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Twenty-one Goats

Patrick Fealey

Part II of A California Blue

    The sun has passed the roofline, so many memories east, where they are, left behind, standing as they are without my eyes. But we are all here, like uprooted flowers waiting to be transplanted. We water our roots and wait on a new home.
    Marliyn pointed out that I spent $24 on a bottle of tequila when she had spent only $15 for the same bottle. I got mine down the street. She got hers at Beverage Plus, a massive liquor store posing as a grocery. That’s where she got the absinthe. Salvia, wormwood, 160 proof. I hadn’t known it was legal anywhere in America. My friend in Maine had to buy it from Germany in 2007 for $100 a bottle. Here it’s about $60. Absinthe taps into more of your reserves than you probably want to spare, particularly if you are shooting it. I haven’t gone insane or even become a befuddled skeleton, but you know you are drinking the devil’s anise. I’m off it today, was on it because I ran out of tequila and forgot about the gallon of Bacardi in the garage.
    Marilyn’s mother (Sally) still doesn’t talk to me. It’s entertaining when the mother and Nigel come by, how Sally avoids me and he shakes my hand. It is easy for her to avoid me when five of us are standing together. I look at her. I say things to her. She doesn’t look at me or respond. I’ve been with her daughter 14 months, not counting our time in college (when she was severe and wouldn’t look me or say hello either.) She spoke to me recently for the first time: “Do you want more whipped cream on your strawberries?” I tell Marilyn her mother doesn’t like me and Marilyn’s hug weakens. I say, “She has read about my life and can’t accept it. I am beyond good and evil.” Marilyn says, “You’re not beyond good and evil.” I say, “Nietzsche was, but he went insane.” I believe I am beyond good and evil, cold, the spiritual elete, but tell that to Marilyn the academic and she’ll call you an arrogant idiot. What I am is someone who cannot be construed as conservative or liberal, but can easily be labeled by the herd as an alcoholic (just like Sally’s favorite President, George W. Bush.)
    Three days in a row now and Derek is still excited about junior high. He picked Rhode Island, my home state, to do a report on in history class. “Why not Hawaii?” Sally asks. (the grandparents take him to Ohahu, Maui, and the Big Island twice a year; when he gets home he refuses to eat our ordinary home-cooked meals.) “The state bird of Rhode Island is the Rhode Island Red,” Derek tells us. I say, “That’s a chicken.” When he mentioned the capitol, it threw me because I had forgotten or erased Providence. Not sure if I dropped it or am suppressing it like molestation. Nobody really likes Providence, but only the ones who pass through are honest about it. Crack deal shootings in the shadow s of Roger Williams’ churches. Scientists dug up Roger Williams’ grave and found one rusty nail. The coffin and bones had rotted away. Someone said the soil looked a little darker. They filled in the hole and proclaimed that the rusty nail was evidence of religious freedom. I don’t know where the idea to dig him up came from. Probably a grant-funded research project for a graduate student at Brown University.
    Marilyn is happy when I work around the yard. Women want to see their men working. The form matters less than the working. She asks me which book I will work on next. I stumble, ramble off titles that need my attention. She isn’t impressed with my uncertainty. She has just read one and wants to know what’s next? The works answer that for me. The only book I know is the one I am writing now. It looks like a collection of stories. I know it is a book. It might be a novel. It is whatever I say it is, for I am the creator. I look at these stories and see a stylistic evolution. You can track a man’s path by reading them. The form changes. I become less lyrical and more personal. I am beyond good and evil, you know, and I will piss off most and honor the few.
    I see professors, cozy and righteous, people whose talent is staying in school the longest. They don’t know what a work week is. Then there is the kid at the surf shop, selling wax, and the kid pumping gas to get through his bachelor’s, or maybe the kid at the movie store, forced to rent out Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Jean Luc Picard. Something is formenting. There was this idea that has been sold out by greed at the cost of serenity and growth, personal fulfillment. Having a toilet that flushes and a mattress you can sleep on would also be nice. The kids are depressed and they don’t mind when a senator is shot in the head. A girl writes “KILL BUSH” on her notebook and the secret service arrives to interrogate her. She becomes a small hero to the discontents, a hero in a landscape where all the heroes have died like our grandfathers and dogs. Old men and dogs will change the world because they understand youth. Soulful and intelligent and wasted youths will become wise and dangerous. Men like Bush will go down as the villains who got away with the money and murder.
    Uneasy (truce?) With that mother. Nigel and I get a long perfectly, but he is pussy-whipped by Sally and constantly makes excuses for her bizarre insults. He used to manage work details comprised of state prisoners. Her disapproval is as plain as his respect and acceptance. She’s cornered now: her daughter, her husband, even her grandson think I’m alright, or in Derek’s words, “cool.” Everyone likes me but this woman with dyed red hair who spends half her life buying things and looks like a bull dog with a perpetually open mouth. She disapproves of her daughter’s choices? She doesn’t want her daughter to be happy? She is jealous and cannot relinquish her status? She calls every day, and at night as soon as we get into bed for she knows our time. (We have put a stop to that.) A sensitive nurse and instructor (they just laid her off without explanation.) She is dismayed that her grandson wants to study the state his mother’s boyfriend is from? “Why not Hawaii?” Like Derek is not allowed to learn something new. I thought with the whipped cream incident she was finally coming around, but last night she was an iceberg bobbing in bile. And now I will separate myself from the smell of this old typer . . .
    Derek is having trouble in English. His test score was in the 30-percentile. I consider it a good sign. English teachers want things to be complex because they cling to their jobs nervously. They make simple things complex because they are idiots. English teachers are the worst because we don’t need them. There are many out there waiting for the job. My English teachers were arrogant, dark-hearted, self-absorbed, and oblivious, with two exceptions. Mrs. Sammons and Mrs. Janis. That’s two in 17 years of school. What was special about them? They encouraged me and gave me time alone to write.
    Is Marilyn wearing anything under that nightgown? Skin smooth creamy legs. She is looking and I want to mount her. She makes a comment about the towel. I stay inside her. I withdraw slowly. Cum all over our bellies. I go to the bathroom and grab a towel. I throw one to her. She makes the comment. “You don’t like being wet.” True. It is like a stiff tag scratching the back of my neck. But we lay together after the towels in our mutual and private ecstasies.
    The sun is getting it up, purple penetration and force, the day has color. Marliyn is in the bedroom doing who knows what. She has been in there for a while. I am thinking about washing my truck after she goes to work. I’ll back it up the driveway. I haven’t washed it yet this summer. The winter dirt inhabits my windows, body, rims.
    Unless I can find a transfusion, I will quit this scene from exhaustion. A case of getting beaten by the need. We aspire to perfect the fulfillment of the need, but collapse and die before satisfaction. In the beginning, it looks like this: “I am ready, therefore I exist.” Later on it looks like this: “I am in pain, therefore I exist.” Then: “I know nothing and I will soon die.” Gets one thinking about the concrete. I am going to get 20 goats, one cow and six German Shepherds and a .223 and a 12-guage and a wire fence and a Smith and Wesson .45 and 3,000 condoms and a riding lawn mower and a few Mexicans and build a castle and live in the tower where I will watch the dawn and eat a banana. A new mission will come to me sharp as obsidian. My mission will be clear. I am on a flawed mission, but it aspires to freedom. I will pay. I will still weep.
    Marilyn is taping an ivy to a green bamboo post. The sunflowers are pluralizing like zygotes. Want me to go on when all the action takes place on the capillary level? Nodding at the helm, dreaming of the battle he will see only in dreams. In the dream the battle is complex and makes sense only to him. He is alone in this battle as he is in his dream. When he wakes up, he has an army. Wakefulness is coming on, time to come home, the door unlocked, open, come on in. We live here.

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