by Ann Beattie
The day before he’d forgotten to send the fax he’d promised the telephone lady, though he’d awakened during the night, smugly proud because he’d dreamed he’d sent it. What would she have done but lose it, anyway. She was probably no longer even working there. If you talked to somebody one day they’d be gone an hour later, and you’d be back to square one, spelling your last name and playing the as in game: the new, monotonous world of “B as in Boy.” Then, when the deaf moron had that down, you could start touching your toes, or whatever else they wanted you to do.
He did a few jumping jacks to jazz up his system. The finale was too enthusiastic and made his hand hurt. Though he’d more or less given up caffeine, the idea of coffee still floated across his mind some mornings—although today was not a day he’d want to pour a hot beverage down his throat. Could it be strep? He watched Coon run around sniffing things, then clicked his fingers for the dog to come. Back in the cabin of the truck, Adventure Kitty clawed at the cage. He got the leash he’d fashioned for her out of a bandanna made ropelike with knots and a length of leftover sailcloth he’d been saving for another project and opened the top of the cage. She stared at him, just on the verge of hissing, though she did not. He slipped it around her neck—nasty swipe from her paw; just what his sore hand needed—and slid his other hand under her belly and lifted her. Probably busting with piss, so maybe it would come out her ears if she pulled her usual shit and wouldn’t do it while she was on the leash. He was too smart in the ways of living with cats to let her walk around unleashed on the grass outside a rest area, that was for sure.
On the grass, the cat gagged, dislodging a small ball of fur. The cat proceeded to stand there, wouldn’t even walk, let alone pee. After five minutes of tugging her forward in increments he decided to put her back in the cage. He told her to remember that she’d had her chance. And let the damn horse stay in its carrier until they got to Maine; it would have what it wanted soon enough. Lucky not to be dog food. He’d stop for some food for the chickens—maybe something he could get for himself that they could share.
But the engine wouldn’t start. How do you like that? Is that good? Just click-click-click. And, for good measure: click-click-click-click. Still interested? Then click-click-click-click-click. He’d traded his redwood lawn chairs for Daley’s extra battery only a week before. What he needed was a jump, but the rest area was deserted. He’d either have to hike out and see if there was a gas station or wait for somebody to pull in, and then you could bet that person would either be a woman, and therefore too afraid to even roll down her window, or some macho truck driver who wouldn’t have the inclination, so he’d claim he couldn’t take the drain, himself. And who knew: maybe Jesus Christ would pull in and have all the time, and all the good inclinations, in the world. That’s “J as in Joker.”
He got out of the truck and slammed the door, leaning back and staring into space, trying to keep calm—and, having thought of Jesus Christ, made a bargain prayer: If you get me out of this parking lot in the next ten minutes, I’ll send the phone lady a fax and a bunch of roses.
And so it came to pass. In the form of a woman, all right, but led into the lot by a guy on a motorcycle. Dawn just breaking, and there was this pale little blonde thing driving a little white Toyota, Harley thundering in front of her with a Wonder Warthog guy gripping the handlebars. “Use some help, bro?” the motorcyclist shouted.
He nodded. This was happening: no dream. “Weak battery,” he said.
“Cheryl,” the motorcyclist shouted into the Toyota’s now open window, “back it up a little.”
The Toyota rolled backwards.
“I’ve got cables,” Carleyville said.
“Got my own right in the trunk,” the man said. Cheryl switched off her engine and got out. She smiled faintly, hurrying toward the bathroom.
“We’ll get ’er goin’,” the man said.
“Thanks for the help,” Carleyville said. The last word didn’t make it; it came out a painful croak. He opened the hood. The man was already dragging cables toward the car. “Yeah, anybody moves around without these, he probably don’t know to bring a beer cooler, either,” the man said. “And that would be some stupid.”
Carleyville nodded. The man was taking charge, placing the clips. His hands were greasy, as if he’d been doing this before. “Get in,” the man said, gesturing with his elbow.
Right. Carleyville had forgotten the part about being inside, turning on the ignition.
It started right away. Hummed like new. As he gave the thumbs-up, he noticed that the overhead light was on. Could he have slept all night with the light on, after he’d turned it on to check the map before doubling up the sleeping bag on top of the cat’s cage for a pillow?
“I’m no good with thank-yous,” the man said. The look in his eye let Carleyville know he shouldn’t insist on any further exchange. It was a look Adventure Kitty might have if he’d left her in the cage for a month. Carleyville nodded and gripped the man’s hand, which was difficult to do, since he had to shake left-handed.
He was on his way again. It took him a while to realize that he shouldn’t obsess about sending roses to the phone lady, because he wouldn’t know where to send them. People who answered the telephone never used their real names, so who was she, really? Even if he remembered her name, it would have been a made-up name, her work address one he wouldn’t know until he unpacked and found a phone bill with the address on it. Of course, he could call and ask—but that might begin to seem like he was hassling her. Roses probably cost too much, anyway, and his credit card was pretty much maxed out. That, however, was a thought he did not want to dwell on.
The house was right where Jimmy circled the map: on the corner of Battsbridge Road and Route 91, four miles from the highway. Or he supposed it was four miles, since it seemed a good stretch. The odometer was broken. He’d overshot, at first, and finding a place to turn around had taken him a couple of miles out of his way.
Fiona, pulling weeds in front of the big brown house, stood slowly, frowning at the caravan pulling onto their street. She looked so much like the birds—she held her head at such a birdlike angle—that he cocked his own head, taking it in. Fiona was adorable. A worrywart, but cute. He tapped the horn, but to his surprise, the horn didn’t make a sound. The sun glinted off the window, which must have been why she couldn’t see him waving. It was murder trying to round the curve and get the horse carrier off 91; expressions of friendship were going to have to be momentarily put on hold.
He sideswiped their mailbox, but it didn’t go down; only minor damage had been done to the pole. Cheap metal thing, anyway: he’d fashion them a better one.
“Nelson!” he heard Fiona call. Shrill voice: that was the downside to Fiona.
Fiona rushed to the rig. And the damned window would hardly go down. He had to settle for saying hello through a three-inch crack at the top.
“Is that really you?” Fiona was squealing. “You said September.”
“I had to get out of there,” he said. “Mr. Rogers was having a breakdown.” He smiled at his new nickname for the landlord.
“Where will you park this?” she asked, more hushed than shrill.
Across from Fiona was a dirt road cutting through a field. Jimmy had described their five acres accurately: not much land where the house stood, but a nice amount of acreage across the way. Carleyville jerked his thumb to the right, pointing to the obvious. Fiona nodded. How the rig was going to make the turn onto such a narrow road was another matter . . . but suddenly Jimmy, in sweatpants and tee-shirt, was rushing to Fiona’s side, so he threw open the door to give his old buddy a hug. In fact, the door flew open too quickly, but Jimmy jumped back in time. Fiona had to steady him. Carleyville hopped out and embraced both of them—a mistake to squeeze with his right hand; he let Jimmy’s back thump pass unreturned—telling them, all at once, about how he’d thought he might be broken down for good in a rest area parking lot, but that he’d gotten out by making a
silent promise to God concerning a woman he’d never met.
Jimmy said to Fiona: “That’s Carleyville—saved, every time, by his incurable romanticism.”
Two days later, clouds were gathering and an impressive wind was blowing up. Jimmy had gone out at daybreak to join two of the guys he worked with, who were racing against the impending hurricane to finish a roof. The rig was going to be fine. There wasn’t a tree for a hundred yards. At Fiona’s insistence, Adventure Kitty had the run of the house, and the birds were hanging in cages inside the garage. Both of the chickens ran off the day they were put in the pen he’d made for them, and Jimmy had told him—straight out; no nonsense—he’d seen one pancaked just up the road. From Fiona and Jimmy’s living-room window, he could see Coon curled up outside the trailer. Coon would never run away or otherwise cause trouble like Adventure Kitty by being piteous and gagging and staggering in the presence of a fairy-tale lady who could rescue her and put her inside her big, beautiful castle, where she served sardines. Coon would have disdained being renamed Precious Little One.
“It’s the waiting that gets to me,” Fiona said. “I can’t stand simply waiting around.”
“It’s better when you don’t have the television on,” he said. “They’re in the business of exciting you.”
“I know, but I’m just all jittery, waiting.”
“You’ll feel better when you have some lunch,” he said. He was chopping vegetables. Already missing Malcolm’s organic carrots and turnips and beets. “You drink so much coffee, you could do with a B complex, Fiona. Coffee leaches vitamin B right out of your system.”
“But I just don’t believe in all these vitamins, Nelson. Too many can be worse than not enough.”
“You’re a Brit,” Carleyville said. “Why aren’t you drinking tea, in the first place?”
“Let’s not have any harmful stereotyping,” she said.
She had started chopping with him. She chopped vegetables the way hopeless girls threw softballs: tentatively, and entirely without will.
“Did she get a job?” he said, knowing Fiona would know whom he meant.
“Right away. She said there was a terrible shortage of nurses. She could have been at work while the ink was drying on her signature.”
He spent a few seconds trying to imagine Christie—wash-and-wear, no-nonsense Christie—writing with a fountain pen. Though considering the bad business trades she made, maybe she’d traded a stained glass lampshade she’d worked weeks on for a fountain pen. Outside, trees were swaying in the wind. Fiona said: “Well, we’ve got flashlights and candles, plenty of candles. I suppose if we lose power we can still have light.”
“You know,” he said, “after lunch I think I’ll go over and pitch in on that roof.”
“Oh, I think you have to have insurance. Be insured, I mean. I don’t think—”
“Well, maybe my good intentions will get rained out,” he said.
The lights flickered. He finished scooping vegetables into the wok and ran for the front door, to get Coon. But Coon was already headed his way, he saw, when he threw open the door. He clicked his fingers, urging the dog to speed it up, though Coon always pretty much moved at his own pace, even with a hurricane brewing. His clicking fingers could not be heard anyway, because of the force of the wind.
“You know, I can’t get that story out of my mind that you—look at it out there! Where do you think Jimmy is? Hello, Coon. You come right into the kitchen and stay safe with us,” Fiona said, patting his side. She started her sentence again: “That story you told about forgetting the goldfish. I mean, you are funny. Though I’d never tell such a story on myself.”
“Fiona,” he said, “don’t you know that old ploy? If you’re really self-loathing, no one will listen to you. So you tell them little things, you point out the road markers, rather than talking about the big wreck on the highway.”
“Oh, you can’t be serious,” she said. “You’re teasing. I mean, I think it’s terrible you forgot the goldfish. I really do. But one doesn’t know what to do but see the humor in it.”
“I tell things for laughs. I want people like you to fall into the trap. It’s a skill of mine, very self-serving. Not everybody’s Jimmy, who can act like whatever happened the second before never happened.”
“Oh, he’s haunted. That’s all talk, and you know it. He’s seen psychiatrists half a dozen times, you know that. He has night sweats. He could use with a little of your ability to back off from the unimportant things, and see life as a comedy.” She looked at him. “As a mixture of comedy and tragedy,” she amended.
“It isn’t. Jimmy’s right, and we’re kidding ourselves.”
She shook her head, disagreeing.
“Tell the truth,” he said. “That time I went to bed and forgot I’d left the pressure cooker on. You were furious, weren’t you? You didn’t think how funny it was the plum puddings were on the ceiling, did you? You were as mad as I’ve ever seen you.”
“Well, I’m not proud of my reaction. You can’t take a compliment, Nelson. All I was saying was that your perspectives can be helpful. Especially when a thing’s already happened.”
Lightning seared into the trees at the back of the property. There was a deep rumble of thunder.
“Times like these you think you might be missing your cue and the special effects are there to help turn you into Frankenstein,” Carleyville said, staring out the window. “But Jimmy and I have already done Frankenstein, so now we spend the rest of our lives figuring out an encore.”
She looked at him, frowning. Finally, her voice more gentle than her eyes, she said: “I know how politically incorrect this is to say, but it still surprises me that a woman wrote that.”
“To me,” he said, interested in his thoughts, “every day is special effects. Except that there’s no transformation. It rains, it snows, it’s sunny, there’s a hurricane—it’s like background music in a movie to create emotion, but the movie’s over and there was no plot. Fiona, I ask you: Is there any reason I should be alive, and other people should be dead?”
“That’s an unanswerable question, and you know it,” she said. “The war is over, Nelson, and you’ve moved on.”
“To your field.”
“You’re just visiting,” Fiona said. “You can be so scathing about yourself. You’ve only come for a visit.”
He thought he detected the ripple of a question in her voice. It was mean to be cynical with Fiona. Truth was, she thought of him more, did more for him, than Jimmy did.
Rain lashed the house as another burst of thunder thudded from the sky.
“I’d think he’d have been back ages ago,” Fiona said.
“Maybe I should drive over and see if there’s a crisis, or something.”
“Oh, Nelson, of course not. We’re having a hurricane. It’s bad enough he’s not back.”
The stove was gas-burning, so there would be no trouble cooking lunch. He decided to start, to distract her.
“Where did the cat go?” she said, as if snapping out of a fog.
“You know what the cat did one time?” he said. “She got in the tub and curled up right over the drain. Nobody would believe a cat ever did that.”
“The tub?” Fiona said, getting up. “You think she could be in the tub?”
She came back a few minutes later, Adventure Kitty curled in her arms. “She was on a shelf of the linen closet,” she said. “Someone left the door ajar.”
“I hope a handful of kittens didn’t follow her out.”
“Oh, Nelson, really! You had her fixed, didn’t you?”
“I was going to, but I had to put the money into truck repairs.”
As Carleyville sautéed, the delectable odor of onions and carrots began to permeate the kitchen. He reached in his pants pocket and took out a small plastic container of dried mint, placing it on the counter. He stirred for another minute, then added green pepper and mushrooms. On top of this he placed shrimp to steam. With his favorite lacque
r chopstick, he stirred everything together, gave it another thirty seconds, then reached in the bag and took out a big pinch of what looked to Fiona like anemic mouse shit. “What is that?” she couldn’t resist asking.
“Lecithin granules,” he said. “Lowers cholesterol.”
“Well, I hope there’s no harm in it: I mean, half these natural food things, there’s—”
“It’s good for you,” he said. “Here I am optimistic about something and you try to make me skeptical.” He opened the other container and sprinkled mint on the food.
With the next clap of thunder, the cat jumped from Fiona’s arms, landing on the dog, who sprang up, scaring the cat even worse.
“Oh!” Fiona said.
Carleyville did not respond to her, but to the scrabbling animals. “Remember this, you assholes,” he shouted. “Every cat and dog must take responsibility not only for himself, but also for his buddy.”
They were without power that night and all the next day. In the morning it was still sprinkling rain, and there were enough gusts of wind to have blown Cleo’s blanket off, although it had been secured with two belts. Carleyville and Jimmy took a walk to assess the damage. A big tree had gone down across 91 and was being worked on by a yellow-jacketed work crew who stopped cutting to call out that they should be careful because of downed wires. The wires were obvious, like spaghetti dumped on top of drumsticks. Like a really bad meal in a really bad restaurant. Nice of them to pipe up, but, Carleyville thought, he and Jimmy had experienced a few worse dangers.
The second-floor shutters of a Victorian had fallen to the ground. “Made pickup sticks out of those,” Jimmy said, gesturing through the rain. The glass on a downstairs window also seemed to be cracked.
