Benjamin Franklin Twitch wasn’t Alan Holman’s brother, but over those strange summer months that culminated in the burning of the Kissimmee Baptist Church, Alan came to think of him as such. Alan and his mom Sandra had just moved in with his grandma-his mom’s mom-in one of the three trailers past the fork on Lake Jemike Road, having spent the previous three years near Gainesville where his mother bedded down with a man who owned a string of Money Mike check-cashing franchises while Alan slept in the room above the garage. Now and then Sandra worked the counter, taking nineteen percent out of social security and third-party checks, but mostly spent her days at the Kwan Um School of Zen where she sat zazen with underfed graduate students and a couple of pony-tailed professors of urban design. Alan went to the local public school-the Fighting Tartantulas of Rochelle High-and mostly kept to himself. It wasn’t exactly an ideal existence, but if Alan had cultivated anything over the course of his short life it was low expectations, and, more importantly, the ability to adapt when even those weren’t met. So when it finally fell apart between Sandra and Money Mike-when his mom no longer felt fully actualized in her relationship, which is to say when she caught Mike banging a nineteen year old clerk Alan had known in school as “the candy girl”-Alan wasn’t exactly disappointed, nor was he surprised. He had his scant belonging packed in a half hour.
On the car ride south to his grandma’s, Sandra told him it was high time he embraced the thisness of his life. She wanted him to go raging into the world. She wanted him to meet what Truth the Universe had reserved for him. Instead he met Twitch, which-in light of the fire, and Pre-Trial Intervention, and most definitely in light of the three months spent at the Canebrake Wilderness School for At-Risk Youth-was, perhaps, the same thing.
The three trailers sat a quarter mile down a dirt road in a dusty clearing razed of the palm and scrub pine that choked the forest. It was all third-growth and appeared badly malnourished, the few hardwoods swallowed by kudzu and staggerbush and the poison sumac Alan found spiraling up the legs of his grandmother’s underpinned back deck. The trailer felt as impoverished as the land. There was a bedroom on each end and a narrow expanse of living room where Alan slept on the couch beneath a Thomas Kinkade print of a waterwheel, the cottage behind it lit with an alien glow.
At the head of Lake Jemike Road sat a sagging farmhouse where the landlady-an aging widow whose husband had taken an asbestos settlement then hacked and coughed his way on to eternity-sat on her porch and talked on her cell. Alan was thinking about the garden gnomes that forested her front lawn when a scrawny man not much older than Alan stepped out of a trailer, hiked the crotch of his jeans, and walked over. He was sunburned and wiry with a fuzz of red hair on his head and the Batman emblem tattooed across his back. Alan watched him step delicately across the washed out clearing and stop with one hand on the rail of his grandmother’s steps.
“She your granny?”
Alan nodded that she was.
“So I guess that was your mamma walking around here before.” He nodded at the trailer. “She’s all right by me. Miss Carter, I mean. I got pneumonia last year and she pretty much nursed me back. Where’d you live before this?”
“Gainesville.”
“Well, you ever burn one in Gainesville?”
Which is how they wound up back in Twitch’s trailer smoking a spliff and listening to Eminem. Alan was stoned in a matter of minutes-it wasn’t his first time smoking pot but it wasn’t far from it, either-so later, when he tried to unbend the timeline of Twitch’s life, it was difficult to string one event after the next. There was the back injury in Vegas that ended Twitch’s season-long winning streak in motocross. Or was it the pneumonia that undid his riding career and the fall from the helicopter that cut short his foray into Mixed Martial Arts? Regardless, the Marines were waiting on him. They wanted him as a sniper. He was just waiting on his call-up.
“Next time you come down here I’ll probably be rolling with some badass up at Quantico.”
But the next time Alan came down Twitch was still there, and the time after that. And soon enough they were getting stoned daily, Twitch drinking the Four Lokos he wouldn’t share-shit’s already illegal, I’m the only fool with sense enough to lay the motherfuckers in for the winter-while Alan slumped in a beach chair and thumbed through a stack of Low Rider magazines. Twitch had a moped but never went anywhere. Loneliness was everywhere. The third trailer was empty. His mom had found a Buddhist Temple in DeLeon Springs and his grandma worked to the bone cleaning the lake houses of trial lawyers and periodontists. Both were gone all day and his mother was gone most of the night as well. So Twitch and Alan were always alone, it seemed, and all always high.
It was June before Sandra brought a man home. Three weeks had passed since the move and Alan had hardly seen his mom, to say nothing of his grandma, but then, without explanation, he came in one Thursday evening to find them both sitting on the couch beneath the waterwheel print, his grandma in her going-to-meeting best, his mother in an unusually modest black mini-skirt and silver blouse. Sitting between them was Craig. He was a shaman who had left Taos to study at the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp before stumbling upon Sandra and the Dhammaram Temple. They were around the table now, Craig sitting at the head while Alan’s grandma doled out mashed potatoes and green beans and buttered biscuits the gold of beach sand. His mom had brought home a bucket of Winn-Dixie fried chicken but it sat untouched on the counter. His grandma had cooked everything and was beaming, here was her family, here was her daughter-gone so wrong but finally righting her life-with this most gentle of men who sat talking of his obligation to his spirit brothers and sisters and how what Gaia desired most was our internal harmony. It was maybe a little ridiculous, sure, but it was also a good deal more pleasant than the screaming that had come to define evenings with Money Mike.
The next evening was the same thing: more charm, more home-cooking. Alan came in carried on the blissful wind of marijuana and awoke that Sunday detecting a shift in his life. He thought maybe he should start helping out at the Temple, give something back, grow a little of that inner harmony he kept hearing about.
But it all went to shit that evening when Twitch showed up with a hand-me-down tux and a bouquet of wildflowers. Sandra had invited him. Alan hadn’t known either knew anything of the other beyond their mutual existence.
“Benjamin,” she called from the kitchen. “I’m so glad you came, and look at you. You look amazing.”
“Hello, Sandra. Thank you for having me.”
Or something like that. It was all too foreign for Alan to fully comprehend, the four of them-Craig was noticeably absent-crowded companionably around the table while Twitch held forth on how Miss Carter had practically resurrected him from an early death. Fluid, he kept saying. My lungs were filling with fluid. For her part, Alan’s grandma blushed and ladled pineapple casserole, squash and okra and pork chops. She was a ghost as far as Alan was concerned, a pair of orthopedic shoes and a cloud formation of hair, her soul-he guessed-as exhausted by work as her ragged body. She spent her days on her knees scrubbing kitchen tile while her daughter spent her days on her knees chanting sutras. Had it not been for the dope he’d smoked earlier in the afternoon Alan thought he might have made something of that, some connection, some relevance that might have lifted him from the Lake Jemike stagnation because-it came to him all at once-he was indeed stuck. There had been no shift after all. He’d thought his life superior to at least Twitch but here was Twitch, more pleasant and complex than Alan had ever imagined. He was embarrassed and, by the time Alan left, angry.
Sandra had brought out a jug of burgundy in the last hour and while his grandma was a tee-totaler, tonight she looked the other way while Sandra took down glass after glass then stood in the door and watched after Twitch as he walked home. She was laughing. Alan sat on the couch beneath the waterwheel and set his face.
“What is he, your fucking dealer?” he asked when she finally shut the door.
Sandra looked stunned for a moment and he watched her face go wide in confusion before it scrunched with anger. Then her mouth fell open. It was all part of a process he’d first witnessed as an infant.
“Or are you sleeping with him?” he asked. “I guess it could be both.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
He shrugged. “I’m just wondering. No big thing either way.”
He started to get up-he had a vision of himself slinking off to bed, indignant, the sight of his back filling his mom with remorse-but she was standing over him, blocking his way.
“I happen to know Benjamin,” she said, “I happen to know Benjamin from the actual real existing outside world. The world outside this little redneck shit-hole that you would have some vague consciousness of if you ever got balls enough to leave it.”
“Whatevs,” he said, “I’m just asking is all.”
But the balls thing hurt, and the anger, which had been as much feigned as anything else, was real now. He shrugged more dramatically than he intended and she shrugged right back, mocking him.
“Get off your ass, Alan,” she said. “I realize life hasn’t been perfect for you, honey, but-”
“Oh, you realize that?”
“I realize-”
“You fucking realize?”
She stomped hard enough to rattle the beaded curtains.
“Would you let me finish? I realize”-she said the word very slowly, re-a-lize, as if, it occurred to him, he was retarded- “I realize life hasn’t been perfect. But coming here was supposed to be something better. I’ve met Craig and-”
“Fucking Craig? Are you serious?”
He wanted to yell at her, he wanted to have it all out. Look at me, he wanted to say. Look at both of us. This is our life. This is our goddamn existence, mom. Beyond the slinking away, he saw her holding him, both of them crying, but a good cry, the kind of tears you come back from. But instead he watched her face harden. Her eyes were dry and her mouth drawn in an ugly hard slot. For the first time since Gainesville she looked her age.
“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “I’m sorry. I simply cannot.”
It was some time later that he climbed off the couch to stand in his mom’s open door. He hadn’t slept and he thought that if he found his mom deep in slumber that would be it, he would get out, flee, whatevs, he told himself. He just wouldn’t stay another fucking minute. But she was awake. A slender figure in the white shimmer of her night gown.
“Come in, baby,” she said, and he realized it always occurred to him after the fact how beautiful she was, how gentle. He sat on the side of his bed and leaned against her while she stroked his hair.
“I’m sorry about before,” he said.
“Shh.”
“I didn’t mean any of it. I know I need to do something. I know I need to be grateful.”
“Shh,” she whispered, “it’s all right. Everything’s all right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, baby. It’ll be all right.”
He must have realized he was crying at the same moment his mom did because all at once she was holding him and stroking his hair with the kind of intensity he imagined she possessed kneeling on her meditation bench facing the void.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his face wet with snot. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
And she kept holding him and promising him it’ll be all right, baby, it’ll be all right.
When his grandma came into the living room the next morning Alan got up. He’d been hearing her come in for the last month-some ungodly hour, who knew what time it was-but had never done more than pull his sleeping bag over his head. She was staring at the coffee pot when he moved behind her. It was four-fifty-two but she didn’t seem surprised to see him. She took something from the microwave, poured two cups of black, and motioned toward the back door.
“Come on, honey. There ain’t no good air in here.”
They sat on the deck in the early dark, the woods full of tree-frogs singing the rising of a dawn that was nothing yet beyond a band of lavender going silver, the air crisp in a way he had never felt here, light and dry despite the dew they’d wiped from their chairs. He’d never realized how alive things could feel, as if all the world lurked just beyond the reach of the porch light. What he had known of this place was the mid-day heat, the dusty afternoon stillness that would fall apart in a sudden shower blown off the ocean. Mosquitoes. Sunburn. His grandma covered her knees with what appeared to be beanbags. When he felt the heat coming off them he realized they were what she had taken from the microwave.
“Old,” she said, and smiled at him. “Just old, honey. I’m all right.”
After a few minutes she lowered herself onto the raw porchboards and clasped her hands like a child kneeling by her bed, forehead tucked against the rail.
“My prayers.”
She prayed out loud, her voice a thin swish that seemed at one with the gathering dawn. She prayed for her daughter and for Alan, for her dead husband and her sister in Cincinnati. She prayed for the pastor of the church and for every doctor and nurse on General Hospital. May the Lord bless them and keep them each and every one. When she was done she rose in a series of slow contortions, trying to smile away the hurt as Alan tried to help her stand and she waved him off saying no, honey, I’m all right, do it everyday. She touched his hair-he had been touched more in the last eight hours than in the preceding eight months-on her way inside and a few minutes later Alan heard the front door open and her Cutlass Supreme start up. When he went inside his mother was sitting cross-legged in the floor.
“Hey, you,” she said. “I was wondering where you’d ran off to. Want to spend the day with your old mom?”
The Dhammaram Temple was little more than a brush arbor, a roof and concrete floor with six or seven meditation pillows half-circled around a three-foot brass Buddha. It sat in the back corner of the eighteen acres that had once comprised the Our Mother of Grace Trappist Monastery, the Temple far from the highway and church and very near the creek that cut along the meadow’s edge. The Abbey had been dissolved a decade prior and now was served by two elderly monks who may or may not have been functioning in an official capacity. There was an air of obsolescence. But the grounds remained lovely: a squared-off cemetery and white-washed church, a long sloping meadow and several copses of laurel oaks. It appeared empty the morning Alan and his mother arrived.
“I think Craig might be by later,” Sandra said, “but I know Brother Vin is up at the prison today doing whatever it is he does, his meditation thing.”
“What about the monks?”
“Brother Vin? Brother Vin’s a monk.” They parked beside the church doors, the only car in the crushed shell lot. “Or do you mean the Catholics? Oh, I don’t think the Catholics are ever really around.”
“So what do we do?”
“Oh, we do whatever,” she said, “we just like, pitch in.”
He found a push mower in an aluminum shed and mowed the area down around the Temple and then on around the church and graveyard, long sweeping rows that paled the dark grass. It took a couple of hours, and by the end he was soaked in sweat and realized how good it felt to sweat from exertion and not simply from the heat. His mom was raking the walk that led down to the arbor.
“You cut it all?”
“What else can I do?”
She wiped one forearm across her head.
“Oh, baby, take a break. You’ll have a heat stroke out here.”
“Let me help you.”
“Well, get some water first. I think there’s a cooler up near the church.”
He found it around back, a yellow Igloo water tank sitting on a discarded pew, a sleeve of paper cones beside it. He fixed a cup and looked out at the lawn. He knew he shouldn’t necessarily be proud, but what had been several acres of unruly grass was now as lined and trimmed as an outfield. It wasn’t much, really, the entire act, but he had done a good job and it occurred to him that sometimes that was all that mattered. Do your work. Do it right. He drank three cones of water and was turning to leave when he saw the paper pinned to the wall. It had curled and some of the typed letters bled but it was still legible.
This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
His mom was pulling weeds from around the Temple when he got back.
“Just start wherever,” she said, “they’re everywhere. But don’t kill yourself.”
They pulled for a half hour, his mother humming and then growing quiet, humming and growing quiet, before she finally spoke.
“I know you aren’t happy here,” she said, “and I know it isn’t your fault.”
He looked at her. She was still bent at the waist but watching him and he wondered how long she had been tracking his progress. Forever, he supposed. There had never been any secrets.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“No.” She straightened up. “No, I know I haven’t exactly been an ideal mother.”
“Mom, you’ve been great. I love you.”
“I’m glad you do, baby, but let me say this. I know I haven’t been much, but honestly: I’ve tried.”
“I know you have. Let’s just finish this.”
They pulled for another half hour before she spoke again.
“I’m sorry about the whole thing with Benjamin,” she said. “Or what do you call him, Twitch? I was just so angry with Craig.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it really wasn’t. Not to do you that way it wasn’t. He just seemed so nice and here I was so angry and then I guess I never realized how young he is.”
“He’s twenty-five, mom.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, and touched his hair. “He can’t be a day over nineteen. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Before the night was over I had forgiven Craig. I’d just forgotten how you have to let certain things go.”
He went back with her the next day and then the next. Brother Vin wasn’t around-his prison thing, I guess-and Craig didn’t show. Which was just fine with Alan. He had come to enjoy the solitude, the quiet work broken by brief exchanges with his mom. They had fallen into a sort of utilitarian harmony and by Wednesday afternoon the Monastery and Temple grounds were immaculate.
Thursday Alan allowed himself the luxury of sleeping in and was still on the couch around ten when Twitch knocked. He knew who it was from the moment he heard someone on the front steps, just as he knew, somehow, it wouldn’t end well, that Alan had gone to abruptly to a place Twitch wasn’t welcome, that he had left his only friend-was he a friend?-behind. But then wasn’t that exactly what Twitch had done to him at dinner Sunday night?
“Where you been hiding, motherfucker?”
Twitch was a haze of pot smoke, eyes spidered and hair on end, a cloud of noxious fumes circulating around the corporeal self that-if such a thing were possible-seemed even more degraded than it had three days prior.
“Why don’t you come out and play with your daddy, you sorry little pissant. Or are you laid up with that good pussy?”
“What’s up, man,” Alan said. Twitch kept looking past his shoulder. “You want to come in a minute?”
“No, dog, I just want to know if you got that pussy on ice or not?”
Alan smiled. “Just me, man. I’m afraid they ain’t following me home yet.”
“They don’t have to follow you home, you dumb motherfucker. That good pussy lives here.” He looked again past Alan’s shoulder. “And I wouldn’t mind me another taste.”
In the time it took Alan’s fist to connect with Twitch’s jaw it occurred to him that Twitch was talking about Sandra, and what surprised him was that his body had understood this before his mind did, that he could feel Twitch’s teeth grind up into the flesh of his cheek at exactly the same moment he understood what Twitch was talking about. He regretted it, but was glad he’d done it, too.
Twitch staggered back and landed by the bottom step, put his hand to his face and spat.
“I will kill you, motherfucker.” His head was already beginning to swell. “I will fucking kill you dead.” Then he got up and ran. Alan went inside and put ice in a dish towel, broke the cubes with a hammer, and applied the wrap to his hand. It was all right. It would be all right. In the morning maybe he would sit on the back deck with his grandma, both of them soothing their aches, neither complaining. No, honey, I’m all right, do it everyday.
A week later Dwayne and Heather moved into the empty trailer. Sandra said Alan should go down and ask if they needed any help unloading the U-Haul hitched to the big Dodge pickup but Twitch was already down there and Alan just shook his head and slunk back inside. That evening Sandra came home with the story. She’d stopped by the landlady’s and learned that Dwayne had installed laminate floors until he lost his job after a DUI. His dad was a contractor, though, apparently with some means, and he had paid the first and last month’s rent along with the security deposit. He’s a good boy, the father had reportedly told her. The girl, too. They just let things get out of a hand, but they’re good people. They better be, the landlady claimed to have told him, it’s a business I’m running here. Not no halfway home.
The next day the Dodge rolled into the clearing just before daylight and Dwayne lopped down the steps and got in. His father the contractor, Alan guessed. Off to an honest day’s work, his grandma said. It was later that morning that Alan got his first good look at Heather. He was alone in the trailer when she dragged a Little Mermaid kiddie pool onto a patch of burnt grass, filled it with the hose, and situated a beach chair in the center. She went inside and came out a few minutes later in a chocolate brown bikini.
Alan moved to the edge of the windows and watched her through a part in the blinds. She was in her mid-twenties, her hair feathered, her breasts and tan clearly fake yet unmistakably beautiful. But it was the sense of wildness that drew him. There looked to be something feral about her, the thin arms wired with blue veins, the purple heart-at least he thought it was a heart-that floated on her brown stomach. She looked twitchy, glancing around her with such suspicion twice he stepped back from the blinds, her body animated by the long-limbed hunger of someone who had survived a long siege and never lost the habit of nerves. He felt himself stiffen and cupped his hand over his denim crotch. The next day he went back to work at the Temple.
But the day after that he stayed home. Twitch’s moped was gone and it occurred to Alan that he and Heather were all alone in the clearing. All day he watched the trailer but she never came out. Was it possible she had left that morning with her husband? He doubted it, but then he had slept right through the Dodge’s arrival. She was in there, he thought, sleeping, he told himself around ten and eleven and even at noon, but by two he thought surely she must have left that morning. But no. The Dodge delivered Wayne around four and out came Heather in her cut-off jeans and an oversized JESUS DIDN’T TAP t-shirt. She bounced down the stairs and Alan watched her kiss her husband on the mouth. He was starting to think he was in love.
That night Alan was staring at the television-some shit on the Discovery Channel about termites, they didn’t have decent cable-when he heard Twitch’s moped buzz past. He looked out just in time to see Twitch and Dwayne crowded onto the seat and headed up the dirt road. It went on for a week, Alan watching the trailer all day and only occasionally catching sight of Heather (the kiddie pool was full of leaves and brown water), Dwayne and Twitch disappearing up the road each evening. Alan would hear them return but was never certain of the time, two, three in the morning. His mother wanted him to return to the Temple but Craig was back in the picture and Alan preferred solitude to bullshit. He quit getting up to sit with his grandma in the morning. He quit doing anything beyond watching for Heather.
He was doing exactly that-kitchen table, Coke flat, Frosted Flakes going soggy in a punch bowl-the day Twitch knocked. It was the dull heat of afternoon and Alan had drifted into an almost trance-like torpor, eyes fixed on the cheap wood paneling, the yellowed wallpaper above it, the glue bubbled with heat and poor craftsmanship. He heard the knock and thought of how shoddy everything felt, the trailer held together with duct tape and rusting bolts, his grandma’s Gorilla glue. He stood slowly. It was one-twenty-seven by the clock. He thought he’d sat down to eat around eleven.
Twitch looked skinnier than ever, eyes sunk and the skin wrapping his skull thin as tissue.
“Hey, dog. You still not talking to me?”
“Naw, I’m cool.” Alan moved back from the door to show Twitch that he was welcome to enter. “You want to come in. Nobody’s here.”
“No, I just come by to see what’s up and all. Didn’t want nothing.” Twitch looked back at his trailer as if someone might have been waiting for him. “Anyways,” he said, “that shit the other week. I wish it hadn’t gone down. I ain’t saying I was in the wrong but I did get into some Haitian voodoo shit. Kind of popped my eyes for a few days.”
“Forget it.”
“Yeah, that’s cool.” He looked back again. “You seen the new girl yet, Heather?”
“Just around is all.”
“Yeah, well let me tell you, brother. That shit’s jumping.”
Alan couldn’t help but to smile. Twitch’s voice was low and restrained but this was the Twitch he knew, the bullshitter, the good-hearted liar.
“That a fact,” Alan said.
“Better believe it is, brother. In fact, I been tapping that shit from dawn to dusk. I been tapping it so hard I done gone and got guilty about it.”
Alan smiled a little too wide and instantly regretted it. Twitch’s face shut down, the brows lowered, the forehead squeezed.
“That why you going out with him every night,” Alan said, “all that guilt?”
“Well, the dumb fucker should no better than to leave his woman all alone without so much as a ride to town.” Twitch snarled, turned and took a step down. “Don’t be jealous, motherfucker,” he said. “You the one went and ruinrt what we had.”
It was only Craig’s arrival that drove Alan from the trailer. He showed up one evening in early July, ate dinner, and walked out to his car. Alan was glad to see him go but then he came back in carrying an airline bag he unpacked in Sandra’s room. Alan spent the night with the TV on so that he couldn’t hear them crawling and whispering and knocking the thin mattress against the wood paneled walls. When he woke in the morning they both sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“Day off,” his mother told him.
Craig saluted with his cup.
“Lap of luxury, young son. Lap of luxury.”
Alan decided to walk to town, whatever there was of it. Craig offered his car but Alan refused it: the point was escape, the point was erasure.
“Well, if you insist,” his mother said, “bring us back some beer. Just whatever’s cheap, Bud or something.”
She gave him a twenty and he started up the highway. It was the time of year crab apples fell and rotted, gummed half-heartedly by birds, and the heat was winey with rot. He hated the smell. Somewhere some kid was growing up with sweet memories about pitching apples in the early gloam of evening, dad cooking steaks, mom calling them in to supper. Twenty years later he would catch the scent and go teary. But Alan hated it.
The trailers were barely out of sight when he gave up and started for home, sweaty and pissed off, his nose full of decomposition. A moment later the big Dodge barreled down the road, a fan of dust behind it like a rooster’s tail. He stepped into the woods but instead of passing the truck slowed. When the window came down he saw that it was Heather.
“Hey,” she said. “You live in the first trailer, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought I’d seen you around. I’m Heather. What’s your name?”
“Alan.”
“Well, you want a ride or something, Alan?”
Two bags of groceries sat in the passenger seat and she told him to just push them over.
“This is Dwayne’s daddy’s truck,” she said. She looked too small for the driver’s seat, skinnier, but prettier too. He could see her knuckles on the wheel, bony thumbs, an onyx ring. The tips of her fingernails were ivory. “I’ve been after him to get us something but I guess he’s too sorry to do anything besides ask his daddy for a handout.”
When they got to the trailer he spotted Craig through the front window. He was on the couch. The look of concentration on his face meant he was probably watching Animal Planet, drunk.
“You don’t mind walking, do you?” Heather asked. “I just need to get this stuff in before it melts.”
He didn’t mind. It was no more than thirty steps, and why didn’t he just help her with these bags? He hadn’t believed he said it-it was like the day he hit Twitch-but she smiled and might have even blushed.
“You are such a gentlemen,” she said.
He carried the bags up the front steps, stopping by the pool just long enough to look back at the window where he had spent so many days watching this exact spot. Inside, he thought of what Twitch had said-that shit’s jumping-and felt a moment of panic. But Heather was already unloading the bags. She offered him a Coke but he could tell she was only being polite, her mind wasting on worry, her husband, her isolated life. Whatever it was she spent her days thinking about. He let himself out and trudged back to face Craig and Sandra.
Twitch came for him the following night, fidgeting on the stoop and drinking one of his sacred Four Lokos.
“You coming or not?” he wanted to know. “Let’s go, motherfucker, it’s Fourth of July. It’s time to party.”
It was after ten and Alan was alone, his grandma asleep, and Sandra and Craig out he didn’t know where. He pulled his shoes on and walked out to find the Dodge pickup idling. He climbed in and straddled the gear shift.
Twitch sat behind the wheel.
“Why you riding bitch?”
“What about Dwayne?”
“Fuck Dwayne,” Twitch said, and Alan noticed his lip. He’d thought Twitch had packed his gum with Copenhagen but by the dome light he saw the lip was split, purple and fat as a nightcrawler with a nasty bloodline parting the center.
“He let you borrow his truck?”
“Fuck Dwayne. This ain’t even Dwayne’s truck.” He pointed at the open passenger door. “You can ride in the back or you can ride over there but you ain’t sitting in my lap.”
A few minutes later they were riding down Main Street. Alan had seen town only a few times and it was just as he expected it to be, shabby and spare with its brake shop and Mexican tiendas, a cafe, Ken’s Pharmacy closed behind its metal grille. They drove to the 7-Eleven and parked around back by several other trucks and a Mustang with an angel air-brushed over the hood. Several boys stood around the bed of a pickup. On the gate was a woman’s hand mirror of granulated powder. A boy in a black hoodie snorted a line and leaned back to thump his chest.
“This right here’s the main event,” Twitch said.
“Is that meth?” Alan asked.
“Hell, no, it ain’t meth.” Twitch laughed. “That ain’t nothing but a little old packet of Ivory Wave.”
“I don’t want it.”
Twitch put a comforting hand on Alan’s shoulder.
“It’s bath salt, dog. Same stuff old granny puts on her bunions.”
“I don’t care,” Alan said. “I don’t want it.”
“Good,” Twitch said. “Good, motherfucker. All the more for me. Let me hit that, Robby.”
He pushed through to the tailgate but the guy named Robby put his hand out.
“Twenty dollars, bro.”
“Come on, dog.” Twitch put his palms out. “I’m like a regular.”
“Twenty dollars, bro. No credit round here.”
Twitch turned to Alan and lightly touched his shoulder.
“Can you help a nigga out?”
“I don’t have any money,” Alan said.
“Oh, fuck you, you fucking liar. I know that granny of yours is sitting on a stack of bills.”
“I really don’t.” Then he remembered the twenty his mother had given to buy beer. He had never taken it from his pocket. “Wait a second,” he said. “Here.”
Twitch took the bill.
“Bless you, brother.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I mean it.” He cupped Alan’s shoulder. “You just saved my life. Bless you.”
Twitch ran the line and a few minutes later danced across the parking lot with the guy in the black hoodie.
“Electric boogaloo,” he shouted to Alan. “Watch me do the Hammer dance. Remember the Hammer dance?” He fell, got up laughing. Someone else ran a line. Alan could hear fireworks going off in the distance then someone set off a string of Toe-Poppers over by the gas pumps.
An Asian man stood in the glass door-Indian, Indonesian.
“I call the police,” he yelled.
“Who is this fuck?” someone asked. “Fuck you and fuck the hairy camel you rode in on.”
“I call the police right now.”
“Call em, motherfucker. You in America now.”
They laughed and whooped and someone set off another string of fireworks. Out by the pumps Twitch was still dancing, oblivious. Alan looked for the guy named Robby but he was gone. He called to Twitch-he was spinning now, arms out, head back-but Twitch orbited a different sun. The Asian man stood by the window and glared, a baseball bat in one hand, phone in the other.
“We need to go,” Alan called. “We need to go, Twitch.”
He looked for someone to appeal to and realized they were alone, Twitch and the boy in the black hoodie, Alan and the man with the bat.
“We need to go, man. Come on, Twitch.”
He was still spinning when Alan heard the sirens, spinning as the blue lights flashed up the street and into the parking lot. Alan looked back once, already regretting the fact that he was going to run. And then he did.
Twitch got thirty days in the county jail. The lockup he called it in the letter he sent Alan. There was no explanation, and what Alan knew about the rest of the night was from the newspaper, read by Craig the next day over breakfast. At the sight of the cops Twitch had ran into the store and tried to lock the front door. Failing that he’d locked himself in the bathroom. When the cops grabbed him he began to sob. Criminal mischief, Craig said. The dumb shit is lucky he isn’t doing three to five for Grand Theft Auto.
The letter came on day seventeen-Alan was keeping dutiful count-and broke Alan’s heart far more than the fact Dwayne had taken Heather and moved out two weeks ago.
They got a pretty good paster in here it began and he’s gown and got me to thinking about how I lived my life so far. I know I got good in me Alan. But I got bad in me to. Like the devil sometimes want let me rest. I been talking to the paster a lot. I been thinking about Jesus faced right up to life and how I haven’t. I hope you will pray for me. What I am seeking now is forgiveness.
He signed the letter Benjamin Franklin Cook and maybe it was the fact that Alan had never known his last name that hurt most. Or maybe the fact that Alan had run.
He went back to the Temple. The grass had withered in the late summer sun but there were things to do and he found them, painting the outbuildings and trimming the hedges around the church. He raked the walk he had raked months before with his mother but did it alone. She and Craig were no longer visiting the Temple. Mostly they stayed at the trailer, drinking Bud Light and watching CMT. Craig would disappear a couple of days a week only to return with random gifts, costume jewelry, second-hand t-shirts, once a feathered headress Sandra wore while she danced to Kenny Chesney.
Alan took Craig’s car. No one seemed to notice. He did everything he could find to do at the Temple then took to sitting on one of the meditation pillows before the brass Buddha. He was there the day he met Brother Vin. The monk looked foreign as hell with his shaved head and robe but he spoke English with a southern drawl and wore a Roll Tide ball cap and Adidas running shoes with no socks. He’d grown up in Birmingham, he said. His parents were boat people.
“You like to sit?” he asked. “It’s comforting?”
“I don’t know,” Alan said. “It isn’t anything really.”
“Exactly. That’s exactly it. You have to expect nothing.”
“I never do.”
For the rest of the week he joined Alan in the afternoons but the following week disappeared again, back to the prison where he led a meditation group. Alan came home to find Craig and Sandra gone and a note on the table that read: Don’t take my car without asking, you fucking prick. He threw it away so his grandmother wouldn’t see it but that was no real concern. She came home exhausted, heated her knee pads and a can of tomato soup, and went to bed. You need to eat, Alan, her last words before the bedroom door clicked shut.
Twitch stopped by the following morning. His lip had healed and he appeared to have gained some weight.
“I found Jesus in the lockup,” he said. “He hunted me down relentless.”
“That’s good.”
They were back by the front stoop, Alan just inside the door, Twitch on the bottom step.
“Good don’t begin to cover it, dog. It’s something way past good. I’m on the straight and narrow now.”
“What about Dwayne?”
“I done forgiven Dwayne.” Then added, as if he’d almost forgotten: “Through Christ who strengthen me.”
But that night Alan heard the moped whine by.
The next evening Twitch knocked a little after nine. A storm had blown up in the afternoon, big thunderheads and a startling wind that approached from a reckless angle, but no rain had fallen.
“Your mamma not home?” he asked.
“No.”
“She didn’t run off with that asshole did she?” He looked mean again. They had shaved his head in jail and his hair had grown out unevenly. A tooth was broken. “You know that son of a bitch is the biggest dope dealer in three counties?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“Well, all right,” he said. “I don’t mean to get worked up about it. Real reason I stopped was to see if you’d go out with me.” He held up a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. “Celebrate my release on my own personal recognizance.”
“What about Jesus?”
“Jesus is invited,” Twitch said. “Hell, everybody’s invited.”
They took Craig’s car and drove all the way to Kissimmee-just anywhere I don’t know a fucking soul, all right?-and drank the Mad Dog behind the Baptist Church.
“What was it like in jail?” Alan asked.
“It wasn’t all that. You had to fight your first day. That was about the worst part.” He took a packet of Ivory Wave from his pocket. “You want to go halfs on this? I know I still owe you.”
Alan shook his head.
“Man, that’s the same shit that got you locked up in the first place.”
“Not really,” Twitch said. He looked dejected though. “It was a lot a shit preceding it, but I know what you’re saying. Fuck it. You know what we should do? We should burn this shit, like ceremonially?” He climbed to the edge of the green Dumpster, lit the edge of the packet and held it aloft.
“I don’t know, man,” said Alan.
“I gotta commit it to the flames.”
“I don’t know. It’s full of cardboard, you know?”
And it was: old boxes pressed flat and piled above the metal lip, the wind lifting them so that they flapped like loose shingles. Twitch looked like he was reconsidering then the packet caught and almost exploded in his hands oh fuck and he dropped it. A span of cardboard lit almost immediately.
“Stomp it out,” Alan called.
But it was burning wildly now, popping and cracking. Twitch jumped down just as the metal expanded with a dull boom. A flaming box lifted and skittered across the parking lot, then another.
“We need to get out of here,” Alan said to himself, and then louder: “We need to get out of here, Twitch.”
Cardboard was everywhere now, lifted by the wind, lifted by the turning thermal of the fire, floating in hand-sized triangles of burning ash.
“We need to go,” Alan said.
But Twitch wasn’t listening. Instead his eyes were fixed on what Alan thought for a brief moment might be an opening in the sky, Twitch’s new-found savior come to claim him, but was instead the roof of the church, burning.
He grabbed Twitch by the elbow.
“We gotta go, man. Come on. We gotta run.”
“No,” Twitch said. There was light enough to see he was crying. “No,” he said. “I’ve got to stay. I’ve fucked up every second of my life but I’ve got to stay.”
“Man-”
“Jesus didn’t run,” he said. “Jesus didn’t tap.” He turned to Alan. “You go on, though.”
But Alan had known from the moment the fire caught that he wasn’t going anywhere, not again. And he didn’t.
It took two days to track down Sandra and Craig-they were on their way back from Taos, a four day drive they made in two, swallowing White Crosses and taking turns at the wheel of a new Navigator-and Alan’s grandma had no idea what to do. So Alan spent three days alone in a holding cell at the city jail where he met the public defender, an angry little man with dandruff, but then Craig showed up with a bag of money and soon enough Alan had a lawyer that ran commercials during The Montel Williams Show. Twitch went to the state for a year and a day and Alan was sentenced to three months at the Canebrake Wilderness School for At-Risk Youth.
He got to come home for two weeks and every night he lay on the couch and listened to the sound of his mother weeping. When the school bus came-it was an actual yellow school bus, as if he was being carried to summer camp and not a low-grade prison-it came as a relief. The first day he found himself being sprayed with a high pressure hose and remembered what Twitch had said about jail it wasn’t all that and it wasn’t really, he folded back into the work, into the solitude, the thisness his mother had implored. He made no friends, and but for the counselors screaming could have been back at the Temple. When he got out, he got out. It wasn’t a big thing.
Things had changed at home. Sandra and Craig had split for Taos and Twitch’s trailer appeared empty. Dirt daubers had built nests along the siding and the gutter was clogged by a nest of swallows. Alan found the moped down in the scrub pine. Someone had walked it down to the creek and slit the tires. His grandmother seemed exhausted beyond recognition, a gray hulk washed up on the shores of her sixtieth year. When she knelt to pray for the cast of General Hospital Alan could hear her jaw work, her knees. Her teeth were gray, as leaned and ticked as the garden gnomes in the landlady’s yard. Alan put his head down, started the local high school, got a job bagging groceries at the Winn-Dixie.
The next spring he decided to go visit the sight of the Baptist Church. What had been left of the structure had proven unstable and been demolished. He read in the paper that a new aluminum building would replace the old wooden frame. Construction would begin the following week. Though he’d lost his license, he drove Craig’s car-his car now, he supposed-over on a Monday evening. The land was being graded, the new building would be larger, he had read, and Alan watched a man climb from a Skid Steer, knock the mud from his boots, and climb into his truck. Alan was still standing there when an older man came up the sidewalk and stopped beside him.
“They pour tomorrow,” the man said. “You can see the forms over there.”
“I saw the new building in the paper,” Alan said. “It looks big.”
“Big,” the man said. He had a cresting wave of perfect silver hair. “Big and vulgar and ugly. What happened here was a tragedy, an absolute disgusting spectacle of narcissism.”
It was only then that Alan recognized the man as the church’s pastor. He knew him from the newspaper. He gave no sign that he recognized Alan.
“One of the guys that was involved,” Alan said.
“One of the urchins, you mean,” the man answered, “one of the chancres that should’ve been cut from the flesh.”
“One of the guys,” Alan said, “I heard he was better for it. That it he regretted it so bad he changed his life.”
“So what then? Does that somehow make it worth it?”
“I don’t know,” Alan said. “I just know it changed his life.”
“Well, that’s a happy little tale, now isn’t it?” He was looking at Alan for the first time. The sun had almost set and his face seemed to hold the orange of twilight. “That’s a happy little tale but let me tell you another. The people who worship here, they are without a home, they are without a center, they are without a locus for their being. If you’d spent the better part of your life worshiping in that church, if you’d watched your children married and your grandchildren baptized in that church, what would you say to one of the guys that was involved? What would you say when you heard it changed his life?”
I know exactly what I’d say, Alan thought, expect nothing. But he didn’t speak, and a moment later the man walked away. It was almost dusk now-the land was graded, tomorrow they would pour the forms-it was time to go home. He headed down the sidewalk in the opposite direction and was almost back to Craig’s car-his car-when he realized the preacher hadn’t mentioned forgiveness. To say nothing of God.
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