Here’s a short story I wrote in my first fiction technique class. If you’ve got the patience to read it in this format, go ahead; let me know what you think. I’d like to investigate ways to cut it up into more manageable pages, though. Maybe I’ll add some illustrations, too…

Empty Sky, Selfless Love

1

The most stressful part of the evening should have come to an end as Sal’s wife Mary cleared the plates from the table and told the boys–how cute, that’s what she called them, not the men or the fellas–to go out back with the cooler of Sam Adams and catch up. During dinner and dessert, Lou and Sal had kept up the impression that they were just old friends from Sal’s bachelor days, which, honestly, Lou hadn’t realized were even over until the previous afternoon.

So, as Mary ran the garbage disposal and the kids, Jake and Jimmy, ages six and–God, who knows what’s the difference?–played Tonka trucks on the living room rug, Sal and Lou (who was still limping heavily) stepped out onto the patio overlooking the quarter-acre backyard, where the sun was just being replaced by the moon and

(how long has it been since I’ve seen)

the stars. Lou reached down into the cooler, his hands numbed for a moment by the icy water, the sea in which a dozen–make that eleven, make that ten–bottles floated like wayward pirate ships. If it had been a long time since Lou noticed the stars, it had been even longer since he’d had a beer. Here’s to the end of prohibition–or at least to Lou’s own private state-mandated dry spell–and the beginning of an eternal happy hour.

The two men, each in his late thirties now, stood awkwardly, shifting on the planks of the patio. The silence was as thick as Lou’s eight years in the pen were long, but he just couldn’t think of anything to say. Sal had been the first phone call he’d made–or tried to make, anyway–from the outside, but now he wasn’t sure he even recognized–or liked for that matter–this stranger who used to be his only friend. This stranger who didn’t even want to see him.

He wanted to ask Sal

(Honestly do you even care? Yeah, I do.)

what had happened since the last time he saw him eight years ago. Where the house and the kids and the wife had come from. The first drink–the crisp, cool, the-way-a-beer-is-supposed-to-taste feel of the Sam Adams–reminded him too much of his karaoke days. It reminded him too much of

(pour some sugar on me)

Kat. She used to tell him–used to, yeah right, like it even lasted that long–he was the best duet she’d ever done (and done here is a double entendre), but she had betrayed him. He’d practically found her in the arms of another man–that damned Beastie Boys guy, Harold Epstein. Fight for Your Right to Party? You can’t be serious. But she was and she left him

(for a moment she is cross-eyed)

at Jerry’s place after singing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Did you ever know that you’re my hero? Kat, did you ever know that you’re a liar? He had Harold Epstein to thank for this damned bum leg.

After the uncomfortable silence had sunk in like dirt in a doormat, Lou looked at Sal’s shoes and said: “I was pretty messed up after Kat left me. And you were the only one who would even look at me.” He took a drink before continuing: “I had no job–that was a mess, wasn’t it?–and no friends. All I had was the neighbor’s mailbox and my Wednesday night

2

in June: The scene is Jerry’s Place, a rusty old roadhouse famous–at least around here–for its three-dollar pitchers, its no-questions-asked policy, and its Wednesday night karaoke. The guy who owns the place, Bill Laswell (not Jerry, who doesn’t exist), is reputed to have been a Desert Storm vet or something. People say Bill’s mind got fried by the desert heat. People say a lot of things.

At one end of the smoky barroom, a makeshift stage is set up with a TV screen and a padded microphone. Wednesdays from eight to midnight, the stage is never empty. Along the back wall runs an old-fashioned padded bar, marked and scarred with sweat rings from glasses and bottles, and lovers’ initials. Behind the bar, Bill Laswell paces, towel slung over his shoulder, taking drink orders and minding his own business.

Lou Jeffries has just finished a duet–”Wind Beneath My Wings” for those keeping score at home–with a robust woman who insists on being called Kat, just Kat. The two of them sit at the bar, sweaty and breathing hard. Lou orders a beer for himself and a Long Island Iced Tea for Kat, who fishes a pack of Marlboro Reds from her sequined purse. Bill brings the drinks and winks at Lou, as if to say Right on, Lou, you still got it. Lou knows though that he doesn’t still got it and he probably never had it to start with.

“You know, you were terrific up there,” Lou says, staring into his own bottle. He can’t bring himself to look into Kat’s green eyes since last week’s heated rendition of “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” during which the duo’s stage personas and deeply guarded emotions collided resulting in a bungled one-night stand for Kat and the beginning of a lifelong obsession for Lou.

Kat lights a cigarette, apparently enthralled by the orange glow just beyond her fingertips. For a moment, she is cross-eyed. She says: “Yeah, Lou.” She takes a drag too long and deep for a lady and sticks the fingers of her other hand in her glass, swirling the ice. “But you know–”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Lou says around the lip of his bottle. “Please, I know.” But he’s lying; he doesn’t know what she’s going to say. He wishes she’d tell him he was the best duet she’d ever done again. He notices the way the bar lights bounce off Kat’s stocking thighs and remembers for a moment what those thighs look like without the stockings.

For a long and laborious moment, neither says anything. Lou listens as his only friend in the world, a regular named Sal Martino, sings “Twisting the Night Away.” Kat swivels on her barstool to face him. She forces him to look at her by way of two fingers–the same two which hold her cigarette–under his chin. Lou wishes for a more appropriate background song, but as Sal finishes, a trio of newcomers begins to sing “Fight For Your Right to Party.”

Lou thinks he notices Kat stealing a glance at one of the wannabes on stage. For a quick moment–not even the time it takes to take a breath–Kat’s face changes. Her disapproving stare is replaced by a childlike, but decidedly adult, look of longing over Lou’s shoulder. She seems to look right past his face, the same face she has just grabbed by the chin. This look only lasts an instant, but it is enough for Lou to put the pieces together, as the saying goes.

“Lou.” Kat brings her face closer to his and he is overwhelmed by the sourness of her breath. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Without waiting for his reply, Kat stands from her barstool, clutching the same purse from which Lou stole her social security card last week, and leaves him sitting alone with his longneck, the fragrance of Marlboro smoke still haunting his nostrils, the phantom image of the look in her eyes as she looked past him–let’s be honest, through him–at the Beastie Boy on the stage behind him haunting his vision.

As the song ends, the Beastie Boy, who Bill Laswell tells Lou is named Something Epstein (he’s a dentist, he thinks), steps down from the stage and leaves the bar, probably to meet Kat for some kind of heated and tawdry love affair. Lou will follow at a distance.

3

Sal Martino stood, arms resting on the patio railing, hands clutching the cool reminder that it’s always five o’clock somewhere. Lou watched intently as Sal ignored him. He noticed that there was nothing really interesting going on in the yard next-door; no dog, no kids, no ever-loving sprinkler oscillating. Sal was ignoring him for sure. But why? Because Lou had just showed up at his house unexpected after eight years of silence? Sure, maybe, but more than likely it was something a little more complex than that. Isn’t it always?

As one minute ticked into the next, and as the sun neared the end of its daily engagement with the western hemisphere, Sal spoke up without looking at Lou.

“I don’t know what to say, Lou.” Not exactly eloquence, but, hey, it was something. “I mean, when you got canned from the telemarketing place, I guess I felt like we had something. I guess I felt like I understood you.” He stopped for a second and sighed heavily.  “I wish I had stopped you from going over there. I mean, I knew something like this would happen. You weren’t yourself. You weren’t stable.”

All of this came out so quickly, Lou had to wonder whether Sal hadn’t practiced this speech in the mirror every morning he’d been in the can. Lou looked at Sal, perhaps for the first time noticing the puffy black shadows under his eyes, the way the years had worn on him.

“What have you been doing, Sal?” he asked, trying to sound a little less accusatory than he felt. He knew Sal from the old days. He weighed in his mind the difference between Sal’s life and his own, and he couldn’t escape

(run, go ahead, but I’ll find you, you old Beastie Boy)

the feeling that Sal hadn’t really changed. He was still the same old conman he had always been. Lou finally phrased it this way: “I mean, where the hell did this Mary come from? And kids? What happened?”

Sal took a quick swig from his bottle and ran the back of his sleeve across his mouth the way he always had. The move looked so natural that Lou, for a quick moment, felt the old high of jumping down from the stage after a song, celebrating with a cold one as the ladies lined up to tell you what they wanted to do with you. But this feeling–this nostalgia–

(glory days/ pass me by/ glory days/ in the wink of a young girl’s eye)

faded as quickly as it came. Sal’s eyes showed that this wasn’t a moment of celebration, but that instead, maybe there was something in his marriage that didn’t quite add up.

Sal said: “That’s a long story, Lou.” He hung his head over the patio railing for a moment, shifting his focus from the empty yard next door. “I met Mary right after you got locked up. I didn’t have anyone either. I guess I was desperate. One Wednesday night

4

in September: the scene is again Jerry’s Place. Sal Martino hangs on the bar, looking a bit like a skeleton wearing a polo shirt and khakis. He drinks Jim Beam until Bill, the barman, tells him eighty-six is his lucky number. Sal hasn’t sung onstage since Lou got locked up. For some reason, he can’t sing. It’s not his voice–he’s not Axl Rose–but (cliché) his heart.

All night, Sal’s been watching this chick in a blue polka-dot dress. She sits alone at a booth in the back corner, eyes always down, fingers tracing the wood grain of the table. Sal has been trying to send some vibes her way, but either she doesn’t notice or his charm is wearing off. If he could just get up there and sing a song for her, a real scorcher… He imagines himself for a moment, in the warm glow of the stage lights. Imaginary Sal says, with a Tom Jones swagger: “This one goes out to the lovely lady in the booth at the back of the room. Whatever’s got you down, let old Sal sing it out of town.” He realizes this sounds cornball even in his mind. He thinks that if he ever met this Imaginary Sal, he’d probably clean his clock, as the saying goes.

Sal leaves the safety of the bar behind him and cruises over to the chick’s table, carrying what’s left of his drink with him. It’s only as he gets closer to the table that he notices the chick is crying. Not just the fake crying you get from pulling out a nose hair or something; this chick is sniffling and honking and wailing.

She looks up at him as she blows her nose into a napkin, and Sal realizes it is exactly half past too late to bail out this time. He’ll have to pretend that he’s really interested in distraught women, but not for the obvious reasons. She’d never go for the kind of guy who would take advantage of a lady in her emotional state–or at least Sal hopes she wouldn’t.

Excuses, excuses… and Sal, in a genuine eureka! moment, comes up with the most ingenious scheme he’s ever thought of. He wishes Lou were here to share in his moment of glory.

Reaching the table, he leans in close to the crying chick in the polka-dot dress. He says: “Scuse me, miss,” and leans in a little closer so his face is inches from hers. “Mind if I join you?”

The crying chick seems to think about his proposal for a moment–a moment that is honestly a little bit too long for Sal’s taste; in this moment he’s really flapping in the wind–and finally gives a little sniffling nod. Sal slides into the empty bench seat across from her and extends his hand for her to shake.

“Name’s Martino, Sal Martino,” he says as she shakes his hand. The warmth of her little hand in his–despite the mucusy wetness of it–triggers emotions Sal hasn’t felt in a long time. Is this love? Maybe, baby…He almost forgets he’s conning her. “I couldn’t help but notice you look a little distraught.”

She says: “I’m Mary. You don’t even want to know.” Her voice is so small Sal has to lean his head way out over the table to hear her over the karaoke noises coming from the other side of the bar. He notices her eyes are kind of bluish green and shiny. And, did someone say beautiful?

He tells her, in his most impressive-sounding voice: “I’m a headshrinker.” She looks puzzled for a second, and Sal realizes he’s gotten ahead of himself. “I mean,” he adds, “I’m a psychologist. I specialize in Freudian psychoanalysis. Whatever your problem is, I’m sure I could help you work it out.” Never mind that he’s not really a headshrinker. That’s the con, see?

Mary doesn’t immediately perk up the way he’d thought she would, so he adds further: “I run my practice out of my apartment. Maybe you’d like to contact me some time for an appointment?” He pulls a bic pen–like any headshrinker would actually use a cheapo pen like that, you doofus–out of his pocket and scrawls his name (with PhD at the end) and number on a napkin. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m all out of business cards right now.”

Mary takes the napkin and Sal gets up to leave, and as he walks out to the parking lot, he feels like maybe this is the most desperate thing he’s ever done. If he still went to confession–which he hasn’t since he was a little kid in Brooklyn–he’d probably have to say something like forgive me father, for I have sinned. I’ve lied to an emotionally distraught chick, and I’m really hoping she doesn’t call me because I’m not sure I can keep this one up…

But she does. She does call him, and he pretends to be a shrink. This goes on for months, until Sal realizes that if he really cares for this chick (which he’s pretty sure he does), he’ll have to eventually tell her the truth. And the amazing thing is, when he tells her it’s all been an act, she doesn’t seem to mind that much. She just goes on talking about her father.

5

The sun had disappeared somewhere over the fence at the back of the yard. Lou cracked open another beer and shifted uneasily on his feet. His damned leg–the same leg that Beastie Boy, Harold Epstein, DDS shattered with his stupid little gun–was throbbing. Lou felt like maybe there were a hundred toothaches jammed in there, just under his jeans.

“So, you and Mary got married then?” he asks, though the answer is pretty

(what is this, Kat? I thought you loved me–)

obvious. The details though…blurry and apparently unimportant.

“Yeah, it was something like that.” Sal grabbed another beer for himself out of the cooler and held it up like a toast. “Here’s to the conman who made good.” He gave a nervous chuckle and resumed his post as watchman over the neighbor’s yard.

The silence which followed went on for entirely too long. Lou noticed at one point that the television had been turned on inside the house. He could faintly hear the once-familiar voices

(pour some sugar on me)

of network newscasters. This was broken by the sound of Mary’s voice, yelling at the kids to stop standing at the back door like a couple of gomers. This was the same Mary who married a man who wooed her by pretending to be a psychologist. Lou wondered how much of the Martino story the neighbors knew. He’d always thought there was a certain assumption about the families who lived on cul-de-sacs like this one. The dirt in the doormat grew thicker and thicker, the silence heavier as Lou came to terms with his situation. He was a remnant, a loose end, the little bit of dirt that wouldn’t just climb into the dustpan.

Sal turned from the neighbor’s yard. “Lou,” he said. “I’ve been cordial, I’ve been folksy.” He sighed heavily with this last word. Folksy. This had always been a wingman codeword between the two of them. If a chick tried to brush you off, you had to keep on acting folksy to convince her that what you really wanted was a good conversation instead of an all-access pass to her apartment. “I thought I told you not to contact me when you got out.”

“Sure you did,” Lou said. He took a long, long, long swig of his beer, finally feeling a buzz. From here on out, he would be seeing everything in 3-B–three beers, har har. He wiped his mouth with his palm and burped loudly. “Sure you did, Sally.”

“I don’t want you messing this up for me.” Sal had lost all whatever folksiness he’d pretended to have. “Finish your beer, and I want you out of here.” He added, almost an afterthought: “Damn it, Lou. I’ve got kids.”

In the neighbor’s yard, that ever-loving sprinkler coughed to life. Water arced out in a wide rainbow as the thing oscillated. Lou envied the grass at that moment. He thought it must be nice for someone

(anyone, anyone?)

to care for you. The way the water gave itself wholly to the grass seemed strangely beautiful the same way Kat

6

looks at Lou, and he is drawn to her strangely beautiful smile, the way her lips curl over her teeth, the way her plump cheeks knot up to make room for them. Candles turn her messy apartment into some sort of medieval fantasyland. He doesn’t even know her real name. She insists he call her Kat, just Kat.

But then, she doesn’t know everything about him because he hasn’t told her.

Hasn’t told her people used to call him Mr. Jeffries. Hasn’t told her he used to be middle management. In this moment, as Kat pulls off first one shoe, then the other, Lou’s mind becomes a flood of apocalyptic proportions. The memories he’s been hiding behind the dam start to spill violently over, toppling telephone poles and uprooting trees.

Out spills his old job, manager-of-the-year for TeleComp International. He had a secretary

(her name’s Nancy, like it matters)

once. She was the real problem. Sexual harassment, sure, that’s what she said.

And, the sad truth is, Lou knows even now that he deserved what he got. Still, he will always, until the day he dies, deny that he went into the women’s bathroom on purpose. Even to Sal Martino, with whom he shares everything, it will always be adamantly an accident, an honest mistake. He will never admit that he was hiding in the stall, hoping to catch a peek through the crack between the wall and the door, his feet up on the toilet seat, his hands pressed to the stall walls for support, sweat pouring from his temples.

Out spills the way he immediately turned to drinking beer and singing karaoke to get his kicks. The way this wasn’t enough. The way he rifled through the mail in every mailbox on his street, hoping to discover some tawdry correspondence. The way he would tear open letters, jealously read the backs of postcards, imagining himself as the object of someone’s longing.

“Lou,” Kat whispers. The way she looks kind of reminds him of Winnie the Pooh–red shirt and no pants. “You are the best duet I’ve ever done.” She laughs as if this has been terribly clever and the look in her eyes is a knowing look, as if the two of them share some hilarious and devilish secret.

In the morning, as Kat showers and the morning light creeps in smoky through the bedroom blinds, Lou will have a devilish secret of his own: He will pillage through Kat’s sequined purse, which she will have left open on the bedside table. He will be looking for more of his tawdry correspondence, but will instead take her social security card for his collection. Her real name doesn’t sound anything like Kat.

7

Lou hadn’t rented a car, and he hadn’t thought to call a cab, so when he stepped out onto the Martinos’ front porch, he stood looking quizzically at the dark horizon which, marred and broken as it was by the houses on the other side of the street, he found beautiful. He noticed that out here in the suburbs, the stars shone like Christmas tree lights poked through a dark purple blanket. Not at all like the view from his

8

cell, sitting on the edge of his bunk, Lou reads the only letter he’s received in these eight years. It’s from his old friend Sal. In the beginning, it’s the same old stuff: how are you? How is prison? Are you eating? But the last paragraph takes a sickening turn. Sal’s handwriting becomes sloppier, as if he’s writing faster to get it all out and in the mail before he changes his mind–at least that’s what Lou hopes. Lou hopes this was a rash decision, but he can’t find anything in the letter to hint at this. There’s no return address.

Lou collapses on his side on the hard bunk and cries like a chick. The only friend he’s had as an adult–let’s face it, the only reason he hasn’t already hung himself from the ceiling by his pillowcase–doesn’t want him calling when he gets out next month.

9

Yesterday: the scene is a payphone outside the gas station across the street from the prison. Lou is wearing the same clothes he wore when he walked in eight years ago. They hang from his now-thin frame and he feels a little like a kid trying on his father’s work clothes–although Little Louie had always preferred his mother’s high heels to his father’s loafers.

He gets Sal Martino’s number from information. He shifts nervously and painfully on his bum leg while the receiver clicks and hums and rings and rings and rings. He’s about to hang up when a woman answers. The woman, through the phone lines, tells him her name is Mary Martino. He tells her he’s an old friend of Sal’s, and she tells him she would be delighted if he would join her family for dinner tomorrow night.

He wonders if he should try finding Kat’s number. He wonders if she’s still with that Beastie Boy dentist, Harold

10

Epstein steps from the shadows of Kat’s bedroom. Lou sees the panic in his eyes. It’s not just panic though; there’s recognition there, too. Lou knows Epstein recognizes him from Jerry’s Place.

From the darkness across the living room, Harold says: “Get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

Lou, surprisingly cool: “This isn’t your house, you Beastie Boy. Why don’t you let Kat tell me to get out if she wants to?” Harold disappears into the deeper shadows of the bedroom and Lou says: “Run, go ahead, but I’ll find you, you old Beastie Boy.”

And as he crosses the living room, he imagines himself rescuing Kat from this jerk Epstein. Surely, she’ll realize he’s the hero here. If Sal were here, he’d say My name’s not Shirley, and no, she won’t.

Lou’s moment of imagined heroism ends quickly with a deafening noise–a gunshot? Where in all of God’s green goodness did that come from?–and an explosive pain in his leg. He collapses, falling on his face on the living room rug, smelling the lovely bits of Marlboro smoke that hang onto the fibers. Through the pain in his leg–doctors will later tell him the bullet has fractured his femur, the strongest bone in his body–he feels sorry for ruining Kat’s rug with his blood.

He mutters into the carpet: “What happened, Kat? I thought you loved me–”

Then, nothing.

11

On a gurney, as he’s being wheeled into a cold and solitary ambulance, Lou sees through whatever medication the police have allowed him to have an image which will be forever burned into his mind like graffiti on the dam which holds back the rest of his memories: In the apartment’s living room window, illuminated off and on by the spinning red light from the ambulance, that damned Harold Epstein has his arm around Kat’s shoulders. She’s in her bathrobe, crying, smoking a cigarette.

And then, nothing again.

12

Eight years later, Lou wished it had all become the nothing of a blackout. Between the mail fraud, the breaking and entering, and Kat’s insistence that Lou had pulled the gun on Epstein, Lou had found himself serving more time than most of the murderers in the pen. He would have rather spent the past eight years in a coma, though. Maybe Sal would have been there when he woke up. Maybe Kat would have been there too. Maybe she would have left that Harold Epstein so she could sit at his bedside every day, reading to him from her paperback romance novels. Maybe she would have waited for him.

That night, on Sal’s front porch, staring at the sky like a poet, Lou hoped Kat, wherever she was, remembered him. He hoped Sal would take good care of Mary and the kids, whatever their names were. He noticed that the neighbors had the sprinklers on in their front yard too, and for a moment he watched the arc of water spraying lovingly across the lawn, giving all it had to the grass.

Lou wanted to be the water from the sprinkler, but more than that, he wanted to forget. He walked across to the neighbor’s yard and lay down on his back in the wet grass at the farthest edge of the sprinkler’s arc.

He screamed at the empty sky, barely managing a melody: “Glory days pass you by. Glory days in the wink of a young girl’s eye.”

He wanted to wake up the whole cul-de-sac: “Glory days, glory days.” He did his best saxophone impression and yelled, trying to fill the empty sky with his voice, gargling occasionally as the sprinkler oscillated his way to pour its selfless love over him.