Joel Myers

(Two excerpts from a novel in progress)

On Tuesday, February 18th, 2003, Curtis Ellis left his wife and son at their dining room table and went to his car to run away for good. His Jeep had always been his sanctuary, and relief cloaked him the moment he closed the door. It was the only place in which he could give voice to any emotion besides a brute and stifled anger—in fact, the only place where he could confess what his heart truly contained. Twice, driving to Illinois, he had confessed early marriage hardships to his father, who soon thereafter succumbed to a brief and relentless pancreatic cancer. And once, to Walker, who he thought was his best friend, after watching a ball game at a bar.

He put his key in the ignition but did not turn it on.

That last time with Walker. After starting to talk on the drive home from the bar, Curt had pulled over abruptly in the parking lot outside a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall, because the pain in his heart overflowed into his voice, despite his better judgment. It was Walker to whom he’d told everything that day, given a map of his mute desperation, alone amid his son’s frenetic play, his son who at times was like a little monster with his constant clamoring for energy. Curt gave Walker a list of the hundred humiliations each day carried with it, his desire to get out, out, for God’s sake he couldn’t take it anymore. Walker sat and took the rushing inventory of Curt’s shadowed heart, having arched his eyebrows, nodding at the end with a whooshing exhale and said, “That’s some heavy stuff.”

Curt had hoped Walker would prove an ongoing confidant, that his witness might raise a thumb-sized flame to the dark horizon of the maze in which he was lost. Walker never brought it up again. It was Walker to whom Curt had shown his emptied hope, like the long red plastic grill lighter on the tool shelf at eye level before him, emptied of butane from the years he had left it since using it only once, camping when he was seventeen.

Dishes clattered to a stop in the sink inside. A stream of water hissed against steel and porcelain. Emma must be doing the dishes. The lighter was like a miniature chainsaw in the shadows. He’d taken it when he went with Walker into that wild expanse of stars by the lake, high schoolers foolish and free, out all night, risking their parents’ wrath. That was the apex of their friendship. Walker, of late, had been caught in his own complicated marriage, and through the stealthy slippage of time, the pair had not seen each other in nearly two years.

Two years. Was that right.

Curt fired up the ignition and the radio blared with an acoustic guitar. Anger whipped in his heart, as it did whenever technology worked against him. His right hand rose to turn it off, but he knew the song. “Jack and Diane,” by John Mellencamp. He paused, smiling against his mood. A friend’s rich sister had bought John Mellencamp’s house in Bloomington, Indiana, and once, Bob Dylan had called, asking for John, not knowing he’d moved. What were those singers’ lives like? How they could travel all round the world, their ideas celebrated on the interview couch, their faces pristine in the warm eye of the camera, never worrying about money, never having to serve as the poor man who’d bought a house above his means, who barely kept things together. Those men were in another world, a perfect world. A world he’d never touch.

His purpose returned to him as the music went on. Just go. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. The purpose tightened in his hands that gripped the steering wheel. His skin was the color of newspaper in the weak light. The life and color gone out of him in that bleak garage, with the one overhead fixture hanging bright from a cord above the vehicle. The skin looked just like it did under the lights of the gas station he worked at in the evening. Just like in the Walmart Auto Center where he put tires on during the day. Bad lighting was everywhere in America. There was a fleck of white primer on the edge of his fingernails from the Sunday work he had done, painting a living room for a hundred bucks for a woman who’d come into the Walmart and struck up a conversation. When he finished, the money wasn’t worth it. He should’ve asked for more.

He was overstrained. Like a taut old metal bridge cable, rust-orange, fraying at the edges. If anyone bothered to look. But no one bothered to look. No one bothered to see in his stoic gaze the limp flesh around his eyes that returned to him in his rearview mirror as clear evidence of his despair. No one could see that hot star of fear in his abdomen as he went to work each day. And how could they? Would he even have the language to speak, if not in the rare sanctuary of a long drive? But still he held it against them all for not seeing. Not seeing him fray and fray, strain and strain to keep up the ceaseless stream of workdays, coming home to his son jumping into his arms, knowing that one day, quietly and unceremoniously, he would break like all worn things that break.

He did not want to break. He wanted to get out, before the last of his soul was twisted apart. He wanted to breathe the free road air, get at least a glimpse of the life he’d had in his youth.

When had this idea about New Orleans even started? He’d been watching TV the night before, late, after Gabe was asleep in his rickety bed. A news report had come on, about life in New Orleans after Hurricane Lili and Tropical Storm Isidore, and the run-up to Mardi Gras on the first Tuesday of March. The place was positively vibrant—jazz bands, parades, beautiful women in costumes luminous as a peacock’s feathers. They interviewed a twenty-something blonde woman, sharp-nosed, tan, heavily made-up, in a white lace top, with blue feather earrings and turquoise Mardi Gras beads. Her beauty pierced him. She was the pure archetype of Woman that most men cling to throughout their lives, that divine apparition, that lively and perfect lay, that pristine magazine cover deity at every checkout counter. In this TV special, that blissful blonde woman, that native New Orleanian interviewed for twenty seconds, became that pristine magazine Woman in Curt’s mind. She would haunt him that night after Emma went to sleep. He breathed weakly, mouth open, imagining her. That woman from the television, that elusive free woman, had quietly unlocked his heart from the yoke of practicality, of fatherhood, of the bills. It had unleashed his desire for one last-ditch effort, one Hail Mary pass at good times from midfield as the clock ran out on the prime of his life. There in the car, the refrain of the song from the radio brought him back.

He closed his eyes, and for a moment he thought of absolutely nothing. Then he nodded, said, “New Orleans.”  He hit the switch for the garage door, and it rumbled open behind him. He put the Jeep in reverse and drove out to the street, pressing the button for the garage door to descend as he put it in drive and turned away. Heading down that familiar street, out through the neighborhood lined with leafless oaks, and further onward, excited and dark with fear, like a prisoner on parole day, he greeted the unknown life that awaited him, the new life fast approaching on the other side of the ramp that led onto the dusk-lit highway.

#

Eight months later, after Dad had vanished and the house was foreclosed on, those first weeks in the dilapidated duplex that was their new home, Gabe lay with Mom in her bed evenings and weekends, watching Lifetime TV shows, with the occasional faint patter of mice scurrying in the kitchen. The two sat, soothed by the laugh tracks and the voices and the distraction television afforded, Gabe comforted by Mom, or him comforting her. Who was the supporter, who the consoled? Two stupefied convalescents, parties to the same collision. Adjusting to life without Dad through the bright charm of the filmed entertainer, the anesthetic trance of television, as in the waiting room of a hospital, waiting to be rescued by a voice overhead.

Mom would sob quietly at night, muffled through the wall. She tried to hide it, but he could always hear. Confusion in sadness slowly dawned one day at a time into the clear reality that Gabe would never see his father again. Or would he? Hope flared like a dying fire. Gabe lay at night, crying, asking the world the question of where his father was, his small cheeks slick with tears, staring at the dark ceiling in the pain of uncertainty, and why, why, why did you go? Was I not good enough? I’m sorry I left out the toys and you tripped that time and I’m sorry I almost crashed the bike and you had to come save me and I’m sorry when I spilled food on the floor and I’m sorry I’m sorry please come back I’ll be better I’ll be better please Dad please please I’m sorry, sobbing in the dark. He imagined Dad coming back, and Gabe would fix it, whatever the problem was, he would sit in bed with Dad and with Mom, between them, their marriage counselor, whatever the problem was, asking him now Dad, do you love Mom? Dad smiling down at him, his smile warm as a stained-glass window, saying yes of course I do. Asking Mom now Mom do you love Dad? Mom saying of course of course. And them embracing and coming back, coming back, his family and their old house, it all coming back, Dad, Dad, why did you leave us, what could I have done can I do better please I’ll do better please I love you dad I’ll be perfect this time please . . . Pleadings unheard, questions never answered. Instead, the silence of the bedroom dark and cold in weak winter moonlight, the heating never warm enough here, Mom trying to save on the gas bill. Gabe hiding under the tent of the primary-colored dinosaur blanket, his breath coming back to him, carbon dioxide lowering him into the vale of sleep.

These were the years of the bathtub. Fate had afforded Gabe this lone luxury in the otherwise ramshackle duplex. His mother now gone most evenings at her new night shift at Longhorn Steakhouse, the house unbearably silent, he had seen Mom do the same once and he tried it, and he loved it. He would pour the water in, flooding, too hot—he always wanted it too hot—staring at the steaming swirling heat, the faucet blasting its waterfall. The sting of heat would balm and dress his sorrow. He would bring in Mom’s little portable radio and set it on the closed toilet seat and plug it in and turn it on. When the tub was a third full, he would squirt in some dish soap and large bubbles would foam up until they nearly flowed over the rim. He would extend his foot, his toes piercing the bubbles, and the heat of the water’s edge would bite at his skin. He winced, retreated, waited, tried again. Dipping his full toes in, bracing, then his foot, then ankles, and so on, until methodically, finally, with the shifting border of pain, his body was eased in, reclining against the porcelain.

And sometimes, lying there, his favorite song would come on the radio, “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan. A song sung by a woman with a voice like glass, starting with just piano. Her voice would make him bow his head like a haltered mule in the sun. The dark cavern of his pain was somehow lit by the candleflame of her voice. His heart was a tendon. Ragged, torn. Her voice a blood, rushing to heal. And the healing hurt and yet did never heal. The pain would start slow and hot, and then by the soft climax of the chorus he was weeping, weeping, twin tears falling into the soapy water, so painful he had to close his eyes. He imagined his father still in their house, playing Johnny Cash on guitar in the bedroom, and naked, Gabe would weep, his arms slick under the water, shoulders wreathed in bubbles, his heart carried by the woman’s voice the way his father had once carried him, by the soprano surface that cradled and rocked him, electrified his blood with hot pain.

After a time, many songs and commercials later, when the water was cold, he would pull out the stopper and towel the bubbles off his sleek torso and turn off the radio and return to his room, with nothing fixed except the pain transmuted into a relaxed and heat-drugged sadness.

These were the years of seeing the other boys with their fathers, with other siblings, not alone in the house as their mother worked late. Years playing four square at recess and in the line to get into the square the other boys pushing one another talking of little league games and who scored what run when and who would beat whom, and Gabe realizing that Dad was supposed to have taken him to play baseball with the other boys. What parade of losses attended the loss of his father? Dad had just started taking him to T-Ball a few times before he left, clapping all shoulders and affirmation from behind the chain link fence. Now he was gone, and this entire track of Gabe’s boyhood had derailed and vanished, a train driven over a broken bridge into the sea.