Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº1

Houses Burning-1

Houses Burningby William R. Soldan

After work on Fridays, I stop to pick up my son, T. J., for our weekend visitations, though it’s only called that on paper. I’m the last person he wants to be around, so I usually don’t see much of him until Sunday afternoons when I bring him home. Today, he tosses his backpack on the seat and climbs into the truck with the same expression of resentment and contempt I’ve grown accustomed to seeing on his fifteen-year-old face. It seems to be permanently fixed there lately, as if he feels compelled to remind his mom and me that we’ve ruined his life.

Donna followed him out and stands on the porch, watching us, but she doesn’t wave. We’ve been separated almost five years now, and she still hasn’t forgiven the pain I caused her. The both of them. It’s my fault T. J. has been getting into trouble. He’s out of control, she says. You broke him, you fix him. Every time I pick him up, I can see the temporary relief. It’s all in her body language, like she’s about to dust off her hands after a grueling week of hard labor. Like she can finally relax. For the next two days he’s your problem.

“Have him there on time,” she yells to me. “Seven a.m.”

About a month ago, T. J. was at a party in a vacant house, and it got raided by the cops. They confiscated an impressive array of recreational goodies, but all the minors got off easy, slapped with a year probation and one hundred hours of community service. He’s lucky, I told him, getting a taste of the law while he’s still young enough to get a smack on the wrist. Best get it out of his system now.

“He’ll be there,” I say, “but I’ll have to drop him early so I can get to work. Been getting some overtime.”

“Long as you’re not late on your payments, I couldn’t care less what you got,” she says, then turns to go in the house. She’s dolled up: a skirt and silky blouse, her golden hair curled like she’s heading out on a date.

“She seeing anybody?” I ask T. J. as I back out onto the street, less because I want to know and more because I want to see how he feels about it if she is.

“Sometimes,” he says.

“Anyone decent?”

“Compared to who?”

He’s earned that much, so I let it slide. “Right,” I say.

And that’s the extent of it until we get across town to my place.

The neighborhood I live in is quiet most days, but with the hushed quality of somewhere always on the verge of detonation the moment the sun goes down. The street bottoms out in a deserted valley lined with burned out factories and brick buildings that were once gas stations or barber shops but now stand empty, their lots littered with windblown garbage and broken glass. All up and down the hill are gnarled trees, houses in varying states of disrepair, and the occasional grass lot. The bungalow where I lay my head is a real capital S shithole, but I’ve got electricity, the plumbing works, and the roof doesn’t leak when it rains. And it’s cheap, so I have no complaints. There are shootings every other night, last week one right on this block — a kid not much older than T. J. The asphalt beneath the streetlight on the corner is still red with his blood. Donna used to get on me about it, living on this side of town. When are you going to move someplace else, so I don’t have to worry about my son when he’s there. But like other things, she’s given up on that. Still, as soon as we pull into the driveway and he jumps out and starts up the buckled sidewalk, I make the effort I never made when it counted most.

“Hey, I was thinking I’d get changed out of these work clothes and we could go get some tacos, or maybe a pizza.”

He turns and almost scoffs as he removes his backward ball cap and reshapes the bill between his hands, then puts it back on over his greasy brown spikes and rubs his slim jaw, like he’s considering the possibility. One of his fake diamond earrings catches the headlights of a passing car and sparkles like a star.

“Nah, I’m good,” he finally says, moving back toward me. “I could use a couple bucks, though.”

It’s early enough, only about five-thirty, but the autumn sky has turned the livid color of a bruise, and I know he’s going out to do things he shouldn’t be. But he hates me enough, I tell myself, and he’d go regardless, so what the hell. Handing him a ten, I say, “Try not to be out too late, all right? I need to have you there first thing tomorrow. You don’t show up, you’re looking at six months, your mom tells me. Maybe longer. And I’ll never hear the end of it.”

He looks at the ten-dollar-bill, like he wants to ask for more, but then decides not to push his luck. “Yeah,” he says. “I hear you.”

Then he starts away, and I’m staring at his back as he jogs across the street and cuts between two boarded up houses.

*

I wait up until just past midnight for him to get in, and when he does, he stinks like liquor and weed.

“Are you trying to get yourself locked up, or what?” I say. “Christ, T. J., use your f*****g head for once.”

He stands there looking annoyed, as if to say, Can we wrap this up already?

“You know what, forget it,” I say. “I’m done.”

He goes to his room without a word. This house isn’t much in the way of amenities — one floor, a couch, a TV, the basics — but there are two bedrooms, so at least he’s got his own space, something I never had when I was his age.

“I always leave before they do, so as not to follow through with any of my bright ideas. The lead pipe in the back. The pistol beneath the seat.”

After about a half hour, once I’m sure he’s asleep, I put on my coat and leave, taking the long way, like I often do, a chance to talk myself out it, to find a better use of my time. But within twenty minutes I’m parked in an alley across from Donna’s.

There’s only one light on in the house, upstairs, and a car in the driveway beside hers. A yellow Mustang I haven’t seen before. I’ve been doing this for a long time, coming here, sitting behind the wheel of my truck, and I’ve seen different cars parked there. I always leave before they do, so as not to follow through with any of my bright ideas. The lead pipe in the back. The pistol beneath the seat. Yet I keep returning. Though I haven’t had a drink in years, so lack even that poor excuse, here I am.

I’ve never considered myself a good man.

*

This month we’re working Saturdays at the packaging plant to meet a missed quota. Eats away my weekends, but it’s time and a half, and with what I owe Donna each month, I always need the extra cash. That’s why Saturday nights I also work security at the Wander Inn. It pays minimum under the table plus a cut of the bartenders’ tips. Every little bit counts.

In the break room at lunch, Bigfoot and Eddie are sitting at one of the scuffed up Formica tables when I come in and fix a cup coffee, burnt and thick as mud. Bigfoot’s lathering up a couple slices of day-old pizza with mayonnaise from a large jar he brought from home. I’ll never understand the s**t this guy eats. Eddie sits next to him, flipping through the Auto Trader and rambling on about all the cherry cars he’s had in his day. He keeps using that word, “cherry.” Now he drives a Ford Tempo with mismatched quarter panels a crack in the windshield, and I think, How far some of us fall.

“What’s up, gentlemen?”

“Hey, Tommy,” Eddie says. “Just counting down to beer-thirty. Got a six on ice waiting in the car.”

“Out in the old custom cherry, eh?”

Bigfoot laughs and almost chokes on his food. He’s got mayonnaise in his beard and crumbs piled up on the shelf of his fat stomach. “Oh s**t,” he says, his mouth still full, “he got you good.”

“Sure, yuck it up, you wise asses,” Eddie says.

“Aww, you hurt his feelings,” Bigfoot says, placing a large meaty hand on Eddie’s scrawny shoulder and giving him a playful shake.

“Get your damn ham hocks off me you hairy bastard.”

They remind me of some backwoods Laurel and Hardy, and I can’t help but laugh a little myself.

On the table there’s a copy of Hard Times, the local arrest publication, and I glance down to see a face I recognize, which isn’t unusual, but while I drink my coffee I pick it up and take a closer look.

“Thought you never read that trash, Tommy,” Eddie says. “Ain’t that what you called it, ‘trash’?”

“That’s exactly what it is,” I say. “Putting people and their transgressions right out on Front Street for everyone to see. All to make a buck and never mind the harm it causes.”

“Why do you care so much, anyway?” Bigfoot asks. “Not like it’s your face on there.”

I think, If you boys only knew.

When the whistle blows, signaling us to return to our machines, I get up and toss my Styrofoam cup into the wastebasket. After Bigfoot and Eddie are gone, I duck around the corner to my locker and tuck the copy of Hard Times into my coat pocket before heading back to work. On the way, I stop off at the giant drums of honey-colored industrial adhesive and load up a bucket to fill the trough of the labeling machine at my work station. The stuff is like sap when it dries, and by the end of the day my clothes are always covered in a fresh layer of it. They can practically stand up on their own even after a run through the washer.

As the glue coats the bottom roller I run a poster-sized label through, slap it down on a long cardboard box, and smooth out the air pockets before shooting it through another set of rollers at the end of the machine where it falls onto wooden skid.

“Putting people and their transgressions right out on Front Street for everyone to see. All to make a buck and never mind the harm it causes.”

The product labels change from week to week, and today they’re for Little Tikes toys. One after another after another I watch toddlers and pre-school-aged children smiling big and climbing around on shotty plastic jungle gyms and brightly colored cars. Back when T. J. was that age, Donna and I used to pick up stuff like this secondhand at yard sales or the Salvation Army, usually missing pieces and marked up with other kids’ names. I try to remember if he ever got anything new, just his own, and when I can’t it’s like one more stone around my neck. What he must have thought. Goddamn.

*

Sitting outside the Juvenile Justice Center waiting for the van to drop off T. J. and the rest of the kids who spent the day paying their debts on a work farm south of the city, I keep staring at the face on the front page of Hard Times, lined up with a dozen others. Picked up for boosting a car, it says. He and I were locked up together, about five years ago, right after my last bender and right before Donna served me with divorce papers. His name is Mike, but everyone in A-wing called him Mr. Clean, because he was jacked and bald and was the only bastard in the place not strung out on something.

“I had tried AA, church, good old fashioned detox and white-knuckle abstinence. Hell, I even went to a shrink for a while and took Antabuse to make me sick if I touched the stuff. But with the reliability of a high tide, my propensity for bad choices always got the upper hand.”

I had been through all the classic cures for my drinking up to that point: I had switched from liquor to beer; I had replaced it with prostitutes, gambling, pills; I had tried AA, church, good old fashioned detox and white-knuckle abstinence. Hell, I even went to a shrink for a while and took Antabuse to make me sick if I touched the stuff. But with the reliability of a high tide, my propensity for bad choices always got the upper hand, and I’d wake to answer for the mess I’d made, often at home but just as often in public. The last time I fell off the wagon, after a handful of weekends in the tank, I bought myself an extended stay in a community corrections facility when I ran my car through someone’s yard and into a ditch before fleeing the scene. It was little more than a County jail masquerading as a treatment program, the only real difference being the food was a step up and you got to wear your own clothes.