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People Skills

Brent Joseph Johnson

    “You ever think that Tibet’s just a region of assholes,” Todd asked him, “and maybe they deserve everything they get?”
    “The entire region?”
    “Why not? Haven’t you ever been to Detroit?”
    Even though it was a Tuesday night and the happy hour had ended when a mob of daydrinkers blew the last of the PBR kegs, the Writers’ Workshop had descended violently and garishly from somewhere beyond the ether and flyspecked its students and faculty across the tables and booths. Now the bar was about three-quarters full, and the selfsame mob, the townies and off-duty bartenders, clouded in their own half-ruined drunks, waited for them to fuck off again.
    “Once maybe. Several decades ago. But it didn’t strike me one way or the other.”
    “Well it’s changed a lot since then. Believe me.”
    The adjunct rifled through his wallet. Then he pulled out a five and set it on the counter. “So you’re really comparing Tibet to Detroit?”
    “I’m just saying it’s possible.”
    Todd Jackson hoisted his beer off its coaster and surveyed the bargoers through the wide mirror behind the liquor bottles. There were green string lights draped about its frame and on either side hung an old-fashioned Hamm’s sign and its movable print of an ancient pine forest with some headwaters and a campground and a little red canoe banked up along the rocks. Inside each plastic timber casing, a system of lights made the water look like it was flowing.
    “Well any case,” he said but when he turned to the right again, the adjunct had disappeared back among his students.
    “Well any case what?” Brent coming from the toilet pulled out his stool and wound his thigh over the top. Then he half stood, half sat on it. He wore a black stocking hat and bumgloves with the tips cut off and a black hoodie and over the hoodie, a newish Dolce & Gabbana jacket from a street market in Hanoi that was already flaking near the wrists. Its knockoff leather didn’t shine quite normally within the clashing suite of bar lights. Instead they just seemed to envelop him in a weird numinous glow.
    Todd turned even farther to the right so that he was now facing the left again.
    “Well any case what?”
    “Do you...ever think that Tibet’s just a region of assholes,” he repeated carefully, “and maybe they deserve everything they get?”
    “Maybe. Just because somebody’s a Buddhist doesn’t mean they’re barred from being an asshole.”
    “Exactly.” Todd set his beer down again but he missed the coaster entirely and struck it against the bartop. Foam spilled up over the side and over his hand.
    “I’m sure they also have yuppies and doorguys and loud neighbors—”
    At the register Dez pulled the bar rag out of her back pocket.
    “—and douchebags and short-change artists and tow truck drivers and personality disorders and, fucking, cop culture and DMVs and—”
    Then she tossed the rag at Todd and his beer mess.
    “—you know, the kind of shit that makes assholes assholes.”
    “Exactly,” Todd said.
    “They all can’t be saints, now can they?”
    “If I was around nothing but saints.” His voice slowed while he started to mop up the mess. He’d been fighting with his wife again and he was now two beers south of hammered. “I’d lose my fucking mind.”
     From the register Dez moved to their side of the counter and worked a fresh rag into her back pocket. “What’re you guys talking about?” she asked. “What’s a short-change artist?”
    “It’s like,” Brent said, “when somebody pays for a beer with a twenty-dollar bill and you go to give them their change and they say ‘oh wait here’s a ten instead’ and while you’re digging through the till again they stop you a second time and hand you a five to round up the change and so this goes on a couple more times back and forth and back and forth til you get all confused and you finally end up giving them more money then you’re supposed to. Some people are just really smooth about it.”
    “Ahh.” Dez lifted herself up onto the backbar. Above her the little yellow tent on the scenorama was trundling off to the left. “And what’s that got to do with Tibet?”
    “Todd was just wondering if maybe Tibet’s just a region of assholes and they deserve everything they get.”
    “Deserve what?”
    “That the Chinese have been treating them like shit for years.”
    The brass bell above the front door rattled, and somebody wearing the exact same pullover fleece as the adjunct, with the exact same color of Alice, shuffled painfully into the bar. He must’ve been in his mid-seventies with a squat roughhewn body built mostly out of large fleshy squares and with the largest square pelvis the three of them had ever seen. Todd slit his eyes at him, bewildered.
    “And what do the Buddhists believe again?”
    Todd started to mumble something but Brent cut him off. “That in order to get into heaven, you have to say a bunch of prayers to enlighten yourself. Otherwise you might come back as dysentery or an earthworm or one of those little beetles that pushes around a ball of shit all day.”
    Near the taps, on the other side of the wait station, the newcomer maneuvered painfully onto a barstool. Once he’d gotten his odd bulk balanced on top of it, he crossed his arms over his belly and worked his massive fleece up over his head. A dryer sheet stuck to his shirt. Right behind one of his suspenders.
    “Psst,” Brent said.
    But Todd ignored him. Relaxing farther into his bony little orb.
    “Psst.” Then he leaned back and gestured at the old man. “I’ll give you three bucks if you pull that dryer sheet off his ribs.”
    Todd looked over and studied him for a bit.
    “I got five on it,” Dez canaried. Then she reached into her tip-pitcher and dug around for a bill.
    “Ten bucks huh?” Todd rose from his stool, polishing off his beer. Then he stepped around the brass ears of the wait station and introduced himself. A queer look broke out across the old man’s big square face, and while Todd reached down and peeled the dryer sheet off his ribs, he jerked ticklishly and oafishly and grumbled something, but Dez and Brent couldn’t hear what it was.
    “Don’t mention it,” Todd said to him. “It happens to me all the time.”

    They’d reached a treacherous point that late in the year when a spate of warm weather was periodically erasing the first big snowfall of the season. In the daytime the snow would melt and turn into slush and the slush would melt and turn into water and the water would drain beneath the town towards the creeks and the river while at night the temperature would sink back below freezing and the snow-water would glass across the pavement. Twice while he scuffled across the driveway to the one-story duplex where he worked for Systems Unlimited, Brent almost ate it on the ice and twice while he was catching his balance, he wheeled his arms clumsily like a shit bodybuilder in a posedown. Finally at the top of the stoop he grabbed hold of the frozen door handle and turned back to the street where Todd and his big gnarly halo of curly brown hair were leaning over the passenger seat, ogling him. Brent flipped them off.
    Inside, the last of the day staff was sitting at the cluttered kitchen table, scribbling through her progress notes when he banged through the front door and set his satchel on one of the manual wheelchairs. He tried to do it quietly but he could still hear the beer bottles clink.
    “Randy and Kurt are in bed,” Amber called out. She was short and thickset with a number of shitty washed-out tattoos across her chest and her legs and her arms and she had a pair of words inked below her left eyelid in bungled calligraphy. The words were unreadable and Brent was told never to ask about them. “And Ree-Rie’s still soaking in the tub. But I already gave him his meds.”
    From a small box on the staff desk Brent dug out a pair of latex gloves. “Randy finish his ROMs?”
    “He says he did but we didn’t have time to check on him. Kurt had another seizure.”
    At the sink Brent dropped to his knees and opened the small cabinet door and began to ferret out the clorox wipes hidden behind the drain trap. Randy’s fingers were almost always covered with blood and gore and Hep C from his constant scabpicking, and whenever he came out of his bedroom to watch TV or eat, he spent most of his time testing the light switches and opening drawers and examining anything he could reach from his walker that he sat on like a wheelchair. “Was it big or small this time,” Brent asked her.
    “Big,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “And he shit himself again.”
    As soon as he’d finished with the kitchen he moved to the back of the house where he found Ree-Rie soaking in the big blue tub. Beneath him lay a hammock with its four straps connecting up onto a Hoyer lift. Two rose past his shoulders and two rose from his inner thighs. On top of the mechanized lift Brent tore the remote off its velcro dock and pressed the up-button, and the lift rose slowly towards the track system built along the ceiling. The hammock in turn swaddled him around his back and thighs and bore him out of the water, Ree-Rie looking slightly stunned like a harpooned manatee. Then with an old brown towel from the towel rack, Brent started to dry him off. First he went for his arms and legs and chest, his hands and feet and face, and through the netting, his back and waist, and finally his semi-erect penis, his hairy ass, and his balls radishing out of his hairy ass. “If you go in any other order than this,” his first senior counselor once told him nearly a decade ago, “you’re gonna give them pinkeye.”
    “All right. But what’s pinkeye again?”
    “It’s what they get if you rub shit in their eyes. So you don’t wanna do that.”
    “Okay.”
    “Nobody wants shit in their eyes.”
    Once he dried him off Brent grabbed the strap next to his left shoulder and towed him over to the toilet where he pried the remote off its dock again and carefully lowered him to the seat. “All right, homie.” Brent sloughed the hammock off his back and threw it on the floor. Then he unfolded a yellow tee-shirt that he found on the back of the wheelchair. “Reach for the stars.”
    Ree-Rie lifted his arms and Brent pulled the shirt down over his torso. The front had a silvery decal of a dump truck on it and the dump truck had eyes and a face and it was smiling. Ree-Rie looked down at it and patted his belly.
    “You want to sit for a while or you want to go to bed?”
    “Wants to sit,” he said gently. Still looking down.
    “You want Bon Jovi or you want it quiet again?”
    Ree-Rie tapped the air with his finger.
    “You want the music?”
    “Wants the music.”
    At the bottom of the wooden staircase Brent cracked one of his forties then moved several feet into the pale basement light where a coiled bulb mushroomed from a joist in the ceiling. To his left stood nearly two dozen stacks of cardboard boxes and each box was brimmed with unopened Dollar Tree shit that Randy had purchased over the years. Beyond the scabpicking he was also a hoarder and beyond the hoarding he was also a pedophile but he wasn’t on the registry or anything and Brent and the other staff didn’t have to escort him around whenever he went out in public. Once Brent had worked for this guy who was attracted to anything weaker than him like dogs and kids and older people and people in wheelchairs and one of Brent’s main tasks was to block him from watching iCarly on Nickelodeon because for whatever reason that show always seemed to set him off. The guy was nearly six and a half feet tall and built like a megalith and even though Brent probably fell into the weaker-than category, he never really had any problems with him outside of the TV.
    To the left of the boxes the light faded off into eely darkness. And along the fade Brent made his way to Kurt’s little storage spot where his burnt orange couch squatted against the concrete wall. He took a seat on the cushion closest to the light and flipped open his phone.
    There was a text from Todd to his wife. “If you think it’s important but I can swing by in the morning.”
    “Hey dipshit,” Brent thumbed back, “wrong person.” Then from his black jeans he pulled out a sandwich baggie with some weed in it and a one-hitter painted like a cigarette.
    Another message came. “Yr not my wife,” it read.
    “Haha,” Brent texted again. “No shit, asshole.”
    It was a quarter past midnight when he returned to the main bathroom and washed out his forty bottle and slipped the empty back into his satchel. Next to the sink Livin’ on a Prayer was still playing on loop but Brent had heard it so many times he always gated it out.
    “You ready for sleep yet?” he slurred. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Or do you want to sit longer?”
    Ree-Rie lifted his head off his arm. “Wants to sit.”
    “All right. But I got to get you into bed at some point.”
    “At some point,” Ree-Rie echoed. Then he laid his head back down again.
    One room over Brent peeked in on Randy who was sprawled out along his bed, breathing heavily under a mess of smelly crocheted blankets. Then quietly shutting the door he stepped across the dark hallway to Kurt’s room.
    At first he couldn’t make out much except for the moonlight that bled in through the edges of the blinds, but as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the glow-in-the-dark planets along Kurt’s pajama top gradually appeared several feet beyond the foot of the bed.
    “Bro,” Brent said. Then he set down his fresh beer just outside the door and pushed it open even wider. “What the hell are you doing?” Several feet into the room, on top of the nightstand, he clicked the pullchain to the little tensor lamp.
    Kurt slightly confused started to chuckle. He was taller than Brent by about three inches even though he bent unnaturally towards the left where a truck had clipped him twenty years ago. He was paler than death and completely naked from the waist down. And save for a massive copse of black pubic hair he was almost entirely hairless.
    “Are you sleepwalking again?”
    “...”
    “Kurt?”
    “I dunno,” his voice sagged. Still facing away. “I heard a thing and a sound and the man. Then I dunno what.”
    “What’d you hear?”
    “The things.”
    “Kurt, what are you talking about?”
    “The birds at my window.”
    Brent leaned over the bed and pried open the blinds. Outside, several hundred crows were barking noisily from the leafless elms that demarcated the property line and the southernmost edge of the city where the barren cornfields began. Closer still, several of them hunkered along the rail of the deck, already staring at him.
    “Well let’s get you back into bed.” Brent let go of the blinds. “Maybe the radio will help.”
    “...”
    “Kurt?”
    “I have to go to the bathroom.”
    “All right. But Ree-Rie’s still on the toilet so use the staff one instead.”
    “...”
    “Well goodnight,” Brent said. Then he stepped back to the door.
    “Can I have a drink of your beer?”
    Brent stopped and turned towards him. “What? What are you talking about?”
    Kurt thought about it for a moment. “Can I have a drink of your beer?”
    Outside, the crows started to bark even louder and one flew so close to the window they could hear its wings bate against the pane.
    “Fine,” Brent sighed. Then he reached down and took the bottle by its neck. “But if you piss the bed again, then scootch over and sleep on the dry spot.”
    “Okay.”
    “And don’t say anything to the other staff. Otherwise I’m going to tell them that you’re a liar.”
    Kurt made a wet cackling sound which Brent took to be a laugh. “I might be a lot of things,” his voice sagged again, “but I ain’t no goddamn liar and I ain’t no goddamn narc.”

    It was the phone that woke Brent up, a half hour before his alarm was set to go off. From the barcalounger beyond his feet, Randy was already eating cereal out of a giant mud-green mixing bowl and watching Yu-Gi-Oh! with the sound on mute.
    Picking up the cordless from the end table Brent hit the glowing green button.
    “Hey sorry. Did I wake you?”
    “No,” he lied.
    “Mary called. Reach cancelled the funfair. The girls at Bancroft came down with bedbugs again and now Apple Court’s got it.”
    He caught himself sinking back into sleep so he turned and dropped his legs to the floor and rubbed his eye. “Okay...”
    “So that means Kurt has to stay home today. Do you want the overtime? Or should I call somebody else?”
    He felt around his pockets for his cellphone.
    “It’s okay. You can say no if you want.”
    “No no. I got you. It’s fine.”
    From the TV, one of the weird little bald people punched a dragon in its nose and bright cartoon light burst throughout the room. And as the light started to fade, a huge rattling snore tore loose from the rear of the house. Even through the walls it sounded huge. “Oh shit,” Brent said jumping off the couch. Then he accidentally hung up the phone.
    In the bathroom he found Ree-Rie asleep on the toilet. His right arm was still stretched out along the oval grab bar and his head was still lolling against his bicep. Brent scuttled around the wheelchair. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit. I am soo fucking sorry.”
    Ree-Rie jerked awake. Then he lifted his head and split open his eyes. “Fucking sorry,” he echoed gently.
    At the toilet Brent undid his seatbelt. Then he threw his arms around his big manatoid body and hoisted him onto his feet. His legs were crooked and thin, and although he was able to stand with a little bit of help, like now, hugging his staff’s neck, he wasn’t able to stand on his own. Brent reached down and grabbed his pajama bottoms and his boxers and pulled them up around his waist. Then he readjusted his hug beneath his armpits, pivoted him towards his wheelchair and sank him back into a sitting position.
    “Well shit, homie.” Brent rose again, scratching the back of his ear. “I guess I fell asleep.”
    Ree-Rie flicked on the power to his wheelchair from a switch near the joystick.
    “How about some breakfast? Are you hungry?”
    Then he carefully levered his chair towards the door.
    “We can do bacon and eggs and waffles and I think there’s some pizza left too...”
    “Wants to go to bed.”
    Brent sighed deeply and swore at himself. “I know you do, hoss, but it’s already morning and we got a big day ahead of us.”
    The chair shifted about in fits and starts and twice it backed into the trashcan.
    “Hey listen. I promise I’ll make it up to you. Pinky swear.”
    But instead Ree-Rie just ignored him and angling for the door, he made his way slowly towards the kitchen.

    It was cold and gloomy along the southern edge of town when Brent finally got off of work that following night and began the three-mile trek back to his house. His shift had lasted nearly twenty-four hours, and outside of the three guys he staffed, he hadn’t seen a single other person til Amber returned for her overnight shift. “You’re not gonna believe the shit I pulled last night,” he called out from the kitchen table. “Unfuckingreal.” From the tiny front entrance she tried to set down her bag quietly but he could still hear her beer bottles clink.
    “You forgot to put Ree-Rie to bed,” she said.
    Brent, startled, looked up at her through the wood spindles of the ponywall. “Yeah exactly. How the fuck did you guess that?”
    He bought another six-pack from the Sudanese store near the big Hy-Vee and made his way back towards Keokuk, taking the sidewalk along the frontage. Once the traffic thinned out he crossed the divided highway at an angle and continued eastbound along a dirt path that he himself had probably scuffed into the grass. Near the intersection he’d just started to light a cigarette when he spotted a small black clump next to one of the few remaining snowbanks left in the area. From his knees he leaned in close to examine it, but when he failed to register what exactly it was, he flipped open his phone and drew the tiny display light over the clump, and the clump in turn resolved itself into a short-coated housecat with a pink jeweled collar. It was dead, recently so, and frozen to the ground, and as Brent rose to his feet again, his knees cracking, and pressed his sneaker to its belly, the cat remained firmly in place. For a moment he just stood there and smoked his cigarette and looked out along the vast concrete plain to the south. There were several stripmalls over there and a Kmart and a building supply and farther down Keokuk, the new Pizza Hut built across the street from the husk of the old one. “Well shit,” he said, his breath ghosting around him. From his satchel he unyoked one of his tallboys and cracked it. “Well shit,” he said again.
    When his beer was half gone he holstered it into the snow and crouched by the cat again. Then he pulled the collar off its neck and looked it over. The collar was wrapped partly in pink duct tape and on its heart-shaped tag there was a phone number and the name of its owner.
    She picked up on the third ring and she didn’t seem all that surprised when he told her that he’d found her cat along the side of the road. “Yeah,” Brent said, “he didn’t make it.”
    “He’s dead?”
    “Yeah,” Brent said, “he’s dead.”
    “Oh okay.”
    “I think he just got hit by a car. He looks peaceful though,” he lied. The cat didn’t look peaceful. It looked the exact opposite of that.
    “Okay.”
    “I’m real sorry to call you like this.”
    She asked him again where they were and Brent told her.
    “Oh Iggy,” she said.
    Fifteen minutes later an ancient red hatchback turned off the highway onto Keokuk Street. Then it pulled a u-ee and parked alongside the curb closest to the greenbelt. In the backseat a golden retriever rose and shifted in its spot and sank again, and as Brent approached the car, his hands in his jacket, the driver turned on her hazards and got out.
    “Hi,” he said, “I’m the one that called about your cat.”
    She had long scraggly brown hair like a deflated perm and long brown jacked-up teeth and when she spoke it looked otherworldly like her mouth was in bloom. “Where is he?”
    He pointed back to where its carcass was frozen to the ground. “I’m going to need a box or a bag if you got it.”
    “Okay,” she said. Then she reached down by the driver’s seat and pulled the hidden lever to the hatch. At the rear of the car, her dog tried to scramble out onto the street but she took hold of it by its collar and pushed it back into the cargo space. Grabbing a vinyl bag she quickly slammed the door shut. “I only let him out this morning,” she offered. “I don’t know how this could happen.”
    Brent wasn’t sure what to do or say so he just curled his bottom lip and shrugged and turned back towards the west again. Part of a newspaper floated up from the juniper bushes at the bottom of the slope and crossed above the snowbank and then out above the highway. “Maybe you should just wait over here while I take care of this,” he said turning back to her.
    She bobbed lightly and drew her mittens over her cheeks.
    “I think it might be best,” he added.
    Near the snowbank he knelt beside the cat again and started to peel it loose. It took more musclework than he thought it would but eventually he got the right hold with the sides of his shoes scrabbling against the frozen ground and managed to push it up and over like he was opening the heavy lid to a trunk. The cat and the frost likewise made a ripping sound.
    “Oh Iggy,” she said, maybe an inch from his ear.
    Brent swore and jerked in surprise.
    “What’d you do to yourself?”
    From here he rose to his feet and stretched and brushed off his jeans. Then he fixed his gloves around his hands and snapped open the bag. It was only when he sank to his knees again and worked the bag over its rear legs did the woman with the horrible mouth start to cry. “Oh Iggy,” she cried. Then she reached for the bag and tried to take it from him but Brent wouldn’t let her. “Oh Iggy,” she cried again.
    Once the bag was fitted around its tiny little body, only its head and shoulders and one of its front paws stayed poised outside of the opening. It looked expertly but grotesquely taxidermized. Finally he rose again and asked her where she lived and she told him. From the car he could see her dog spinning around and around in her backseat. “It’s just around the corner,” she said. Then she tried to take the bag again.
    “Maybe I should just walk him over for you. Maybe you can find something bigger and I can put him in it.”
    She looked back at her little red car where her dog began to spin more and more frantically. Then she wiped her eyes and her nose with the heel of her mitten. “Could you?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” he said, “go on ahead. I’ll take care of it.”
    From the snowbank he lifted his beer again and started to polish it off but the beer didn’t taste like beer anymore. It tasted like something else. Brent tossed the can onto the frozen grass at the bottom of the slope and cracking another one, he picked his way towards Keokuk. It was still nighttime outside. It was still almost winter. And the cars were still passing along the highway. And everything around him still meant the same thing that it did before. He looked down at the bag twisting by his knee and inside of it the cat was looking back at him. It wasn’t crushed or mangled or anything but its eyes were hard and glassy and its tongue was pointed sharply out of its mouth and its pale mottled lips were pulled tight over its fangs and it had a surprised look across its face.
    “Well, Iggy, sunrise sunset, am I right?” he said to the cat.
    But the cat didn’t say anything back.

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