The Least One Needs

Fresh out of college, DB seeks his fortune in Tar Sands country. But when the operation shuts down and he decides to stick it out, he’s soon exposed to his new home’s dark side.
The last months of DB’s time at college, among his colleagues if not his friends, were a panicked hunt for work. Before the mortar-boards settled, he signed a contract with a Tar Sands operation out West. They were taking every fresh body, and paying it practical joke levels of money if there was an Engineering brain attached. Though his job would be nothing more than walking around with a clipboard, it seemed the best option for adventure.
Three months into the dust and hearing damage and callused-hand lonesomeness, the whole operation, big as a colonial city — came skidding to a halt. The generators still hiccuping as DB moved his few things from a locker to a shoebox. They were right, the “tree-huggers” and “hippies” as they were mocked in the pits. The barbarians are always right, DB thinks, and they always win in the end.
He takes the loss-prevention money they begrudged him, plus the hardly depleted sum he’d made so far, and waited in town for the diesels to fire up again. A crappy little town the Tar Sands have dioxified and radiated with money, until his apartment building grew like an abscess on the liquor store and post office, until a strip mall and bowling alley metastasized out of old store-fronts and a big-name grocery store pushed through the skin, another for the barbarians down along the coal-colored river. A town of eight thousand, less now with the Sands on hiatus, about as many people as DB went to college with back east. One of these is the girl. How in the hell else would all of this matter? But she didn’t love him, or didn’t understand that there was a world out past the freeways that he wanted to see, that he was afraid he might remain the same person forever if he never left. The thousand miles makes it hard to remember all the reasons. It’s been four months since commencement and when he scrubs off the Sands and shaves down the beard, he looks fresh out of high school.
Prolonged free time by himself. In college he learned to live on what he thought was the least one needs. And here he has hardly any furniture or décor. Ready to slip out at a moment’s notice, though he doesn’t know if he would recognize the moment when it came. He watches videos on the Internet, drinks just enough to feel as though he’s having fun but not enough to call her, reads books during the day, and buys more in the used book-shop than he could ever read in a year. He looks up the prices for plane tickets, for whitewater expeditions, for a trip “home”. He eyes people in town that he might be able to befriend or buy weed from, but it hasn’t worked out yet. The few guys he knows from the Sands have families, anybody young and single seems to’ve fled.
When he feels lonely, as he does, and which seems only more lucid when he talks to friends back home, he does laundry across the street and sits in the bar connected to it. Lucky’s Laundromat and Lucky’s Taproom. A museum to dive bars of yore, wood-paneling and low ceilings, a pooling sharpness of day-light on the vinyl seats and the dark, glossy wood. He reads Auster’s New York Trilogy — that hallucination of following people and losing yourself — in the best-lit booth and drinks a sweaty beer. A guy comes in from the laundromat in just boxers, and the bartender — not Lucky in any sense, wide in the wrong places, a way of talking like there’s something sour in his mouth — drafts a pitcher for him without a word. He notices DB and flashes two fingers for two glasses, pads over bare-foot and stands confident with the beer, kind of beautiful in the strange bar penumbra, though everything about him is average: average build, a kind of average handsomeness, his age up near thirty.
“Are you Angie’s brother.”
And lost in the coincidence of Auster, buzzed on Pils, DB says:
“Angie’s my girlfriend. My ex . . .no, wait, how do you know Angie?”
“There’s no Angie. Beer?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m Marshall.”
“Okay.”
He sits across and refills DB’s glass, notices the book, his arms tattooed with some dense narrative of the woods.
“I’m DB. I’m not really from here.”
Marshall chuckles into his hand, friendly, more or less.
“Of course you’re not.”
They clink glasses and DB knows this guy. Or knows other members of his tribe. A kindness with a wire running through it. A tendency to laugh, as he is now, at the simple texture of life before him. He will make one’s life chaotic, with fervor and not drama.
“You came for the Sands, right?” Marshall says.
“Yeah.”
“A gold rush, kinda. Lot less whores and gunfire, though.”
“Lot of money in the hills. Sometimes I think we ought to leave it there.”
“You know . . .I’m the town’s only native son.”
It’s not clear if he’s joking. His tone suggests everything is a joke, or that all these words are pieces that have to be played to get through to the real game. There is no Angie.
“That can’t be true.”
“Everyone leaves,” he says. Smiling at this though, the punch-line to a locals-only joke.
“Everyone? That bar-tender’s got to be — ”
“Henry!” Marshall yells to him. “Where you from again?”
“Plainfield, Illinois. Don’t remind me.”
DB isn’t convinced, but it’s a good trick. His recent degree in the sciences beholds him to all that rigor, and he thinks it true, though it’s slowly eroding since he got here.
“I know that’s not convincing,” Marshall says. “But it’s a pretty good trick, huh?”
“You’re saying everyone in this town grew up somewhere else.”
“Born somewhere else at least. Might move here with their parents, and if that’s the case they usually take the first bus out right after high school. I’m telling you, I’m the only one.”
DB looks to front of the bar, a dusty window, a brisk gloomy panel of the sky outside.
“But what about the . . . um . . .”
“The barbarians?” Marshall says, grinning, rotating his beer a half turn on the table that’s been gouged and vandalized and lacquered over.
“Yeah, the barbarians.”
“Traveling kids, mostly. A few serious activists. Rainbow kids came out here for their big party last year, year before. Some of them stayed right there in their tents.”
“Not a single person?”
“You can check the records if you like.”
DB is to stop by Marshall’s house any time. It was built nice but needs new everything: paint, windows, shutters, slats in the swinging bench. There’s no phone. DB waits three days. Finishes the Auster book. Reads most of Stranger in a Strange Land before noticing that the tattered blank leaf at the front has been marked-up to read “Marshall” in an erratic, blue-ink hand. Also the copy of White Noise. Meditations in Green. The Cities of the Red Night. The name written in the front not to claim ownership, but as graffiti on the side of a moving train.
Late in the afternoon, on a Saturday, the sun back out though the warmth has been lost in a morning storm, DB walks over. Down this street there used to be a decent view of a mountain, so he’s told, but they blew that motherfucker’s head off to get at what’s inside. The streets are empty. No cars in motion or doors opening, no kids on bicycles. He can believe the town has been evacuated, left to fend for itself against the dust. In addition to the books, he’s been reading over his contract to see if he can’t just give back the hold-over money and get the hell out of here. When steps up onto the porch, tthe door swings open.
“Hey, come on in. Keep your shoes on,” Marshall says, though he’s bare-foot, in running shorts, a tattoo on his back DB missed the other day: just a mountain, like a Japanese woodcut, but an asymmetry more beautiful than Fuji. It must be the one they blew up. They step through a barren mud-room into a kitchen, well-worn and eggshell white, two glasses on the counter and a couple ice cubes in each, a sealed bottle of Tullamore Dew.
“Whiskey, right?”
“Yeah, but how did you — ”
“You’re going to be gone soon. My as well be able to say you have a friend. ”
They sit in the living room to drink. A bearskin rug — “the tongue and the eyes all plastic” — a coffee-table covered in mail, a single dumb-bell holding down a stack of magazines. Very few books. Picasso’s Don Quixote in a frame, a coat of arms with bears and ranch-fencing.
They don’t ask each other questions, like DB knows they’re supposed to, and it’s a relief. Since school ended, he’s fielded a lot of aggravation about what he will do with his life. Innocent questions, mostly, but they force him to consider. A solid half of his friends moved out of the Rust Belt, or are working on it, and he hasn’t invited any one out to this grey little town, though they’ve invited him to crash on their couch in interesting places, San Francisco, Austin. Somehow where a person ends up is an accomplishment and, for the time being, showing up there seems like riding coat-tails. He doesn’t want to talk about his parents either, a long and uninteresting set of traits and narratives bundled together with dull-colored thread. He hardly knows who they are, like the parents of somebody he played soccer with as a child.
“Dad gave me the house, right,” Marshall says. “But he’s not around, so I kind of exist here without much trouble.”
“Where’s he at?”
“Dead thirty seconds longer than my mom, you know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Nah. It happened.”
This seems to be his legitimate response and the ice in his glass clinks with finality as he sets it down on the coffee-table and pours another. He has a contentment of movement DB thought reserved for old people, an energy in his eyes.
“So,” he says, with a gesture to the outside world. “Bustling out there today or what?”
“Did I miss a memo?”
“Everyone’s inside, watching college ball, dicking around on their computers.”
“You spend much time on the computer?”
“I don’t touch the thing if no one is paying me. I might be the only townie who actually uses it for something. It was like dropping satellite TV on Bhutan.”
They work on their drinks and eventually Marshall brings out a deck of funny-looking cards. The game is “Set” and the symbols look like something used to test ESP in four different categories: shape, color, number, and fill, and each of these with three varieties. The game: set out an array of twelve cards and then quickly identify trios among them that have something in common. They must each have the same shape, or three different shapes. The same number, or three different. Same fill, or not. Same color, or not. A set of three single triangles might be different from each other in every other way. They play awhile, but DB has difficulty catching on. Marshall calls out “Set” dispassionately, with an amused smile, hardly even looking at the cards.
“You have to feel the pattern. That’s the trick. You can’t sit here and look at every card and analyze. Once you’ve seen everything that can come out of the deck, you’ll just feel the sets, understand? You’ll just feel that there is some disjoint or coming together in the random.”
Another hour doing this, half the whiskey, and DB gets loose with questions. He asks how Marshall spends his time, and Marshall sees a set. Finds a quixotic trio when DB asks if he likes this town. And when he prods about Marshall’s plans for the coming years, he swipes up the cards and returns them to the deck. No set to be found. He puts the cards away and turns on the radio. Just one station on the FM comes through, and it is droning, hill country blues that tries to convince them both that they have done got old, that they can’t do the things that they used to do.
“Hey,” Marshall says, like he’s just found out. “You want to go to this party tonight?”
A little after nine, Marshall says it’s time to go. On the porch, he stops sudden, holds out his hand in some old hunting gesture, and listens to the neighborhood as though they are tracking something that swings through the trees. Then his hand slips into his pocket and he hustles down the steps. They walk catercorner across Stone Street and another couple blocks and down the driveway of a house not unlike Marshall’s own into the backyard just as the keg is tapped, and the firepit comes to life cirlced by dudes with dusty, solid postures — pit-men and excavators — and a busted-hump panel van unloads three young guys who’ve started drinking on the drive over. The license plate from DB’s own home state back east.
DB follows Marshall inside where the party warms up in the conjoined kitchen/living room, and gets a swell of names he tries to fix to faces and then clothing and then finally gives up on. Marshall knows a few of these people, but everyone seems invited on the extroversion of one member in their pair or trio. DB thinks he knows the host — he goes by Blackie though his skin is olive and his beard threaded with filaments of red. Turns out they were in a construction trailer for the same meeting months back but hadn’t exchanged more than handshakes.
There gets to be more than a dozen people standing or on stools, lounging on the easy chair and its arms like refugees on a motorbike, cushions on the floor. Bottles of liquor and mixers gather on the counter separating the white tile from the hardwood. They talk about music DB doesn’t know. Sunsets in places where they grew up, how ugly the dust makes them here. They talk about cliff-faces in the hidden stretches of the country where they will one day live. Not one person is from here, and each guy — it is almost all young men of drinking and sowing age — is some private archive of himself: states that he has called home, dreams that he has had, girls that got away in the wend of circumstance.
DB talks to a guy with an angular face and a labyrinth of tattoos below the elbow, tries to figure out the hometown of the room’s only female — a pear-shaped girl with a rosary wrapped tight around her wrist — but she’s distracted by a kitten in a fit of sneezing. Someone named Jebediah, in shorts and a denim jacket, asks him if he believes in predestination or Providence or nothing at all and slips off into the kitchen before DB can answer. It gets lonely and Marshall mingles with the efficacy of an assassin. The conversations all hermetic and burning like road-flares, leaving behind clumps of greyish detritus useful to no one. DB thinks about going home. Thinks about going to the Greyhound station and waiting for the first bus out. Thinks about how home-home isn’t what it used to be either.
“They stole my technology,” Marshall says, blustering up to DB. He’s drunk, wears it capably, sleepily. “Just took it right out of my head and here it goes.”
Blackie shucks the table-cloth from an upright piano in the corner, lets a sagging-roof birdhouse fall off to the floor, an umbrella with the company logo printed Orwellian, months and months of dust, and drags the thing to the center of the room on its swollen casters. People shout and laugh and call out requests for songs they’ve heard never played on a piano. Marshall sets the bench in its place to plunk a few keys and Blackie dips into the kitchen, extracts a drawer from the cabinetry like a tooth, and brings it back to the piano. He eases up the narrow lid of the piano, breaks a pencil from the drawer in half and jams the splintery pieces between the wires, hunched over as familiar as replacing an alternator. Marshall plays a chord and it twangs and he nods his head, points to a spot under the hood. Jebediah and the girl help: a roll of scotch tape, paper clips, old rubber bands, keys on a ring that they hook to the wire so it jangles mournfully when the proper key is struck. It sounds terrible, but Marshall plays with his eyes closed and each time he hits a key it sounds different from the last. To DB, in his growing drunk, it is the death knell of some robot built in the days of the vacuum tube, a junkyard clanging. But a heartbeat can be made of anything. The girl tries to dance and someone claps their hands to her stomping, to her baggy jeans bunching and falling straight along her ankles. They jam nearly the entire drawer into the piano and DB peers over some shoulders to look inside: irrevocably changed, the piano. Splinters of pencil everywhere, rubber-bands knotted, fishing line binding wires of different notes, shims of crinkly plastic film under the hammers. It looks like a wound dressed in garbage. The notes groan.
The girl pulls DB away to dance her in a stilted jig and everyone laughs or claps or dances raising their sloshing cups. It is as though they are, right now, inventing these things that have always been done. Strangers placed in a room, with booze, until they’ve jump-started culture again with no talent for it. Marshall sings with a foot tap for every syllable:
“Oh, you can’t go home A-gain. You can’t go home. . . You can’t go home A-gain, you can’t go home. . .”
And over and over again until everyone is singing this and DB starts to believe it. That there never was a home. That this place could never be it, but will have to be for now. That they are not so much living here as occupying a space on the map until it’s sloughed off the earth and sold for fuel. They sweat and yell, these ten or twelve, and Jebediah at some point picks DB up in the air, spins him on his shoulder. Blackie makes magnanimous proclamations for their fate. Marshall bangs on the keys as if the piano is a drum, until pieces of Blackie’s kitchen start falling out to the floor.
***
At midnight, everyone mostly seated once again, glowing drunk, DB stands next to Marshall at the piano. The dancing has stopped, and now they work together on something slower. Inventing a melody out of thudding and cranking. Marshall is all over the place, but DB just plunks his fingers down on two keys that make a sound like someone being softly punched in the jaw. This is how he’s always made friends in the past, drunkenly, on things said and done that no one can remember clearly.
Someone shows up. He comes in the door carrying by the neck a half-gone handle of Jack Daniels, so long in the freezer the bottle has chunked with ice up to the level of the booze. He holds it like a winning baton, as a trophy for something he worked long and humble toward. 5' 6” or whatever’s enough shorter than average to notice, fatter in the jowls than in the gut, T-shirt and jeans, an inkling of mutton chops, his limbal ring a quarter-inch thick so his eyes seem dull green gems set place in by hand. DB is the only person to notice him, like this dude is some Ghost of Shit-show Future. He goes into the kitchen to fix a couple drinks and the new guy stands lonesome behind the counter, brandishing the ice-jawed cudgel of his whiskey bottle.
“You know what’s wrong with this party?” he says, as though he’s been dispatched to find out. He looks past DB to the living room, its drunken absorption with itself.
“I’m having a fairly good time — ”
“These people are all assholes. I’m right next door and they don’t say a word to me.”
“I think they’re alright. You just have to play it cool,” DB says. The Neighbor’s eyes flare and he waves the bottle.
“Cool? Cool? You seem cool . . . they talk to you? Everyone is so cool.”
DB backs into the living room, broadcasts his discomfort to Marshall in a glance.
“Who is that?” he says.
“Hell if I know.”
The Neighbor says something to his bottle, a mumble lost in the chatter and meant to be monologue, and then louder — “please” — and again like he’s begging you to stop breaking his fingers one knuckle at a time. He zings the cap across the room, unnoticed by Blackie or anyone, and raises the bottle to his pouched lips. A glug and then another, and on, until he’s done seven, eight, nine shots’ worth in one go, DB sees them chamber in his throat. The Neighbor lowers the bottle back to where it’d be holstered if it was a gun and lets out a roar. His eyes roll back and when the vision returns and his knees have not buckled, he glares murderously, looks at the bottle disappointed that booze remains, and leans against counter.
“Assholes,” he shouts and drops the whiskey. Everyone’s attention on him now. He tromps to the door and it open, tries to slam it shut behind him but the hydraulic arm clunks and hisses and he stumbles down the two steps.
Minutes later, DB rushes outside with Marshall and Blackie and the Neighbor is picking himself up off the ground. The fire burns high and hot and the guys standing around it laugh, cast slurs, pound their beers.
“I’ll destroy you,” the Neighbor yells, his forehead scratched where it struck some corner on the way down, a grass stain on his elbow. “I’ll destroy all of you.”
“Get the hell out of here,” somebody says, the one that punched him or some other. The neighbor swung on people and one of these guys had enough. It’s difficult to know what happened. They all stare the Neighbor down, growling almost, but one of them watches the fire, suffers through his girlfriend’s mouthed harangue, her body hidden under a hoodie, hair bundled in a pony-tail. “Sam . . .jesus,” she says, and he tosses his cup into the flames.
“Everyone is so cool, aren’t they? So cool and cool and cool,” the Neighbor mumbles. He braces himself on the keg to instruct the bonfire. “It’s all the same. It’s all . . . mud.”
But then he sees DB and there’s a glimpse of shame, and so DB gets close, underneath and between.
“Let’s get you home,” he says. Talking in slow vowels like speaking to an animal. People laugh at the stagger, at the way the Neighbor lurches and almost falls again. He herds him out front, careful not to touch him, displaying the palms of his hands. Talking to him like he is taking care of the guy, like there’s nothing to worry about.
“Yeah, get that faggot out of here,” someone yells.
“Shut up!” the Neighbor screams, an octave more desperate than anything he’s said, a cry somewhere in his throat. “So sick of this shit.”
He lunges toward the party, but DB’s in the way and there’s no grace in the Neighbor’s step. DB just moves closer and closer, repeating himself, telling him everything is alright, they’ll just get him home and everything will be okay. Wondering how he got elected to this position, where in his peaceful years he’s learned to do this. The Neighbor looks him in the eye. He will tear up when he gets home, as soon as he’s out of earshot he’ll wail and bang his head and lie on the floor.
“Just give it up, buddy. C’mon. Just give it up.”
“I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.”
But they do work their way out to the front-yard, where the cars of the party are lined up on the curb: a couple pick-ups, mostly cheap compacts bought by the side of the road somewhere. DB gets him far enough, into his own yard, lonely-looking as a vagabond under the paltry street-light, and then goes back to the fire for a keg cup. Already, whatever actually happened is lost in assumption and a queering of details from booze: he clocked Sam in the jaw, he barely hit him at all, he acted like he wanted a dick in his mouth, he reached for the secret breasts of Sam’s girl.
DB drinks his beer quickly. Fills another and blows the foam off into the grass. He’s outside of the fire-circle. The laughs and declamations might as well be about him and he can feel his own softness yielding. Maybe he hasn’t breathed enough of this town’s dust. He’s worried about the Neighbor. Not the alcohol in his stomach, that’ll all get slept off . . .
“Destroy!” out in the front-yard. The banging of metal. DB runs out there and in the silvery faux-moonlight, the Neighbor brings both fists down on the hood of someone’s car, two, three times with the steel deforming under his hands. He steps to the next screaming “destroy” and does the same. DB touches his shoulder between slams and the Neighbor turns to him, tries to land a booze-sludged haymaker, and DB wraps him up in his arms, one wrist under his right armpit and the other over his collar-bone so it pins the Neighbor’s arm to the side of his head, takes him to the grass like this, flailing, inert, lies on top of him.
“You have to go home.”
There’s struggling, feet digging to the mud, a spasm in his hips as the Neighbor tries to buck him off. DB looks at the guy’s house. A light on inside. Too much room in there for a man who lives by himself. It must radiate silence this late at night.
“Listen, you have to go home now.”
“Okay,” the Neighbor says, crying. “Okay, I’ll go.”
DB lets him up and the neighbor swings, lands the softest punch in the world on DB’s Adam’s apple, and he wraps up the Neighbor again, takes him to the grass, lies on him and repeats it all. Nearly the whole party around them now, gawking, laughing, gasping. “Punch him in the head,” someone says. “Knee him in the gut.” DB pulls the Neighbor to his feet, wiry arm pasted to his face, and walks him toward his house. They trip up and fall in his driveway, the soft lumping thud of running over a dog. There’s a yelp and a scream like children make under an older brother’s torture. And then the crying again. He tells him it’s over, that he has to go home now or things will get actually ugly. This isn’t a threat. The party around them wants blood.
The Neighbor goes slack and as DB pulls him up once more, people tight at his elbows, the Neighbor flares out swinging at everyone. Tapping Blackie, missing Sam, snagging his knuckles in the hoodie of his girl. He’s hit a girl. DB ties up his arms and drags him toward the house, but Sam lunges out from the party and blasts the Neighbor in the face with four, five, six, well-trained blows and DB holding him defenseless through all of it. Too fast for anything else. The Neighbor slumps to the concrete.
“C’mon, man, you have got to go in.”
And his voice is wet, gurgling:
“I can’t . . . he beat the shit out of me.”
DB sees the blood. From his nose, and his mouth, his left eyebrow. Black as Tar Sand run-off in a growing puddle there on the pavement. Like a hole opening up with no bottom straight through to the other side. The party encircles them and Sam has vanished. People on cell phones. The girl crying. Blackie sheet-white, his hand to the side of his face as though welded there. Someone taps DB’s shoulder and he flinches. Marshall, as coolly uninvolved and bored as an aide at recess, as disappointed with children in general.
“Let’s go get some cigarettes, huh?”
“But I don’t — ”
“Just c’mon.”
Paying for cigarettes, they can see the siren-lights flashing over on Stone Street. DB’s heart has not slowed and Marshall says they ought to walk around. The streets are quiet, haunted with a slowly growing fog. DB has an unprecedented smoke. It does nothing more than reveal the depth of the shake in his hands.
“You think people will get better some day,” Marshall says. In the place where a question goes, though his tone is like admitting he knows a secret.
“I do. I want them to.”
“It’s a helpful little fib after something like that.”
Marshall points out landmarks in the town, in his own neighborhood. The place where he lied to a girl that he wasn’t losing his virginity, and another where he lied that he was. Where Blackie’s band once played a basement show and got shut down by the sheriff after one blistering song. The tree that, if you climb to the very top, permits a lonely, crackling radio signal from Helena. He waves DB up onto the porch of a darkened house and they sit on the swing bench left there eye-hooked to the ceiling.
“I’ve read half the books in that store, and I haven’t changed one bit,” Marshall says.
“Sometimes you don’t know how drunk you are until you stand up.”
“But where would someone go? I already got this place all figured out.”
They talk for an hour there on that porch and when they finally dip into the existence of Angie, DB says he feels homesick, but he doesn’t think the place he remembers will show up on any map. Marshall says he’s felt that way his entire life.
***
Back at the party, the cops are gone. The scabbing blood-stain on the Neighbor’s driveway is not. DB and Marshall slip in unnoticed and still maybe eight people hang in the living room. Blackie plunks one jittery, tonking key on the piano. No one talks. Marshall finds drinks and a seat on the couch, DB on the floor near him, looking to each person to see if they’re sorry or worried. Everybody just looks tired.
In the brighter light, DB notices the blood on his hands, dried to a crust in the lines of his palm, blood speckled on his shoes. Marshall nudges him with a bottle that’s being passed mouth to mouth. It’s the last of the Neighbor’s Jack Daniels. Just about gone now. The bottom still scrimmed with the thinnest layer of ice.
