It's All Downhill from Here

Tom likes the smell of the rope. He had tried for hours to remember how to tie the noose, but then remembered they didn’t teach them to tie nooses in Boy Scouts. What good was Boy Scouts, anyway, he thought. So he looked it up online and tied the best noose he could tie from a tutorial on YouTube given by a 12-year-old Indian boy who never said why he ties nooses and posts videos on YouTube of him doing so. But the boy sure knew what he was doing. There is one part when he ties them fast and his hands move like magic. It is something like tying a necktie. The rabbit goes around the hole, and all that.

He slides his head into the hole and takes a deep breath. And there he stands halfway up a metal ladder in the middle of his garage with that rope around his neck, just standing there as though in contemplation of something so great that he is paralyzed in the thought. He stares without blinking at an old hornet’s nest in the garage roof vent as though it is the face of God. Atop the rafters, there are sleds and boxes of Christmas directions which are about the only sentimental things that she didn’t take. It is July and no one cares about Christmas decorations in July.

She left him for a salsa dancer named Eduardo Cardinale, who people in town called “Taco Eddie” or “Fast Eddie,” for obvious reasons. When there weren’t enough housewives to “teach the salsa,” as he said it, he worked at the only Mexican restaurant in town which employs only Mexicans who speak very little English. However, there is one snow-white high school girl hostess there who looks a lot like Sissy Spacek when she played Carrie. 

Some of the boys at the bar call her “fire crotch,” even though she is still in high school and they aren’t supposed to talk about high school girls that way. Tom spent a lot of time at the bar, so the inevitable conversation of this teenage fire crotch, always led to talk of Fast Eddie, and everyone would look at Tom and ask him, in varying levels of sincerity or sarcasm, something like so, “Heard from your wife, yet?”

“Ed,” she called him in the weeks before all this. Ed this. Ed that. Ed says. She would come home and dance across the floor as Tom read a book, or did the dishes, or made dinner. Some mundane chore that one of them had to do. But she made Tom smile then in his naivety, acting so youthful and cheery. In twenty-five years together, this was the youngest he had ever seemed to her. The most lighthearted and carefree since before she was pregnant.

He should have known, he thought standing there on that shitty paint-speckled ladder that she was up to no good. That she was too damn happy not to be doing something wrong. That is how their relationship was since the beginning. They would be happy when they got a new car, or went on vacation, or exchanged gifts at Christmas, or celebrated their daughter’s birthday, but neither of them would ever be happy for no reason at all. Just simply to be. There was no happiness between them that wasn’t material.

She said she took salsa lessons because she wanted to learn how to dance, although there isn’t a single salsa dance bar in town, or in the next town, Tom related. She said it doesn’t matter and how she thought salsa dancing was some great art form, and since she was absent anything remotely close to any other style or form of art, and every other form of dancing bored her to think about, salsa it was.

We could square dance at the community center on Saturday nights, Tom offered. Square dance? She laughed back. Tom, you’re such a country bumpkin. She said maybe she would teach him to salsa and when they went on the cruise they always talked about going on, they could be the envy of the cruise ship. She said Ed was that good. Wendy sure had her some big dreams, Tom’s mind swirled edging forward on the fourth rung of the ladder. Then he cursed himself for ever marrying someone named "Wendy Jo." It was a ridiculous name, he thought when he met her. 

He also cursed himself for breaking up with the girl he dated before to date someone named Wendy Jo and to eventually marry her and give up all he could have been to have a child with her. A child that was like glue to him. Who glued them together. But somewhere in all that stickiness, he truly loved her and was loyal to her despite the opportunities he now considered, which he never considered at the time. Life was a series of misfortunes and regrets for Tom Kimble, bumpkin or no bumpkin.

Hanging yourself isn’t just a spur of the moment thing to do. There is planning that goes into it, which was especially true for Tom. He sent his brother a letter that set out his funeral arrangements precisely, so not to place a burden upon his family. He enclosed a check for $8,000 that would cover everything. He wrote a letter to his grown daughter who was in college in Michigan. A very soft and touching letter in parts that said sorry without saying sorry at all, and that refrained from calling her mother a dirty whore.

He wrote it a hundred times before settling on the final draft. Although soft and sincere in parts, the bulk read like tech instructions for operating a toaster oven. He let his dog Frank loose, who was probably roaming the neighborhood and pissing on someone’s flowers. The dog was in love with Wendy and after Wendy didn’t come home, he acted like he was depressed and stood by the door looking at it, which only further depressed Tom.

He thought about praying to God one last time, but decided against it. God knows what he is feeling. God knows everything, after all. For two weeks since she left, he prayed to God she would come home. So, there was nothing else left to say. She wasn’t coming home and he had no idea where she was. Only that she had left by her own free will because he received a phone call from her fat sister Becky that said she had told Becky that she and Ed were madly in love, and were soulmates, and were living together somewhere, and all that other happy shit, and to tell Tom not to look for her.

Her sister sounded as though she were eating Frito’s when she was telling Tom what Wendy Jo had told her to tell him because there were periodic crunches that made her dialogue almost inaudible. It was the worst Dear John a person could get.

And so, in consideration of the misery of the above stated events, Tom kicks out the ladder and the initial drop is like a punch in the throat. He gags and his eyes water and he dangles there kicking his legs about six inches off the ground. He forgot to play his favorite song before he got up there and the CD player sits uselessly on the work bench waiting to be pressed and put on repeat for dramatic effect when someone finally finds his body. “Hallelujah,” by Jeff Buckley. Everyone’s favorite song. 

In a moment of panic, he reaches up for the rope, but stops before he grabs it. God’s merciful hand becomes the Iranian Sheik’s merciless muscular choke-hold. And then for some reason, he thinks about Tammy Faye Bakker’s tears and the mudslide of mascara down the hills of her cheeks on TV. His mother cried watching Tammy Faye cry. Even when he was only ten, he knew that Jim Bakker was a no-good sex-deviant charlatan.

And there as Tom dangles with thoughts of Jim and Tammy Faye and his mother and those wads of tissues as his mother says there is no good left in this world, Tommy, and people are against her and everyone she loves, the rafter suddenly snaps and he falls to the concrete and two boxes of glass Christmas bulbs and a green strand of lights come crashing down upon him, along with three sleds and a silver strand of garland and a tiny mouse that scurries away never to be seen again.

When Tom turned 40, the boys at the bar prophetically said it was all downhill from there, and in two years he had lost everything, it seemed. Wendy and all the Mexican food he ever liked, slayed from his heart and palette by Fast Eddie. His job at the insurance agency a week later to a new guy with better hair and a whiter smile. His daughter to the universe of college and to a boyfriend she says is her world all over Facebook and who rarely calls home. And now, even the simple reprieve of death was taken from him by the physics of improper weight distribution.

He lies there on the ground and bawls in his best shirt and tie and writhes around the way a dehydrated earthworm writhes around when the sidewalk is dry and sunny. His neck and throat are sore. He turns over and there beside him lay one of the three porcelain wise men from the Christmas box. Balthazar, he thinks. The black guy. The King of Arabia who gave Baby Jesus the gift of myrrh. But Balthazar wasn’t giving anyone anything anymore. He had been beheaded like John the Baptist.

Tom stumbles out of the garage with the noose still around his neck. His neighbor is pulling in from work and says hello over the privacy fence, but Tom doesn’t say anything back. The rope drags behind him like a dragon tail. He goes inside and pours himself a drink, a brandy, takes off the noose and throws it to the ground. He should have bought the gun, he tells himself. The .44 caliber. Then he thinks of playing Clue as a kid and decides to call himself Colonel Mustard from here forward and tries to remember all the murder weapons but gets no further than a knife, a wrench, a candlestick, a revolver, and a rope. Maybe that was all there ever was.

After a couple days of sleeping, he wakes to a call from his daughter. She is telling him about her boyfriend again. She is saying he is her world and all that happy shit people say about someone new and rarely about someone old. Before she hangs up, she asks him about the letter he sent her in the mail. She says she doesn’t understand what he was trying to say to her. She tells him mom called her and she is fine. She tells him he shouldn’t take it so hard because mom wasn’t happy before and everyone should be happy. She asks him if he has cancer, or something. He says no and that everything is fine because he can’t remember what he wrote to her and then he hangs up.

His brother calls him later that evening as Tom is watching a basketball game between two schools who no one likes besides people who went to college there, or people who love basketball so much that they don’t care who plays. They like to see a leather ball be bounced around and go into the orange iron hoop and swoosh through the net because it gives them some dopey sense of vicarious satisfaction when it does. Basketball is a team game, he remembers Mr. Hamm, his grade school gym teacher, telling them seriously in second grade. Mr. Hamm is dead now.

Tom could hardly dribble a ball, let alone put it in a hoop. Nor did he care to. His brother asks him if he is okay and Tom says it was all a bad joke. What about the check, his brother says. Keep it, Tom says. Give it to Sophie for college. We can’t do that, his brother complains. Then tear it up, Tom says. I don’t care. He hangs up and his brother calls back and asks him if he is really okay. Tom says yes, he is really okay. We heard about Wendy, he says. They have all heard about Wendy.

Tom, rather Colonel Mustard, can’t go to the only bar in town anymore. After Wendy left with Fast Eddie, everyone looked at him with such pity it made him feel like hell. One guy told him that Fast Eddie did his wife, too, in a sort of sad show of comradery, but his wife never left him and Tom felt worse because of it. Although the boys (who are not boys at all, but rather old or aging men) try not to talk about it, after a few beers that is where the conversation inevitably leads. Like it is a drain and their sobriety is the clog, the slow-leak. Someone talks about boycotting the restaurant, though Fast Eddie doesn’t even work there anymore. Others talk about building a wall, or calling INS to check green-cards. Then someone talks about that fire crotch hostess over there and Tom rubs his face and says nothing at all.

He tells everyone Frank his beagle ran away and someone says they found a dead beagle on Fifth Avenue the very same day that got hit by a truck. Someone picked him up and disposed of him, the person assures Tom in a rare moment of barroom consolation. Tom says it is better that way, but he weeps like a damn baby on his way home.

He decides to repair the rafter and try to hang himself again, so he goes back to True-Value, where he bought the rope days before, and bought the wood and the brackets he needs to support his weight. After looking at the wood that broke, it looked like there was termite damage. The same cute girl who sold him the rope is at the counter and she asks him how the rope worked out in an odd-kind-of-way and he says not so well. She has clear blue eyes and short black hair. She stares at him before realizing she is staring. He remembered someone at the bar saying something crude about her one time. She is younger, maybe 25 or 26, and she has a young kid, he somehow knows. Likely from the bar.

“Do you go to Red’s?”

“I used to,” he replies.

“I thought so. I used to barmaid there. A bunch of dirty old men stuck in 1979. Doesn’t suit you.”

“You don’t think so?” he asks indifferently.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Well, I suppose that’s kind of you to say.”

“I’m Hope.” She offers her hand to shake. He shakes it.

“I’m Colonel Mustard.”

“Colonel Mustard? What in the hell kind of name is that?”

“It’s my name.”

“Okay. But are you sure you are not Tom Kimble? Your wife left you for Taco Eddie, right?”

Tom rubs his face. “Does everyone know?”

“This is the hardware, Tom. People come here and talk as much as they buy hammers and nails. It’s just what they do.”

He turns to walk away with his wood and brackets in hand without saying anything more. But before he gets to the door she calls out to him. “Hey, do you want to have a drink? I am off in five minutes. I don’t have any plans.”

He can see himself in the window glass. It’s dark outside and sprinkling. Neon puddles are lit up on the street absorbing the lights of the signs in the storefront window. The hardware tries its best to look like 1957 the way the drive-in movie tries to look like 1957 because in 1957 it was all happy shit then. What a sad bastard he sees looking back at him. But what the hell would a drink hurt? And if he took her it meant he could go back into Red’s and have a drink because the boys at the bar would give him the customary privacy they give any couple until he engages them, which, of course, he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t let them in at all and he would sit there with Hope and have a drink and he would go home and fix the rafter and hang himself again. He hopes his brother hadn’t torn up the check. He knew he wouldn’t, though. Not $8,000. But he wouldn’t cash it either, until Tom was dead.

“Sure,” he says, though not looking back. “Why not? Do you need a ride?”

“No, I have my truck. I can meet you at Red’s in less than 10 minutes?”

“Okay.”

He waits for her in the gravel parking lot listening to Bruce Springsteen in his car. “Valentine’s Day” from Tunnel of Love. The CD is practically worn out and skips now and then. She pulls up in a big red Ford, kind of beat-up and accidentally loud because of a bad tailpipe. She is listening to country, he can hear. She hops out and he watches her. She is wearing tight torn jeans and boots and a black Beatles t-shirt which had been hidden under her blue True-Value work smock. Certainly, she isn’t old enough to remember the Beatles. But who is anyway? She is thin, short and very cute, that much he can’t take away from her as much as he tries to with viscous scrutiny. Her teeth are perfect and she smells nice. Why in the hell does she want to have a beer with me, he thinks. She could have a beer with anyone. Any more muscular or younger dope coming in to buy a hammer or some yard tools.

It doesn’t matter, it is just a beer, he tells himself. And there surely have been odder mismatched couples in Red’s over the span of 80 years than a 42-year-old broken down bag-of-bones former insurance agent with thinning hair and pale skin and a 25-year-old beautiful tan and busty hardware store clerk with a smile that could melt even the coldest of hearts. Red had seen many such odd couples, surely, come in and leave. And sometimes, they might’ve come back, or never at all. Her eyes are full of electric red light from a Killian’s neon sign that hangs in the side-window. The sky is clear and lit up with brilliant universes of life, bursting like pin-dots in black silk before a 10,000-watt flood-lamp.

Red is dead, but no one bothered to change the name. Over 80 years they had incorporated a “Red” theme and every shade of red makes an appearance from the red-maple bar top, to the candy-apple red toilets. They walk in awkwardly together, not quite side-by-side, but almost. She, much less awkward than him, trailing behind him a little. As to be expected, the boys at the bar turn their gray heads as the odd couple enters and their eyes get fat and their mouths open a little letting out little complaints of life in the modesty of their silent exhalations. But when Tom and the hardware girl, as they call her, have a seat in a booth away from the bar, they turn back towards the bartender and go on conversing about glory days and boobs and sports. Iron hoops and more balls.

Tom is wearing a shirt and tie, but the tie is loose. His hair is a little messy but he is otherwise presentable for a 42-year-old broken-hearted sap. But his dourness it is not evident and he talks pleasantly and laughs and makes jokes as though his insides were not ate up. They chit-chat for a bit over beers a peppy barmaid brings. The barmaid doesn’t know Hope. Though they both worked the same job, their paths never crossed. After a beer, she gets right to it.

“So, Colonel Mustard, tell me about your wife.”

“I don’t want to talk about her. And you can call me Tom.”

“You wanted to be called Colonel Mustard, didn’t you? So, Colonel it is.”

“I am still not talking about her.”

“That’s fine. But let me say this. Anyone who leaves someone, no matter why they leave, outside of physical or mental abuse, never really loved that person to begin with. Call it infatuation, or a temporary need, whatever you will, but they didn’t love them. You don’t leave love. You don’t just pack your things and go. So, you must ask yourself, Colonel, what have you lost besides someone who didn’t love you to begin with? You gained in the respect that you have an entire life to be lived ahead of you, to perhaps find someone who does love you enough to never leave you. You are better off without her. The prosecution rests.”

No word from the defense. Tom smiles in disbelief of what she is saying. He finishes off the first beer and the barmaid is quick to bring another. The boys at the bar break out in a chorus of laughter about something or other. Their backs are like a wall and turned to Tom and Hope and they don’t turn back around. “My ex-boyfriend left me 8 months pregnant. That was two years ago. He tried to come back three times and I said no every time, because, again, you don’t leave what you love. Ever. Love may make a mistake. It may hurt you in some way, but it doesn’t ever leave you.”

Tom listens. It isn’t by much of a coincidence at all that someone stacked the jukebox with Bruce Springsteen songs, but it helped his mood considerably. Bruce Springsteen is often played in Red’s, along with Thin Lizzy, the Kinks, Neil Young, and The Eagles. Whoever played the songs, played nearly every song off Tunnel of Love, including Tom’s favorite, “Valentine’s Day,” more than once. The girl looks mesmerizing in bar light and the soft lights of 40 watt-bulbs in glass flower-shaped wall sconces gleam in her eyes like a moon in a well and he looks at her as she speaks and cannot look away, nor think of anything else.

Several beers later, the evening is dwindling and Hope says she has to go home soon because her mom is watching her son for her and she never goes out, so she doesn’t know how well her son will do without her. She hadn’t checked her cellphone because she left it in her truck. She is not so self-absorbed, she says, that anything on her cellphone matters. She asks him if he wants to go out the following weekend, and he agrees. Same place. She makes him promise to come and he promises. He walks her to her car and watches her faded taillights pull out into the darkness of the road and disappear in a swarm of other red eyes.

Tom goes home and puts the wood in the garage and the bracket on the work bench and doesn’t bother to fix the rafter. Maybe tomorrow, he says to himself. But tomorrow comes and goes and instead of fixing it, he goes to Church and sits in a back pew and listens to the pastor speak of letting go. The words are large on the screen. Let Go! And he thinks of Tammy Faye Bakker crying mudslides on TV and Jessica Hahn on the cover of Playboy after saying she was drugged and raped by Pastor Jim Bakker.

He has lunch near the hardware, but Hope isn’t working. He knows because he walks past and looks inside and there is a different girl in her place. Then he goes to the gym and shopping. The next day, he applies for another job at another insurance agency and he is hired on the spot, making more money from the start than he made in his previous position. And finally, the following weekend comes and he meets Hope at Red’s and they talk more about life and she says she never felt sorry for Tammy Faye Bakker at all, or Jessica Hahn.

Three weeks pass and three more Saturday night meetings for beers. Three nights of Springsteen songs and pizza in Red’s in the same booth. Then she gets quiet for a minute and tells him there is something she needs to say before they go any further. And for some reason, he is thinking that she is going to tell him that she is a transvestite, probably because someone had just played “Lola.” But she looks nothing like a man and she doesn’t tell him she is a transvestite, after all.

“I knew why you bought the rope, Colonel. I knew when you bought it why you bought it, but I didn’t do anything or say anything to stop you from doing it. I watched you walk out the door as slow as you did with it and that night I felt so damn bad I didn’t sleep at all. I simply prayed that you would change your mind, or that you would fail in doing what you sought to do. I kept wondering if you were hanging there without anyone in the world to cut you down. I had no idea where you lived, so there was nothing I could do besides call the police. But I didn’t even call them because I was too scared. So, I just prayed. And when you came back a few days later, well, I was relieved. I could see the rope burn on your neck. Your eyes were still red from the busted blood vessels. And in your left eye there was the shape of a heart. That was my sign. I asked God for a sign in the shape of a heart months ago. To be worn on someone I was meant to be with. Did you notice it?”

“Yes, but not that it was in the shape of a heart. No.”

“It was. I didn’t want you to kill yourself, but if you hadn't tried, you never would have had the heart. I wanted to resuscitate you. You were dead when you walked in and I wanted to breathe life into you. The opposite of leaving is coming. And I have come to you four times now. And I want to keep coming to you and I don’t want to ever sell you a length of rope, though it was her who sold it to you, really. Not me at all. I was simply the person that made the exchange. I want to keep coming to you, Colonel.”

“You can start by calling me Tom. Colonel is pretty annoying now that I hear it.”

She smiles. “Tom, it is.”

Tom sits back and drinks his beer more satisfied than he had ever felt himself to be. He looks at the beautiful woman across from him and smiles for lack of anything else. It was either that or cry. There is an old boy rule that says you never cry and you especially never cry in a bar. He sits there and absorbs the moment as best he can without saying anything back because he knew in time, it would be one to remember. And he is confident in the woman and he sees love through her eyes. Real love that doesn’t leave or ever look away. That is interested in what you are saying and that hears you because it wants to hear you.

And what she has for him is reflected in him, the way his deplorable face was reflected in the window glass when she asked him to have a drink, weeks before. She looks at him and smiles and his smile back is his answer and she gives him her heart at that moment with full confidence it will not be returned to her, nor will it be damaged in his possession. It will be made whole because there are no such termites in love. And love is a solid wood that needs no bracket.

Months pass. Tom replaces the rafter and coils the rope up and hangs it from a nail, and the ladder beside it. He calls the exterminator to spray, but the exterminator says he doesn’t have any indication of termites, but he sprays anyway because something must have eaten the wood. And the thought is not lost on Tom that he owes his life to the work of a termite. He owes his life to a broken-heart. One single and tiny thing and one terrible condition he never expected to endure. And he owes his life to the kindness of a stranger who asked him for a drink because she stood behind that counter and waited for someone with a heart.

There are no more thoughts of nooses, or how skilled a 12-year-old Indian boy ties them on YouTube. No more rabbits around holes and no more avoidance of Mexican food, the restaurant, and salsa. No more jealousy of his daughter’s university or boyfriend, or bother in his heart when she tells him that mom is happy and doing well. Good for mom, he says back. Life is too short not to be happy.   

He takes Hope and her son sled riding at the park on the first snowfall in late November. Hope turns and smiles at him and tells him to hold on because it is all downhill from here, and he laughs when she says it and he tells her that isn’t a good expression. Sure, it is, she says. What fun is it to go uphill, Tom? I have never thought of it that way before, he replies. I guess it is no fun at all. She shakes her head and kisses him with chapped lips. And they race down the steep hillside on plastic and space-foam sleds and topple over at the bottom in a foot of snow.

By Christmas, they decorate their house and Balthazar has a head again and gives Baby Jesus the gift of Myrrh in the porcelain nativity. It was sometime in mid-December that Frank the beagle came back. He had not been smashed by a truck after all. He was living with neighbors down the street who thought he was a stray until someone told someone that Tom had a beagle that ran away and they put two and two together. The neighbor stood there with the dog on the leash and Frank was happy to see Tom because his tail wagged to the right. We didn’t know, they said. We’re sorry. It’s alright, Tom replied. It’s better that way. And Frank no longer stood at the door waiting for Wendy to come home.

It is in January that Tom hears that Wendy has been dumped by Fast Eddie from the boys at the bar. They swear it is true and they say she is staying with her sister, Fat Becky, they call her. She told someone she wanted to tell Tom she was sorry and come home. Fast Eddie is back teaching salsa again and waiting tables at the Mexican restaurant. Someone asks Tom if he is going to go over and kill him with the .44 they heard he bought last week at the Pawn and Tom smiles and says no, but he is certainly going to go over and have words with him. What about, the bartender asks.

Tom smiles, “I am going to thank him and see if he will teach me the salsa.” And he snaps his fingers like castanets and leaves to go home to Hope.