I wrote a short story. I was getting tired of writing about myself so I thought I'd write about imaginary people. It's from the male perspective, although you might have noticed that a few hundred words in. Or not. I never write stories. Just poems. But this was fun. I cannot comprehend writing a novel though, there are so many words!
The Absence of Light
Picture this first. Two men sitting in the cab of a green pick-up. Plymouth, 1957, chrome on the hood and along the bumper. The hood ornament is a woman with her face stuck out to the sky, like she’s proving something to someone. There is almost a smile on her lips but it’s really more of an “I’ll show you” look. The truck is parked on a little dirt road, tall grass waving around the sides and making scratchy sounds against the steel of the car. The paint on the pick-up is a soft, watered-down color. Like the insides of those bag-worms that hang off the maple trees and get squished by shoes when they fall, or burned in big piles along with the leaves.
The passenger in the truck is my father, Arlie. The man in the drivers seat is his brother, Bus. They both have on white tee-shirts and old jeans. They’re both smoking, my dad; Marlboros, my uncle Bus; Pall Malls. My dad rests his arm on the rolled down window, his thumb hooked into the top groove of the door frame, cigarette between his first and second fingers. Bus keeps his cigarette in his mouth, talking around it.
“ I picked these up at Talleys. I knew you wanted them. I got me a pair too.”
Bus reaches under his seat and pulls out a sack.
“ You didn’t have to get me anything. I didn’t get you anything when you graduated.”
Bus takes the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to spit on the ground. “You were only eleven when I graduated, asshole. Anyway, you still got a month to go. Open the sack.”
Arlie pulls out a pair of waders. The rubber squeaks as it comes stiffly out of the Talley’s sack.
“Waders. Shit, I been wanting these for a year. Thanks Bus. This is sharp.” Arlie opens the door of the cab and steps out, crushing his cigarette on the ground. The air is still and the weeds that had been blowing are suddenly silent, the only noise is the scritch of the waders going up over Arlie’s jeans. The sky is turning plum and the sun hits the chrome as it sets, making Arlie squint as he pulls the suspenders over his shoulders. He doesn’t know he has started a son.
I am the size of a fingernail. The trimmed off part, not the part still stuck to the finger. I am floating in a sea of salt and fluid. Emily Faltz is my mother and she has been throwing up for four days straight. This is an old-fashioned pregnancy test. She is in the kitchen of her parents house. It is the house she goes to bed in every night. The floors in the hallway are made of wood from her grandpa’s farm, when there were trees where the corn is growing now. It is dark wood; walnut, and in a few places the knots have poked out and come loose. Emily’s father fills the holes with little square pieces of wood, sometimes maple or sycamore, and visitors are always surprised by the bright, odd chunks in the middle of the dark floor. The light over the sink separates into rays, shines off Emily’s hair and also reflects off the bottom of the pan she’s scrubbing. The water from the well spatters and breaks, air bubbles forcing through the faucet. She hates doing dishes. Her fingernails are weak and peel apart, and her hands get so dry they crack in the winter. She’s glad winter is done. The radishes and turnips are opening the ground out back, and today she walked home from school with her sweater held in the crook of her arm. After the dishes are done she is going to put on her pale blue dress with the three pearl buttons and meet Arlie at the band shell in the park. Emily puts the pan down on the dishtowel and vomits, as quiet as she can, into the sink.
I’m driving my own car now. My cousin, Larry is in the passenger seat writing dirty words on the side window and Ben is in the back , scooted up between us so he can hear over the engine.
“White, go quail hunting with me next weekend. My dad just gave me his old 22 and I want to go shoot something” Ben is the youngest and looks just like Bus. Larry looks like his dad too only he has two different colored eyes. One blue, with a tinge of yellow, and one brown. His mom, my aunt Pauline, says it’s a mark of good luck but I think it makes him look like a freak.
“I can’t next weekend. I have to help my dad put up his new shed.” I didn’t really. I just didn’t want to go hunting with Ben. He shot our new pointer pup three years ago when he was thirteen, and when I see him with a gun I still want to wrestle him down and thump his head a few times. Everybody calls me White. I was born with the name Mitch, but from the first day of my life I’ve had the blondest, white hair anyone ever saw.
Larry rubs his fist on the window, erasing his words. We’re out for a Friday night with no where to go and a fifth of Jim Beam in the trunk. The sky is going from pale purple to cobalt, and the trees in the west darken into silhouettes. I pull the car over. We’re a couple miles outside of town and the cars are scarce so I just park there, a few feet on the shoulder but at least a door and a tail-light still on the road. The evening air feels like football weather but the season is over. The moon is coming up bright, and pretty soon the trees will be trees again, instead of silhouettes.
“What do you want to do?” I ask, figuring I’ll probably make the decisions anyway. I pick at the loose skin around my knuckle, and wait for Larry or Ben to talk.
“Well, we could go over to the bowling alley.” Larry says. “They’ll serve us a beer and their hamburgers are good.”
“You just want to go see that girl.” Ben pokes Larry in the arm. “The one with the little tiny ears who always wears a ponytail.” Ben turns to me. “She’s bowlegged.”
Larry ignores him, “Let’s drink some of that whiskey and decide”.
There are no headlights shining in either direction as we get out. The trunk light comes on and illuminates our faces peering in at the bottle of Jim Beam. I look over at Ben and his face is a red lantern inside his skin. It’s like I can see the bones pushing out, making his features seem unfamiliar.
“Hey, what’s this action?” Ben holds up my 12 gauge. “Hell, Let’s do some shooting now.” Larry gives me a look and puts his hand on the gun. Everyone in our family wants to high-tail it when Ben picks up a gun.
“Ben, leave it.” Larry picks up the bottle with one hand and pushes the gun back into the trunk with the other. “What say we have a drink and kick up some dust in town”. He grins at Ben and I as he shuts the trunk, the absence of light returning us to ourselves.
Ben takes the bottle and cracks the lid, laughing.
At the Piggly Wiggly, Larry is combing his hair with his fingers. The rear view mirror is turned slightly toward him and when I look over at it out of habit, I see the brown vinyl of the door.
“Hey White, that girl over at the bowling alley, She’s real nice. She let me bowl two games last week for nothing. But don’t talk about it in front of Ben. When I liked that girl in my fourth period English class, he spread it all over and she never looked at me again”. Larry turns my mirror back into position. I reach over and adjust it so I can see the door of the grocery store.
“Well then drop it now, cause here comes Ben.” Ben walks out toward the car with a box of vanilla wafers. We’ve been sitting in the parking lot watching the night pass, swigging a little Jim Beam and deciding what we’re going to do. There are at least four other cars doing the same. Every once in a while we sing to the radio, but only if it’s The Stones or Tom Petty. We’re waiting to begin the Friday night we’ve been waiting all week for.
“Here,” Ben shoves the box of cookies up into the front . “I bought these for all of us. I might try and get me a job in there. I saw James from school. Man, it’s a breeze. He works three nights a week and made enough since last August to put down money on a car.” Ben’s dad gave their beat-up Ford to Larry and now Ben has to save up for his own car.
“What, so you can drive into town and sit in a parking lot”. Larry wants to go see the girl at the bowling alley. “Let’s get out of here.” He opens the window on his side and leans his head out, working on his hair in the outside mirror now. I start up the car, we each take another drink, and I put a vanilla wafer in my mouth.
“Well, do you want to go in or not?” I shout this over the noise coming out of the bowling alley. We’re standing at the entrance, looking in through the glass doors that swing either in or out, both with effort. Ben has a mouthful of vanilla wafers and every time he talks, crumbs fly out at Larry and I. We’re just drunk enough to find this funny.
“Yeh, let’s play one. There’s nothing else to do.” Larry is still trying to hide why we’re here. Ben opens the door and we are blasted by the sound of pins falling against pins and the heavy sound of the balls crashing into the floor. The carpet is greenish yellow with a pattern of thick, reddish circles and random cigarette burns that mesh together and spiral down the whole length of the building. The smell of wax and sweat and smoke hits us as loud as the noise.
We leave Ben looking for an open lane and make our way to the shoe rental booth. I look over at Larry. He’s sporting one well-combed head of hair and his funny, two-toned eyes are moving quickly over the cashiers. I don’t see any girl in a pony-tail but Larry continues up to one of the other girls. “Excuse me, I, uh, think I left my wallet here last week. Caroline was working. Is she here? She might have noticed it”. Larry asks in a voice that is his, but different.
“No, she’s not working tonight”. The girl hollers down to a man in a red shirt with a name badge on. “Hey, Steve, anyone turn in a wallet?”
Steve shakes his head and continues writing down sizes of shoes. We turn and find Ben standing behind us. “Okay, I know, we’re leaving”. He smiles like he knows everything about everything, and we follow him out the door.
The lights at the Piggly Wiggly are still on even though they’re closed. As we pull through the parking lot we can see Ben’s friend James stacking paper sacks at the end of each check-out. Larry is stretched out in the back seat, asleep, his head smacking against the window whenever we go over a bump.
“How come Larry doesn’t want me to know he’s goofy for that girl at the bowling alley?” Ben breaks the silence that had settled over us for the ride back out to their house.
“Because of that time before when you told the whole school he liked Robin. You know, she never talked to him after that. It’s not a big deal. That girl at the bowling alley, she’s just a girl. Larry can go see her next week.” I didn’t figure it would hurt to be straight with Ben. He knew when we were standing by the shoe booth anyway.
“That was last year. I’m not gonna be a geek about it. I might give Larry a hard time but I’m not gonna go blab about it like I did before. It’s like the damn guns. You’re all afraid I’m gonna kill somebody. That was three years ago.” Ben shakes his head and turns his face to the window. The moon is on it’s downward slope, and the trees we passed earlier are silhouettes again. Larry’s head bounces around on the side arm-rest of the back seat, grunting out a snore every once in a while. I can’t say anything to Ben. It’s funny how with some people, you can’t seem to forget the stupid things. Ben knows it, too.
“Shit White, You guys got to see all my mistakes. You two made yours while I was too young to even know how dumb you could be”. Ben laughs it off but he’s right.
The porch light is on for me when I get home. I let myself in, turn off the light and walk down the hall with the funny, pale blocks of wood. There is a soft blue glow coming from my parents room.
“Goodnight Mitch,” my mother says. I can see my father watching TV.
“Goodnight.” I walk past them and start up the stairs.
“Mitch, let’s do a little fishing this weekend.” My dad calls after me.
“I can’t, I’m going hunting with Ben. The next weekend, okay?” I hear my dad say something to my mom and then, “The next weekend sounds fine.”
The stairs are old, and groan as I walk them. The moon has set and before I get to my room, my parents have turned off their television. I have to feel for the door, and when I find it, I just stand in the doorway. The whole house is pitch black. No noises, no shadows. I can almost see in the dark.
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