Calling Home

by Michael Cadnum

  “That’s true. I have a lot on my mind lately.”

  “You look a little tired.”

  “No, I feel fine.”

  He nodded. “Me, too,” he said drily. You have to like someone like Mr. Dixon. He could walk into class carrying his severed arm, look at you, nod hello, nod to the arm, and say, “Little accident.” “You like getting F’s?” he asked.

  “No, I hate getting F’s,” I said, but Mr. Dixon was already talking to two girls with admit slips, so I faded from the room; I didn’t mind doing badly at geometry—it’s an antique philosophy of lines and points, neither of which, it starts by admitting, can ever exist in any real place. But I felt that I had disappointed Mr. Dixon. Why should he care? He had seen thousands of geometry students roll like so many boulders down that big empty gorge of classroom upon classroom. He must know inside somewhere that geometry doesn’t matter, or that it is, at best, an acquired taste. But it feels bad to be a failure at something, even at something stupid, and I needed some time to myself so I could think about what was happening.

  Harding High was going to be torn down in a few months. It had been condemned because they were afraid if an earthquake hit, the buildings would collapse. Raw holes were kicked in the walls of the hallways, and students had written names and drawn freehand anatomies on the doors. It was like inhabiting a huge piece of trash.

  I sauntered into the counselors’ office and blinked because of the blue fluorescent lights there. File cabinets echoed from the insect-brittle tapping of a typewriter. A bell rang far over my head and I closed my eyes for a moment. I took a deep breath. I opened my eyes and there was my counselor, wide-eyed—as if my presence had called him with a jerk from some level of Hades where they manufacture index cards.

  He backed away from me. “You can’t just drop in and see me,” he said, breathing antacid into my face. “You have to fill out a request.”

  “Mr. Dixon sent me here.”

  “Where’s your slip?”

  My attention drifted. Hard to believe, I know, but I simply could not focus on someone so inconsequential. I stretched my shoulders and made an effort, bending forward earnestly. “He told me I should see you about transferring from geometry.”

  “Mr. Dixon.”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Tyler chewed, savored, and swallowed that residue of tummy medicine he had in his mouth. “You were the one who wanted to take geometry.” His face got sharp and he made himself look smart. “I told you you couldn’t handle the work. That’s university prep.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I told you it would be very difficult, and now here you are.” Spookily, he and I were alone in the office. The typing had stopped. The clock on the lime-green wall made a noise like someone sucking a lozenge, and the minute hand advanced one step. Mr. Tyler glanced around, coughed and patted his coat pocket.

  “I wanted to take some math,” I said, trying to sound stupid enough to be harmless. “It’s important to be well-rounded.”

  “What did you get in algebra?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “As I recall,” he said, patting his breast, “you did very poorly.” He put his hand into his coat like he was adjusting his bra strap. He brought out a small white tube and slipped what looked exactly like a tablet of chalk onto his gray tongue. “Make an appointment,” he said. “And we’ll talk about it.”

  I nodded, but his heel had made a squeak like a rusty car door and he was already in his office, a small cubicle behind translucent glass. His form rippled and shifted behind the rough texture of the glass like someone you could not conjure into your memory, a distant relative, or someone who used to be very important who, at that very moment, you cannot recall. It was abrupt, being left there at the counter, and even though I had wanted to be left alone I was not prepared to be left alone in that place.

  A secretary clicked across the room to the typewriter. She was a heavyset Latino, pretty black eyebrows, muy made-up, a revvy chassis, but over the hill. She looked at me, passing a pink wad of gum across her tongue as if it were me and, to no one’s surprise, I didn’t taste all that good.

  Angela was waiting for me in her green BMW after school, racing the engine in neutral and working the gear knob like it was a penis that refused to comply. “What took you?”

  “Nothing took me. I’m just walking along the ground like a normal human being.”

  “That would be a first.”

  The BMW made toylike squeals as it pushed off from the gutter. She deftly avoided a guy on a motorcycle, and leaned on the horn at two junior high school kids who were crossing Lake Boulevard in a crosswalk. “They’re not back yet,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. I admired Angela’s black hair. She was beautiful. There was no question. I was lucky to have her, of course, but then, she was lucky to have me. Mutual good taste. She changed lanes to pass a pickup loaded with branches, and punched buttons on the car stereo. Music thumped the car and I twitched, working my knuckles, frowning at the soreness, feeling for my seat belt, which I found and worked until it clicked. I experimented with it to make sure I was secured by it.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with me.”

  “You art like a zombie. What have you been taking?”

  “Nothing. My nervous system is completely unaffected by any stimulant or depressant.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you.”

  “Almost certainly.” I pretended to be suave, but I felt about as suave as a cow pie. She offered me a cigarette and I took it, letting the thing flip up and down in my mouth as I talked and waited for the cigarette lighter to pop out, but I did not want to be with Angela that afternoon, and I was sorry her parents weren’t back from Vegas.

  She was a year ahead of me. She should have been going to Skyline, but her parents had decided to let her finish her senior year at Harding. Her father had made a lot of money in the past couple of years inventing ways for meat to brown as well as cook in microwave ovens. They had moved out of the mixed neighborhood near Harding and into a new house on stilts overlooking eucalyptus and the expanse of Oakland.

  Angela let the BMW fishtail a little going around curves in the hills, flashing in and out of the shade of redwood trees. She jerked the wheel and the car jumped up the driveway. We left the car making the ticking noises cars make as they cool and slipped into a house so new it smelled like Saran Wrap. The carpet was orange, and the new sofa was a blinding blue. Paintings of patio furniture decorated the walls.

  I was drawn to the view, to escape the sight of all that newness and to get some wind on my face, but Angela called me back, holding forth a highball like a movie star in some old movie filled with talk and cigarettes. She arrayed herself on the sofa and I stumbled into a leather chair. I settled back, sipping my drink, a tall scotch. The flavor snaked into me and something in me went stiff. I swallowed the drink as fast as I could, hoping some shock to my system would ease me into a new state of mind: clarity. The use of booze as shoehorn is well known, but it is not a surefire method. What is? But I looked at Angela acting, whether she knew it or not, like her mother flirting with a lover, some friend of her husband’s invited up for a little of the wet stuff while hubby was out testing candied hams, and did not like what I saw. Angela is striking to behold. She could be in magazines, in or out of clothes. The sight of her did not please me.

  We did the sticky on her parents’ bed, gluey with whiskey and working it hard, like some athletic event, or a twelve-cylinder monster created to consume as much as possible in the shortest space of time. I took the bus home. I told myself that I felt fine, that I would maintain the situation and that Mead’s father would have a long and happy life.

  Lani was sitting right in front of me and I had not seen her.

  “I was calling to you and you looked right through me,” she said. Her black hair was damp from her postgame shower, and she held a notebook crammed wi
th sheet music.

  I realized that I wanted to talk to Lani more than anyone. She was the sort of person you want to have like you, and you want to have understand you. There was a compelling quality in her dark eyes, and the way she looked at me as if she saw me.

  “You must be on your way home,” I managed to say.

  “Going to piano lessons. You can come, too. My teacher’s very interesting.” Lani has a soft, deep voice, always a little serious, a little formal. “I’ve never met anyone like him.”

  I was, stupidly, a little jealous of her piano teacher.

  “Maybe someday I will, but not tonight.”

  “Are you all right, Peter?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “You look so strange.”

  “I’ve always been a little strange,” I said, making myself laugh.

  “This is different. You should take care of yourself.”

  “I’m fine, Lani. Really.”

  She flexed her fingers. “He tells me that the muscles for softball and the muscles for piano are not compatible. He tells me I’ll have to decide whether I want to pursue the piano, or the curveball.”

  “I’ve never heard you play.”

  “You aren’t missing anything. Maybe someday I’ll be as good as I want to be. You know,” she said, changing the subject in an instant, “I’ve never seen any of your drawings.”

  “I don’t draw anymore. I used to. But I stopped. I think I’m getting stupid as I grow up.” I laughed, as though I had made a joke. “Premature senility.”

  “I think you should draw. I bet you’re a marvelous artist.”

  I felt hot, pleased and embarrassed. “Not that marvelous—”

  “I expect a lot of you, Peter. You’re not an ordinary person at all.”

  “It might be good to be ordinary. A major achievement, far beyond my reach.”

  She looked at me, hard. “Are you sure you feel all right?”

  6

  Ted’s light was on, the top of his gray head just visible in his basement. I hesitated outside my own house, then trotted across the street. I knocked on his basement door, and winced. I withdrew my hand and held it close to me.

  “Peter! How are you? Come in, I’m just setting up something new.”

  “What happened to the village?”

  “I destroyed it. Like a god, I took it down. I’m making mountains now.” He held up a box of wallpaper paste. “I’m getting bridges in.”

  “Where are the trains?”

  “They’re put away, but they’ll come back. This whole table will be an Alpine village, circa 1900. I went to the Alps once, you know.”

  The smell of wallpaper paste was bland but overpowering. The stir-stick made a solid, sticky noise in a bucket of it. “I mix newspaper with this stuff, and lay it over mountains made of chicken wire.”

  “I can’t believe you took down your village. It was so pretty.”

  “Nothing. Wait’ll you see this. I’m buying new trains, too. Hundreds of dollars. Made in Austria. Precision and detail you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Will there be a town?”

  “A village. Twenty or thirty people. And this.” He picked up a small mirror from the clutter of his worktable. “Do you know what this is?”

  “What is it?” I said, to please him.

  “A pond for ice skaters. I think of everything.”

  I was sorry to not be able to see his trains run their circuits around the table. There had always been something comforting about watching the trains arrive again and again, with a miniature rumble past the man with the dog, and the boy selling the newspaper, and the gardener with his shovel, none of them moving. Only the train moved, an illogical event in all that stillness, but a sight that always comforted. But I was excited that something new was coming: mountains. An iced pond. And bridges across valleys that did not yet exist.

  Ted fumbled at his workbench and found a small black radio with his paste-sticky hand, working the dial with difficulty. A Warriors game sputtered. He adjusted the dial and it came in clearly. The score was tied in the first quarter.

  “I’ll even have an elk. See him?”

  I nudged a small figure on the table beside me. It looked very much unlike a real elk, but I knew that realism was not the point. I wasn’t sure what the point was, but I understood it. “When will you be done?”

  “Months from now. What’s the sense of hurrying? The longer I take, the more satisfying it is. When you’re finished, you really don’t have anything to do but start all over again.”

  “It takes so much patience.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It takes steady, quiet impatience. The kind that builds real villages. Real mountains, too, I suppose.”

  There was a figure leaning against the hood of a car as I crossed the street. I hesitated, power emptying from my body. I kept moving, even though his car was parked directly in my path and there was no way I could reach my doorstep without walking right past him. The figure straightened as I approached and, although I could not see his face in the darkness, I could tell he was looking very closely at me, studying me, taking me in as if he wanted to know everything there was to know about me. I wanted to run; the only thing I could think about was running, and yet I knew if I ran, it would be all over, that the only thing to do was to act calm and behave like nothing in the whole world was wrong.

  “Peter?”

  I took a step.

  “It is you,” he said.

  I moved to where the streetlight fell across his face.

  “You’ve grown so much. And look at those shoulders.”

  “I’m still not very tall,” I managed.

  “No, but I’m not either. Not short. But not tall. Just right. Here. Get in the car.”

  “I—”

  “She knows.”

  “I’m surprised to see you.”

  “Get in the car. Good Lord, we can’t stand around in the street like a couple of complete strangers. Come on. Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s go. What would you like? Steak? I feel like a big steak.”

  “Nice car,” I said, shutting the door.

  “Rented.” He had trouble finding the key slot. “Didn’t your mother tell you I was coming?”

  “No. She never mentioned it.”

  He looked into me for a moment, not at me but into me. “I’m not surprised,” he said.

  My father drove fast, and sloppily, unfamiliar with the car, and like he was impatient with other cars for existing, like he wanted a bare world, all flat, where he and I could barrel along and talk without having to notice anyone else.

  “Where’s a good steak house? Here?”

  He had been driving so fast I was confused. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll stop here. What difference does it make? I’m hungry. How about you? You must be hungry. Good Lord. A growing boy. A junior.” He said “junior” as if to reassure me that he knew what grade I was in and everything. I fumbled awkwardly with the door handle. “Come on, let’s go eat,” he said outside the car. “I’m starving.”

  I couldn’t open my side of the car, so I crawled across the front seat and got out on the driver’s side. My father hurried ahead, and I followed him, wondering if the car would be stolen. “I forgot to lock the car,” I said at last.

  “Forget it.”

  “There are thieves all over this town.”

  “Forget it. They steal the car, we’ll call the place I rented it from.”

  We entered the restaurant. It was warm inside, and the lights were comfortably dim. My father strode across the room and chose a booth with large, plastic-upholstered seats. I slid into mine. My father opened a menu with a flick of his wrist. I had not seen him in years, and I was fascinated to look at him, although I could not simply sit and stare at him like he was a television. I looked sideways at him, and every time he looked down, or looked away, I looked at him carefully to see what he looked like, and to
see how much he had changed. He was not as blond as I am, and not as muscular, and his hair had receded above his temples.

  He looked handsome, in a thin, beat-up way, but he did not have a face that was easy to look at. He was quick, and his eyes went here and there, and he made a person feel that he was friendly, but in a hurry. He also made a person feel that he could get very angry in about two seconds.

  “Slow service,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Grown-up, practically.”

  I made the same blank expression I make every time an older person states the obvious.

  “What do you want? Here’s a menu. Take your pick. I feel like a steak.”

  We ordered New York steaks, both rare. As soon as the waitress, who had hair piled up nearly to the ceiling, had tucked her pencil into her bib and minced away, my father slid his water glass slightly away from him and said, “I’m here to talk about something fairly serious.”

  I toyed with a fork and put it down.

  “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. And it’s something your mother has been thinking about.”

  I waited.

  “I might as well plow right ahead, right?”

  I tried to say “right.”

  “How would you like to come live with me?”

  I clasped my hands together to keep them from trembling, but I couldn’t control them.

  “I know this is sudden, but the situation is this. Now, you don’t have to say yea or nay right now, but the situation is this: you and your mother don’t get along. Correct?”

  “We get along okay.”

  “You have trouble getting along with her—which I can understand perfectly well—and like anyone your age, you could use a change of scenery.”

  “I get along with her. There’s no problem.”

  “She says there’s been a problem.”

  I felt betrayed. I did not look at my father. I felt a tine on the fork like I was checking it for sharpness, a field tester the fork companies send out to check up on the quality of their products. “Sometimes we have arguments,” I said finally.