Perfect Circle: Chapter 1

"Numero dos. See, the first thing is, when I got in this morning, I found the weekend crew had screwed up the dog food displays." Lee's dog, the Frankenterrier, padded in to scope me out. "This story isn't really about dog food," I told him. "The dog food is just the teaser." Frank's ears drooped, and he settled down under the table to snooze.

Lee took a long pull on his beer. "You're making me hungry." He strolled into his kitchen. "Want something? Vicky did a chicken mole before she went to work."

"Of all your current girlfriends, she's my favorite." I'm a Pierce-Top-With-Fork man, myself, when it comes to cooking.

"How long until we get to the part where you fuck up?" Lee fussed at the stove, dumping a drumstick onto a plate of rice and ladling mole sauce over it. "I bet that's the funny part."

I drained my Pacifico down to the halfway point, still trying to wash away the lingering taste of cat food. "Long story short: I'm already tired and cranky when Mrs. Belton rolls in. The Belton is this vicious scamming old hag who drops by three times a week to pass off color-xeroxed cat-toy coupons and complain about the service. So today she shows up claiming the NutroMax we sold her was spoiled. This is dry food in a vacuum-sealed bag. So I politely reached into the bag for some--"

"And ate it." Lee grinned. "Shit, that's just standing behind the product. They should have given you a raise."

"You'd think." But I had gritted my teeth (still spackled with cat food) and told Dickless Phil, my manager, that his general point -- you can't spray customers in the face with lamb-flavored cat-food crumbs -- was well-taken, and that I would be careful not to do it again, even to vicious scamming old hags. He canned my ass anyway.

Lee and I considered my situation over Mexican food. I dropped out after 11th grade. I knew even then it was a stupid thing to do, but there's a big gap between knowing something and getting it. "The trouble is, I haven't got anything to fucking sell," I said, somewhere through my third Pacifico. "When I was 19, I used to despise the whole idea of growing up into, you know, nine to five in the suburbs. The shows I watched on TV just wanted to sell me beer. Now it's ads for life insurance and financial planning. And the bitch of it is, I want them."

"Next it will be heart medication," Lee said. "Home improvement supplies."

"Viagra," I said gloomily.

"When would you ever need it?"

"Fuck off." I grinned into my beer. "But the older I am, the harder it is to get even shitty jobs. Fuck, I hate worrying about money." I was pissed and even scared about losing a job that 10 years ago I wouldn't have been caught dead taking. How humiliating. "Jesus, Lee, I don't have my G.E.D. I can't drive big trucks. I can't even type."

"There's the Army," Lee suggested.

"Or Refinery Row."

"Same thing," he said. We drank to that.

We finished eating and left the dishes in Lee's sink. I stretched out on the couch while Lee started the VCR and then settled into a fat armchair as the FBI warning played across the blue TV screen. The Frankenterrier assumed his movie-watching position, slumped across Lee's feet. "You know what they say about that which does not kill us," Lee said philosophically, tipping back another mouthful of Pacifico.

"¿Qué?"

"It can still hurt like hell."

"Amen," I said.

That night I couldn't get to sleep. Long after midnight my crappy A/C unit was still beating like a tired heart, losing its long war with the sweltering Houston heat. I lay on the mattress in my "studio" apartment, sweating and itching, while my mind stupidly circled: I couldn't even take my kid to Six Flags -- how did I think I was going to help her through college? Why wasn't my name on her birth certificate? When the hell had she started wearing a bra? Why, for that matter; she was still flatter than a West Texas highway. Around and around, as useless as that old A/C unit, a record with a scratch in it.

Funny to think Megan had probably never seen a vinyl record.

I rolled off my mattress and dug the Classifieds out of a three-day-old copy of the Houston Chronicle, looking for high five-figure jobs for guys with a keen interest in alternative music and no high-school degree. The pickings were slim.

At two in the morning I gave up and went outside. Houston is basically a concrete saucepan full of swamp water. The sun heats it up to a slow boil in May and keeps it simmering through to the end of October. Even at two o'clock in the morning it was still sweltering, sweaty and restless. A tree roach as long as my thumb went hurrying along the sidewalk, big enough to throw a shadow by the yellow gleam of the streetlight. I walked up Cambridge to Holcombe and took the path along Braes Bayou. "Bayou" is our romantic Southern word for "big concrete drainage culvert." The bayous are theoretically there to protect us in case of heavy rain, but they don't stop flooding; they just give you an extra hour to get to high ground.

I walked west along Braes Bayou until the path dipped under the Fannin overpass. From down in the gully, I couldn't see the cars as they passed overhead -- just catch the sweep of their lights going by, and the hiss of tires.

Before me, the path disappeared into the darkness under the bridge. The silhouette of a man was standing there like a gatekeeper in the gloom. I slowed up. A lot of homeless people hang out under these bridges. This guy was wearing a construction worker's battered hard hat and no shoes or socks. I wondered if I should give him a buck, or if that would just make me a good target for a mugging. I slowed up more. Now I was close enough to hear him muttering, some kind of Bible verse.

I had just decided to turn back when he raised his face and I saw that he was dead. His bare feet and pale cheeks and hard hat were all in black and white, and he had the lightless eyes the dead so often have. Those underground eyes. "His feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace," the dead man said. "And his voice as the sound of many waters."

"Jesus," I whispered. "Uncle Billy?"

He was still wearing his Brown & Root jumpsuit. His naked feet stuck out from his pant legs, white as cut mushrooms. I always remembered him as grumpy and middle-aged, but now I realized he had died at only 32 or 33. My age. I got a powerful feeling that he had been waiting for me: waiting years for me to come down to the concrete bayou and be washed in that black water.

One cold distant streetlight showed in the strip of night sky overhead. The banks of the bayou seemed very tall. Down here the darkness was pooled, heavy and deep. Dirty water gurgled and whispered, echoing under the bridge. The smell of decay was thick as mud in my mouth. My heart beat. My chest shook with the thudding of it. Billy's eyes slid across my face, blind as stones. "Be thou faithful unto death," he said, "and I will give thee a crown of life."

I jumped off the asphalt path and bolted up the embankment, digging my fingers into the muddy slope. Bits of cardboard and old beer cans rattled and pinged as I scrabbled up the hillside. Sliding and slipping, I grabbed at the tall grass, tearing out clumps of it, pulling myself up until I scrambled out of the dim ravine. "I have somewhat against thee," Uncle Billy called, from down in the gloom. "Because thou hast left thy first love."

Up at street level, the night seemed normal, flat and wide. Lights on in the office buildings of the Texas Medical Center. Traffic humming through the intersections. I ran and I didn't look back, ran like a bastard down Fannin and then along Old Spanish Trail, my feet thudding and the sound of my own ragged breathing loud in my ears. I didn't stop running until I banged up the back stairs of my apartment building and found myself safe in my own kitchen again.

The last time I saw Uncle Billy, it was 1977. I was watching "Batman" every day after school. My grandpa Jay Paul was still alive, lingering on in the nursing home that would later be shut down after three orderlies were investigated for elder abuse. Back then, David Bowie was in Berlin, making great records like "Low" and "Lodger," but in Deer Park even a rebel like AJ only knew "Space Oddity." In 1977, Josie was already starting to look after her useless doper family. It would be years before we met.

The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down. Not for anyone, not even family. The secret is to pretend you can't hear the voices of the people who have fallen down there in the dark.

There was a red light blinking on my answering machine. The message was from Tom Hanlon, telling me his offer was still on the table. A thousand bucks to come see about the dead girl in his garage.

I stared at the machine for a long time, thinking about Megan, and bus fare, and rent, and the fact that I didn't have a job anymore. This is how girls get to be hookers, I thought. You get into a jam where you've only got one thing left to sell.

I called him back.

Next week, in Chapter 2: When it's all sounds and voices, nine times out of ten you're talking schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is every bit as real and scary as ghosts, but nothing I can do jack shit about.

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