Tumbledown (56 page)

Violet keeps her eyes shut. She wishes to look at each of his paintings again, study them and identify the figures. She has to tell Jimmy. Perhaps later, they will tell their parents. Pook was painting the family all along. These thoughts come to her without remorse or pain but with a sense of relief that is remarkably similar to happiness. She is over her brother’s death, she realizes, which leads her to understand the next thing: one day she will be over Arthur’s death. This thought is hard to take, as she thought she was already over it.

Violet takes a long breath and opens her eyes. Lolly has planted herself on the towel where Barnstone had lain. Violet puts her arm around Lolly’s sun-warmed shoulders. “I’m glad you’re safe,” she says. And later that afternoon, when the two are again lying together, having moved out of the sun and into the tent, the animosity Violet feels for Lolly finally evaporates. She feels a connection with Lolly she cannot name. (Let us name it for her: they are women unfairly abandoned by men who made promises.) Speaking softly, almost a whisper, Violet says, “You should come to Tucson with me.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Lolly says, “All right.” After a few seconds, she adds, “James can find me there as easily as anywhere.”

Violet lets that go. “That tattoo on your abdomen,” she says. “What is it?”

Lolly replies, “It’s the shadow of my former self.”

The power of the ocean to soothe and restore is not simply myth. Billy Atlas feels alive and brave and happy. He glops sunscreen over his sunburned shoulders as he walks along the beach. “You ought to put some of this on,” he says.

Vex shakes his head. “They make it out of what? Chemicals they find in glass and hard metals, that’s what. How else to give the sun the bounce?”

“You’re turning into a fire truck,” Billy says.

“I’ve always been a fire truck,” Vex replies.

They walk along the edge of the water. The others are eating, but Billy’s exercise regimen requires him to hike and not to overeat. Also, he had three burritos on the drive down. He holds a cold beer in one hand, with four more linked together by their plastic collars in the other. He and Vex will get in some exercise while Karly and the others eat and nap and sculpt things in the sand. Karly has a talent for sculpting. She is especially good with mashed potatoes. She has a lot of surprising talents, like how she remembers everybody’s name, how she knew the way back to Onyx Springs when they took a drive in the mountains, how even in getting lost or having a flat tire there is something funny. She has taught Billy a morning routine that he finds especially useful. They stand together outside, their toes aligned on the edge of the concrete stoop, and check themselves out—shoes, socks, pants, the works. Twice, Billy realized that he forgot his belt and once Karly made him change his shoes. He’d put on his red-and-gray sneakers with white tube socks, and Karly said, “You can’t wear those, Billy. That’s silly.”

Billy stared. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re really really really ugly,” Karly said seriously. “They’re fuzzy.”

Billy pursed his lips and nodded. “This is exactly the kind of advice I need on a daily basis.” He kissed her then, and they both went inside to fit themselves up with what they lacked.

Sex is still not a big part of the marital picture, but they have broken the ice on two occasions. Once in bed, with only partial success, and once in the shower, a rousing victory. In bed, Karly made a few comments that inadvertently led to complications. “Don’t you have to get big first?” she asked, right as Billy was about to enter her, and later, at another crucial moment, she said, “Is it in?”

“The first time is always practice,” he said afterward, and she laughed, saying, “Everybody knows that.”

The shower was a different story. Billy was in there to wash the stink off after work, and she joined him. They soaped each other, and there was a moment while she worked up the suds in his hair with one hand that she freed the other hand to grasp the shampoo by taking the washcloth she was holding between her teeth, the cloth hanging from her mouth, lengthening as it saturated.
Jesus, that washcloth.
They made love standing up and laughing. And afterward, still in the shower, arms around her, Billy found himself crying. A day to be remembered forever: Billy Atlas crying with gratitude or from sheer happiness.

“The problem with beer in cans,” Vex says, staring at his Budweiser, “is the motherfucking cans. You can’t wait to crush the bastards.”

“Anyone ever suggest that you’ve got anger issues?”

“Almost everybody. ’Cept the ones too chicken-bait to talk.”

“And? What do you think?”

“I think I kicked their fucking asses.”

“You haven’t kicked everyone’s butt.”

“I can’t fuck up everybody that deserves it,” he says defensively. “I’m only one person.”

It is obvious to Billy that Vex should not be in the sheltered workshop or, for that matter, in the same zip code as the workshop. Vex has slipped through the famous cracks, and Billy suspects that either Bob Whitman’s counseling report or the evaluation Jimmy did should have eliminated the nutball. But neither Bob’s report nor Jimmy’s evaluation has been handed over, and Billy is pretty sure they’ll never arrive. Bob seems to have an endless number of tools and small appliances that need repair. And Jimmy? Billy understands what the rest of them refuse to see: Jimmy Candler is gone.

Vex drops his can in the sand and stomps on it. Billy gives his own a shake: half a beer to go. Vex leaps with both feet to drive the smashed can into the sand. He has on socks but not shoes, and the toe ends flop as he pounds the can. He picks up the flattened aluminum and slips it into the back pocket of his soaked jeans.

Billy hands him another beer. “You don’t get violent when you drink, do you? Just curious.”

“Not that you would notice.”

“ ’Cause if you get violent,” Billy says, “somebody will get hurt, and I like all these people. Including me.”

“It’d be better if there was one person, just one person, it was okay to hurt.”

“I guess that’s true. I don’t know, though. Who’d volunteer for such work?”

“Doesn’t seem like too much to ask. There’s a fuckload of people in the world.”

“Life’s hard,” Billy agrees, “but also surprising.”

“How can you know if you’ve got surprises coming?”

“You can’t,” Billy says, “but I guarantee you do.”

“You’re fucking with my head.”

Earlier, standing beside Rhine’s tent, watching Lolly and Violet sleep within it while the others gathered around the castle or person or possibly bear that Karly was sculpting, Billy tried to tell Barnstone that Jimmy wasn’t coming back. She turned to engage him, but across a stretch of sand Andujar was opening the van door and climbing in. “I have to lower some windows,” she told Billy, and then there was no one to tell. Jimmy is not coming back to the Center, not coming back to Lolly, not going back to Lise, and not likely returning to his house. Billy guesses that he’s in a hotel somewhere, trying to make up his mind what to do. He hopes it isn’t a high-rise hotel, though he doesn’t think Jimmy will jump out a window like his brother. He isn’t the right sort of person to kill himself.

What sort of person is he then? If anyone should know, it’s Billy.

Vex is talking now about Bob Whitman’s rototiller, which has 392 pieces, if you count every screw and washer. Billy realizes that he’ll need to find new things for Vex to take apart after Whitman retires. Otherwise, the guy is liable to throttle somebody. While Billy considers what all he might offer—Karly’s dishwasher, the lousy air conditioner on Karly’s roof, the Dart—it occurs to him that Jimmy is out there somewhere doing the same thing: taking his life apart in order to put it back together. If Pook were alive, Billy reasons, he would live with Jimmy, and Jimmy wouldn’t be a counselor but whatever he’s genuinely cut out to be. Maybe he would have written comic books—or some kind of books—that Pook would have illustrated. Who but Billy knows this? Billy doesn’t have a PhD or even a skill, besides pizza cook, but about this subject he is the supreme expert. No one knows as much about Jimmy Candler as Billy, including, most obviously, Jimmy himself.

“See that?” Vex points at the ocean. “I’m slowing that wave down just with my mind.”

It does look slower than the other waves. “You think that bonk on the head gave you superpowers?”

“Anybody can do it, but I’m the only one makes the effort.”

“I used to think if I went to pee during a key moment in a baseball game I was watching on TV that my team would suffer.”

“That’s fucking stupid,” Vex says. “Mind waves can’t go through television. You can’t digitize mind waves. That’s dumb as fuck.”

“I’m feeling nostalgic,” Billy admits. “Happy and nostalgic at the same time.”

“Must be getting your dick wet every night. It depletes the chemicals in your brain to come so much. What you think is happiness is just holes in the gray matter. Why you think stupid fucks are so happy all the time?”

“You must be an effing genius then.”

“If I knew how to want the right things,” Vex says, “I’d want them.

Anyone would. But even if you
know
the right things, which nobody does, it doesn’t mean you fucking want them, even if you
want
to want them.”

“That sounds like a pop song,” Billy says.
“I want to want you, baby.”
Vex stoops to pick up a chipped white shell. “You ever thought how clouds look like garbage?” He tosses the shell like a Frisbee. “You’ve asked me that a million times. I can’t see it. It makes no sense to me whatsoever.”

“Garbage without all the fucking friction. So it floats.
Friction
ought to be a four-letter word.”

“Why don’t you say
friction
instead of
fuck
or
shit
or
motherfucking?
People would immediately like you more.”

Vex finishes his beer, drops the can into the sand, and stomps on it, leaps on it. He picks up the flattened can and sticks it in his back pocket. “Just like that? People will like me?”

“No, not really, but you could still try it.”

“Shut the friction up,” he says. “Friction your mother. I’ve got crazy bullfriction in my head.” Tears appear in his eyes. “It’s okay, I guess.”

A cloud moves in front of the sun, and both men lift their heads to admire it. The evening of the shower sex, Billy and Karly ate hamburgers and watched a dumb movie on television that made both of them laugh. When they went to bed, he did not want to sleep. He wanted to hold tight to his happiness. Not many days would be like this one, he thought, and he did not want to let it slip away just yet. At the same time, he understood that happiness was only one thing that this marriage would permit him to claim, and the other things might be complicated and difficult and contradictory. But happiness was what he could claim that evening, and he gripped the sheet in his fists as if to hold on to it. Today, strolling along the beach, he feels the same. Who knew such pleasure was available to a person? The cloud moves off the sun, and the men resume walking.

“It’s like this,” Vex says, “I take things apart and I put them back together.”

“That’s the late-breaking news?” Billy laughs. “I’d sorta noticed that already. The question is, why do you do it? What does it teach you?”

“Everything ’cept the magic,” Vex says. “What, you know, puts spark into the world.”

Billy considers this for several steps. “That’s still a lot to know. If you know all that, then you must have some guess about the spark.”

Vex shakes his head. “It’s like a deaf motherfucker inventing drums.”

“You should join me on my exercise program.”

“The last thing I need to lose is fucking weight.”

“Friction weight.”

“Sorry.”

“It’ll give you something to do besides take stuff apart.”

Vex sighs. “I’m not going to hurt anyone today. Quit worrying. I haven’t hurt anyone for a long time. Like weeks.”

Billy pats him on the back. They’re just the same, he and Vex. Not that Billy is the slightest bit violent and his own head doesn’t have a crazy fireball bouncing around in it, but there’s something between them that’s the same. He likes knowing that. He finishes his beer and drops the can on the beach at Vex’s feet.

He says, “Be my guest.”

If Mick Coury dies in the Onyx Springs hospital, Candler is in a hotel room, on the twelfth floor, standing on a balcony that overlooks the ocean. If Mick Coury pisses on the pills instead of swallowing them, Candler is in the Laguna Mountains, at Bob Whitman’s cabin, on the screened porch, one hand raised to a roof beam. He’s drinking from the same bottle of scotch either way. The rail around the balcony is wrought iron and reaches mid thigh. A sliding glass door is open to its full length, letting the wind off the water sweep past him and into the room. It is a wet, warm wind. Conifers tower over the cabin, and a chipmunk scrambles under the porch. The sound of what might be a mountain stream infiltrates his ears. The sun is sinking. Candler stares at the ocean and smells the pines.

Bob Whitman’s Jeep ascends the gravel drive. It is still light, but Bob has his headlights on. The Jeep turns in the narrow lane and makes a precise maneuver to back around Candler’s rental car and up to the porch. Lashed to the bumper is a rectangular gray container. Candler sets down his coffee cup of scotch. He has spent three nights on the mountain, and it’s Saturday afternoon. The cabin has electricity and running water, but no phone, internet, or television. His cell phone gets no reception. There is an old radio, and he has listened to the Padres bungle leads, drop fly balls, get thrown out at home. Down a slender path from the porch, in a narrow depression, lies a miniature lake, a blue lozenge surrounded by trees. Candler thought he might fish, but he hasn’t touched the pole or tackle box. Each day, he has taken a book to the lakeside, settled in the shade, and read, books that he found in Bob Whitman’s cabin, war novels, detective stories, and now a science fiction epic called
Ramshackle,
about the conceivable future, survival after the world has fallen apart and then fallen down, a lively, messy book, full of characters. And he has reread the note that Lise tacked to her front door. He uses it to mark his place, reads it each day before opening the book. He remembers the girl in L.A. to whom the note refers, the bleached blonde, the stripper, the novice prostitute, but he cannot make her into Lise. The transformation seems to him more than cosmetic, as if the molecules of her body were altered.