The heroin was too much, much too much, Peter
Wagner says somewhat despondently to himself. It was like floating into the
beautiful but disabling clouds of a coma—a fabulous flight but a debilitating
descent. He thinks, if it wasn't for that they could have stayed
together, but now he is being evicted—well, not evicted exactly, but forced to
vacate because of non-payment of rent (same difference); while his girlfriend,
Wendy, is incarcerated at the Hilltop unit, a branch of the Texas Department of
Corrections.
Each time before when he passed the
exit at I-30 and Broadway, on his trips back and forth to his storage unit,
someone in a red and white space suit waved to him. Apparently, the Exxon
station (the sponsor of this extraterrestrial well-wisher) was running some
kind of promotion. And as he passes under the I-30 Bridge and looks out at the
storm clouds hovering like UFOs in the distance, he wonders if the spaceman
will be out once again welcoming the passing cars.
And sure enough, as he comes out from
under the bridge and looks over at the Exxon station, glistening in the rain,
he encounters the spaceman, like some kind of mad hypnotic robot, waving in his
general direction—a white gloved hand swaying from side to side, blessing the
white Chevrolet pickups, blue Fords, Cavaliers, and surf green Pontiacs—the
outline of a set of thin shoulders and clavicles more like small pointed
breasts poking out from behind the red and white helmet.
This would be strange enough by itself,
he thinks, but it is magnified and topped off by the fact that the spaceman
seems to be waving telepathically in sync to the chorus of a song by the
Cranberries blasting out of the dashboard of his maroon eighty-eight Buick
Skylark:
In your head
In your head they are crying
In your head
Zombie, Zombie, Zombie...
What’s in your head, in your head
Zombie...
As he passes the American Pawn
Superstore, he remembers the winter before when he and Wendy visited her family
in San Marcos for Christmas and then spent New Year’s camping along the banks
of the Blanco river. The air was cold and pure. They shared a sleeping bag and
had sex; he thinks she was happy then.
Shaky and depressed as he passes
Bobtown and then Rosehill road, a few blocks from his former home now, Wagner
spots a small dilapidated bait shop to his right and comes to a big green sign
that says Zion Road in white reflective letters. The rain has begun falling in
waves, in wild gusts of water, and as he turns his windshield wipers to maximum
speed the road begins to undulate and one of his wheels begins to shake,
vibrating through the entire body of the car. He wonders if he has picked up
some debris off the road. Then, he realizes he has a flat, and hobbles off the
service road to a small park maintained by the City of Garland. Through the
rain he can see the long masts on the sailboats in the harbor ahead.
The last time he saw her she was
dressed in the uniform of a Dallas County inmate—a white one-piece shirt and
pants suit, her waif-like figure culminating in a perfect set of small, round
breasts. He was allowed to see her for a maximum of thirty minutes. She had
waited for him in the reception area behind a wire mesh partition. Cute with a
blond page boy haircut, button nose and pretty lips, and off drugs for more
than a month, she looked healthier than he had ever seen her; her skin seemed
so luminous—radiant, even the wetness of her eyes glistened, twinkling
unexpectedly; her whole being seemed open to him, exposed.
“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater,” she said
that when she was either happy, high or both.
“Well, you’re looking up.”
“Up. Right. God knows I’ve been down.
Dr. Hook and all his black phobias,” she waved dramatically with a flourish of
her hands.
“You look great.”
“Oh yes, just look at my lovely gown.
Miss America here or rather Miss Dallas County. See, right here written in
black letters on my back,” she turned her back to show him. “Fucking freak
show. I can think of better things.”
“Now, don’t be sarcastic.”
“I definitely wish I was somewhere else.
Last week one girl was almost killed. This big fat bitch with dirty blonde hair
got on top of this skinny girl and slammed her head against the concrete floor
over and over like a basketball. The skinny girl was screaming and crying and
no one helped. It was so scary. They took her to Parkland with a fractured
skull.”
“All things considered; you seem to be
handling it pretty well.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I’m pissed or
what. I guess in a strange way, I’m on a kind of pink
cloud. I've accepted my situation, but happiness isn’t where I’m at
right now. I mean it’s not a goal. Not here. I want out, I just don’t want to
drive myself crazy thinking about it.”
“I’ve missed you so much. I wish
we were together right now, without the drugs, just us. It could be fantastic.”
“Fantastic, with our track record how
would we know?”
“Maybe we could find out.”
“Maybe,” she said carefully taking a
neutral position.
“I’m getting better.”
“Better than what?” she asked,
incredulously. “And then what’s all this gun business all about?”
“You mean my letter?”
“Yes, that letter really freaked me
out.”
“After I mailed it,
I couldn't take it back. It was a metaphor. I was speaking
poetically. I don’t even have a gun.”
“You call blowing your brains out,
fuckin’ poetic? Come on, give me a break.”
“I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?” he
said mockingly with a grin, rolling his eyes. “What can I say, my life is
nothing without you.” He gestured flamboyantly as if it were all a joke.
“You’re such a DQ—Drama Queen,” she
sputtered, emphasizing each syllable.
“It was nothing. I was upset.”
“You send a suicide note. And you say
it was nothing.”
“Well, you’ve given me plenty to worry
about, too.”
“You mean you’re obsessed with me and
want to control every move I make. And to be honest, I’ve had enough of that.”
“I don’t want to control you.”
“That’s what you say. And there’s
something else. I want a normal life, maybe even have a family.”
“A family,” he repeated in a soft
voice. He knew what that meant, but was afraid of saying it. He was HIV
positive and she wasn’t and ultimately a family with him was uncertain at best.
“Wendy, are you going to move back in with me?”
She hesitated, her face tightening. “I
can’t say. It will be at least a month before I go to Gatesville. And
then, they’ll probably assign me a to halfway house. Anyway, it isn’t what
I want. It’s what the Texas Department of Corrections wants.”
“What about after that?”
“That’s just too far ahead in the
future.”
“But what do you want to do?”
“You just don’t get it. This is another
chance for both of us. But just because we've both been given another
chance, it doesn't mean we’re going to get back together. Just look
at our history, it’s all about using, fighting and fucking up. I want something
different.”
“Don’t you see, it can be so different
now.”
“How? ”
“Back with me and off the drugs.”
“Back with you—every time we’ve been
together we’ve been high.”
“All I want is a happy and wonderful
life”
“Stoned out of your mind. Come down to
earth, Captain Fantasy. What you want is a fairy tale. You’re such a total
dreamer,” she countered.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want someone I can depend on.”
“You know you can depend on me.”
“Depend on you, are you kidding? I
wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“Your blaming me for that fat fuck with
the lavender Cadillac? That half-assed lawyer. That disbarred attorney.
Modeling agent. What a joke.”
“I took those jobs because we needed
money.”
“I helped.”
“You mean you helped spend the money
that I made and then ran and took handouts from your father. And where did you
get the money for your new place? Your father. Have you got a job? No. Are you
going to your aftercare? No. What are you doing? Again, nothing.”
“All right. Go back and be a whore,
suck dick for a fix.”
“What about you? You’re not above
sucking dick for a fix, are you?” Wendy’s mood had grown darker, more hostile.
“I had to do what I had to do. I was
sick. But that’s over,” Wagner blushed.
“You’re just like me, you’ll use anyone
or anything to get what you want.”
“We’ll see how you do when you get out.
You’ll be back out there taking it in the ass.”
“Yeah and how many times did you take
it in the ass. Did you like it. Did you just love it?” Wendy asked, coming
closer, taunting him.
“Go to hell. Fucking whore. Bitch. I
don’t care what you do.”
After being detoxed and hospitalized
for chemical dependency and depression, Wagner found his now partially vacated
one bedroom condo overlooking Lake Ray Hubbard in the classifieds of The Dallas
Morning News. And it was while in the hospital that Wagner was diagnosed HIV
positive. His doctor recommended that he move into an Oxford house (a kind of
half-way house for alcoholics and addicts, which Wagner refused) and begin a
strict regimen of medication. But after his initial prescription for Zoloft and
Paxel ran out, he quit taking any medication.
Isolated and anxious, Wagner would stay
up all night watching TV or fishing by the white rocks in front of his condo.
And while he had seen his neighbor once before in the daylight, that first
night, his neighbor was nothing more than a thin ghost wavering in the
darkness, a portable oxygen tank by his side.
Later, Wagner discovered that his
somewhat eccentric and sickly neighbor received all kinds of promotional stuff
from Marlboro (even a yellow inflatable canoe that took up an entire spare
bedroom) by turning in the labels from his discarded cigarette packs. So after
that, Wagner began calling him the Marlboro man.
The Marlboro man made a wonderful
fishing companion, buying boxes and boxes of expensive Texas Gulf shrimp for
bait, confessing he was on food stamps and disability and had no other use for
the shrimp since he subsisted on vanilla Ensure injected into a feeding tube
implanted in his chest.
Mornings, Wagner would wake to find him
knocking on his sliding glass door, holding wet catfish hanging helplessly on a
stringer. “Do you want them?” he would ask. Wagner would always say yes.
Nights, Wagner and the Marlboro man
would sit out on the white rocks and wait for the fish to bite; while out toward
the reeds, an egret would wade on stilt-like legs, scooping up minnows in its
long bill—the light blue stars glittering, momentarily brightening to white.
“They’re going to put a gambling casino
out there on a riverboat right in front of my unit,” the Marlboro man had
bragged one night, his bony arm pointing toward the channel where they fished.
“A woman came by with a questionnaire. Some kind of poll. It’s going to the
City Council and the Texas House of Representatives. There’s going to be a
vote,” he said stoically, a subtle glimmer of hope in his eyes. “Hey, I once
won fifteen grand in Shreveport.”
“Won it and walked away? Or won it and
then lost it?”
“Hell no, I won it. Took it to the bank
baby.”
“When? Before you got sick?”
“After by God, I deserved it. At first,
I was going to use the money to pay off some court costs with Dallas County.
But boy when they found out I was sick; they wouldn’t take me. Cost them too
much to keep me. Fuck them. Cocksuckers, they changed their tune. They wouldn’t
lock me up if they could,” the Marlboro man said, hushed between puffs on his
cigarette.
“Wow. What’s your doctor say about the
smoking?”
“I should quit. Fuck. Don’t take no
doctor to know that. They wanted to cut my voice-box out, but I said hell no.
It wouldn’t fit this boys’ lifestyle.”
“What drinking and fishing all night?”
Wagner laughed and then felt a tug on
his line, standing and then stumbling as he began to reel the fish in. Then,
the fish jumped, white and luminous in the moonlight. Wagner thought it sounded
like a boy doing a belly flop from the high dive of a pool. It was big. But it
got away.
Wagner blankly stares out his car window at the harbor. Since
changing the flat, he has hardly moved. He thinks, maybe it’s for the best that
he’s going back to Iowa. He's already called his father in Davenport and said
he was coming home. His father offered to send some travel money, but Wagner
sheepishly declined. He reaches up and turns on the overhead interior light and
then opens Wendy’s letter, gently taking it out of the original envelope; he
has compulsively folded and unfolded it so many times that the paper has begun
to tear into its faint blue lines and pink margins, cutting holes in her words.
Enclosed with the letter is a note in bold red capital letters: “GENERAL
INMATE CORRESPONDENCE. TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE—INSTITUTIONAL DIVISION.”
She's not coming back. Who has he been kidding?
He doesn't know what is more pathetic, the stories Wendy used to make
up when she was off flying high or his own fabrications: his dreams of Wendy
coming up to Iowa and staying with him and starting a new life, clean and free.
But he knows, fears even, they would be off to Chicago and it would be just
like before—the drug houses, violent arguments, paranoia, sex for money,
disappearing acts and all the insanity. He knows they don't have a chance
together, that they must each find their own way to freedom; that they are both
too fragile to depend on one another; they must find another way; they must
find something bigger than the both of them, something strong and
secure to hold on to, something not so slippery.
Wagner remembers trying to revive Wendy after an overdose—her lips
were pale blue, cold, cyanotic. He thought she was dead. Fortunately, he called
911 and the paramedics were able to save her. Afterwards, she said she would
move back in with him, but not now. Wagner puts the letter back into the
envelope and walks out into the darkness toward the harbor. He considers
tossing the letter out into the water, but he cannot. And as he begins to turn
back, he vaguely recalls something his doctor in rehab said about winning. What
was it? What could he win? He imagines the last days of the Marlboro man,
wasted, deluded and dreaming of a gambling casino out in the channel. He sees
the red glare of the ambulance and the fire truck that follows it. The Marlboro
man carried to the waiting ambulance, floating weightlessly beneath the white
sheets of the stretcher.
It is very dark, and Wagner can hear
the waves crashing by the shore. Lightning flashes and then shudders, echoing
in the dark blue. And then, he remembers what it was his doctor had said in
rehab. It wasn't about winning. No, he says to himself, it wasn't about winning
at all.
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