And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  Well, he had, and if he’s to go after another job like his old one, he will have to hold his nose and man up again. Maybe this, he thinks, is what’s caused him to delay his job search. Disgust.

  But how can this be? Poker-wise he’d gone all-in on a banking career. He can’t just fold. What else does he have?

  Helping Alex set up his Tenth Avenue studio, running out for their lunches, stretching canvases, has proved an effective therapy against the anxiety of his indecision. It’s even given him an occasional sense of joy—no doubt aided by the Wellbutrin. But drugs and Alex’s friendship are stopgaps to his falling apart and not a sustainable career path.

  It is late afternoon when Ethan exits the supply store and the weather has deteriorated. A sideways sleet gums his eyelashes. Flagging blindly with a bag in each hand, he is refused by one cab after another until their hissing tires send him to the subway. He surfaces at Chambers Street into a wet wind smashing up the Hudson. In his lobby’s mirror, his gaze meets the stare of a teary-eyed, white-haired, red-faced old man. It is just himself—in forty years. He brushes the snow from his head.

  THE NEXT DAY, traces of the blizzard imprint the sky like muddy boots. Today Yahvi has consented to see Ethan for the first time since their split, after he slept with Zoe.

  As he crosses Canal Street a scrap of blue tantalizes at the horizon’s vanishing point. Ethan continues north, trudging over arctic berms. At the agreed-upon coffee shop Yahvi kisses Ethan warmly on the cheek.

  He orders up two espressos and they perch on stools at the countertop in front of the window. When Ethan begins to speak she hushes him with a finger to her lips. “Listen,” she says. Ethan opens his ears. The sound of an engine grows until finally a snowplow crunches past their window. Then the stillness settles back in. The lack of traffic, the muffling snow, the cloud-saturated sky, have transformed what should be a rush hour. For once on the streets it is not the sound of engines that takes precedence. He and Yahvi can hear nature’s silence. Even inside the cafe the conversations are muted to match the outer calm. Yahvi had always pointed out street noises to Ethan when they were together—the sound of dueling car horns harmonizing, the oddly affecting drumming of a talented busker. He recalls telling her about the Fibonacci sequence and how Black Star used it in the song “Astronomy.” Mathematicians and musicians were not that far apart. He and Yahvi had once had real potential. Ethan blinks hard to dissipate a tear. Yahvi turns from the window to study him.

  “You’ve lost weight?” she says.

  “Have I?” Ethan prevaricates, unsure if her question is a criticism or a compliment. His ghost in the window does seem thin to him.

  Yahvi clasps his arm. “You must eat. You must.” Her sympathy soothes like a quilt tucked around him. This is why he wanted to see her. Also, he cannot bore Alex with any more of his problems.

  To appease her concern Ethan buys a danish. “I’m not on a regular feeding schedule,” he says. “Anyway, you look wonderful.”

  Yahvi’s kohl mascara makes her eyes immense. When she was young her grandmother taught her to make up this way to scare off malign spirits. At times she keeps up the tradition. Ethan is glad she did this today—even if it means that she is putting up her guard against him.

  “On dark days you must dress brightly,” Yahvi says, referring to the layers of gold and orange silk that envelope her against the weather.

  In his gray fleece top and faded jeans, Ethan is particularly drab and their mismatch makes him miss her even more.

  “I heard your suite,” Ethan manages. In January he’d taken the subway to Brooklyn College for the premiere of Ganesh in America, the composition she’d started when they were dating.

  “Why didn’t you say hello?” Yahvi asks.

  His memory is of leaving the postperformance reception after spying her on the arm of the bearded lead violin, who played his instrument so violently he had to replace his bow. He and Yahvi seemed a matched pair and Ethan had felt punched in the stomach. “I waved to you over the heads of the crowd. You were the evening’s superstar. I couldn’t get close to you,” he says.

  “And what are you up to these days? Where do you work?”

  “Remember that UIB thing? It’s not quite done.”

  “Wait? Does this mean you don’t have a new job yet?”

  Ethan has no good answer to her amazement. Perhaps his overnighter with Zoe wasn’t the only reason Yahvi and he broke up. What he is, a man with a limited focus, has disheartened her again.

  “Ethan, it’s time to move on and grow.”

  Ethan hems. “There’s been some progress. My lawyer just forwarded UIB’s proposal. They’ll back off on the bonus clawback if I desist from my wrongful termination claim.”

  “That’s great! Then you’ve won.”

  Ethan shakes his head. “Not yet. Someone sabotaged me and I’m going to prove it. All I need is a look at the mainframe backups from my last day at work. I know UIB kept them—legal would have insisted. What I need to show is that the program I was working on was resaved after I left the office.”

  “But there’s a problem with this?” Yahvi asks.

  “UIB won’t release the backups. And my lawyer is having trouble with the subpoena.”

  “Then, Ethan! Just let it go!” Yahvi’s cry turns heads in the cafe. She digs her pianist fingers into Ethan’s wrist and whispers. “Move on with your life.”

  “KEEP MOVING,” ETHAN tells himself. His sneakered feet are frozen, his fingers about to snap off in their gloves. On the clearer avenues, cabs slip over the packed snow as he marches in the streets with the other pedestrians.

  Alex’s new work space, found by Juliette, and temporary, is in a Chelsea warehouse that is soon to blossom into a boutique apartment building. Inside, Alex is leaning from a ladder to reach the edge of a twelve-by-twelve canvas, blank except for a horizontal black stripe. The ladder tilts and Ethan steadies it while Alex sweeps a fat curve through the stripe. They move the ladder and do another curve. Alex has created a sideways dollar sign that Franz Kline might have painted. “Got my cadium?” he asks.

  “Cadmium,” says Ethan.

  But only after Alex stops painting does any conversation begin.

  “Looks good,” says Ethan about the red-framed dollar sign.

  “Later it won’t be obvious,” Alex says. He builds his paintings in layers. “So, what up?”

  Ethan shrugs. “Nada. Yahvi says hello.”

  Alex nods. “You two going out again?”

  “Nah. Just had coffee. She’s dating a violinist.”

  “Shall I cut his strings?”

  “Would you?”

  “Done. And what else? You’re wearing your badass face.”

  “Am I?” Ethan says. He’s been waiting to talk about this with Alex. “Flying Tiger,” he says. “I’m committed now.”

  “Fuck,” Alex says.

  The Flying Tigers was Ethan’s favorite movie as a boy after he saw one of the actual planes at an air museum. It was about a squad of American pilots in China prior to Pearl Harbor. In the final scene, John Wayne and a Clark Gable lookalike named John Carroll are on a mission to blow up a Japanese ammo train. But at the last second their plane is hit and Wayne bails thinking Carroll is right behind. Wounded, Carroll chooses to dive-bomb the plane into the train in best American kamikaze style. He’s going to die anyway so why not make it worthwhile?

  “Your lawyer. Does she recommend a suicide attack?” Alex asks.

  “She says that this latest offer is the best I’m likely to get. That if I piss off UIB by not accepting they’ll dig in their heels and outspend and outlast me.”

  “Sounds like a good read of the situation,” Alex says. “They just want back your bonus from last year, right?”

  “That’s not the point anymore. And besides,” Ethan says, jokey, “I’ve already changed my Gmail address. Flytiger3.1416.”

  Ethan’s complaint, a lost career, he knows is minor compared to what others have lost
to the banks: homes and families. But he feels a similar humiliation. It’s insulting that despite the ruin they have inflicted, they still tread like giants. That Ethan is one of the few who can resist obligates him to try. “I’m going to nail UIB,” he says.

  “Magnifique, Ethan,” says Juliette, who has just entered the studio.

  CHAPTER 20

  Florida

  Dear Jessica,

  Though your last letter is five months old and contained but a newspaper clipping and no return address I am still trying. Once a month I send a letter general delivery to the San Bernardino post office that postmarked your envelope. I would not be having to tell you this if every one of those letters did not come back to me stamped RETURN TO SENDER.

  Why do I not stop writing? My faith in you tells me we will somehow connect again. When that happens I will offer these returned letters as proof that I am no longer the unreliable father who was not there to see you grow or be your mothers support. By the way you should not blame her for running off. She learned that trick from me. When I heard she had left I almost went to get you. But staying with an aunt and cousins was better for a twelve-year-old than being raised by the lost person I was then. I never visited you fearing I would spirit you away if I did. I HAD to let you go.

  And now even though you are not receiving my letters I CANT let you go.

  The selfish reason for this is that I have nothing better to do than scribble words on paper. The better reason is that I want to be your example of what not to be. My hope is to keep you from giving up on yourself the way I did when my life started going south. A cell I can pace with five steps is where that attitude brought me.

  But enough of the pity party. You still have a life and so do I. And things are not so bad in here. My cellmate Ector Ramirez has begun to teach me some Spanish guitar. Have you ever heard Malagueña (thank Ector the professor for the spelling)? I was never a real smooth picker but when I was young I could jangle a tune. This song though is a complicated animal. And as we only have one instrument and because of regulations only one hour a day to strum I practice on a neck made out of a paint stirrer. After lights out I take up my practice board until the sound of tapping makes the professor shush me.

  One more piece of news that is neither good or bad. My Hail Mary appeal is dust. This is no tragedy because it was an unlikely hope that my public defender would admit to screwing up at my trial. Maybe though I was denied not for lack of evidence but because the warden thinks I am a loon for writing to myself. Time and again I mail off these letters to you only to get them back a few weeks later. But maybe this is not crazy. Even if you have not read them my minders have. I can tell from the taped envelope flaps. So I aint just talking to myself here. Be sure to keep this in mind if my letter gets through and you choose to write. I would sooner smash my fingers with a brick than do anything else to hurt you.

  Your loving father,

  Don

  CHAPTER 21

  California

  “The house is a wreck and it’s in a neighborhood from hell, but it’s yours,” Miss Shelly says, getting close to a topic Jessica refuses to discuss. “I spoke with Newt’s brother and he don’t want it. Says he has enough stuff to work on.”

  Jessica looks away from her friend.

  “Honey,” Shelly says, “There’s a notary here and it would be better if we take care of the paperwork before I’m too weak.”

  Out under the jacaranda at the hospice, Jessica picks at blades of grass while a breeze waves the branches overhead. She had known that Shelly was not well on the day they had met. But she didn’t know then that Newt’s bad back was metastasizing cancer. He is gone. Soon Shelly will be. It’s her choice.

  “Come on, Jessie. I’d like to do this for you. I know Newt would have wanted to, too. Why you stayed with us through all this is a mystery. But I’m grateful. I’ve got to do something for you.”

  Looking up at Shelly, withered and yellow, her oxygen breather shut off and dangling from her neck while she sips from a shrinking, pencil-thin joint, Jessica wants to tell her there is no mystery. She has stayed because too many of the people in her life were not there when she needed them.

  “What do you say?” Miss Shelly asks.

  Jessica’s only line of defense is reproach. “Why don’t you go back on dialysis? Why don’t you get in line for a kidney?”

  “I’m not a good prospect, not with stage four hep C. My liver’s tanking, too.”

  They had never talked about Shelly’s decision to die. Shelly hadn’t even told Jessica that she was going off dialysis. Jessica’s cheeks are damp now and she wipes one with the side of a fist. She takes the joint from Shelly’s lips, sucks at it, and coughs.

  “You should give up those damn Marlboros,” Miss Shelly says.

  Jessica extinguishes the remainder of the joint, a roach now, by licking it. Then she swallows the roach, like Newt taught her. Also thanks to Newt she doesn’t have to worry about getting weed. Shelly and she could never burn through all the cannabis hanging in the shed.

  The two women get down to business. Shelly fills out checks for the bills Jessica has brought—bills for the house’s electricity, water, telephone; bills for the private hospice charges. Even at this point Miss Shelly is meticulous with her figures, like the CPA she was studying to be. When she’s done with her bookkeeping she gives Jessica a serious look.

  “Jessie, you are the most goddamn responsible person I know. I want you to start taking care of all this stuff for me.” She offers Jessica her checkbook. “There’s not a lot a bread in the account but I signed a bunch of blanks. Guess I’d better kick soon or they’ll be moving me to a public bed.”

  BACK AT THE house Jessica collects the day’s mail and drops it on the dining room table. It’s mostly bills, including past due notices from several of Newt’s doctors. While Jessica contemplates the figures, his ghost watches her from his old chair. Then Skittles sits up and her golden eyes pose a question.

  “What do you want, girl?” Jessica asks her.

  Skittles makes a hum in the back of her throat.

  “You don’t really think I should write checks for these?” Jessica says. “If I do and Miss Shelly is still alive in three months, there won’t be enough for her hospice. She’ll be sent to a hospital that won’t be half as nice as where she is. Is that what you want?” Lately Jessica has begun to have many one-sided conversations with Skittles.

  Across the table, Newt’s ghost smiles.

  “What do I do?” she asks of the burly shadow. “You know I don’t want anyone to find me yet. You know I don’t care about the money. I’d tap my old bank account in a second to pay this pile of bills. But that would put me on the map, send me out of this safe place you made for me.”

  Newt’s gentle eyes remind Jessica of what he had whispered in her ear toward the end—that with her around it was easier for him to let go, since he knew that Shelly would not be alone. He reminds her that she is responsible for Shelly.

  “Okay,” Jessica says, her relief palpable. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right, Newt.”

  At the sound of his name, Skittles lifts her head, confused at the attention Jessica is giving to an empty chair. But Jessica knows that Newt is there and what he wishes her to do.

  THE NEXT MORNING Jessica drives to the Bank of America monolith in downtown San Bernardino. She gives up her name, account PIN, her social security number, her former address on a Nevada Air Force base, a current address that she lies about, and she is finally allowed access to her military savings. From a nervous teller she requests money orders for the doctor’s bills she’s brought along. Exiting, Jessica cuts between a pair of surprised businesswomen, who step back and gawk at her, she imagines, as they would at Bonnie Parker making a gunpoint withdrawal. Or do they just see some kind of street trash?

  That’s how Jessica lately has begun to feel under the gaze of middle-class eyes, dressing as she does in jeans and a tank top. She hasn’t taken scissors to
her hair since her Air Force discharge and it has grown wild down to her shoulders, almost Rastafarian. And, after Newt’s death, she had let Miss Shelly ink her arms with a wild cosmology—the right with jungle flora, the left with Maori spirals. But does her appearance deserve those glances? Are they even real? Or is this silent tsking that follows her of her own doing—the result of her disciplined military side, the old Jessica, emerging.

  Loudly, publicly, she introduces her two halves, “Jessie, this is Jessica. Jessica, Jessie,” and makes a formal bow.

  At the post office, a clerk sells her postage and points her toward a table with forms. Miss Shelly is having her mail in Newt’s final taxes, and per her instructions, she is sending them certified.

  She puts stamps on the doctor’s bills and returns her certified slips to the mail clerk. He looks at the envelopes that she has addressed to the IRS and Sacramento.

  “You know it’s the sixteenth. You’re a day late with taxes,” he says, reviewing what she’s given him.

  “Not if you’re dead.”

  “Just trying to help,” he apologizes. And then his face brightens. “Your name is Jessica Aldridge?” he asks. “From Florida, maybe?”

  The hairs on Jessica’s arms bristle—ten minutes after putting her name back into the system at BoA and they have found her. And by they, she does not know who she means. But there are wanted posters on the nearby walls.

  “Hey. Slow down,” the clerk says as Jessica backs away. “It’s an innocent question. For the past six months we’ve been getting general delivery letters here addressed to a Jessica Aldridge. She never picks them up and we keep returning them to the sender. We just got another. They’re as regular as clockwork.”