Nobody Like You: Six Stories
Jeff Landon
Nobody Like You
My cousin Blake used to live here, in Lynchburg, but he must’ve moved or reenlisted in the Navy because when I went to Blake’s apartment this huge Japanese guy answered the door.
“I’m Doug,” I said, and then I felt like the world’s biggest asshole for using my real name. “I’m looking for my cousin Blake.”
The Japanese guy said, “Nobody lives here, just me.”
I think I made him nervous. I could see a few cats behind him, on the couch. They looked nervous, too.
So I walked around all night—I didn’t know what else to do. The next night, I went to the mall. It looked like every other mall so I felt more or less at home. Inside, I got warmed up and ate a steak sandwich. These girls kept looking at me, laughing. One of them, the queen, scooted her chair closer to me.
“Excuse me,” she said, while her friends giggled into their hands. “I was wondering, have you ever, in your whole life, washed your hair?”
I didn’t say anything. I knew I was dirty. I was shoveling food into my mouth like a raccoon or a vulture. These girls, they were nibbling on chicken fingers and French fries. Even the ugly one had shiny hair and perfect teeth. All my life, I’ve seen girls like these girls, but I’ve never talked to them. They were just here to shop and drive the boner boys crazy, and then they’d go home. They’d sleep in a nice bed and never feel like me or remember me.
In the food court, I looked at all the couples and the girls I’d never know and it was like they were scenery, nobody like you. I thought about my brother, Sam, and my mother. I thought about that guy I killed: Henry Dobbins. I thought about that exact moment when he turned his head and noticed, for the first and last time, my car about to crash into him. I wondered what he thought about in that last second, what he might have said. His girl was beside him. Maybe he said her name out loud and maybe she said, Baby, I’m right here. That wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, if you think about it all the time, like I do.
How to
Please a Woman
I got a ride from a baldheaded truck driver named Gil all the way to Bedford, a small churchy town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Gil was a talker. In thirty minutes he filled me in on the various ways his children had disappointed him, and how to please a woman orally.
“You just gotta get in there and love what you’re doing,” he told me. He gripped his big hands around the steering wheel like someone trying to crack open walnuts.
“Scrounge around a little bit,” he said. “Believe me, the ladies will let you know when you hit the spot.”
Gil dropped me off by the side of the road, and I walked down the street in the sun. I took a deep whiff of myself. I felt diseased.
Where I’m Going
I bought a room for twenty-eight dollars at a slummy roadside motel. My room was dark and tiny and reeked of piss, smoke, and Lysol, but I didn’t care.
It wasn’t so bad. I took a long, mostly cold shower and when the TV wouldn’t work, I crossed the street and bought a steak and cheese sandwich for breakfast at a restaurant called Amy’s Drop Inn. I wanted some weed or some speed, and I should’ve asked Gil but he was already in another town by now. I didn’t know anyone in this town, and even the dishwashers in Amy’s kitchen looked clean and God-stirred.
I ate slowly and watched the senior citizens of Bedford. They gummed buttery grits and runny scrambled eggs and yakked about football and bitched, relentlessly, about the coffee.
“Too strong,” somebody said. “Makes my heart thump—you hear that? Good Lord, they are trying to kill us all!”
Outside, in the parking lot, a couple embraced beside a pickup truck. They weren’t old, but they sure weren’t young. The woman had long hair. She wore a parka that reached her kneecaps, and her hands were in the guy’s hair, which was ashy-white but full. He was a fat guy in overalls, and her hands were cupping his substantial ass and he had this shit-eating smile on his face. He was either drunk or crazy or lucky, holding a woman that he liked in the parking lot under the watchful eyes of Baptists sliding heels of toast through bumps of yolk and cheese grits.
I thought about calling home, but I didn’t. Instead, I wrote a postcard to my mother and Sam. On the front of the card was a river with snow falling on it. There was snow all over the ground and even in the trees, and it made me wish that I’d grown up in a place where I could walk to a frozen pond with my hockey skates. I wrote: Hey Mom. I’m alive and I’m sorry and I’m moving again. I’ll call when I get there but I don’t know where I’m going yet. I signed it, D, but then I changed my mind and crossed out my name completely.
Yoga
Sam’s mother, Betsy, filled a saucer of milk for Fluff, their cat. On the kitchen floor, Betsy pretzeled herself into a yoga position with the soles of her feet facing the water-veined roof in our kitchen.
“Do you love your brother?” she asked Sam.
“I have to,” he said.
“Wrong answer.”
Sam kept looking at Betsy’s feet—they were long and thin and freckled—and her face was blotchy and strained.
“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” he asked her.
“You have no idea,” she said, almost laughing.
Temporary
Sam knew it would be bad, but, really, it was so much worse than he’d expected. Like, last winter, this kid named Barney Goudie killed himself. Barney had no friends, severe acne, and he never looked at people when he talked, but it didn’t matter much because by the ninth grade he’d stopped talking altogether, and in the tenth grade he started to flunk all his classes even Beginning Art and, seriously, a lump of clay could pass Beginning Art. So dumb Barney, he dropped out of school and nobody missed him until the night he shot himself in the bed of his father’s pickup truck. In that moment, he went from this totally boring loser to a temporarily interesting loser. Doug even went to his funeral, and he told Sam all about the sophomore girls clinging to each other and crying.
It wasn’t such a tragedy—socially, it was the best move Barney ever made. For a few days, everyone tried to conjure up memories of Barney, but the best anyone could do were things like: He sure did like that yellow striped shirt. Or: He ate paste in elementary school—like, a whole bottle of it. Or: My mother said his father molested his sister. Or: He had a weird smell, like three-day-old hot dog water.
In the cafeteria, on the first day of school, Sam ate half his sandwich and put his head down on the desk. He never thought he’d be one of those guys, like Barney, that eats alone in the cafeteria. He was already sick of everything, and it hadn’t even started yet.
Dori’s Story
Sometimes my friends ask me about that night, even though I tell them to stop. In therapy, we’re all supposed to talk about what’s inside us, but I don’t want to anymore. People want to know what happened. They want to know if I’m OK. I understand that—but I don’t want to talk.
I don’t tell them about the hospital that night, sitting in that chair beside Henry, waiting for him to die. I don’t talk about that with anyone.
But I do remember how it felt, that night. At first, right after the collision, everything was quiet. Doug Figgens had already driven away, and Henry was slumped over the steering wheel, and there was so much blood. I got out of the car, and started screaming. I didn’t notice, at first, this small crowd that had already gathered. Older people mostly, in summer robes and pajamas. A woman I never met tried to hug me, and I let her, but only for a few seconds. Someone told me an ambulance was on the way. Someone else told me not to touch Henry. The woman who hugged me had enormous hands and a big mole right over the corner of her mouth. She kept staring at me with enormous concern, but her hands felt like Styrofoam and I had to turn away. She disgusted me.
I walked away from all of them and sat on the curb on the other side of the street. A siren caterwauled and soon the police arrived. They asked me a few questions, and I told them the truth. I told them it was Doug Figgens, and I told them I was sure.
I rode in the ambulance. I never talk about that, either. It was so bright in there, and so frantic—two people trying so hard to save Henry’s life. I was almost afraid to touch Henry. I hate to think about that now, but I was scared.
And then he died. I went outside to smoke a cigarette. There was a garden behind the hospital filled with white roses and ornate birdbaths. I walked along a path that zigzagged between the flowers. I walked until I reached the parking garage, and then I took the elevator to the top floor. I wanted to be closer to the sky. In case there’s a heaven, I wanted to tell someone that Henry was a good person, because he was, most of the time.
Henry and I used to come here, when we were first going out. We’d park on the top level of this parking lot and make out under the stars in his ridiculous convertible. I’m sure a part of me wanted to remember those nights, but it was ugly and scary up there without Henry.
After the funeral and everything, I stayed in bed for three months. I wanted to stay in bed forever, but I knew how much it hurt my family, and in some weird way that I still don’t understand, I felt like I was hurting Henry, too. But I couldn’t move.
I went outside because I needed to be away from people. Here’s one thing I thought about: Those flowerbeds behind the hospital are beautiful for a reason. You walk past them, and maybe you barely notice how much care and patience went into each perfectly manicured row. That’s how it is sometimes when it’s late at night and you’re hurting. Maybe you want to sink into those flowers forever, but you keep on moving, and maybe you even look up at the sky, because this is it, for now. You’re stuck. There’s nothing else. It’s just the moon on the flowers and the rest of your life.
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