THREE hours after we boost the TV, Cal starts talking about going to California. He talks about the girls with those tits you find online, the ones who never have to bundle up for winter ’cause the sun never sets on Burbank or Malibu or any of those places. He talks about bottomless margaritas and endless shrimp buffets, room service and escorts you can pay by the minute. Cal says he will teach me to surf, teach me everything.
I’m trying to figure out where we’ll unload this Panasonic for more than a hundred bucks, so I try to ignore him. I don’t even think Cal remembered to grab the remote before we left the Stockyard. He’s only been bouncing there for two weeks and Big Randy doesn’t tell him shit. Just says to keep sticky fingers off the girls and watch for those assholes with the spy cameras tucked up under their hats. They’re the ones ruining the profits.
“The best part is no snow. No ice. No waking up at night with your balls shrunk to prunes.”
No way am I getting the kids back if someone finds us with this TV. But no one’s going to report a missing TV these days. Not when we left how many thousands tucked inside Randy’s office, covered in white powder and protein stains or whatever else is dripping from the DJ’s nose. The report will just go into a file folder somewhere in the station basement until the annual Christmas bonfire consumes it all.
“You ever think about learning to surf, Jimmy? I seen too many guys bust their faces on America’s Funniest Home Videos to try that shit, but maybe if I hired a trainer…”
The lawyer says motions take money to file, and I got a lot of motions to make. I’ve got pictures I went and printed off at the library. Pictures of Alice doing shots of tequila in Georgia, pictures of long salt lines stretching up her stomach and down the sides of her hips. She’s lost weight and her nose is red. Every time she smiles, the camera burns her eyes a little deeper until they’re just holes. She’s got denim jeans on down there in Florida, sleeping every night in Brad Paisley’s tour bus. No snow to keep her shrivelled and cold. She says she’s in love, says he’s the one, ever since they met at the Havelock Jamboree. Lawyer says I need to file each piece of evidence separately, but his office smells like cat piss and the law degree hanging from his wall is missing some punctuation. He drives a Buick with three bald tires and smiles too much when I step into his office. Alice keeps posting pictures from down in the Keys, her arms wrapped around bodyguards, her tattoos of Jason and Marlee poking out from under the straps of her bathing suit while she sips champagne and the sun sets like it’s the end of the world behind her.
I am waiting for her camera to break.
“Cal, let’s take it to Donna.”
Cal looks up from his fantasies of ten pound shrimp and naked eighteen year olds. He needs his pills to stay lucid and awake, but he doesn’t get paid until we sell this piece of shit. I can’t carry a TV by myself.
“Whatever you wanna do, man. She might still be up.”
The road is pockmarked and swallows up my front tire as we bounce away from the arena parking lot. The streetlights guide me and I try to spin the radio dial away from country stations where Paisley sings about mud on the tires, Southern girls, and the endless bounty of America. All I can see is Alice writhing on the stage under some kind of smoke machine and a bunch of cigarettes burning in the audience before her, burning until I start to cough. A stoplight pulses into my vision and reminds me to make a left onto the busted gravel. Only one set of lights glows down the row of bungalows. There are snowmen watching us as we pass.
Donna used to work with Alice at the Stockyard back before Paisley and his tour bus. Her old boy Delany got her some Oxy after he was run off the road a few months ago by the cops. They keep her from dreaming, she says. Keep her from all the boys leering in her sleep. She’s always got cash laying around, tucked between underwear and couch cushions. No bank account. I have Cal knock at the door and try not to let her see me standing beside him in the cold.
The Panasonic sits in the backseat and stares at us.
“Five in the morning, Cal. Five in the goddamn morning. You got some need? I don’t have anything for it. Told you that once before. Now get off my porch before I wake up Del.”
“We got something for you, Donna. Why you always gotta spin it back at me?”
Donna leans her head out the door into the cold. Her hair is wet.
“Oh hell no. Fuck that. You wanna bring that asshole in here?”
I jam a hand into the doorframe before Donna can close it.
“We’ll make it worth your while, alright? I promise I won’t do any crazy shit.”
Donna knows all about the phone calls. She knows about the messages I left on Alice’s voicemail, the ones that allowed her parents to come and grab the kids. Alice played them for her. I told the officers I wasn’t in a very good state of mind at the time. Alice played them for everybody, even got me suspended from the mill for a month. That didn’t stop the bills though, and it didn’t stop the lawyer. Voice mail ruined all of that. Voice mail and Brad Paisley’s hairless chest.
“Yeah? You won’t—what was it—string me up like a kite? Chop me up so I’ll fit down the drain better? What else did you say to her? You’d lock the kids up in a hole before you’d let her touch them? Got enough holes on your property to do that, Jimmy. Got enough holes to bury everyone if you wanted to. Get off my porch.”
Cal turns back to the car.
“Hey, grab that thing and show her off. Don’t just run,” I say.
Headlights rolls up the street, and Cal skitters back up to the porch.
“I can’t get fired again, man. If they find out about this—”
“About what?” Donna says. Her hair is starting to freeze and my hand turns red inside the doorframe. “You really got something for me, or is this all just bullshit to figure out where Alice is at now?”
“We actually have something,” I say and the pressure loosens up off my fist. I crack my knuckles and look at the damage. Donna shakes the ice in her hair and we follow the droplets down the hall. Her living room is stacked with magazines and lingerie and all the furniture is orange. Donna lives inside a pumpkin, and her TV is a piece of shit.
“Two hundred bucks for a Panasonic. Thirty-two inches of glory. What do you say?”
Donna flips through a magazine and ignores us on the couch. Cal is pacing back and forth. He needs to get back to his apartment before he starts freaking out again. Twenty years dealing with Cal and I never understood why he won’t carry his meds on him.
“Not even a scratch on it, alright? You can replace this piece of crap and save yourself five hundred bucks in the process. Cash. Right now. All we gotta do is pull it outta the backseat.”
Sometimes Donna babysat Jason and Marlee. She used to play hide and seek with them until Marlee climbed into the dryer and hid there for a few hours. Alice almost took off Donna’s head when she came home from a shift covered in cold sweat and make-up to find her daughter banging on the lint trap. After that, it was just movies and board games.
“Can you keep your voice down, Jimmy? You’re gonna wake up Del. He’s supposed to find out tomorrow if they’ll let him do any physio after the trial is done. Doesn’t want to be a cripple forever—Cal get your hands off of that shit. I’m air drying those things.”
Cal takes a seat and pulls out some postcards he jacked from the gas station. He’s written letters to his mother across the back with fake return addresses stretching up and down the Golden Coast. It’s the only excuse he can think of to avoid the hospital. Cal can’t handle hospitals—too many reflective surfaces, too many people asking how he feels today, asking for reasons and for his personal information. His Mom is only twenty minutes down the highway, but it may as well be Florida for all he cares.
“Who gives a shit about Del?” I say. “He shouldn’t have run. They catch him with three or four plants in the car, so what? Could plead that down. Get off with some probation.”
Donna rolls her eyes at me. While I was plotting murders in Alice’s inbox to try and win her back, Del had been trying to move his stash from an abandoned cottage to the family farm. New owners and buyers in the area had everyone a little on edge. Lots of old things lying underneath rotten decks and docks that no one with any sense wanted to find. Del was just trying to do some clean up when the sirens came on behind him. He let them chase him for twenty minutes until they forced him into the ditch and broke his collarbone.
“You know, I could probably get two TVs for the same price if I just wait you out,” Donna says and pries a bottle out of her housecoat. The pink fabric and orange furniture make my eyes burn. Cal is picking through Donna’s underwear while she tries to twist off the childproof cap.
“You’re talking about two hypothetical TVs there,” I say. Hypothetical is a word the lawyer likes to drop in my lap whenever I talk about getting the kids back. He says we’d have to start with some anger management classes, some group therapy—all the court-ordered treatments I’ve tried to ignore. Maybe I could get a few hours of supervised visitation if I followed those suggestions. The lawyer gave me the name of Cal’s shrink, the same one writing prescriptions for half of Owen Sound and most of the reserves outside this town. We may be second cousins, but I know my brain isn’t as mangled as that boy’s mind.
“Hype-a-what?” Donna laughs, and slides an Oxy down her throat. She doesn’t need to chase it with anything. Her lips are always wet.
“Hypothetical. Yeah, we might have to steal something else tomorrow, or someone will decide to toss their old set out for garbage day, but you’re taking a risk there. We’ve got you a bird here, right in the hand. You can talk about the two you see out there in the bushes all you want, but they aren’t sittin’ in my backseat. Thing doesn’t even have a serial number.”
“Everything’s got serial numbers in California,” Cal says. His eyes have moved onto the VHS tapes stacked up by the busted old TV. Donna tapes all her performances at the Stockyard and tries to sell them on the internet. Delany’s convinced her video is still a viable format. He needs the money, but can’t afford a DVD player or any of that Blu-ray shit.
“No serial… Oh, hell no. You took the TV from the bar? Didn’t Cal just start there? You really think Big Randy won’t put that together? He’s not stupid you know; just a pig. Just a rutting pig. He’s all over the new girls now, taking them back to the office. Even when they gotta dance! Even when the crowd is rowdy, Randy’s got ’em cooped up back there all for himself.”
Donna and Alice used to be those girls back in the office with their razor blades and magic mirrors and stained panties landing on the floor. That’s how Randy says it. Panties. He really liked to pop the ‘p’ between his lips and let the rest slip through his stubby teeth.
“So what if we did? He doesn’t have any proof. There’s no way he’s letting the cops search the place, and there’s no one bigger than Cal to stop us.”
Donna taps her foot against the coffee table. Her frozen hair has melted and the couch is soaked behind her. She bites her purple lip and hums a little to herself. I know Alice it still sending her letters about Brad Paisley. About how soft his chest is in the night. About the booze and the coke and the taste of other men, how their sweat is cleaner, their minds are clearer. And I don’t want to blame her, but I do.
“I dunno… two hundred for that shit? Really? Did you even grab the remote?”
Alice’s old man shuts the door on me every time and her mother likes to call the cops to do spot checks on my place. Told them I was growing weed in the basement, that I had unregistered guns lingering around in the garage. Not a safe environment for children. She even told them about the stripper pole we had installed in the bedroom one Christmas, failing to inform the officers her daughter was the one who bought it in the first place. Everyone at the Stockyard called her Stacked Alice, even in toasts at our wedding. Her parents weren’t invited.
“Alright—how ’bout this? I know you won’t be findin’ two TVs like this for Del anytime soon. And I know two hundred is a lot to part with. How about you give me one hundred for Cal and instead of my hundred, you just let me take a look at those letters Alice has been sending you from Florida.”
Donna’s wide eyes move from her toes to my face.
“I don’t got any emails or letters, Jimmy. I told you. She isn’t saying anything to me.”
There is a yawn from down the hall. Cal keeps sorting through the videotapes, trying to line them up into alphabetical order. He likes to keep an order—a hierarchy of things. He includes women with those things, alongside ten inch shrimp and thirty-two ounce steaks.
“Nothing? She’s posting pictures and all kinds of shit. She hasn’t said a word to you? Bullshit, Donna. Just let me see a few and I’ll just give you the fucking TV. You can have it.”
Donna shakes her head.
“I’m not giving you anything, Jimmy. You understand a restraining order, right? You know she’s not coming back until you’re locked up. You get that?”
Alice’s parents screen my calls. I don’t bother leaving messages. Lawyer says that is just further evidence. Yesterday, I drove past the school a few times hoping to see one of them poke a head out of a window or something. But I can’t tell any of the kids apart in their snowsuits.
“I get a lot of shit, Donna. I fuckin’ get enough shit.”
I try calling the mill, try asking for a tour on the night crew. I can sling cases, I can use the forklifts. I know which trucks need a boost and where to find the temps taking another smoke behind the fuel shed. They tell me I’m suspended pending further review every time like I can’t read or something, like I can’t see the notices lingering on my fridge, like Brad Paisley isn’t playing in every single supermarket, singing about Alice in the mud, Alice in the backseat, Alice everywhere with him, everywhere but here.
I grab a bottle off the floor and chuck it at the wall. It shatters above Donna’s head.
“Just show me the fucking letters, alright?”
Alice never even liked country music. She used to make fun of the Hank Williams shit my Dad left me, rolled her eyes at all the Willie I played in the car. She called it my dead dog music. I slowly won her over, slowly watched her work Steve Earle into her sets down at the Stockyard, watched the men wince and moan while she took off her clothes. The words dripped off her with the sweat, and I knew she was coming home with me. It’s always best to know.
It’s the not knowing that brands you. Leaves a mark for everyone to see.
“Del! Del you gotta come in here now! You gotta get up! Fuckin Jimmy—”
Donna is up off the couch and running down the stunted hall. There are only five rooms in this box and I can hear Del stumbling around in the bedroom, looking for the rifle his uncle gave him for protection after the cops confiscated everything. I grab another bottle of something from the sticky floor and chuck it down the hall after Donna. It catches her in the back. She falls onto the floor and the smell of gin fills my face. Not knowing is the worst part. Donna has all those letters with the details laid out in ink.
“Jimmy, there aren’t any letters! There’s nothing!”
Donna’s looking up at me from the floor. I can hear Del stump toward me from the bedroom with one arm done up in plaster. The signatures on the cast are all his own. His ancient gun scrapes the wall as he moves. His tattoos are black and blue impressions of Donna’s face.
No way will he buy that TV now.
“Get the fuck out of here, Jim,” Del says. The floor is sticky. Cal tries to slip out the front door behind me with a handful of videotapes. Del is almost as tall as Cal. Used to toss dirt clods at his mom’s car whenever she came to pick him up. Del liked to call her the town drain.
“Oh you brought the ’tard with you, eh? Doin’ some community service tonight, Jim? He ain’t taking any of those tapes with him, you know. Those are an investment. How you doin’ anyway, Cali? Your momma ever end up taking you out there?”
Cal is tugging at my arm. He wants to go. He’s forgotten his postcards on the floor. According to the addresses, he’s been all the way down to San Diego this week.
“You dumb fucks,” Del says. “You think I wouldn’t just jack the thing myself? I should just shoot you both down now, but no point there. With the injury, I might just get probation. Look at that poor ’tarded bastard. Why you gotta bring him, Jimmy?”
Everyone knows Cal was a mistake. Grew up with his mother and a bunch of rotating uncles over the years who left behind cigarette burns and the taste of soap in his mouth. Their cars stained the driveway until it looked like one big oil patch shining in the dark.
“We’re going Del, alright? Just put your shit down. You don’t need another violation.”
Cal shakes his head. He doesn’t want to put down Del’s investment. I grab a few of the tapes from his giant hands. Cal’s mother always told him his dad had run off to Sacramento, where he was doing radio play-by-play for the Kings. Del says the tapes are worth something, worth protecting, and Cal won’t let them go. He needs the money for a ticket to the coast.
“Just give me the tapes. Give me all that shit and take your junk ass TV down to the pawn.”
Cal starts chucking tapes at Del, just whipping them at the cast. One bounces off Del’s face and spools of black tape sprout out across the floor. Little frames of naked Donna writhing on the pole unfurl across the sticky yellow carpeting. I can’t see her face, but the outline looks like her. She’s still crying on the floor, trying to avoid the broken glass. Cal hasn’t been taking his meds for six hours now, and Del has been after him for seventeen years.
I watch Cal grab Del’s broken arm and slam him against the wall. There is a snap.
“Put him down Cal, you gotta put him down,” Donna screams. The lawyer says the best thing for me right now is to stay out of trouble. Stay away from Alice’s friends, her family. Stay away from everyone. I’ve spent too many nights inside, but I understand his point. Del is making some weird choking sound and his face is changing colours. I slowly back out the front door and let the screen shut quietly behind me. Donna yells something after me, something about calling off my fucking dog, but I don’t got a leash. Cal won’t need the money from the TV now.
The air outside is cold and the snowmen are still watching me. There’s another bellow from the bungalow. Everything looks pink and gray. I put the car into reverse and pull out of the driveway. Cal is probably choking Del until he blacks out, the same strategy he’s been using at the Stockyard for the last two weeks. You see the patrons walking around with purple throats the next morning, trying to order eggs through mangled voice boxes. Donna’s probably flushing all their pills down the toilet ’cause the neighbours will be calling the cops again—a morning ritual in this neighbourhood; sirens and birds to wake the children with the sun.
Brad Paisley is on the radio and his voice is singing to me about all the little moments, all the dirty words. The time she lost the directions, and the time she burnt his birthday cake. He’s singing about Alice and I know she’s not coming back. I know there are no letters. The Panasonic is still in the backseat and its watching me make a left onto a one-way street. One television is better than none, even without the remote. Only houses I’ve ever seen with two were in Cal’s magazines and travel brochures. Palatial places down by the ocean. Places where the view goes on forever; a sight beyond your reach.
I need something I can’t touch. Something my hands can’t quite hold. Everything I cling to these days turns to shit and lead. Even the Panasonic is beginning to crack around the edges.
It’s only twenty five hundred miles until Modesto.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of the short story collection All We Want is Everything (ARP Books, 2013), a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2013, and WASTE (Dzanc Books, 2016). Sullivan no longer works in a warehouse.
LF #042 © Andrew F. Sullivan. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, June 2013.
