Belly Up Read online

  MY BLACK TONGUE grew into a giant slug, the kind you find in the ocean that have white dots on their backs and slippery skin. It no longer fit in the confines of my mouth so I opened my lips and let it hang out. The bigger my tongue got, the smaller my airhole was. My throat felt like the cave Jesus was left for dead in, the one whose entryway had a giant rolling rock. Don’t let the rock roll over the opening, I remember thinking, keep breathing. I lay down in the shed and put two fingers in my mouth. I pressed my fingers to the top of my tongue. I felt the air go in and out of me and pictured myself from above, deflated and wrinkly.

  I HAVE ONLY BEEN in one serious car crash. I was driving on the highway when it started to rain. Traffic bottlenecked and went from seventy to zero. I stopped my car along the ribbon of red brake lights. And then I saw the car from behind coming for me. I could see it the rearview mirror. He’s coming, I thought, he’s still coming, he’s coming so fast for me, where is my body going to go? My body went forward, significantly, and then the air bag knocked me out cold. I came to bathed in my own blood. It was still seeping out my nose and onto to the white balloon in front of me when I heard the rain coming through the broken windshield and landing on top of my head.

  MY BROTHER HAS ALWAYS BEEN bad with blood. When his wife birthed their daughter, he passed out as soon as the stuff started gushing out of her. People say it’s like that with men, that it’s not that uncommon, that even something less blood-violent than birth is liable to irk them. People say it’s because women are so used to bleeding that they’re better with it, better at understanding what is at play when one’s own liquid leaks. I don’t think this is the case with my brother. I think he just never thinks about all the things that can go wrong. As in, there are the types of people who constantly envision what it would be like to be beheaded, and there are those who don’t. My brother is the latter. He is very satisfied with his veins and the work they do to keep his blood within him. He never thinks about what would happen if they exploded and it all went wrong.

  THE BUMPS ON THE TOP of my tongue looked like white pimples. I examined them in the mirror of my treasure box and squeezed to see if they would pop. Watery blood leaked out onto my fingertips. The red was only there for an instant and then it seeped into the black.

  WHEN I REALIZED MY TONGUE was continuing to grow, I knew I had to tell my mother. I walked back into the house, found her working on setting some tile in one of the would-be bathrooms, and stuck out my tongue. What did you swallow, she screamed at me, what have you done?

  IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME to reconcile two of my tendencies: I have a great fear of diving boards and yet when I am on high-up platforms, such as roofs or cliff trails, I have an impulse to jump. I feel it in my feet, this kind of airy giddiness that goes what-if, what-if. Whereas, up on the diving board there is the certainty of the outcome and I clam up. I’ve been made to go up that long ladder by peer pressure and then there I am. I famously as a teenager actually turned around once and retreated from a high-dive, an unspeakable, shameful act at that age, so why do I have such an urge to jump off other things? Is it because the outcome is unknowable? What does my brain think I am going to do—fly? It’s ridiculous that my body says, just jump off it. When I lived in a big-city apartment building and was smoking a cigarette with a friend up on the roof, I once confessed this to them and the friend said, oh, of course, me too. It’s a strange feeling, the friend said, wanting to fling yourself off things. Is this why we are friends? I asked her, because we both want to jump?

  IN THE CAR ON THE WAY to the doctor my mother said, oh, when I get my hands on your brother. I couldn’t speak because of my black tongue. If I had been able to speak I would have told her, it wasn’t him. He didn’t threaten or dare or make false promises of riches. He didn’t push my head down into the wires or tell me that if I did it I would gain eternal life. I did wonder at the time if this experience would make me live longer or make me more conductive. You hear stories about people who are, by no coincidence, struck by lightning twice. I did this to myself, I wanted to tell my mother. I don’t know why I did this. Your guess is as good as mine.

  THERE ARE GOOD THINGS ABOUT having the impulse to throw yourself off the side of a cliff. I think it makes you more likely to survive. If things get bad, I’ll just learn Arabic and move to Beirut, I have thought before. If my relationship falls apart, I’ll just move to Bangladesh. Surely there I can make myself again, make myself new. Maybe that’s what I thought was going to happen when I stuck my tongue in. Maybe I thought it would let me start over and be reformed.

  IN THE AMBULANCE after the car crash I remember putting my fingers in my mouth and feeling my tongue, all around it, underneath it and on its sides. It felt normal-sized. What was I feeling for at the back of my throat? Some type of closing? The threat of it all lurking back there deep in the depths of my mouth?

  IN THE PEDIATRICS WARD my mother said, only you would do this to me. What have I done to make you do this to me? My black tongue hung out of my lips. A doctor came and put a clear moist bandage on it. Wrapped in the doctor’s swaddling cloth the black tongue looked like a piece of shellacked rotten fish. Through the bandage the doctor put a needle. It felt like he was sucking out the black tongue’s extra blood. Deflating, I thought again, important things are leaving me. How important is it to keep things like blood inside?

  FOR MY BROTHER’S THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, I had him and his wife over and made squid ink spaghetti. Not from scratch—I just bought it at the store. My brother was very skeptical of the color of the noodles. He was the type of kid who, for a long time, only ate things that were white and starch. Why did you make me this weird thing? my brother said after the meal was done. Why didn’t you just make something I like? What happened—you went to the grocery store and you jumped in the wrong food aisle? Just because something is on the shelves doesn’t mean that it’s for you to try?

  IN THE BROKEN-FINGER DAYS I did a lot of punching. It was all above water, legal hitting, but it was still very violent and I would, oftentimes, cause people to bleed. I crushed noses like cherry tomatoes. I made black eyes turn purple, then yellow. I was running miles a day, eating like a maniac, because no matter how much food I put in my body, I could not equal the amount of energy that left through my hits. Over the couple years I was heavy hitting, parts of my tongue got taken off while fighting. Some nut would get me hard in the cheek and my jaw would clamp quick before I got a chance to get my tongue back inside my teeth. They were just little chips, for the most part. It always felt like they more or less grew back. Whenever this happened, I’d swish my bloody tongue bits around my mouth and then, before the next throw, spit into the glove of my left hand.

  THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH of your body you can ruin.

  I BEND DOWN ON MY KNEES and look into the hole. In the hole I see my parents’ roofless rancher and my brother playing pick-up-sticks by himself in the backyard. My mother is wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt. She is humming to herself, scrubbing at something. She’s upright and at the kitchen counter, sponge in hand. I crawl up on a chair next to her. Dinner, says my mother and my brother rushes in. Wild rice, my mother says, nothing more. Nothing more? my brother and I exclaim in unison. My mother, unfaltering, shovels the spoonfuls of it into our mouths. I choke on the rice and spit it out. My brother guzzles it down and inhales.

  THE SUMMER OF THE BLACK TONGUE didn’t tame me. It made me wilder, in some ways, more willing to try things because I had done the worst and survived. Yes, my mother was mad at me for a day or so, but eventually, during the afternoon of the next day, she gave in. I think the live-in nature of the whole thing made the forgiveness come faster. I was a child in a half-built house—what did she expect? I had a summer birthday, so we ended up having to do a black tongue celebration. Although the black only lasted a month or so, in the family mythology the black stuck around the whole year. The summer of the black tongue turned into the black tongue birthday, which turned into the year my tongue was colored bla
ck. My father framed a photo of me from that birthday, shirtless in our brown backyard with a stick in my hand and my tongue out, not even trying to blow out the candles, not even trying to please. Look, I was saying to the photographer, who was probably my mother, look what I’ve done. I have a black tongue. I won’t do anything you ask of me unless I get to take off my shirt and do live-in friends.

  WHEN I LOOK CLOSELY at my tongue I can tell it’s actually a forest of flesh-colored flaps, small and floppy, that comb down flat when I pull them across my upper teeth. You have to brush it, my mother says. I’ll have this tongue until I ruin it. Zing, I think as I stick it out, spark sizzle black.

  BURN

  PEOPLE KEPT DYING and I was made to sleep in their beds. The dead had been removed, and so I slept with their wives. The first to die was my neighbor, Billy Green. Billy Green had a wife named Wanda. Wanda had large breasts and hip-hugger jeans. They took Billy away in the night. I got a note on my door the next morning. It said:

  Last night Billy Green drove his truck into a tree on Arizona Street. Wanda is now all alone. Will you sleep over at her place tonight? Keep her company at home? Make sure the shock of it all isn’t too bad?

  I replied in the affirmative. I’m your man, I said. I’ll take care of Wanda. I’ve always had a knack with cooking, and so I figured I could feed Wanda’s grief. I planned to bring her some rosemary chicken and sage-butter biscuits. Maybe some lemon bars for dessert and some sweet tea for drinking. I wanted to bring her anything that would help with the forgetting, something good enough and rich enough that all her thoughts would go to her taste buds instead of into mourning.

  In the evening I walked over to Wanda’s and wrapped my arms around her. There was a gaggle of women weeping with her on the porch. I showed the women the food and told them to drink some iced tea and eat the lemon bars. After the women were fed and their tears turned to sniffling, I waved each one of them off into the night and said:

  “See you at the service!”

  “May the Lord be with you tonight!”

  “Take a drink for Billy!”

  They nodded and embraced me and said yes, of course, yes, we will do it all. I ushered Wanda back inside. She had the look of a squirrel who had just discovered winter. I poured her a cold cup of water. We sat in the living room. Wanda said:

  “You know, Joe Engel, I just never thought it was going to get this bad. I just never thought Billy would be so nothing that he left. He left me, Joe. He put himself in that tree out of spite. I can see him in the driver’s seat of the Chevy, thinking Wanda, Goddammit, I am bored as hell. You, Wanda Green, have put me here in this damn tree. I am going to lodge myself in this here trunk and make you pull me out. I am going to make you get blood on your hands and brains on your jeans and—”

  I interrupted:

  “That’s not true, Wanda. Don’t say it, because it’s not true. Billy is a dead man and he didn’t say any of that. The only thing he was thinking when his head hit that tree is whiskey. Let’s go to bed, Wanda. It’s too much. I’ll sleep on the couch here, and we’ll just go to bed.”

  “Oh, Joe, please. I can’t bear to be in that room by myself. Just come and lie next to me, will you? We’ll sleep with our clothes on and everything. I’m so tired, I was going to fall asleep with my clothes on, anyway. Just don’t leave me alone like this.”

  “OK. Wanda, OK. I’ll come in after you’ve adjusted yourself.”

  I could hear her in the bedroom sniffling and putting her head on the pillow. I heard her turn once and then entered after her. Sure enough, there Wanda was, in her jeans and tank top, sleeping hard. The bedroom had fake wood paneling and a large glass door that opened onto the backyard. There was a dresser and on top of the dresser was a picture of Wanda and Billy at a lake in a heart-shaped picture frame. Billy looked like he was losing hair and had somehow burnt his nose. I took off my hat and put it on the dresser and crawled into bed with Wanda. I found the groove of Billy’s body in the bed frame and sunk in. I curled my knees how he had curled his. I shouldered the pillow with the same awkward angle. I heard Wanda breathe at my back as he had no doubt heard her do. The wind whispered in through her nostrils and gasped out through her mouth. Her body shuddered with life as if she was crying in her sleep. The moon came in through the sliding glass door and lightened us both. I dozed off and then woke back up sweating rain. I was so hot that my head felt pushed, cornered into a box and pressed on. I got up and got some water and took off my flannel shirt. I had an undershirt on beneath, so I figured I was still within the range of reasonable. As I was walking back to the bed, I heard a tap on the sliding glass door.

  “Hey you! Joe Engel! What the hell are you doing in that Goddamn bedroom with my Goddamn wife?”

  There Billy was, wispy and a bit see-through to be sure, but hollering and drunk all the same. I put a finger up signaling, “Give me a moment, Billy. Let me go get something and then I’ll come outside and explain the whole thing.”

  He kept screaming and yelling and kicking the door. I was scared as hell Wanda would wake up and die of fright, but she kept snoring and even turned over to face the other way. I had seen a rope out in the garage earlier when the gaggle had been gathering and went to retrieve it. I put my boots back on but kept my over shirt off and put the rope over one shoulder before I slid the glass door open to meet dead Billy Green.

  Billy said, “Joe. I don’t know what you think you are doing in there, but that is my wife and I don’t care how drunk you think I am, I am not drunk enough to look at you sleeping in my bed! I am going to beat you with this bottle and put this here dagger right through your heart!”

  I let Billy say and do as he wanted because I knew his bottle and his dagger was just smoke and air. I said, “You go ahead and try that and see how that works out for you.”

  I could almost see his face turning red with rage. He raised his bottle of ghost Beam and brought it down on my crown. It went straight through me. Ghost glass. It’s like having a cup of cold water thrown on you, nothing more. I took advantage of his surprise and pulled his legs out from under him. I folded him into quarters and then halved him again and stuffed him in a nearby bucket. Then I took a tarp and pulled it tight over the top. Billy was sounding all muffled inside and kept hollering about his bottle. I whipped out the rope and swung it around the top and then crossed it over the bottom and tied it so tight I knew he would never get out. Then I dug a hole deep enough to stand in and placed the ghost of Billy Green at the very bottom.

  “Goodbye, Billy,” I said as I heaped dirt on top of the canned preserves of his soul.

  Inside Wanda was still snoring. She looked pretty in this late light of the moon. I crawled back in beside her and went straight to sleeping and woke up the next morning in the most peaceful state. She made me coffee and cried a little bit, but it was a relaxed sob, not one filled with desperation. Just an exhale of air accompanied by a slow tear. After she let it out she smiled and sat down and pushed her bangs off her forehead and looked over at me.

  “Thanks for staying, Joe,” she said.

  “Well, you’re so welcome, Wanda. I wouldn’t have let it be any other way.”

  “I heard you doing battle with Billy last night, and I want to thank you for that, too.”

  “Of course, Wanda. Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.”

  And with that I kind of half bowed and walked out the front door and went back home to make myself some breakfast. I left Wanda the remains of the chicken and the biscuits.

  As fall took hold, Wanda turned from teary-eyed to tough. I saw her at the grocery store picking out produce with the confidence of a woman who knew what she needed. In our nook of town the leaves kept turning until they twisted themselves off. Snow spattered our walkways and I shoveled what I could. It was when we were knee-deep in winter that I got another note on my door. It said:

  Joe. Robert’s dead. Keeled over while gardening. It is a very bad scene over here at Mary’s. Come i
f you can. We need all the help we can get.

  I stopped what I was doing and prepared myself for the white world. I got to Mary’s with a thermos of hot chocolate and some coffee cake and a goat cheese–zucchini casserole and asked her if there was anything I could do. People had been over earlier, but had all left because of the early setting of the sun. Things needed to be done before the night froze. Mary didn’t say anything or look up into my face. She just sat there in her easy chair, looking like she was having a vision, dry-eyed, staring off into the far corner of the room. As the night got deeper I said, “Well Mary, time for me to get home,” but then she turned and gave me this look of absolute terror so I reneged and said, “but I can of course stay if you want.” She nodded her head but still didn’t speak. When it got to be eleven I tried again, “Look Mary, it’s late. Let’s get some sleep.” And in response, she held out her arms to me like a child wanting to be picked up and taken to bed. I walked over to her and she put her arms around my neck and I swung her legs under my elbow. She bowed her head in near slumber and her body bent at her torso. I carried her across the living room and down a narrow hallway filled with pictures of their wedding, their children, their generations of dogs. I pushed open the door to the bedroom with my foot and placed Mary on the side of the bed that looked like hers. I couldn’t tell if she had fallen asleep in my arms or just refused to open her eyes. I made for the door, to go sleep on the living room floor, but I heard a voice behind me. At first it sounded like just a small yelp but then Mary cleared her throat and said, “Please don’t.” I went over to Robert’s side of the bed and sat for a moment and then took off my shoes and swung my legs in. My body felt dwarfed by the imprint of his large form and the depression it had made in his sleep. Mary was breathing steady but I knew she wasn’t sleeping. The snow and the walk and the carrying had tired me and despite my unease at falling asleep, I did so faster than faucet water turns cold.