By John Honkala
Featured Art: The Sacrificial Lambs by Brooke Ripley
Lucy said You need something to do and handed me this bag of trash, which is barely half-full, it’s like a hobo bindle. I’m not one to take orders, or demands really, especially not from her, but the tone she took—it was so dismissive—got me extra riled so I grabbed the bag without even thinking and went out the back door and wound it around a few times and slung it over the deck railing like a softball pitcher really clocking one in. I shot it upward though and it hit the overhang and fell straight down on someone’s moonroof. Quality bag, it didn’t break. Just sort of stuck there on the car like it was full of diapers or something. I went down the three flights and retrieved it. Maybe one of the neighbors was peeping but I didn’t really care. Lucy’s up there with the rest of them. Her dad’s hospiced in the front room, cancer of the esophagus, can’t even eat, they feed him with a syringe. And I was getting in the way. Buck, can you find a hobby, she’s always saying. Surely when I dump this thing, when I have to kick open the sticking gate and brush the snow off the dumpster and I toss this wad in and walk back up the steps in my wet slippers, when I open the door and stamp the wet off, Lucy will be there in the kitchen and she’ll say, Buck, the door. Please. She’ll add that because she knows me after thirty years. The TV will still be going, the Bears, and they’ll all be in the dining room because her dad’s in the front room and they’ll all be talking about him like he’s not right there in earshot and that the absolute very last thing he wants is to be lying in his pajamas in his daughter’s front room drowning in pity and the horrid smell of green bean casserole, all decorum gone to the wind, everyone pretending he’s not farting, eating their dogfood, and meanwhile the toilet’s been running for three days, something he could fix in half a minute and then get back to his stool in the basement. Lucy saying Ha ha Dad would hate this and one of the others going Ha ha I know.
But I’m going up. It’s cold.
Lucy wishes I would call him Dad to his face. I have a dad, I always tell her. Anyway he said George when I shook his hand in their front room those years ago. He also said Good luck son, and since then I’ve turned that over in my mind maybe a million times trying to figure out what he meant. What followed was all sorts of fun, I can barely believe I had it. Lucy and I took all the money we earned and we made a golden calf that we lay before, besotted and fat, Lucy riding me like a big old horse and me at her mouth like a sucker fish, furrowing the floor of our apartment until the hardwood shined like marble. We went to Vegas and got married by a fat Elvis in a chapel the size of this landing and I made a wreath for her from some boxwood branches I ripped from the Tropicana garden. That was when Lucy used to call me King Shit. Stand on the bed again, King Shit, she would say, Stand up there and make a decree. But then her mom died and she found her way back to the Church and she herself came down like Moses off the Mount and broke those tablets at my feet and made me drink the golden calf in a grog mug of Chicago tap water. I’ve had my sword drawn ever since. She went and changed but I’m the open book, same as it ever was. Me and George became friends, though, and when he moved in downstairs we drank beers in the basement and fixed up the building until the landlord hired George as the maintenance guy. One time Lucy said to me Why don’t you just marry him? and I said Ha ha that’s what I did and, honestly, that still makes me laugh. George and Buck. Buck and George. Buck and Lucy and George and The Holy Ghost.
Well, I should have shoveled. George being incapacitated and all, his duties sort of fall to me. That’s not official but I think the landlord assumes it, and she’s probably right to think so. Checks are still coming in. It’s a good five inches out here and there are footprints mashed into the stair drifts and these shitty green boards get slippery. Obviously I’ve got other things going on right now but if someone fell and broke their back or something I’m pretty sure I’d hear about it. There are eight of these stairwells on this building and lots of traffic. I can shovel tomorrow, or maybe the sun will come out.
Will Lucy be in the kitchen? No, but her cousin is, a big fat guy with his shirt tucked in and a goatee to hide his chin. He’s scraping his plate into the open garbage can, new bag in there. I guess I missed the delivery, he says to me, and I don’t have any time for it. It smells like that bag really was full of diapers and this apartment is the staging area for them, like there’s an overturned cloche on the table and on the silver platter a neat pyramid of soiled diapers surrounded by green bean casserole and mashed rutabaga and a bleu cheese jello mold and a jiggling bowl of calf brains. George is there in the front room and he’s groaning and no one else is saying anything. Just fucking John Madden or one of those guys handing out turkey legs to the Lions’ offensive line. George hates football, all sports really, but especially football. Buncha nut twisters and eye gougers, he would say if he had even a shred of laryngeal muscle. I would add Wouldn’t know a lug nut from a dick nut, and I can guarantee you he’d start coughing from laughing.
Will Lucy be in the bedroom? No, but another cousin is, rifling through the coats on the bed, which Lucy made today, the one day of the year it’s made. Have you seen a pink scarf, she asks me. Well, I say, if you open the drawer on Lucy’s side of the bed and move the cigar boxes and the rosary and the picture frames, then dig through a pile of hair ties, pens, and jewelry, you’ll find a small pink vibrator that looks like a tube of lipstick, or King Shit as I call it, but otherwise no pink that I’ve seen. Out she goes. And a minute later, Lucy: Buck, can you please go to the basement and gather a few of Dad’s things, he’s lost out there. I’m supposed to do this? Find George’s things? Bring him a screwdriver and nail gun to lay at his side? Is this like a King Tut deal, I ask her. We bury him in the front room with a bunch of crap from his life? He’s not dead, she tells me. Just do it. Please.
And out and down again, stepping in my slipper-prints, hand on the railing all the way down. A woman’s out with her dog, a giant mastiff wearing a coat who just lies on the sidewalk and refuses to shit. Hi, Buck, she says, which means Lucy told her my name. The lights in the basement go on in rows, fluorescents kicking up like someone flipped the switch at Comiskey, flickering on in series. Here’s the whole shop. George and I spent two decades down here, getting it to where it is now, which is, I have to say, in a really good place. Everything we need is down here. George got us a fridge a decade ago and that’s still kicking, although it’s hard to find MGD anymore so it gets stocked with what Andy’s has but MGD if Lucy stops at the Binny’s. All the tools we use day-to-day are on pegboards. They’re not labeled but we know where everything goes. We keep things tidy. The snips are missing, though, and I think George was using them to trim new gutters the day he went to the doctor because he couldn’t swallow anymore. He wouldn’t want those with him anyway. They’re cheap and they do the job but never well, they’re never really the right tool. Some tools are like that, they’re right there so you use them, but there’s a better way. I’ll bring him the speed square and the 5-in-1 and the folding ruler. When I start talking politics, George likes to hold the folding ruler down in his crotch and extend the brass slider out inch by inch and tell me Look at my little lizard dick Buck, tell me more about these Republicans, and then sometimes he unhinges the first section so the ruler’s like eighteen inches long with that tiny slider out at the end and he says I care so much. I talk right over that, it’s gross. Or I say I’m married to your daughter for chrissakes. But it’s a useful tool, so I’ll bring it up. We always have projects going down here. That’s why when Lucy tells me to get a hobby I know she doesn’t mean it. She just means go away. I have a lot of energy and she’s anxious like a small dog.
I didn’t know George’s wife, Lucy’s mother, very well. She made her eyebrows with a pencil and wore shearling and fur-lined coats and had a leopard print tablecloth that Lucy tossed after the funeral. George says Lucy took right after her but I fail to see how, Lucy in her sweatshirts and black pants that are basically long johns except they don’t have the waffle pattern. But once before she died, when they had the place on Pulaski, Judy—that was her name, Judy—she roasted a leg of lamb over a spit in the backyard and had all the neighbors over and by all I mean all, there must have been a hundred people in the yard and the garage and out front on the stoop. And with the lamb there were giant chafing dishes full of scalloped potatoes and Greek salad and some kind of orzo dish and who knows what else, plus coolers and wheelbarrows full of ice and beer and Bartles & Jaymes. Kids crawling all over the deck and the fence and playing in the street and climbing on cars and generally being underfoot at a time when I had no patience for that sort of thing. Well, I still don’t. And that party went all day long and the smoke from the lamb went up and out of that yard like a beacon and the neighbors kept coming, like flies all of them. Judy was right in the middle of it in a silver apron with a long meat fork and a wine cooler and she was like the mayor, those people stood in line to walk past her rotisserie and to tell her this was a day they’d never forget and that this is what the neighborhood needs, some community, some friendship. At maybe eight—it was after the lamb was gone but it was still light out, half light out, charcoal to the east—I went into the house to get some air and Judy was in her room and I saw her in there as I passed by and she was sitting at her small vanity holding a tube of lipstick and she was crying. I think that’s maybe how Lucy and Judy are alike.
Turning off the lights is equally as satisfying as turning them on, bringing down all six switches at once with a flat hand and arm. The switches reach a halfway point and then just flip on their own. Upstairs it’s louder than I thought it would be. They’re even laughing when I come in and I have to kick off my slippers because they got soaked in the puddles under the stairs. I hand the tools to Lucy and she carries them over to George and lays them at his side and kisses his forehead and he makes a noise like an animal trapped in the eaves but only Lucy and I hear it, thank God. Buck, your plate’s still full, I hear from the dining room and I yell back that the possum is undercooked. They’re playing Pictionary and drawing on a huge tablet set on Lucy’s painting easel, which I haven’t seen since her early religious years when she was real gung-ho about her hymnal and making paintings of biblical scenes and she used the word piety a lot. Not so anymore. She’s just an old Catholic lady now, and she swears when it suits her and invokes The Saints as necessary. They’re drawing a wheelbarrow and it’s like none of them have ever seen a wheelbarrow. They’ve got two wheels drawn. Lucy sits down at the table and shouts Wheelbarrow and the round ends. The coffee table is stacked with twelve-packs of plastic syringes, they’re each the size of a stick of dynamite. In better times, George and I would probably take two or three of them to the basement and store them in one of the bins just in case we ever needed one. Maybe we find a wounded bird.
Lucy comes over again. We’re running out of drinks, she says, can you please run down to Andy’s? There goes Buck, I hear on my way out, in boots this time, and into the dark and out through the alley down to the corner. It’s real quiet out. From the snow, yes, because that always sucks the noise away, but also because no one is out and all the stores are closed except Andy’s and down farther the Citgo is still lighted up like a night worksite on the Dan Ryan, it would hurt just to walk by the place. My boots squeak the snow and I can hear it inside my head inside my hat. Andy’s sitting on a stool behind the counter watching the Arabic channel on a small TV. His name is unpronounceable so he goes by Andy. He gives me treats for the cat and I feed her there on the counter and she lies down with her ass in the air for me to pet. Everyone’s staying in, I say to Andy and he tells me they’ll start coming out in a few hours. He’s watching a soccer game. Lucy’s got the family over, I tell him, and she thinks they need more drinks. He says It’s good to be with family, Buck, like he’s an old sage, and he pours me some of the wine he’s drinking and sets it next to the cat. I sit on the stool next to the Lotto machine and take off my hat and sip the wine. You should change out this cardboard, I tell him. He’s got beer boxes laid down on the floor and they’re soaked and dirty. How’s George, he asks, and I tell him he’s in the front room now, we moved a bed out there. He’s got a few tools with him, is all I add. Andy shells pistachios into a paper cup and shakes it at the cat. I sit there until all the snow is melted off my boots and there’s a big wet spot on the cardboard beneath the stool. George has outlived Judy by more than twenty years. When she died, he told me that he’d never cooked a meal in his entire life except for unwrapping Twinkies and that probably doesn’t count. But look, he hasn’t starved to death. There are things we just learn because we have to, how to file the taxes, how to set mouse traps, how to stay married, how to live with chronic pain, and right now feels like one of those times, a force that Lucy would call fate or His will but I call The Crapshoot of Life. Andy doesn’t say much and we sit there listening to the Arabic soccer game until he comes around from behind the counter and lays a few new cardboard rectangles on top of the wet ones. I hand him my empty glass when he’s done and he asks me Are you okay, Buck, and I tell him I don’t think Lucy is but I’m fine. I get the beer and pay for it and Andy says Happy Thanksgiving and send my best to George and I give the cat one more treat before I leave.
They’re coming down the back steps when I get back to the building, all turning around the staircase in a big line, slicking up the snow. Looks like you’ll have a late night, they say to me, and thank God they’re carrying the leftovers out with them. Lucy was crying earlier, one of them tells me, she’s had a little too much to drink maybe. But I know that’s not true, Lucy’s a sipper. I stand on the deck and watch them file out along the side of the building and they disappear one by one through the door to the sidewalk until it bangs shut and the security lights blink off and everything’s back to normal for a moment, the view from my deck. Inside the dining room table is cleared and the chairs are back under it and the dishes are washed and piled next to the sink in the kitchen, just the range light on over the stove, and now that they’re all gone it seems like the diaper smell is gone too. It’s really something to have the apartment back, even if everything’s about to go sideways. They left a note on the table that says Buck, thanks for the use of your home, and when I think about it, I guess this is my home, the shop and the tools, these old floors, the made bed, the syringes, and Lucy, who loves me, and George who loves me too, although he can’t say it, and never would anyway, lying there in his pajamas in the front room. The TV is showing an old Western and Lucy comes out of the bedroom with her hair down and the mascara wiped from her eyes and we sit down on the couch in the dark and watch it at a low volume, Dad’s shadow blinking on the wall behind us.
John Honkala’s work has appeared in The Normal School and is forthcoming in Cutleaf. He lives in Chicago.
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