My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (43 page)

So I began to refine my attempts, especially since postage was now quite dear.

Every pay period I'd put aside twenty dollars or so for postage stamps, and I'd make a studied list of potential journals and began sending chapters out that way. I had divorced myself from any hope of publishing at this point and was doing this mostly out of an autonomic impulse. I just kept putting things in the mail and not thinking about them. Trudge, trudge, feet on the road, et cetera.

Meanwhile, I reported for duty as a driver, as needed, at my little pizza place, and I watched the kids mingle and diagnosed them from my perch, at forty years old. (“Oh, honey; he doesn't know he's gay yet. Wow, that chick has issues. Jesus, that guy has some serious anger problems, from his mommy. Watch how he drinks.”) It was interesting to see all this from the clinical distance that comes with age and experience, and I wondered if when I was that age, my own pathologies and anxieties had been so clearly visible and surfaced when I worked in a similar situation, and why the fuck didn't anyone tell me? Like I was about to do, with these kids.

Kidding.

No, actually, besides the driving and weeping bit, because I spent so much time alone in a car, I actually didn't mind the pizza stuff so much, until one Sunday afternoon I received an order to deliver a pizza to an address that I knew very well. Ten years ago, they had been my archenemies. Back when I lived with someone else, these were our next-door neighbors.

I had been living with someone in a house that shared a driveway, an easement. Being Seattle, this meant that neither household used it. You used it to unload your groceries or lawn-care products, but as soon as you were done, you backed out of it and cleared the way. You certainly didn't park there or use it for anything else.

When that original family moved, the house was purchased by a younger couple from Oklahoma who had purloined their senile grandmother's retirement money—ostensibly, to be used for a retirement home—and used it to buy property in Seattle. They'd turn the garage into a mother-in-law apartment and she would live there until she died, they thought. Happy, happy. But building mother-in-law units in the city was illegal, and the garage was on the property line. They were ingratiating and loud, and had a young kid named Sam, and they took over the easement and the mornings with noise, which was an issue since both my girlfriend and I worked nights.

It became horrible, angry, and uncomfortable. We eventually moved, and then split up, but of course the memories remained.

And now I was delivering a pizza to that address.

And I knew that they still lived there because that kid, Sam, as it turned out, had been my boss, at the pizza place, all along.

And I had to deliver a pizza there.

De profundis.

I stood in the parking lot that Sunday morning just flooded with rage, cortisol, and anxiety.

I know you're there, God, and you're doing this to me.

I'm doing what I fucking can, God, and you keep piling this SHIT onto me, you motherfucker.

If you were here, God, I would kick you in the dick, you fucking bastard.

I stood there and fumed, then packed up the pizzas in my car and made the delivery. This was my job right now. I would do it.

It turned out that I was off by a number and was instead delivering a pizza to the house I had lived in before, and a man with one arm answered the door, and he didn't know why I was sweating the way that I was. I thanked him for the four-dollar tip and nearly had my own arm removed by his huge German shepherd, but I was grateful, then sat in my car and apologized to God, said maybe,
I hope you can understand
.

We pals again, God?

No?

Well, fuck you, then, God.

I couldn't even explain that one to Sarah. It just went too deep, too far back, and I continued with what I was doing until I was going to do something else. I found out that my old friend, John, may have been embellishing his earnings back when I spoke to him about pizza delivery being something unexpectedly lucrative, and I was now burning through my savings rather quickly, as I perspired through that summer in a kitchen, prepping salads and folding boxes and talking to children about their pot use and making very little money in return.

Throughout this, Sarah's own situation was deteriorating, as her school had been downsized and she was teaching only part-time now, her divorce dragging on and taking a huge emotional toll. She had taken to watching every penny that she had, knew there were some real adjustments to her lifestyle headed her way, and was preparing as much as she could for the blow. She had even started going to the food bank, twice a week, to save on groceries. She did this without fuss, without talking about it, feeling that the hundred dollars she would save on groceries could go to Genevieve's bills at the veterinarian. Vivie was getting older, needed lots of care, and it was expensive. When she told me this, admitted to it like it was something shameful, I was in awe of her resolve, her ability to suffer in silence, and wished, wished that I had even a shred of it; it made me love her even more.

That's about as much as I'm comfortable saying, as I want to shield her privacy, but she was enduring some hard moments, tough times, as she watched everything she had built dry up and flake away in sections, and we had only one another to cling to at this point, in the evenings. Then we'd wake up in the morning and face our deteriorations again, daily.

And Brenda Brown had also started falling victim to her own personal demons and had quit the karate school in a miasma of drama after the incident with Dylan, forcing the students to choose between studying with her or staying with the school, and since karate is very much a vehicle of personal charisma, lots of people left when Brenda did, for their own reasons, and the sparkle seemed to go out of both the school and Brenda.

Her health began deteriorating, and she became erratic, weird, and potentially harmful to herself and others.

It didn't help that Bill Brown had to be put down, and she hadn't been prepared for that, would never have been prepared to let go of her own dogs, but it had been painful to watch this poor dog fall apart from age like he did, and so our friend from the school, the veterinarian who was taking care of Cleo, too, was able to put Bill down, and Brenda fell apart further.

Then Jack County was diagnosed with leukemia, and this just sent Brenda into a freefall, and it was then decided she had to move back home to Indiana.

This destroyed me, too, as Jack County was my favorite dog at this time, as bonded as we were, and both Sarah and I held each other and cried the day he had to be put down.

We had taken him out for a walk the day before, and he limped and moved gingerly because his hips and joints were killing him, and we walked him for a bit in the most scenic part of Queen Anne, my neighborhood, this lovely saunter at the very top of the hill that's a part of historical Seattle called “the Crown Walk,” which I'd never realized was there, after all this time. I admitted to her just how frightened I really was, how terrifying these last months since I lost my job had been as we walked Jack County, and Sarah said, “Does it mean anything to you that what you're experiencing is a part of a historical moment?” I think she meant the financial crisis from a few years back, and I thought of it as we walked with a lumbering Jack, and thought,
Not at all
. I couldn't see past my personal penumbra.

At the end of the walk, we watched Jack County come alive for the last time as he flirted with a female labradoodle, and you could, for a moment, see the spark come back in his eye and the spring come back in his step. We laughed at Old Jack County, but then when the girl dog left, his spark vanished and was gone, and Jack was no more, ever again.

Sarah's house was empty, and only the two of us remained some nights, clutching one another and trying to stay above water.

Nasir found me at the pizza place when he needed someone to help with his new enterprise. It had to be some sort of tax shelter, but the way he pitched it to me was that he and a friend from his mosque were opening a new print shop in a town north of Seattle, and he needed me to run it, as a manager.

Nasir had been my printer when I was a freelancer, and I'd never have met him if I hadn't moved to that shit part of town with Steph. He certainly stuck out, in post-9/11 America and Seattle, because you didn't see many people in town who proudly dressed in traditional halal Islamic garb, wore the beard and the beanie cap. He was my age, spoke unaccented English, and seemed earnest in his proposal, saying I could do with something back in my regular vocation.

“What are you doing here?” he asked me one afternoon at the pizza place, made it sound like it was a spiritual question.

I was reminded of a movie I'd seen some years previous, some remake of a Victorian novel called
The Four Feathers
, and I remembered a particular scene where the hero is bereft, left out to die, and a wandering warrior finds him, confers with his conscience, then decides to save our hero.

Asked later why he'd reached this choice, the warrior responds, “God put you in my way.”

I studied Nasir and wondered, briefly, if God had put him in my way, or me in his, but either way, I took his offer.

Besides everything else, I had grown weary of searching for house numbers while delivering pizzas in the impenetrable Seattle night. Bastards don't make any sense.

So I accepted.

The drive north and south every day to and from Snohomish took me right by Steph's accident site, and every time I drove past it, my stomach would knot and I'd get a real sense of sadness and gloom, and I'd try to keep from looking at the bent, unrepaired railing where the Jeep went over, but I had to, every single time, and then one day it suddenly occurred to me to wonder,
What if I had been with her? What if I'd been in her passenger seat? Would I have had time to stop the Jeep from going over?
I shivered at the possibility that I could have been there to stop the wreck.