Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

He turned to pick up his tools and saw Joseph at the window. Mike waved and decided to join him to see what it looked like from there.

  Joseph moved aside to let Mike have the view.

  “Well, what do you think of that? A Trasco in your own backyard!”

  Ann came to look. “Why, Mike, it’s so clever!”

  Joseph nodded and then asked, “Did you ever find the sign I made you?”

  “Oh, yeah, I did,” Mike said, “yeah,” trying not to remember either what it said or what he had done with it.

  “I just remembered that,” Joseph said.

  Through dinner, which Ann served, Joseph spoke rarely, and always when he did, it was to ask a question of Mike and to add that now-familiar refrain “I just remembered that.” His hands shook when he tried to pass the cranberry or the gravy. The little girls sat gravely wearing the paper hats that came out of their Christmas crackers, saying no more than “please” or “thank you.” Mike worked hard to fulfill the double obligation of eating enough to honor the feast and talking enough to make the occasion the double celebration it was intended to be. He was enormously relieved when he felt he had stayed as long as he was expected to. He carried off with him matching woolen cap and muffler of the same ridiculous sort Joseph wore, touched that Ann had knitted them for him but not able to wear them out of the house.

  On the way back to the warehouse, he turned on the radio and heard, “But if somehow you could / Pack up your sorrows and / Give them all to me / You would lose them, I know how to use them / Give them all to me.” The weight of Joseph’s illness as heavy in him as the dinner he had just eaten, Mike had a momentary glimmer of what might have driven Joseph as far as he’d gone. Other people’s griefs could send you mad. Mike no more wanted to shoulder Joseph’s calamities than he did his own. It would take a thousand-mile shrug to get them off his back.

  Mike had no clear destination. If there had been a town called Away, he would have headed for that. With the camper top secured on his Datsun, a mattress, sleeping bag, and camp stove stowed in the back, along, at the last minute, with golf clubs and tennis racket, which made him feel he could take a holiday even from the self he had been, he could be independent. If he discovered that the excuse he’d always given Alma for refusing to spend money on a vacation, which was simply that he couldn’t stand idle time, turned out to be true, he could always go visit his mother and brother, but he wanted to feel under no obligation to anyone. He hadn’t dealt this hand, but he could choose to play it.

  Mike realized almost at once that he did not want to drive a thousand miles with only the radio for distraction. The songs only salted his thoughts with a bitterness he had to escape. He needed a companion. He thought of and rejected Carlotta because she hadn’t the money to take real time off. He thought of borrowing one of his children and knew Alma would never hear of it. He had no taste for the melodrama of kidnapping. The simple and obvious solution was to pick up a hitchhiker. Mike minimized the danger of being mugged by stowing a heavy wrench on the shelf behind the seat under a blanket out of sight but in easy reach. The mistake a lot of men made with Mike was assuming his size would make him slow.

  Driving out of Vancouver early on Boxing Day, Mike was surprised to find no hitchhikers on the road, but at the border, where an American immigration officer asked a lot of unnecessary questions not only about where he was going, for how long, and why but about his job, his bank account, his marital status, he was relieved to suffer being obsequious alone. He knew very well how to do it since his job for the last eight years had allowed him only two choices, knocking a man down the stairs or kissing his ass.

  He fanned his credit cards without saying he didn’t have American Express because he didn’t like the fucking name. He said he was a designer of jungle gyms on a visit to his mother in Arizona. He gave Alma’s parents’ address as his own. Then he waited with a show of patience, under which should have been written “simulated,” while he was checked in the big black book of particular undesirables. Probably a guy like Allen Dent, a real rip-off artist who could cross the border on his own wings, was asked to show nothing but his expensively straightened teeth.

  Mike found his first hitchhiker in Blaine just across the border, a kid who was going to Seattle to marry a girl who was apparently the only virgin he had ever met. There was no point in giving him advice. The ones who so willingly let you into their pants before the blessed occasion could just as easily lock the chastity belt and throw the key away the day after the deed was done. Still, if this kid had a taste for deflowering virgins, he’d be safer and happier molesting girls on the playground at a junior high than marrying one. Such thoughts so depressed Mike that he asked the kid about his job, but he didn’t have one. His girl clerked in a department store and thought maybe she could get him in there in the stockroom. Then he was back to talking about getting married.

  “Married guys are always telling you not to do it, not to tie yourself down. They forget what getting it anytime you like it is worth, you know? You married?”

  Mike nodded.

  “Everybody is after all,” the kid concluded.

  Mike heard Alma say, “How many people do you know who’ve stayed married as long as we have?” When you’re twenty, everybody else in the world is married. When you’re thirty, everybody else is divorced.

  He let the kid off, glad to be rid of him, and drove some miles alone with the worse company of Alma. He tried to think, instead, of Carlotta, but nothing of her friendliness or eager appetite came back to him. The only image he could call up was her lying on her bed, pale as a corpse, just before he passed out. It hadn’t even occurred to him to phone to see how she was. He didn’t want to know.

  Unable to stand his own company, he stopped for a young couple, dressed in jeans, ponchos, boots, and beads. He should have known by their costume that they would be his age, veteran dropouts, on their way to yet another commune, where they’d find again nobody ever got round to planting anything but grass or making anything but each other’s women. They hadn’t been in the truck ten minutes before the conversation made it clear that for a steak dinner for both of them—at least they weren’t vegetarians—she’d fuck. Mike offered each of them an apple and dropped them in Portland. As she got out of the car, she handed Mike a couple of joints. He was sorry then that he’d let them go. What would have been the matter with buying them a meal, smoking some dope with them, then, if he felt like it, having a friendly screw? She wasn’t bad-looking.

  Mike hadn’t done anything like that since he was in high school, when he had to do it, when fucking a girl with a bunch of your friends was as much an initiation rite as being able to knock any one of them down. A couple of the girls they knew were always willing for a buck a piece, but the greater conquest was cruising around until you found a girl or two you didn’t know. None of his father’s dire warnings about venereal disease and prison terms discouraged Mike. Such dangers were part of the point. Fear was never an excuse. The only way anyone got out of that Saturday night car was to have some place he was getting it free all for himself. Those Saturday nights, once the novelty wore off, simply bored and depressed Mike.

  Sex with Alma would have bored him if he’d had it often enough. How many times could you get up enthusiasm for screwing a dead whale? The cruelty of that image amused him. Yet he had not, until Carlotta, ever cheated on Alma, and he’d had plenty of opportunity. Was it just another sign of his parsimony that he wouldn’t pay double for anything? It was more than that. Even bad sex with Alma had the wonder of possibility in it, the discovering of a child in her woman’s flesh, as you might discover shape in wood or stone. When she had stopped wanting children, Alma had ceased to be his wife. He had stayed with her as long as he had because she was the mother of his children. Carlotta? She hardly seemed to Mike a woman at all. She was his good friend, whom he had finally beaten at her own game, and he regretted it in the same way he had regretted defeating a male friend, though he understood the necessity
. It wouldn’t have to happen again.

  It was getting dark. There was no point in trying to make it to Grants Pass that night. He’d go off the freeway at Roseburg and find some place quiet after he’d had something to eat. He stepped inside a café and was confronted with the loud music he had had to tolerate at work, a cluster of nervously joking and punching teenaged boys by the jukebox, booths of girls who looked no more than fifteen or sixteen with babies in laps, in high chairs, making bloody swamps of french fries and catsup while their mothers gossiped.

  “She told me that he swore he wouldn’t hit her again, and she said it was her fault most of the time anyway because she nagged him. They’ve gone to Reno for a second honeymoon. Her mom kept the baby.”

  “Wouldn’t mind Charlie slugging me if I could get a trip to Reno out of it.”

  “Only trip I’d get to Reno is alone.”

  A two-year-old in a high chair overturned a glass of milk; a baby began to howl. Mike had forgotten how much even his own children had irritated him at that age. He knew he couldn’t eat a meal here without fighting the impulse to silence every child in the place. He walked out, found a grocery store, bought himself more ground meat, half a dozen eggs, and a can of tomato juice.

  After he’d eaten his frugal supper, sitting in his camper door, he took out one of the joints he had been given, smoked, and watched the winter stars. The signs he had been watching all day long to read the names of realities that lay out of sight near the surreal highway began to be shapes in his mind to be reclaimed, to hang high in space, making no claim to reality at all. The huge transport trucks which had passed him in both directions all day long began to come apart as easily as pieces of Lego, not in fantasies of frightening wreckage, but in redeemable shapes. Mike remembered his brother working over an old car, determined to make it run, while Mike, five years younger, understanding nothing about engines, played among the parts as if they were building blocks.

  “That’s not the way it goes,” his brother had shouted at him. “Don’t mess with that.”

  Jud had thought Mike was retarded because he never built anything the way it said to, tried to make something that looked like a boat out of an airplane kit, engineered a stool that would stand only on its seat.

  “I want to make it look like it wants to get up, like a bug on its back.”

  Mike hadn’t the language then to talk about movement that didn’t exist, illusion, art.

  “Art is putting the wrong things together. Picasso knew that.”

  After a while he’d go see Jud, explain to him the difference between usefulness and meaning.

  The next morning there was snow on the ground at Grants Pass, but the sun was shining, and the roads were clear. Mike wished someone else had been driving as he came down the long, winding road into California and approached Shasta. Several times he pulled off and stopped in order simply to look at the views. It was impossible to believe that just a few hours to the south oranges and grapefruit ripened in hot sun. The golf clubs and tennis racket seemed more absurd than ever. There was a grand peaceful familiarity about this landscape, all substance and clarity. Carlotta said she had to work in the cold. Certainly there was nothing in the miniature brilliance of spring for Mike. Flowers got in the way of his stride like dog shit when he wanted to be looking up, as he did now, at the classic shape of a mountain. He would have liked to stay here awhile, but he still had too much need to be gone since there was nothing else to do. Driving became an occupation.

  Once he was in the flat, mild Central Valley, he mourned the mountains, nothing here but acres of dusty olive groves. Mike suffered a boredom intense enough to cancel his anger. Late in the afternoon he gave up the struggle against sleep, pulling into a rest area, and did not even bother to get into the back of the truck but lay cramped on the seat. When he woke, it was after dark, and he was back inside a private time which made him feel less and less in touch with time in the human world. But he soon discovered it didn’t matter in California. Nothing ever seemed to close down. It was as easy to get a six-pack of beer at four in the morning as it was at four in the afternoon. There were all-night gas stations, drugstores, movies, and there seemed to be a great many more people, not just runaways and derelicts, who inhabited what were unused portions of night and morning in Vancouver. Mike did not feel the outlaw or outcast he often did in his own city. Neither, however, did he feel at home, wandering in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, as far south as San Diego.

  Mike did not know how to find and make new friends. Oh, he could strike up an easy enough conversation with working stiffs in any city but he felt lonelier with them than he did by himself. In selling galleries and museums, he always felt awkward and was therefore abrupt with anyone who tried to approach him. Once, years ago, in the Vancouver Art Gallery, one of the staff had mistaken him for the plumber they were waiting for. He had never set foot in the building again, mocked the shows he only read about as the kind of tenth-rate garbage always foisted off on hick towns like Vancouver. When he was in Los Angeles, he put on his suit and went to galleries which handled the really big names, passing himself off as a prospective buyer. The combination of his father-in-law’s taste in clothes and his own knowledge was persuasive, and for several hours Mike tried to enjoy the flattering attention not of simple clerks but of gallery owners called to attend him once he had started asking intelligent questions. But it was such an empty trick—masquerading in the trappings of power didn’t give him any—and such a cowardly substitute for what he should have risked that he ended his tour full of self-loathing.

  What else could he really do? He had no adequate photographs of his work, and he hadn’t any Canadian shows to his credit. His work had not been on public display since the student group exhibit when he was graduated. Anyway, these people weren’t in it to discover anybody. They were in it for the big money of the big names. He did ask for the names of galleries where lesser-known and local artists showed their work, but he did not visit them at all, even as a rich buyer. He hadn’t come down here to be humiliated as a Canadian nobody. He wasn’t out to prove anything at all.

  Yet the simplest circumstances seemed to turn into tests. He got into more punch-outs than he had at work, and he discovered it was one thing to deal with out-of-shape drunks, another to deal with the young punks from muscle beach. Mike had lost twenty-five pounds in the last six months, and he was eating and sleeping more like a stray dog than a man.

  “Why don’t you learn to play golf?” asked one peaceable kid who refused to take Mike’s aggressiveness seriously. “It’s more fun and better for you at your age.”

  If Mike’s clubs had been handy, he’d have beaten the kid to death for his good advice.

  Well, what the hell was he doing? He was letting the ten percent of his earnings he had religiously saved ever since he was a kid with a paper route leak away like pus out of the last of Job’s boils as if that were the painful cure for his pain. Stupid. He was being entirely stupid.

  It was nearly the first of February. He wrote a check for Alma and sent her a note to say he would be in Arizona for a while at his brother’s. Then he picked out postcards to send to his sons, a picture of dolphins for Vic, named illustrations of desert cacti for Tony. At the same time he scribbled wish-you-were-here messages to Ann and Joseph, to Carlotta.

  Mike hadn’t seen Jud for five years, not since their father’s funeral. They hadn’t talked much then, but Jud had told him he was getting rid of his wife, who’d turned out to be nothing but a tramp, and he was taking their mother south with him to look after the kids. It would give her a home and something to do. Mike had been too grateful to be relieved of the financial and emotional responsibility of his mother to think much about what getting rid of a wife had been for Jud. Mike had met his sister-in-law at the wedding when he went down to Phoenix to be best man, and Jud had brought her home to Vancouver a couple of times, but after there were two children, the grandparents had gone south to visit. Mike remembe
red her as a pretty woman who hadn’t much to say for herself. Alma hadn’t taken to her, so they’d seen no more of her than duty seemed to require. Jud had his own friends in Vancouver. They were the sort of brothers who never did much together.

  Now Mike wondered how inadequate a brother he might have been to Jud at that time. If he’d undergone even a small measure of the pain Mike was experiencing, he must have needed someone to talk to. Maybe he’d been able to talk to their mother. Mike doubted it, remembering his mother in black, mourning with the stoic formality of a peasant a man whose moods she had accepted like the weather, whose pronouncements she had neither believed nor corrected, a man who had loved her clumsily, provided for her at best uncertainly, his only legacy to her two sons he had taught responsibility and frugality by bad example. The only comfort she could have been to Jud was in not questioning his decision to get rid of his wife, in taking over his household and children and making his life more familiar to and comfortable for him than it had been since he left home. When she said goodbye to Mike, she made her simple explanation: “Jud’s the one who needs me.”

  Jud had sent her back to Vancouver several times on short holidays. Though she and Alma always seemed to get along all right, his mother’s presence increased tension between him and Alma, who seemed to be unnecessarily always trying to impress her mother-in-law. “You don’t have to feed my mother all this fancy garbage. She’s just a peasant, you know, like me.” Alma even wanted to give a luncheon, inviting friends of his mother’s. “Christ, Alma, she didn’t have any friends. She wasn’t a member of the Junior League.” Alma didn’t argue with him. Her mother gave a luncheon, and Mike didn’t ask who had been invited. Once Alma accused him of being ashamed of his mother, as if he couldn’t see for himself what a handsome and intelligent woman she was, perfectly “presentable.” Ashamed of her? He would have married such a woman if there had been anyone remotely like her anywhere in his experience.