Текст книги "Fear Itself"

Автор книги: Duffy Prendergast

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“Tony’s Electric.” It sounded to me as if I had called him on his cell phone as I heard noises in the background (the shrill high pitched squeal of a circular saw and the pounding of a hammer) that indicated that he was at a construction site.

“Are you hiring?”

I heard an extended breath, “I might need a laborer.” He said with a Bostonian sounding accent.

“How much does it pay?”

“How many years have you worked in the trade?”

“Four summers…with my father.” “Maybe ten bucks an hour for the right person.”

“Can you pay cash?”

“Are you from the labor department? No, I can’t pay cash.”

“I really need the job.”

“When can you meet me? I gotta see if you got what it takes.”

“What does it take?”

“Hard work. Show up on time. Don’t ask, just do. That’s what it takes!”

I met Tony at a fast-food restaurant about twenty minutes from my house. He was a large hulking Italian man with a wide squat nose and a broad bull face. He had dark skin and a husky build. I was immediately intimidated by him. My interview consisted of Tony grabbing my wrists and looking at my “pussy” hands and telling me that I wasn’t cut out for the kind of labor he needed; to which I replied with a tone of desperation:

“I need the job.”

“What are you, like forty? You said you worked two summers with your old man. I thought you was a kid. Don’t you have nothing you know how to do at your age?”

“Four summers…and I’ve been away.” “Ohhh no! I don’t hire ex-cons!” He said, rolling his eyes, and he abruptly stood up and started to walk away.

I reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. When he turned back toward me I thought he was going to clump me on the head. I timidly spoke, “I wasn’t in prison.” He brushed my hand from his back like he was shooing away a fly, “I’m an alcoholic. I was drunk for most of the last twenty years but I’ve been sober for over a year.” I felt bad for telling such a blatant lie, but I couldn’t very well tell him the truth.

“Why do you want to get paid under the table?”

“I got an ex-wife who will garnish my wages for alimony if she finds me. At ten bucks an hour I’ll barely make enough money to feed myself.”

“I got one a those too!” he said pursing his lips and furrowing his brow in an exaggerated sympathetic frown.

“A what?”

“A ex-wife.” He shook his thick head indicating that he thought he was about to make a huge mistake, “In cash the job pays eight-fifty an hour. If you can’t make it to work on time I’ll can ya. If you’re lazy I’ll can ya too. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you tomorrow at seven in the morning with an address. I start at eight. Don’t be late. And no drinkin. I smell alcohol on your breath and I’ll can ya too.”

He turned and left and that was the end of my interview. I was so giddy that I had landed a job and that I could continue to survive that I hurried home and I took Sarah out for an ice-cream sundae, the first splurge since we had arrived in Kansas.

The work-days were long and the work was hard but I made enough money to pay my bills. And Tony, despite his direct and hardnosed approach, was a nice guy. He said that he had worked by himself for ten years until I called him. “You caught me on the right day.” He said. He had received a few dozen phone calls a year from people looking for work but I was the first he had hired. He didn’t want to run a company, he said, he just wanted to do what he knew how to do and get paid for it.

He hadn’t initially intended to teach me anything. He figured he would just use me to run for tools and to be an extra set of hands, and by the looks of his hands, hard and course and nicked and scarred in so many places, he needed an extra set of hands; but he took a liking to me and he started to show me how to fish wire with fiberglass rods; that is long plastic sticks the thickness of a pencil screwed together. We would drill a hole in the floor and shove the rods into the wall and then we would cut a box out where a receptacle would eventually go and we would retrieve the rods and pull the wire up to our opening.

Tony also showed me how electricity is constantly seeking the ground, literally, and how the electricity chases the ground through the filament of a light bulb and down to the grounded wire and in so doing heats up the filament until it glows. He showed me how to bend metal tubing into nice neat shapes and to connect the tubing with threaded connectors and to insert them into junction boxes where we would eventually pull our wires together and tie our circuits with red and yellow wire– nuts. He showed me how to land the wires inside of an electrical breaker-panel and to tie them into circuit-breakers and grounded bars. He showed me how the wires had to have neat bends so that the work would be distinguishable from amateur work. He taught me how the different size breakers corresponded to different thicknesses of wires; how amperes were the equivalent of heat and that thicker wires could handle more heat and so they were protected by the breaker according to how much heat the wires could tolerate; if the wire got too hot the breaker would sense too high a temperature and shut the electricity off to that wire. Tony showed me how to tie an electrical service into the service lines coming in from the street. He touched the energized wire with his tongue to show me that it wouldn’t hurt me so long as I was not grounded, and then he crimped the wires together using a large crimping tool and some butt-splices; hollow aluminum tubing used to join the wires together. For the most part, though, I did the grunt work. I pounded copper colored eight foot ground rods into the hard earth with a sledge hammer and I pulled wire and crawled into tight soot filled attics and drilled holes. In short, in just a few months I had learned enough to get hurt working by myself, but I had absorbed enough knowledge to warrant a raise to nine dollars an hour cash.

I was a fast study and I came to enjoy doing the electrical work with Tony. I appreciated the satisfaction of being able to look back at my work and actually seeing the fruit of my labor, a feeling I never quite felt while pushing paper. I even enjoyed the physical workout and I started to develop a toned physique. I also began to have aspirations of being able to do some of the more complicated tasks without supervision; and Tony let me try tying an electrical panel on my own. When I was finished he told me what a good job I had done, but then went on to critique my work pointing out some small mistakes I had made and showing me how I had to really tighten the screws that held the wires so that they didn’t come loose; “Loose wires cause fires!” he said looking into my eyes with a dire expression. Still I was as happy as a schoolboy to get a pat on the back and to accomplish what at one time seemed like an unachievable task.

The downside to doing the electrical work with Tony was that we worked until Tony said it was time to quit and sometimes we worked until well after sunset and I was left to face my fear of darkness alone. I was safe enough walking to my car as I always waited for Tony to leave with me so that I would not have to walk alone; but I was spooked during the drive home alone and while walking, or rather sprinting, from my car to the house. During the drive home I drove with the interior light on in the car and the radio playing to give myself a false sense of security. Once home I would sprint from the car to the door of the house and on up the stairs until I reached the safety of my apartment with a basting of sweat pouring from my pores and my heart racing like a stock-car engine.

And Sarah, poor Sarah, was forced to stay at home all day. She had missed too much of the school year already and would have to make the entire year up the following Fall. On top of that I still needed to create a new identity for her so that she could go to school without drawing the attention of nosy school teachers that would bring the authorities down on me. I hadn’t given that problem a lot of thought but I figured we had until the start of the next school year to solve our problem. I knew that I would have to obtain the birth certificate of a mentally handicapped child or a child who was missing or who had died young. Some solution would present itself; I had heard that illegal aliens did it all the time. In the meantime I provided Sarah with an ample supply of children’s books and some young adult books. She was a voracious reader and I had a hard time keeping up with her appetite. I often stopped at used bookstores and thrift stores during my lunch hour to find books for her to read. When she returned to school she might be behind her piers in some subjects but she would be the best reader in her class.

And Sarah seemed happy in her role as homemaker; too happy perhaps. She had learned to cook well enough, in the brief time she had spent in the kitchen with Melanie, and she had a warm meal waiting fro me at the end of every hard day of work. She was only seven; but she had learned to make a variety of incredible dishes. She made stuffed shells in tomato sauce, lasagna that would make any Italian chef proud, stuffed peppers, manicotti, chicken parmesan (we couldn’t afford veal), and spaghetti and meatballs that tasted better than Catherine had ever made. And she would accompany each entrée with a side of baked potato, or mashed potato with chives or gravy, or French fries, and always another vegetable such as green beans or Brussels-sprouts, or thick stalks of asparagus covered in a butter sauce (despite the fact that she hated these green vegetables herself). And she would pack lunches for me every workday; thick sandwiches piled with turkey and ham and Swiss cheese or provolone and mustard and mayonnaise, or corned beef on rye with mustard, and always a little bag of chips and a soda with a little note in the bag reminding me to pick something up from the grocery on the way home, and a reminder of how much she loved me or telling me that I was the “best daddy in the whole world” which made me want to work even harder to actually live up to her accolades.

In addition to cooking Sarah also took care of the laundry and the housekeeping as well. Our apartment may not have been much to brag about, but it was always spotless. She kept the bathroom so clean that I hated to bathe for fear of leaving such filthy black dirt and grime, as I inevitably would, in such a pristine tub because I would leave it smeared with large black hand-prints and a film of the filthiest slime, the result of my labor; crawling through soot filled attics and dusty basements.

In the evenings Sarah and I resorted to old habits watching old black and white movies together on the living-room sofa wrapped in blankets. Or sometimes when we grew bored with television we would both read. Since Sarah spent most of her free time during the day reading by springtime she had moved well beyond the basic children’s books of her age group and preferred reading the classics, revised for children to accommodate a less refined vocabulary, while I read the latest fiction by John Updyke or Alice Monroe or Andre Dubus or Nadine Gordimer.

On Friday or Saturday nights Amber would stop by, telling her husband, who after a while had called off his private detective, that she was spending the evening with Melanie or with her sister and we would order pizza and play board games until Sarah grew tired and fell asleep. Then Amber and I would slip into my bed and copulate like wild animals.

Afterwards I would fantasize aloud about her leaving her husband and coming to live with me, a sour subject for her to be sure because she knew that she would never do so. She couldn’t bear to leave her children and she couldn’t imagine raising them in my pathetic apartment or on my pathetic income. She was reluctant, too, to give up the lush house that she and her husband had built and that she had poured so much sweat into. She had no reservations at all about continuing our affair indefinitely though. She said that we were so sexually simpatico that she couldn’t imagine giving me up.

If it were to come down to making a choice between leaving her entire family behind or letting go of me, she said, that I would be her hands down choice. I doubted this was true, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and I owed her so much, and I so looked forward to our evenings together.

Amber prided herself in being a great lover and she seemed to go overboard trying to prove that she was the worlds best. She did things that I could not have imagined, drawing on my body like a straw to a milkshake; reducing me to a puddle of sweat. During those short nights she used up all of the stamina that I had saved from the time she had last left me. And still there was something missing, a void that she discarded in her wake. And so, as was the norm, she would leave me to my cold and lonely bed at two o’clock or so in the morning, to stare at my ceiling longing for her warm body to be next to mine.

Sometimes, after she had fulfilled her weekend stripping obligations, Melanie would stop by to see Sarah and I, occasionally accompanied by Amber or by her new guardian Christopher (a large handsome black man of whom I must admit I was a bit jealous), or sometimes Melanie simply came alone. When Melanie came alone, after Sarah fell asleep, we would talk for hours. We often flirted with each other as well but ultimately we would turn our backs on the attraction that we could not help but to feel for one another. I didn’t see myself as attractive and I didn’t understand her attraction to me. I was much older than she was, and I didn’t think that I looked very appealing at all in my black beard and mustache. But I often wondered how it would have been to have her as a lover; her warm Beautiful body next to mine for an entire night instead of the empty bed that I would have to endure after making love to Amber. But alas I could not betray Amber and I didn’t dare ask Melanie to do such a thing causing damage to their friendship.

But the more I talked to Melanie the closer we became and the more I entrusted her with the girth of my story; my having been accused of killing my wife and our ensuing flight. I half expected her to be appalled and to think me guilty, but I felt the need to confide in another adult and Amber, with her short visits, had become less a confidant than I would have thought or hoped. She rarely even called by winter’s end. She simply showed up to be serviced once a week as though I were her stud bull. But Melanie surprised me with her understanding and acceptance of me.

“I know people and I can tell that you wouldn’t hurt anyone unless you were provoked.”

“You mean like when I was your security.”

“That was different. You were protecting a lady in distress not attacking a lady.”

“I only wish I could remember it. I still think you made it up to spare me.”

“You really were wonderful. By looking at you I wouldn’t have thought you would have had that kind of strength or ability.”

“I’ve really only been in one fight all my life before that one, and I never even struck a single blow in that fight.”

“Well you must have a switch that you flip when you need to be tough because you were my hero that night.”

With her story of my heroics Melanie made me feel like a courageous man, although with my secret phobia it was hard for me to feel gallant. The truth was that I had a hard time believing that I could have done something so brave and heroic as she claimed and not have remembered it. I was all but convinced that she had made the whole story up to make me feel better. I mean if I had fired a gun wouldn’t there have been police? Wouldn’t the cops have showed up at her front door? Her story was suspect, but I liked to hear her tell it anyway. She made me feel like a man. But the truth was probably that I had been conked on the head and knocked unconscious and she had managed to get us both out without further incident, probably with the threat of crying rape or something.

Sarah and I settled into a comfortable routine and despite my continued espousement I stopped having those horrible disturbing dreams of having sex with her. I wondered if they might not have been inspired by the combination of the fact that she was not actually my daughter by blood and that I loved her more than anyone could love another human being. No doubt my espousement of her also played a role, and that her reference to me on rare occasions as lover contributed as well, but I had never had such dreams before Catherine died. I was just glad to have those dreams behind me. And Sarah had resigned herself to sleeping in her own bed at night and rarely crept into my bed in the mornings anymore.

One Friday evening, after Sarah had gone to sleep, Amber and I were in my bedroom with the door closed in the middle of a heated session with Amber on top of me, bouncing like a clown on a pogo stick, and I thought I heard my bedroom door creak open so I grabbed Amber by the waist and stopped her in mid thrust.

“What’s the matter? What are you doing? I was so close?” Amber’s eyes were green with anger and her tone was demeaning, as though she were scolding a subordinate.

“I heard something.” I said defensively. “What was it?”

I craned my neck and noticed that the door was slightly ajar, “I think it was Sarah.”

Amber got up and opened the door but there was no one there. “You’re being paranoid.” She said. She crept out of the bedroom and checked on Sarah and then came back into the room and scowled at me.

“Don’t ever pull that shit with me again.” She seethed.

I sat slack-jawed and dumbfounded. I wondered what I had done that was so inappropriate. I was at a loss for words.

I thought little more of the incident. My imagination must have gotten the best of me, I thought, as regarded Sarah looking into the bedroom while we made love. I worried so that Sarah would spy me making love to Amber and that it would somehow injure her psyche. She was obviously already damaged goods if she had, as I suspected, killed her mother, and I didn’t want her to be corrupted in any other way. I didn’t want her to have any animosity towards Amber because of our physical relationship. I didn’t want her to confuse her role as daughter with that of lover, or to be jealous again, as she obviously was of Catherine.

And my paranoia that Sarah might have been spying on me was quickly assuaged when the next day she woke me to a breakfast in bed with a tray of bacon and rye toast and orange juice and a thick three-egg mushroom omelet that I ate while she gushed about how wonderful she thought Amber was.

“Why can’t she come over more often?” she asked.

I carved a hunk of my omelet and raised it to my mouth, “She’s a busy lady.” I said relieved that Sarah was so receptive to the company of another woman, and then I shoveled the gob of egg into my gullet.

“Maybe you should ask her daddy to let her sleep over next week so that we can play games all night long.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.” I promised as I forked a glob of mushroom and cheese into my mouth.

And every day that week Sarah packed me the usual wonderful lunch with a note reminding me of how much she loved me.

On Friday evening after work I stopped by Melanie’s house, still wearing my soiled work clothes. It had been a particularly hard work day as the weather had turned unusually cold and I had spent most of the day crawling around a frigid dirty attic on my knees drilling holes. By the time I was done, given the cold temperature outside and more importantly in the attic, I was frozen to the bone. I would have liked to have grabbed a blood-warming glass of bourbon with Tony after work, but of course he thought that I was a raging alcoholic so I couldn’t very well ask him to stop off for a drink. So I stopped by to see Melanie in the hopes of pouring just a little hard liquor into my system to chase the chill from my blood.

Melanie, as it turned out, had no stripping engagements, and we sat and shared a half a bottle of whiskey mixed with cola and ice. We talked and we laughed and we grew drunk and foolish and I completely forgot about the little obligation waiting for me at home. I hadn’t truly indulged myself since the last night I spent with Catherine and I did like a drink from time to time.

Even drunk, though, I knew that what we were doing was wrong when Melanie and I found ourselves entangled in a long passionate kiss on her sofa, and then we felt and fondled one-another, both our hands exploring territory that should have remained unfamiliar. We were violating our friendship to Amber, like Judas with his silver only we traded on lust, by touching each other, caressing the tender parts, tickling the sensitive curves and tasting each other’s fruits. But ever since I had first seen the voluptuous curves of Melanie’s naked body undulating in front of so many men I had wondered how her supple body would taste and feel. But she had been the forbidden fruit and I blocked her sensuality from my consciousness. I kept my eyes from wondering; wandering. But uninhibited by the taint of liquor my judgment was clouded and once I had tasted Melanie’s lips it followed that her shoulder would be just as sweet and tender and her arms, by extension, and her smallish round breasts and her navel and her thighs just as tasty. And we were naked on her living room floor in the time it took to exhale a heated breath, and the alcohol deluded my brain into misguided rationalizations that seem absurd upon sober reconsideration. By the time we had finished we were so drunk that we fumbled to her bedroom and made clumsy guilt-soaked love before contrition got the best of me and I dressed hurriedly and stumbled remorsefully from her chamber and thoughtlessly and fearlessly (the whiskey having erased my apprehension) into the night and out to my car and ultimately home.

When I walked through my kitchen door Sarah was holding a large kitchen knife in her hand and I could tell from her expression that she was pissed. She was like an angry midget housewife, standing on a milk-crate in the kitchen with her tiny apron wrapped about her waist, one hand on her hip and the other pointing the gleaming knife at me.

“I made a special dinner tonight. Where were you?”

“I’m sorry,” I slurred, “I stopped by to see Melanie honey. I didn’t know you made a special dinner.”

Sarah stepped off of the milk-crate and stormed toward me and dropped the knife onto the kitchen table and sulked out of the room with tears streaming down her face, “You don’t love me! You love Melanie and Amber, but you don’t love me.”

I was heart sick. I followed her into her room and I picked her up and put her on my lap but she fought me all the way, kicking and covering her face. “I love you honey, more than anyone in the whole world.” I did my best not to slur my words but I was piss drunk.

“No you don’t. You just want to kiss on Melanie and Amber like they do in the movies.”

“Honey, I could never love them as much as I love you.”

She pushed me away, “Go eat your dinner. I worked on it for four hours. You could at least eat your dinner.” She was so pathetic and adorable at the same time. In the fog of the whiskey I felt like I had somehow betrayed her. I had certainly let her down. But she made me feel as though I had been unfaithful, as to a wife. It was strange feeling subordinate to a child.

Food was the last thing I wanted at that point, but I wasn’t about to disappoint Sarah any further. I shouldn’t have stopped off after work. The guilt of having slept with Melanie was beginning to eat at me too. I hoped that Melanie wouldn’t say anything to Amber. I cut up and shoveled what should have been a delicious breaded veal cutlet into my mouth followed by heaping helpings of mashed potatoes and butter-corn, but to my churning intestines pickled in hooch the food was as vile to me as ipecac. Poor Sarah, I thought. I had let her down. I shouldn’t have done that. I remember the disappointment I felt as a child when my father had made a promise to take us to a movie or some such event only to come home smelling of whiskey much too late to fulfill his promise. What right had I to go out and have fun without Sarah while she was home slaving over a stove at the age of seven. I was all that she had and I had left her alone at home while I went out and had fun. And the fun I had had seemed to weigh like a rock in my stomach as I shoveled food into my face.

When I was finished I stumbled into the living room and I sat next to Sarah on the couch. She was watching an old Bela Laugosi vampire movie on the television. I pulled her to me and she reluctantly let me sit close to her, but I fell asleep in the middle of the movie and must have begun to snore loudly because Sarah elbowed my in the stomach.

“If you’re not going to stay awake you can just go to bed.” She sounded like an angry little wife.

“I’ll stay awake.” I said, but as hard as I fought to keep myself focused, before long I was snoring again. Once more she elbowed me in the gut.

“I thought you were going to stay awake?”

“I’m sorry honey; I guess I had better go to bed.”

I got up and staggered to my room filled with onus and I stripped myself, down to by boxer shorts, of my filthy work clothes and I collapsed into the bed still stinking of whiskey and Melanie’s coital scent. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping, but I remember having a dream where I was in a fight with Tommy Sullivan. I was throwing and dodging punches after accusing him of killing Catherine. But Tommy somehow got the upper hand and he ended up sitting on my stomach bouncing up and down on top of me. I remember asking him to stop but he wouldn’t. And then I realized that I wasn’t dreaming. That someone was actually bouncing up and down on my stomach and I felt like I was going to throw up. I slowly opened my burning bloodshot eyes and I was horrified to find Sarah, completely naked, straddling my waist (I still had my boxer-shorts on) and bouncing up and down on my belly as if she were trying to fornicate.

“No! Sarah, what are you doing?” I grabbed her by the waist and tried to shove her off of my stomach but she slid her tiny feet beneath my thighs and continued to bounce. I did my best to keep from heaving. I had grown extremely nauseous from a combination of the whiskey in my gut, Sarah’s bouncing on my abdomen and the revulsion of the image of my daughter simulating sexual intercourse with me. I sat up at the waist and I pushed Sarah back onto the bed, perhaps a little too hard. “No! Sarah, what are you doing?”

Sarah began to sob heavily, “I’m doing what married people do, like you and mommy did and like you do with Amber. It’s what married people do, daddy!” she screamed as tears ran down her reddened face.

“But baby,” I covered my nakedness and I tried to pick her up; I wanted to cradle her, “I’m your daddy. We’re not married.”

“Yes we are! We went to church, remember?”

“Yes honey, I remember, but that was just pretend.”

Sarah pushed me away and jumped off of the bed and ran out of the room. I rolled off of the side of my bed and I heaved into the little blue garbage can I kept by my nightstand. I heaved until my dinner was gone. I heaved until all of the whiskey that was left in my stomach was gone. I heaved until the image embroidered on my brain of Melanie was gone. But I couldn’t heave away the vision of Sarah on top of me naked. I got up, staggering and stumbling, carrying the garbage pale filled with my vomit while holding a sheet about my waist and I went into the bathroom and fell to the floor and poured my puke into the toilet. I turned the faucet on in the tub and rinsed the pail and then I crawled into the tub banging my chin on the side as I rolled into the tiny white porcelain cavity. I needed to sober up to deal with Sarah. The poor child was so confused.

She deserved better than me. I was filled to my eyebrows with peccancy. I began to think that maybe Sarah would have been better-off if I had left her with Catherine’s parents and gone to jail. At least then she would have been in school. At least then I wouldn’t have further espoused her. At least then she wouldn’t have been trying to fuck me.

I remember thinking: Fuck Oedipus and his whore of a mother! Fuck women! Fuck Catherine for dying. Fuck her for cheating! I have never wanted to be dead more than at that moment, still stinking drunk, scalding water pouring over me as I tried to burn the shame and guilt from my body. I swore I would never drink again. I swore that I would never espouse Sarah again. I swore that I would never cheat again. I was confused and vile and filled with self-loathing. I was a despicable human being. I wanted to march down to the local police precinct and turn myself in to the authorities. In my head I screamed “I’m the one you’re looking for. I’m the murderer! And now I’m a child molester too! I’m the piece of shit that cheated on his married girlfriend with her best friend!” I just wanted to blow my brains out and rid the world of my existence. But before I did any of that I needed to make things right for Sarah. I needed to straighten her head out. I needed to show her that it was possible for me to love her more than anyone could love someone without inserting my prick into her. I needed her to know how much I loved and adored her, but as a father not a wife. I held my head under the scalding water and I let the stream cauterize my scalp. I used a washcloth to scour the stink from my flesh, from my arms and my face and my chest and my belly (where Sarah had pressed her vagina) and may prick where Melanie had wrapped her open cunt, until all of my body parts were red and burning.

When I got out of the tub I painfully toweled myself dry and went to my bedroom. I was still sick to my stomach with the acrid taste of whiskey tattooed on my tongue, like a permanent stain. I looked at the clock on my nightstand. It was only just past three in the morning. I could still smell the stench of vomit in my room. I dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a white cotton tee-shirt. I went back to the bathroom and I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I needed to be clean. I made coffee and drank it down, scorching my throat. I needed to be sober. Then I went to Sarah’s door and I knocked softly.