I’m with my drinking buddies and all I have to do is lean over once and whisper at them, psst, and then I just start on it.
It was from a morning where I woke up at three A.M. in the morning, earlier than I normally would’ve but not by that much so, some two or three hours. Before I fell back asleep, I freed myself up in my boxers and flipped my cell phone over and saw the time, and I saw that I’d missed a phone call or two. I also understood that Mary-Kate, my first wife, had snored fully through these calls in a way I hadn’t, although it wasn’t like I noticed any of this myself, since I was still a little warm and bewildered. So later, around seven A.M., after I’d poured my secret first and mixed it in with my coffee, I got another phone call that came as a huge surprise, and this phone call had told me that Jacoby was dead.
All my coffee tastes the same. I thought this just before my phone rang. The refrigerator magnets and outside past the frosted patio windows, and the morning light that shone in along the porch deck, and everything else, were as still as I remember them. I make the same terrified face every phone call I get.
“Bus,” which is what all my close friends and Mary-Kate call me, “Bus, well I’ll be.”
On the other end of the phone was a man named Kevin Belyear. The type of man who has been in my phone forever, since before they even started making these things. But it’d been more than some ten years, or a really long time like that, since I had last heard his voice. He said it was a pleasure to hear mine, except I hadn’t said a thing yet, so I just said, “Kevin.”
“Bus, something happened and there’s something I want to talk to you about,” Kevin said.
“Sure, go ahead Kevin.”
“I need to talk to you about something,” Kevin said, “is Liam there?”
Liam is our boy.
“I wish,” I laughed. No shit, I laughed. “Been an empty nest over here for a while now. Especially since this pandemic business started up.”
“Ah,” said Kevin, “Jacoby never left our house.”
That was what he told me first.
It made sense, as that was how we knew each other. Our boys had grown up and used to run around together when we all lived in Mount Pleasant, Texas. I’d drink beers with Kevin and we became buddies ourselves. Mary-Kate and Kevin’s wife Charlene would join us sometimes in their own conversation, around the kitchen table, while the boys liked to run around and shout and holler. Both boys played on the same club soccer team, and they had matching neon backpacks and soccer cleats and necklaces the both of them did, and each a spell of long sweeping bangs that would bother their eyes. The boys loved iPod touch video games and the Wii, and some nights on a sleep-over I would wake up in the middle of the night and hear them still at it.
Then one evening Kevin told me his fat boss sat him down and offered him a job on his company’s new off-shore project. They would relocate to Beaumont, Texas, where he would make a whole lot more money. That was what happened next. These sorts of things happen all the time in the business. It happened to me once after our boy was born, and it happened again after the recession. But in every way, and especially in the business, life tunnels on.
Liam, he went out and finished middle school then high school and graduated from Louisiana State University an entire semester early. He worked as a risk consultant up until the pandemic, when he transitioned into wholesale distribution. We’re extremely proud of our boy and we make sure to tell him every time we see him.
I got up then for another cup of coffee. With my hands full, I let the phone rest between my cheek and my shoulder, and undid the cap of the shooter with my teeth. I heard the toilet with the loose flapper in the half-bath refill itself with a long metal hiss. I swirled my coffee around and sipped on it. When I took this phone call I wasn’t in my chair, and I have two chairs in this house that are mine. I have my sofa recliner with a great view of the TV, and I have my seat on my side of the dining table that faces the hallway to my bedroom. I was seated in neither one of these, but a different chair at the table, a fourth chair that almost no one sits in at any time.
And as for the other boy, I had to assume that every moment that had passed had passed for him as well. I have no idea what kind of person Jacoby became in all this time. An old fart like me, I only know a few things. I learned that Jacoby worked as a Friday’s waiter and had a new girlfriend when lockdown began. I know that all of his new buddies were a hooligan bunch who didn’t like to be slowed down. I know he had been outside when he wasn’t supposed to be. The boy sneaking out at the age of twenty-five, would you believe it. He had come home with symptoms.
But that ain’t what did him in. I know how they get, any excuse to hole up away from you, and they go on and try to hide their excitement. He had food in there and a bathroom, and paranoia on his side. Kevin and Charlene hadn’t seen him for four days and were still convinced he was under the same roof. Finally, they received a phone call themselves.
They shrieked across the house for hours. They figured the illness had up and vanished the boy from the face of our Earth, would you believe it. At the time I would. I would’ve never believed that hooligan bunch on the other end of the line.
That night Jacoby had climbed out the window and landed on the A/C unit at the base of their house and was out of there. Been doing it nearly every night, and would climb back through drunk somehow in the early morning before anybody woke up. They liked to throw it down, Jacoby and his buddies and his new girlfriend did, on some very late nights. They liked to pass handles around until one of them puked out the window of a moving car. I know that one of his buddies, I’m not sure which, suggested an idea that they go to something young people go to called micro-wrestling, which was still running in secret behind an abandoned Randall’s. This is where little people, people born as dwarfs, wrestle and fight and bets are placed on them. Hell if I know. But that’s what happened next. It also seemed that Jacoby hadn’t really wanted to go to that, but said he didn’t want to go back either, that he felt like a prisoner in his own home.
I’ve had my fun before, and I’ve drowned my troubles, too. I know how easy it is.
This wrestling ring was an inflatable pool aired up behind the strip mall, and there were a couple of dumpsters and the cars parked around to border them in. Jacoby, his new girlfriend, and his buddies planned to smoke a little something and pass it around and mingle. That’s what they did next. The buddies were drunk and tried talking some of the dwarfs into fighting them for money when Jacoby went to smoke a cigarette by himself. They hadn’t noticed he left.
I heard soft water running from my bathroom inside my bedroom. I saw the sun reveal where all the dust had piled up in my house. I saw the paint on the porch deck was peeling off and I saw the squirrels had been getting to my bird feeders. I felt shame run through me, a fast thought, that if this phone call might end soon then I would have time for one more cup of coffee.
Jacoby took a final draw from his cigarette and threw it in the dumpster. Somebody, we don’t know who, had gotten behind the wheel of a pick-up truck that should not have. Jacoby leaned against the wall of the strip mall behind the dumpster and took a breather. It seemed he didn’t want to watch the wrestling.
It must have been a free-for-all, no holds barred. His dumbass buddies slipping around in that inflatable pool, taking licks to their thighs and knees and laughing off their asses. They were all talking shit, pushing bruises, seeing how far they could take it. Even Jacoby.
At once, bam, the pick-up truck hit the dumpster. It went in reverse when it hadn’t meant to. Jacoby was behind it and was crushed out of space. Some people began to scramble.
Yes, this right here was a wicked story, I was seeing that now, and all what Kevin had just gotten done telling me over the phone.
It was then that Mary-Kate, my first wife, walked in.
She didn’t say a word of good morning to me but instead passed right on by as if I was the potted plant or the framed photo of our family. I realized immediately, horrified, that I’d forgotten completely everything we argued about the night before and all the reasons she was upset with me.
“Can you believe that, Bus?” Kevin choked out, “a prisoner in his own home?”
Mary-Kate went and stood by the sink and looked out into the yard at some of our things. Some dead limbs out there, the fallen pine needles, the grill with the tarp over it, and the hose-head hanging limp over the wooden yard fence, just to name a few.
I had all this time on my hands but not enough to rinse my mug out in the sink.
When I finally hung up the phone I told Mary-Kate there was something I wanted to talk to her about.
“Not now, Bus.”
I burped. “No, I got something important to say, I swear it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever thought,” Mary-Kate spun around to face me, “for one second of your stupid useless life, that I might have something I would like to say to you?”
But get this, I tapped my drinking buddy on the elbow, get this: the invitations still came in as physical mail, but said that for the funeral we’d have to Zoom in. The meeting room number and the passcode, Jacoby’s birthday, were written on the inside.
I could tell from her background that Mary-Kate called in from her sister’s house. I knew Kevin and I knew Charlene. And there my boy was, in his muted box in the corner of my laptop. I drank from a cup just out of view of the camera. Liam wore a nice black coat, but he looked like he had just woken up, his hair reaching for every direction, beautiful and rare and wild as an egg.