The House of Happy Mayhem Read online

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  Another night passes uneventfully. I don’t see Lisa or James at the park the next day, and that night I go back to the Catamount. I’ve had a few drinks but I’m still holding my own, watching a rerun of a sitcom on the television when I glance out the window and see James. He’s smiling, gesticulating, and then he’s throwing his head back in laughter. I don’t see whom he’s talking and smiling and laughing with until he passes by the window, and as he does, he places his arm around the shoulders of the woman I saw him with before. The brunette.

  I ask the bartender for another drink and he brings it to me. Then I drink it and watch the window, even though they are gone and not likely to return. My mind whirls about. I hear the laugh track from the television and I take it as a sign. Not that anyone is laughing at me, no, there’s no reason for anyone to laugh at me. They’re all laughing at Lisa. She’s being two-timed and doesn’t know it and it’s like a comical situation in a Woody Allen movie.

  A man at the bar turns to me. He’s the same man that went off at me the other night about the government. He’s drunk as all hell. “I’m supposed to believe,” he says, “that the man who sat in a classroom reading a kids’ book for seven minutes after he was told the country was under attack, who was warned repeatedly about imminent threats against the country and chose to ignore them, who has traipsed off on vacation every time there is a domestic or international disaster, is a decisive man-of-action with the fortitude to run a nation!”

  I try to ignore him but he is relentless. I look back at the window and wonder what James and Little Miss Brunette are doing now behind Lisa’s beautiful and trusting back.

  “I’m supposed to believe that the escalating violence, chaos and deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are a sign of progress?” he goes on.

  I turn to him and tell him to shut the hell up and he gets all uppity and warns me not to tell him to shut up. So I tell him to fuck off, and suddenly both of us are shouting at each other. I’ve had a few drinks and I’m pissed off and don’t want some goddamn psychotic liberal going off at me at the moment.

  When we get too loud, before the bartender can say anything, a voice behind us tells us both to shut the hell up.

  I turn around and see the guy who shoots hoops at the park. He gives me a look like he’s trying to place me from somewhere, and I make the mistake of letting him know by telling him that he’s a has-been, his wife and child resent him and that the Lakers fucking suck. I tell him that he drinks too much and can’t let go of his glory days as a high school or possibly a college ball player. He never made it to the big time and he probably works construction or at Home Depot and he hates the world for cheating him out of his dream. And while I’m saying all of this he’s getting to his feet, and then he’s standing right in front of me and I call him a loser with no other goals than a goal long since passed.

  That’s when he hits me, and everything spins around and I suddenly find myself on the floor. I lay there for a minute, and think about Lisa at home, and James off with that no-good bitch of a brunette. Then I stumble up to my feet, spit out what I hope will be pain but is only spit, and ask the bartender for my check.

  I pay the man and leave a good tip and then make my way Wal-Mart. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive and I take it cautiously because I’ve been drinking. I purchase what I need and then stop at a convenience store and get something else and then I go home. I pour some bleach into a glass and then add some ice. Then I add some more ice and then a small amount of nail polish remover and when I’ve added that I add more ice. Then I add some more ice and wait about twenty minutes until the liquid in the glass has clouded. I go through a couple more minor procedures and pour the liquid into a sports water bottle, then go into my linen closet and grab two washcloths.

  The park is different at night. All the specters, the evil sides of children—the angry sides that punch through windows—come out at night. They are like demons and they force me to see contorted faces and frightening things. I sit on the rock best situated to view the Cohan household, and I see that there is only one car in the driveway. I know it’s Lisa’s car, and so I wait and wait, and think about Lisa, so beautiful, and James, a son of a bitch who doesn’t realize that what he has is the greatest thing anyone in the world could ever have.

  Eventually headlights spring up and sparkle into the street. I watch the car pull into the Cohan driveway and I see James get out. He looks tired and a little drunk but he has the aura of a man who has gotten laid. I wait for him to go inside, give it another minute, and then make my way out of the park and across the street. I watch the living room light go off, then I creep up the eight steps and sit in the yard, passing the sports bottle back and forth between my hands.

  I let this go on for over an hour. Then I get up, walk slowly to the front door and let myself in. The house is quiet. All the lights are off but I know my way around well enough now that I can find my way.

  The bedroom door is open. The curtains are drawn open as well, and moonlight is spilling in and casting gray light upon the sleeping couple in bed together.

  I pop the stopper on the sports bottle and it makes a tiny hiss. Then I wait patiently for a while. When I’ve waited long enough I pull the two washcloths out of my back pocket, and douse them both with the homemade chloroform. Crossing to the left side of the bed, where James is asleep, I study both of their faces. Such a perfect couple, the right kinds of people and the right kinds of people for this right kind of house.

  But they aren’t right. James has done something very wrong and I know he’s guilty. I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes. I don’t have to witness it in detail to know what he’s doing, and I don’t know what he’s told Lisa, but Lisa, such a beautiful, perfect woman, so beautiful my mind boggles and dazzles at the very thought of her, doesn’t deserve to be treated this way. And so I take the washcloths and cover both of their mouths and noses.

  They struggle, but both of them are asleep and their fights are both short-lived and futile. I stuff the washcloths back into my pocket and think of how beautiful they are. Both of them so lovely, yet James screwed it up. I had hoped to drink soda or even beer with him in front of his big-screen TV, but now that I know the kind of person he is, that will never happen. To me, he has cashed in his humanity card and I clench my right hand into a tight fist.

  My first punch doesn’t do a whole lot more than jostle his head, but the next one makes a cracking sound, and with the next I can feel his teeth loosening, breaking beneath my blows. I punch him more times than I can count, again and again until I actually have a piece of one of his teeth lodged into the flesh of my knuckles and there is blood all over his pillow and in my mind I quote Shakespeare. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!

  Unconscious, in the moonlight, he looks like a very sorry, very sad jack-o-lantern.

  I think of my father calling me a “Little shit” and beating me for shattering a window, and then I walk around the bed to Lisa. She’s unconscious but beautiful. I get water up my nose while in the middle of a swimming hole, and now it comes out my eyes. I allow myself to stroke her hair three times. I plant a gentle kiss on her forehead and whisper, “The monster’s gone, Lisa. The monster’s gone and won’t hurt you any more.”

  Then I rise up, make my way out of the bedroom, down the hall and out the front door, locking it behind me.

  I cross the street, run my fingers along the chain-linked fence, and then enter the park, so dark and gloomy, you little shit, but with less antagonism than before. I make my way across the grass and think about the man with the black lab—the poor lonely bastard—and when I reach the river I toss away my copy of the Cohan house key, a key for the right kind of house where the right kinds of people live, and my Christmas dream decides to end.

  With my mind seeing that dog jumping high into the air to catch that sunny yellow Frisbee, I toss off one more eggnog and then make
my way home, in the dark, thinking about how I forgot to bring a book this time.

  I wonder what book it would have been.

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