Large Animals in Everyday Life (12 page)

By the time Suzanne arrived, he could barely contain himself, he had been thinking about the incident all afternoon. He took Suzanne's jacket, told her about the bird, and imitated for her the response of the checkout girl: “‘When I saw you running for the bird, I said,
There's a man of action
!'” Suzanne seemed to
smile. He was sure she had smiled. As he brought out their beers and Li'l Smokies he said, “You know, the truly amazing thing was how nobody wanted to be the one to say they saw it. Just like when someone gets murdered in New York City in front of everyone but nobody says,
Hey, you know, cut that out
. Not that I've ever been there, but you know what I mean?” Suzanne looked pretty, biting daintily at her wienie, he thought. “Of course, you never realize how big these stores really are until you see a bird in there,” he told her, over their main course. “I mean, it was really
flying
. It had a long way to
go
.” Then, during dessert, he worried again about whether the bird would be permanently traumatized, whether other birds would smell person on it, etc. “The bush I left it under was pretty small,” he said. “It did
hop
, but I'm thinking maybe I should have taken it across the street to the park …”

Suzanne suddenly said, “If I hear the word ‘bird' one more time, I'm walking out that door.” Dallas was surprised and a little embarrassed.

“Okay,” he said. Only then, a moment later, he remembered the most miraculous thing, which he hadn't yet told her. “I'm sorry,” he said quickly and conspiratorially, “but I forgot to tell you the most amazing part: I could feel the
you-know-what's
heart beating! Through my windbreaker, I could feel it in my hand! It was so fast you couldn't even make out separate beats!”

Suzanne flung down her napkin and left.

He thought immediately of calling her, then thought of how much better a note would be and, leaving their plates of red velvet cake on the table, ran to the closet and lugged out the Smith-Corona he'd received for his high school graduation and set it up on the floor beside an outlet. He would explain, the elite typeface lending dignity to his words, that she had not seen the real him. He wasn't himself, it was that simple. It was like that post-traumatic stress thing, the Space Shuttle thing, reactivated by seeing the bird (though the bird didn't explode). He would not pass her the note childishly at work but send it through the mail,
bespeaking civility, self-control,
breeding
. He began to type, but a second later stopped: he didn't know her address, not even her last name! Her phone number was all he had.

Then, in a flash, he remembered the reverse phone book—Chune Pei Liu had told him about it once in the middle of the night—a phone book that would tell you, if you had a number, who the person was that it belonged to, and of course where they lived. The book was top secret, Chune said; only phone company officials were allowed to see it, but he had managed to get a copy, and now it was gone. He would be sent to jail! he'd yelled at Dallas. He was searching the place frantically, pulling up the edges of the carpet and dragging the refrigerator away from the wall; he pushed Dallas out of bed so he could check between the mattress and the box spring. In the morning, though, he was a little confused. Maybe he'd only dreamed that he had a copy, he said. Or maybe he'd dreamed that the book existed in the first place.

Dallas sighed. The local white pages were short, only one or two hundred pages—how long could it possibly take to skim through, if he looked only at first names and 335 prefixes? He sat Indian-style for an hour or so, running his finger down the columns, sometimes going back and rereading a page when he thought his mind might have wandered, but he didn't find anyone who could have been her. Finally he gave up and went to bed.

Dallas still thought about the evening all the time, though it had been over a year ago. He saw Suzanne almost every day, and sometimes she smiled and sometimes she didn't. He kept waiting for the right thing to say to her to leap into his mind, but the thing remained obscure, even cagey. He sometimes began to feel that the thing should not have to be an apology, that none of this was his fault, that there was no logical reason why he should not be allowed some gratification in the world, but the thing itself seemed to rebel at this show of independence on Dallas's part, assuring him that whatever he came up with would
be wrong, and that anyone, everyone, most particularly Suzanne, would know it.

• • •

ATTENTION: BUG PEOPLE
, said the mailing label he'd lettered and stuck on his front door, warning the exterminator that he was allergic to every kind of spray, but when he got home from work one Friday night he heard noises in there anyway and realized with disappointment that Donna Long was there. He just wanted to be alone—he'd relayed three phone messages from Robin Hood to Suzanne that evening, which he had hoped meant they were breaking up but which had turned out to mean that they were planning a camping trip. “I could take care of your cats while you're away,” Dallas had said to her, but she'd only laughed.

Donna's car, a swanky royal-blue 1966 Chevy Impala, must have been parked in the back. The car was always larger than Dallas believed possible, and it embarrassed him a little, as though Donna were not the building's plumber but some backwards friend of his who had come to stay. She had been trying to fix his slow shower drain off and on for eight weeks, and he felt that this reflected on him personally, on some embarrassing defect of his body or character. She sometimes went out for a chemical or part and returned eight hours later as “The Tonight Show” was coming on, or eight days later, out of nowhere. He coughed as he let himself in; he felt he had to appear soberly busy with important tasks at all times whenever a maintenance or repair person was in his home.

“Yoo-hoo!” Donna Long yelled from the bathroom. “I finally got my hands on that clog, and you won't believe what it was.”

Dallas stood in the doorway and watched Donna's broad bent back straining the seams of her plaid flannel shirt. From the back, she could have been a man. She had one arm deep in a fresh hole she had made in the tiled wall. “Six-inch stopper chain,” she said, into the hole. “Wound around enough hair to build King Kong.
Hair would've gone, but no chemical I know eats through a
chain
.”

“So that's it, you're done?” Dallas said.

“Not quite, dude,” she said. “Got some reassembling to do.” She withdrew her arm slowly and he looked away, as though he might have seen something obscene. When he looked back she had straightened up to her full height of six feet and stood there grinning at him and holding her black hand away from her body. She looked like an oversized baby doll, he thought, and he noticed that her face appeared worse than usual, her eyes unusually bright and damaged-looking.

“I see you looking at that,” she said, touching the skin under one of her eyes, “but you don't need to get alarmed. I just had a little conflict with my sister the other night. Debbie. She's a big bruiser like myself. She been staying with me at my trailer since her old man run off, and she gets to drinking, you know what I mean?”

Dallas nodded and quickly retreated into the kitchen, embarrassed. “Yup, Debbie don't like Debbie,
that's
the problem,” he could hear her saying. “Debbie got to learn to like Debbie
first
.” The way she kept talking to herself reminded him of the endless family of gray cats who lived near the dumpster behind the restaurant and spent their days and nights strolling around and crying, begging, never getting enough of whatever it was they wanted. They were cute cats, but nobody ever took one in. Their wiggly bodies and bright eyes, which would have seemed adorable on other, calmer cats, seemed, oddly, only to make them more pathetic, even slightly grotesque.

Donna clanked around in her toolbox for a moment and then began to hum in a high, surprisingly feminine voice. Dallas got a Baggie full of yogurt-dipped peanuts from the refrigerator and stood in his kitchen, eating them one at a time and listening. The tune arrested him. It was slow and sad in an old-fashioned, respectable way, as though whoever wrote it took sadness for granted. He didn't think he'd heard it before, but it reminded
him of a golden summer twenty years ago when he had become obsessed with stamp collecting. He remembered crouching over his album on the sunny floor of his bedroom for days on end until the muscles in the backs of his knees got sore and he could hardly stand without falling down. And then came a terrible evening when he had almost fainted in his bed when he felt a stray stamp hinge tickling his ankle and believed for a moment that it was a black widow. “I told you not to overdo it,” his mother had said. Donna's sad, wordless vibrato was bringing this all back to him.

“What song is that?” he called to her.

“What'd you say, honey?” Donna yelled.

Dallas headed down the dark hall, shouting, “What
song
is that?” and slammed into Donna's flannel front. He leaped backwards.

“‘I Missed Me,'” she said.

“You missed me?” Dallas said.

“No, the song is ‘I Missed Me,'” she said. “The legendary late Jim Reeves. I ordered it off the TV.”

“Oh,” Dallas said. “I listen to classical music.”

“Well, I don't know if you'd call it a
classic
, but it sure sticks with you,” Donna said. “Had it in my head for a week. Even dreamed it.”

“Uh huh,” Dallas said. He was embarrassed to be standing so close to her in the dark.

“Hey, what are you eating there?” she said.

He offered her a yogurt peanut.

She chewed with concentration and her eyes widened. “Dude!” she said. “These are
great
!” She stared at him disbelievingly, as though he personally had been hiding all yogurt peanuts from her her whole life.

“You can have them, take them,” he said.

“
Thank
you!” she said.

“So you're coming back to seal that up?” he said.

“Yeah, tomorrow,” she said. “But where do you
get
these?”

“Any grocery store,” Dallas said, edging back toward the front door.

“Well, good night,” she finally said. “Dude, yogurt! I just can't get over that!”

Dallas got into his pajamas, trying without success to whistle the song. He realized a moment later that he had forgotten to ask her whether he was allowed to shower.

• • •

“Your Uncle Lafitte was always a melancholy man,” his mother told him on the phone the next morning. “Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside, as they say. But when he went on the road, he became a new man.” She was implying that Dallas took after Lafitte, but Lafitte had died of tequila poisoning when Dallas was still very little, and Dallas barely remembered the man. He had seen him maybe once, at someone's wedding. He had a picture in his head of a stout, gleaming man in a crisp white shirt and trousers that looked like they'd been assembled out of bed-sheets, sitting heavily in a straight-backed chair next to a buffet table on which was an enormous silver urn full of whipped cream. Dallas made several trips to the table to gaze up at the whipped cream, whose merry peaks he could just see rising above the rim of the urn, and every time he approached the table his Uncle Lafitte was making a pronouncement. “Well, you might be in the water, but you sure ain't getting
wet
, you know what I mean?” Uncle Lafitte roared. “Well, you might be breathing, but you sure ain't getting any
air
, you know what I mean?” he shouted. “Well, you might be on the highway, but that ain't your
car
, you know what I'm saying?” Dallas had no picture in his head of the person to whom his uncle was speaking. He had, in fact, a suspicion that the whole memory was false, that like the reverse phone book it was only a dream.

“Take a lesson from Lafitte,” Dallas's mother said. “On the road, he found what he was looking for all those years.” Before his
death, Uncle Lafitte had invented, marketed, and made famous throughout the Panhandle a powder that took the itch right out of your skin. He had sold a riding mower to a blind man who had bumped into it while trying to find the store's rest room. He'd sold a stereo system to an old couple so deaf they had to lie on the floor of the store with their heads next to the speakers in order to hear anything. But Dallas knew no one would ever buy anything from him, and he felt anyway that his own life must be stupid peas compared to whatever would make a man drink tequila. He hated tequila. If Lafitte were alive, he would probably pace once around Dallas's tiny apartment and spit. “What is your exact problem this instant?” Dallas's mother said.

“I can't take a shower,” Dallas said.

After he hung up with his mother he immediately dialed Donna Long. “When am I allowed to take a shower?” he said, as soon as she answered.

“This ain't Donna,” the woman's voice said.

“Great,” Dallas said. “Well, I have to go to work, so where is she?”

“You that Texas guy?” the woman said. “Boy, I'm still waiting to hear the end of
you
. You better watch it. Wink at her once and she'll be moving in the piano, the chandelier, and all the fine china.”

“Wait, oh my God,” Dallas said. “Donna has a piano?”

“Figure of speech,” the woman said. “I'll give her your message.” She hung up.

Dallas went to his shower and looked at the hole. It was the size of two tiles and its edges were uneven with crumbling dry-wall and bits of mildewed caulking. It reminded him of a wound. He couldn't even imagine what it would be like to put his hand into it.

He worked the lunch shift unshowered, his forehead shining with oil. He could certainly have washed his face in his sink, but this hadn't occurred to him at the time. Feeling oily, he was subdued and preoccupied, and a couple of Suzanne's buddies started
calling him “Mr. Business.” Suzanne herself kept her usual distance, though this time Dallas felt that Donna, rather than he himself, was to blame.