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Benny and the Badger

Bob Strother

    Jake stood in the middle of the nearly empty room, her eyes drifting from the nail holes in the wall to the yellow chintz curtains still hanging brightly from the windows. Both were reminders of all she’d lost. She felt cold, hollow, not sure if it was the rain coming down in sheets outside or if she’d just settled into the bleak reality of a life without—
    “Hey, Annie?”
    Jake turned. Ben stood in the doorway that led in from the bedroom, practically filling the space with his six-four, two-hundred-fifty-pound frame. He held a large, brown cardboard box. Spines of books and gilt-edged photo frames peeked out haphazardly over the top.
    “It’s Jake,” she said, wishing she wasn’t so often forced to remind someone of her gender preference—wishing she could finally be what she wanted to be, was meant to be.
    “Oh yeah, I forgot, but I’m cool with that. Anyway, this is the last box.”
    She nodded and turned away again, her gaze drawn to the telephone sitting silently on the sun-faded carpet. She wanted to pick it up, find the dial tone gone, know that was the reason she hadn’t heard from Megan. She wanted a lot of things, but only one mattered now, the one thing she couldn’t have.
    Jake closed her eyes, wishing she could curl up in a corner, clamp her hands over her ears, and shut out the world. Either that or yank the goddamn phone from its jack and sling it through the window. Instead, she sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

.....

    Jake and Megan had been together for five years. Four years of college in Colorado, studying aeronautical maintenance, and one year after they’d moved to northern Georgia—the happiest years of her young life. It hadn’t mattered that neither of them had been able to find work in their field. They’d gotten jobs at Target, minimum wage at first, but Jake had worked hard and, before the year was out, she was on the management track. It hadn’t been about a career. For her, it was just about love and being able to provide for her partner.

.....

    Mini-tsunamis from passing big rigs crashed onto the car’s windshield, interrupting the hypnotic thump of the wiper blades, each wave a painful reminder of the tears Jake had shed over the past few weeks. She sat slumped in the passenger seat, head resting against the glass, struggling desperately not to think.
    “Bad day for a funeral,” Ben said.
    Jake turned to look at him. Even squinting, trying to see through the rain-drenched windshield, he had the same, goofy half-grin that seemed a permanent feature of his open face.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
    He flicked a quick glance in her direction. “Nothing. We passed a funeral procession a ways back. That’s all. You didn’t notice?”
    She leaned back against the window. He hadn’t meant anything. She was being too sensitive. And he was right, too. Why did it always seem to rain for funerals?
    Her funeral—something she’d given considerable thought to lately. Would Megan come? Would she cry? Jake ran one hand absently under her sleeve, feeling the scabbed-over ridges along the inside of her forearm. She’d cut herself as an adolescent, had started again in the last couple of weeks, but never too deep. Not deep enough for that. Not yet.
    Might as well be dead, though. They were headed for New Jersey, where she would move in with her stepbrother Ben, eight years her senior, Ben’s mom, and Jake’s father. There, she would go to work in another Target, just as if life went on as usual.
    “I’m sorry about Megan,” Ben offered.
    It was the first time he’d mentioned the breakup, although it had certainly been the elephant in the room for the past few days. Jake had spent two days crying on her father’s shoulder before he and her stepmother had loaded up the last of her furniture and pointed the U-Haul northward. Ben had stayed behind to help her with the rest of her personal belongings.
    “It’s all right,” she said. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t right at all. It would never be right again. Jake felt tears forming in her eyes and squeezed them shut. “She was bi, you know?”
    Ben nodded. “Mom told me.”
    That was what had made their relationship unique. Jake wanted, more than anything—well, not so much as she wanted to be with Megan, but she’d found that out too late—to become a man. She’d been saving for the operation since she started work, secure in the knowledge that Megan would love her regardless of her gender.
    Jake used the corner of her flannel shirt to wipe her eyes. “I’ll never find anyone else like her.”
    “You’ll find someone,” Ben said, “sooner or later.”
    “How would you know?” Jake said. She hugged herself and wept openly while Ben retreated to the refuge of navigating through the driving rain.

.....

    Somewhere northeast of Knoxville, they stopped at a convenience store. While Ben went inside, Jake slipped one of the photos from the box on the back seat. It was of her and Megan at their graduation ceremony, smiling into the camera. She wished she were back there—that she could reverse time, do things differently, make amends. As she replaced the photo, she noticed the small book with the colorful cover, a children’s book, Benny and the Badger. She pulled it out and was flipping through the pages when Ben returned with sodas and snacks.
    “What’s that?” he asked.
    “It’s a book my dad gave me when I was little. Not sure why I kept it all these years.”
    Ben leaned over and inspected the front cover. “I never heard of a book about a badger.”
    “It’s about a kid who finds an injured badger and nurses it back to health, then one day the badger bites him.”
    “Whoa,” Ben said. “Does the kid have to get rabies shots?”
    Jake shrugged. “The book doesn’t say, just that Benny ended up letting the badger go.”
    Ben started the car and pulled back out onto the road. “I thought kids’ books all had happy endings.”
    Jake shrugged again. “Badgers are fierce, tenacious animals, not suitable for domestication. I’m sure there’s a moral lesson in there somewhere, probably something about being true to your nature.”
    “That’s cool,” Ben said.
    Jake wondered if there was anything Ben didn’t think was cool.

.....

    The rain ended somewhere in Virginia, and darkness settled over the Appalachians like a purple blanket. Jake slept fitfully, interrupted by visitations from her former lover—laughing, pouting, sensuous, and finally, the dispassionate, indifferent Megan that had moved in with a boy from the store. Jake awoke to find her cheeks wet. She wiped her eyes with a sleeve and asked, “Where are we?”
    “Near Roanoke,” Ben said, yawning. “Got miles to go before I sleep.”
    Jake glanced back at her travel bag tucked neatly behind the driver’s seat. “You want some pills? I’ve got some left over from when we were in college, you know? Studying for exams?”
    “Ah, yes,” Ben said. “Benzedrine, little white pills, bennies—my namesake, by the way—drug of choice for college students and long-haul truckers. Yes, indeed, Jake, I do want some. I want them very, very much, but I think, for now at least, I’ll decline your offer.”
    Jake smacked herself in the forehead. She’d forgotten what her dad had told her about Ben’s problem. It started when he was in college, had continued on and off, through jail and near overdoses, until he went on methadone a few months back.
    “I’m sorry, Ben, I forgot about the drug thing.”
    “Don’t get neurotic about it. I live with it every hour of every day.”
    “I am neurotic,” Jake said. “It’s what I do best.”
    “And I’m fucked up,” Ben said. “Or maybe just fucked.”
    “Do you want me to drive some?”
    Ben glanced over at her, gave her that goofy grin. “In your condition? No way.”

.....

    They got coffee at a drive-through outside of Charleston, West Virginia, and chatted to help Ben stay awake. He carried most of the conversation, and Jake was okay with that. It kept her from thinking so much.
    “For about a year, after I dropped out of college, I worked a barge on the Tennessee River. Ten days on the river, ten days off. The whole time I was on the water, I was clean. I mean, if you got fucked up on the river, there were all sorts of ways you might get killed. But as soon as I got off, I’d go directly to my source, spend all my pay on drugs, and stay high ’til I had to go back.”
    Ben blew on his coffee to cool it. “It doesn’t sound like much of a life, I know, but it was all I needed.”
    “Why’d you quit?” Jake asked.
    “Got stopped with drugs in the car, did a little jail time, lost the job.”
    “You have a girlfriend when all this was going on?”
    Ben was quiet for a moment. “Sort of, I guess. Mostly we just shot up and stayed high. Not much sex was involved. When we did it, it was kind of like an afterthought.”
    “Huh,” Jake said. Maybe Ben and the girl, whoever she was, had the right idea. “That was the problem with me and Megan.” She wasn’t sure why she brought it up. Maybe it was the darkness, the dim glow from the dash lights, the warm, hushed intimacy of the car’s interior. Whatever the reason, she felt better almost as the words left her lips. “I never felt right making love with her like a woman. I wanted to be able to love her like a man would’ve. I put it off, found reasons not to have sex.”
    Jake sighed but continued, “I even spent a lot of the money I’d saved on gifts for her, to help make up for .... Well, you get the picture.”
    Ben nodded. “You were working against your goal to try and keep what you had.”
    “In the end, I lost on both fronts. Now I’m behind on the operation money, and I don’t have Megan either.”
    “Bummer,” Ben said. “I feel for you, man.”
    Jake raised an eyebrow. Apparently her losing Megan was one thing that wasn’t cool.

.....

    Jake guessed the confession was balm for her soul because she fell asleep again, and this time it was without Megan’s troubling specter. When she awoke, they had picked up I-78 in Pennsylvania and were closing in on the Garden State. Bands of pink light lined the horizon and tractor-trailers whizzed by like angry hornets.
    “How long now?” she asked.
    “Couple of hours, then home, sweet home.” Ben smiled at her, a tired smile but a genuine one. “It’ll be cool, having you around. I never had a ... brother.”
    Jake couldn’t help smiling, too. Ben was all right. Goofy, yes, troubled, sure, but all right.
    “Why’d you do it, Ben?” she asked. “Why’d you take drugs?”
    “It was the easy way out,” he said. “I didn’t hurt anymore. I just felt numb. That’s the way I liked it. Still do, as far as that goes. But I try—every day, you know?”
    She thought maybe she did. She had her dad, a good man who understood her and accepted her the way she was. Now she had a family, too—not exactly the Cleavers, but one she figured she could live with.
    And she still had her dream. She was like the badger—she’d hold on as long as it took.

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