Jude Rall

General Rules for Deadbeats

All of us sat around in the shelter of the canvas awning attached to Isiah’s RV all still on our parents mobile family plan. He, Isiah, had been working the last three months on a project where he filmed those banners on the side of small town roads with those dead WW2, Korea and Nam veterans in their dress uniforms and editing them together with pictures of men who look just like them, close up, the slowly wracking back the digital zoom revealing the inevitable Nazi and Soviet uniforms. He liked explaining to us his goals with it and he liked to explain how he wanted it to make middle aged white men, specifically his Dad’s age and demographic feel. It was a very old school art piece that could make someone feel important, like he was changing the world. 

Often, we sat down under this RV by the river. Their parents lived up the hill and we usually slept on the ground or if it was cold or raining stuffed in the RV. It was buggy but we often had a fire going and sometimes a satellite for TV because some of us liked to watch sports. We drank beer and sometimes the other guys smoked. Sometimes girls were brought around but never stayed long and we usually understood and if a guy didn’t understand he’d run off with the girl and we would understand that too. Isaiah was the de facto leader not because everyone liked him but because he talked the most and had the most money from something he wouldn’t say. We fished a lot but mostly we sat and were quiet and drank beers. A lot of the time Isaiah would talk and prompt the other guys into discussion about what he put on the TV via youtube airplay or just what was on the news. There was that typical masochistic delight from talking about these things. But I never really talked. When he prompted me I would usually say, “I don’t know much about that,” and let it drop, reel in my bobber or if I had not bobber get another beer from the cooler. I would really get more angry than anyone else talking about those things. Everyone thought I had half a brain or no brain at all due to the muteness and my staring off. One night I heard someone talking to Isaiah asking him why I was there, what I did, that I seemed like less than a zombie. “We ain’t all do nothing,” Isaiah told him, as if he was making a point and any chance he got he would bring up my past, “he was big once. bigger than you or me. You should’ve talked to him fresh out of school before his brain went to mush in this place. He could talk so good that your mind would go to TV static just listening. Now it seems he says one thing and does another.” The other guy, not Isaiah, laughed, and through the wall I could hear him shrug, “He doesn’t even smoke,” he said. 

It was all set to go on this way. I hung around like a distant cousin and drank. I would spend most of my internal time thinking about what Isaiah said when I used to be big. I couldn’t think of what it would be like to be smart, let alone remember it. It was something on the TV that I saw at a glance. That a close friend of mine had gotten into a car accident and it was on national news because they were trans. Most of the guys watched the footage of the car accident stone faced with these smiles on their faces (like smiles were little hands that could push away accident and dominos) then when she slammed into the wall and spun out, hitting the truck, one leaned back in their chair and remarked that the person who had been driving the small and crumpled car was an idiot (my friend). The truck driver ran up and pulled her out of the car then got all confused but man-ed up and tried his best to treat the injury that the news had blurred unmasterfully. No one said much more about it and no one listened to the report and the angle taken much since someone caught a big fish. Everyone rushed over and they decided it was big enough to keep and eat for dinner. I asked Isaiah to drive me into Little Rock and he did that night not half drunk. He told me in his old jeep SUV that he had a dream about me leaving a few nights ago. That to him, there at the commune, I was like Indiana Jones teaching classes at school on history, and that in his dream he saw me diving into a tomb with a,“standard expression, but really loving it.” 

“You were really loving it,” he said to the steering wheel, he’s eyes getting red a little, and I could tell that this was one of those moments similar to the warm moments I used to get reading that part in War and Peace where Nikoli thinks about how he danced with his late father and how in the future he would dance with his son. That parallel. Except this moment was absurd and stupid and I barely knew Isaiah.

On the greyhound bus an old man sitting next to me looked at me and told me I had a disturbing face. It seemed my worst fears had come alive. I looked at him and tried to imagine how I looked to him. He sat hunched over. An older pair of cowboy boots with the American flag on them were there, on the floor, and after a moment I knew for sure that somehow they were attached to the jeans falling into them, somehow. “Now, why would you say that to someone?” I asked. “Because you keep moving your mouth like you’re unaware of it. And you just have the look of a catfish with that wide mouth of yours and long hair. The long hair. When’s the last time you stretched?” 

“My what?” 

The plan was to find a way to go directly to the hospital, see her, and take the bus back to the commune. 

Rode on the bus snakingly through Detroit trying to remember how I had managed to get around before. 

Inside the hospital I asked for elucidation of room number of one Clara. They denied me that. They, the receptionist, told me that she wasn’t seeing visitors. And I didn’t plead. I told her thank you then walked around for a minute until she went to get something from behind the desk and walked past. I looked through the windows of most that I passed. If it got bad I would pretend I had been told the room number and forgotten it.

I passed one room with a group of men standing outside talking about building materials. Her father and brother. People in the trades could always launch into their strange mazelike conversations that seemed similar to conversations about movies and TV in that once one of the two parties in the conversation agree on liking something or being fans of some material or technique the conversation proceeds completely cordially. The difference was in conversation about Television and Movies, specifically that, not a conversation about making a movie, since that would be trade conversation, no one can be better than another person in their taste or opinions, but everyone believes they are. It ends up at a stalemate and is deeply unsatisfying. This is opposed to the sense of the work conversation, where once at common ground, the better tradesman in a specific skill can come out knowledgeable, explain their technique in an interesting and possibly completely uninformative way, to feel better, then the other tradesman, now entering into his own specific and smart discovery about materials and trade, or story about his own creation (still, though alienated from his final product) can garner his own ego and prideful boost and thus the spiral goes on and on talking about material (Both conversations are impossible on the internet since a Trade turns into TV). These two were talking about painting walls at a rate that could never be stopped unless for an outside force. That outside force was me, and I was glad, for, I couldn’t stand conversations of any kind. 

“Wow,” said the younger one. “I have not seen you in a long time.” He was perfectly happy to see me. 

“I saw it on the news. How is she doing?” I asked, stopping at a good talking length from the two men. 

“Alive, but not in great condition,” said the older man. He seemed to be considering something serious in his head. Likely, the possibility of his daughter's death. “Why do you keep doing that with your lips?” he asked me. 

I shrugged because I did not know what he was talking about and did not see why it mattered. “Can I go in and see her?” I asked. 

“There’s some people in there already. They’ve been there all day with her. They give us mean looks when we go in so we’ve just been staying out, mostly. But you can go in.” 

“Who is it?” 

“Do you want to stay at our house tonight? We always liked you. And you look like you need a shower.” 

“Sure, maybe,” I said, and I pushed through the chemical smelling men and entered the room. 

Two people with their backs to me sat reading books in nearly identical postures. It could be possible that one was not reading but instead mirroring. When I came in the man to my left who was my age sat up further and turned. The girl sitting to the right of me continued reading. The man, Tyler, mouth dropped open. He kicked the girl next to him, Angela, in her Doc Martins, to get her to look at me. She turned and her jaw did not drop but her face went brilliantly red. This was no soldier returning home. The dictator reveals that the man assassinated had only been a body double. I walked to the other side of the bed. I did not want to have to stand behind them the entire time. They followed me with their heads all the way. The girl in the hospital bed was breathing, slightly, and there were bandages spilling out from under her hospital gown (she was not under the covers). Her face was perfectly fine, serine, it was almost nice to look at except for the fact that it made me feel responsible for something I didn’t do because of the extensive damage.

“Has she talked yet?” I asked. 

“No, not at all,” Tyler said, smoothing his long and well cleaned hair behind the ears. He had that sort of dark sallow skinny face that people didn’t realize they had. 

“But they said she’ll wake up any minute,” Angela said then stood up. “In fact could you watch her for a minute while we go out for a cigarette.” I could not understand my generation and the obsession with hundreds of years of cigarette propaganda. “You can do that can’t you?” The way she said it, unflinchingly, almost kind, could’ve made it sound to anyone who did not know us that she was joking. They both got their heavy canvas jackets off the back of their chairs and left the room. 

Outside the two relatives had gone. I assumed they would be back later too. I pulled a third chair over. Listening to the low, slow breathing of one of my closest friends. I had only known her as a girl. We met in college, in a class, and I found her to be smarter than anyone.

There was an apparent quietness of the room and when I seemed awake to it (The World), rare moments, I felt entirely present, good or bad, most of our lives, divine or not, we are asleep. But these moments, a peculiar melancholy formed paired with a peculiar sourceless embarrassment and I would start to think that these feelings might be so strange and specific that they could only be mine and mine alone. Then often, in those times, like when I sat there in the hospital room, I think of my Dad. I had an idea that some of these deeper, possibly genetic ways of processing the world humans have, we shared, he and I. We lived similar lives too, because in many ways, I modeled myself from him. And I would think that maybe if there is one person in the world who feels as I do it was him. I could get myself to believe, with some effort, that since he, my father felt closely, another person could, then do everyone (The World). Then I gained a confusing feeling of consultation from the universe and that could only be consultative through this method, otherwise, the feeling turns to dread. I liked to believe that he might’ve sat in hospital rooms, when he was my age, and the world was totally and slightly different but he felt the same. Likely, no. 

I sat back down, watched her breath and smiled a little to myself while now thinking about people and places. She opened her eyes for a moment then closed them and opened them again. She looked at me for a while and said, “Why are you moving your lips like that, Jacob? You look like a fish.” 

I smiled and didn’t say anything. I did not feel like being funny today. 

“You’re here,” she said. “You should come back more often. It wasn’t too bad. You didn’t kill him.” 

“You’re all loopy on painkillers,” I said. “And I would rather be a deadbeat.” 

“Has anyone been here? Besides my uncle and my Dad?” 

“Tyler and Angela.” 

“Oh, I know about them. I pretend to sleep,” she winked, “since all they talk about is movies and TV. To them I’m sitting on the couch with a high noon not injured.” 

“You were on the national news.” 

“I know. My Dad said there were death threats.” 

I expect I made a disgusted face. “Right. I’d expect that. No visitors?” 

“None, no. So far so good. The death threats are general, blankets, because if they got personal, well, then there would be an empathy problem.” 

“I would hope, but maybe that isn’t how it works. Are you in pain?” 

“Yes.” 

“Sorry. I’m going to go now. I only wanted to check if you were ok,” I stood and went to the door. I saw Tyler and Angela were coming back through the small window in the door. 

“Please stay in town,” she asked, before I went through the door. 

In the hall Tyler asked if she had said anything or woken up when they were gone. 

Told them no. 

Back in Arkansas I called Isiah from the greyhound station and asked if he would pick me up. 

“No, Jacob, no, I can’t.” 

I didn’t say anything knowing that in a moment he would explain. 

“There was a vote and you know we are perfectly democratic here. You know this? And the fact is our and your ideologies don’t, can’t, line up. Now, look, I don’t believe it. I like you. It’s them. Then, they got together.” 

“One more beer for each of them huh? Who will dig their fucking worms from the ground?” 

“It’s alright. It’s alright, calm down. I venmoed you for the rest of your deposit, the five hundred deposit you gave two years ago, remember? There’s two hundred left.” 

“Were they just waiting for me to leave? You think?” 

“You’re mad?” Isaiah asked, wondering like a small kid. 

“Why not.”  

“It is only surprising to me because you haven’t showed this much- fucking stuff- juice for a year and a half.” He yelled this. He toned down, “look go to California for a bit or something, that’s what everyone does. Or go to the east and wreak havoc, maybe with a few minor charges of protest we can do a revote.”

“You know, I was like that, because I was trying to get to some kind of egoless place and-” 

Isaiah hung up. I realized it was stupid. Pretty much all of it. Isaiah called me back, a moment later, and I picked up, calm. 

“You know, Jacob, you always reminded me of this officer from wine country New York. I found him below the finger lakes and he was one of the only ones I found Cause Of Death. You look just like him.” And added like nothing at all, “he looked like he could’ve been your father.” he paused again, then, “There’s a memoir of a buddy of his that said he was shot and he hid it from his squad for a whole week. They all said he acted completely normal and nobody noticed and right when they were walking through this flower field in eastern France with a view of the whole countryside right there ahead of him, a bombed out town to their left, scorched earth, desolation, and a large camp to their right half plundered and empty, the distance a ‘ real fact, and clear,’ said the man in the memoir, his friend, the man that looked like you, or your father, said, ‘Finally something pretty,’ and he dropped dead, he just let go. Can you believe that? They said he fell to the ground like a fish. A fish they said. Like he had suddenly admitted to himself that the water wasn’t water and he was in the dry air.”