Chapter One

The wad of mud felt good in his hand. Charlie Davis, thirty-eight,
married and childless, was three houses over from his own. He was
hiding behind the tall oleanders on the left side of the Mackris'
house, staring out into the street with an licking-lips expression of
anticipation on his face. He was waiting in the moonlight for a car to
drive by - a particular car - so he could heave his ball of mud at it
and retreat behind the back fences for the quick run back to his house.
Although the moon was full and bright, shining coolly against the
silvery-white backdrop of the Mackris house, the ground was firm from
lack of rain. The hose, Charlie recalled from lawn day discussions with
Phil Mackris, was on the other side of the house, so if he wanted mud
he would have to make his own. Charlie unzipped his shorts and urinated
on the soil right next to the stucco wall. After his urine seeped into
the soil, he bent to mix some mud. It was then that he spotted some dog
shit. Charlie packed it in with the mud and waited for a car. A Lexus,
perhaps, or a Mercedes; something worth the while of picking up dog
shit with his bare hands to put in a mudball made with his own piss. He
stood and waited; with two weeks off, he could wait all night and then
some, but it would not take nearly that long. The middle of his tongue
felt dry, and longed for a beer in the same way it did when he was
working in the sun.

The mud felt cool, with a satisfying weight. He remembered why
children loved to play in mud, why it soothed a dog's paws to dig in
moist soil. Several cars eased by, but none compelled Charlie. It
wasn't an issue of money or prestige; his own car was a newer Range
Rover, won in a yearlong sales contest at the dealership. Charlie's
disdain and ambivalence had something to do with the design of luxury
sedans and the clientele they attracted at the dealership. They wore
expensive sweaters, had silver hair, and they frowned a lot. The
customers weren'texcited about anything. It was as though they went to
Buxton Motors because they had to. Because someone expected it of them.
Charlie repeatedly curled and uncurled his hands into fists as he
showed them the ins and outs of the best gently-used sedans money could
buy. He laughed and swore when the Cadillac sale pushed him over the
top, and the Range Rover sitting in the back of the lot would be his.
It had been owned by a woman who was in a hurry to sell due to some
sort of mumbled financial trouble; she stuffed the thicket of folded
hundreds into her purse and walked right off the lot. She sat at the
bus stop and smoked several long, dark cigarettes: Mores. It would take
forever to get the odor of burning tobacco out of the Range Rover, and
Charlie could still smell fresh blasts of More smoke when he flicked on
the air conditioner. It did not matter that he was a smoker himself; he
could smell another person's smoke above his own every time.

Jim and Ginny Mackris were giggling inside their home; Charlie could
hear them through an open window over his head. They were listening to
music together and their voices pitched and dove as though they were
dancing or wrestling. Every other house on Woodglen Lane was dark; it
was a Wednesday night and everyone besides Jim and Ginny liked to turn
in early. On cool nights in his garage, Charlie could hear couples in
nearby houses making love as early as nine o'clock. His own wife,
Wanda, would be working on a puzzle or knitting sweaters in front of
the television. The neighbor women cooed and moaned with soaring voices
with windows open, their wide bodies plied by Charlie's friends and
golfing buddies, while Wanda searched for tiny hints of Big Ben and
Swiss mountainsides. Charlie sipped beer and smoked Merits while the
neighborhood settled into the night. It did not occur to him to take a
voyeuristic interest in the marital doings of his neighbors; if
anything, it interrupted his contemplations of the concentric smoke
rings wafting from the edge of his garage.

The muted growl of a large displacement engine broke the silence;
Charlie was surprised that he reflexively recognized it as a Jaguar,
probably a couple of years old. The throw of the bluish headlights
wrapped around the corner, and the car would be within striking
distance in seconds. Charlie licked his lips again and regarded the
lump of drying mud, which had acquired the temperature of his hand. He
could smell the dog shit inside the mudball. As the Jaguar eased into
range, Charlie stepped away from the oleander, judged the distance of
the throw against the weight in his hand, and let loose the large
muscles on the left side of his body. He imagined himself in any number
of athletic situations: a sweet-swinging golfer with a perfect
follow-through, watching his ball fairly hang in the air. A diver
springing from a platform. Reggie Jackson, October 1978. A smirking
David, watching a stone from his sling pierce Goliath's temple.

Charlie planted his right foot and let fly the mudball. He led the
Jaguar by a few feet, and the ball made of soil, piss, and dog shit
landed with a wetly resonant thud on the back window. He dove back
behind the oleanders in time to see a red bank of brake lights between
the narrow leaves. The Jaguar stopped in the middle of the street, but
the driver didn't get out to survey the damage. Charlie imagined the
driver gripping the steering wheel, silently debating the merits of
opening the door and yelling warnings out into the night. Maybe a
glovebox handgun was being checked for ammunition? After a few more
moments that froze Charlie's throat solid, the Jaguar's transmission
slipped into gear and the car pulled away. It never occurred to him to
burst into giggles, as he thought he would, but then again, he was
alone. If Speck from the lot was hiding behind the oleanders with him,
they would bite their knuckles to choke back laughter and chortle all
the way back to Charlie's house. In addition to the beer, he needed a
cigarette. Nonsmokers, they just don't get it. After a moment of such
supreme jackassing, a smoke was of the highest order. He and Speck
would make sly, offhanded theater of lighting a Merit, kicking their
heads back to blow their exhaust into the night. Charlie's cigarettes
were sitting on the hood of his car, back in his garage.

He hugged the stucco of the Mackris house, waiting to be sure the
Jaguar was really gone. The wall was still radiating heat from earlier
in the day. He could feel the rush from every hefty thump in his chest,
and Jim and Ginny had stopped giggling in favor of a soft burble from
the television. Charlie's hand was dark from the mud, and it glinted in
the moonlight from the minerals in the soil. He held it out from his
body, and let the weight of his arm peel him away from the stucco wall.
The Mackris television was suddenly quiet, and there was no sound on
Woodglen Lane. Charlie turned and walked back to the alleyway behind
the row of homes. His heart throbbed against his ribs. The moon shone
brightly in the blank Arizona sky, and the short way back home was lit
in pearly grey. It was the middle of the week, the start of a two-week
vacation, and there was nothing to do once the mud and dog shit was
washed away from his hands.

Every light in the Davis house was on, and through the back window
Charlie could see Wanda lift a diet soda can to her mouth. He was
electric with adrenaline, but he had been in the same situation before,
where he would be better off stifling his nervous energy. The stifling
air inside the house, and the stink of whatever meal Wanda had cooked
and left on the stovetop, negated the bracing feeling that had him on
his toes. Wanda looked up from her perch on the sofa, regarded Charlie
with her jetlagged, dehydrated stare, and went back to whatever she was
doing. The house was a compression chamber of odd, frumpy aromas, old,
mismatched furniture from long-dead relatives, and the looming grayness
and doom of a place occupied by people whose business was conducted
with the help of two packs a day. It did not help that the place was
lit with cheap sixty-watt bulbs that burned yellower than usual. It did
not help that the Davises relied on their own semiannual disgust with
themselves to whip out the cleaning supplies and give the place a good
going-over. It did not help that Charlie stood in his backyard gazing
at his wife, remembering all too well the confused fumbling he did with
her nightclothes the previous night, when he awoke suddenly with a
desire to copulate, forget everything else that was wrong. It didn't
work. Wanda wouldn't lift her hips enough to allow Charlie to slip off
her panties, and he fell back asleep with his hand wedged under the
shiny fabric. Tonight, as Charlie came back from defacing a stranger's
car, would be Wanda's first chance to comment. He dreaded the dryness
of her most likely words.

Charlie opened the back patio door and went to the kitchen sink to
wash his hands. Wanda was no more than ten feet away, but she was
watching I Love Lucy and taking some sort of notes on a yellow legal
pad while a Parliament Light burned between the thick fingers of her
right hand. Despite the relative squalor of their home, Wanda would be
disgusted to know that Charlie had used his own urine to make a mudpie,
and had supplemented it with shit from an unknown dog. On the stovetop,
a large saucepan held several helpings of instant macaroni and cheese,
a staple in the diets of poor folk and those who choose not to eat
well. It was unclear to Charlie which category applied to Wanda and
himself, but he knew that it would be up to him to toss out the
leftovers. Wanda would fall asleep on the sofa, wake suddenly in the
middle of the night, and make her way to the bedroom after a long, loud
trip to the master bathroom.

``You missed dinner. There's mac and cheese there and, like, most of
a chicken fried steak in the oven." Wanda spoke without taking her eyes
off the screen, which was filled with Fred Mertz. Charlie opened the
oven door and saw a large, blackish-brown mass resting on a plate lined
with oil-sodden paper towels. There was a large bite taken from one
side. An electric skillet held a pool of congealing grease with brown
and black flecks studded on the surface.

``Thanks." He dried his hands on a greasy dishtowel and watched the
silhouette of Wanda's head against the black and white graininess of
the old television program on the large screen. Fred Mertz and his
wife, Ethel, were having some sort of argument that Lucy and Ricky were
attempting to mediate. Wanda's head bobbed slightly, and she made more
notes on her pad between pulls on her cigarette. Charlie turned, fished
a Michelob from the refrigerator, careful to step away before the
stench of rotting food overwhelmed him. Before his hand hit the knob on
the garage door, Wanda put down her legal pad and called out, "Next
time you want to fuck, try and catch me when I'm awake. Works better
that way."

``Check." He stepped into the garage, opened his beer, grabbed his
cigarettes, and pressed the button next to the door, which groaned as
it crept upward. It was nine-thirty. The outside air was dry and crisp;
it took away the sick aroma of the house and beckoned Charlie to drag
his lawn chair closer to the driveway. It was time to settle in, time
to draw up some sort of plan for the next two weeks, because other than
throw a handful of mud at an expensive car, he had none. The thought of
Wanda, lighting cigarette after cigarette and drinking diet orange soda
while writing her notes in perfect seventh-grade cursive, deflated
Charlie's soul.

He hated her hair. When they met, it was sleek, cut in a perfect bob
that curved against the taut skin of her long neck. After the wedding,
she somehow perfected the method of making her hair curl into ringlets,
and it never ceased to smell sulphurous, like a rotting egg, as though
she permed her hair at home every week. Even so, among the items
Charlie listed to address during his stay-home vacation was to fall in
love with Wanda again, or at least to replace his cynical image of her
with one consistent with being married to the woman for fifteen years.
Charlie closed his eyes and drew on a Merit, trying to remember the
simplest of Wanda's pleasures and the most tantalizing of her wiles.
When they met, she was a regular breakfast customer at the diner where
he waited tables. It was a blast furnace of an Arizona summer, and she
wore tight denim dresses that showed off her cleavage and the freckles
covering it. She ordered waffles every morning, and Charlie wrote the
same order on his pad every day, just to look down her top. She wore
the same thing on their first date, with white pumps, and after an
overpriced Mexican dinner complete with margaritas she rolled down the
passenger window in his truck and lit a Parliament. 'Man,' she said,
her head sinking against the headrest, 'is there anything quite like a
cigarette?'

Although it didn't happen that evening, it was Wanda that got
Charlie interested in smoking. They made great sport of selecting his
brand; they went to a convenience store and paid the cashier five
dollars to stand aside and let them pick packs from the rack at will.
Wanda had Charlie hold each pack in his hand, then slip it in his shirt
pocket, and then put it on the counter next to his wallet and car keys.
He was not allowed to smoke Winstons because her father was a Winston
man, and she said that Marlboros were bad in a nonspecific way. Camels
were for kids, which left the lesser brands. They settled on Merits in
the way that most couples settle on a car or on furniture, and they
left the store with a carton. 'Now, look,' she said, 'this is a full
carton. Like them or not, you have to smoke them, and I'm not going to
smoke them for you. I suggest you get going, sir.'

The first carton of Merits went down well, and over the next
sixteen years Charlie worked his way up to two packs a day. In his
garage, looking out onto the moonlit street, he lost count of the butts
on the slab around him, and there was a wide semicircle of gray ash in
front of his lawn chair. It was midnight, three and a half hours after
he slung a shit-filled mudball at a stranger's car, for reasons that
were not likely to be clear for some time. For one thing, he was still
mulling the things about Wanda that had caused him to follow her around
like a large species of dog, and whether it would be possible to
revisit those things after she had let her body go straight to hell and
had acquired a nasty I Love Lucy habit. He recalled the way they snuck
away from their own wedding reception to smoke a joint on the far side
of the hotel, and how they giggled at how much wedding cake they would
eat when the munchies kicked in. Her eyes seemed to warm and melt into
tiny pools when he fished the joint out of the inside pocket of his
rented tuxedo. There would be no picture of that moment in the wedding
album, yet that image was the one that Charlie would recall in his
darkest moments of marital insecurity: Wanda, in white chiffon, her
hair piled high on her head, smashing an old Cheeto with her satiny
shoes while gingerly holding the roach of a joint. Inside, the
television had gone quiet, and Wanda, fifteen years removed from that
day, snored like a neglected engine.