Alison Petty24
Andrew StarkOliveMy friend Jessie killed himself on a Monday in springtime. Turns out, most people kill themselves onMondays in springtime. It doesn’t make sense, spring being a time of new life. But the depressive wakes to birdsongand sunshine, to flurries of pollen, and it all seems like a broken promise, the illusion of happiness. That’show Jessie put it, anyway. We were installing a new phone system at the Tribal Center, both of us shoehornedin the attic rafters, saturated with sweat while running network wire, and he just started crying. I thought he waschoking on those pink pillows of insulation, all the glass-reinforced grains between our teeth like dust.“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”It was as if he’d just relayed to me some doctor’s damning pronouncement that rapidly upped his expirationdate, a giant cancer, perhaps, like an octopus hugging his brain, threading its awful tendrils around his spine,working toward his heart.He was the type of guy you’d forget you ever went to school with – he blended into the lockers, meldedwith the Formica, and in class pictures, second row back, third from the left, the blacks and reds of his ChicagoBulls t-shirt integrated seamlessly into the backdrop of encyclopedias and flashcards. He never raised his hand,and (in my memory, anyway) he seemed like an organic extension of the desk itself. He might as well have neverexisted at all. And Jessie – my remarkably unremarkable friend – slipped into a routine, rappelled into the channelsof habit as if off a cliff. Every night he’d close George’s Tavern, climb behind the wheel of his rusted-outChevy S-10 with a couple liters of vodka sloshing around in his gut, and drive up to the Holiday station wherehe’d buy a six-pack of Coors and a microwavable bean-and-cheese burrito before heading home to his dingy onebedroomon Baraga’s shoreline and drinking himself further into the undertow. His name had never appeared inthe newspaper; he was rarely, if ever, the topic of anyone’s conversation.He had the occasional girl, sure, called them “Rez Dogs.” But tangling with girls here is a gamble. Sayyou sleep with some pretty cocktail waitress at the casino, or you flirt with a sexy bartender at the Sidetrack, oryou score the phone number off a nurse at Tribal Health. Any given hour in the nights following, you might windup with her hammered ex-boyfriend stumbling up to your house with a bat or a shotgun.I’ve had the occasional girl, too, but it’s been a while. In the same way captive old pups in a pound acclimateto the cold cement floors, the concrete vistas and the steel horizon, I’ve learned to accept loneliness. Thegood girls flee or head off to college and marry Business majors or Economics buffs, guys who fold their sweatersand wash their hands after they take a piss. Or they’re ruined early, at around twelve years old, by drugs or pregnancy.Or they die, like Ginny did. She worked as a cashier at the Pines Convenience Center. And she really wasbeautiful – pale as the belly of a lake trout, with inkblot eyes and thick black hair. I liked Ginny. After work, I’dwaltz in there and buy a six-pack or a pint, and she’d get all squirmy and smiley behind the counter. We’d bitchabout our jobs or just chitchat about whatever, but the place was always busy with folks blowing their welfarechecks on booze or cartons of Seneca 100s, so our conversations were brief. Then, one night last July, her boyfriendhad a meltdown and sawed her head off with a buck knife. Thankfully, people said, her two kids were stayingwith their grandma at the time.25