About The Lonely 3

Post 239:

Together the Lonely: A Novel

Chapter Three:

3. Denny

            Nothing right. I can’t get anything right. His hands were quivering from cold and wet, quaking from fear. It made the simple task of unlocking the front door almost impossible. Competing for supremacy with the rain and the sound of metal scraping metal, he could hear his aunt yelling in grating, pitched tones.

            “Who’s out there? Dennis? That you?”

            “My key’s not working. Can you come unlock the door?”

            “Just use the key. I’m in my robe. There’s weirdoes out there.”

            Denny was past keeping his emotions chained. “Just open, please, Aunt Ray!”

            He began pounding the peeling wood, feeling the moment would never end. The thought of running off the porch in front of traffic flashed through his brain. He turned away and looked at the street and then at his soaked boots. Queens could be sad. Even sadder in the rain. Rows of rusty cars and rust-colored houses. Just wait for a truck and it’ll all be over. Just wait for a truck and make sure you do it. Don’t be a gosh darn idio—

            “Denny? What are you doing? You look like a chubby private eye.”

            He shook the water off his thrift store fedora and guided his aunt back in the house as quickly as her bones would allow. Three nosy cats shrieked and skittered away as Denny pounded his feet on the fraying entry mat. As he locked the door and brought down the blinds, Aunt Ray started poking him between the shoulders with a bony finger. “Easy, Dick Tracy. You don’t want to wake up your mom.” Denny’s aunt was only ten years older than him, but that didn’t preclude her from living out the old maid’s life with her whole heart.  

            “Everything you say is for old people,” he said, carefully hanging up his coat. Water dripped down onto old newspapers collecting against the wall. “From another century or something.”

            “You need some clothes from this century,” she smirked, walking on creaking floors to the den just off the entryway. “And maybe a job this century. What’ve you been doing out there?” Aunt Ray negotiated her body back into her recliner and turned up the news, waving her nephew away. He caught a fleeting glimpse and sound byte of the top story as she turned up the volume. It made him lumber away down the dimly lit hall toward the kitchen, afraid that the surreal sound of his own name spoken by a stranger might come through the television. He turned the hot water to full and put his still trembling hands underneath the current until they started to burn. He hardly noticed at first, nervously watching the backyard through the fog-covered kitchen plate glass window. Finally the physical caught up with the emotional and he pulled his hands away from the sting. Damn-shit-dammit-to-shit-for-shit’s!

            Aunt Ray sounded off. “Give your mother some peace!”

            Denny shook his head and hands, placing the burned skin back under the faucet, this time on cold. He suddenly found himself laughing and crying, looking again out the window into the backyard. There was a rotted wooden swing set standing out there—he could barely make it out through the rain. A few memories flashed through his mind. Maybe they were imaginings. The rain went away for a moment. He could see his dad, tall and rugged like him, but somehow noble in an undershirt—mom was happy to give instructions from the steps as he and his sister were gently pushed and caught. The sun was high, the little rubber seats were warm on their legs. Meaningful. Meaningless. He didn’t know, but the vision seemed to lead his body out the back door and into the middle of the yard. It was as good a place as any. He wasn’t supposed to still be there, yet there he was.    

            Denny pulled a revolver out from his pants and put the barrel under his chin. The rain continued, unrelenting. His back was to the house he had lived in his entire life. His eyes were dancing in their sockets, looking with exasperation at the decrepit swing set. Rusted memories. The vision was no longer there. No idyllic father, no laughing pig-tailed sister; the sunshine days were erased, leaving him to heave and gasp, drowning in the rain. Minutes or moments. Gallows moments, dreamlike and confused. He pulled the trigger.

            Nothing. But not the nothing he was expecting.

            Just the old swing set and the soggy smell of home and a gun that wouldn’t fire. He’d spent too much time in the rain. The weapon was waterlogged. Forgetting his fear, forgetting death, Denny pulled the trigger again and again, if only to know for once and for one tiny moment that things could go according to plan.

            He couldn’t get anything right. Good for nothing. Not even dying.