In An Arid Land (16 page)

"Oh," I say and then stutter an apology if I bothered him, but I'd like to know if my wife is home.

"Yes, certainly, yes, just a moment." I hear shuffling in the background and remember the phone is on the nightstand must be sheets, bed clothes, naked bodies and then it all goes silent when the guy cups the receiver. Very suddenly I hear, "Jim?"

"Yeah, it's me."

"At this hour?" I hear her say to him, "What time is it?" And then, "God, Jim, it's one-thirty."

"Twelve-thirty here, but I didn't call to talk about time."

"Well, then what? Are you hurt?"

"I want to come home."

The silence on the line is so deep and dark and far away that I wait as if to hear a pebble fall to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I imagine her mouth open, her pale red hair a mess atop her lean, serious face, her body on its side held up by an elbow on the sheets. And I can see our bedspread all tangled about her, and the bookcase headboard with my paperbacks and her big hardback business books angled in between the clock radio and the picture of the dog. Then I imagine him. Though I've never seen him in the flesh, I can see him now: a strained, concerned, yet half-amused scowl on his face.

She says, "Look, Jim, can't we talk in the morning?"

"Why? It's simple. I want to come home."

"Let's talk in the morning."

"Why not now?"

"Because it's not morning."

"What difference does that make?" I'm getting mad, even though I know I shouldn't; it's doing me no good. "Nothing's going to change by morning."

"I have to work, Jim."

"Jackie, please, listen" But she stops it, saying, "Jim, Jim, look well, wait just a minute," and then he says something and she responds, and he responds, and by the time she's back on the line I've slammed the phone down. It bounces out of the cradle so I pick it up and I slam it down again, and again, until it seats itself and I can leave it alone. Then I hear it, and I turn. Pop's standing in the doorway.

For two hours we talk, sitting on the bed, him in his old flannel robe, me in my jeans and tee shirt. I explain everything and I even yell when I lay on the gritty part about the other guy and how I didn't know. Getting it out is a big relief, but there's still something churning inside me. He pats my shoulders, keeps saying, "What a shame," and shaking his head and saying, "You got to go back. You got to work it out. After six years you can't just let it burn away." Then he slips in, "This would of killed your mother," and it sends me to my feet. I stammer in frustration, "God, Jesus, damn, Pop. Why bring her into this?"

"Watch your tongue when you're talking about your mother."

"I'm not talking about her."

"Well, be careful."

We fume in silence, looking at each other, until he says, "This would of killed your mother," and he hangs his head. On go my boots and up comes his head: "Where you going?" But I don't answer and out the door I am before he can get up and follow. His voice comes to me through the house: "Go home to her, Jimbo."

In the truck the green lights of the dashboard are not very friendly as I drive through town and out of town and then up to the top of a hill that overlooks everything. I get out and go to the edge of the hill. Below me, spreading out for miles, are dots of light porch lights, rig lights, car lights on the highway. They fan out from Newton like a little solar system racing away from a star. Looking hard I find Pop's neighborhood, imagine I can see his street, and then look to find the house of Charlene's aunt and uncle, but it's hidden among buildings on the far side of town. And then I remember something that seems very important.

My mother was my father's second wife. He told me the story a dozen or more years ago, just before I shipped out for the war, as if he wanted me to know in case it was the last time we saw each other. He was very solemn when he told me, embarrassed perhaps, as we had always been extremely religious people, members of a Southern congregation that shunned the divorced.

They had married the summer he graduated from high school. "We just couldn't wait, you have to see. You know how it is." And before the first year was up she gave birth to a child, a boy, "very much like you." But she was a restless girl and my father ambitious. He worked hard and was gone often for weeks at a time in the oil fields of West Texas where the really good money was to be had back then. "It seemed every time I came home there'd be a new piece of furniture in the house or she'd be wearing a new dress and there the baby'd be dragging around dirty diapers and we'd argue and yell and scream, but nothing ever changed." For two years they lived in an undercurrent of anger and lust until one day he came home and it was apparent she hadn't been alone. "I mean, a pair of the guy's drawers were right there in the bedroom. She didn't even have the decency to pick 'em up."

I recall that he told me this story as we were eating dinner one Friday night at a hot dog place near the house in Houston. Mom was still at work, doing the books at the paint store where she punched a clock for nearly three decades so they could send me to college and buy a new car every four years. When he got to the part about "she didn't have the decency to pick 'em up," he stopped chewing, stared at his plate, glanced up at me but quickly went back to his plate, and said, "We killed that boy."

They had argued"violently, violently we argued"and he snatched up the baby and stuffed some things into a bag and started out the door, his wife of two years following and tugging on his sleeves and grabbing at his hair, and on the landing"we were living in a garage apartment, you see"he turned to throw back one last good obscenity, but she was stronger than he thought and she clutched the baby's arms and refused to let go and he held onto the baby's legs and refused to let go and the baby was wailing and neighbors were out below screaming up to please hold it down or they'd call the police, and in the midst of this human scramble "something went wrong, real wrong."

He said, "I remember leaning over the banister and literally watching that boy, my son, you've got to understandI watched him fall, and it lasted only a split second though it seemed it lasted a very long, long time and then I saw him hit the pavement and then I saw" He stopped. He put down his hot dog, took a drink of the soda he had been nursing and I could see that he was putting all his energy into restraining the natural emotional explosion that his body wanted to let go with.

"I was a wreck for years, you see, Jimbo. All through the war I didn't care about nothing, like I wanted to die. But then your mother came into my life" I said, "Don't, Pop," and he didn't. He reached across the table and squeezed my arm.

When I pull myself together and shake off the nearness of the memory I am more or less overcome by how small and alone I am. There are the dots of light below me and the dots of light above me and I have the feeling that I'm floating helplessly between the two planes of light. Above is the void, below is Newton and all the little houses and all the people sleeping peacefully in their own beds. Pop and Charlene are down there, and Mother in her grave back in Houston and that dead boy, my half-brother, I guess he would have been; I don't even know his name. I don't even know what to call my own brother.

I fight off the pity, go looking for something else and what I find almost makes me laugh. Because what strikes me is that I am a lucky man, lucky for lots of reasons to be alive, lucky, you'd have to say, that fate or misfortune or whatever it is sometimes leads us into misery. I'm lucky that once there was a good woman named Kathleen Anderson, nee Flanigan, also known as Katty, who took a used-up man named Henry and led him out of misery, and that together they begat a son, and together they called that son James, also known as Jimbo. I think about that, how it is that I am at least alive and have a name, but it doesn't seem enough, can't be enough, and I go on to think about how good luck and bad luck trade places throughout a life and how each seems to stack up on itself, getting better and better or worse and worse, and how the difference between me and all those people asleep in their houses down the hill is that, for one reason or another, with help or without, they have been able to get through the bad and have somehow made it good and that good luck is really nothing more than peace of mind. That's what I want, peace of mind, to sleep calmly in my own bed, and I hate it that they're in the good and I'm in the bad and that I'm completely lost as to how to get out of it.

Where it comes from, from which part of my mind or my body, I don't know, but I open my mouth and shout into the night, "Listen, people, my name is Jim Anderson and I am a lucky man."

I'm sure that no one hears me, but I stand still listening to the echo, then just listening, feeling my body breathe, and then I walk slowly to the truck, even though I don't know where I'm going. And that's when I find out I was wrong. That's when I hear the voice rolling up the hill from one of the houses down below. He yells, "Who cares?" drawing out the words so that they hang in the night, and then, "So what?" The sound of it bristles my hair and makes me pause, holding the door handle. But then comes the laughter. I laugh quietly, remotely, in little jerks, my eyes tearing up, imagining that other guy down the hill, a man like me maybe but dressed only in a robe and slippers, pacing on the grass of his backyard, smoking a cigarette perhaps, pulling on his hair, trying to figure out whatever it is he needs to figure out when all of a sudden this voice descends on him from the darkness telling him something he really doesn't want to hear. The poor bastard. I laugh and laugh. It feels better knowing I'm not alone. And I mutter at the steering wheel, "You're right, brother. You're absolutely, goddamn right."

The dashboard lights are friendlier now as I drive back to the house. I go in through the kitchen, certain that Pop's worn out and sleeping hard, and then straight to my room. Without care I pack swiftly, stuffing my things into the two suitcases I brought, and as I'm heading out through the living room I stop at the sewing cabinet. In the weak glow from the window I see the thimbles reaching up to me. I kneel until my eyes are level with the thimbles and I look at them like they're a problem I have to solve. I mumble, "Thank you, Mama," but I don't waste time over it. I get a little paper bag out of the kitchen and gently, very gently, drop all the thimbles inside.

The bug light at the porch of Charlene's house is still on when I stop. It shines a yellow cone out into the yard. A dog appears from the darkness, growling raggedly between his teeth, but he passes quickly through the cone. With a pencil from the glove box I write "Charlene" on the bag of thimbles, holding it up in the light that reaches the truck, "from Jimbo." Then I write, "You're a good woman." I put the bag in the mailbox, raise the little red flag and drive away. At the highway I see the sun is about to edge up in the east, a cool orange and pink above South Dakota, above Mount Rushmore, but I see no faces in the line of clouds that is nothing more than a distant shadow over the horizon. It's like a lesson from sophomore English so much meaning, so much symbolism: something settled, a new beginning. But it does me no good. I wait, barely breathing, listening to the engine idle quietly, trying to decide which way to go.

When it had begun the early rising? She couldn't remember exactly and he wouldn't talk about it, though six weeks was a good guess, just after his father died and he returned home her home, their home from the week he took off from work and from her to settle things with his family over in Houston.

Yes, it started when his father died. Poor man.

At first she hadn't noticed any great change at all, except that he was up and about when she woke, with the coffee made and the paper on the table, unopened, the rubber band still taut, holding in the news. No, he wasn't up early to read, and it took him several days to learn the proper proportions of coffee and water and heat and time required to keep out the bitterness. Making the coffee had always been her job and while it was brewing, a brief span of solitude which she enjoyed, she would tend to minor leftover tasks; she picked up the living room or did the dishes from the night before, meaningless things but somehow important to her and necessary.