The Mutual UFO Network Page 23

  “That Doogie Roy,” Maizy told me. “That SOB. I don’t know whether to love him or cuss him to his grave.”

  It was easy, handing over the anhydrous. All I had to do was meet Doogie out in the country somewhere, maybe pull back up one of those old oil lease roads where the brush hid us, and bleed a little off the truck into some propane tanks. You know, the kind you all use on your gas grills. Doogie took it from there. He kept a little anhydrous for himself and sold the rest to whoever needed it to make meth and then split the cash with me. I saved it all, hid it away in an old Maxwell House can in the garage. It was more money than I’d ever seen, and I was afraid to touch it, for fear that once I started spending it, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  “You’re a good man, Baby James,” he said. “You and me? We’re going places.”

  But we weren’t. I knew that. No place but to hell in a handbasket, like my daddy always claimed. I had that money, but I was still eaten up on the inside.

  Back in the winter, I’d started to talk to April. For a while, no one knew, not even Maizy, but days when I was out on my route, I’d just start in, and what I’d say went something like this: Honey, it’s your daddy. April Renee, it’s me. I’d tell her about the weather, just ordinary things like that: how much snow was on the ground, the way the air tasted like pennies, the whistle the wind made through the truck’s window seals—things she might have forgotten in the twenty years she’d been gone. Things that were easy for me to say.

  I expected she was in a place where there was no winter. That’s the blessing, I suppose—one sunny day after another. Sort of like when you take off in an airplane and it’s raining until you get up so high you break through to sunshine. There you are, up in the clear blue, looking down on all those clouds, and you don’t give another thought to the rain and muck you left below you. It’s not yours anymore. That’s heaven, I guess: sunshine and blue skies and a carpet of fluffy white clouds and the worries of the living tossed away.

  “No, that’d be hell,” Maizy said when I finally told it all to her. “Every day the same. Baby, I’m guessing there’s snow in heaven, just enough to pretty things up once in a while, and those fall days when the leaves have turned and there’s just enough of a snap in the air to make you feel all bright and new. I bet it even rains a little, one of those drizzly rains that April liked to go out and play in. Remember?”

  I told her I did, but I was miserable because I’d forgotten how April liked to hold her arms out to her sides and spin around with her head thrown back and her mouth open, trying to catch raindrops. I’d forgotten how she sounded when she giggled. I tried to close my eyes and hear it, and even though I got close, I never could manage it, not really, if you know what I mean. You think the voices of the dead will stay with you forever, but that’s not really the truth of it.

  “April was lucky to have you as a daddy,” Doogie said to me the next day, and just like that I was filled with shame because I hadn’t been a good daddy at all. Not only had I made poor use of the money meant to help us through her sickness, now I’d begun to forget the things that made her April Renee.

  This year there was a woman over in Sparta who convinced people that her little girl had leukemia. She doped her up, shaved her head, claimed she was taking her to the hospital for chemo, and then when the girl came out of the dope and didn’t remember any of it, her mama told her it was because of the chemo medicine messing up her mind. She made that little girl believe she was dying, all for the money that came rolling in. There’s no saving that woman. Me? I’d like to think there’s hope.

  Eventually I told Doogie that was the end of the anhydrous; he’d have to get it somewhere else.

  We were out in the country, back up an old lane where blackberry bramble and persimmon saplings were filling in what had once been the path to someone’s farmhouse. There wasn’t a sound but the wind through the brush and leaves and a blue jay jeering.

  “Baby James, you don’t mean that,” Doogie said.

  But I did. I convinced myself I was on my way to better times. “It is what I mean,” I told him.

  He laid his hand on my shoulder and chuckled. “It’s not that easy, my man.” He gave me a shake. “You’re in with me now. We both know too much about each other.”

  “Could be,” I said. “But that’s the end of it, Doogie. I’m done.”

  In the days that followed, I’d drive up to the Lutheran church where Maizy and I tied the knot, and I’d tell myself life could start over. It was quiet there at the church, this little old country church up on a hill, a gravel road running by, pastures of timothy grass waving out to the horizon. Crows called, and that was a sound that put me at ease, coming so clear and sharp, no other noise around to clutter it up.

  I’d get to talking to April. I told her what I did with the money folks sent when she was sick, and I asked her to forgive me. All that money. All the time I spent scheming with it, looking forward to those checks coming in the mail. I told April all of it. How I ripped open those envelopes, tossed the “Wish you well” cards aside. I’m looking for a way to make it right, I told her, hoping that somewhere she was listening. April, I said, it’s not too late for your daddy. Honest, I believe it’s not. You just wait.

  From time to time, a car went by, a plume of dust trailing out behind, that head-banger rock and roll music blasting from the CD player. Kids. Maybe cranked up on meth. Who knows? All it takes is some anhydrous, some lithium batteries, some brake cleaning fluid, some Sudafed cold medicine, and you’re ready to set up shop. The Nazi Method, they call the recipe for cooking meth with anhydrous, because the Germans used it to keep their soldiers jazzed up during World War II. You can set up a lab anywhere: the woods, your house, a horse trailer. The cops even caught some kids cooking meth in a car in the high school parking lot. That’s how it is these days, and I’m sorry to say I ever had a part in it.

  Anyway, up at the church I thought about what sort of woman April would have been.

  Like Maizy, I imagine: strong-willed, stubborn, on the lookout for anyone bent on doing her rotten, but soft inside—yes, I believe that in spite of our troubles—soft like Maizy, or at least the girl she was that first time I walked into the Mister Peanut and threw her into a spin.

  She claims it was my voice. “All buttery,” she said one night, not long after April died. “Gentle. I told my mama. ‘Maizy,’ she said, ‘you can’t go wrong with a soft-spoken man.’”

  Maybe she’s right; maybe the quiet voice speaks from a peaceful heart. But what I figure is this: you can’t know what’s inside folks—hell, you can’t even know what’s inside yourself—until something happens to rough you up, something like your little girl dying and leaving you years and years to think on it, to feel it in your throat and chest, to never stop imagining that one morning you might open your eyes and there she’ll be. She’s with you and she’s not. It’s the here-and-gone of her that leaves a wound too deep and sore to ever heal.

  The few times Maizy and I tried to talk it out, it was no use. It was like opening a valve on an anhydrous tank if you don’t know what you’re doing. The ammonia leaks out, and you get burned. The anhydrous attaches itself to a moisture source: your eyes, your skin, your lungs. Ask any meth cook about everything that can go wrong: burns, explosions, suffocations. If you’re going to cook with “annie,” you best be on your toes.

  “It hurts me to remember too much,” Maizy said that time we were talking about April and what it must be like in her heaven. “I get to thinking about how you threw that money away—money those good people sent to help us out—and how it took me nearly a year to save enough to put a headstone on April’s grave. A year, Baby. I’d go out to the cemetery and see that little mound of dirt. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to forgive you for that.”

  The night the linden tree fell, Maizy and I didn’t know it. We were both sleeping. It was only the next morning, when we woke up and came out to the kitchen and looked out the window, that we saw
the tree down across our backyard. It fell on Maizy’s flowerbed, squashed her snapdragons and gladiolus and purple coneflowers. There’d been no storm, no wind, no thunder and lighting. A ninety-foot tree just crashed to the ground, and we didn’t hear it. My God, it must have shaken the house, but we kept on dreaming. “Didn’t you know it?” Maizy’s mama asked her when she came over to get a look. “No, Mama,” Maizy told her. “I guess Baby and me were both dead to the world.”

  How could that be? Maybe when April died, we stopped paying attention to what might be out there waiting to surprise us. Dead to the world. I’m thinking of those zombies now, the ones from those B movies like Night and Dawn—Hollywood zombies, though Doogie Roy claims we ought to call them Pittsburgh zombies, since all the important zombie movies were made there. That distinction aside, I’m thinking about how zombies always seem to have some dim memory of their past lives. Once they rise and start to walk, they can’t keep themselves from visiting the places they knew when they were among the living. At first they seem normal. Then you look in their eyes and you see how empty they are. It’s gone—whatever it is that made them who they were—and now they’re putting on a show, fooling people into thinking they’re human.

  One night, I came home from a quick run to the Toot-n-Totem for milk and Doogie Roy was sitting in my house. He was laying back in my recliner chair, his hands behind his head, his feet up. Maizy was on the couch, her arms crossed over her chest. It was almost midnight, and the TV was on but the sound was on mute. The picture flickered and changed. People waved their arms, stamped their feet, turned and marched out of rooms, but there was no way to tell what they were saying.

  “What’s the story?” I asked.

  Maizy got up off the couch and tramped on down the hall. Our bedroom door slammed shut, and somehow that vibration shook the TV off mute, and a woman’s voice said, “You sonofabitch.”

  Doogie couldn’t stop laughing.

  I kicked his feet off the chair. “What’s so funny?”

  “Everything,” he said. “I mean it, Baby James. This whole damned mess.”

  The cops were on to him. Earlier in the evening, they’d been in the Mister Peanut, wanting to ask him some questions. He heard them up front, and he slipped out the back and made his way to our house.

  I knew he’d told Maizy everything, about the meth and the anhydrous and how I’d been in on it. I knew that’s why she was steamed. Hearing it from Doogie surely brought back all the bad memories of the time April was sick, and now Maizy was back in our bedroom, no doubt holed up with misery and the belief that her life with me would always be a sad life and maybe it was time for her to cut bait.

  Doogie needed to get out of town. Get set up somewhere else, he said. “If they put me away on a dope charge. Me? With my record? Baby, I’m never coming back.” What he wanted was money. “Just a stake. You know, a start. Don’t worry. I’ll pay you back.” He knew I had it, the cash he’d given me. “If the cops get me,” he said, “they’re going to ask questions. They’re going to want to know where I got that annie.”

  “I believe you’d tell them,” I said.

  Said Doogie, “I expect I just might.”

  So there I was, caught by the short hairs. “Doogie,” I said, “let me tell you I had plans for that money. I aimed to give it over to St. Jude’s.”

  It wasn’t the truth; I said it before I knew I was going to.

  “That place you had April. That hospital for kids.”

  “In Memphis,” I said. “I know you remember.”

  He closed his eyes. He balled his hands up into fists. I saw that tattoo again: 3 QTS. MILK, YOGURT, LESTOIL.

  “I do,” he said. “I surely do, Baby James. It was Sweethearts’ Day, and there was ice on the roads, and I had Coco Joe. That was before they sent me up the first time and took Joe away from me. I still wonder where he ended up. But I remember that day. You bet I do. April and Joe and me and you and Maizy. I never told you this, Baby, but that’s the closest I ever come to feeling part of a family. You understand?”

  “I do, Doogie. Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “We got soldered together that day. You know it. Maizy does, too, even if she won’t own up to it. We’re all alike, shot to hell. We wouldn’t know happy if it slapped us in the face. All of us. We’re just getting by.”

  I asked him what he’d done with his share of the anhydrous money. “I know you were making a wad.”

  “Oh, it just goes. You know, Baby James. It just flies out of your hand.”

  It was then that Maizy came out of our bedroom, wrestling with a suitcase—one of those out-of-date boxy Samsonites that you have to carry, no wheels like the ones folks zip around with these days. A red vinyl suitcase with latches, the one Maizy carried on our honeymoon, the same one she packed when we took April down to St. Jude’s to stay.

  “Maizy,” I said, and then for a few seconds I couldn’t go on. It broke me, that suitcase, and the way she had to grip it with two hands and still it bumped against the wall. “Darlin’,” I finally said. “Don’t.”

  She got to the end of the hall, and she tried to swing the suitcase at me. I’m confident she was intent on doing me harm, but the Samsonite was too heavy, and she nearly toppled over.

  I caught her. I held her to me the way I had all those years ago, when we’d first begun to get dizzy over each other. I held her the way I did the day April left us, and, like then, I felt Maizy holding me, too. I knew, from the way her arms wrapped around my waist and her face pressed into my throat, there was still a chance for us, and yet there was nothing to say—no words at all—to make this chance real and something we could work at. It was the merest shiver of air, a puny reminder of the way life had once been for us. Then Maizy pounded her fist against my chest.

  “Oh, you sonofabitch,” she said. “Making money off that junk, ruining all those people’s lives.”

  The foot rest came down on my reclining chair, and I felt the floor shake when Doogie stood up. “People ruin their own lives,” he said. “That’s the true by and by of it, hard as it is to say. Some people just can’t stop ruining them. People like me.”

  I wished there was something to say to make us all feel hopeful, but like I already told you, there weren’t words enough.

  So I asked Doogie what I’d always wanted to but never had. I asked him what the story was with his tattoo.

  “Prison tattoo.” He held out his arm and studied it. “That’s what I was on my way to the IGA to get, the day the cops brought me in on grand theft auto. Three quarts of milk, some yogurt, and Lestoil. I had this old boy at Vandalia ink it on my arm, that list, so I could look at it and remind myself that someday I’d walk out of there and I’d have something to do. I’d have this errand to run.” He put a hand on my back and one on Maizy’s. “Little things. That’s how we keep getting on.”

  I had to choose. Did I give that money to Doogie, or did I save it—maybe even stay good to my word and give it to St. Jude’s—and take the chance I’d end up in Dutch with the law?

  You can think your life comes down to making this choice or that, and sometimes I suppose it’s true, but more often, it’s not that way at all. You can’t cut one choice out from all the others that have come before it or the ones bound to follow. Nothing is ever as clear cut as this or that. What I knew, standing there in my house that night with Maizy and Doogie Roy, was I’d never get it right, this thing we call living. It was too late. Too many things said and done. Maybe I’d lost too much. Maybe I’d gotten hard in the heart and reached the point where I didn’t give a good Goddamn what happened. But I was trying, just like I’d told April, to get straightened out, to remember what it was to love this life.

  “I’m trying to get back,” I said to Maizy. “Back to the way things were. There was you and me and April.”

  “That’s where you’re stupid,” she said. “Nothing’s ever going to be the way it was before April died.”

  It can be like that, life s
o full of loss you don’t know what to say or where to turn. So I didn’t do a thing. I just sat down there on the couch, dummied up, and there was Maizy with her suitcase and Doogie Roy, the two of them, waiting.

  April, hon, I’m sorry I had to burn down the Mister Peanut—sorry I had to be that sort of man—but in the long run it was the thing to do. Even though your mama thought it was one more sign that we were on our way to ruin, it was right for her and me, and it was right for Doogie Roy. He didn’t know it that night when he stood in our house expecting me to give him that money, but I hope, wherever he is, he knows it now. Maybe you’ll find a way to tell him. Maybe someday, you’ll send down a sign. He’ll be driving by a burnt-out building and he’ll see that yellow tape the fire department puts up—FIRE SCENE, it’ll say, DON’T CROSS, and he’ll understand there are limits to how many mistakes we can make in a life and still save ourselves. He’ll know why I couldn’t give him that money.

  I had to burn down the Mister Peanut so Doogie would know I wasn’t to be messed with, wasn’t Sweet Baby James at all, but someone who, if he had to, could hurt people, innocent folks like the ones who owned the Mister Peanut, who didn’t deserve a bad break.

  Even now, I can barely believe it was me who said that night, “Come on, Doogie. Let’s go for a ride. Then we’ll see about that money.”

  He trusted me, just like we trusted the doctors when you were sick. What choice did we have? Sometimes, when you’re down on your luck, you have to let people take you—you have to hope there’s something better waiting on down the road.

  Doogie got in my truck, and he said he knew he could count on me. He said I was his little buddy, and that almost broke me, but I made myself forget about Coco Joe and how you always took to him and that last day there at St. Jude’s when he hopped up on your pillow and talked to you while you slipped away. I know, if you were here with me now, a grown woman, it’d embarrass you to hear me tell this story. I’ll have to ask you to forgive me that.