Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  Nor: I was thinking of you yesterday morning, and then couldn’t stop. All day long, you understand? Though I have gone about what I’ve needed to do like a normal person—don’t worry, I’m not broken. I just wanted, now, to hear your voice.

  Here is the message she actually leaves, in its entirety:

  “Sam, hi, it’s Mom … Just, you know, checking in … Nothing urgent … Wondering how you are— Oh, stupid of me: How’d the big game go? I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. Let me know everything when you have a moment … Okay, well … Sending love … Bye …”

  There are speeches that have started wars and led to suicides. This would not be one of them. It is a penny dropped down a very deep well. Ruth has loads of pennies stored up; she is that kind of woman.

  You let it go and then wait for the splash and echo; you hold your breath or pray. The rest is in how you choose to think about it.

  She sits down at the piano in her living room to wait.

  SAM

  THE GREYHOUND TERMINAL IN VEGAS.

  No one in the world knows where he is. This could be freedom, except it pretty clearly isn’t.

  From a waiting-room bench, three days of stubble on his jaw, he watches half his fellow losers grab their rucksacks and worn suitcases and slink off into the deathless light of the Nevada morning.

  Vegas, baby.

  No one around to greet them. When they’re gone, he misses them, broods over them henlike, though during their cross-country ride together he stubbornly avoided all contact. These poor unwashed bus creatures have reached their destination, apparently.

  The glimpse of his own nature that abruptly comes at him then is a mental sucker punch. He almost goes down, but doesn’t.

  DWIGHT

  BY FIVE O’CLOCK, with an hour till closing, I’m loitering behind the store next to the hulking dumpster, at my feet a tidy pile of half-smoked butts. One a day my prescribed limit—perfectly reasonable, I’d argue, given that I’m probably the last nicotine junkie in the state and bear responsibility for single-handedly keeping the industry alive. Leaving the pile visible is my way of showing whoever might be interested that I’m not only keeping with my program but can restrain myself from smoking the death stick all the way to the filter. I personally sweep up the mess every Saturday afternoon, thus to start fresh again on Monday. Creature of habit that I am. Dog urinating on a bush.

  Officially at present, however, I’m overseeing the unloading of a Nike truck backed up to the store’s open rear port: large industrial-strength boxes of Nike golf clubs and Nike soccer balls and footballs and Nike track shoes and field cleats and high-tops and all manner of Nike equipment and apparel, Lycra and cotton, tight and baggy. Call it legal pornography—a man allowed (no, paid, though not richly) to ogle in broad daylight the unveiling of humble but sacred objects (balls and sticks and nets) that, in the right hands, on emerald fields of dreams, might one day become the heroic stories of his unlived life, memories better than his own.

  The sound of basketball dribbling then, childhood’s echo: it’s Evander, Tony’s nephew by marriage, twenty-six going on thirteen, who works the stockroom and does odd jobs for us when he isn’t chasing skirts and getting high down at the piers. Tony, being a family man, makes room for all sorts so long as they’re blood, or nearly, casts a wide financial umbrella and is generous with his shade. Evander, wearing lime-green Nadal clamdiggers and a violet striped Pacific Sunwear tank, does a through-the-legs crossover with head fake, goes round the back, and pulls up for an imaginary jumper.

  “Ooosh. Gi-down.” He mimes the ball going through the invisible net, and one of the Nike truck guys—heavyweight division, with a shaved noggin—turns to get an eyeful of this Majorcan-dressed man-child. The ball in Evander’s hands a Nike, of course, fresh off the truck. The cardboard frame it came in lies in torn pieces on the ground—just one more thing in his life the kid has no intention of ever paying for or picking up.

  “Evander?”

  He shoots me a grin, right wrist still down-flapped as if he’s just sunk the winning trifecta at the Staples Center.

  “Is there something more constructive you could be doing right now besides playing air hoops?”

  “What, like smoking?” The grin turning stiletto—as if to say, in his fake homeboyese: Yo, hoss, I’ze family and you ain’t. “Getting, like, cancer?”

  “It so happens I’m working.”

  “Yeah? So happens I’m Kobe.”

  “I hate to break it to you, dude, but you’re white and short.”

  “Dude? Man, how old’re you, anyway?”

  Dribbling leisurely, the kid sways and jukes his way into the building.

  “I’m half a fucking century, you prick,” I say to no one in particular.

  The huge truck guy cocks his cue-ball head at me. I shrug and ground out my cigarette, tossing the butt onto the pile by the dumpster.

  Reentering the premises, I can feel the air-conditioning on too high. This is a sore spot with Tony, who has to pay the bills. I walk through the stockroom into the mechanicals room and adjust the thermostat three degrees warmer. I’m functioning, doing things, but in my head I’ve moved on to thinking about Penny Jacobs, the pretty and refreshingly forthright UCSB English professor who’ll be coming over to my house for dinner the next evening—and, if the stars are aligned and the gods mildly tanked, maybe some romance as well.

  I met Penny right here in the store, in aisle six (aqua sports, camping), the week before Christmas. She stopped in to look for snorkel equipment for her daughter, who, she mentioned with a faint note of feminine irritation, was going to Florida “to see her father.” A phrase and tone that caught my attention, as did her short brown hair, pert nose, and tennis player’s slim but muscular legs. As did the big fat book she was lugging around (only customer to do so) in her ringless left hand. Upon inquiry, the book turned out to be the collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop, a poet I’d never heard of but who, I was assured, was one of the greats. By which time I was listening hard while saying things like “And your daughter’s shoe size is?” and staring into this woman’s hazel eyes as she told me about this literary genius who’d lived in Brazil and been a lesbian while also probably being in love with (though apparently never screwing) another great, pretty much insane poet named Robert Lowell, and who—this was Bishop she was talking about, not Lowell—sometimes spent up to fifteen years working on a single poem, drafts of which she kept stuck to her refrigerator door. And I responded, pulling a pair out of a box, with something like “These are the best fins in the game,” or some such inanity, because that’s my job. She gave me a little smile then, though not at all condescending—something to the tune of “It must be sort of a kick to say things like ‘These are the best fins in the game,’ which really, when you get down to it, in its fine American banality, is just another kind of poetry.” All of which seemed pretty unusual and appealing to me under the circumstances—namely, our being in a sporting-goods store—and struck me meaningfully, and not just because I’d been a near-monk for so long that I’d begun to feel like Thomas Merton (the only monk whose name I could reliably recall).

  And so, before I knew it, I’d rashly offered Penny Jacobs twenty-five percent off the merchandise (top of the line and rated a Best Buy by Consumer Reports) in exchange for her phone number.

  A deal she took, though only after due consideration.

  “Boss?”

  Lost in my reverie, I’ve wandered out to the sales floor and am now being greeted by Chang Sook Oh, former manager of the UCSB varsity tennis team and by far our most conscientious employee, emerging from the stockroom with two boxes of hockey skates for a waiting customer.

  “What’s up, Chang?”

  “We’re out all Merrells between eights and eleven and a halfs. And Salomons are low. Should I place an order?”

  “Check with Derek first to see what’s low his side. And when you talk to Mike at distribution tell him we need that bulk discount. They scri
mped us last time.”

  “Got it, Boss.”

  Chang wears his clothes and hair neat, goes to church every Sunday, and is the only person in America who calls me Boss.

  “How’s your mother, Chang?”

  “Doing better today, thanks, Boss.”

  I watch him walk away, duck-toed and light on his feet. His mother has kidney problems that will probably do her in soon, but the kid never complains about it and never misses a day’s work. A good son. I can picture him washing her swollen feet in water scented with some Korean herb; making a Tupperware lunch for her before heading off in the morning; checking the connections on the dialysis machine to make sure that, within the sad, sinking chaos of her last years, this one necessary thing will function according to the warranty.

  Of course, such ruminations by a man in middle life about a young man his son’s age are prone to a high degree of subjectivity. Like most guys of my ilk (whatever that means), I’m in all likelihood just another salmon narcissist, ever returning to the corpse-strewn spawning ground of me, where one day, unless something even worse happens, I too will quietly expire.

  What I can say for certain is that watching Chang Sook Oh approach his seated customer at the end of aisle nine (skis, snowboards, winter-sports apparel, ice skates, hockey equipment), squat down, and enthusiastically present the merchandise as though on a silver platter, a suckling pig at a feast, hearing his low, genuinely congratulatory murmur of “These Bauers are top of the line,” I can feel myself already eddying off into a backwater of personal regret that, in truth, has nothing to do with this upstanding young man or his dying mother and everything to do with my own internal weather.

  At the register, Sandra’s just finishing ringing somebody up: “Thanks and, you know, have a good one.”

  Exit customer, bearing two cans of Penn tennis balls, rolls of Tourna Grip, a pack of string grommets, and a Wilson sun visor.

  “Whatever,” Sandra mutters to herself.

  “Tony come in?” I ask.

  “Had to take his dog to the vet. Some sort of diarrhea thing? Poop all over the house.”

  “Sounds ugly.”

  “Like, what kind of name is Dudley for a dog?” Sandra grabs a SoCal sales catalog and begins fanning herself. “It’s so motherfuckin’ hot in here. Can’t you turn up the conditioning or something?”

  “Just turned it down. Ever pay your own utility bills?”

  “Tony can be so cheap sometimes.”

  “I’m going to get some air for a minute.”

  “You already got some.”

  I look at her.

  She puts her hands on her hips—her lippy pose. “What, like you think you’re invisible on the security camera back there? You got a nicotine problem, Dwight. That’s bad.”

  I grin. “I know.”

  I head out the front doors. Weekdays can’t touch weekends in the sporting-goods trade, and the parking lot is only a quarter full.

  For Chang’s ice-skate customer, I pick the Mercedes SUV, and a Subaru Outback wagon for the schoolteacher type I saw poking around the Patagonia fleece vests in aisle three. Just a little game of mine to pass the time. A palm tree is growing out of a clump of green between the lot and the four-lane Calle Real, and high up its leaves are shimmying in a breeze that, down where I’m standing, I can’t even feel. A hallucinatory taste of the evening’s first cold beer starts climbing the back of my throat, and this is not an unhappy thing.

  Then a yawn convulses me, and the moment it’s over I feel doomed by fatigue.

  SAM

  HE COLLECTS HIS DUFFEL from the luggage well. The driver points him in the direction of the municipal bus stop half a mile away, and he starts to walk. Late afternoon, a fog of exhaustion in his head. Moving, after three days of sitting, still bruised from the fight, like an old man with rickets.

  He observes that Santa Barbara is a clean and prosperous town, not entirely real. Half the street names are in Spanish. The few people he sees are sun-browned and mostly blond, dressed in shorts, T-shirts, slip-on sneakers, or flip-flops. They appear to regard him, if they regard him at all, with curious suspicion, as a ragged and somewhat embarrassing spectacle from the Far North. An assessment with which he cannot disagree. He thinks how the nights back East will still be cold. The fog in his head slowly beginning to lift, he remembers Emma holding him that night two years ago, her hand burning down the front of his jeans as she presses him against the rusted feed trough of the abandoned farm in Falls Village. The feeling of being, just this once, a single body, two broken pieces forged together in the secret, dew-ridden dark.

  His arm has begun to ache, and he stops to switch the duffel to his other hand. A light breeze blowing in from the west. In it the fermented whiff of his own body and what he hopes might be the briny breath of the Pacific. Though right now he can’t see his way to the ocean; just the sourceless egg-blue light everywhere and the vertiginous, faintly swaying palms along the broad sunbaked streets whose brightness has begun to infect him like the onset of motion sickness.

  He remembers sitting on a sofa next to his dad and watching a ballgame, the smells of furniture leather and cooked popcorn, his dad’s heavy arm resting on his shoulders, pulling him in; but which year and which game he doesn’t know and will never trust.

  And so it goes: the duffel switching hand to hand, the mind clear but seeing backward, the angled sun anointing him like a troubled pilgrim who’s journeyed to the far edge of the continent in search of a blessing that he doesn’t believe in but can’t stop looking for.

  PENNY

  THURSDAY OFFICE HOURS RUN FORTY MINUTES LATE because her toughest, most confident student (the brassy, probably gay, raven-haired junior who starts at point guard for the women’s varsity basketball team and who for some reason seemed to believe, until today, that a poem, no matter how well made, is just a simple equation with a plug-in answer), Angela, while reading aloud some Louise Glück lines on the death of the poet’s father, bursts into tears, right in her office. Not so discrete or containable after all, this big, intelligent, well-defended girl, whose own father turns out to be on his deathbed. There she sits, gasping with sobs, stripped right down to the interior—the soft tissue, where the pain resides and the words, if they’re true, take root. Nothing for Penny to do but comfort her and pass the Kleenex and say, I know, I know. Because, dammit, she does know. If not these specific lines—My father has forgotten me / in the excitement of dying (no, Penny’s dad, tough nut that he is, is still out there making a nuisance of himself)—then the more communal experience of being knocked flat, your liver ripped out, by a handful of lines on a page.

  On her way home she stops at Vons to buy fresh herbs and arugula, a baguette, for dinner. She’ll make an omelet and a salad, fruit for dessert, and then while Ali works on her report on the Biafran War (bit of a stretch for a twelve-year-old, it seems to Penny), she’ll go into her little study off the kitchen, sit on her Eames lounge chair and ottoman (the set, which she loves with an embarrassing ardor, a fifth-anniversary present from her ex, Darryl, one of the only unselfish acts she’s inclined to credit him with in retrospect), take her original copy of Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles off the shelf and, poem by poem, immerse herself in the pure early work as in a pool of deep, clear water whose underground tributaries, bearing news from distant mountains, she can feel but never accurately source.

  Parking the car, she enters the house through the back door, straight into the kitchen.

  “You’re late.” Ali’s greeting the hooded gaze that appeared on the girl’s face about six months ago and never left. She’s sitting—brown-haired and, in Penny’s opinion, way too put-together for someone still under five feet tall—at the kitchen table with a bottle of Vitamin-water, a bag of Gummi Bears, a metallic pink laptop, and a heavy tome on the Biafran conflict.

  Setting the groceries on the counter, Penny goes to the refrigerator for the eggs. “Sorry, student meltdown.”

  “Over poetry?” The
sarcasm implicit, impressive, without a single note of strain.

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Cracking eggs into a bowl and beginning to chop the herbs.

  Ali sniffs, pops a Gummi Bear into her mouth.

  “You’ll ruin your appetite,” Penny hears herself say automatically, remembering, even as she speaks, a line from another Glück poem: Once we were happy, we had no memories.

  “The Biafrans had to eat their dogs when there weren’t any more goats,” Ali declares. “They ate their parrots.”

  “Please move your things and set the table.”

  “Whole families were brutally murdered with machetes. Some were burned. It was, like, one of the most savage wars in history.”

  And another Glück: I had come to a strange city, without belongings: / in the dream, it was your city, I was looking for you.

  “Would you like your baguette heated?”

  Was it seeing Angela, the tough jock, break down in her office that makes her feel so vulnerable now to these internal waves of words about being freed from the past? Penny thinks about Dwight, how the thing about him, right from that first day, meeting him in the sporting-goods store, getting picked up by him really, is his categorical difference from the rest of the cast of her life. He’s not some hotshot linguistics professor like Darryl, not a blazing preteen sharpshooter like Ali. He couldn’t care less about stupid academic politics or, for that matter, what’s cool or uncool in junior high, wouldn’t know a good poem from a bad one if it hit him on the head. What he is, she senses intuitively (and still can’t say why), is solid, tangible; a man, lived-in, sure of himself, respectful, decent. She doesn’t have to go looking for him with blind hands in the dark to know what she has or whom she can trust. Doesn’t, as in the old days, have to spend precious emotional capital that she isn’t sure she has in trying to one-up him, or outmaneuver him, or, worst of all, lie to him.