The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  Nothing stayed the same. Not the place he went to sleep or the place he woke. Not hope or the lack of hope. The difference between a good and a bad day as small as the presence, or the absence, of clean socks. Sometimes he was pleased with his own resourcefulness. He had it knocked, and if he wasn’t good enough for some people, namely his ungrateful son, screw them. Then a bleak black mood would slam him sideways. Who was he kidding, trying to shine up the piece of shit that was his life?

  For the last three nights he’d stayed in Bolinas, with a woman he’d met here. Sometimes a thing like that just came your way. He’d been sitting on the beach, with the dog hunkered down next to him, watching the kids on their boogie boards. The kids wore wetsuits because of the cold ocean, and it was pretty cold on the beach too, so he’d brought a piece of cardboard to sit on. You couldn’t camp on the beach, just sit. But the sun was out and he had a paper cup of hot coffee to warm his hands and the waves were the perfect entertainment for somebody who had nothing else to do but to watch them. Did anybody ever ask a wave if it had plans, or prospects, or any business taking up space? Not likely.

  He could have slept right there. Curled himself up next to the dog. But he kept an eye on the kids, who had come out of the water now and were hanging out at one end of the beach, milling around and jeering at one another. A couple of years ago, in this same little peace-and-love hippie town, on this same beach, a bunch of kids, not these same kids but some just like them, had beaten a homeless guy half to death with skateboards and bottles.

  A woman walked past him on the sand and stopped. “Hi.”

  Sean squinted up at her. She had silver hair, trailing down past her shoulders. She wore a long skirt and silver bracelets around one ankle. “Hi,” he said back to her.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” She said it like it was some kind of test question.

  “Bojangles. After the famous dancer.”

  “Does your dog dance?”

  “Not while I’ve been watching him.”

  “How about you, do you dance?” She did a little dipping, twirling step in the sand. Her feet were bare except for flat sandals. She looked like somebody’s crazy grandmother.

  “Nope. My dancing days are over.”

  “Well that’s a shame.”

  “Uh-huh.” He wasn’t so sure. Dancing wasn’t one of those things he spent time feeling bad about.

  The woman gathered her skirts up in a flounce and sat down next to him—that is, next to Bojangles, who was next to Sean. Bojangles wiggled his nose into her side to get himself petted. “Pretty pretty boy. I like dogs. Is he OK with cats?”

  “He and cats usually work things out.”

  “Because I’ve got two cats.”

  “That’s nice,” Sean said. It was easiest to keep on being agreeable. She wasn’t as old as he’d thought at first, at least not as old as her hair. Maybe she wasn’t much older than he was. He was waiting to make up his mind about her. He figured she was one of the town’s herd of hippies, people who went around talking about energy and astrology and who grew psychedelic mushrooms in their closets. “I like your necklace,” he said. It was made up of yellow stones that were the size of gravel. Admiring the necklace gave him an excuse to look down her shirt.

  “It’s amber. That’s fossilized tree resin.” She picked up one of the stones and held it for him to see. “This one has a little bit of something inside it, maybe part of an insect.”

  “Oh, yeah. Pretty cool.” He leaned in closer to look. He didn’t think she was wearing a bra. Her skin and clothes gave off a smell that was part ashtray, part incense, part cat. An unfresh smell, soft around the edges, like the crumbs you found in the bottom of a coat pocket.

  “Or a dinosaur. Because they had dinosaurs back then. My name is Dawn.”

  “Sean. Nice to meet you.” He put his coffee down and held out his hand and they shook. Unlike most women, who didn’t put any effort into a handshake, she pumped his hand up and down, cowgirl-style.

  They sat and watched the waves pile up. Sean drank his coffee. He hadn’t spent a lot of time talking lately and he was out of practice.

  Dawn said, “Which one’s the biggest ocean, do you know?”

  He tried to remember the other oceans. Atlantic, Arctic, Indian. Were there others? “I guess I don’t know. It might be this one.”

  “Well it doesn’t seem all that big from right here. You probably have to look down on it from outer space.”

  “Uh-huh.” Maybe she was stoned. It was the kind of thing stoned people got really intense about.

  “Which do you think is more important, air or water?”

  Stoned. Or something. There was an annoying little-kid quality to her questions. He said, “I guess it depends if you’re a fish.”

  “Ahh.” She nodded. “That’s funny.”

  It wasn’t all that funny. “Ha-ha,” he said obligingly. Maybe she was some kind of village idiot, or a burned-out druggie casualty. He decided she wasn’t bad-looking. Just a little crispy around the edges, like she’d spent too much time in the sun. “So, Dawn, you from around here?”

  “These days I am. Uh-huh.”

  Some old dread rose in his throat, you from around here? But he was just spooking himself. He said, “You mean, you moved here from someplace else?” She didn’t answer, only occupied herself with pushing her tongue around the inside of her mouth in a systematic fashion, as if she’d lost something in there. “Never mind,” Sean said.

  The dog rolled over on his back and Dawn rubbed his stomach. “Why did you name him that really? Bojangles?”

  “I dunno. It was just one of those names that wasn’t nailed down. Nobody else was using it.” He didn’t want to tell her that it had something to do with drinking a lot of beer and watching an old movie and making the clever observation that the dog, like Bojangles, was black.

  “You can change a dog’s name, can’t you?” She asked it like she really didn’t know.

  “Well yeah, it’s not illegal or anything. But then the dog wouldn’t know when you were calling him. Why would I want to change his name anyway?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t look happy. Sometimes the wrong name can do that.”

  “He’s fine,” Sean said. He didn’t want some nutty woman telling him he couldn’t take care of his own dog.

  “See, if you change a name, the universe will call you by the new name.”

  “All right. Fair enough. I’ll put it on the to-do list.” It was just mystic hippie talk, like crystal healing. He guessed if he was going to hang around here, he ought to learn the lingo.

  “Sean. Hey! It rhymes! Sean and Dawn.”

  “Yeah. Who knew.”

  “What kind of a name is that, Sean?”

  “Celtic. You know, Irish. Some places in Ireland, it’s pronounced ‘Shayne.’ It’s a form of John, and, ah, the French ‘Jean.’ ”

  “So you really have a whole lot of names.” She made it sound as if he’d said he had a whole lot of money.

  “If you look at it in a certain way, yeah.” His name was Shit For Brains, and Broke Ass, and Gimp.

  Dawn got up and brushed the sand from her skirt. “You want any vegetarian chili? I made some last night.”

  “As it happens,” Sean said, “I’m a huge fan of vegetarian chili.”

  And that’s how he’d come to be sitting on Dawn’s front porch three days later, with his truck parked in the driveway and his dog in the yard and his boots under her bed. He’d felt sort of bad at first, like he was taking advantage. There was probably some law meant to protect the borderline mentally deficient or the seriously high—he still didn’t know which she was, or maybe she was both—from, well, from people like himself. But she was allowed to run around loose and walk the streets on her own. Though in this particular town, home to the spiritually inclined and the drug-inclined a
nd people who called themselves poets or artists because nobody told them they weren’t, that didn’t signify much. Anybody could, and did, have full citizenship rights here.

  After the first night he stayed there, he woke up with the fattest of the two cats perched on the end of the bed, staring him down. It was an orange cat with flat green eyes, and Sean’s heart seized up like somebody had injected solder into it, but really, the cat was no stranger than anything else he’d woken up to, namely this bed with a woman in it, and so he calmed himself and wiggled his toes for the pleasure of feeling the sheets around them.

  Dawn said she used to live in Utah, in the desert. She said she used to have a husband and three children. In Utah! Then one day she had been struck by lightning, lightning in her head. After that everyone “kept trying to make me stay inside.” So she ran away and came to the ocean, because all along she had really been a water person. She had changed her name too, although she wouldn’t tell him her old name because then her old life might hear it and track her down.

  Sean said Well, that sort of thing could happen. The old lightning-in-the-brain problem.

  It wasn’t exactly an explanation, but it sort of explained things. She surely didn’t seem to like staying inside, and often enough Sean was left alone with the cats to make himself at home. On one such occasion, he nosed around and found some Social Security check stubs made out to Cheryl Krupalija.

  He tried to find out just how much money Dawn had, both because he was curious and for more suspect motives that he didn’t care to admit to himself. She had a small coin purse, like a child’s, and she kept her paper money in it, folded up like origami. There didn’t seem to be that much of it, but he hadn’t seen her buy much either. The Social Security checks weren’t very large, not enough to pay a lot in the way of rent. Her shingled cottage had only two rooms, a bedroom and everything else, but here in the Land of Ridiculous Real Estate, it was probably worth a few hundred thousand dollars. How did any of the longhairs and people who made driftwood sculptures get by around here? Did they all sell drugs?

  He’d noticed that just up the hill from Dawn’s place, at the far end of the same driveway, was another, grander house, shingled in the same style as hers. You saw a lot of such add-ons, or studios, or guest cottages tacked on to larger properties. “Who lives up there?” Sean asked her.

  “Roberto,” Dawn said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, pushing marijuana stems through a screen. The resins collected on a small mirror below.

  “And who’s he when he’s at home?”

  “He isn’t home right now.”

  “It’s just a way of speaking. Forget it.” He should have known better than to attempt any kind of clever conversation with her. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. But he’s allergic to the cats.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sean watched her to see if she might be interested in coming back to bed, but she was hell-bent on processing the bag of stems. She tended to get involved in a project once she started it. Sean went out to the front porch. It was one of those mornings of high overcast and fog you got so often along the coast, the gray air blotting out all the colors of the world. It made you feel like you were inside of something and couldn’t get out. He wondered what Conner was doing right now. Following that rich woman around and cleaning up after her.

  He was going to call Conner, once he got his feet underneath him and had something to show for himself and didn’t have to put up with a lot of pissy attitude. After all, who was it that had raised the kid pretty much single-handed after Conner’s mother bailed on them? Who’d paid for his food and clothes and all his computer toys? If you turned it into math, calculated his effort times days and weeks and months and years, wasn’t that enough to earn him some credit in the lean times? Buy him a little forgiveness if he’d done a few things wrong?

  He was down right now but he could still get himself back up. Already Sean was sketching out a life for himself here. He still had his tools, and there was work he could do if it didn’t involve climbing or too much lifting. He could fix a few things up for Dawn. Make some contributions to the household.

  He didn’t like the idea that if his son was living off a rich woman, he might be living off a poor one.

  Dawn wasn’t the best cook in the world—meals involved lots of carrots and beets and other gnarly things that grew in the ground—but at least it was cooking. Most of what he’d been eating were things that didn’t require preparation, bread, mostly. She seemed OK with Sean being here—that is, she didn’t tell him he had to leave. It was a funny feeling, being in the same room with somebody who from time to time seemed to forget you were there. As much as you could get tired of women who talked and talked, the ones who wanted to know what you were thinking, which meant, were you thinking of them, with Dawn there were silences like blank spots, like a record skipping. It made for a lonesome time.

  “Tell me about your kids, your kids back in Utah,” he said, and she said she didn’t think they were in Utah anymore. She was petting the skinny cat. The skinny cat was long and narrow, and it bent around corners like it was a sheet of paper.

  “All right, where are they? Where do they live now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sean waited, but she wasn’t saying more. “Were they boys or girls?” he asked.

  She shook her head, fast, as if trying to get what was left of her children out of it. She said, “Can animals be vegetarians? I mean, cats and dogs.”

  “That cat’s already too skinny,” Sean said. “Don’t start feeding it a lot of vegetable slop.”

  “It could eat fish. I guess that still counts as vegetarian.”

  What kind of woman didn’t know or care about her kids? It wasn’t human. It wouldn’t even do credit to a cat.

  This morning, the third in a row he’d woken up in a bed, he heard a car pass by on the driveway. He and Dawn were enjoying some private time together, and Sean was disinclined to interrupt it. Later, he looked out the window to see a sporty red car, a BMW, parked up at the larger house uphill.

  “Is that your pal Roberto’s car up there?” he asked her, in case Roberto was anybody he ought to be prepared to say howdy to.

  Dawn was in the bathtub, squeezing water over herself with a big sea sponge, the kind that looked like it might start crawling around on its own. “He has a lot of cars,” she said.

  “Well, somebody’s up there,” Sean said, trying to sound serious and important but getting distracted by the view. Naked, Dawn was saggy in some places and worn down in others, but he didn’t mind, not one bit. In one way at least, he was a lucky man.

  He was so grateful that she put up with the complications of his own beat-to-shit body, the ways in which he had to labor and arrange himself, all the worry and relief. He’d been afraid that after so much time of doing without, and so many insults to his system, his poor old dick was going to hide between his legs and refuse to come out, and that no woman would look on him without pity. Maybe she was brain-damaged, simple-minded, but thank God for her.

  “Hey, look.” Dawn raised herself up in the tub until her nipples broke the surface of the bathwater. “I’m a mermaid!”

  “You sure are. That’s a great trick. Do you have any more tricks? I want you to practice them. I’m going out for a while, OK?”

  He whistled to Bojangles and they set off down the road to the beach. Already he’d established something of a routine: park himself in front of the waves for a time. Next head into town and equip himself with some small purchase—mints, a nail clipper, a can of dog food, anything to give himself the pleasant sense of spending money—then end up in the saloon where he drank one beer, making it last a long time. Then, in the late afternoon, feeling like he’d accomplished, if not a day’s work, then at least something close to a day’s occupation, he’d collect his dog again from the sidewalk outside and head back up the hill to Dawn
’s. He could get used to living like this. He was already used to it.

  But this time as he approached he could see a man standing in Dawn’s yard. He was a big man with heavy shoulders, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. He was studying Sean’s truck, taking it in, moving to one side of it, then another. Sean quickened his step as best he could. “Hi there,” he said, once he was within hailing distance. Keeping it cautious, ready for things to go either way.

  “This your truck?”

  “That it is.”

  “Mind if I ask what it’s doing here?”

  “Mind if I ask why you want to know?”

  They looked each other over. Big tub of tripes. His belly riding the front of his T-shirt. The T-shirt was red and featured a picture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco. He had a lot of wiry black hair going gray, and a gray mustache and beard trimmed so as to make a hole for his mouth. He said, “Because I take a particular interest in who parks in my driveway.”

  “I bet you’re Roberto. Hi. Sean. Sean McDonald. I’m a friend of Dawn’s.”

  Sean offered his hand. Roberto took a step forward and shook. “Friend of Dawn’s. You must be a new friend.”

  “That I am.”

  “Well, well,” Roberto said. “She does get around, our Dawn.”

  Sean didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem like a conversation that was going to end up in a good place.

  But then Roberto laughed and pointed to Bojangles, who was lifting his leg on the garbage bins. “That your hound?”

  “Yeah, he’s mine.”

  “That’s gotta be the most pitiful-looking dog I’ve ever seen.”