He’d done as he was told.
Did what he promised.
It didn’t take long to adjust.
After a week of training, Wayne started the overnight sorting shift at the garbage facility just off downtown. He found if he spiked his rum with Alka-Seltzer, he could make it through the entire night without his back cramping up, and if he chewed gum, he never stank of booze— just tropical fruit mixed with burned coffee from the never-ending pot in the lobby of his new home, the LAX Holiday Inn.
Working nights suited him.
In the past three years, the sun had become his personal dilating curse, a daily resilient reminder that he was running out of time to make right with his daughters, win back his ex-wife. But these past weeks were better. Wayne had a job, a solid check in his pocket. He could afford the sneer cracking across his face as he sped into downtown Los Angeles at dusk. While the rest of the city sat in steaming traffic trying to get home, he raced in the opposite direction longing to roll down his Buick’s window, scream into the eighty-mile-per-hour wind,
Jesus and damned Jesus again, I worked in your priory of ink and dusk.
I said, ‘Save me.’ And you did.
I return, your chapel’s hound.
Ended with a wolf cry,
The words flying out of his mouth as cartoons,
Fat, dancing letters in orange, red, and green.
They would explode into tiny versions of themselves, carry in the wind.
Shower across the highway and, like caterpillars or amoebas – he couldn’t decide which – slip into every ear of all the weary-eyed commuters he passed on the way to his new job.
God was good.
God is still great.
God had rewarded Wayne because of his sacrifice.
A long time ago, Wayne killed for his country.
A long time ago, Wayne covered Iraqi sand in Iraqi oil and Iraqi blood.
At the start of his third week, his boss, Albee, a balding fat-bodied Armenien who couldn’t have been much older than Wayne’s forty-four years, blasted his name over the P.A. and told him to come to his office. Wayne was annoyed, frustrated. He was just getting into the zone. His hands were moving without thinking. He’d filled two waist-high recycling bins before the sun was gone. Wayne ignored Albee’s barking rasp and closed his eyes, trying to finish his favorite daydream:
His daughters were young.
They loved him.
Their eyes filled with wonder as he bit off the sleeves of two straws and blew them across the table at the pizza parlor back home.
Albee repeated his name through the crackling speaker. Wayne squinted his eyes tighter, willing his dream to continue.
The pizza arrives at the table.
Before the waitress can set it down, his youngest, Forever, braces herself on her big sister, America’s shoulder.
When they’re close, the girls look like twins.
They both have their mother’s deep brown eyes.
Light freckles cover their noses, spread across their cheeks.
Forever purses her entire face, blows on her slice.
America closes her eyes, takes her first bite.
And then, like always– he could paint the picture in the dark because he lived this dream whenever he could– his daughters smile at him, and Wayne smiles too because they are a galaxy, three shining suns resisting a plague.
‘Wayne, I can see you on the damn camera! Get your ass!’
Wayne scowled, slowly opened his eyes, and nodded to the ceiling-mounted camera just above his head. He still smelled pizza as he took off his gloves and left his place on the line. And he still tasted the bite of root beer as he ducked into the bathroom and choked down two swallows of white rum from his flask. The hallway to Albee’s office sounded like the pizza parlor’s arcade. He remembered checking his breath in his hand as he walked back to his daughters from the bathroom, just like he was checking his breath in his hand before he knocked twice on Albee’s office door.
‘Come on in, Wayne.’
A police officer was standing behind Albee’s desk in the corner of the tiny office. She gave Wayne a friendly smile as he sat in the same chair he had been interviewed in. Her brown hair was tied back. Her hand rested on the top of her gun, reminding it to stay still.
‘Is this about my tags?’ Wayne interrupted. ‘Because I haven’t had a chance to register my car. Money, ya’ know?’
Wayne’s nervous laugh shot from his mouth, landed into silence. He rubbed the thighs of his work suit, smearing fresh garbage stains to his knees. The officer checked a black notepad in her hand, stuck it in her back pocket. When she spoke, his heart had broken a long time ago, so there were no more tears. Cans cut his fingers for the rest of the day. Broken light bulbs shred his palms to pulp.
***
He was a war chief.
The highway was his trail.
After every step, Wayne closed his eyes and heard his wife walking behind him.
She didn’t think they’d make it.
The girls didn’t care.
Forever and America flew through the ditches next to him.
They ran through the marsh, jibing back and forth, snapping at each other with rubber
bands. Behind the blue pickerel rushes their dresses looked like waving yellow flags. The fabric caught on the tall blades of grass. Their bare feet slapped at the shallow water.
Their laughter was a cardinal’s trill.
He told the troopers he was once great. He was a veteran, honest, and just wanted to see his girls. They picked him up in the flatlands just past Commerce. He’d been walking and hitching for over a week. They sat him on the shoulder of the highway, emptied his rucksack onto the ground. He watched his last five dollars sail into the speeding traffic. Like all the other trash, it floated out, found its way onto the grill of a southbound car.
The troopers made fun of his worn-through boots.
They said his clothes looked like shit tickets hanging on a stray.
We can’t stop. We have so much farther to go.
His wife told him to get up. The girls were getting cold. Wayne tried to coax them back with his last cigarette. It was fresh honeycomb folded inside a wax envelope. The paper felt slick under his long nails. But he couldn’t see them anymore, and he couldn’t hear them. He wished his hands were free. He would lick his fingertips, light a screaming whistle into the air.
‘Where are you headed?’ asked the trooper.
‘Do you wanna hear a story?’ asked Wayne.
There were the oil fires and his devoted guns.
Dropping them in the sand, knowing they would never return.
There were the trucks brimming with mortars.
Their flags ripping the black-clouded sky.
There were his daughters following their mother, stealing out in the middle of the night.
There was his wife’s silence.
His father conceding dismay.
There were the ruts in the backyard that he’d never bothered to fill.
The crack in the kitchen window that grew every year.
There was his scarred back, a knotted python of a spine.
There was the gin.
The whiskey, the oxys, and menthols.
There was the highway, warm beer, and the dog that followed him for two days.
‘Are you hungry?’ asked the trooper.
The man held out his hand to Wayne. Wayne remembered the smell of the Lake Texoma growing up, just like the highway it smelled like a mix of river and oil. He heard the cars, the rush of water, saw bullets filling the air like static.
***
The first kick landed solid on his ribs. It hurt but not enough to move. After a year of sleeping in storefronts, Wayne had learned that sometimes it was best to play dead. The cops would shake you if they were serious– if there was a freeze warning or a blizzard on its way. The bar drunks would push-on if they didn’t get a rise. He’d only been pissed on once, and the guy stopped and apologized, his dick like a vacuum hose in the dark. If you didn’t move, bit your tongue like a madman– the embarrassment and pain would put you right back to sleep. That’s the way he liked it. Be the pile of clothes dreaming about your dead wife, lost daughters, warm water, and a whiskey-dripping sun.
But the second hit was a bomb.
His left arm exploded in pain.
Even with a sweater, a sweatshirt, and two jackets on, it felt like he’d been hit by a car.
He knew that because he had been hit by a car – twice.
When he first got to Chicago, he didn’t know any better so he walked the streets drunk. It took two separate accidents at the same intersection– Michigan and Ohio– for him to learn that if he was going to drink, he had to stay put. He was lucky both times. Both times, he walked away with just scrapes, but never forgot what it felt like. It felt like now– like his body was filled with leaves. As he screamed and scrambled, he was sure he’d see the cartoons again– Wile E. Coyote flaunting his new invention, a Nevada sledgehammer the size of a school bus,
No Guff stamped on its big brass head.
Superman saved his life.
He appeared like in the movies, landed on the ground, pulled back his dirt-crusted hood.
With one hand, he grabbed the bat before the bum could finish his third swing at Wayne’s head.
‘He stole my kit!’ yelled the bum with the bat. ‘He’s sleeping on my goddamn bag!’ Superman turned to Wayne. Under the street lamps, he was a black giant. The bat looked like a steel toothpick in his hands. His hair was black, a thick and hard afro, and his eyes were huge, white, and clear. Wayne got up. The pain came in waves, big fiery waves. Superman grabbed the sleeping bag and threw it at the other man’s feet. The bum threw it over his cart, rolled away.
‘You alright?’ asked Superman.
‘I think it’s broken.’
‘It ain’t broken.
Not tonight.
Tomorrow maybe.
Tonight, it’s sore.’
Superman gave Wayne a pile of aspirin from his own stash, let him set up inside the camp next to him. Down there, on the south side of the Loop, people were still civil to each other even though they had nothing left. As long as they stayed on city-owned lots, the police didn’t hassle them, and the families of lone men and women could keep keeping on without fear of being arrested or carted off to a city shelter where gutter punks rolled every new body for all they got as soon as the lights went out. On Superman’s lot, there was no stealing and no fighting. He was a veteran just like Wayne – a former Marine who preferred crack over oxy’s and shitty booze.
‘You should sleep,’ he said.
And just like that, Wayne did.
Time went by faster. Having someone to talk to turned the winters into short songs. Superman showed him which missions were the best to eat at and how to sleep on the trains without getting caught. They went everywhere together, traded stories while they pan-handled for lunch. Superman was Chicago-raised, joined the Marines out of high school, and fought on the other side of Iraq at the same time as Wayne. His lungs bled at night. He lost track of days, and when everything acted up, he had to sleep for a week. Wayne had met other veterans on the street, but none of them made any sense. Even to him, they were animals ready to rip off your limbs and then go back to eating their chow like nothing happened. Superman understood. When Wayne told him about his family, how much he missed the girls, Superman always pushed him, told him he’d help Wayne get cleaned up.
‘We can find ‘em, Wayne. This country’s big, but it ain’t all that. Ya’ heard?’
‘Not yet. I want them to see me at my best.’
‘Hate to tell you: your best is right now. Your best was gone yesterday. Your best is wherever you’re at.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Not on that. The truth is there ain’t no easy way of doing it. No matter what you look like, what you’re wearing, how much money you got – they still might put you out. I fell for the same thing. I found this suit one day and saved it for six months. I wouldn’t let nothing touch it. I was living under a bridge, and it didn’t have one stain or spot. The day came when I washed up and put it on. I’d saved six hundred and put it in my breast pocket. Didn’t make a difference when I knocked on the door, wife turned me away the same. I thought I was healed up, but she hadn’t forgotten a thing.’
‘What’d you do’
‘What you think?
I got high, motherfucker.
Smoked through that cash.
I was an inferno.’
***
He’d been better off carrying him. The wheelchair kept pulling to the left in the rain.
Superman said it would be easier if the chair was on the street – not as many dips and cracks. Wayne told him that was his fever talking. It didn’t make a difference. The problem was the front left wheel. For the past two miles, Wayne watched it jam over and over. Now, it looked like a fist of mud.
‘How much farther?’ asked Wayne.
Superman lifted his head. His eyes were bloated, yellowed like sour milk.
‘It’s coming up. We got this, Wayne.’
It was three weeks of everything getting worse. Superman had one of his flare-ups. His skin hurt, and he’d been coughing up blood. Usually, his spells passed in a few days. He would take it easy, sleep it off in his box while Wayne brought food from the kitchens. But after a week, he wasn’t getting any better. His fever was only breaking for hours at a time. Then the kitchens stopped letting Wayne take food to go. They didn’t believe him when he told them that Superman couldn’t walk. He’d gotten lucky, found a neighborhood Italian place that threw away bags of bread and sauce every couple of days, but all that went to hell when Wayne showed up too early one night. The dishwasher caught him going through the trash. He tried to explain his situation to the guy – he had to get food to save the city, and he still couldn’t figure out if the guy didn’t speak English or just had a really bad night, because he beat the shit out of Wayne with a broken pizza paddle, tried to crush his face on a curb.
Wayne’s cheek scraped off onto the cement.
His skin and beard looked like hairy grubs floating in his pool of blood.
Superman would have been proud.
He didn’t throw one punch.
He just cried, sobbed off and on for another day, partly because he was drunk, partly because he didn’t know how to help Kal El, and partly because he realized that he couldn’t have fought back even if he wanted to. He wasn’t built for that anymore. He only knew how to walk.
Walk, and thank Krypton for another suffering day.
The hospital sprawled across four city blocks. Every building looked the same, like giant bricks with tiny doors, dark windows, and confusing signs that pointed in every direction towards parking, clinics, and exits. Wayne stepped in front of the wheelchair and crouched down. Superman’s head was flopped to his chest like a ragdoll. His lifeless arms hung down the side of the chair. Wayne leaned the wheelchair onto its back tires, sprinted up the middle of the street towards a parking garage. The attendant in the little box waved his hands. Wayne couldn’t remember the last time he’d run. His knees cracked, and his feet landed flat and hard on the cement. The man waved him off like he was swatting flies. Wayne turned the wheelchair around and pushed harder.
He begged himself to keep going.
‘C’mon…Please…Please…’
His body felt heavy even though he barely held any weight. Underneath all his clothes, his lungs stretched his ribs, and his ribs threatened to rip from his body like an exploding sack of bones. He felt it all. The polluted rain stinging his scabbed-up face. Black water collecting in his beard around his chin. The emergency room doors rushed towards them. Wayne yelled at them to open as if he could control his life with words.
‘Open! Hurry!’
Wayne only saw the woman behind the window. The rest of the room was a yellow blur, and smelled of donuts and bleach. She made eye contact with him. He saw her decide to get up, but then she frowned, sat back down.
She picked up a clipboard, pushed it under the window.
‘Is he a veteran?’
‘He’s everything.’
Wally Rudolph is a multi-disciplinary artist and the author of the novels Four Corners and Mighty, Mighty (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press). His fiction has appeared in the literary journals Palooka, Lines+Stars, Milk Money, The Slush Pile, and The Brooklyner, among others. Born in Canada to Chinese-Jamaican immigrants and raised in Texas, he’s traveled and lived throughout North America but now calls The City of Angels home.
Featured Artwork:
My Brain My Static
Jim Still-Pepper’s photography captures images that reveal the light of life. And how light is fleeting; it fades; it is easily taken for granted. He tries to shoot while there is still light. Some of his work features the big picture, and others contain just pieces of the puzzle. He urges his audience to catch the light and life in each of his photos. For his “real job,” he is a therapist who works with at-risk families. He is also a national public thinker, consultant, and workshop leader.