The Grand Tour (6 page)

A magnum of Moët collected dust in the back of the cooler. It had been there since he'd gotten the job four years earlier. He sprang it from its prison, at first justifying the theft by thinking about what an asshole the owner, Stu—who spent almost all his copious free time golfing on the verdant and manicured courses that gulped the city's scant water supply like sun-sick hounds—was; then by thinking about how the champagne would soon go bad if it wasn't already; then dispensing with the charade altogether. It was there and he wanted it, that was all. He lifted a champagne flute for good measure.

Outside, he locked the door and dropped his key in the mail slot. He straightened in the tall sunlight, feeling like an inmate released from prison on a surprise parole. The book had sold. He realized he hadn't called his editor yet or asked how much money he'd be getting, then he realized it didn't matter: if it was only a hundred dollars, he could take that to Apache Nights and put it all on 27 Red. He drove to the north side of South Mountain and turned up an access road. The road petered out next to a TV antenna station about halfway up the hill, and he parked in the runoff beside a hiking trail, next to a giant
NO PARKING
sign. He walked slowly up the zigzagging trail, pausing frequently to rest, then left the path and moved through the uneven brush until he found a spot that suited him.

It was a flat patch of sandy scrub, with a huge dark saguaro standing to his left like a terse, disapproving ranch hand watching the town drunk on an epic binge. He looked down the mountain at his adoptive city. From a distance, Phoenix looked like a real place with history and secrets and not the pretend place it was, with everything built five minutes ago, a pastel Disneyland for Republicans and old people and methamphetamine addicts. He uncorked the bottle and turned it up, spilling a frothing mouthful down the front of his shirt. He was embarrassed by his need to commemorate the moment—it suggested there was still a part of him, however small, that remained capable of pride. And, worse, hope. Shouldn't he have known better than that by now?

Yes, but he couldn't help it. Ego and its running buddy Sexual Desire were the nightmare guests at Dignity's party—drunk buffoons that stayed far too late, refused to take polite hints, trashed the place, and insulted their host. The champagne stung his throat as it went down. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with everything. The vast city planing out in front of him didn't begrudge him his frail vanity. It didn't care. And on either side of Phoenix, the empty desert seemed like an absolution. It was why, despite the harsh, alien terrain, and his lack of relatives and family history there, he'd stayed for so long. The desert was unforgiving, yet it forgave. Having no memory, what choice did it have?

On the way home, he stopped at a bar, then another one, then possibly a third. He was there for a while, and everything got foggy and smudged. The day outside had somehow darkened without his notice or assent. He squinted up at the bartender, one of those very fat shorn-headed bald guys that grow a goatee in order to create the impression of having an actual face and neck and head rather than just a fleshy head-shaped lump growing out of their collars.

“The book sold,” he told the bartender.

The bartender said, “That's the third time you told me. Go the fuck home.”

As he drove south on the John Wayne Parkway into the desert, the halogen lights of the outer suburbs of Chandler left vapor traces on his stunned retinas. Some kind of animal—a dog or coyote or mountain lion—flashed in his headlights, green eyes ablaze. He jerked the wheel and his head to the right in tandem. There was a tremendous sense of fluid motion, water falling and falling, then hitting bottom with a soft slap.

When he came to, his car was splayed around a concrete overpass piling, the hood buckled and steam escaping with a disgusted sigh. Two cop cars had stopped ahead of him, just past the overpass, their gumballs blinking on and off. In the distance, he heard more sirens. He wanted to tell everyone that he was fine, to go home, not to make a stink about it. He wanted to open the door and jog off into the black maw of the desert. Instead, he sat there with his head on the steering wheel and his nose dripping blood, until something went a-tap-tap-tapping on his window. He looked up to see a penlight and, past that, the face of an unfriendly-looking policeman. The cop tapped the window again, and Richard rolled it down.

The policeman said, “Have you been drinking, sir?”

“The book sold.”

The first check, when it arrived, was eighteen thousand and change. He stood in front of his trailer and rubbed his finger over the embossed type. There were three more on the way, a very nice contract for eighty-five thousand, gross, less Stan's agent fee. Of course, another chunk would immediately go to taxes, but sixty-five thousand, or however much that left, was still a lot of money. Not enough to never work again. Not enough to move to Europe and live out his life as a grappa-swilling letch. Not quite enough to start his own bar, from which he would ban people like himself on sight. Not enough to do lots of things, but enough to not feel like a complete fool for quitting his job, totaling his car, and getting DUIey-Twoey all in the same day.

It was enough, as it turned out, to buy a nearby house in foreclosure, in a superexurban neighborhood called the Bluffs. There was no bluff visible in the landscape, so perhaps the name referred to the cavalier attitude local banks and homeowners had taken toward the adjustable-rate mortgages that subsequently emptied the neighborhood. It turned out they were giving the things away—all you had to do was show up at auction with a roll of quarters and a ballpoint pen. Richard got the house—a fantastically ugly stucco ranch with a porte-cochere and an ornamental chimney—for twenty thousand down and two hundred a month. It was one of two occupied homes on the street, a lonely cul-de-sac that hung out exposed into the scrubby desert like the caboose wagon in a doomed pioneer convoy. At night the coyotes called and responded across miles of empty land. The desolation of the place seemed a drawback to most buyers, hence the price, but Richard loved it. If only, he thought, the other homeowner on the street would default, it would be perfect.

The phone rang in his new living room. Groaning up from the La-Z-Boy, he picked his way across the room, covered with trash, books, and unpacked moving boxes. It was more or less the same amount of garbage and unwanted possessions he'd had in the trailer, just spaced out to fill the larger living area. The white, plastic rotary phone lay on the sofa, next to the sliding glass door that opened to the patio. He sat down and hoisted the heavy receiver, like lifting a small dumbbell.

“Yeah.”

“Richard, it's Stan.”

“Hey.” His attention remained thoroughly commanded by a
Dukes of Hazzard
episode he'd been watching on the TV; or, more specifically, by Catherine Bach; or, even more specifically, by Catherine Bach's ass. An earlier spell hovering motionless over his typewriter had culminated in the bold decision to squander the rest of the day. If he wasn't going to produce anything, it could at least be a choice.

“You there?”

“Oh, yeah.” He turned the volume down.

“I assume you haven't checked your email lately?”

“Not in the last few months, no.”

“Are you sitting down?”

“Do people actually say that? For future reference, I'm always sitting down.”

Daisy Duke bent over the General Lee, and he candidly imagined himself bent over her back. The exertion alone, to say nothing of the excitement, he decided, would kill him within five seconds. Just before the phone rang, he'd been considering self-abuse, a term that became more and more apt with age. “What?”

“I said the book's doing great. The reviews are glowing. It has critical mass.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“It means everyone's lining up behind it. I've seen it happen before.”

“Okay, well. Great.”

“You don't understand, it's selling.”

“Really.” Richard clicked off the TV, and over the next twenty minutes, Stan detailed, in loving and exhaustive fashion, what all of this meant. It meant more money. It meant the other books were going to be reprinted in trade paperback. It meant interviews with NPR, the
TBR,
and a peppering of other acronyms that Richard had never heard of.

“And you know what all this means.”

“No,” he said.

“Book tour. ASAP. Speaking engagements, some of them paying.”

“Which means flying.”

“No, I was thinking you could ride a camel around everywhere, like one of the wise men.”

“I hate flying.”

“So what? Everybody hates flying. Listen, we've been getting calls. There's real interest. Do you know how rare that is? Usually you'd be screaming at three deaf retirees in the Topeka Books-a-Million. Do you hate money, too?”

Richard did hate money, but he hated not having it more. And the amount of money Stan estimated was startling and had a persuasive quality. It would be enough to see him through another couple of years, maybe even pay off his mortgage. Commerce, Stan said, was a cruel taskmaster. He might never have the chance to cash in like this again. Did he want to go back to bartending? Richard imagined talking to the same stiffs, the same horrible bums who came in and bought their beer with quarters they'd dug out from beneath someone else's couch cushions. They got drunk and eventually tipped with the only thing they had that was worth giving: their absence from the bar.

“Okay,” he said. “But listen, I drive whenever possible.”

“Have you ever heard of Ambien? Get some.”

He hadn't heard of Ambien, but his foreman friend in Mesa said he could get some, no problem. That they would make flying easy. Over the next month, he became better acquainted with his publicist, Dana, a loud, merry woman he'd had two cursory conversations with months earlier, who suddenly wanted to chat every day. Could he block off three weeks for a tour? He checked his nonexistent calendar, filled with all his nonexistent obligations, and found he could. Great, she said, we'll kick it off at Spillman College, a money gig. And did he want a student escort?

He bought the thirty-dollar suit. He called Eileen again.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it's Richard.”

“Hi.”

He looked down at the itinerary Dana had sent over. “I'm sorry about that last conversation.”

“It's okay.”

“No, it's not. But listen, they've got me on a book tour. I'm gonna be in New York on the twenty-seventh. I'm doing a reading and talk at Argosy, then a cocktail party somewhere. I was hoping I could see you, maybe get some dinner.”

The intervening pause was almost comically long, but Richard was penitent and silent. He read the names of the western cities on the list—
Spillman, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pomona, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City
—over and over to himself, an incantation of sorts, trying to keep his mind clear. He'd learned long ago that the best way to ensure something didn't happen was to consciously hope for it. The only time good things happened in his life was when he hadn't hoped for them to happen (Cindy's conception) or when it was something he'd hoped for, but then it didn't happen for so long that he eventually forgot he'd ever cared (the book). He'd stopped following sports on this basis, finding that any team on which he focused his diseased mojo—the Giants from 1975 to 1982, for example—would immediately get injured en masse or die in a plane crash or at any rate suck in perpetuity until he stopped giving a shit.

Finally, Eileen said, “Yes, that would be nice, I think. Call me when you're close, and we'll firm up plans.”

Richard put the leash on Victor, opened the sliding glass door, and walked out into his backyard, as he thought of it, though really it was just the desert. The only rough property demarcation was a small arroyo that began fifty or so feet away. Victor liked to pee in the arroyo and smell the desert wildflowers that bloomed on the edges, and so they went there. Cars were just visible up on the nearby highway, speeding away from Phoenix, and who could blame them? The last stragglers of the rush-hour push to the exurbs, they always seemed sad to him, chasing after something that had already passed by long ago. The empurpled sun clung to its mantle over the desert horizon, and he felt his heart was the same: tired and bruised at a late hour, but still somehow hopeful in its way.

He walked Victor to the end of the gulch, which butted up against the base of the road, the sides rising shoulder high. Motors hummed past. Eileen's face was vivid in his mind. The day before, he had taken the bus into downtown Phoenix to the central library, something he had begun doing to check his email. It was a modern building, described in a placard in the entryway as
a curving copper mesa split by a stainless steel canyon, inspired by Monument Valley
. It looked like a child's toy piano to Richard, carelessly flung down in the scrub and sand. He sat down at one of the free terminals and looked for pictures of his ex-wife and, as always, was surprised by the quantity online.

He was both pleased and disappointed to see that she looked the same as ever. The same as she'd looked the last time he saw her, soon after his second divorce, when she'd stopped through Phoenix to see how he was holding up. Better than ever, really. She looked like she was working out, like maybe she'd had some very subtle and expensive plastic surgery done. In one photo he studied closely, she stood behind a lectern and jabbed at the air with two fingers. Her face still radiated the fierce intelligence and vitality it had always had, but the good looks she'd possessed at thirty had hardened and heightened themselves into a kind of monumentality, a sculptural exemplification of the ethical, intellectual life she'd always prized above everything else. She'd gotten the face she deserved—they both had. He'd been hoping she would look like most fifty-seven-year-old women, i.e., like a fifty-seven-year-old man, but it wasn't the case. She was still beautiful.