A Deal

R.C. Darcy only pondered blowing his brains out for a few seconds that morning.

It happened while he was shaving. He was thinking about people and what they do, and staring into the mirror, and using his father’s razorblade, when that pondering shuddered through him. To get rid of it, he tapped the plastic head of the razorblade on the sink twice. The pondering went away, but the empty sound of his tapping was not a good sound. He caught his own gaze in the mirror and, behind it, the dark polyester shower curtain. People’s bodies got zipped into bags like that.

R.C. Darcy turned off the faucet and stared at the soapy bubbles trailing their way down the drain. Like his father, whose house this was, he shaved with Ivory Soap lather. He looked at the little double blade on the blue plastic razor and then at his own dark whiskers, intermingled there with his father’s white ones. His father said that rough things usually passed if you just took a deep breath and stepped back. That being strong meant waiting out the bad thoughts.

You didn’t actually need a gun. There might not be a gun in the house anyway. He had probably locked it up somewhere. You could probably angle the little blades in such a way as to slice an artery. If you wanted to bleed out, you were supposed to slice the artery lengthwise. Not dead across. Lengthwise. Faster and probably harder to stitch back up.

The Ivory bubbles had stopped trailing now, and only two of them were left. They had settled into what looked like permanent holding positions in the base of the porcelain sink.

‘Randall, would you maybe like to load up the truck and take the garbage out to the transfer station for me?’ his father called from downstairs, too loud, as usual.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ R.C. called back, loud too, for his father’s sake. His father was hard of hearing.

‘What?’

‘Maybe tomorrow, Dad,’ R.C. called, louder still. He felt a flash of concern that his own loudness might have passed for anger. He hadn’t meant to get angry.

One of the bubbles popped.

‘Well what the hell are you going to do today? It’s eleven o’clock,’ his father called out. When R.C. didn’t answer, there came the sound of his father heading upstairs.

Hearing the first stomps, R.C., who had been doing his best not to look in the mirror, looked in it now and shouted: ‘I don’t know, Dad.’ And this time his voice was loud and rough and he guessed he probably was angry at something after all. ‘I don’t know. Don’t come in here.’

The stomping stopped and the door stayed closed but the other bubble popped too.

***

At the kitchen table, over Budweisers, they both agreed he hadn’t been sleeping well. R.C. Darcy agreed to go back up and take a nap if his father would do the same. They both hadn’t been sleeping well. And that was all he was going to say about it. He just didn’t feel like talking.

He opened another bottle.

R.C. Darcy fell asleep more easily than he thought he would. Those three lunchtime Budweisers probably helped. He got in a good two hours, but he found himself bending over the cot next to his bed, his two hands around his father’s frail neck.

The shouting from inside his father’s throat started out all muffled, but it got loud enough quick enough to pull R. C. out of the barracks he thought he was defending.

R.C. Darcy raised his hands, stared at them, dropped to his knees and sobbed out big heaving sobs.

‘I’m so sorry, Dad,’ he moaned, over and over again, like they were the only words in the dictionary now.

***

More than a little put out by the news that he had stolen her rent money and used it to buy weed, Cass Yubkin, who was extremely pregnant, told her best friend Amy Lemon she had resolved not to speak to her father Yuri again either, presumably forever.

‘Don’t you get on my shit list,’ she had warned her father just the night before. ‘Now, you know that’s where you’re headed, Papa. People who get on that list don’t get off of it. I’m not threatening you. I’m not saying you need to come with me to my meetings. I’m not saying anything about the drinking. I’m just telling you the truth, Papa. You do not want to be on my shit list. And that is where you are headed. And you know that’s true. And if you don’t want to hear the truth, then don’t come around here. That’s the official language in my house, Papa. Truth.’

And then the next morning the motherfucker had taken four hundred dollars cash and said he would hand it over to Amy Lemon when she swung by his place to pick up his rent.

And then he hadn’t. It was just gone.

And Amy said she saw big baggies full of weed on the table she knew Yuri couldn’t possibly afford. And Amy said he was all, ‘What?’

The asshole responsible for Cass’s pregnancy was also on her shit list. She had not spoken to him in several weeks. She had plenty to say. She just said it to Amy. Not to the asshole.

***

When his first name was called, R.C. Darcy said, ‘Present,’ and the women all laughed. The sound of their laughter jarred him. He hadn’t expected to hear them laugh at him.

He had agreed maybe writing about things would help. One of his father’s friends was married to someone who went to this writing group that met weekly. His father had called her after the whole choking thing. R.C. Darcy had gone there, to the library. He didn’t feel like talking to a therapist or anyone like that, though.

The blood seemed to be running slow in his veins, and he couldn’t keep track of what the ladies gathered around the table were saying. It was a group session that involved reading things out loud and so forth. From time to time they stopped, and when they stopped, they appeared to be waiting for him to contribute to the conversation.

The middle-aged matron seated at the head of the table used his first name again. She had not exactly mispronounced it, but she had spoken it with such unearned familiarity and such emptiness that he found himself crazy and uneasy again. She mentioned that she was a friend of his father’s.

Couldn’t he just leave? The index finger of his left hand went numb and he didn’t move and the woman went on smiling and talking, using his name over and over again in various sentences as though she owned it. He wasn’t at all sure how to make her stop. Then she asked him to tell the group why he had shown up.

When she asked that, right out loud, he remembered what to say. He told her he was there because he didn’t know how to write a book about what had happened to him in Iraq, but his father felt he should probably write such a book. Whether or not he decided to show it to anyone. Which he probably wouldn’t. He didn’t know how to start.

The matron smiled but it wasn’t obvious what she was smiling at or why. ‘Is there anything you want to share with us?’ Only afterwards did it occur to R.C. Darcy that what she meant was, Did you bring anything you’d like to read out loud? Which, of course, he hadn’t. He hadn’t written anything yet. But he didn’t know that was what she meant. He thought she wanted him to talk about Iraq. Which he didn’t feel like doing.

She wouldn’t look away, though. She just raised her eyebrows and kept her mouth open a little without saying anything, like they were actors on stage and it was his turn to talk.

‘I saw a lot of people die,’ R.C. said.

Her mouth closed.

‘I saw some people that didn’t die that wished they had,’ he said. ‘My dad thought maybe I ought to write about that, or try to.’

There is a special kind of pause people make when they understand they are in at the deep end of a pool and hadn’t planned to be there. That pause happened. Then the woman started speaking again, about him this time, and he waited for her to stop speaking, but again she just refused to stop. She said something about him defending freedom and being wonderful and so forth. Then she began shuffling a pile of papers in front of her.

‘I’ll read from my book to get us started,’ she said.

Her book was about the Russian show trials, back in the 1930s. The Communists made people say that they had committed crimes when they hadn’t. Then, even when they confessed, they were shot. About two minutes after she started reading that, he knew that he didn’t want to hear any more. Everything she read was already welldocumented. There was no point to writing any of it. It just went on and on, and she had all these references for everything. She had put the footnotes right in the main story, and she read out all the footnotes every time they came up. To prove beyond a doubt that it had all happened.

When she finally finished, she looked at the rest of the group beaming, like she had won a gold medal at the Olympics or something, then looked at him and said his name again and called him her special guest. He stared at the brass buttons that ran up and down the arms of her blouse. The blouse bothered him. He remembered his father telling him that if he didn’t have anything nice to say at the meeting he shouldn’t say anything at all.

The matron leading the writing group said: ‘Did you want to say anything, Randall? You looked like you wanted to say something.’

Everybody looked at him.

‘I’m good,’ said R.C. Darcy.

‘Please,’ the matron said, smiling. And everybody around the table smiled, too. People do look at you. They make you say things you don’t mean to say.

‘I found most of that really boring,’ said R.C. ‘You took this really terrifying thing and you had no respect for it. You just made it boring. Jesus.’

He was about to tell her that she had no right to make something like that boring, but he stopped himself. The whole index finger ached now, a sharper ache, all the way through to the center of his palm. He stared at his hands.

Who was he to say what she had a right to do and what she didn’t have a right to do? It occurred to R.C. that perhaps he had no business telling people what he thought was right or wrong. For all he could tell, he believed nothing at the moment. He wasn’t sure he was interested in believing anything anymore.

Other than him staring at his hands, not much happened for a while. It occurred to him that the reason there was no sound in the room might be that all the women were staring at him. He looked up and saw wide eyes all around the table.

He stood and made for the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t think I can write about this for you people,’ R.C. said. His finger felt a little better right as he said that. He got some feeling back into it.

‘Anyway, I told my dad I would take his garbage out to the transfer station.’ Next thing he knew, he was out the door and behind the wheel of the Ford. People don’t need to know everything.

People are criminals. They try to push you into doing things.

***

Seated in the Shed, contemplating her own swollen feet, requiring to be done with all this, observing her time drawing ever toward resolution and still, damn it, not ever done with anything, Cass Yubkin found herself longing for the state of not ever having to put anyone on the Shit List, not ever having been pregnant. She thought of a photograph taken in March of 1970, and longed for the smile of her father in that photograph and the sound of his laughter from that remembered instant. She remembered this image of him reading her a story about a bird in a hurricane, searching for a branch that no longer existed.

He saw that dreamy look on her face and thought for a moment that she didn’t deserve to be bothered, and he wanted to talk to her about something other than the truck, but he wasn’t good with words. All he ended up saying was, ‘Am I locked in?’

And he sounded louder and more impatient than he meant to.

She did not answer, opting instead to continue the inspection of the tops of her old grey tennis shoes, no longer comfortable.

Now she was being rude.

‘Excuse me. Am I locked in? R.C. Darcy. I was in before four. The front gate’s locked.’

‘So walk around. Arsey D’Arsey.’

‘Yeah. But my truck. Hey. Hey. Up here … there we go. That’s called eye contact. Listen, I’m running late. My dad’s got a VFW meeting. I have to get going.’

She took him in. Had he really just attempted to pull rank? He had. That expectant, broad-browed face. Those upraised eyebrows. That meaningful pause she was now supposed to fill. That sense of entitlement.

‘What does the sign say,’ she said, reserving her question mark, which he did not deserve. ‘The sign out front with the big red letters. Don’t guess. Walk out. Take a look, come back in here and tell me what the sign says. Don’t. Don’t fuck with me, Arsey D’Arsey. Just do it.’

Stunned, inert for a moment, then stern and full of purpose, he left. She had the Shed all to herself again. Was he gone for good or —

A thread of sudden pain ran through her. Pulled at her from inside.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

She stood with difficulty, staggered to the nearby wall, placed both palms against it, and leaned her heavy body into the building.

Shit.

The sound of his steps outside. Then the sound of him returning to the little outbuilding. The sound of the door opening and closing. She was not looking at him, though, but rather at the details of the back wall that supported her. Crevices and paint flakes. Her tight-clad ass, alas, presented to him (no helping that now), her bare forearms set against the cheap panelling. She said: ‘Don’t mind me. Go ahead.’ He coughed a little cough and said:

‘Dump closes at four p.m. sharp.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I was here before four.’

‘Congratulations. What time is it now.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘Dump closes at four PM sharp.’

She raised one forearm up the wall a bit. Then the other. She gasped.

‘Are you alright?’

She walked herself back up, turned with diligent effort, and caught his eye. ‘Nice to meet you, Arsey D’Arsey. You must be having a really lousy goddamned day, huh? I mean this day must really be testing your fucking patience, yes? Nothing to say? So what are you, a dropout or some such? I mean, I don’t get it. It’s pretty big letters right out in front there. Impossible to miss from where you parked your pickup. Don’t get me wrong, I like you. I just wouldn’t think reading would be such a fucking problem.’

His eyes were in neutral, fixed on her, confused, like a dreamer staring at a reflection that doesn’t match up.

‘That’s my dad’s pickup,’ he said. ‘It’s not mine.’

‘Get the fuck out of here.’

He seemed to her to be trying to memorize something about her face.

‘Let me guess. Not from around these parts. Christ. My luck. Always draw the rookies at the end of the fucking shift.’

She stopped talking, and having recovered her composure, walked slowly over to her seat. She sat with great care, then extracted a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit up. She heaved in a great cloud of unseen smoke, then heaved it back out again, toward him, for his inspection.

‘So you’ve got no wheels. Just like me. So you’ve got a mile and a half, maybe two. To walk. Just like me. My turn to shit on you. On you. Start walking, motherfucker. Fucking daddy’s boy. Fucking errand runner.’

A weird little bubble of quiet descended over them. She didn’t care for it.

He said: ‘I guess you know you shouldn’t be smoking.’

Her eyes narrowed. The next thing she said was going to be something about his mother, but instead she felt it pull again, and a deep cry rose from within her, raspy, like a buzzsaw:

‘AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH.’

Her head had dropped down, hung itself low, without her even meaning to. Her knees were farther apart now. The thread of pain had pulled them out that way.

When she looked up at him, she saw he was closer, kneeling right next to her. He had pulled out his phone, but he was looking right at her, his face a big blank.

‘Don’t look at me like this shit isn’t scary,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at me like nothing is happening. Like some goddamned soldier or something. Waiting for orders. Be a person for God’s sake.’

He blinked twice, and when he saw she wouldn’t look away, he nodded.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. No, I’m actually sorry. It’s scary. It is scaring me. You going into labour. You’re right.’

‘Thank you. Ask me my name. I’m a person, Goddammit.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Cass.’

‘I’m calling someone, Cass.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You need to breathe,’ he said, and she made a face. ‘It’s just true, you do.’

‘I know. I know that. I just forgot. Stop fucking telling me what to do. You’re on time out.’

‘OK.’

‘OK.’

She breathed as he punched in some numbers.

***

Fifteen freaking hours of labour. A drip of Pitocin, finally, which she asked for in the first place. Red lights and beeps and fetal distress, and that horse’s ass of a doctor lost the baby.

Or someone did.

‘I’m fucked up,’ she whispered, imagining she was alone. ‘And I’ve …’ Someone coughed.

‘Your husband says to tell you he’s ready to take you home anytime you’re ready.’

The unsmiling nurse waited at the door. Cass only stared with eyes too tired to blink.

‘Mrs Yubnik, did you hear what I said? Mr. Yubnik…’

‘He’s not my husband. Or my boyfriend. He’s a stalker, for all I can tell. Tell him to leave me alone. Would you please?’

‘Is this the same man who checked you in?’

Her eyebrows up: Wouldn’t he be the Daddy?

‘I know who brought me here, bitch. Up in my business.’

The nurse stiffened and glared. ‘Shall we call you a cab then, Mrs, sorry, Ms Yubnik?’

The stink of this place. Alcohol, ammonia. She checked her mobile. No word back from her brother yet about that loan.

‘Will the hospital pay for the cab?’

‘No.’

‘Fine. You know what? Fine. Just get me out of here.’

R.C. was sitting in the waiting room, having identified himself as the person who would drive her home no matter what she had to say about it. When she saw him, she said: ‘I thought I put you on time out.’

‘Yep.’ He put away the magazine and got up.

She glared at him but he walked right over anyway. He commandeered the chair from the nurse without a word — who seemed to give up the fight a little too easily, truth be told.

‘Yep,’ he said again. ‘You did. I’m on time out. And you’ve got nobody. If you had someone, they’d have been here. Now can you tell me where you live?’

She glared at him. ‘My friend Amy is working. That’s the only reason she isn’t here. And my brother’s in Massachusetts. OK?’

‘OK. Well, they’re not driving you home then. So I am. Where do you live?’

He wheeled Cass out toward the red Ford pickup.

‘I don’t give my address out.’

‘I know you don’t. But if you did. Where do you live?’

He must have wanted her to crack a smile, but that wasn’t about to happen. They hit a bump. ‘Shit. Slow the fuck down. In fact, stop pushing this damn thing.’

He stopped. They were in the parking lot. When she looked at him he was already looking straight back.

‘Do you drink?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t bullshit me. Don’t you dare lie to me, Arsey. You hear me? Do you drink or use?’

He held on to her gaze tight, like it was a rock, well off the shore, and he couldn’t swim.

‘I drink,’ he said, ‘but I don’t use drugs. Just beer and wine. I don’t smoke, either.’

‘Is that true? Is what you just said to me true?’

Her voice cracked on the last word. Her eyes were all wet, and they were sadder and hollower now, but she still waited for the answer and for some reason it didn’t hurt when she looked at him. Her coat was gathered over her abdomen, making it look fuller than he knew it was now. He wanted to say something about what had happened to her in the hospital, but it wouldn’t have made anything any better.

‘Yes. Look. See that red truck? That’s my dad’s Ford. Right over there. Maybe I push you the rest of the way and then we decide what to do?’ It was maybe twenty yards away. She nodded.

The pushing was slower and more careful this time. When they got there, he opened the passenger side door for her. She didn’t move. Just sat there in the wheelchair.

‘Would you stop? If I asked you to, I mean? Would you stop drinking beer?’

He sniffed hard, like he was afraid of running out of air, and kneeled down and looked her right in the eye.

‘I might have to tell you some stuff if I agree to that,’ he said. ‘Some ugly stuff. From when I was in the service. I would have to talk about rough things that happened overseas. When I drink, it’s because I don’t want to talk about anything that’s rough.’

She stared him down. ‘Yeah? Would that be a deal, then?’

The memory of those two bubbles in the sink before they popped came back to him for some reason.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That would be a deal.’

‘OK, well if that’s a deal, that’s fine, then. Will you stop drinking? That’s the only way I’m getting in this truck.’

‘Yeah, I’ll stop.’

‘Say you promise. Say the words. Out loud.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. I promise. I will stop drinking.’

‘Say, “I’m fucked up, and I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I get scared sometimes, but I’m a good person. And it’s going to be all right.”’

He nodded again. ‘I’m fucked up. And I’ve …’ He knew what came next but his mouth wouldn’t work right.

‘Say it. ‘I’ve made mistakes in my life. And I get scared sometimes. But I’m a good person.’’ ‘I’m fucked up. And I’ve made mistakes in my life. And I get scared sometimes. But I’m a good person.’

‘And it’s going to be all right,’ she said.

‘And it’s going to be all right.’

‘OK.’

‘OK. Are you going to get in?’

She looked at him, then looked into the red truck’s open door.

‘You need some help?’ he asked. His voice wasn’t loud at all. She caught his eyes again — they were hazel — and nodded and said her address out loud and closed her own eyes and let him lift her. She was lighter than he expected. It would have been OK if she were heavier. He still would have settled her in and buckled her up as best he could. Rough things can happen. Terrible things. People need a little help sometimes.