DuBois

Aren R. LeBrun

 “Dubois” has been named a finalist for the New Letters Robert Day Award for Fiction

I was living downtown with my wife at the time, a poet and former runner-up for Miss St. Louis, at a motel not far from the hydroelectric facility, swallowing pharmaceutical amphetamines and prattling on rather dishonestly about life, one day into the next. We fought, lost weight, held each other, issued crazy, unpardonable accusations, made love with the TV screaming, invented new futures all the time and planned them out with a detail and aplomb that would injure your heart.

Then one night she discharged a firearm in my direction and I struck her in the jaw with a brass ashtray shaped like the state of Idaho. I fell to my knees, weeping for forgiveness, and she put her boot into my temple as hard as she could. By the time I looked up, she’d fled our enclave into the nauseous blur of brick and neon, and I saw my grandfather’s watch was broken. 

​I spotted her a few evenings later, through the big front window at Emery’s, shooting pool with a blonde-haired college kid who stood numbed before the stupidity of human fortune. With pure grace and mystery she carried herself pane to pane through the murky light of the place and out of my view forever. I returned to the motel and stretched out in the bathtub with the lights off, until the manager, a slender Vietnamese fellow on the other side of middle age, arrived to announce through the doorway I was being summarily evicted for failure to pay a crying dime for five nights running.

​“Your life,” he said, as I slid him the keycard through the glass partition in his office, “does not need to be this way.” 

​“I’ll consider it,” I said. “Thanks, you know, for never calling the cops.”

​“Craziness in people a bad, bad thing.”

​“You won’t hear me dispute this.”

I went out through the lobby doors and onto the street for a while, spending a night on this couch or another, getting by, sort of. On warmer nights I slept in my truck under the freeway, traffic thundering past invisibly overhead, globes of weird light sliding across the windows and over the interior contours, rousing me now and then from erotic nightmares that exploded away into nothing like sparks from an angle grinder. We don’t even need to get into it. Just know you had a two-legged animal in your midst that spring who desired life in its own diminished manner and even glanced at a newspaper from time to time, existing not quite as improbably as you’d think. 

Then who should turn up but DuBois. I could never fully shake him. He spotted me in a booth in the back of the Crow’s Nest, where I’d been nodding out many days that season, putting various things off. 

​“Is this what’s-his-fuck in my midst?” 

​“Hey, DuBois.” 

​“What the hell, son. How you been getting on?”

​He took a seat across from me. He didn’t look very good at all. A bad change had come over his face, a sort of wobbly vacancy that could give over to mania in a second, less than a second, and I could tell it pained him to bend his knees. We ordered well bourbon and began discussing this and that.

DuBois and I went back a few years by then. He worked as a corrections officer on my cell block at the Grafton County facility, the one and only time I’d ever gone to jail. By the time they escorted me out of there, he’d switched sides, having been nailed smuggling cigarettes to inmates at a markup generally deemed unprofessional. They ran his photo on the local news and gave him eighteen months with which he was instructed to consider alternative methods of living. Beyond that, nobody mentioned it much.

He asked me now, “How’s married life been treating you?”

​“We had a disagreement,” I said. “She shot me.” 

​“She shot you?” 

​“Shot at me, yeah. There was a misfire. She’s since vanished from my life.” 

​“Ain’t that the fucking way,” said DuBois, philosophically. 

He materialized a few days later, or perhaps it was again that very afternoon, holding two Coors by the bottlenecks and chewing on a pistachio. 

​“I realize,” he said, “that you may be in something of a money-making frame of mind.”

​“Ah, well,” I said. “Perhaps.” 

He sat down again and slid a beer across the table. His eyes formed two white holes blazing in the dark. I took a long, cold drink and waited for something to happen.

DuBois was just your typical mixed bag who’d been around forever. No haircut on God’s earth would lessen his resemblance to an escaped convict trying to sell you two left shoes for bus fare. But you felt a wound in your heart, for, in the end, he was not unlike all the others who’d never asked to be born and were in it mainly for the money.

​“I got a little something, but it’s a two-person job,” he said. 

“Are you no longer working with Phil Holiday?” 

“Phil’s having an episode. Writing letters to the President, his water company, you know, yelling at airplanes. You could say he’s lost any sense of a schedule.”

​“I see,” I said.   

“You still driving that old shitbox of yours?”

​“I’m kind of living in it,” I told him. “It’s parked someplace around here.”

​We found my Nissan a few streets down, perhaps my last legitimate possession in this world, and got in. I had to open DuBois’ door from the inside. He held a warped, steel box of jangling tools in his lap, and by his feet sat a pair of empty duffel bags. We took Route 104 north over the bridge and up where the land curls into hills that give way to the bright wedge of river beneath, snaking through a town reduced to insignificant structures and hard pinpricks of electric light. Soon we came upon a housing development, an elliptical island of prefab condominiums erected across a wide, brown field of dancing reeds. 

“That’s it,” DuBois said. I pulled in. The sign read Mill Company Senior Living. I examined the identical structures passing slowly alongside us, some yet unfinished.

​“I’m not all the way comfortable with a break-in job,” I admitted.

​“Hey, there’s nothing to it.” 

​We parked at the apex of the cul-de-sac before a house with no vehicles in the driveway. I felt horrible about it, but that’s as far as that went. DuBois withdrew a filthy crewneck t-shirt from his toolbox and handed it to me. “You’ll want that on,” he said. 

It was yellow and smelled faintly of sweat and canned fish. Big block letters across the front compelled one to ASK ME ABOUT VOTING. From a duffel bag, he extracted a clipboard containing what appeared to be campaign literature and handed it over as well. Glossy brochures and a stack of postcards bound by an elastic band, each featuring the same clean, beaming woman in an expensive, western-cut shirt and ivory Stetson. 

​“What do I do with this?” I said. 

​“Just go around, knock on some doors. You’re canvassing the neighborhood, it’s called.” 

​“Where, specifically, did you get this stuff, DuBois?”

​“At the party office. They’re hiring anybody that walks in the door, provided you’re not fucked on pills or covered in the blood of the innocent.”

​I could hardly believe it, but so it went. DuBois was earning an hourly wage under the temporary employ of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, distributing literature and registering residents’ opinions on a five-point scale in an app. 

​“They see your location, okay?” he said, guiding me through the menus on his phone. “Just walk up and down the street at a regular pace. Knock on some doors, push NOT HOME, NOT HOME, et cetera. Throw in a couple threes and fours to make it look legit. You get a knack. Nobody looks very close, anyway.” 

​“What do I say if somebody comes to the door?”

​“You hand them one of these pamphlets,” he said, “and you spout off whatever goofy goddamn bullshit comes into your head.”

I took a slow loop around the Mill Company Senior Living community, pausing before the addresses listed on the screen, selecting NOT HOME, and wedging brochures into the door jambs. Soon I was feeling sick in my stomach. I waved uneasily at a trio of old men holding croquet mallets on a patch of yellow grass. My broken watch kept sliding up and down my wrist, a gift from my grandfather, whose own life came to an end in his car a little ways outside Stillwater, Oklahoma.

I came to on my hands and knees on somebody’s front steps, vomiting ropes of bile into an empty terracotta pot. A very old female resident was staring down at me, blinking in her open doorway, gripping a juice box or something. I stood and tried to catch my breath. 

​She said, “You’re here to fix my television.” 

​“No ma’am,” I said. “That’s not right.”

​“The thing is,” she said. “I have a problem with my television. I would like to watch the Orioles.”  

​“I’m here on other business completely,” I said. 

​She was still dressed in her nightgown. The corner of her mouth hung open uncontrollably, trembling and wet, and her scalp showed through a wispy cirrus of snow-white hair. What words could you say for that gaze, for the eyes of a human soul standing on eternity’s edge and still trying to care? 

​“Have you talked to Keith today?” she said. “Is he with you?”

​“I don’t know where he is,” I said. “I really wish I could tell you.” 

​“Keith served two years in the United States Navy. A doctor found a murmur. He was a good boy. You ask anyone they’ll say it. He didn’t go looking for trouble. Not like his daddy in that way. In his heart they found a murmur. He received ribbons for an ambush. Do you understand what I’m saying? A doctor found a murmur. That’s when everything started to happen.”

​“I’ll have someone look into this matter right away,” I said.

​“I wish you such a happy, happy life,” she said.

DuBois had assembled a pair of laptops on a maple dining room table beside an iPad, a small box of woman’s jewelry, a drawer full of polished sterling silverware, and some other objects of salable value. 

​“Give me a hand packing up,” he called as I stepped in through the sliding door. He’d busted it from its flimsy locking mechanism with a pry bar now propped in the corner. We filled the first duffel bag and started on the other. 

​“How’d you do?” he said. 

​“Fine, I guess. It’s hard to believe they pay you for that.” 

​“Easiest fucking money in the world!” he said.

​“I vomited on a lady’s porch. In her plant pot. She saw me do it. It’s doubtful she’s in full command.” 

​“These things, they happen.” 

​We zipped up the bags and each carried one to my Frontier. DuBois quickly returned for his toolbox and prybar, slid the door shut on its railing, and came back to the truck. Then we left. It really was as simple as that. When you get yourself out of the way, the criminal act is nothing at all. 

​“How’d you know about this place, anyway?” I asked, as I crept the truck down the lane, past the croquet players, and toward the main road again. 

​“I used to live here,” DuBois said, closing one eye and then the other, back and forth. “With my grandparents, you know, after I got out. That used to be their place we were just in.” 

​I reflected on this statement and determined it stood to reason as much as anything.

​“Where,” I asked, “are your grandparents, today?” 

​“In that funeral home on Sawyer Street,” he said. “That big white building sort of kitty-corner to what’s it called, Dudley’s? The bottle redemption place?”

​“So they’ve passed away, you’re telling me? They died recently?” 

​“Don’t get strange,” he said. “All our times will come. They’re in my prayers.” 

​“I was just trying to understand the situation,” I said. 

​Although there’s probably nothing but pain in this world, small naked loneliness eating away under the meat of everything, all in all, I was feeling pretty much okay. We were coming into early summer then, and I was getting by on my veteran’s disability checks without much trouble, eating cold hot dogs from the package and occasionally plunging government money into a hole in my arm. 

Many mornings in those days my feet would carry me down to Riverfront Park, where I’d walk the gravel path that contorts along the alder-studded bank, watching the hawks circle above on their thermal currents, gone to heaven in my blood, promising myself I’d run into Melissa. That was her name.  We used to walk there together in the afternoons, during the early days when you still needed it to mean something, replenishing our self-esteem in the company of humans who didn’t need to be hunted with nets and thrown in jail by the dozen. In short, non-psychotics, people who throw projectiles at medicated purebreds, lay on quilted blankets in the sun, who listen to National Public Radio and racewalk past you in neon spandex discussing a blueberry corporation that’s issued a recall.

​Melissa came from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the youngest of four sisters. We met in a snowstorm at the bus stop outside a meeting at the library for people like us, a meeting we’d both, as it happens, been too high and scared to walk into. She shivered badly in the wintry air. I lent her my good canvas jacket. She draped it over her shoulders. Her hair was red and calm. We’d be back very soon, we agreed, when we were ready at last to have sense talked into us by the reputable. Her name was Mel, she said, but everyone called her Melissa, and we laughed in the snowfall because surely she’d meant to order that the other way around. She said she was unnerved by gallant conduct, evidently, and I told her none of us is born to perfection. Then she asked my name, and I said it was Franklin Roosevelt, which is true, but that everyone called me “what’s-his-fuck” or things of this nature. A touch of self-effacement can go a long way in situations like that. We rode the city bus most of the night, swapping lies, and she fell asleep with her cheek pressed up against my shoulder. 

At the end of the path, where the crushed gravel walkway curls back around, several of our more notable townspersons had donated a square concrete lookout where you can stand and watch the current explode over the dam in a roaring maelstrom of silver mist you can taste on the wind as you think about your twisted life and listen for your heart to stop beating. 

She’d just broken free from a nasty ordeal with a man named Kenneth Lawton. She always used both names. Lawton was involved in commercial real estate somehow and collected Smith & Wesson pistols with low serial numbers and once knocked three of her teeth out with an extension cord owing to feelings of jealousy and left her bleeding without a voice in the back of a U-Haul. It was one of his antique revolvers Melissa fired at me in our motel room, later on, hoping to spray my brains onto the wood panel wainscotting and kill me forever. I suppose I owe this Lawton for his yen for weapons too decrepit to murder with reliability. 

She lied to my soul and in the end wished to blow my head from my shoulders, but I loved her, and might always, for life can sometimes go that way. 

We were never actually married, that’s just the word we used. 

​I saw DuBois again maybe two weeks later, once more at the Nest. He was waving an envelope at my face with cash inside it, in fact, my share of what he’d been able to sell online.

“For your trouble.” 

​I took the money and counted it. Nearly four hundred, all told. “You’re going to get caught, doing this, one of these days,” I said.  

​“Maybe,” he said. “And then again, maybe not.” 

​We wandered out into the street where it had been raining for nearly three days without cease and went uptown to another spot I don’t even remember anymore, wherein we played darts and became drunk for a fair price in no time at all. 

​Night converged, turning the windows to mirrors, and a foggy discussion was occurring that I was more or less a part of. 

​“Easiest dumbfuck thing I ever done for money,” DuBois was saying, “was take my clothes off and stand naked for a drawing class.” 

​“No way in hell,” I said.  

​“Sure. Figure Drawing, it’s called. At the university.”

​“I fear I have been made drunk,” Holiday said. 

​Involved in this discussion were DuBois, Phil Holiday, and myself. We had snorted a little cocaine off an Altoids tin, and our faces glowed now with tremendous warmth and meaninglessness.

​“It was me and this lady and this other guy, a Mexican, all three of us as bare ass as the day we were born. Three hundred bucks each for three-hour sessions, twice a week.” 

​“Government entities spy on me through my connected devices,” Holiday said. “A man cannot get situated.”

​“They’re spying on all of us,” I said. “Don’t let it get you down.”

​“My connected devices have been bugged by government entities who seek to alter my viewpoints because I won’t sit by and go along with their narrative even a second longer.” 

“That’s what I’m saying to you!” I shouted. 

“David was missing a leg. That was the Mexican. They had to sit him on a stool, otherwise he’d have a hard time.”

“Is it not a civil rights violation to yank on a man’s mind?” 

​“Follow the money,” said a man I’d never seen in my life and had honestly forgotten was present.​

But I feared we’d left DuBois hanging, a little. “Six hundred a week can go a long, long way,” I said. 

​“It’s the truth,” Holiday said. 

​“Some of them pictures were pretty interesting, too,” DuBois said. 

There stood a boy not yet twenty at the center of a small congregation in the plaza, holding forth before a granite admiral, hair crushed back with pomade, disappearing inside a black, three-piece suit. 

​“We are all of us broken people, trying to become a little more like Jesus,” he said.

​Among his parishioners were me, Ewan Savage, and DuBois. We’d been riding around in Savage’s van since before dawn, all pretty well stoned and just fucking off completely. It was Savage, in fact, who first recognized the preacher through the café window across the plaza, where we’d been vibrating in the steam from our coffee cups. 

“If that’s fuckin’ Jitterbug Jimmy, I’ll shit,” he said.  

​This was another time, later in the summer. My hair was getting shaggy in the back, and I needed some crown work done, too. We followed Savage out the door. ​Beside the preacher stood a young woman in a galvanized steel garden bed full of water, jeans rolled halfway up her calves. Another woman was lined up behind her, smiling encouragingly, and behind her, a very old man.

The preacher’s voice churned out through a decent set of lungs into his PA box, jettisoning at a slight delay off the quiet, flat-faced buildings. 

​“You alone are worth the highest praise and all His love,” he said. 

“His love, His love, His love,” whispered the world. 

​The woman wore a black t-shirt with the words FAITH OVER FEAR embossed across the bust in cursive gold script, as you see on wedding invitations and bottles of pink wine that don’t cost a whole lot. Savage was laughing uncontrollably beside me. The preacher said something into her ear, and she held her nose as he dipped her back gently into the water. 

​“And He tells us,” said Jitterbug Jimmy, or whoever, “When all others drown, but I alone survive, God is protecting me. When all others are rescued, but I alone drown, God is protecting me, also.” 

​“I once seen that boy piss in his actual pants,” Savage told me, with tears in his eyes. “He was stealing second base and bang. Just kept running like nothing was even going on.” 

​When Jimmy hauled her up from the water, the woman’s clothing clung flat to her body. Beads tumbled down her flesh like a shower of diamonds, her hair a black and silent storm. 

​And I alone in that desert, companionless in the ruins of myself, watching the clouds gather force over the far-off rim of the world.

Once, in front of Bill Montana’s garage, I watched DuBois pull the longest knife I’ve ever seen on a benzodiazepine salesman from Uvalde, Texas who’d accused him of cheating at cards at three in the afternoon. I have no doubt DuBois would have killed this man, or been slain in the effort, but it just fizzled away, and we laughed like you waft smoke toward the window with a magazine. “You’re one sort of twisted-up motherfucker,” the Texan appraised.

​Perhaps that was it, the real and final truth, that he was maimed the whole way down, but I’m not sure. He did not wish it so. It’s just that the manic impulse he rode from torment to torment was the nearest he could get to a definition of what his life might be about. He sought simply to seize hold of things wherever he could, to squeeze and crush and wrench until fractures appeared, so he could say: “I have caused damage, for something is wrong with me.” 

The last time I saw DuBois alive would’ve been out at his stepmother’s farmhouse over in Clinton, the night after those public christenings. We were inhaling vaporized hash oil in the back room and trying to watch The Last Samurai, but the dogs were making too much noise and nothing would hold together.

“You ever wonder about this born-again shit?” DuBois asked the ceiling. “You guys believe in any of that?”

The dogs were Rottweilers, I think. I could hear them in the garage, violent with fear.

“They’re exploiting them idiots, you ask me,” Savage said. “Saying you can get right with Jesus now that all your sinnin’s outta your system and your wiener don’t barely work anyhow. I seen a whole video on this once.”

“I don’t know, I think I’d take that deal myself,” said DuBois, whom the next I’d hear would be found lifeless in an Irving washroom with a bootlace around his arm.

I was suffering from a splitting headache and sat nursing a liter of white wine, watching Savage, a man I truthfully barely knew, tattoo a compass rose on my thigh with a stick-and-poke kit he’d recently sent away for. Savage had intended to draw a bloodshot eyeball at first, but couldn’t handle the vessel patterns, or something. I still have it down there. I can pull up my shorts and look. His south will forever be north to me, but otherwise it came out all right.