GARRIES

By Justin Noga

Photo by: Adobe Stock

The only son Garry wanted wasn’t even a blood son. A reject, a castoff. Thomas, this non-son, had a forehead scooped into a kind of slight horn. Pinched-out lips. Laugh like a throttled chicken. But Garry knew from his years training airborne cadets that without him, the boy’s life was a coin flip: Thomas, a fatherless fuck-up, or Thomas, a true leader of men.

That marriage blew up, the one yoking Thomas to him. In Garry’s last year at Fort Bragg tempering cadets with hard-swung bags of oranges—these did not visibly bruise cadets—Thomas, then only six, was caught smelling some old dude’s pillows in a third-floor dormer, a boyish curiosity, but the dude walked in on him uncurious. Garry’s boy became a belt-beaten boy. Wife at the time—Betts—she wouldn’t even scold Thomas for it.

“Dumbshit already knows he did wrong,” Betts said, unraveled on the couch watching Lifetime hoarder stories, Thomas hidden in the hall closet.

“But,” Garry asked, “does he know how it went wrong.”

“Because he was a dumbshit.”

“Don’t make him a dumbshit, just the moves dumbshit,” he said. “You got to train him out of dumbshit.”

“Who am I to screw into his life and tell him what he needs to learn on his own?”

Garry stood there picking orange rind from his thumbnail. Soon he dragged the boy to the woodshed. In there, Thomas begged your standard “Daddy, please!” but Garry didn’t work him over like his own father would, never did, just sat him on the gummy lawnmower engine and calmly described how to chop potatoes.

“You’re a leader, boy. You bring a fresh potato every time. Sometimes they’re the same idiot. Sometimes one-offs. But you only work with potatoes you know you can chop.”

“Potatoes?”

“Drop ‘em while you’re hot—follow? I don’t want to hear no shit about your work. Don’t even want to see it. You do that work, do it smart.”

Thomas nodding, “Potatoes, potatoes.”

Back inside, Lifetime was still on. An aunt was strangling a debutante in a stationary tub, blood all over the laundry. Betts said, “That whole family’s dumbshit, too.”

***

Thomas was a charity case. Son of Bett’s sister, Ann, grown by mistake in an addict’s belly. When Garry and Betts’s babysitting favor turned into a week, two weeks, Betts was all, “Ann will pick him up when she’s better,” and “Ann needs time to think,” but a month on Betts’s tuned changed: “Leave her be, let her live her life.” Okay, toddlers weren’t all bad. Who was he to judge, anyway? A son was a son, a mother a mother. But a drug was not a drug—squeezies were something special. Nothing to dock Ann for. This was when Garry first learned of squeezies, too. He’d shaken these new pills off his own potatoes at the base, had a fine midnight banging a newly numbed arm against a disused two-blade rotor used for blindfolded phantom jumps. Yet his own doses were mismeasured, he later learned. One squeezie was fine, two a hard fall. Toes went numb, too, the bad kind of numb. Garry found a medkit netted to a wall, and once opened, watched its crooked shears slip through soft tissue and catch at the bone like a hot dog with a stubbornly frozen middle. Forgot all about it until he woke up in a C-17 cargo hold over Germany to an awful rot in his boot.

The stump—the far right little toe—had crusted over in the month since, but it still felt like a thing to warn Ann about.

So he told Ann direct.

“Two-armed Moms are something for a boy to be proud of,” he said, scooping up the last of Thomas’s toys from her sticky trailer floor.

“Arms?”

“I fight to protect the fragile bodies within this great country, Ann.”

She waved her chicken-thin arms at the soiled wreck around her. “What a job you’ve done.”

He had even written a note for his sister-in-law in case she ever mismeasured doses.

ARE YOU HIGH, ANN

DO YOU HAVE A SHARP OBJECT, ANN

PUT AWAY THE SHARP OBJECT, ANN

REPLACE WITH BURGER

DOUSE THAT SHIT END TO END IN A GOOD SAUCE

EAT THAT SHIT

WATCH PAYBACK UNTIL THE TAPE BREAKS

GOOD WORK, SOLDIER

But, soon kicked out of Ann’s trailer, he never had a chance to gift it. Never knew what came of her, either. All that ended not long after—Betts, Ann, airborne—but the note remained, fortuitously feathering out of his pocket one night as scissors again crept nearer and nearer to the big toe. “What a good idea,” he said proudly. Ended up laminating the note in tape, saved in his wallet. Not another toe lost in all the three years he went from being a jumpmaster with a stale wife in North Carolina to a long haul trucker with a fresh wife in Ohio. Blink of an eye. You get lost sometimes. Sometimes notes is all we got to find our way back.

***

Didn’t take long for Thomas to visit Garry up in Ohio, his new wife Em knowing the ex was no good for Thomas.

Garry sipped a jack and coke through a twisty straw. He said to Em, “Maybe after a while Thomas could come live with us?”

“Permanently?” Em was doing this step aerobics thing in the living room Garry liked to raise a flag to.

“Good idea, butterbean.”

She hardly knew Garry’s record as a father, only of Thomas’s periodic dumbshittery. “We’ll do a test run.”

“That a yes?”

“That’s a we will do a test run.”

And when Thomas finally visited for the summer—two weeks!—his little shit did everything right. Garry only noticed the thefts because he looked for them. Just small idiot things around the house going AWOL, like TV channel knobs, a basement soap foamer, a petrified wood fridge magnet. Em had dogs, too, Twit and Twat, a sheltie, a schnauzer, and the neon green nametag from Twit’s collar, like, evaporated, is how Em put it. That sent Todnod, Em’s son of 12 or 13, into a panic. Cushions were dug into enough Garry worried some lost squeezies would be found. But what didn’t send Todnod into a panic? A boy coddled into a puddle, not a drop of leadership. Only took Garry one small coughed-out hint around Thomas—“Shame we lost that collar, right, boy?”—to get it to appear in the water dish, the tag gleaming like a wished-upon coin.

At the edge of the yard each morning were two little shit potatoes around Thomas’s age. Twins. Every time Garry made eye contact the shits pulled out a map of Cuba and studied the horizon. The map was Garry’s, Cold War-era, but Garry was too impressed to snatch it back. Said nothing to Thomas. Let him find his way—last good thing Betts ever said. But once in a while you had to nudge. A week into the visit, Garry pulled into the driveway after work and watched those potatoes distracting Todnod, who kept saying, “Twit’s gone missing. Did you see her? Did you see my baby girl?” Meanwhile Thomas was upstairs in Todnod’s room swiping whatever piqued his interest—Thomas told Garry all this direct, only way he even knew. In the car outside Desserters that same night, Thomas unloaded his pockets of the secret life Todnod hid under his mattress: travel bottles of conditioner, small Post-Its of nude anime women Todnod had drawn and signed and soiled.

Milkshake shot out Garry’s nose he laughed so hard. “My God, has he ever seen a nipple?”

“I have,” Thomas said.

“You’re eight.”

“Nine.”

“Nine? Nine’s too young anyway to see a nipple.”

“I’ve seen a lot of things.”

“Don’t want to know, boy.”

“Nipples, buttholes, bush like a wild thicket—”

“Heard enough!” Garry clapped his hand over his kid’s mouth, his hand coming away filthy with strawberry slush.

Thomas pointed excitedly at another drawing. “Is that a hoo-ha?”

“Not in this world.”

“Seen that, too. Whole heaps of hoo-ha’s better than that.”

“I said I don’t want to know!”

They bought fried Snickers to go, and on the way out Garry saw his son ogling the breasts of a woman too old for Thomas and too young for Garry. Neither should’ve been looking. Buckling up for the ride back, Garry saw a flagpole raised up on his boy.

“Christ,” Garry said, “no wood in this vehicle.” 

Thomas took stock of his awful little kid pecker and laughed this insane sort of laugh Garry’d never heard come from a human outside a killing field.

This kid, this kid.

When the test-run ended, Garry drove the boy eight hours back in a straight shot. Every pissbreak came with fresh fast food, secret suckles of the soda fountain, lips on as many nozzles they could get away with before the cashiers grew wise, because when would Thomas feel this new life again? Betts barely did anything with him. Better leave the kid with a good memory. Ride back alone, though, all Garry could think of was Thomas’s final curdling face, that squat-in-a-ball-and-pout-right-there thing he devolved into once dropped on Betts’s double-wide porch. 

Shouldn’t my boy care about my memory of him? 

To snuff it out on the drive back, Garry took a few too many squeezies. Thought he measured right, discovered he did not, the heat coming into his face in a fine way, the road smooth and languorous in a fine way, until it got less fine, very much less fine, and all that touch sensitivity burned out to deadened numbness, and it felt like he was trapped inside a kind of fleshy unfeeling marionette, a flesh sack, a flesh sack, that phrase looping in his head as he watched its long arms wrapped in flannel sleeves operate a steering wheel. In the rearview, he spotted a face sagging horribly, the whole right side clowning down, which, okay, was not good, but also not permanent. Can you u-ey back to that rest stop, Flesh Sack? The car suddenly lurched toward the grass median, skreeling past two lanes of traffic—figured he’d smash into a caravan family, someone’s uncle on a motorcycle, impact impact impact impact—but Flesh Sack was a leader, a real leader, gliding them gently into the berm. He opened his eyes to the car idling in the grass. Right-side up. Facing traffic. No cops. Nobody dead. No one even slowing down. 

He said to this new friend, Good work, soldier, though his tongue didn’t work the words right. (Ooed ork, slodder. Goo ord, kolder.) Feeling came back into his body, followed by a cooling warmth on his lap. Four burgers and a strawberry milkshake were motherbirded down his chest, and, and piss? His piss? Flesh Sack’s? Dammit, he said, I thought you were a leader, private. Okay, but if true piss, impermanent piss. In the trunk were spare clothes for these moments. Play his cards right, maybe Flesh Sack’ll drive him to work to give him a good scrub by the loading dock before he gets home, maybe remind Garry what worked him into such a lather in the first place.

***

Back in his Ohio garage, unnumbed and scrubbed clean, Garry recalled his wife’s missing sheltie, Twit—fuck, now he’ll have to pay attention. Missing a week into Thomas’s visit. Though Twit could’ve been living a fine life away from Todnod and all should cheer such a lifestyle change, Todnod cried and cried and sucked the edge of his tried-and-true milkblanket all the rest of the week. The boy was like 13. Fifteen? Around there. Todnod spent the whole visit posting the most pathetic of hand-written flyers:

SHE HAS SOFT CRIMPED HAIR BEHIND THE EARS

LIKE 

SHE JUST DONE A PERM

And:

SHE LIKES TO LICK YOUR LEGS DRY AFTER A SHOWER 

BUT YOU GOT TO RE-WASH THEM 

AND HOPE SHE’S HYDRATED THAT FIRST ROUND SO SHE DON’T LICK AGAIN

BUT IT’S OKAY IF SHE DOES

SHE’S LIVED A HARD LIFE 

JUST LET HER

Todnod plastered them all around the neighborhood. Never invited Thomas along. His own new brother. On the kitchen counter Garry found a note from Em on a new stack to staple around town. The warmth of the squeezies had faded into gooey eyes. Couldn’t read anything. But he could smell, some bad smell, wisping out the hall at the other end of the house, the guest room where Thomas had slept. Inside he found Twit, crushed, herself a goo under a steeply bowed mattress, the same mattress Garry and Thomas were hopping up and down on for an hour at the end of that first week, Thomas saying he’d never slept on a bed so big.

“Listen to how happy he is,” Garry had said to Em in the hallway, Garry exhausted but the kid still bouncing, bouncing.

“Lot of energy to handle,” Em said.

“Lot of joy.”

And now Garry’s head was crashing out. He fished out two squeezies hidden under his shoe insert to get his new friend Flesh Sack to mule away Twit’s body before sunrise. Two pills, three pills—Flesh Sack was AWOL. Just a stomach ache. Garry muled it all himself: scraping the fur off the mattress underside, driving to the Big K and dumpstering the rags and Em’s old winter coat Twit left her death stain on. Garry had to kick some mulch over the dead dog and convince himself the kid was just a kid. One slip-up wasn’t so bad. Boy’s still learning.

Next morning, Todnod and Em were crying in the garden. Todnod sat in the mulch and stroked the dog’s cold ear. 

“How on earth did you get here, my love?” he whispered.

Garry moseyed over and did a sorrowful sound and looked up at the second-floor window—Todnod’s. “You ever leave your window open, boy?”

The looks they were giving him, my God.

***

It was hard, then, to get Thomas invited back. Wife didn’t know how the dog died but noted the timing suspicious. The dog was buried in the corner of their yard beneath a dying pine, a vigil with seven minutes of candlelit silence to mark each of her years. That night, Em stared at the ceiling and said, “What do you want me to say?”

“Should I be asking you something?” Garry flipped through a novel about a honeypot spy who strangled Soviets with a lost lover’s phantom arm.

She spun away with the sheets. “What a good question. Such a good question.”

Next summer rolled around, and Em cut Thomas’s two-week visit down to one, and required Garry to call off work the whole time to chaperone. No free-ranging. Be glue to the greasy slick of a boy. Noon, Thomas flew to the Akron-Canton airport, Garry sitting with the boy in the handicap stall, private, lockable. The boy was huge now. Huge huge, not tall huge.

Garry pinched his waist, a fleshy fistful. “What do they have you on?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. Wet pathetic eyes, blinking wrong.

“Show me.”

“Aunt Betts said you aren’t allowed.”

“Betts says a lot of things. What do you say?”

“I don’t know.”

Garry dug through the boy’s backpack anyway, a neon number bought last summer now dulled and cigarette burned. Bottle after bottle he lined up on the toilet paper dispenser. He presented the first. “Does this one make you feel better?”

“Not really.”

“And this?”

“No.”

“What happens if you skip this one?”

“I don’t know. She counts, though. Counts everything.”

“Betts can barely count out change.”

Garry plucked a plastic-wrapped squeezie from his wallet—two pills in one wrap to keep doses reasonable—and told Thomas the boy was old enough to make his own decisions. Garry wedged the pills high into his gums. 

“You take medication, too, Daddy?”

“I control the situation.” And Garry went Ahhh and had Thomas glance into his ragged mouth, the front row bleached and perfect but the back soft-spotted in yellows and blacks, pitted in unflossed grime, every tooth wishing for an escape hatch, and Thomas, that little shit, he reeled at his own father’s mouth. “Eyes on me,” Garry said, and lifted his cheek to show the high pocket of flesh in which he’d stuffed the pills. Voilà!

“Aunt Betts checks there. First thing.”

“Then use chewing gum to stuff it in, dammit.” He spit out the wrap and replaced it in his wallet. “I don’t fucking know. Read the fucking room and follow the tide, right? Else you’re fucked. Don’t be fucked.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be fucked.” At this, Garry’s boy started weeping on the lidless toilet like a real Todnod.

“God’s sake, look what they’re doing to you.” Garry had to do it himself, then, counting out the days the boy’ll be in town and flushing each day’s dose down the toilet. “I shouldn’t have to make you better.”

“I know, Daddy.”

“Say thanks.”

“I said I know.”

***

Around the TV that night, the boy’s meds were missed for the first time in however long Betts had him on the stuff. Em a year ago would’ve hounded Garry about any medication Thomas was on but now she sat there folding laundry and barely saying hi. Between them on the green-striped couch sat Thomas, who eyed the leftover schnauzer across the room. Thomas was a worm within the dog’s head. This was Twat. Twit was the buried one. Twat was older and deaf and near-blind, and she sat there cataracted on a recliner in a nest of Todnod’s tangled legs, where it sniffed the familiar smell and whimpered and whimpered, and every time it whimpered Thomas whimpered along, pitch perfect.

Garry nudged Em. “What talent, what a voice.” Lifetime was on, a show about debutantes strangling aunts in public thoroughfares. Survivors won makeovers.

Em turned up the volume. That debutante was really giving it now. 

Thomas hollered above the choking. “Why’s your pup so sad?”

“Why do you think?” Em hollered back.

It hit midnight. The boy had a shrieking nightmare that woke everyone up. Garry tip-toed in, sat down on the bed, said nothing as Thomas blew a web of snot onto the sheets. 

“Todnod still have that milkblanket? I could use a pick-me-up, Daddy.”

“You’re not mouthing a child’s blanket.”

“They help with sleep. Soft things.”

“You’re, what, 14?”

“Ten.”

“You ain’ a baby, is my meaning.”

“Don’t mean I’m a baby.”

“Once the meds are flushed away in a few days you’ll be fine. It’s called withdraw. Withdrawal? Withdraw.”

“But what about now?”

Garry breathed into his face. “Now you stop being a fucking baby.”

This was not working. The boy was crying. Betts had calved off the part of Thomas he loved best. Garry knew he should dig inside himself here, to root out some fatherly advice to repair this boy, to remember the lessons learned from all the one-off failures of sons he had run from—Pittsburgh, Fayetteville, Mansfield, Hope Mills, Hoffman, Oak Ridge, Whitesburg. Sons born from smoke, from drink, from simple forgetfulness to pull out, from love, actual love so many times he could sense it in his body like a bad cold coming on. Sons born simultaneously states away, or years apart, or down the street, or miscarried or adopted or aborted. Sons grown into crayon-written letters, type-written affidavits, photo postcards, emails skimmed annually. Young drunks on voicemails citing growth and accomplishment, mugshot newspapers citing meth, assault, exposure, light casualties. Sons of old forgotten memories, like a new mother asleep in a rocking chair with the newborn son snugged against her breast, Garry pushing a finger-scoop of strawberry fudge toward its fishmouth to see if it loved ice cream as much as he did, the baby yowling from the cold, Garry vacating in due haste. Sons with names never sounding real. Joedave. Hangle. Shick. Charlb. Jannie. Vanthern. Choseley. Clock. Click. Tick. Tock. These were real, weren’t they? Sometimes he wondered if it was all the same son—the same one born, the same one contacting him, the same he ran from—or simply a potato he chopped too hard whose life motto had become Fuck With Sgt Slout, prodding holes into his memory, convincing him he had no son but the non-blood son Thomas, crying there in the guest room on a mattress he had bleached of dog decay the summer before, waiting for his flailing daddy to at least tell him something, anything, didn’t matter if it was true. So Garry said, “You have a brother, you know that?”

Thomas wiped his eyes and sighed. “Todnod.”

“God no—a good one. A great one. He’s nearby. Not here. Not Ohio. He’s in Pittsburgh. Fayetteville before that. High school. Got a dog, too.”

“Like Twat?”

“Better than Twat.”

“Could,” he sucked snot down his throat, “could we give him a call?”

“Sure.”

“Now, I mean.”

“It’s late.”

“Please?”

“We’ll try tomorrow.” 

“Please, Daddy?”

“It’s too late to—” The boy was hurting, new tears welling. “Fine. We’ll leave a message. But straighten up. Don’t embarrass yourself.”

Garry grabbed his cell, dialed his own number until it clicked to voicemail. Told Thomas to leave a kindly hello, and his brother would call in the morning. “Hi son, hello son of mine. Say hi to your brother. You remember me talking about him? We’re in Ohio. I’ll pass you to Thomas now.”

Thomas put his hand over the receiver. “What’s his name?”

“Call him brother. He’s your real brother.”

“But what’s his name, Daddy?”

“I already told you, dingus.”

Garry suspected he hadn’t, but he stared hard enough Thomas buckled. The boy ate the panic and found a spot of warm fakery to hide within. How proud Garry was then. Garry imagined the voicemail he’d listen to in the morning. Thomas in a cheer, Thomas saying how great to finally hear of a real familial bond. Instead, Thomas said into the receiver, “Oh, Brother Benji! You’re home!”

“Benji?”

“Quiet, Daddy, we’re conversing.”

And Garry sat there dumb on the bed and watched this show of pretend unspool: Thomas laughing at jokes only he heard, cupping his mouth to whisper into the line, “Say that again!” and “Oh my God, for real?” Tears one second and the next just talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk.

Garry reached for the phone. “I think we’re done.”

“Jeez Louise, wait your turn.”

“Now.”

Thomas pulled away. “Old man. Yeah. What’s that? Thinking the same thing. Perf. You got it, Brother Benji.” Thomas handed the phone back to Garry, the line long dead. “We’re gonna go meet up tomorrow. Me and him.”

“Did he now?”

“He said to tell you don’t wait up. Driving straight from Fayetteville.”

“Thought Benji was in Pittsburgh?”

“Pittsburgh after, duh.”

“All that way to hang out?”

“We’re like this,” he said, holding up crossed fingers.

Garry thought it a fun joke until Thomas disappeared all the next day. 

It was a Sunday, Em and Todnod lingering in the house knowing Garry fucked up. Em hounded him all morning about being a good chaperone, but Garry blew her off—Thomas is just off for a quick jaunt to the church, godlessness not in his blood like it is in this house on Sundays, which he does all the time at Betts’s, no harm to it—which Em knew was transparently bullshit. But Garry ran off before he could process Em’s anger, pissing the whole day away by creeping around playgrounds for his slippery turd. No luck. Waiting for his dealer off Market and Elm, Garry looped the brief voicemail for clues. The audio was all ocean and garble, though, the boy’s thumb over the receiver the whole time. Can’t even leave a message right, fuck sake. At sunset, Garry finally pulled into the driveway, his mind an absolute wreck. Another son lost. He wondered: where to now? Behind his glovebox he’d hidden a stash of squeezies, swallowed a wrap without water. Reclined a while. The engine clicked, clicked. When he opened his eyes, he saw Em in the patio with her arms crossed, staring at him for god knows how long.

He joined her there. Pretended everything was normal: the way his hug tensed her, the way she said Thomas was asleep.

Garry nodded. “The whole time, I know. Sleepy boy.”

“Just now.”

“I mean the whole of now. Betts never lets him sleep.”

“Right.”

“Could I get through, Em? I’d like to see him.”

“So who’s Benji?”

“Who?”

“He said he has a brother here.”

“Todnod’s not a real brother.”

Her face ticked. “I’m talking about someone named Benji. Older boy.”

“Right, Benji.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Who is this person he is calling a brother?”

“Todnod?”

“Benji!”

“So not Todnod.”

“Christ sake!” She snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Benji! Benji! Who is Benji!”

“Oh, him. Long story.”

“I don’t have time for long stories.”

“Me either, Embers.” His head throbbed. He was becoming high but unenjoyably so. Flesh Sack was even waiting out this moment, the coward. He reached for the door behind her but Em slapped him away.

She asked, “Is Thomas your only son?”

“Todnod is my son, too.” He smiled his perfect front teeth.

“And do you have any other children?”

He pretended like he didn’t hear. By his count they’d been married almost four years, and she’d never asked him this before. Or she did, and he said no, and she never asked again, proof that a No fits over a hole in your head so much easier than a Yes.

She asked again.

“Benji, Benji. Oh. Right. Him.”

“And?”

Garry laughed. “I made him up, Em. Thomas needed distracting. Long story. You didn’t want long stories. I don’t know who Benji is. Probably a friend of his here.”

“Is Thomas your only son?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because I want to know you. Because there should be no secrets between us.”

“I’ve never lied to you, my heart of hearts.”

“Never?”

“Never before and never after.”

“Tell me, then”—Em tipped her head, her arms crossed tightly, where, within them, he noticed a torn-open envelope, a letter crinkling in her palm he knew she’d never speak of—“what is it you consider a lie, Garry?”

***

Garry slept on the couch covered by a thin green blanket. High-end models on TV mutely sauntered down the catwalk. He peered into Thomas’s room to see if he was really there—dead asleep, didn’t flinch—so Garry decided, why not, let’s get incredibly high and end this fucking day. Ate four squeezies. Chugged five Amstels. Woke not long after still on the couch, steeped in piss.

Thomas hung over him. “He said you had a tinkle problem.”

“What?”

“My brother. Your son.”

“Where were you?”

“With my brother, talking about your tinkle problem.”

“Todnod’s not your brother.”

He laughed. “Oh, please. You know what I mean.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“Why would I lie to you, Daddy?”

“What’s his name, then?”

“Who?”

“Your brother.”

“Benji.”

“Who said his name was Benji?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I never told you his name.”

Thomas looked at him like he was crazy. If only Garry stood up, became a violent man like his own father, a man who so often lifted his little bastard boy up by the neck when caught in a lie, piss-sodden church loafers dangling in the air, told this idiot boy of his he needn’t try to lie to his father, because see how high his father can dangle him? But Garry couldn’t even lift his own head, let alone become the father he wasn’t. So Thomas did as only a father could do.

“You’re just old,” Thomas said. “You’re old and dumb and covered in tinkle and forgot all about what you told me.” Thomas flicked the center of his old man’s head. “But you can’t do nothing about being stupid, can you?”

***

Few days after, another shrieking nightmare. Em said she couldn’t deal with it. Didn’t have to say Garry was on thin ice for Garry to feel it cracking. In her schnauzer robe she stood away from the Febreezed couch she’d quarantined him to. “Not my problem. You wanted him here.”

The guest room was shut. Garry opened it, saw Thomas rushing back to his bed to fake-snore like a cartoon. Rustling in the closet. Inside, he saw the two little shit potatoes from the summer before, both more haggard, both in matching red underwear.

Thomas said, “It’s okay. They’re brothers.”

This kid, this kid.

“We can’t have this,” is all Garry said, knowing if he’d unpack this moment even an inch he’d never see his boy again. So he jostled the twins out the window the way they came. Each was given a twenty lifted that morning from Em’s purse, told never to speak of it and never to return.

“Those were my friends, Daddy,” Thomas said. He hung out the window like a pre-strangled debutante, the boys in the moonlight shedding their unders and streaking across the neighbor’s yard.

“They’re inconsistencies,” Garry said. “That’s how you handle inconsistencies. You think your old man don’t know the world?”

That look of his again. “I said they’re brothers, Daddy. It’s fine.”

***

Next summer, Thomas’s flight got canceled altogether. Bett’s doing. Letter from Betts was long and legalese. It involved closets, pairs of brothers.

Em read it silently over Garry’s shoulder and near puked.

Garry pointed at a line. “Nobody got hurt, see?”

***

The months after he lost Thomas, it became apparent Flesh Sack—old friend, goodly friend—had snaked him. Tied him up in the backseat. Now Garry watched it tear his marriage apart seam by seam. Sometimes Flesh Sack refused to talk to Em. Sometimes it talked to her too much. Sometimes it called Em names like Betts or Carey or Tilly or Which One Are You?, grinning wide and claiming it was a josh, can’t she take a josh, Virginia? Flesh Sack rarely slept in the same bed as Em, choosing not the reeking couch but the walk-out garage roof, where it picked at the tarpaper until it unraveled, could be rolled blanketwise, leaving Garry to awaken in the cooking sun like a tuxedoed worm. In those trapped moments, Flesh Sack rested, allowing Garry to take the wheel. He’d spend an hour fighting his way out of the tarpaper, to finally breathe, to stretch his accordioned spine—only to find Flesh Sack slithering up to say Thanks, hang its ass at the corner of the roof for a morning bm. 

Garry’d have to clean that up, too.

Once, Flesh Sack accompanied Em to Sears. It bought a breadmaker, clearance, claiming an interest in baking, and for dinner had melted inside it a bagged loaf of Wonder Bread. Another time Flesh Sack charged a flat screen at full price and hocked it to Garry’s dealer Dwayne for squeezies worth half the price. Flesh Sack ate raw eggs in front of Todnod to see him squirm, shell and all. Flesh Sack shaved in the kitchen sink. Flesh Sack stayed up late in the unfinished concrete basement and drank jars of expired hoisin sauce. Flesh Sack TiVo’d Project Runway in the living room, hid easily-found lube beneath couch cushions, denied knowledge of its existence to Em, and at midnight dug in the trash to retrieve and re-deposit under the same cushion. Flesh Sack never counted out pills, just felt the heft of a baggie and presumed it all one dose. Pills at work. Pills with hoisin. Pills while brushing. Pills in all orifices but the ear. Pills intravenous. Pills subcutaneous. Pills while trickling piss into Todnod’s bed while the boy was at school. Pills pilled down Twat’s throat, the blind dog not too unwilling, having a fine time chewing off a dewclaw on a velvet recliner. Pills, why not, powdered in an ear. Pills in a strand of Sixlets shaken into Flesh Sack’s cheek during a dead-quiet chicken dinner with Em and Todnod. “They’re candy,” Flesh Sack said unprompted. “I can’t eat candy?” Garry saw all this horror from the backseat.

Where’s your tact, Flesh Sack?

This is a stable home. 

Not some trash hole. 

We’re not trash here.

Flesh Sack proved Garry wrong by becoming trash himself, the scent of the freshly shat beating him awake one morning. He saw a thin sheet of snow around him, and it occurred to him there on the roof: isn’t it still summer? He stayed rolled in tarpaper and glanced at his sockless feet—a cold blue shorn smooth of nails, throbbing toes likely missing but hopefully just in deep shadow. He wished Flesh Sack would be a team player. My goodly friend, stability means sustainability. Sustainability means better pills, a better bed, a better wife—and do you not agree Em is the best? But no matter how much Flesh Sack agreed, it always wriggled back worse. One hope: Em would come up here, sponge in one hand, warm bucket of water in the other. The tarpaper would stay on, but she’d reach inside to wash him perfectly. Whispers: “Just lay there, and I’ll do the rest.” They’d move to North Carolina, Em and Garry-in-Tarpaper. Garry-in-Tarpaper would sip lemonade in a rocking chair. Em would haul Garry-in-Tarpaper to couches, to TVs, to bathrooms, to his old airfield to watch rusted planes roaring overhead. Garry-in-Tarpaper would raise yellow labs all named Thomas. Em and Garry-in-Tarpaper would combine savings, retirement, and she wouldn’t notice the ever-growing chunk he’d withdrawn from both hers and his, because the labs would be breeders and leaders all, growing their nest egg tenfold every night, and Thomas could come to live with them, the boy Thomas, perfect Thomas, and Todnod would finally fade into the wallpaper like the faulty magic eye he always was. But the money issue: did she know yet? Would she forgive Garry-in-Tarpaper? She would. That’s what made him good for her. Forgiving. Forgetful. Always open for business. But Em never came up to meet Garry-in-Tarpaper, to shovel the shit heaps surrounding him. Just as well, because Garry knew Garry-in-Tarpaper was a snake, too.

***

There were no theatrics. The marriage ended as all marriages do.

It was winter. Outside the bus station the Greyhound idled for the long haul back south, longest trip Garry’d taken since getting shitcanned from the trucking job some four months ago. Or was it longer? he wondered, watching the buses come and go. He was dangerously sober—12 official days, three if Coors counted—but everything still felt fuzzy. Em and Todnod were there to see him off. Todnod drove, a new driver tailwhipping over the ice at every corner.

When Garry lifted his backpack at the station, Todnod pointed to his hand.

“What happened to your fingers?” he asked.

Garry squinted at Todnod, not hating him exactly, just sort of sad for the little shit who, in spite of Em banning his blankets, still paddled into the kitchen at night to microwave a milk-sodden dishrag to snuffle its hot wet knuckle under the dining table. The boy never learned how to hide. And this sadsack kept pointing at Garry in the station, at Garry’s fingers, and Garry said, “Fingers, fingers,” like the word was new to him. On his right hand he saw one missing digit, no, two, the middle and ring, a new devil horn hand. How’d he not notice?

“Is that new?” Todnod asked.

Em said, “Leave him alone, hon.”

“I fought for your country,” Garry said. “POW/MIA. You are not forgotten.”

“They look new.”

“Not no private, not no corporal—it’s sergeant. I earned my name. What’ve you ever earned?”

Todnod turned to his mother. “What’s he on about?”

Bewilderment set in as he studied the stumps. Purpled, swollen, the stitching a definite home repair. But Flesh Sack had left him in rehab, didn’t he? Was this me lopping off? “Okay, scabs look fresh, I’ll give you that.”

Bus honked. Garry blinked. Him and Em stood there in the cold alone for the first time in however long, Todnod distracted inside the station by the candy machines. “I love you butterbean,” Garry said. “I’ll see you soon, yeah?”

“Okay, butterbean. We’ll be seeing you.”

“I love you, butterbean,” he said again.

“Stay healthy, will you?”

“I will, love of my life, for our love resides eternal in the blistering forevers of the sun.”

“Okay then.”

Couldn’t she say he loved him, at least? Least a hug, even if she could tell his sweatpants—shit, this isn’t sweatpants weather—his sweatpants had the start of a flagpole? But she was at a distance, only comfortable with a quick shoulder pat, those pats the last touches from her he might ever get. So he asked. Asked her direct, his arms flung out for a full hug, cock tented horribly. Why not.

“We,” and she made a long noise, “we maybe think that won’t help the situation.”

“A hug is not a situation.”

“We wish it were not the case, either.”

“We?”

“The family. Todnod. Me.”

“What about Garry? What about Twat?”

“Do you not recall what happened to Twat?”

“That’s Twit. You’re thinking of Twit, for God’s sake. Accidents happen.”

Em took a breath. “What do you want me to say to that?”

Behind her, Todnod ambled about a row of gumball machines, tinkering the flaps, fingers coming out hued with old candy dust. He deposited these fingers between his lips. An eternity passed: flap to mouth, flap to mouth. Todnod finally saw Garry watching. Saw Garry’s rage boiling, like, Here I am a man who could squish the potato you are with single stump. But this potato, this boy who can’t even drive in snow, he saluted a devil horn hand like an honorable cadet. No bullshit.

Em patted his tricep, a kindly touch surprising enough he could jerk to it later. “Stay safe,” she said. “Don’t call.”

***

The red-eye was sixteen hours, a neighboring wet seat for company. His car was repoed, his TV and breadmaker pawned, all his two shirts and seven socks shoved into his backpack along with a lidless orange tupperware cup filled with loose change he’d stolen from the top of the washer, the cup now his, the washer now Em’s entirely. “Call it even,” she had said, and how could he question her? Both their credit cards were maxed out, retirements drained, but nearer to Raleigh he knew of a credit union that didn’t know any better, and maybe he’d send her a brochure, get a $50 commission, get a new card in her name, send to her as a gift? The second the bus turned, Em was lost into the shrinking landscape. He dug into his backpack: two waterlogged squeezies to last him, fused, knuckled. Luckily rehab had trashed his tolerance, evangelized him into a born-again virgin of the pill. The melted wrapper finally tugged free, and the bitterness spread along his tongue. He sat quietly. Waited for baseline. For calming default. Thought about Thomas. Thomas in jail going on a year. What did he read in Betts’s letter? Wanted to remember, dreaded what he’d find. No matter—Thomas’ll get out when he’s 18, giving Garry enough time to build up a fresh home for them both, not far from the jail near Jaspers, and maybe in the meantime he could visit for, like, weekly mentorships, one-on-one trainings, bridge it to classes for the kids stuck there, maybe all them little Garries needing a nudge in the right direction, and Garry then, he felt his head heating up a little too hot. Sweating. Wheezing. He dug into his pocket and found some markered-up note he didn’t recognize: 

ARE YOU ——— A    

——— ——— ——— ——— ———

PU ——— ——— S ——— ——— ———

——— ——— ——— ———

——S ——— ——— ——— ——— ———

——— ——— ———

——— ———Y ——— ——— ——— ——— ———

——— ——— —SOLDIER

The fuck wrote this?

He crumbled it, threw it under his seat. He reached up to spin the A/C dial, but his body, Christ, it was Flesh Sack, Garry stuck inside Flesh Sack again. Can’t that fuck provide some small mercy here and turn on the air? Instead of drooling? Letting a scalp itch fester? It wasn’t panic—more like, disappointment, irritation, because the life he and Flesh Sack wanted to live were so apart from one another, and Garry remembered how years ago he told Thomas on the drive back to Jaspers, the boy carsick with a full stomach of Swenson’s, to look at the clouds in the distance, a still image of perfect nature, focus there and the sickness will go away. Flesh Sack said, “You mean that?” Outside the bus were gobs of snow smacking against the window, manic, unsettled.

Flesh Sack turned to the person sitting next to them, sitting atop a crinkling trash bag. 

“Heat is on.” Flesh Sack pointed up. “No heat.”

“This is how you introduce yourself?” she said.

Flesh Sack blinked slow. “I need a rest.”

“Say hello. Ask how I am.”

“You’d think two’d be fine to take, but no, two is too many for our little pissbaby.”

“Two what?”

“Two sons, three sons, five—he avoids letters. He avoids towns, phones. Can’t even get his numbers straight. They don’t want to know him. They want a signature, confirmation, a genetic overview. Nothing else. Better off not knowing the details.”

She laughed. “Least you’re up front.”

The old woman had a thick lap, and he sunk into her. Crashed out. How long he passed out, or if he did, he didn’t know. He felt her fingers run through his hair—and she came upon his festering itch. Scratched and scratched. “You have so much gray,” she said. She plucked one out, and despite the pain, Flesh Sack didn’t flinch. “Poor grizzly thing. Don’t know how to take care of yourself, do you?” She yanked more, peppered them onto his nose.

“Stop?” Garry managed to say.

“No.”

“Heat?”

“No.”

“Itch?”

“Stop drooling on me.”

“But there’s a real one,” Garry said. “One who wants me. A real leader of men. A good man. He just needs some nudging.” He turned to her, Flesh Sack dawdling in shadow. “Would you like to meet Thomas one day?”

And this woman leaned over him, this old woman his own age, his own eyes, her whole face blurring into his she was so close, her thumb, her thumb hooking into his mouth and gagging him. “Did I say you could talk?”

About the author

Justin Noga

Justin Noga is a writer out of Akron, Ohio. His work can be found and forthcoming in Conjunctions, BOOTH, Bennington Review, The Arkansas International, Witness, Northwest Review, and Reed Magazine. He was a fellowship recipient at Vermont Studio Center, Artist Relief, and the Virginia G. Piper Center. He lives in Arizona. Find him periodically on Instagram @jus.tin.no.ga and online at justinnoga.com.