Sign Languages (5 page)

Marvin believed it might be drugs but didn't say that to anyone; instead he turned his attention to someone in the accounting department. Only Madelaine asked and, receiving a vacant stare, didn't ask again for over two months until she cajoled Nancy to lunch at a new restaurant full of aquariums and gorgeous waiters in tight Italian pants that zipped up the side.

“What is wrong? What's happened? Are you ill? You had a mammogram last month… is that it? Nancy, can I help? Everyone's worried sick about you.”

And on and on until she had stopped, her face flushed, her eyes full of tears. Real tears for me, Nancy thought, and patted Madelaine's hand and told her everything would be fine soon. Only a temporary personal problem. “It's my mother… she's terribly sick,” she told her. And added the threat of cancer since Madelaine had mentioned the mammogram.

And later in one of the rooms, her rumpled suit collecting cat hair, chenille threads, the odor of pork sausage and eggs for supper, she was sorry for lying, for sacrificing her mother, and wondered what if it were true.

But she breathed in the age, was, to her mind, older than her mother, than the man she slept next to every night. Once he had reached for her, his small hand running up her thigh. But she had brushed him away and felt sincere and elevated by her dismissal. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she whispered into his deaf ear. “Huh?” “Not now, later,” she spoke up, her voice muffled by carpet, drapes, afghans.

She still did well at selling houses. She's lost almost all of her beauty, the newer man said. The newest woman had never seen it. “But not her touch; no, she's still got that magic touch.”

I'm learning everything, she thought. About it all. And she took on the older clients, men who wanted to rub up against her in narrow doorways in empty office buildings. Their wives in other cities. And she stayed still for them, her eyes averted, until they both passed into long corridors scuffed by mailing carts.

By now she had practically emptied her house. There were a few clothes, all the photographs, the answering machine all lighted up, the tape crammed with voices and whining beeps.

She never altered a single thing at Mr. Warrant's. She tucked her underwear in the drawer below his, she drank disgustingly thick whole milk. She delighted in the filtered light through the blinds. She roared her car past the destroyed mills; it rocketed over the uneven tracks.

Until a Saturday morning when she brought the heavy pistol from the drawer and sat on the bed. Their bed, she said to herself. It was like a movie pistol, the barrel long and octagonal. She counted its sides more than once.

She recollected a photograph whose absence or perhaps presence somewhere else—at her mother's, not in albums but in shoeless boxes?—worried her. It wasn't her father but a friend of his in uniform wearing a pistol in a waxy brown scabbard. “A fellow officer,” she heard him say. His voice was a young man's voice in her ears.

She believed it was unloaded, thought she'd seen the cartridges in a drawer or in a jar in some other room. But she couldn't be sure and so quickly brought the barrel up to her lips and opened wide. “Ouch, your teeth!” the German had shouted. And a joke, long ago though only in high school, wasn't it? About the desire for fold-back teeth in a woman. This thickness on her tongue and mouth like lava, or an animal burrowing in the throat.

She sucked the metal of it. All greasy and shedlike. Garages and body shops. The litter of unsalable things.

But you know she didn't bleed until almost sixty hours later. It was a little before two in the morning when she sat up and said “Oh Jesus” because she had never done something like this.

“What's wrong? Nancy?” And his back's joints popping, Mr. Warrant sat up. “Goddammit,” he shouted and pulled away from her.

They fumbled in the dark, their legs sticky from her blood until he thumbed on the light, its three-way bulb only working on low, barely illuminating the two of them there, the covers flung back and Nancy's panties the chocolate red of refused blood.

“Christ, I'm sorry,” she said, and stood and surveyed the damage, her mind full of the necessity for towels, sheets, had it gone through to the mattress? Thinking, there really is no other bed.

“Good God,” Mr. Warrant said looking up at her, past stained clothes, his eyes wide.

She came around to him and sat, taking his shoulders, forcing his face away. He thought it was his blood, she said to herself. “It's all right… it's okay… it's mine. I'll go get some towels and clean sheets.”

“No, no,” he mumbled, his lips still thick from sleep. Both their breaths the concoction of the days' odors.

“I didn't remember the blood, you know.”

Nancy nudged him out to arm's length. His wispy hair like a baby's, his face discolored on one side. “It's been thirty years I guess. All that… all of that.” She watched him look at her differently. She believed he wanted to grab the covers up or flee. His face was full of fear, and she knew hers was too. She believed they sat there looking exactly the same. She clenched his shoulders, her fingers dug into his flimsy flesh.

Nancy worked quickly for almost half an hour until she finished and they slept. She had refused to leave. She wouldn't dare go to the convenience store near the loop, out past the foundries. Instead she had folded one of his undershirts into a roll and pulled it between her legs.

“She's changed,” the newer man said. But they never knew what they meant by that. And once, overhearing Marvin talk about the new girl he'd slept with, she had stepped around the corner just to shut him up for a moment. The triumph, she knew, only lasted until she was out of earshot.

She went back once a week for over a month, but the doors were locked, and she never knocked, and though she had keys, she never put them into any of the locks.

Her clothes came in boxes left in her carport or on the tiny front porch. They came over a period of weeks. One she recognized as the carton that had held the mugs. Later, she'd gone out to the shed and unlocked it and saw he had taken all the boxes.

She handled some houses better now. She found she was less afraid when she saw buckled sidewalks and walls patterned by the bright squares from removed pictures and photographs.

“You scared me,” he had printed on the lid of one of the first boxes with a felt-tipped marker. She pictured his hand working a puzzle.

Two months later she phoned him and his voice was as she remembered it, but now she knew he had never talked to her much and had never, she believed, looked her in the eyes until the night she had bled on them both.

“Hello, Mr. Warrant,” and she was pleased his voice was firm and not surprised. Neither hung up because of any of a dozen unarticulated thoughts that rushed like cold air, then hot, through both their minds. But though she begged him, he refused to take any rent at all and, until she moved downtown with Ms. Bojangles and across the courtyard from Madelaine Woo, he returned every month's check in a brown envelope with the return address of some company carefully marked through.

RESIDUE

Chris had come to this Asian desert for no good reasons. Sure, he'd gotten nervous the first month after the army'd finished with him. And, February, over a year ago, he'd met her dancing at some club across the county line where liquor stores stayed open to midnight and pitchers of beer in the honky-tonks were twice as expensive as they should have been.

But then he ran away from her. That's what he called it himself.
I've run away
. And once he'd done that, once he'd piled his things under the pickup's leaking camper top, he didn't stop in Childress or Flatonia or even in Houston where he planned to stop—where so many others had stopped over the last hundred years of running that direction from all the other directions.

Once out the door—her face on the pillow wiped clean of makeup, eyebrowless, twenty years older than lounge light and bedside lamps revealed; open and slack—he was fantastically weightless. Like a balloon let loose, he jettisoned his air, voided the ballast of her, then his pickup, finally even his split and wired suitcase full of cassette tapes and cigarettes. Until he floated gently to earth here in this high Asian desert. To this town with no pronounceable name. Goatville, they called it. First the survey party chief, Walliston, had said that over a gritty, almost flat St. Pauli's Girl. Then he and the other instrument man, Paddy, had repeated it. Then they'd all said it to themselves in their small rooms as the cool spring had given way to an awful summer heat which only intensified the bone-numbing nights. All the day's repressive heat sucked cleanly away within an hour of sundown. The chilled metal frames of their beds betraying the passionless ritual of masturbation. Or their semen saved up for a couple of days to splatter the neck and nipples; sperm and breath the only warmth in the bare rooms. Watch faces flashing in the light of desert stars.

Somewhere to the east, on this vast plain as flat as the military haircut he'd kept, Dutchmen were planning a dam across a river gorge. He'd seen the river from the airplane and later crossed it in a Jeep, the water a jade-and-red slug stretched out in the sand. But in Goatville the river was several hard hours away, looping in a gradual decline to the south and west.

So the three of them took out level loops. They carried numbers from the top of a seven-foot cement post sunk in the red sand. The two hired rodmen were locals. Taught to rest the numbered rod on the brass cap and to rock it gently back and forth. Quite natural to these two who spoke fragmented English and rocked in their prayers at noon, a lighted candle stuck to the truck bumper, a prayer wheel in each hand. Chants and moans. Some local religion born of immense distances, landscapes of red and ocher, skies painfully blue and clear. The name of god sent flying on the wind that guttered the candle and spun the wheel.

They took numbers out into the desert. They began at the brass cap, blinding in the sun. The butt of the rod kissing metal to metal. Each day the loops grew longer, farther from the cement post. An oval in the field book becoming an oval of numbers. The desert's topography betraying itself to the tenth of a foot. 4.7. 5.2.

One day Chris realized how unbelievably flat it was, and he wondered how long ago the others had come to the same conclusion; he knew he was the last. He stared through the Gurley level. They were weightless by now. The liquids and salts that held them down all gone, replaced by special brews and tablets. Walliston sitting in the open door of the Suburban, its huge balloon tires lifting him three feet off the ground.

Turning back, his eyeball was again sucked into the light and wavering heat of the tube. He'd spat out thousands of numbers in three months even with a week in the nearest city seven hundred miles away to the south and west. There had been St. Pauli's Girl there, too. And noise and the thick Eurasian woman who took you in her mouth and pulled your balls down to your knees until pain forced a shriek. The shriek eaten by her and all the crash of buses and mopeds outside in the yellow hazy air.

Paddy lay up under the truck, his eyes safely behind a forearm. His last two-hour stint at reading the rod done. So, finally, Walliston would step down and slowly wave his arms, the watch crystal catching the declining brilliance in a threat of tomorrow's slow climb and fall.

In the distance Chan #1 shouldered the rod they seldom had to telescope past its first section. Most of the numbers falling between 4.2 and 5.0. The dry streambeds packed with sand.

He watched Chan #2 clap and dance around his brother rod-man. Their loose brown-and-white clothes whipping in some wind not found here a hundred yards to their west.

Sometimes he wanted all the things he'd never liked. There could be snow covering this landscape of sere waist-high brush and scattered piles of dull stone. Where's the party, chief? they'd kidded earlier. That and all the other old surveying jokes. But they no longer enthusiastically completed field books at night in the bare front room of the hotel. And now no one dropped by to look at them; the first foreigners in over four years. The last man an Argentinean who'd arrived in a flurry of language and left again immediately. No one sure of what he'd wanted though they'd all come running to offer suggested routes, times of day to depart, evaluations of tire treads and jerrycans.

Once they'd figured that six more months would see them through. But there were the delays of equipment repair, gasoline replenishment, sandstorms rising out of the west like mile-high red surf. The light gone, not filtered away but absent. The vast red wave cascading down, filling everything. Ears and nostrils. Unopened beer cans and toothpaste tubes. Carburetors. The fine screw adjustments of instruments.

Deutschmarks filled their accounts in the distant city. New clothes came one day and they hurried inside to change and laugh. The three of them played cards with the faded deck, the plastic backing sanded away already. The two Chans laughing and talking at them in their broken Empire English. Pointing and shaking their heads as cigarettes changed piles. Paddy's Salems producing a groan from the other two who scooped them in begrudgingly.

Making use of the long light of summer, they worked six days a week. From six until noon; four until eight. On what they estimated was Sunday, they stayed in the hotel near the one well in the middle of town. Town from their windows on the second floor consisting of two perpendicular streets.

From his window Chris saw mud roofs, a foolish tethered goat that bled from its bound leg. Stupid to struggle, he thought. He smelled sand and heat. At the town's edge the afternoon sun destroyed everything beyond with fantastic undulations. He rubbed his eyes.

They forgot things. Couldn't recall old addresses, the tight curl of pubic hair, the whorls lost in the buzz of a thousand prayer wheels spinning atop courtyard walls. Endless prayers, he thought, ironically generated by the gods for the gods. A wonderful joke by the people living in solitude on such an endless, arid plain.