The Pickle

The Pickle

Alonzo grew up in Austin, Texas, so the name Charles Whitman was quite well known to him. He was the ex-Marine who got up on the main tower at the University of Texas-Austin and killed sixteen people in one day, back in 1966, and it seemed like everyone knew somebody he had killed, or was related in some way to the havoc he had wreaked. When Alonzo joined the Marines, it was pointed out to him that Charles Whitman had been a Marine, so he felt, in a way, like this guy had cast a shadow over his life. Every time there was a school shooting his name came up again. People had been talking about him while Alonzo was growing up, and they were still talking about him.

When Alonzo came back from the Marines, he lived with another ex-Marine, Ricardo, in an old house in Austin, and prepared to go to graduate school, where he was eventually to get a degree in Anthropology. He and Ricardo went out drinking a lot, as Austin was good for that, and they'd often end up talking about their "demons." They were referring to the nightmares you would get if you had killed people, as both of them had. Ex-Marines worked together to keep from become Charles Whitmans, and fit back into a society that really didn't understand them or what they had been through, and in that regard, Alonzo and Ricardo were good for each other. In a sense, Austin was worse that way than most places, because people were so busy having fun in Austin, ex-Marines like Alonzo and Ricardo risked becoming even more isolated. So they drank a lot, and comforted each other.

In Ricardo's house, which Alonzo was now living in, was a round jar that appeared to have a brain in it. It had a label, and Alonzo swore the label could have read "Whitman" or something like it, though it was faded. It was an old jar, and whatever it was in there, was in formaldehyde, or a strong-smelling substance. Ricardo just referred to it as "the pickle," and invited Alonzo to move it back to the garage, which he did one day; that's when he saw the label. It disturbed him, but he couldn't get much information out of Ricardo. There were some other graduate students who had lived in the house; there were, at one point, a few other jars like it around; most of the jars had gone away as people moved out, but this one didn't. One time Ricardo said to him, well, if it is a brain, how am I supposed to get rid of it? What do you do with a brain? At that point Ricardo was not advocating removing it; he didn't want to deal with it.

Alonzo forgot about the jar, but after Ricardo moved out, he got married and had a son, and his wife would occasionally ask him about that jar in the garage. "Why not just toss it out?" she'd ask. He thought about what Ricardo said, and left it there, probably too long. His wife knew when it was better to drop a subject, and she did. 

Alonzo thought about the demons, occasionally, too. He'd dealt with his, really, by becoming an expert in Mayan archaeology. Those Mayans had secrets, and Alonzo knew them; this made him feel better about having secrets himself. He'd killed people in Iraq, they'd killed people down there in Mexico and Guatemala, and nobody was free of demons. Demons were the psychic wreckage of killing, the memories of the living. Ricardo dealt with his demons by lifting weights fanatically, and breaking glass whenever he had a chance, for example, in bars. Ricardo and Alonzo still went out drinking regularly; they talked about it.

One night Alonzo pressed Ricardo about the jar. Ricardo was really the only one who could know, since he used to live in the house, and he knew something that he wasn't telling. After they'd drunk a few, Alonzo pressed him more. Finally Ricardo got mad. "It is a brain," he said. "The university had them sitting around, and some people took a whole bunch of them right out of the Animal Resources storeroom, and that's why they were in that house. You can go ahead and get rid of it if you want, Alonzo, I'm sure it's useless now. It's been sitting there what, twenty years?"

Alonzo was aware that he, too, was drunk, and was slurring his words, but he said, "You know what's creepy, is that I could swear it said 'Whitman' on the side. I swear I saw it."

"You need to get rid of that jar," said Ricardo. "You want help? I'll help. Let's go." He never even dealt with the Whitman comment; he just basically got Alonzo to get out of his seat and get in his car. Ricardo insisted. They went to Alonzo's house, opened the garage, and found the jar. They looked at the label, which was now too faded to read. Ricardo wrapped it up in a couple of old rags, and put it out in the middle of the back alley, away from the garage. He took an old axe and smashed the jar in pieces, but, because it was wrapped in old rags, the glass shards didn't fly all over the place; after all, there were kids in the neighborhood; they didn't want a kid walking in glass like that. The smell of formaldehyde was strong, but Ricardo, with his massive frame, shielded Alonzo from seeing the gruesome contents, and he walked the whole mess down the alley to a dumpster, and got Alonzo to walk away from it, and go back to the bar. At the bar, Ricardo argued that he'd felt responsible for the jar, since it was in the house that he'd basically handed over to his friend. It was his job, so he got rid of it. He told Alonzo to forget about it, although, when Alonzo got home, his wife mentioned the noise in the back alley. It had waken her up, and disturbed her, as if she'd known. That was back in about 2007.

Fast forward a few years, and there were a few more school shootings. Sometimes it was a Marine, sometimes it was just a school, but it seemed like every time you turned around, people snapped, people killed people, everybody got rattled. Austin's claim to fame, of course, was having the first, and the worst, but now there were many of them, so many that Alonzo wondered what kind of world he was bringing his kid into. When the Virginia Tech shooting came along, Alonzo was actually relieved, because that was the first one that was actually worse than the Charles Whitman shooting. Some guy somewhere would snap, and Ricardo and Alonzo would talk about demons and how that evil stuff would just build up inside you, if you let it, if you didn't work it out. Alonzo felt lucky, actually; he had a wife and kid; he had a job; he had a friend, Ricardo, who understood his demons and helped him when the nightmares got to him too badly. Every time some shooting happened, he basically thanked God it wasn't him that had snapped.

Eventually, Alonzo was able to get a little more out of Ricardo about the jar. There was one graduate student, in particular, Ricardo said, who had gone over the edge. It seemed to Ricardo that each of the students in that house had had a jar, but this guy moved out, and didn't take his jar. Maybe they had stolen the jars together, from the Animal Resources lab, on a dare, but when it came time to move, this guy wasn't going to move his jar, and left it behind. And something bad had happened to him; Ricardo wasn't sure what, because he didn't know the guy well. But he had always associated the jar with that guy. At first, he said, he wouldn't get rid of the jar, because the guy might come back for it, or because it was too hard to get rid of it. But now, he felt differently, and he hadn't hesitated to just smash it when he had the chance. Ricardo was in an ongoing war with his own demons. If he had an axe and a jar, he'd use the axe on the jar. He'd lost his patience with letting things get under his skin.

Just recently, the news came out. Some brains were missing from the UT-Austin; maybe they were in San Antonio. University officials admitted they didn't know exactly what had happened to them. And, word was, that one of them was that of Charles Whitman, who had actually requested an autopsy before he went on his rampage. Nobody in San Antonio had any idea, the trail had gone cold, and they had to admit, they just weren't sure what had happened. They were old, though, they said; they wouldn't do anyone much good. Probably somebody had just thrown them out, because they needed the space. Ricardo, when he heard that, agreed. "That's how things work at a university," he said. "People lose track of stuff, they'll lose it, because they don't even remember what it is or what it means. Unlike those people in Iraq; the people in Iraq, they'll never forget anything." As he said it, I realized that those people, his demons, were right there with him; they'd been right there all along.

(12-12-14)

The Other Guy's Fault

I detest texters who cost you a light, because they're so busy not paying attention that the green light comes and goes and they still haven't finished their text until the very end of the light. So this one time I saw this happening; there was a little red Mustang right in front of me in a left-turn lane, and I really leaned on the horn, right in her face so to speak, because I didn't want to miss another light. People don't usually honk their horns like that in Texas, so she got a little rattled and gunned it, but the problem was, she was in reverse, so she smashed right into me, right in my face, so to speak, and my Caddy started to let out a plume of steam that kind of altered the visibility.

Why would she be in reverse? At first I thought she'd smashed me deliberately, because she didn't like my horn. But no, I found out later, she was in reverse because she'd gone a little too far into the intersection in the first place, and she'd had to back up right before her boyfriend had face-timed her. And it was game day, which around here means more traffic, unusually high anticipation, people in a hurry, people carrying entire kegs to the parking lots over near the stadium, everybody waiting for them, and all this frenzied activity. So people were not happy that we were still in this left-turn lane with a huge plume of steam rising up over us, and some people started honking and becoming visibly impatient.

I was furious, as I've already said. But lo and behold, when I saw her getting out of her car and coming toward me, everything changed. She also was quite upset, trying to imagine what would happen to her insurance, what it would cost to repair her Mustang and my Caddy, whether to call a tow truck or the police, how to get wherever she was going, and all that. Her boyfriend was yelling at her on the cell phone that she held in her hand, going "Victoria! Victoria! Are you there?" Well of course she's here, idiot, where else would she be? I didn't like this guy already. He had heard the crash, I'm sure, and had some idea what was happening. As it turned out, he could also see a little bit, depending on how she held the phone.

Years later these counseling people taught me that they'd asked everyone how they knew they'd met the love of their life, sometimes in a crowd, or in a situation like this, or wherever. People just know this stuff, and there's no accounting for it. That's kind of what I was going through. I could describe her to you, her long red hair and freckles, all the unique characteristics, but it wouldn't matter, it was other things that did it. Maybe it was that she obviously had this jerk of a boyfriend who would demand that they face-time right while she was turning left on a game day, how insensitive! I had to save her from a guy like that. Face-time, as you may know, is like a phone call on your cell-phone, but you can see the other person, which some people don't like, and they can see you. But what's the point? I don't generally need to see people when I call them.

So we stood there in the road, exchanging insurance information, and the police were there relatively quickly, considering the traffic, and now of course the whole intersection was very backed up, cars going back five or ten blocks in every direction while people tried to get past us. But we weren't going anywhere; it was obvious, to me, anyway, that my Caddy would need a tow. Now her boyfriend was screaming at her something about how whenever somebody hits you from behind, it's his fault. If a car runs into a car in front of it, it's that car's fault, no matter what. Yes, buddy, but this wasn't what happened, I was about to tell him, and I felt like grabbing that phone right out of her hand, but I didn't have to, because suddenly she took the phone and threw it hard on the ground near her own car tires, whereupon it smashed and broke, but ended up way under the car somewhere, where we could still hear this boyfriend going on and on about the other guy's fault. Now this was right before the policeman arrived; the policeman got a sense of what had happened, but he didn't see it directly, because his view was blocked by a delivery truck that was unable to get around us successfully. But right after she'd smashed the phone, she was finding her insurance information and giving it to me, and it was kind of like she was giving me her number, the way she was looking at me, and it was also like, smashing that phone was getting rid of the jerk, he was gone, just like that. That's what it was, as it turned out, because he had given her the phone, and he was the one who had insisted on face-timing or having her always answer it, and, she said, she could get another one easily and it wouldn't have to be all set up on his conditions.

Probably the angriest person in the entire situation was this one football fan right behind me, who was so close to the Caddy that he couldn't just get out and go on his way. Now I know he was a football fan because he was dressed in the local red-and-black, but everyone is, I guess, but he also had these flags on his car.  He was mad partly because the person behind him, a young and helpful graduate student, had simply turned off his car, gotten out of it, and started directing traffic. The graduate student was helping the delivery van get through the intersection; everyone was really impatient; but this football fan directly behind that car kept waving his hands at me like I could get him out of this situation. Sorry, man, my Caddy is blocking the intersection, and you're trapped from behind. There's nothing I can do. He starts honking and yelling like somebody's supposed to do something. Maybe he was honking at the graduate student. He's the one who needed to be somewhere. I was beginning to feel like, football game or whatever, I just wanted to stand here with this woman for a little longer. Leave me alone, I'm concentrating.

The policeman finally had to go over and threaten the football fan with arrest if he didn't shut up and let everyone direct traffic and get out of here. The tow-trucks came; she had one too, but they couldn't get anywhere near us because there was so much traffic stuck or moving around us. The boyfriend, whose yelling under the car finally stopped, arrived on the site and was so angry that she told him to go away and leave her alone, but he said no and raised his voice at her. Maybe it was his red Mustang that had been damaged, or maybe he just wanted his phone, or maybe he saw right away that he was losing her and his world was falling apart, but he was pretty steamed up, and it was all I could do to not step between them. But finally the football fan stepped in and started yelling at him, because he couldn't bear watching a young woman being so mistreated. So now these two men, the football fan and the boyfriend, started pushing and punching each other, and this was a little surprising, because there was a policeman right there, although that policeman may have been preoccupied at the time, but what did they think? Eventually the policeman called for backup, they separated the two men, and hauled them both off for assault, because they'd both swung at each other. Victoria tried her best to reason with the boyfriend, whose name was Charles, but he wasn't seeing reason, he kept pushing the idea that it was my fault, that she needed to get the phone, and that she was acting kind of like she liked me. This last one was true, I hoped.

The football fan, for his part, had kind of a hot temper, as I've said, but once he got out of his car he could see that I couldn't move until I was towed away, and besides, the graduate student who had trapped him from behind wasn't maliciously blocking him in just to keep him trapped all afternoon. As it turned out, he owned a business, and this business had put a lot of money into what they called a tailgate, where they barbequed a pig or whatever, in the parking lot, and drank heavily before the game, and all this cost the business thousands. They didn't care; it was a tax write-off, but it all depended on him bringing the proper ingredients at the right time, probably secret barbeque sauce or whatever, so he'd gotten a little mad that this whole thing was being held up by this accident.

So the football fan and Charles were pushing and punching each other, and this was mostly a problem because it was still a busy street and cars were slowing down going each direction to watch these guys get mad at each other. But eventually the policeman got involved and the backup that he called got involved too; this other guy got there by foot which is obviously faster in this situation, and they arrested these two guys for assault. The football fan was asking if there was anything like "justifiable assault" because this sure was a case where this guy deserved a punch or two, but the policeman was explaining that they could sort out right and wrong with the judge, for now they were just getting off the road. And they did. Victoria put up a cursory fight but was actually a little grateful to see that Charles guy hauled off. Maybe things weren't working out so well for him, and surely not for them. When they hauled off her car, it ran over the phone, and she didn't even look at it.

Years later, we were married, Victoria and I, and we saw that football fan at a game. He said something about how that tailgate had become an enormous thing, and we had to stop by sometime before the next game, but I think that he liked her more than me, and I'm not much of a tailgater anyway. I go to the games as a professional journalist, but I learned to let Victoria do other stuff on those days, because she knew way too many people, they would come around and talk, and I couldn't watch, and she didn't care so much about the game itself anyway. You'd think her texting, face-timing in the car, backing up right into me, and throwing the phone right in front of me would all be red flags that said, watch out for this woman, and yes, my friends told me the same thing; she's obviously not one for cool, careful deliberation.  But it all turned out pretty well, and I ended up writing up all that wild behavior to the fact that she was just at the point of breaking up with that Charles guy, and that was a stressful time. Charles turned out to be a real loser, but that is another story; at least she had the good judgment to ditch him when she had the chance. And years later, I'd tease her about how she'd put on the gas without even realizing she was in reverse; she'd tease me about how she had to smash my Caddy just to get my attention. But, as I said, it all worked out in the end.

(12-14)