amanda Irene rush

Ashland University MFA Alum

Jack Nobody

My mother had only been dead four days when Jack showed up at the Pink Palms Diner for the first time, filling the space in the corner she had left behind. It was like when my cat died last year and another one had shown up in the backyard, skinny and tick-ridden, meowing like crazy as I dumped the last shovelful of dirt into the grave I had dug. Jack was like that. Not from the dead, exactly, but close to it.

He had the makings of a regular here at the Pink Palms Diner. Someone my mother would have sat all day long with in the back corner by the bathroom, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes if she were still alive. Everyday for the last five years she had sat that way. Ever since the divorce. A desertion, she had called it, reminding everyone she never saw any papers. My father had simply left one day with all her money, had even kissed her goodbye. “Son of a bitch had the nerve to tongue me.” The doctor told me she died from complications with her heart. That didn’t surprise me; hers had always seemed hard. The fact that she hadn’t wanted a funeral or service or any kind of remembrance didn’t surprise me either. “Why fuss?” she always said. “When I’m dead, I’ll be dead.”

“How ‘bout a coffee, Sal,” Jack said to me when I came over to his table. I didn’t like the way he shortened my name so quick, though part of me was happy he took the time to look at my name tag and not just say “gal” or “hon” or “sweet cheeks.”

He held his cup as I poured. His hand was smooth, with manicured nails and a gold class ring on his index finger. I looked at my own hand holding the pot. The knuckles were wrinkled, fingernails jagged. They looked worn, older than twenty-five. 

“You can call me Jack,” he said smiling, even though I hadn’t asked. He didn’t say much else about himself, but I knew he wasn’t from around here because he still called Florida “The South” and wore shorts even though it was the middle of January. During my break, I sat at a friendly distance while he plugged me full of questions: Why wasn’t I in college? Did I have a boyfriend? Was my family from here? 

I said, “Maybe you ought to mind your own business, mister who-the-hell-are you.” But I smiled when I said it, because he did. He had a good smile. Like a game show host.  

That night, soaking in the tub, I shaved my legs I had left alone for months and wondered where Jack might have come from. When I had asked him he just said he was from up north. I supposed to him up north meant somewhere particular like Ohio, or Indiana, or Pennsylvania. But to me it only meant someplace better.

I hadn’t always lived in Cape Coral. We came down from Marion, Ohio back in ‘75 after my father got laid off from Whirlpool. “He was like a damn kid back then,” my mother had said. “Acted like we were going on a permanent vacation.”

It was my mother who first landed a new job, at Scottie’s Arena in North Fort Myers, where she learned to run the big sewing machines that made custom canvas awnings and boat covers. Scottie starred in his own commercials wearing a kilt and one of those funny hats. For years, I thought he was naked underneath that skirt because he ended every commercial by saying, “Come see me, nude!” I eventually learned that was just “Come see me, now!” in Scot talk.

My father worked on construction teams, helping to build the houses popping up like dandelions on the Cape. But he was never steady at it. Every couple weeks he’d leave a job bitching about how if the boss was going to pay the wetbacks more than him, to hell with it. “You got no skill, Del,” my mother would tell him. “You’re no better than a Mexican.”

I missed him sometimes, like you might miss a dog or a worn pair of shoes. He wasn’t much of a father-father. He never taught me how to ride a bike or tie my shoes or tell time. But he was fun to go swimming with or watch television. We liked the same shows: Dallas and Dukes of Hazards and Rockford Files. My mother didn’t like TV. The only thing she ever watched was the six o’clock news, for the weather and nothing else. She was always wondering about hurricanes – never worrying though, because if there’s one thing my mother never did was worry. One year, there was a hurricane brewing out in the Gulf named Betty. My father teased her about it for weeks. “Watch out ya’ll! I’m here to tell you, hurricane Betty don’t fuck around.”

My mother was proud of her name. She didn’t like names short for something else. She liked names that sounded feminine, but stood on their own. Like hers, Betty. Or her mother’s, Mary. It was a family thing from a long line of like-minded women. Her grandmother’s name was Lucy. My mother carried on the tradition when I was born, and even though my father and many others called me Sal, my mother always called me Sally.

Like I said, Jack had the makings of a regular here at Pink Palms, and within a week he was playing chess with Harry, who was co-owner with his ex-wife Alice, and ordering his omelettes special with sausage gravy poured on top.  Harry said he hadn’t seen such a disgusting concoction since that time he and Alice spent the holidays with her parents in Minnesota. 

“You ever see what they eat up there, buddy?” Harry asked, taking Jack’s second knight. “That fish fat shit?”

“Lutefisk?” Jack said.

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Pukefish.”

Alice had come out of the kitchen and wiped her hands on her apron. “Don’t listen to him,” she said to Jack. “My ex here wouldn’t know fine cuisine if it bit him on his big fat ass.”

Harry stood up a little from his seat. “Why don’t you and your attorney kiss my big fat ass?”

“We’d have to charge you for it,” Alice said. “And you don’t have the money.”

Harry laughed and sat down again. “Goddamn right I don’t.” Harry wiped his forehead with the bottom of his apron. “Check, buddy.”

I poured more coffee for Jack while he studied the board. He looked up and winked at me. He moved his hand to his bishop and let it hover over the piece.

“C’mon already,” said Harry. “I gotta make potato salad before the mayonnaise turns.” He leaned back in his chair and fanned himself with a menu. Harry had a big fat everything. In the heat of the kitchen, he’d get to sweating so fierce, his face would get all flushed and he’d wave a hand at Alice like a drowning man. She’d bring him a huge, plastic tumbler of ice water from the jug she kept just for him. It was during these times I envied them their closeness, even if it did sometimes border on meanness.

Jack still hadn’t made a move. Harry stood up and put his cook’s hat on. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don’t move nothin’. We’ll finish this tomorrow.”

The chessboard sat on its own table, the one against the wall, near the side entrance. Harry was big on chess, played it with anyone who was willing. He had tried to get my mother to play, but she never would.

“For God’s sake, Harry, I’m a grown woman,” she’d say. “I got no business playing games, and neither do you.”

At these times Alice would give her an, “Amen, sister.”

“All that no-nonsense nonsense is making you both old,” Harry would tell them. And he would pull my mother up by the hand and try to dance with her, then turn and reach out for Alice. My mother would sit back down and shoo him away with her arm. “Just like a man,” she’d say. “Don’t you people ever grow up?”

Jack moved to another table so he wouldn’t mess up the chess board. He nodded at me. “You play, Sal?”

I shook my head.

“Shame,” he said. “You look like you’d be fun to play with.”

I snapped him with the dishtowel I carried in my apron. “Get out of here, Jack – ” I wanted to call him by his full name, like my mother would have, to show he was in trouble. “What’s your last name anyway?” I asked him.

He sipped on his coffee. Wiped his mouth with a napkin. “What do you think it is?” 

“Jack Nobody. That’s what I think.”

“Jack Nobody it is,” he said, raising his cup in a toast. “Ladies and gentlemen, please me to announce Mr. Jack Nobody and his beautiful, brunette bonnie, Miss Sally Someone.”

I laughed, a little embarrassed. “You’re crazy,” I said, leaning against the chair on the other side of his table. 

“Sit down, Sally,” he said, pushing the chair out with his foot., making me stumble a

little. “I’ll buy you lunch.”    

“I’ve already taken my break,” I said.

“Well, then you’ll just have to come out to dinner with me.”

“Sorry, Mr. Nobody. Harry doesn’t like us fraternizing with the customers.”

Jack’s house was just off Pine Island Road on a dirt drive in the middle of a field. Not a house, really, but a trailer. Squat and damp and dripping with cats. “A man’s castle,” he said, and laughed. We had eaten at the Pegasus Cafe out on Santa Barbara. Jack had ordered two dozen oysters and a bottle of Michelob. I had crab cakes and a virgin banana daiquiri.  

Next to the hose hook-up, which had no hose, was a garbage can. Jack shooed the animals away that were lounging on and around it and pried the lid off.  Scooping out a batch of cat food, he scattered it around the yard like feed.

“Here kitty, kitty, kitties,” he muttered. 

The cats hissed and yowled and fought like ducks. They were horrible things. I said maybe he shouldn’t feed them and they’d go away.

“Tried that when I first moved in,” he said, kicking away a white, one-eared tom. “Damn things scratched through my window screens and sprayed my car. Stunk the thing up good. You know that thick piss the male ones get?” He buried the scooper back in the bin and sealed the lid. “Anyway, I figure it’s like rent. They own the place for all I know.”

Inside, the trailer was cramped but clean. On the small counter next to the sink, a frying pan and plate and fork set in a dish bin, washed and ready to be put away. Through a curtain of beads I could see the double bed that took up the entire back end of the trailer. It was made and two flat pillows were arranged side by side. 

Jack excused himself and stepped into the bathroom which was next to the waist high refrigerator. I waited until he had shut the accordion-style door behind him before I looked around some more. On the table was a Home and Away magazine and some travel brochures: Orlando; Key West; Sanibel. I picked up the magazine and turned it over. The address label said Del Prado Barber Shop. I set it down and placed the brochures on top like I had found them.  

“You got any dreams, Sally?” Jack asked when we were sitting at the table. The sun had gone down and a cool breeze smelling faintly of cat urine and canal water was blowing through the window. Outside, the toms yowled into the night, a sad and pitiful sound.

“Dreams?” I asked. 

“I mean, like longings, desires. You ever wish you could be somewhere else?”   

All I ever thought about was somewhere else. I hated Cape Coral with its pastel stucco buildings and paved everything. Its scrubby, dried up fields and trees that gave no shade. I hated the way the streets ran straight with no hill, no natural bend. I hated the way the canals cut into the land forcing you to go ways you didn’t want to go. The mosquitos that bit me in my car even when I had the windows up. The ants that swarmed across my kitchen countertop. The stark, wet, blanket-like heat. But I didn’t tell him any of this. My mother had warned me about men like Jack. “Don’t ever trust a man who promises you dreams,” she’d said. 

“I don’t see what’s wrong with right here where we’re at,” I said. “Why’d you come here, if you’re just gonna wish you were someplace else?”

Jack leaned back and stared out the window. “When I was a kid, I used to think about being a sailor. So, when I was old enough, I went to Boston and tried to get a job on a ship headed across the ocean. I wanted to be one of those guys who wore their pants cut off at the knees and let their beards grow long. I wanted to fall in love with the sea like you hear about in old songs.”

“Did you?”

“No,” said Jack, letting the curtain fall. “The men were as unromantic as tax accountants and the sea stank like a whore after Saturday night.”

“You got a real way with words, Jack Nobody.”

Jack laughed. He had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, which were so blue I swear you could see the sun in them. “Tell me, Sal. What do you dream of being?” His voice was gentle. The lure of it strong as a spring tide. For a moment I felt how easy it would be to let go, to get pulled under.

“I’ll be who I’ll be, I gather.” The words sounded so much like my mother I had to look over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t there. 

“You aren’t gonna leave, are you?” Jack asked, sitting up a little.

“You drove me, remember?”

Jack smiled and leaned back again. “I like you Sal. You’re all right.”

“I got a little place up in Morrow County,” he told me a few weeks later, afterwards. I was lying in the crook of his arm. His skin was warm and smelled like clean laundry. “There’s woods behind the house and a pond out back with fish and crawdads. You can pick raspberries fresh off the vine and run around naked if you want ‘cause the closest neighbor is three miles away.”

I didn’t know where Morrow County was, but I liked the sound of it. It had promise and whimsy. I thought of us running around naked and I felt myself blush. It sounded fine, though. The green and the trees and the shade. 

Jack was the first man I ever saw naked in the light of day. His body was lean and tight. I didn’t know how old he was. He wasn’t twenty and he wasn’t fifty. He looked like he could hold his own in a fight.

He wasn’t my first, though. That had been a boy from high school, my junior year. We were in Oceanography together. One night I went to his house to help him study and after only twenty minutes, he said, “Who cares about this crap anyways? Let’s go drive.” He had his own car, a Malibu Classic. An old model, the kind that still had the headlight switch on the floor near the brake. We drove out to north Cape Coral, the most deserted place on earth in the ‘eighties. Not a house or a building or even a stray trailer like Jack’s. The street signs, blanched by the sun, flashed as we drove through streets paved years ago, overgrown with weeds waist high..

The boy cut the engine and took a blanket out of the backseat. We spread it out in the middle of what might have been NW 23rd Terrace. Above us, the power lines hummed. While we did it, his hip bones dug into mine and I could feel the gravel beneath my backside. But the sky was vast and the air cool as his breath against my neck came fast and warm in time with my own. I looked up at the stars and wished night was day and that it would never end. 

“We ought to take a trip,” Jack said, taking a drag off his cigarette and making it crackle.

I ran my hand along his arm. “Yes,” I said. “A trip.” If it was too soon for such talk, I didn’t care. It felt good to dream out in the open for a change. To share a vision of something else with someone else. His arm was tan, with long, lean muscles. I imagined him chopping wood for a campfire at that quiet country house in Morrow County. 

“Montego Bay,” Jack said.

“What?” I didn’t know where that was but it sounded hot. 

“Or California,” said Jack. “We could gas up the old Vista Cruiser and head west. Maybe stop in San Antone on the way. I got a friend there owes me a few favors.” He blew smoke rings above our heads and I reached up, breaking them with my finger.

“Why do you stay here, Harry?” I was in the kitchen making potato salad, mixing in the sour cream -- his secret ingredient -- with my bare hands. Harry looked up from his portable black and white. He’d been watching The Three Stooges and a commercial for suntan lotion was on. Harry shook some ice from his tumbler into his mouth and crunched it between his teeth.

“Where’m I gonna go at my age, kid?”

“Don’t you have family up in Jersey?”

Harry shook more ice into his mouth, sucked a little and then spit it back into the cup.

“You know what they got in New Jersey?” he said, turning back to the TV. “Toxic waste and gangsters.” 

I squished the potatoes, letting the cream and mayo ooze between my fingers. “But don’t you miss them? Your family, I mean. Don’t you ever want to know them?”

“Sure, kid. I’d love to see them. But down here people need me a lot more than they do.”

I wondered if he was talking about Alice. I had heard them after closing sometimes when they thought I was busy mopping the floor or filling the salt shakers. They’d be in the kitchen. Alice with the big oven mitt on scrubbing the grill with the block, her other hand in easy reach of the vodka bottle she kept in the walk-in that she didn’t think anybody knew about. Harry pouring leftover vegetable soup or shrimp bisque into empty sour cream containers for me to take home. They’d talk first, low. Then get louder and angrier until they were screaming at each other.    

“Leave, you fat bastard, if you’re so goddamn miserable.” There’d be a clatter as a metal spatula flew across the plate deck.

“You think I won’t?” Harry would say, no doubt ducking just in time.

Then there’d be the sound of Alice crying. Then silence. Then the quiet creaking of Alice leaning against the sink, no doubt wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, before saying, “You won’t leave, will you Harry?”

Harry looked at me. “God rest your mother, kid, but you’re lucky. You don’t have nobody that needs you. You’re not stuck here.” He rattled the ice again in his cup, looked thoughtful. “You tell yourself, I’m out of here just as soon as so-and-so’s ready to make it on their own. But truth is, no one’s ever ready to make it on their own.”

I wondered if that’s what my mother had been doing down here. Waiting for my father to make it on his own, to not need her so much. Maybe that’s why she kept her eyes on hurricanes, thinking that a big wind was her only ticket out without feeling responsible. Something to come along and blow her away to someplace better. What a hit it must have been when my father bailed first. 

And what was I waiting on? Was I waiting on something to come and whisk me away? Or was I hoping someone would come along to be what I needed to make this place bearable? I thought of Jack. Of how easily our lives had come together.  Of our days spent at the Pink Palms, me pouring coffee and wiping tables while Jack and Harry bantered over the chess board. Of our nights, lazy and naked in the back of his trailer, the sound of Jack’s voice so bright and sure, making me believe every door would open to a prize. 

There in the kitchen with Harry, I realized for the first time in years I wasn’t unhappy.

“It’s gettin’ too hot down here, Sal,” Jack said one night a few months later. I was in the crook of his arm again, nestled down. His voice rose over the whir of the window a/c like a bird call on a breeze. A bird you might hear sing in that faraway place from where he had come, that place maybe he’d take me to. I closed my eyes and breathed in his good, clean smell.

“What do you say, Sal?” he asked.

I lifted my head a little, eyes still half-closed, thinking about how we could go there, to that place with birds and breezes and cool languid nights, together. “What do I say about what?” I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted to hear him say it.

“Getting out of here. With me.”

Eyes open now, I put my hand on his chest, hairs tickling my cheek. I could, I thought. I could get out of here. With Jack.

He propped himself up on his elbow, toppling me into the sheets. “I’ve been thinking about St. Thomas,” he said. “I’ve got a friend down there we could stay with, got a place right on the beach. The whole set-up is a Jimmy Buffet song. You’d love it, Sal.”

“Saint who?” I said, righting myself onto my own elbow. It was my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth.

Just a few days later, the goodbyes said and the last kiss kissed, I was back at the Pink Palms working a double to fill up the time. Harry sat at the table with the chess board, the pieces lined up and ready, waiting, the other chair empty. Every few minutes he’d wipe his face with the damp tail of his apron. I brought him his tumbler of ice water and he downed the refill in nearly one gulp, the ice clattering dully against the plastic. He let out a long “aaahhh” and closed his eyes. “What a life,” he said to no one in particular.

I went back to rolling silverware at the counter, trying to lose myself in the soft clank of simple things. Fork, knife, spoon. You’re too young not to get out and live. Jack’s voice bright and sure. Then, mine to him: And you’re too old not to settle down and stay. Why didn’t I tell him? Take me north, Jack. Take me where I want to go. Would he have, if I had asked? I blinked back tears I felt silly for shedding, and with a napkin I pretended to blow my nose so I could wipe my eyes. I thought of my mother, so proud and independent, and wondered what dreams she had harbored in her heart.

“What’d you do, Sally?” I heard Harry ask. “Where’s Jack?”

Before I could answer, Alice came out of the kitchen. “Poor Harry,” she said with what sounded like a little sympathy. “He’s got nobody to play with.”

I went back to rolling. Fork, knife, spoon. 

You didn’t even ask. 

____

AMANDA IRENE RUSH IS A WRITER AND PSYCHIATRIC NURSE PRACTITIONER IN CENTRAL OHIO. SHE IS A PROUD GRADUATE OF ASHLAND UNIVERSITY'S MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM. HER WORK HAS APPEARED IN VANDERBILT PRESS’ 2008 ANTHOLOGY THE WAY WE WORK, THE BELLEVUE LITERARY REVIEW, BREVITY NONFICTION BLOG, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST ONLINE MAGAZINE, AND PEATSMOKE.