"the best american deaths of the last year" by Kevin Richard White
Originally published in Edge (the journal of Tahoe Writers Works) in 2015
My brother always told me to make lists. He says it's very important. So I am going to finally - at least about this. I'm sitting down at the kitchen table. My brother is at work. Dad is in the next room, watching some annoying loud soccer match. Someone's playing someone and I don't care. I have a beer and potato chips and a pen that works and a notebook that I stole from work and the cat is lying down by my feet and I have nowhere to go. It's time to title the list. Night falls and people are screaming to each other in seedy bars and I write about truths that will sting.
The Best American Deaths Of The Last Year
A List By: Me
1. Eric Anson
2. James Butker
3. Joe Rollins
4. Mark Megaghy
5. Peter Dent
6. ---
I guess we'll end there. I can't remember any others.
"Jesus, they almost scored!" Dad screams from the easy chair.
"Shut up!" I yelp.
"Goddamn it, cheer for your country," Dad retorts and shifts his girth in the night.
I crunch a potato chip and I put pen to paper.
Eric Anson sold shitty weed that was probably oregano before classes every day. He always wrapped it up tight in sandwich bags and wore Slipknot shirts that were too tight. But he was funny. Always had a good racist joke in his arsenal. However, he did not have common sense, and one day in January, in the snow, he flipped off a card-carrying NRA member in a Rav 4 and met his demise on an island right outside Kohl's when the third bullet ripped through his trachea and danced out the other side, bone sticking out, spouting obscenities. Parole, restitution to Eric's family, sobbing families in court rooms and several newspaper articles later, the whole matter was forgotten about, and Eric's ashes remain unscattered in a coffee can in his parent's kitchen. He was 20.
"Man, that goalie," Dad tells the air conditioner. "He can play."
The cat nips at my toe. I finish the beer and grab another.
"Get me one," Dad says. I do. He points a claw at the TV. "Sit down and watch this. It's tied."
"I don't care."
"You and your brother and your lists!" He spits the last word out all over the rug.
"I have work to do."
I sit down again. I fill my mouth with chips. I don't have anywhere to go. I don't have a girlfriend.
Ol' James Butker, or Butt they lovingly referred to him as, was a big game pitcher who took our high school to many grand playoff games, where we promptly lost under the guise that we were competitive. It wasn't him, though - he would pitch brilliant innings, mix and match the heater with the curve, but our offense got him nothing. He would always go home afterwards and steal his dad's liquor and cry with a Maxim and wake up the next day, pretending that he was still going to get his NCAA scholarship where he could promptly lose again under a different moniker. But losing senior year proved to be too much, and he took a cheap bottle of wine from his dad's cabinet, mixed it with Aspirin, and decided to join other high-school athletes in the big towel-smacking shower room in the sky. He was 18.
Dad comes up behind me and grabs the list. "What in the hell are you writing?"
"Give that back, Dad," I threaten.
"Jesus," he says, and gives it back. "The wind blew and the shit flew and there stood you. There's a GAME on in the next room."
"Father!"
"Fine," he said, and went in search of food. He stopped to look at the floor. "Jesus, Liam, you have crumbs all over the floor."
"I'll get them later."
"Potato chip crumbs," as if I didn't know.
"Padre," I said.
"I know you will. Goddamn crumbs and goddamn cats everywhere." He stopped to say something else, but thought better of it and left the room. I shook my head and continued the list. I didn't have many more to write about.
Joe Rollins didn't hurt at all. He was a dickhead. He sprayed himself with this terrible cologne and actually read the Twilight novels and it was not to impress the female race. He did it because he thought it spoke of true love. Joey was a hell of a carpenter, actually. He went the wood shop route and created many sets for our school plays but had a wonderful affinity for 1920's porn, a fact that all of us learned at one party when someone went into his room and found what seemed to be an old flapper costume that he had forced his girlfriend to wear during their many lustful (disgusting?) evenings. The embarrassment on Tumblr proved to be too much, and Joseph, in a suit and necktie, crashed his 97 Ford Escort into the school's favorite oak tree three weeks before graduation, and allowed the fire to lap at his soul, dying in a horribly tragic yet unsurprisingly forgotten incident that the district promptly pushed aside two weeks later. He was 17.
I finish the beer and grab one more. Why not?
"GOAL!" Dad bellows.
"SILENCIO POR FAVOR," I shout.
The cat runs into the living room.
"GOD BLESS AMERICA," Dad says.
"PADRE, SILENCIO," I say.
"Cram it," he says.
I return to my work.
Mark Megaghy never had any luck. Born with baseball talent but given webbed feet, Mark bounced around from jock to nerd to goth to junkie before he finally settled in the experimental art crowd, where his thumbtack and rubber band portraits of everyday life found to find its foothold in the never-expanding art world of our hometown. Having dabbled in mescaline and peyote and Bud Light, he had an affinity for jumping off bridges and filming himself while doing it ("a selfie for the thrillseekers", he told me in a FB message, and he had only sent me this after I accidentally drunken liked one of his masterpieces of art, something he had titled "I Am Better Than Bob Ross"). Gravity proved to be the fucking bitch, though, and he had slipped while going off the Keim Street bridge, cracking his head on crackling concrete, and dying in the murky green mere minutes later. He was 24. He had donated his entire body of work to the local community college museum, where it sits in its basement, giving conversations to cobwebs.
I am shaken by the meaty paws of my life-giver.
"We are America, and we will succeed in our wonderful quest to Americanize the game of soccer," Dad warbles.
"Oh my God, Dad. Please."
"Your mother," he says, "will have a fit if she saw these potato chip crumbs around your feet like this is fucking Arlington cemetery."
Without any more goading, I grab the dustpan and brush.
"I know I raised you right," he says proudly.
I sweep them up and dump them in the trash, narrating as I went.
"Now Goddamn," Dad says, "was that so hard?"
"Yes."
"What are you writing?"
I sigh. I give up. I let him pick it up again. He stares at the yellow notebook paper. He reads to himself. Suddenly, you can see he's tearing up. He doesn't know what to say. Finally, he lays it down back on the table. He comes up to me slowly. He hugs me before I can stop him.
"Liam, why are you doing this?"
I guess in the beginning of my narrative I didn't make my motives entirely clear.
"Liam," he says, and begins to cry a little.
"Dad, come on, there's a soccer game on."
"Please tell me why you're doing this."
"I don't know. Because."
He has yet to let go. I smell all of the years on him - years of attempting to make a life, years of alcohol, years of proceedings and restraining orders and dreams that went south. He is fat. He does not shave well. He can't tie a tie. But he's my dad. What the fuck else am I supposed to do? Forget about him? Let him go? We watch movies together. We don't watch soccer. But we go grocery shopping. We do puzzles occasionally. We don't go to the zoo. But we're family. You tell me what I'm supposed to do.
"Liam," he says, and then he lets go.
"Dad, just go watch your game."
He leaves me without another word. He has his pride. He can be beautiful at times. He knows how to lock doors, but he knows how to open them, too.
I stare at the dead soldiers in front of me. No girlfriend to stop me, no nothing to get in the way of anything. One more left in the fridge; Dad won't want it. I stop moving briefly to hear him sniffling in the living room. The game continues. It all continues. We're all just people. Aren't we? I open it up, the cap falls to the floor. The cat thinks he's being fed, so he runs out. When he learns my moves, he just collapses. He is the smartest one of us all, by far. I pet him. I scratch under his chin, his eyes close and I know in this moment he is the happiest one in the house. He's so happy. I cry a little. I stop and I go back to my seat. The list has two more entries, but the last one will be enough for now.
I start writing about Peter Dent.
But why do I do?
Is it because that all of my friends are married or living together? Is it because maybe I do have a drinking problem? Is it because I wait for things that are never going to happen? Is it because I went to a high school where people I know are either dead or in jail? Is it because the people I know - and actually laughed with, actually have memories with - are no longer people, but ideas? Who knows? Who can say? Don't say God. Just don't. Don't do it. It's nothing. It's a life that has parents that are separated. It's a life where a drink becomes the only food. It's what regulates you down to nothing. It's what breaks you down to a thought that the stars don't give a shit about. Remember that. Beautiful girls will walk past you and smile but they will not know what you are all about because you are afraid. It's why you are given a life with opportunity and chance, and all you get in return is silence. It is why you are writing a list about people you know who are dead. It is why you are left behind when the rest of the world flies on their brilliance.
It is why you write about a fucking guy who died who meant everything to you but only means something to you now because you are alone and that no one is around to drill sense into your head that it's stupid.
But it isn't.
I write more about Peter Dent. It doesn't matter what I write.
I count it as a great death.
It is no different than a bellowing laugh into a dark night, into a void where we use silence as a buffer. It is no different than lying when we could just as easily speak. I do not know until the end of my list that I am loudly crying. The soccer game gets muted. The beer is empty. The cat has gone to sleep somewhere else. I am the only thing left in the room, the only piece of shit left alive.
Dad stumbles in. I don't stop him. He reads over my shoulder what I wrote.
"Liam," he says.
I wave him off. I can't see through the tears. He hugs me again. He whispers.
"You have to stop writing about your brother," he says.
Kevin Richard White's fiction appears in Hobart, Rejection Letters, Lost Balloon, The Molotov Cocktail, Soft Cartel, X-R-A-Y, The Hunger, Hypertext and Grub Street among many others. He is a Flash Fiction Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine as well as a reader for Fractured Lit and Quarterly West. He lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Drinking With Women.
https://neutralspaces.co/misterkrw/
Twitter: @misterkrw