Fiction: Sugar

By Steve Passey

 

The older of the two men woke up from a dream where he had rolled his truck but he did not know how. He could not remember the wreck. The vehicle had to come to rest right-side up but crumpled like an old beer can, doors open, hood up and folded like a napkin, the vehicle glass shattered into grains. The grey vehicle had settled into a farmer’s field an improbable distance from the road and was already rusted. He walked around and around, trying to remember the catastrophe of the wreck, but he could not. The event itself was gone, only the effects remained. At some point, there in the field, he came across how own body – but not his body as he lay dreaming, or as he walked in awake. Instead, his remains, well-removed from the ruins of the truck, were desiccated, dried-out, and sublimated into the earth. He had, it seemed, been dead a long time. He stood over his own ruin in silence, his body there like an old coil of rope or a folded tarp, silted into place with the fine dirt driven by the wind and the sun and the rain and until then, unfound. He woke up and said aloud to no one save himself that no one ever sees themselves dead in their dreams and that it could not mean anything and that there are prophecies made hindsight but not in dreams and that was the all of it.  

Speaking aloud to yourself after a dream is prayer. Awake at four, he lay there for an hour before getting up. This is how men sleep, once they hit an age. Once they are awake, they are awake. At seven he got up and got dressed and went to get the younger man, his coworker.  In the trailer park where they mowed and trimmed and kept the humble common properties in order one of the residents had died. The deceased was an old man, not merely older, one-eyed, and a bit of a character, no real family to speak of, a man who was said to keep a lot of cash in the house because he did not trust to institutions like banks. 

Other people had talked of it, and others would come to see for themselves, and some of those would come to steal, all with their justifications, all with their need. Even the government comes to collect from the dead, for as much as they can assert. The plot of land on which the trailer sat is still subject to the landowner’s rents. So, they who come to collect, come to collect. 

The two men walked up to the door of the dead man’s trailer and checked the door handle. It was open, and they entered. They had parked the truck in the drive. There was a lawnmower in the back.

The first man spoke to the second. Look for the sugar bowl he said. The old man kept five-hundred dollars in that sugar bowl, always. He didn’t trust banks. 

The younger of the two looked around. I don’t see no sugar bowl, he said. 

Keep looking, the older man said. If not the sugar bowl, something to hold that kind of sugar.

The younger man. More literally-minded than the older, walked past the kitchen, slowly, looking at each door, at each closet, before he went into the bathroom. The older man stayed to the kitchen, opening drawers, quietly though, and looking through the cupboards.

Get a load of this, the younger man said, coming out from the bathroom. He was holding a spiral-bound notebook.

What’s that, the older man asked? 

The old coot kept a shit diary, the younger man said. 

A what?  

A shit diary. Like, a list of all his bowel movements.  

The older man grabbed the book and read. 

July 1, it said: Firm. Uniform coloration. Not perfect, but good enough. 

July 2, it said: Goddamn. Barely made it in in time. Beer shit. Didn’t dare flush for an hour. 

July 3^rd it said: Not good. Like five little movements in one.  I think I am getting sick.

July 4^th it said: Shame. Just shame. I prayed. If Jesus will turn me around, I’ll quit drinking. 

July 5^th it said. Godly. Seven shades of whatever I et. Large, firm, well-formed. Was out clearing the brush all morning. Turnt out all I needed was exercise. Had a beer. Thanked THE LORD. 

July 6^th it said: Went for a walk for an hour. Shit too fast, and did not enjoy, but I think I am back to normal.

There are hundreds of pages the younger man said. A poop log. 

Jesus, the older man said, then, noting the book, that the old man had a fair hand for a crazy person. His printing is small, but it can be read. Did I tell you the old fucker only had one eye? 

You didn’t have to, the younger man said. I knowed it, because I had seen him, but I never did have the instance to meet. 

He was a paranoid schizophrenic, the older man said, and oft and ond he’d get off his meds and go crazy. The police would come and get him, and subdued with some struggle, he’d be driven up to the hospital. In a week the doctors would straighten him out. His thoughts remained the orations of chaos, and of devils whispering into his ear about every conspiracy imaginable on this our earth for all time all rolled into one, but he could hold a job off and on, as his fits allowed. But one time the cops come for him, because had been ranting again and scaring people in the parking lots of the grocery stores and the convenience stores and the high school too, and they come and fetched him on a storm of a winter night and the roads were such that no one was going to take him to the hospital. They put him in a holding cell. Now, what happened of that, no one ever said with any specificity, but over the night he must have acted up and those two cops beat him. Beat him bad. At some point, they knocked one of his eyes out. Not gouged, not pulled, but knocked. I imagine they meant to kill him, for whatever offence he’d said or done. At any rate the morning come, all clear sky and powdered snow undriven, and those two threw the wreck of his unconscious body in the back of the car – he did not wake – and took him to the hospital leaving tire tracks very neatly in their wake, for they alone had taken the road at that time. When he got there the intake noted his disposition and asked the police what had happened. They said only that the storm was bad, and that they figured he’d slipped and fallen, for this was the condition in which they found him. Fair enough, the intake said, and they took him in and in time, once he’d healed, they returned him out a door walking from whence he once was once carted in all bloodied up and one eye short.

Hell of story, the younger man said. Fucking cops.

Well, the older man said, you got law, and then you got order. Order is the aim. Order is the priority, and the law but one way of achieving it. The damndest thing of it is, he said, is that when he got out of there, he didn’t never take no medication ever again. Didn’t need it. Having that eye kicked right out of his head quieted him some. He got a job at the rendering plant – he had worked there before and the old Hungarian that run it thought he deserved a chance and hired him. Turned out to be a fair call. The old man worked there until a few days ago when he dropped dead.  Heart attack. 

Here's to a normal life, the young man said, and a normal death. 

Well, said the old man, normal enough, but he didn’t ever patch over that eyeless socket, didn’t believe in banks, and – at this he held up the tidily annotated scribbler – he kept a record of each and every bowel movement he ever had, replete with some brief philosophy thereby. Now, let us find that sugar bowl and be on our way, richer for this experience, at least for this day of all our days.

A girl then, dark of hair and blue of eye, walked from the back of the trailer from the bedroom so recently unoccupied by the previous inhabitant. She wore jeans and canvas sneakers, and had a coat one size too big and she had three lines tattooed on her chin and the words love and hate tattooed on the first joint below each knuckle the blue of those statements becoming diffuse with the passage of time, for the linework of the tattooist’s art is poorly suited to people’s hands. In those hands she held a framed picture of old one-eye with a small girl upon his lap, both smiling. It was not a formal sitting, but unposed, and all the more charming thereby. 

Who are you she said, and why are you in my grandpa’s trailer? 

The younger man, thinking them caught up, said nothing.  

The older man jerked his thumb towards the front door, towards where they had parked their truck, with the mower in back. We’re from the Trailer Park Management Company, he said. We mow the lawns. 

Then why are you in here, she asked?

Because the door was open, the older man said, and because we knew your grandfather – and this he spoke more slowly – your grandfather weren’t here so who, we thought, could it be?
Just me, she said. She held up the picture. 

I was six, she said, and I didn’t see him often, but he was kind to me, and I loved him. I wanted this picture. I feel like it should be mine. No one else cares. 

I didn’t know old one-eye had a granddaughter, the younger man said.

She held out the picture, and there a girl, dark of hair and blue of eye, happy in her smile and with a gap in her teeth.

It’s hard to explain family to others, she said. 

Hell yes, it is, the older man said. We’ll be on our way then, but mind you lock that door when you go. All sorts of folks out and about in this park. 

I will, she said.

The two men left in the truck in which they came with the mower bound by cords to the bed so it would not roll about. 

Who would have thought that old one-eye would have had family, the younger man asked?

Everybody got family, the older man said, without looking at the younger man. Everyone, somewhere. 

But he did not believe it to be true, even when he said it. He wondered of himself that he might have been out-thought. 

 

#

 

The Girl waited until the two men had left in their lawn-mower truck and were out of sight before she left the house without locking the door. She walked in the opposite direction from the way they drove, until she got into the passenger side of an old black car one purchased for $250. The man driving it had scars of tracks and tracks of scars on his arms, and had been proud of the fact that he knew how to obtain narcotics while in rehab. The trick he had said, was to obtain but not to use. If you can do that you ain’t an addict. You are in control. So, when you are out, you can use, or not. You have already proven what you are not. You are absolved, as if by God himself. 

He asked the girl, when she slid in, if it was true what the lady at the gas station cash register had told them, that an old man of strange appearance and stranger habits, who had smelled of dead animals and beer, had died in there and that there was money in the house, here or there, in a sugar bowl or a sock or an envelope in the pocket of a suit jacket he’d worn when he got married and never since or anything like that. 

She did not answer, instead producing from inside the folds of her oversized coat a sugar bowl, from which she removed a thick roll of bills. 

Hell yeah, the man said, that old lady was right. There’s five-hundred there for sure, maybe a thousand.

Eighteen-hundred, she said, looking away. She smiled when she said it. She had a smoker’s smile and a smoker’s charm. They’d put five-dollars’ worth of gas in when they had heard the story about the dead man from the lady at the gas station and it was the last of their cash and she’d smiled at the old lady the exact same way.

Who were those guys, he asked her? 

I think they come to steal she said, same as me. They said they were like, the lawnmowers, but I think they come to steal. Why would men with jobs need to steal?

The driver said that of course people with jobs need to steal. That young guy probably pushes that mower for minimum wage. He looked like he might be slow in his mind. The older one directs him for not much more. He really has two jobs, because he’s got to order the mowing and look after the kid. Most jobs aren’t enough and they never were. Ask their boss why he don’t pay them much. It’s because the boss-man steals from the laborer. There’s a finer line between working and stealing than people want to admit and there always has been. If not brothers, the two things are cousins, for sure.

The girl, fifteen or sixteen years old, maybe, nodded like she got it.  

How did you see them off he asked? It seemed very cordial, watching you all talk.

She brought out the picture, of the old one-eyed man and the black-haired, blue-eyed little girl and held it up. 

I told them that he was my granddad, she said, and this was him and that this was me. 

The driver marveled at that, and the picture. 

Hell, he said, looking at the picture. You could be. You could be. 

I could be, she said, but I am not. 

She threw the picture out the open window and then threw the sugar bowl out and then she set her hand to just above above the mirror, arching the palm of her hand to ride the air in the wake of the car’s passing like a wing, like children and old men do when riding in a vehicle with the windows down.

Ah, the driver said, without your make up and your oversize coat and your smile we would know you for the devil? 

They drove away, slowly and surely, nursing the car along so as to not to break it down and render themselves dependent on some greater fortune that might never come. Only so many people die alone.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Passey is from Southern Alberta. He is the author of "Alone on the Couch With a Gun in My Mouth" (Anxiety Press) and a few other things, as well as hosting "Just Sayin' - interviews with writers and musicians, on CKXU.