Nowhere Man - 1. Chapter 1: Nowhere Man

The park was like any other you’d see littering the small Texas towns along I-35. Ours had sixteen units lining either side of a bumpy dirt road that curved slightly to the left as you drove down the slow decline. I say it was a road, but truthfully, it was more like a weathered trail that Ford single-cab trucks had beaten down for years and years, creating the only discernable path through the park.

The first house to your right was clean by Easton Park standards. It belonged to an older woman who lived with her two sons. The eldest had a wife and two children, both born somewhere in the four years usually designated for high school and all of them living out of three bedrooms in a deluxe double-wide that cost 540 dollars a month. The younger boy, I’d learned, was a rising basketball star and spent his evenings dribbling up and down the path.

Across from them lived Monty Wright, an older man who single-handedly kept Bud Light in business. On any given Sunday, he could be found grilling and watching a sporting event with a can of beer in hand, eager to share. He lived next to the nosey Mrs. Peterson who fed the local cats, yet claimed they weren’t hers. Next to her lived Steve Randall, whose dog barked and yelped too loud and ate up everyone’s trash if he escaped his pen at night.

I lived six units down to the right with my brother Dustin and his wife Ashley. I’d moved in with them after finishing my technical degree in Dallas and finding that heating and cooling repair wasn’t the booming market it had promised to be. I made what little living I had installing cabinets for one of the town’s bigger employer’s, “Cale’s Cabinets.” It amazed me how the name rolled off the tongue. Cale must have grown up knowing he wanted to build cabinets. Nothing rolled with Travis, so I guess I was shit out of luck.

I’d lived at Easton Park for three months when I met Tyler Lafferty. It was a Tuesday evening. I’d just written my brother a check for the cable, meaning it was around the middle of the month. I dragged the trash out, doing what I could to make it feel like I wasn’t living in a two bedroom double wide with my brother and his wife.

“Got a light,” were the first words he said to me. I looked up as I was lifting the city issued trash bin, trying not to pay attention to the smell of stale beer that greeted me.

He stood, six feet tall and skinny. His shirt was off and his dirty jeans rode severely low on his hips, revealing plaid boxer shorts that bunched below his belly button. He had two tattoos. One on his chest and another on his arm. The three claw marks on his arm sat above what looked like a hard bicep, small, but perfectly suited for his skinny frame.

“I umm,” I stammered. “I might have one inside.”

“Run and check, will you?” he commanded rather than asked. I would run and check.

I dropped the trash in the bin and went inside, trying not to make a noise while my sister-in-law watched whatever reality offering network TV had that night. I rifled around the kitchen for a few seconds before she asked what I was looking for.

“Lighter,” I said.

“Third drawer on the left, hon,” she said sweetly. It was good mood Ashley today and I was relieved. She went back to her rocking and I went outside into the warm spring air.

My new friend had taken it upon himself to have a seat on my stoop. The middle step. As I stepped around him, I noticed a larger tattoo on his back—that made three.

I leaned against the side of our trailer as he lit a Marlboro Red beside me. I knew the brand by the smell because it was all my father had smoked before he passed away.

“You don’t smoke?” the guy inquired in the same commanding tone he’d used before.

“No,” I answered, taking in the second hand smoke of his cigarette as it wafted upwards towards me. I wasn’t a snob about it. I had chosen not to smoke an early age—a bi-product of watching your father breath out of a tube at 40 something years old.

“You drink?”

A man of few words, I thought.

“Yeah,” I replied. I guess I was a man of even fewer words. He stood up and walked down the path slowly. It was almost like a saunter, a leaned back stroll that was remarkably confident. As he walked away, I wondered what he wanted me to do. There hadn’t been a formal invitation, but then again, who just leaves conversations hanging?

He paused after about ten steps and turned. “You comin’?” I took a few steps forward until I was in stride with him, hands in my pocket and walking in step.

He led me to the unit that was next to last on the strip. I didn’t know many people on this side of the park. He bound up his three steps in one leap, the only quick movement I’d seen him make all night, and opened the door. I followed him in to a single-wide trailer, empty except for a couch, a small table with an even smaller television on it, a dinner tray and a small alarm clock. A pair of steal toe boots and a jacket lay next to the couch. A man of few words and even fewer possessions.

The kitchen was as dismally stocked as the living room. I followed him into the small kitchen; the only light in the room came from the refrigerator after he’d opened it. I noticed a coffee maker on the counter, next to it one mug and a small plate. Inside the fridge was a case of Natural Light, a bottle of ranch dressing and what looked like a bag of French fries that you could bake up or microwave in no time.

He handed me a Natty, ice cold, and took out a second one for himself. He walked back outside and I followed him. Again he sat on the second step and I leaned back against his trailer, waiting for him to make conversation. The view from his unit was confusing and if not for the familiar sound of a bouncing basketball, I would’ve been disoriented completely.

“What’s your name?” I asked him, glad to break the silence if he wouldn’t.

“Tyler.” He looked to me as if to ask what mine was. Why couldn’t he just ask?

“Travis,” I replied to his non-question. “How long have you lived here?”

“A while,” he responded. I wasn’t sure what a while was and I was beginning to think that this conversation was like pulling teeth. Still, after three months living at Easton Park, he was the first person who’d talked to me that didn’t own a cat or a dog that kept me up at night.

“I moved in about three months ago,” I said. “I live up with my brother and his wife.”

“I know where you live,” he said. At first it creeped me out that he’d said that, but then I remembered that he’d found me to ask for a light.

“You married?” I asked.

“Was.”

“What happened?” I asked, figuring it was up to me to make my presence there with him worth it. One of us had to ask the questions.

“I’m not anymore,” he responded. Well duh, I thought, but decided to drop it. “Want another beer?”

I didn’t realize that he’d finished his last one. I’d only taken a few sips of mine. When you don’t say much, it leaves a lot of time to drink. I nodded and watched him retreat inside to get two more beers. I chugged mine while he was gone. The screen door opened and Tyler’s voice boomed out at me.

“Come inside,” he said. “There ain’t no maid service here.”

I took a last swig and hustled into the trailer. The lights were still out and the room felt darker than before. He handed me another Natty and this time he sat on the couch. I took a seat beside him, not knowing what to do next.

“My wife died a while ago,” he said quietly. He clicked open the beer can and slurped on it. “It’s been me and my boy Pete ever since.”

“How old is Pete?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Dunno,” he said. “He was my wife’s before she got sick.” He didn’t know how old his step-son was? That’s bizarre, I thought. I feel like that’s something you figure out along the way.

“Pete,” he yelled out of nowhere, startling me a little. “Pete, come here.” And it was when he tapped the inside of his thigh that I realized that Pete was a dog. I followed his hand with my eyes from the inside of his thigh to the head of a black retriever, noticing for the first time the sort of package my new friend had. Even in the dark, I could tell it was larger than average and hung to the right, towards me. As Tyler played with Pete’s head with his right hand, he silently sipped his beer with his left.

At first Pete didn’t know what to make of me, indicating that this guy probably didn’t have friends over very often. When he realized I was harmless, Pete lay down on the ground in front of Tyler and wagged his tail while I threw more questions at Tyler.

It took an hour and three beers before Tyler’s tongue finally started to loosen up.

“What’s your plan out of this shit-hole?” he asked me. It was his first question towards me that I hadn’t asked him first.

“Huh?” I replied.

“Everyone has a plan to get out of this shit-hole,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“I guess I haven’t thought about it,” I replied.

“Well think about it, my friend,” he said, patting me on the knee. I’d counted four knee pats so far, each of which came right before another beer refill. I could tell it was time for can number six of the night. “Or else you’ll be stuck here all your life wondering where it went.”

And right on cue, Tyler stood up and walked to the fridge. I could tell that his saunter was a little quicker now, not nearly as confident or secure. He handed me another cold brew and sat down next to me.

It was 100 percent my imagination, I thought, but I could have sworn that this time around, he’d plopped down a little closer than the last. It had been over a year since I’d gone up to the Whiskey Flats in the city to get my dick sucked by an anonymous John; I was probably reading into a sign that wasn’t there. Or was it because I was about to be six beers in and could feel myself growing warm under the collars? Still, I felt like something was happening and I kept stealing glances towards my friend’s crotch to see if it was just my imagination.

“You know what’s great,” he said in another ambiguous sentence/question. “What’s great is that I had a plan to get out this shit-hole. And I had one foot out the door. And then life fucked me and I’m right back where I started.”

I assumed he was talking about his dead wife again. In the hour we’d been playing “Get to know the mysterious stranger,” he’d gone in and out of random thoughts about her. He’d say something about his wife, and then a second later, as if he hadn’t brought it up, he’d say something completely random.

“I’m a dead dog away from being a sad country song,” he said, looking at me. He turned his gaze to Pete and said, “Don’t worry, Pete. You’re not going nowhere on me, are you? Nowhere Pete.”

I sensed a tension, or a chemistry. I thought that if he was on the same page as me, he’d kiss me right now. Although, I wasn’t sure what I’d even do with a kiss. At this point in my dry spell, one kiss would probably send me over the edge.

But he didn’t, and I wasn’t surprised. No one in these parts wanted to kiss another man, and even if they did want to, they’d make damn sure the other man wanted to do it even more. Hitting on the wrong stranger here was the fastest one-way to ticket to a hate crime. So I didn’t wait for him to kiss me. Instead, I took another sip of my beer and forgot about the tension and the chemistry.

“Nowhere man,” he said. I wondered why he was repeating himself. “They’ll call me nowhere man when they make that country song.”

“Nowhere man?” I asked. “What in the fuck is a nowhere man?”

“A nowhere man is neither here nor there,” he said. I’d never heard of it. “A man that’s in no place and every place at the same time.”

“No, no,” I said, my voice a decibel louder than it had been an hour ago. “A man who is everyplace would be an everywhere man.”

He didn’t say anything right away. And then he nodded. “You’re right.”

Tyler excused himself to the bathroom. While he was gone, I readjusted myself a little, wondering if Pete had seen me do it. I was getting hornier by the drink, as I always did, but I knew so much better than to think about acting on it. Instead, I planned to jack off in the bathroom at home. I thought about how many beers we’d already polished off. Six a piece. That was twelve total. If we had started with a full case when I got there, there were twelve left. But it probably wasn’t full, because I didn’t remember seeing him open it. And if it wasn’t full, then there were probably ten or eleven left.

“He was a nowhere man, a man who belonged to no one,” I heard Tyler sing as the bathroom door opened. His voice was accompanied by the loud sound of a flushing toilet. “A man who lived on his own and depended on no one.”

“No one,” I chimed in. I wasn’t sure you could rhyme one with one in country music, but this was his song, so I went with it. I took the top of the harmony as I followed him, echoing the stanza that he was making up on the spot.

“He was biding his time until his life was all done. And he could join the one he’d lost and love in the great heaven above. He was biding his time until his life was all done. Or until he found another one that he could love.”

“He could love,” I sang, forcing a key change. Tyler hopped up and played an air guitar like a ten-year-old listening to his favorite 80’s rocker.

“I said that Nowhere Man was biding his time until his life was done,” he sang in the new, higher key. I stood up and joined him on our single wide stage, the two of us playing this epic country anthem to the world. “Until.”

“Until,” I sang slowly. Knowing what line he was going to sing, I joined in instead of echoing, creating the harmony. “He found him someone that he could love.”

“That he could love….” Tyler sang, bringing it back down. He stood straight up again and smiled at me. I smiled back, feeling a feeling and sensing a tension once more. As he sat, I decided now was a good time to leave. The guy I’d met a couple hours before who didn’t speak three words at a time was now singing to me in his living room. I was tipsy enough to think that meant something that could get me in a world of hurt if I was wrong. I’d have to borrow my brother’s car soon and make that trip up to the Flats in the city I’d been planning to take.

“I’m gonna go,” I said to him, but I didn’t move. Instead, I stood there, waiting for him to acknowledge what I’d said and respond. He stood up.

“Ok,” he said.

“Thanks for the beer,” I replied.

“Tomorrow it’s on you,” he said. “And we’ll write Everywhere Man, the follow up to Nowhere Man.”

“We can’t write all of the country songs before the dog has died,” I said.

“You’re right,” he replied.

I walked out of the trailer, leaving my friend in a darkness of his own making. As I walked to my unit, I wondered if he had been serious about hanging out again tomorrow. When I got to the stoop where I’d first been surprised by this Nowhere Man, I planned my entrance and how I was going to go straight to my bedroom of the trailer, rip my pants off and jack off, thinking about my new friend.