Barrel Fever and Other Stories Read online

  Without paying they would cut out of the station and squeal their tires onto the busy street, playing their radios so loudly that I could hear them off in the distance for blocks. I would shout after them. I happen to know that Hell is nothing like the beach. There is no sand in Hell, or water either. It is so hot in Hell that the sand has melted. Think about that!

  Many people would speak to me about troubles with their cars. They would feel a pull in the steering wheel or hear a noise like someone trapped under the hood was patiently tapping to be let out. Canton told me to tell them that it sounded like a transmission problem and that they should make an appointment to have one of our men look it over. I understood that this was Canton's plan to entrap people by making the most of their fears. After the third week I told him that I could no longer be party to that. He did not seem angry or surprised but suggested that I might enjoy a job that gave me more solitude.

  I began to work shorter hours on a later shift, a hands-on job designed to acquaint me with humility. I cleaned the rest rooms and found unspeakable things there. Men would advertise themselves on the walls with markers and sharp knives. Carlton had the door taken off the men's room stall when he discovered it was being used as a perverse clubhouse by confused and lonely men. I would mop the floor and clean the sink and toilet daily.

  "Human waste is, above all, human," I told myself. "I am a human, they are humans." Together we are a humanity who might take a moment or two to clean up after ourselves.

  The women were just as bad as the men, sometimes worse. Frightened of germs, many women would use hand towels and toilet paper to fashion a nest upon which to sit. The bathroom floor was a fire hazard. I found quite a few articles of clothing in the women's bathroom. It is I who was responsible for organizing the lost-and-found box at our station. So far, nobody has stepped forward to claim anything so I am considering donating these clothes to the needy. A newborn baby was found at a Sunoco station on Glenwood Avenue last year. It was a baby girl, still alive. She was taken to the hospital and named for a letter of the alphabet. After a month, the mother stepped forward to claim her child.

  The mother said that it was a misunderstanding. She said she would never again ask her boyfriend to baby-sit. So how did her boyfriend sneak a baby into the women's rest room? That is what the public wants to know. I have been following the case closely, which is a coincidence because I thought I had discovered a tiny baby in the women's rest room of our station just last week. I followed my instincts and called the police, an ambulance, and Pastor Holden. The moments passed like hours and, in my impatience I reached into the toilet and pulled the baby shape out, thinking it might still be alive, praying I might save it. Thank God I was mistaken. It was not a baby after all. (But it certainly was big enough!)

  Following that episode Carlton decided that Taylor should clean the rest rooms, seeing that he has a family to support and is in need of the extra hours. He also assigned Taylor the job of carrying in the beach balls and quarts of Pepsi we offer as premiums to customers who spend twenty dollars or more. In all honesty I felt slightly envious. Here Taylor was, getting all of the good jobs (so I thought). While it was true that he had a child to support, it is also true that the child is twenty-seven years old and currently resides in Feeny State Penitentiary, where he is serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery. It turns out that he robbed a service station. Carlton knows nothing about it. He has been told that Taylor's son is a five-year-old in need of costly rhinoplasty, which will hopefully correct the child's breathing disorder.

  "How's the boy?" Carlton might ask.

  "Not good, not at all good," Taylor will answer. "Had me up all night long for the past three days. Sounds like somebody scraping a shovel against the pavement. That's exactly what it sounds like, listening to that baby try and grab a breath. It's a sound to break a man's heart."

  Taylor told me later that a shovel striking pavement is the sound his sister makes as she snores beside him in bed. It is wrong to lie to Carlton, and I have spent many long hours mulling it over in my mind. If Carlton should come to me and ask, "Is Taylor's son an infant or is he a convict?" I would feel honor-bound to tell the truth. So far he has never asked but, should he, I am prepared to deliver the truth and pray that Taylor will understand.

  My next job was to clean the area around the dumpster and to carry in the tubes and tires at closing. That is how I got my picture in the newspaper. I was carrying the inner tubes in a stack around me when someone took a snapshot of it. I had memorized the path from the pump island to the garage and was used to walking in the dark so it was no problem for me. I was right there in the evening paper but you could not see my face, just my legs.

  Now Carlton wants me to do this every day. I come in at four-thirty and stand in front of the station wearing tubes until six or later. Canton says that it is an eye-catcher during rush hour and is good for customer relations. While I pace back and forth I can often hear Carlton's loud voice as he jokes with the customers. He says, "I hope it doesn't tire him out," and "Folks, you are looking at the original boob tube." I wish that I could see the people's faces as they look in amazement at me, a man made of inner tubes, a dark tornado that can save them from drowning.

  We Get Along

  WE'RE washing down the kitchen in the vacant basement apartment, my mother and I. She opens the cabinet beneath the sink and acknowledges the mildew huddled in the damp corners. "I will destroy you," she whispers, slowly fingering the trigger on the can of disinfectant. "You're scum, do you hear me? Scum."

  Personally addressing each stain is a telltale sign that my mother is entering her vengeful stage. I turn on the radio hoping to distract her. "Please, no," she says. "Not that, not now." She says it as though I were a suitor trying to work my hand beneath her apron on the first date. That's when I slam my fist against the refrigerator door and say, "Ma, I'm lonely."

  It's something I saw someone do last night on TV, a hand-some, sunburnt pioneer boy heading west in a soiled Conestoga wagon. In the movie the mother gathered the boy in her arms and stroked his head, offering words of comfort and staring off into the bright horizon that suddenly appeared before her.

  In the basement apartment my mother wrings out her sponge and says, "Lonely? You'll find out what lonely is if you don't quit acting like a goddamned monkey and get on the stick. Then you'll see lonely."

  A monkey? Bless her heart, my mother thinks I would be lonelier without her.

  "You're the man now," she said to me after my father died, "you're the man." Then she turned to Popeye, our calico tom, and said, "You're the cat now, Popeye, you're the cat," as if she'd always worn a veil over her face and had never known we were men and cats all along.

  The night after his funeral my mother smashed the Pontiac windows with a golf club. I was in bed watching TV when I heard the noise and came running out barefoot in my robe thinking it was someone, some kids maybe, and there she was standing beside the car with this golf club. The windshield was webbed and sagging, and she stepped back to take another crack at it. There was a moth on her forehead. I took the club from her hands and said, "Mother, listen to me. This is our car. Why not the Dinellos' or the Ablemans'?" She said she preferred the Pontiac as she was within the rights of the law to destroy her own property.

  Another moth, this one brilliant and spotted, lighted on her shoulder, and we all watched as the windshield heaved and collapsed, raining chunks like crushed ice onto the dash and front seat.

  We replaced the windshield with plastic as a temporary measure. I ride shotgun, my head out the window like a dog, while my mother drives slowly, cursing, the cigarette poking out of her mouth like a fuse. The drivers behind us grouse and honk their horns.

  "Listen to them," my mother says, tightening her grip on the wheel, "all in a big hurry to meet some big stinking heart attack." It embarrasses me that she cannot recognize herself in others. "The trick is not to allow yourself to be consumed by your anger," she whispers between clenche
d teeth, her knuckles white. She says she would like to have his body exhumed so she can spit on it.

  "That'll cost money."

  "We'll go there at night with shovels, just the two of us," she says. "What'll it cost?"

  I say, "He's rotting flesh now, and long fingernails. You don't want to see that."

  "I would pay dearly to see a thing like that. Name your price."

  That was months ago, before she developed her theory that he wasn't really dead at all. During the latter period she spent a great deal of time behaving in a clairvoyant fashion. Placing her index fingers to her temples she would pronounce, "Right this minute he's sitting beside a puddle no, a pool. I see a swimming pool and a. . checkered bathing suit, a wet bathing suit. I see a diving board and. . what's this? I see a cocktail napkin that reads. . 'Fort Cheswick' no, I take that back! It reads 'Port Selznick. . Country Club.' There's something written beneath it. . something in very tiny letters. . I'm seeing the letter H. . and the letter V and. ." At this point she would surrender her head to the tabletop. "Goddamn you," she would say. "I've lost it. I was this close, Dale, and then I lost it when you cracked that ice tray."

  I would then pour my Pepsi and remind her that we had both seen his body after the accident. We saw his arm torn off at the shoulder and lying in a separate bag beside him.

  "He was in a drawer," I'd say. "Normal, healthy adults do not choose to spend their time in a refrigerated morgue. If he had it in him to play this sort of joke, chances are we would have known it before now."

  "He lied to me for fifteen years so why should I believe him flow? Maybe he's alive with one arm. It happens."

  My mother's sister Margery refers to this as "Evelyne's stage of denial." Since my father's death my mother has grown closer to her sister Margery, who provides her with slogans such as "God doesn't close one door without opening another," "One day at a time," and, my mother's favorite, "You're only as sick as your secrets."

  I feel sick.

  I'm cleaning the refrigerator in the basement apartment when I find two squirrel tails in the crisper and another one, attached to the genuine article, wrapped in newspaper in the freezer. The squirrel looks pathetically eager, its paws frozen beside its terrible, crowded mouth.

  "Oh, that Nick Papanides was one sick customer," my mother says, referring to the former tenant. "He and I were standing in the backyard one day last month when Popeye dragged home a squirrel, the way he'll do sometimes it wasn't quite dead yet. It was putting up a fight but you could tell this one wasn't going to climb any more trees. It was pitiful. We're standing there when Nick asks, 'May I?' So I said, 'Hell, it's a free country knock yourself out.' Then he throws a towel over the damned thing, stomps on it a few times, and carries it into the apartment. He used to cook them with eggplant," she says. "I can't say I'm too sorry to see him go. You couldn't pay me to eat a goddamned squirrel it's nothing but a rat with long fingernails and a pretty tail." She pauses to scratch at her ankle with the rough side of a sponge. "There's a type that rents basement apartments," she says. "They need a low ceiling to match their self-esteem. You couldn't pay me to live with pipes eight inches over my head. We should try renting out the attic get some cheerful people around here for a change."

  I thought Nick was cheerful enough. He was no Shirley Temple but neither was he the despondent mole my mother would have me believe. Before he moved away, Nick and I would lie upon his big water bed, naked, listening to my mother's voice and footsteps as she paced back and forth with the telephone.

  "She is laying each of her cards upon a table tonight," Nick would say.

  It killed me, the way he put a phrase together. Instead of "off the deep end," he'd say "into the part where the water is more high than your head."

  One way or another you find things out about people. After a tenant leaves, we always find something, objects hidden and for-gotten about or just left behind. We've found bottles of pills and birthday cards, cassette tapes and jewelry and pictures drawn on the backs of playing cards. We use these things to put together a better idea of the people we thought we knew.

  Tom Dodges, for example, left behind two ink-stained bras, a mason jar of gasoline, a book on ventriloquism, and a pillow-case stuffed with dog hair. Tom Dodges, a grown man! He moved out to attend a technical college and was replaced by a loud, chumpy dope my mother and I refer to as "The Sportsman." The Sportsman worked as a printer and presented me with dozens of single-sheet calendars picturing naked women leaning against motorcycles or bent over the hoods of troubled cars: women holding tools as if they were trophies they had won for being pert and shameless.

  "Add this to your collection," he would whisper. After a while I stopped opening them.

  The Sportsman was clinically obsessed with any game involving a ball. Any round object that moved along the ground or through the air; smacked with a bat or club, kicked, dribbled, passed by hand or prodded with a cue, mallet, or paddle it commanded his full attention. He followed all games, either on television or radio, the volume so loud that it could be heard all the way down the street. It was his habit to coach the players from wherever he happened to be. "Cahill, you shithead, what's your problem? Jesus Christ, you couldn't catch a fucking cold. Hand that uniform over to your mother, why don't you, you faggoty piece of shit."

  It got on my nerves in a big way. Even with tissue stuffed into my ears I could still hear him from my bedroom. I made it a point to avoid him, but certain people can't take a clue. The moment I passed his window or open door he would call out, "Hey, Dale, you watching the game?"

  "No."

  "You're kidding me, right? The Stallions are ahead by eight points with twenty minutes left in the game and you mean to tell me you're not watching? What are you, some kind of an apple-polisher, running off to polish some goddamned apple?"

  He would rapidly rub his hands along the sides of his sweaty beer can, a dopey illustration of the verb polish, and then, thank-fully, the televised ball would regain his attention and I was able to pass.

  The hands-down worst day of my entire life was the October afternoon when the Sportsman took me to an actual football game. He had bought the tickets in advance and arranged everything with my father. I would sooner eat a Vaseline sandwich than witness two minutes of a football game on TV, let alone an actual, live game. I began feigning illness three days in advance, unforgiving chills accompanied by memory loss and a stiffening of the joints. I was in my bedroom, moaning, when the Sportsman arrived at my door, accompanied by my father.

  "Who are you and what do you want with me?" I asked, my stiff arms raised against the light. "I'm so cold, so. . cold. When will it stop being winter? So. . cold. If you have any decency, sirs, you will leave me alone to die with dignity."

  "Get up and get dressed," my father shouted, ripping the blankets from the bed. "Either that or you'll go in your pajamas."

  I gave it another shot. "Go? Go where? Are you taking me to the hospital? Will it be warm there? Who are you? Are you one of the soldiers who visited yesterday? I told you, we have no more bread. We've had no bread for weeks."

  "Hey, my man," the Sportsman said when I met him a few minutes later on the sidewalk. "Give me five."

  We took a bus to the stadium and this bus, it crawled while Mr. Congeniality struck up a game-related conversation with every passenger, all of whom seemed to find him charming. The stadium was even worse. Once the game began, the Sportsman was riveted, screaming and leaping up from his seat, rooting with the best of them. It was a safe bet that he wasn't going anywhere until long after the last ball was mauled. I excused myself and took the next bus home. Nobody was there, so I rooted through the kitchen drawers and found the spare key to the Sportsman's apartment, figuring I would go down and investigate for a while. I've done it with every tenant, and why shouldn't I? It's my house too, partly. I wanted to discover the Sportsman's pathetic secrets: the sheets stained with urine and decorated with hairs, the magazines beside a foul toilet, the medication and l
etters they all keep.

  One time, while Tom Dodges was out of town, I found, beside a shit-smeared pillow, a magazine picturing naked men, women, and children summering at a nudist colony. These people went about their business, picnicking, cycling, enjoying a barbecue they were just like anyone else except that they were naked. Most of them, the parents, were uninviting in their nudity. I mean, you really wouldn't want to see them that way, but in this magazine you had no choice. Someone, probably Tom, had accentuated this magazine, with a ballpoint pen. The nudists were provided with thoughts and dialogue, crudely contained within cloud-shaped bubbles that poured from their mouths. "You want a nice big hot dog?"

  When Tom returned from his vacation I looked at him differently. I acted the same, but in my mind he became a specimen. Every time he greeted me I pictured those nudists and the filthy pillow. I had always liked Tom and my experience in his apartment made a deep impression on me. Any of us could die tomorrow. It happens all the time. Any of us could have our home broken into and examined by thieves. If I can enter a tenant's apartment, who's to say that he can't enter mine? I have learned to destroy all the evidence. It isn't enough to hide it; you have to burn it and trust that the important secrets will be held in your mind.

  I entered the Sportsman's apartment because I wanted to see him differently, to see through him with absolute conviction. I felt I deserved the sensation after everything he had put me through. So I went. I let myself in, quietly, and discovered my father and Aunt Margery on the foldout sofa bed. They were actively naked and it took them a moment or two to notice me standing there.

  "Jesus," my father said, covering my aunt's face with a sofa cushion.

  "Jesus Christ," my aunt said in a muffled voice, struggling against the pillow.

  I said, "Oh, Lord."

  It strikes me as funny that Jesus' name was invoked at this time and with such sincerity. Jesus, in pictures, has a beard and long, healthy-looking hair. His eyes are moist with pain and compassion, pretty eyes. That is all I know about him, yet, in times of crisis, his seems to be the name that comes to our lips whether we believe or not. In that regard he has a very good reputation. The details of my father's naked body do not bear reporting. When he stood up I looked away. I saw a dress neatly folded upon the TV set, placed beside a bra and panties. I saw my father's pants and briefs, a tangled ball beside the coffee table.