Don't Kiss Me: Stories(6)

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Late morning, nine holes with an old lobbyist friend. After lunch, nap. During nap, I’ll do my damnedest to enter my favorite dream, the dream in which I’ve mounted Jackie Kennedy on the steps of my alma mater. It’s a cold night and we are under my coat. The stars are like flecks of ice on a dark ocean. After nap, dinner with Pat. After dinner, telephone hour. After telephone hour, bed. Pat calls our bedroom the Secret Garden. Because of all the florals. Like we are preparing for the casket. Tonight I will reach for my wife the way I reach for Jackie in that dream. Like I mean it. Not open to discussion. It’s not Jackie Kennedy that is the draw. It is that in the dream neither of us has seen the inside of the White House. We are just two people getting primitive. History corrected. I can taste it like a brine: so many mistakes. Tonight I want to touch Pat. See her the way she was. Skin like cream, bright bright eyes. Present corrected. Forget how the world has turned on its axis for all of eternity. And will long after I’m gone.





DALLAS


Dallas’s momma kicked him out three nights before. He slept the first two nights next to the old man next door on a yellowed twin mattress. The bed was up on cinder blocks and the old man used their hollow centers to display his valuables, which looked to be made up mostly of chipped chess pieces and dinged-up model cars and pink bunches of toilet paper Dallas guessed were supposed to look like paper flowers, or something. The old man was out on his porch when Dallas’s momma chased him out the house with his own switchblade, and soon as she slammed the door the old man waved Dallas over with his old-man claw, said, They’s biscuits and jam and shit in the kitchen, help yeself. The old man had cable, and besides Dallas wasn’t a snob or anything, if the old man needed someone’s arm to hold at night Dallas wasn’t fixing to call the authorities over it, except during the third night the old man tried to roll over onto Dallas, whispering about how Dallas could have anything in the house, money, things worth money, even that guitar in the corner, and Dallas at first just let it happen, he couldn’t quite catch up to why there should be any bother with it, and then something surged up in his gut, something tentacled, and he pushed the man off him and ran out the house with his pants and shoes in one hand and the guitar in the other, and then when his bare feet hit the cold grass in the yard he thought maybe how that was the first time he’d ever actively decided he didn’t want something to happen, and he wondered if that meant he was a man, at least according to what his momma would think was a man. He looked toward his momma’s house, could see the light from the TV in the front room through the curtains, his momma just inside relaxing and enjoying herself with a glass of beer resting comfortably on that big whale belly while he looked longingly in, her own son shirtless, and Dallas put on his pants and shoes and walked past her house and the one after that and then the one after that, and he turned a corner and walked all the way to the park and slept in the soft dirt under the monkey bars. In the morning a redheaded child stood over him and asked him could he please move, she was trying to practice. The sky was the color of the buttermilk his momma drank every morning and it hurt his eyes. He sat on a swing and watched the child for a while. She pumped her legs and grunted. The guitar wasn’t anywhere his eyes could see and he tried to work up some emotion about that but there was none.

He walked over and asked the child for some change. She stopped moving and hung there, arms straight. Her hair shimmered in defiance of such an ugly sky. For a minute Dallas saw friendship in her big child’s eyes, and he felt his heart open a little, like a blossom, or a fist, then she told him, Take yeself to a shirt store, you all burnt up, then take yeself to a churchly place where you could find a bath. Dallas said, No one likes a redhead anyway, and grownups don’t bathe, they shower, and then he stuck his fingers in her pockets and fished out a nickel and a dime and a colorless gumball he popped immediately into his mouth. In the scuffle the child dropped down and fell to her knees and let loose a warbling cry Dallas recognized as mostly anger, and he turned and ran. After a few blocks he slowed and spit the gum at his feet, kept spitting every few steps because it felt appropriate. Yessir, he said as loud as he pleased, just exactly like a fist.

Dallas knew there was a Circle K a few streets over and he walked there to pass some time. Inside he loitered in the home-aids aisle and pretended to be choosing between two different types of lightbulbs. When the girl at the counter wasn’t looking he snatched a shirt with Who Farted? printed on it and put it on inside out. He moved to the soda machine and cupped his hand under the orange Fanta and helped himself while the girl tended to the donut case. Dallas watched a man survey the candy selection at the counter. After a while he settled on a packet of licorice rope and some Goobers. Dallas walked over and said, I’ll give you fifteen cents for a lift to wherever you going, and without meeting Dallas’s eye the man said, Surely can, I’m a Christian ain’t I?

Dallas rode in the cab of the man’s truck. It felt like afternoon but he couldn’t be sure. That odd sky lay above him like a yellowed sheet but quite a breeze got worked up and whipped around him and through his hair and it was all Dallas could do not to open his mouth and swallow up big mouthfuls of it. The truck slowed and turned and Dallas saw that the man was going to the movies. He wondered what kind of man this was, going to a movie in the middle of the day, but he was grateful to arrive at some kind of destination.