Ragged Company (9 page)

“Could we see this one?” Dick asked.

“What one?” Digger replied, looking worried.

“This one here,” Dick said, laying the paper on the table and pointing a finger at an ad in the bottom corner of the page.

“
Rain Man?
” Digger said. “It’s fucking pouring outside and you wanna see something about rain? Don’t you wanna see something that makes you forget that it’s raining?”

“But it’s not about rain,” Dick said.

“The name says
Rain Man.
How the frig could it be about anything else but fucking rain?” Digger asked.

“It’s about the man,” Dick said.

“What friggin’ man?”

“The man who lives in the rain.”

“Geez, will one of you help me with this guy?” Digger asked, looking at Timber and me for help.

“What do you mean about the man who lives in the rain, honey?” I asked Dick.

He looked at me with confusion in his eyes. Scared. Frightened at the prospect of chasing the thought until he caught it. “I don’t know. But you know sometimes how walkin’ all by yourself in the rain kinda makes you feel better sometimes, like Granite said?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I kinda think this movie’s about a guy like that on accounta everybody feels like that sometimes an’ so they’d wanna make a story about it.”

“Fer fuck sake!” Digger said. “Now we’re gonna go to a flick because the loogan here thinks we all wanna be all fucked up and blue?”

“I don’t think that’s what Dick’s saying, Digger,” Timber said quietly. “I think he’s saying that this movie might be good to see because it has something to say that all of us can connect with. Right, Dick?”

“I guess so,” Dick said. “I don’t really know. All I know is that I gotta see this one on accounta my belly tell me it’s right. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes a lot of sense to me,” I said.

“Sounds like horseshit to me,” Digger said.

There was silence for a moment.

“
Rain Man?
” Digger says, looking around at the three of us.

We nodded.

“Un-be-fucking-lievable,” he said. “Now I’m going to a flick because of the belly of Double Dick Dumont.”

It made perfect sense to me. Grandma One Sky used to tell me a lot about the invisible. We’re surrounded by invisible friends all of the time, she would say, and even though the idea of ghosts frightened me a bit, Grandma One Sky’s casual acceptance of it made me more comfortable with the notion. She went on to say that our invisible friends sometimes whisper to us and tell us what we should do or choose. We call these whispers intuition, sixth sense, or ESP. Dick’s idea that he had to see this particular movie because of a feeling in his belly told me that the shadowed ones were indicating through him that this was the movie we were meant to see. I’d wondered what had happened to them since the first meeting with Granite, but I’d known they’d be back. We’d been tied to each other for far too long for them to desert me just like that.

“
Rain Man
it is, then,” I said.

During the walk to the theatre there were shadowed ones everywhere. I was glad to see them. It had become a comfort to me to know that even in the most desperately lonely times, I had never been truly alone, that there had always been an invisible friend or
two watching over me, keeping vigil through my pain. Or that in those moments when joy was the gift, they were there too, seeing and remembering the great wide energy of life. I saw them outside the theatre when we arrived and I saw them in the aisles when we walked in. And I saw them standing around Granite.

“Well whatta ya know?” Digger said. “It’s the rock man.”

He seemed surprised and pleased to see us, and as we made our way toward him I could see the invisible ones around him make room for us. I smiled at that.

“How did you manage to pick this movie?” he asked.

“My belly told me,” Dick said, smiling at Granite and shaking his hand.

“Yeah,” Digger said. “We’re here because of gas.”

“Actually, Dick just felt that this was the one we had to see on a day like this,” Timber said, reaching over to shake Granite’s hand too.

“Well, it’s literal, that’s for sure,” Granite said.

“And you?” I asked. “How did you manage to pick this movie?”

He creased his brow in thought. “You know, I don’t really know either. Maybe it was because the director is one whose work I appreciate, or the actor. Dustin Hoffman is an immaculate performer. Or maybe it was the review material I’d read that indicated a good story. I don’t know. My plan was to see
Another Woman
with Gena Rowlands but somehow I wound up here. I was actually on my way to another theatre. I suppose that sounds strange.”

“Not to me,” I said and patted his shoulder.

R
AY BRINGS US
another round and I throw mine back like it’s the last one I’m ever going to get. My good god. That movie made me want to run away as much as it pressed me back in my seat and forced my eyes to watch it all unfold before me.

“Amazing,” was all I said.

“Amazing?” Digger asked. “What was so amazing about that?”

“Just the story,” I said.

“The story? The story was about a loogan. Fucking guy couldn’t even tie his shoes without help. You call that amazing?”

“No,” I said. “What I call amazing is that he was able to teach everyone around him.”

“Teach them what?” Granite asked, sipping on his whisky.

I sat back. Sometimes the thoughts just tumbled out of my head and it made me uneasy to try to stretch them out for someone.

“Well, I kinda think that he taught them about life, I guess.” I looked at my shoes.

“That’s an interesting observation,” Granite said. “Taught them what about life?”

Amelia grinned at me and I felt better, more at ease with coaxing the words out. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it just seemed to me that he taught everyone that life is never clear for any of us. Any of us. Not just the ones that didn’t get dealt a better hand. Fuck, the truth of it is that life scares the hell out of all of us sometimes. Especially when we think we need to see it better, clearer, more in focus. The Rain Man was able to remind people that it’s part of all of us—and that it’s okay because we survive.”

They all just looked at me.

“You’re right,” Digger said. “That
is
amazing.”

“Thank you,” I said, surprised.

“Amazing that you got all that out of a movie about a loser who’s gotta live locked up all his friggin’ life.”

He looked at me hard and swallowed his draft.

“Didn’t you like any of it, Digger?” Amelia asked.

“Fuck no. Well, I kinda got into the gambling riff and he shoulda got with the hooker. The fucking guy’s sitting on eighty grand and he’s not gonna get laid? He doesn’t go for that, he is a fucking loogan. I mean, really. What guy’s not gonna go for that?”

“Not me,” Dick said.

“Says the other fucking loogan,” Digger said, and waved at Ray.

“It made me sad,” Dick mumbled.

“Sad? Why did it make you sad, honey?” Amelia asked.

“On accounta I’m the Rain Man,” Dick said.

“Oh, Jesus,” Digger groaned. “Better make that two, Ray. I’m gonna need it.”

Dick sat forward in his chair and drank slowly from his beer. Then he looked around the table at all of us and smiled weakly. “I guess he taught me ’bout life, too.”

“How, Dick?” Granite asked.

“I ain’t never been able to see it clear like Timber said. I always gotta ask on accounta I can’t see it at all sometimes. It’s like it’s all too fast, too noisy, too bright, too dark. Too everythin’ sometimes. Like the Rain Man.”

“An’ sometimes I think I gotta have someone look after me all the time too. To make things clear so I can get by. But I can’t do none of the things the Rain Man could do. I can’t count or read or nothin’.”

“You’ve never been able to read or write or count?” Granite asked.

Dick shook his head.

“But how can that be?” Granite asked. “Your parents didn’t send you to school? Even the first few grades?”

Dick looked at him and swallowed the rest of his beer. His chin shook with emotion and I could sense his desire to run away as fast as he could. He heaved a huge sigh and fired up a smoke with trembling hands.

“I don’t wanna talk about that,” he said.

“Okay, Dick, okay,” Amelia said, taking one of his hands in hers. “You don’t have to.”

“You know, Dick,” Granite said. “The Rain Man had a condition.”

“Condition?” Dick asked.

“Yes. A condition. It means a way of being. His way of being was called ‘autism.’ That’s why he couldn’t figure things out. That’s why the world scared him. You’re not like him because you don’t have a condition.”

“I don’t?” Dick asked, brightening somewhat.

“No. At least, not that I can see. You just never got taught how to interpret the world.”

“Interpret?”

“Yes. Interpret means to see and understand. There are skills you get taught to help you do that. You learn to read and write and count and it makes it easier to interpret what’s going on around you. Apparently you were never given those skills. But it’s never too late to learn,” Granite said.

“I can learn?”

“Sure. Anyone can.”

“Even me?”

“Especially you. Because you know what?”

“What?”

“You’re way ahead of most people already.”

“I am?”

“Yes. You are.”

“How?”

“Because you can imagine.” Granite grinned.

“Imagine?”

“Yes. Imagine. See, Dick, stories reach us through our imagination. It’s our imagination that makes them seem real to us, real enough to believe in them, real enough to be affected by them, and real enough to learn from them sometimes. And you, because you like the movies so much, have a very good imagination.”

“I do?” Dick asked.

“Yes. You do. Can you imagine yourself being able to read?”

Dick screwed up his brow in thought and stared off across the room for a long while. Then he looked right at Granite and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I can. I can imagine that.”

“Then that’s all you need to get started. You can learn.”

“Did you hear that, Digger?” Dick asked excitedly. “I can learn.”

“Yeah, well learn to get us another fucking beer then, Rain Man,” Digger growled, then rabbit punched him lightly on the leg.

“How do you know so much about stories, Granite?” I asked.

He looked at me. He held the look for a good moment or two and the only word that I can use to describe what I saw in his face is
control.
He was very controlled. Hanging on with everything he had.

“Well, Timber,” he said, “I worked with stories for a long time.
Real stories. Not imagined ones like I was talking to Dick about. News stories. I worked for a newspaper. I was a journalist.”

“Wow,” I said. “So you do know a thing or two about how stories are built.”

“Too much,” he said.

“And you’re retired now? It’s over?”

He looked at Dick and said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

I nodded. All of us understood that completely.

T
WO WEEKS WENT BY
and I found myself wondering when the next encounter would be. They puzzled me. It seemed to me that they were as different from each other as I was to all of them. Yet they hung together. I’d never been hungry. I’d never been dirty, ragged, or penniless. If I had been, I believed that I would have struck out alone and made whatever needed to happen in my life happen in order to get up and away from the sordid confines of the street. I wouldn’t have looked for partners to keep me there. Loyalty meant you banded together for a cause, an uplifting, or at the very least, the staunch maintenance of a position. It didn’t mean, in my experience, group immobilization. One of them needed to be a driver, the one who impelled the others to reach for something beyond what they’d grown used to. Or maybe, familiarity itself imprisoned them, as if the street had a grip on them that was relentless because of whatever their initial surrender had been. In my mind, you surrendered yourself to those circumstances. No right-minded person went there on purpose and no right-minded person looked for support to enable them to stay there. Still, they were loyal to each other and that impressed me and puzzled me in equal proportion. I wanted to learn more about them if I could.

I settled on a movie called
Stealing Home.
It was showing at a small repertory theatre and even though the review I had read pointed to a romance and a memory-land sort of film, I was drawn to it. Driving there, I noticed the first signs of imminent
spring. There was no crowd outside the theatre and few in the lobby or at the confection stand. I amused myself awhile admiring the artistic nature of the movie posters announcing upcoming films, and once it was close enough to showing time I walked into the theatre. And there they were.

I found myself smiling a little despite myself. Both at the coincidence of another meeting and at the sight of them in the row they occupied. They sat like children, awed, eager, staring at the empty screen. I marvelled at how well behaved they were. Even though Digger snuck a surreptitious swallow from the bottle in his coat pocket, it was done as easily as a regular patron sucks the straw of his soda pop—they sat there silent, respectful, and patient, waiting for the adventure to begin again. I moved slowly toward them.

There were others in the theatre and they looked up as I passed, nodded in recognition of another aficionado and watched where I might sit so that they could speculate idly about the type of viewer I was, as if theatre geography could imply great things about me. I heard muffled surprise when I stepped up to the row where the ragged people sat and greeted them.

“Well, well,” I said, “this is a surprise.”

“Hello, Granite,” Amelia said with a big smile for me.

“Granite,” Timber said with a two-finger salute.

“Hi, Granite,” Dick intoned, big-eyed and grinning.

“Rock,” Digger growled.

“Rock?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. Granite’s a friggin’ stretch but Rock’s something I can handle calling somebody,” he said and nodded.