How Thirsty We Are, Yes, So Thirsty

by Bill Panara

I had a dream, and in that dream there was a woman, and in that woman's eyes there was nothing but love. She held her arms out to me, her small shoulders covered by her long brown hair, and I entered them, letting her hold me close to her chest. Her arms wrapped around me and tied me in close to her, but I felt afraid. I could see something off in the distance, just a flash of light, a little fart of pink flame. I stared and waited and then I heard a bang, an explosion, and the earth beneath me shook so that the woman's arms vibrated like she was cold. My heart was pounding and I stared off into the night, watching as the flashes, blinding like lightning, burnt my eyes. With each flash came a loud crack, and I knew that the world was ending. This was it, the end in a series of atomic fireworks. I pulled away from the woman and I ran. But as I ran, I felt more scared, and I realized that I felt that way because I wasn't being held by that woman any more. I started crying because I couldn't turn around, and all I could see was the black night standing ahead of me, and all I could hear was the brilliant thumping of the bombs behind me. My feet carried me forward, but in my mind I recognized that I was dead, and that I had died the moment I broke from her embrace.

This dream was interrupted when my drunken father came home. The sound of the door slamming behind him pulled me out of my sleep. My father was a tall fellow with a mustache and stubble all over his neck. He wore glasses but still couldn't see well. The doctors said that his vision was leaving him, and I imagined each day growing darker for him, fading further into gray. His hair was stringy and dirty. Most of the time he hid it under a brown cowboy hat, with the greasy tail ends poking out. He wore boots and a big belt buckle. He drank like a fish, and would always talk to himself when he was drunk.

“Yur fuckin fucker,” he slurred. I heard him clearly, even though he was downstairs in his chair and I was upstairs in my bed. He sounded angry. I knew his routine, and I pictured him sitting in his old lazy chair with a glass of fresh whisky in his hand. I squinted so that I could see if Pogo was awake.

“Der dead now, ain't cha,” my father muttered. I looked harder at Pogo. I couldn't see his eyes, and decided he was asleep. But the thought out it – of his eyes, or eyes in general – made me think of the dream, and the woman. I knew who she was.

I closed my eyes, trying my best to block out my father's drunken rambling, and tried to dream of her again.

She was my mother, who left us when I was three.

***

The next morning, I found my father's gun sitting next to his bottle of whisky. It wasn't unusual for him to take his gun out when he got to drinking. I had seen him once, at a bar, when he drank a lot of beer and pulled his gun on a stranger that looked at him funny. The guy was scared, and I understood because I really thought my father was going to kill him. He didn't. He put the gun down on the bar and bought the fellow a beer instead.

I couldn't help but pick up my father's gun and smell it. It smelled funny, and I knew he had fired it. I placed it back down on the counter. I didn't want him to know that I'd touched it.

My brother, Pogo, was sitting at the table, waiting for me to make him breakfast. Pogo was two years older than I was, but mentally I was far ahead of him. Pogo had Down Syndrome, with crossed eyes and giant fat cheeks. I called him Pogo because when he walked he looked like he was bouncing, like he was on a pogo stick. I took Pogo everywhere I'd go. He was like a big dumb shadow. I loved him, though. I took care of him. God knows my father wouldn't.

As soon as I cracked open the first egg, my father stumbled down from his bed. His hair stood up and there was whisky on his breath. When he looked around the kitchen, he squinted. His eyes, like tiny rat holes, scanned the area until he saw me.

“Yer makin eggs, boy?” he asked.

“Yup, pa,” I answered, not looking at him.

“Make ‘em fast, and make some for me.”

“'k, pa,” I said, stirring the eggs with a fork.

He sat down at the table with Pogo, and breathed out heavy.

“Bring me my whisky, boy.”

I let go of the fork and let it sit in the bowl. I picked up the bottle of whisky and set it in front of him. He opened it and took a long drink, whipping his mouth with his wrist when he was done.

“Eat hearty, boys,” he finally said. “We got work to do.”

Pogo laughed and clapped his hands. He loved it when my father gave us jobs. He liked to feel like he was helping, even though I usually did most of the work.

“What, papa?” Pogo asked, his cheeks pink with excitement.

My father took another drink. He rubbed his eyes.

“We got a grave to dig.”

***

My father sent me down to the basement to fetch the shovels. The basement was a dark, wet place, with a floor of damp dirt that smelled like piss. There were always rats scurrying around down there, and sometimes I'd find Pogo laughing and smashing rats with a shovel. It was something of a hobby for him.

I grabbed two shovels, kicked a rat away, and went back upstairs.

Pogo was already outside, bouncing on his heels and waiting for us. My dad placed his hat on top of his head and went out, letting the screen door swing back towards me. I could already tell that this was going to be tough. It was hot as hell outside, and that meant the ground would be hard. I followed my father as he smoked a cigarette and walked, saying nothing.

We walked for about two miles. Pogo's enthusiasm went drastically down with each step – he kept stopping, sitting down, and having to rest.

“Get yer fat ass up and walk, boy,” my father said, smoking and spitting.

“Don't talk to him like that,” I snapped.

“Shut yer mouth,” he said. “Get his ass up. You don't want me to.”

I didn't, and I'd help Pogo up and hold his hand as we walked through the heat. My father walked a good ten paces ahead of us, never looking back. I wondered if he knew where he was going, on account of all the liquor he had drank. I realized we were walking in the general direction of the town bar, which sat a few miles from our home. My father would walk through the dirt at night to get to the bar, and then stagger back home when he was good and drunk. He had done this for years, and knew the route like the back of his hand. As we got closer to the bar, my father's de facto church, I wondered when we would stop.

That is until I saw the body, and then I knew our trip was complete.

I didn't recognize the man. He laid face up, blood coming out of his mouth and his skin dry, the sun making cracks in it. It was strong to see a dead body. I had never seen one before. It didn't look like I would've expected. There was no resemblance to the living, the cheeks sunken in and the eyes staring blankly off. It looked more like a shell, and I thought about how it looked that way because the spirit had left. Seeing that dead body confirmed my belief in the Lord.

My father didn't explain what had happened. It was no surprise. I could've guessed that these men got in some sort of a fight at the bar, and that my father had followed him out and shot him. That was my best guess, but I'll never know for sure what had happened.

“Start digging,” my father said to us, looking down at the dead man. Pogo and I began, battering our shovels into the ground and tossing away light-brown dirt until a shabby grave started to form. My father did nothing but sit and smoke and drop ash on the world. He was strange like that. I couldn't help but wonder why he had us dig the grave. Was he too lazy to dig it himself? Or did he want us, it some sick way, to see what he'd done, partly out of a sense of guilt, partly because he knew it would make us fear him worse.

It took Pogo and me three hours to dig the grave. Sweat rolled down our faces in long streams, and our bodies ached. When we were finished, the hole in the earth just deep enough, my father took the dead man by his shoulders and dragged him in. The body fell into the ground, making a soft thud as it landed.

“I'm goin to the bar,” he barked. “Need a drink. Wait for me here, an make sure that body's good and buried when I get back.”

He turned and walked away. As he did, he looked back one last time, and in his deep voice, mumbled, “How thirsty I am. Yeah, thirsty.”

Pogo and I worked through the day, into the night and the dropping of the sun, making sure our job was done well. When we were finished, we sat on the grave and got to talking. It was getting dark, and the evening air cooled us.

“I like digging,” Pogo said, nodding.

“I sure don't,” I responded. “Ain't no fun in doin it. ‘Specially cause of the body an all.”

Pogo didn't seem to be thinking about what we did in a moral way. To him, it was just an act, moving earth and replacing it. No more, no less.

“Papa's gonna like it,” he said, referring to the grave, which now was invisible to the eye.

“It's just as good as the last one.”

His comment startled me. “The last one?”

“Yup,” he said, still nodding.

“When was that?”

“Oh, long time ago.”

“I don't remember that.”

He held his hands out like he was holding something. “You were small. A baby.”

I didn't say anything for awhile. Finally, I looked at him and asked, “You helped pa out?”

“Yup,” he said, “I digged.”

“Where?”

“Our house. Down.”

“What do you mean down?”

“Down the stairs.”

“In the basement?”

“Yup.”

That he had never mentioned this was not shocking. Pogo had a queer logic when it came to telling me things. He had kept a dead rat in his bed once, for maybe a year, who knows how long, without telling anybody. When I finally saw it cuddled up in his arms while he slept, I snatched it, disgusted. He took it back from me, smiling, and said, “Look. It's cute!”

“Pogo,” I said, hoping he wasn't just telling me crazy talk, “what did you help Pa bury in the basement.”

“A lady,” he answered, quickly.

I went numb, stunned. My father had always told me that my mother left us, ran off, when I was three. I never questioned his story. I never asked anyone else about it, or tried to figure out where she'd run to.

But what Pogo told me made thoughts fly through my head like race cars. My father - crazy, drunk, blind, mean, the killer of at least one other person - could easily have killed her and buried her in the basement. It wasn't just conceivable; it was probably true. An anger welled up within me, and though I tried to calm it, I couldn't.

“Pogo,” I said, my lips trembling, “who was she?”

Pogo shrugged. “Don't know.”

“Was it mom?”

Pogo looked up at me, excited. “Yeah, mom!”

In that moment, two things became clear to me. I was going to dig up that basement, so help me God, and I was going to kill my father.

***

The next week, my father drank constantly. There was always a glass of whisky in his hand, and as soon as he'd drink it down halfway, he'd fill it back up again. What he didn't know, perhaps because of his haste in drinking, perhaps because he couldn't see, was that he was drinking more than just whisky. He was drinking dirt from the grave of the man he had killed.

I had concocted the idea in bed the night Pogo and I had dug the grave. The idea came from the word ‘thirsty,' the sound of it. I thought of how thirsty my father always was, how he always needed to drink. I thought of how he'd said that word when he left Pogo and me so he could go get drunk. Images came to my mind, images of dirt and sand, and I thought that I would keep him thirsty as long as he'd live.

The next afternoon, the sun high and hot again, Pogo and I returned to the place where we had buried that man the previous day. I had a shovel with me, and an empty coffee can. I scooped up earth from the grave and poured it into the can. Pogo helped, not knowing exactly what we were doing. He carried the can, a metal barrel the size of a small keg, back. I told him not to tell our father, because I was trying to surprise him.

“Oh good!” Pogo exclaimed, laughing.

Back home, I went into my father's liquor cabinet and opened his bottles of whisky. Carefully, I pouring dirt into each bottle, being sure to cap the bottle and shake it so that the particles spread around. At first, I started small, just dropping a slight amount of land into his booze. But after a few days of him drinking, devouring the whisky like a drowning man might devour air, I increased my meddling, poisoning his drink more explicitly. By the fourth or fifth day, I was spiking his drink with great divots of land.

I would like to think that the land in his drink kept him thirsty, and that he drank so much because of his never-ending thirst. In reality, he was a heavy alcoholic and, having recently shot a man, he had gone into a complete alcoholic binge, a week long bender which would begin each day when he awoke and would end when he'd pass out. He never mentioned, or even seemed to notice, the dirt in his drink. He just drank, and all that sand, that dust, would slide down his throat and sit in his belly.

It got to the point where I was going back to the grave constantly, taking more and more dirt. I'd wait until my father would pass out and then, knowing that nothing would pull him out of that sleep, I'd dump my takings into his bottles of booze, often emptying the can I'd just filled.

In this time, the dirt in his drink, like mud in his gut, wore down his body and the whisky, thick as poison, wore down his mind. He didn't leave the house for long spells, sometimes two or three days. He began to talk to himself non-stop, mumbling strange guttural nonsense that I couldn't make anything of. I'd listen, my ear pressed to the door of the bedroom, waiting for him to say something about my mother. Sometimes he did.

“Ellen,” he'd grumble, “yer runnin baby, yer runnin. Keep on runnin baby. Daddy ain't comin' to get ya.”

I wouldn't know what he meant. I heard him say it more than once, something about my mother running. I pictured her trying to get away, so many years ago, when I was just three, and him, drunk on whisky and anger, putting a bullet in her back.

Pogo would sit on the floor and listen too. He'd mostly just laugh and twirl his finger around his ear.

“He crazy!” Pogo would say, and give me his large gummy smile.

Crying became a common occurrence too. It wasn't hard to hear him crying his eyes out, but God help me if I let on that I heard, he would've skinned me alive. The old man would cry right before he fell asleep. And while he'd cry, he'd apologize to everyone. I listened to the names, but never heard mine.

“I'm sorry,” he'd weep. “Ellen…I didn't mean it…and Faith…and Jeremy and everyone…Jesus Christ'll save you, baby…I'm sorry, ya hear? Sorry! Faith and Ellen and Daniel and Stephanie and everyone…what have I done….”

A week had gone by, and he was losing it fast. I continued my devious behavior, pouring hot Alabama sand into his Whisky at night when he'd cried himself to sleep. I'd picture the grains of dirt floating through his blood stream, how he'd taste death with each swallow of dark brown booze.

He drank relentlessly that week. And although I was still scared witless of him, I began to grow confident. I watched him become more and more defenseless, drinking away his head, his muscle control, his consciousness.

I didn't sleep at all. I'd lie on my back, staring at the ceiling.

I knew what came next. It terrified and excited me.

I had to dig up that basement.

I had to find her.

***

“When are we going?” Pogo asked, disappointed. He wanted to do his job, to go get the dirt. I'd taught him well. He'd collected it with me. I even taught him to pour it into the bottles with me. He'd hold the funnel and I would pour. Then I'd hold my finger to my lips.

“Shhh!” he'd whisper loudly, his lips curled in a smile.

It was Sunday and I sat Pogo down. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Promise me something.”

“Yeah,” Pogo said, a calmness in his brown eyes.

“You need to listen to me, Pogo.”

He nodded.

“If something were to happen to pa, you gotta promise that you'll stay with me.”

“Something happen to pa?”

“Now I ain't sayin' that something will happen, but if it does, you gotta make sure that you stay with me. Know why?”

“'Cause you're my brother.”

“You're God damn right, I'm your brother. And ain't no other God damn soul in this world gonna take care of you like I am. You hear?”

“I hear. I understand.”

“Good. I just want to make sure you do. I can take care of you real good, even better than pa can. You just stay with me.”

“Tell me, what's gonna happen?”

He sure wasn't dumb. He knew something was happening.

“Now you let me worry ‘bout that.” I leaned in close to him. “And promise me something else…”

“What? What is it?”

“Tonight, you gotta stay in our room. Now you'll be by yourself, you hear? But you gotta stay there, no matter what.”

“Okay. I'll stay.”

I nodded to him. “I don't want you getting' yourself hurt, now.”

***

It was the dead of night when the tears stopped. I snuck out of my room quietly as I could. I tip-toed past him. The lights were still on, and he was sitting back in his chair, a half-drunk cup of dirty whisky on the table besides him. I knelt down and looked at it. Under the light, I could see the thick cloud of dirt floating around.

“Poor bastard,” I couldn't help but think. I looked around, my head darting about, my eyes scanning the room for his gun. I didn't see it anywhere.

The night had been the same as the others. The crying, the mumbling, the long list of incoherent apologies.

“Ellen,” he grumbled. “Yer better run, baby…but ya don't gotta…Stephanie ain't runnin' no more…I ain't runnin'…ya listenin? I ain't!”

And then slowly he fell asleep. I looked around once again for the gun, but when I saw it my body froze.

It was in his hand, tucked coolly under his arm.

I asked myself if I should try to take it, but decided against it. If he was going to kill me, it wouldn't be until after I'd dug up that moldy old basement.

Down the stairs I went. I could hear the rats running around, their little legs scampering across the damp ground. I pulled on the light cord and they scattered. The stairs creaked a little when I went down the rest of the ways, and my hair stood on its ends. Could he hear? Would the sound of the stairs cause him to wake? I tried to pull the questions out of my mind.

I found a shovel and, without a pause for hesitation, I drove it into the ground. I had to know what was down there. I thought of my dream and my mother and that look in her eyes. Love. I couldn't let her stay down there, alone, forgotten. If she was down there, I was going to get her. I would not abandon her.

My mind, once racing with frenzied thoughts of being caught and killed, was suddenly at ease. The digging had done that. It was all muscle memory. I thought nothing as I tossed large mounds of earth over my shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye I remember seeing my shadow, and watching it as it threw full spades of ground at the walls. My body was covered in sweat and I kept digging. Soon, my feet were at the bottom of a hole that must've been about three feet deep.

I kept going, insane with purpose. She must be down here, I kept thinking, she must be. I dug and dug. My arms were growing tired and I threw the shovel away. Where was she? The hole was now at least four and a half feet deep. I had been digging for what seemed like hours. I fell to my knees and began pulling the dirt away with my hands. Tears of exhaustion streamed down my face. How could I explain this to him? What would happen when he awoke and found the basement like this?

It would be impossible to describe how my head pounded, how my temples felt as though they would burst. I felt my fingers sink into the ground, deeper and deeper, as the ground got wetter and wetter.

And then I felt it. I stopped, whipping snot and tears from my face with my forearm. I reached back down and dug until I could hold it up.

I had found her, in the form of a skull.

I held the skull before my eyes, and it was then that my entire being broke down. The tears came down freely and my hands shook. It was true. Pogo was right. I brought the skull to my face and put my cheek to it. It had been so long.

As soon as I brought the skull from my cheek, I felt my entire body go cold. It was fear, and that fear was brought on by the sound of those steps creaking away. Somebody was coming down.

Without strategy I turned. My face had the general expression every kid has when they're caught doing something naughty. Here he came, and I was going to die.

Wait, I thought. Maybe it's Pogo! Yes! It's him! He's come down to check on me! That's all!

I could feel a smile begin to form. Of course, it was just Pogo coming down. I came to my knees, my eyes now able to see up out of the hole, and that's when I dropped the skull.

It was not Pogo. It was my father.

He walked to the hole, not really looking at me, but just looking at the entire scene. I wondered what he could see.

I saw the gun, still in his hand.

“What…” he began, dumbfounded. “What the fuck are yer doin'? You sonofabitch! I'll…”

He started to raise the gun, but then he saw the skull. I know because I could see his eyes. They darted around and then saw it, and that's when they went dull and blank.

His bottom lip quivered. “You son of a bitch…you son of…”

I backed up out of the hole. I kept my eyes on him the entire time, my heart pounding. Slowly, walking backwards, I walked over to where I had dropped the shovel. I knelt, my eyes on him, on the gun, and felt my fingers go around the long wooden handle of the spade.

Finally his eyes rose, meeting mine. “Yer know who that is?”

The fear inside me left. “That's my mother, you God damn bastard.

I expected him to shoot then, to end it. But he didn't.

He laughed.

And as he did, I heard the stairs creak again. This time, it was him, my poor brother, walking with that old bounce in his step.

“Pogo!” I shouted.

My father didn't understand. He swung himself around, afraid of whatever was behind him, and fired.

I ran across the room towards him. His back was to me. I didn't look to see where his bullet had landed, and if he had killed my brother.

I closed my eyes and swung hard as I could, and planted the blade of the shovel six inches deep in the father's brain.

***

I remember sitting on those stairs, holding Pogo.

“Look,” he said, and pointed at the gun wound with one of his chubby fingers.

“It ain't bad.”

“It hurt.”

“Like hell it does.”

I said it to make him feel better. I looked back at his face.

“I ain't gonna let you die now. I'm your brother and I'm gonna be here right next to you till you start to feel better, and then, as sure as I'm sittin' here, we're gonna make ourselves a big old plate of scrambled eggs.”

His brown eyes looked up at me. “With bacon?”

“You bet. Four strips each, nice and burnt just the way you like ‘em.”

He smiled, and then he closed his eyes.

He was dead.

***

As it turned out, there was an entire skeleton in the ground in my basement.

Believe it or not, I dug it out alone. I suppose people could've helped me, but I didn't want them to.

Then there were the police. I explained it all to them, just like how I told it here. I showed them where that man was buried, out by the bar. I told them how I had killed my dad, and how he had killed my brother.

I showed them the bones.

A few days later, my entire family was buried all at once. My pa. Pogo. My mother. Three little boxes, all planted right next to one another. It's funny to have everyone get buried together like that. It's better, almost. Maybe big goodbyes are easier than little ones.

When they buried them all, I could still hear my father's voice. “Keep on runnin', baby…Daddy ain't comin' to get ya.”

Somehow, I knew it meant something.

***

On what would have been his thirty-fifth birthday, I visited Pogo's grave, and there I ran into an old woman wearing all black. She put a flower down on his gravestone, and she turned to me.

“He was my son,” she said.

I looked in her eyes. I recognized them immediately from my dream.

We found ourselves sitting in a diner, down off Monroe , drinking coffee. We didn't talk for awhile. I just looked at her, stunned. Finally, she put the coffee cup down and began talking.

“I never meant to leave you,” she said. “I had to. They were after me.”

“Who,” I asked. I could feel my heart in the center of my throat.

“The police, Billy. They were gonna lock me up.”

She looked at me as though I should've known exactly what she was talking about. Her nose was sharp and his skin was white.

“For what?”

“'Cause of that girl, Faith.”

“What girl, momma?”

She looked away and sipped her coffee.

“Tell me, momma, I need to know.”

She looked off into the distance for awhile, and then, in hushed tones, told me everything. There was a girl, seventeen years old, named Faith, who lived in some town a half hour away. My mom watched my pa when she was around, and knew he had a fancy for her. So one day ma came home early, just to see what she'd find, and she found ‘em together, pa and this girl Faith.

My mother pulled out a gun and killed her. She tried to kill my pa too. Then she turned, jumped in a car and left. She started driving and never came back.

Least not until now.

I looked at my cup of coffee as she told me these things. The coffee was dark brown, and I began to see little granules, like specks of dirt, floating in it.

And she kept talking. Pa was a good guy. Didn't drink, treated her well. That Faith was young. Ma had to stay away, because the police were after her.

Or so she thought.

I didn't tell her that pa buried that girl in the basement. I guess he did it to protect both of them. He must've known that if he didn't hide it, Faith would never have her good name again. A baby whore, people would call her. There also must've been a part of him that wanted my mother to get away. She didn't know it, but there was nobody chasing after her. No cops. Nothing.

She ran away. Plain as day.

After she left, that's when he started drinking. The alcohol was to forget, but he couldn't.

It was his memories, not the whisky, that finally drove him mad.

I thought all these things as my mother spoke. When she was finished, she looked back off in the distance.

“You must hate me,” she said.

I tried to answer, but couldn't. I couldn't make a sound.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I tried to say something, but could only cough. I held my hand up, summoning the waiter.

“There's nothing wrong,” I managed. But that was a lie. There was a feeling inside me, same as that dream so long ago. I knew it well.

The world had ended.

“I'm okay,” I said, my face red. “Just thirsty, oh so very thirsty.”