REST STOP

IN the second stall of an I-70 rest stop somewhere between St. Louis and Kansas City, I
was half-concentrating on the task in hand when, from a little white tile somewhere to my
right, a grasshopper did what grasshoppers do. It jumped.

I’d been driving for nineteen hours straight, on my way from New York to
California, hopped-up on Ritalin I’d stolen from my father after he convinced some idiot
at the VA that he had ADHD. Really he was just depressed after my mother passed
away—more from the chemo than the cancer, which for some reason I imagine is like little
tiny nuclear bombs going off inside you till you’re dead and then some. Maybe moths can
hear the explosions.

The Ritalin helped him out of bed and through his day, but the way me and my
siblings saw it side-effects included anxiety, irritability, patriotism, one night in the
Sayville Modern Diner he asked, “What’s broccoli?” and another night he ate a Beef
Merlot Lean Cuisine and a loaf of pumpernickel bread then threatened to commit suicide
with the butter knife. I wrestled it from him and we fell to the kitchen floor and knocked
over Sparkles’ water dish and rolled around in the puddle for a while, which had swollenup
dog food crumbs in it and smelled. After she got bored with watching from the
doorway, my sister walked over and yanked his artificial leg off and ran out of the house
with it. This stunned him, and he quit struggling long enough for me to make a proposal:
I told him to stop being a shithead. He said no.

I thought about that for a few seconds, then offered to get his leg for him if he
promised not to kill himself. He thought about that for a few seconds, then agreed and
added, “now get off me.”

“Promise first,” I said.

“I fuckin promise,” he said.

“You fuckin promise what?”

“I fuckin promise not to kill myself.”

“It fuckin pleases me to hear you say that, Dad,” I said, and then I rolled off him
onto my back, and together the two of us lay there in the puddle staring up at the dead
bug silhouettes in the fluorescent lights. After catching my breath, I hit him lightly on the
chest with the back of my open hand. After catching his, he reached across himself and
shook it.

The batteries in the orange flashlight were dead, so I went to the battery drawer and spent
a minute putting in and taking out dead batteries. Eventually I found a combination that
worked, but barely, and as soon as I got outside the light went dim and died, so I shook it
a little before throwing it at a tree. When it hit the trunk it flashed bright for half a
second then fell to ground where I left it. Then I walked a lap around the outside of the
house in the dark.

Halfway into lap two I spotted my sister across the street at the end of the dock
staring down into the brown water of the Connetquot River. I walked out to the end of
the dock and stood next to her and didn’t say anything, just stared down into the brown
water of the Connetquot River. She didn’t say anything either. I patted my pockets and
found my cigarettes, patted them again and found my lighter, lit two and handed her one.
Neither of us said anything. We just smoked and stared down into the brown water of the
Connetquot River, and after a while I wondered if turtles can get hepatitis. I know that
clams can, Isabella Rosellini did a PSA-thing about it once, wearing boots on a billboard I
saw on the westbound platform of the Babylon train station. Standing there on the end of
the dock with my sister I suddenly felt very tired.

“Where is it,” I said.

“I threw it in the bushes,” she said, then turned and pointed.

I followed the tip of her finger with my eyes and, squinting, was just able to make
out a foot with a black sneaker on it protruding from the top of one of the shrubs
bordering the property.

The two of us turned and stared down into the water again, and after what seemed
like a long time I crushed my cigarette out on the bottom of an upside- down bucket
placed over one of the rotting pilings of the dock and said poor turtles, but more mumble
than pronounced, like, prtrtles. Then I went and retrieved the leg out of the bush and
headed into the house with it under my arm like a gift.

My father was at the kitchen table reading a days-old newspaper stuffing handfuls of
croutons into his face. When he saw me he wiped his left hand down his denim shirt,
twice. I handed him the leg, and he immediately started picking small branches and bits of
shrub out of the stump socket and dropping them on the floor, then turned the whole
thing upside-down and shook it. Satisfied, he placed the leg on the floor in front of him,
rolled up his pant to just above the knee, pushed his stump into the stump socket with
both hands, then stood up and shifted his weight from right to left to right again, like a
junior high dancer. Then he bent down and pulled the neoprene stump sleeve up over the
knee, rolled his pant leg down, sat back in the chair and resumed reading the days-old
newspaper. I told him I was going to bed. He turned to look at the stove-clock.

“It’s only nine,” he said.

I didn’t answer him, just wiped a piece of swollen-up dog food off his shoulder and
went upstairs to my room and fell asleep and didn’t get up till three the next day.
I stuck around a few months after my brother and sister abandoned ship—supposedly to
keep an eye on him but really cause I couldn’t do much of anything except sit around
wondering what my mother’s body looked like rotting in an expensive box under the
ground; also cause he had a big tv—and one Sunday morning I came downstairs to find
him at the kitchen table staring at a crossword puzzle through lopsided RiteAid reading
glasses on the end of his nose. In front of him were six or seven crushed-up Bud cans, one
un-crushed, a bag of oatmeal cookies, and he had a giant scab down the left side of his
face, and parts of it were still bleeding.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Morning,” he said.

I put the kettle on and got a coffee cup out of the coffee cup cabinet. Then I put in
two tea bags for double power, cause I needed it. I was staring at his still-bleeding face
figuring how best to proceed when he said, “King of bread. Three letters.”

I thought about breads. I like sourdough and think it should be King, but it is more
than three letters. Then I walked over and looked at the crossword over his shoulder, and
then at his face some more, and then at the crossword some more. “Dunno,” I said, and
then I turned and stared out the window at two squirrels hanging off a wooden bird
feeder. There was no seed in the feeder, hadn’t been any for years. They were chewing on
the wood roof.

“We should get some bird seed,” I said. “For the squirrels.”

“Tijuana Brass Trumpeter Herb. Six letters. Fourth is E.”

“I have no idea,” I said, because I didn’t, and when the water started boiling I
poured it into my cup and went to fridge for half-and-half.

“Mae and Nathaniel, five letters.”

“Wests. What happened to your face?”

“I fell off my bike.”

“Oh.”

It made sense as far as explanations go. This was summer, festival season on Long
Island—LobsterFest, Clamfest, Oysterfest, some Indian pow-wow thing and an antique
boat show—and in order to avoid driving drunk he had taken to riding my sister’s old
lady-bike—a brown Ross called “the Duchess” to these events, drinking till he was asked
or made to leave, then trying to pedal home.

“That your breakfast?” I asked him.

He flashed me some kind of look and stuffed a whole cookie into his mouth and
began chewing it in what I think was supposed to be an aggressive manner. He resembled
a giant, unhappy five year-old, and it unsettled me.

“I tried to eat a hardboiled egg but the shell wouldn’t come off easy,” he said.

“Want me to get you somethin from the deli?”

“No,” he said, staring at a spot on the floor near my feet now.

I stared at the spot on the floor near my feet, and then I asked him if he was
thinking about mopping.

I said, “Are you thinking about mopping?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you jealous that I have ten toes?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you like my socks?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you smart?”

He stuffed another cookie in his mouth and stood up and stalked off to finish his
crossword in front of the big television. I gave the back of his head the middle finger,
rinsed a few dishes in the sink and placed them in the dishwasher. Then I raided his pills.
In the middle of counting them out I realized I was breathing loudly through my nostrils.
A festival or two later I came home around ten or eleven to find a running pickup
truck in front of the house, the taillights tinting the exhaust red, tinting the bushes and
the mailbox red, the guy struggling to unload my sister’s bicycle from the back of his truck
red. I parked and hurried over to help, and as I got closer I saw that my father was also in
the back of the truck, on his back, tugging at the front wheel of the Duchess. When he
noticed me there he yelled, “Hey Kid!”

“Hey Dad,” I said.

He just lay there smiling at me and blinking for a while, like he was genuinely
happy to see me. Then, as if he just at that moment remembered something unpleasant,
the smile slowly came off his face and he turned and looked out over the lawn and said,

“You gotta leave me here…just fuckin leave me here.”

A week later, I did.

I’d probably eaten four or five Ritalin and snorted another off a Hannah paperback with a
rolled up oil change receipt, plus I’d downed a lukewarm cup of burnt gas station coffee a
few miles back so my heart felt like it might bust right out of my chest and float there all
shiny-style like jesus’s or mary’s or whichever that was by the time I pulled into the rest
stop—one of those generic looking ones, a sand-colored single-story with the men’s room
on one side and the women’s on the other, the vending machines in the middle, a picnic
table or two off to the right. I had to go so bad I power-walked up the path and was
unzipped and dick-out five feet from the men’s room door. Once inside I saw that both
urinals were stopped-up with paper towels, so I hobbled then hopped into the first of two
stalls and saw what looked like a murder scene only browner, and with spinach, hopped
into the handicapped stall and fired at will, shuffled my way closer and was peeing and
staring at the ceiling, and then at the wall, and then at the toilet, and then at the floor, and
then at the grasshopper on the floor, to my right. At first I just gave it a quick look, but
then I gave it another because it seemed, in its absolute stillness, to be staring at me. I’m
thinking now of a painting in the hallway outside my brother and my’s childhood
bedroom of two cartoonish kids with oversized heads and big eyes that, whenever I worked
up the courage to look at them, seemed to be looking at me. The grasshopper’s effect was
similar; I didn’t like it.

I considered peeing at it to break the spell, but didn’t. Instead I continued staring
back at the grasshopper and it continued staring at me, like in a staring contest, or
showdown. After a while I said to it, “shoo,” but it did not shoo, it stared at me. Then I
said to it, “get outta here,” but it did not get out of there, it continued staring at me.
Then I stomped my right foot and it catapulted itself directly into my stream of urine, the
force of which knocked it into the toilet bowl. There it began swimming a series of
terrified figure-eights, obviously in great danger of drowning.

My one experience with near-drowning is that it’s uncomfortable. Also, I
lifeguarded at a small inground pool at a home for retarded people back in the early 90’s,
and there was a guy there named Joe Pepe who liked vacuum cleaners so much that all the
nurses aids cut vacuum cleaner ads out of the paper and gave them to him as a reward for
behaving himself, one of the many things he had no talent for. I don’t remember too
much about him except that he looked exactly how a retarded person with glasses looks
like, and that everyday, as soon as I showed up for work, he’d tell me he fucked my mom.
I’d tell him back that he did not fuck my mom, and he’d go on insisting that yeah, he did
fuck my mom, last night, and she loved it, and I’d go on insisting that he had not, and he
would say yes he did so and so on. This would continue until I grew tired of the
argument and quit, after which he’d make some kind of celebratory noise and run leaping
out of the room triumphantly. What he didn’t do though, ever, at least not while I
worked there, was go in the pool. So one day after he started in with the mom stuff I said
to him, “I’m sure she enjoyed it, Joe. Why don’t you come swim in the pool and we’ll talk
about it.” His face scrunched up. “Awww, whatsa matter, Joe,” I said. “You’re not scared
to come into the pool are you, Joe?” He clenched his fists and spun around two times.
“Not you, Joe,” I said. “No way. That couldn’t be the case cause my mom wouldn’t fuck
anybody that’s scared to go in the pool—it’s one of her rules. She told me so on my
thirteenth birthday. She said, ‘Happy birthday, Alby, here is your present. It’s a card, and
in it you’ll find five dollars for every year of your life for a total of fffffffffffffffffffff-sixty-five
dollars. I love you very much and I am very proud of you, you are growing up so fast now,
and I just want you to know that I will never ever ever fuck anyone who can’t swim. Not
ever. I find it unattractive.’ So, Joe, if you really want me to believe that you fucked my
mom last night you’re gonna have to prove to me you can swim.”

“No,” he said, sniffing then wiping his nose then his eye with his wrist. “No no no!”

“Well why not?” I said.

“I don’t wanna.”

“Well why don’t you wanna?”

“Cause I almost drownded once…” he said. “It hurt!”

I pissed around the grasshopper as best I could and pinched off as soon as was possible.
Then I stood there, over it, watching it struggle up the side of the bowl, slip back in and
rest. Over and over: struggle, slip, rest…struggle, slip, rest… struggle. I looked around a
little for something to fish him out with and, finding nothing, I simply reached in and
scooped him up with my right hand and carried him outside, where I put him on the
ground near a bush and nudged him with my index finger. Then, and I may have
imagined this but I don’t think so, he kinda shook himself dry, like a dog, and jumped one
small time. I nudged him again till he made a bigger jump.

Afterwards, as I was washing my hands with soap, I guessed that it must’ve confused
my arc of urine with an edible plant leaf, or like a lot of people I know, was strongly
attracted to shiny things. But then I considered the possibility that maybe it had at least
some intention of offing itself. Of course, I don’t really believe an insect has the mental
capacity to suffer the kind of anguish one has to in order to want to kill oneself, but
certainly there’s nothing unreasonable in wondering if things could be so bad for a
grasshopper.

Two steps toward the hand-dryers and I was pretty sure the answer to that question,
no matter the animal, is yes.

Matt Sumell's short fiction has so far appeared in Faultline, The Brooklyn Review, Book Glutton, SaltGrass, and NOON. Having grown up on the south shore of Long Island, New York, he is a graduate of UC Irvine's MFA program, and is currently  in Los Angeles and finishing up his first collection of short stories, tentatively titled MAKING NICE.