Only a third of the way to New Orleans, their rickety Dodge Spirit sputters and stops on the most barren stretch of Old River Road, nearby the levee and a lone barge abandoned to river and rust, still sixty-two miles from Charity Hospital and thirty-five miles from home. Smokes like burning sugar, the whole front of the car bubbles black. Ben huddles over the engine and thaws his cold hands. Claude breaks into his third tantrum for the day and bangs his head on the dashboard.

“Why does it always have to be this way, Ben?” he screams from the window. Ben hears the sickness in his voice—deep-cracked and hollow. “Why? Why? Why?” Then spitting his cusswords, breath swirling from his cracked lips like a sink drain: “Can’t you ever put your fucking head under the hood and check the fucking anti-freeze? Do I need to get out of this fucking car and catch pneumonia? I thought you were white trash, you stupid fuck! Shouldn’t you know how to fix a car? I’m going to be late! Again! It’s already eleven o’clock! You’re gonna fuck everything up! People will think I’m a fuck-up!”

Then Claude stomps the car’s floor and gets out. Red-faced and back slouched, small, bony fists clenched like the jaws of a cottonmouth, he stands so close that Ben smells his hot, vinegary breath. “I hate you!” Claude screams, and widens his eyes into ovals of white storm. Ben winces by habit, not need, and glances away to still his bottom lip.

The road is empty. No junkyard houses spy from the trees or mesh-wire fences—just cropland on one side and levee on the other. Ben remembers a childhood summer spent somewhere nearby in a plantation and his mother’s stupendous smile above her triangle of watermelon.

It’s a curious thing to Ben that Claude will no doubt find Ben’s fault in every spoiled situation, and the reason things go so awfully wrong; but it’s a shame Claude doesn’t see the benefits of these everyday accidents. They’ll avoid the lunch-time traffic in New Orleans and eat uptown at the Bluebird instead of stomaching the hospital’s less-than-hospitable pot roast and cold French fries. Ben believes such forward-looking thoughts could even save their relationship, and certainly make a difference in Claude’s health. But what’s the point to try? Men won’t change; and they don’t love each other anymore. It’s only pity, his sense of obligation, and good Catholic guilt that keeps Ben from walking out—though he doesn’t believe he’d find a good man elsewhere. He watches a few pecans plummet from a stumpy tree and wonders how he ever wound up in such sorry circumstances, with a nutcase, a crap job, and broken-down clunker.

Later, a rug cleaner’s truck stops, a greasy hand waves from its window, and the couple hitches a ride to the nearest service station. The heater defrosts Claude’s anger to silent regard of the passing live oaks, black gum tops, and yellow mud. Ben twiddles his thumbs and daydreams about going to France. “Wonder how long this cold is gonna last,” the old driver speculates, gray beard down to his belt, tapping his fingers across the furry steering wheel. He calls out his window at the station, then comes around to open the door for the couple.

“Morning, folks!” says a young man in jeans and a turtleneck sweeping the station’s doorway, “Got plenty hot coffee inside!” He sets his eyes road level, fixed as a labrador’s on a struggling rabbit, broom to the toe of his boot, when Ben explains their dilemma. The truck backfires, though the attendant doesn’t wince, and sluggishly departs. “I can tow it myself, Mister. Ain’t no sense waking up my mechanic before noon.”

Ben smiles at the generous offer, but Claude huffs, constantly upset, and points rudely at the man who now smiles to wild blue yonder. Then Claude draws a big circle in the air with two fingers, slashes through it with one, then points to his own eyeball. Oh, the man must be blind, Ben then conceives, deceived by age and good looks, and Claude clarifies for once and for all, asking the man incredulously, “I’m sorry. You’re sure you can handle that? You’re blind, aren’t you? I really don’t think blind people can drive cars. Right?”

“Certainly can.”

“Ben, he can’t see, he’ll wreck our car,” Claude whispers as they follow into the dusty convenience store, screen door swinging and creaking, to a counter topped with egg and pickle jars. “How can he drive?”

“I’m sure the man knows what he can’t do,” Ben assures, scooching up the sleeves of his winter coat, approaching the rusty, battered register. Now it’s quite obvious that the attendant has deep useless eyes, nonetheless ambitious, searching back and forth like a bug’s antennae, and capable, Ben’s sure, of hearing everything they whisper.

“Now I need one of you to drive, of course,” he appends at the very last moment. “I can paw the tow, but the State won’t let me behind the wheel.”

With his fist wrapped around the old three-on-a-tree, slowly remembering how to drive it, Ben realizes he’s happy that Claude stayed behind. He wishes he didn’t always have to worry about Claude’s illness, and wishes Claude could handle things like other people, with a little dignity and some discipline. That’s how Ben would’ve approached it. “Why’d your car break down?” the blind man asks. His big hands are nut-brown: the physical remainder of a summer’s sun. He talks with a sweet nasal twang that creeps out the side of his mouth like smoke, a hick innocence. Skinny mustache, wrestler’s ears, and black bangs to his nose. He couldn’t be any older than twenty-five.

“I don’t really know much about cars,” Ben confesses. “I thought it might be the radiator.”

“Well, the weather ain’t so great. It’s crazy conditions we’re getting. Never gets this cold usually. My aunt’s pipes busted last night.” He wipes his hand across his dirty pants. “I’m Peter, by the way. But you can call me Pete. No need to shake my hand. You’re driving strange wheels.”

“Pete. I have a cousin named Pete. Not too good of a fella though.”

River Road is notched with rain welts and unduly crooked. The previous night’s freeze left a white rime upon the house fences, aluminum cans, and tractors. Finally a real goddamned winter, Ben thinks. The truck grunts forward, bobbing left and right, and up and down, and Pete bounces in his seat. “So you can’t see all the way? Or just—”

“One hundred percent.”

“Since you were born or—”

“Linen truck. I used to drive one for the Laundromat. One morning I opened up the back door and a whole cloud of white dust blew out like a swarm of bees. Once I cleared my eyes and got back on the road—bam—God snapped his fingers and said ‘your eyes don’t work anymore’.”

“My God.”

“The doctors claimed I’d see fine again in a few weeks, but it’s been four years.”

The Dodge is still discharging a low-muzzled breath. Pete sets to his task like a mouse at the jaws of a trap—his nose and fingers to locate buttons and knobs. His palms blacken with dirt and oil. Jean-jacketed muscles tighten as he tries to lift up the tow. He asks Ben to help secure the harnesses around the tires. It goes quicker than Ben expected. Their arms rub together inadvertently, the car’s front end rises, and they’re done.

It’s one of those old mom and pop gas stations that Pete tends to—rusted pump, grimy windows, and red letters spell out MITCH AND MAUDE’S, PO-BOYS 11 TO 8, and AIR-CONDITIONED ROOMS FOR RENT. The road is empty and gray, and across it grows a sugar cane field. Ben comes out with a key on its ring, swinging it around his finger. Claude stares down at the cracks across the picnic table. It’s getting colder as the day wears on, everything thrown off balance by this frigid weather and seeming on the verge of weariness. Crawfish holes are dusted with frost in the frozen mud beneath their feet. The bonfire sticks from the New Year have been disassembled and tied together in bunches to bring into the store for firewood, but mosquitoes, in winter even, have infested the wood so the surface is freckled white.

Ben keeps his voice cheerful when he informs Claude, “The mechanic can’t come in today. His dog’s having babies.” After an uncomfortable lull, he adds, “I tried calling Mom and Dad. I tried getting Larry and Bob, too. Nothing. There’s no bus or cab way out here. But the attendant guy has an empty motel room in back for twenty-two bucks.”

Five hours afterward, they sit quietly in the motel room staring at Claude’s two suitcases while the sun swirls the sky the color of ripe figs. No one’s answered the phone at the nurse’s station. Folding over the final corner of a sheet of stationary, smoothing the crease with his index finger, and amidst the grumbling of his hungry stomach, Ben finally suggests, “Why don’t we get a bite to eat, baby. What do you say?”

Their atypically late lunch is one ham-and-swiss po-boy, made with day-old French bread, split, with mustard potato salad and two pickled eggs, eaten together on the green table inside Mitch and Maude’s. The other counter boy, Ricky, delivers one cold drink to them on a red plastic tray. “Have a good meal,” he offers politely, looking Ben in the eye. Neither Ben nor Claude utters a word throughout their meal. After each angry bite, Claude wipes the floral-print napkin across his mouth. A fat house fly lands on Ben’s pickled egg.

“I want to take a walk,” Claude says after his last spoonful of potato salad.

“Really?”

Dreading the inevitable silence of the rest of the day, Ben complies, without objections, though he worries that Claude might catch cold in the freezing weather, and he knows Claude must have some buried intent. Along the shoulder of the two-lane road, Ben reflects on the soft trudge of their feet in the shells, waiting for the thing to come up. Their progress is slow. His stomach is unsettled. Beside a tiny church with half its roof blown away, and where in its empty parking lot, a newspaper sheet flutters, Claude stops mid-step, the crunching ceases, he rubs his temples, and asks, “Why aren’t you staying at the hospital with me? Don’t you feel bad about leaving me there?”

“Honey, you know I can’t get away. It’s work…and Pepper and Diggy.”

“I wish I had a tape recorder…Do you know how fucking ridiculous you sound?”

“Please don’t start again. I’m sorry. I know how you feel. I was even thinking of staying with your mom on the weekends, but how ‘bout I drive down once during the week, too? I can drive down on Wednesdays—”

“Stop it! You’re such a damn liar. You won’t do anything. You never do anything! I know your twisted little mind. You think you’re better than me. You think I’m scared of being alone. You think I’m scared because I could go blind. Like that freak in there. Or maybe because I have all this shit inside me and God only knows what will happen. Fuck you. I’m not afraid. It’s you who can’t get it through your thick skull.”

Ben looks up the road toward home. “I’m not forcing you,” he says.

Claude’s face is as red as a persimmon. “You’re a zombie. You won’t do anything. You won’t feel anything. You won’t give anything!” Then he shuts up, as suddenly as the newspaper sheet plunges to the ground, letting the words sit and stew. The flag of a barge passes above the levee. A roar of men’s laughter echoes down. “I’m sorry,” Claude says, “I’m such a horrible person…Don’t hate me.”

In the late evening, Ben phones the hospital again. After six rings, he sits heavily on the end of the bed, listening to a muffled voice from the next room. His pants feel too tight at the waist. A foreign man finally answers, perhaps Vietnamese, or Cambodian, but he can’t understand English.

“Stranded,” Ben says again. “No, stranded. No car. Stuck. We can’t make it today.” He tries to speak slowly and clearly. Claude crawls onto the bed in his pajamas. Chews from the corner of a chocolate graham cracker. “No, no…Don’t cancel anything but tonight…He has insurance…Of course, if we have to…The tests don’t start until Monday…No, not a patient before…Yes…That one…Thank you…See you tomorrow…No, no, tomorrow…For Christ’s sake.”

He feels Claude worm up behind him; and his hands, bone-dry from medications and excessive washing, scratch Ben’s neck like an itchy sweater. When Claude’s lips press against his neck, just like a nurse’s fingers checking for a pulse, he smells the familiar stench of Chinese herbs.

Together they stare at the green ribbon stapled above the bathroom door. Ben holds in his gut while Claude reaches for his crotch. “How are you, baby?” he asks politely. He doesn’t do anything else. He knows what Claude wants, but it’s beyond his capability. He can’t forgive and forget Claude’s fists and insults. The ribbon quivers up and down after the heater creaks on. “Whatever. I’m not going to beg you, fucker,” Claude assures. Ben knows that tone of voice. He even feels it shaking in the bed. Then comes the slap across his head, like a basketball thrown, and Claude whispers, “I hate you, Ben. I’m taking a bath.”

Ben steps outside and shuts the door on the ferocious roar of running bathwater and finds Pete in the open door of the next room smoking a cigarette in the dark. He approaches the blind fellow while blowing into his cupped hands.

“You just missed the most excitement we’ve had for weeks and weeks. Had a blue jay stuck up in the chimney chute. Two hours I could hear its little wings beating and flapping. Squeaking every now and then. Had to pull it out with my hands. It darted straight out the front door and knocked over the chips.” He drinks from a bottle of Moosehead. Then wipes under his chin with his dirty turtleneck. “To freedom.”

“Freedom.”

“My brother and I…now we had ourselves some fun in sweet home Norco. Not many people could understand us. We were this close.”

“Were?”

“Yes, Sir. My brother ain’t here no more,” he explains with cold fish eyes. “He killed himself. I’m not shy about saying it like my ma and paw.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I just figured you and me are the same kind of people. I don’t normally tell people my personal info. But here you come with your friend. That’s all I’m saying. That’s a rare thing. And my brother, he knew a hell of a lot about the world. We weren’t just horny teenagers with no intentions.”

Ben listens to the pop of fast flying roaches against the wall. “Oh. I’m very sorry,” he says and realizes how often he apologizes. He always feels so powerless when he can’t solve a problem. A moment later, he excuses himself, returns to the room, and turns on the television. He lowers the volume ‘til he can hear the every-so-often plink or plunk of Claude’s bathwater, waiting for the sound of it draining.

By midnight’s yellow moon, Claude is tucked into a crescent beside him, glowing orange by a short practical lamp. The heater rumbles again while Ben counts down the discs of Claude’s spine. Once he wanted to be with Claude so badly. That was back when they didn’t know each other as well, when Ben hadn’t yet witnessed the crazed current that ran through his lover’s veins. Now Claude’s snores churned out of rhythm with clicking and clacking of the heater. Bubbling up together. But another sound beats barely within the current. A knife carving through thick cardboard. A muted saw into wood.

Ben turns out the bed lamp, suddenly staring into the dark at nothing, then puts his ear against the wall above the headboard. A thump and a drag on the other side of the very same wall. Drowsy as the blues on Basin Street. He even convinces himself that he’s not a pervert as he holds up an empty water glass sideways to the wall. Simple neighborly eavesdropping. The moon casts bleary blue light across Ben’s white underwear and skinny white legs. With his other hand, he rubs up and down, clearly discerning someone’s heavy breathing on the other side of paint and plaster, and imagining Pete’s legs spread wide across the corner of the bed. But then a breach in Claude’s snores. He squints down to whisper, “Baby? Are you still awake?”

Carefully, Ben muddles out of the bed, pulls on his pants, and switches on the television again. The sudden burst of fuzzed sound provokes a twist and turn from Claude, but in the end, some steady noise will make it easier to get back in. Everyone can hear a key turning.

Outside, a surge of adrenaline, equally attributable to the rabid winter or the secret of what Pete is now doing, shivers across Ben’s shoulders. He whimpers, holds back the urge to bolt back into the room. Dumb and slow, the river murk had come rooting over the levee like an old blind monster. He shoes squish in the frost. He squats, roosting beneath Pete’s window, and shuts his eyes, unable to lift his head. On the other side of the levee, the Mississippi pushes toward New Orleans with such fat force that it sweeps up debris and tree limbs. The river is only sound. The rushing water and the insistent grind of metal against metal as the tows rub against their chains and anchors.

His nerves are jangled. He licks his lips and wonders whether Claude is up now. Slowly, methodically, he lifts his head over the windowpane. The blinds are half-opened. Spooked by his own reflection, he’s about to duck again. But in the murk of Ben’s counterpart, Pete’s legs thrash wildly above the seat of a chair. He hangs naked from a yellow rope tied to a black metal hook in the ceiling, his back writhing like a snake in water, his bare white ass clenched.

Ben does nothing and utters the same. He’s just as good as a zombie. But Pete has the other end of the rope in his hand, and its wrapped twice around his fist, while his red calves twitch to keep his feet off the chair. His legs kick, and his fingers clench, and at any moment, he could knock over the chair. His useless eyes open wider. He lifts his legs higher. He repeats, purple-faced, baring his teeth. Repeats.

Then the chair tips over. Veins fatten in his neck. The rope slips out of his hand, and Pete falls. A mound on the floor. Viciously breathing. Cock erect, eyes set on a single point. Maybe he can see something again—an answer in the blaze of white stars before him. Peace.

Ben stands up and grasps the wall. His throat quivers, his chest heaves, and tears drip from his nose. He steps backward. His shoes sinking into soft frozen mud. His nostrils filled with the smell of chlorophyll. He steps back to their door, wipes his running nose, pushes in the key and turns it, then enters the dark, booming heat, seeing Farrah Fawcett aim her pistol at sky-blue. He crawls into bed, imagining what the world might be like without Claude, and as the credits roll, the picture goes out again. Barely, he can see the green ribbon waver and the heater winds up. There’s that familiar tight squeeze around his heart. Rushing from and toward catastrophe at once. He tries but he can’t stop it. Without brakes, a body’s lie. Though his pulse boils, his lungs stiffen, Ben understands he won’t really die here and now. But that’s hard to remember when it’s happening. It doesn’t really matter he can’t wake Claude and say goodbye. His heart isn’t really settled to burst over everything in the room.

 

© 2005 Patrick Ryan - Contributor's Bio