Do Not Doubt the Man [Short Story]

"My dad once drowned a litter of kittens in a burlap sack," Garrett said.

"When was this?" I said.

"When I was eight," he said.

"Why?"

"Had too many cats already."

"Why not get them spayed?" I asked.

"No money for that."

He licked his palm and put his cigarette out in his hand like we used to do as teenagers.

"C'mon," he said. "Let's get this shit over with."

I had never been in a funeral home before. Everyone I ever loved was still alive.

Garrett's father had died in a dentist's chair at the age of 58 from anesthesia ineptly applied. His father's name was Albert and he was a drunk and a slumlord. It was a closed casket. Nobody spoke and there was no service in the cemetery. We left the funeral and drove to one of the tenements he had owned.

"I own all this now, dude," Garrett said.

"That's cool, I guess," I said.

We partied in the manager's apartment. Well, Garrett's apartment now. Somebody I didn't recognize was handing out pills.

"What are they?" I asked.

"I don't know, man," he said. "I just found them in the bathroom. Label's missing."

I took three. I wanted to be respectful so I attempted to make a toast but was shushed. The apartment was cramped and I couldn't get a handle on the vibe. I was smiling when I shouldn't, happy to be alive. No one else at the wake shared my opinions. They were eager to flex their viciousness. Garrett's sister showed up and the mood went black. She started shrieking at Garrett, tearing at his shirt collar. We pulled them apart and she sat in the middle of the room, on the crusty carpet, and cried. We went out back to drink more. Garrett withdrew to his bedroom, unable to speak, ignoring anyone who asked him to come out.

My pills turned on me too. The face of Garrett's mother kept rising up in my mind. At the funeral home service, she had been unmoored, sobbing and inconsolable. I begged the vision to leave me alone and when that didn't work, I drank till I passed out.

I woke up in a barcalounger on the porch. My wallet was missing and my eye was black. I couldn't move just yet, let the cold air cure and punish me.

This behavior, the wailing and chest-beating, from Garrett and his family shocked me. Their reaction to Albert's death made no sense. I had known the family twelve years and by my accounting, his wife and six children all hated the man. They belittled him and mocked him, never showed respect or deference. The children were unruly and roamed the neighborhoods stealing lawn ornaments and throwing firecrackers. The house was a disgusting rat's nest, piled high with mannequins, sewing machines, swamp coolers, costume jewelry, broken PCB boards, towers of laserdiscs, and other fathomless piles of detritus from evicted tenants. His ex-lover blackmailed them once. As penitence, his wife demanded that he climb to the top of the mountain that loomed over the town and sleep there for 3 days. Albert was instructed to strip down naked once he reached the top and beg God's forgiveness. I longed to know what dirt this ex-lover was possibly holding but never had the courage to ask. Albert would wander the house in white briefs and a ratty t-shirt, chain smoking cigarellos, kicking us off the computers to check his eBay auctions at three in the morning.

I knocked on the door to the apartment, but no one answered. The bright morning light made my eyes water and I was shaking with hunger. I walked the four miles back to my childhood home.

To be fair, Albert did have this sort of idiot savant quality. He recognized the power of the Internet early on and filled the house with computers he built. They had counterfeit access cards for the satellite tv. He flipped houses and managed shitty apartment buildings all across the valley. And yet they never seemed to have any money. The kids dressed in Wal-Mart hand-me-downs. Often, his mom didn't bother to make dinner and we would buy hot dogs from the gas station or microwave something we had hidden in the freezer.

Here I am, ten years later, buying the same hot dogs. My parent's dark and empty house loomed at the end of a long driveway. I didn't have a clicker for the gate anymore so I had to climb the fence. My mom wasn't home. She was obsessed with this new church. Spent all her time there. All the better. I turned on the shower and curled up on the tile, scrapped at the grout with my nail. My childhood came back to me.

Garrett and the other children were a strange lot: no two alike in temperament or personality, yet carbon copies of each other physically. In the face at least. My friend was thin and rangy. The other five ranged from rotund to blimp. None of them got further than fifty miles from home. Jerry, the oldest kid, had his twentieth birthday on the lawn of the house he grew up in. I was there, fifteen years old, holding a can of pepper spray and a taser.

"When the clock hits midnight, get me with the pepper spray and then jab me with the taser," he said

"You sure about this?" I said.

"I've never doubted anything in my life."

I believed him. Who was I to deny him a birthday wish? He wanted to exit his teenage years the same way he came in: screaming and pissing his pants.

And now, under the needle pricks of the water, the tile floor sucking the pain from my bruised face, the memories came hot and fast . We drank to excess in gutted homes that Albert had bought in foreclosure. We would poke a hole in the bottom of the cheap vodka Garrett's mom used to clean the horses' hooves. She had started booby trapping the cap with tape and sharpies. We would squeeze out what we need then wait the agonizing ten minutes while the tap water trickled through the puncture, close the hole with a hot glue gun. We smoked indoors. When it snowed and the city didn't have the money to plow the streets we took his mother's car out to the boulevards, pulled the emergency brake and spent the afternoon slowly spinning down four empty lanes.

I hadn't brought a change of clothes. I left my mom a note. It was six hours back to the city and I didn't have time to wait around. I drove with abandon, unmoored, till I was stuck in traffic, skyscrapers in sight, tears of joy streaming down my face.