By Phil Earle
The morning after, I decide it’s over. Making breakfast and doing the dishes at the same time, I say to myself, “Never again.” The baby on the hardwood between my feet pulls a pan from the cabinet and the crash sets my eyes herky jerky. How nice it will be, to be past this eight drink a night prison. How liberating to break the shackles of this routine: drinking and vaping and checking baseball scores, then YouTube NFL highlights, then rearranging my golf clubs. Not Leaving Las Vegas, but Staying in Milwaukee.
I pick up the baby and hold her. My hand covers her entire back. Middle finger snug between her shoulder blades. A cube of butter collapses in the hot pan. Yesterday I started drinking at 4:37 PM. The headache stabs as feet pomp pomp pomp down the carpeted stairs. One, two, three kids—Where is the juice? Shit. We just ordered groceries but had forgotten the juice. Juice the life blood for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, for smoothies, for everything. The boys amble to the table like it’s a board meeting.
Out the picture window, Beth kneels in the garden. She planted corn and squash and beans and lettuce and strawberries and a wall of tomatoes outside of the garage. Every day the vegetables seem to multiply. The sunflowers grew fifteen feet tall and bowed so far into the neighbor’s yard, Beth had to tie them to the fence with twine. She likes to talk to me about her garden, usually when I am on my phone, ordering vintage band t-shirts or Super Nintendo games, checking the scores.
I make eggs like every morning: scrambled for the children, fried for Beth, and Diet Coke for myself. Then I am holding the baby in the crook of my arm and bending over to pick up toys in the long grass of the yard. I am up and down the stairs doing laundry. I am taking all the children to the park while Beth works in her office with the door shut. I am up the steps, down the slide. I count to ten thousand, check baseball scores. Check my high school friends on social media. Some have become fascists. A black butterfly flutters up and away across the playground. I walk around the jungle gym to make sure my kids didn’t get their necks caught in the monkey bars. I count to five hundred and watch them swing sticks at each other. They wear the jeans and sneakers and haircuts of older boys now. A strong slow breeze moves around my face. The baby grabs at it. There are cigarette butts below the bench by the playground, and I imagine hitting that smoker so hard that they shit themselves. There are still two Coors Tall Boys in the fridge, I think.
By 4:50 PM, the van is parked for the night, and I drink White Claws in the shadow of the garage door. A ghoul with a stomach like a Chevy rusting and forgotten in a riverbed. Alone for a moment with the heat and the gardening supplies and ripped inflatable pool toys, I commune with the smell of gasoline and my sweat. Then I vape weed, and then the Juul, and then I reset the sprinkler out in the stiff, blanched grass of our yard.
The boys are busy in the basement and Beth is inside breast feeding the baby when a rabbit hops under the swings, and stops between the lawn chair and the fire pit. I hit the Juul and record the bunny on my phone. It’s big marble eye records me back to infinity. A black butterfly, like the black butterfly from the park, swoops down and lights on me, walks down my arms until my trembling hand sends the butterfly skyward, tottering upward, along the garage gutter, between the power lines, up and up, racing the airplanes to heaven.
“I have to grab a couple things for dinner,” I tell Beth. She wants me to go, and knows how much I like riding my bike, knows how I need my privacy, though it worries her.
On the hill overlooking the airport, a plane comes in, and a plane goes out. What looks like a death ray rotates on the top of the control tower. The panorama is inspiring, then uninspiring as I watch the traffic move down Layton, the smoke billowing from the power plant in the distance. Notice the small plane tooling, remember the Hardee’s I cannot see. The Great Lake I cannot see. I drink one of the White Claws I’ve just purchased but hold it close to my bag, in case a cop is around.
I have written down inside myself a disappointed prayer: a summation of desperately low bar hopes. I thank whatever god that I will soon be over this, one day. Then Don from work texts me, asking me to cover for him tomorrow, and I fill my belly with White Claw, crush the can and quick open another. A plane comes in. A plane goes out.
Chicken sizzles in the pan with yellow, red, and green peppers. I chop a handful of mushrooms. Then an onion. All for curry. Beth comes down and kisses me. The baby is sleeping. My gut is rotten but I still eat chips and pretzels and dip and sour gummy watermelons at the sink while the chicken fries. I listen to my football podcast. I have another drink in my hand, twin to the one on the workbench in the garage. I move back and forth between them.
After dinner, I am tired. Beth and the boys play piano in the living room. I lay on the floor and my legs ache from all the standing. I take the boys up for bed and they fight me. I yell at them, want to cry but don’t. Their pajamas are getting too small. Lightning fills the sky outside their window, illuminating the tin Jurassic Park Raptor Containment Area poster I ordered for them off Amazon. I fall into a short narcotic sleep with my arm around one. Then I stumble down the stairs an hour later, or maybe years.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, older now, hair messy in a ponytail, a scribbled self portrait. Then I try to brush away that sick-sweet White Claw smell for Beth until my gums start to bleed.
I look at the darkened ceiling above our bed. Beth and the baby are asleep beside me. A twist of blanket keeps my bad right foot elevated. I listen to the noise machine hum, the cars ghosting through our neighborhood. I already feel hungover.
Phil Earle works as a fry cook down by the port. His writing has been published at Fence, Post Road, Beloit Fiction Journal, Juked, Hobart and The Millions.