Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  “I like the Dunkin’ Donuts,” Pete said.

  “I know you do.” Drummond took a deep breath and said firmly, “Today we’re doing things just a little different from normal. You’re having a visitor. She’s a nice lady, and she wants to ask you some questions.”

  “I think I’d like to become a baker.”

  “What happened to being a janitor?”

  “Maybe a janitor at a bakery.”

  “Now you’re thinking.” Drummond turned on his stool and looked his son in the eye. “Remember how Mom used to bake bread?”

  “No,” said the boy.

  “No?” Drummond absently cleaned ink from a fingernail with the blade of a screwdriver. “Of course you do. She’d put a damp towel over the bowl, and you’d sing to her. She used to tell you that it was your singing that made the dough rise, remember?”

  Drummond turned back to his workbench and listened to the rain and to the boy praying and telling the beads. The wall in front of his bench was covered with pinups of writers posed beside their typewriters. Drummond wasn’t particularly well read but he knew a lot about literature through the machines that made it. This knowledge was handy in selling a Royal Quiet De Luxe to an aspiring writer whose hero was Hemingway or a Hermes Baby Rocket to a Steinbeck fan. A curiosity he’d never been able to figure out was that many of these writers didn’t really know how to type. They hung like vultures over their machines, clawing at the keyboard with two fingers and sometimes a thumb, and while they were often hugely prolific, they went about it desperately, hunting and pecking, as though scratching sentences out of the dirt. Given their technique, it was a miracle some of them managed to say anything. An editorialist for the Seattle Times told Drummond that he just sat there and hit the machine until, letter by letter, it coughed up the words he wanted. Even Michener, a man Drummond had read and esteemed highly, in part for having typed more than anyone on earth, except perhaps a few unsung women from the bygone era of the secretarial pool, was a clod at the keys.

  “You had a really good voice,” Drummond said.

  At twenty-minute intervals, the sidewalk filled and then emptied, the shopwindow blooming with successive crops of black umbrellas as buses came and went. The hour for the appointment with the social worker approached, and Drummond found that he could no longer concentrate. He rolled two sheets of paper into the novelist’s Olivetti, typing the date and a salutation to his wife, then sat with his elbows on the workbench, staring. He wondered if he should drop “Dear” and go simply with “Theresa,” keeping things businesslike, a touch cold. Whenever Drummond opened a machine, he saw a life in the amphitheater of seated type bars, just as a dentist, peering into a mouth for the first time, probably understood something about the person, his age and habits and vices. Letters were gnawed and ground down like teeth, gunked up with ink and the plaque of gum erasers, stained with everything from coffee to nicotine and lipstick, but none of his knowledge helped him now. Drummond wanted to type a letter and update his wife, but the mechanic in him felt as though the soul of what he had to say just wasn’t in the machine. He looked at the greeting again and noticed that the capital “T” in his wife’s name was faintly blurred. That sometimes happened when the type bar struck the guide and slipped sideways on impact, indicating a slight misalignment.

  Drummond had been expecting a rendition of his wife, but the woman who walked in the door shortly after noon was nothing like Theresa. She couldn’t have been much older than Pete, and she wore faded jeans and a soft, sloppy V-necked sweater with the sleeves casually bunched up at her elbows. Her hair was long and her eyes were gray and her nose, though small, was bulbous. Drummond offered her a stool at the back of the shop and brought her a cup of coffee.

  “So, Peter, I’m from Keystone,” she said. “A halfway house in Fremont.”

  Pete squirmed in his recliner, rubbing his hands over the thighs of his soiled khakis.

  “Nothing’s been decided,” Drummond assured the boy.

  “Do you have many friends?” the social worker asked.

  “No,” Pete said.

  “No one you see on a regular basis?”

  The boy reached for the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and then picked up his rosary beads instead. The long chain trembled in his trembling hands, and his mouth made smacking noises, as though he were slopping down soup.

  “When I talked to your father, he said you were in a day program several years ago. Did you enjoy that?”

  “It was okay.”

  “Why did you stop going?”

  “I think I’ll go outside.”

  “No,” Drummond said. “Stay here and talk to the lady. She only has a few questions, and then we’re done.”

  The copper cowbell above the shop door clattered and the sheets of paper in the typewriters waved and rustled, giving off the slight dry whisper of skittering leaves. Drummond half listened to the tapping keys and the ringing bells and the ratchet of the returning carriage until the cowbell clanged dully a second time as the customer left. In the ensuing quiet, the sound of his boy working the polished rosary beads between his rough scaly fingers distracted Drummond from the social worker’s questions. The cowbell clapped a third time. A young mother was trying to ease a tandem carriage across the threshold without waking her twin babies. Drummond excused himself and went to help lift the front axle over the bump.

  “My husband would love that,” the woman said. Mindful of her babies, she spoke in a soft voice. “What is it?”

  “That’s a Remington Streamliner,” Drummond said.

  “Do you mind if I give it a try?”

  “No, go right ahead.”

  He set the machine on a desk and held a chair for the woman. Perhaps the new world of computers had taught people timidity, schooling them in the possibility or threat of losing a thing irrevocably with the slightest touch. This woman’s hand pressed the “H” so tentatively that the type bar fell back with an exhausted plop before it reached the paper.

  “Go ahead,” Drummond said. “Give it a good, clean stroke. You won’t hurt it. With a manual typewriter you want a little bounce. You can put your shoulders into it.”

  “Now is the time for all good men now is the time,” the woman typed on the black-lacquered machine, and when the bell rang out, happily ratifying what she’d written, she squealed and clapped her hands.

  “This is the most beautiful typewriter I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s so—so noir! It’s got Hollywood written all over it.”

  “It’s prewar,” Drummond said. “WWII, I mean. What’s your husband do?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” the woman said. “But he’s got that midlife thing going on and wants to try his hand at screenplays. He’s got lots of stories from his days as a public defender. His birthday’s coming up, and I just know he’s going to be depressed.”

  “Hold on,” Drummond said, walking back to his workbench. He pulled a photo off the wall.

  “If your mind’s too great for you,” Pete was saying, “you should just let God take it. That’s what Christ did. He was brain-dead. He never thought on his own.”

  “I’ve never heard that before,” the social worker said.

  Drummond took the photograph and, somewhat chagrined at the wacky course the interview was taking, returned to the showroom. “That’s Raymond Chandler,” he said. Chandler wore large owlish glasses and sat with a pipe clenched between his teeth, in a bungalow on the Paramount lot. A sleek gleaming Streamliner rested on his desk.

  The woman ran a slender hand lovingly over the polished casing, as though it were the hood of a car. Drummond told her the price, expecting her to balk, but instead she gave the machine a pat, ticking her wedding band against the metal, and then brought out a checkbook, paying for the machine and purchasing, in addition, extra ribbons, a bottle of Wite-Out, and a foam pad. “It’s just too perfect,” she said. The typewriter was added like a third sleeping baby to the carriage. Drummond helped the woman ov
er the threshold again and watched her go. All the young mothers these days were so lovely in a casual, offhand way. Drummond still dressed like his father, who had always worn a shirt and tie under his smock, as though his job were on a par, in dignity and importance, with the work of a doctor.

  Drummond returned to his son and the social worker.

  “If I let God take my brain, I’d be laughing. I’d know where I was going.”

  The woman wrote something on a clipboard, which was beginning to crawl with tiny, antlike words.

  “Where would you be going?” she asked.

  “I’d be going down.”

  “Down?”

  “I’m trying to figure my brain. What it wants me to do. I think to go down, but I can’t figure out what it’s good for. It’s too much for me.”

  Pete’s lips smacked grotesquely, and he stood up.

  “I think I just want to be a son,” he said. “Not a god.” His elbow jerked involuntarily. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The boy vanished into the back of the shop. Drummond turned to the social worker, whose long straight hair framed a lovely, plain face.

  “Is that typical?” she asked. “That kind of talk?”

  Drummond sat on his stool. “Yeah,” he said.

  “And the dyskinesia?”

  Drummond nodded—tardive dyskinesia. Half the words he needed to describe his son he couldn’t spell, and all of them sounded as fantastic and as far away as the Mesozoic monsters he had loved so much as a child. He remembered paging through The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs as if it were yesterday. The illustrations were lurid and the narrative encompassed the soupy advent and sad passing of an entire world. Now his boy was the incredible creature, and Drummond’s vocabulary had become lumbering and dinosauric, plodding with polysyllables.

  When the boy returned, he announced that he’d looked in the bathroom mirror and couldn’t see any love in his eyes. Without saying goodbye to the social worker, he picked up his broken umbrella, tapping the chrome spike across the carpeted floor on his way outside to smoke.

  “Are you a believer?” Drummond asked.

  “No,” the young woman said.

  “He suffers,” Drummond said. “The suffering—”

  The woman nodded. Drummond told her how the boy saw faces disintegrate before his eyes, faces that fell to pieces, then disappeared, leaving a hole. He told her how in the early days of the illness they’d taken the beloved family dog to the pound because it was talking to Pete and could read his mind and Pete was afraid the dog would tear him apart. Two weeks ago it was the shop radio, an old Philco that had been Drummond’s father’s—they couldn’t listen anymore. When the announcers laughed, Pete thought they were laughing at him. They would say exactly what he was thinking, predicting his thoughts. Last week the boy was so afraid that he’d only walk backward in public, convinced that someone was following him. He stumbled in reverse up the steps of the bus, and walked backward down the aisle.

  Drummond said, “It’s Friday, so, what—Wednesday night, I guess—he smelled burning flesh in the house. I always check on him before I go to bed, just to make sure he’s okay.” He sighed. “When I went in that night, he had raw eggs all around his bed. So I thought it was time to call you.”

  “You said your wife is gone?”

  “I think so,” Drummond said. Even though he knew the interview was over, he let the matter drift because he was uncomfortable with sympathy. “If anything happened to me.” he said, “I don’t know—”

  “That’s got to have you worried,” the woman said. She was very professional and understanding and Drummond realized how little conversation he’d had since his wife left. The interview, though, was a botch. When the social worker mentioned a waiting list, halfheartedly, Drummond saw that his growing need for help was exactly the thing disqualifying him for help from this woman.

  “These things don’t really bother me,” he said feebly. “Because—because I understand him, you see.”

  Drummond taped a sign on the door and locked the shop. He and the boy walked in the rain to the drugstore. Pete twirled his ragged, useless umbrella over their heads.

  “I decided against a halfway house,” Drummond said.

  “You have to forsake me,” the boy said. “I see that eventually happening.”

  “You don’t see, not if that’s what you think.”

  “Maybe I just see better. I’m like a prophet. And you’re sort of unevolved.”

  “Okay,” Drummond said. “All right, maybe. I’m unevolved. Sure.”

  They picked up a bottle of hand lotion and then at the rack by the register Pete tried on a pair of glasses. The gold-rimmed frames sat cockeyed on his nose, and the left lens was stamped with the manufacturer’s name: Optivision. The large square lenses themselves were neutral, as clear as windowpanes. Pete looked longingly at himself in the mirror, blinking his green eves. Drummond wasn’t sure whether to dissuade him; from a distance the boy, bespectacled, looked oddly more balanced, his elusive deranged face suddenly pulled into focus.

  “You don’t really need glasses,” Drummond said.

  “I do.”

  “Your eyes were fine last time we had them checked.”

  Pete said he wanted these glasses, these, with the gold frames, so that people would see the love. In the end, it was only another of the seemingly endless list of lunatic errands Drummond had grown accustomed to, and he gave up, paying for the glasses. They stepped next door and bought their usual lunch of doughnuts, of crullers and old-fashioneds, from the Greek. Drummond was still wary of the Greek, since the day, several months ago, when he’d asked Pete, rather loudly and obviously playing to an audience, if he wanted the psycho special. Drummond had been standing right beside Pete, but the Greek hadn’t realized they were together. Pete’s illness chipped away at the family resemblance and people often took them for strangers. The Greek had apologized, and Pete had forgotten the incident—if, indeed, he’d ever noticed it—but the day lingered in Drummond’s mind, a slight defensive hitch, every time he walked through the door of Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “I love Seattle,” Pete said, as they started back to the shop. He held the tattered umbrella in one hand and the white sack of doughnuts in the other. “I think Seattle’s one of the most happening places on the face of the globe at this point in time. We’re gonna determine civilization in the next century. I’ve never met so many movie stars—this is where it’s at. Literally, one of the hot spots of the nation is Seattle, USA.” He looked at his father through the rain-beaded, fogged lenses of his new glasses, which hung askew on the tip of his nose. “Just the other day, I ran into John Denver in the street. I said, ‘Oh, John, I’m writing an album and mailing it to you. It’s called Donuts.’”

  Drummond let the conversation blow away in the rain. He hooked his arm through his son’s and hurried him on, but Pete shrugged him off. People glanced sideways at the two men as they made their strange way down Second Avenue. The boy’s umbrella was a blasted tangle of snapping fabric and flailing spokes. Drummond’s smock flew out behind him. He lowered his head against the wind and the rain and the faces. His fondest boyhood memories were of walking down this same street with his father, strolling and waving as if the elder Drummond were the mayor of the avenue. Now his father was dead and he was the father, and this was his son.

  “I love finding stuff in the street. Like this umbrella . . .” The boy lurched along, planting each foot directly in front of the other. “I went to a sculpture show. That’s what the umbrella’s all about. It didn’t occur to me until I was walking up the street and it broke. I knew it was going to break, but I didn’t know what I would do with it after. Then I thought. A sculpture. Of course. A sculpture. What else? I call it Salvador. After Salvador Allende, the city Salvador, and Salvador Dalí. It’s a triumvirate piece of sculpture. Covering all three bases.”

  About a block from the shop, as they were crossing Bell Street, the boy knelt down in the inters
ection. He took up a storybook prayer posture, kneeling, his hands folded together in the shape of a candle flame and his head solemnly bowed with his lips touching the tips of his fingers. The sack of doughnuts split open in the rain and the umbrella skittered away in the wind. People paused to look down at the odd penitent praying in the crosswalk. Drummond saw a shiny patch on the asphalt turn from red to green, and then a few cars drove around, slowly. On either side of the crosswalk, a waiting crowd of pedestrians jostled one another at the curb for a view, and Drummond had a familiar passing urge to explain. It seemed the boy would never get up, but then suddenly he made the sign of the cross, rose, and resumed walking, contemplatively, toward the shop.

  They had not made much progress when the boy again fell to the sidewalk, again crossing himself and praying, the whole thing repeated like a liturgical rite, as if the boy were kneeling for the Stations. A moment of prayer, the stream of people parting, the stares so blank they seemed to Drummond like pity or hatred, then the boy rising and picking his way cautiously along a fixed, narrow path, again dropping like a supplicant to the sidewalk. Drummond fell to his knees beside his son, imploring him to get up. The boy’s glasses were gone and his thin, oily hair was pasted flat on his scalp. Drummond’s long smock, saturated, clung darkly to his back. Pete rose again and put his foot down on a seam in the concrete and followed the cracked path and again began praying. Women in the beauty salon next to the shop watched at the window as Drummond knelt with his son in the rain. He tried to hoist him up by his armpits, but the boy was a heavy dead weight. He lugged him across the sidewalk, heaving him a few feet at a time, until they made it safely to the shop door.

  Inside, Drummond snipped the twine on a new bundle of shop rags and began drying the boy off. He wiped his hair and ran the rag down his neck. He unbuttoned his shirt and toweled off his arms and chest, surprised, as always, to see the boy so hirsute. Drummond used to bathe him as an infant in the kitchen sink, and he remembered the yellow curtains Theresa had sewn, and the steamed window and the sill with the glossy green leaves of potted ivy. Drummond tried to bring back the feeling of those early winter twilights at the sink, he and the boy reflected in the window. He piled the wet rags, one after another, on the workbench, and when the boy was dry he said, “We’re going to close up.”