Darien Cavanaugh

Crazy Eights

Martin hung up when I answered the phone. He wanted someone else to answer. I called back and Leanne started to deny that he was there but then handed him the phone so he could ask me to come pick him up.

I went to pick him up.

Tricia lay passed out on the couch, and Leanne’s eyes darted all around—darted from me to Martin to the clock to Tricia to the door. Martin took a twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Best with a few cans missing from the refrigerator and held it under his arm. He suggested we go on a walk, said we needed to talk.

We walked down the street, around the corner, down another street, and under an interstate overpass—Martin talking the whole time. He had this to say to me: “There’s nothing going on with me and Tricia.”

A fence surrounds the sloped concrete base of the overpass. Martin and I slammed the beers we were drinking and I tossed the others over the fence. Then I climbed over, grabbed them, and strode up the slope, all the way to the top where it meets the underside of the overpass. Cars sped by at seventy miles-per-hour just feet above, their wheels pounding out heavy gdundun sounds as they hit pavement junctures, uneven stretches of silence separating one car from the next. A splatter of foam sprayed across my knuckles as I popped open a can of beer.

Martin looked like a horned beetle in a glass jar—arms reaching and grasping, legs hiking and slipping, unable to scale the fence but displaying impressive determination. Huffing and grunting with every breath, working his way higher inch by inch, he managed to make it to the top a few times but couldn’t heave himself over. He would just hang there. Watching him, I knew his fingers were cramping from clasping the chain links to bear his weight, the stretching and straining turning the skin of his hands wrenching white and stinging pink until he finally lost his grip and dropped to his feet. His best effort ended with him slipping and falling, his back crashing hard on the ground with a ten-foot-fall thud. Then he gave up altogether and slumped down under an oak growing near the fence. He asked me to toss him a beer, I said that I couldn’t throw that far, and he told me not to be an ass. We sat there hollering back and forth at each other through the heavy stillness of 4 A.M. until he asked for a beer again and I shook one up and threw it at the tree he was leaning against. The beer burst against the tree and showered down on him. He called me a dick, then sat sulking and puffing on a cigarette…

We must have been there nearly half an hour. Martin was talking but I had quit listening—I knew what he was saying. He was rambling on and on about him and Tricia and me and Tricia and me and him. Every minute or so I would say “yeah” or “uh huh” loud enough for him to hear, but I wasn’t paying any attention.

I finished another beer and wandered out from under the overpass, across its concrete base, and up a grassy embankment to the interstate. By the time I reached the top, I could barely hear Martin’s voice. I hopped onto the overpass guardrail and held my arms out straight like the wings of the Thunderbird figure atop a totem pole—the toy totem poles that come in little plastic bags of little plastic cowboys and Indians. One foot in front of the other, step-by-step, steady walking the rail, I reached the center of the overpass. The interstate ran alongside of me and Hanna Avenue crossed under, the two roads perpendicular lines on overlapping planes, with me at a shared intersection. Some of the cars honked as they sped past, gusts of screaming metallic light blowing over me.

Martin shouted at me from below, called me a jackass and warned that I was going to fall to my death. Of course I had considered the possibility. However, I had not appreciated, until he shouted up at me, that I am afraid of embarrassment. Not the naked-at-school kind of embarrassment, but the dying-a-pathetically-ridiculous-and-pointless-death kind of embarrassment. I scurried backwards, teetering and tottering, to the beginning of the guardrail, jumped off onto the shoulder of the interstate, and sat there on the damp grass.

I knew about Martin and Tricia all along, more or less. I knew since the night the three of us sat drinking on a park bench overlooking Palmetto Bay, more or less. I knew when Tricia got up to leave and Martin shuffled along behind her, the two of them moving down along the shore together, back to our house—mine and hers. They went inside and stayed a little too long. Long enough for me to wonder, but not really long enough for much. Then they got in her car and drove away. That was when I knew. That was when I realized that Tricia was the twin sister that Martin loved but never had, the nameless twin sister from the story he wrote about garbage trucks mounting and fucking each other with mechanical grace, the ecstatic moans of their hydraulic dumpster-lifts and the slow orgasmic rhythm of their hollow-steel clunks echoing through predawn silence.

While they were gone I threw empty bottles out at the rocks peaking through the surface of low tide, watching them shatter into the air and softly splash into the sea. Water wears away the jagged edges over time, polishing the shards into perfectly smooth little glass pebbles. I thought of something finding those translucent green gems a long time from now, finding mine and those of everyone else who ever tossed bottles at cragged rocks cresting the black of a midnight sea. I wanted the remains of broken bottles along the Earth’s shores to be among the few remaining artifacts of a forgotten culture, an extinct species. But how long before the pebbles completely erode, before they become smooth little grains of sand and then nothing.

Martin and Tricia came back with more beer, in brown bottles instead of green.

That night with the bottles and the beer at the house on the shore was a long time ago. I don’t live in that house anymore. I live with Martin now. With Martin, and Kevin, and Kaywon, and Beau, the five of us alone together in a house far from the sea.

When I came down from the overpass, Martin and I went home. We walked back to Leanne’s apartment without speaking, and then drove in silence down Leanne’s street, around the corner, under the overpass, around another corner, and into our driveway without a word.

I walked to the twenty-four hour convenience store at the end of our street, with Martin at my heels. The clerk pressed a Cuban sandwich for me while I grabbed a bag of sour cream- and onion-flavored multigrain chips and a blue bottle of green tea. Martin stood quietly by the counter, obviously eager to resume the conversation—the conversation I wanted so very badly not to continue, the conversation that was not a conversation. But it didn’t matter. I knew the son-of-a-bitch was going to start again as soon as we got out the door, reciting his same old incoherent rant about love and madness while I fantasized about gouging out my eardrums with anything I could find laying on the sidewalk…a stick, a chewed-up pencil, or the twisted and rusted wire of an extra clothes-hanger that a patron of the Laundromat next door to the twenty-four hour store dropped while carrying a heaping basket of freshly washed “summer breeze”-scented whites to cram into the hatchback of a little economy car. Who could blame someone for not having stopped with such a load, for not wanting to lean down and set the basket of summer breeze whites on such a greasy grimy ground of oil and asphalt and tread marks after spending two hours at the Laundromat where every kid in the neighborhood had been running around demanding quarters from their mothers for sodas and videogames while all the grownups just wanted to go home and have clean clothes.

I sat on the curb in front of our house, my thoughts becoming prayers that Martin would go inside and leave me alone. He sat down beside me instead. The streetlamp behind us stretched our shadows and cast them all the way across the road, over a neighbor’s yard, and up the wall of a bungalow, like the distorted phantom death-flashes of the victims of Fat Man and Little Boy scorched onto schoolhouse walls.

“So, what do you want to do?” he asked.

“I want to not talk about it anymore,” I answered.

He kept talking about it. He said, “She’s special, you know? She’s one of a kind.”

Mosquitoes flitted around my ears and I tried distracting myself by searching for the flickers of their shadows fluttering around the monstrous silhouettes of our heads.

He kept talking. I held the bag of chips towards him. He ate a few, then asked for some of the sandwich. I tore off a piece. He began speaking again and I honestly did not listen enough to make sense of his words. Then a mosquito landed on my arm and I smacked it, squashing it into a grey and red K-shaped smear. And that was it. I was through, through with the mosquitoes and the heat and the noise. I just wanted to go inside and hear nothing, just sit on the couch in the dark and watch TV and eat my sandwich. So that’s what I did. But Martin came in ten seconds later and sat on the loveseat across the room, insisting that “We need to talk this through.”

I stared at the TV as he spoke. There was nothing on. A local public-access channel was airing prerecorded stock car races from the East Bay Raceway. Martin kept raising his voice until I finally muted the TV, but I continued to pay more attention to it than him.

As one of the races ended, two commentators appeared, their heads filling most of the screen. In the background, service crews and speedway workers began rearranging the series of wooden barricades and tire stacks that formed the inner wall of the racetrack. When they finished, the new course was shaped like a figure eight. A camera zoomed in on eight drivers who stood on a platform as officials blindfolded them and put helmets with blacked-out visors over their heads. Eight other men walked the blindfolded drivers to their cars, the drivers climbed into their seats, and their escorts got into the passenger seats. The flag dropped and the cars took off around the track, each driver blind and dependent on the guidance of his passenger. It was obvious that stopping or slowing down violated some rule, whether official or implicit. Several cars grazed one another during early passes through the figure eight’s intersection, each time avoiding a major collision by only a flashing moment.

Martin asked me to turn off the television. Leaning back on the couch, I turned toward him but left the TV on. I tried to listen to what he was saying, hoping that my feigned interest might satisfy him. But I couldn’t do it. When I heard him say, “You know, you’re just looking at this whole thing the wrong way,” I took a bite of my sandwich and started watching the stockcar races again. I didn’t really care about them either though. There weren’t any crashes, nothing major anyway. Every time a dead-on collision seemed imminent the cars only bumped and scraped each other as they slipped through. I wondered how long it could last. My sandwich was cold.

Several minutes later there was still talking, talking, talking. Martin was still talking, and I still wasn’t listening so I started thinking about things I wished I’d done and I wanted to be upstairs in bed with Marie, a girl I half-hated. A girl whose voice sounded like a dull saw gnawing through a rusty pipe when she sat bitchy and indifferent at our local bar or on a front porch with everyone passing a cheap bottle around. A girl that dreaded sleeping alone and became mournful-sweet in the dark intimacy of a bedroom.

One night, not so long ago, Marie lay in my bed drunk and half-naked with stale-wine breath and cigarette-hair and a hint of sweat as she spoke soft and sleepy-headed. “Yeah,” she said, “When I was over there the other night, Martin kept giving her Xanax like every five minutes. And she was already fucked-up. We had been drinking since like four in the afternoon. I mean I was really drunk, but Tricia could barely talk, she kept nodding off and Martin kept giving her pills and like rubbing her legs and putting his arm around her and shit and she was like totally oblivious.

“And so I was telling them about…shit, I can’t remember…and it was something important too. Something fucked-up had happened that day. So, I’m telling them about…whatever, and I look over and Martin was like kissing her. I mean like full on kissing her and groping her, and she was like lying there all like blahhhh. So, I was like ‘Okay, I’m leaving,’ and I went home. I mean she knows better than that. She’s fucking old enough to know better. If she wants to get into situations like that, that’s none of my business. I’m through trying to save Tricia.”

We lay there in the still darkness for a while. Pulling my arm around her and nuzzling up close, with her back against my chest and her thighs pushed up tight against me, Marie whispered sweetly, “You can put it in my ass if you want.” It sounded nice, but we fell asleep instead.

Oh how I wanted back that night with Marie. Sitting on the couch, staring at recorded races on TV as I tried my best to ignore Martin, there was nothing I wanted more than to be upstairs reliving that missed night with Marie. The memory of the cock-stiffening melody of those lust-fuck words from her soft, warm mouth played over and over in my head like nothing else could until my thoughts came to a needle-scratching halt as Martin interrupted my erotic recollection, raising his voice even louder to regain my attention. It took me a moment to return to his ramblings, to surrender thoughts of easy sleazy sex to tediously inane debate.

He was saying, “Tricia’s amazing. She’s amazing now, and once she gets all her shit straightened out she’s going to be so on. She’s going to be the one. She’s just been through a lot, you know.” He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled. “It’s all about wounds and dealing with them. It’s about losing, but being beautiful losers.”

After considering his last comment I attempted to explain, in the most intimate terms, that I will always love the friendship that he and I had shared and that it meant more than any other. But words are slippery, traitorous beasts and mine sprang forth from my throat sounding more like, “Shut up. You’re a fucking idiot. And if you make one more allusion to some book you think is our lives, I swear to Christ I will choke the shit out of you—I will fucking choke you. We’re not characters, nobody’s fucking watching us. She’s not Daisy or Brett. She’s a fucking whore, a worse whore than either of them. And it’s not beautiful or romantic, and I don’t want it anymore. I’m tired of it. It’s all bullshit.”

“It’s not going to last,” he said. “It’s not going to be like this. Why can’t you see that? She and I aren’t together. It’s just a thing. You two will get back together and we’ll all be fine.”

“What are you fucking talking about? We’re not going to be fine. I don’t want us to be fine. I want us to be over, all of us—me, her, you. Especially you, you fucking coward.” I stopped myself. But then I started again. “You always wanted to beat me. You always needed to be better than me at everything. You were never fucking happy. You were never satisfied. But you know what? You couldn’t fuck her while we were together, could you? Everyone else could, but not you. You tried. I know you tried. I just never cared because you were never a threat to me.”

Martin was shaking his head. He said, “You don’t mean that. Don’t be like that. You two were meant for each other if any two people ever were. You’re exactly alike. Jesus, that picture of the two of you in front of the Hub—”

The sandwich hit his face with a hard smack that startled both of us. Something had saved him, some reflexive impulse had flashed through me in an instant, prompting me to switch hands, to throw the sandwich instead of the thick-bottomed glass tea bottle. I wanted to pound his head with my fist until I shattered every bone in my hand. But I felt sorry for him, and I was thankful that I had not thrown the bottle. I leaned toward him and said, “Don’t say another word.”

He sat there, his head tilted down, mustard-mayo mix smeared across his cheek, strands of shredded-pork scattered across his belly and lap. Pieces of bread and slices of cheese and salami lay strewn around him on the loveseat and the floor. Everything stayed exactly like that for a long moment.

I finally turned back to the TV. Then Martin spoke softly. He said, “I knew her first.” After a pause, he added, “I always loved her. You knew that. I fucking introduced you to her.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “And you know it doesn’t matter, because she never wanted you. She doesn’t want you now.”

He got up and went to the bathroom to wipe off his face. I heard his heavy steps thumping down the hall and his bedroom door close. I took the TV off mute and stretched out on the couch. Somehow, the races were a scam, a hoax. The commentators spoke in terms of life-and-death, their language and inflections full of anxiety and excitement, but the action on the track belied their animation. Nothing important would happen. Nothing important had happened. Earlier in the night all the drivers went home much the same as they had arrived at the track, the worst of them suffering only scrapes and bruises, the best gaining nothing but a plastic trophy.