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Reasonable Limits His car bugs the shit out of me. OK, a lot of things about him bug me, but his car is right up there at the top of the list. All orderly and neat and clean like he does brain surgery in it or something. Not a fucking thread out of place in the upholstery; everything shiny like he had 100 Mexicans polishing away at it every night, making sure that things are just right. My brother is now making a lot more money than I, which also kind of pisses me off, and he never misses a chance to bring that up either—how the little brother made good and all. And it’s not like I don’t know where this comes from, all the crap that comes out of his mouth, the glorious miracle that is his life. By the way, I think he’s had something done there—on his mouth, I mean. Can you get your mouth fixed? Looks-wise? Because his looks better somehow; I don’t know, more stylish or something. Movie-star mouth. The rest of us just have a hole there that we shove crap into. His looks like it’s something special these days, like he only uses it to perform sexual acts on really hot women or lick hundred-dollar bills or something. Anyway, yeah, it’s a competitive thing, not that there’s much to compete over. He’s won and he knows it and you’d think that he would be a good enough winner to just shut the fuck up about it. Maybe that’s one of those life lessons that just didn’t take—the whole good winners and losers thing—no matter how much I used to smack him around for whining that I wasn’t playing fair. But that’s all water under the bridge now—or would be if he would give it a goddamn rest, but he keeps on coming out here, driving all the way out of town to the trailer, and he gets out of that 100-Mexican car, and he always looks the old homestead up and down and kind of gives his head a shake as he reviews my overall situation like he didn’t know it was going to get like this, even though it always seems to manage to. But here he is, with his new mouth and all, all dandied up in a new suit, and he says he’s got a business proposition, by which he means that he wants me to clean out his garage or haul some fucking shit somewhere or just stand there and gape like some kind of goddamn inbred trailer park pothead at his pool and his electronics and whatnot. He got some art queen from town to come out and spruce his place up last year, and now you can’t even fart in it without mussing some kind of queer-ass doodad that supposedly adds an impertinent textural element to the room or some such shit, but it just gets on my nerves and makes me jumpy. It makes him jumpy too. You should see his face when I tell him I got to hit the crapper. I mean, when using your bathroom in the way God intended becomes an issue because you’ve got the British fucking crown jewels in there or something, then it seems to me that you’ve got a problem. Take the trailer. Sure, it’s either too cold or too hot and it stinks in there when it rains, but there ain’t nothing much left that can be damaged by a man going about his daily affairs, I’ll tell you that much. So he’s got his business proposition, and I start to make noise like my back is acting up, which maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but I don’t really feel up to appearing on the How Rich Is My Brother show today given that I spent the night chasing some kind of goddamn vermin around the trailer. I’m not even sure there was a vermin in there, to be completely honest, but they get in often enough that it was probably a worthwhile exercise anyway by way of keeping in practice at least. The vermin-control thing has gotten a whole lot harder since I was warned about discharging firearms, which is a straight-up violation of my rights, and what with the Second Amendment being the place from which all the other rights spring, is pretty much like pissing on the fucking Constitution as a whole, which, as a loyal American, is something I cannot abide by, but I’m sick of talking to the police all the time so I’m letting that shit slide for the moment. But it all goes on the list, believe you me. Anyway, he says it’s not one of those jobs, this one is special, by which I figure he means that it’s even shittier than usual or more humiliating or both, but he says no, I’m telling you, you’ve just got to give someone a ride somewhere and asks if I got my license back yet, which pisses me off, him asking a question like that, and he says no offense but I had to check. He had something on his teeth. He kept licking them. I asked him what the hell he was doing with his tongue, and he said whitening strips for keeping up appearances. The amazing thing is that he lends me his car for this. I mean, he knows that my transportation tends toward the unreliable, but he has never, ever let me get in his car before, much less drive it. But sure enough he was serious so I dropped him off back in town and went to where he said to go. Well, not straight over because I had some time to kill and I liked the feel, me at the wheel of that Lincoln. It’s one of those big, soft cars, and driving it is like laying in the arms of a fat hooker, so I took the long way, which I figured was OK because I usually don’t ask for much. I rolled up at the address he told me, some two-story apartment house across town with some kind of name that sounded a lot nicer than it was, which, I guess, is the point—Bell Air something or Villa whatever—and there’s a girl outside, big rack, which I notice right away, blond—she’s wearing clothes like Madonna or something, you know, where they look kind of trashy but in a really expensive, don’t-touch-me kind of way. Well, she comes over to the car and she is all pissy, like those kind of girls get, where the slightest little inconvenience is a huge deal, and maybe it is for pretty girls because they don’t have long, you know, depending on what kind of pretty they are and where that takes them. And, first thing, she starts into me about being late. “Roddy said you would be here half an hour ago.” Which is just at the starting end of late, I tell her. I mean, late is like hours and hours. Or never getting there at all. Now that’s late. “And you’re drunk,” she says. I tell her that I am as drunk as I am late, and she says something under her breath and opens the car door and drags me out and says, “I’ll drive,” and I start to think I underestimated her on account of the way she looked and all. I ask where we’re going, and she just says, “Doctor,” and that’s it for a while until she says, “He said he would send somebody trustworthy,” and I said I was trustworthy, and she said that I showed up drunk and late. I said I was only half drunk and half an hour late, and, in my book, that was within reasonable limits of trustworthiness. She kind of snorted through her nose and said that that was the story of her life. Reasonable limits. I asked if she was sick, and she said yeah, basically, but that it was easy to fix within reasonable limits, and then she did that snorting thing again. She drove pretty good, one hand on the wheel, real casual-like. And, eventually, she got a little less mad at me, and pretty soon we were talking. She was more than pretty, really, right on the edge of beautiful, though I tried not to stare. I have learned that the hot girls don’t like to be stared at, which I could never figure out because isn’t that kind of the point of hotness? But she wasn’t too mad at me anymore, and she started to seem nice, like someone you could watch football with and not someone who would yell at you and make you eat some kind of vegetable that you’ve never heard of before because that’s all she’ll eat so she won’t get fat, which is the way a lot of them seem to act, at least judging from the TV. Not that I would know She said, “Well, it doesn’t matter why at this point. It seems like the current situation is that I’m driving my boyfriend’s drunk brother over to my abortion, which I’m getting because the boyfriend isn’t really daddy material by anyone’s standards, so I guess the whole why part doesn’t really mean a lot anymore.” There didn’t seem to be much I could add to that, so I didn’t say anything. “Funny thing,” she said after a while, “all of those things, his meanness, his way with money, all that flash, that’s what made me like him in the first place. Like he would keep me safe, like he knew how to do things. But then I get knocked up, and, suddenly, all that stuff seems like the exact reasons he would be the absolute worst person in the world to have a baby with. Isn’t that funny? That’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it?” I told her that I hardly ever knew how things were supposed to work and then, because I was uncomfortable, I said, “Do you think he did something to his mouth?” She laughed and said, “Yes! Yes! I thought it was just me. Like even more than those whitening strips. Like maybe he had his lips done or something. God, I’m so glad someone else noticed.” She looked over at me with a big smile, and I liked her more then than I have anybody in a long time. “My name is Suzy,” she said. “Bobby,” I told her. “Nice to meet you.” She pulled up to the curb in front of the office and told me to wait. Some guy was standing out front with a huge poster of an aborted baby. She walked straight up to that guy and stared him hard in the face until he looked away and then she went inside. I must have fallen asleep because it seemed like she came right back out. She got back in the car and just sat there for a second, looking around. I told her I was probably sober enough to drive by now and she said OK. I slid over behind the wheel and she got in beside me and I turned the car on. The dead-baby guy was down at the end of the block now, and she pointed at him and said, “Now why don’t I pick men like that? Doesn’t he look like a fine gentleman, a perfect catch for somebody like me?” I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not, so I didn’t say anything. We sat there for a second, and I just started goosing the engine, giving it little spurts of gas. “On second thought,” she said, “maybe he’s just like Roddy. Except he dresses like shit and has a big fucking picture of a dead baby.” I pushed the gas in a little harder, and the engine started getting a little louder. It was like it was someone else’s foot pushing down on that pedal. I felt it go down to the floor, and the car started to scream and shake. “What are you doing?” she asked, looking over at me. She had to talk loud now with all of the engine noise. I shouted back, “It appears that I am going to run that asshole down.” Without taking my right foot off the gas, I stepped hard on the brake with my left and put the car in gear. It moved around under us like an animal. I took my foot off the brake, and the tires squealed as we tore off down the street straight at the dead-baby guy, who just stood and stared at us, his eyes getting bigger and bigger. Man, we were on that poor bastard fast. In the end, though, I didn’t have it in me. At the last second I pulled the wheel to the side, dead-baby guy jumped for the bushes, and we blew by him in a big gust of wind. But the dead-baby sign flew up in the air and came down on the windshield and got stuck somehow. So there we were, blasting down the street at about 70 miles per hour with nothing visible in front of us but aborted fetus, and I thought, Well, this sure as shit is a hell of a way to die. But we didn’t die. The dead-baby poster blew off the windshield, and I somehow managed not to hit anything, at least not head-on, though I did scrape Roddy’s precious paint job on some stuff in passing. I slowed down and got things back under control but kept driving for a few miles, just to put some distance between us and the scene of the crime. I looked over at Suzy and saw she was watching me. “That,” she said, “was a really fucked-up thing to do.” “Yeah, I know,” I told her. “It was just like, all of a sudden, I was mad on your account. The way people have been treating you lately.” “I suppose that’s sweet,” she said, “in a deranged, hillbilly sort of way.” We both kept silent for a while as I drove aimlessly around. “You know,” I finally said, “maybe it’s time for me to get out of here, find a new town, new set of fuckups. I could give you a ride somewhere.” “You’re going to take Roddy’s car?” “Well, just for a little bit. I’ll probably drop it off for him a few towns over. He can get someone to pick it up for him.” She said, “Are you going to try to kill anyone else for me?” “I reckon not,” I said. “I didn’t enjoy it all that much the first time.” She thought for a little bit and then gave me a quick nod. “OK,” she said. “Let’s go. A new set of fuckups sounds pretty appealing right now.” We dropped by the Villa whatever so she could get some stuff, and then I pointed the Lincoln west, because west seems like the direction of fresh starts, the direction people go to get out from under their tired, old lives. Suzy turned to me and said, “You know, I’m not really in the market for a new boyfriend right now,” and I said that was just fine by me. And it was because just then my heart felt bigger than that Lincoln, big enough for Suzy and Roddy and the dead-baby guy, big enough for the whole wide world. We rolled out of town, me and my friend, Suzy, the engine putting out a smooth 3000 RPM.
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firsthand or anything. Finally, she asked how I knew Roddy and I said he’s my little brother and she looks over and says, “You’re his brother?” real surprised. “He sent his brother?” and I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, like maybe she was mad because usually I only get to clean out the garage, so maybe it’s insulting to her or something. So I said, by way of maybe calming her down, that he was probably just rubbing my nose in it again, showing me how pretty his girlfriend was. She laughed again and said, “Yeah, that sounds like Roddy; use my abortion to score points on his brother.” I didn’t say anything. She said, “Well, wouldn’t you? If Roddy got you pregnant, wouldn’t you get an abortion?” I told her that was kind of a hard thing for me to think about, and she said, “Yeah, I guess it might be. But he has a mean streak, like a real bad dog, you know?” I told her that I did. But sometimes I think it might be my fault. I wasn’t very nice to him growing up.