MARLIN HAD ASKED HIS mother the question, six years earlier.
He was younger, but years past being draped over that line between boy and man. He had returned from a visit with his dying father. It had only been a month prior the doctor told them he was being eaten from the inside out. Dr. Whitten had seemed surprised the family had not been in the know, as Mason Stains had gotten his diagnosis almost half a year earlier. But Mason liked to carry weight and what could be heavier and more personal than one’s own demise. The man was champion at Sisyphus-ing that shit until he could no longer do so, and he just dropped his aching arms and let that boulder roll.
Marlin came into the trailer and sat down, late breeze silent and just as weak. He had been home for nearly twenty minutes before his mother emerged from the hall and noticed him.
“How was that?”
The small woman asked. A question that was more habitual courtesy than functional inquiry often asked after a funeral or a root canal, where the best answer is really not to answer at all. Marlin looked at her with tired blue eyes that always seemed ready to shed water.
Marlin took off his hat and dropped it on the floor by his feet. He paid no mind to the cat that appeared to sniff at the sweaty fabric.
“It was fine…as far as watching the man who sired you…then left you…then wanted to be part of your life again, watching that man evaporate a visit at a time.” Marlin frowned, trying to not let his anger at the circumstances boil over onto his well-meaning mother. “It’s like a photograph fading before your very eyes. Like someone erases the picture real slow…”
The older woman nodded; her lips formed a curt line. Her eyes held all the compassion he’d ever wanted or needed. “I know,” she muttered. Tall minutes of silence circled them like buzzards.
“I hate this.” Marlin’s voice was a gavel bang. “I hate that I can’t even be easily wrecked by my father dying…it has to be as complicated as everything else. Rooms full of selfish envy and sadness, dishonesty is so rich in our veins…” He trailed off and whimpered under his breath.
“My, you do have a way with
words.” The woman smiled wanly and then licked her lips before continuing on. “I once read where a human is just a dollar’s worth of chemicals and water. I think when I first heard this fact it was eighty-nine cents worth so I’m allowing for inflation. But I’ve known people who seemed to be worth so much more and I’ve known others I wouldn’t waste on a ragweed garden. People are people, Son. Stupid animals, yet they are also all the gods and devils. They are shadow boxes that only flicker the image we give the candle for. You’ve a right to be angry and hurting. You are losing something you’ve only recently gotten back…
Her bony hand on his shoulder was a millstone.
“Was my father a good man?”
Her eyes narrowed and the breath she took in through her nose was an audible hiss, she reached over to the cluttered table by the chair and fished a smoke from the pack, lit it, and perched it on her lip. She sucked in the smoke and held it prisoner for a long minute. When she spoke, the words made a wizard’s entrance through the cancerous mist.
“He was. When we first met…he was the nicest man. A beautiful man. A kind man.” She stared at the wall and kept her eyes from his for the duration of her speaking.
“One time, early on, we was talking…I loved listening to that man talk. Stories of his growing up poor with all his brothers and sisters. Their adventures. Life on the mountain. He had such a reverence and that rich voice. Filled you up like fresh bread.”
Another deep drag. The room had grown so quiet, he could hear the small crinkling sound of shredded tobacco burning in its paper chrysalis, to be reborn in seconds as silvery smoke.
“I told your father that I had grown up near the lake but had never been on it. Oh, I’d swum in it countless times but had never taken a boat out on it. Never been further than maybe twenty feet from shore. So, one weekend, he picked me up. We was still dating, mostly to the movies or the diner, and I asked what we were doing, and he ignored me. Just sat
there driving with a stupid half-smile on his face. I started getting mad, as can be my way, and badgered him the whole drive. When he parked by the edge of the lake and we got out, he took my hand. We walked to the edge of the water. It lapped the small, pebbled beach loudly and smelled divine, like years. I could smell time in it. Ancient creatures that swirled beneath its surface eons ago. I closed my eyes and saw schools of white fish swimming that had long ago been digested in the bellies of the natives ‘round here.”
She stopped talking and smoked another cigarette to nothing.
Marlin winced.
“I know you’re afraid of water. Scared of boats, Hell, you used to cry when it’d rain too long.” she chuckled and after lighting a third cigarette, continued.
“Your father had gotten a boat, nothing much, just a simple aluminum fishing boat, one of them squarish ones, probably his brother Jim’s, and he told me he was going to take me out on the lake. We would drift under the stars for the first time. He helped me in and pushed it out before he jumped in himself. He rowed us out nearer the center of the lake. The few buildings on the shore looked like toys, like them little cardboard houses that come with train sets. I looked over the side and the water was just glistening black. As we stilled and the small waves slowed. The water calmed. It looked like a mirror. We were sitting in the middle of a giant mirror. I looked at your dad and he was smiling, and I think I was crying. I said, “Oh, it’s so beautiful.” He laughed. What a laugh that man had…and he says to me, ‘Look up then down’, so I did. Marlin, there were so many stars that night. The sky was crammed full and when I looked up at them and then down at the black water, the stars were reflected there as clear and well. It was like we were floating in space.”
The old woman was crying
then, quietly, and tears had streaked her cheeks, blooming them ruddy. She sniffled and stubbed out her smoke. “Next to you, that was the best thing he ever gave me.”
“And Merle?” Marlin whispered but the woman did not hear or gave no indication to acknowledge if she had. The muslin smile that flitted to her lips to be gone just as quick could have meant anything.
Marlin nodded and leaned back in the chair. He closed his eyes and tried to recall any moment in his childhood not marred by longing or guilt or regret. Zero is an easy number to count to.
“You asked me if your dad was a good man…I think most wicked men see a good man’s face in the mirror. Least I ‘spect that’s what they reckon to themselves…I’d not say he was ever truly wicked; I don’t think he ever done any of the things he did to purposefully hurt another. He was selfish. He’d grown up having to share everything and when he was grown, he wanted to have it all to himself. We all are or can be. Your father just had no truck to say no, especially when it came to saying it to himself. I don’t think he ever even saw the things he did as bad or hurtful…just what he wanted.” Her dark lips lifted, parted, allowed more words to tumble out.
“Nothing stronger than the lies we tell ourselves. How’s that old saying go…If hope was enough and wishes were sins, I can’t remember…”
She trailed off and her eyes, small pools of brown shine clouded, and moisture escaped to run down her hollow cheeks.
“But I can tell you one undeniable truth, you’re a good man, Son.”
“It’s all I aim for, I guess.” Marlin stood and kicked off his boots. “I’m going to have a shower and head for bed. Being is tiresome.” He stomped back down the hallway before she had even looked in his direction.
“Being what?”
“Just being,” and then he was just footsteps on the thin carpet.
“Ok, goodnight, Son.” She plucked one more cigarette from the pack and smoked in the plain glow of the television, where a muted Tom Selleck chased a man on a beach.
2001, ONE WEEK FROM the end of June
Marlin counted the bobbing bright of the fireflies, the thick grass beneath them whispering in the evening breeze.
Some summers, there were barely any to note, then there were others, like this one, where the bouncing dots of luminescence seemed downright otherworldly in number. The fairy magic of fantasy movies and Disney cartoons.
Marlin Stains sat on the bowing wooden steps that led to the front porch of the trailer, a bottle of soda in a slender hand. Condensation dripped onto the gravel at his feet, darkening it to a deep slate. The last fingers of the sun were pulling over the mountain, with the sky darkening in its slow chase. Dusk always seemed like a gasp from tired lungs, He thought.
Marlin squinted at the house across the road. It crouched where it had as long as he could remember, its unlighted windows were black mouths that hung open, yet spoke not at all. The porch roof sagged, and a few rotten boards hung from the awning like ribs. Marlin drank the last of his cola and dropped the bottle in the crate by the steps. The clink echoed across the quiet evening.
Mr. Wish, or Aloysius Wesley Garman, as he was christened at birth, had been in the ground nearly a dozen years, but if Marlin closed his tired eyes, he could still see the old man. Sitting in his rusted folding chair at the back edge of the driveway, smoking a seemingly endless stream of Pall Malls. He could almost hear the water slosh in the old bucket that sat by the old man’s feet, the one that held his beer in melting ice. He could hear the gunshot of the tab being pulled and the slurp of foam as Mr. Wish sucked down that first gulp. He closed his eyes and listened to the bats squeaking as they dove for mosquitoes and biting flies. It took seconds for even that slight sampler of sounds to solidify into firmer memories.
“You ever done a thing that you regretted, son?” The old man’s words rode on the smoke that fled his mouth. Marlin thought of bluish phantoms escaping a gaping cavern. Wish’s large fingers looked like ginger root as they held the smoking butt between them.
“Once.” The boy shuffled his gaze along with his feet, though he remained in place. His voice
was very small in the big night.
In the feeble reach of the porch light, Mr. Wish looked positively ancient. Wrinkles upon wrinkles formed run-on sentences, punctuated with liver spots and moles. He brought the small stub of a cigarette to his nearly toothless mouth and sucked so hard; the end screamed red like a wound. He squinted at Marlin as the smoke leaked from nostrils and lips.
“Once ain’t never been fed, Boy.”
He let that hang like tallow for a moment before throwing more sticky words at it.
“Once is a hungry thing. But if’s you feed it, it’ll grow to twice…then that to three times and before you know it you done grown up a bad fuckin’ habit.” He flicked the dead cigarette to the ground where it joined dozens of others. He pulled the crumpled red pack from his shirt pocket and had another nesting on his lip almost instantaneously, like a magic trick. The lighter chinked and the slight breeze carried the metallic ozone smell of the fluid to the boy’s nostrils.
Marlin listened and found his gaze not stuck to the old man, but the air above him, as though his scalding words flew about him like a swarm of gnats awaiting the hungry mouths of bats.
“Well, boy…what was it you done?”
Mr. Wish showed his few teeth when he asked it, the few he had were crooked and gray like old cemetery stones.
“I killed my brother…”
“Like Cain?” The old man said it as though the words were wrapped in chain too heavy to quite spit out.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure who that is.”
“The Bible, son.”
“We don’t have one.”
The old man’s features bled shadowy, ...
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