“You want a little more juice in there?” he said, pointing to her cup. He couldn’t remember when he had been this uncomfortable. Then Harriet said, “You won’t say anything, will you?”
“Say about what?” he said, but he knew what she did not want him to say anything about, and the only reason he said something was that seeing her like that, Harriet, all crumpled and sipping SunnyD, it nearly choked him up. He never in his life thought Harriet would make him feel like he was about to cry.
“What happens at Fantastic Deals stays at Fantastic Deals,” he said.
Harriet lifted her cup in the air for him to fill. “What happens what, now?”
He explained that this was the name of the lot, though most people just called it Kepler’s.
She said, “Well, I bet there’s a lot you don’t want to get out goes on around here.”
Bobby could not help his grinning. He splashed some SunnyD in her cup. He sat down in his desk chair and rolled it a little closer to her. That’s okay, Harriet. Go on acting like you don’t care. I saw it. I know it’s there. In you like it’s in me and everyone. Even my brother, who half the time I want to hit in the neck. And in that girl of yours and the one she bought the car with. There and waiting, all of us have it, got it to burn.
AS HE DIALED HIS sister’s number, Marcus pictured that camper, sun-struck silver as tin foil. Nobody died, it helped to remember, for he knew how long Annie had been banking on one day coming into big-time money. One ought not ever employ the word bank as a verb, or at all. Foul and four-letter word. But neither ought one to be taking consolation from the vision of an Airstream where tragedy lingered still.
But it was his day. The phone was ringing. As it rang, he thought of the time he had said to Rebecca, one night near the end of them, “Something is wrong with me,” and Rebecca, lying next to him in bed, against him (her softness still warm and chiding him in memory for forsaking all that was good and sweet and kind in her for all that was rapacious and prideful and greedy in himself), but as far away, at that point, as Minneapolis, said, “Something is wrong with everyone,” her emphasis placed so rightly on the word “wrong” designed—and just now successful in its designation—to make Marcus realize how utterly unoriginal were his sins.
If everyone is wrong, might as well call upon the present-tense drifter to join hands with the mute and wiry man and provide me the right tools to deliver this confession I ought to have made months ago.
“Marcus?” said Annie, when Marcus said his sister’s name into the phone.
Marcus said, “I lost the farm.”
“At least you didn’t buy it,” she said, which meant, he knew, “die.” Which meant she thought he was kidding.
“Somebody did die,” he said.
“Who?”
“You don’t know him,” said Marcus. “I don’t even know him.” Why was he even talking or thinking about him when he was supposed to be confessing his wrongs?
“Are you drunk?”
“No,” he said, “I’m in Texas. And I mean it. I lost the farm.”
“Well, maybe you ought to get the hell out of Texas and go find it,” she said. “If you’re even in Texas. Why would you be?”
“It hasn’t gone anywhere. I just . . . we just don’t own it anymore.”
Then came the lag between what he said and what she said back that he had so dreaded.
“Well, who did you sell it to?” she said finally.
“No one. The Bank of America took it.”
Marcus heard trees fall in forests. Mosquitoes, their unison buzz nearly mechanized, in the Great Dismal Swamp. The squeak of sneakers in a gymnatorium in rural Kansas. Vee of geese honking over the ancient and storied silt of the Mississippi Delta.
“I’ll get a job and pay you back, Annie, I promise,” he said into the quiet. “I will go without everything until I have made things right with you.”
“What kind of job?” said Annie. Her voice after the hours of silence was wet and raw, as if she had already been crying, or yelling. “Where are you even calling from?”
“I told you. I’m in Texas.”
“You’re living in Texas now?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Who moves to Texas? So, what, you’re going to go drill an oil well and pay me back five hundred grand?”
“That’s a little high, don’t you think? I’d say at the most I owe you three hundred grand. And I said I would pay you back. Maybe we can work out a payment plan?”
“Maybe you can pay me what half of that land was worth instead of trying to tell me what you think you owe me. What are you living off, by the way?”
“I sold my truck.”
“That Ford? And what are you living in, a tent?”
“I’ll send you what I got for the truck.”
“So you can be homeless and I will have to feel sorry for you, living under an underpass in, like, Houston? I cannot believe this. I cannot believe you. You think I don’t know about your fucking museum? In a place you’d have to get lost in to find? Two hours off the interstate?”
“Lots of people came, Annie. I had Canadians and some Japanese and a couple who invited me to their chalet outside Zurich. It wasn’t just that people didn’t come, it was more, I just got in over my head.”
“Yeah, if it were only your head you got in over, that would be one thing. You don’t even sound that upset about it.”
“Lots of families fall out over money late in life.”
“What, so, this is like a thing? So you’re like normal?”
“I’m just saying.” The mute and wiry man, having handed off his tools, was gone, but the drifter was waiting for him in the present tense. He had the Buick pulled up to the curb outside the hotel. Rising water lifted tire-flattened beer cans from the gutter underneath Her Lowness. I’m just saying I got to go now.
“Don’t call me again, Marcus. If you get in trouble down there, don’t bother Mom. We’re not going to bail you out.”
“I know,” said Marcus, but he wasn’t worried about it because he had someone waiting on him downstairs and he had another someone else waiting for him, someone to whom he could tell things, someone he did not owe a dime.
But when he hung up the phone he did not move from the bed. What paralyzed him was first a feeling and then the feeling that he could not tolerate what he felt. He could not stomach feeling hated, despised, pitied, reviled, regretted. Marcus had known people who spoke of others who, for this reason or that, held them in low regard, and it no more bothered them than did an airplane passing high above them in the clouds, just barely visible, then gone. What can you do about it? I can no more control what people think of me than I can make that airplane up there turn around and fly back to wherever it took off from, and how do I ever even really know what goes on in somebody else’s head? I don’t know any more than I know where that plane is headed or who is on it or whether they seek in the city of their final destination business or pleasure. Who knows?
Well, Marcus knew. He knew what other people were thinking; he always had. He could tell whether they liked him or not, and if they did not, he did everything he could to make them change their minds about him. It is okay to lie sometimes. It is fine to lie if it means people otherwise would hate you. He said to his sister when she asked him how he was supporting himself, “I sold my truck.” He did not tell his sister that someone stole his truck, that in fact he was living off money hidden from the bank and from her; she would have been hurt and also she would have hated him more than she already did. She hated him. She would never forgive him.
It is easy to pretend that people love you instead of hate you. Just go to ride. You can go to ride in your head. You can say to yourself, Now you get out of this hotel room you cannot afford, and you get in the car you cannot afford, and you drive across the street to the Fina station and buy a paper. It’s only a dollar. You can afford that because in the back of the paper are the help-wanted ads. And you want help. You need it. Get
ting a job and paying back your sister is the only thing you can afford to do because then she won’t hate you as much. Every time you send her a check, maybe she will hate you a little less.
Pay down the hate. But it wasn’t as if he had just now figured out that she would hate him for what he had done to her future. See, from the beginning he had found a way to pretend otherwise. He could, for instance, forget the land was half hers. Which half ? He would stand on his porch at dusk and stare off into the sunken scrub, already claimed by shadow, alit with fireflies, and holler, “Who do you belong to? Speak up, I can’t hear you.” The land lay there like a recalcitrant truant refusing to rise in time to meet the school bus.
Or he could, rather than forget that it was half hers, hold that against her. If it is half yours, why aren’t you down here trying to turn a profit or at least half a profit? Why did you leave it all up to me?
See, you can find rooms in your head that are empty. You can dress them up however you want. Marcus found an empty one and he filled it with mirrors. Fine ones with gilded frames and funky oval ones with no frames and the long rectangular ones you buy for dorm rooms. Every time he would go inside that room he would look in the mirrors, and there looking back at him was a man who tried to do right by everyone. All you can do is try. Only assholic coaches and preachers whose faith has no doubt don’t recognize the single most recognizable sign of life, which is the good old try. Holding a mirror to the mouth is less effective than checking to see whether they at least tried. But some people still hate you for not succeeding, so they decide you never even tried. They hate you for not trying because it is easier than hating you for failing. People started their sentences with “From where I stand” and “To my mind” and “Looks like to me.” From where they stood to their minds it looked like to them that Marcus had not even tried, but people had no idea how elaborate had been his vision for the transformation of a piece of swampland into an oddball but wildly seductive temple of scientific lore that no less than National Geographic, Smithsonian, and even the New York Times would have featured in their slick pages. Every frame of every mirror in that room in his head flashed with the image of the man who could have made this happen had they just given him more time.
Marcus sat in the parking lot of the Fina station accusing himself of the crime of attempted living. He paged through the newspaper, searching for his name in the court docket, but there were only want ads. He searched the ads for wants that even slightly matched his needs. But everyone wanted Creative Individuals. To drive trucks, to serve food in cafeterias, to take X-rays, to pick tomatoes. Marcus was not a creative individual. The only thing he could create was a right fucking mess. If you get into trouble down there, don’t call us, we’re not going to bail you out. That’s okay, I got someone I can call. I got a ride, thank you very much. But when he looked out the window at the street below, Her Lowness sat empty. No one is waiting for you, Marcus. There was no present tense. Just his sister’s hate blowing through the ventilation in his room. Her hate fluttered curtains. It lifted the pages of a magazine. It drove him out of his room and downstairs and into Her Lowness and across the street to buy the paper.
Now he had the paper spread open and all the world wanted was creative individuals. He was neither. I am no different from anyone else, Marcus said to the black water pooling in the parking lot of the gas station. In seconds it had reached the bottom of the Buick. This was not his car; it was only half his car, just like the farm had been half his. But the problem was he acted like it was his and his alone. “You do exactly what you want, when you want,” Rebecca had claimed. The trick is to share all the world, and time. To merge, not to divvy.
But it was not his car it was only half his just like the farm. Maria’s half must stay dry because two people in one day wrote her hurtful letters and all because of the car. But she kept the car and the car took her to a river where she was baptized in a bathing suit from the Dollar General. The car took her to see her brother so long lost to her who maybe hated her for what she had done and they ate some barbecue from some chain place by a busy highway and now the brother did not hate her.
This car could save him too. But water covered his lap. The car would save him and his sister would no longer hate him only if he could keep the water from rising. Rebecca would not come back but she would forgive him his sins. At the very top of the Buick there was a pocket of air but that air belonged to Maria because his half was swamped. He said it was her day but she had given her day to him. A chart to keep these things straight lay soaked and ruined on the floorboard. Ink from the pen he had used to do the divvying bled the water even blacker. Marcus would rather succumb than float up to breathe big from Maria’s half. He felt the newspaper lifted off his lap and he watched it float away. He put the car in gear and he pulled out of the parking lot into traffic, because he did not want to owe Maria a dime.
BECAUSE SHE HAD A project at home—helping Maria clean out the Airstream—Maria’s mother did not go back to the motel that evening. Neither of them was hungry, and Maria, having decided to move into the camper, wanted to get to work cleaning it up, so they skipped dinner and filled buckets with soap and water. For a while they worked quietly until Maria, thinking of Manny—of how, when she had quizzed him about their parents’ marriage, he’d said, “Why don’t you ask her? You’re the one staying with her”—said, “Why did you not leave Dad?”
Her mother had been cleaning the tiny stove. She looked up at Maria, who was washing the walls. “I couldn’t leave him,” she said after a while.
“Why not?”
“Because I married him. Maria, you’ll maybe say it’s old fashioned, but what is old fashioned about keeping your word? Or I guess I know the answer to that. Doing what you said you’re going to do, that’s been old fashioned.”
“I guess being miserable has been around a long time, too.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said her mother, putting down her sponge. “Now you’re going to stand there and tell me how I felt inside? I never once told you how you felt after that boy killed himself.”
“You never said anything about it at all.”
“What was it to say? I did what I could, I guess. Anyway I can change it now, well, I can’t figure it out.”
Maria said nothing. For ten minutes she scrubbed and listened to her mother work. But it did not seem right to her that she should be in her father’s space, this camper he had bought with such hope for some renewal, and not try to honor his memory in ways other than dusting and scrubbing.
“Did you ever try to leave Dad?”
Her mother was in the bathroom. But she could hear her. Maria heard the toilet seat slam down. “Maria, I swear.”
“I just need to know. I’m not trying to make things harder than they already are. I just need to know these things.”
Her mother came out of the bathroom. She leaned against the stove. She said, “Your father, he’d fall apart. I would say, I’m leaving, I’m going to go be with Ray, and he’d cry and he’d beg me not to. He’d just—he was, I don’t know, fragile maybe. He couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. He just wanted to be around me even when I told him I wanted to be with Ray. He’d cry and he’d say things.”
“What things?”
“That’s all been over so long, I don’t see the sense in—”
“No,” said Maria. “Tell me, what did he say?”
“Maria,” said her mother, “had your daddy made good on his crazy, half-drunk claims and done to me what that boy done to you—”
“He didn’t do it to me,” Maria said.
“But he did, child. Look at you.”
“What? I hurt still? How could I not?”
“How can you keep it? How can you live and hurt over all that right on?”
“You’re asking me how I can live?”
“Yes. I guess I am.”
A car pulled up in the drive. Alberto come to check on his water tank, most likely. Maria looked out the win
dow and saw the Buick. She said to her mother, “Just a minute.”
“Who is it?”
“Marcus.”
“Who?”
“The man I share the car with.”
“Lord God. What does he want?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see. I’m not through talking about this.”
Maria went out to the car. Marcus was sitting behind the wheel, the car idling, as if he were waiting for her to come out. As if he had come to pick her up, as if this was the plan.
“Marcus?”
“I wondered if you have a moment to talk.”
“Can you give me a few minutes? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“Sure,” he said. Of course he would say that. He was always so agreeable. She had asked him to buy a car with her and he had said yes. She’d chosen the schedule where they alternated days and he had said fine, even though she could tell that he preferred his other chart. He told her he was leaving town, take the car, time for me to go, and she’d stopped the car in the middle of the street and slid over and he’d gotten in and driven her east to see Manny. She had begun to wonder, well before she got his note, what made him so accommodating. Surely indulging her was not just a way of redressing his wrongs to his sister and his family and his ancestors and the land he had lost. That would make her just a line on a list that needed to be ticked off so he might live his life with somewhat less shame.
But of course that was all she was to him. It had nothing to do with her, with her needs, just as what she needed from him had nothing to do with him as a person distinct from a stranger in a car lot upon whose mercy she had placed her trust in others. Just seconds ago, when he asked her for a moment to talk, her first reaction was to send him away. He looked haggard and needy, sitting in her drive, and she had other things to attend to. She was in the middle of something she had been in the middle of for years and years, and now finally she was talking to her mother about things her mother would never talk about, and here came Marcus in their car. He needed her, obviously. But she needed her mother now.
She said, “Just a few minutes.”
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