They Know Me Everywhere



5.



The first thing Billy thought he'd better do was calm the fuck down but that only took about a minute. Then he went and got a glass and drank 2 big glasses of water. Then he went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, showered. Got dressed. He swept the broken glass from his bed and from the floor around his bed and dumped it in the trash. He stripped the blankets and sheets from his bed and balled them into the laundry hamper. Then he went under the sink, found a roll of duct tape and two heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags. He removed the broken pane from the window, lowered the screen, and patched back the cold with the bag and and the tape. He hoped for no more break-ins.



He carried the broken window outside around in back of the trailer and leaned it against his shed. There he observed the shallow imprints of his brother's boots, filling with falling snow, leading back through the other yards and into the tree line.



Fine.



He went back inside and filled the tea-kettle, turned on the stove, made a cup of instant coffee. He left it black. He stood at the kitchen window sipping it, gazing out into the falling snow at Buddy's diminishing boot-track, feeling terribly calm, wanting a cigarette badly. He'd have to buy a pack. He'd picked the wrong lifetime to quit. Everything was so fucked up. He felt himself beginning to cut loose from caring.



He picked up the phone and started to call in sick for work, then thought: Fuck it. They were going to fire him anyway. He'd better find Buddy quick though. His brother was crazy but not stupid. Well, he couldn't even call Buddy crazy anymore. He knew people thought he, Billy, was crazy. Crazy was an inaccurate description: they'd had a bad upbringing. They'd both almost turned out OK. Maybe all this was just a phase they were going through.



Fuck it.



He felt himself again cutting loose from it all. Emily. Those kids. Buddy. Emily. Emily



He finished his coffee, went in and took a seat on the couch. All was silent. He engaged his thoughts of suicide again, left them. He thought about Emily, about the times, years ago, before any pregnancy, when she'd bring home another girl. Images of that naked past warped like a hunger now in his mind: sounds and smells and feelings, girls' names, candles burning, girls' hair moving beneath him, across him, too much of it. All of that dead ambigous past with its dead hopes and dead promises came warping back through his blood now. He could feel his heart beating.



He lowered his jeans, masturbated, ended up coming all over the fresh flannel shirt he'd put on. There was a lot. He'd have to change the shirt now. He sat there with his shrinking dick in his hand wondering if this tendency toward ruination of his might be genetic.



What a fucking cop-out.



As he cleaned up and put himself back together he could feel himself again cutting loose from everything and dropping from society, becoming his brother, essentially. He felt no anger. This scared him, because ordinarily, if he were right, he'd have wanted to kill Buddy - not be him. He'd never looked up to his older brother. Quite the contrary.



An image came into his mind of himself in his truck with Led Zeppelin on the radio and him on the hunt for weed, pussy, and alcohol: it seemed real palatable. They were going to fire him anyway. Maybe even prosecute.



Maybe he'd run into Buddy and kill him and then himself.



I better go get me some smokes, he thought, before I really do lose my fucking mind and do something else stupid...



and to think, I'm a father? A cop?



With bare realization he cut loose from it right then, finally, because it was all so ridiculous. Before he'd become an affront, last of all, to himself, he'd cut loose. Whatever he was, he was not to be taken lightly.



He stepped out of the trailer into the rest of his days.