Colossus
BY MAURICE IRVIN
FORMELLER AND I drank, listened to music, and shot the shit long into the night. Toward the end of the evening, a consensus was reached that we should take a trip down to Allerton Park in Monticello. Allerton was some guy who had spent his family’s money a century ago by putting up statues from around the world all over his land. Formeller said he was crazy. I said all dead men were crazy when they were alive. Formeller said he wanted to go just to do something, because he was sick of doing nothing. I told him that impulse only gave the illusion of freedom, that spontaneity simply painted up the canvas of the mundane with vivid colors, that it faded back to white eventually. But legend had it that Pink Floyd had played Allerton Park once during the seventies, and that was enough for me. The main attraction for Formeller was the Sun Singer, a colossus that had been erected in the middle of a field, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere.
I figured it would have been one of those things we said but didn’t do—drunk talk, where most of our ideas came from, not that they were good ones. Usually a day’s sleep afterward saved us from ourselves. But I wasn’t surprised when Formeller shook me awake in the early morning, telling me to get in the car, we were going. We piled into my car and took off. Formeller and I were the only people out for miles.
We were barely out of Bloomington when our smoking synced up—if one of us lit a cigarette, the other would too, until we read each other’s minds and grabbed our packs at the same time. Cold blasts of air hit our faces as the wind rushed into the car through the cracked windows. Snow drifted across the empty road and the sun reflected off the icy ground and off the snowbanks piled up on either side of the road with fence posts sticking out of them.
Formeller was huge. I felt sorry for him when I looked over and saw him crammed into the passenger side of my tiny Saturn. His profile reminded me of the bust of a long dead composer or philosopher. He had the same stoic features: protruding lips, rounded chin, pronounced nose, the glare of the sun making it look like his eyes might be missing their pupils. When we reached the Illinois countryside, he perked up and pointed out the grain bins he had built for his job. He cracked his knuckles as if preparing to build the bins all over again. There were flakey calluses and deflated blisters on his palms that looked like they were just beginning to heal.
Each cylinder on the horizon had a story. When we passed one, Formeller told about how he had nearly caved his head in climbing out of its improvised doorway. He pulled off his weathered baseball cap and rubbed his gnarled forehead in memory. At another, he told how one of his bosses was burned in an electrical fire years ago when servicing some faulty wiring in a nearby barn. Afterward, the poor bastard had to wear long sleeves to cover his scars, even in the summer. When we passed another, Formeller talked about a guy who had fallen off the roof, fresh track marks still in his arms.
“Was he all right?” I asked.
Formeller shrugged his massive shoulders. “He’ll have a limp for the rest of his life, but he’s alive.”
When the bins started to disappear, I imagined them as Bloomington’s outstretched arms trying to rein us back in. I used to think of our sooty and blackened hometown as a quaint slice of Americana. Real pride to be born and bred, never wanted to leave. I’d come to realize, as most did, how big of a trap it really was. It was the most soulless city, in the most soulless state, in the most soulless nation on Earth. It was a land where livelihood went to curl up and wither away, home to insurance agents and college professors who spoke with the same flat, generic accent envied by newscasters. All the people I knew who would make it had gotten the hell out, cut ties, and never looked back. They had their eyes on some distant future ten years down the line. The heads of the people who had stuck around, my own included, had been steadily filling up with rocks ever since grade school. We would be spinning our wheels until we realized it was too late to even start living.
Townies like me didn’t leave because as much as we hated the fucking place, it was still home. Where else would we belong anyway, some other hell hole out there? Bloomington may have been a piece of shit, sure, but at least it was our piece of shit. If you had to polish a turd, you might as well have polished your own turd, a piece of shit the smell of which you knew and recognized. And we said, polish that turd to the best of your ability, until you’ve got the shiniest shit on the block.
“I can’t wait ’til I get out of here,” Formeller said, squinting into the blinding fields of ice flying by. “Someday I’ll be an expatriate. Oregon is just the first step.”
Formeller planned to go to culinary school in Portland. He wanted to become a chef in a foreign country, though he had never left the continent. I couldn’t say much. I had studied abroad, but only for a semester, dipping my toes into the unknown and then scrambling back to safety.
“As soon as I get enough money together, I’m gone,” Formeller said, more to himself than me. He was always saving money but never had any saved. “You’ll come visit me, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You and me in Portland. I’ll be a chef, and you’ll be a writer. You can crash on my couch and write a book about my exploits. We’ll become heroin addicts like everyone else. The American Dream, right there.”
Formeller laughed. I laughed too, but for different reasons. Formeller had been talking about culinary school for a couple years. I watched as his planes took off, and he stayed behind. I’d never seen him cook, but again, I couldn’t say anything. I had studied writing in school only to end up selling insurance.
Back in college, on nights when I was really fucked up, I used to look around a room full of friends and imagine us in a few years’ time, all famous. We would look back and laugh at the memories of the artist with coke lines broken up on the back of a DVD case, a jagged, razor-cut plastic straw up his nose. We would remember when the poet filled a bong with Gatorade and left it in for so long that spider eggs grew inside and died, stained orange. We would all giggle when the State of the Union address came on, turning to our wives and children and telling them how the President used to make dynamite Jell-O shots without using any water. We would be able to single-handedly stun an entire cocktail party by saying we knew each other from way back. Eventually I saw what we really were: a group of sad, miserable fucks like everyone else, dropouts and drug addicts, unemployed, still living with our parents. We were ordinary, and too depressed to acknowledge it, much less accept it.
When we passed the McLean County sign, Formeller fiddled with the radio, quiet now that we weren’t home. He found “Baba O’Riley” and pointed at the radio, dragging slowly on his cigarette.
“That’s my shit,” he said, exhaling.
“Yeah?” I said, flicking my own butt through the slit in the window.
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “It’s a working-class song, real blue-collar, just like me.”
Formeller turned up the volume and shrieked with the vocal, softly pounding his mammoth fist on the dashboard. Out there in the fields, he fought for his meals.
“It’s a message of hope. Nobody’s excited about anything anymore. Makes me want to get fired up about something, anything, you know?”
“Bullshit.”
He looked at me like I had told him I was undergoing gender reassignment surgery.
“What?”
“It’s not a message of hope. It’s about wasted potential. Aimlessness and angst. Teenagers who are angry because they have nothing to be angry about. Kids who grow up to be disillusioned adults because they didn’t make anything of themselves. It’s about delusions of grandeur.”
Formeller jerked away from a phantom punch to the nose.
“Fucking pessimist,” he barked, turning to the window again, his verbal equivalent of spitting in my face.
“Fucking optimist,” I sneered back.
When we hit the entrance to Allerton Park, great icicles hung on the archway like monstrous teeth. We did not hear the expected gritty sound of the gravel drive—the stones were packed tightly together under a thick sheet of ice. The car almost fishtailed off the road when we dipped into the woods, the path plummeting down a hill into a wooded valley. Tree limbs hung low from the weight of the snow on them.
The woods opened into a circular field with a cleared drive around the edges. In the middle, a pale green figure stood atop a stone block, its arms stretched toward the sky like a triumphant boxer. I parked to the side of the road and Formeller and I shuffled out of the car, slowly crunching our way across the brittle, frozen grass. Every step left a pockmark in the ground. Formeller produced a pint of Seagram’s 7 from his inside coat pocket as we reached the small shadow of the Sun Singer, the noontime sun directly overhead.
“A good warm nip for a cold day?” he said, drinking from and then passing the whiskey.
What the hell, I thought. I wiped the spit from the mouth of the bottle and took a swig.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Rot gut,” I said, gasping and passing the whiskey back.
“I meant the statue.”
I looked up at the oxidized Singer and was met with an eyeful of gangrenous genitalia, shriveled and crooked, once bronzed in its glory days. I wondered briefly if anyone had licked it on a cold day as a joke, a good photo op, and had to have the fire department dislodge their tongue. What a sight that would have been. A picture with stories.
“He looks cold,” I said, pointing.
It was true. The Singer was naked save a warrior’s helmet on his head. His nipples jutted inches from his chest. The arms were well-defined, hands open-palmed to the burning sun. One of his feet was halted as if mid-stride and was cracked between the toes and up the calf. It was as though a stumbling block had been thrown in front of the Singer, causing him to set his face in a primal scream toward the sky before being cast.
“You saw Stonehenge when you were in England, right?” Formeller asked.
I nodded. I hadn’t, but I let him believe what he wanted.
“I bet that was something.”
I watched Formeller as he retreated into some fantasy about a distant, mystical place where monolithic stones raged thousands of feet into a purple sky, a supernatural hum flooding the surrounding plains.
“It’s just a big pile of rocks,” I said.
“Jesus,” he growled. “Do you have to shit on everything?”
“What?”
Formeller had turned toward me but his glance roved everywhere. He spoke to the field, the forest, the Singer, the sun, but not to me.
“Nothing gets to you,” he said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Forget it,” he said.
He lit a cigarette, and I followed suit. I sucked mine down to the filter and blew smoke into the Sun Singer’s balls. Formeller tossed his away half-finished and sipped from his bottle. He looked behind him like the forest was tearing itself down.
“Let’s go,” he said, turning to walk back to the car. He was hunched over and almost staggering.
As we drove away, the Sun Singer bobbed in the rear-view mirror, still shouting to the heavens how goddamned freezing it was in rural Mid-America. We came to the same hill I had fishtailed down into the park. The angle of incline was too sharp—the car’s tires whirred helplessly. We slid in smooth increments side-to-side, front and back, but gained no ground. Bells chimed as Formeller opened his door.
“Throw it into low gear,” he said.
“I don’t think it’ll—”
But he was gone. I shuddered, freezing wind blowing in through the door he had left open. He appeared in the back window, his face crimson in the brake lights. His mass hunkered down out of sight and the car began to shake. I fumbled with Neutral, 2, then 3. After a few minutes, a blistering “Fuck!” caused me to jam the stick into P. I hopped out and found Formeller pressing his hands against the bumper. He was still trying to push the car up the hill even though he had fallen to one knee.
“Give it up, man,” I said quietly. “We’re going nowhere.”
Formeller leaned back, his hands dropping into his lap. I moved to help him, but we both knew he didn’t want me to. He looked at me as he got up. His eyes were slits, red with wet edges, his upper lip trying to swallow the bottom. The leg of his jeans was soaked, water dripping from the fabric and mingling with the icy sludge in the tire tracks at his feet. He hobbled to the side of the road, cleared off a tree stump with the sleeve of his coat, and sat. I went and stood next to him. We both lit cigarettes, shot down some whiskey, and watched exhaust sputter from the car’s tail pipe.
Eventually, Formeller remembered an old trick of using the floor mats in the car as traction for the tires and we freed ourselves, driving around the park until we found another exit. We did not speak to each other on the trip home. The spinning tires had burned up the fabric floormats, but we had put them back anyway. They made the inside of the car smell terrible.
Maurice Irvin’s story “Scrape,” published in Portland Review, was nominated for consideration in The Best American Short Stories 2018. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
