“They had about a fifteen-minute wait between the time of the movie being over and my lesson ending up here. Wife’s car, it was in the shop. No big deal. Fifteen-minute wait, fifteen minutes for me to drive over; they got thirty minutes to kill.
“But me, I’m talking to this woman like I’m trying to pick her up, and I’m not, you see. My wife was it, but I wanted to see if I still had the old charm. You know, if I had some appeal, ’cause then I was in my mid-thirties, starting to lose a bit of hair, and no matter how hard I worked, no matter how good I was at Shen Chuan, I was getting a bit of a pouch, you know.”
Tad patted his belly as if to prove it.
“So, I’m chatting up the young thing, and I realize suddenly, Damn, I’ve forgotten about Dorothy and John. But you know what? I think, well, another five minutes isn’t going to hurt. Because I’m explaining some special moves to this gal, nothing she’s ready to do, really, but it’s fun to show my stuff, you know. Show what I got. And finally I think: Shit, I got to go, so I do.
“Dorothy called the house. I didn’t know this until later, ’cause there’s no phone in the dojo. Later, I see the phone light blinking, turn it on, and it’s Dorothy. ‘Honey, are you okay? We’re waiting, and I’m a little worried.’ Worried. She was worried. About me. I should have been there, and she’s worried something happened to me. And me, I’m chattin’ up poontang like I’m on the hustle, just to keep the old ego polished.
“So later I learn they went to the little café next to the theater, had a Coke, something like that. They came outside to see if I’d made it yet, and a truck—this is like something out of a bad fucking movie—but a truck, a fucking dump truck full of gravel, going down the main drag, not where it should have been hauling that shit, makes a corner too fast and turns over. It doesn’t hit my family. But the gravel does. Like thousands of little bullets.
“When I got there, they were under it, kid. Under all that goddamn gravel. Someone says, ‘There’s a woman and a kid under that shit,’ and I knew…knew it was them. Started trying to dig them out with my bare hands. On top of that fucking pile digging like a goddamn dog. People all around helping.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tad held up a hand. “Let me get to the bottom of it, kid. They were dead. My fault. Had I been on time, they wouldn’t have been there when that truck came around. They’d have been fine. Just gravel on the sidewalk. They were the only ones standing in that spot. Can you believe that? Just the wrong place at the wrong time. Standing there. Waiting on it.
“You want some fucking schmaltz, now. You want the shit they put in the cheap fucking movies? John, my boy, he had a card in his pocket. Wasn’t Father’s Day, wasn’t Christmas, wasn’t my fucking birthday. But at school he made a card with his own hands. I still have it. It says, ‘World’s best dad.’ Cops gave it to me later. All crumpled and shit, but it’s my most prized possession. Is that schmaltz, kid? Is that the shit?
“I began to lose my center. I thought it was just the pain at first, and a year later I’m trying to pull it all together, reestablish my classes. The young woman I was talking to, one I was trying to impress, she wanted to come back, but I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t look at that woman again. It’s not that she did anything. I did something. Let my ego loose. That’s about the first thing you learn in martial arts. Put your ego in a sack and take a stick to it. I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t see her again, or anyone else I knew.
“Got all new people. Started being too rough. Hurting people. If they fought back hard, I hurt them more. I quit teaching. I didn’t need the money. My wife had money, and now it was mine. I was all alone. No wife. No son. No students. The in-laws hated me, as they should have.
“I took to the bottle. So here I am. Sober for the moment. Thinking about a drink. Seeing you, all drunk like me when I was young, I got to think, is it just fun with you, or is it something else? I think it’s something else.”
Harry didn’t know what to say, so he said what he had said before. “I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too. But what about you? What about that drinking? What’s your story?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“We had a deal.”
“Okay.” And Harry told him about the honky-tonk, about the old car when he was a kid. When he finished, he said, “Now what do you think?”
Tad studied him, scratched behind his ear. “Sounds, huh?” Tad said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s some weird shit.”
“You think I’m nuts?”
“I’ve heard some say we’ve lost abilities over the centuries, since we crawled out of the primordial soup. Things like extrasensory perception, the ability to smell a female in heat from a mile away, a prehensile tail, an inordinate love of bananas. Maybe you rediscovered some of it. Or maybe you’re just fucking nuts. Ever been dropped on your head? I’m serious now. You been dropped, you know of?”
“No.”
“Hit with something?”
Harry shook his head. “The mumps, like I told you. That’s it.”
“Do they cause brain damage, the mumps?”
Harry sighed.
“You got to let go of that booze,” Tad said. “Trust me on that, kid. Follow my advice, even if I don’t take it.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“What happened to me, happened. This shit about the sounds, I don’t know. I’d ask your mother about being dropped, that’s what I’d do. Get some specialist. Somebody knows about the brain, can get in there with a cutter, the pliers, fucking tire tool and a truck jack. Whatever it takes. Maybe you’re schizo. It’s no crime. It’s a condition. You got it, you didn’t ask for it. Just showed up, and now you got to deal with it, and the way you do that, you see a doctor.”
“I’ve seen them. They can’t help me. I live with this every day, and it’s not schizophrenia, and I wasn’t dropped on my goddamn head.”
“Don’t shit yourself. Just said it could be something like that.”
“Let me tell you something. When I first found my apartment, I went over every inch, stomping, slamming doors, whacking the walls, scraping the chairs, seeing if there was, so to speak, a ghost in the machine. None. That’s why I live in that shithole. Not just to save money, but because I’m certain there’s nothing lurking inside it.
“Just to make sure I didn’t miss some spot, I taped cardboard and egg cartons all over the walls. Didn’t want to drive tacks—afraid I might find a spot, you see. A spot holding some disaster. Hear what I’m saying, Tad?”
“Loud and clear.”
“I don’t even go to my friend’s Joey’s bathroom. You want to know why?”
“Sure, kid. Lay it out.”
“I was in his shitter, doing my business, stood up after the wiping, and my pants, which were still around my knees, caught the toilet lid, popped it up and down, and there was this guy in the sound, and I could see him sitting on that toilet long before Joey was renting the place. He had a sawed-off shotgun under his chin. I just clicked the goddamn toilet cover, the one with the hole in it, one you sit on—”
“Yeah, I got you.”
“Clicked that with the back of my pants, and I see him, the sawed-off under his chin, and he pulls the trigger. Blood and brains and skull everywhere. The sound of that gun going off in that small space…it was deafening.
“Why did I see him? Why? Because he’s getting ready to do it, his pants around his ankles, and he rose up a bit and clicked that fucking lid. When he did, he pulled the trigger and the lid snapped down again, holding the sounds. Can you believe that?”
“I’m working on it.”
“It’s enough to drive you crazy.”
“You may already have taken the trip, kid. Relax.”
“I looked it up. This suicide. I’m a bear on research because of this stuff. But I looked it up in newspapers, on the Internet, and sure enough, a guy killed himself there. Despondent over a breakup
with his wife, something like that. I never told Joey. Just don’t use his bathroom. I’m over there, and I got to go, I hold it. Fact is, I try not to even visit unless I’m drunk.
“This research I do—because of it, I know every spot on campus, around campus, where there has been a major car accident, where anyone was killed or even badly injured. I got a notebook in my back pocket, got it all written there, if I ever need to be sure.”
Harry pulled the notebook from his pocket, tossed it on the table. Tad picked it up, flicked it open, glanced at it. There was writing and little crude maps drawn inside.
“Pretty detailed,” Tad said.
“I wear soft-soled shoes, rubber tipped. That way, I hit some stone wall with my shoe where there was a car wreck, step hard on some spot where someone was thrown clear of a wreck, I don’t activate it. Trapped memories can be anywhere. You wouldn’t believe how many rapes there have been on campus. People don’t report them all.”
“So,” Tad said, “it’s like someone gets hurt, they touch something, the sounds, the whole event is in what they touch?”
“No. Woman gets slammed violently against a jukebox, that records. Guy kills himself in a toilet, and the lid clicks as the gun goes off, that records. Not only the sound. Not only the event. The emotions. Sometimes I get echoes from the original sounds. Reverberations. Old images…only I’m not so sure they’re images. It’s like…there are ghosts. Spirits. Not religious bullshit, but some bit of something left over from when they were alive. Their emotions. I feel it, and I can hardly shake it.”
“I want to believe you, but—”
“It’s amazing how much violence there is in the world. Sometimes it’s just a kind of mind bump, a push, a sound and color flash, and it’s gone. Not always something big-time serious. But it’s there, and I can hardly go anywhere without coming up against it.”
“You got a point, kid.”
“The world is full of it, stuffed with it. And it’s not just the hidden stuff. I got to deal with that, then I got to deal with what everyone else hears as well. All the anger and meanness. It’s in the music. Fuck this, motherfucker that, kill this one, fuck that one. Death to cops and queers and women. If it’s not the music, it’s the way people talk to one another. It’s the goddamn talk shows, the political shows, all that arguing. Never stops. And you want to know why I drink? Why I won’t stop?”
When Harry finished talking, he slid down in the chair and took a deep breath. He had almost worn himself out.
Tad studied him for a moment, said, “Kid, you ever go to a real city, not some burg like here, some big place like Houston, someplace like that, and this sound shit is real, or you even think it’s real, you’re gonna have the top of your head blow off.”
15
Harry drove home, wondering why he had told Tad about it, this problem he had. It wasn’t something he talked about anymore, not since Joey and the doctors thought he was crazy. His mom too, though she would never say such a thing. And now he had told this guy.
But it was different. He didn’t know Tad, really, so it didn’t matter what he thought. This way he got to rant, get it off his chest. Tad would just write him off as a nutter, go back to the bottle.
They would be drunk nutters together in different places.
Something like that.
Harry had a full day to kill, and he killed it studying, when he could concentrate. But he spent a lot of time thinking, thinking about Tad and his family, the way the old man had whipped the shit out of those thugs out back of the bar, whipped them while drunk, took their money and didn’t even know it.
He believed Tad didn’t remember taking the money. Believed it wasn’t so much robbery as irony. An object lesson for assholes.
He tried to concentrate on his psychology book, but a shadow fell over him and the page went dim. He looked up to see night come early. Or so it seemed. It was a rain cloud, and it filled the room until it was black as a wedge of chocolate on chocolate.
Harry sat back, didn’t bother with the lights. The dark was pleasant. He could feel and taste the ozone in the air, could hear the wind picking up, the rain pounding lightly on the roof, then he heard it grow heavy, as if the drops were full of lead.
He got up, pulled back the curtain, and looked out. There was a bit of light in the shadow, and he could see big balls of hail. Lightning tore at the darkness like an angry child ripping at paper.
He thought about his car as he listened to the hail hit. There wasn’t any kind of garage; place didn’t have one. But he thought maybe the big oaks on either side of the drive would protect it some. Not that it was anything special, anything to be proud of, any kind of chick wagon. It was a brown car of nondescript nothingness.
He hoped at least the hail wouldn’t crack the windshield.
The ice came down hard and beat on the roof, and some of it clattered against the glass. Harry tried to figure if there was any way some horror could be trapped in the sound made by the hunks of ice; if in their impact on the roof there was an event, colorful and loud and terrible, just waiting to leap out. What if there was a guy drowned in a lake, thrashed and screamed and slapped the water a lot before he went under; say later some water evaporated, became rain, or hail—could that hold the memory?
No, that was too much. The water would have been transformed; wouldn’t happen. He hoped.
Harry moved back a bit, and it was a good thing. A ball of hail struck the glass near the windowsill, broke through, came bouncing into the room, rolling across the floor, sprinkling glass, shedding ice slivers. It came to a stop between his feet.
He picked it up. It was cold and firm. Felt like a small baseball found in morning-dew grass. He took it into the bathroom, dropped it into the sink to let it melt. That cold touch made him think about a cold beer. He had a few in the little refrigerator. But he decided against it.
A thing the old man had said, about the drinking. It stuck with him. How did it go exactly? Something about being a self-made man.
Yeah. That was it. A self-made man. Tad said he was a self-made man, a self-made drunk.
Tad told him he was driving the same road.
Harry tore off the edge of a cardboard box and got some tape and taped the cardboard over the hole in the window. Maybe the landlord would fix it.
He got a broom out of the bathroom, where it leaned against the edge of the shower frame, swept the glass onto a piece of firm paper, picked it up, and tossed it in the garbage can.
Harry moved his chair to the center of the room and sat listening to the summer hail. It slammed against the house for about fifteen minutes, subsided. Then there was a slice of light in the darkness, and it slipped through the curtains and filled the room.
Harry didn’t move.
He sat and listened, and the last of the hail, smaller now, passed, followed by a smattering of rain, then it too was gone, and the light outside grew brighter yet and he could see clearly in the room.
He sat in the chair and listened.
There was nothing now, not even cars out on the road in front of the house.
There was only silence and sunlight, and he sat in the warmth of the light and listened to the nothingness of silence for as long as it lasted.
16
“The Beast in Me” sung by Johnny Cash was playing on the FM station as Harry drove to campus. He thought, the beast is not in me. It’s out there, and I let it in from time to time. A beast belonging to others. That’s the rub. It’s not even my beast.
As Harry drove he navigated according to his knowledge of “bad places.” He felt he was safe in the car if he stayed out on the road. He had never had one of his experiences just driving on the road, but he thought it could happen. Maybe hit a pothole where some tire had hit and blown and the car had gone off the road. If driving into a pothole frightened someone enough, it might be recorded, because things were like sponges when it came to fear; they soaked it up and held it.
And he squeezed it out.
> God, was there anyone else in the world with this problem?
He couldn’t be the only one.
He drove onto campus and found a spot. When he got out of the car he slung his backpack over his shoulder, locked the car door, and started walking, keeping himself aware of where “things” had happened, at least the ones he knew about.
He had a path he always took, and he knew it was a safe path. He’d worked it out, followed it for weeks, and nothing had leaped out of the architecture at him, off of the sidewalk.
He avoided touching anything as he walked.
This way he knew he was safe.
Which was why, on this Wednesday morning, he was so upset. The path he usually took was blocked.
Construction. The sidewalk was torn up and there were barriers all about, big, burly men working at banging up the concrete with jackhammers and the like.
For a moment Harry just stood and stared.
Blocked.
Can’t go my route.
Shit.
He thought all manner of things, but none of them were any good.
Like trying to go under the wooden barriers and weave his way through the workmen.
He figured that wouldn’t work out. It would only cause him to possibly be part of a violent moment himself, though, in his own estimation, that was easier to handle. You couldn’t see what was happening to yourself, only feel it. It was seeing their faces, feeling their terror that made him crazy.
He slipped his backpack off his shoulder, laid it on the ground, got his notepad out of his back pocket, studied it.
All right. He could go left, then skirt around all this business, but he didn’t know that territory. Most likely, as was the case with much territory, it would be safe. Nothing hidden.
But you never knew. It was always a struggle.
Shit, he told himself, you go to bars. You do that, and they’re worse places to go than a college campus.
But they’ve got the beer. Enough of that, I’m okay.