack followed by a hiss and a tinny wobble. Robert stomped the brake, watched a long tanker-truck whoosh by and swerved for the sidelines, a thin shoulder of ice-hard ground and road litter. The Benz climbed the shoulder and sagged forward like a crippled drafthorse.
As he grabbed for his briefcase, Robert saw his own face flit through the mirror, saw the mat of hair Caitlin said could become a bug’s nest from the stoppage of shampoo. He tore through his phone numbers, checked his watch, started to phone Benz Central - their so-called concierge service - but didn’t finish. There was a better idea, it just meant killing time – he thought of the phrase just that way, killing time – and he got a dirty, evil rise out of saying it to himself. The reps all started early, picking up phones by seven - to get the metal beasts herded into the shop and the loaners out on the road before the normal workday began. He knew just whose ass to stick this up – it would be no one but Darrell. He left voice mails for his secretary and a few others, poked the hazard button hard, like it was the eye of an enemy, and trudged off in the cold to find coffee. A joint called Three Yolks came up first.
The coffee was weak but fresh and the omelette looked like the cook had used a shovel for a spatula. Robert made it and the fries and the toast last for fifty minutes, and then the dealership operator answered and put him through.
Darrell went into his gruff service-friendly thing.“Why in hell did you wait for me? You didn’t have to wait, you didn’t even have to dial a phone. You just press the i-button on the console, any time, day or night.”
“I could have changed it myself too.”
“We don’t want owners changing tires. You didn’t buy a Benz for that.”
“Well what do you plan to do for me? Time is money. At my rate, you owe me more than a tire, a lot more.”
Dead air, cell static. Robert thought either the call had fuzzed out or Darrell was calling a tow on another line.
“You there?” He said it twice.
“Yes I’m here. But in fifteen I’ll be there. It’s the fastest I can do.”
“You mean the tow truck…”
“I mean me.”
Darrell had taken him by surprise. Complete surprise.
“You?”
“I’m doing my job. I want to see things for myself.”
They met on the ice-cold shoulder. Robert stepped out of the dead Benz, pulling the black leather jacket around him and zipping it high. Darrell parked his C-class baby Benz and came out in some lumpy thermal parka, a Sears take on L.L. Bean. The coat put on twenty pounds he didn’t need.“Your car?”
“No, yours. It’s a loaner. You drive this, I drive yours back to the shop.”
“Whoopty doo. I get to drive a C-class. I paid for an E-class. This is shit.”
“Can I open your trunk?”
Robert didn’t particularly want the bratwurst fingers touching his things, even when gloved. But he went ahead and popped the trunk, lifting the handle himself – slowly and gravely – finishing the move with a head-shake to signify disgust. Darrell plunged his hands in, fishing around for the tool kit, checking the jack, then unbolting everything and pulling it out – all except the spare, that toy tire, the rubber donut that makes you look like a three-wheeled fool going down the road.
“So what’s this, a demotion - you’re doing the gorilla work now?”
Darrell said nothing. He set the jack on the ground by the flat and stood up, avoiding Robert’s eyes, looking beyond him, up and down the highway. Robert bit his lip, holding back the tirade he could hear in his own head – the whole litany beginning with the appointments he had to kill, the day blown to shit, the sleepless flight, the lemon of a car…
“Well, show me where it is.”
“Show you what?”
“The hole you hit.”
“What are you going to do, fill it?”
Robert expected to hear him give it again – the let-me-do-my-job speech. But Darrell did nothing except look – up and away - at a plane climbing out of Logan.
“You won’t find any potholes up there. Try looking there, right down there – you see it?” He pointed, and kept pointing as he walked the frigid roadside back towards the hole, Darrell hulking over his outstretched arm. Finally Darrell picked up on it, the crater over in the passing lane. He stopped and stared. He lifted the fogged spectacles off his nose, wiped them, then stared even harder.
“Big damn hole, you’re right. Deeper than the tire, I’m sure. Kaboom.”
“That’s right. Tell them in fucking Stuttgart. Kaboom.”
“Was it dark when you hit it?”
“No, it wasn’t dark. The sun was up. Just up.”
“So why didn’t you see it?”
“What are you saying to me?”
Darrell paused and let out a long heave of breath, a fat-guy sound. It hit the cold and it plumed steam.
“I’m saying to you that with these cars you’ve got to keep your eyes on the road. In these conditions, it’s the only real defense you have. It’s you and the steering wheel.”
Robert remembered the billboard, the instant of distraction, the way it had yanked his eyes up and to the right. Suddenly the blood beat in his temples, going at him like two hammers. “What the fuck are you telling me – that it’s my fault?”
And Darrell turned his back on him, just like that. He plodded back towards the trunk. Not answering, not saying shit.
He didn’t speak until he was right in front of the trunk. Then all he said was, “let’s get that spare out.”
He said it over his shoulder, the larded shoulder in the lumpy parka. And it was the shoulder and the idiot comment that did it – that and the old taste of dirt spreading over the tongue. It all hit like a combination punch and tripped Robert’s last remaining wire.
He had a flash-thought of mayhem, an urge to brain Darrell with the thing back on the desk, the chrome paperweight embossed with Darrell’s employee-of-the-month achievements. That changed to an impulse to club the base of Darrell’s fat neck with the jack. But in the end what Robert did was lift nothing but his own feet. He sprang up like a monkey and grabbed the big head from the rear, knocking off the glasses and locking his arms, TV-wrestler style, around Darrell’s ears. Darrell shook his shoulders and twisted his torso to no avail – Robert clung like a crazed ape that had swooped down from a tree. And he felt that way too, but strangely weightless, his victim big as a steer, and quickly the whole thing turned into steer wrestling. Working the headlock, Robert got the neck to bend. With his left fist he began shooting punches into the potato nose. Darrell bucked his hips and, after flailing and slapping, mainly at the air, tried to curl a one-arm bearhug around Robert’s ribcage.
The bearhug gained pressure and Robert had the sense of a boulder rolling onto his ribs, squeezing the oxygen out of him. He tried to punch faster, fist drilling all over the cranium, but he knew he was moving in slow-motion, not even punching but tapping and dabbing. Then the bearhug broke, inexplicably went slack, and Darrell went onto his knees, gasping and shaking all over.
Out of his throat he managed to burble two words, “I give,” and Robert let him go. Feeling anything but victorious, merely lucky. And nervous about the traffic whizzing by.
He stood over Darrell, panting. “Now you can change my tire. Now.”
But Darrell didn’t budge from his knees, except to shudder. There was a new tone in the gasping face, an eerie presence that was gray-blue, but not like skin color. More the absence of it.
“What is it? What’s the matter with you?”
Darrell raised his right hand off the ground and slapped his chest. “Give me a minute, for Christ’s sake.” The words came out in single-syllable spurts, punctuated by more gasping.
“What is it? Should I call someone? Do you have pills?” Robert looked around wildly for blue lights. And he realized he wanted to see blue lights just as much as he did not want to see them.
“Give me a minute, for Christ’s sake.”
A minute passed, and more minutes. Darrell not budging, his paws and feet planted on the cold ground.
Robert thought of an animal in the slaughterhouse, bleating for its life.
“Let me help you up. I’ll call 911.” He flipped his phone but Darrell shook his head and pumped out a sound that said no – a grunt that said it better than the word itself. Then he staggered to his feet and pulled a brown pharmacy bottle out of his pants.
“Give me those,” Robert said. He pushed and twisted the cap off. “I have water in the car.”
He didn’t say he was sorry, but it crossed his mind – just as Darrell handed him back the bottle of Aquafina.
“You don’t love me. You love your own dirt.”And with that, Caitlin took the kids away for the last six weeks of the summer. Took them to such a remote Pacific Northwest outpost it might as well have been Siberia – not reachable without killing two-thirds of a work week. Robert worked, paced the empty rooms and started dating the laptop. Eventually he reached a dark corner of Craigslist, where he found a woman willing to do what Caitlin said she would not do – for a certain wallet size, of course. The bar of Ivory she shoved in his mouth made him gag and spit as planned, but in the end all he saw in the chipped bathroom mirror of her tract house was the face of a rabid man, foaming like a dog. When she made him kneel – as scripted – his eyes got stuck on the large hole in her absurd black stockings, on the exposed thigh-skin all veins and goosepimples. He wondered what was making her so cold on a broiling summer day, and he wound up throwing her extra money and escaping to a sports bar a quarter hour before his time was up. Then he went home and stayed home.
The landscape crew stopped coming – Caitlin must have let the contract run out. Robert stopped showering altogether, only swiped at himself now and then with a damp washcloth. On weekends he sat upstairs and stared through the screen at the long green expanse, the carpet of good Kentucky bluegrass. It was no match for the weeds. They grew wild and strong and obliterated it.