Hot Springs (21 page)

“Well, I’m impressed. You tracked me down, you came all the way here. That means something.”

“We’re in this together.”

“You say that. But on the other hand, how can I trust you after what you admitted in the parlor?”

He closed his eyes momentarily with frustration, then took a breath. “I didn’t say anything in the parlor.”

“You may not think you did, but you did.” She popped a few potato chips into her mouth and chewed them noisily, then sucked the grease from her forefinger. “It’s like on airplanes, when they explain the safety procedures to you. You know? The flight attendant tells you that in the event of an emergency, oxygen masks will descend from the overhead compartment. If you’re traveling with young children, you should put on your own mask first, then put on theirs. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“No,” said Landis. “Are you planning to fly someplace with Emily?”

“I have to put on my own mask first.”

“What mask? What are you talking about?” He still had half a sandwich, but it was starting to stick in his throat. She hadn’t put anything on it, and it was very dry. “You got any mustard?”

“It’s not good?” She looked alarmed.

“No, no, it’s great.” He drank some more Coke. “I just thought it would be better with mustard.”

“See? Now I’m all upset because I made you a bad sandwich. I’m emotionally shaky these days, in case you hadn’t noticed. So what I need is to be left alone to adjust my own mask and just breathe oxygen for a while.”

He thought about Hoyt Crudup. “I nearly died on the way here,” he said. “Ran right off the road. I had a kind of revelation.”

“Please,” said Bernice. “Spare me. I’ve got enough trouble with her.” She raised her eyes ceilingward.

“All that time alone, you get to thinking about things.”

“You should be careful. Thinking isn’t your big strength, is it? Anyway, you can’t stay here,” she said. “I can’t run the risk of you abandoning me again. You understand that, right?”

“I would if it made any sense,” he said. “But I
didn’t
abandon you. It’s the opposite—I drove clear across the country to find you and be with you. I think it’s crazy that you don’t see that.”

“Well, maybe I think you’re crazy to have come all this way.”

“That’s what your friend said. She said I should stay out of it. She said if we get caught eventually, I’m the one that’s really got a problem, my not being related to the kid at all.” He took another swallow of Coke. He was conscious of sweat all over his face. “So, I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me that we ought to get out of the country. Maybe up to Canada.”

“I’m staying here,” she said. “For a while anyway.”

“Why?”

“I’m from here. I’ve got a place to stay. I got a job.”

“We’ll need a birth certificate for her, even for Canada, but we could say something happened to it, like there was a fire.”

“I doubt that would work.”

“Then we’ll get a fake one. We could go to Canada.”

“Except then there’d be a record. I don’t think that would be so smart.”

“Bernice, I found you. You haven’t exactly disappeared off the grid. You’re findable. You know what else? What is your money situation, anyway? You can’t raise a kid on nothing. What kind of job did you get? Are you sitting on some trust fund, or what? I look at this house, I don’t know what to think.”

“The house is my dad’s, and he is not rich. When he bought this place, it was dirt cheap. Everything in this neighborhood was. As for money, I got some insurance money when my mother died, all right? Not much, but some.”

“I thought the whole thing with giving up Emily was because you needed money.”

“Well, that just shows how little you know, doesn’t it? You think I sold my own baby? Is that what you think?”

“No, but you said they bought her. You said it, not me.”

“This is none of your business,” she said. “
We
are none of your business.”

He finished his sandwich, chewing slowly. “You won’t leave with me, and you won’t let me stay with you.” The lower halves of the big dining-room windows were pebbled glass, but through the upper part he could see the fire escapes on the next building, black against the painted red brick. Dust motes hung in the air, and there were cobwebs up against the crown molding in the corner. “Is that what I’m hearing?”

“That’s the size of it. I’m sorry you came all this way.”

He closed his eyes. “Goddamn it,” he said. He brought his fist down on the table hard, the contact rattling everything on it, his plate, his glass, the tarnished brass candelabra.

“Don’t,” she said. “You made it happen. You weren’t reliable. I need reliable.”

“You can’t do this alone. I know you. You don’t even
want
to do this alone.”

“I’m putting on my mask,” she said. “You should see about yours.”

A
little after midnight, Landis drained his fifth beer, asked the bartender to change a five for quarters, pushed back from the bar, and headed out to the street. If he was going to sleep another night in the truck, he figured he might as well do it drunk. But he wasn’t tired yet, so he went walking around the neighborhood, peering at his reflection in the window of the dry cleaner’s, reading the lost-dog and yard-sale notices taped to the streetlight outside Neon, the coffee bar. There was a pay phone across the street, and he went over to it.

Robin picked up on the second ring. “Hey,” he said. “Remember me?”

“I was just thinking about you,” she said.

“Yeah? Anything interesting?”

“Very. Where are you?”

He looked around. At the bus stop at the end of the block, a big, Nordic-looking man in a stained tracksuit was muttering to himself angrily. Seventies rock rasped out into the street through a tinny speaker above the door of a burgers-and-beer place. The night air felt like something pressed out of a steam iron. “Hard to say. Between a rock and a hard place, maybe.”

“I quit the dentist’s office.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. I’m going back to school, I’ve decided. This way, I get to buy school supplies. I love that, you know? Getting pens and notebooks and stuff—you just feel this sense of possibility. Of course, it never lasts. But I’m looking forward, I really am.”

“School for what?”

“Nothing in particular. Just school.”

A bus pulled up, but the Nordic-looking man did not get on. Moths swam and fluttered in the light of the streetlamp above him. “I’m in Baltimore,” he said. “First time.”

“What’s it like?”

“Not so great. Like it went a few rounds with a much bigger, meaner city. Like it could use a vacation someplace nicer. But I guess it’ll do.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. He listened to a saxophone tracing a thin, vertical melody into the air. “I have to go,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. But I’m glad you called. I hope you will again. You take care of yourself, and you take care of them, too.”

“I don’t know. How do you take care of someone who doesn’t want it? Who won’t let you?”

“Just go ahead and do it anyway,” she said. “Don’t be so damn polite.”

He awoke early the next morning to the sound of birds. His back felt like someone had kicked it with a steel-toed boot, and he badly needed to piss. He kept some foam in the back of the truck, but it hardly constituted a mattress, and he’d had to sleep tucked awkwardly in among his belongings, aware the whole time of the odor of gasoline. Clearly, he was getting too old for this. After climbing out, he took his toothbrush and walked back to the little commercial district to get some breakfast and clean up. There were plenty of signs posted in the neighborhood, and he figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find himself a cheap flop for the short term. The long term, well, he’d have to see.

At a place called Joe Mama’s, just off the main drag, he met a college girl who let him use her cell phone. “Go ahead,” she said. “I never get near to using up my minutes.” She was typing things into a computer. He told her thanks and tried some numbers from the
City Paper
, but it was still early and no one was picking up.

“You’ll find something,” the girl told him. “This neighborhood is full of ratholes. I lived in one last year. I woke up one night and there was a kid in the next room walking around talking to himself. I screamed and he went back out the window he’d come in. This year I found someplace a lot nicer. Anyhow, you just have to look around a bit.”

The linoleum-covered stairs sagged noticeably to the right, and as Landis followed the fat man up them, he imagined the whole thing giving way, and the two of them in free fall toward the cat-piss-covered floor. It was going to happen to someone, someday. The row houses in this neighborhood were like old teeth—you’d get a couple
of strong healthy ones, but then one like this, decayed and rotten and stinking and soft. The fat man wheezed with the effort, the back of his white nylon shirt soaked through with sweat. On the third floor, in the back, was apartment five. The number was glued on and crooked. Some previous tenant had left stickers with the names of what Landis figured were local bands plastered on the cheap door: Skull Divers, Rainbow Pest, Enigma. He could imagine these bands and the bars you’d have to go in to hear them, and it made him feel old. And yet, if he wanted eventually to work sound here, these were some of the people he’d be getting to know.

“No drugs,” the fat man said, as Landis handed over the cash. “Got me?”

“OK,” said Landis. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m serious about that.”

“So am I.”

“Refrigerator’s new. I hadda throw the old one out.”

“Nice,” Landis said, admiring it. It was so undersized he doubted you could stand a carton of milk inside.

“I ordinarily wouldn’t do this, you understand, but my last tenant died. Usually, I like a commitment of at least nine months. You are paying well below market rates.”

Landis nodded. “I appreciate that.”

“That’s a new mattress on that bed, too.”

“Excellent.”

“You’re not a student?”

“Nope.”

“Not a talker, either, huh? That’s all right. I respect a person’s privacy. Just make sure you respect my building and we’ll get along fine.” He summoned something like a smile. “Know what was in that refrigerator?”

“Do I want to?”

“Eggs. The guy kept buying eggs, then not throwing them out when they expired. Must have been two hundred of them in there.” He put out a hand. Landis counted two hundred and fifty dollars and gave it to him. He handed Landis a key and heaved himself back out the door.

When Landis was alone, he used the tiny bathroom, which looked clean enough, though he detected a hint of old urine smell. He hated to think about what was under the layers of cracked linoleum. The apartment had been a bedroom at some point in the building’s past, before someone started carving it up. Wood paneling hid what were probably crumbling plaster walls, the laths showing through like ribs. The paneling was warped and bulged oddly in places, and Landis thought you’d want to avoid staring too hard at it if you were drunk.

He sat on the bed and looked out the window. He was surprised to discover that he could just see the back of Bernice’s father’s house across the alley and a few houses up—the wooden balcony that was built on to the second floor, the broken shutter that hung askew at one side of the back window beside it. The guy was letting the place go to shit. Houses needed to be lived in. Getting down onto the floor, he did a couple of push-ups, holding his breath as he did so against the foreign, slightly sick aroma of the gray carpeting. He wasn’t used to this weather, not after nearly twenty years in the West. His skin felt clammy and he was aware of a ripe smell rising out of his work boots. It had taken all day to find this place, and he was tired, tired.

After two trips to the truck, he’d moved in what he needed. For now, this would do. He’d never cared much about his surroundings, really, and he figured if you took actual square feet, this place probably wasn’t much worse than his old trailer. But there he’d had the outside. Many evenings he’d sat out staring down on the lights of the sprawling city, drinking a beer, pretending he owned the world. It hadn’t been happiness, exactly, not in the sense that he’d always
assumed people were supposed to be happy, either with a lot of money or a big loving family, or maybe pursuing some dream like photographing bears at the South Pole or having sex with movie stars, which he assumed was probably the ultimate happiness, judging from magazine covers. But there had been a stillness, the sky over him a great inverted bowl full of stars, and some nights that was exactly what he wanted.