So, you find things. And you know you should be doing other than looking, like seeking gainful employment or curing a major disease using only an assortment of stray household items. You know that, sure. But instead … instead you go bumbling around your haphazard past, turning over this stone or that, forgetting to watch for hibernating snakes and other biting nasties that’ll raise bumps on your skin and itch up your soul something awful. And you find things; you just do. Like this often grossly overwritten story-start dating back more than a dozen years, titled “Shotgun Fly-Fishing,” about a real insensitive asshole of a protagonist who’s in search of long-lost siblings, lost meaning, etc.
Later in the story, the narrator reveals that as a kid, he literally beat his old man to death with the same belt he used to get beaten with himself. Good times, y’know?
There are a few stray fun bits here, though. Mean-spirited stuff, but still sorta funny, maybe. In short, pretty much like the guy I used to be, before I got better at being me. Or worse. It’s often hard to tell.
So that said, let’s briefly meet Wallace, who called out of the blue, to talk about bloodlines …
It was to be, forever, The Day of Wallace, a grossly inebriated stretch of hours fraught with impenetrable clouds and a long, ugly fight with an uncomplicated corkscrew and an unwieldy bottle. He called out of the blue, this Wallace, identifying himself as my brother, long and lost and hopeful, and wishing me a happy birthday. He’d been thinking about calling me for a while, he said, but had decided to wait until today to “renew our acquaintance.” Birthdays and bloodlines, he figured, went well together.
But it wasn’t my birthday. Yesterday was — a day of unmitigated sun, one more in an unbroken line of jokes by the Divine at my expense. I kept this little tidbit to myself, however, because prior to today, I had no clear evidence that any living kin existed, if this goofball even qualified. I’d done my share of speculating, to be sure, much of it in very public circumstances, though I must confess, no mental picture I’d ever come up with had ever been burdened with the name “Wallace” before.
“Wallace,” I repeated to myself. “Wallace.” Great God.
“Some present,” he chortled, “huh?” His voice was like the motor of a small, poorly running appliance.
“Yes,” I ventured. “Some present.”
We shot the shit for a while, perfectly amiable, talking around the issue. Wallace was calling on his lunch break, he said. He was a floor manager of 12 years at the pulp mill outside of New Bern, where he now lived, not even 40 miles from me. “All this time, right down the road from each other,” he rambled on jovially, unaware that until this past January, I’d lived away from here for most of my life, thank God.
“Highway 43,” he said, “and you’re here.”
I knew the road. It was tattooed across my memory, a winding two-lane cutting through miles of piss-poor trailer country: palm reading by Madame Somebody, another dirt-driveway dime-store psychic with a pack of angry yard dogs; gravel-lot cinderblock bars with names like Billy’s Lounge; the Eastern North Carolina Coon Hunter’s Association clubhouse, years standing; fields alternating from fallow to soybeans, corn and tobacco, depending on the season; blink-and-ya-missed-it towns with names like Chicod. Which, pronounced correctly, sounds a bit like swearing, as it damn well should.
The same road that my family used to take to the beach — with this very Wallace nestled seat-buckle-free beside me, in bad need of a haircut and a good snot-wiping, and nodding off against my shoulder? — stalling that one time in front of the base compound in Havelock, courtesy of a busted fuel pump, to stare out of the pine-pollened windows at off-duty crewcuts, military hardware and titty bars baking in concrete heat, and returning home by dark in violent silence.
Wallace liked tinkering with lawnmower engines on his days off, he confided, and was the coach of his oldest boy’s Little League team, a former member of the school board his wife now chaired. And he was a Shriner, the youngest ever in his lodge.
“You must be proud,” I said.
“Yessir, I reckon I am.” And I reckon he was, too.
I had an unfortunate and already unshakable mental picture of him to blemish my nights ahead: Wallace sporting his ornate, red, flattened dunce cap, which cast strange shadows across a gut that was surely bigger than he was tall, as he maneuvered one of those godforsaken mini-cars in manic figure-eights at some we’re-proud-of-local-produce parade or other, rocketing down Main Street, in between the alcoholic clowns and a morose and drooping high-school band, a barely marching mass of untreatable zits and tin ears, oompah, oompah, hurrah, hurrah. Wallace at the Grifton Shad Festival (come celebrate our greasy, shit-eating fish!), zipping his souped-up go-cart past this year’s Miss Teen North Carolina, her big bleached-blond bangs like sweaty angels’ wings as her pampered white-gloved hands waved from the back of daddy’s painstakingly preserved classic white Mustang convertible he bought right about the time impotence reared its ugly head — or, to be more exact, didn’t. Wallace at the Ayden Collard Festival (eat the biggest mess of bitter greens cooked in pig fat without heaving, and win a prize!), crunching errant tossed candy as he roared past the hardware-store float, the volunteer-fire-department truck, the foam-flecked prancing horses. In between festival gigs, he probably practiced his moves on one of his changing legion of repaired riding mowers, trying to get a wheel as he rounded the perimeter of his yard, and grinning at his defeated, frigid wife in the kitchen window.
I do hate me a Shriner.
Wallace and I finally skirted around the particulars: where he was from, family names as he remembered them, when adopted, by whom, etc. Some of it seemed to line up, I must admit, but I kept losing track of what he was saying. The man was like an ever-flushing toilet, and the shit just kept rising back to the surface, seemingly from nowhere. I mixed myself a new drink, fishing an olive out of the jar in the compact fridge I keep in my office, and dug in for the duration.
He was getting older, Wallace warmly confessed somewhere along in there, and he sure as hell missed having a big extended family — real family, folks with a common past to spend time with on holidays, and to just call and shoot the shit with on weekends, y’know? “You don’t mind me sayin’ ‘shit,’ I hope? Hell, I guess we’re both big boys now, huh? Heh, heh.”
Of course, I said. Of course.
And shouldn’t his kids have that same joy of family? he rattled on, causing my left eye to start throbbing like an extra, overtaxed heart. Christ, this guy really did need a brother, maybe a whole frigging truckload of them. “And having another uncle on their daddy’s side would add so much to their lives, and to mine,” he concluded. He sounded a little misty.
In retrospect, I realize that I was paying far too little attention.
Of course, I agreed again. Of course.
And then, unable to stand any more of this drivel, I told him I was shamelessly rich, and that I was suffering from the final stages of a terminal illness. Weaker by the day, what to do, what to do?
“Oh, God!” he exclaimed. “Oh, no!”
Well, no, actually. Not that second part. My health is pretty passable, barring a testy little hernia I’ve needed to have addressed for years now, and an overweening fondness for things that nine out of 10 doctors resolutely agree will kill me. That, and several former therapists, wives and friends might hazard that I ought to be medicated to within an inch of my life. Or locked up. Or both. Still, it felt good to stretch the truth a bit, to see how far I could pull it before it snapped back in my face. Most facts are like taffy — they’ll stretch and sag and lose your interest long before any real holes show through.
And for a short time, at least, my embellishments did wonders for the conversation.
Wallace was rather frantically suggesting second opinions, a good doctor he knew of over in Beaufort, retired, but maybe he could help? What, er, what was it I was suffering from?
“Malaise,” I confessed, accidentally honest.
“What?”
Oh, hell. “The AIDS,” I said.
“Holy shit!” This time, Wallace didn’t ask if it was OK to curse like that. He must have figured that, me with the AIDS and all, I could handle a sharp word or two.
“Bet you don’t see too much of that sort of thing down at the lodge,” I hazarded. “AIDS, I mean.”
“Oh, no. No.” Pause. “No.”
I wrestled with the next detail, figuring it could make or break the call, which had by then taken on a certain rosy, perverse charm. “Blood transfusion,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” He said “I” like “Ah.” I’ve always hated that.
“That’s how I got it,” I continued. “That’s what infected me.”
“Oh. Well.” Wallace didn’t sound particularly relieved. Come on, play ball, here, you redneck doughboy! Y’know, I could’ve turned out to be some butt-driven faggot or cut-throat drug freak. How about suddenly ending up with one of those in your closet?
“Nicked myself on the wrist cleaning a fish I caught on a charter down in Morehead,” I pressed on, annoyed but undeterred. “I lost a fair bit of blood, went in to get stitched up, and now look at me.”
Not only do I not fish, but I positively loathe Morehead City. In a coin toss between this state’s appallingly nicknamed Crystal Coast and the boiling beaches of hell, the devil gets my vote every time. And by then, I was pretty well toasted. Yeah, just look at me.
“Man, oh, man,” Wallace said. He sounded profoundly, inexplicably sad.
“A huge red snapper, scales as big as my thumbnail! Would have been a meal for four.” Wallace whistled softly.
“That’s a tasty fish,” I felt compelled to add. It is, too.
Wallace either ignored that, or he didn’t hear it. “They’ve got that AIDS cocktail thing now,” he offered. “A whole bunch of treatments in one. You … you looked into that?”
“I hab,” I said, teasing the olive out of my glass with my tongue.
And on and on it went, until some compassionate drivel about medical advancements and quality of life just did me in, and I carelessly blamed Wallace for the death of my mother, at which point he hung up abruptly, and never called back.
Hey brother, can’t ya’ take a joke? Jeez.
Wallace, the dumb fuck, had seemed pretty sold on the idea of our siblingship up until then; and I’ll give him this: His story wasn’t the most outrageous to come down the pike. In fact, it had a certain unpalatable resonance to it.
Regardless, I didn’t like what I’d heard of the guy. He was a human fencepost, and no brother of mine could possibly be so irrefutably dull. Anyway, I was growing pretty weary of the Ma and Pa Kettle homilies, and this whole dumb charade — the increasingly fewer highs and ever-escalating lows. And it’s not like I haven’t shot myself in the foot before.
Nonetheless, I dutifully wrote the call down in my log: August 16, 1996: Wallace Kidderly, 42. Adopted from the state of North Carolina at age 6, in June 1967, to Russell and Mabel Kidderly, Beaufort. Original first name: Alex. Last name: uncertain; believes it might have been Wainwright.
At which point, I went in the bathroom and threw up.
After washing my face, rinsing out my mouth and checking over my clothes , I pulled down a slat on the window blinds, taking a peek outside. The full, dark clouds still hung overhead like a windswept blanket of night pinned up against the underside of the sky. I let loose of the blind, and it snapped to. It never did rain that day.
An hour later, I’d put to rest the better part of two mediocre bottles of wine, eating the crumbled cork floating in the second one as if it belonged there, or occasionally spitting the fragments on the floor in a half-hearted attempt to make the wastebasket. Small drops of red now pepper the carpet of my office.
When my “sister” Sandy called a few weeks later, also out of the blue, I had the forethought not to blame her for mother’s death. That tack hadn’t worked the first time I tried it.
And, in fact, it had been my own fault anyway.
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