OBLIVION ANGELS (excerpt from the forthcomin novel)
Sheldon Lee Compton
Teddy / 2022
Twice a week Teddy Reed sort of 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, Teddy thought.
Any time he was outside to work he couldn’t help but notice his stomach, the weight he had gained there since turning thirty. In under a decade since first noticing the disappearance of his abs, Teddy had just kept eating and kept not exercising other than general labor. It would be fair to call him huge. At least chunky. And the rest of him hadn’t faired very well, either. Duel receding hairlines had gradually given him a dagger of hair left leaving him a distinct Dracula look. A fat Dracula look. He still had a handsome face, though. At least that. A regal nose and light blue eyes (what he’d always thought was his most striking feature and one he often pointed out by opening eyes as wide as possible when first courting Rita decades earlier). Time had also been kind as far as wrinkles. No crows feet at the corners of those blue eyes and a clear complexion. And he was tall. Six feet, two inches, maybe three inches. Enough that it was a thing people sometimes commented on. Lord you’re tall. Look there, you have to duck to get in here. His closely cropped five o’ clock shadow finished out what he thought was at least a handsomeness from the collarbones up. Still, both because a lack of options and the abundant middle-age spread, he had made zero moves on any women for at least five years, and that had been at the Mark IV while drunk and stunning high along with twenty or thirty other drunk men sharking about for the same five women who could have been extremely iffy outside the dark shroud of the club and into any shade of morning light. It was a bachelor’s life for Teddy, but, unlike his suffering kitchen sink and living room carpet, he kept most of his yard in reasonably good shape. Most of it.
The worst section of his yard was the place Jamie put her single-wide years ago. It was the trailer that blighted the whole property, no matter how hard Teddy 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. Teddy would have moved it long ago, but he couldn’t.
After he finished with the grass, Teddy stepped into the house and took a beer and a Pepsi from the fridge. He walked slowly onto the porch and down the front steps. He sat on the last step and opened the bottle of Natural Light. 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 didn’t need beer anyway. He still had that belly. The sag of it pushed his shirt tight over his belt buckle. Teddy was old. He accepted it. The gray hairs speared throughout his hair and the thin beard. The body that had once been a force as a middle linebacker in high school now with the same mass but distributed in ways that were common among old high school football stars, a thickness recognizable among his fellow gridiron buddies. He downed half of a Pepsi and stopped when the burn in his throat was too much. But it was cold and refreshing and enough so for him to forget about the smell of hops and barley.
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 Teddy put most everything else out of his mind. He went inside.
He first started a fire. It took twice 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 Teddy’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.
When they were dating, how sweet she could be, and how outrageous her parents had been. Once in January, her mom and dad had become upset about something long lost to Teddy now. But the evening ended with the two of them leaving on foot to his house. Rita wrapped her arm through Teddy’s and they walked the three miles. Funny thing was, Teddy couldn’t remember any part of the walk except the last ten minutes or so. They trudged slowly in several inches of snow along the old section of railroad that ran straight through Clear Creek. Halfway, he could look up the hill to his right and see his house. That house had looked like a beacon of pure light to him. There his parents were usually gone and this gave Teddy and Rita a place and plenty of time to fuck. This was back when they had sex five or six times a week, so much that Teddy developed a friction burn on the side of his dick that eventually turned into a scab.
He didn’t say anything to Rita about the scab, feeling he could just power through it. He enjoyed fucking as much as Rita, which made them in no way different than any other sixteen year olds in the world. After the first time, when the scab peeled off directly upon entry, Teddy stopped everything and admitted his injury. Rita laughed long and hard about it, having no giant burn-cut anywhere on her cooch.
Some bad and some good, but always Rita. She could have laughed at him for weeks and he would still have loved her. Within two years they were living in their own house. Teddy worked for Shirley Evans, a lady who, somehow, owned a coal mine. She also owned the house they rented. This was where they lived when Jamie was born. By the time Miranda came along they had moved. When Tiffany was born, they had already taken the leap to the Lexington area, Berea, a town about fifteen minutes outside both Lexington and Richmond. Teddy worked at a plumbing shop at Eastern Kentucky University during that time. Rita stayed home and one job wasn’t enough.
Rita’s idea was that Teddy quit the plumbing shop and they basically squat in the townhouse until the owners came around to kick them out. Teddy was on board. He figured they could manage at least a couple months putting off the rent payment, making whatever excuses that might work. It made them both miss renting from Shirley. Rent there had been only one-hundred dollars a month.
One of the highlights for them during the 90s was the softball league. Despite their initial worries about creating a stable family life, things had become manageable and even pleasant by this time. Teddy’s job at the Trace coal washing plant was safe and paid well, Jamie, who had suffered respiratory problems as a baby, was healthy and well, Rita had thrown herself into making the house as comfortable as possible, while also taking some classes at the community college for medical transcription. And Teddy had his entertainment, Rita’s softball league. He remembered the Midwest National Tournament like a movie he once watched.
The tournament would usually have already started by the time Rita would pull into the parking lot for field number two. She played shortstop because even though she was short she was stocky and fast. Could throw hard and on target. Teddy would get the cooler from the back of the truck and place it on the first bleacher. About everybody had been sure they brought beer to the games. The truth was that it was a couple 12-packs of cheap pop. They couldn’t afford Pepsi at a dollar a bottle from the vending machines.
Teddy had always posted up directly behind home plate, clutching the fencing with one hand and a Cola brand in the other. He was their best cheerleader, all in all. Always beside him was Evan Miller. Evan’s wife was also on the team, first base and sometimes the catcher. She was good, even though she was along in years compared to the others playing, especially on the opposing team.
This team was called The Brew Crew because before every game they would stand around their sports cars drinking beer. Then, straight after the last out of the game before them, they would stalk in one moving mass to the dugout.
Seven of the starting nine for The Brew Crew were fresh out of playing college softball. Home runs, double plays, put outs from the centerfield fence. You were going to see it all during a game with this team. And the Brew Crew was who Rita and the rest were playing today. The two of them were the only teams in the national tournament from Eastern Kentucky.
There was only so much of this kind of thinking Teddy 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 Teddy 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 Teddy had ever witnessed, but Jamie was proud as hell. She never said it, but it was easy to see that she liked running out to the dollar store for another brush or two, because she liked to seem like a person who worked hard when she was around people. And while in the middle of painting the trailer, she wore paint slapped across her clothes and even a dot or a random slash of gray on her high cheekbones.
When Jamie was in this kind of mood she totally disregarded the boys and men who would approach her with their best lines and flattering her and, with some of those brave enough, asking for a number or offering a date. Because, even in Teddy’s old work clothes and covered in sumbitch-flat gray paint, she was doubtless one of the prettiest girls around. Skin like milked coffee, long black hair so black she often had Superman blue streaks appearing and disappearing depending on the light. And she always either braided it in a long, single ponytail or two ponytails that slipped around her shoulders and down her back, a style that planted Lolita-thoughts in about every male in Red Knife, which they told one another because they knew each other had the filthy desire to see those ponytails swaying right over top of them with a big old smile right there in the middle.
Men were plainly drawn to Jamie.
And Jamie was drawn to everything else.
Other than his old lawn chair, a decaying porch swing, and a red cooler he had used for cold drinks during the softball games, the porch was bare. A line of handmade wooden rocking chairs, five total — his, Rita’s, Jamie’s, Miranda’s, and Tiffany’s — 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 ball 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 Teddy 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.
***
“Still retired?”
Kenny Roop eyeballed Teddy coming into the IGA. Teddy tried a nod and then a side step to get around him, but Kenny was never great on social cues. He moved with Teddy until finally Teddy answered.
“Still retired, Kenny. Just like everybody else around here," Teddy said. “I mean I am fifty-seven after all so what could I really do anyway? Should have followed the lead and retired about fifteen years ago, right?”
Jab, jab, jab. Kenny Roop had been retired since he was twenty-eight. Bad back he said. So punch, punch, punch, Teddy 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," Teddy said. “Be about three weeks solid work. Interested?”
Kenny twirled his finger in the air. Whoopdeedo. And then swung wide into another aisle that Teddy 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.
Teddy 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 Teddy, scars running about two feet long from his ankles to his knee caps. 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. In order to drive shortbed or eighteen-wheeler for coal, there had to be a little left of the unknown, a little bit of mystery as to 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, Teddy 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 have worked it through. Only Teddy 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," Teddy said.
Shaw waved with one plastic-gloved hand. " Teddy.”
“Okay then," Teddy 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 Teddy!”
Teddy 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 Teddy 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 the dips and spikes of heartbeat line tracings 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. Teddy couldn’t remember what the it Faulkner had been referring to, probably the bear most likely, but at three in the morning there were so many possibilities for what that particular it might have been.
In the afternoons before Teddy 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.
Teddy 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 outlines of the mountains 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 Teddy 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, Teddy 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. Teddy 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. Percocets. 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, Teddy 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 Teddy 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, Teddy 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 Teddy could hear the hurt and pain in the raspy sobs. She was hiding to cry. It was the single most heartbreaking moment Teddy 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 Teddy’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. The dream was routine, as was most as far as Teddy 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. Teddy 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. Teddy 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. Teddy 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.
And then the entire property had a thick white mist or fog collapsed over it. Teddy hadn’t seen something like this since fighting fires as a twenty-something-year-old volunteer back in the 90s. In the middle of woods with lines of fire running everywhere and all around, near your very feet while working, there was no sight. Even the trees were out of view. All the world was smoke and the thin, serpentine lines of fires twinkling through the smoke.
This white, the blanket Teddy sat inside now, was thicker and more dense than the days he spent fighting fire. Then, as fast as it appeared, the blanket of white dispersed and lifted in one flat plate into the air and away.
Teddy 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. Teddy 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
Teddy / 2022
Twice a week Teddy Reed sort of 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, Teddy thought.
Any time he was outside to work he couldn’t help but notice his stomach, the weight he had gained there since turning thirty. In under a decade since first noticing the disappearance of his abs, Teddy had just kept eating and kept not exercising other than general labor. It would be fair to call him huge. At least chunky. And the rest of him hadn’t faired very well, either. Duel receding hairlines had gradually given him a dagger of hair left leaving him a distinct Dracula look. A fat Dracula look. He still had a handsome face, though. At least that. A regal nose and light blue eyes (what he’d always thought was his most striking feature and one he often pointed out by opening eyes as wide as possible when first courting Rita decades earlier). Time had also been kind as far as wrinkles. No crows feet at the corners of those blue eyes and a clear complexion. And he was tall. Six feet, two inches, maybe three inches. Enough that it was a thing people sometimes commented on. Lord you’re tall. Look there, you have to duck to get in here. His closely cropped five o’ clock shadow finished out what he thought was at least a handsomeness from the collarbones up. Still, both because a lack of options and the abundant middle-age spread, he had made zero moves on any women for at least five years, and that had been at the Mark IV while drunk and stunning high along with twenty or thirty other drunk men sharking about for the same five women who could have been extremely iffy outside the dark shroud of the club and into any shade of morning light. It was a bachelor’s life for Teddy, but, unlike his suffering kitchen sink and living room carpet, he kept most of his yard in reasonably good shape. Most of it.
The worst section of his yard was the place Jamie put her single-wide years ago. It was the trailer that blighted the whole property, no matter how hard Teddy 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. Teddy would have moved it long ago, but he couldn’t.
After he finished with the grass, Teddy stepped into the house and took a beer and a Pepsi from the fridge. He walked slowly onto the porch and down the front steps. He sat on the last step and opened the bottle of Natural Light. 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 didn’t need beer anyway. He still had that belly. The sag of it pushed his shirt tight over his belt buckle. Teddy was old. He accepted it. The gray hairs speared throughout his hair and the thin beard. The body that had once been a force as a middle linebacker in high school now with the same mass but distributed in ways that were common among old high school football stars, a thickness recognizable among his fellow gridiron buddies. He downed half of a Pepsi and stopped when the burn in his throat was too much. But it was cold and refreshing and enough so for him to forget about the smell of hops and barley.
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 Teddy put most everything else out of his mind. He went inside.
He first started a fire. It took twice 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 Teddy’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.
When they were dating, how sweet she could be, and how outrageous her parents had been. Once in January, her mom and dad had become upset about something long lost to Teddy now. But the evening ended with the two of them leaving on foot to his house. Rita wrapped her arm through Teddy’s and they walked the three miles. Funny thing was, Teddy couldn’t remember any part of the walk except the last ten minutes or so. They trudged slowly in several inches of snow along the old section of railroad that ran straight through Clear Creek. Halfway, he could look up the hill to his right and see his house. That house had looked like a beacon of pure light to him. There his parents were usually gone and this gave Teddy and Rita a place and plenty of time to fuck. This was back when they had sex five or six times a week, so much that Teddy developed a friction burn on the side of his dick that eventually turned into a scab.
He didn’t say anything to Rita about the scab, feeling he could just power through it. He enjoyed fucking as much as Rita, which made them in no way different than any other sixteen year olds in the world. After the first time, when the scab peeled off directly upon entry, Teddy stopped everything and admitted his injury. Rita laughed long and hard about it, having no giant burn-cut anywhere on her cooch.
Some bad and some good, but always Rita. She could have laughed at him for weeks and he would still have loved her. Within two years they were living in their own house. Teddy worked for Shirley Evans, a lady who, somehow, owned a coal mine. She also owned the house they rented. This was where they lived when Jamie was born. By the time Miranda came along they had moved. When Tiffany was born, they had already taken the leap to the Lexington area, Berea, a town about fifteen minutes outside both Lexington and Richmond. Teddy worked at a plumbing shop at Eastern Kentucky University during that time. Rita stayed home and one job wasn’t enough.
Rita’s idea was that Teddy quit the plumbing shop and they basically squat in the townhouse until the owners came around to kick them out. Teddy was on board. He figured they could manage at least a couple months putting off the rent payment, making whatever excuses that might work. It made them both miss renting from Shirley. Rent there had been only one-hundred dollars a month.
One of the highlights for them during the 90s was the softball league. Despite their initial worries about creating a stable family life, things had become manageable and even pleasant by this time. Teddy’s job at the Trace coal washing plant was safe and paid well, Jamie, who had suffered respiratory problems as a baby, was healthy and well, Rita had thrown herself into making the house as comfortable as possible, while also taking some classes at the community college for medical transcription. And Teddy had his entertainment, Rita’s softball league. He remembered the Midwest National Tournament like a movie he once watched.
The tournament would usually have already started by the time Rita would pull into the parking lot for field number two. She played shortstop because even though she was short she was stocky and fast. Could throw hard and on target. Teddy would get the cooler from the back of the truck and place it on the first bleacher. About everybody had been sure they brought beer to the games. The truth was that it was a couple 12-packs of cheap pop. They couldn’t afford Pepsi at a dollar a bottle from the vending machines.
Teddy had always posted up directly behind home plate, clutching the fencing with one hand and a Cola brand in the other. He was their best cheerleader, all in all. Always beside him was Evan Miller. Evan’s wife was also on the team, first base and sometimes the catcher. She was good, even though she was along in years compared to the others playing, especially on the opposing team.
This team was called The Brew Crew because before every game they would stand around their sports cars drinking beer. Then, straight after the last out of the game before them, they would stalk in one moving mass to the dugout.
Seven of the starting nine for The Brew Crew were fresh out of playing college softball. Home runs, double plays, put outs from the centerfield fence. You were going to see it all during a game with this team. And the Brew Crew was who Rita and the rest were playing today. The two of them were the only teams in the national tournament from Eastern Kentucky.
There was only so much of this kind of thinking Teddy 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 Teddy 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 Teddy had ever witnessed, but Jamie was proud as hell. She never said it, but it was easy to see that she liked running out to the dollar store for another brush or two, because she liked to seem like a person who worked hard when she was around people. And while in the middle of painting the trailer, she wore paint slapped across her clothes and even a dot or a random slash of gray on her high cheekbones.
When Jamie was in this kind of mood she totally disregarded the boys and men who would approach her with their best lines and flattering her and, with some of those brave enough, asking for a number or offering a date. Because, even in Teddy’s old work clothes and covered in sumbitch-flat gray paint, she was doubtless one of the prettiest girls around. Skin like milked coffee, long black hair so black she often had Superman blue streaks appearing and disappearing depending on the light. And she always either braided it in a long, single ponytail or two ponytails that slipped around her shoulders and down her back, a style that planted Lolita-thoughts in about every male in Red Knife, which they told one another because they knew each other had the filthy desire to see those ponytails swaying right over top of them with a big old smile right there in the middle.
Men were plainly drawn to Jamie.
And Jamie was drawn to everything else.
Other than his old lawn chair, a decaying porch swing, and a red cooler he had used for cold drinks during the softball games, the porch was bare. A line of handmade wooden rocking chairs, five total — his, Rita’s, Jamie’s, Miranda’s, and Tiffany’s — 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 ball 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 Teddy 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.
***
“Still retired?”
Kenny Roop eyeballed Teddy coming into the IGA. Teddy tried a nod and then a side step to get around him, but Kenny was never great on social cues. He moved with Teddy until finally Teddy answered.
“Still retired, Kenny. Just like everybody else around here," Teddy said. “I mean I am fifty-seven after all so what could I really do anyway? Should have followed the lead and retired about fifteen years ago, right?”
Jab, jab, jab. Kenny Roop had been retired since he was twenty-eight. Bad back he said. So punch, punch, punch, Teddy 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," Teddy said. “Be about three weeks solid work. Interested?”
Kenny twirled his finger in the air. Whoopdeedo. And then swung wide into another aisle that Teddy 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.
Teddy 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 Teddy, scars running about two feet long from his ankles to his knee caps. 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. In order to drive shortbed or eighteen-wheeler for coal, there had to be a little left of the unknown, a little bit of mystery as to 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, Teddy 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 have worked it through. Only Teddy 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," Teddy said.
Shaw waved with one plastic-gloved hand. " Teddy.”
“Okay then," Teddy 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 Teddy!”
Teddy 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 Teddy 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 the dips and spikes of heartbeat line tracings 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. Teddy couldn’t remember what the it Faulkner had been referring to, probably the bear most likely, but at three in the morning there were so many possibilities for what that particular it might have been.
In the afternoons before Teddy 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.
Teddy 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 outlines of the mountains 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 Teddy 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, Teddy 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. Teddy 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. Percocets. 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, Teddy 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 Teddy 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, Teddy 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 Teddy could hear the hurt and pain in the raspy sobs. She was hiding to cry. It was the single most heartbreaking moment Teddy 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 Teddy’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. The dream was routine, as was most as far as Teddy 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. Teddy 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. Teddy 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. Teddy 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.
And then the entire property had a thick white mist or fog collapsed over it. Teddy hadn’t seen something like this since fighting fires as a twenty-something-year-old volunteer back in the 90s. In the middle of woods with lines of fire running everywhere and all around, near your very feet while working, there was no sight. Even the trees were out of view. All the world was smoke and the thin, serpentine lines of fires twinkling through the smoke.
This white, the blanket Teddy sat inside now, was thicker and more dense than the days he spent fighting fire. Then, as fast as it appeared, the blanket of white dispersed and lifted in one flat plate into the air and away.
Teddy 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. Teddy 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.