ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEVIN KEATING’s stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Story South’s Million Writers Award, and the Ben Hoffer/Best New Writing Award. His essays and fiction have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Identity Theory, The Stickman Review, Mad Hatter’s Review, Underground Voices, Smokebox, Fringe, Perigee, Megaera, Plum Ruby Review, Fiction Warehouse, Fifth Street Review, Juked, and many others.

Lethe

By Kevin Keating


1


Garrett waited until the last possible moment, when the weatherman with the lopsided toupée and Midwestern drawl warned of freezing temperatures, wet snow, the final hours of Indian summer; he waited until the neighbors, standing at their kitchen windows, watched him as children might watch their closets late at night, wondering what terrible secrets lurked within that menacing abyss, then, when caught staring, cowered behind the blinds and disappeared into the swirling dust motes of their silent and hermetic homes; he waited until the green moss undulating on the surface of the pool resembled an alien organism, eyeless and kaleidoscopically oily, that yearned to swallow him and slowly gestate his flesh and bones under the rotting autumn leaves that glistened in the dying light of that late October afternoon; he waited, in fact, until he was forced to withstand the booming boisterous notes from Big Ben Cowley, the tow truck driver who lived across the street, a great barrel-chested man whose belly was bursting with pierogies and kielbasa and countless jars of sauerkraut and pickled beets.

“Better stop daydreaming,” warned Ben, scratching the humid pit of his trousers.  “Winter storm is on the way.  Damn early this year.”  He had a habit of stating the obvious “because,” he said between bursts of raucous laughter, “it makes the other fella look downright foolish.”  Already his voice had taken on a familiar tone, that of the hardnosed father finding an almost cruel pleasure in reprimanding his lazy and incompetent son.  He rattled off orders: “That pool needs emptied, them leaves need collected and put into bags, the cover strapped down.  People around here are beginning to talk.” 

The neighbors loved to gossip, true enough, and Big Ben was no exception. He knew everyone’s business and could intuitively measure the varying degrees to which they lied, but Garrett tried to convince himself that he should be grateful for this little pep talk, that Big Ben was only trying to help when no one else had an interest in doing so. 

“Me, I like to get my chores done early,” said Ben, “so I can relax, catch a buzz, watch the game.”

Something bothered him about Ben’s dumb acceptance of these menial tasks.  Is this what most men did in October?  Get the house ready for winter, drink a few beers, stare at the TV?  Or was this merely a crude caricature he created when he first moved to this neighborhood with its mix of working class bungalows and million dollar townhouses?  Garrett’s street had been particularly slow to undergo gentrification, and for the past year he had to endure the tedious counsel of pipefitters and boilermakers, blue-haired cleaning ladies and bespectacled school teachers.  Would they ever sell and leave him in peace?  Not Ben.  It would take an army to extract him from his castle.  He intended to die in his own bed while his six grown children, wailing hosannas and tearing out their hair, gathered around and awaited the passing of the great patriarch. 

Garrett had no children of his own.  At thirty-five, he felt too old, too set in his ways for the sleep-deprived, hallucinatory madness of late-night feedings and burpings and diaper changings.  That was an important distinction between the two men.  There were other differences as well.  Ben took great pride in his postage stamp of property, his yard was a carefully manicured Eden, while Garrett’s had become a barren wasteland, a blistering windswept Sinai, a one-time oasis swallowed up by grief and confusion.  Most mornings, as Garrett languished in bed, submerged in the sweet lethargy of deep depression, blankets pulled up to his eyes, Ben puttered around the garden, watering and pruning the giant azaleas that looked like burning bushes and he a middle-aged potbellied American Moses who need only step outside his front door to receive a daily dose of divine revelation.  Ben always felt compelled to impart insipid and quasi-Biblical clichés to the cosmopolite heathen next door, the make-believe Buddhist.

“We’re all made of the same clay, you know.” 

Yes, Garrett agreed, we’re all made of clay, and we all burn in the furnace of God’s love, ordeal by fire, while a whole host of angels takes bets on which of us will crack first.

He finished his cigarette, last one in the pack, and let it fall into the pool where for an instant the glowing ember hissed, then went dark.  He wondered.  If he plunged into that black sludge would his boiling brain hiss and sizzle, too?  Would all of these painful memories rise like steam and dissipate?  He considered asking Ben for his opinion, but his neighbor, obtuse and uneducated, insensitive to the subtleties of life, had wandered over to the garage where he opened the cooler and dug around until he found one of the beers that had been bobbing around in the warm water since the party abruptly ended that terrible night two month’s ago. 

Ben, of course, had not been one of the invited guests.  Garrett was the type who wanted everyone, especially a scruffy fool like Ben, to know that he’d “arrived.”  The common man must either envy him from a distance or bow down in his presence and pay homage to his remarkable accomplishments as a financier and his great work as a philanthropist--and at such a young age!  But Ben took no interest in these things. 

“It’s Monday,” said Ben.  “Did you know that?  Hey, you know what day it is?”

Garrett shrugged.  He hadn’t been to work in weeks and hadn’t paid the bills for the yard care and pool service.  There were angry notices in his mailbox, angry messages on his voice mail.     

Ben shook his head and finished the beer, belching uproariously, with something like pride even, before continuing with his lecture.

“Listen, the two of us should be able to clean up the pool and have the cover strapped down in under an hour.  Come on, young man, roll up your sleeves.”

Garrett tried to suppress a smile.  “I wonder what Malcolm is up to these days,” he murmured.

Big Ben squinted.  “What was that?  What did you say?  Malcolm?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing.  You know, maybe I should talk to my wife.  I should really talk to Peggy about this.”

Ben poked him in the chest with a greasy finger that left a mark on his shirt.  Evidently he’d been working on something that afternoon, flushing out the carburetor on his lawnmower, changing the oil on his truck.  “You leave her alone, understand.  What’s done is done.  You’re asking for nothing but trouble.  She doesn’t want to see you right now.  Take my word for it.  Don’t mess with that woman.  You know what will happen if you do.”

“Yes, I know…”     

Garrett gazed into the water and summoned the ghosts of August to return, asked that they please make their way back to him through time and space.  He willed them to be there, his wife serving one of her mysterious drinks, a concoction of bitter and cloudy booze that she forced on all of their guests, insisting that “it will help you to forget things, every ridiculous trifle, every neurotic crisis, every delusion, not that you’re delusional, my darlings, no, no, but sooner or later life does have a way of making us see things that aren’t really there,” and the guests, laughing at her charm and wisdom and perhaps intimidated by her rather imposing physique, as statuesque and aggressively physical as a battle hardened Amazon’s, drank the potent brew, unprepared for the ferocity with which the liquor wormed its way into their brains and made them dance and sing and, as the night wore on, seek out empty rooms where they behaved very badly indeed, pausing in their abominations just long enough to ask her, “What do you call this stuff?” to which she replied, “Nepenthe, no, that’s not it, oh I forget, but it’s fabulous, isn’t it?” and all the while her five-year old son, up past his bedtime, the only sober witness to this strange and unholy spectacle, ran helter-skelter around the pool, fishing for compliments, the occasional clap of hands, doing a late summer sarabande, jackknifing and cannon-balling in the deep end.  No one paid him any attention.  The party raged on. 

Now Garrett watched as Ben reached inside the cooler for another beer.  How would this upstanding working class man have reacted to those wild parties, with what words of condemnation would he have greeted Garrett today?

“Don’t mind if I have another, do you, pal, before we get started?”  Ben, superstitious in everything he did, tapped the top of the can three times before he popped it open.  “A little hair of the dog.  Does wonders for a man’s strength.”

In a sudden rage Garrett picked up the cooler and shoved it at him. 

“There you go, pal.  Drink all you want.” 

Then flashing Ben a sardonic grin he rushed into the garage and slipped into the shiny silver coupe that he’d purchased as a reward for himself.  You can’t have a new house in a trendy neighborhood and a trophy wife without the hot car to complete the package--the Holy Trinity of Success.  Garrett put the car into reverse and, stomping on the accelerator, left Ben standing in the driveway, shaking his head and cradling the cooler in his arms as if it were a child.



Published July 2008