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Fiction Short Story

by Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Ten-Year Visit

Mom’s house on Christmas Day. Seems like 50 relatives over. I remember some of the older ones but anyone under ten wouldn’t have been born when I left. My eyes are blurry from fatigue after the 24-hour trip home. I don’t really know any of the people in the room now. They’re all ten years older than they were when I knew them. I find it best to sit and not attract attention. Aunt Maggie is the nosiest. She wants to know where I’ve been since 1993. She still talks too loud. I don’t recognize her at first because she has gained 100 pounds. Her husband, my mother’s brother, Uncle Charles, tells her to leave me alone. It is the kindest act of my holiday.

Phone rings in the morning. A man who was my friend nearly 20 years ago says he wants to have coffee at Bell’s, the diner, like the old days. They called him Elder, the oldest son. We don’t recognize each other anymore. He could be an imposter. The first thing he tells me is that all of our old friends from Wayland High school are gone. He says it’s just him and me now. I want a glass of wine and hashish. I tell him that, in Wayland, it’s still just him. I leave tomorrow. He says we should go out tonight then. He’s 35 and balding. He’s overweight, more so than he was in high school after he quit the track team to focus on his writing. He works at the gas station, changing oil. I say it would be okay if he calls me later and I leave the diner.

Kathy Spellings kissed me at Bell’s when I was sixteen. She had a round belly and strong wrists. She was a brown Indian like me, a part of an Indian tribe that didn’t exist in the eyes of the government. She had long, black hair she tied into a ponytail when she played tennis. Like me, she ate too much cheese pizza and strawberry ice cream to be thin, but, unlike me, she was quick as a cat. Elder was her first boyfriend. I tried to forgive him then, but I gave up.

Kathy was my first girlfriend. In tenth grade, if I could have, I would have killed Elder. Elder is gay now. I suppose he was gay then, too, but back then he was a poet. That’s what he told everyone. He talked about the pain in his life. His mother’s death. His father’s failing garage. His alcoholic younger brother. He only wrote down one poem that I know of. And I know he didn’t write it. He copied it out of an old edition of Norton’s anthology, a book I bought him at a yard sale for a quarter. It was something by the guy who wrote, Death Be Not Proud.

In high school, Elder was a whore. With that one poem, a big cheesy smile, and his sad family stories, he seduced girls all over west Michigan. Now that I think about it, I hate Elder. Now Elder has grease stuck in his fingertips and under his nails. Permanent grease.

Since I’ve been home, I bet I’ve spoken less than one hundred words. In high school, I would sometimes go days without speaking. Everyone I knew was used to it so they didn’t bother me about it. When I go home to Amsterdam to my wife Carol, I will speak thousands of words a day. I will speak English, a little Dutch, a little Italian, and my wife’s language, Brazilian Portuguese. In Europe, I talk all the time. Sometimes, my friends ask me to be quiet.

Tonight I will visit my sister Elizabeth and her family. Elizabeth was the last family member I spoke to before leaving ten years ago. She dropped me off at the airport in Chicago at the International Terminal. Now she has a husband and triplets.

I watch movies with my mom all afternoon. She doesn’t move around much anymore. She likes spy movies. I don’t understand why. She tries to talk me into staying longer. She needs help around the house and with the yard. She says she’s lonely since my father died in a plane crash last year. He wasn’t really my dad. He was my step-dad. I never met him in person but I talked to him on the phone once.

Elder calls again and tells me he’ll be at Jolly Bar around nine. I say that’s fine and hang up. He expects to see me there.

We have dinner at Elizabeth’s house. Her husband is a nice man, but he’s too confident in the stability of his life. He doesn’t acknowledge that his job or family could collapse at any moment. I sometimes tell people that civilization is an anomaly and impermanent. Indians know these things. At dinner, I talk little. Elizabeth’s husband is named Tom and he has a bad goatee. He wears polo shirts and slacks. He looks like a lawyer, one who takes a laptop and a fax machine on vacation. My nieces are beautiful. They are named after my grandmother and her two sisters. I would have named them after men to confuse people.

Elizabeth and Tom cook a vegetarian meal. I keep forgetting to tell my family that I started eating meat again a few years ago. I missed the taste, so I began to eat it again. We eat vegetarian lentil soup, vegetarian pasta, and vegetarian ice cream. My sister tells me she wants me to stay home and bring whatshername over here. She misses me and loves me so I forgive her for being so selfish and insulting to my wife. Tom says nothing. I can’t tell if he disagrees with Elizabeth or if he says nothing because he isn’t a blood relative.

After dinner, we have Christmas. Elizabeth gives me a book signed by her friend who attended Harvard with her. It’s a screenplay with a picture of famous actors on the cover. I tell Elizabeth that I will read it on the plane tomorrow. I’ve already seen the film. She starts to cry. I feel bad and ask her permission to take a short walk.

Tom and my sister live near the state police station on Forrest. They live across the street from our childhood home at 524 Forrest. I go and look at our old house. It’s small and ugly compared to other houses on the street. I walk south up the street toward downtown Wayland. We lived on this street for nine years. Here, I broke Steve Polson’s nose. Here, I scraped most of the skin off my knee when I jumped off my bike. Here, I turned left on my way to school at Steeby Elementary. Here, through an open window, I watched a drunk lady undress and crumple into her bed. Here, I saw Denver, Markie Alexander’s dog, crushed to death by a garbage truck driver.

Before long, I’m standing in front of Jolly Bar. I check my watch. It’s only seven thirty. I look inside to see if I recognize anyone from my childhood. I see Elder. He’s early. I go inside. Elder claps me on the back and orders me a drink. I prefer Grey Goose vodka in my martinis but all they have is Stoli. The bartender serves my drink in a plastic cup, the kind we used at house parties on Greenwood in Ann Arbor.

Elder is already drunk. He talks to me about Kathy and the others he slept with when we were teenagers. It’s a weekday and only the regular drunks are there. They’re much older than we are. Everyone in the bar knows Elder.

I want to hurt Elder somehow so I challenge him to a game of pool. I’m an exceptional pool player. I defeat Elder quickly. He doesn’t even sink one ball. We play again and again until Elder tires of losing every game. I can tell he’s angry with me, that I won’t let him even compete with me. He stops talking about teenaged women he knew and starts talking about his job—from good memories to bad reality.

The last time I was in a fight was in Tucson, Arizona. I was there to interview for a job as a law clerk for a federal judge. The fight was over a game of pool at a bar on Congress Street. I broke a chair over my adversary’s head. I then broke a cue stick over his prostrate body. I would’ve stabbed him dead with the broken cue stick but several large men pulled me away. I didn’t get the clerkship.

I’ve seen many amazing things since that day. A bus explosion in Bogotá. Bloody corpses lined up for identification in South Africa. Burned corpses of smoke jumpers in Guatemala. The execution by hanging of a brutal military leader in Pakistan. I’ve been in hundreds, maybe thousands, of bars and dance clubs. I’ve witnessed dozens of fistfights and a couple of knife fights. All that and I haven’t fought for over ten years.

Tonight, I will fight Elder. I will fight him until he’s dead.

We go out the back door of the bar around ten. Elder is so drunk that he can barely stand. It’ll be easy for me to fight and defeat him. He directs me around the corner to his father’s garage on Main Street. The street is empty. I look around for something with which to beat Elder. A blunt instrument, as they say in the movies. I see nothing until we reach the garage. Elder has trouble with the keys because his hands are unsteady but I’m smart enough to let him open the door on his own. Inside, we walk through the garage to the back stairs. I see a pair of greasy work gloves. I also see a large wrench, almost as large as an axe.

Upstairs, Elder talks incessantly. His speech is slurred and he staggers almost comically around the studio apartment. I calmly put on the gloves and take up the wrench, wiping it down to obscure any of my fingerprints. Elder ignores me. I turn and look at myself in his mirror over the dresser near his bed. I look strong and dangerous. I turn to face Elder, to beat him to death. It won’t take long.

But I don’t beat Elder to death or even raise one hand against him. In fact, I drop the large wrench onto Elder’s unkempt bed and raise my gloved hands. Elder is very, very drunk. His eyes are almost closed. He can barely keep his head up off his own chest. He’s sitting on his sole kitchen chair pointing a shotgun at me. The shotgun wavers a bit, but the aim is good enough to change my life forever if he fires it.

I ask him what he’s doing. His voice is so fuzzy I can’t understand. I ask again. He says he wants my wallet.

I say okay but I don’t move.

Elder tells me that his life is a sack of shit, that he is poor, and he is lonely. He tells me he deserves more and that I deserve less. He says something about Kathy but I can’t understand him anymore. He slowly slumps forward and drops his gun. He slides to the floor next to his bed. While I hope Elder dies of blood poisoning or asphyxiates on his own vomit, I do nothing to injure him. I replace the gloves and the wrench on my way out.

As my plane accelerates down the runway at the Gerald R. Ford (formerly Kent County) airport in the morning, I think that beating Elder to death would’ve been the perfect crime. By the time anyone found his pathetic corpse, I’d be in Amsterdam. I have no record and there’d be no way for the local police to trace me. The drunks in the bar didn’t know me. I would’ve gotten away scot-free.

Before I said good-bye this morning, I gave my mom ten thousand dollars. I told her that she could use the money for anything she wanted. I suggested that there was enough for her and Elizabeth’s entire family to visit me in Amsterdam. Carol and I have a large house, for Amsterdam. I told my mother that in Amsterdam I am a different person. I’ll tell her anything she wants to know. I’ll entertain her and tell jokes. I’ll laugh and have fun. I’ll be normal.

Copyright © 2004 Matthew L.M. Fletcher

About the Author
Matthew is a Grand Traverse Band Ottawa and lives in Peshawbestown, Michigan. He has published fiction in Punk Planet, Outsider Ink, The Dunes Review, The Vermont Law Review, Sabella, and Snow Monkey.