The One-Eyed Man Read online

  “How much does this stuff cost?” I asked Tony. “I mean, compared to a bottle of actual soap?”

  “Third and goal,” Tony said, pointing at the television. “Sit down. Chill out.”

  “I need you to take this seriously,” I told him.

  On the sofa, Art made a noise somewhere between a chuckle and a snort. “Bathroom wipes are clogging up sewer systems all over the country.”

  “Shit,” Tony said. “I use those. They’re supposed to be flushable.”

  “Funny you mention that,” Art said. “It says here that no regulatory body governs claims of flushability. That you could put a ‘flushable’ label on a sleeping bag, but that doesn’t make it so.”

  “Lying bastards,” Tony said.

  “And get this: apparently there’s a way for the sewer district to tell exactly which house the wipes came from. Some pretty serious public shaming going on. Also, in some instances, civil charges.”

  “Are you serious?” Tony said. “Alice will divorce me.”

  “Doesn’t she use them, too?” Art asked.

  “Nah, they’re mine,” Tony said. “A man’s gotta have his own little things, you know?”

  I opened my mouth to say something else about the liquid hand wash formulated with cleansing agents, but Tony silenced me with one raised finger as Alabama’s quarterback lofted a pass. It drifted down into the arms of his receiver, who did a balletic job of sneaking a toe inbounds before the ball’s trajectory carried him out of the back of the end zone.

  Tony bolted up from his easy chair. “That’s the spread!” he hollered.

  This outburst brought Aggie, Tony’s Goldendoodle, running from the kitchen. She nudged Tony’s hand with her nose, seeking reassurance, as dogs will, that his agitation did not mean her world was coming to an end.

  “That dog,” Art said, “looks like an Ewok.”

  “She’s hypoallergenic,” Tony said, watching slow-motion multiangle replays of the touchdown. “No fur, just hair.”

  “A gay Ewok,” Art said.

  Why did I choose that moment to hurl the bottle of liquid hand wash through the window behind the sofa? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. It certainly wasn’t because I disagreed with Art—the dog did, in fact, look like a gay Ewok.

  At the sound of glass shattering, Art dropped his phone and threw his arms over his head in a panicked warding gesture. The dog bolted back into the kitchen, tail firmly tucked.

  Tony stared at me. “What the fuck, K.?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just need you to engage me about this thing. This hand wash/soap thing. It’s really bothering me.”

  “No shit,” Art said. “Why would you throw a bottle of soap at me, if nothing was bothering you?”

  “I didn’t throw it at you,” I told him. “I threw it at the window. That you happened to be sitting in front of the window I chose to throw it at is totally coincidental.”

  “Cool, so I’m just going to pick this coincidental glass out of my hair,” Art said, reaching up with both hands.

  “And it’s not soap,” I told him. “It’s liquid hand wash.”

  “What’s the fucking difference?” Art asked.

  “That’s it,” I said. “That’s it exactly. What is the difference?”

  “When I say ‘what’s the fucking difference,’” Art said, “what I mean is, ‘who fucking cares?’”

  “Well, I do,” I said. “I mean, look at me. I’m shaking. I feel a little sick, too, actually.”

  “Do me a favor and don’t puke in my living room,” Tony said. “Alice is going to freak out as it is. First the bathroom wipes, and now this.”

  The dog poked her snout through the doorway, trepidatious yet hopeful that the worst of the disturbance had passed.

  “Listen, Tony, I’ll pay for the window,” I said.

  “You’re fucking right you will.”

  “But can I have the bottle of liquid hand wash?”

  “What for?” he said, then stopped, closed his eyes, and waved his hands in the air as if to erase the words he’d just spoken. “Wait, you know what—never mind. I don’t care. Yes, you can have the goddamn bottle of goddamn soap.”

  “You mind grabbing that for me?” I asked Art, nodding toward the sill where the liquid hand wash had come to rest.

  He fished the bottle out and handed it over.

  “Okay,” I said, looking around. “So I’m going to go.”

  “Good idea,” Tony said.

  We all stayed there for a second longer, looking at each other, the dog included.

  “Anytime you’re ready,” Tony said.

  • • •

  There were plenty of places in town where Tony could have purchased the liquid hand wash formulated with cleansing agents, but Total Foods seemed the most likely. So I got on the highway, the most direct route across town to the Total Foods plaza.

  Some might think it kismet that the moment I merged with traffic was also the moment when the blue pickup truck happened along and settled into the cruising lane in front of me. But by that point in my life, I no longer engaged in this kind of magical thinking. That I ended up behind the truck was completely random, the not-so-improbable result of the fact that I lived in a place where rural meets aspiring urban, hillbilly meets hipster, Bud Light meets brunch.

  The truck was a 1980s vintage Ford, tailgate honeycombed with rust and rear bumper not a bumper at all, but rather a slab of aftermarket steel that presumably had replaced the original bumper when it rotted away. It bore a single sticker, centered above the trailer hitch: WHOSE NEXT, the sticker read, in star-spangled font, and beneath that: DON’T TREAD ON AMERICA.

  I cruised behind this truck for a while, considering. Then I started flashing my headlights and honking my horn. After about a mile of this, the truck finally veered to the breakdown lane. I eased in behind it and put my car in park.

  The driver of the truck unfolded himself from the cab and looked at me, arms out, palms up, face decidedly sour. He was big, well north of six feet, and wide of both shoulder and hip. Long stringy hair dangled from underneath his baseball cap like tangles of dirty cobwebs.

  I got out of the car and walked toward the man. He met me halfway, and we stood gazing at each other where the front of my vehicle met the rear of his. He had a look in his eyes that was not good.

  “I wanted to ask about your bumper sticker, there,” I said to him.

  He looked at his truck, then back at me. “That’s what you were going crazy about?”

  “I wouldn’t refer to it as ‘crazy.’ But yes.”

  The man stared. “Jesus. What about it?”

  “I’m having difficulty understanding what it means, exactly,” I said.

  “What don’t you understand?” he said. “Who’s next. Like when you’re fighting. ‘Who wants what this guy just got?’”

  “What which guy just got?” I asked.

  The man hesitated, and a slight smile played on his lips. “You’re gonna make me say it?”

  “I’m not trying to make you do anything,” I told him. “I just don’t know who the guy is that you’re talking about. And that’s setting aside, for the moment, the fact that your sticker uses the possessive form of ‘who’ rather than the contraction of ‘who is.’”

  The man squinted, evidently his way of asking for clarification.

  “If you’re trying to say ‘who is next’—which is clearly what you’re trying to say—it’s ‘w-h-o-apostrophe-s,’ not ‘w-h-o-s-e.’”

  “Like anyone gives a shit, genius.”

  “Fair point,” I said. “It’s true that very few people care about the difference between an adjective and a conjunction anymore. But again, setting that aside. Who is the person who had this terrible thing done to him that you’re now threatening to do to other people?”

  The man looked out at the passing traffic. “Now I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me
start over. You put that sticker on your truck. My understanding of how bumper stickers work—and I’ve never had a bumper sticker on any of my vehicles, so forgive me if I’m way off here—is that a person agrees strongly enough with the sentiment expressed on the sticker that he feels it is a good and accurate way to represent himself to the world. Is it fair to say that about your relationship to this bumper sticker?”

  “Sure,” the man said. “If you want to sound like a stuck-up douche bag about it.”

  “Right,” I said. “So if you agree with the sentiment on the sticker so thoroughly that you’re eager to put it on your truck, then explaining that sentiment to a third party—in this case, me—should not be difficult. In theory.”

  “Still not clear on what you’re asking me, bub.”

  I thought for a moment. “How about this,” I said. “‘Who’s next’ implies that someone came before. Who was that person? Who got the beating that your bumper sticker now threatens to visit upon someone else?”

  Understanding dawned on the man’s face. “The fucking towelheads,” he said. “Who else?”

  “Which towelheads?”

  He stared at me.

  “I’m asking sincerely,” I said.

  “Osama and his whole fucking crew, man.”

  “And they’re the ones treading on America?” I asked.

  “Them and the rest,” the man said.

  “So, all the towelheads?”

  “Fucking right.”

  “But what are they doing to us, exactly?”

  “You mean besides 9/11?”

  “Aside from that.”

  “Ain’t that enough?”

  “Surely. But your grievance seems to be ongoing. So I imagine the offense is ongoing as well.”

  “They’re all ‘Death to America’ all the time. Burning flags and shit. They hate us because we’re free.”

  “Why would they hate us for being free? That’s like hating us for breathing, or eating Twinkies.”

  “They hate us for being free because they’re not free.”

  “So they don’t like us because we have something they aspire to?”

  “Yeah,” the man said. Then he glanced again at the traffic whizzing by and said, “Are we really standing on the side of the road talking about this right now?”

  “We are,” I told him, “and I’ll be happy to let you go in a moment. But have you considered that there are probably more than a handful of reasons why the towelheads hate us, and none of those has anything to do with anyone’s relative freedom?”

  “Let me tell you something, bub—”

  “Israel and Palestine, for starters,” I said. “Iran, 1953.”

  “Who the hell is talking about Iran, you simple son of a bitch?”

  “I’m just saying, there are other, more likely reasons.”

  “I don’t really spend a whole lot of time thinking about it, if you want the God’s honest.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to, though?” I asked him. “I mean, if you’re going to drive around with that bumper sticker on your truck?”

  “I think,” the man said, “that you ought to mind your goddamn business.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Except I would argue that you made it my business by broadcasting your beliefs about towelheads.”

  The man leaned toward me. “It’s a fucking bumper sticker. I forgot it was even there until you started going crazy behind me. It don’t mean anything.”

  “But of course it means something,” I said. “It means you’re a racist. It also means that complete ignorance of a subject does not preclude your having strong opinions about it.”

  The man slitted his eyes and took one heavy, menacing step forward.

  “Which, in fairness, makes you not unlike many other Americans,” I said.

  He jutted his belly up against my chest, knocking me back half a step.

  “I really hope,” I told him, “that you’re not about to do what I think you’re about to do.”

  • • •

  The knob over my left eye, having sprung up instantly under the man’s knuckles, had turned a grotesque blue-black by the time I reached the Total Foods parking lot. My brainpan throbbed, and I felt more than a little sick to my stomach, but I had arrived, however belatedly, so I grabbed the liquid hand wash and went in.

  The Total Foods entrance was choked with heaps of pumpkins: pumpkins on the floor, pumpkins on small wooden stands and apple crates, pumpkins stacked precariously on one another. A few steps inside, amidst the obscene plenitude of the produce section, a group of people had gathered around a long banquet table. A sign to the right of the table read GET EXCITED ABOUT GOURDS, and near the sign a man in a Total Foods apron with tattooed arms stood stuffing baby pumpkins with a mixture of brown rice, lentils, and mushrooms. He had on a Bluetooth headset, and talked into it at length about the brown rice, lentil, and mushroom mixture, his voice amplified by a small wireless speaker on the table. A tray of pumpkin lasagna, already mangled by the throng, rested next to the speaker, along with a large steel bowl of crunchy pumpkin salad.

  The crowd ate these various permutations of pumpkin off of tiny compostable plates. They turned to each other and nodded and said indecipherable but enthusiastic things around mouthfuls of food. The air smelled of garlic and scorched vegetable matter and, ambiently, armpit.

  “You okay?” a guy next to me asked. He was very short, barely above midget stature, and had a startlingly perfect pompadour fade. It looked more like carbon fiber than hair, looked, in fact, as though it had been manufactured under great heat and pressure somewhere far away from his head—Pennsylvania, maybe. He wore thick-framed black glasses and an expression of real concern.

  “I think so,” I told him. “Why?”

  “Well for starters, your face is jacked up,” he said.

  “It’s been a strange day, even by my standards,” I told him. “But I think I’m alright.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Try the lasagna, and you’ll be even more alright.”

  But even if I’d been interested in trying the lasagna, there was no way, really, as the crowd around the table was seven deep and packed as tight as a Roman phalanx. Instead, I watched from a distance as the man in the apron topped the stuffed baby pumpkins with a sprinkle of parsley, then moved on to a bowl of pumpkin bar batter.

  “Excuse me,” I called to him.

  He looked up from his mixing. “Yes?” he said. “There’s a question? We’re happy to answer questions. Any question at all that you have about pumpkins. That’s what we’re here for.”

  “Great,” I said, “because my question is about pumpkins. Listen, I don’t mean to be a noodge, but I’m wondering about the sign you have over there.”

  “What about it, man?”

  “Well it says that we should get excited about gourds. But then here you are working exclusively with pumpkins. Which are not gourds, I don’t think.”

  The Total Foods guy smiled as he continued to stir his batter. “Actually, that’s a really good point,” he said. “The interesting thing is that there’s no consensus regarding the difference between pumpkins, gourds, and squashes. Although in terms of common usage, the general rule of thumb is: cook a squash, carve a pumpkin, and look at a gourd.”

  “But you’re cooking a pumpkin,” I said.

  “Right. Because, really, any of the plants in the Cucurbita family can be called a gourd. And for our purposes, here today, a pumpkin is a gourd. Ergo, get excited about gourds.”

  “But why not just say ‘Get excited about pumpkins,’ and avoid any confusion?” I asked.

  The guy was still smiling. “Well then you’d lose the alliteration.”

  “What alliteration? ‘Get’ and ‘gourd’?”

  “You got it, buddy.”

  “Again, I’m sorry to nitpick,” I said, “but ‘get’ and ‘gourd’ are a bit far apart in that phrase to really count as alliteration.”

  People turned toward me, their faces scr
unched up with displeasure even as they continued chewing. The Total Foods guy, apparently having reached the limits of his knowledge of poetics, just stared.

  I turned to walk away, but before I got out of earshot I heard someone say that they thought Republicans shopped at Sam’s Club. This caused a great and knowing laughter among the crowd at the banquet table. They were still tittering when I reached the end of the produce area and turned left past the wines to enter the Total Foods Premium Body Care section.

  It was, in a word, mammoth. Two sets of shelves, each taller than me, stretched one hundred feet or so in length. My eyes flitted over innumerable products, searching in vain for a bottle to match the liquid hand wash formulated with cleansing agents. What I found instead were daily facial cleansers and gentle skin cleansers, bioactive facial washes made with eight (unidentified) berries, Exfoliating Walnut and Apple Wood Face Scrub, six varieties of Authentic African Black Soap, a pyramid of Neem and Turmeric Handcrafted Cleansing Bars, and a dozen bottles of Apricot Milk Wash with Probiotics. Not to mention the Sea Buckthorn with Ester-C Rejuvenating Facial Cleanser, the Organic Vetiver Cedar Triple Milled Soap, and something called Chamomile and Soap Bark Cleansing Cream, which seemed, if one could believe the label, to somehow be soap, cleanser, and cream at once.

  All this, while Rome burned.

  The scope of the problem, and thus the scope of my dilemma, was much greater than I had anticipated. In search of an answer to the riddle of the liquid hand wash formulated with cleansing agents, I’d instead stumbled into a thicket of yet more riddles. I began to tremble, there in the Premium Body Care section. I began to sweat. I felt dizzy, though whether from anxiety or concussion was unclear. I even started to talk to myself a bit, the sort of comforting nonsense noises one makes to soothe a fussy baby.

  After a few moments I closed my eyes, blocking out the sight of all that skin care. I took several shuddering breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Thus semicomposed, I strode head-down out of the aisle in search of a Total Foods employee.

  I found one in the next aisle, a woman in her midtwenties bent over a large cardboard box marked “Stuffed Shells.” Inside the cardboard box were other, smaller boxes, and each of these was marked “Stuffed Shells” as well.