Swept Aside
by Steven J. McDermott
I packed my two duffel bags and got the hell out of the house before I did something I’d regret. Sitting on the front porch waiting for the cab to arrive reminded me of when I got out of the army: everything I owned in two green canvas bags and thinking, now what the fuck do I do?
Behind me the door opened and Kym Lee stuck her head out.
—And another thing, she said. I cancelled the credit cards.
The door slammed shut. Earlier she’d told me about closing the other accounts and selling my truck to pay off her student loans and our credit card debt. Her lawyer told her to make a fresh start. So Kym Lee handed me $750—my share of what was left, Washington being a community property state and all—along with the divorce papers. Things were much simpler, she’d said, because we only rented the house.
Across the street a light came on upstairs and I could see a head peeking between the drapes. Ralph. Well this would prove him right. He always said my job in Singapore, one month on, two weeks off, would doom the marriage. At least Kym Lee didn’t know about my account at the Malaysian bank.
The door opened again. Out popped her head.
—I already told Jackie and Steve, she said. They said it’s about fucking time.
She slammed the door shut again. That wasn’t an option anyway; they were her friends. The only other friends I had were our friends, which aren’t any kind of friends at all. Not the kind that would help me move, or call me to ask how I was getting on. Not the kind that would give me a place to stay for a few days. That left Skeeter, my old army buddy. I’d have to give him a call, see if he’d let me hang out until it was time to return to Singapore.
The front door opened again. I didn’t bother to look back.
—You want answers you selfish bastard? Do you? Go plumb your own fucking self!
As the door slammed I jumped up and tried the knob but she’d already locked it. I kicked the door, then turned around and looked across the street. Ralph’s head was still watching from between the drapes. I unclipped the Swiss Army knife from my belt chain and went back to the door and started carving letters big enough for Ralph to see: F—U—C—K Y—O—U.
The cab pulled up to the curb and I grabbed the duffels. The cabbie helped me load them into the trunk.
—Sea-Tac, I said.
—Which airline?
—Just go to the strip, I said. I need a motel for the night.
As we drove off I could see them both watching from windows: Ralph on his side of the street, Kym Lee on hers.
~~~~~
Two days later, the Fourth of July, I was on the outskirts of Gresham, Oregon, having flown down to Portland on a shuttle flight. The rented four-wheel drive SUV I was driving reeked of cigar smoke and Freon, which made it difficult for me to concentrate as I tried to find Skeeter’s house. It had been five years since I’d seen Skeeter—a nickname he got after winning a skeet-shooting bet one wild R and R weekend in Manila. A quick phone call, a line of BS, and there I was, leaving I-84, crossing over the railroad tracks, and prowling past mobile home parks and dilapidated apartment buildings with signs advertising, Free Month’s Rent and No Lease Needed! The sidewalks turned to gravel and then gave out entirely as I drove passed a stretch of wooded lots with 1960’s style ramblers that looked as if they hadn’t been cared for since they were built. None of the houses had numbers visible, but Skeeter had said to look for the septic truck, and that was how I found the place. A dark brown rambler with a shake roof covered in chartreuse moss and tufts of grass. A rusted chain link fence guarded the yard. What used to be a lawn was a couple of feet tall and gone to seed. The grass competed with five-foot high purple thistles. Foxglove grew in the open drainage ditch between the fence and the street.
I parked in the driveway behind the white truck with AA Septic Service painted on the back in red letters. As I walked up the driveway a 737 with its gear down roared overhead on its way to land at Portland International Airport. At the screen door I was met by a little kid in cut-offs with mud smeared on his bare chest.
—Mom, he yelled over his shoulder, a man’s here.
—Let him in, mom yelled back from deeper in the house.
—You can come in, the kid said and ran off.
The house smelled of high-grade pot, fried chicken, and what might have been urine curdling in a toilet somebody had forgotten to flush. I went into the kitchen where Skeeter’s wife Amalia was at the sink rinsing a plate.
—It’s Rick, I said, and batted at a fly coming towards my face.
—Larry’s out back, she said without looking at me. She grabbed another plate from the counter and dumped corncobs and chicken bones into an orange plastic garbage can. Beer’s in the fridge, she said, help yourself. Her tone of voice was weary and made me think she’d seen a few too many of Skeeter’s ex-army buddies.
Inside the house it was at least ten degrees warmer than outside and I missed the SUV’s air conditioning. A drop of sweat slid into the gap between the waistband of my shorts and my back and down into the crack of my ass. Looking at Amalia, I couldn’t help myself from thinking about Kym Lee. They were both short and dark skinned, although the similarities ended there. Kym Lee was Korean, Amalia probably Mexican. When Kym Lee and I first met ten years ago, she was lithe and subtly athletic. Two years ago she’d gone hard-core, started working out twice a day—it helped to relieve stress, she said—until she was all muscles and bone, skin taut as stretched plastic wrap. I watched Amalia scrubbing plates, watched the roll of fat between her cut-offs and halter-top jiggle, alarmed at the way it aroused me.
I grabbed a couple of Dead Guy Ales from the fridge and headed outside. Skeeter, wearing a black and gray camouflage shirt that swelled over his gut—he’d easily put on fifty pounds since I’d last seen him—was helping his two boys arrange their fireworks for detonation. We hugged and back-slapped, then sat in webbed lawn chairs and drank our beers. We got the old army stories out of the way first, then he told me about the septic business and I told him about working as a maintenance mechanic at off shore oil wells in Singapore. The kids got antsy when fireworks started going off around the neighborhood. Skeeter told them to wait until dark. Amalia brought us more beers and went back inside and I tried not to look at the sway of her ample ass, or at least not let Skeeter catch me looking. The volume of detonating fireworks kept escalating and Skeeter finally let the kids start in on the sparklers. We sat and watched the boys run around giddily spaying sparks. Then it was full-on dark and we lit the cones and firecrackers for them. When the boy’s fireworks were all used up we sat back and listened as the neighborhood played at war.
—Doesn’t exactly remind you of Desert Storm, does it? Skeeter said.
—No.
—So cut the shit, Rick, Skeeter said. What are you doing here?
—I don’t know, I said. Guess I needed to see someone who knew me when.
Skeeter started laughing, big belly laughs. Oh, that’s a good one, he said, and slapped his thigh several times. Tell me another.
—Just looking for a place to hang out, maybe get some advice on what to do about Kym Lee.
Just then a loud explosion went off nearby, followed in quick succession by three more.
—Whoa! one of the boys said. What was that?
—M-80’s, Skeeter said. Now we’re talking. But I can do better than that, he said, and went into the house.
A few minutes later he was back outside with a shotgun.
—That’s the Skeeter I know and love, I said.
—Larry, don’t be a fucking idiot, Amalia said from the patio door.
—Here, I said, and picked up a paper plate.
He laughed, put the stock to his shoulder, said, Pull!
I flung the paper plate like a Frisbee. Blam! Then the other barrel, blam!
—Take that, the older kid yelled as Skeeter reloaded.
—Do it again, Daddy, do it again, the younger one yelled as he hopped up and down.
Skeeter let loose both barrels. BLAAAM!
~~~~~
The next night, I sat in the rental car, a new station wagon that smelled of vinyl, carpet gases, and cleaning fluid. I was parked across the street and down two houses from our house—my soon to be ex-house. At Skeeter’s urging, I was there to work things out, but if you’d asked me, right then, what I had in mind, I couldn’t have told you. Some vague concept of trying to open the lines of communication I suppose. Make one last stab at the why’s and wherefore’s, one last attempt to pierce Kym Lee’s defensive membranes. Except I hadn’t a clue what to ask her, and even if I somehow figured that part out, I surely didn’t know how to initiate the conversation, let alone what to do after that. And the last words she said to me—shouted, actually—weren’t helpful. I mean what was I supposed to do with, plumb your own fucking self?
I wondered if all my travel was symptom or cause. I went out to the rigs when Kym Lee started on her MA. Which worked out great at first. The bucks I made covered a big chunk of her tuition, plus I wasn’t in her way for a month at a time so she had plenty of unencumbered study time. Coming back home was like honeymoon time all over again. But our relationship started going sour even before she began work on her law degree. As Ralph had said, I tempted fate by being away so much. I looked over at his house with only the porch light on, wondered if he was up there watching, same as me.
The depths of self I knew right then was embarrassment about my marriage ending as a cliché. I was ashamed that my life was turning into a fucking TV script. I couldn’t understand that I’d been so out of touch—so truly out of the relationship—that I had no other way to conceive what had gone wrong—where I had gone wrong—except via that cliché. At that moment I was utterly lost and contemplating god knows what scripted ending.
Skeeter had summed up my situation by suggesting I could try to repair the damage, make amends, beg for a second chance. Or I could concede defeat, move on, start over somewhere else. Or I could get even in a newsworthy manner, with guns blazing. But even drunk and wielding a shotgun, Skeeter gave me no odds on getting even and getting away. His last words of encouragement? You’re down on your knees at the crossroads, buddy, is what Skeeter said. Ask the Lord to save you if he pleases, Skeeter said. But I do believe you be sinking down.
Up the street the lights in the house were out and she wasn’t home yet. I waited, knocking back miniature bottles of whiskey. I polished off four of the six and wished I’d bought a pint, maybe even a fifth, instead. I considered my options. Back to the rigs in Singapore? One month on, and then two weeks to do, what? The brothels of Bangkok like the single guys, and even some of the married ones? No, I wasn’t that much of a nihilist. Or maybe I could get transferred to somewhere else I didn’t call home: Kuala Lumpur? Nigeria? The North Sea, where I could choose between Scottish or Norwegian wells?
I drank another whiskey, studied the house. I just couldn’t believe she’d sold my truck. Easy enough to throw daggers of blame at her. But, realistically, where would that get me? She’d implied it was something I’d done. Or not done. Maybe it was those silences? Those moments when I was afraid to express how I really felt because I thought doing so would bring about the very situation we now found ourselves in.
A whirring like a car wash roused me and I saw in the rear view mirror that a street cleaner was working its way down the curb on my side of the street. The rig stopped directly behind my car and the driver got out and walked up to my door and rapped his knuckles on the glass. I turned the key a notch and powered the window down. He backed off a bit as a whiff of my booze breath wafted out.
—Mind moving real quick, he said.
—You kidding? I said. Go around.
—I’ve missed this stretch three weeks running, he said. Take me five seconds. Then you can park here for a month all I care.
—Forget it, I said.
—Look, pal, I’ve had a bad enough night as it is, so just move, OK?
—Fuck off! I’m having a shitty night, too, I said, and powered up the window.
He squatted, pressed his face hard against the glass so that his lips were mashed and his teeth tapped the glass with each word: Move the fucking car.
I mashed my face against the glass so we were lip to lip: Or what? I yelled against the glass.
He stood, kicked the door, and went back to street cleaner, mounted up. Before I could raise the seat he had rammed the bumper, engine growling like a bulldozer, and shoved the car forward. He pushed out a bit, and the back end of the car swung around until it was perpendicular to the street. He turned in, revved the engine hard, and shoved my car right up onto Ralph’s lawn. As the car rocked to a stop I saw him raise the sweeper’s brushes off the pavement. He gave me a big smile and the middle finger before shifting into a higher gear and driving off.
I sat there a moment considering the finger he’d given me—took it as the sign it was meant to be—until the lights came on in Ralph’s house. I started the car, backed over the curb, and drove away from that street and those houses, which I’m both happy and sad to say I never saw again.
Copyright © 2006 Steven J. McDermott