Lunsford’s Boy (part 1)

$155.86

A body loses over forty thousand skin cells per minute. This is something Ms. Lunsford taught me in ninth grade biology. That seemed especially long ago as I considered the number over and over again in a small motel bathroom along a skinny road heading into Corydon, Indiana—a town where people could still make a living with their hands and knew their neighbors by name and church affiliation. I stood naked in front of a mirror as the shower spattered to a start. 

At twenty-five my life was a third over, and I thought of it this way. As reflected in the mirror, my body was a culmination of millions of tiny losses over a quarter of a century. It was my fourth day at Suzie’s Bed Stay and it would be my first shower. Gooseflesh had risen on my collarbones. As I smoothed the bumps over, surely taking a few hundred skin cells with them, there were three knocks in quick succession at the motel room’s door. I knew it was the boy with the black eye because he’d knocked each of the past three days; none of which I’d answered. The boy as seen through the door’s peephole had thin bones and a square face like his father’s and a hook-shaped nose like his mother’s—they owned the motel, the Walter family. The son’s name was Nathan. They were well respected and went to First Baptist in Andover. Most of the town reckoned the husband and wife hated each other. For no other reason but the persistent whispers and heresy of affairs on his part. I never liked him much but I had no place to think badly of them. I was in Mrs. Walter’s debt; she’d lent me the room on the cheap—$10.50 a day—and let me borrow a cooler to keep my dead cat from rotting. I didn’t tell her this was the reason. Mrs. Walter hadn’t asked and I was grateful for that too. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself on the end of her kindness. She and her husband were the only ones that remained good to Ms. Lunsford and me after the town found out about us. The Walters had us over for roast dinners and wine nights, legitimizing us as a real couple. Regardless, I still wasn’t the husband’s biggest fan. He smacked Nathan as a kid—not hard but enough—and his hugs lingered with Ms. Lunsford. We babysat Nathan a few times. Mrs. Walter paid us more money than the job warranted. That was years ago. Nathan was old enough to be on his own now, maybe in high school, I thought. I told myself if the boy knocked again I’d answer. He didn’t. I got in the shower and let the world be reduced to each drop of water that fell against my brow, taking even more of myself away. 

Forty thousand seemed like a lot but didn’t at the same time. The number stuck because the house Ms. Lunsford and I moved into after my father died was appraised at forty thousand by the bank—the same bank that took it four days before that shower. I was seventeen when we moved into the house and spent eight years there with the cat, including six years there with Ms. Lunsford—a tombstone grey house in the middle of a perpetually dying field—a small brick house that probably had more skin cells stuck between the floor boards than I had left on my body, and all it took were three letters and two visits by a man in a yellow suit from a bank in Louisville for them to take the house that once was appraised at forty thousand dollars. All that was gone now, which left me with a dead cat rotting in an ice box, a knife previously belonging to my father, and a pool of clothing strewn across a motel bed. Forty thousand seemed like a lot but didn’t at the same time. I scrubbed a loofa mindlessly against my forehead. Ms. Lunsford once said in a hotel in Florida, “Mike, baby, scrubbing so hard will give you wrinkles.” I was fifteen when she told me that. It was before the school axed her, before the house, before the dinners at the Walter’s, before the cat, and I didn’t care anymore. The black-eyed boy—the one with the parents that the town reckoned hated each other—Nathan with the face of his father—with the mother whose kindness was the fat I was temporarily surviving on—knocked three more times but each knock was drawn out a little longer than the last, like the procession of a drum beaten by a cautious player unsure of what his dictating composer desired. I didn’t care about this either. I wasn’t thinking about the kindness I owed, I was too busy ruminating over the things I had lost. 

The dead cat’s name was Lucca. Lucca was a black and brown Maine Coon with puffs of hair at the tips of his ears, tipping twenty pounds when he was still alive. Depending on a body’s mass and percentage of fat, it can lose ten percent of its weight if unpreserved within thirty-six hours; something else Ms. Lunsford had taught me. That night I tried not to think about either of them.

 

 Millfield’s was the fifth largest corn conglomerate out of the Midwest and they’d sunk their teeth into Corydon long before I was born. After dropping out of school I landed an apprenticeship, working my way up to a combine operator just like my father. It paid okay for a piss tick of a town—thirty thousand a year—enough to support me and Ms. Lunsford who wouldn’t do anything but teach but couldn’t because of me. That was alright though, there was enough work to go around until there wasn’t any more land for Millfield’s to buy up. They owned almost every flat piece of dirt in Harrison County, buying up dead people’s houses and squeezing out the spawns of the baby boomers, tearing down brick by brick all the outlying homes of Corydon. My own house was one of the last they clawed into, and with the banks help they sure enough got it. According to the town’s people, in many ways, Millfied’s was almost a deity—one you made tribute to by selling whatever they asked, otherwise one got screwed—God’s wrath, Dad used to kid. He was a farm overseer and combine operator for them until he lost a ring finger one winter to the cold, losing his job with it. Millfield’s made a winning argument in the court against paying him worker’s comp due to my father’s negligence of appropriate weather-wear for the climate; should’ve worn thicker gloves, they said. God’s wrath, he continued to tease even after losing his job, joking about Millfield’s all the way up to his death the next winter. I didn’t believe in superstition or God—luck was the closest thing to religion for me—just luck and bad luck and where one falls in between the two, that’s what mattered. Millfield’s clipped my job due to their inability to acquire new land. With no money to keep the house, I lost that too. Millfield’s had swooped in for the newly foreclosed home and were demolishing it within a week. It was clear where I placed on my own religious scale.

$145.36

Knocking snapped me out of sleep. I’d only been out for a few hours. It was blue-dark still. I drew the covers over my head as though that would be enough for the visitor to go away, but the knock had not been at my door but the neighbor’s. It was followed by a man’s voice that was not Nathan’s. Soon a woman spoke and in a second two bodies crashed into our shared wall, pressing, surely pressing into one another. I listened and listened as one body moved farther into the other. If the boy had knocked at my door then I’d have let him inside. It was lonely as anything being the third party to two bodies tearing at one another. The wall creaked at the mounting weight, and I listened.  

The neighbors finished when dawn’s silver light shone through the blinds in strips across the room. The man left more quietly than he’d come, leaving only the crash of the door in his wake. I wondered if the woman next door was asleep now, curled up beneath a white bed sheet similar to my own, equally alone. It was difficult to imagine. The new silence stirred into phantom moans, echoing in the motel room. I bent the pillow around my head, my arms pressing either side of it against my ears. I was met with futility, because the noises reverberating against the walls and beating against the inner shell of my skull were impressions of my own thought, partly imbedded there in that moment from the night of voyeurism and partly from the recesses of my own memory. The moans, memories and coinciding thoughts came to me like yipping and yawping dogs, whose barks I desperately tried to turn into something meaningful or perhaps emotive, but it was just sound—vicious sound that kept me awake until the morning grey light shone throughout the entire room—a room small enough to land a gob of spit on either wall from where I was laid with the pillow wrapped about my head. I wished my spit was acidic and could tear a hole between the wall that separated us just for her to realize I’m here too, right here, even if you don’t know it, here I am, please, please be quiet. She must’ve been asleep because when I tried to hear anything but what I had conjured through unwilling invention, there was a sullen quietness. Light had filled the room like water in a bath. My stomach churned about itself, grumbling. I hadn’t eaten in more than a day. It was only mid-October but the cold was biting at the windows early that year. Finally, having given up on sleep, I got up and showered. The warm water burned at my neck. I peered through a textured glass window inside the shower. It looked out over the back of the motel. Though the glass distorted the view, I could still make out my parked car, a dump skip and a white field that went up a hill, rising like a low built wall that met the horizon. The water ran cold. I got out and dressed. As I was about to step out the door I was met with yet another knock.

Nathan stood in the open doorway with his hands shoved in his pockets, rocking back and forth from toes to heels. The bruising around his eye had yellowed a bit.

“What’s up, bud?” I asked, closing the door behind me and locking it.

“Well,” he said, “Ma told me to check up on you. You know, just to see how you were doing.”

I was certain Mrs. Walter was a better person than I ever hoped to be. “Tell her she’s sweet. Tell her I’m alright. Haven’t a reason to be otherwise.” 

Suzie’s Bed Stay was a two story joint built in a u-shape. My room was on the second floor in the middle of the u. I made way to the staircase with Nathan in tow. 

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

I let him catch up a little bit until he was alongside me. “Course.”

“You and Ms. Lunsford used to babysit me. For years—‘till I was far too old to be babysat if you ask me.”

“Don’t you remember?” he asked again. “Tarpon Park when I was little. She used to take me all the time. Ms. Lunsford was great. Do—”

“Today’s a school day. You should be in school.”

“You took me into Louisville a few times. Man, those buildings seemed like mountains—mountains.”

“Wednesday is a school day.”

“It’s Thursday,” said Nathan. I was in no position to tell the kid to shove off. Nathan was a good kid—had been since he was little, just a little much. I wished my car was closer, having parked it in the single-rowed lot behind the building so no one would recognize it and figure that I was staying at the motel. I wanted to disappear all at once. I hated the idea of having to tell someone about losing the house and having nowhere else to go. Everyone in Corydon probably already knew anyway. Bad news like that went around like the flu, but still—I didn’t want to have to admit to losing it. 

“Listen, Nathan, it’s been great catching up, but I have a lot of stuff I’ve got to get done in town. Maybe we can chat another time?” I opened my car door as his chin dropped a little.

“Well, maybe I can help some?” he asked.

I let him get in the passenger side. 

Her Christian name was Kristen. Her parents nicknamed her Krissie. She had me call her Ms. Lunsford. Half the time she claimed it made her feel sexy; the other half, she said it simply felt right. I’d always called her Ms. Lunsford. Twice a year we used to visit her parents down in Naples, Florida, bringing Lucca with us since we had no one back home to look after him. On these trips I never went with her to meet the parents. She’d go off and I’d wait for her back at the hotel with the cat. They just wouldn’t understand, she’d say. Mr. Lunsford was a gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. I’d only seen pictures and heard stories, but he seemed like a hard bastard. I was alright not meeting them, but I was always curious as to what they thought their daughter’s life was like in Indiana. Did they know about the boy or the house or the cat or losing the job? I never asked her. Those sorts of talks were something we both avoided, simply reminders of how what we were doing was inexplicable to most. So I waited at the hotels for her to come back from seeing her parents. Sometimes she’d come back with food—her mother made the best pork chops—and other times Ms. Lunsford returned with half emptied bottles of wine. The latter times, when her blued lips were sweet, she’d kiss me, and between the kisses we’d finish off the bottles and maybe go out to dinner—dinners where I couldn’t drink—and we’d come back to the room and shower—she loved watching me shower, it only made me uncomfortable when she’d run a finger across my face and say she wished her skin was still like mine. Those nights in Florida were some of the best we had. 

 

Nathan should’ve been handsome as his father was, but the boy was built wrong in comparison. Nathan had Mr. Walter’s sharp-boned face but the son’s nose pulled too many of his features towards the middle, throwing everything off. Mr. Walter was perfectly handsome and he’d aged that way. When I was in high school any man older that was deemed hot by the girls would be considered a “Walter-type”—that’s the sort of handsome he was—handsome enough to be what others were compared to—that’s just the opposite of what Nathan was. Nathan was dismissible, even as he sat in my car, his shoulders slinking under and over the seat belt, chest concaved between the two, it was as though he’d slip away from the seat with the slightest bump or turn of the car at any moment and be gone. That was my impression of what it was like when Nathan walked in a room, as though he could slip away and disappear without anyone noticing the displacement of a body or the new space from that body’s disappearance.

“Do your parents know you’re missing school?” I asked.

“Ma’s been so busy trying to figure out what to do with business during the dead season but dad already has something in the works. Can’t figure why she’s worried.”

“What’s your dad got?”

“He’s already opened up a salon down in Louisville. Small place but nice. His whole shtick is that they buy hair and turn them into weaves and extensions. And the hair that doesn’t get bought gets donated.”

“Donated where?”

“Cancer kids.”

From where Nathan sat I couldn’t see his bruised eye. I still hated his father.

“You never answered my question?”

“About what?”

“School—they know you’re missing school?”

“They’re too busy to notice.”

My 1991 Honda Accord with the cracked dash and motor that chattered along the thin road back into Corydon pulled us all the way to The Parlor. I parked without cutting the motor. The Parlor was an ice cream shop that had beer and food as well—the closest thing to a decent bar the town had. And besides the church on a Sunday morning or Wednesday night and the Walmart along the way to Waynetown, The Parlor was the busiest spot for miles.

“Nathan, I have to meet with some people, but if you’re good to help out, I was wondering if you could head over to my house and start dumping stuff.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’re bulldozing the house Monday. I need to get all my stuff out beforehand, otherwise there’s a fat ticket to pay.”

“You want me to chuck all of it?”

“I have everything I need, but all the stuff left at the house needs to be out. Whatever’s there just pop in bags and leave out front. Don’t worry about any of it.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Listen, if you don’t want to I really can do it myself. I thought you wanted to help but honest it’s not a—”

“No, no, I can do it. You want me to drive there?”

“You still know where it is right?”

“Sure, you guys and dad drove me back and forth plenty. I know my way.”

“And you’re good to drive yourself?”

“Don’t have a license,” he said, “but I’ve driven Ma’s car before.”

I shut the door behind me and watched my car with the sun-rotted paint job bumble down the street. I could still hear the motor after losing sight of it. 

An old woman was sat beside The Parlor’s door. Her face was lined deeply, reminiscent of old leather. Her arms limply placed on her crossed legs and her mouth that jutted open and closed without tugging on the hardened skin around her lips both reminded me of an abandoned ventriloquist dummy. It was something you saw in Louisville, but the homeless there were in swarms, almost never alone, and somehow this woman sat the way she was and where she was made the scene all the more sad. I did my best not to look her in the eye. The woman was fetid, and as I walked by her rankness tugged at my nostrils. I forced an aversion to empathy in that moment with the thought that everything must age that way and one day we will all be rot, but in a way wasn’t this just another sort of empathy? The woman dissipated from thought as the door chimed, entering The Parlor. 

The room was full of familiars, all of whom were older than I’d once known them as. All of them had changed some and had cumulatively lost millions if not billions of skin cells. We were all new but similar to our old selves, though The Parlor itself hadn’t changed. The red upholstered stools sat at the long oak bar and plastic booths were strewn across the room. There were posters from, or made to look from the fifties and sixties plastered on all the walls. The Parlor was most likely the same as it was before any of us were there. One can find post cards of The Parlor from an array of decades at the town’s paper shop. Only we had changed in The Parlor. Patrons had come and gone. Owners had sold it to the next. Young cute girls—most of whom were attending or graduated from Harrison HS—were replaced by the new, younger cute girls who will be replaced by newer, younger cute girls. Some eyes darted my way as the chime’s metallic shrill echoed throughout the room. They were older to me but similar as I was to them. Most knew about Ms. Lunsford and the house. Some had been kind like Mrs. Walter. Others reckoned I should’ve slunk away from Corydon like Nathan in a seat or a room with his narrow and tapered body. After twenty five years my face had remained young enough beneath the brow but my hairline crawled back in a c-shape against my scalp, so I’d capped my skull with a red ball cap to cover the mess. I tugged at the brim of the hat, hoping for the illusion of unmoved youth. I didn’t like going bald, recalling finding tufts of Lucca’s hair throughout the house as the first sign of him dying. I didn’t think I was dying—not quickly—but it did remind me that one day it would come as it had for the cat, and it forced me to consider and reconsider the forty thousand skin cells I had lost walking into the room. I thought about this, and the house being taken by a bank with a bulldozer, and the cat who’d once lost hair as I was doing then, and the woman outside with the face molded like wood, and I, like everyone in the room, was older yet new but still similar to themselves. I thought about these things and considered that wood also rots like flesh, and brick and stones erode and fall apart; this too was some form of empathy. And as I walked over to the bar weighing these things and numbers, it was the closest I had come to a breakdown since before I’d lost the house. I sat at a stool nearest to a cute girl that worked at The Parlor who faintly reminded me of Ms. Lunsford but younger. This was enough to calm me, a redirected focal point of the world, something that drew the feeling to a core, holding everything together as gravity would hold an object to the Earth. The most sense that I could make out of any of it was that the future wasn’t what it used to be and that was the way it would always be. The girl’s name was Rose. Rose brought over a coffee with two sugars without me asking. She knew my name and what to bring me. That was enough to keep me together right then. 

 

Rose brought over a plate of pork chops and rice. I hadn’t bit into it but I knew it’d crumble like an eraser with a similar flavor. I got them every time. I knew they were awful. She took up my mug and brought it to the back without asking. The pork was oak brown and the plate was adorned with palm trees.

When I think of Florida I do not think of palm trees. A different image comes first. When I think of Florida I think of messy black hair coming down a honey-colored back like vines. When I think of Florida I see a girl faced away from me towards the sea, letting the water lap up at her feet which are half buried in sand. Her hair comes down to her bikini bottoms. The water is a little lighter than the sky and the sky is a little lighter than her bikini bottoms and the girl is a little darker than the sand. Each color has another color except for her black hair. This absence of color is at the core of my thought when I think of Florida. I’m sure the girl is Ms. Lunsford but the image without context could be any girl with black hair. She sits in what could be a post card—unreal but certainly real because I was once there. It’s funny how your own memories could belong to anyone or be in any post card without context and anyone could be anyone without a face. Rose had black hair that came down to the knot of her apron. She wore a floral dress a little shorter than the apron. Once again she came back with coffee that I hadn’t needed to ask for, made just the way I would’ve wanted. Then she walked over to a new patron a few stools down. Steam rose from the mug, and I drew my face near it, watching as Rose walked away, focusing on her black hair. With the steam like humidity and the black hair at the center of this immediate world, it could’ve been Florida; she could’ve been Ms. Lunsford.  

 

Three bites of bad pork, three cups of coffee and a beer were enough to put me over and make my stomach feel like a water balloon. Nathan was taking longer than I would’ve liked. One can only nurse food and drink alone for so long before they seem sort of sad. That’s the last thing I wanted Rose to think. We didn’t talk much—hardly spoke besides to kid each other, exchanging a few bright lines once in a while—nothing too friendly—bar banter mostly. She was too young to have heard first-hand about Ms. Lunsford, but stories like that get passed down into fables and tall tales. Hopefully, if she did know the story, she didn’t know I was that student; it’s hard enough to explain something like that to people you know, never mind someone you don’t.

Nathan knew, and he didn’t seem to mind or care. It was maybe why I asked him to clear out the house. I’d never been good at cleaning out the mess and excess of my life. I had a habit of holding onto things I didn’t need—far too sentimental. Any old trinket could become a shrine to some small memory or event. A gas station receipt from when I was twenty-three becomes the day the girl left. A cork from a bottle we finished on a beach at twenty becomes sex in the Gulf of Mexico. A candle we picked up at the pet store at seventeen to celebrate Lucca turning one becomes the closest moment of me and Ms. Lunsford as parents, something that meant just as much to her since she was too old to have children without complications—she was willing to try but I wouldn’t let us. A stack of New Yorker magazines I read at the hospital at fifteen become the week my father died. A tube of lipstick stolen from Ms. Lunsford’s bedside table at thirteen becomes my first time. A knife used to slice off a stingray’s wing on vacation in my dad’s hometown in Georgia becomes the closest I got to knowing dad, I mean really knowing him. A teal dress found in a box beneath dad’s papers becomes my mother. It was the closest I could get to her. Dad couldn’t bear having pictures of her. He wasn’t nearly as sentimental as me. 

Besides the knife which was in the car, Nathan would find all of these objects and discard them. How simple it was, throwing memories away like old postcards from a stranger. I was glad to have him help. I couldn’t purge anything that’d made up my life—a life small enough to fit on the back of a receipt paper, but hell I couldn’t even throw out a gas station receipt, let alone my whole life. I wished I was more like my dad, but at least I had Nathan. 

Maybe my life would become more real after he managed the waste of it. I hoped this wasn’t the case though; I appreciated his indifference. To him, I hoped, the receipt would be just paper, the cork no more than a cork, the candle just unburnt wax, the magazines—simply waste and dead histories, the lipstick nothing more than lipstick, and for the teal dress to be less than a dress—less than clothing—cotton—simply cotton—cotton unfit for winter’s brashness—maybe even less than cotton—thin fibers entwined tightly about one another for no purpose other than to exist as cotton—simply fibers made together so to hold something more. I wished to remain less than opaque to Nathan. Things would be easier that way. 

I asked Rose for the check and a to-go box. Before I’d leave, I planned to tell her I was giving the homeless gal outside my scraps, but I wouldn’t say it like that—I’d say I was giving away my food to the woman outside. I just wanted Rose to think I was a good guy.

The door chimed as I handed over my debit card after she slipped me a to-go box. It was Nathan. His hair was muddled and his face was more pink than usual. Jacketless, his thin arms bore protruding veins. 

“Everything alright?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s all taken care of,” he said, still slightly panting. Maybe I should’ve helped, I thought.

Rose brought over my receipt and the merchants copy and quickly disappeared back into the kitchen. She’d charged me for each refill of coffee. The check came out to $24.50, over fifteen percent of all the money I had left in the world. Regardless, I still tipped ten bucks. I didn’t want to seem desperate in front of Nathan, so I didn’t wait for Rose. I packed the food and we left before I got to mention my plan for feeding the homeless woman, but it was alright; she was gone anyhow, though her smell lingered. Breath seeped out from my mouth like smoke. 

“Nathan, thanks. I don’t think you know how much your help meant.

“It’s not a thing,” he said.

“If you ever need anything—I have you. And here’s some food by the way,” I said, handing him the Styrofoam box.

He smiled and got in the car. I flicked on the heater. It wasn’t much good so I sped down the road beneath the tunnel of boned trees that’d lost most of their flesh already. Some of the branches flickered like hair caught in wind and I thought of Rose as Ms. Lunsford. Nathan was digging into the leftovers, picking the meat right off the bone. The heater was starting to stir some by the time we were pulling behind the motel. I hoped the homeless woman at least found somewhere warm to go. 

 

The clouds wore purple from the setting sun. Nathan asked me to pop the trunk. So I did and he retrieved a medium-sized box. He’d collected all of the pictures and hand-written notes he could find in the house. Nathan thought I might want them. The box had heft. I put on my best impression of my father, letting him know how displeased I was without saying much. Nathan understood and didn’t stick around much longer. 

I heaved the box up to the room, stripped off my clothes that were damp with cold and showered. While I pissed into the draining water, I watched through the window as Nathan clambered up the hill towards the Walters’ home. The glass distorted him so that he was simply a black blob in the field. Stood still, he could’ve been mistaken as a tree. My piss carried a coffee smell. It was dark when I finally turned the faucet off. 

Once dry I started to finger through the box. In all the pictures I was smiling and had more hair. The difference in the hair was enough to make it seem as though the boy shown could be somebody else. So much so that all photos of the girl tucked beneath the armpit of the boy with hair dug into my gut with jealousy. It’s strange to think that one can be jealous of a different version of themselves. The notes were worse but in a different way. Writing and posting sticky notes was something she did extensively since she’d stopped teaching. She’d put them on anything about anything; a love note on a lamp; directions to a chemist in Waynetown on a box of cereal; grocery lists on a mirror. All of these notes were a shadow of Ms. Lunsford’s voice. It was her I heard as I read them. 

There was a knock at the door, but once again it was the neighbor’s. A few rushed whispers later there were hushed moans that quickly grew into panting and huffing. I sat on the cat box with a few notes and a picture of Ms. Lunsford throwing her head back in laughter. She wore a black dress and her face was blurred slightly. She’d been caught in motion, and it was as though this snapshot had been plucked right out of time at random. The two bodies next door once again beat into one another against the wall. With my eyes closed I tried imagining that Ms. Lunsford and I were the bodies. I saw glimpses of flesh, throws of black hair rustling in a shadowed room; I imagined the grit of sand against my ass; more flesh; a girl with her head cocked back, laughing; the white caps of her teeth; more flesh.

It was over for the neighbors almost as quickly as it’d started. The man offered his apologies, explaining he had to leave. The woman’s response was too soft to pick up through the wall. The door opened, but they must’ve held each other a moment longer for it didn’t close right away, staying open just long enough for me to imagine the top of a scalp with long black hair and holding her there, pressing my arms firmly about her as vines around a tree. The crashing of a closing door ended my imagined embrace. The smell of pear shampooed hair lingered. I went over to the dividing wall, pressing an ear against it. I could hear muffled crying.  

 

I’d never buried a body before. There wasn’t money to do so for my father. My mother—she was buried, but I was too young to remember in full. The only thing I know about her funeral was that there were white flowers everywhere. I don’t think it’s something my father told me—he’s never said anything about her funeral. 

When I picture her alive I see the dress; when I think of her dead I see a night-vision green field dotted with the small white heads of flowers. I don’t have the memory, merely the association of white flowers with my dead mother. Still, it must’ve come from somewhere. The earliest memory I have of the white flowers was drawing them over and over again in a notebook my freshman year of high school. I can still imagine myself occupying that young body with my un-callused hand clutching a pencil, scribbling the memory of the flowers into a notebook. I remember exactly what it was like drawing those flowers in that young body with the accompanying thought of my mother. I’ve never learned the correct way to dispose of a body. Surely one could let a body rot, but if you loved that body, what is the correct way? I wished I could’ve buried her, so at the very least it would’ve supplied me with some form of reference in the correct way to bury Lucca.

I was sat atop of the ice cooler, placing all the pictures and notes back inside the box. The woman next door ceased crying by the time I’d boxed up what was left of Ms. Lunsford. Only her voice and glimpses of her likeness remained, but both came in waves like a storm in a neighboring countryside, flashing white light and the occasional crack of thunder ebbing and flowing in the near distance. The pictures and notes tidied away in the box were far enough so to see that storm from the safety of a window. Behind the glass I was numb to all of it.

The air was wet and too cold to snow. A single greying black cloud hid the moon. The lights in the motel parking lot burned away at metal stems, too bright to look directly toward, so I fixed my gaze onto the bit of concrete ahead of me, not staring at the box pulling at my arms and shoulders and nor towards the only lights in that small bit of country. A few miles away late harvesters hummed away at their tasks. I could hear combine teeth chattering, biting into what was left of a field. I wondered whose homes they’d taken to make way for that night and those workers. On Monday it’d be mine. I wondered how long before they farmed where my home would one day formerly be.

Behind the motel where it was separated from the fields by a chain link fence, a stinging breeze picked up. I heaved the box over and into the tin skip like a hammer throw. It opened mid-air and the wind took up some of the loose pictures and notes as it would dying leaves, floating some about the skip and others over the fence and into the field, with a few landing at my feet. 

The paper notes reminded me of feathers or white petals, and the colored pictures made me think of confetti, all of which were barely lit by the light illuminating from the bathroom next to my own. It was a yellow light, and the textured glass from which it shone was like a crystal or diamond.

The woman stepped into the lit window of the shower. Naked, her skin was pink against the yellow with black hair that covered most of her back as she turned. She was a slight girl, not young, nor old. The flesh that made her nipples was darker than the rest of her body—a body made blemish-less and smooth by the distorting glass. As seen from where I stood, the woman’s face bore no distinguishable features, not even a line for a mouth or pockets for eyes that might’ve been blue or green or brown or grey. Her body, unreal enough to be made of wax, was almost sexless if it hadn’t been for the small hills of flesh that made up her modest breasts. As she soaped her body did not move in twists and turns, but seemingly bent as a whole without any sharpness, like a dancer to slow music might or the stem of a flower meeting a breeze—slowly and delicately she moved. I stepped back, crouching a little, receding into the darkness made by the dump, hiding from the little light there, but still watching the girl made opaque by the window. She had seemed more real through the wall. Beforehand she might’ve had bones and veins and eyelashes and maybe a family and a married lover and perhaps she carried pictures of her past lovers with her and she may’ve had a job in a small town like this one with her own people—people she knew—people that knew she was real and had a name and all these past lovers who also had names. Through the window she was simply pink flesh and black hair, malleable to the world’s impressions of who she was. She was less real seen as a wax moving statue than heard crying or fucking or being fucked through a wall. If she was crying inside the shower then I would not have been able to hear her. If she was fucked inside the shower in front of me, her lover might as well have been another wax figurine. The closest to real she might’ve become whilst fucked in the shower was if a palm pressed firmly against the window so to bear the weight of the two of them; maybe that’d be proof enough she was real, but for now she was perfect.

The woman was perfect because she could’ve been anyone. Her voyeur made her as he went, clued in by what little was given, the rest he could conjure up through his impressions of the world and what he wanted. It was a cold reality I discovered: that we’d rather make a girl out of someone else than have the real thing. One couldn’t be disappointed this way. To me, the woman in the window wasn’t just anyone, I’d already imprinted someone in the curved flesh I saw through the glass. I watched until it was over. I mourned every skin cell she lost in that shower as much as the flesh that I saw in it. The time went by like sand in a loose hand, and it was sad to see her slip away like that. But she did. I didn’t think of the cold until it was over. It was hard to close my hand—my fingers frozen to twigs. I stayed crouched a little longer, guessing at how many skin cells she might’ve lost—half a million, maybe—not giving a damn about my fingers or how much I’d lost. I knew I’d done the wrong thing by watching but it didn’t surprise me; I was used to the wrong thing by then.

The wind had blown more of the pictures and notes out of the dump. They made a semi skirt on the ground about my feet. I stood straight so to make my retreat back to the room but a car swung around the corner, throwing its lights over the concrete. I made myself small behind the skip and against the fence. It was a black Durango and it parked a little passed me and the window whose light had now been switched off. I half-expected a man, the woman’s man, to exit the car and go to her room. 

Though it wasn’t him, or if it had been, he was now with a different lover. The car rocked, bending either side of the axel. It was twenty minutes or so until it was done. By then the cold had bit into my cheeks and I couldn’t care less who was in the car. The Durango kicked to life and left the way it’d come. I withdrew to the room and into the shower, immediately staring outside so to see if there was any chance of her having spotted me. All was impossibly black as though a wall was on the other side of the glass. 

$100.36

I was woken violently from a dream which was forgotten by the time my piss hissed against the toilet water. The bathroom tile burned cold at my feet. My ears rung in a way that reminded me of Florida’s white noise in the night—persistent crickets and frogs. I let these individual sensation well up, filling my mind completely. 

Conscious of my dwindling money and the foreseeable poverty I faced with looming certainty that any work in Corydon was unforeseeable, I decided not to go to The Parlor that day. Instead I waited for the five o’clock hour. It was something I’d done many times over the years—not necessarily waiting specifically for five o’clock but whatever time the sun was midway through its decent—in October it was during the five o’clock hour. Once again it was a triviality, an act of sentimentality executed for the nostalgic melancholy it provided.  

It happened when I was still a kid—a sophomore in high school—right after Dad lost some more fingers. I served as a student aid for Ms. Lunsford. She’d slip cash into an envelope the days she wanted me to take a bus to a motel in Andover after school. Amidst suing Millfield’s for workers comp and strapped for cash and bleeding himself further to keep a lawyer on his side, my father was all too happy with me not being home for dinner. He didn’t mind me staying out all night either; it meant my breakfast was comped for him as well. Admittedly I can’t say I gave much care to Ms. Lunsford’s aversion to having me around her house. There was a husband before me whose pictures or remnants I wasn’t too keen on seeing for myself, so I was fine fooling in a motel; she was loving me in a way she knew how. I didn’t mind the piss smell on a bus or screwing on a spring torn mattress. It was well worth it.

The bus fares came more frequent as the fall progressed but the last few weeks of autumn were bitter. The bus services were grounded and school was suspended because of snow. Dad still had to contend with the lawyers so I had the days free. Ms. Lunsford would swing her truck around a road that cut through the woods north of Dad’s house. I met her out there bundled to the nines and she’d have me lie flat in the bench seat behind the driver’s. We drove like that at a crawl through snow-stricken Corydon all the way to her house. I was relieved that she wasn’t the sort to keep much of her life as framed décor along the walls. In fact she never mentioned much about her husband anyhow, so why had I bothered worrying? The only thing Ms. Lunsford ever said about him was that he spoke like her father. I didn’t know her father, so this meant nothing to me. We fooled in the softest bed I’d yet known. It didn’t have the bounce a motel bed had, so the weight on one another just amply pressed us more firmly together as we went. On the last afternoon of those snowed in weeks the sun broke from the grey and came through the blinds in gold slits, shining over our yellow bodies. In the light that radiated on and from our bodies there were tiny white particles of dust and skin floating in the air. I recall wondering whether they were everywhere and we just didn’t care to see them. Ms. Lunsford was asleep, her head rested upon my chest with a small delicate hand holding her cheek between the two of us. I fought sleep to have a few hours of conscious peace, occasionally running my fingers through her hair. The particles that made up the tiny slow dance of white in the evening light were impossible to count. And I was okay with that right then as I was with everything else for the first time in a while. 

Eventually Ms. Lunsford came gently to waking. She decided she’d cook dinner for us, leaving the house to pick up a few things from the grocers. Obviously I couldn’t go with her to town so I waited, holding onto an already passed moment just a little longer, letting the gold light dissipate from the room and watching all the flesh we’d lost over those few days go with it. For years I’ve waited for the sun-setting hour just to lie or sit in front of a west-facing window and trick myself into thinking I was fifteen again. It’s frightening how easy it is. Its futility is also frightening. I reckon my life would be different if I had simply fallen asleep with her that day in my arms. It would be one less important thing to hold onto.  

 

The grey skies held all through the five o’clock hour. Minutes went like sand through fingers as the sun quietly set behind a single looming cloud. There was no golden hour, simply light making way for the absence of it. Wildfires of panic came over me in flurries as the last drips of the day slipped away. I tried picturing Ms. Lunsford but all I saw were corners of a mouth, black hair against a sun-kissed back, the fold of a bent knee, the edge of an eyebrow, hands small enough to be held by mine and disappear, smooth flesh of perhaps a stomach or thigh or breast—all I could conjure up were pieces of the woman made into parts of a puzzle still missing pieces, and with every new thought came the same puzzle with the different parts assembled and new ones missing. I rose and rushed out of the room and out into the steely whipping winds, down the stairs barefoot and around the lot all the way to the skip. Before I realized my feet hurt from scraping at the concrete they had left the floor as I hoisted myself into the dumpster, falling down through boxes and bags filled with spill and rot bearing a smell that dispelled the drip of my nose from the cold. It was too dark to see the deeper trash but I felt for paper and pictures with my body submerged to about mid-stomach. Most of what I pulled fell apart in my hands but the bits and pieces that felt enough like what I hoped for I stuffed inside my pockets, filling each to the point of bursting from their stitching. 

“You need help?”

Startled, I dropped what was probably a diaper. I turned to see it was Nathan. 

“Oh. Oh no, I’m fine. I’d trashed something by accident.”

“What was it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, climbing out of the dumpster, hoping that whatever was in my pockets was enough to make up Ms. Lunsford. I also hoped it was too dark for Nathan to see how full my pockets were.

I went inside ahead of the boy and threw the blanket over the ice cooler. Nathan sat against the wall next to the door. 

“Do you want a drink?” I asked.

“Water, please.”

“I only have beer. There’s a tap though.”

“Beer’s fine,” he said without looking up at me. I plucked up a warm Bud Lite from a Walmart bag and rolled it to him across the floor. I took one too.

“You have a bottle opener?” he asked.

I shook my head, rolled up a sleeve, tensing the meat of my forearm, and popped the cap with it. Nathan tried to do the same but the cap cut into his arm. I took the bottle from him and did it myself, handing it back after. Self-conscious about the garbage smell that clung to me, I retreated to the other side of the room.

As he sipped his beer I realized I had nothing to say nor the desire to cut small chat, but it wasn’t decent to kick a kid out into the cold. And after being caught dumpster diving I reckoned it better to be kind with company than weird and alone. I told Nathan not to fool with anything, and I retreated even farther from him and into the bathroom, hopping in the shower fully-clothed and pocket-filled with my beer still in hand, taking three long pulls until all that was left was a bit of pizzle water at the bottom of the bottle. I switched on the shower and placed the bottle on the tub floor, letting it fill and overflow. My clothes grew heavy, sticking to me like a batch of wet leaves, never bothering to empty out the pockets. That was alright, I thought, it was probably just trash. I couldn’t shake the smell of rot and wished I would’ve dragged the cooler in the bathroom after me. It was one thing getting caught dumpster diving, but another to be caught hording a dead cat. Though the smell of the clothes was worse enough, and considering that a stench had started to leak from Lucca’s box, it probably would’ve been unbearable in that shower. After twenty minutes I started to peel off the wet clothes, shedding them into small heaps in the tub. I waited a little longer until I heard the knocks. That’s when I stopped the shower and pressed an ear to the wall. I imagined Nathan was doing the same as the neighbor girl fell into the arms of the unknown. That night their union seemed particularly vehement. A table cracked against the shared partition. A lamp fell. A bed’s frame was taut to its full bend and restraint. He huffed as she let out small cries, almost yelps, sounding a little like pleasure with some desperation. I hated the man as more of Ms. Lunsford came back to me. The pictures still weren’t full in my mind but they moved and as she moved more of her came into the frame with some of her still slipping from it as though I watched the woman through a broken TV. The next door neighbor imagined as Ms. Lunsford was being hurt by a man that wasn’t me and I hated him for this. My ear firmly pressed into the wall ached a little. 

Once they stopped it stayed silent. There was no apology of having to leave and no door closing behind him. He stayed and maybe cuddled, maybe they gingerly stared at one another, maybe his gently-brushing forefingers went through her hair or across her shoulder blades, and for this I hated him more—this quiet kindness. I thought of Nathan and his ear maybe hurting like mine, and for this I hated myself.

Nathan was stood by the wall with the bottle in hand still full up to its neck. The blanket that covered Lucca’s box appeared to be untouched. He drew the beer to his lips, taking a long sip. I opened another for myself.

“You go to Harrison County High, right?” I asked.

Nathan nodded, resuming his place on the floor near the window. The yellowing bruised eye seemed darker when his head was tilted down.

“Have you taken a class in the music room? The one by the gym?”

“I haven’t had a class there, but I’ve been inside. Why?”

“Well the music room used to have these two soundproof booths. I used to hook-up with a girl in there, during Ms. Stoudt’s class—nothing too serious, touching and making out mostly. But the girl would always be afraid someone could hear us when we were supposed to practicing the recorder. She always stopped before things got too good—afraid that Ms. Stoudt would run up on us in the room.”

“Did she ever?” Nathan asked.

“Oh no. God, if she ever had she probably would’ve died at the sight of it. Very, very Christian. She went to a presybetarian church three times a week and changed it when the one off Faulkenberg Road started letting gay pastors in. She was backwards but sweet. She wouldn’t have said a word if she’d caught us—Stoudt would’ve been dumbfounded. That room kept all manner of sin from her.”

“You reckon nobody knew then?”

“Hell somebody must’ve. One time I took the gal over to Stoudt’s during lunch period, thinking the room would be empty for us, and it was, except for that one of the booths was shut. And when we got close you could hear them, huffing away at it. Wasn’t so soundproof. So sure, somebody knew—someone must’ve heard us, but nobody said spit. Regardless, from then on the girl cut out any fooling during class. We played our recorders in the three-tiered rafters with the rest of them.” I gestured at the motel room’s shared wall, “Still, it’s strange being on the other side.”

By now Nathan had finished his beer. I rolled him another. This time he cracked it with his forearm no problem.

“You keeping any girls at school?” I asked with a grin, “Tug any skirts in the music room lately?”

He laughed. Even with the yellow knock beneath his eye, he seemed a little less wounded when he laughed, a little more handsome, a little more like his father in this regard. I wanted to tell him this. I wanted it to make him feel a little bit better. But I didn’t.

“That means you have somebody,” I said.

“No, not really—nothing serious.” Nathan was still smiling. 

“Okay, so you got a girl. She’s blonde, right? She’s blonde and small but thin—maybe not thin but athletic-looking—a soccer player maybe? She’s named after a month? April maybe?”

He was laughing from his gut, sloshing his beer slightly as I continued to kid him.

“You guys met in AP History? Or Lit? You fool in music rooms until prom. She’s a good girl and no one else has had her. She’s sweet and her name’s April and she calls you her babe and you call her sugar butt. Your mother likes her. Her father frightens you but you like the way his hand is never too tight when you shake it. Nathan, April’s a keeper, am I right?”

He’s lost most of his beer on the carpet. Soon I ought to give him another.  

“Something like that I guess,” said Nathan, regaining his composure, “but maybe not. It’s more complicated than that.”

“It always is.”

“She’s my girl but she isn’t. We aren’t together anymore but we were. It’s complicated.”

“Complicated is alright.”

“She left school, see—she dropped out. And it was tough not seeing her. Then there was this other guy, and well—I don’t know. I see him around town and stuff.”

“Is that how you got the smacked eye?”

“We still might get together again. It’s a timing thing. And she’s brunette—not blonde.”

“It always is.”

A girl wanting Nathan made him even more like his father, and his black eye belonging to the girl made Mr. Walter a lot more likeable.

“I won’t push much further,” I said, “but next time I want details.”

The neighbor’s door creaking open and quickly slamming shut cut through the space between Nathan and me in two waves. 

He stared pensively at the wall and asked, “It sounded a lot worse than it probably was, right?”

“I think so.”

It was time for both our next beers. They were the last two. After a few minutes of savoring pulls of the bottles Nathan broke in with, “Who was the girl?”

I pointed to the neighbor’s, “Her? I haven’t a clue.”

“No, I mean the one in your story.”

“Oh. Nadine. Her name was Nadine and she was small and athletic-looking.”

He smiled but it was a lie. The story was a lie with some elements of small truths simply reconfigured and spun for something to say. There was no Nadine in a soundproof booth. Ms. Lunsford is the only woman I’ve been with. In reality I was only in the music room once. It was three months and two weeks before they amputated the rest of Dad’s ice-ridden, blackened fingers and three months and three weeks until he coughed out half a lung in a spool of dark red gore and three months and three and a half weeks to him clocking out for good and four months and a week before Ms. Lunsford moved me in out of pity for what had happened and for how long we’d been tugging at each other’s clothes in motels. Three months before things went wrong she insisted it’d be sexy to try it at the school. The detail about going to the music class during the lunch period was real, but I’d gone alone and inside the class she waited for me. She locked the door and we never made it to the booth. She quickly burst into tears after some kissing and said how bad it all was. In hindsight it hadn’t even started to get bad. The story I told Nathan was mostly a lie; the fear of being caught was real; the room was real; Ms. Stoudt was real; there was once a Nadine, she was my mother. She was once real. Now she’s just a phantom implanted in the spaces I need to fill like the name of a girl who isn’t real. But Nathan liked the story, and it got him to open up and that’s what mattered then. I reckon it’s one of the few good things I’ve ever done.

He left after those last beers. I too left not soon after, making my way to the lot behind the motel and into my car, watching as a woman came into view through the distorting glass window. She kept her hair in a bun the entire shower. Her flesh seemed more yellow than usual, less real.

$89.86

A few hours later the heater cut out. Slowly the winter crept into the room. By morning I was layered beneath the sheets in a coat, a sweater and shirt. Nathan came over in the early afternoon. It was another day where the world seemed to be made of grey steel and the fleshless trees out beyond the fields seemed more like bones than trees. Nathan’s top lip was busted by the right canine tooth. I said nothing about it. We went to The Parlor for some warmth.

Outside The Parlor the old woman was in a half-squat leant up against the building. Her hands were shaking and her leathered cheeks were filled with blood that’d risen to the surface. I made up excuses in my head as to why I couldn’t help her, most of which boiled down to Nathan and money. I did my best not to see her.

Inside most of the tables were full. It was mostly kids Nathan’s age and a few older couples I recognized from either working at Millfield’s or from pottering about town. I figured Nathan knew some of the kids but he didn’t say hi to anybody. Two yellow-haired girls with bob-cuts got up from a table, and quickly we swooped in, taking it up. Rose was serving a spotty-faced boy sat at the bar. He wore a backwards flat-brimmed cap. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but it was a lingering conversation. I lifted up the bill of my own ball cap in case she hadn’t seen my face. Ten minutes went and Rose had brought the boy a coke and resumed conversation. It was as though she was doing her best not to see us. 

A bald woman that waddled like a penguin came to take our order. Her scalp made me think she was sick, so did her hallowed face, but it turned out Mr. Walter had recently cut her hair so to donate it to charity. She told us she always used to sell her hair to the salons in Louisville for extra dough. I didn’t even know this was a racket. I wished I had hair to sell. She told us about these salons and how when she found out about Mr. Walter’s charity she knew immediately what the Christian thing to do was. She spoke lavishly of the Walter’s family, especially of the charming Mr. Walter. She rubbed the little pricks left on her head as she spoke. Nathan withered as the conversation commenced, interjecting less and less as the woman chatted along. Finally she took our orders: pork chop for me and a single scoop of French Lavender for him. I’d hardly said a thing besides my order but she kept throwing me darting glares as though I was a stranger sat at a table of a mother and her infant son. This piled on top of Rose’s obliviousness made for a quiet lunch. The bald server’s name tag read: Laura. Laura kept checking on us, each time returning with new compliments and favorable adjectives for Mr. Walter as though she was hording a damned thesaurus in the backroom.

Nathan stood to use the pisser and I made a reason to go to the bar, going up right next to the spotty-faced kid, and asked Rose, “Do you know Ms. Stoudt by any chance?” 

She greeted me amiably and said the name seemed familiar, that she’d maybe heard it at church but couldn’t say if she knew Ms. Stoudt indefinitely and followed up by asking why. This too was followed with an introduction to the spotty-faced kid, Zach. Zach’s hand was a limp fish in my own. This made me smile, otherwise, he seemed a polite enough guy. He said he thought Ms. Stoudt was dead. That she’d died from tread-less, bald tires and a slick wet road, slipping right beneath the back of a tractor. Zach couldn’t be certain; she’d died before they were freshmen. Rose affirmed that she had heard the name in church—a eulogy, she thinks, when she was still in middle school. I was shocked I hadn’t known. It seemed like it would’ve been hot news in a town where weather warrants most of the local news’ slots. Perhaps I was in Florida when it happened. Nathan was back at the table now, having avoided us on his way back from the restroom. I left Zach and Rose graciously and in surprisingly good spirit. I’d learned that Rose’s boy had weak hands, that she’d introduce me not as a customer to someone she knew but as someone she also knew, that she is a good girl for going to church and I learned of Ms. Stoudt’s death. The latter was in a small way a blessing for I hadn’t a clue where I was going by using Ms. Stoudt as an injector to Rose’s conversation. And perhaps my leaving at its discovery might garner some sort of sympathy from Rose after assuming I was made sad by the news.

As I sat back down Nathan asked, “You know Rose?”

“Sure, of course. How do you know her?”

“Rose Dungan went to Harrison before dropping out. She used to work at the Walmart with her dad.”

“I didn’t know she dropped out.”

“I didn’t know you knew her,” he said.

Rose Dungan was her full name. With a full name and a boy whose conversations lingered and a small series of events that constituted a timeline of small disappointments, Rose had been attributed with a name and a small life. Perhaps there was still more but I merely caught a passing glimpse of it as though I saw her world through a moving train’s window.

Laura waddled up to us, placing the check down in front of me. “You’re Griffin’s boy aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, weary at the first hearing of my father’s name in a long time.

“He was swell too. Both of you all’s dads are good people. Were good people. My husband worked with Griffin for years. We had you over for dinner when you were yay high. I’m sorry for your loss.”

That was something else I hadn’t heard in some time. “Thank you.”

“My husband died not too long after,” she said.

I glanced down, fixating on the bill, $13.50. Despite it being such a small meal, it’d taken a sizeable chunk of what I had left. I wasn’t so much disturbed by the news of this second death than by the realization that it was likely for those who were born in Corydon that they’d die in Corydon—be it by accident or time, it’d happen by birth right. It was the understanding of the literal convergence of an end as a beginning that kept my stare fixed upon the merchant’s copy of the receipt. We were all to die in Corydon—that was certain whilst nothing else was, and our lives would remain small enough to fit on the back of a receipt paper and to be only remembered through passing chit-chat at The Parlor. This weighty realization capsized any possible notion of me returning my condolences to Laura. By the time Nathan had placed his thin-fingered hand upon my arm in a small gesture, Laura was gone.