I’m on the road heading north from south Florida to
Gainesville. My heavy old car floats at sixty-five mph along a back road route,
fly windows open, air rippling my T-shirt. In my haste to escape Gainesville, I
may have helped kill my best friend. I didn’t attempt to hide anything. The
evidence of my guilt is there. The detective I’ll meet in another hour will know
that I intend to clean up what I can. It’s mid-June now. Spring had been warm. I
may present a self-defense plea.
The apartment complex where I lived with Gary is in the
northwest section of the city, near the Koppers creosote plant. When prevailing
winds are from the south, the air smells of pine straw and neighbors’ cooking.
Otherwise the scent of creosote is pervasive, as though we’re surrounded by telephone
poles and not tall loblolly and longleaf pines. The apartment complex is made
of two-story and half-empty brown cinderblock box structures. A small parking
lot sits at the front entrance. It is large enough to hold perhaps twenty cars,
but most of the tenants are welfare recipients and few of them own a car. I am
one of the car owners.
The people at the complex are afraid of my car. It’s a
four-door 1967 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The man I escaped from Gainesville to calls
it “the voodoo Cutlass”. Its paint has faded to primer gray. A year ago, a
friend’s mother took me in to live with her so that I could attend college. She
had mauve curtains in her house and dust ruffles on the beds. She ended her
evenings by smoking one menthol cigarette and drinking one glass of wine. Rent was
my housework and cooking. I repaid her after a few semesters by starting to
smoke her menthol cigarettes and taking a can of black spray paint to my faded
Cutlass. I painted tribal-looking geometric designs and original motifs all
over the body. My motifs did not harmonize with her mauve curtains and one
glass of wine per night. A month after I’d painted them, she kicked me out and
I went to live with Gary in apartment #9.
#9 was a standalone two-bedroom one-bath unit in the
apartment complex. It faced a row of the two-story units like a condemned man
facing a firing squad. There was a laundry room adjoining our unit, equipped
with one washer. Its agitator was coated in a thick floral-scented frosting of
everyone else’s detergent, powdered and liquid types mixed. The dryer made
every resident’s clothes smell alike, with top notes of fire hazard, thanks to
a long-lost lint screen. The washer and dryer were often used by passers-by and
other transients as surfaces to sit on while illicit substances were smoked.
Any persons passing our kitchen window en route to the smoking lounge felt
compelled to look in out of curiosity.
One quiet evening I arrayed a line of empty beer cans along
the sill of this window and took target practice from the living room sofa. I had a long-barreled Crossman pellet pistol,
and was loading pellets one at a time, pumping the chamber twice, lining up the
sights and firing.
Pf!
A can recoiled and clattered from the sill. I reloaded,
pumped twice, aimed and fired.
Pf! Down went another can. Six cans fit across the sill.
Four more to go. I was inserting another pellet into the breach when suddenly
there was a face at the window, eyes rolling around and checking the place out
en route to the laundry room. I raised the pistol and sighted between the eyes.
The eyes got real big and the man apparently didn’t care for one particular
content of the apartment, that being me.
Our front door was hollow construction, and only a little
sturdier than an interior door. The dead bolt seemed to be present more for
show than any real ability to keep a determined burglar out. On another quiet
evening, Gary and I had archery practice. An old cartoon poster of President
Nixon and Spiro Agnew in Greyhound bus driver uniforms hung on the front door.
The caption underneath read “Leave the Driving to Us”. We strung my old archery
bow and fired arrows at the poster. They penetrated the door easily but stopped
halfway through because of friction. When we retrieved the arrows, we saw that the
holes looked enough like bullet holes from the outside to be of possible
benefit as a burglary deterrent. They remained unpatched.
We took rides to Paines prairie and walked the trails after
heavy rains, looking for artifacts. Everywhere outside Gainesville had been or
still was either pasture or farmland. The dirt trails yielded up their cow bones
and we dug around for more. What we found we took back home, cleaning them of
tiny roots and dark brown loam clinging to the surface. Red clay had worked
into the tiny holes and spongy bone crevices. I built a kinetic sculpture from
the bones, painting stripes and spots on the flat bones before hanging it
outside just above the door. The other residents took a wide berth around our
unit.
I arrived at the Gainesville police station in the
mid-afternoon. The woman who had called me up one evening in tears over the bad
news told me that Detective Cooper was the investigator. I asked for him at the
front desk. He greeted me in an expressionless professional manner and took me
to a small interview room. We sat across a table from one another while he
asked me questions. I saw that he had little rubber bands at the back of his
mouth. They were distracting. Watching the rubber bands stretch and retract
back there was fascinating. Could one pop out and hit someone in the face
during an interview? I wanted to be doing anything other than what I was doing
just then. And this was going to be the most pleasant part.
He asked me who else had a key to the apartment. I said I
didn’t know.
He asked if I knew of any drug use or other illicit activity
going on at the apartment. I said I had suspicions but didn’t know.
I was briefly disoriented when I got into town and tried finding
the street to the apartment complex. It was late afternoon, and I had been sure
that I would get lost or turned around at least twice anyway. I hadn’t been in
this area for six years. A college town can change completely in six years for
people who don’t live there. I drove slowly up the street towards the apartment
entrance and parking lot, my windows down in the warm, humid air, tires
crunching over a deteriorating gravel road as blue jays screamed from the
trees. The car had no air conditioning, and the day was warm. At two hundred
yards out from the apartment, an odor completely new to me probed deep into the
base of my brain and prophesied to me the futures of all mankind.
Sweetish, wet and foul, it admixed with the scent of
creosote to coat a tarry black and sticky outlook onto an entire neighborhood. A
large fly raced past my open window towards the apartment. Just before I got to
the parking lot I could see the standalone unit, every door and window open, profusely
weeping air from fans on high settings placed in every orifice.
Tatters of yellow police tape fluttered from pine trees in a
broken line around the apartment perimeter. I pulled into the lot, parking next
to a newer silver Honda. I assumed that this car belonged to Gary’s dad. Gary
had been his firstborn and only son. I got out and shut the heavy door. Inside,
the apartment was in a familiar yet sinister disarray. In an office which had
once been a bedroom which once was mine, what remains of Gary covers the tile
floor, and is itself covered over by a plastic yellow tarp.
I am a plastic yellow coward.
