Tumbledown (24 page)
Authors: Robert Boswell
Little wonder that he distrusted capitalism.
He could have held on to certain paintings and let their value accumulate, but he was always short on cash. This was inevitably true despite his university salary and his wife’s community college salary. Money simply evaporated.
He had been a reasonably successful artist all of his adult life, and sometimes he thought this was a fatal limitation, that he could not draw on the years of frustration and difficult economic times that other artists bitched about. In such moments, he would seem to himself like a watchdog who knows the route around the fenced property so well that he can take no pleasure in it, and what he wishes for is an intruder, an enemy, a justification for all this circling, and he comes to love the imagined intruder that would give him reason to bark and attack, and in his misery he comes to mistake those he loves for those he hates and he wants to bite their heads off. In particular, in the summer of 1987, his patience with Pook was giving out, like the flickering, rolling screen of an old television that would soon go black.
In their family, not counting the animals, only Jimmy and his sister Violet were not artists, and they were not artists for different reasons. Violet had the talent but did not envy the life. Jimmy had no talent and even his stick figures were wobbly and uncertain, like television with bad reception. Though Violet was closer to him in age than Pook, Jimmy saw a lot less of her. They did not become close until after Pook died and she went away to college. But she was there, too, that summer, sixteen years old and in her room or off at her summer jobs—scooping ice cream or shelving books at the library or taking tickets from the sweating patrons who wished to escape the heat in the dark of a movie theater. Three jobs, but it was the one at the cineplex that defined the summer of 1987. She made a new set of friends at the theater and they got to see movies free, plus a discount on popcorn and sodas. She did not see every movie released that summer, but she kept a list of the ones she saw:
Creepshow 2, River’s Edge, Ishtar, Beverly Hills Cop II, Ernest Goes to Camp, The Untouchables, Harry and the Hendersons, The Witches of Eastwick, Roxanne, Dragnet, Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, Robocop, Full Metal Jacket, Jean de Florette, Adventures in Babysitting, Summer School, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, La Bamba, The Lost Boys, No Way Out, Dirty Dancing, The Big Easy, The Princess Bride.
She could have sneaked the boys in, but then they’d be there every night, Jimmy talking about some inane action figure or baseball player, Billy-the-Blob blubbering happily alongside him, and Pook, her sweet and silent and ultimately scary big brother, for whom movies were a torture, shadowing the younger boys and bothering her new friends with his size and silence and the hibernating violence that now and again woke within him.
Because he had flunked two grades, Pook was in Violet’s classes during her freshman year of high school, and she had seated herself beside him and whispered to him, and guided him as best she could, losing most of her long time friends in the process. He still did not pass and still got into fights, and she never had close friends again while she was in high school, except for a boy at the cineplex, whose name was Armando Sandoval, two years older than Violet and from the other side of town, already enrolled at the University of Arizona. Armando was handsome and funny and homosexual, and he had a car. He drove her to work and bought her presents, just like a real boyfriend, but without the pressure of romance and disrobing and sex. Except with Violet, he pretended to be straight.
Violet was legitimately straight but a virgin, and she liked having Armando as a boyfriend. “Keep in mind,” May Candler advised her, “all the things that attract you to him now will eventually drive you crazy.” They went to a lot of movies together. Armando preferred big hits and liked to analyze their success—not what the movies were about but why the public lapped them up—a love of commerce over art that Violet found entertaining. She dragged him to one dark, artsy film
(River’s Edge),
which he
absitively loathed.
“The director is showing off how serious he is,” Armando argued, “like those boys who wear capes to parade their suffering.” Any movie that wasn’t at least trying to be a blockbuster didn’t interest him.
What Jimmy had in common with his sister: they both liked to read. In 1987 Jimmy had a strong preference for comic books, baseball novels, and the Hardy Boys (though Frank and Joe’s hold on him was giving out), or books with sexy covers and descriptions of girls putting their slender arms around boys’ muscular necks. Violet gave him
On the Road,
but he never got beyond the first few pages. She loved Jane Austen, rereading three of the novels that summer
(Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion),
and the Brontës
(Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre)
and Edith Wharton (
The Age of Innocence
twice), but she also read
The Exorcist,
which she found in a stack on the floor of her parents’ closet, and
Valley of the Dolls,
which was also in the stack, and
The World According to Garp,
which her mother checked out of the library and lined up on the lowboy in the hall, along with her other library choices
(The Prince of Tides, Crooked Hearts, It, A Perfect Spy),
all of which Violet read before her mother completed
Garp,
and the only hardback her parents purchased new:
Presumed Innocent
by Scott Turow.
Violet and Jimmy both imagined that they’d be writers, the creators of worlds within worlds, but Violet had turned her back on comic books (it was Armando who insisted they see
Superman IV
) and Jimmy wasn’t yet reading the novels she loved. The only time this shared interest provided them with a moment’s intercourse was when each agreed to cast the other as a character in a single sentence involving a simile. This was Violet’s idea, and she had to explain to her brother what a simile was. Her goal was to teach her brother the difference between the books she loved and the junk he read.
Description of Jimmy, as written by Violet:
He charged about dirtily from one meaningless undertaking to the next meaningless undertaking like an unquenchable hummingbird in a store that sold nothing but plastic flowers.
A description of Violet, as written by Jimmy:
She combed her hair and made up her face with the precision of a watchmaker and so became invulnerable to the passage of time and the things she touched with the fingertips of her left hand got younger instead of older and she knew in her heart she had to use her power for goodness instead of evil.
“That’s more than one sentence,” Violet said, annoyed, because anyone could see that if he cut out the comic book elements his description would be better than hers. “I’m so sick of superheroes,” she went on. “Why can’t you accept the world the way it is?”
“I do,” Jimmy said. “But think about it. In the whole world there are billions of people, right? Billions and billions and billions, to be accurate, and surely one of them must have powers that he keeps hidden. I mean, what are the odds that no one would have any superpowers? Not even one out of the ten hundred billion who are alive or used to be alive?”
“One hundred percent against,” she replied.
“No way. Like what about Pook, who can talk to animals in
their
language?”
“He cannot.”
“Then why do the animals like him?”
“That’s not a superpower, that’s just—I can’t talk to you. You need a bath.”
“Here we go with the bath again. I was in the cistern like ten minutes ago.”
“
Soap.
Shampoo. Scrubbing. Why don’t you become Mr. Superclean?”
“If it’ll make you happy.”
After that conversation, Violet decided she did not want to be a writer but rather a librarian or bookseller or editor, and Jimmy took a bath. The contest took place the last week of July of that fateful summer. At this point in their shared life, Jimmy and Violet would both have described the family as
happy,
despite Pook’s getting kicked out of school, despite Frederick’s intermittent anger, despite May’s distance. Later on, of course, the children would hear about their father’s indiscretions and May’s bouts of depression, how he would get drunk and insult his colleagues at the university, how she would go months without letting him into her bed, but these adult secrets did not tarnish the narrative to which the children held tightly—that everything had been good until Pook died.
DAY 8:
By the time lunch came around Friday, Maura and Vex had a routine. Overnight, he had fashioned a giant rubber gasket that fit over the end of the stubby concrete pole and connected perfectly with the Carlton Hotel. When break time came, she grabbed the ashtray and he, the gasket. He lit her cigarette and she lit his, using his flip-top lighter that produced several inches of flame. He taught her how to roll cigarettes, how to tie various knots that were superior to the traditional figure eight, and how to tell time by the concrete pole’s shadow.
“What if it’s nighttime?” she asked.
“Then you’re off the clock,” he said.
He told her about mental exercises that permitted him to look around corners, vaginal exercises that permitted women to make themselves impenetrable to men, and an insane but systematic reason why no one should have hair more than a quarter inch long. “The Samson story was reversed, see, to keep people in the dark. It’s growing hair that makes you weak, not cutting it off.” In the workshop, he threw fits, yelling terrible red-faced curses. Crews would have given him the boot, but Billy just made him sit in a corner until he could pretend to be rational. Vex hated to lose assembly time and squirmed in the seat, but obediently sat when he was told to and stared at his hands. When he was alone with Maura in the parking lot, he never yelled or threatened and she enjoyed his company.
“Why don’t you want anybody to touch you?” she asked him. “Says who?”
She made her voice low and ridiculous. “Nobody touch Vex!”
His laughter was sly and skittish. “I got a few topics of nobody’s business. Chaos in the hacky sack.” He pointed with the cigarette at his head. “Chimney up your thoughts long enough and see for yourself. Like when you were in there sparking at that boy Whine.”
“His name is Rhine.”
“Nobody’s name is Rhine. Another trick, you gotta wise up. What’ve I been saying all day?”
“A lot of incoherent loony-ass shit.”
“A loon shits, that’s guano.” He coughed out a laugh. “I can joke, too. See? But serious here, a man’s got clefts in him, woman too, and gorges and deep, deep divides. You think you can build a bridge? You think this here is bridge-building school? Pack life into a box of your own making is it. But how do you do it, right?”
“Which leads me to the obvious question,” Maura said, stubbing out her smoke. “Were you born a muddle-headed trout or did something happen to you?”
Vex offered his sly chuckle. “I’d let
you
touch me.”
“I’d rather chew on electrical cord.”
“If I still had a thing for women, I’d have a thing for you.”
“Switch over to household pets?”
“I’m making my mind pure, like the deep down in the planet water that takes days to get to the surface, even with a high-efficiency submersible pump and the horsepower of a Silverado. Pure mind can see inside the mechanics of anything. You walk from here to there, I see ball joints, bone pistons, hinges. Go ahead, walk. You’ll see me see you.”
She tried it. It was a lot like being naked. He nodded appreciatively and she blushed.
“Built exactly right,” he said, “balanced and sturdy and strong, like a perfect backhoe.”
It wasn’t an ideal compliment but she blushed again.
“Sex is all about practice.” He gestured with his cigarette. “Like pistons and rings. You have to run the engine high and low, vary the RPMs, or the rings don’t set right. You follow?”
She replied by crushing her cigarette in the Carlton Hotel, noticing that she had only just lit it. The words
virgin smoke
popped into her head.
Here I am crushing my virgin smoke,
she thought. Smoking, too, had required practice, as had drinking beer.
“Having too much sexual bounty has been a mixed dressing.” He lifted his hand-rolled cigarette to her face. “Look how evenly that burns.”
Billy Atlas took her aside that afternoon to ask her if Vex was a problem for her.
“He’s weird,” she said, “and creep city half the time. I maybe like him, though. In small doses. He’s okay enough.”
“He told me I could lose weight,” Billy said, “by imagining bees pollinating soap bubbles.”
“That sounds like him, all right.”
“Maybe he meant I was supposed to do that instead of eating. Karly says he doesn’t bother her.”
“He doesn’t bother me either,” Maura said.
Except he’s a metaphor,
she thought. He had arrived to make tangible the difference between her life with Mick and her life without him. Subtract Mick and she would wind up with some monster truck like Vex.
The van arrived and took her into the weekend.
DAYS 9 & 10:
“He’ll live with me,” Jimmy always replied to the question his parents often raised, usually without quite saying it and sometimes without saying anything, one merely catching the other’s eye, a specific look of concern reserved for this topic:
What would Pook do when they were no longer able to care for him?
Or: What should Pook do with his life?
Or: How would Pook get by in the world?
Or: What to do about Pook?
To Jimmy, Pook seemed uncomplicated, without pretense or artifice of any kind, but that didn’t mean he was predictable. He could surprise you. Boy, could he.
One day early on in that same summer, following an angry tirade by Frederick Candler against Pook, Jimmy and Billy decided to resolve the problem by making a list that would explain Pook to other people, including the family. This was needed, they understood, because Jimmy’s father had gotten upset for the reason that Pook would not get on the roof and sweep the rain, meaning Frederick Candler had to do it. (Jimmy and Billy volunteered but no one wanted those two on the roof.) “You’re so goddamn stubborn,” Mr. Candler accused Pook. “And selfish.”
The boys knew that Pook was not selfish (there was no arguing with
stubborn
), he simply did not do certain things, and while he would happily climb a ladder, he would not step off it onto another surface. To expect him to do so was like asking a cat to swim or a dog to walk on those metal grates they can see through. They made the list to define and explain Pook.
1. Pook is enormous.
This was not, strictly speaking, true. His actual height was six feet two inches, but he seemed much larger, partly because of the way he would stare and partly because of the quiet he kept. His hair was short—his mother ran a battery-powered clipper over his skull every Sunday morning—and he shaved himself daily with an electric razor. He had broad, muscular shoulders, and he was fierce when angered, and these things also increased his size. The source of his anger was not always evident, and he could rarely, afterward, explain what made him angry, but he was protective of his siblings and parents and Billy Atlas and all animals everywhere, and to Jimmy and Billy, he was enormous.
2. Pook doesn’t like to talk much.
He carried his silence with him the way another person might carry a briefcase—one with a lock and full of papers no one would ever see. Jimmy and Billy, at least, believed there were papers inside. Others, including Frederick Candler, seemed to think the briefcase was empty. Conversations with Pook were never long.
“Is this your sock on the branch?”
He nods.
“Is it supposed to be there?”
Nothing.
“Do you want it there?”
He nods.
“Why do you want it there?”
He says, “It fits.”
Or he says, “If the wind moves it.”
Or he says, “I thought daytime.”
“What do you mean?”
Nothing.
3. Pook stays on one level.
He would not climb trees or dive into the cistern, but he would go up a ladder and stand on thetop rung, or he would lean over one of the canals and dip his face or some other part of his body into the water. But he would not step off the ladder and into the tree house, and he would not slide off into the cistern. The roof was out of the question.
4. Pook makes sense in his own way.
By which they meant he was consistent and logical within the terms of his own understanding of the world, but (unfortunately) those terms were not evident and were completely mysterious to others.
5. Pook likes shaking things.
This was an erroneous generalization. He enjoyed shaking martinis for his parents because he liked the way the jigger turned icy in his hands. He did not particularly care to shake other things, and both of the boys were dimly aware that they were not quite hitting this one on the head. Nonetheless, they left it in.
6. Pook doesn’t like to have no clothes on.
He took baths in his underwear. He slept in pajamas. He wore layers of clothing, even in the Tucson summer.
7. Pook doesn’t do one thing after another.
By which they meant that he had trouble with sequential tasks. He would willingly turn any of the horizontal steering wheels when directed to by a parent or sibling or Billy Atlas, but he could not, on his own, water first the distant green patch, then the trees, the garden, and so on. He used a push mower to trim the front patch of the Candlers’ lawn every week without being asked and whether it needed it or not, but he would not cut any of the other splotches of grass on the property, no matter the extent to which their father directed him or yelled. Jimmy believed that Pook would mow the other, scattered lawns if there was a mower for each different patch, but he never brought up this idea with his father for fear of inciting Pook-directed rage.
8. Pook can’t digest with talk going on.
He did not like conversation when he ate and he did not like visitors, except Billy, and when conversation at the dinner table reached a certain—never to others—identifiable point, he would take his plate and drink and flatware into his bedroom, where he would put the plate on his desk, which faced the wall, and eat in silence. (He never asked for seconds, and May Candler learned to overfill his plate.) Yet he would not begin a meal in his room. Even if guests were over, he would not start dinner at the desk. A plate of food set there would go uneaten and seemingly unnoticed. He had to begin at the table and then slink away.
9. Pook likes doing the dishes.
He washed the dishes every night with his siblings or alone, and he knew where to put every pot, pan, plate, cup, and utensil.
10. Pook doesn’t like TV.
He had no interest in television, including cartoons or shows that featured comic book characters. He liked comic books, but it was never clear whether he was reading the panels or just looking at the pictures. He would accompany others to the movies, but he never enjoyed them, sometimes openly moaning during them, sometimes falling asleep, and one time lying on the carpet between the rows of seats with his hands over his ears
(Crocodile Dundee).
11. Pook is not a picky eater but he is a picky drinker.
He drank water and milk and nothing else, but he always cleaned his plate, even when Frederick Candler made the dreaded onion enchiladas.
12. Pook is never sick.
He never got the flu or colds, and when he had the typical childhood illnesses, he stayed in bed as his mother directed but didn’t seem to understand that a fever made him feel bad. He would just lie there.
13. Pook walks in his sleep.
This item on the list was inaccurate. Some nights, for reasons no one could determine, he would leave his bed and sleep on the porch or in the yard or in the station wagon. He was always awake when he went out the door.
14. Pook sees himself and is surprised.
Mirrors made him turn to look behind him, but after that requisite gesture, he might stare at himself or he might not.
15. Pook only draws Pook when he draws people.
Same Man was Pook and Pook was Same Man and everyone looked the same as Same Man.
16. Pook doesn’t like noon.
He would go inside no matter what they were doing at or near noon. Later that summer, Jimmy would figure out why, but at the time they created this list it was merely an unexplainable fact, like the existence of black holes or the nature of evil.
17. Pook doesn’t like seats on bikes.
Pook would permit no seat on his bicycle. Their father insistently put the seat on, and Pook insistently took it off. The sight of the bare post would send Frederick Candler into a rage, and he fit the seat on with locking nuts, using a giant plumbing wrench to tighten it down. Discovering the seat once again on his bicycle, Pook would begin working it off. He never used tools, just waggled the seat back and forth until it loosened—a project that might take an hour. He approached the task calmly and never complained to his father about the seat’s recurrence. When Frederick Candler took the bike to an auto shop and had the seat welded on, Pook quit riding his bike altogether until Jimmy and Billy sneaked a hacksaw out of the garage and sawed off the post—a project that took most of a day. They rode their own bikes to the Safeway and tossed the seat into a dumpster. No one—not Pook and not Frederick Candler—ever said a word about it, although Mr. Candler must have known that it had not been Pook who sawed through the post. The battle of the bicycle seat came to an end.
18. Pook is liked best of anyone by animals.
The Dog preferred Pook above all others, and the cats, who would have nothing to do with the remainder of the family, ran to him and let him stroke them. Several times, Jimmy and Billy came across Pook in the shade of one of the ruined outbuildings watching the cats sleep. He would be on his haunches, like a catcher in a baseball game, watching.
19. Pook knows something about shadows and colors.
Some mornings Pook would stand or crouch on the porch and watch the sun grab hold of the yard in increments, coloring the pump handle and pump, the low wire fence around the garden, the tomatoes hanging on the spindly plants, the white of the concrete canals. The light progressed like a slow wave, washing the yard, sweeping away everything, even the house, flooded and looted by the light. And Pook liked to watch.
20. Pook loves the people he knows and they love him.
The summer sky in Arizona was the size of eternity, and within every cubic inch of that floating transparency—secured to each constituent of the Candler relations, bound to them and trailing them like the smoke of existence—was the enigma of Pook, in whom their sense of the world did not reside in any recognizable form.
