Give My Love
by Ernie Pylar
July 30, 2009
I was driving south on 13. I had gone down to Medford early in the morning, trying to get a job with that window manufacturer. I thought I’d be moving boxes around but it turns out they wanted someone who could operate heavy machinery and I don’t know any of that shit. I was a little pissed and was just driving away. I had no business going south but I was just driving, with my windows down. To go all that way and wake up a lot earlier than you’ve been waking up lately only to find out that you read the damn ad wrong . . . the day hadn’t started yet and I was already a failure.
It was a wonder I saw the guy at all. I must have been just north of Stetsonville when I spotted somebody on the side of the road. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but this guy didn’t look like a hitchhiker. He wasn’t sticking his thumb out or walking slowly or looking sad at the cars. He really wasn’t doing much of anything at all. He was just sorta lying there face down on the ground. Maybe something was wrong, so I pulled over about fifty feet ahead of him and got out of the car. It felt good to stop driving, because I was still upset about the job thing and couldn’t exactly drive straight because my arms were still frustrated and rubbery. But then I looked over at him and didn’t want to deal with someone else’s problems.
“He’s just a bum asleep on the side of the road,” I said to myself. “Leave him alone. Or a thief waiting for you to get close. Then he’ll slit your throat and take your money.” The two dollars and the maxed-out credit card in my wallet. The twelve cents in my right front pocket. The expired coupon for cereal that must’ve been washed in the laundry with these jeans about seven or eight times. I wasn’t about to take it out now. It was part of the jeans. And the twenty dollar bill I kept in my glove compartment in case of emergency. “Leave him alone.”
So I walked closer. His clothes didn’t look all that ratty: dark blue, fairly new jeans and a brown leather jacket, something like a pilot’s jacket. I imagined that under the jacket he wore a black T-shirt. “Hey man, you okay?” I got so close that I bent over and shook him by the shoulders. “Wake up! Somebody’s gonna run you over if you stay here like this.” I thought I saw him twitch, but he didn’t wake up. Then I stared at him for a long while and decided that he wasn’t breathing. Then I felt around as best I could for a pulse. After about fifteen seconds of feeling vaguely around his neck and wrist, my body leaped back in horror before I could even convince myself he was dead.
From my new position about a foot away from the corpse, I bent over so I could look at his torso from a side angle, in case he actually was breathing or would suddenly take a giant gulp of air and let me leave. I froze up, the same way I froze up when I was eight and my fish died. I knew that it was dead and it couldn’t move or anything, but that made it worse. If it was dead it was dangerous and could hurt me more than if it were alive. I was terrified and didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to touch him. But now he was my responsibility. I found him first.
I wished I had a phone so I could call it in, and I wanted to drive to the police station to report it, but I didn’t want to just leave him. His right arm was stretched along the ground, while his left was curled up underneath his chest. “Heart attack. And he’s a lefty.” With his last dying motion, he must’ve clutched his chest in agony with his left hand while his right hand reached out for something he thought he saw in the sky.
I trembled all over. My balls shrunk. It was hard to breathe, so I opened my mouth and stared ahead slack-jawed. Without thinking, I shuffled over and kicked at his shoulders, trying to flip the dead guy over with one foot. It’s harder than you think, and he had a bit of a gut on him. All I managed to do was push him a few inches closer to the ditch on the side of the road. As I thought about pushing him all the way over and letting someone else deal with him, I heard a car speeding by behind me. I immediately spun around and began inventing reasons why I wouldn’t have killed him. “I didn’t kill him, I don’t know him! Why would I kill someone I wouldn’t know! I mean, other than for the fun of it, but I’m not that kind of guy. Just look at my car. Does that look like the car of a serial murderer? Of course not. I know what a serial murderer’s car would look like, and it would have to be much neater than that piece of shit.” I would’ve been in jail before I knew it, but the car didn’t bother to slow down. By the time I spotted it on the road it was already a football field away and I could barely make out what kind of car it was.
His hair was brown and wavy. He seemed about middle-aged, or a young man who had run himself ragged. The stubble on his face suggested he could grow a full beard, and if it grew out all the way, he would look like Jeremiah Johnson or Charles Manson. Reluctantly, I bent down and lifted him onto his back with my hands. I’d been wrong about him. His shirt was green. I averted my eyes from his face, imagining spiders or something crawling out of his nose, so all I saw was that he didn’t seem that dead. I noticed when I’d lifted him that he was still a little flexible, so he must’ve just died and rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet. A piece of paper, with some sort of logo on it, hung loosely from his partially closed left hand. It had been pinned underneath the man’s body, but now that I’d flipped him over, the first gust of wind blew the paper away. It skittered down the road. Feeling it was an important clue, I chased after it. The pesky little thing gave me a hard time, spinning out of my way twice before I put all my effort into it and finally snagged the thing. I lifted it up in triumph and realized that I had chased it right into the highway. If there’d been a car coming my way I’d have been deader than the dead man, but there are never many cars out here. It’s not a busy road.
The paper was thick and a little greasy. On one side a note was written in terrible handwriting, and on the other was a Popeye’s Chicken logo. It looked like one side of a Popeye’s bag had been ripped out to make a single, wrinkly page, and the rest of the bag was nowhere to be found. It was probably the only stationary the guy could find, which was especially odd because I never remembered seeing a Popeye’s in this area, or even in the county and possibly the state. I didn’t venture to guess why he’d been carrying the pen. He must’ve written it in the early morning, sitting up or lying on the road, trying to find a good way to write but really just failing as the occasional car blew right by him without a care in the world. The further the letter went, the harder it was to make out the handwriting.
I don’t know if it was the booze or the food but I can’t go on and I’m scared. That some sonofabitch is going to find me dead on the side of the road.
Dear sonofabitch:
My name is Pete Williams. I live in Gilman on 2nd Avenue in a big house that used to be bright yellow. Show my bloated body to that cunt of a wife of mine and give her all my love. Tell my boy I know where he gets his dope and he should knock it off before he turns into me. Kick my dog for me. You’re such a stupid sonofabitch you just
After that the handwriting trailed off. Either he was trying to write and couldn’t anymore, or he got bored or desperate and scribbled meaninglessly on the torn-up bag. I don’t think he was taking himself seriously, and I’m pretty sure he never really thought he was going to die. His stomach was just kicking the shit out of him, and the morning sun was coming up. He had a pen, who knows where he got it, and he had an empty bag, and he tore it up and sat down on the side of the road and wrote. I wish I could have more nights like that, but once I hit about one or two o’clock, it doesn’t matter what I’m on, my body wants to sleep. He thought it would all pass in a couple of hours, and if he was the kind of asshole who would write a letter like that as a joke, he probably became furious when he finally realized what was coming, and his wife was a bigger cunt and his son was a shithead and the last thing he thought of before dying was strangling that cocksucking dog. He died in a rage.
Now he was mine. I crumpled up the note and put it in my pocket. I thought that maybe he had a phone, but I still didn’t want to search a dead man. And it would look bad once the police found out I’d called him in using his own cell phone. He probably didn’t have one anyways. If he did he would’ve called someone to pick him up, and if he was too out of it to dial the numbers, I would’ve found him lying on the side of the road clutching his phone, angling his mouth to the receiver like he believed in God, begging for help from the stranger on the other end of some random number. I thought about him praying into his phone and felt bad for him. I didn’t want to leave him there, and it would look bad if I left him there. Someone else would find him, and they’d see my tire tracks on the road. It would only be a matter of time before they found me. They’d ask if anyone had seen anything suspicious on that stretch of 13 just north of Stetsonville, and even though the car that had passed me by didn’t seem to give a shit, I’m sure that once it came to the police, they’d remember everything: my weight, my license plate number, the names of the girls I’d kissed or tried to kiss in high school, everything. I couldn’t leave him there.
I opened the door to my backseat and dragged Pete Williams into my car. It took such a long time. I couldn’t just fling him in there. I had to drag him the fifty feet to my car, then open the passenger side back door, then pull him onto the seat, which meant that I had to get in the car to pull him in, then I had to crawl over the corpse to get back outside and push his legs in. The more I worried about details, the more I forgot about the terror, but not the dread. My plan, which I was still coming up with from moment to moment, was to drive the body back to Medford and drop it off somewhere. Maybe I could dump it in front of the police station and take off, or better yet, the fire station, because they wouldn’t be expecting it at the fire station. He was a little too tall for my back seat, and I thought a little while about putting him in the trunk, but it seemed that if I were pulled over, it would look too suspicious to have a dead body in the trunk. Pete was still fresh enough to be limber, so I folded him up into something of a fetal position, then I grabbed an old, plaid blanket I would lay down on the seats if I was moving around something dirty or wet. I covered him up with it as best I could. Nothing stuck out from underneath the blanket, but he made for an awfully suspicious looking lump in my backseat. It wouldn’t take much for the blanket to fall to the side and show off a finger or a lock of his growing hair. I rolled up the windows.
When I started up the car, I turned on the A/C. It hadn’t been used in years, so it made funny noises at me. I turned it as cold as it would go. It felt more appropriate that way, but I realized that I’d been sweating a lot, and now my sweat ran cold. The rubbery feeling came back to my arms. I used up a lot of effort pushing on the gas and turning the steering wheel all the way to the left so I could make a u-turn and head back to Medford. It’s no fun driving with a dead body in your car. It’s like driving with a woman who won’t talk to you. You know she’s there, but all you can hear are the things she’s not saying to you. Accusations and nasty remarks. All I could do was drive straight. When the road turned slightly to the left, I remembered old nightmares I thought I’d forgotten.
It dawned on me then that I was only making things worse for myself. It always dawns on you too late. I had been so worried about looking suspicious that I stopped thinking. If there was something wrong with leaving the body there to report it, then moving the body was probably criminal. I was acting like a guilty man, and I couldn’t just explain to the cops that I always acted like a guilty man. “I’m not saying I never do anything wrong,” I tell the cops, “but I’d cover up a stranger’s horrible crimes to make up for some small embarrassing thing I’d done the night before. I get in a fight with my mother, and the next day, I stick up for an elderly lady at work. Even though she doesn’t want my help. And I defend her too much and curse out my boss. And I get fired. And to make up for the fact I get fired, I try to grow a garden. But I plant at the wrong time and everything dies after a frost. And to make up for it I apply for every job I can find.” And when I can’t figure out how to read a classified ad, I pick up dead men on the side of the road. I make up for trouble with more trouble.
It doesn’t help that the country roads out here aren’t really empty. There’s always some building or something just within sight no matter where you go. If something’s gone wrong, and people have a mind to watch out for it, there’s no hope for you. Once your stretch of highway hits a village, and there was at least one in-between Stetsonville and Medford, everyone will know what to look for. People are like that. They make a point of noticing things. I couldn’t imagine how the guy in my backseat he got so far into the middle of nowhere without anybody taking an interest, at least enough of an interest to call the police. He might’ve gone to a bar outside of the towns and crawled his way up through the fields, but he didn’t really look like he had trekked his way through the middle of a forest. But it all happened at night. Maybe he was the kind of guy who slipped in and out of the shadows. It might’ve been a lonely night.
My panic ebbed and flowed the closer I got to Medford. I never noticed the scenery before, the trees behind the little shit town I passed through and the houses in front of the forest on the stretches of open highway. The closer I came to people, the more I knew I was doing something wrong. At this point I owed the something to the dead man. I’d taken on the responsibility of the dead, of moving them where they needed to go, and I wasn’t doing that at all. It wasn’t right to dump him in front of the fire station or the police station or a hospital. At any point I’d be spotted, and when I was, I’d have utterly failed, again. I needed some answers. I needed a way out.
I needed a drink. I thought about taking a sharp left or right at one of the smaller intersections before Medford and trying to find a bar somewhere in the outskirts, but if I went that far out of my way, I’d probably never come back. I knew that Medford had a bunch of bars on Main Street, which wasn’t really a main street but a road alongside the railways and the river. It wouldn’t hurt anybody to stop in for a drink or two. I could barely drive with my nerves the way that they were, so as I came into the town, instead of veering towards the fire station, I went to Main Street and parked my car right on the side of the road. I thought that maybe it would’ve been better if I’d found an alley a few blocks down and parked there, but I looked back and saw that the body was still covered up. If I was caught, I was caught no matter what I did. I parked on the side of the road where everybody could see and played it cool. Or as cool as I could while I dropped my keys twice getting out of the car, and one more time walking down the sidewalk. The best place within sight was called Lounge Around. The outside was made of aluminum siding, a door, and two windows large enough to hold neon signs. There was a second floor, but it didn’t seem to be of any consequence to me.
I didn’t know if it would be open this early, but times were tough, so now it opened early. When I stepped inside, it had the atmosphere I was looking for, the kind that made you forget what time it was or even that there was such a thing as time. Like a casino or a church. I was in there for five seconds and I thought I had been there for millions of years. I sat at the bar and thought, and realized that I only had two dollars in my pocket. When the bartender asked what I wanted, I said, “Wait,” and ran out to my car to get the emergency twenty in my glove compartment, then I ran back in and suddenly felt like ordering something special. Beer wouldn’t leave the right taste in my mouth. Not with a dead man in my car. “I’ll have a whiskey and coke,” I said, after I’d sat down at the bar and stared the man in the face. “No, wait, a rum and coke.”
“What kind of rum?” He was in his thirties or maybe forties. His hair was cut so short he may as well have shaved it all off.
“. . . Whatever.” I put the twenty on the bar and the man looked at it knowingly, figuring that I was here to spend as much of that twenty as I could. Which wasn’t what I’d planned but it was a damn good idea now that I’d started thinking about it.
“What are you here for?”
I looked around and realized no one had come in yet, not even the barflies. It looked like they opened up early to get ready for a lunch crowd. Just by the front door, a few sparse meals were advertised on a chalkboard. A meal sounded good right now, but I didn’t have the time, or the money.
“Job hunting,” I said.
“Probably shouldn’t have come here, then.” He gave me my drink and laid the change on the table. It was a stiff drink and made me happy. I don’t drink rum very often.
“Oh . . . I’m done for the day.”
“Pretty quick, then.”
“Yeah. Not what I was hoping for.”
He let me have my first drink in silence. I want to say that it took away the unsteady feeling and made me stronger, but all it really did was help me forget that my muscles were twitching in constant anticipation of dead men walking through the door, followed by police and then a lynch mob. There were these surges in my chest, trying to pull me up off my stool and into the street, where I’d beg for help from strangers. I’d beg for someone to take me away from here, to somewhere where I didn’t know where I was. I finished my drink and felt better about it. I started laughing at nothing and myself.
“Could I get another drink?” At first I shouted it like the place was crowded, but at about the middle of the sentence I remembered I was alone. By the time I got to drink I was mumbling.
“Sure.” The change was still on the bar, a ten and some singles. He took the ten and came back with more singles. Altogether it looked like enough for one more. Then he brought the drink.
“Where were you applying?” the man asked. “I haven’t heard of anything opening up in the area.”
“Up by that window place.”
“We got a couple of those.”
“It could’ve been . . . Hurd or Weather Shield or Ameriframe. I can’t even remember now. Sounded like a warehouse job. Moving boxes around. But the interview was in a little office place so I guess the warehouse was somewhere else. I thought it would’ve been about moving stuff around, but I had to know how to use these machines, and for some reason I just didn’t want to lie. So they asked me to leave . . . They don’t appreciate honesty, is what.”
“What was the ad for?”
“Forklift operator.”
The bartender laughed. “Yknow, if the job title has forklift in it, don’t you think they’d expect you to know how to use a forklift?”
“Yeah . . . I guess.” The bartender laughed some more, which made me feel bad about myself, but I deserved it and didn’t hold it against him. “I really don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking job, that’s what you were thinking. I’ve seen people come in here so desperate for a job they’d run for President.”
“Yeah . . .” I said. Now I laughed. I still felt like a stupid shit, but now I didn’t feel so bad about it.
“I don’t blame you. I mean, you look like a forklift operator. I can see you behind a forklift. It’s a wonder they didn’t hire you right off the bat.”
“You should’ve seen how many people were there.”
“Those sonofabitches. Showing up to get your job. I bet some of them even knew how to work a forklift.”
“They had credentials.”
“Ah, fuck credentials. You looked the part. That should’ve been the only thing that mattered.”
At least I was entertaining the guy. He walked back and forth behind the bar, getting the place ready for the rest of the day. He was on the other side of the room when he asked, “Where did you work before?”
“Over at this Greek take-out place in Merrill. Working the counter. Mopping the floors. Shit like that.”
“Merrill?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where you live, then?”
“In the area.”
“It’s a hell of a ride from Merrill.”
“There ain’t no jobs. I’ve tried. It’s getting to the point where I’d drive to Denver if it meant I’d get a job.”
“How did you lose your old one?”
“Fired.”
“Well, no shit. Were you laid off?”
“No, the place is still doing pretty good.”
“What is it, then?”
“I called my boss a cocksucker.”
The bartender laughed again. I was making his day. I was almost proud of myself.
“Why did you call him a cocksucker?”
“ . . . Cuz he’s a cocksucker.”
“That’s good . . . I wish I could afford to call my boss a cocksucker.”
“Yeah, well, so do I.” I raised my glass as if I were making a toast, but he was on the job and couldn’t drink. He nodded, though, and that was good enough. “You mean you don’t own the place?”
“Oh, no . . . I just work here.”
“Can I gave you some advice?”
“What?”
“Don’t call the owner a cocksucker.”
“Really?” he said, smiling wider. “Why not?”
“I don’t think he’ll like it.”
“It’s good advice.” We’d run out of things to say. “I learn something new every day.”
In the silence I finished my second drink. Now I was at the point where I felt reflective. If I were alone I’d look at the mirror and talk to myself. Instead, I took the note out of my pocket and looked at it again.
I don’t know if it was the booze or the food but I can’t go on and I’m scared. That some sonofabitch is going to find me dead on the side of the road.
Dear sonofabitch:
My name is Pete Williams. I live in Gilman on 2nd Avenue in a big house that used to be bright yellow. Show my bloated body to that cunt of a wife of mine and give her all my love. Tell my boy I know where he gets his dope and he should knock it off before he turns into me. Kick my dog for me. You’re such a stupid sonofabitch you just
The bartender came over and saw the logo on the back of the paper. “Popeye’s? Where did you get that?”
“Side of the road. Somebody had written a note on it. Weird.”
“What does it say?”
“Oh . . .” I folded the paper back up. “Nothing. It was just weird. The whole thing.”
“I guess. You want another?”
“Yeah, one more. If you wouldn’t mind.” He picked up the singles, counted out what he needed, and left the rest. Good enough for a tip or the cheapest beer they had. As he brought the last drink, a guy walked in wearing khakis and a tucked-in polo shirt. The first of the lunch crowd. He asked if he could get a BLT.
“Sorry, the cook’s not in yet. It shouldn’t be too long now. Did you want a drink?”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh, I’m on my break . . . so yes, yes I do.” He ordered a beer I’d never heard of. I didn’t like him.
When the bartender came back with the beer, he slapped the guy on the shoulder and said, “Hey, do you see that sorry sonofabitch on the other side of the bar? That man right there is the best goddamned forklift operator in the county. And you know what? He can’t get a job. No one will take him. I’m just saying, I know times are tough, but if you know anybody who needs someone to operate their forklift, that’s your man.” He laughed and shouted, “Hey, what’s your name, then?”
I looked over slowly and said, “My name’s Pete. Peter Williams.”
The bartender turned back to the asshole in the polo shirt. “Tell everybody you know. Pete Williams is your man.” As he walked to my side of the bar, he mumbled in my direction, “Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“Oh, of course. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I downed the rest of my drink. This was about all I could take. I left the change on the bar and started to walk away, but before I did, I turned around and yelled at the bartender, “Hey!”
“Yeah?”
“How do I get to Gilman from here?”
“They got jobs in Gilman?”
“. . . It couldn’t hurt to check.”
“There are a lot of towns closer than Gilman.”
“It couldn’t hurt to check.”
“All right, then . . . just take 64 west. It’ll turn on you every now and then, but just stick to 64. It’ll take you about an hour, if you’re driving the speed limit.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck to you.”
I would’ve wished him good luck back, but I was already out the door. And the light that burst in on me once I stepped out of the door gave me hope. I was ready to go.
It took me a couple of seconds to remember where I’d parked my car. Turned out it was fifteen feet to the right of me, and a twelve-year-old kid was looking into my back window. I panicked a little, but I was in the kind of mood where nothing could touch me. I strolled up behind him, stumbling once, and looked over his shoulder. One leg stuck out from under the blanket. Either his body was stiffening up and changing position, or something had pushed the blanket to the side. The kid just stared. No one else was around, and he didn’t seem to know I was there.
So I punched him in the shoulder from behind. He jumped about a foot in the air and spun around. He thought he was a dead man. “Hey,” I said to him, and I pointed straight between his eyes, then I started laughing and I had to start again. “Hey,” I said, then I laughed and clammed myself up. “SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I put my index finger on my lips. “SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I put it on his lips. “SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I moved my index finger back and forth between us. “If you tell anybody, I’m gonna do to you what I did to him.” I laughed again and started walking past him. I slapped him on the shoulder. “Now get out of here, you little cunt.” He ran off, the good little kid that he was, leaving me alone with my car. It took me too long to put the key in the driver’s side door, but it didn’t bother me much. Once you got out to the highway, it was easy to drive drunk. And I wasn’t really that drunk, it was just that I wasn’t used to rum. By the time I got to Gilman I’d probably have a nasty headache, but that would keep me in place while I was talking to the wife.
Because that’s what I was going to do. I was taking the body back to the family, where it belonged. Not a firehouse or police station or hospital. The man was mine. His dignity was mine. I felt like I had just found a cowboy scalped in the middle of the prairie. It was my job to take the body back to his wife and break the bad news. And to comfort her and tell her how to get on with the rest of her life. This makes so much sense on rum.
It was a little dicey getting out into the country, because at first I couldn’t find 64, but I was able to get to 13, and then when I realized I was taking 13 outside of Medford, I pulled over to the side of the road and thought. I didn’t know if which way I was pointing, but I knew that 13 went north and south and 64 went east and west, and that the two met somewhere towards the middle of Medford. So if I was at the outskirts of town, all I had to do was turn around and watch the signs carefully. When I got to 64, some arrow or another would tell me how to go east or west. And I was going west. Easy. It worked like a charm, without a cop car in sight. The only problem was that I knew I was driving further west than I think I ever had in a single day. I’d gone further when I’d been on vacation, but now I didn’t know when I’d get back home. Which meant that I’d hit one of those little points of no return, where I couldn’t turn back because turning back would be a bigger pain in the ass than going on. So I went on, past the town and out into the middle of nowhere again, with my cowboy in the back seat and vindication waiting for me in a house that used to be yellow.
All that time out on the road gave me time to think about how I was driving. I was disappointed that I drove just as drunk as everything said I would. Whenever I had to stop, I stopped too late and floated into the intersection. If a deer or a child had leaped into the road, I would’ve hit it, and because I was drunk, I would’ve just driven away, with all the dents and blood still on my car. Who would care? Not the people around me. Anytime I came across another car on the road, they knew everything about me. The cars behind me slowed down to make sure they stayed behind me. The cars ahead of me turned at the next intersection to get out of my way. It was a little embarrassing, but it also felt like a red carpet had been laid out for me. So long as nobody I passed called the cops, I was riding the golden road to Gilman.
The highway made a sharp right turn to the north which almost confused me, but I managed it alright and pretty soon I saw a big grey water tower announcing my arrival. GILMAN, it said. The paint-chipped GILMAN clung to its rusty tower over my shitty little car. The strangest part was that I never really got close to it. The tower hung over me, but it was somewhere in the middle of the town. So I never actually got close to it, but as I was driving through, looking for 2nd Avenue, it was always there, and I was always passing it up. But I never saw exactly where it was placed. It was over the entire town, like it could collapse and take everyone with it. I started feeling a general throbbing just behind my forehead, which meant I was dehydrated and well on the way to a hangover. There must’ve been a bar somewhere in town, but all I had was the two bucks in my wallet. Maybe I could sell the car to some local, body and all, and run off to live off with the wife. I was Pete Williams. The dope-smoking son was mine. I wanted the cunt of a wife. For a few minutes I would’ve done anything for her. I saw her as something that used to be voluptuous, but now there was a bit of fat hanging from her thighs and the sides of her ass and the front of her stomach. And her tits sagged, but all of it meant that she still had a figure and still swayed when she walked. Swayed like a woman does when she carries an infant from her hips, holding it tired, low and out of sight, an appendage of her body. Life giving.
The streets were numbered, but there weren’t that many of them. Coming from the east like I was, they started at 9th and worked their way down. It didn’t take long to get to 2nd Avenue, but I made a left turn and it must’ve been wrong. There weren’t any houses in that direction, just broken down buildings and a dead end. The dead end was a fancy bridge over a small creek. I think it led to a park, but it wasn’t where I wanted to go, so I turned back and went the other way up 2nd Avenue, passing the intersection where I’d made the wrong turn. Now I had a chance to look around. The grocery store looked like it was about to go out of business. The gas station looked like it had already been closed, but maybe it wasn’t. It was a beautiful town and beautiful because it was dying or already dead, carried along by the people who refused to leave. I knew all this because by then I knew everything. I was far enough away from home so that I couldn’t let the details hold me back.
It was only about a block past the intersection when I saw what had to be a house that used to be yellow. Nobody was outside, but there was a red dirt driveway leading to a garage that used to be yellow. I parked in the driveway and got out of the car. I looked my car up and down and remembered the body in the back seat. Not that I hadn’t known that it was there but it wasn’t as important as getting to the house. Things were missing. The corpse should’ve smelled by now, but I didn’t smell it. And where was the woman tending vegetables in the garden that wasn’t there? Why wasn’t she hanging everyone’s clothes on a clothesline stretched from the garage to the house? Why wasn’t she hanging my clothes on the line? Where were the children running in circles around an oak tree and playing in the street because cars never came down that street? Where were the people to greet me with a cautious smile?
It was so empty. I walked up the porch and rang the bell and knocked on the door and rang and knocked some more. A small woman opened the door, skinny and petite, smoking a cigarette. She wasn’t what I wanted, but the cigarette gave her character and it seemed to match her frame. Spare, but efficient. There wasn’t an ounce on her that was wasted. When a man made love to her, he made love to her whole body, the tear ducts and the tips of her ears. Pete was a lucky man.
“Mrs. Williams? . . . Um, Miss . . . Are you the husband of Peter Williams?”
“. . . Yeah . . . He’s not in right now. Are you looking for him?”
“Um, miss . . . Mrs. Will . . . I, I don’t know how . . . it’s not about him . . . it is about him . . . I have to show you something . . . just . . . just come with me.”
I knew right then I had to back up. I was too close to her.
“I’m sorry, it’s just, I don’t mean any harm, it’s just, it’s about your husband, you have to come with me, no, I have to show you, no, just . . . I’m sorry. Give me a minute here.”
She was worried now, and one of her children walked up behind her. Or maybe it was her only child, there was no way for me to be sure. He was tall, taller than her, but he looked lanky and young, unsure of how to move his body. The shit could still probably take me in a fight, so I started to tell myself I needed to be careful. Which I knew wouldn’t help, so I told myself to be careful about being careful.
“I’m sorry if I startled you . . . or confused you or whatever . . . but something’s happened. I wouldn’t feel right just telling you. Could I show you? It would be right if I showed you. The car’s in the driveway, I hope you don’t mind I parked in your driveway, I don’t like parking in the street and getting in people’s way, it’s not my thing. Would you mind coming? I can’t just . . .” I gestured towards my car, then I saw the look on her face and stepped back. I moved backwards off the porch, almost falling down the two or three stairs leading from the porch to the lawn, but I was standing once I got down there. “I mean, I know, you don’t know me, this doesn’t sound right, come to my car and all that, but this is important to you. I know it. You’re Pete William’s wife, right?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You’re Pete Williams wife, right?”
“Yes, I’m Pete’s wife.”
“You’re not just saying that, right? Because if you’re not this isn’t for you. If you’re not his wife, this would, this would just hurt you.”
“What is it?”
“You have to come with me, it’s just, it’s just my car. You just have to come to my car. I know that this, this is, just . . . trust me. I mean, no, just . . . there’s something you need to see.”
She had a vague idea of what was going on, that something bad had happened to her husband. She leaned back to her big son and did a bad job of keeping her voice down. “Tom? Come on out to the porch. Keep an eye out.”
“Something’s happened,” I said.
“I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.” Tom came out first and stood on the porch and looked at me. The wife walked off the porch and waited for me to do something. I trotted to her driveway, to the rear window of my car, and I gestured at her to come over. She did, slowly. When she got by my car, all she could see in the back seat was a blanket covering a lump. And part of a leg sticking out from underneath.
“It’s . . .” I said. “It’s just . . .”
“What is this?” She said it with urgency, a kind of urgency that had nothing to do with me. “What . . . I don’t . . .”
I opened the door and took the blanket off the dead man’s head. His face had slumped down on my cushion. It looked like it would be that way forever, his lips and cheeks permanently skewed to the left because of the way I’d laid him on the seat. I knew for certain I’d come to the right house, because she’d raised her hand to her mouth and didn’t know what to do. “Tom?” she yelled. “Tom?”
Her son got off the porch and started walking towards us.
“Stay where you are, Tom!” she yelled. “Tom don’t come here!” She looked at me with her hand over her mouth. “What the fuck is the matter with you!”
“I didn’t, I just . . .”
“What the fuck is the matter with you!”
“I didn’t kill him! I didn’t kill him . . . I just found him.”
“Why did you --”
“He was on the side of the --”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“He was on the side of the road!”
She walked away and walked back and walked away and walked back. “Out! Fucking! Out!” She burst past me to the open door and looked in close at her dead husband but she didn’t want to touch it. She ran off again. Tom walked in closer. “Tom stay there! Stay there Tom! Tom!”
I wanted to hold her, because she was a wreck and I wanted to comfort her. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know. I found him.”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“He told me to.”
“He . . .”
“He had a note. I saw him on the side of the road. He had a note. He told me where he lived.” I dug around in my pocket and pulled out the note. “I mean, I saw him and I saw the note, and I couldn’t just get the cops after I saw the note. These were last wishes.”
“How did he die?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It was in the morning. It must’ve been a long night.”
She didn’t say anything. It meant that my story made sense. “What does the note say?” She reached for it.
“No,” I said, and I pulled away.
“Can I see it?”
“Can I read it? I mean, I know that you want . . . but can I tell you what it says? If I read it, you’ll know why I came here. Better than if you read it yourself. It was . . . you don’t go to a hospital after you’ve read it.”
“ . . . Popeye’s?”
“I . . . I don’t know. But everything was right up here. Just let me read it.”
She quieted down and was fidgeting. What I was about to say was probably the furthest thing from her mind. But I still had to deliver.
“He . . . I was driving down from Medford when I see him, I see somebody on the side of the road, lying on the side of the road. I stopped. And it turns out he was . . . yknow. And there’s this letter pinned underneath him. I don’t know where he got the paper or the pen, I didn’t search him, I wouldn’t do that, but it says, yknow:
My name is Pete Williams. I come from Gilman. I live on 2nd Avenue in a big, yellow house. I have a beautiful wife and a strong, healthy son. Tell my son that I’m proud of him. I know he’ll do good no matter what he does. Tell him to take care of his mother.
“It goes on, do you want me to keep on reading? This was important. I mean, I couldn’t read this note and not bring him here. I couldn’t spend half the day in a fucking hospital when he had this message on him. I don’t know how he died, but he must’ve seen it coming and he wrote this letter and when I read it I had to . . . I had to bring him here. Do you understand?” She looked at me and didn’t know what to say. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Tell them that I’m sorry. I wanted to be with them. Give my love to my beautiful wife. Tell her that she’s always been there for me. Tell her that I wish I could be with her. Tell her
I ran out of things to say. “I’m sorry,” he said. “His handwriting got kind of bad. Tell her . . . um . . .”
“Let me see it.”
“No, it’s just not readable. It gets kinda . . .”
Tell my wife that she shouldn’t be afraid . . .
“Your husband wanted you to know that you shouldn’t be afraid . . . to love another man.” I gave up all pretense and put the note back in my pocket. “He knows, it’s not right to live alone. Your boy there, he’ll need a father. That’s what he was trying to say . . . in the handwriting . . . I don’t know, do you need any money or something?”
“I don’t know . . .” She’d gone numb. “I’m just going to go inside now. I just, um, can you wait out here?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I sat by my car and Pete Williams while the wife went inside the house. As she opened the door, the dog came out. Tom stayed on the porch and stared at me. But the dog took off down the stairs and ran around the lawn like an idiot. It was a little Shih Tzu, the kind of dog you really couldn’t kick without feeling like an asshole afterwards. It ran up to me and sniffed my foot, then it ran around and pissed on my car. Then it ran back by Tom. It couldn’t stop running until it decided to rest in the shade of a tree. I really didn’t know what to do. I thought about walking up to Tom and striking up a conversation, but the way he was looking at me, I think he wanted to kick my ass. He measured me up and was pretty sure that he could. All he needed was a signal from his mother and I was a dead man.
He seemed a little disappointed when the police SUV pulled up. The local cops. I wasn’t really surprised, but somehow I was sad about it. God only knows what she’d told them. She didn’t come out of the house, but she must’ve been behind the front door, because Tom would look at the door as he stood on the porch and sometimes he would say something at the door. The cop played it cool, but he didn’t know what to do. He’d probably never dealt with something like this. Instinctively I backed away from my car, to give the cop room to walk around and survey the scene. He saw the open door and looked in. He stopped and looked, without a change of expression, just confirming what he’d heard on the phone. Then he straightened up and looked at me. Seemed like a nice guy.
“So you’re the . . .”
“I didn’t call.”
“You’re the . . .”
“I’m the one who --”
“Right.”
“And that’s the . . .”
“The husband. Yes.” He didn’t want to move. Neither did I.
“I’m going to have to get some more people here.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re gonna have to come with me.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want my keys?” I asked him.
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all.”
I dug through my pockets and handed him my keys. It was strange how natural I treated it. I was just glad that I didn’t have to talk to the wife anymore. It hadn’t been as moving an experience as I thought it would’ve been. Maybe I thought she would’ve been stoic about it like the cop had to be. She would’ve nodded her head and thanked me as I drove off into the sunset at one in the afternoon. As things were, she stood on the porch and gave me dirty looks from behind her son. Tom still looked clueless, but he seemed concerned. In a few minutes it would dawn on him, or his mother would tell him what had happened.
I asked the cop when he thought anybody would get here. He said it wouldn’t be for awhile, because the sheriff’s office was in Medford and that was quite a drive away. “I know that,” I said. I found him just north of Stetsonville. Just lying there, and --”
“We can talk about that later.”
“ . . . Would you mind if you got me out of here now? It would probably make the wife feel better.”
“I guess we could. I’d have to take you to the station, and it doesn’t have much of a holding cell.”
“That’s fine. Will you take care of my car for me?”
“Oh, yeah, usually in cases like these we tow the car to a lot, but . . . but I don’t know what’s going on here.”
“I’m a little lost myself.”
“Have you been drinking, sir?”
I didn’t say anything, then I asked again if he could get me out of here.
“Let’s just go,” he said.
“Could you make it look like you’re arresting me?”
“Why?”
“I think it would make her feel better.”
“ . . . Sure.” He didn’t have any real handcuffs on him, so instead he put those plastic handcuffs on me that they used on drunks and suspected terrorists at the airport. I’m not even sure he put them on right, because it felt like I could just slip them off, but he did a good job of holding my head as I got into the back seat of the squad car, even though the squad car was an SUV and I had to step up into it. By the time I was in, he had to get on his tiptoes to make sure that his hand was still on the top of my head.
The ride to the station took about a minute and a half. The building itself was a long, rectangular storage bin whose outer walls were made of pale green siding. The officer got my handcuffs off and escorted me into the building, which was little more than an office.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“I’ve got nowhere to go.”
“We don’t exactly have the facilities, but I’ll put you in our drunk tank.”
“Well I’m still kinda drunk right now so that’ll be all right.”
He laughed at me. “You shouldn’t have said that to me.”
“Right.”
“I’ll take you to the tank and I’ll head on back, then we’ll all come down to ask you some questions. My name’s Jim.”
“I understand. Jim.” I reached out to shake his hand, but he wouldn’t take it. We walked to the back, to their makeshift drunk tank. I was the only one there. It was still early. He guided me in and stood by the door.
“You sit tight now.”
“I’ll be waiting for you. You’re bringing me car here, right?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
He closed the door and left me to myself. It was a solid metal door, but every other wall in the room seemed to be made of a light plaster that a determined drunk could punch right through at a moment’s notice. But then he’d have to contend with the aluminum siding, or an officer wondering why a hand was sticking out of his wall. There were a few curious dents in the wall. They looked a little patched. I ran my hand along the dents and wondered about how calm I was. When the cop car had pulled up, I had suddenly drifted to a place where I couldn’t worry anymore, because I’d already lost control over the situation. I’d used up all control and worry hours ago. Besides, the walls were pink and soothing. The room had a toilet in one corner and a cot covered in mysterious stains. I would’ve preferred to stay away from both, so I sat down in the corner and nearly took a nap. My body had used itself up on the room.
When I was just about to nod off, somebody burst in the room who wasn’t Jim. He was about the same height as Jim but fatter. “Okay, what is this?”
A voice piped up from somewhere where I couldn’t see. “He found it.”
The man looked me in the eye. “Yeah.” There was a thin, gold name tag on the man’s uniform, high on his left breast. From what I could read of it, his last name was Leacook. Mr. Leacook strolled on up to my corner. “Can I ask you a few questions? Sir?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on out and I’ll ask you a few questions.”
They took me to the office area, where Mr. Leacook and two other officers stood around a desk. Mr. Leacook got a chair. So did I. Everyone else stood.
“So . . . you just found him?” he asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Tell us what happened.”
It should’ve dawned on me that the smallest wrong word could lead to murder charges, but I wasn’t thinking about it that way. I treated it like a job interview. Even if I failed it, they’d let me go away.
I told them what happened. About not being able to find a job and finding a dead body on the side of the road. I showed them the note and insisted they give it back. Then I told them that I dragged Pete into my car. Because it wasn’t right to leave him there, I said. And I couldn’t call it in because I didn’t have a cell phone. It all made perfect sense. When I got back to Medford, I was so out of sorts about the whole thing that I had a few drinks. There wasn’t any point to lying about it now. They already had me figured out now. I had a few drinks, and the note told me to take the guy to Gilman. I took the guy to Gilman and gave his wife my love. That was what I was supposed to do.
Mr. Leacook asked to see my ID. I gave it to him. He handed it back. “Merrill? What are you doing over here?”
“Job hunting.”
“There aren’t any jobs in Gilman.”
“Well, but I said Medford. I was in Medford at the time.”
“You said you were just north of Stetsonville.”
“That was after I fucked up the job interview.”
“Shouldn’t you have been heading back east, to Merrill?”
“I . . . fucked up the job interview. I was mad. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“What was the job?”
“ . . . Forklift operator.”
“Why didn’t you get it?”
“I didn’t know how to operate a forklift.”
“Yknow, there’s a kid in Medford who said he saw a body in the back seat of a car. Said that a guy came up behind him and said he’d killed him and said he’d do the same to him if he told anyone about it.”
The little cunt. “I had just come out of the bar . . . I was in a good mood. A funny mood.”
“Do you usually threaten children when you’re in a good mood?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Mr. Leacook stopped and stared. He looked right at me and saw nothing but fuckup. “See . . .We believe you. We saw the body and don’t know how you could’ve killed him. Unless you drank the fucker to death. You could’ve found him on the road, you could’ve been out bumming with him all night and didn’t know what to do when he dropped dead at sunrise.”
“I told you that I found him --”
“We believe you. What I’m saying is we don’t care. You didn’t murder the shithead, we’re pretty damn sure of it, and everything else, as far as I’m concerned, is just an embarrassment. It’s an embarrassment that you’re unemployed and found a dead man and dragged him halfway across the county drunk off your ass just because you thought that’s what he wanted. It was an embarrassment for his wife. An embarrassment that she had her dead husband carted out in front of her by an unlicensed stranger. An embarrassment for him, wherever he is now, the drunk fuck. This ain’t the first time we saw him. Thank God it’s the last. It had better be the last. An embarrassment for us. We don’t need this story getting out. The news loves that shit, and as far as I’m concerned, all of my people are good, law-abiding people, and the shit that Pete Williams just pulled and the shit that you just pulled does not happen in Taylor County.”
He stopped to catch his breath and look at me some more. “Times are tough,” I said.
“He died of a stroke,” Mr Leacook continued. “His car had broken down, his cell phone was dead, and he was walking to the next town when boom, God strikes him down. You, as you’re job hunting, come across the body on the highway, and you, being the Good Samaritan and fine, sensible human being that you are, you call 911 and an ambulance comes to take him away. His wife identifies the body in the morgue, like a loving wife should. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. You’re staying here for the night. We’ll let you go in the morning. Is there anyone who needs to know?”
“They won’t worry.”
“Good. Your job hunt didn’t go well. You were out drinking all night, enjoying yourself. As best you know how. You crashed at a friend’s place or spent the night in the tank. If you ever have to explain yourself, tell different versions to different people. It’ll mean it’s not important what you did. Go and get yourself a job and a girl. Buy some better looking clothes. Clean your car once in awhile, for fuck’s sake. And never pick up strangers on the side of the road, dead or alive or neither. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you.”
“Good. Someone will let you out in the morning. Jim?”
“Yes, sir.” Without having to receive an actual order, Jim escorted me back to the room and closed the door. Judging from the small cube glass window placed high on the wall furthest from the door, it was still light out. I had a long ways to go. I still wasn’t sleeping on that cot. I was starting to get hungry, no one was coming, and the pleasant drunkenness was wearing off. I was in it for the long haul.
Sitting back down in my corner, I nodded off again, sleeping and waking up again at odd intervals. When I dreamed, they were strange dreams, all about the girls I’d try to kiss in high school. They’d all gotten tremendously fat, tall, or magical. I only really woke up by the time it was dark. The door opened up and someone I didn’t see pushed in another drunk. He had a big, grey beard like he’d been mining gold for centuries. As he walked in, he muttered various obscenities about the police and his rights. A cop shouted from the outside, “Do you need another cot in there?”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure!”
“You’re all a bunch of cocksuckers!” the old man said. “What about my fucking America!” The door was already closed. “You cunt! You cunt! You black bastard!” Then he sat down on the cot and cried for a little while. Eventually he lay down, facing his back to me and looking at the wall. It was quiet again.
“Why did they have to keep me overnight?” I said to myself. The old man didn’t hear. They wanted to keep the story under control. They wanted to let me know who’s boss. They wanted to let me know what an embarrassment was. I was too sober for this. I needed a drink.
All at once -- but this could’ve been hours later, at any time of the night -- the man in the cot, still lying down, raised up his free arm and punched it clear through the wall. It snapped me out of whatever I thought I was thinking.
His arm hung in the hole he’d made for about twenty seconds, then he took his arm out and shifted around on the cot like he was about to wake up. I didn’t want to have to talk to him right now, so I dug around for the note in my pocket so I could make it look I was doing something important. I read it absentmindedly in silence.
I don’t know if it was the booze or the food but I can’t go on and I’m scared. That some sonofabitch is going to find me dead on the side of the road.
Dear sonofabitch:
My name is Pete Williams. I live in Gilman on 2nd Avenue in a big house that used to be bright yellow. Show my bloated body to that cunt of a wife of mine and give her all my love. Tell my boy I know where he gets his dope and he should knock it off before he turns into me. Kick my dog for me. You’re such a stupid sonofabitch you just
“God, I could go for some of that,” the old man said. He must’ve seen the logo on the back. “Is there one of those around here?”
“I don’t know. I found this on the ground.”
“Oh . . . too bad. It smells good.”
I lifted it to my nose and couldn’t smell a thing. “Yes it does,” I said.
“Wish I could be there instead of here. There are so many places I’d rather be than here.” I nodded at him. “Oh . . . better here than sleeping with my wife.” He watched something behind me and took on the look of a thoughtful alcoholic. “Cuz my wife is dead.” He almost laughed.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Ain’t your fault.”
“When did it happen?”
“Years ago . . .” We sat around and thought about the dead. And how good they are. Not the best way to spend an evening. Soon enough, he laid back down, turned his back to me, and slept. He was an old pro. I wasn’t nearly so lucky. I spent the rest of the night trying to fall asleep. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time I listened to the old man breathe. Sitting there and listening for the whole night. By the time the sun came up, he was still asleep and I couldn’t hear a thing without hearing the silence around it. I was starving. I snapped my fingers just to hear the sound. At some point the door opened and Jim looked in.
“You’re free to go,” he said.
“How long have you been here?”
“I just got in. I got off my shift right after your little meeting yesterday.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t like waking him up.”
I got out of my corner. My back and neck had cramped up. I couldn’t stand up straight. “Do you know any good restaurants in the area?”
“I guess you could buy something at the grocery store. If you’re hungry.”
He gave me my car keys. I thanked him and got out. My car was waiting outside. Jim was a good guy. I looked around to see if anything had changed. Maybe there would be a foreign hair on my back seat, but I couldn’t find anything. When they took Pete out of the car, he must have frozen up by then. And they must’ve had a hard time of it, because the passenger rear door had a few odd scratches, and I couldn’t roll the window down. I don’t know what they had to do to get the body out, but it must’ve stiffened up by then. The whole place smelled like death, and all I could think of was that I couldn’t afford a new car.
I get my keys out of my pocket. There’s not much gas left in my car, I don’t have a job, my car smells like death, and I make poor decisions. I have two dollars in my wallet.
Just for now, just so I can get home, I’m looking up. I’m rolling down all my windows, or at least the ones that work. My engine is going to get me home on fumes. Two dollars is all I am ever going to need. I’m getting a job and buying a dog I can kick. And knocking up a woman that I can call my wife. When I die, I’m giving her all my love.