Begin to Exit Here Read online

  Janice put her hand on my knee and said, “Don’t sack me.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to sack you,” I said. “I’m one of the polite Germans. I say, ‘May I sack you, please?’”

  “You’re evidently thinking of an expanded, more personal meaning for sack,” she said, smiling ironically.

  “At first I wasn’t, but I am now,” I said, happy and scared and astonished that in a few seconds my discussions of the plunderings of ancient Germans had been transformed by Janice into a metaphor for sex. I didn’t know what to say. I pretended to be interested again in the people around the bonfire.

  “There’s another southern custom I think I like: People roasting marshmallows on a pitchfork over the remains of a burning shed,” I said, looking over at Janice to see if this latest insidious insight of mine seemed funny and distracting to her, and if she maybe had a somewhat erotic look on her face, as if she were thinking of how we might sack each other. She was smiling, but why I couldn’t be sure.

  “I’m starting to get a little drunk,” she said, pouring her wine into the pine needles. “I better drive home while I still can.” And in the same instant when I was sad that she was going to leave, as if suddenly she was tired of me and I wasn’t at all the kind of man she wanted to know, she said, “Would you like to go home with me and look at my artifacts?” And she started laughing, as though I were embarrassed and she found that charming.

  I was going to say I’d been looking at her artifacts all night, but instead I just said, “Yes.”

  5

  She lived in a small basement apartment overlooking the core of the Earth, was how she described it to me when we got there. As she gave me a brief tour of her apartment, she said, “These are genuine cinder-block walls, not cheap imitations. Notice how they retain moisture, allowing for the uniform growth of mold and mildew. This apartment is ecologically balanced. I sometimes have spiders, earthworms, crickets, and centipedes, which I really despise and kill as often as I find them. A physics professor I had in college said that if we humans finally destroyed the planet in a nuclear cataclysm, bugs would survive and dominate the Earth. I think they’re already trying that in my apartment, so I’m engaged in a guerrilla war to usurp them.”

  There was a neat old antique desk of some sort in her little living room, made of polished, dented maple with brass handles on the drawers. When I pulled open the center drawer to look at whatever papers and things would be in the neat old desk, there was a big black pistol there next to a loaded magazine stuffed with large bullets.

  “Janice?” I said to her in the kitchen, where she was fixing me some Italian coffee and getting some wine for herself. “Do you shoot centipedes with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic Beretta?”

  She looked at me through the kitchen doorway and smiled, then started laughing, holding her hands over her face in surprise or embarrassment as if, oh, no, I’d found the silly little nine-millimeter Beretta. I held up the gun and said, “I guess if a bad viral epidemic breaks out, you’d treat patients with this?”

  She walked up next to me, still laughing, and put her hand lightly on my back and said, “My father gave me that on my birthday last August.”

  “A gun? For your birthday?”

  “I’m supposed to shoot you if you behave badly in my apartment.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “My father read some newspaper story about date rapes. He got upset and bought me that gun, so I guess if things go badly tonight, I’ll have to shoot you in the forehead, if you don’t mind.”

  “Things won’t go badly,” I said, putting the gun back in the drawer. “How many men have you shot?”

  “I don’t count them,” she said, patting my back and returning to the kitchen, where I followed to be near her and get some coffee.

  “Dating is a lot different now than when I grew up,” I said. “Men are supposed to carry condoms and women are supposed to carry guns.”

  “And you men have it a lot easier than women, as usual. Condoms aren’t nearly as expensive as guns,” she said.

  “I wonder,” I said, “if the Catholic Church would oppose guns as a form of birth control? If you shoot someone to avoid pregnancy, is that contraception?”

  “It’s probably manslaughter,” Janice said.

  She turned on her big ceiling fan with the brass-tipped wooden blades and turned on her little dehumidifier in the corner next to a potted ficus tree decorated with little white Christmas lights, and then she had me sit next to her on the musty but comfortable sofa under the pale light of a beaten-up, antique floor lamp with a huge burgundy shade pleated and rigid as a starched skirt. The desk was at the end of the sofa on my side, so I said, “Do you want to sit on this side? The gun’s over here.”

  She said, “No. You can just hand it to me if I need it.”

  “Okay.”

  At first, as the ceiling fan steadily blew humid, cool air on us and we adjusted to the silent weirdness of sitting there together at last for our known and unknown reasons that we hoped were the same, Janice sat cross-legged in her white shorts and peach-colored sleeveless blouse, leaning her elbow on the back of the couch, slowly twirling a thick strand of her dark brown, nearly black hair, looking at me and smiling a little, as if studying with satisfaction this strange new man she’d brought home. I wondered how soon she’d reach for me, or if I’d reach for her first. I just wanted to hold her. I’d wait.

  “Well, are you going to show me your artifacts?” I said, lighting a cigarette and then sipping some very hot coffee.

  She sniggered quietly and grinned. “I’m not sure I know you well enough to show you my artifacts just yet,” she said. “Tell me more about how you grew up in a swamp in Texas and where you went to college and why you’re in North Carolina and if you hope to do anything in life that matters before you grow dim and vanish, like we all will.”

  “All that? Jesus Christ, we could be up all night.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “Well, you will be when I’m done, if I get done.”

  “Tell me some stories, Kurt,” she said, and stretched one of her legs out across my knees, and I liked her some more, wishing she knew that. So then I told her some stories, pretty abbreviated, so she wouldn’t fall asleep.

  I told her I lived in Texas only long enough to learn that the beautiful black and red and white coral snakes didn’t want to be picked up because they could kill you. And you shouldn’t pet alligators because they can kill you. One of the first things I learned as a boy was that I was obviously going to die one day, and maybe pretty soon if we continued living in southeast Texas, which was filled with handsome reptiles that evidently wanted to kill everybody. When I was maybe four or five, my father got some new job in Wichita, Kansas, and so we all drove to Wichita, where eventually I learned that my father was a chemical engineer. He worked for the Air Force doing secret, abstract shit that had something to do with all of those underground missiles in Kansas, the Titan missiles with nuclear warheads. We were the only kids, my big sister and I, that I knew of whose father worked on missiles that could blow the fuck out of the whole world. We knew abstractly, the way little kids do, that it was the Russians who were going to blow us up with their hydrogen bombs and nuclear missiles if we, the United States, weren’t stronger than they were with bigger and more numerous underground missiles and so on, and so it seemed rational and patriotic to have missiles that could kill everyone on the planet, although ultimately it made no goddamn sense at all and just horrified us.

  “What’s your sister’s name?” Janice asked.

  “Kristen. We, Kristen and I, had a hideout in the woods near our house, out by a big creek that was dried up most of the time. There were these long rows of big trees that grew along the creek. They were hedge apple trees, meaning they grew this big, useless green fruit with bumps all over it that I don’t think any human or animal could eat. They were the size of softballs, and the only use we ever found for them w
as to throw them at the trees and smash them open. Anyway, the hedge apple trees grew pretty close together, and my sister and I found some old tin from a crumbled farm shed and some other boards and junk out in the fields and used it to build a little hideout with a roof and a door and no windows. And sometimes when we went there with maybe some Hostess Twinkies or some kind of food like that, we’d pretend that the Hostess Twinkies were our provisions during the end of the world, when all of the missiles were flying and the bombs were being dropped and huge, massive mushroom clouds bigger than thunderheads turned the sky orange and gray and black. It was stupid, but we thought that being far enough out in the woods could protect us from nuclear explosions and we wouldn’t die. And we’d sit in the dirt in our hideout with the wind blowing in through all the big cracks and through our door, and stare off across the plains and study every cloud changing along the horizon, wondering which one might become a mushroom cloud and start killing us all. One time Kristen started crying. We weren’t even talking about anything. She was just rolling a hedge apple in a circle on the dirt, looking out at the big summer sky as a giant thunderhead swelled up a long way off. I think the thunderhead had a rounded top, sort of, and maybe Kristen thought it looked like a mushroom cloud, and her head started trembling a little and she started crying. I held her hand with both of mine, and this is making me real damn sad. I don’t think I want to remember this now, or I’ll start crying, dammit.”

  Janice sat up quickly and held my hand. “You can cry if you need to,” she said and touched my cheek with her fingertips. “I think you just wandered into your childhood again and remembered something terribly sad. Let’s wander into the kitchen. I’ll get you some more coffee or a Coke or something, and I promise I won’t let the Russians blow you up, okay?”

  “Instead, you’ll shoot me with your Beretta,” I said.

  “Maybe not. You’re behaving very well. It doesn’t appear as if I’m going to have to kill you. I like that.”

  In the kitchen as I leaned against the oven and watched Janice stooping over to look for things in the refrigerator, I happily stared at the contours of her butt and said, “You know what? You have a wondrous butt.”

  She turned her head sideways to look at me. “You’re not sad anymore,” she said.

  I shook my head no.

  “Thank you for liking my butt. No one’s ever called it wondrous before.”

  “I’m glad to be the first.”

  She fixed a plate of some kind of French cheese and rye wafers and poured herself a little more Gallo and poured me a glass of ginger ale, and with that little feast, we went back to the couch where Janice announced, “I like your butt, too.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad we agree on each other’s butts.”

  Returning to the importunately abbreviated story of my life, I told her that if the Great Plains were going to kill my sister and me, it wouldn’t have been a Soviet missile but an ordinary thunderstorm and its lightning, tornadoes, and floods. You could even die from hail. One time in Wichita we saw hail the size of dog heads. Then we wondered which was worse: radioactive fallout or hail as thick as dog skulls? Of course we never knew, and then, because of my father’s secretive career in the defense industry, things changed radically, and in 1965 we moved to an elegant and fantastically expensive home in Mission Hills, Kansas. That’s a little city that serves as an elite refuge for the upper-middle class, right across the state line from Kansas City. When my father got his new job as a senior staff engineer and we moved into what I thought was our little palace in Mission Hills, I realized that being on the refined verge of worldwide annihilation paid well. I had a bedroom the size of a bowling alley. I’m lying. It was only as big as a church. Kristen and I decided that the huge downstairs fireplace was wide enough and deep enough to put some dirt on the floor and grow firewood. And then you could put in some Indians and bears and deer and have a civilization in the fireplace. But Kristen, who’s a year older than me, refused to be awed and content with our thermonuclear wealth, and one day in November, when there was snow everywhere and we were outside, she looked at our big gingerbread house and said something like ‘Kurt, this is no better than Wichita. The Russians can still blow us up. They know we’re here.’

  “I said, ‘They know we’re in Mission Hills? Who told them?’ I was a charming, dumb-ass little boy. And then what, what? And then of course in the following years I began to grow up, become educated, get venereal disease, serve as an acolyte in the Episcopal Church, fall in love, get mangled on my own recognizance, and finally, the really big decision in my formal misdevelopment, go to college to study English, enabling me to remain unemployed for as many consecutive years as I could endure. And here I am, an innocent, thermonuclear white guy in the South. Am I being coherent? I apologize if I am.”

  6

  She smiled at me kind of gently, musingly, as if visualizing part of what I’d just told her and wondering, while looking straight into my eyes, if I was the kind of man she wanted to be next to on the couch. It might have been a moment where two people who have been talking for a long time and like each other immensely at last run out of spontaneous things to say and they’re left in the big quiet, the place of dumb, anxious existence again where you don’t even know why you’re in the world or in the room, or whether or not proceeding with your life can happily involve this person you’re looking at, or if you should just go away, or what. I wondered if she was sleepy and would ask me to leave, like I had a good place to go to, but I didn’t, unless it was her. She was the good place. I was afraid to tell her that. Everything was quiet now, and we stared at each other. I was trying to memorize her face, and I badly wanted to kiss her.

  “What time is it?” she said, even though she could see from my bare arms that I didn’t have a watch.

  “Night,” I said. “I don’t have a watch, so that’s only an estimate.”

  She struggled not to laugh, then laughed loudly, kind of gleefully shaking her head and thumping the bottoms of her bare feet into my thigh.

  She straightened herself on the couch, sitting cross-legged with one of her knees now resting on my thigh, and I was happy. She lit one of my Camels and took a sip of wine. “Do you have to be anywhere in the morning?” she said.

  I think this meant she was going to ask me to stay, and I was jolted with pleasure and tension. “No,” I said.

  “I have a small bed,” she said, looking into my eyes.

  “Mine’s not very big, either,” I said.

  “You’re a strange man.”

  “I know.”

  “I have a fan in the bedroom, in case it gets too hot.”

  “So do I. You’re a lot like I am.”

  She smiled and put her hand on my cheek. “Is it time for you to go home?”

  “I don’t want it to be.”

  “I have a question.”

  “What?”

  “Would you be upset if I undressed and laid down on you in my bed?”

  “I’d be upset if you didn’t.”

  She closed her eyes and I closed mine.

  “I can’t see you,” I said, feeling her breath on my face.

  “I’m close,” she said, leaning her lips into mine, and a tingling wave of lightness and warmth rushed through me. It wasn’t just chemicals and DNA. It was her. She kissed my cheek and my eyelid, and then my lips again, leaning down onto me with her full weight, pressing her breasts against my chest and wrapping her legs around mine. I almost cried from the suddenness of her happening to me. I tried not to, squinting my eyes shut, but she could sense it and lifted her head up in front of my face and said, “What’s wrong? You’re starting to cry.”

  “I won’t. I’m fine.”

  “But why would I make you cry? I want you to be happy.”

  “That’s it. I am. Good things don’t happen to me, and suddenly, here you are happening to me. I don’t know why.” I put my finger in my mouth and bit it. She pulled my finger from my mouth and kissed me.


  Quietly into my ear, she said, “I want to happen to you. That’s why I haven’t shot you.”

  I looked in her eyes. “Do I get to see your artifacts now?”

  “Better than that,” she said. “You get to see me.”

  7

  If you didn’t want to be unemployed, you shouldn’t have gotten fired,” Janice said in her soft, playful voice.

  “I know,” I said, distractedly watching Phil Donahue on television interviewing a transvestite from the Transvaal.

  “Just get in your car and drive out there and see if they’ll hire you, Kurt. You can get a good job later. You just need some money from somewhere. Go to the interview. I’ll fix you a Chinese dinner tonight, okay?”

  “This is ludicrous. I feel stupid.”

  “Kurt. I know it’s weird, it’s very weird, but try it. It’s a job.”

  “Okay. Here I go. I’ll see you tonight. Wish me luck, or something random and uncontrollable.”

  “Something random and uncontrollable? Lord, you’re the most sardonic man I ever knew.”

  “I guess I have to excel at something.”

  “You’ll be fine. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Okay. Here I go. Bye-bye.”

  “Bye.”

  As I drove out the highway past Small and the endless pine forest crowding up to the edges of the highway like gangs of trees letting me pass by, I tried to think of the stupidest job I ever had. There were too many. At Royals’ Stadium in Kansas City, I was the only beer vendor with a degree in English. The other vendors, almost all of them inner-city blacks, made fun of me for being an almost-black because I had a job like theirs.

  “I’m part Comanche. Fuck you,” I told them sometimes.

  “What’s Comanche?” they’d say.

  “Don’t you dumb bastards watch cowboy movies? A Comanche’s an Indian. You shouldn’t be allowed to be a goddamn beer vendor if you don’t know the names of the Indian tribes we stole this country from.”