The Beetle & Mr. McGillicuddy
by Bretton B. Holmes She kept trying to convince herself that the key was to stay in the present. She wanted a cigarette. It had been days since they’d seen one. Cigarettes were abundant on campus, but they were nowhere near the school. The more they walked, the more the desire in her grew. It was like a lead weight around her neck, until the smell of a cigarette arrived and the unmistakable pungency would grip the bowels like a pair of warm hands. The first inhalation would bring tacit ease where nothing else mattered. God, she thought as they walked, there used to be cigarettes everywhere. A cigarette would mean that for a brief span of fifteen minutes, she could focus on something other than the pain in her foot. She didn’t how long they had been on this trek. The malleable time continuum usually escaped her during these endless slogs. For her, it was like driving somewhere (back when she still had a car), feeling like the return trip hadn’t really taken that long. Her scuffed black combat-style boots were worn without socks, rubbing against her ankle, bringing the kind of pain that made everything else seem worse. “You ever notice how none of the lost socks in this city end up in the bins at the shelter?” she asked the boy walking beside her. He was tall and lanky with bad skin and a six-month difference in age. She thought of him as a boy because he didn’t have what she referred to as “believable determination.” She could see, though, how the cog was turning toward a simple truth - the impending moment he would either be relegated to his current fate or find some avenue of self-actualization. She also knew that her view of him was a privilege of her gender. He thought his lankiness was because he’d been forced to eat too many potatoes as a child. Pale and prone to blistering, there were spots on his skin he would pick at whenever they would stop to rest. They hadn’t stopped today. His hair spilled out from his skull in dark unwashed rivulets that danced slightly whenever a car would speed by. She looked to his feet now, clad in old Converse All-Stars, the rubber tops poking out from beneath the now worn-tassled edge of his blue jeans with each step. They were darkened with oil and dirt around the lower leg from all-weather walking. The luxury of doing laundry had long since become historical. His feet moved in automatic succession, resigned to their task of a forward momentum that never seemed to translate to progress. “I never notice that about socks in this city,” he said. She knew he was exhausted. He said ‘this city’ as though there were others with which to compare; as though they’d just arrived off some great cruise, ending after a durable but pleasant time at sea, and were trekking to their seasonal apartment, which they’d quickly purchased with the disbursement from a dead relative so as to avoid some tax or other; to arrive there exhausted but comforted by the familiarity of the place, and to be greeted by the spoons and napkin holders they’d so carefully picked out together. “What time is it?” she asked. The road noise drowned the heel-scrape of his shoes on the endless pavement. She’d told him at the shelter they were the wrong shoes after hearing him complain, but when another male snickered at her admonishments, he’d worn them in defiance. Now he suffered. She noticed a syncopated tension in the way his gait changed after she asked about the time. “I think there’s a bank ahead with a clock on the sign…why would you ask me that?” “I don’t…I don’t know.” “Well I don’t either,” he said, jutting out his wrist to show the lack of a timepiece. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I owned a watch?” The sound of the cars going by went unheard. She felt a hot prickly wave of shame pass through her. She hadn’t meant the question to be an assertion about his station in the world. “I’m…sorry.” she said. “…I’d tell you but it’s been so long I can’t remember…” he said, his voice trailing off as if trying to avoid some memory of a grandparent presenting him with one on his birthday. She watched the steps his feet made and recalled a 9th grade class trip she’d taken to Barcelona. “All the way to Spain with a bag” her mother had quipped, standing in the middle of the airport, looking down at her with an odd half-smile, hands on her hips. She now knew that the look was one of veiled disdain, because her mother had wanted to go instead. The whole trip seemed like some beautiful half-recalled dream when she thought of it now. She was too young then to grasp the significance of travel to an entirely different country as a potential inoculation against either bewilderment or homelessness. Her mother had reservations about the whole thing, asking her repeatedly what she would do if she got lost. She answered she would be with other kids and there were chaperones going; hand selected by the administration, which garnered a barely discernible grunt from her mother. Now she had a different answer for her mother. There was no “lost” anymore; unless you counted the fact that her mother had long since disappeared. The chaperones were of a much different ilk these days. A dormant feeling from in the pit of her stomach spilled into her limbs as if panic might overtake her. This happened, not often, but often enough that when the feeling came on, she had a hard time fighting it off. She always wondered how she’d arrived at the idea that her mother might provide some sort of a safety net in case things didn’t quite work out. The feeling in the pit of her stomach was the result of the knowledge she’d made up the entire notion herself. Each pulse contained acute regret. She hadn’t yet added the necessary action to overcome the feeling. Spirit could be both weak and strong in alternating ways and under differing conditions, but Spirit was not to be trifled with. All mammals were susceptible to its force, but the most enlightened did not make vain efforts at control. Like a see-saw, much of the ease one might find came from the center. Spirit could ebb and Spirit could flow, but Spirit always demanded respect. Her mother, she now knew, had only cared about her wellbeing, but at the time, her mother had felt put upon. Now with her heel being scraped raw by the inside of her boot, she wanted things to be as they’d once been. Comfortable... They were in the belly of the slog now; too far to go back and not far enough to have arrived. She’d made it perfectly clear they weren’t together, but she didn’t want to be by herself. Safety in numbers. He waved a fly away as they trod along and when it came back moments later, he ignored it. The road lurched ahead; stores speckled the north side where they walked, with a train track parallel on the other side. They had not seen a train go by since they’d begun walking. “Where are we going?” she asked. Silence. “Oh, I know. There. We’re going there…” she said, like an elitist matriarch preparing to discuss the ridiculous rise of Fascism from her protected perch of denial; much in the same way she had felt anytime her mother opted for condescension when an unapproved response was given. “Anyone ever say you ask a lot of dumb questions?” he said, not looking at her. She didn’t answer the irony. As a woman in the world it was one of the things you had to deal with. Some male unable to handle pain, the result of his mother making him eat his peanut butter and jelly sandwich with crusts on. This persecution had grown into a muted crusade against all women everywhere. She called it The Resentment of Desire – the whole “can’t live with ‘em, can’t shoot em” joke. She remembered a scene from a Dirty Harry movie she’d watched with the neighbor’s kid decades before. A prostitute, in the back seat of the sheriff’s car after a rather close scrape, just eviscerated the guy. There was nothing the bumbly sheriff could say to Harry other than ‘You gonna let her talk to me like that?’ Harry replied ‘You’re the one wanted to talk.’ There were no homeless feminists just like there were no foxhole atheists. One learned survival by surviving, and she was sometimes entertained by the notion that she could always make money and he would be relegated to whether or not someone would pay him to dig a hole somewhere. There were more men on street corners begging than there were women. But now it was she who was on the street, one foot in front of the other, walking next to this male who likely wouldn’t raise a finger to help her if things went pear-shaped. He wasn’t the worst sort (she could hear her mother’s tongue clacking against the roof of her mouth admonishing her about “settling”) but he wasn’t the best either. He was, as most men were, childish and emotionally unavailable. He’d told her his sad story about being in high school and the truck that his father had saved up for. They’d lived a meager life after his mother had died when he was eleven. There had been no talk of the future, a good thing he said as his father died two years later. He’d stared into nothingness as he remembered: “I’d done the schoolwork, not great or anything, but I’d done it. The wind that blew around in the halls on cold days, with the leaves coming in from outside and being chased by both the unseen force of the air and the janitors never made me wonder about what everyone else had planned. I never saw the leaves and thought, ‘yes, I too should be somewhere else’ you know, ‘on to other things.’ I didn’t know what options were. The din of talk about the future had turned into a sine wave of static in my brain. I mean, sure, others were talking about shit like having visited colleges, staying in a dorm of a weekend and stuff like that, but it was so far out of my realm of experience. All I knew was that I had X number of days before I didn’t have to walk through those halls anymore or go into those same smelling and same looking rooms anymore. Then there was the cap and gown thing, and the circumstance of it hit me but the pomp hadn’t I guess, somehow, and I walked across the stage and shook hands with a man whom I never spoke to in the four years I’d been there. Then it was over and I didn’t feel anything. I saw how happy everyone else was and I wanted to feel that too, but it just wouldn’t come. I was like a man being released from prison, expected to go on outside and find his way, but I hadn’t been prepared for it at all. Then this rich kid I’d hung out with during senior year came up to me. We would usually walk down to the 7-Eleven and smoke cigarettes and eat cheap hot dogs because he liked them and they were all I could afford, and he came up to me with this big smile on his face, happy, and started going on about the brave new frontiers we’d be setting off toward and wasn’t it awesome?! I forced a smile because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, I figured he’d taken some of the good drugs he had access to, being rich and all, and then he said something about some big party everyone would be going to and turned around and I never saw him again.” The assertion in her mind as they walked was that men, for thousands of years, had fucked up the world. Their effigies of cock filling the nothingness of sky, each one bigger and uglier than the one before. Some even covered in mirrors as though to make them appear larger. The problem was that women (or so the loudest among them would have everyone believe) were ready for their shot at reversing this course of domination. The unfortunate truth was that vaginas made for good paintings but not good buildings. The problem was that many of those same women had, over the course of their lives found it necessary to inculcate themselves with the doctrines and practices of the men who surrounded them, sleeping with their oppressors as it were, so the end result was the same. In order to run among wolves, one had to become a wolf. Well, she thought, that and the fact that the evidence things were a mess surrounded them yet no one seemed to really mind. There was struggle and Fate no matter where you were. Random events would creep up that appeared to have some order in their ultimate demise, but not often enough to register on anyone’s transom. Fate: A beetle begins the long arduous task of crossing a sleepy street in a quiet neighborhood. The beetle has no concept of the task ahead it simply picks a direction. It may not even do that – maybe it just starts walking. Then, a Mr. McGillicuddy, shall we say, from over a mile away and even further from the beetle’s consciousness, gets his double-vacuum stainless steel coffee cup nestled into the faux wood grain receptacle of his Jaguar XJS. The beetle has no idea what a car tire is as it laboriously trods along across the expanse of street. The beetle will never know what a car tire is. The beetle will never be aware that finding some reason to dawdle, a moment to discover a new leaf perhaps, to just be a beetle, that by the time Mr. McGillicuddy’s left front Pirelli tire with 15,322 miles logged on it arrives on scene, the beetle would quite possibly have missed a very sudden and very flattening death. Then again, one could argue the beetle does not ever question its place or purpose in the world. As a result, and although entirely unproven with empirical evidence, the beetle’s next moment is exactly the same as every moment that came before. She knew that this was what she was now, a beetle on a sidewalk and she wondered how it was that the male next to her seemed entirely oblivious to this fact. One explanation might be that he thought, somewhere deep down, he would be the one driving the car over all the other beetles some day. This, of course, he would say was his birthright and privilege as a male. This was also what kept him plodding forward without any real progress. Could it all be this simple? Was it all a matter of perspective? Many of those whom she saw at the shelter fairly regularly had long ago dispensed with rational thought, howling nonsensical gibberish to the point it wasn’t even viewed as abnormal anymore. They seemed to understand Zen more than anyone else. Nothing within one’s control so why not let go completely? Perhaps it had more to do with the increasing absence of skin on her foot as it rubbed against the inside of the moistening leather boot. Blood was the only natural liquid she could think of that turned hard without any change in temperature or by adding another substance to it. Well, the only natural liquid possessed by both sexes. Funny she thought as she passed the Reisen Donut Shop, (thinking while looking at the well-worn sign how everything but people got better with age), how that had been the first time she’d thought about sex in the last two weeks. She supposed this had more to do with some sort of survival instinct having taken over than any real lack of interest. It wasn’t the pain of the skin being rubbed off that bothered her as much as the lack of forethought about obtaining something as simple as socks. There was a time of course that she would have made a list, including the necessity of ensuring she had socks on hand for an eventuality of being stranded. She used to be prepared, she thought, but the obsequious notion had resulted in nothing more than her current state of homelessness. Now that she was without a pair of socks, making up a list of necessary provisions in her head didn’t seem to improve her spirits as it had in times past. The sidewalk became uneven and this aggravated the condition of her foot to the point it felt like someone had poured warm water into the leather boot. She knew this to be blood. The pain made the mind come up with all manner of unforeseen explanations as to what might be happening, each one worse than the previous thought. “Can we stop?” she asked. “No, not til we get to the next cross street. Hargrove I think it is…” “Not even just for a bit? My foot is—“ “You want to stop go ahead. I’m gonna keep going.” The pain in her foot, his entire lack of concern and obvious lack of a rationale for not taking a short break brought out her Mother. “What, you got a JOB interview you’re gonna be late for or something?” He said nothing, opting instead to fume. She could tell her words caused an avalanche of self-doubt and self-recrimination. It was a blow to his delicate nether-regions, that area most tender of all maleness. She hadn’t meant him to feel bad, but now with tears coming down his cheeks in wet rivulets that cut through the dirt there, she felt bad. He, like many of his ilk, could serve but not eat. She felt her blood pressure rise, the hot liquid inside her pressing into her chest, making it feel tight and strong. She no longer cared about her foot. Had he decided to say something at that moment, she was certain she could have stomped his guts out right there in front of a Goodyear tire store even with a “Help Wanted” sign out front. There would be no job. There had been a time when he’d had a job, but that was a long time ago and the person who’d hired him had left the printing company and the new guy had been a real pain in the ass (from what he’d told her) and they ended up in a tiff over something left in the break room fridge. Fed up with co-workers eating his lunch every day, he’d taken the initiative and had baked some brownies mixing a very strong laxative in with the cocoa powder. Half the shipping department was out for two days and one guy, Larsen, a middle aged male who was prone to dehydration because he drank too much alcohol, was hospitalized because he’d eaten three of the damn things. And that was when he’d been given his walking papers and as he was fond of saying to other males, “I been walking ever since…” What she couldn’t understand, even with the pain in her foot gnawing into her calf and knee now, was how someone who could be so properly motivated in one situation could lose the entire plot elsewhere. The thing didn’t make sense, and she’d thought to ask him about this, but changed her mind. Once a man started to cry you just had to let them get it over with. They walked past the Hanson Hardware Store with all the mowers out front beckoning to be covered in cut brown grass clippings. The scene reminded her of standing at the window while still an adolescent watching her father in the sweltering heat making rows with the loud machine. The yard he mowed died much in the same way he had when they’d turned it into the northeast section of a Wal-Mart parking after he’d lost their house. He’d eventually started sleeping on the sofa in the living area of their apartment until 1 or 2 in the afternoon and from there it had only been a matter of time. The store looked fairly abuzz for a…what day was it again? She couldn’t remember. Funny that, she thought initially, but then a chill of panic went through her. This is where it begins. The simple things start to fall away. The things you once thought were so much daily rigor and routine. The number of times you said if only time didn’t exist and it could be whatever day you wanted it to be. And now that time it seemed had arrived… How stupid she’d been about…everything. They came upon a bus stop. Deserted now, it proffered a modicum of shade from the beating sun but no protection from the heat of the concrete. Her ankle felt as though someone was using a vegetable peeler on it with every step. But the bench of the stop was a welcome oasis and they eased into sitting as if to savor that initial moment of rest, that moment when the body understands the arduous journey it has been on. They leaned against each other in a not so abandoned way, and from the look of them across the street they appeared to be close to one another, like two soldiers after a fight in some distant land where neither spoke the language and were glad to have a small moment to breathe. “I’m tired,” she said. The boy leaned against her and almost immediately found a spot on his arm to dig at. “Yes, me too,” he said. “I wish we had a cigarette…” “Haven’t you heard smoking kills?” She laughed. “Why do you think I want one?” Levity. The moments were few and far between, usually only appearing from the most arduous of circumstances. “How’s your foot…” What’s this she thought…concern? Where’d that come from? “It hurts like fire,” she said. “I’ve got some plastic bag…it’s clean. Might do as a barrier.” “How’s that?” “Tear off a piece, double it over and put it on the spot where it is rubbing. It’ll stick because of the blood but once it’s on there it will keep the leather from rubbing for a while…here…” He reached into his pocket and pulled the plastic bag out. It was clean and she watched as he tore a circle out and knelt down in front of her. She watched, knowing that he was going through something without any real frame of her own reference. Taking her boot off revealed a half-dollar sized area where the skin was gone. “You should have told me,” he said. The remark came out as genuine concern and she was touched. She felt bad about not having said something sooner. On these mean streets that had little regard for the practice, survival necessitated honesty. “Sorry” she said. Perhaps it was that he understood something she didn’t; something having to do with severity, even though he couldn’t pick the right shoes out of the bin at the shelter to save his life. She thought this fact might be part of his knowledge somehow. That in order to be able to deal with severity one had to practice it. Like monks wearing hair shirts or sitting on ice-caked mountaintops in the Himalayas trying to dry freezing wet sheets with their minds. Perhaps he was some kind of modern monk. She wasn’t sure, but she figured they’d have kicked him out because of his attitude. She giggled at the thought of him being sent on his way by the brothers, none of them realizing he was the most devout and pious among them. He opened her boot as wide as possible so her foot would not touch the sides and move the plastic. “Alright, let’s get on with it Cinderella.” This made her smile at first but then she thought he might have meant it to be condescending. She’d always wondered at that story; how those of Cinderella’s own ilk had caused her to gain what appeared to be at first blush all manner of good fortune. What the story never got to was the psychotic neediness of the prince. “Who the hell falls in love at first sight?” she thought. No, for her it had to be based on something more than crashing some random party thrown by what was ostensibly some rich frat boy looking for something he couldn’t obtain by just starting off with “Hi, my name is…” No, the mothers of America had done their sons a huge disservice for the most part. Not teaching them manners, instead some twisted version of what they wanted in a man. But not this one, she thought. Sure, he had a fairly constant disgruntlement about him, but he had something most men didn’t, a sense of empathy for another human being. He began tying her boot. He cranked on the laces too tight. “Jesus, that’s too tight!” she said. “No help for it. You want it loose it’ll cause more problems than it solves.” “Yes, a bit…please.” He untied the boot and loosened the laces as she moved her foot and then retied them. “That better?” “Yes, thank you.” “Alright, break time’s over. Let’s hit it.” They got their bags together. Her ankle felt a bit better. The pain was still there but not as bad and the plastic seemed to do the trick he’d suggested. What she felt now was the break they’d taken. Having walked so far for so long, anytime they stopped to rest everything seemed to seize up, like a horse drawing a heavy load and having to lurch hard forward to get moving again. She tried walking around the covered bus-stop to work out the kinks. “Plastic working?” he asked. “Oh yeah, definitely. I’m just stiff.” “We’ll get some water. Gotta be a water fountain in the office building up the street there.” She looked ahead and the building looked to be much further than the way he’d made it sound. As they made their way toward the intersection, she felt as if she was walking in Jell-o. Green Jell-o. Each step seemed to be stuck in something and the going was hard. She looked ahead and noticed the signal indicating it was safe to cross. The traffic perpendicular to them was practically non-existent. He went on ahead, not looking back at her. She saw his feet pick up their pace a bit and begin to trot slightly in order to get across the street. They were entirely the wrong shoes to be wearing but she supposed they were his to wear. She looked down and noticed that the boot housing her injured foot was untied. “Good grief” she thought, “he can’t even tie and shoelace properly.” She let the weight of her bag fall from her shoulder and onto the pavement as she knelt down to tie it and then realized this was their lot in life, untied shoelaces. No, she thought, better to be grateful that there was a boot on her foot that she could tie than to get frustrated with him. She tied the boot deliberately and as neatly as she could and felt the satisfaction of closure in the task. It was the sound of the engine that first alerted her that something might be wrong. The sound came in above the normal hum of the street in a way that deliberately quickened her heart rate. As she let go of the laces and began to look up, time slowed. A beetle lumbered by just in front of her, making it’s way across the sidewalk. It was a curious thing, how an organism with such spindly legs and such a relatively enormous weight on its back could plod forward like that, lugubrious and doleful, yet unremittingly. She first heard the oxygen-piercing scream of a woman across the intersection witnessing the final second before impact. When she looked up, all she saw were the sad shoes, resting there in the street as if he’d simply stepped out of them and disappeared. The End. |
Bretton B Holmes holds an MFA in Playwriting from the University of Southern California. His work has been published in various publications and produced across the country. He lives in Texas. You can learn more about him here.
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