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Winter Eighty-Nine

R. H. Palmer

    His name is Michael, or maybe it isn’t. For some reason Conner rings a bell. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the right one to tell this story, but it’s starting to get chilly up here and I’ll be damned if I walked all this way to chicken out now.
    Michael-Conner joined me, but he’s is a little faded, so I guess I’ll keep going by myself. He keeps telling me to call Jenny and get her to come out. He loved that girl. But I can’t call her and I keep trying to tell him that. That’s why we’re here in the first place.
    Jenny killed herself six years ago, and Michael-Conner has been rolling ever since.
    She’d been such a nice girl, or mostly. I always liked her, maybe a bit too much, but I know everyone else did too. The last time we saw her alive was three days before she died at the Halloween party she threw at her parents’ house. She loved to throw all-nighters in that big, old townhouse while her parents were on date night across the river. It was one of those creepy-old, Victorian-style mansions that creaks when you open a door and whines in the middle of the night because it’s too damned tired to be a house anymore. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be that old and have to hold everything together. Fucking houses.
    The party was one of the games Jenny and Michael-Conner played together and forced everyone else to join in. She’d be the host of one of those murder-mysteries, you know, and said she was always the murderer. Every single time. No one believed her though, so we just kept playing. I can’t remember a time when we actually finished the game and found out who murdered us all. That was the genius part. She knew what she was doing. Being a kid, you know.
    We were the bad version of the bad kids. The type your parents tell you not to hang around and for once you agree with them. Michael-Conner-or-maybe-it-was-Jeff introduced us to what he called “the underground,” but later I found out that his underground had been above ground and unpopular for almost 30 years. He smoked Kools. He smoked grass. He smoked just about anything you could grind up and put in a pipe. Yes, a pipe – he was that kid.
    Jenny and Michael-Conner-Jeff had disappeared for hours that night, and none of us thought anything of it. I just assumed they were upstairs, or whatever, but now that I think about it, it might’ve just been the house making noises. Disappearances happened all the time with those two, but we didn’t care. And after all, we didn’t even remember his name. When he came back to the party alone, no one noticed. But when she didn’t come back at all, we did.
    Jenny was high-class sexy, you know, the sexy that doesn’t overdo itself. I knew she was leaps and bounds over my head, but for some reason she always stuck around with us. She always had on short shorts and those tight fitting shirts with heavy eye makeup and dark purple lipstick. She put this wave in her hair close to her face and liked to call herself ZaSu and smoked newspaper blunts out of an antique cigarette holder she found at a rummage sale. And she was a Christian too, according to her, and innocent. She wore one of those big-studded, gold crosses around her neck some of the time, with tiny figurines of a boy and a girl she stole from the outlet mall. We all knew she was full of shit, but we always agreed with her.
    When we realized she hadn’t come back in, Michael-Conner-Jeff remembered she’d gone home, to her own house, across town to the no-good part. We were left in her parents’ house alone, which immediately freaked us, and we packed up everything we could find – including all the good liquor – and went our separate ways. Across town, into the slums of Conger Boulevard and Ninth Street, Jenny was relieving her babysitter, a small, Chinese girl named Na Ya. She paid her in dimes.
    The little red and white trailer she lived in still sits 173 feet from the front door of the gas station even these many years later. Don’t ask me how I know. I only walked it drunk three dozen times, and crawled a few of those. We all have to drive by it on the way to town, and none of us ever look directly at it. Maybe it’s not really there after all. I don’t know. It stopped being there to us because she was gone too. In my head, I picture it all caved in, just like she was in death.
    The day she died, Jenny had run over to that gas station where the nasty Sig Adams worked. She never told us, but I know what happened. I read the papers before tearing them into strips to mimic her favorite brand of homemade cigarettes. At least I think they’re hers. But I heard all the gossip on the news too, about the daughter of a respectable, local politician. She was damned near a celebrity in death; so much more than she’d been in life.
    Jenny was always at that gas station to steal food for her kids ‘cause she spent all her money on weed. We even gave her money, sometimes, but she’d be higher than a hot air balloon in August in under three hours. Those poor kids. I always felt so bad for them. But I felt bad for Jenny too. She never got much sleep on account of them. And she told me she never wanted them around anyway. I think she was lying to me about that. That poor Jenny.
    She was arrested nearly once a week at that gas station for stealing because Sig Adams would report her every time, but Sheriff Kreke never took her in. He knew who she was and who those two babies were she had inside. No DCFS agent would dare try to take away the grandkids of a Senator, politics, you know. She was safe as could be, or almost. And she knew it too.
    I’d seen those kids once; they’d been sleeping in a third- or fourth-generation crib, in a tiny room decorated with peeling wallpaper consisting of early 80s Sesame Street characters. It was an oak crib painted white some decades before. I was higher than a kite when I was in that room and the Sesame Street characters kept running and disappearing behind a dresser or closet door. They freaked me out, so I got away as soon as I could by offering to make banana pancakes, my specialty when everyone is too much something-or-other to make food. My secret is to grind up the banana in place of the flour. It’s one of the most fascinating things to do.
    Jenny had been in that baby room too, looking at them with awe and terror at the same time. She often said they were the best and worst things to happen to her.
    I remember they had the most basic physical features: ears as prominent as trumpets, bright red and screaming just like their little mouths; a subtle chin matching their mother’s and a direct link to the Tennessee mountain McKitrick’s on her Senator’s father’s side. They had low cheekbones, again not promising, and too-small mouths. They did have the largest, widest-set eyes I’d ever seen. Back then, I thought I imagined them turning into horses or hammerhead sharks. Little baby mutants. That freaked me out too.
    Jenny said the eyes would have heavy lids with a squint when they got older and she hated it. They’d look just like her. Said their faces were going to make them look ugly, though I always thought Michael-Conner-Jeff was a bit more attractive than that. She said those eyes reminded her of a story he’d told her once about his great-grandmother who raised seven kids on her own while her drunkard husband got himself killed in Germany. I don’t know how.
    The story goes that the mutant babies were hungry that morning, and she’d gone over to steal some milk and cereal like she’d done a thousand times over. She would lock her front door with the babies on the floor and run like a bat outta hell to get to the station and back in under five minutes. It was like a game for her, trying to beat her old time. I like to imagine that she bought the milk and stole the cheaper cereal once she got there. It’s easier to think of her that way.
    Kreke told the news that she’d dumped out the single-serving cereal into an old pan and sloshed the milk in afterward, and that’s how he found them. I know those kids was worse than that, covered in milk, their own mess, and the smell of Mary Jane on the kitchen floor, like always. When he’d finally forced his way into the trailer after half an hour of fist pounding and baby crying, he found Jenny in the back bathroom with a four-inch kitchen knife on the floor. He gave some bad descriptions too, like her eyes were open and unfocused out the bedroom window, but I don’t like to think about Jenny like that. She’d dug that knife into her stomach. I wonder now what she’d been looking for.
    Michael-Conner-Jeff spoke for a long time at her funeral. It wasn’t a real funeral though, we weren’t allowed at that; it was a memorial for us at the top of the cliff after we snuck into the morgue to steal her ashes. We just wanted to pay tribute to the girl none of us really ever knew. Her parents had been furious about that, and they rounded us all up and threw us in jail for a couple weeks. I’ve still got the fine and community volunteer hours to finish, but I think I’ll get to it this year, maybe.
    When he spoke, he read some of her poetry. It shocked me that she’d been so good. I never would’ve guessed that out of a girl like her.
    “And this last one, she’s got it called, ‘Those Photos of You’,” he started at the end of the memorial. It wasn’t like memorials on television. There wasn’t any rain.
    “‘Never in my life have I wanted to hate you so much, for everything you did wrong and right; for every time I asked you for help, real help, and you told me no; for never telling me I’m good enough for you and for making me realize that’s true.’”
    We all suspected she’d been talking about her parents, but really, I think she meant Michael-Conner-Jeff. I don’t know for sure. It made me sad enough to want to cry, but I figured crying wouldn’t be the thing to do just then, so I thought about my dog at home, and the time he nearly chewed clear through my favorite red boots. That got me out of crying-mode real quick.
    He continued, “‘I’d like to hate you most for making me feel guilty for being happy; for being drunk at my own birthday party this year; and for taking advantage of my patience when I was nearly done. I was awful for leaving my cigarettes in your car, but you didn’t have to act rudely to my stuffed animals. And for that time I scratched your back, and you shook my wrists, but you never did mine.’”
    Michael-Conner-Jeff was crying now. I felt bad for him. Silent tears were running down his face, but he wiped them away between inhales from his pipe.
    “‘Mostly, I want to thank you for letting me think you read my work, when all I wanted was a little appreciation, and for always calling me crazy.’”
    She loved to write, I suppose, just as much as she loved to smoke and drink. She really loved to write. I guess, this last time, she was caught up in her own world. We scattered her ashes from the top of Fern Cliff across the river.
    Going through her trailer, I heard her parents found too many books. She’s written in them all, in the margins and on the covers. Jenny was deep, a lot deeper than we’d all thought. It’s amazing what people teach you about themselves when they die. Her favorites had been Woolf and Chopin. We all wonder why she didn’t just walk into the water with stones in her pockets like that Edna chick.
    I think she probably didn’t want to steal the stones. That sounds like her.
    Her other poetry made me think she was happy. Jenny was a girl who always seemed cheerful, even though she never broke a smile. She wasn’t like that. She led a life filled with dreams of accomplishment and untainted love, but that never surfaced from the interior of that red and white trailer, and the books she kept inside. So we’ll never really know what it was like in her head.
    Me? I guess I’m a creature of habit. It’s been too many years since then. Jenny’s gravestone never has flowers when I visit, so I pick some dandelions and tie them together with some newspaper strips. She would’ve appreciated my creativity and thoughtfulness. I know she’s not in the actual ground there, but Fern Cliff was closed when a couple teenagers jumped and died there a few summers back, so I can’t visit unless it’s late at night, and I’m always afraid I’ll fall when I’m high.
    Michael-Conner-Jeff disengaged from our group when she died, mostly. I still talk to him from time to time, mostly around the anniversary of Jenny’s death. It was like we lost another person, though he wasn’t missed as much. He wasn’t ever the same. I’ve never learned his name, I guess I could ask him now, but I won’t. I suppose that’s me being lazy after all. I don’t know.
    I talk to her though, at her gravestone and tonight at the top of the cliff. I tell her how things are going. I just lost my job, again, but I’m applying for a manager’s position at a home improvement store, though I doubt they’ll take me. My name doesn’t mean much for reliability. It’s almost Christmas, so I tell her what my perfect sister and her perfect family are doing in perfect Utah while I sleep off another hangover at my girlfriend’s house. Every now and then, Michael-Conner-Jeff interrupts my blubbering with a word or two of his own, about his new paramour or how Jenny’s little kids are doing. The Senator is retired now, after his wife died, and he takes care of them down in Florida. I think Michael-Conner-Jeff sees them every now and again, but I don’t know for sure.
    As the wind whistles through the air at the top of cliff, where I’m reciting this to you now, I get the sense that Jenny knew exactly what she was doing all along. She used to quote someone, and I’ve forgotten that name too, but when we would be doing something we weren’t supposed to, she’d stop us and, all serious-like, say, “You only live once, but if you do it right, then once is enough.”
    And I know she’s been right all along.

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