Taking It (11 page)

The contractor was a tall man with a beer belly and a cowboy hat. He was called Wade and he swore a lot. He said the immigration people were a bunch of jerk-offs. He said anyone who got bit by a baby rattlesnake had their heads so far up their butts you could just roll them along the ground.

But he said I could sit in the cab of his pickup, where it was air-conditioned, and he didn't say it with a look, the way some men do, meaning: Spend some time next to me and I'll show you a couple of moves.

Wade just ignored me in a friendly way, and I sat and watched Ted drive a down-size Deere tractor, dragging a dry field flat. There were papers on the front seat beside me, manila folders and legal documents, an environmental-impact report, and a letter to a company that was late with a shipment of crushed granite.

These forms were interesting, county and state commissions having to be satisfied that no pollutants were going to drain from the new golf course into the water table. There was a letter to the immigration department about harassing skilled employees on-site. I spotted a couple of typos.

Wade opened the door and used the phone on the dash to make a phone call, hanging up when there was no answer.

“You ought to get one of those computer programs that check spelling,” I said.

He looked at me from under his cowboy hat.

“I just thought I'd mention it,” I said.

24

At ten-thirty a snack truck pulled up. It was a white pickup with aluminum doors that opened to display plastic containers of flavored yogurt and several kinds of donuts, including plain, glazed, and chocolate-covered, and cinnamon rolls in cellophane.

At lunch another truck swung into the parking lot, and we ate burritos and prepackaged sandwiches. I ate a ham sandwich on white bread with dill pickles that soaked through the bread and made it soggy and green. I had a diet 7-Up. The drinks were in a bed of ice. When you picked one out it left a can-shaped cavity. The woman in charge put another can into the hollow to get cold.

All day I sat there, getting the point. This was how Ted lived, working under a smoggy sky.

I lounged in the truck and listened to the radio, which could be adjusted so you got police calls. The dispatcher was a woman with one of those bone-numb, bored voices. There was a man on Baseline Road the dispatcher said was fifty-one fifty. I knew that meant mentally disturbed. The man was naked, running from backyard to backyard, swinging over fences. The police apprehended him, and after he was in custody the police calls weren't very interesting.

At last shadows fell from the mountains, softening the outline of the rocks and the clawed hill. It was still hot, and there was a smell of skunk in the air.

Ted was dusty, his boots and his pants white with it. He was sweating and his hair stood up all around his head. “Have a good day?” he asked.

I didn't want to tell him how I felt.

We drove to a restaurant called La Estrellita, a pink stucco place only a few blocks from where Ted lived. “You aren't going to go home and take a shower?” I asked.

Music was playing, a song I could tell was sad, a town the man would never see, a place more beautiful than any town he had ever known. I could make out most of the Spanish, and what I couldn't I understood anyway. I thought that surely Ted couldn't sit in here all dusty and sweaty like that, but people at other tables looked tired and dusty, too.

We ate gigantic tacos, tacos piled with refritos and avocado and sour cream. I drank iced tea and Ted had a Dos Equis.

“I wouldn't attract the attention of the immigration people,” I said. It was good to let him know I could handle a job in construction if I wanted to.

Ted swallowed, dabbed his mouth with a napkin with the name of the restaurant on it in red. He looked like he didn't want to talk about immigration troubles. His face was thinner than I remembered it, and he hadn't shaved very well, a little patch of whiskers under his nose. “Wade knows what he's doing.”

“Maybe he hires someone working on someone else's Social Security number,” I said. “Maybe Wade knows when he hires the person, maybe Wade doesn't. If Wade complains too much about the border people, they might start investigating more carefully. Maybe Wade should just forget about the guy with the green card problem.”

“That's a good point,” said Ted.

His halfhearted compliment made me feel self-conscious. “I was just thinking.”

“The legal mind,” he said.

“I want to live with you,” I said. It came out suddenly, and there it was, something I hadn't even been aware of thinking. “I don't mean just the summer. I mean, move here, finish my senior year. I could get a job, maybe work for Wade in an office.”

Ted gave it some thought. “You like my house?”

I chewed a piece of tortilla.

“My backyard?” asked Ted. He looked ridiculous with his hair like that, all messed up, like someone who tried to look insane on purpose. “You like the patio with no sign of life but one hibiscus?”

“You have nice soap in the shower,” I said.

“I don't want you living with me,” Ted said. He didn't say it like someone being cruel. He said it in a kind tone, but it was like a slap. “You can stay the summer, and I'll be glad to have you. But you can't run away from your problems.”

I let three beats pass before I said anything. The family counselor at Kaiser suggested this once as a way of not saying hurtful things. “You'll never graduate from college,” I said. “All your plans add up to eating glue sandwiches for lunch beside a golf course for retired people.”

“So you couldn't stand living with me anyway,” he said, as though he had just proved something.

“I don't want your help, Ted,” I said. There were tears in my eyes but my voice was steady. “You're right. I see how you're going to live the rest of your life and I don't want to sit around on your flea-market furniture.”

“You can talk to Mother,” said Ted. “Or Dad. Try it. Don't be such a coward.”

I was out of the booth, straightening the wrinkles in my dress.

It was just about dark. The parking lot was filling up. A big shiny pickup truck crammed with men in baseball caps slowed down and took a look at me.

I didn't care. I let them look. One of them said something, and the rest of them laughed. The truck rolled away, gravel
snap crackle pop
under the oversize tires.

Ted called to me.

“Where are you going?” he said when he caught up.

“Walking to your place,” I said.

“You won't be able to find it,” he said.

“I'll find it.”

“You won't be able to get in,” he said. “I keep it locked. I bought window stoppers at one of those security stores. The windows won't slide open.”

I didn't bother telling him that if I wanted to get in, I would.

I was afraid of what I was going to do, but I didn't have any choice.

25

Ted and I didn't really have much to say for a while.

I had already made up my mind. I was uneasy when I thought about what I had to do, but I was realistic. I made myself stop thinking.

We drove the few blocks through the darkness, and when we got there, Lincoln was standing in the front yard, bounding around like he was too happy to stay on the ground, he wanted to practice flying.

I held the dog by his collar and took him through the house to the back and tied him up again. He kept wanting to jump up and down. I tied a monster knot, one I invented on the spot, and tugged it hard, Lincoln licking my ear. I turned on the spigot at the side of the house and filled up his plastic basin.

Ted wrestled the top off a can of chicken meat and put it in a bowl with some leftover macaroni and cheese. When he took it outside, Lincoln gobbled the food, and when it was gone, he licked the concrete around the plate.

“What does he usually eat?” Ted asked.

“Dog food,” I said.

Ted said he felt like watching television. He said there was rum raisin ice cream in the fridge. He wasn't sulking, or acting clipped and cold the way Mother did after a fight. He acted like he wanted to avoid me for awhile, maybe hoping I'd get over my mood. He fingered the remote and watched a show with the sound off, penguins standing around.

I had a glass of water. It tasted like dirt. I went outside and watched the lights of airplanes drift across the stars. Lincoln's rope wasn't long enough for him to come and sit beside me. He came as far as he could and lay on his belly. He whined a little, a quiet whistling noise.

I listened while Ted made a phone call. I tensed up, but he was talking about what dumb videos they had at the mall. I could tell by the way he used his voice, sounding confident and caring, that he must be talking to Connie.

When he was off the phone, he came out beside me on the patio. “Hear that?” he said.

Hear what? I wanted to ask. I assumed he was referring to how cool he sounded on the telephone just then, showing off, something he rarely did. Maybe Connie had agreed to leave for Las Vegas tonight, a package marriage—rings, chapel, and deluxe suite—and he was breaking the news.

I knew that Adler and Mother must be back now. They would be unpacking, or maybe they would leave that for tomorrow, go right to bed.

“Coyotes,” said Ted.

There had been a puppylike yammering in the distance, not a sound to catch my attention compared with the faint rumble of jets and the muttering of various televisions in the neighborhood.

Lincoln was standing still, nose toward the sound.

“They sound like little dogs,” I said.

“They aren't little,” he said. “They aren't dogs.”

Ted liked sounding this way, knowledgeable, tough. I realized how little I knew. I tucked my feet under the chair I was in, a folding aluminum chair with little corrosion bubbles on the arms. Rattlesnakes, I thought. Scorpions.

I felt his touch in my hair. I don't like to be touched there. It just messes it up, even though I keep it casual, wash and wear. The sun around here would color it, not to mention fry it dry. “I didn't bring enough clothes,” I said.

“You don't make a lot of sense sometimes,” said Ted.

I had forgotten my cigarettes again, left them in the living room. Maybe I wasn't a cigarette smoker anymore. It happens: You aren't what you used to be.

The phone rang in the kitchen. Ted had one of those houses where everything was out of date, the telephone fastened to the wall, the refrigerator with a plastic ice tray you had to bend in your hands to loosen the cubes.

Ted didn't move, looking down at me.

I made a gesture—go ahead and answer it.

I think we both knew who it was before he even approached the kitchen. I could hear him inside, the way he said, “Hello, Mom,” a little loudly so I could hear.

Yes, I heard him say. She's here. There was a longer pause, and I knew what kind of questions she was asking.

Instead of answering questions, though, Ted was just saying, “Yes. Sure,” listening, making encouraging sounds. “That's right.”

If you didn't know Ted, you'd think he sounded casual, easygoing, an ordinary guy talking to his mom, no problem. I could hear it, though, the tension resurrecting itself. Mother had fought with each of us, swearing that we would send her to a mental hospital.

I have to wonder sometimes what animals are trying to say, they spend so much time making noise.

“I don't think she wants to talk,” said Ted. “She's out on the patio, looking at the stars.”

I could imagine what my mother pictured. She imagined a luxuriant patio with broad-leafed plants, a little fountain trickling in the corner, ferns. Adler was probably in the same room with her, his hands folded, waiting patiently for her to get off the phone.

“I won't,” Ted was saying. “Don't worry,” he said with a tired chuckle.

The coyotes were there, yammering like puppies in pain.

26

A couple of crickets started up, over by the hibiscus. Ted stayed on the phone for a while, and I gazed up at the sky.

The stars were an invisible net stretched tight by tiny silver pins. I can feel the net attached to my own private darkness, my secret sky.

Maureen would know what I was talking about, but she would be distracted by things that didn't bother me. She would hear the clatter of a trash can lid several houses away and say she bet nobody recycled cans around here, just threw them away.

He was off the phone, there beside me on the patio, hands in his pockets, his shadow, in the light from the kitchen, falling all the way to the fence.

“She's worried,” he said. “She wants you to call her.”

I didn't bother to respond.

“You should,” he said.

“What were you saying?” I asked.

“Mom told me not to let you drive me crazy,” he said.

How nice of her, I thought, to show such interest in both of us. “She'd be shocked,” I said, “if she knew you couldn't afford new work boots.”

He looked down at his feet. “These are just getting broken in, Anna.”

No more Anna Teresa. No more brotherly calm. He was impatient, weary. “I pay my own rent,” he said. “I buy my groceries. I'm learning how to lay sprinklers.”

“That's an amazing branch of science,” I said. “Sprinklers.”

He shook his head, took a deep breath and let it out. I could sense him full of things he wanted to say.

“Maybe Wade'll start you in on weed pulling,” I said. “Let you study that for a few years.”

“You can't get far in Southern California landscaping without a feel for irrigation,” he said.

“The drip system,” I said. “Tubes leading right to the base of each little plant.”

“It's efficient,” he said.

I looked around at the blank concrete for a moment, knowing his eyes were on me. “I counted on you. I thought you were special, Ted. I thought you, of all people, could really do something wonderful with your life.”