Our town, the younger people in it, had a need, a craving, for raucous bars run by younger people who let customers do whatever they wanted, who did not demand a particular decorum, whose bars did not attract respectable middle-class people of a certain age, neither the old drunks. Bars that didn’t attract any people who would remind us of what we would certainly become one day, of our futures, which we declined to explore. It was the mid-seventies, and the summer of love was gone, dead, the war in Vietnam finally abandoned to shameful history, drugs were mundane and boring, deadly, marijuana was no longer fun, all the funny weed poisoned by the government down in Mexico and all the new stuff heavy Colombian fare that smelled bad and turned you into a lobotomy case if you weren’t careful with it. The worst-off among us did quaaludes with their beer, or went dry and turned on to heroin. Monster Man, for instance. When I said to him that he should watch out for that shit, he stared at me, his features slack, and said, “No, man, it’s the best.” And that was as much as he could say, dropping back into his fog. And why not? Monster Man was always doomed. I’ve never known anyone who sustained as many serious head injuries. Once something—maybe a radio knob—made a perfectly round dent in his forehead about an inch wide and deep, to little effect. When he cleaned up, a few years later, he fell asleep at the wheel of his eighteen-wheeler and jackknifed it on the off-ramp not a mile from his home. That one killed him. At the graveside service, his sister looked over her shoulder at me as if I were somehow to blame. People like Monster Man, and like Robbie, like Cecil Hart, who made innocent drunken fun of that man leaving the Pizza King and the man came back with a .38 and shot him through the heart. Bo Logan, thrown out of Lewis Webb’s truck against a tree a half second before the truck hit the same tree and cut him in half. Max Blackburn thrown in jail for being too high and OD’d on PCP, dying on the bare floor as his cellmates and the jailer paid no mind. Stephen Page, with his Honda and Marlon Brando looks, choking on his own vomit in bed down the hall from his sleeping or passed-out parents. Wright Hawthorn back home alive from Vietnam, drowning in six inches of water out at the lake, his friends just a few yards away. You had my mother numbed down to almost nothing. Father drunk down to a heart attack at forty-eight. Younger brother strung out on quaaludes and bad pot. All of them and more with their destinies visible right there on their faces, in their eyes, plain as if a voice were speaking from there, telling you not to place any of your foolish hope in this one here.
I had thought my brother immune to all that, invulnerable. He was a natural sportsman who would quit jobs come deer season and disappear. He was a spendthrift who borrowed money from me, the miser, though when he worked he made three times what I made at my part-time job after school in construction. He tried to teach me how to hunt and fish, as these were his passions, but at the time I couldn’t care less, only did it to please him or try to. He set me on a deer stand at the club he belonged to, and a sizable buck came trotting over the hill straight toward me, stopped, turned sideways, and looked in the other direction toward the dogs and men that were driving him through the woods. Trembling, I blasted away, emptied the twelve-gauge into the beautiful animal, which nevertheless died slowly. I stood and watched it, feeling sick. The other hunters came up, smeared my face with the blood. But when they tried to tie the buck’s scrotum around my neck with a piece of string, I balked. Their faces fell, and I knew I was disgracing my brother but at the time I didn’t care. Back at camp, I washed the blood from my face, took a hindquarter, and went home.
Nevertheless, just two months before he died, when I was home for Christmas, he took me out hunting again—he belonged to a different club by then. We saw nothing. And during a break from our stands, we stood together and smoked cigarettes, talking of nothing. Brother talk. He looked at me, that cocky grin on his square-jawed face, his old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses slightly askew, his one green eye and one brown eye behind them, and said, “I haven’t gotten a decent shot in three years and you go out just one time, stand behind a fallen-down tree, and a goddamn buck trots right up to you and says, ‘Shoot me.’ ” So we finally had a good laugh about that. It was the last time I saw him alive. He’d tried college and said no thanks. Got past his twenty-first birthday, then his twenty-second. Got married, settled down, was learning cabinet making when he wasn’t running the bar. He seemed happy. Other young people, mostly crazy ones but not always, died all the time. It was that way in boring small towns. But I didn’t think my brother would ever die. He had too much life in him, more than other people did. The thought of that being snuffed out, in any way, was so inconceivable that such a thought never entered my mind, until it happened. And I wasn’t alone in thinking that. Not only my family but also his friends felt the same. Any death cracks the world in some way. My brother’s seemed to break it apart.
It only took about six months of Crazy Horse, six months to bankrupt it, close it down, leave it to sit there, boarded up, empty, until years later someone bought the lot and bulldozed it all down. I don’t know what’s there, now. I haven’t been back.
Everyone thought the bar had been named for Neil Young’s band, but my brother had named it for the great Oglala Sioux warrior, who could summon himself into the spirit world during battle and suffer no harm. Who knew no fear and died resisting the enemy, betrayed. A man whose ways were understated but bold, who had true visions, borne out in the end. Who believed that the spirit world is the real world, and we are but shadows cast dimly from it.
• • • •
I did, finally, go to my wife and beg her to take me back. I promised, because she demanded it, that I would stop drinking, stop getting high, stop hanging out with my decadent friends, that I would join her family’s Baptist church, get a decent job, enroll in the local junior college, start acting like an adult. Like a husband and father. I was nineteen years old, and it was time. A church friend rented us his family’s brick bungalow on a nice street in the north part of town. My father-in-law got me a job at the lumberyard, working in the woodshop, where they let me come and go for classes anytime I liked. I got in more than thirty hours a week, made good money, and liked the older guys I worked with.
I made an earnest effort. I cleaned up. Attended Sunday morning and evening services, Wednesday services, supper. I went around with another guy to do what they called “witnessing,” entering people’s homes like Mormons and talking to them about Jesus and the church. This was deeply embarrassing, but I did it. I taught a youth Sunday School class. I sang in the choir, somewhat tenor. I was baptized wearing a white saintly robe in the big glass tank in the wall behind the choir. I was cold sober for almost two years, except for the occasional bourbon with the elegant fifty-year-old widow who lived across the street. She was one of the most respected people in our town, and so my wife considered my occasional bourbon with Mrs. Wilding to be acceptable, perhaps even honorable, as she was not only a very respectable person managing her family on her own, but also a person of upper middle class wealth. That she liked to have a bourbon with me every now and then was considered to be a good sign.
My God those bourbons were delicious.
My parents divorced. There’d long been the strain of emotional distance, and the loss of their firstborn child was too much. My mother began dating an old friend who’d been in love with her in high school, before she married my father. They drove around in his enormous powder blue two-door Bonneville with white leather seats, sipping bourbon and water from little jelly jars. My mother sat with one leg tucked beneath the other, like a teen. The man who would become my stepfather, Clarence, beamed at having finally gotten a date with his high school dream.
My father moved to Jackson and rented a place in a cheap complex of prefab apartments. When I could muster the will to visit him, I endured the stench of an older bachelor’s abode, with its filthy bathroom tiles and the general odor of unwashed socks. He liked to sit in his La-Z-Boy and watch The Benny Hill Show and cackle over Benny’s stupid sex jokes. He was recovering from a triple bypass, out of work. He’d let his body have its way and let his mind go idle. It was depressing, but I understood.
My younger brother was gone in his fog.
They were all surviving however they could.
My wife and I moved upstate so I could attend the university in Starkville. I didn’t like the idea, didn’t want to go. I liked my job, liked our house, liked my bourbons with Mrs. Wilding, and though I did not like all the church business I had a feeling we wouldn’t last very long away from our families, even only ninety miles away. And indeed we would not. Just two months in she realized I didn’t love her anymore, and I wondered if I ever had, and then I was alone up there and miserable. And sometime in there I got the news that Robbie Love was dead. Like his father, he’d done himself in. I had to wonder if his mother would get herself off the hook for this one, her youngest child. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t her fault somehow.
Grant Holifield, who’d been out with Robbie that night, told me what happened.
When Robbie turned eighteen he got the money his father had left him in his will. His mother tried to sue him for it because he wasn’t yet twenty-one, but lost, and Robbie went on a long drunk of his own. He wasn’t violent like Jack Flanagan, being of slight build, though he bought a big revolver and liked to wave it around, laughing at whoever freaked out over that. He started wearing cowboy boots to increase his height and walked like John Wayne drunk, a kind of controlled wobbly sideways staggering gait. With his new money, he finally moved out of his mother’s house, though he’d slept elsewhere as much or more often than home, anyway. He didn’t rent a place of his own but just kept sleeping around on people’s sofas, floors, right in their beds with them, fully clothed. He slept on bar floors and, when it was warm enough, in little clearings in the woods. He slept in other people’s cars, sometimes cars belonging to people he didn’t even know, scaring them half to death when they found him there the next morning. Once a half-blind old man didn’t notice him passed out in the back seat of his ’61 Rambler American and drove him around town all morning, to the drugstore, his barbershop, the hardware store, took lunch at the new McDonald’s, and when he was headed back home Robbie almost gave him a heart attack by sitting up and asking if he could pull over at a bus stop so he could catch a bus downtown. He smelled bad and wouldn’t bathe until his straw hair stuck to his head as if wet and his body odor became overwhelming enough to elicit universal, loudly expressed disapproval.
Since the demise of Crazy Horse, a new popular bar had popped up on State Boulevard, between the junior high school and the local state mental hospital, in an old log cabin refurbished by a big man nicknamed Mimi who’d been a good friend of my late brother’s. Robbie, a regular, was in there with Holifield, hitting it hard. Holifield was by then the only person who would put up with Robbie’s difficult ways. They’d been friends since elementary school. He practically made himself into Robbie’s valet, took care of him, drove him around, let him sleep on his own sofa most nights, tried to make sure of it, in fact. Robbie was drinking whiskey he’d poured into an empty beer can and just about blind with it. He had the big pistol, a Dirty Harry Model 29 .44 magnum revolver, jammed into the front of his jeans, handle and half the cylinder visible to anyone who looked, and when he was drunk enough to make even easygoing Mimi nervous about it, Mimi persuaded Holifield to get him out of there. Which Holifield did, one big hand on skinny Robbie’s arm as he John Wayned himself through the crowd of other drunks outside to Holifield’s car.
But before they got out the front door Robbie said, “Wait, phone call.” He found a quarter in his fob pocket, dropped it in, dialed, and after a moment he said, clear as if he was sober, “You ready now? You ready for it, bitch? ’Cause I’m coming over. Right now. You better be ready.” He hung up, they went out, and Robbie told him to drive to his, Robbie’s, mother’s, house. Holifield tried to take him to his own house but when they pulled up there Robbie put the gun’s barrel to Holifield’s sweaty neck and said, “We going to the old bitch’s house right now, Grant. Let’s go.” So Holifield backed out of his driveway and drove them to Robbie’s mother’s bungalow, going slow till Robbie waved the pistol at him and said, “Speed up, motherfucker, I ain’t got all night.”
His mother was standing in the open doorway, stoop light on, flanked by two policemen. “Don’t get out, Robbie,” Holifield said but Robbie was half out of the car so Holifield stopped and Robbie, the .44 huge in his small, almost childlike hand, staggered into the yard as the cops pulled their weapons and told him to stop, to not come any closer. His mother just stood there, mouth open in disbelief. Holifield thought Robbie would be gunned down, except that he did stop, called out, “Hey?”
Then he said, to his everlasting credit, “Get a load of this,” and fired a .44 magnum round into his own right temple. It obliterated the left side of his head. Sent it in a wet cloud up into the streetlights. It looked, Holifield said, like he’d set off a bomb in the left side of his brain.
• • • •
I went home to attend the funeral, at the same funeral home that had buried my brother almost three years before. The crowd was big, not as big as my brother’s, but bigger than I’d thought it would be. People loved Robbie after all. No one believed he’d had a chance to do any better than he had.
Out on the funeral home’s porch Holifield was holding forth to a handful of guys standing there smoking.
“Fucking amazing,” Holifield said.
“Who got the gun?” another said.
“Cops got the gun. I guess they gave it to his mother, after all was said and done.”
“I wonder what she did with it?”
“I don’t know, but I bet she didn’t give it to Eddie.” That was Robbie’s older brother, the quiet one. “Probably ate it, monster bitch.”
“Swallowed it whole, fires .44 mag rounds out her ass.”
“Out her old ironclad—”
“God don’t even want to think about that.”
Inside, Robbie’s mother, her big dyed red hair a mess, sat near the coffin, comforted by a group of women her own age and younger. Eddie stood to one side, no expression but a stern stillness on his face. Robbie’s mother wept and wailed. But she got in her very last victory over that boy. The coffin was open. The undertaker had done his best, but the left side of Robbie’s head looked as if he’d clapped a big clod of Bondo onto it and smoothed it out as well as he could. It was horrifying. What kind of mother would open that coffin, invite everyone to see her baby son, let them see exactly how awfully he had betrayed her one last time?
I didn’t go with Holifield to the graveside service. I left the funeral home and walked the three miles to my mother’s house on the north side of town. I didn’t want to see anyone. But that’s where my own car was. I had nowhere else to go.
