OBLIVION ANGELS
Sheldon Lee Compton
Chapter 1
Ray 2022
Twice a week Ray Reed cut his grass. The main yard was broken up into sections. There was a part reserved for folksy stuff like handmade wagon wheels, big geodes found at yard sales and gift shops over the years, wormy poplar benches meant for sitting even though no one had ever sat on one. He sold five of those at the last Fourth of July fireworks up at Keywright. Keeping those benches in the yard was as good as a billboard for advertising. Is a billboard. Was a billboard. They’re something, Ray thought.
The worst section for looks was the place Jamie put her single-wide years ago. It was the trailer that blighted the whole property, no matter how hard Ray tried. After Jamie put it there, she and a couple of her buddies hit the outside with flat gray paint straight from the bucket with big flat brushes. The result was exactly what anyone would expect. The trailer was a disaster, looked less, in fact, like a trailer and more like a misshapen chuck of crumbling shale. Ray would have moved it long ago, but he couldn’t.
After he finished with the grass, Ray stepped into the house and took a beer from the fridge. He walked slowly onto the porch and down the front steps. He sat on the last step and opened the bottle. He put it under his nose and inhaled deeply and thoughtfully. The scent alone could almost hold him. Deliberately, he poured the beer out at his feet, watched the rich foam swell and then absorb through the zoysia grass and disappear. He had two left in the fridge. Enough for one more week of mowing.
He watched the daylight glow soften and then all of a sudden the mountains as far as he could see blurred into one dim, continuous bump. Soon the losing light crawled its way into the yard and he stood, tossed the beer bottle into a washtub beside the house. It rattled with all the others then settled, leaving behind a melancholic silence as it did. The quiet folded up what was left of the lonely Sunday and Ray put most everything else out of his mind. He went inside.
He first started a fire. It took a couple of tries to get the wood to take, but he squatted close, close enough to catch the unmistakable scent of fireplace ash, until it took. His knees popped several times as he stood, but he was satisfied. Something primal about a fire lifted Ray’s spirits for a short while, and he took any lifting of spirits he could get.
He leaned back into the couch, pulled air in, held it there, and then let it burst out. He wished it would go ahead and get darker so the fire would burn just a little bit brighter. For more than an hour he didn’t move very much. The quiet came like phantom waves all through the house to settle directly on his chest. His concerns whittled down to the basics like happiness and love, a deep sadness and a wounded heart. She did that, Rita. Brought out the big-heart thinking. There was only so much of this Ray could do before he went back to the porch. An airplane cut a white line low across the dusklight sky, visible only barely. He felt himself trying to consciously focus on the airplane. To what end and exactly why Ray couldn’t have said, but while watching the plane, thinking about the people on it, the pilot asking for coffee, it was as if he was only inside the field of that observation. Nothing existed outside of watching the white line move upward and over the mountain ridge. But he always understood that he’d only been in this disconnect for a moment. The return always found the present worse than he left it.
It had been thinking about the trailer that started it, how Jamie and her friends painted it sumbitch-gray. It had taken them more than a week and from start to finish it was the worst effort and worst results Ray had ever witnessed, but Jamie was proud as hell.
Other than his old lawn chair, a decaying porch swing and a red cooler he once used for cold drinks during Rita’s softball games, the porch was bare. A line of handmade wooden rocking chairs, five total — his, Rita’s, Jamie’s, Jennifer’s and Tiffany’s — were gone, sold for water bill money years and years ago. Once he had let himself remember this sharp reality, the rest came in hard. An old basketball goal in the middle of the yard just beside where they had always parked their vehicles. It leaned forward, the six four-by-fours he made for Jamie to finish the goal nearly rotted in half. It would fall soon. The tiny outhouse off to the right of the porch at the top of the only little hill on the property. It had been in use when Ray was a boy. He kept it when he added the bathroom back in his mid-twenties when his folks had given him the house and moved to a smaller place, all their children then grown and off to lives of their own. And then the yard, which he tended twice a week. It was always hard to look out on it after he was finished. It was a testament to how far the life he had worked so hard for had perished.
In a row about two lawnmowers wide was his single small path of trimmed grass leading to his truck parked sideways at the edge of the yard. Everything was where it had always been, but the rot of misery and sadness and regret had taken all that over like a dream of death. The benches he sold had been sold years ago. The ones left were indistinguishable from an oak stump. But he had the path to his truck. That’s all he needed, a path to his truck. The rest could go to hell with everything else.
“Still retired?”
Kenny Roop eyeballed Ray coming into the IGA. Ray tried a nod and then a side step to get around him, but Kenny was never great on social cues. He moved with Ray until finally Ray answered.
“Still retired, Kenny. Just like everybody else around here,” Ray said. “I mean I am forty after all so what could I really do anyway?”
Jab, jab, jab. Kenny Roop had been retired since he was twenty-eight. Bad back he said. So punch, punch, punch, Ray figured. He deserved it.
“Well I’d work if I could, I’ll tell you that right now,” Kenny said.
“Oh yeah? I got some property could use a good hand about now,” Ray said. “Be about three weeks solid work. Interested?”
Kenny twirled his finger in the air. Whoopdeedo. And then swung wide into another aisle that Ray intended on avoiding at all costs. He only needed milk and cereal. It was his basic meal three times a day. His stove hadn’t been turned on in three years, and that had been to boil water once for coffee.
Ray actually was retired and for good reason. He used to drive shortbed coal trucks for Spider Newsome. About ten years into it, his brakes gave out coming down Allen Mountain. Allen Mountain that ended in a two-way junction with a solid wall of mountainside straight ahead. He kept working it until he could see the bridge right before the mountainside and then bailed. It seemed that should have been it. He jumped from the Mac and survived. But jumping from a truck going in excess of about sixty miles an hour onto the pavement leaves a mark. It left two on Ray, scars running about two feet long from his ankles to his kneecaps. There was enough metal in there to build a skyscraper, he tried to joke after the third surgery.
It was rehab for a year and then he went out again. The pain wasn’t bad, his legs healed well, but his mind was gone. To drive shortbed or eighteen-wheeler for coal, there had to be a little left of the unknown, a little bit of mystery for what could happen when things went terribly wrong. The driver who has that can keep it up for thirty years or more; the driver who does not have that, who knows that a thing can go wrong when you least expect no matter how well you're driving, might as well park it and put a house number on it.
Early retirement cost him a percentage of his full benefits, but he had no choice. He tried contract roofing for about six months and realized his legs did hurt when pushed hard enough. It was everything he could do to get up and down the ladder, let alone carry fifty-pound bundles of shingles up. With only a couple young boys from Norton helping and everybody else standing around watching, Ray went ahead and officially retired.
He joined a lot of his friends from high school in this. It was essentially the path taken - graduate high school, work five years in the coal mines, get injured in some way, file for disability, live the life of the retired even though some of them were decades from being old enough to do so having worked it through. Only Ray was thirty years behind them. Kenny Roop was typical, not the exception.
Shaw Holmes, owner of the IGA, worked the front and only the register day in and day out except on Sunday. Sunday he received the Brown Food Service truck and stocked product. Today Shaw was at the meat counter stocking bacon and bologna. His wife, Cleo, covered the register. Shaw was good people.
“Hey bud,” Ray said.
Shaw waved with one plastic-gloved hand. “Ray.”
“Okay then,” Ray said, nodded, and then moved down the meat aisle toward the milk. Sometimes Shaw went into his own world. Probably from years under fluorescent lights and listening to idiots like Kenny Roop go on and on.
“Oh Ray!”
Ray turned and was surprised to see Shaw hanging through the butcher’s window above the display. “Yeah?”
“I saw Rita here the other day,” he said. “Thought you might want to know that.”
It was something Ray wanted to know, but it was hard to hear it all the same.
“She didn’t look so good,” Shaw added.
“No, I’d imagine not.”
The ticking from the old space heater, the one he kept from a job nightwatching at Melvin’s lumber yard in Jarvis when he was hardly more than twenty years old, reminded him of long nights and long, dark mornings reading books and magazines and drinking when he could and watching the sky for UFOs. He also slept some in the tiny watch building when he could and in the summers he set up a split-barrel fire outside and read there or just listened to the radio if anything good was on.
He read Faulkner’s The Bear. He read Stephen King by candlelight on purpose to stay awake when the alcohol kicked in because he was the scariest. Hard to drift off to sleep reading about vampires in towns not much different than his own. But it had been a line from Faulkner that came back to him every time around dusk when out of the full darkness the mountains slowly came through, showing their ridges like hairline cracks across the sky. The phrase from the book was it was not going to heaven since they had already decided it had no immortal soul. Ray couldn’t remember what the it Faulkner had been referring to, probably an animal, but at three in the morning there were so many possibilities for what that particular it might have been.
In the afternoons before Ray would leave for a shift, Rita would get a plastic IGA bag and make a bologna and cheese sandwich. She’d take a bag of Ruffles and a Little Debbie cake and load the bag. He would see her smile and wish she could always be just like that, frozen in that place with their hearts light and hopeful. Together. He wanted to be a good man for her, and she wanted a good man eager to go out into the world for her and the baby inside her.
Ray spent a lot of time inside that memory. He spent a lot of time inside that memory letting the peepers cry for the oncoming rain watching the ridgelines disappear as easily as they'd appeared years and years ago, one giant jigsaw made up of only two pieces, one smoke-blue and the other black on black.
The rain and the peepers behind the house were enough to crumble him at his foundation. There was no reason for this other than some melancholy buried deeply Ray couldn’t find and fix. The weather held such control over his emotions, always had. On the porch now, he couldn’t find a reason in the world to smile. Spring is rebirth my ass, he thought. Spring is hell. Give me winter and early darkness and a reason to stay holed up inside the house away from everything bright. This is the direction his thinking would go, long into the evening. And even though the peepers and the sound of the rain across the metal roof and the drenched look of everything already dead across the yard were enough to buckle him, Ray set up on the porch. He thought about the ways the world looked when he was sober and clean. It was a kind of dark pit scraping around for souls to swallow. Ray wanted to be out of his mind. He didn’t want beer or liquor. He had already destroyed entire worlds that way. He wanted hard drugs, or at least pills. Oxycodone or hydrocodone. Percocet. Meth in a pinch, even the hardest homemade kind. Shake and bake. Pot. Whatever else was making the rounds these days. He had been out of touch since Rita left. There may be something more lethal to tackle. If so, he was ready.
If limbo was a kind of hell, and he figured it was maybe the worst kind, Ray was in it. He had no idea if Rita was even still around. She could have dropped by the IGA on her way to somewhere else counties away. Then again, she could be living a mile up the road and he would have no way of knowing. The kind of pain they shared, the pain of two big empty holes in their lives, could easily spring apart two souls like opposing magnets. And when it did it wouldn’t matter how hard anyone pushed.
Sadness and regret wound around Ray every minute of every day. There were times he couldn’t understand why he didn’t simply drop to his knees and finally perish from his cursed existence. He often thought about what an existence beyond this one would feel like. It might hurt as bad but it couldn’t hurt worse. Scripture spoke of eternal flames and burning. This, Ray would tell anyone, was nothing. The true torture was within the mind, with each thought that tried to rise above the pain, tried to reach a place of peace, and was knocked back by misery unmatched.
He dropped onto the porch swing and the rafters groaned. He could feel the fasteners give. The weight seemed to spear through his heart, and he leaned sideways, wrapped himself in his own arms, and started to cry. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. And while he cried, a single night came back to him as it always did during these helpless jags. He had heard Rita crying through the bedroom door. She had done it as quietly as possible, but Ray could hear the hurt and pain in the raspy sobs. She was hiding to cry. It was the single most heartbreaking moment Ray had ever experienced. So he cried on the porch swing and heard Rita over and over until the rain was gone and the peepers were gone.
The heater lined up at the foot of Ray’s bed continued ticking in the quiet. Outside it was near seventy degrees, but it had been much colder at bedtime the night before. He woke at a little after nine hot and disturbed from a dream that wasn’t quite a nightmare and surely wasn’t routine. The dream was routine, as was most as far as Ray was concerned. So he dreamed his family didn’t love him anymore, that they disowned him, that every ounce of affection he ever fought for had been spit back at him. Routine. Better than the night before when he dreamed of an unknown person slashing a large knife blade across his eyes and then across his throat. He remembered the panic he felt, the way the hot gush of blood became stronger until it passed the point when he knew he was going to die. He’d been told it was really likely that the moment someone dies there’s an acceptance. Ray felt that in his knifing dream. It wasn’t so much an acceptance as it was the loss of fear. So the dream of his family turning on him, which was both more frequent and worse, was the dream he had most often. Routine.
There was a time, how many years ago now he wouldn’t have been able to say as time was warped for him in decades rather than years or months, when he drank until he couldn’t speak and jump-stepped from the porch and swayed left until he reached the old birdhouse and truck tire he put in place after digging for a day to get a hole big enough to hold it firm, the same as the one in the park at Keywright. Here he would lean against the tire and stare at the birdhouse. Ray couldn’t remember if he made it or bought it or if it had been given to him or to Rita or even one of the kids. But he studied it and as he studied it the birdhouse changed in so many different ways. He saw a shade of color begin to appear along the sides and a bright blue paint raise a full half inch off the squat little roof. The wood was made new again in one instant, and the birdhouse was completely new.
The basketball goal, the lumber for the pole and a sawed out piece of chipboard for a backboard, started to bend back to its straight position. The lumber, a moment ago darkened by the weather, retained its crisp yellow. Ray could see slices where the wood had been cut, fresh feathers of untreated oak. The old riding lawnmower did the same, going from rust to new again and then, like a back flow of water, zipped across the yard, past the open doors of the tool shed, and back inside.
Ray touched the sides of his face, his chin. He calmed his breathing. With his mouth still hanging open, he felt the large grooves of the makeshift playground tire where he sat. The world is still the world. Everything was fine. I’m fine, he thought. And right away a redbird popped out of the birdhouse. And then another after that and another after that. Redbirds spilled from the birdhouse forming one pulsing red object for a few seconds and then flew apart like bursts of ruby fireworks until they made a swirling canopy over the house, the yard, Jamie’s old trailer at the very edge of the property, everything. Ray could see something inside the moving redbirds, faces forming, twirling into view and then moving away again. Outlines of people, heads with open mouths, wide and terrified, crying out as they faded away.
Sheldon Lee Compton
Chapter 1
Ray 2022
Twice a week Ray Reed cut his grass. The main yard was broken up into sections. There was a part reserved for folksy stuff like handmade wagon wheels, big geodes found at yard sales and gift shops over the years, wormy poplar benches meant for sitting even though no one had ever sat on one. He sold five of those at the last Fourth of July fireworks up at Keywright. Keeping those benches in the yard was as good as a billboard for advertising. Is a billboard. Was a billboard. They’re something, Ray thought.
The worst section for looks was the place Jamie put her single-wide years ago. It was the trailer that blighted the whole property, no matter how hard Ray tried. After Jamie put it there, she and a couple of her buddies hit the outside with flat gray paint straight from the bucket with big flat brushes. The result was exactly what anyone would expect. The trailer was a disaster, looked less, in fact, like a trailer and more like a misshapen chuck of crumbling shale. Ray would have moved it long ago, but he couldn’t.
After he finished with the grass, Ray stepped into the house and took a beer from the fridge. He walked slowly onto the porch and down the front steps. He sat on the last step and opened the bottle. He put it under his nose and inhaled deeply and thoughtfully. The scent alone could almost hold him. Deliberately, he poured the beer out at his feet, watched the rich foam swell and then absorb through the zoysia grass and disappear. He had two left in the fridge. Enough for one more week of mowing.
He watched the daylight glow soften and then all of a sudden the mountains as far as he could see blurred into one dim, continuous bump. Soon the losing light crawled its way into the yard and he stood, tossed the beer bottle into a washtub beside the house. It rattled with all the others then settled, leaving behind a melancholic silence as it did. The quiet folded up what was left of the lonely Sunday and Ray put most everything else out of his mind. He went inside.
He first started a fire. It took a couple of tries to get the wood to take, but he squatted close, close enough to catch the unmistakable scent of fireplace ash, until it took. His knees popped several times as he stood, but he was satisfied. Something primal about a fire lifted Ray’s spirits for a short while, and he took any lifting of spirits he could get.
He leaned back into the couch, pulled air in, held it there, and then let it burst out. He wished it would go ahead and get darker so the fire would burn just a little bit brighter. For more than an hour he didn’t move very much. The quiet came like phantom waves all through the house to settle directly on his chest. His concerns whittled down to the basics like happiness and love, a deep sadness and a wounded heart. She did that, Rita. Brought out the big-heart thinking. There was only so much of this Ray could do before he went back to the porch. An airplane cut a white line low across the dusklight sky, visible only barely. He felt himself trying to consciously focus on the airplane. To what end and exactly why Ray couldn’t have said, but while watching the plane, thinking about the people on it, the pilot asking for coffee, it was as if he was only inside the field of that observation. Nothing existed outside of watching the white line move upward and over the mountain ridge. But he always understood that he’d only been in this disconnect for a moment. The return always found the present worse than he left it.
It had been thinking about the trailer that started it, how Jamie and her friends painted it sumbitch-gray. It had taken them more than a week and from start to finish it was the worst effort and worst results Ray had ever witnessed, but Jamie was proud as hell.
Other than his old lawn chair, a decaying porch swing and a red cooler he once used for cold drinks during Rita’s softball games, the porch was bare. A line of handmade wooden rocking chairs, five total — his, Rita’s, Jamie’s, Jennifer’s and Tiffany’s — were gone, sold for water bill money years and years ago. Once he had let himself remember this sharp reality, the rest came in hard. An old basketball goal in the middle of the yard just beside where they had always parked their vehicles. It leaned forward, the six four-by-fours he made for Jamie to finish the goal nearly rotted in half. It would fall soon. The tiny outhouse off to the right of the porch at the top of the only little hill on the property. It had been in use when Ray was a boy. He kept it when he added the bathroom back in his mid-twenties when his folks had given him the house and moved to a smaller place, all their children then grown and off to lives of their own. And then the yard, which he tended twice a week. It was always hard to look out on it after he was finished. It was a testament to how far the life he had worked so hard for had perished.
In a row about two lawnmowers wide was his single small path of trimmed grass leading to his truck parked sideways at the edge of the yard. Everything was where it had always been, but the rot of misery and sadness and regret had taken all that over like a dream of death. The benches he sold had been sold years ago. The ones left were indistinguishable from an oak stump. But he had the path to his truck. That’s all he needed, a path to his truck. The rest could go to hell with everything else.
“Still retired?”
Kenny Roop eyeballed Ray coming into the IGA. Ray tried a nod and then a side step to get around him, but Kenny was never great on social cues. He moved with Ray until finally Ray answered.
“Still retired, Kenny. Just like everybody else around here,” Ray said. “I mean I am forty after all so what could I really do anyway?”
Jab, jab, jab. Kenny Roop had been retired since he was twenty-eight. Bad back he said. So punch, punch, punch, Ray figured. He deserved it.
“Well I’d work if I could, I’ll tell you that right now,” Kenny said.
“Oh yeah? I got some property could use a good hand about now,” Ray said. “Be about three weeks solid work. Interested?”
Kenny twirled his finger in the air. Whoopdeedo. And then swung wide into another aisle that Ray intended on avoiding at all costs. He only needed milk and cereal. It was his basic meal three times a day. His stove hadn’t been turned on in three years, and that had been to boil water once for coffee.
Ray actually was retired and for good reason. He used to drive shortbed coal trucks for Spider Newsome. About ten years into it, his brakes gave out coming down Allen Mountain. Allen Mountain that ended in a two-way junction with a solid wall of mountainside straight ahead. He kept working it until he could see the bridge right before the mountainside and then bailed. It seemed that should have been it. He jumped from the Mac and survived. But jumping from a truck going in excess of about sixty miles an hour onto the pavement leaves a mark. It left two on Ray, scars running about two feet long from his ankles to his kneecaps. There was enough metal in there to build a skyscraper, he tried to joke after the third surgery.
It was rehab for a year and then he went out again. The pain wasn’t bad, his legs healed well, but his mind was gone. To drive shortbed or eighteen-wheeler for coal, there had to be a little left of the unknown, a little bit of mystery for what could happen when things went terribly wrong. The driver who has that can keep it up for thirty years or more; the driver who does not have that, who knows that a thing can go wrong when you least expect no matter how well you're driving, might as well park it and put a house number on it.
Early retirement cost him a percentage of his full benefits, but he had no choice. He tried contract roofing for about six months and realized his legs did hurt when pushed hard enough. It was everything he could do to get up and down the ladder, let alone carry fifty-pound bundles of shingles up. With only a couple young boys from Norton helping and everybody else standing around watching, Ray went ahead and officially retired.
He joined a lot of his friends from high school in this. It was essentially the path taken - graduate high school, work five years in the coal mines, get injured in some way, file for disability, live the life of the retired even though some of them were decades from being old enough to do so having worked it through. Only Ray was thirty years behind them. Kenny Roop was typical, not the exception.
Shaw Holmes, owner of the IGA, worked the front and only the register day in and day out except on Sunday. Sunday he received the Brown Food Service truck and stocked product. Today Shaw was at the meat counter stocking bacon and bologna. His wife, Cleo, covered the register. Shaw was good people.
“Hey bud,” Ray said.
Shaw waved with one plastic-gloved hand. “Ray.”
“Okay then,” Ray said, nodded, and then moved down the meat aisle toward the milk. Sometimes Shaw went into his own world. Probably from years under fluorescent lights and listening to idiots like Kenny Roop go on and on.
“Oh Ray!”
Ray turned and was surprised to see Shaw hanging through the butcher’s window above the display. “Yeah?”
“I saw Rita here the other day,” he said. “Thought you might want to know that.”
It was something Ray wanted to know, but it was hard to hear it all the same.
“She didn’t look so good,” Shaw added.
“No, I’d imagine not.”
The ticking from the old space heater, the one he kept from a job nightwatching at Melvin’s lumber yard in Jarvis when he was hardly more than twenty years old, reminded him of long nights and long, dark mornings reading books and magazines and drinking when he could and watching the sky for UFOs. He also slept some in the tiny watch building when he could and in the summers he set up a split-barrel fire outside and read there or just listened to the radio if anything good was on.
He read Faulkner’s The Bear. He read Stephen King by candlelight on purpose to stay awake when the alcohol kicked in because he was the scariest. Hard to drift off to sleep reading about vampires in towns not much different than his own. But it had been a line from Faulkner that came back to him every time around dusk when out of the full darkness the mountains slowly came through, showing their ridges like hairline cracks across the sky. The phrase from the book was it was not going to heaven since they had already decided it had no immortal soul. Ray couldn’t remember what the it Faulkner had been referring to, probably an animal, but at three in the morning there were so many possibilities for what that particular it might have been.
In the afternoons before Ray would leave for a shift, Rita would get a plastic IGA bag and make a bologna and cheese sandwich. She’d take a bag of Ruffles and a Little Debbie cake and load the bag. He would see her smile and wish she could always be just like that, frozen in that place with their hearts light and hopeful. Together. He wanted to be a good man for her, and she wanted a good man eager to go out into the world for her and the baby inside her.
Ray spent a lot of time inside that memory. He spent a lot of time inside that memory letting the peepers cry for the oncoming rain watching the ridgelines disappear as easily as they'd appeared years and years ago, one giant jigsaw made up of only two pieces, one smoke-blue and the other black on black.
The rain and the peepers behind the house were enough to crumble him at his foundation. There was no reason for this other than some melancholy buried deeply Ray couldn’t find and fix. The weather held such control over his emotions, always had. On the porch now, he couldn’t find a reason in the world to smile. Spring is rebirth my ass, he thought. Spring is hell. Give me winter and early darkness and a reason to stay holed up inside the house away from everything bright. This is the direction his thinking would go, long into the evening. And even though the peepers and the sound of the rain across the metal roof and the drenched look of everything already dead across the yard were enough to buckle him, Ray set up on the porch. He thought about the ways the world looked when he was sober and clean. It was a kind of dark pit scraping around for souls to swallow. Ray wanted to be out of his mind. He didn’t want beer or liquor. He had already destroyed entire worlds that way. He wanted hard drugs, or at least pills. Oxycodone or hydrocodone. Percocet. Meth in a pinch, even the hardest homemade kind. Shake and bake. Pot. Whatever else was making the rounds these days. He had been out of touch since Rita left. There may be something more lethal to tackle. If so, he was ready.
If limbo was a kind of hell, and he figured it was maybe the worst kind, Ray was in it. He had no idea if Rita was even still around. She could have dropped by the IGA on her way to somewhere else counties away. Then again, she could be living a mile up the road and he would have no way of knowing. The kind of pain they shared, the pain of two big empty holes in their lives, could easily spring apart two souls like opposing magnets. And when it did it wouldn’t matter how hard anyone pushed.
Sadness and regret wound around Ray every minute of every day. There were times he couldn’t understand why he didn’t simply drop to his knees and finally perish from his cursed existence. He often thought about what an existence beyond this one would feel like. It might hurt as bad but it couldn’t hurt worse. Scripture spoke of eternal flames and burning. This, Ray would tell anyone, was nothing. The true torture was within the mind, with each thought that tried to rise above the pain, tried to reach a place of peace, and was knocked back by misery unmatched.
He dropped onto the porch swing and the rafters groaned. He could feel the fasteners give. The weight seemed to spear through his heart, and he leaned sideways, wrapped himself in his own arms, and started to cry. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. And while he cried, a single night came back to him as it always did during these helpless jags. He had heard Rita crying through the bedroom door. She had done it as quietly as possible, but Ray could hear the hurt and pain in the raspy sobs. She was hiding to cry. It was the single most heartbreaking moment Ray had ever experienced. So he cried on the porch swing and heard Rita over and over until the rain was gone and the peepers were gone.
The heater lined up at the foot of Ray’s bed continued ticking in the quiet. Outside it was near seventy degrees, but it had been much colder at bedtime the night before. He woke at a little after nine hot and disturbed from a dream that wasn’t quite a nightmare and surely wasn’t routine. The dream was routine, as was most as far as Ray was concerned. So he dreamed his family didn’t love him anymore, that they disowned him, that every ounce of affection he ever fought for had been spit back at him. Routine. Better than the night before when he dreamed of an unknown person slashing a large knife blade across his eyes and then across his throat. He remembered the panic he felt, the way the hot gush of blood became stronger until it passed the point when he knew he was going to die. He’d been told it was really likely that the moment someone dies there’s an acceptance. Ray felt that in his knifing dream. It wasn’t so much an acceptance as it was the loss of fear. So the dream of his family turning on him, which was both more frequent and worse, was the dream he had most often. Routine.
There was a time, how many years ago now he wouldn’t have been able to say as time was warped for him in decades rather than years or months, when he drank until he couldn’t speak and jump-stepped from the porch and swayed left until he reached the old birdhouse and truck tire he put in place after digging for a day to get a hole big enough to hold it firm, the same as the one in the park at Keywright. Here he would lean against the tire and stare at the birdhouse. Ray couldn’t remember if he made it or bought it or if it had been given to him or to Rita or even one of the kids. But he studied it and as he studied it the birdhouse changed in so many different ways. He saw a shade of color begin to appear along the sides and a bright blue paint raise a full half inch off the squat little roof. The wood was made new again in one instant, and the birdhouse was completely new.
The basketball goal, the lumber for the pole and a sawed out piece of chipboard for a backboard, started to bend back to its straight position. The lumber, a moment ago darkened by the weather, retained its crisp yellow. Ray could see slices where the wood had been cut, fresh feathers of untreated oak. The old riding lawnmower did the same, going from rust to new again and then, like a back flow of water, zipped across the yard, past the open doors of the tool shed, and back inside.
Ray touched the sides of his face, his chin. He calmed his breathing. With his mouth still hanging open, he felt the large grooves of the makeshift playground tire where he sat. The world is still the world. Everything was fine. I’m fine, he thought. And right away a redbird popped out of the birdhouse. And then another after that and another after that. Redbirds spilled from the birdhouse forming one pulsing red object for a few seconds and then flew apart like bursts of ruby fireworks until they made a swirling canopy over the house, the yard, Jamie’s old trailer at the very edge of the property, everything. Ray could see something inside the moving redbirds, faces forming, twirling into view and then moving away again. Outlines of people, heads with open mouths, wide and terrified, crying out as they faded away.