These triplets, now. What were they called? Was that trochaic?
He didn’t know. The fact that he could find out no longer seemed important, but he could find out, yes. It was something people taught; it was no big secret.
Or take this variation, which Alfie had also seen all over the country: “Here I sit, on the pooper, giving birth to a Maine state trooper.”
It was always Maine, no matter where you were it was always Maine State Trooper, and why? Because no other state would scan. Maine was the only one of the fifty whose name consisted of a single syllable. Yet again, it was in triplets: “Here I sit, on the poop er.”
He had thought of writing a book. Just a little one. The first title to occur to him had been “Don’t Look Up Here, You’re Pissing on Your Shoes,” but you couldn’t call a book that. Not and reasonably hope someone would put it out for sale in a store, anyway. And, besides, that was light. Frothy. He had become convinced over the years that something was going on here, and it wasn’t frothy. The title 78
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he had finally decided on was an adaptation of something he’d seen in a rest-area toilet stall outside Fort Scott, Kansas, on Highway 54.
“I Killed Ted Bundy: The Secret Transit Code of America’s Highways.” By Alfred Zimmer. That sounded mysterious and ominous, almost scholarly. But he hadn’t done it. And although he had seen “If I supply the yarn, will she make me one” added to “My mother made me a whore” all over the country, he had never expounded (at least in writing) on the startling lack of sympathy, the “just deal with it” sen-sibility, of the response. Or what about “Mammon is the King of New Jersey”? How did one explain why New Jersey made it funny and the name of some other state probably wouldn’t? Even to try seemed almost arrogant. He was just a little man, after all, with a little man’s job. He sold things. A line of frozen dinners, currently.
And now, of course . . . now . . .
Alfie took another deep drag on his cigarette, mashed it out, and called home. He didn’t expect to get Maura and didn’t. It was his own recorded voice that answered him, ending with the number of his cell-phone. A lot of good that would do; the cell-phone was in the trunk of the Chevrolet, broken. He had never had good luck with gadgets.
After the beep he said, “Hi, it’s me. I’m in Lincoln. It’s snowing.
Remember the casserole you were going to take over to my mother.
She’ll be expecting it. And she asked for the Red Ball coupons. I know you think she’s crazy on that subject, but humor her, okay? She’s old.
Tell Carlene Daddy says hi.” He paused, then for the first time in about five years added, “I love you.”
He hung up, thought about another cigarette—no worries about lung cancer, not now—and decided against it. He put the notebook, open to the last page, beside the telephone. He picked up the gun and rolled out the cylinder. Fully loaded. He snapped the cylinder back in with a flick of his wrist, then slipped the short barrel into his mouth.
It tasted of oil and metal. He thought, Here I SIT, about to COOL it, my plan to EAT a fuckin’ BOOL- it. He grinned around the barrel. That was terrible. He never would have written that down in his book.
Then another thought occurred to him and he put the gun back in its trench on the pillow, drew the phone to him again, and once more 79
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dialled home. He waited for his voice to recite the useless cell-phone number, then said, “Me again. Don’t forget Rambo’s appointment at the vet day after tomorrow, okay? Also the sea-jerky strips at night.
They really do help his hips. Bye.”
He hung up and raised the gun again. Before he could put the barrel in his mouth, his eye fell on the notebook. He frowned and put the gun down. The book was open to the last four entries. The first thing anyone responding to the shot would see would be his dead body, sprawled across the bed closest to the bathroom, his head hanging down and bleeding on the nubbly green rug. The second thing, however, would be the Spiral notebook, open to the final written page.
Alfie imagined some cop, some Nebraska state trooper who would never be written about on any bathroom wall due to the disciplines of scansion, reading those final entries, perhaps turning the battered old notebook toward him with the tip of his own pen. He would read the first three entries—“Trojan Gum,” “Poopie doopie,” “Save Russian Jews”—and dismiss them as insanity. He would read the last line, “All that you love will be carried away,” and decide that the dead guy had regained a little rationality at the end, just enough to write a halfway sensible suicide note.
Alfie didn’t like the idea of people thinking he was crazy (further examination of the book, which contained such information as
“Medger Evers is alive and well in Disneyland,” would only confirm that impression). He was not crazy, and the things he had written here over the years weren’t crazy, either. He was convinced of it. And if he was wrong, if these were the rantings of lunatics, they needed to be examined even more closely. That thing about don’t look up here, you’re pissing on your shoes, for instance, was that humor? Or a growl of rage?
He considered using the john to get rid of the notebook, then shook his head. He’d end up on his knees with his shirtsleeves rolled back, fishing around in there, trying to get the damn thing back out.
While the fan rattled and the fluorescent buzzed. And although immersion might blur some of the ink, it wouldn’t blur all of it. Not enough. Besides, the notebook had been with him so long, riding in 80
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his pocket across so many flat and empty Midwest miles. He hated the idea of just flushing it away.
The last page, then? Surely one page, balled up, would go down.
But that would leave the rest for them (there was always a them) to discover, all that clear evidence of an unsound mind. They’d say,
“Lucky he didn’t decide to visit a schoolyard with an AK-47. Take a bunch of little kids with him.” And it would follow Maura like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail. “Did you hear about her husband?” they’d ask each other in the supermarket. “Killed himself in a motel. Left a book full of crazy stuff. Lucky he didn’t kill her. ” Well, he could afford to be a little hard about that. Maura was an adult, after all. Carlene, on the other hand . . . Carlene was . . .
Alfie looked at his watch. At her j.-v. basketball game, that’s where Carlene was right now. Her teammates would say most of the same things the supermarket ladies would say, only within earshot and accompanied by those chilling seventh-grade giggles. Eyes full of glee and horror. Was that fair? No, of course not, but there was nothing fair about what had happened to him, either. Sometimes when you were cruising along the highway, you saw big curls of rubber that had unwound from the recap tires some of the independent truckers used. That was what he felt like now: thrown tread. The pills made it worse. They cleared your mind just enough for you to see what a colossal jam you were in.
“But I’m not crazy,” he said. “That doesn’t make me crazy.” No.
Crazy might actually be better.
Alfie picked up the notebook, flipped it closed much as he had flipped the cylinder back into the .38, and sat there tapping it against his leg. This was ludicrous.
Ludicrous or not, it nagged him. The way thinking a stove burner might still be on sometimes nagged him when he was home, nagged until he finally got up and checked and found it cold. Only this was worse. Because he loved the stuff in the notebook. Amassing graffiti—
thinking about graffiti—had been his real work these last years, not selling price-code readers or frozen dinners that were really not much more than Swansons or Freezer Queens in fancy microwavable 81
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dishes. The daffy exuberance of “Helen Keller fucked her feller!” for instance. Yet the notebook might be a real embarrassment once he was dead. It would be like accidentally hanging yourself in the closet because you were experimenting with a new way of jacking off and got found that way with your shorts under your feet and shit on your ankles. Some of the stuff in his notebook might show up in the newspaper, along with his picture. Once upon a time he would have scoffed at the idea, but in these days, when even Bible Belt newspapers routinely speculated about a mole on the President’s penis, the notion was hard to dismiss.