by John Fulton
“Are we going to Oak Groves right now?” I asked.
“He never said anything that made sense, anything that you could reply to,” she said. “You can’t get to know someone you can’t have a conversation with, can you?”
She seemed to expect an answer from me, so I gave her one. “Not really.”
“He just muttered all the time. A lot of the elderly at Oak Groves are like that. The other nurses tell me I’m going to get used to that. But I’m not used to it, and I don’t want to get used to it. He couldn’t hear you, either. When you’d say his name, you had to yell it right in his face as if you were calling to someone across a parking lot. It felt cruel. Even then he hardly knew to look at you. You can’t get to know someone like that, can you?”
“I guess not,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t mean to be telling you all of this. But I haven’t been able to talk to anybody yet.” She looked at her watch. “It only happened a few hours ago. Afterwards, I took the others to lunch as if it were just any other day and none of it affected me at all. But it did. It really did. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
We drove through the intersection of 100 South and 200 East, exactly one block south and two blocks east of the Temple, I knew, because the grid system in Salt Lake was built around Temple Square. Every address told you where you were in relation to that silly-looking holy site. The City of Zion really was built around God. At a red light on Main Street, we stopped in front of the high stucco walls of Temple Square, behind which rose the Disney-like spires of the Temple itself with the golden statue of the Angel Moroni blowing a trumpet atop the highest central spire. Pedestrians hurried in and out of the Temple Square gates, huddled beneath umbrellas and newspapers and squinting into the wet air.
“When God returns,” Jenny said, “the Angel Moroni will come to life and really blow his trumpet. That could happen at any time. It could happen now. That’s when everybody will come back to life.” She was peering out the window at the angel and trying to distract us so that she wouldn’t have to hear about Mr. Warner anymore. I saw her plan and I didn’t want to hear any more about the old man, either, but I didn’t much like what Jenny was saying. I didn’t like having to picture, as I did then, everyone digging free of their graves and walking around in the afternoon sun, trailing black earth behind them, as golden Moroni blasted at his trumpet.
“Who told you that?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“Janet Spencer,” she said. Janet Spencer was Mormon, as all the popular girls at Billmore were. She just happened to live up the street from us and wore the sort of trendy clothes that Jenny had to have ever since they had become friends. After school, Jenny spent hours over at Janet’s place, where she had been learning not only what sort of clothes she should be wearing, but also what she should believe. On the last two Sundays, the Spencers had picked up Jenny in their Mercedes station wagon and driven her down the hill to their ward, where she prayed and read from the Bible and did whatever else Mormons do for the better part of the day. When our father questioned her, she said she didn’t really believe in God or Mormonism. “I look forward to it. I’m meeting people, and I like it,” she said. But on those two Sundays she had come back happy, humming and singing songs I’d never heard. And the fact that Janet Spencer had been brainwashing my sister with Mormon renditions of the end of the world worried me. Despite her denials, Jenny tended to believe things. She wanted to believe things. She should have been spending her time after school and on Sundays learning geometry and not hokey stories about Kingdom Come.
“Don’t believe everything Janet Spencer says,” I said.
“I don’t believe everything,” she said. All the same, she couldn’t shut up about it. “She taught me the Ten Commandments. Would you like to hear the Ten Commandments?”
“Not right now,” my mother said. “I’m going to ask you two to please be quiet until we get to Oak Groves.”
The rain was coming down heavily now, beating against the hood and running down the windshield so fast that the wipers hardly made a difference. Then the rain, even as we sat at the light, eased up. I could see the reflection of my mother’s face in the windshield, the wipers moving through it and the water flowing over it—her eyes, her nose, her mouth—but not changing it. “I’d rather not go to that place,” I said. “Maybe you could take Jenny and me home first.”
My mother glared at me and I could tell that, in that instant, she was furious with me. “You’re your father’s son,” she said. “You are. God help me.” The anger settled and steadied her and she drove now with a frightening ease and control. It was as if she had a goal, a purpose, and her anger had put her in mind of this fact.
“My shoulder hurts,” I said. “The doctor said it might not heal for months. He said he didn’t understand what was wrong with me.”
She looked over at me, though I didn’t see concern in her eyes. I saw exhaustion and frustration and suspicion. She didn’t believe me. “Are you trying to add worry to my life? Is that what you’re trying to do?” She took out a cigarette and lit it, seeming to draw more calm, more strength, as she inhaled and let out smoke. “Somebody has to work in this family. Don’t you two know that?”
“I know it,” Jenny said.
“You know why I’m working at this place, don’t you? You know why I’m cleaning up after old people—mopping their urine off the floor, feeding them, watching them die.” She shook her head, then took a long draw from her cigarette.
“Jenny says she knows it,” I said.
“This is a question for you, Steven. I want you to think about it now and I want you to give me an answer. I was just asking you to come along with me, to keep me company while I do this thing. That’s all I wanted from you.” She let out a long, tired breath. “This family,” she said.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “You’re acting strange.” I was angry or scared, I didn’t know which. I only knew I had to fight her now, to resist something that I could sense was happening.
“What’s wrong with me,” she said, “is that I’m tired of carrying all the weight around here.” She was pulling into the parking lot of a Dee’s Family Restaurant somewhere around Fourth. It wasn’t the nicest restaurant, close enough to the park benches of the Town Hall and the warm, quiet shelter of the City Library to bring in the homeless, who were literally streaming through the doors as we pulled up. I was noticing how dirty the rain seemed, how it flooded the street gutters with a thick brown water and plastered discarded newspaper to the sidewalks and made the sky a blurry, concrete gray that seemed to absorb all distance and space. It was supposed to be winter, and I wished for the hard, bleak, leveling whiteness of snow, the quiet and sure way it lays itself down, erases things until the whole world is mute and soft and simplified.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“We’re going to have a talk, Steven. There’s no need to make this any more difficult than it needs to be. I don’t mean to get angry at you. None of this is your fault, is it?” she said. I could tell she was trying to calm down, and I was glad. “I thought I’d offer you a treat or something. How’s that sound?”
“Why?” Jenny asked. She didn’t understand any better than I did what entitled us to a treat.
“Because we need to talk about something,” my mother said.
I didn’t like the sound of this at all. “I thought we needed to go to Oak Groves now,” I said, an idea that suddenly seemed preferable to any talk. “What about Mr. Warner?”
“Mr. Warner,” she said. She took a deep breath and seemed about to cry again. But then she put her hands squarely on her knees and looked out the windshield. “Mr. Warner is dead,” she said. “I guess he can wait for us.”
* * *
Standing just inside the door with menus in her hand, the hostess took one look at us—a woman and two kids—and said, “Nonsmoking?” to which my mother shook her head and requested
smoking, despite the fact that she had been attempting with some success to quit since we’d come to Salt Lake and that that particular section was overrun with all the bums trying to get out of the rain, drinking coffee and blowing cigarette smoke so thick a haze of gray hung in the air. We sat at a booth next to a rain-streaked window. Jenny said she was hungry in a very pleasant voice, though she was looking to the right of us where a bum and his girlfriend sat together. The bum wore two plastic bags cinched with rubber bands over his feet—one of which said GAP on it, a detail I hoped my sister hadn’t missed. In the chair next to him, he had set a huge garbage bag of empty Coke cans that would probably purchase his lunch, or something else, later in the day. There were other bums in that place, too, a few in the booth in front of us and some at tables farther away from us; and I noticed then that beneath the heavy odors in that restaurant, odors of cigarette smoke and bacon and fried potatoes, lay another odor—the damp smell of animals—though it was not really a stink or even an unpleasant smell. It was just the smell of wet bodies warming up, drying off, the smell of Noir, for example, when he came in from the rain, the smell of the outdoors when it gets cramped up inside. I knew that the smell had been carried in by the people around us, and it made me feel a little unsafe and put me in mind of something that had happened a long time ago with my father, who had never had a lot of patience with these sorts of people. His take on bums was simple: They don’t work. They sit around and expect something for nothing. You don’t get something for nothing. Seeing a panhandler could set him off. “You know something?” he’d say to them. “I work. I get up every day and I go to work.” That was funny for him to say, since it was rarely true and was definitely not true during our time in Salt Lake when he worked three times a week at the garage and went to school the other two days.
The thing that happened had to do with this very nice pair of shoes. We were living in Boise at the time and my father had just had a heated face-to-face with someone at the phone company about his choice not to pay for a feature on our service that we had never ordered and had never used. He had been arguing with a woman supervisor who kept repeating the same line to him. “I’m sorry, sir. I wish I could help you. But our policy is not my policy. It is the company’s policy.” His voice kept getting louder while hers remained at the same dispassionate, monotonous tone. It drove him mad. I don’t remember whether he’d won or lost that argument, though my father did not often carry his side of arguments. After leaving the phone company, we ran into the man with the shoes sitting outside against a brick wall and holding up a sign that said MONEY FOR FOOD. My father stood over him and said nothing. An elderly woman stepped around him to drop a few coins into the man’s cup. She gave my father an odd look as she walked down the sidewalk, but he did not move. He just stood there until the man looked up and said, “You going to give me money or not?”
“Excuse me,” my father said, and the beggar repeated his question. “No way in hell,” my father said. “Not when you wear shoes like that.” The man’s shoes were black leather, shiny, unmarked, and obviously new. They fastened in the front with a silver buckle. “Your shoes are nicer than mine, and you’re asking me for money. No,” he said again. “No way in hell.” It was true that the shoes were very nice despite the fact that the man’s other clothes—his ragged blue jeans and dirty white T-shirt—were what you might have expected from a beggar. The man’s face was dirty and skinny. His lips were swollen and his lower lip was chapped and split in the middle. His beautiful black shoes, however, were a mystery. My father pointed down at his own shoes then, an old pair of blue Adidas, one of them with a gash in the side so large that you could see part of my father’s socked foot. “Look at my shoes, for Christ’s sake.” He was too angry, and it worried me. The fact was, my father had nicer shoes at home in his closet, a pair of dress shoes and maybe some house slippers, all of them nice enough, even if they were not quite as new-looking as this stranger’s shiny black leather shoes with silver buckles. The beggar’s shoes certainly were not my father’s style, since the buckles gave them a boyish appearance. All the same, they had really set him off. My father turned and pointed at me, at my shoes. “Look at my son’s shoes.” My shoes were white sneakers, though the white had worn to a dirty brown, and I could remember finding them at a secondhand shop in very good shape; I could remember how excited my mother had been that they fit me since my foot was unusually narrow and we so often had to settle for shoes that my feet swam in. Now they were old, it was true. But once they’d been very good shoes, and we’d been lucky to find them. I wished he hadn’t pointed to me. “You think I am going to give you money when I can’t afford better shoes for my son? Is that what you think?”
My father took a step closer to the man, who stood up then, I think, to protect himself. “Stop pointing at my shoes,” the man said, which was strange since my father had been pointing at our shoes.
“I’d like to know where you got them,” my father said. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
“You can go to hell,” the beggar said.
“You’re asking us for money!” my father shouted.
“This is harassment. He’s harassing me!” the man shouted into the street. But the sidewalks were mostly empty and a few passers-by on the other side of the street decided to ignore the situation.
“I want to know where you got those,” my father said.
“You can fuck off!” the man shouted.
“You’re asking us for money!” my father shouted again. He walked right up to the beggar and pushed him once. He sort of hit him with both hands out flat on the chest, shoved him away, and caused the plastic foam cup the man had been holding to fall and spill coins over the sidewalk.
The beggar didn’t look once at the money. You could see his skinny, dry face fill with rage. “You don’t touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!” My father took one and then another step back. He grabbed my arm, and we started walking fast for the car as the beggar, still furious, followed us. I remember his thick, sweet garbage smell very close behind us and the broken, raw anger in his voice. “You touch me again, I’ll have you and your son locked up, you hear? You hear?” My father opened the car door for me and got in on his side as the beggar kept yelling, “You hear? You hear?” He kept shouting at us even as we drove away. I watched him shake his arms in the air behind us and then disappear as we turned the corner.
When we stopped at the first light, my father hit the steering wheel with his fist about a half dozen times. “Did you see that guy’s shoes? Jesus.” I didn’t know what to say. I had been terrified that something bad had been about to happen between my father and the other man, that they would hit each other, that someone would get hurt. For the rest of the drive home, my father was preoccupied. He turned the radio on. He searched for a station—country, rock, classical—but nothing seemed to sound right to him, and he switched it off. He rifled in the glove box for a cassette tape he couldn’t find and swore and swerved out of his lane. He kept whispering something to himself, and once he even pulled off the road and into a parking lot and looked over at me. “I’ve got to ask you something,” he said. I nodded. “Do you believe that we are going to be doing better someday? Do you believe me when I say that we are going to buy ourselves a house in a few years and move in for good?”
“Sure,” I said.
“A house with a nice yard and separate rooms for you and Jenny, a room for your mother and me, and a nice front room and kitchen. You believe we’re going to get that someday?” In those days, the house we talked about was more modest, more our size. It wasn’t until later, after my father had failed again and again to establish himself in a job, that we somehow began talking about a three-story house with large windows and five bathrooms and a swimming pool.
“Yes,” I said. “I always believed that.”
That seemed to help him, and he was able to pull himself together and get back on the road. But closer to home, when we stopped at another light, he hit
the wheel with the palm of his hand again and said, in a fierce whisper, “Those goddamned shoes.” I wanted him to forget about the shoes, but I saw in his face as he looked at the road that he couldn’t.
* * *
If you don’t want to talk to someone, you don’t look at them. My little sister evidently hadn’t learned that yet because she was staring right at the bum next to us. She was a beginner when it came to interacting with strangers. She still thought everybody in the world was more or less safe. It was hard not to look at him, though, with his feet covered nearly to the knee in plastic bags. Jenny stared right at the Gap bag, and the bum seized the moment, lifting that leg up and winking at her. “How do you like my galoshes?” he asked.
She looked away, pretending he wasn’t there, and put her napkin in her lap. “At Janet Spencer’s house,” she said, “they always put their napkins in their laps as soon as they sit at the table. Then they say grace. They fold their arms like this.” She folded her arms.
“We’re not saying grace,” I said.
“They work, believe it or not,” the woman who sat opposite the bum said. The woman was extremely thin, especially in the face, where you could see the bony round shape of her eye sockets. She wore this fake fur that was matted down with water.
