SCATTERS

BY THOMAS VAN GEMERT

*

Fenton was the heavy breather and when he slept his face got all puffy and his jaw shifted and his tongue protruded a bit making him look quite retarded. He forgot to bring a pillow on the trip and so he laid his head on his bag. When he woke up in the afternoon, he’d start his day complaining about the straps. But it was Fenton’s breathing that was the worst and he slept like a dead man, unresponsive to shoves. You could lift his arm and it would drop like a strip of rubber, wrist flapping. He’d sleep through blaring music and slamming doors but the moment somebody said something to him directly, or if the tone sounded directly, or in the form of a question, he’d wake.

Mick was the heavy snorer. His adam’s apple or something near his adam’s apple or possibly his adam’s apple would block his breathing and you sat there listening to his body struggle to get air into it. This irritating strangling sound made Mateel wish Mick would either start breathing normally again or stop breathing altogether - not gargling in between the two. Mick didn’t care about messes but he did about germs and bugs. One morning he noticed a spider in the middle of his bed after he had taken a shower. He used a wrapper on a beareau to pick it up. Then it fell on Fenton and Mick and Mateel laughed. The spider wedged itself in Fenton’s knee pit and they kept up the commotion. Fenton just rolled a little to the side and muttered into his pillow “Get it off”. Mick and Mateel weren’t sure whether he was really awake or not. If he was it made it more funnier. Finally it was on the rug and Mateel picked up a shoe and clumped it a few times. Mick complained about hitting it too hard and getting its guts on the rug so he lightened up a bit. Then Mick meticulously scooped it with the wrapper and then dropped the wrapper back on top of the low beareau. He didn’t have a garbage can in the room when Mateel and Fenton arrived the day before. Then he found the plastic grocery bag that Mateel had brought his sandals in on the floor and started using that as one.

*

In the living room of the frat house sits Rob. He is thirty-five and is still living here. He has long shitty hair and ugly glasses. On his feet are ratty yellow flip flops. He mostly just sits in the living room, wrapped in a blanket, watching TV. There is something that really pisses him off about people in the frat house that don’t live there. He is doing his best to make Mick’s friends feel unwelcome. The other day one of them opened the fridge and he got up out of his couch and scuffed into the kitchen and stood there staring at him. Mick’s friend didn’t look up. He decided not to put his beer bottle in there amongst the puddle of dark liquid at the bottom. Nor on its side next to the scattered packages of cheese and turned around and walked out. Rob went back to watching TV.

*

When he reached into his dop kit he split the tip of his finger on his shaver. He didn’t notice this though because he had been drinking. Fenton was still downstairs playing pool with some freshman. Mateel didn’t notice he had cut himself until the next morning, splotches on his pants and on the cap of his toothpaste.

*

The Sergeant of Arms walks out of the house with Harvey. Harvey is wearing the same pair of baggy green jeans he wore yesterday with logo patches on the knee pits. They are being watched by two drunkards sitting in chairs on the roof. Psst Harvey, one of the drunkards calls out and the other shooshes him.

*

Hey you two are wearing the same outfit.

Yes, we know.

But why are you wearing the same thing?

Don’t ask.

Hey Jared I’m going to see you again man, where are you living now?

In a house.

Are you having any parties?

We’re having a goat party during homecoming weekend. You can come if you want.

Oh yeah?

Well we’re taking off now, see you all later.

I’m going to see you again before I die man. Do hear me man? Before I die I’m gonna see you again.

Okay.

Goats have rectangle pupils. Did you know that? Rectangle pupils.

Okay, bye.

When you get that goat for the party, check it out. Look at its eyes. You can see the rectangles.

*

Fenton is looking in the blue truck with the missing grill and the broken down lawn mowers in its bed. Mateel comes down the fire escape with dress clothes slung from a hanger over his back. He walks over to the car wedged in the corner of the lot, opens a back door of his car and delicately sets the clothes down on the seat. Standing up, he looks over at Fenton and says “Come on let’s go. You’ll can get it from him later.” Fenton drops his fist lightly against the glass, “Its right there. I can see it down there.”

*

Christy missed the cement mixer. She asks him to do it again. Fenton pours his new shot glass halfway with the irish cream, then drops a small amount of lemon juice. Mateel is in a frenzy, saying anything that comes to mind. He asks the girl sitting next to him something but she doesn’t hear him. She and the others are all watching and laughing as Fenton’s cheeks puff out. Mateel looks at Christy and remembers last year when she walked in late and made Matt read his story about the cave woman over again. Mateel had to leave because a second reading could never have been as funny as the first. And it wasn’t, Jared said so later. Christy did something like that again sometime after that and Mateel, upon complaining again, received hissing red anger from Christy. He didn’t complain again now because it had been so long. He did note, however, that she hadn’t changed in that regard. The only thing different about her was the engagement ring on her finger.

*

Later, while he was mowing a large lawn and his mind started to wander, he revisited his passing the DA in the hallway on his way out of the courthouse. “Hey Gricar,” he could have said. “Can I ask you a question?” And at this, Mateel went off on another tangent, what the reaction would have been. There were many possible ones that he went through. He had the time. The lawn was big and he had to travel, couldn’t keep from traveling, nobody could.

“Yes,” DA Gricar would say after turning around.

“Do you get off on ruining peoples lives?” There is a beautiful pause at this point, very cinematic, while the air and lights hover in amongst the two men in suit and tie standing in a hallway, anticipating some kind of dramatic answer that will determine the trial’s outcome.

But no answer is spoken. Just the tiniest beginnings of a smile at the corners of DA Gricar’s mouth. Another line on the forehead. The thick tanned skin giving off the feel of getting even thicker. So thick and solid not a single pore could possibly become infected. For if one ever had, the man’s credibility, his prominent position, would never be as it was then.

He turns around and upon turning slaps the manila folders he is holding against his thigh. Mateel turns too and swings the door back into the brick wall. The stopper on the floor does its job, but the door buckles from the force and a loud slam emits. He goes up the steps and walks out of the courthouse. Not too far away, at the top of the sloping hill, Fenton is sleeping in the passenger seat of Mateel’s car. Mateel pictures this in his mind: the mouth gaping with a fat tongue.

*

Mick is trying to get Lisa to go to bed with him again. It seems like a life long mission. He sits on the couch next to her, showing her how Will shook his hand one night at a party in the fraternity house basement, before they both became fraternity brothers, at the time when they were currently roommates in an apartment upstairs from the apartment he is in now: Lisa and Christy’s apartment. The handshake is like an ordinary handshake only the index finger itches slowly at the others palm. Lisa giggles and she shakes his hand the same way. Soon everyone in the room is shaking hands to experience it. Mateel shakes Lisa’s hand. Mick shakes Jared’s hand. Christy shakes Jared’s hand. Jared shakes his friend in the matching outfit’s hand. Fenton isn’t interested though. He has already been through this before in some bar with Mick and Mateel and so continues sitting against the wall next to a speaker with his Irish creme and lemon juice bottles laying on the floor between his legs. He always plays the mellow in these kind of situations, being around people he doesn’t know that well, even though his mind is ready to bolt up and start dancing.

Next Mick asks Lisa if she wants to go in the hot tub with him. The hot tub in the shack next to the small parking lot behind the frat house. She has a quick excuse, two in fact: having a cold and school work to do. She and Christy both sound nasal.

Jared and his friend both get up to leave and Mateel notices and points out the same sweatshirt and jeans on the both of them.

*

The Sergeant at Arms imitates loudly how Harvey’s friend asks for weed whenever he sees him. Fenton laughs and Mateel makes a conscious effort not too. He thinks the Sergeant at Arms is a fake and is disgusted at Fenton’s laughing. Harvey smiles but inside Mateel knows he’s angry. Three of his friends were kicked out of the house during a party last Friday night for harassing Jesse, the only girl living there. Harvey is patient and understanding though, trying to get his point across in a polite way, a quality in him that Mateel knows no doubt is one of the reasons Harvey has so many friends. It astounded Mateel for a while how a man with such hideously broken out skin in college could have so many friends and get so many girls. Now he was beginning to understand why. Jeff laughs again at what the Sergeant of Arms says. Mateel looks around the room again for a place to sit, considers the arm of the couch, then decides not too.

*

The moth slaps against the bottoms of the cups and then the cups stop. A pause. It moves. Obviously a mistake, for the cups begin shaking again. The moth feels as if its mind is left at the bottom of the other cup at the beginning but then doesn’t know where or even what it is. The cups stop shaking. It is inevitable, until it dies, the moth will continue to crawl.

*

“Slice of cheese.”

“One dollar,” the pizza maker says at the window. He takes the wrinkled dollar, walks back to the counters and puts the dollar in the cash register. With the round blade he criss-crosses the fresh pie. A piece is served on a paper plate to the man at the window. The man takes it and walks away.

“Slice of cheese,” the next man in line says.

“One dollar.”

*

“That’s a tight squeeze.” “I know. Looks like another turfing.” They stare again for a moment out the windshield at the space between the rears of the two cars parked on either side. It isn’t worth even considering. Mateel starts the engine, shifts into reverse.

*

The cushion chair emits a fecal odor when sat in. “That’s a new one,” the man says upstairs behind the short kitchen counter when Fenton and Mateel tell him this. The girl laughs at this too. She is wearing black sandals around navy blue socks which Mateel keeps looking at. It is all he can see of her at most times because Harvey is sitting between. This girl is hot and when she asks the guy who walks in if she can paint his toe nails, Mateel wishes she could paint his. If only this nose weren’t so big and dented, Mateel thinks, if only.

They are all in the house that Harvey lives in. Although Harvey is a brother in the fraternity, he doesn’t live in it like Mick does. The phone rings and the girl is disappointed that it isn’t for her. Its Mick for Harvey and the girl growls even louder because Mick calls a lot for Harvey and she feels like Harvey’s secretary.

“It’s your boyfriend,” she says smiling.

*

It has to be spontaneous. The first time the idea enters the mind, it is viewed in a way that is most interesting. After that you might as well not even bother.

The cat was looking to get on his lap as he sat at the table. For a split second it makes a human gesture with the tilt of its head and an aversion of the eyes to the lap. He looks at something on the top of his hand. It looks like a splinter, a small one. Between two of his knuckles. How could I have possibly gotten a splinter there, he thinks. The cat, that had been sitting patiently and looking up at him, walks away to drink out of the toilet. He listens to the faint lapping and wonders if he should take a picture of that sometime and send it to the daily cat calendar company. They probably wouldn’t even put it in. Toilets and animals don’t mix. Toilets and pictures don’t mix. Even the word toilet has a disgusting ring to it. At the table he is eating grapes out of a bowl. It is the same bowl his mother set out in front of him after the predictable argument. He could be such an asshole and he couldn’t seem to help it. His mind would just click and a sentence would be out of his mouth before he even considered consequences. This was more apt to happen when he was tired. The last two nights he had slept on the floor of a dingy, moth infested room. This would have been fine but the other two people who slept in the room consisted of a heavy breather and a heavy snorer.

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