How We Are Hungry (8 page)

When it’s his turn Fish asks for Mr. Ali, but the woman at the counter, heavy-lidded and wearing a maize-colored sari, says he’s gone. “I am Mrs. Ali. Yes please?” Fish shows her the letter that Chuck faxed, asking for Adam’s stuff. Chuck insisted on ending the letter with “I trust that this matter will not present a problem.” Every legal letter Chuck writes ends this way. He loses half of his cases.

Fish can see the bags just behind her, in a narrow hallway with a cement floor. Two clear plastic bags sit there, alert, and two tennis bags, one covered in mud. Mrs. Ali reads the note, then looks up at Fish. It’s then that he almost cries. Water seems to fill his forehead; his eyes are just portals that show he’s drowning. What is she looking at? How much does she know? She must know. The ambulance picked Adam up here, and she or her husband surely packed and stored his belongings. She knew Adam as a flailer, as a leaper, and now knows Fish as someone lesser, someone who picks up the bags of people like Adam. Fish is now among the people who live in motels and jump off motel roofs. There’s a highway just above the motel, and on it people are passing this place at eighty miles an hour, wondering what happens in the filthy world below.

“I have to call Mr. Ali,” she says, and does so, using a receiver larger than her face. She gets off the phone with Mr. Ali and lets Fish into the hallway behind the desk.

“Thanks,” he says on the way out.

“All right,” she says, opening the door for him. “Good!” she adds, and after he’s gone throws the bolt, right to left.

Fish loads the bags into his trunk, and then remembers what he wanted to investigate. He has forgotten to look until now, and is suddenly thrilled. He walks over to the courtyard area to see where Adam jumped. But he can’t find a part of the motel complex that has four stories. There is just the one two-story building, in an L shape around the pool, and its roof is only about eighteen feet high.
Dumbshit!
Fish has figured it out. Of course! Forty feet isn’t Adam’s way, after all, but eighteen feet is. He jumped from this.
Dumbshit! Coward! Pissfuck!
Who jumps eighteen feet? Who does this? This is so wrong. There are too many things wrong everywhere for this kind of thing, this jumping from eighteen-foot roofs. Adam must have known that eighteen feet wasn’t far enough to kill himself, just far enough to break bones. And the only thing sadder than an eighteen-foot motel roof is the guy staring at it.

He goes back to the car and opens the trunk. He reaches inside one of the plastic bags, looking for something solid. Most of its contents are soft, clothes, and here and there moist, but he soon finds a trophy, a small one with a tennis player on top and someone else’s name engraved on it. Elsewhere between the folds of shirts and socks there is some deodorant, a handful of tapes, which Fish pulls out for the drive home, and a bottle of cologne called Together, which makes him laugh. Adam is the only guy Fish knows who wears cologne. The only other items of note are five belts, wound as one like a rattlesnake, and a ten-pound container of baby powder.

And now a woman is walking across the lot toward Fish. Every part of her is moving—her ankles, unsteady in heels; her arms swinging; her head, which jitters with each step, as if it, too, played a part in her propulsion. Her features are mismatched—small chin, wide nose, the icy, almost clear eyes of a wolf. She’s wearing jeans and a denim jacket, with pointy blue velveteen boots and the streamlined, utilitarian body of a tomboy teenager.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” Fish says.

“What’re you doing?” she asks. “Coming or going?”

She reminds him of the South somehow. He thinks of Kentucky and doesn’t know why. Is she nineteen or thirty? Fish can’t tell.

“I’m packing this stuff up,” he says.

“Then?”

“Then I’m driving down to see a friend.” It’s after ten and he hasn’t called Annie yet. If he calls too late she won’t let him come over.

“Can you give me a ride?” the woman says. “I’m trying to get to San Diego.”

“Oh. Yeah. See, I’m not going that far.”

Behind them, a truck parks and sighs.

“I can get out wherever you stop.”

He looks at her to see if she has a gun or a crowbar. He wants to help, but more than this, he wants to leave. Not long ago, at a gas station in Daly City, a tall man in a straw hat told Fish that he didn’t have any cash, and could Fish spot him twenty dollars—he’d give Fish a personal check in exchange. Fish figured he’d be less than human if he said no, so he said yes. The man had a car, after all, and was wearing a sports coat, so this was just a small transaction between solvent citizens. The guy put his home phone number on the check and everything. But the check bounced.

Fish had only wanted to help the man. He spent that first day thinking he had helped him, believing in the community of souls, in Daly City or anywhere. And then that man took it away. He reached inside Fish and took that from him.

Fish gets in the car and unlocks the passenger side. He moves a Jack in the Box bag and a milk carton and now the woman is sitting in the passenger seat, a few inches from him. She picks up the map from the floor, folds it quickly, expertly, and puts it in the side compartment.

“Thanks for this. You’re sweet,” she says, giving him her hand in a royal way. “What’s your name?”

“Eddie,” he says. Her hand is cold. He doesn’t know if he should kiss it or shake it. He doesn’t do either, just holds it for a few seconds and lets it drop.

“That’s weird,” she says. “My brother’s name is Eddie. Was.”

Now Fish considers giving her his real name. Instead, he says, “He changed his name?”

“No, he died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” she says.

Fish pulls out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. No worries. He wants to tell her how much he hates that expression, but doesn’t. “Don’t worry” makes sense, is a pat on the arm, a reassurance from one person to another, but “No worries” implies there aren’t any worries anywhere in the world, and that’s just not true.

They get on the highway. Fish asks her name. Her name is Wendy.

“Where’re you going?” she asks.

“Redondo Beach, I think.” That’s where Annie lives. Near the beach, with a futon, in a cave of an apartment next to the garage of a family of five. Her place is full of small glass figurines of mythical animals, ears pinched while the glass was molten— hippogriffs, hydras, satyrs, a tiny sphinx the color of cantaloupe.

“My ex lives in Redondo,” Wendy says. “He’s married now. She had four kids. Two of them Downies.”

“Huh,” Fish says. She is staring at him. He wonders how he looks in profile.

“So what were you doing at the motel?”

“Nothing. Getting stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Just some stuff. Friend’s stuff.” Somehow that sounds shady. But he lets it go. She seems impressed.

Wendy pushes the radio scan button a few times, and finds the “Oooh-oooh, Jackie Blue” song.

“I love this song,” she says, and slaps her lap loudly. She leaves her hands there, grabbing her thighs as if to keep them in place.

“So do you party?” she asks.

“What?”

“Do. You. Party.”

“In general? I don’t—”

“You know. Party.”

He’s lost. He gives her a pleading look.

“You and me, party, handsome. We should go party somewhere. We could stop and get a drink and stuff. Or a room. Get some weed. Whatever.”

Fish finally knows. Shit. Normal women don’t call men “handsome”—only waitresses and prostitutes do that. It’s a shame, though. “Handsome” is such a beautiful word.

Fish gives her offer some thought. Her thighs have his head lunging. But it would cost too much, right, spending time with a woman like this? He doesn’t know.
How did I get
to my age without knowing how much things like this cost?
But he can’t. He never takes off his shirt with people he doesn’t know. She’d see the hair on his shoulders and his hernia scar, much more sinister than it needed to be and she’d think he was a bad package, that the hair and the crooked smiling scar were proof he needed to pay for the kind of company she could offer.

“Nah, I gotta get down to Redondo,” he says, as if deciding whether or not to see an afternoon movie. “My friend’s waiting for me. And his wife and my mom and everyone. Cousins.” His mouth is adding family members quicker than his head can count. “They’re probably all waiting up.”

“We can be quick, if you want,” she says.

Another orange-and-black bird appears, shooting across the road low and fast. Fish wants to ask Wendy if she knows what they’re called—thrushes? finches? Not that it would make any difference, knowing their name. A name is a diagnosis, and neither makes a bit of difference. He glances over at her; her shoulders are squared to him now, her chin lowered. “I’m not expensive,” she says.

Fish pulls off the highway and under a gas-station canopy; it’s bright like daylight and he thinks of Reno. Wendy has asked to use the bathroom, and here her skin looks blue, translucent, as if lit from within, and the humidity has lifted. Instead of using the bathroom, though, she heads straight to the pay phone, and while she’s on the phone she waves Fish away like he’s her father dropping her off at a concert. He leaves.

By the time he gets to a phone to call Annie, it’s too late. He wakes her up, or she pretends to have been asleep. Her first syllable is full of scorn, and he wonders if Wendy is still at the gas station where he left her, a few miles back. “You have to start thinking of other people, honey,” Annie says, now without anger, without anything, and hangs up.

He is back at the hospital twenty minutes later. It’s well after midnight, and he has no hope of getting up to Adam’s room through the doors. He parks his car in the same spot and calculates which window is his. He knows that Adam is on the third floor, and the two possible windows are on either side of the steel ladder. So he runs under the willows and through the palmettos and starts up.

It’s the left window. He can see Adam in the light of the TV. His twelve-year-old’s face is facing Fish now, eyes closed. The brownie woman has gone.

As Fish is about to tap on the glass, Adam opens his eyes. When he sees Fish, he’s disbelieving. He closes one eye, as if looking through a telescope, to be sure. Fish waves, and Adam, with his fingers only, waves back.

Fish hasn’t thought any further than this. If he had a specific message for Adam, he could mime it through the glass, but he doesn’t have that kind of message.

Adam mouths the word “How?” and points to Fish. Fish is about to mime climbing a ladder but realizes he can’t do this without taking both hands off the rungs. He tries it with one hand, but it looks more like he’s shopping, like he’s doing the shopping-cart dance. Adam doesn’t get it.

Fish shakes his head, wiping the board clean. He decides he’ll pry the window open and tumble in and talk. But the window frame is flush to the building. It will not give.

Fish knocks his head on the glass, twice. Adam smiles. Fish does it a few more times, just to entertain him. Adam pretends to be laughing a lot. It isn’t as great as either of them makes it out to be, but there isn’t anything else to do. Soon Adam yawns. Fish yawns. Adam’s eyes are flickering, so Fish gestures that he’ll see him tomorrow, rolling his hand like he’s creating a wave, the wave meaning tomorrow, rolling and rolling.

Fish drives to Redondo and checks into a Red Roof by the highway. He figures he’ll call Annie in the morning and then see Adam again on his way back north, and do something with all the bags after he’s gone through them and dumped the pills and anything else he doesn’t want Adam to have. He resolves to get him a real suitcase or two, something with a hard shell, sturdy. He can do that tomorrow.

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow he can put Adam’s stuff in the sturdy suitcases and take them to him, put them in the hospital room, lined up by the door so they’re there when he’s ready to leave. Adam can be a promising young man with neat sturdy suitcases. Fish will repack everything, put it all in two rows, pants on one side and shirts on the other, with the second suitcase holding the other things—socks and underwear and toiletries and belts, baby powder. Tomorrow he can do these things better than he did today. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

Fish’s Red Roof room is dark and he knows he’s being stupid. The walls smell like people, and he doesn’t deserve this, to be tricked like this again. He had made so many promises to himself that he would never waste himself, never again hand a pure intention, so much like a newborn, to someone so careless. He is done being fooled. Why would that Daly City man jack him on a bad check? It was such violence. He will not be the sucker. He doesn’t want to be a part of the world under the highway. No. Today was tomorrow and tomorrow was always the same. No, he’ll skip Annie and Adam and just get a shotgun now and go to that farm on I-5 and shoot a bunch of stupid cows. Ha ha! They wouldn’t make it, anyway—so many animals are built to die. Maybe cut off their heads and hollow them out and wear one as a mask. Yes! Just for fun. Just to do it. The humidity inside one of those big heavy heads—he’d love to see what it’s like in there for a second. His clean hair would be covered in blood, his face wet, filthy from the stuff he didn’t scoop out before he put the fucking thing on.

SHE WAITS, SEETHING, BLOOMING

SHE IS A SINGLE MOTHER and has no interest in any men but her son, who is fifteen and has not called. It is 2:33 am and he hasn’t phoned since 5:40 that evening, when he said he’d be eating dinner out. And now she is watching
Elimidate
, drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing hitting her only son with a golf club. She is picturing slapping him flat and hard across his face and is thinking that the sound it would make would almost make up for her worry, her inability to sleep, the many hundreds of dire thoughts that have torched her mind these past hours. Where is he? She doesn’t even know where he would go, or with whom. He’s a loner, he’s an eccentric. He is, she thinks, the sort of teenager who gets involved with deviants on the Internet. And yet somehow she knows that he is safe, that he is fine but has for whatever reason been unable to call, or has not even given it much thought. He is testing his boundaries, perhaps, and she will remind him of the consequences of such thoughtlessness. And when she thinks of what she will say to him and how loudly she will say it, she feels a strange kind of pleasure. The pleasure is like that enjoyed by the passionate scratching of a body overwhelmed with irritation. Giving oneself up to that scratching, everywhere and furious—which she did only a month earlier when she’d contracted poison oak—that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known. And now, waiting for her son and knowing how righteous will be her indignation, how richly justified will be anything she yells into his irresponsible face, she finds herself awaiting his arrival in the way the ravenous might await a meal. She is nodding her head. She is tapping a pen against her dry lips. She tries to order her thoughts, to decide where to start with him. How general should her criticisms be? Should they be specific only to this night, or should this be the door through which they pass in order to talk about all of his failings? The possibilities! She will have license to go anywhere, to say anything. She pours more gin into her tumbler of merlot, and when she looks up, at 2:47, his headlights are drawing chalk across the front window. This will be divine, she thinks. This will be superb. It will be florid, glorious; she will scratch and scratch and bloom. She runs to the door. She can’t wait for it to begin.