Rumble Tumble

“You know I wasn’t celibate before we met. I never claimed to be any goddamn nun.”

“Yeah, I know, but I like to think in a little fantasy compartaient of my brain that you’ve been saving it just for me.”

“You and a lot of others.”

“Boy, that makes me feel good.”

“I thought this pity I felt for him was love. I gave him money. I gave him chances. I took him out of the shed, and pretty soon he’s lodged in my house tighter than a stitch. He wouldn’t work. Not really. He’d piddle here and there to pick up a few bucks, but I never knew him to put in a full day’s work once. He liked a good three hours and then back to the TV set, or he’d set around and play his harmonica and lie about how he used to play with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Always had plans and opportunities just around the corner. He had a truck he borrowed that he was supposed to buy, and he drove it around for months, dodging the guy who owned it. And he never did buy it. He started talking about all that was wrong with it, dismissing the fact he’d been riding around in it for nearly half a year. I bought him a truck and he drove the other one over to the fella’s house who owned it, got out and left it and ran back to my car and we drove out of there like thieves. But still I’m not seeing who this guy really is. He kept on complaining about all the bad breaks he’d had. How he had to live like a nigger. No offense to Leonard. That’s how he put it. He complained about the shacks people let him live in, like maybe they should have fixed them up for him or moved him into their homes. These people weren’t slumlords. They were helping the guy out because they felt sorry for him, and he wasn’t paying a penny.

“He complained they wanted him to do work for his room and board. It was always somebody else’s fault and always someone else’s responsibility to get him out of his bullshit. The truck I got him wasn’t good as he deserved. It had problems. He wanted better. He admitted he owed money for past hospital bills and to the IRS and said he couldn’t work because they’d take what he made. I paid his bankruptcy off. And it wasn’t a little bit of money. He supposedly took the money to a lawyer, but the bankruptcy never happened. I asked him about it, he got mad. Like it wasn’t something I was party to at all. He came up with new excuses. All of them lame. I began to realize what I thought might be a spark of salvation down there inside of him, a sort of muted intelligence, was nothing more than stupidity and shallowness, self-centeredness and misplaced ego. He didn’t really have any feelings outside of those for himself. He was a big con game. The level of his intelligence, if measured in inches, would have been just enough to get him up to where he could play in the toilet bowl with a long-handled spoon.

“I like to never got rid of him, and finally it turned ugly. I was prepared to call the police and have him removed. I dreamed fondly of my husband with his head on fire and thought maybe this guy would look good with a fire cap too. I began to think of them negative thoughts, you know. But I determined to avoid arson on another human body, not because he didn’t deserve it, but because I thought I might not get off for it this time. I cut off his nookie. I cut off his food. I threatened the law. He finally got the hint. Besides, he knew it was all coming to an end. He’d been through it before. He had been working another sucker all along, some other person to feel sorry for him and to tell him how I mistreated him. So he went from my house to another shed. Last I heard was that person’s hospitality played out and he went to yet another shed. Always living in sheds or garages or shacking up in someone’s house on a cold night. Working all day long to keep from working.

“By now, if the sorry cocksucker had gotten a job at a filling station and put in all the effort working he put into not working, he’d be vice president of goddamn Exxon. Anyway, it taught me a lesson. There’s folks out there down-and-out because of fate, but there’s lots of folks out there down-and-out because they aren’t worth squat. There really are bums, Hap. Not just homeless. And there’s even little circus-sold fucks out there who are not down-and-out at all, but have plenty of money and work in whorehouses as pimps and strangle and kill and rob people, and yet they want you to feel sorry for them because they’re short. I say, shit, riding dogs in a circus is good honest work compared to what he’s become. Hell, fuckin’ wood rats under a circus tent for spare change is even more honest work. You with me on all this?”

“I think I’m tracking,” I said. “Except that part about the rats.”

“Pretend I said chickens, or some kind of small furry animal other than a rat.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can visualize that.”

We lay there for a while, looking at the ceiling. And finally Brett said, “Will you hold me, baby?”

I said, “Would you really kill Red he didn’t show us to your daughter?”