“Dad.”
“And you never learned to ride it.”
“You never taught me.”
“Yeah, it’s probably my fault. But it seemed like you didn’t even want the bike, like you were scared of it. Were you scared of it?” On the TV, a bird flashed down through the sunlight like the gleam of an assassin’s sword and snatched at the feet of a juvenile goat. He turned the TV off and the whiskey bottle up.
“I don’t want to talk to you when you’re drunk. Call me when you’re in town.”
“Did you ever learn how to ride a bike?” he asked. “That’s what I want, I want to know if you ever learned to ride a bike, that’s why I’m calling.” The line was dead.
The whiskey was gone; nothing remained but amber syrup that coated the bottle’s crenellated bottom. The birds killed for food, yes, but surely there was also pleasure in it. He found himself staring up at the repaired spot on the ceiling again, and he imagined another kind of wild animal up there, born blind and helpless in the dark, feeding on insects and insulation, and eventually becoming impossibly strong and savage. Having mastered its small domain, it would want out, to hunt in the light.
CHAPTER THREE
As he pulled through the parking lot, Vance took a last look behind him at the hotel, the light coming from Richard’s open door, and noticed the airport pickup sign crumpled in the backseat, where it had been carelessly tossed. He’d spent two hours on it the day before, after trashing a first effort because it didn’t look spiffy enough. The second attempt had been completed with a ruler and pencil first, before being Sharpied within an inch of its life. He reached back and grabbed it and threw it out the window as he turned onto the hotel access road. Trees blurred by as he stepped on the gas, as though he could outrun his own self-loathing.
He was embarrassed by himself, by his expectations over the last few months, ever since the department had contacted him and asked if he might like to escort Richard on his tour stop. If he’d like to spend time with one of his heroes, a man for whom he’d run a fan blog for two years—why, yes, as it turned out, he would. The intervening time had been a delirious haze, during which he cranked out two hundred pages of his manuscript. But what exactly had he expected? Nothing much, he realized now: just instant friendship, kinship, mentorship—that was all. Just to have his life changed, that was all.
The specific fantasy he’d been harboring for months—he tightly clenched the steering wheel to avoid fully summoning it up in recollection—went something like this: he would write a manuscript and give it to Richard, who, with a wry and uncontrollably spreading smile, would read it immediately and pronounce it very good indeed, send it on to his agent and editor with a note about the staggering magnitude of talent he’d stumbled across, get the book published, and thereby initiate a durable, decades-long working relationship, capped by Vance writing Richard’s biography and executing his estate. Or something like that. And while he hadn’t really expected Richard to necessarily take an interest in some kid from the sticks, he also hadn’t expected him to toss his novel in the trash and tell him to quit.
He merged onto the empty two-lane that bisected the still heart of downtown Spillman. A couple of leathery women smoked outside a neon-lit sports bar, and one of them turned her face to the sky in soundless, grimacing laughter. A police car crept by, aimless and slow. In perfect concert with Vance’s mood, to the right, his old high school appeared: Central County, which sounded and looked like a correctional facility and was run like one, too. As he passed, he caught a glimpse of it, a distant granite goliath where he’d spent four years dreaming about being anywhere else in the world. Now he was free, but to do what? Nothing, as it turned out: take care of his mother, write incoherent nonsense, deliver pizzas, fail out of college, spend whole days in bed uselessly reading and dreaming about himself. His life was a thing he was looking for, waiting to begin, and his heart sometimes ached for it like a beautiful white-tailed buck just visible behind dark trees.
He’d thought about leaving, of course, about just getting in the car and going, but going where? And with what money? Even if he’d had the funds, the idea of successfully moving to a different city, getting an apartment and a job, seemed almost comically difficult. Move to another city? He could barely move across his room. It seemed somehow futile, regardless—himself in another place would still be himself. A deeper change than mere setting was needed, something drastic. But what? To become someone else entirely, he felt, was the real and unfortunate answer. Steering with his knee, he picked up his writing notebook from the center console, flipped to a blank page, and jotted: Life Improvement Plan: (1) Become different person.
Past the high school, he entered the long stretch of car dealerships and brown muddy lots waiting to host car dealerships mordantly referred to in local parlance as the Miracle Mile. He reflexively craned his head to the right as he went by his place of work. He delivered pizzas for a local chain called Pizza Boy, the mascot of which was not a boy holding or eating a pizza, as a reasonable person might imagine, but a boy made out of pizza. Blank pepperoni eyes, mushrooms for teeth, and the gooey skin of a burn victim. Pizza Boy—the business and the character—figured prominently in Vance’s nightmares. His manager was a thirty-something burnout named Jarrett, who had long since surrendered to his destiny. Hey, the job sucks, but it pays for my bills, pills, and wheels went Jarrett’s familiar, agonizingly near-rhymed mantra.
But maybe Jarrett had it right. Maybe that was the trick, he thought, turning right onto Bell Road. Lower your expectations as far as you could; even better, have no expectations at all. Why should he, for example, have expected to learn anything from Richard? Why should he have been disappointed by Richard not being who he wanted him to be, by Richard being a loudmouth drunk like his father? Why should he, for that matter, expect his father, Steve, to be other than what he was? Why should he expect anything at all? And shouldn’t he know better by now?
As he drove, the orange glow of municipal sodium-vapor streetlights gave way to the thin yellow of porch lamps, increasingly diffuse as the space between houses grew. Then empty, overgrown stretches with no light at all. The ambient darkness grew thicker, and it wasn’t so much that he was driving away from the light of town as he was driving into something, inside it—a tunnel or a throat. Three miles down the road, he slowed and turned up the driveway. Black pines bent overhead, sharers of a secret, conifers conferring. Underneath sat the house, gray and wraithlike against a dark parcel of state forest. The place felt poised right on the very edge of town, and in a town like Spillman, where most places felt like the edge of town, it felt more like the edge of civilization. Vance sometimes lay awake in his bed and looked out his window at the forest ten feet away as a sailor in ye olden times might have looked out at the yawning black sea. Here Be Monsters.
The atmosphere inside the house, as always, seemed thicker than the atmosphere outside, as though it were composed of different, heavier elements—molybdenum, francium, cobalt. It was a combination of the smell of cigarette smoke coming from upstairs and the ever-present smell of moldering garbage, the low lighting his mother favored, the yellow nicotine-stained walls, and, most of all, the fat, foglike silence of long illness. It was hard to breathe at first, but you got used to it. Vance went up the half flight of stairs and paused at the top. Down the hall, light seeped through the frame of his mother’s room. He took a heavy breath and entered.
She lay in bed watching the small TV on the dresser in the corner, a thick smoked-yellow glass ashtray on the blanket draped over her wasted frame, Pyramid 120 menthol in hand. A line of faded-orange pill bottles wound its way from the side to around the front of the TV. She said, “Where’ve you been?”
“I had a college thing.”
“What time is it?”
“Midnight, a little after.”
“Went late, huh?”
“Yeah.” Vance picked up a pile of dirty clothes and dropped them in the hamper. “How are you?”
“Oh
, fine, you know. The usual.” The usual these days meant she hadn’t been out of bed, had spent all day chain-smoking and watching Law & Order, maybe mixing in a little reading, some serial killer dreck du jour. It was possible, even probable, she hadn’t eaten anything. Her weight fluctuations were an extremely reliable indicator of her mental condition, and right now she was very, very skinny, childish inside a V-neck gray T-shirt. Her skin was translucent from lack of light—it hung from the small bones of her clavicle like a gauzy silk gown off a clothes hanger.
“Have you eaten?” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I ate earlier. When did you become such a serious child?”
“Let me make you something anyway.”
“I’m really not hungry.” She adjusted the thick glasses on her face and seemed to look at him for the first time. “How’s school?”
“Fine,” he said, neglecting to mention he’d stopped going a month ago.
In the kitchen, he left the light off to avoid seeing the state it was in, but the smell told him everything he didn’t want to know. He vowed to do a thorough cleaning over the weekend—it had been a long time. Even when his mother was in one of her increasingly rare good phases, she was not a natural or fastidious housekeeper. But during the bad spells she couldn’t bring herself to clean anything. And left to Vance, who barely had the energy or wherewithal to pull on a pair of socks, the house was constantly in danger of crossing the line from messy to uninhabitable. The toilets furred over, the sink filled with dishes, the counters became shellacked with crust and crud. He assembled a grilled cheese with bread he hoped wasn’t moldy and cooked it in a pan he hoped was clean. When he brought it in, his mother looked at it as though he’d set down a shoe or a toaster beside her.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Eat it,” he said to the side of her face, knowing she was just as likely to shove the sandwich under the bed as she was to consume it. He shut her door behind him and sifted through the pile of unopened mail on the dining room table. He couldn’t remember the last time they had eaten at the table; its household function had slowly and inexorably shifted from a place to eat to a place to pile unwanted envelopes. An unpaid gas bill, a love letter from the DMV. Also, the state of the student loans he hadn’t yet canceled and grants he’d failed to apply for and letters from the dean of students presumably wondering where he’d been. He still went to his creative writing class every week and helped organize the readings, and that was it. He assumed he’d been kicked out of everything else and was currently being expelled from school, expunged from the system. He wasn’t sure because he’d stopped reading emails from the university a month ago and instead filtered them directly into his spam folder. He didn’t know how it had all happened; it wasn’t as though he’d decided to drop out of school, he just hadn’t been able to bring himself to go; and as the weeks went by, instead of deciding to quit or not quit, he’d opted to simply ignore it as long as possible and hope it would go away.
As a matter of course, he looked for a letter from his father, though he knew one wouldn’t be there. Not a card for his nineteenth birthday two months previous, not a letter informing them of his whereabouts, and certainly not any of the many thousands in back child support he owed. He’d stopped paying years before, although the small stream of money they were meant to get had, from the outset, come in as a grudging, anemic trickle. When he was sixteen, in a fit of irate curiosity, Vance had spent $29.99 he couldn’t afford for a membership on internetsleuth.com, a supremely dodgy website that purported to locate a Steven Marcus Allerby in Queens, New York. Mapquest pinpointed the address in the middle of a neighborhood named Sunnyside. The name, and its ominous cheer, had lodged themselves in Vance’s head—he assumed it had to be ironic and imagined his hapless father living in a shuttered tenement that permitted no light whatsoever. The address had lodged itself in his wallet, on a folded slip of paper he kept meaning to throw away.
Through the window behind the table, his car sat in the driveway, gray in the moonlight. During his childhood, a succession of cars had sat where his sat now, usually in various states of repair and disrepair, surrounded by sheets of newspaper on which rested oily bolts and obscure engine segments, like patients at some fly-by-night clinic with their guts out. On the rare occasions when his father found employment, it was as an unlicensed auto mechanic and detailer; he’d escaped, six years ago, in a ’68 Ford Falcon he’d spent months with, neglecting his family in favor of restoring it. Vance had helped load up the car, laden with all of Steve’s possessions like a pioneer-era dray horse, knock-kneed under saddlebags. This was the swan song in a series of attempts his mother and father had made at reconciliation that went back as far as Vance could remember. As now, his mother had been upstairs in her room.
“Where are you going,” he’d asked, setting a lamp shaped like a steam engine on the front seat.
“Anywhere else.”
“Why?”
“So I don’t kill your mother, and so she doesn’t kill me.”
“Take me with you.”
His father had started the car and looked at him with real tenderness—not a look that very often crossed Steve Allerby’s face—and said, “I’ll be back real soon, okay?” Then he threw the car into gear and, in his rush to get away, bottomed out at the end of the drive, scraping a trail of sparks. He had not been back, real soon or otherwise.
Vance tossed a few envelopes in the reeking trash, then went downstairs and surveyed his domain. Ever since his brother, John, had joined the army, nearly three years earlier, Vance had had the entire downstairs to himself. Two bedrooms and the larger den area, although it was really all one space and resembled some hayseed branch library gone to hell. There were stacks of books everywhere—on the few shelves but also leaning against the wall in unsteady towers, not to mention strewn everywhere on the floor. There were books in boxes and books in bags and books clustered in piles for which he had long since forgotten the grouping logic, if, in fact, there ever had been any—the cadaverous Irish existentialist balanced on top of Brazilian sci-fi which in turn sat on an obese leather-bound anthology entitled An Illustrated History of Good Reading. Over the years, he had spent his meager disposable income on books and not much else. He was a familiar figure at local library sales, estate sales, and Salvation Army giveaway bins across three counties.
That was where, in fact, he’d first found Richard’s oeuvre, several duplicate copies of which teetered in a musty stack beside his bed. He’d loved the first, Skyscraper Blues, about a young man, not much older than him, who joins a gang of Mohawk Indians working fifty stories off the ground. There was an impossible, bursting freedom in these pages, a palpable yen for adventure and life—the last line existed in Vance’s head as a kind of aesthetic beacon: Bright light rose from the earth far below them, a city still in darkness, but waking before it knew the day had begun. The other books had less of this sense, but he loved them anyway: the language and the antic comedy, as well as an adolescent self-hatred to which he naturally related. They had made him want to write.
He kicked the tower over. Then he went around the room kicking over the other stacks, and then he kicked the books lying on the floor. He moved to the corner where his laptop was propped on a milk crate, a sock wilted over it. For the last three months, he’d sat in front of it every day, writing his manuscript in a fever dream of possibility. As the page count magically increased, he’d indulged himself in a mounting excitement at the act of creation. And it wasn’t just the creation of a narrative—eighty, one hundred fifty, finally two hundred implausible pages—somehow it had seemed like he was creating himself. Now, having seen the pages askew in Richard’s wastebasket, the whole thing seemed delusional, the fantasy of a madman or an idiot. He retrieved the file as a coroner might pull out a corpse in its morgue drawer: Vancenovel/draft18.docx. He deleted it.
Sweeping some envelopes and clothes off the bed, he
lay down in the impression he’d made in the mattress from sleeping in the same spot for so long. At least he’d made an impression somewhere. A book lurked under the knot of blankets at his feet, and he pulled out a bent copy of Without Leave. On the cover, a young Richard in his army greens stared back at him, handsome and defiant and stupid, and completely unaware of what would happen to him or who he’d become.
I’d spent most of the flight to Vietnam trying to ignore my neighbor, whose information, ironically, I can still remember today: Lance Corporal Matthew Singleton, from Youngstown, Ohio. Lance Corporal Matthew Singleton from Youngstown, Ohio, had spent what felt like the entire flight, including taxiing on the tarmac in San Francisco, talking about girls he knew back home in intimate and aggressive and slightly nauseating detail—what their cooters, his word, smelled like; what positions they liked best; which ones gave the best head; and so on and so forth. For a while, his monologue had provided a welcome distraction from the flight—the turbulent juddering of the plane and my heart—but it eventually got old. My only defense was craning my head away from him to look out the window. For hours, there had been nothing, just a frayed carpet of clouds on top of the Pacific’s hard floor. Now, our Boeing 707 listed leftward in a slow, corkscrew approach over Cam Ranh Bay and the surrounding jungle. The trees and other vegetation below the plane were unbroken and looked impenetrable—you tried to imagine people down there, going about their business, living some kind of life, but it was impossible. A couple of tiny puffs of smoke issued from somewhere, as though scoffing in response to my line of thought: Shows what you know.
“This chick, Teresa Milner,” my seatmate was pointing out the window, “had a carpet on her thick as that shit down there. Had to grab a machete to make any headway, if you follow.”
“I do.”
“Real thick bush, I’m saying.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, I get it.”
The Grand Tour Page 4
