Jacobson’s organ is an olfactory organ that helps animals detect chemicals in their environment. Located near the roof of the mouth, it’s present in many mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.
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“Keep your distance from the river,” I told her. I ran my tongue along the roof of my mouth and felt the old, corrugated tin shed hidden up there with no tools in it to speak of, only a panting, half-dead snowbird. I was in love for the fifth or sixth time that week and my apartment was very cold. She went under the counter looking for another bottle of vodka, the pom-pom and point of her Santa hat bobbing along the bar’s sticky, tinseled horizon like a hand puppet.
“Distance from what?”
I stepped off the bar stool, then thought better of it, immediately repossessed the hunched posture no one ever seemed to want me to escape. I was always misunderstanding her—the important part was I wasn’t alone. One more. She was always asking about what happened to me as a kid, as a man, as a state senator and then saying oh wow under her breath like she felt sort of sorry for me while she counted bottles and flapped her wet hands at clouds of drain flies, squinting. She poured another one.
I said, “Farmhouse. Falling apart.”
I told her my childhood home was abandoned. I talked slow to make sure I was saying it right and not changing any details from the last time I told it. Where was she going again? I drove by it with my sister last year, the farmhouse. We got whoopings in there and worse. The bartender said, Ahhhhhhhh in a pouting way, then lit up when a guy walked in, a torturously duded guy in a billowing mustard-and-red sports outfit. He had a flattop and a smeared lobster or scorpion tattooed on his forehead in faded black ink, faded like he’d tried to rub it off with sandpaper.
Randy!
She ran from behind the bar, a bottle opener jutting out of the back pocket of her elf pants, and jumped into the man named Randy. I always struggle with this. The boyfriend is—okay, okay—Randy, and I know they both make fun of me when I’m not planted squarely in front of them. Though they do give each other little looks, I think, from time to time when I’m explaining something I feel is important. So maybe even then, too. Every outfit is a sports outfit for Randy and it corresponds with the seasons. It’s nice to see young(ish?) love…but what about me? Donna took off quite a while ago, right about when I got voted out and, after a few months of moping in the basement or garage, I started coming here and a few other dark places to do my moping.
Randy held her by the waist and his mouth was open and his eyes were dead. I told them I used to be the Speaker of the House and they both laughed a little like I’d never said that exact thing and she took my fifty dollar bill.
Randy was my signal to go.
I went into the cold sunlight and the other one, other bartender, was out there, still smoking. We watched an extra-long Christmas stocking writhe in the breeze, squirm crazily across the parking lot like a crimson serpent until it wrapped itself around a parking meter and gave up. She squeezed my arm lightly and shivered back deeper into her long red-and-green sweater. Lisa? I think it’s Lisa.
“Headed home, Senator?”
There we were, two vertebrates shivering under an ice-drooped awning.
“Next place,” I told her. Lisa.
They know where I go. Hell if I’m going home at one o’clock in the afternoon.
I walked to the bus stop. Chemical reactions filled every seat when the time came. The snow bird’s broken call was just a whisper, not nearly loud enough to cut through the chatter of people’s bodily functions and sparse applause. I kept my hands to myself. There was a time my hands wandered everywhere, over forbidden lands navigated by the most immaterial of senses.
Senator Jacobson may now address the assembly.
I bet Randy never passed a bipartisan appropriations bill or helped build a casino out in the middle of fucking nowhere. To be honest, I could never remember if her name was Maria or Marie or Mary. And perhaps his name isn’t Randy. I wished I had a piece of gum. I wished I had Donna. Memories. Growing up, our farmhouse had miles of flat sunflower fields around it on all sides. They had us surrounded back then! Long, uneven lines of spindly trees gave no encouragement and the little lackluster gravel road we all hated the sound of became an unanticipated benefactor: I ran and ran and ran. It turned out I had gone to seed. Fortunate things occurred that I struggle to understand, pheromones be damned, undecoded specters of possibility. Love wrapped its greedy mind around me. Respect came my way by way of Donna’s father, a State Supreme Court Judge. My constituents seemed to me to be androids assembled from unnatural components but I loved them—how couldn’t I? Service was my middle name. I voted with my subconscious to great effect. Intersections were scolded, freeway tolls burned alive screaming like children on a canyon-plunging field trip bus. I could smell the suffering and death. Bleeding. Stuffed animals. “Pass this or else!” I’d cry.
At the end of my duties—the day some hidden things clamored, white and bleary into sunshine—the whole chamber echoed with a singular gasp when I collapsed at the podium, limbs folded underneath me like a chain-link fence in a windstorm. The whole tool shed was on full display: Ken Jacobson, State Senator. We knew he had issues.
I remembered! She said Randy(?) wanted to take her sledding on the river!
I pulled the string and the snowbird went ding.
At the next place—a little dive with a circle bar and a statue of Elvis—the man at the curving counter said plainly with a new neon moustache, “No. Remember. We’re done here, Ken.” On to another bar a block down, I shoveled myself into the future past the shops with their windows dressed merrily and I thought, at the end of the day, I just don’t want that nice girl to drown. Not this time of year. The thing about the river in late December is it’s tricky. You can’t tell if its solid just by looking at it. You’re taking your chances. Will it bear your weight, bide its time, or split open laughing to leave you clawing and clamoring beneath its long, frozen tongue?
At the next spot, Belinda or Becky had my drink made before I even sat down.
“Merry Christmas, Senator. We close in half an hour.”