Truants (19 page)

“Okay, be an orphan.” I ran up to Will just as the glass door slid open.

A man stood before us, his expression a confused combination of pains. He was obviously irritated that anyone unannounced was at his door at nine o’clock at night, and further perplexed to be confronted by his father. I fully expected him to scream, but instead he coughed: “Dad!”

Will’s face was blank, searching, tentative; his mouth a fragile smile. “Hello, Robbie.”

“Dad.” This Robbie said again, letting go of the door. “Dad. Why, what are you … dad! Oh, come in! Come in!” and he waved us inside. It was one of those extended moments when, due to nervousness, he neither stopped talking nor moving his hands. His hands jumped from pocket to pocket in the kelly green jumpsuit he wore. There were zippers in it everywhere. Evidently he had just returned from a parachute jump or a gardening meet. I have always held that one-piece clothes are for babies, so that colored my first encounter with Will’s son. The crotch of the suit rode up considerably, a fact that may have contributed to Robbie’s animated state.

“Janice!” Robbie yelled into the other room. “Janice, come here!” I couldn’t tell if it was the way a man calls his wife to see his father or if it was a cry for help. Then Robbie said to us: “What are you doing, dad? Did they give you the day off?”

“It’s kind of a field trip,” I said.

“No, Rob, no. This is my friend, Collin.” I shook Robbie’s hand.

“I’m glad to meet you,” I said. “Any son of Will’s is—”

“I’ve left Blue Mesa,” Will said. Robbie’s face assumed a sober regularity while he took in the news, a face I imagined he used in business, “I’ve left the home and come up here.”

Robbie said nothing. His teeth came out to work his upper lip, and every so often he’d run two fingers around his mouth. When he raised his arms the suit stretched so much I thought he’d leave the parquet floor.

So we stood a little moment in the foyer. The space was that: a
space
, not a room. The one rug was on the wall. It portrayed in hooked wool a saguaro cactus holding up the sun. I could see into the living room where all was white; rug, couch, reflected in the glass on the other side. If a person stood in the right spot in this glass house, he could be reflected right out of himself, side to side to infinity.

Will was still expecting things, I think, but it all sat clearly on me. There had been some mistake in the hospital forty years ago, a switch; Robbie was not Will’s son. He couldn’t be.

The worst was the kids running in and climbing onto Will, calling, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” I thought about it then:
Grandfather
. The baby, three or four, I don’t know, maybe two, wore turquoise pajamas with a Superman shield on the chest in red, something from an exclusive catalogue. As she jumped up and down, I thought, “I should have expected this.” The other child, a boy of six or so, calmly pulled his grandfather to his knees to throw his arms around his grandfather’s neck and not let go. The scene was so stinking sweet, I wasn’t ready for it. They were for the moment, I guess,
grandchildren
. They filled up the space in a rich antic repetition of my old friend’s genes.

Janice came in. She was a pretty woman, almost too pretty, the kind of woman who could host talk shows. Her pale, blond hair was short in a clever way, a way which didn’t look short. She carried a magazine in one hand and a pencil in the other. Seeing her children on Will, she smiled but with a little start, and blended it into a country club: “Why Will, hello! How
are
you?”

What did her in was that she looked at Robbie while she said it. Janice stepped up and shook Will’s hand and gave him the symbol of a kiss, and when she stepped back she had somehow gathered her kids by her side.

I mean, I won’t forget it. Will there, alone for a minute on his knees, alone there in that space. I could paint it, and that’s saying one whole lot remembering Margaret and art class. But I could: the kids, now quietly attached to their mother; Janice and her interpretation of a smile; Robbie his hands in his pockets. The green of his jumpsuit would be hard to duplicate. Me, the only alien blood in the house, standing behind an old man on his knees on a brown and blond inlaid parquet floor. In the quiet I could hear people shooting each other on the television in the other room.

Will rose.

Janice gave Robbie a look, I think. I saw her eyebrows ripple, and she and the children were gone. She did not look at me once.

“Well, I don’t know, dad,” Robbie said. “I mean we’ve been through this before, right partner?” He tried to laugh and Will stood still and allowed the younger man to put a hand on his shoulder.

Robbie removed the hand.

“We’ve been through this, and …” his hands plunged. “Hey,” he said, trying for a fresh start, trying to say something impossible, trying, I think, to be honest. I almost felt sorry for him. “Hey, we settled this.” And then again the laugh, the gesture. “Come on; you got the day off, right?”

Will had not moved.

“Can you stay the night?” Robbie said. “You and Collin?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. It was
no
.

“What about a sandwich? Come on, you’ve been driving. Have a sandwich and stay over … Janice!”

“I’m not really very hungry,” I said to Will.

“Janice! Janice!”

The baby girl peeked out of a door down the hall and giggled at me. When she did it twice more, I crept down there leaving Will and his son and I crouched by the door. She peeked out.

“BOO!” I said.

She screamed a beginning string of giggles and retreated. I followed her into the kitchen, bumping into Janice.

“What do you want?” she said in such a way that I questioned whether she was addressing me. She had the potential to be fierce, I decided.

“Me? Nothing. I was just …”

“Who are you? What are you doing with that old man?” She said, gathering her kids.

“Say,” I started, “you’re mistaken—”

“Out!” she said, the way people do late at night in the suburbs. “Get out!”

I should have left right there. But she rankled me; I was going to stay until she understood our mission; suddenly I was willing to argue.

But she clutched the telephone and began dialing deliberately, looking at me between each digit.

I went on: “Utterly mistaken. There is no interloper.” I pointed at myself. “I am not interloping here, Janice.”

When I said her name, she cried out.

“Who are you calling?”

“The police. I want you to leave.”

“Don’t do that. Listen …”

She did not stop.

“Listen! We’re leaving.” I held up my arms. “No harm done. We got cleaned up and came over to see the grandkids.”

What I was saying was not making sense to her. She was turned absolutely on the phone. I did not want her to call the police and re-place me in Noble Canyon.

“Please don’t do that.
It is not necessary
. We are leaving.” I pantomimed opening the door. She did not move, ear on phone.

I reached for the receiver in what I considered to be a very gentle, pacifist motion.

When I touched it, she kneed me. I blacked out for a tenth of a second, and then it was a flashing rush of gonad temper that surfaced next, and I disconnected the call with a finger.

She was glaring at me, full force. Finally, I stood up straight. It was a mistake.

“Look …”

Charity demands that I call her next action reflex, as she struck me in the nose with the telephone receiver. Something in my nose was broken hotly, and while blood flushed my shirt, my eyes—blind and white hot—seemed to converge on the spot.

My next actions, committed as they were by a blind man bleeding in a kitchen, seem like the remote heroics of someone else.

I compressed the telephone, the only object I was in touch with, in my pulsating hand, and ripped the entire mechanism off the wall. It was pure adrenal temper. And it didn’t quite rip off the wall. One staple, holding the cord, flew from the wall in a dusting of paint chips. I yanked again, and another staple ripped out, farther along. I was crazed. My steaming, bloody, throbbing nose dictated it all.

Janice stood in the corner in front of the awed children. Her face was a blur, but I realized—distantly—that I was unwittingly giving her the performance she had originally anticipated. I should have stopped.

But. I ripped the phone cord, staple by staple from the kitchen wall in nine vigorous pulls, sending chips of paint in a flurry, until I came to the plug in the floorboard. I pulled twice on this, but it wouldn’t give. So I fell to the floor and braced my feet on the wall and pulled and pulled like a man escaping in a rowboat, but it wouldn’t snap. This is not what I’d seen on T.V.; this is not the one-tug-quick-snap. When my hands were all red with white lines from pulling, I stopped, stood up and ranged through the kitchen like a bear until I found a butcher knife. With this instrument, as my anger, energy, and life-forces faded, I cut the goddamned telephone cord. It took three tries.

This is when Robbie entered the kitchen. His hands flew out of his jumpsuit, and for a moment I mistook his stance for a lethal karate pose. “Okay now!” he shouted. “Hey, okay now!”

Okay now. Blood was the theme in the kitchen, and I seemed to be holding the knife. A broad bib hung on my shirt like a brown scab, and the floor was a constellation of smeared drops. Robbie continued the “Okay now!” speech until Will opened the door.

“Collin!” he said. “What happened?” He came to me and held my head in both hands along the chin bones. I could make out his eyes squinting at where I felt my own had merged. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t swallow. I was on the plateau before tears, trying to hold. Will backed up a bit and I saw his hand come up, and he placed his thumb and forefinger in the red center of the pain.

“Broke your nose, buster,” he said.

“Yup,” I said and the word broke and then I was crying and bleeding in Will’s arms.

“Broke your nose.”

The family did not move. I was sorry for scaring the kids. It hurt that I had lived four years in one of the roughest detention centers in Arizona, and I had to come to the suburbs to be struck by blunt instruments and wield a knife. Robbie picked up the phone after a while, and though he could see the severed end, he put the receiver to his ear. I guess it was all magic to him anyhow, cord or not.

“Dead,” he said.

Will let me go. He looked at his relatives where they stood in the corner in front of the glass cupboards.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Robbie.”

“Yeah,” Robbie shrugged. “We can get it fixed.”

It was a fairly silly thing for him to say. I suspected him of being a good man, of doing as his neighbors did, of being competent in things I had no idea of.

“Sure you can, son.”

I placed the knife on the counter. The handle was sticky when I let it go. I could see pretty well out of one of my eyes now, and I had scared the kids. They stood by Janice, who had only done her duty in her household. With the crying, something in my knees had given way, and I said flatly:

“I don’t understand this, Mr. and Mrs. Clare. We didn’t come to cut up your telephone. I’m sorry for that. We came … it was a reunion.”

No one said anything.

Will opened the door for me and said, “We’re going now.”

Robbie moved behind us as I followed Will past the acres of gleaming glass, everywhere glass, the white living room, the white rug, all gone in glass.

“You can stay overnight,” Robbie offered. “I mean …”

“No, thanks, Rob. We’ll go,” Will said. “Goodbye.” He stepped out of the house. I turned to Robbie, trying to think of some final thing to say, something that would anchor this scene as believable later. Something. Then I saw the children, again peering by the kitchen door, fascinated by bloodman from outerspace, the worst thing ever in their house.

“Kids,” I said, my nose only numb now, the icy swollen center of my face. “Remember this. Tonight. That’s your grandfather out there …”

I couldn’t go on. Just because planning is not one of my strengths doesn’t mean I’m a master of the extemporaneous.

I know now that I wanted to instruct them to enroll their own father in The Blue Mesa Boarding Home as soon as he stuttered once, or drooled. I wanted to tell them that he would be better off. I wanted to tell them they were supposed to. I wanted to yell “You started the damn thing!” at Robbie. But we don’t get everything we want, and besides, the point was made.

Sure I’d wrecked the whole visit, but it would have been pretty bad without my activities. I backed out without a bow, feeling somewhat better about the circumstances under which one has his nose broken, and I walked to the car like a boxer after the final bell, my nose a new fire, my girlfriend in the stands.

31

*************

North

For eighty-five dollars I enjoyed the services of the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Las Vegas and those of Dr. S. E. Thornton, a deft and dextrous woman who unplugged and realigned my nose in less than one minute. The best thing about the visit was that she referred to my injury as “trauma” which was right as right. I was hoping she could treat Will also. The worst thing about the visit was the emergency room beforehand which was occupied by two couples. All four people had been shot in various places. They sprawled across the chairs opposite ours while we waited. They had been to a party.

Seeing people in worse shape than we were alleviated the need to talk. Will handled the hospital scene well, sitting by me as if this was routine, dealing with the doctor directly, paying the nurse cash as Louisa walked me back to the car. He had made up his mind about something.

At the car, Will said to Louisa, “Drive north.”

“North!” She laughed. “Which way is fucking north!”

He laughed too, briefly, and said, “The freeway is over there. You enter left and go right.
Salt Lake City
it will say. Okay?”

“Enter left. Go right. Salt Lake City. No problem.”

“I called my brother who lives there. I’ll tell you about him later,” he said, getting into the back seat. He didn’t look defeated. He didn’t look like some loser old guy at large with the orphans. “Now, I feel like sleeping in a car.” He reclined on the seat and said to himself: “Enter left, go right. No problem.”