Life in the Land of the Living Read online

  In Daniel Vilmure’s riveting, powerfully tender first novel, two nameless boys take off on a rampage through a seedy Florida port town on a hot, roiling August night, courting disaster with all the reckless abandon of boys until disaster turns and runs them down. They are brothers, out of a background just better than redneck, with a hard-drinking father and a faithless, despairing mother who has moved out. The older brother is a drunk like his daddy, illiterate and, he suspects, illegitimate. One moment he is hair-triggered, ready to snap. The next moment, he’s James Dean—cool, dancing on a high wire between grace and damnation. His kid brother—the little smart ass, the one with sense—goes along to save him but is no match for such hell-bent momentum.

  They race through the night, the older boy pushing the kid away, yet implicating him. They move helter-skelter through the town, fleeing a brawl at the bait and tackle shop, lifting their supper and a bottle of Gatorade from the all-night Stop ’n’ Go, sneaking into the Double D drive-in where they witness a killing (the first death in a night rife with mayhem), dodging sanctuary when it is offered, pitching themselves headlong —almost lovingly—into harm’s way, until they are moving too fast to be saved.

  L I F E

  in the

  L A N D

  of the

  LIVING

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY

  ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  ______________________

  Copyright © 1985, 1986, 1987 by

  Daniel Vilmure

  All rights reserved under International

  and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions.

  Published in the United States by

  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and

  simultaneously in Canada by Random

  House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc.,

  New York.

  Portions of this work were originally

  published in The Harvard Advocate,

  Padan Aram: The Harvard Literary

  Review and Red Beans and Rice.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vilmure, Daniel.

  Life in the land of the living.

  I. Title.

  PS3572-I39L5 1987 8i3’.54 87-45101

  ISBN 0-394-56142-2

  Manufactured in the United States

  of America

  FIRST EDITION

  TO MARCUS SMITH

  AND

  BOBBIE BRISTOL

  Nothin’ feels better than blood on blood.

  —BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  L I F E

  in the

  L A N D

  of the

  LIVING

  ________________________________

  He was dead set against me going, but there was nothing he could do.

  I sat on the bed while he watched me. I put on one sock, rolled it up to my knee, then rolled it back down to my ankle. Then I did the same with the other.

  “Hand me my shoes. They’re right there on the dresser.”

  “You can put on your shoes if you want to, but you’re not going anywhere. You might even ask me to hand them to you, and I might even do it, but that won’t change matters none.”

  I looked at him and through him and past him to the shoes.

  “I can get up and fetch them myself if you’re too lazy to fetch them for me.”

  “If I’m too lazy to fetch them for you, what does that say about the one who wants them fetched?”

  I got up and went to the dresser and took the shoes. Then I sat on the bed and looked at him while I put them on.

  He said, “I’m leaving now.”

  “So long.”

  He bit his lip.

  “If you come after me,” he said, “I’ll kick your ass.”

  I already had my shoes on.

  “You don’t scare me none.”

  “I should.”

  I stood. When he went to leave I went right with him. I hung right on his heels.

  “I’m warning you.”

  We passed down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the utility room. He paused on the lip of the back-porch like a little kid pushed to the edge of a diving board.

  “I’m going now.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m going now and you’re heading back inside.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. I looked at him. “We’ll just see.”

  He stepped down, took five paces into the yard, and turned to face me. Then I stepped down, took four steps toward him, and did not flinch when he swung. I was up from the grass in plenty of time to take the second punch. It landed harder than the first and a wetness spread across my lips. This time, when I hit the grass, I did not get up, and when I did get up, some time later, I lay on my daddy’s rollaway bed with a brown paper bag full of ice on my jaw. I was bleeding. My brother said, “There’s some mercurochrome on the nightstand.” Before I could get it he took it up and tossed it to me. I dabbed it on my lip and watched him pace back and forth in the halfdark. He hugged himself with his own hands. “Always has to have his way. Stubborn as a girl. Jesus Christ, should’ve knocked that look clean off of him. Should’ve shown him who’s boss around here.”

  “Shut up.”

  His jaw dropped and his face froze deadpan. His undershirt was covered with some of my blood and in the yellow light of the backporch he looked like a clown with a knife in his back.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said shut up.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  He took out a cigarette and lit it and smoked it. Then he blinked and turned pure red and tossed the cigarette down to the floor. He leapt. His face came to hover not one inch over mine. His cheeks twitched like lizard tails.

  “You’re lucky I haven’t killed you by now. You’re lucky your guts ain’t strewn across the living room wall.”

  I imagined that, imagined him stringing my guts like tinsel all across the living room wall.

  “Will you get off me now? I’m tired of bleeding on you.”

  He rose with one swift push and went and stood by the bedroom window. The curtains ballooned about his head and he looked like a spirit through them. In the pocket of his army jacket he carried a canteen. He said it was filled with medicine and no one else could drink from it. He reached into his jacket, took the canteen, unscrewed the top, and took a short swig. Then he coughed and held his hand to his chest and caught his breath. “Stuff tastes terrible,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

  I asked him for fun what the medicine was for.

  “Helps the blood circulate.”

  He reached into his breastpocket and took out another cigarette. He stuck it in his lip and let it dangle there. I did not know if he was going to smoke it or wear it.

  “I think I stopped bleeding.”

  “Good,” he said.

  His eyes grew narrow and he put his hands on his hips. He was still staring through the open bedroom window.

  “What are you looking at?”

  He did not answer me. He took a long drag from the cigarette and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He blew some smoke through the wirescreen.

  “Hey. What are you looking at?”

  He motioned with his jaw. “Bellamy kids.”

  I rose on my elbows. “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He sniffed and leaned hard against the windowsill. His head fell below his shoulders and he crossed his legs. Beneath his undershirt his stomach rose and fell. He looked dead tired. “I don’t know,” he repeated. He did not look up. “Playing Statues, I guess.”

  I g
ot up from the rollaway and went to the bathroom and dumped the ice in the bag down the sink. Then I went to the window and stood beside my brother. He was five years older than me, and I could barely see above the windowsill, but he took me up on the tops of his shoes, and then I could see fine.

  Through the wirescreen, past the backlot, and over the dogworn chainlink fence, the Bellamy children had gathered around the lopsided base of a tetherball pole. From the screenporch the sound of a piano came, and whenever the music stopped, so would the Bellamys. They looked like they were having a good time. Jerry, the youngest, mimicked a gorilla. Jeanne, his sister, crouched like a crawfish. Leslie, clearly, was a squatting baseball catcher. And Thomas, who was my brother’s age, lay stretched out like a dead man.

  My brother said, “He’s too old to be playing games like that.”

  A ribbon of smoke crawled from his mouth.

  “Still,” I said, “it’s a pretty good statue, don’t you think?”

  My brother brought me off his shoetops.

  “Depends,” he said. “Depends.”

  We left.

  The cars were coming home from work as we walked down Pennymont Boulevard. You could tell which ones came from Martis Mechanical and which ones came from Dheu Southern Chemical on account of the condition they were in. Martis cars had greased streaks and rust stains, worn-out tires and fender-bent bumpers. Dheu South cars were in better shape, long and sleek and smooth-running, and each was covered with a fine cake of phosphate.

  The drivers were like their cars. You could tell who was who by the shape they were in, too. Martis workers chainsmoked and bounced to the radio and waved at one another through rearview mirrors. But Dheu folks sat behind the wheel stonestill, never looking to the right nor the left as if the world on either side scared the absolute hell out of them. It was curious.

  I called to my brother.

  “What?”

  “Watch this.”

  I turned my back to the traffic and unbuttoned my pants. Then I mooned the world.

  “Jesus! You prevert!”

  He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and hustled me over to a mobile home villa. He brought me behind a clump of ixoras and ordered me to button my pants. I could hear all the cars on Pennymont honking.

  “Jesus!” my brother said. It was the second time he’d said it.

  I snugged my pants up around my hips.

  “What?”

  He knelt down and took me by the shoulders and shook me.

  “What the hell’d you go and do that for?”

  I looked at him.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I wanted to see if they’d notice.”

  My brother threw up his hands.

  “Why hell yes they’d notice! They would and they did! Don’t you never ever think?”

  I glared at him. He glared back. He didn’t need to talk to me so bad. I was thinking when I pulled my pants down. I wanted to see if the Dheu South workers would notice. I wanted to see if they weren’t as dead as they looked. Besides, if a fella wanted to take off his pants, I supposed he had a right.

  “Well,” I said, “did you think it was funny?”

  He looked at me helplessly.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think you got both wheels stuck in the sand.”

  He slapped me on the side of the head and led me along till we were back on Pennymont.

  I could see the LB&T.

  It was almost six-thirty.

  The Losian Bait & Tackle Store sat in the dead center of four billboards. Its walls were made of corrugated tin and its roof was made out of green seethrough plastic. Come rainy season my brother and I would climb the palm trees beside the store and drop down onto the plasticoated roof. Below us the shapes of men would move slowly, and before us pools of polliwogs lay. We’d take off our sneakers and scoop scores into them, then lower the shoes down onto the ground and walk home barefooted, prizes in hand. In our backyard a bathtub brimming with rainwater made a fine home for the tadpoles, and we fed them twice daily on a strict diet of crushed cockroaches and maple syrup. We put a hurricane board across the tub to keep the frogs from jumping out, but that wasn’t a problem. In the darkness their eyes grew as big as wiffle balls, and fattened up by maple syrup they ballooned to a shape more round than long, like fleshy heads of dead cabbage with stublegs and bugeyes. But they were good-behaved and never caused trouble.

  Some we sold to a science teacher and others we liked we kindly set free. A few, however, were not fortunate.

  I came home once to a sink full of Bud cans and bloody legless frog bodies. A saucer of cooking grease sat by the stove and an unsettling smell hung in the air.

  “Nice and sweet!” my daddy called from the dinner table, bleary-eyed, his jaws working. “You boys shore make a good frog!”

  I threw up.

  To some degree the owner of the LB&T resembled a frog. His skin was so pale as to appear green, his cheeks bulged permanently with chewing-T that might have been flies for all my brother and I knew, and the flesh about his face and body hung in surplus pouches. His name was Lester Losian, and he spoke like a frog would could frogs speak: slow and graveled and godawfully deep. And you could barely see his lime-slice eyes for the mole-covered lids that bunched up over them.

  Once my daddy told me that Lester Losian made more money leasing out space for his billboards than on any bait and tackle he might have sold over the counter. Lester himself had informed our daddy that the only reason he kept the store open was because he loved to fish, and because he respected fishermen, and because it was “a fisherman’s duty to work toward the preservation of a dying sport.”

  “And so you realize,” our daddy explained, “that the LB&T remains open solely out of the goodness of Lester Losian’s heart.”

  Of course Lester’s heart didn’t keep him from selling bait at cutthroat prices, nor did it knock out of commission the only Coke machine this side of the county that asked seventy-five cents a pop, nor especially did it call to a halt those Saturday night, all-nite poker tourneys—the ones that kept Lester independently wealthy, the ones that progressed complete with jungle juice and potato chips, the ones that followed my daddy headbent into a confessional and hellbent through his Sabbath day drunk the very next afternoon. And so Lester was as much to blame as Bohannon.

  Dewey Bohannon had seen me walking down Fulbright Avenue the afternoon of that same day. I was alone and a good mile from home, and he pulled his milktruck up alongside of me and coasted slow.

  “You! Boy!”

  I did not answer him.

  “You! Little feller! I know you can hear me!”

  I started to walk on the inside of parked cars, hoping he was following so close he’d crash. But he didn’t.

  “You! You!”

  “What is it?”

  He said my mama’s name. She was with him then.

  “You her boy, right?”

  “I am!” I hollered. “And I’m also my daddy’s— more his than hers! You can have the old bitch for all I care!”

  At that he parked his truck, got out, and started to run. I ran too. I ducked into a construction site and stopped dead at a puddle of mud the size and depth of a swimming pool. I waded in up to my neck. When Bohannon came upon me he fingered the fabric of his uniform and circled the pool like a displaced shark. His bald head and black eyes burned in the daylight.

  “You come out of there!”

  “You go to hell!”

  He took out a dollar bill.

  “I’ll give you this!”

  “And I’ll give you this!”

  I displayed a mud-covered middle finger. He was none too pleased after that.

  He started circling the puddle faster and faster, like the tigers in the Sambo story. After a while I thought he’d turn into a tub of butter, but no such luck. He stopped and caught his wind and wiped his face with a wrinkled bandana. Then he pointed at me and his finger shook.

  “Liste
n, you, I’m gonna say something whether you wanna hear it or not, and whether or not you actually do hear it, it’s up to you to tell your daddy what it was that was said, and who it was that said it, and why it was he said what it was he said. You got me?”

  I started to laugh and swallowed some mud.

  “And don’t you go funnin’ me!”

  I laughed harder and swallowed more mud.

  “All right,” he said. “Laugh, then. But listen.” He began: “There’s something your daddy owes your mama and me. He knows what it is, so I don’t have to name it. We’ve been waiting plenty long for him to give it up, and we’re not going to wait any longer.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Tonight,” he went on, “at six-thirty, I’m going to be at the LB&T. Now I know your daddy’s going to be there, so don’t you try and tell me he ain’t.”

  I wasn’t going to tell him a thing.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m on to your game before you can play it!” He scratched his head and collected his thoughts. “Yesterday,” he continued, “your mama and I went downtown and got us a court order to collect what your daddy owes us. You hear that, boy? A court order. Judge says there ain’t nothing this side of hell, your pa included, that can put a stop to such truck as that. Tonight I’m gonna bring that piece of paper with me, show your daddy we mean business. And if he don’t want to see it, if he puts up a fuss, well—I’ll make him see it!” He wagged his finger at me again, stubborn, like it was some sort of Sears and Roebuck mail-order wand. “So you can just tell him that! You tell him all I said! And you also tell him to make sure he doesn’t decide not to show up, ’cause if he does, I swear I’ll make it twice as worse for him! You follow?”

  I didn’t say a thing.

  “Good,” he said. “Tonight, then. Six-thirty. You tell him.”

  He turned and left. As he was walking away I scooped my hand in the pool and nailed him in the back with a cake of mud. He shot around and considered me hard and the veins on his forehead pledged allegiance. He looked like he was working up the nerve to kill me, but he decided against it. “That’s all right,” he said. “I can change uniforms. I’ll forgive you this time, boy.” And he left.