Murphy men always outlive their women.
Not that the gals don’t try their best. Hell, they do everything they can think of to outlive us. They poison us with boxed and canned chemicals, they screw our best friends before and sometimes after our nuptials hoping we’ll get in duels over their honor and die with bullets between our eyes, they make us take the nastiest, most dangerous jobs since building the fucking pyramids. They screech about the long hours we work and the connections we have to maintain after work at Dick’s, our restaurant, and they nag us into strokes and heart attacks. But no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try—and you’d be surprised how hard some of them have tried, knives, guns, emptying the liquor cabinet into the toilet hoping we’ll beat them for it and end up jailed with the losers and get sodomized to death—or worse—we outlive them.
By far. We outlive them by generations. I mean, a Murphy man usually buries four or five bitches before he’s through. And as far as I can tell, this’s been going on since the old Irish famine days, when a Murphy man would eat half an earth-apple a day and his family would stuff their faces fat with mutton, and they’d all die young and he’d have to hitch-up to another wench. Granddad Murphy had already outlived four.
A chick with a really good body and a pimpled up face, had to be one of Mary’s clan but somehow nowhere near as ugly as the rest of them, walked up to me. Her dress was thin and tight and white and she wasn’t wearing a bra and her nipples punched out like lug nuts. She had a beer in each hand, and she finished one off and tossed it away and cracked the other and took a big guzzle.
“Are you T-Bird?” she said.
“That’s me.”
“You’re going to be my big brother,” she said, and she smiled and her pimples went away. “I’m Rhonda.”
I thought, Shit. Oh shit.
“I just graduated,” she said. She smiled again, and she kept looking at me. “From high school. Right after my eighteenth birthday.”
“Aren’t you a little old to be Mary’s daughter? She’s not much older than me.”
“I’m her step-daughter,” Rhonda said. “What’s that make you and me?”
Mary’s other kids ran over to us. The boy had yellowed skin and kinky orange hair and wore a Raiders tee shirt. The girl was fat and round and probably only ten but her hair was in pony tails and her skin was deep brown and she looked like an ancient Indian squaw ready to sprout the grays.
“How about grabbing me a couple beers,” I said.
“I was just going to ask if you wanted me to get you one,” she said. She smiled one of those smiles your sister-to-be isn’t supposed to smile at you, or anyone else. And I watched her walk toward the Markstein truck, and she turned around to see if I was watching and smiled again when she saw I was.
I couldn’t see a panty line beneath that tight white dress, but it looked like she had on some of those whore panties I’d seen in Hustler, the ones with the string that runs up the ass and up over the hips.
I got a hardon, of course. It seemed like my hardon never went down. Even in the scow, that smell everywhere and nothing to look at but heaps of trash, I always had a hardon. And I was twenty-one years old and had never gotten any nookie that I could remember. It wasn’t like I hadn’t had any chances, I was just the world’s biggest chickenshit. I’d had plenty of chances. Hell, I’d had women actually tackle me at bars and nightclubs during the breaks at gigs I was playing on my trumpet, tearing at my jeans and yanking at my dick. But I’d get spooked, and I’d shove them away and scram on out of there, go back to the bandstand and make like I was checking the equipment or oiling up the valves of my horn. I’d be shaking and scared. I was the biggest coward on earth, and sometimes I even wondered if I was a fag.
But I knew I wasn’t, because it was chicks, not queers, that I thought about when I’d get a thinking hardon. If it wasn’t bad enough that I had hardon when there weren’t any chicks around, imagine how bad it got when a babe was anywhere near. My dick was like a goddamn divining rod over the worldwide ocean of cunt. And the women, they knew. Hell, how could they not know unless I was wearing a trenchcoat or hunched over at a barstool, as had become my custom. Some babe—hell, even a below average piece with some special good part—a sexy pair of eyes or long legs or the right mouth or a great curve of the back—would walk into the bar and boing! I wouldn’t be able to walk for the rest of the night and I’d have to jack off forever and ever in my scow just so I could get some sleep.
It didn’t take Rhonda long to come back with the beers. She brought four, since she’d finished hers off. Two for each of us. We cracked a couple open and knocked them together and when she drank from hers she didn’t look at the can but looked at my eyes, and she stood close to me and I felt really wicked and nasty like some slime from Arkansas or Eastern Oregon.
I slammed my beer and cracked another can.
And Rhonda slammed hers and did the same.
“Sorry for the smell,” I said.
“What smell?” Rhonda said. She tipped her head back and sniffed, and I thought I was going to die looking at her neck like that.
“I drive that scow over there,” I said. “The dump.”
“I know,” she said. “My mom told me you had a steady job,” she said. “Non-Union.” She looked at me nasty. “Scab,” she whispered, and the word never before in the history of man sounded so good.
“I won’t be a dumptruck driver forever,” I said. “I play trumpet. I might go to college. I have a laborer’s union card. I have options.”
“Well,” she said, “you don’t smell to me. Not one bit. I wish I could smell you. I got really drunk one time, and I fell down a flight of stairs and knocked my head. It was pretty bad. Hospital and everything. I can’t smell or taste anything.”
“Whiskey’s like water?” I said.
She nodded. “Beer is a foamy throat-rush,” she said. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth. Her neck! “In the back of my neck.”
Granddad Murphy was looking at me. He winked.
“Do I smell?” she said. “I can never tell. I worry about it sometimes.”
She leaned close to me, pressed against me so I could smell her and my face was nuzzled in her armpit and sandwiched against her tit and that was it. I never felt anything so good. My face got a hardon. I was a goner for sure.
A train was coming, and the ground started shaking, and the kids ran to the tracks to see how close they could get and feel the wind sucking at their faces. You could tell it was a long train by the sound of the whistle, the pitch getting higher and higher, and you could feel it rumbling and punching down on the wooden ties and slick iron rails and everyone there on that GE lawn turned to watch it, and you could tell that everyone brewing up on that lawn wished he was on that train and rolling away and away.
. . .
From down the street police sirens sounded. The train of Vieira garbage scows headed toward my dumps skidded to a stop like some obscene herd of tailed-up elephants, and you could hear the trash shifting back and forth in the slosh. They worked scab with me, established men who rented houses that had driveways and yards they could park their scows in at night, men who came home at night to a good meal and a Mexican or Asian wife who respected them because they worked, because they came home, men whose lives were the lives any man in his right mind would want.
Sheets of sluice spilled, and if the orange-rind sulfured smell of the dumps hadn’t already been in my nose I’m sure I would have smelled the juice. The cops got closer, nearly a dozen cars, lights flashing and sirens full tilt and they pulled to a double-parked stop and in the middle of the train was Pop’s Ford Fairlane, and he’d had it painted white and shiny and he’d gotten new chrome mouldings and slapped on some mags and set of 60-series Goodyears and we all knew where he got those and that unless he’d rigged the books there’d be hell to pay from his boss when he went back to work on Monday.
The band’s drummer was changing the skin of the bass drum. There was a logo on the new skin. It read, “Bud’s Hot Five.”
When Pop stepped out of the Fairlane, everyone was silent for a second. We couldn’t believe what we saw.
Pop looked like something from a black and white movie, all decked out in a tuxedo and top-hat, his barrel chest making the jacket hang as if he had his shotgun holstered at his side beneath. He wore shiny white shoes that looked like they’d never take a scuff, and you just knew that his cane was really a sheath for a sword. He looked like the classiest gentleman that ever stepped foot in Oakland.
Someone let a war whoop, a call we’d all heard and that most of us had brayed, our neighborhood battle cry, the one you heard on both sides of the creek when there was about to be a shootout or a serious block-fight, the sandpaper-throat gut-chuck vein-pop call of joy and hate and don’t-you-fuck-with-me-or-mine that was followed by everything true and honest and without censor or restraint. And the war was not a war but instead was union, consummation, not that of Pop and Mary, but Pop with all of us, soon to be a married man, a citizen, a man taking care of not only himself and his, but of a wife. It was a howl from each and every, a howl that let everyone know that this man, Bud Murphy, Pop, was now a man with territory, with something to protect, and that all men and all wives and someday the children grown into men and wives would stand by his side and protect him from what might befall or befuck.
Everyone made their way to the Markstein truck and grabbed handfuls of beers and started chugging, chanting, “Bud, Bud, Bud! Bud, Bud, Bud!” and they laughed a lot at the pun. Two fatties—both of them with skinny rednecks—lifted their tube tops and cupped their boobs for Pop, and everyone cheered and some people laughed. The boobies weren’t that bad, actually. They would have been really great boobies, first class, if they’d been attached to other women. Boobs are like that sometimes.
“My aunties,” Rhonda said. “Lura and Tura, my mother’s sisters,” she said. “Twins.”
“Quadruplets,” I said.
“They have really big tits,” Rhonda said.
“They’re both on the big side.”
“Still,” Rhonda said.
She looked sad. She was looking at her own tits.
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” I said.
She looked at me with eyes that made me want to drag her off to someplace beautiful, a place without factories or warehouses, without garbage dumps and seagulls carrying the guts of anything once living and now dead into the sky to make the sky stink as bad as the earth below, a place that smelled of pine trees and licorice or the Pacific or fields of poppy, that stretched out in fans of all that was good and right about California, the place that the Spaniards found when they sailed up the coast in galleons and thought they’d discovered the Garden of Eden and knew that God and the angels had protected this paradise from the evil of man. I wanted to tell her that she was the most beautiful woman that ever walked the planet, and that if she’d marry me, now, on the spot, I’d care for her the rest of her days and caress her wrinkles when she was old and drink wine with her over a smoldering pit of coals while the sun set over the world and while we both died at the same time, our breaths wheezing their last as we embraced for the final time.
I wanted it all. The car, the kids, the house, the retirement and the fishing rods and a garage all my own, and I imagined myself working on a car in the winter and my knuckles bleeding from banging wrenches against manifolds and my woman, my Rhonda, bringing me coffee and brandy and red rags to wipe my forehead. I saw myself with a child, a son, my son, a trumpet in his hands, his lips pressed against the mouthpiece, the fingergrips too big for his small hands, his mind focused on pressing the valves at the same time as he shot his breaths and remembered the names of the notes, and me sitting beside him next to the music stand, the transcribed sheet music of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” spread out and the only etude my son would ever need to know, he, my son, the child who would redeem every fucked up thing about my own fucked up family, he, this son of mine, the light burning through generations of soot, of grease and oil, of concrete dust and asphalt fumes and the noise of the jackhammer, he, my son, the reward for work well done and honestly performed. My child, Rhonda. Give me my child. Your tits? I love them. I love them with or without you, but with you they may suckle my son, and you, mother of my child, you may be the redeemer of centuries of Murphy toil and anguish and drunken earth soaking tears and faux joys of men bruiting in the flickering fires of hearths of desperate hope. Your tits, Rhonda? They’re just swell with me.
“Really,” I said.
She smiled.
I tossed back my beer. So did she. Lots of people were tossing back beers. Lura and Tura hadn’t pulled their tube tops back down. Pop was walking toward the Markstein truck, and every three or four steps he chugged a beer someone pushed his way. It was going to be a good wedding.
