Loser's Bracket

  “So what were you doing in a treatment program?”

  “Benefits,” he says. “Government was right there to thank you for your service when you’re hunkered down in war, but that was about all the thank you you’d get unless you had something wrong you could prove. You coulda been sprayed with chemicals that’d take the skin right off you, and cauterize your lungs in the process, but if you couldn’t prove your condition was a result of that damn war, the G-Men just put you on hold. They finally came across with some bennies for the guys they bathed in Agent Orange, but not before a whole lot of them died waiting. Drug addict was the easiest. All you had to do was get a doc to say the word, and if you knew what you were doing you could get in a program, get on housing, get a Pell Grant if your GI Bill was used up. If they didn’t have a viable VA program in your area, you could get into a local one. It’s better these days, I guess.”

  “So you went into drug treatment even though you weren’t an addict.”

  “Not too hard to get off drugs when you’re not on ’em. But what I couldn’t get off was that damn war.”

  “A lot of bad stuff happen to you?”

  “A lot of bad stuff happened to everyone,” he says. “That wasn’t what was killing me. It was what I’d done.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Let’s just say, things that are hard to forgive, things that sneak up on you later.”

  “PTSD?”

  “Call it what you want.”

  “So then . . .”

  “I’d tried everything. Went to church, did about every damn risky thing I could think of that might kill me, meditated; I just got more confused. Every church told me something different—didn’t know whether to let Jesus save me or save myself. Couldn’t figure good from bad, love from hate. Went decades like that. One night around midnight I rode over to the Monroe Street bridge thinking about going out the easy way. Was actually sitting with my legs over the edge when I got it: if I jump and there’s a god, I’m going to have to account for myself.”

  “For jumping?”

  “Naw, I’d have just said ‘Hell with you, Lord, you made it too hard.’ Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before; I just needed to save as many lives as I took. I didn’t know how many I took, but I knew I’d ruined a bunch of them. My government talked me into going to a place I had no right going, doing things I had no right doing.”

  The clock above the counter says I’m late for dinner, but I’m not interrupting this.

  “Came down off that bridge,” he says. “Rode to a meeting, decided that was as good a place as any to find some of those particular lives. Turned out, the only person can save a person is that person, but I found I could be a help sometimes; you know, shut my mouth and listen, be a witness. Did that off and on for years. Then one night when you were just a pup, I run into Nancy. She was new . . . think you had just been taken again and she was raw, stress so great she looked to be bleeding out the eyes, nearly twice as big as she is now; obese to the point you could hear her breathing clear across the room. I remember thinking, This woman’s gonna stroke out before this meeting starts. She made it through, but she was one miserable drug-crazed lady. Ugly and desperate as her life looked, it seemed like there was a light in there somewhere, felt familiar somehow. So I took it as a test.”

  “A test. Like . . . God testing you?”

  “The world tests you, Annie. If there’s a god, he has bigger fish to fry. Anyway, we start talking. Hell, she was the victim of every-damn-thing. Protective services lying to her, stealing her babies when they got no right. Ungrateful kids, asshole boyfriends. Pretty much anything negative invented in the world was tracking Nancy Boots.”

  “Did you tell her to grow up?”

  “Told her no such thing,” he says. “I listened. You challenge somebody laying out their troubles, all you’re doing is giving them reasons to think harder on what they’re already thinking, and setting it up so they won’t listen when you do have something to say. Adds to their ammo, if you know what I mean. You can’t help anybody unless you’re willing to hear their story.” He smiles and winks at me. “So stop asking questions and listen to mine.”

  I smile back. And zip it.

  “Couple meetings later we’re on break and I’m standing in the lobby after taking a leak; hear this, this . . . sobbing from inside the ladies’ room. Then these two women come out all horrified and laughing, and as the door’s closing I hear the sobbing again. The two women walk away shaking their heads and elbowing each other and I’m thinking, only other person I saw go in was Nancy. I wait a bit and no one else comes out, so in I go, hear more crying coming from one of the stalls. I ask if everyone’s okay in there and the sobbing stops, but I don’t get an answer. I ask, ‘Is that you, Nancy Boots?’ and it’s quiet a second, then this weak ‘Yeah,’ so what the hell, I open the door and there’s your momma sittin’ with a roll of paper in her hand. I say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she just looks at me. I say ‘What’s wrong?’ and she bursts into tears again, says, ‘My arms are too short.’”

  Oh my god, Nancy got so heavy she couldn’t reach around . . . she couldn’t clean herself.

  “Those women were laughing at her. I’m furious; I mean, killing mad. So I help your mom out and we get ready to go back to the meeting, but she says, ‘I can’t go back there,’ and I say, ‘If you can’t, I can’t,’ and take her to my car, go back inside, stand in front of those bitches, and say, ‘You ladies can get clean and sober all you want—never touch another drug—but you still won’t have a bit of damn decency.’ Last meeting I ever went to.”

  “Wow, Walter. You got together with Nancy wiping her. . . .”

  His hand shoots up. “You don’t need that movie in your head, and I don’t need the rerun. Point is, we’re sitting in the car and she’s still crying and thanking me for getting her out of there, and I see a big ol’ woman with a right pretty face, if you can see past her life. Maybe it was timing, but I’d done plenty of things in my life that left an ache on someone, so I thought the two of us might have a project.”

  I have never seen Nancy as pretty. I’ve seen her big and I’ve seen her relatively small, seen rage and revenge and hurt written all over her, but never pretty.

  “I told you before, this part isn’t for you. You grow up with someone as up and down as Nancy’s been over the years, you got to take care of yourself; I get that. You’re doin’ it. This other part’s my duty. I’m just sayin’ . . . I could only help her heal if I was ready to heal myself.”

  I rub my eyes, look at him. “You thought she was pretty.”

  “I knew damn well she was pretty. Hell, how do you think you got to looking like you do? That Rance fella’s no prize.”

  We sit awhile, watching people move in and out, set up their laptops.

  I’m overdue at home, so I pack my stuff into my backpack and stand up with him. “Keep following me, Walter.”

  He nods, puts a hand on my shoulder. I move his hand and hug him. “You’re a great guy, Walter. Kind of like a saint.”

  “Long damn way from that.”

  Cool thing about book club; it goes year-round. Sharon is not fond of the fact that schools work hard to make sure we don’t read anything we can fall in love with, so she does her best to work around our schedules.

  “I just read a chapter of a book we should consider,” Leah says. She holds it up. “Living Dead Girl. Elizabeth Scott.”

  Maddy says, “Zombies?”

  “Way not zombies,” Leah says. “It’s about this cool little tough ten-year-old girl who gets kidnapped by a pedophile. First night, he parks with her across from her home and describes in great detail what he’ll do to every member of her family if she tries to get away. He knows all their names. She tells the story as a teenager, still his captive.”

  I say, “Jesus, Leah.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “I’m doing it for you. Worst thing you can do when bad things happen is dance around them. Makin
g yourself tough is never the wrong thing. Ask Lynne Cox.”

  Maddy says, “Cold water and losing . . . they’re not the same.”

  “Body and mind,” Leah says. “One in the same. Ask. Lynne. Cox.”

  The very thought of reading the book she just described makes my stomach churn, but in a strange way, tugs at me.

  Sharon glances toward me. “It’s a good book, but every bit as disturbing as good. I have to put a warning label on this one.”

  “For me,” I say.

  “For you,” she says.

  “Well, you’re right. It’s killing me. But I gotta go with Leah. And Lynne Cox.”

  Sharon rolls her eyes and throws up her hands. She’s funny.

  I’m curled up on the couch in the basement rec room watching an installment of this very strange cable TV series called The Leftovers. The premise is that on October 14 of whatever year, at the exact same moment, two percent of the population of Earth vanished. That’s two out of every one hundred people, so no matter who you are, you lost somebody or somebody close to you has. If you were in a car with a driver who disappeared, you better get your foot over to the brake. If you were some guy making love with one of the two percent, you better be on a soft mattress because you’re going to fall about a foot. Farther if it happened to be Nancy. At any rate, it seems everything I run into these days is about loss. Marvin is playing a video game on his computer and watching out of the corner of his eye. As much of a control freak as Pop is, he doesn’t use Parental Controls and these “leftover” people screw like rabbits, because who knows when it will happen again. I’ll bet Marvin is hitting all-time lows on his game scores.

  My iPhone pings.

  Walter: Meet me for coffee

  Me: When

  Walter: Now

  Me: On my way.

  I say, “Marvin, memorize the naked scenes. There’ll be a test.”

  “Which I will pass with flying colors. I may even go on the Internet afterward to pick up some extra credit.”

  And I’m off to Revel.

  “Sheila’s gone,” Walter says as I join him at the back table.

  “Where?”

  He shrugs. “If I knew that, I’d have said so. After your mom and Sheila’s last tangle, Sheila quit coming over. Nancy got to feeling bad for her part in it and sent me to see if I could coax her to come for dinner. Place was empty.”

  “No Yvonne either?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m worried. The girl’s got nothing going. She’s gotta figure when Frankie comes back, he’s going straight into the system. That mess on his arm by itself wouldn’t have gotten anything but a warning, but the case is high-profile now with all the damn TV and your family history. The fact that he disappeared out from under her nose along with her current free-fallin’ weight loss. . . . three strikes.” Walter still talks like there’s no chance Frankie won’t show up.

  My stomach jumps. The other side of Sheila’s rage is hopelessness. “You think she’ll hurt herself?”

  “I would.”

  I close my eyes. “I guess I might, too. Does Nancy know Sheila’s gone?”

  “Not yet.” He scratches the week’s growth on his chin. “One other thing. I’m not gonna tell you quite yet, but . . . do you think you could get me an audience with that old caseworker of yours?”

  “An audience?”

  “Fancy word for a talk.”

  “I know what an audience is, Walter,” and I laugh. “It’s what I get with you every week or so right here. Why do you want to talk to Wiz?”

  “All will be revealed, young lady. All will be revealed.”

  We’re wrapping up our book club session on Living Dead Girl and I’m glad. This story is the kind of fiction that’s truer than truth, because of what it does inside your head. Sharon was right to warn me about it, Leah was right to bring it, and I was right to read it; it set me up for anything. It doesn’t end the way I’d like, but enough is enough.

  Mark says, “It reminds me of that guy who kidnapped the three girls back in the early two-thousands. He kept them until, like, two-thousand-thirteen.”

  “Ariel Castro,” Sharon says. “He went to prison. Committed suicide there.”

  “Kidnap, suicide,” Seth says. “Unfortunate he didn’t reverse the order.”

  “So why is this book so powerful?” Sharon asks, holding up her copy. “Anyone think it wasn’t?”

  Nobody thinks that.

  Oscar says it was so powerful he didn’t read past the first chapter. “Too real. Where I come from . . . Too real.”

  “I believe you,” Sharon says, “which takes me back to my original question.”

  “Stories get into your head in a way the real world doesn’t,” Leah says. “When you read about that Castro guy, you think about what it must have been like for those girls, like how trapped they were and how they couldn’t know the truth about anything going on right on the outer walls of that house, and it’s bad but it’s over at the time you’re hearing about it and everyone’s okay; well, maybe not okay, but alive and getting help. But when you read a story like Living Dead Girl, you walk with her, page by page, like in real time, and you have no idea whether or not everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “You’re with her. You could be her.”

  Layton gives a short laugh. “You know how the best review a book can get is supposed to be, ‘I couldn’t put it down’? Well, I couldn’t not put this one down. But then I couldn’t not pick it back up.”

  Maddy starts to talk, then chokes. “You know what I hated? I hated that she was such a cool kid before he got her, and then she was just more and more scooped out.”

  That sends my heart into my throat.

  Up goes Seth’s hand. The one outlier. “It was a good book,” he says. “Held together well. I thought the author was a superb word conservationist. But this power you all seem to have succumbed to eluded me.”

  Sharon says, “And we know why that is, don’t we, Seth?”

  “We know the theory,” Seth says.

  “But it’s a theory like evolution, don’t you think? Like . . . solid?”

  “Maybe pretty solid,” Seth admits.

  “C’mon, buddy, you got to give me this one,” Sharon says. “You have the big figure-it-out brain. The rational brain. These babies . . .”—and her hand sweeps the group—“have the big crybaby brain, the emotional one. Your emotional brain is, like, one-celled.”

  “A bit of hyperbole,” Seth says, “but you’re the librarian, so I’ll concede that.”

  Sharon slaps both palms on the table. “Good! You guys know what’s next, right? We all agreed? Four weeks telling our own stories. Remember? We tell them, then we write them.”

  There is a grudging, collective, “Yeah . . .”

  “Hey,” she says, “it’s a writer’s club, too, and lately we’ve been doing way more reading than writing.”

  This has always seemed like the most dangerous part of this club to me; it requires way more trust than I’m used to allowing.

  Up goes Seth’s hand, again. “I don’t believe I had a voice in this decision. Is there a reason I wasn’t informed about this aspect?”

  “There is,” Sharon says. “When your mother called to inquire about this club, she told me you’d be resistant, that self-disclosure isn’t your thing; so we agreed to be honorable. We kept it from you.”

  “Did you have conversations with everyone’s mother before bringing them in?”

  “No,” she says. “Everyone else joined without assistance from their mother.”

  Seth nods in surrender, shows us the closest thing he knows to embarrassment with a head shake and a glance toward the ground. “I guess my mother and I need to have another conversation.”

  Seth doesn’t realize how much he’s disclosing, telling us there were other conversations.

  “And why would talking about one’s life have anything to do with one’s writing anyway?” He seems indignant.

/>   “Good stories come from life,” Sharon says. “And for most writers, it’s the easiest place to start.”

  “Well, it seems like an outlandish waste of time to me, if you want the truth.”

  “I don’t want the truth, Seth. Nobody’s going to make you tell your story, but if you listen you might understand why the rest of us will.” She keeps looking at Seth, but the rest is catch-up for us. “See, life happens as much in the imagination as it does out where there’s earth, wind, and fire. How we understand story can be a blueprint for understanding our lives. Things happen in seemingly random order, but if we pay attention to real events the way an author pays attention to story, we’re forced to look at cause and effect, and understanding cause and effect shows us the relatedness of events, and our parts in them.”

  “If more teachers knew that,” Maddy says, “we wouldn’t be reading so much shit in our English classes.”

  “But if you weren’t reading so much shit in your English classes, I’d have a harder time getting you to my book club, so be nice to your English teachers. And read the shit they give you. Some of it is really good shit. Now, any storytellers?”

  Mark says, “This is crazy. I have this . . . I don’t know, almost a compulsion to say something, but it’s swimming around in my head in a way . . . that makes it hard to find, like, the opening paragraph.”

  Sharon says, “Remember in our last writing block, we decided it’s not necessary to start at the ‘start,’ that you jump in at the most compelling part.”

  Mark shifts around in his seat and he stares into that “nowhere” space a few inches in front of him, and he looks like he’s about to jump into water only Lynne Cox could endure. “You guys scare the heck out of me . . . I mean, this club.”

  “Yet here you are,” Maddy says.

  “Yeah. Here I am. So here goes. I go to church; my whole family does. We believe what we hear, try to act on those beliefs. As long as we do that, everything is calm at our house. But I have an older sister; she was my hero because she always took me with her, and looked out for me when I did stupid things. She taught me to hunt, to never pull the trigger without a clear shot, never kill something for the fun of killing. My whole family does that, but I was Stella’s project, and she made sure I did good and felt good.”