A Stranger in This World (9 page)

But it was stupid, too, and it wasn’t hard to make fun of them: the rusty mag wheels and broken bicycles and cassette tapes in Mexican, the sharp eyes of the bargainers. “This thing work?” they ask, holding up a ten-dollar blender, shaking it, listening for rattles.

“Works fine.”

“Mind if I plug it in?”

“I’ll get it for you.” Then Sherlock Holmes investigates, listening for rattles, trying all twelve speeds:
LIQUEFY, PUREE, FRAPPÉ
.

“I guess I could go seven and a half,” Sherlock says.

“This isn’t my booth,” I tell him, as instructed. “I can’t go lower than nine on my own, but if you want to come back later …” He shakes his head, doubtfully. “You could give it a try.”

“You guarantee it?”

“If it doesn’t work, bring it back next week, we’ll give you another.” Sherlock still can’t make up his mind, so I try to encourage him: “Margaret’s here every week.”

“This’s Margaret’s booth?” Sherlock looks around at the stuff and grins. “Course it is, who else would it be—stupid of me, getting stupid. Well, you tell Margaret that Frank Teller’s got her blender, and if she wants to make a deal with me she can come see me.” Sherlock leaves with the blender under his arm, which seems to be OK with Alicia—she shrugs at me, elaborately.

When Margaret got back with a load of broken toasters, it was OK with her, too, though she immediately went out to
track down the deal. She looked happy and purposeful in the hard sunlight. The drive-in was scurrying with things and shoppers, like an ant farm busying itself against the last days before winter, which this might have been. The night before with Dorothy felt like a dream in the hard clear light. It made me happy to be a part of the life, minding the store in my folding lawn chair, making change out of a cigar box, watching the 49ers on a little five-inch black-and-white with Alicia, who was rooting for the Broncos.

“John Elway,” she said, serious as ever. “The three amigos. They can’t lose.”

“It doesn’t really matter who wins,” I told her, I guess because it sounded like the kind of thing an adult ought to say. “The important thing is the game, not the winner.”

Alicia looked at me like I was nuts.
“Somebody’s
got to win,” she said. “And somebody’s got to
lose.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, answerless, and tried to interest myself in the game.

Margaret cleared $153 that afternoon, not counting what she had to spend for broken junk. She took us out for hamburgers at Stockman’s Cafe downtown, then the three of them dropped me off at my room and we all made a lot of plans and promises I couldn’t even remember later on.

I couldn’t remember because Coy was waiting for me along with Dorothy when I got back to my room and somebody had beaten the shit out of Coy. She was washing his face, which was a mess, bruises rising up around his eyes, lips like burned Vienna sausages, and I looked over at my schoolbooks on the little desk and wondered what the fuck I was doing in the middle of this.
Books for Business
and the
Cash Flow Work Book
.

“What happened to him?” I asked Dorothy.

“His friends happened to him,” she said. “The same ones that are going to happen to me if I don’t come up with twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Maybe the two of you should leave town,” I said. But when I said it I saw Coy and Dorothy fucking again, I saw how tenderly she held the washcloth to Coy’s damaged face, and I couldn’t stand to let her go. I’m doing this for love, I thought. It seemed like enough of a reason.

“I’m going to Denver,” Coy said, though it was hard to understand him because of how swollen up his face was. “I fuck to share.”

“What?” I asked him.

“I’m fuckin’
scared
of those guys,” Coy said. He leaned his head back in the chair until he was looking at Dorothy upside down, behind him. He said, “I’m fuckin’ scared of you, too. Shit like this didn’t used to happen to me,” or maybe he said “doesn’t usually happen to me.” I couldn’t tell. There was a minute of quiet between them in the kitchen where I could feel it slipping away: the swap meet, Margaret, the busy bees getting ready for winter.

The kitchen light was too bright, too clear. I didn’t want to see that clearly. When I switched it off, a soft, late-afternoon light came through the dirty window that put us all in twilight. Even Coy’s hamburger face looked like it was out of an old painting, the way he looked back at Dorothy, the way she looked down at him. I felt like the light was connecting all of us, holding us in a fold like a soft gray cloth. The place where the world balances, I thought, not knowing exactly what I meant. And a line from an old song:
she loves me better than I love myself
.

“I’m going to Denver,” Coy said, and got up out of the chair and got his jacket from the couch and got out the little chrome automatic that was between the sofa cushions. It had been a while since I’d seen a gun and it came as a surprise. “I’m gone,” he said, holding the pistol toward Dorothy, grip first. “You want this?”

“Maybe I’d better,” she said, and tucked it into her white purse with the long leather fringes, and took her lipstick out while she was in there and freshened up in a little mirror she carried.

And then Coy was gone and it was old times again: she laid the little pistol on the counter and a pint of vodka and a pack of Virginia Slims and the mirror and the knife and the little paper envelope. Like a kit, I thought, a Dorothy kit. “Did I tell you about the radioactive mud?” she asked me.

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“You’d remember if I told you,” she said. “At least I hope you would. It was this resort place down near Phoenix, kind of a shithole, you know, run-down, but it must have been nice once. And anyway, they were dumb enough to give me a job …”

I eased back in the kitchen chair and it was just like three in the morning, even though it wasn’t even five in the afternoon yet. I reached a beer out of the little dorm refrigerator while she told her story. This is what love means, I thought: the thing you can’t walk away from. It was just like old times.

And then it was three in the morning for real and I was by myself again in the one-room apartment and I couldn’t sleep.
Partly it was the crank but mostly it was the old tightrope-walker feeling I got from Dorothy, looking down and seeing the ground so far below … Before she left I gave her a check for the $2,500, a good check, but it was most of the money I had in the world. She gave me the keys to the turquoise Thunderbird but I knew I couldn’t sell it. It was just a loan, a temporary thing, there was no need to transfer the title.

Thinking about this, it was like I had two parts of my brain and one side was always trying to bullshit the other and always succeeding. It was like the old days when every morning I would wake up and say that was the day I was going to quit and every day I was back on the crank by noon. The best part would be when I’d promise myself I was going to quit the next day, and then I’d just do up everything in the house, all the crank, drink all the whiskey, smoke all the cigarettes, so I wouldn’t be tempted … The funny part was that one side of my brain really did know what was going on. One side of my brain knew that I’d pissed away the money for rent and food and tuition at the Vo-Tech and it was really gone.

It was all for today. Dorothy was not going to get beat up. It felt crazy, the way that months of my future went down the toilet to pay for good times she already had, good times she had without me. I thought of how I made that money one day at a time: working on the railroad, an extra gang out of St. Regis, Montana. I was swinging a nine-pound spike maul ten hours a day and liking it. After a few weeks the foreman offered to let me switch to machine operator but I told him no, thanks. I liked the feel of the hammer, liked the feeling of getting strong and sleeping well.

The one side of my brain knew what the truth was and
the other side had just lies and bullshit: Dorothy would come through, it didn’t matter anyway, something would have happened to throw me back into the old life if it wasn’t her … What made me feel crazy was that I was acting like the truth was nothing and the lies and the bullshit were real. The truth was cold and hard and it was easier to look the other way or to pretend, but that didn’t keep it from being the truth. That railroad money was going to pay for a new life and now it was gone. I was miles above the ground, looking down, crazy. I thought of the work that I had put into that money. I thought of how long it would take Margaret to make that money with her toasters and blenders and it made me sick, sick in my body. I pulled on my wool coat and my stupid hat with the flaps. I had to get out of this room.

An ice fog and a refinery haze blanketed the street outside and made the air taste like gasoline. The Thunderbird stood at the curb, the windshield blind with ice. The dings and dents stood out in the yellow light, and you could see the old uneven Bondo job in the back wheel wells. I asked for water, I thought, and she gave me gasoline. Sometimes the blues made perfect sense, three in the morning and drifting down the empty streets, looking for something. Dead leaves rustled in the gutters, like lawyer’s papers. Drifting: my feet would take me anywhere but I couldn’t tell which way to go. Every direction was as good as any other and the blues came up inside again: I’m just drifting and drifting, baby, like a ship out on the sea … out in the night and praying for a lighthouse, a signal from shore, anything to tell the rocks from the harbor, crazy … My feet took me toward the old neighborhood, where the streetlights ended. Since the company bought the houses up
they had gone abandoned and dark. The high school kids shot out the windows and stole the plumbing and painted their names in spray-can splashes and drips, like they pissed red paint onto the wall.
TOXIC HAZARD
, read the notices on every door,
DANGER PELIGRO
.

I turned the corner onto my old block and it was like a mouthful of broken teeth, with the glass still hanging in the window frames and the dark holes where the doors were hammered down. There were winos living in some of these places. I could see Sterno flames flickering on the walls, on the street where I learned to ride a bicycle, fell in love, where my mother and my father celebrated their anniversaries one after the other until the gasoline got into the ground water. That was where things started turning to shit: when the gasoline started coming through the basement walls. I was still high off Dorothy’s crank and I could see everything perfectly clearly, I could see my own life for once. And this street was where my life was, where I had a job and a wife and a $21,000 pickup truck with a stereo that would blow the fucking doors off. And then what? The gasoline dissolved the paint so it came off the basement walls in big rubbery sheets and then Dorothy left and since then I didn’t know where I was going. Somewhere there was a connection. I was feeling sorry for myself. I tried to stop, I called myself a pussy, but there was something missing, just gone, and the emptiness and lonely feeling would not leave me be.

A flickering candlelight was coming from the window of my old living room, and a sound of voices. I edged up toward the house across the battered grass, gone to dirt now, mostly. Trying not to make any noise, I found out how drunk I was. I
tripped over a clump of dirt and the voices quit inside. After a minute they started up again and I crept up closer, trying to make out the words, but they fell away in scraps on the cold wind. One of the voices belonged to a woman and suddenly I knew it was Dorothy.

I crept up closer, wondering what she was doing there, what she was cooking up, who she was fucking. It came to me like somebody turning on a light: she was going to spend my money and she was going to fuck somebody else and I was going to be out in the cold, always. I pictured her singing in the broken house, sharing a pint of whiskey, the bitch. It wasn’t even love, it was just a game I couldn’t quit playing, or maybe it was the same thing … Everything felt so clear and sharp to me but nothing made sense.

I stuck my head through the window and it wasn’t Dorothy at all but a dark-haired woman, maybe an Indian. For a minute I thought of Margaret but then I saw that I didn’t know anything at all.

“The fuck out of here,” one of the men shouted, and I ran down my own lawn and through the dark, fear mixing with the taste of gasoline in the air. Through the dark and running, and after a minute I liked the feel of running, the punishment I was giving my body. My lungs were suffering, my legs were burning, my face was turning to glass in the cold, and it was fine with me. I knew I deserved it, I deserved worse and sooner or later I’d get it. The thoughts came in rhythm with my pumping legs: I don’t need this trouble, I don’t want this trouble, don’t save this trouble for anyone but me … Running slowly now, with the crank and alcohol pumping through my blood, I felt like I was about to fall down under a streetlight
and that was all right too, whatever happened. I saw myself frozen dead in the weeds and maybe that was what was supposed to happen. The streets were too wide, the people who lived here now weren’t big enough to fill them up, I wasn’t big enough.

I didn’t stop until I got to Margaret’s trailer. I leaned against a boat-tail Riviera parked across the street and I stared at the dark windows, breathing hard. I didn’t know what I wanted from her but I knew that I wanted her, and when I saw the light go on in her bedroom I thought that I’d woken her up with my thoughts.

“Parker, is that you?” she asked. “What are you doing out here?”

I tried to think of what I ought to say, watching her eyes blink, trying to see. A little bit of a moon that night. She was wearing a down jacket and sno-pacs over her nightgown, and her hair was tangled and loose.

“I don’t really have an explanation,” I finally said.

“Did you want to see me?”

“No,” I said, and I could see her face was still confused, full of sleep. “I mean, I want to see you, but I don’t think you want to see me.”

“That’s too much to think about,” she said. “It’s time to sleep now. Do you want to come in with me?”