Lost Echoes

9

There were lots of doctors for the next few years. Doctors with charts and tests and even medicine that made him tired and a little loopy. It was supposed to help him focus. It was supposed to help him with his delusions. It made him feel bad.

A little later, he would think, yeah, I felt bad, but I was numb. And numb, that was good.

But back then he didn’t know that.

So, he quit taking the medicine, thought: Okay, maybe I’m a fruitcake with extra nuts, and maybe I’m not. And if I am a fruitcake, then I probably don’t know it. But I know this: My parents don’t have any money, and I’m costing them a ton because I might be nuts.

So I got to quit being nuts.

Or whatever is wrong with me has got to stop.

I’ll just stop now.

And he did stop.

Sort of.

He was sixteen and had his license. Had his first chance to go out and see the world from behind a steering wheel, and the truth of the matter was, he was frightened.

There had been other episodes.

One night, while riding in a car with Joey, who got his license first, he had “an experience.” It wasn’t the same as before. The car door closing was fine. The ride was fine. Then they hit a bump and the glove box snapped open and the lid dropped down with a reverberation, and it jumped on him.

Different this time. Milder. Just a bumpy ride at midday, a black man yelling as a car came out of nowhere. Just a fender-bender on the right side that knocked the glove box open, that and a high kick start on a rush of adrenaline. The driver even started to smile, happy he hadn’t gotten twisted into the metal. Then the man’s face fell off like melted black wax and the world Harry knew came back and it was all over.

Joey was sitting behind the wheel looking at him when he came out of it. Joey pulled over, said, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Quit jumping. You’re fucking me up, man.”

“What?”

“You’re hopping and screaming. Ain’t even any music on.”

“Shit,” Harry said.

“That’s what I almost did.”

“Is this car used?” Harry asked.

“Yeah. It is. What you think, I get an old model and no one’s ever driven it? Like it’s been sitting on the car lot for a few years till I buy it?”

“Was it ever wrecked?”

“I don’t know. How the fuck would I know? Close the glove box. That fucker’s always popping open.”

“Can we leave it open so it doesn’t do that again?”

“You got more pussy ways than anyone I know. Yeah. Leave it open if it don’t make you hop and yell. Most motherfuckers like to listen to the radio, they’re gonna do that hoppin’ about. But you, you got the silent drummer going on, you know.”

There had been other incidents, not in cars. In houses. When he visited Joey, and Joey’s father closed the door, there had been images of Joey’s mother being shoved up against it, taking a whack. There were places all over that house like that. Memories hidden in the walls where Joey and his mother and siblings had been bounced by Joey’s father. That place was a smorgasbord of fear.

It gave Harry a kind of sick stomach to be there. All that angry business hidden in the walls and furniture, the way Joey and his mom and his brother had to glide by without disturbing the air around Mr. Barnhouse. And the way Barnhouse looked at him, as if he were some interloper there to do him harm or take away his television set, which seemed to be Barnhouse’s lifeline. Without that, he would have had nothing but silence, the life inside his own head.

Harry figured it wasn’t very nice in there, in Mr. Barnhouse’s head, and that noise of any kind, beating the wife and children now and then, was welcome. Anything but silence. Anything but being alone with himself inside his head.

He quit going there, waited on the porch until Joey came out. Found ways to be somewhere else, have Joey meet him somewhere, like his own home.

Home was a sanctuary. There were no horrors hidden in that old house, and his parents weren’t creating anything that might be recorded.

Oh, there was something by the windows. Where he had fallen when he was six. Once when he stomped the floor there, killing a roach, he discovered a childhood version of himself, and the room went dark and he could see a chair and the windows were full of imagery; the drive-in theater and cartoons across the way, and he could hear loud honky-tonk music. And there had been something just a little different.

He had felt pain.

In his ear.

And then his mother, younger, robed, hair loose and wild, had come rushing from the bedroom, followed by his father. The image began to fade, speed up. He saw them rushing out the door, his father carrying him in his arms. Yeah. Things were recorded—in houses and cars and furniture, and who knew what all?

He just didn’t understand why.

Unless it was all in his head, and he was, in fact, crazy.

He was thinking of all this as he sat in a chair with his license in his hand, considering going out. He had use of the family car tonight, the very first time, and he wanted to go, but he was scared, and not of images, but of something more common. The highway. Parallel parking. He had barely passed that part.

“You look nice,” his dad said.

“What?” Harry looked up.

His dad grinned at him. He noticed his dad looked tired, and for the first time he realized that he had grayed around the temples and there was a little less hair on top. Saw him every day, and now he noticed. God, when did that happen?

“Said you look good. All cleaned up.”

“Ah, you know. Nothing much. A shower.”

Dad laughed. “And lots of smell-pretty.”

“Got too much?”

“Roll down the window, let the wind blow some of it off, and you’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You going out, or you just gonna drive that chair?”

“I’m going out. I guess.”

“You got the car. You got your license. It’s Friday night. What you ought to do is go out. What you gonna sit here for?”

“Just thinking.”

“About girls?”

“Not really.”

“I suggest you do. Girls are pretty nice to think about. You ain’t got the fanciest ride in the world there, but you can go on dates, you know. You got to ask a girl, though. I always found out, you didn’t ask them, they didn’t show up.”

Harry felt himself turning red. “Yeah, I know.”

“Listen here, Harry. I know what you’re thinking. It’s about that stuff.”

That’s what his dad always called the visions, the bothersome stuff.

“Just a little.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with you.”

“You think, Dad? I mean, the doctors—”

“Hell with them.”

Dad pulled over a wooden chair, sat down across from him.

“Let me tell you, you’re…you know…imaginative.”

“You mean I make things up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You think I believe them, but they aren’t true?”

The big man paused, put his hands in his lap. “Son, I don’t know. Truly I don’t. But it was said there was some in our family had the second sight. Can’t say it was true, but it was the story.”

“This is sort of like hindsight, Daddy. It’s already done. It’s like I hear and see ghosts in sounds. It’s got something to do with fear, or violence. I’ve told you all this.”

Dad sat and considered for a moment. “Hindsight, second sight, maybe it’s all the same.”

“Who had second sight in our family?”

“My mother. You never knew her. Dead before you were born, just like your grandpa. All your grandparents, dead before you were born. That’s too bad. Least as far as your grandmother—my mother—went. Your mom’s parents, good people. My dad, he was a son of a bitch…. You know the scars on my back?”

“The barbed wire?”

The old man nodded. “Them ain’t barbed wire. Told you I got tangled in barbed wire when I was a kid. That ain’t what happened. I didn’t want to tell you, not then, that your grandpa beat me with a belt. The buckle. It cut me, made them scars.”

“Why are you telling me now, Daddy?”

“I don’t know. I think you ought to know. Don’t know why, but thought you ought to.”

“What did you do?”

“When he hit me?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t nothing I could do. I was a kid, and he was big and mean and always drunk…. You stay away from that liquor, hear me? You might have the tendency. I drank a little when I was young, and I had the tendency. It brought the mean out in me. Your mama, she got me away from that. Told me she’d go out with me, but not if I drank, and if I drank she was through with me. I ain’t never taken another drop…. Thing is, Harry, there’s shit in your life you don’t expect. Ain’t all of it good. But you got to get around that, got to grab the good, got to get your mind wrapped around that, and let the bad things go. Otherwise you just get caught up in hating or being mad, or being worried all the time. You got what you got, son. But you’ll deal with it.”

“You think?”

“Hell, boy, I know…. Here’s the keys. It’s got a full tank.”

The old man opened his wallet, and Harry could see there was a twenty in there, three or four ones. Daddy took out the twenty, handed it to him.

“No, Dad, that’s all right.”

“Take it. You might want a Coke or something. Might want to buy a girl a Coke. Take the car out, you ought to try and have a little money. Take it, son.”

Harry took the twenty. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Hey, that’s what dads do.”

“Sure.”

Harry stood up.

“You be careful out there, son.”

“Absolutely.”

“She idles kind of heavy at lights, stop signs, but she’s okay. I’ve tuned her up and gone over her good. She’ll run like a spotted-ass ape.”

Harry laughed. “And how do they run?”

Dad grinned. “I don’t really know, son. Just an old saying.”

Harry suddenly grabbed his Dad and hugged him. “I love you,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you too, son. Hey, you’re getting quite a grip there.”

Later on, Harry was really glad he did that.

That night, out on the town, doing his thing with Joey riding beside him, Joey drinking a bit, whiskey in Coke, offering him some, but him refusing; out there trying to pick up girls, being awkward and unsuccessful about it; out there on the highways, circling the Dairy Queen, waving at friends passing by in their cars, having the time of his life, his old man, home, sitting at dinner, suddenly stood up from the table, and his mom would tell it like this: “He was just fine: then he stood bolt upright, said, ‘I feel kind of off,’ grabbed his left arm, and then he dropped.”

Heart attack.

Dead and gone.

Things were coming apart.