31.
After the rain things were strange and timid and the sky was sunny and time felt in slow motion like a dream half-remembered. It was really hot and everything was frozen and I could feel something unseen clinging on my back like a monkey without skin. I was beginning to feel very dragged down and I had, for some reason, a guilty feeling about everything in the world that had nothing to do with anything concerning myself. I was back to walking around without seeing anything and I couldn’t stand daylight and I was a cheap vampire stuck in a useless void. And most of all I felt that something was on its way to a conclusion - something that never really began in the first place, and I felt like I had a new show to watch seeing Sean and Gregory goofing around at the Cavern, but that didn’t last for too long. In fact it all ended up very quickly.
The duo had planted some Tijuana M80s, old ones Gregory Den had had in his closet for years, behind some tall skinny trees in the backyard near the swimming pool of the Cavern. Den had connected each explosive with a wire and extended uncoiled it all the way back, along the sidewall and hung it (obscured behind ivy) near the side yard gate. These were placed to sabatoge a party Sissy had planned for some of his church friends. On that noisy splashing day Sean and Gregory drove up stealthily and parked right outside the house at the foot of the driveway. Gregory got out – Sean driving - and grabbed the wire that still had plenty of slack and Sean from the inside propped the hood. Gregory Den then touched the wire to the + part of the engine and we heard three extremely loud pops from the backyard – like gunshots they sounded, even louder.
Then one of the bushes alongside the side of the pool caught on fire. It was a small blaze that Sissy put out with a bucket of pool water, but this burning bush spoke and told him: “This is the last straw for those guys!!!”
And that it was. The straws were out. We couldn’t suck life from the Cavern any longer…
It turned out Ed was going to move back to his parent’s house anyway; he’d lost his job and was going to a trade school – so we’d have gotten booted without Ed there either way.
Sissy and Crumb were going move out and live somewhere in some bachalor apartment together. Sissy’s parents had grown tired of living in the desert where they’d moved to retire, and wanted the house back. The Cavern would be there’s again. Everything was done…
I don’t like it too good when thing’s come to an end, especially when I don’t gain anything from it. When the whole thing finished I felt robbed somehow. I felt as if I’d wasted a lot of time and had gotten nothing out of it.
The last I saw Marc Sandoval was at Sean Dusk’s house.
It was night, maybe a week after the sports bar conversation after he and Dusk had “attempted” working out, and Gregory, myself, and David and Sean were watching TV. I felt tired that night, sluggish and gray. I remember feeling really tired and that I wanted to sleep for days. I didn’t feel like ever moving from that couch – I think we all felt that way.
Anyhow, that night Gregory Den ended up leaving early. I don’t know where he went but he left, and in a couple of minutes, the doorbell rang…
Soon enough Marc was inside the family room.
As I said I was really tired and I barley recall what happened that night. I barley remember the actions but I remember some of the words.
Marc was sitting on one of the barstools and Sean was on the couch next to me. David was aloof watching the tube and Marc - no surprise - seemed both vacant and edgy.
“You and Sammi went out to Hollywood a few months ago,” he said to Sean with a pale voice.
Sean just sat there frozen. Marc was frozen, too, but in a different sort of way.
“She told me last night about it,” he said to Sean. “I finally got it out of her. I knew she’d been keeping something from me.”
Sean sighed.
“What’s the big deal? We just drove around that night, David too.”
“But all that doesn’t matter,” Marc said. “It’s not that I think you did anything with her. It’s just the fact she lied to me that night. You manipulated her to lie to be. You manipulate everyone, Sean.”
“I manipulate everyone?” Sean said in a perplexed tone. “I think what you’re doing right now is refered to as projecting, Marc.”
“You do it all the time,” Marc said stubbornly. “Everything has to go your way or nothing will happen at all.”
David blew air threw his nose and shook his head.
Marc pointed to David, still looking at Sean. “You even changed David. He was so nice at one time, and now he has no feelings, just like you.”
“C’mon, Marc,” David sighed.
“Everything has to go YOUR way, Marc,” said Sean Dusk, “or you’ll make sure everybody has a bad time. I just like to hang out and have fun. If people follow me it isn’t because I manipulate them to follow – it’s because they want to. And anyhow, follow isn’t even the right word. People hang out with me as I hang out with them.”
“But you made Sammi lie,” Marc said.
“I didn’t make anybody do anything. Not Sammi, not David, not anyone, Marc. It’s all dreamt up in your mind.”
“You can fuck with all your puppets, you can even fuck with me,” Marc said with an edgy tone. “But don’t fuck with my girlfriend, Sean. That will get you in trouble.”
Marc got up from the stool, and began to walk out of the room.
Sean looked at Marc, and said:
“You’re either a black sheep or a scapegoat.”
“I’ve had enough of your bullshit,” Marc said, stopping by the door.
“The feeling is mutual,” Sean said – with finality in his tone.
And that was it. Marc left. With that he walked out of the room, through the hallway, and then, slammed the front door when he left.
“Well,” Sean said to David. “That’ll wake my parents. But I doubt that if Marc knew he’d care. He’d say it was their fault for sleeping in their own house. Because that’s Marc Sandoval for you…
“Never to blame for anything…
“Monkey logic…
“Pure vain insanity!”
Leaving Sean’s that night I felt torn in a way. I don’t know why but I felt like I’d wasted an entire year of my life, and couldn’t stop thinking about the first time Marc and I sat on the roof with the beers…
My stomach hurt. I felt a whole lot of things I couldn’t really put into any logical sense. I went home and slept without dreaming…
32.
The next day I went over to the Cavern to see if Ed needed help moving.
When I got to the cavern Ed had just left; I knew that because the prodigal son, Cudd, who was there to pick up some of his things he’d left in the garage, had told me as he put the last of it into the trunk.
“So,” I said. “How was it in Washington?”
He was parked along the sidewalk. I was parked across the street. He was standing by the driver’s side. We both had the car in-between us.
“There was nothing for me in Washington,” he said in a vacant tone, “so I came back. Simple as that.”
“No work huh?”
“There was some work, but no life to go along with it. So I thought to myself - if I got nothing going on, I might as well be here where it’s not always raining.”
“I’ve never been away, I mean, not for too long,” I said. “I’ve never moved out of this town before. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“Well,” Cudd said, “I think moving, unless you really have to, is overrated. Gale Trask is full of it. Life’s the same everywhere. You can’t find yourself if you’re looking for yourself. And if you do, all you end up finding is what you were already…
“In a nutshell,” Cudd concluded morosely, “life is no big deal.”
He nodded, got into his car, started it up, and pressed the button for the passenger window to open. When it was I leaned down and looked in and saw through his window and noticed, for the first time, that the strange tree was gone. There was a stump for where it had been. The front of the house seemed naked and pale without it.
“That house,” I said, “sure had some memories.”
Cudd, staring over quickly, nodded. Then he faced forward again, smirked, and rolled his eyes. “Yeah… I guess so.”
“I think I’m gonna miss it,” I told him.
He looked at me, shook his head. “I doubt if I will. It was just a place to live when I didn’t have any other place, that’s all. Just like where I’m headed now.”
“All right,” I said. “You take care.”
“Yeah,” he replied vacantly. “You do the same…”
He drove around in a U-turn, to face out of the col de sac, nodded to me and waved his hand coolly, and then drove off.
I stood on the street, alone.
The Cavern was dead, and was a house again - I stared at it for a very long time.
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