old folks home, short story

An excerpt from Harry Dreams of Jupiter, a book of 16 short stories

1132 E. 65^th St., Kansas City, MO 64131, 816-333-7303

Old folks home

“Goddammit, I don’t give a shit if everyone in this fuckin store knows what the hell’s wrong with me,” Rainer said, his voice getting louder. He and Carla stood in the candy aisle at the warehouse store. Pallets of M&Ms, Starbursts, and Oh Henry! bars around them. “I’m scared fucking shitless...”

“Don’t use the f-word, not here,” Carla growled.

“Quit interrupting me. That makes everything so much goddamn better. I’ll use it all I want.”

“But there are all these people. You’re embarrassing me.”

“I don’t fucking care...”

Carla spun and walked down the aisle, her flip-flops slapping against the concrete floor.

“Carla...Carla...” Rainer’s voice became louder. “Goddammit...Shitgoddammit.” He wanted to strike something but there was nothing around but Zero bars and the stout steel rack that held a second tier of pallets. “Goddammit, Carla. Walkin away makes everything right. Carla, goddammit...Carla.”

Carla turned around, stopping with one shoulder his direction. She held the strap of her purse at the other shoulder in a tight fist.

“I have to stand here and take your shit,” she said. Her eyes were wide, becoming teary. “You get like this all the time. You get angry and raise your voice. You say the same goddamn thing again and again. I don’t have to take it.”

Rainer deflated. His shoulders dropped and his hands fell to his side. He felt himself lean back off the balls of his feet. He looked down the aisle and between the space between the tops of the pallets and the bottom of the steel shelves. People pushing carts looked away. The store seemed quiet.

“Carla, you’re right again,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared, like I said. I go to a job I hate everyday. And everyday all I want to do as soon as I get there is walk the fuck out...”

Carla had flinched at the sound of the word. “Watch the f-word.”

“All right. All right. I hate that place; I hate those people. I don’t belong there. It’s a nightmare.”

“I know, babe. It’s just a little longer.”

“All I ever hear from anyone is how I should be happy and grateful I have a job. That I have to pay all my bills. That I can’t just quit and ruin my chances for the future. Then, every asshole who says that turns right around and tells me life can’t always be about money.”

“It can’t, hon. It isn’t. We’ll be all right. Just take it easy.”

Rainer wasn’t paying attention. “When you have all your debt and taxes paid and have a million in the bank...” He picked up a package of twenty-four Mars bars and turned it over in his hand. “Then, maybe, it isn’t about money. But until then, it’s all about money and I’m sick of hearing about how much I need it.”

Rainer looked up into the steel girders and mercury lights above. He took a deep breath and could feel some of the anger subside into fatigue. “We get in here, Carla, and have to shop for this or that. All I can think about is that house we have to pay for and the fact that I may not have that stupid job soon. Big cheese Marion isn’t going to keep me around forever. She knows I don’t like the place, and I can’t find enthusiasm for the job anymore.”

“Let’s just get this done,” Carla said. “Let’s just get over with what we need to and we’ll go home and figure out the accounts.” Rainer calmed down. His face pulled into a knot of worry. They went to the clothing stand where shirts and pants formed haphazard piles. He felt as if he had become shrunken.

As they dug through the shirts, he tried to find the cheapest ones, not merely because they were cheap, but because the more expensive ones, the store brand, never fit him right. He thought the couple he had purchased at the store before, when he cinched up the collars and buttoned the top buttons, made him look like a tick.

Carla then went off to look at the food and take in some of the samples that store employees were giving out. Rainer thought the people handing out the food always looked so embarrassed standing there with toy knives and little cups. Paper hats and plastic gloves. Soup and sporks. Toothpicks stuck in tiny salty sausages like cat turds with handles. They never looked anyone in the eye. He imagined they got paid about squat for their work. All he could think about when he saw those people was that he was looking at his future.

He looked at the televisions. HDTV and flat plasma screens were nice, he thought. It looked nice, like a great promise. But the payoff was just more TV. People were proud when they were able to buy them. Poor bastards.

When Carla had come back, he had been through housewares and garden tools. She touched him on the shoulder as he was looking at a cast-iron fireplace grate. “I’m sorry again, Carla. I’m not myself today.” He turned around and faced her. She took his hand. “It’s a rough one and I’m sorry to put you through it. I’m just spooked. A house. Mattie’s tuition. Bills and more bills. Then, we come here and spend money like crazy. I mean, we have to save some money, and it seems like we spend the most of it on just stuff. I mean, we can feed ourselves for something less than a hundred a damn week. We have to do something.”

“We will, babe. I promise. We’ll sit down and make a list before we go shopping every week and cut down on the amount of money we’re spending. We’ll save some more. It won’t be bad.”

They rolled up to the cashier with two shirts, two pairs of pants, a medium price boombox to replace the eleven-year-old radio/CD player than had worn out earlier in the month. They had a set of mixing bowls for their friend, Don, who had moved into a new house. The total was $264.57. Rainer made believe he needed the clothes for his next job, the one he’d get after Marion kicked him out, and he felt his lips loosen. Then, he felt an extra weight on his shoulders when he thought of the shoes he still needed to buy to replace the ones with the third set of soles he walked holes into. He felt the bruises forming on the balls of his feet because his pair of running shoes had reached the end of its useful life.

When they got home, he took a nap. He had needed one because he hadn’t slept the night before. He woke up confused and tired. He made some coffee and after he sipped it down over the last pages of the newspaper he hadn’t read that morning, split some wood for the fireplace.

He didn’t talk much, just listened to the new stereo and read a book. Mattie, his daughter, and her friend put finishing touches on Mattie’s school project, a family tree. When they had finished, they went into Mattie’s room and shut the door. Rainer went to the dining room table and looked over her work. With his index finger, he traced the lines from Mattie, through him, across his mother and and into an age of farmers and serfs. He went back and did the same over his father, and dead-ended in the same era as before, a dark, smoky and fetid past of bent dirt farmers who lost their land, came to the United States, worked all the time, and drank themselves to death.

Carla’s keys jingled. “Where you headed, babe?” he said.

“I’m just going to take the movies back.”

“No. Let me. I haven’t had an excuse to smoke my pipe all week.”

He packed his pipe from a little leather pouch, grabbed a book of matches, and picked up the movies off the television. Once in his truck, he started the engine and let it warm while his put a match to the tobacco. He hadn’t smoked in a month, and it tasted fine. Putting the truck in gear, he pulled out of the driveway and headed into the red-yellow of the streetlights that spilled across quiet streets. Nothing moved but his truck as he drove first to the post office first to drop the receipt and the new warranty for the boombox for a $20 rebate into the mail. Puffing away, he went to the movie store and dropped the movies into the after-hours drop though the store was still open. Then he headed back into his neighborhood.

Once he arrived in the pocket of streets between the interstate and the railroad tracks, a square-mile swath of older residences, businesses, and some new construction. He knew the place well, having walked the dog up and down these streets hundreds of times. But he had never driven but the few that led into and out of the neighborhood and to his house. He was amazed now at how many one-way streets there were. He found himself driving against a lines of cars parked on both sides of the street faced the other direction. The few people out walking their dogs gawked at him.

He stopped at a corner on the hill overlooking downtown and out across a wide expanse of the city and turned off the headlights and ignition. He turned the radio down to a whisper. Across the street stood the Church of the Good Pastor, a low, flat brick building with no windows facing the street. Kids ran in and out of a door, through which Rainer could see Christmas lights. Lights flickered over the strands of white and red on the interstate that ran down into the valley below. He felt off-kilter, like he was getting sick, but not quite. A good night’s sleep, he thought, was all he needed. It was all he ever needed.

He puffed on his pipe and listened to the kids and the traffic on the interstate. He tried to change his perspective. It was a good job, a good career job. But editing gift books, what he used to call nonbooks, was nothing he had planned on. A series of random events resulting from low vision, he thought. People get out of school and know where they want to go, where they have to do to get where they are going. He had lived his life more like a pinball, bouncing here and there, ringing up some points here to have them shaved there. Bonus balls were lives started and ended within a few pushes of the flipper buttons. Even if he were careful not to tip the machinery, he would run out of balls soon.

There was always something. Life never settled down to a deep breath and a nap in an easy chair. Not for him. They needed a house. The sewer pipe broke. Transmissions slipped. They needed to keep Mattie in a school where she was challenged. They needed to pay the child support to Mattie’s mom.

He could quit, and they would all have to deal with it. After all, it was his choice to keep this up, keep up the appearance of being happy to belong to his family, to the book group, to a company family. He chose to act that he was grateful to the boss for being allowed to be employed. He acted like he was a part of a group of people who didn’t ever talk to him, who didn’t really talk to each other except about what kinds of televisions and SUVs they bought, the kinds of interesting and trendy computer baubles and digital cameras they had. There had to be more than this. “I feel like I’m all by myself up there,” he said to himself. “I’m sick of trying to figure out whose ass I have to kiss this week. And Marion fucking hates me.”

He puffed and went through the gamut: One minute, he scolded himself for having more ambition than talent, the next he was dreaming of sitting back and watching his empire grow. It hurt him to think that after two years in the shit business, he had come to understand only that capitalism allowed trinket salesman to make fortunes because their trinkets had a mystique bric-a-brac seeking housewives couldn’t live without. A catalog of stuff he liked, printed on high-quality paper twice a year. He could do that if he wanted. But he would have to follow though, he would have to want to do that until he could make it pay and then some.

He watched the lights flicker. Trains snaked through the railyards next to the old train station. The pipe had warmed now to the point where it was comfortably hot in his hand. A woman in a small car pulled up next to him. The window rolled down automatically. She had curly hair and a dog that yapped. “Say, I’m kind of lost. Could you tell me how to get to the old folks home?”

He saw how the lights formed a horizon of their own, a well-defined line between land and sky, between light and darkness. He could tell her, all right. It was only a short walk to the old folks home, to a place where everyone had chicken hands and memories of pasts that didn’t exist. It was a place where the present was remade everyday and the future extended only to dinnertime. He took a last draw on his pipe and knocked it out on the side of the truck. He would go to work just one more day, one more week, one more paycheck.

“Yeah,” he said, turning the ignition. “Just follow me. It seems I’m headed there myself.” We’re all headed there, he thought, leading the woman in the small car the wrong way down a one-way street.

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