We Live in Water: Stories

by Jess Walter

  “But how many days are we gonna be in Flintstone Land?”

  “Vancouver would be cool.”

  “But at least two days, right?”

  “Look, I don’t know.”

  “There’s a natural history museum in Vancouver.”

  “Vancouver’s like a real city.”

  Wayne is sorry he brought it up. “Yeah, we’ll see. Just finish your dinner.”

  Karen comes back in and gives them all a warm roll and him a cold look. She says, under her breath, “How’d it go, Detective?”

  He glares at Karen, but the suspects don’t seem to have heard her.

  ON SUNDAY Wayne goes to the refrigerator. He gets two Lucky Lagers, puts them in the narrow closet, on the floor behind his four pairs of coveralls, which are hung behind his shirts. Then he opens the bathroom window. He goes back into his bedroom and grabs a clean set of coveralls from the closet. Glances down at the jar, makes sure the handle is straight up at midnight, and that it’s precisely in its carpet indentation. He pulls the coveralls on over his jeans, up to his waist, the way he wears them when he’s going to work. He starts down the hall.

  He taps on the Girl’s door, opens it and looks in. She’s sitting cross-legged on her floor in front of her stereo. She sees him and takes off her headphones. “You gotta listen to this, Dad.”

  He comes in and puts the headphones on. It sounds just like all the other shit she listens to.

  “Isn’t that cool?”

  Christ. “It’s great,” he says. He hands back the headphones.

  “I thought you’d like it,” the Girl says. “See, all my music isn’t stupid.”

  “Hey,” he says. “Your mom’s helping Grandma Lil today and I got called in to work. You watch the boys a while?”

  “Sure,” she says, and puts the headphones back on. He leaves her door open.

  The boys are playing army men. One takes the little green army, the other the little beige army. They spread the little plastic men on the floor across from each other and sit behind their armies throwing Legos at the other guy’s army. First one to knock over all the other guy’s army men wins. Moron game. They’ll play this for hours, Karen finding the little plastic army men everywhere, behind couch cushions, in the laundry, under the table.

  “Who’s fighting?”

  “I’m the Viet Cong,” the Middle one says. “If you look at it a certain way, they’re kind of like the American Revolutionaries.”

  Great. Middle one’s a commie.

  The Little one takes an army man out of his mouth. “I’m the Americans,” he says proudly.

  “Dad,” the Middle one says, “you were in the navy after Korea but before Vietnam, right?”

  “Right,” Wayne says.

  “So you didn’t fight.”

  “No.”

  “I told you,” the Middle one tells the Little one.

  “But who were you versus?” the Little one asks.

  “You ain’t always versus someone. We just toured around the Pacific.”

  “Like a police car on patrol,” Middle one says.

  “Something like that.”

  “Huh,” says Little one, and he puts the army man back in his mouth.

  “Well, I’m headed in to work,” Wayne says. “Your sister’s in charge.” The boys go back to playing and ignore him. “See you tonight.”

  Wayne goes outside. He climbs in his pickup truck. His day off and he’s pretending to go to work. Karen’s right; he is losing it. He knows Ken sometimes acts like he got called in, and then he goes and screws that Donna. Probably ball-deep in her right now. Shit, that almost makes more sense. He stares back at the house, a little one-story rambler. It’s not that different from the house he grew up in. His old man was a welder, worked his ass off, sixty-hour weeks.

  Wayne did it only once, stole from the Vacation Fund. He took two dimes. He was eight. Ed Hendry and his brother were going to the store. Wayne bought a pack of baseball cards and some stick candy with the stolen money. Worst fucking candy he ever ate. He’d thought, Who’s gonna miss two dimes? But that whole trip, from Spokane to Yellowstone, he held his breath. God, what if we run out of money? He’d pray they found a hill to park on to start the car. What if we run out of gas five miles from home and everyone turns to me? Look at that, Wayne. Two dimes short.

  Maybe Karen’s right and this is all just guilt.

  Wayne looks back at the house. But if he’s right—and goddamn it, he wishes he wasn’t, but he is—one of those shithead kids in there has stolen five or six times and keeps going back. That’s what gets him. He did it once, and it almost killed him. You want your kids to do better than you did—his dad a welder, Wayne a good job at Kaiser Aluminum, maybe his kids will go to college. But you also want them to be better. And one of them is a goddamn thief? Christ. Wayne can’t handle that. He’s never hit his kids—a spanking here and there—but he’s a little worried what he might do.

  He starts his truck. Backs out of the driveway, takes one more glance at the house, drives down the street and parks at the grocery store on Trent. Slides out of his coveralls, leaves them in the truck, and humps home the two blocks. He goes through the back gate, to the side of the house, hoists himself up on the open windowsill, and eases down into the bathroom. He listens. It’s quiet. Wayne takes off his boots, tiptoes through the bathroom, looks both ways, then slips into his and Karen’s bedroom. He leaves the door open a bit. He creeps past the bed and into the closet.

  There’s the Vacation Fund, just inside the closet doorway, the jar set with the handle pointed straight up at midnight. Wayne steps past it, deeper into the closet. He slides behind his coveralls, which hang there like a curtain. He sits on the floor against the back wall, in the dark.

  Wayne reaches for one of the beers, pops it, takes a drink. He’ll sit here all day if he has to.

  Maybe it is the Middle one. That shit about the Viet Cong? What was that?

  He hears Karen again: You’re imagining things. You’re losing it.

  Maybe. Wayne sits in the dark, drinking a cool Lucky Lager. He’s not sure how much time passes. The caps have puzzles in them. The Girl and the Middle one race to solve them. Wayne pushes the coveralls aside to let some light spill into the back of the closet. He reads the bottle cap. A key. A chess pawn. A truck. The letters ing. Easy. Key pawn truck ing: keep on trucking.

  Then he hears footsteps in the hall and lets the coveralls fall again, so he’s in the dark. The bathroom door opens and then closes. Just someone going to the bathroom. He sighs, feels strangely relieved, and realizes how happy he’ll be if he sits here all day, drinks these beers and nothing happens. If Karen’s right. On the other side of the wall, the toilet flushes. Wayne takes a sip of his beer. More footsteps, soft on the carpet. Shit, the steps are coming this way. Wayne cocks his head to hear.

  The floor creaks. One of them is inside the room. Wayne holds his breath. The steps come across the floor.

  Then the closet door squeaks as someone opens it a little wider. Wayne covers his mouth. His older brother, Mike, was a thief. Stole from the neighbors. Stole a car once. Never amounted to shit. On his third divorce.

  Wayne can hear breathing on the other side of the coveralls. He listens as the thief unscrews the lid of the jar. Goddamn it. One of his kids! The thief tips the jar and some change comes out. Not much. Just a little. Wayne reaches out and puts his hand on the coveralls hanging in front of him. Karen has to wash them by hand, because of all the dirt and chemicals and shit. They’re so heavy they’d screw up the washing machine.

  The thief is going through the change. Dropping the pennies and nickels and dimes back in. Probably taking two or three quarters, just what Wayne would expect, just what he would do. Wayne counts to three. All he has to do is pull those coveralls aside.

  He counts to three again. The thief screws the lid back on the jar.

  The thief pushes the jar back into the closet. Wayne squeezes his eyes tight. One of his kids is a socio
path. Now. Do it now. Caught you, you goddamn thief.

  But Wayne just sits curled up on the floor of his closet in the dark, behind his coveralls. He can’t do it. He hears the feet pad across the room again. Out the door. Wayne’s head falls to his knees. When it’s quiet again, he reaches for the other beer.

  The closet is three feet by five feet. The whole house is just nine hundred square feet. It’s set on a fifty-by-sixty-foot plot of grass and dandelions, across from a vacant lot, in a neighborhood of postwar clapboards and cottages. The house cost $44,000. The interest rate is 13 percent. The father works rotating shifts at a dying aluminum plant—day, swing, graveyard—for $9.45 an hour, and he comes home so tired, so greasy, so black with soot and sweat that he’s unrecognizable, and yet, every day he gets up to do it again. He sits in that closet with a beer, his head between his knees.

  In the hallway, the thief burns with shame, the quarters two hot circles of mourning in my palm.

  Can a Corn

  KEN TOOK dialysis Tuesdays and Thursdays. It fell to Tommy after his mom passed to check his stepdad out of the Pine Lodge Correctional Facility. Drop him at the hospital. Take him back three hours later.

  Ken groaned as he climbed up the truck. —Whatcha got there, Tom?

  Tommy looked over the back seat. —Pole and tackle.

  —You goin’ fishin’ this weekend?

  —I ain’t skydivin’.

  Ken stared out his window. —You stop me by a store?

  There was a downtown grocery sold Lotto, fortified wines, and forties. Ken hopped out. Tommy spun radio stations until Ken came back with a can a corn.

  —Oh, no you ain’t, Ken.

  —So got-damn tired, Tom. Can’t sit on that blood machine today.

  —You’d rather die?

  —I’d rather fish.

  —No way, Ken.

  He drove toward Sacred Heart. But when Tommy stopped at a red light Ken reached back, got the pole, and jumped out. Fine, Tommy thought. Die. I don’t care. The old man walked toward the Spokane River. Tommy pulled up next to him, reached over, and popped the passenger door.

  —Get in the damn truck, Ken.

  Ken ignored him.

  —That pole ain’t even geared.

  Ken walked, facing away.

  Tommy drove alongside for another block. —Get in the truck, Ken.

  Ken turned down a one-way. Tommy couldn’t follow.

  Fine. Stupid bastard. Tommy went back to work, but the only thing in the pit was a brake job on some old lady’s Lincoln: six hundred in repairs on a shit-bucket worth three. Right. Pissed, Tommy gave the Lincoln to Miguel and drove back downtown.

  He parked, got his tackle box from the truck, and walked back along the river. Found his stepfather under a bridge, dry pole next to him.

  Tommy gave him hook and weight.

  Ken’s gray fingers shook.

  —Give it here. Tommy weighted and hooked the line. He pulled a can opener from the tackle box and opened Ken’s corn. Carefully, Tommy pushed the steel hook into the corn’s paper skin until, with a tiny spurt, it gave way.

  He handed the old man back the pole. Ken cast it.

  Half-hour later, Ken reeled in a dull catfish, yellow-eyed and spiny. No fight in it. Almost like it didn’t mind.

  Ken held it up. —Well I will be got-damned.

  Tommy released the fish. It just sort of sank.

  He dropped the old man at the front gate of the prison, his breathing already shallow. Rusty. He was so weak Tommy had to reach over and pop his door again.

  —Hey that wadn’t a bad got-damn fish. All things considered. His eyes were filming over already. —We should go again Tuesday.

  —We gonna start playin’ catch now, too? Tommy asked.

  Ken laughed.

  Tommy watched the old man pass through the metal gate. The fucker.

  Virgo

  YOU ALL SAY the same thing. You suits, you cops, you shrinks, you all sound alike: tell us what happened. Give us your side of the story. My side of the story. My side. As if truth were a box that you could flip over when you want another side, another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, maybe no truth.

  You don’t really want my side of the story. You don’t want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside my head. You don’t want to feel the things I’ve felt. You just want to know that one thing: why.

  Fine. Here’s why: Her. I did it all for her.

  THIS ALL began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath.

  I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” So I gathered my things. Four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards I carried to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw . . . him. Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up Twenty-first like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.

  He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. Mark Aikens was a sous chef at Il Pattio, one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy . . . listened. It grew dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on—the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast: She’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom. How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort.

  But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time. I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.

  The light went out.

  I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was . . . they were . . .

  I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost a leg to diabetes. It took him a while to get his prosthetic on.

  When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”

  “You always did make people nervous,” my father said.

  Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father/son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”

  BEFORE ALL of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work.

  As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local co
py, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day. My favorite, because it was Tanya’s favorite, was “Inside Living”—page two of the features section, the best-read page in the O—with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with a simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.

  Now, to some, I may indeed be—as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me—strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence, but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.

  Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets.

  And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”

  “Dante’s.”

  “Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”

  “I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.

  “Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”

  “Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”

  “Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”

  “That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”

  “I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”