By the time he gets to the house he’s hungry. The driveway’s empty. He begins making waffles, stacking them hot on a plate in the oven. After Dawnell drives in, she sits for a moment, making a call on her cell phone. Wyatt watches her study his truck and look toward the house. After a few moments she gets out. She’s wearing white gloves and a hat with a veil. Amy’s in a blue dress trimmed with lace. He smiles—he’ll go to church with them from now on. He begins thinking about all that he has to say. Minutes later, Coyd pulls into the driveway in his patrol car.
Wyatt steps outside. “Dawnell,” he says, “what’s going on?” Coyd steps between them.
“I want him out of here,” Dawnell says.
“Look, there’s no need,” Wyatt says. “I’m OK now. We just need to talk.”
Coyd holds up his hand. “Put the spatula down, Wyatt,” he says. “She’s got a protection order. Judge Davis signed it last night. You got to be out of here.”
Wyatt’s heart jumps. He feels his fists tighten. “What the hell, Coyd? You think I’m fixing to flip her to death?” he says. “This is my goddamn house. Dawnell? Honey? What’s this about?”
“Figure it out,” she says.
Coyd turns to Dawnell. “We talked about this, Dawnell. Now get in the car.”
Dawnell turns away, pushing Amy ahead of her, climbs inside and slams the door. Wyatt’s swollen eyeball throbs. A starling lands in the cedar, setting loose a drizzle of blackened needles.
Coyd puts a hand on Wyatt’s shoulder. “The whole damn volunteer fire department was out here taking care of that tree, Wyatt. You think you can just burn the whole place down? Look at you, man. You stink! You’re all busted up. You gotta get yourself squared away. Now let me get you out of here.”
Wyatt stiffens, tapping a cigarette pack against his knuckle. “What are you saying, Coyd? Am I under arrest?” He watches the car as Dawnell glares back through the windshield. Amy looks over the dash, fury burning in her eyes.
“Not as far as I’m concerned,” Coyd says. “But you’re not staying here. I can’t let you. Dawnell packed you some bags and set ’em out in the shed.”
Wyatt pulls a cigarette from the pack and reaches to his pocket for a light. He pauses, stares at the empty matchbook, and the fight in him drains away. He stands with the unlit cigarette in his lips, squeezes his eyes shut, lifts his face to the empty sky.
Coyd takes his arm. “I can cuff you right now, Wyatt,” he says, hardening his tone. “What happens next is up to you, buddy. Now what’s it going to be?”
On Castles
by Trevor J. Houser
from StoryQuarterly
Before Wesley Mantooth is lifted into the desert sky all he could think about was castles.
One day, before going to law school, he decided to go to Scotland to look at them.
“Come with me,” he said.
Wesley paid a local innkeeper to take us around to see if anything caught his eye.
“But I thought you wanted to build your own?” I asked, not yet comfortable with the idea of my best friend living in a castle all the way over in Islay.
Wesley snorted a bump off his fingernail, “I’ll need somewhere to stay while they’re building it, won’t I?”
We spent the morning looking at castles. They were mostly gargantuan and slathered with peat. I touched them just to make sure, but they were real. For lunch we stopped at a tavern in Port Ellen. We had scotches and roast hen. I could smell gull shit and stale beer.
“Which one was your favorite?” asked Wesley, gnawing on a thighbone.
“I liked the one with the moat.”
“Yes,” said Wesley, “but I didn’t much care for their turrets.”
“Islay is the fifth largest Scottish island and the sixth largest island surrounding Britain,” said the innkeeper.
After lunch, we went back to castle hunting. There was one very handsome model that was built in the sixteenth century. I went to the top of it alone and looked out on the countryside. There were cows and limestone churches warming themselves in the sun.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” said Wesley.
The three of us made our way from castle to castle until sunset. The sunset was a soft orange glow obscured by massive gray columns of storm clouds.
“God is behind there,” said the innkeeper.
* * * *
Wesley on my intercom, trying to coax me outside.
“What the hell?” Wesley says. “Enough of this Howard Hughes shit and come down here like a human being. Wait are you alone? What have they done to you? What have you done with my friend and colleague, you animals?”
“You’re coked to the brains,” I say. “Leave me alone.”
“If you don’t come down here in three minutes I’ll be forced to brutally rape the first person I see,” says Wesley.
“I’m staying.”
“That’s very un-American of you,” says Wesley. “I wanted to buy you nine or ten drinks of your preference. You leave me no choice but to call your mother and inform her I will be dropping by later for apple pie and senior citizen cunnilingus.”
I sigh into the intercom.
“Alright, I warned you,” says Wesley. I hear a sharp snort followed by Wesley’s deranged attempts at girlish screams.
* * * *
Once upon a time in the future when Wesley is already blown up in the desert, I will write the President of the United States.
“My best friend was recently blown up in Iraq,” I will write in the future to the future President. “Please explain.”
The President will not reply. On television I will see him playing golf with the British prime minister. They will seem refreshed, unworried. I will briefly consider going around the corner and buying a cleaver to assassinate said President, but then I will decide the President is too far away, so I watch television instead.
The death of my best friend will put me in a deep funk. For three weeks I will suckle at bottles of Alsatian Gewurztraminer. I will think of purchasing a Swiss cow online. I will write letters to each of the Cabinet members except for the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development because I figure they have enough on their plate. In between letters I will often consider lighting myself on fire, or releasing a live mako on the Capitol steps. In the afternoons, I will watch a program about wild horses in Montana. They are led by a big white one, possibly a Mecklenberger, or an Orlov Trotter. The horse’s name is Flower. It will be on every night at nine.
* * * *
One afternoon I write a drunken email to Wesley telling him to quit and move with me to Mexico so that we can marry Catholic girls and go on adventures together.
Wesley writes back:
What was I thinking? They tricked me with all that money and those goddamned club ties! You know how I feel about traditional neckwear. At least the medical profession has sense enough to kiss off an afternoon for golf, or defile a nurse in the records room. The only sane thing I can say about these people is that they actually condone heavy drug use.
Approximately,
Mantooth
* * * *
My phone rings at three o’clock in the morning. It’s Wesley.
“I’m dying,” he says.
“Dying how?”
“Iraq. They’re shipping me off tomorrow.”
“For work?”
“Yesss.”
“You sound strange.”
“Strange? Strange how?”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Oh. Valium.”
“Valium?”
“And double Greyhounds.”
“Did they say why they’re sending you?”
“Moderately complex matters.”
“Are you going?”
“My division at the firm is government and infrastructure. In a nutshell.”
“Quit.”
“My father.”
“What about your father?”
“He would cut me off.”
“That’s not more important than dying.”
“Your opinion.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“You could kidnap me.”
“From Iraq?”
“We could hide out at my father’s place in Zermatt. Go skiing until the war is over. They would think it was terrorists. Probably get a raise.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Six months.”
“Jesus.”
“Je-sus!”
“Well, what now?”
“Grey-hooouuunnnnd.”
“If you want I can take you to the airport.”
“They have a car. It is coming for me.”
“Wes?”
“Hm.”
“Be careful.”
“Mmm.”
“Make sure to wear one of those things.”
“Wear what exactly?”
“That Kevlar, or whatever they call it.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know, but I’d wear it if I were you.”
“You concerned for my safety, old buddy?”
“No, I’m concerned about the Middle Eastern coke supply.”
“Funny. I should sleep now. Fuzzy sheep. Look out beloowwwww.”
“Wes?”
“Yesss.”
“Take care of yourself.”
* * * *
Wesley and I once had simultaneous panic attacks. We were on an airport shuttle outside Vail, Colorado. The night before we’d had too much cocaine and Wild Turkey at a friend’s wedding. Everyone else on the shuttle looked normal. I remember Wes sweating and pleading with the normal looking passengers to let him out because he was having acute kidney failure.
“Don’t you know I am the duke of Archibald?” he screamed at the driver.
* * * *
I worry about Wesley. People blowing up every day. I watch terrorists on TV because it is the new national pastime. I am watching them now. They are mourning the loss of another terrorist. They are in some drab little neighborhood I will never see in my lifetime. How long would they mourn for, I wonder? I watch by myself on the couch. I have a Tom Collins. I know the President isn’t watching. He is golfing in Palm Springs, which has the least amount of terrorists per capita in the universe. I watch intently. One terrorist has on mirrored sunglasses. He is smoking a long-stemmed ivory pipe. He is in what looks like a circus tent surrounded by a buffet of dried fruits and various teas. I think he looks forlorn. Forlorn terrorists are the most dangerous, I think. The other terrorists smile sheepishly at the TV cameras and sometimes eat what look to be dates.
“These are terrorists of honor,” I say as I settle down with another Collins.
* * * *
I point out Iraq on my desk globe. I touch it. It is beige colored. Some day, I think, I will get married near a lagoon, or somewhere equally romantic, and Wesley and his wife will live nearby and all four of us will play cards and drink Vermentino. But not now. Now is not the time for Vermentino. Now is the time of terrorism, which is like the Stone Age, or something similar, but also different.
* * * *
I am thinking about castles.
I walk to the fake castle in Central Park near Eightieth where they sometimes hold summer concerts. I imagine living inside as a fake lord or duke. A castle is a place for hunkering down for a long winter of ham-hocks and hay shortages. It looks cozy for a castle. I like cozy places. When I was younger I wanted to live under a tree like Mole in The Wind in the Willows. A crackling fire and cured sausages hanging with dry sherry in little green bottles and roots curving out like rafters.
You can’t live under a tree nowadays.
People would vote against it, or stick flame-throwers down the chimney.
* * * *
I decide to go to Iraq and rescue Wesley.
Accomplishing such a feat will give me direction while simultaneously saving Wesley from all but certain dismemberment. I decide this is something I should have decided a long time ago. This decision makes me feel bold and unselfish for once in my life.
Why not, I think? Why don’t people just go over to a war unannounced and take away their loved ones en-masse? What is stopping them? I can see it now. Cameras following my every move through the war-torn countryside. The President wishing me luck from a verdant fairway in Palm Springs. I would find Wesley and we would steal away into the night. This would be followed by a week of hiking through the wilderness during which we would eat trout and drink chartreuse for sustenance. We would dream of Switzerland and talk about Cicero. Hot buttered rum and coked up countesses awaiting us on the winter slopes of Zermatt.
The other thing that could happen is that we could die.
* * * *
The first leg of my trip is to Morocco via Paris. I do not like Paris, but I admire the airport bar. I drink down three French ales while pretending to watch soccer. The game is confusing, but the beer is good. Once in Morocco I find a hotel thrown together with white mud and whopping teak ceiling fans that chop at the north African heat in vain. I spend three days smoking hash and dreaming up daring escape scenarios. One night at a nearby café, I meet two substitute schoolteachers from Florida. They are frightened of the locals and joke that they need an escort.
“We want to get drunk,” they tell me.
We go to slavery museums together and eat long spicy lunches in the old district. The old district is different from the new district in that it has fewer hotels and more murders per capita. One of the teachers is blond. The other is a redhead. The blonde is named Sally. I can’t remember the redhead’s name, but she is afraid of snakes. During one of the snake charmer shows I pinch the redhead hard on the back of her overly freckled neck as if she were being bitten. She screams and runs off crying. Sally laughingly consoles her as I watch another cobra rise from the wicker. I think, what if we dropped a million laser-guided cobra baskets on Baghdad? Would they survive the impact? What exactly is the going rate for cobra labor these days?
At night, we eat couscous and all manner of things that have been jerked, or steamed.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Sally asks.
“I’m breaking my friend out of the war,” I say.
“I don’t think they let you do that,” the redhead snaps, still a bit raw about the business with the snake.
“Why not?” I ask.
“It’s like taking your kids out of class before school’s out,” the redhead says. “It’s just not done.”
“Yeah,” Sally chimes. “You need a note from the principal to do that. So you would need a note from the President, I suppose, or at least some sort of general.”
“I’m going note-less,” I say.
“How are you going to do it?” Sally asks.
“I’m going to walk into Iraq and take him.”
“Take him where?” the redhead asks.
“Switzerland.”
“That doesn’t sound very smart does it Sally?”
“Sure doesn’t.”
We get drunk and smoke hash back in my room. I don’t have sex with either of them as both are afflicted with unfortunate semi-mullets and an over-reliance on blue mascara. Early the next morning I slip out of the hotel before they wake up.
I take a taxi to the desert.
I start walking.
“Now I am really rescuing my friend,” I say to the desert.
I walk for a long time through the desert before I realize I have made a mistake. I turn around. I take a bus back to Morocco and buy a map. According to the map, I am nearly a thousand miles from Baghdad. It is Wednesday. I ponder hopping a flight to Kuwait, or possibly Jordan. Then I get another hotel room in a different part of town. I call room service. I order a BLT and a French beer. All the beer here is French, or Belgian. I decide coming here was a stupid idea.
The telephone rings. It is Sally.
“Hey mister, we jus
t saw you tearing through the lobby. What do you know, we’re staying at the same hotel!”
I hang up. I call down to the front desk. I ask for another room under the name Algernon Swinburne. I take a bath. Don’t think of Wesley dodging explosions. I drink French and Belgian beer in bed until I fall asleep. The next morning I get a flight back to New York.
* * * *
A month later, I learn of his death by phone.
“They blew him up,” weeps his father. “Can you believe they blew my boy up?”
His father says a stray mortar found him one afternoon minding his own business inside the Green Zone. One minute he was having a harmless turkey sandwich the next minute his arm came off at the shoulder followed by irreversible blood loss.
I hang up.
I look out the window.
The world is changing, but how?
I stay home.
I polish off my wine rack until the funeral, which is later that week.
It’s a small church on the Upper East Side. Wesley’s closed casket is there. It smells like shoe polish and candle wax. I take a seat near the back by myself. I try to listen to the priest, but my mind wanders. I am in Islay. I am on the slopes of Zermatt contemplating late-night hot tubbing with coked up countesses. My friend is not in that box with only one arm, I reason. My friend had two arms and liked to do lines while watching the Yankees game.
“All I want is to be left alone,” I tell people.
The first thing I do is to purchase a can of lighter fluid.
For two days I regard the lighter fluid gravely from a safe distance. Once I pull out a box of matches from under the sink, but that’s as far as it goes.
I go back to regarding it gravely from a safe distance.
The following nine days I refuse to leave my couch, or watch TV, or eat excessively, or drink alcohol, or sleep, or deconstruct porno, or do anything Wesley is now unable to enjoy, being that he is no longer of this world.