Roger, Corinne’s dad, was confined to a wheelchair. He had a young VA nurse who came by every morning and stuttered while she bathed him, combed his hair, made his bed, and cooked his bacon, but he was alone by noon. We drove from Tampa up to the panhandle once a month when his SSI check came in, to wheel him down the aisles of booze and grocery stores and take him to a movie, which he’d promptly talk through. Two hours of “Aww, that’s bullshit,” or “There’s no way that guy could survive that. Asshole Hollywood directors.”
His head was cocked permanently to the side from the neck injury, giving the false impression that he was inquisitive about things. It was some form of torticollis, from brain trauma, Corinne told me one night while she modeled new panties in my bedroom mirror. Whenever we were up there, he liked to point and give me detailed descriptions of the knives in his wall-mounted collection. I’d unboxed and hung most of them myself, but I never interrupted him.
The neck thing wasn’t a combat injury. He’d gotten all jellied out on pain pills at the air base in Vietnam, hopped in a jeep, and tore off down the muddy roads in the middle of a monsoon. He spun it into a tree. His head ended up wedged in between the dashboard and a low-hanging branch for a good two or three hours before they found him.
One night, we pulled up to his double-wide, and my headlights flashed off the chrome of his chair. He’d wheeled himself out the back of his lot. We got out of the car. He was mumbling, glaring at the full moon, a big hunting knife in his lap. He grunted and tensed when Corinne walked up behind him and caressed his shoulder. She bent down to look him in the eye.
“Daddy, you’re getting all bit up. The bugs are awful back here. What’s wrong?”
His lip trembled and his hand gripped and re-gripped the knife handle. I hung back a little. It smelled like he’d wet himself. Two lots down, a porch light flicked on and an old woman in a house dress leaned out the screen door to stare.
“Mr. Jarvis,” I said.
“It’s Wayne, fucker.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
He glared back at me over his shoulder. In a patch of ashy light that penetrated the backyard through the pine boughs, his face was all grizzle and red welts. I reached out for the chair and he jabbed at my hand with the knife. There was a clack, a quick sting at the knuckle. It seeped red. I shook it and pressed it into my shirt sleeve.
“Back off, kid. Get the fuck off my lot while you still have all your fingers,” he said.
“Daddy!” Corinne slapped his arm. He flinched. The knife dropped out of his hand and onto his lap. She pushed his chair away from me.
“Baby, I’m so sorry. Daddy, how could you?”
It would have been very easy to take away that cheap truck store gift shop knife and run it across his saggy old neck in two quick motions. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and thought about how carefully Corinne would arrange her pictures of him on the coffee table of her apartment. Her mom had been missing since 1989. She never cried in front of me, but that neighborhood was Corinne’s soft underbelly. Something about it. The bugs, the shame on her face, an eye twitch Roger made after she’d slapped him, the way his hands shot up to protect his face. I felt for him. My shoulders unclenched and I soaked up the muggy air.
The old woman called out. “He ain’t been himself.” I held up a hand to her. Corinne angled Roger’s chair away from the gaper. “He’s getting himself some fresh air, you go on inside now,” she said.
He was trembling, a little like the time I found him passed out in his bedroom closet, wheelchair lying sideways on the floor, talking to himself in a dream. The knife slid off his lap as he tried to stand, pushing up out of the chair with shaky arms.
“Daddy, relax, stop it, you’re going to hurt yourself,” she said.
I put my good hand out to stop her from interfering. “Let him get it all out.”
He grunted, shook the chair, pushed up, and flopped back down. Corinne wrapped her arms around my neck and sobbed a little. He groaned and tried to push his head upright, straight as it was in 1970. Over and over. It dumped back to the side every time. It took a few minutes, but the tantrum passed. From behind, he looked asleep. A pinpoint of warmth pulsed behind my sternum. I found myself placing my good hand on his shoulder and giving it a squeeze.
“You’re alright, friend,” I said. His muscles softened. His old crash scars looked pasted-on in the moonlight, white, raised, something like an aerial view of a river delta. We wheeled him up the ramp into his trailer. He liked cream of celery soup and grilled cheese, so I cooked while Corinne pushed him down the hall to clean him up. When they came back to the kitchen, his face was dotted with bug bite cream and he wouldn’t look me in the eye. She shook her head as she pushed him up to his spot at the table. His lip was quivering when I set the tray in front of him. He clutched Corinne’s hand.
“Daddy, you’re squeezing too hard, it hurts.”
He let out a long sigh and caressed her with a thumb. She propped his head upright with on oily-smelling pillow.
“I ain’t paid the lot rent in three months,” he said.
“Daddy,” she said, smoothing his hair back behind his ear.
“I miss your momma so much. So much.”
He pushed his tray away with a finger and looked me in the eye for the first time since we’d arrived. “Go ahead and sit down, Oran. Make yourself at home.”
The chair was the plastic outdoor patio type, with black stains around the seat and cigarette burns on the arms. The rest of the trailer matched it. Roger tugged a plastic baggie with a five-inch bud in it out of his hunting vest, and Corinne rolled him a joint. I held his moist head upright while he toked. Just like a baby. I imagined some kind of custom-made neck harness that would keep it straight permanently for him, and made a mental note to ask my therapist if he knew any designers in the medical industry.
Roger told us what the last month had been like. He’d gotten sick of drinking alone and ordering cheap, dragon-engraved knives off QVC Network. He had a surge of what he called “friskiness.” He decided to wheel himself three miles up the main road to the Wheel Well, a hot-rod themed bar full of bikers and vets and blue-collar types. He met Rhonda, an over-tanned, middle-aged tart with papery skin, the facial droop of a stroke victim, and a glaze-eyed sob story about her fatherless kid with autism.
Rhonda would fold up Roger’s wheelchair, ease him into her cigarette-yellowed Ford Focus, drive him home from the bar, wheel him up into the trailer, down the hall to the bathroom, and she’d bathe him. She’d light candles, roll him a joint, play his favorite music, rub his chest with a warm washcloth. Roger closed his eyes remembering it. The lights flickered in the trailer.
“Power’s gonna get shut off soon, too,” he said.
“Jesus, Daddy.”
He went on telling us about the way she would kiss him and “start something,” but never finish the job. Then came the first “medical emergency” for her son. The insurance company had stopped paying for his meds, he was getting crazy at school, he couldn’t help himself, he had a sickness. He’d hurt another kid with a makeshift blow gun. Roger gave her most of his monthly SSI check. He never met the kid, and didn’t want to.
A few days later, she offered to let him relax in the car while she took his pin number and bank card to the ATM to withdraw cash for the meds. It was raining, so he let her. The next day, his ATM card and all the money in his account were gone.
For the last week, Roger had been wheeling himself back and forth along the highway to the bar, looking for her. No Rhonda. He sat there every night, in the back, against the wall between the bathroom doors, sipping rum and Cokes and watching the locals play pool. Last Friday he got too hammered, blacked out, and wheeled himself up to the front of the local police station, where he promptly bumped into the glass door, threw up, and fell out of the chair. This news made its way back to the Wheel Well, so Teddy B the Bald Bartender gave him his first drink free, raising a shot and announcing to everyone that “Ralphing Roger’s in the house, slam it down and hold it down, people!”
The next night, he toyed with the idea of rolling in front of one of the pairs of oncoming headlights on his way home. Rhonda was probably somewhere smoking oxy off a sheet of tin foil, or sucking off Craigslist johns in a motel room, or maybe she really had a sick kid. Maybe she’d come back to flay more meat off of Roger, with a real boyfriend toting a ball peen hammer intended for his fingers.
“Come with me,” Corinne whispered, as she rolled him into the living room and clicked the TV on.
Corinne drove me home in a light rain, along the coast. I rested my head on her thigh as we passed through towns. She played with my hair. It was easy to doze, bathed in the scent of coconut lotion and her skin. The streetlights ran a repeating pattern over her thighs. She talked about an article she found about an endangered species of amphibian that lived in a hidden lake below Mexico City, and how it could regenerate lost limbs. She wondered if its’ DNA could make her daddy’s neck regenerate and stand up straight again.
I pictured mote-sized pheromones floating out of her pores and I inhaled them. They lodged in different parts of my head and hung there in a tiny constellation. Outside Roger’s bedroom window, there would be a pool of cold light from the streetlamp in the parking lot, filled with a slowly-turning cloud of mosquitoes. The itch cream on his welts would wear off. He might be waking up alone in the dark.
Paul Massignani is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in F Magazine and Hair Trigger.
