Taking It

by Michael Cadnum

  Chatter. It was good to see him and hear him, but Ted was different now. He was tanned, and his hair was the same color as Dad’s, dirty blond. I had the feeling Ted might have gotten a tattoo or something, made some drastic alteration in himself. But I looked him up and down, Levi’s and a white V-necked T-shirt, and running shoes with no laces, the feet just stuck in, slipper-fashion. He needed a shave.

  “I had to talk to you,” I said.

  “You’re having trouble,” he said, sitting down across from me.

  He was sipping a glass of milk, nonfat, the only kind either of us would drink. He was sitting looking at me, patient and friendly. This was the Ted I wanted.

  “So much has been happening,” I began. And then I couldn’t talk, looking around at the yellow, speckled floor. I had so much to say I couldn’t say anything.

  “The sofa’s pretty comfortable,” he said. “I set out some blankets.”

  I shook my head. How could I even think of sleep?

  “We have time,” he said. “All kinds of time.”

  I blinked, clearing my vision. I found myself considering his words. All kinds of time. I couldn’t finish my soup.

  “Look how tired you are,” he said. “You drove five hundred miles today.”

  I couldn’t help being irritated with Ted. I was with him at last and he was saying the same kind of thing Dad says, trying to be nice and giving me a caring, interested look, but about two chapters behind.

  “Mother wants me to move in with her,” I said.

  “Well, I can understand that being a problem,” Ted said. He was in an orbit far from Mom and Dad, and when he couldn’t make it to Mom’s wedding, no one was really surprised.

  “She’s not the person she used to be,” I said. I had almost said the same wretch she used to be.

  “Years of therapy, working at last,” he said.

  “She’s trying to be reasonable, the poor thing,” I said. I meant to roll my eyes when I said this, but my timing was off, and the statement came out flat, truthful.

  He smiled, but there was something wrong with him.

  “You’re tired,” I said.

  “I have to get up in the morning,” he said.

  I hesitated. The saltines collect at the bottom of the bowl. I stirred the floury paste for a moment. “You haven’t met Adler,” I said.

  “What’s he like?”

  Sometimes a question is too big.

  I was tired after all. Tired and used up. The kitchen was small, dishes in a rack, a coffee mug, a glass. I had half-expected my brother to be living with someone. There was a shelf, salt and pepper, instant coffee, Hershey’s powdered cocoa. My brother and I are crazy about the stuff.

  “Connie moved out,” he said.

  Reading my mind. It’s nice to have a brother, but a little scary, as though he might know something about me that I had forgotten.

  23

  It was early, the room gray light.

  Lincoln’s snout was in my face. The furniture was sagging, tattered at the corners, including the sofa I was lying on. One of the seat cushions had fallen off the sofa during the night.

  I was crippled. I hunched over to the TV and turned it on. I kept the sound off, the way Dad does, looking at the screen to make sure life is still going on. I heard Ted in the bedroom, a drawer opening and closing. I was about to beat him to the bathroom, something I used to be pretty good at, but he got there first.

  There was a collection of things on the coffee table, cigarettes, my purse, a Scientific American. The pages were stuck together with what looked like spilled Coke. My espadrilles toed together on the carpet. My dress was on the floor. I like silk, but it tends to wrinkle. The woman at Maxi’s says I may be more of a cotton person.

  Lincoln whined at the back door and I let him out. There was a concrete patio with a barbecue. Lincoln squatted beside a hibiscus with three blossoms.

  When Ted was out of the bathroom and thumping around in the bedroom, I moved fast. My brother has nice soap, Neutrogena, soothing, with a clean smell. I took a shower and washed my hair with his yucca blossom shampoo.

  I wandered into the kitchen, drying my hair with a Gold’s Gym towel. Ted was making cocoa for two, using real sugar. When he took the cocoa out of the microwave, it was delicious.

  Lincoln was back in the kitchen, nosing the air.

  “A dog like that must eat a lot,” said Ted.

  “I thought you were something big in landscaping,” I said.

  “We have to hurry,” Ted replied. “I’m running late.”

  He was shaved and smelled of aftershave, his hair combed back. He was twenty-three, and had been in and out of college, UCLA, Fullerton State. He wore a denim shirt with an orange undershirt showing at the collar, and the same Levi’s as the night before. He was wearing work shoes, scuffed and old, with new red laces.

  I should have expected this, but it surprised me. Despite what he had said the night before, I had imagined him taking the day off.

  “You landscape the yard here?” I said.

  He put toast into the toaster, an ancient appliance with blackened crumbs all over the top.

  “Those old newspapers out on the front step,” I continued. “I like that casual, sun-baked look. Nice touch.

  “Beautiful job on the backyard, too,” I said.

  He didn’t respond. He kept smiling, starting to hum something under his breath.

  “Good cocoa,” I said.

  He said, “You don’t have to drink it.”

  I was going to be quiet for a while, eat toast and plum jam, look out the window at the smog between the back door and the mountains. But I found myself saying, “I thought you would live someplace nice.”

  “You’re disappointed,” he said.

  “Someplace Zen, raked sand and a few maple trees, maybe a pool, a few fish.”

  “Maybe a monk,” he said, “propped against a rock.”

  “All I see is cement.”

  He opened a can of Spam and put it on a plate by the back door. The dog nosed it around the floor, having trouble picking it up. Ted put a slice of toast on a plate and gave it to me. He let his piece cool for a while in the toaster and then picked it out and ate it, no butter, no jam.

  I shut up. Maybe he was in a bad mood. He would start quoting things like, “That which does not kill me makes me strong,” or the one about it’s easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get into heaven if you have any kind of taste in clothes.

  “The sofa was pretty comfortable,” I said.

  “I’m saving up for some new things,” he said. “A new sofa, a television, maybe a home entertainment center.” He said this ironically, but he probably had something expensive planned, something that would make Beethoven echo off the canyons.

  I said, “I see how you can use some entertainment.”

  We left Lincoln tied to a water pipe in the concrete emptiness of the backyard. We left him with a plastic basin full of water. Ted tied a triple knot in the gray rope, but I was sure Lincoln would get it undone and escape. There was nothing I could do.

  Ted drove a red Toyota pickup. The Toyota on the tailgate had been partly colored in to read OYO.

  His neighborhood was even worse in daylight, chain-link fences and pregnant women with five little children. We drove through housing tracts, some new, some worn-out, until we got to some open space.

  “Connie and I didn’t exactly break up,” he said, responding to my question. “She decided she didn’t like living with me. It was a setback, but I’ll see her Friday night.”

  Lincoln was going to be gone when I got back. I looked out at the ash-gray scenery, hating it.

  “We’re clearing boulders,” said Ted, driving fast, much faster than I usually go. “Tearing out some sage, some creosote. We used to have a bigger crew, but one guy popped a nerve in his neck and another guy had something wrong with his green card. Immigration people arrested him. And one guy got bit by a baby rattlesnake. He couldn�
��t handle the stress. So the rest of us are busy.”

  “You talk like this all the time now?” I asked.

  He looked over at me, his glance saying: Like what?

  “You used to talk like a book, Thoreau or someone. Now you sound like a work jock.”

  “We have a break at ten-thirty,” he said, after a very long pause.

  The contractor was a tall man with a beer belly and a cowboy hat. He was called Wade and he swore a lot. He said the immigration people were a bunch of jerk-offs. He said anyone who got bit by a baby rattlesnake had their heads so far up their butts you could just roll them along the ground.

  But he said I could sit in the cab of his pickup, where it was air-conditioned, and he didn’t say it with a look, the way some men do, meaning: Spend some time next to me and I’ll show you a couple of moves.

  Wade just ignored me in a friendly way, and I sat and watched Ted drive a down-size Deere tractor, dragging a dry field flat. There were papers on the front seat beside me, manila folders and legal documents, an environmental-impact report, and a letter to a company that was late with a shipment of crushed granite.

  These forms were interesting, county and state commissions having to be satisfied that no pollutants were going to drain from the new golf course into the water table. There was a letter to the immigration department about harassing skilled employees on-site. I spotted a couple of typos.

  Wade opened the door and used the phone on the dash to make a phone call, hanging up when there was no answer.

  “You ought to get one of those computer programs that check spelling,” I said.

  He looked at me from under his cowboy hat.

  “I just thought I’d mention it,” I said.

  24

  At ten-thirty a snack truck pulled up. It was a white pickup with aluminum doors that opened to display plastic containers of flavored yogurt and several kinds of donuts, including plain, glazed, and chocolate-covered, and cinnamon rolls in cellophane.

  At lunch another truck swung into the parking lot, and we ate burritos and prepackaged sandwiches. I ate a ham sandwich on white bread with dill pickles that soaked through the bread and made it soggy and green. I had a diet 7-Up. The drinks were in a bed of ice. When you picked one out it left a can-shaped cavity. The woman in charge put another can into the hollow to get cold.

  All day I sat there, getting the point. This was how Ted lived, working under a smoggy sky.

  I lounged in the truck and listened to the radio, which could be adjusted so you got police calls. The dispatcher was a woman with one of those bone-numb, bored voices. There was a man on Baseline Road the dispatcher said was fifty-one fifty. I knew that meant mentally disturbed. The man was naked, running from backyard to backyard, swinging over fences. The police apprehended him, and after he was in custody the police calls weren’t very interesting.

  At last shadows fell from the mountains, softening the outline of the rocks and the clawed hill. It was still hot, and there was a smell of skunk in the air.

  Ted was dusty, his boots and his pants white with it. He was sweating and his hair stood up all around his head. “Have a good day?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to tell him how I felt.

  We drove to a restaurant called La Estrellita, a pink stucco place only a few blocks from where Ted lived. “You aren’t going to go home and take a shower?” I asked.

  Music was playing, a song I could tell was sad, a town the man would never see, a place more beautiful than any town he had ever known. I could make out most of the Spanish, and what I couldn’t I understood anyway. I thought that surely Ted couldn’t sit in here all dusty and sweaty like that, but people at other tables looked tired and dusty, too.

  We ate gigantic tacos, tacos piled with refritos and avocado and sour cream. I drank iced tea and Ted had a Dos Equis.

  “I wouldn’t attract the attention of the immigration people,” I said. It was good to let him know I could handle a job in construction if I wanted to.

  Ted swallowed, dabbed his mouth with a napkin with the name of the restaurant on it in red. He looked like he didn’t want to talk about immigration troubles. His face was thinner than I remembered it, and he hadn’t shaved very well, a little patch of whiskers under his nose. “Wade knows what he’s doing.”

  “Maybe he hires someone working on someone else’s Social Security number,” I said. “Maybe Wade knows when he hires the person, maybe Wade doesn’t. If Wade complains too much about the border people, they might start investigating more carefully. Maybe Wade should just forget about the guy with the green card problem.”

  “That’s a good point,” said Ted.

  His halfhearted compliment made me feel self-conscious. “I was just thinking.”

  “The legal mind,” he said.

  “I want to live with you,” I said. It came out suddenly, and there it was, something I hadn’t even been aware of thinking. “I don’t mean just the summer. I mean, move here, finish my senior year. I could get a job, maybe work for Wade in an office.”

  Ted gave it some thought. “You like my house?”

  I chewed a piece of tortilla.

  “My backyard?” asked Ted. He looked ridiculous with his hair like that, all messed up, like someone who tried to look insane on purpose. “You like the patio with no sign of life but one hibiscus?”

  “You have nice soap in the shower,” I said.

  “I don’t want you living with me,” Ted said. He didn’t say it like someone being cruel. He said it in a kind tone, but it was like a slap. “You can stay the summer, and I’ll be glad to have you. But you can’t run away from your problems.”

  I let three beats pass before I said anything. The family counselor at Kaiser suggested this once as a way of not saying hurtful things. “You’ll never graduate from college,” I said. “All your plans add up to eating glue sandwiches for lunch beside a golf course for retired people.”

  “So you couldn’t stand living with me anyway,” he said, as though he had just proved something.

  “I don’t want your help, Ted,” I said. There were tears in my eyes but my voice was steady. “You’re right. I see how you’re going to live the rest of your life and I don’t want to sit around on your flea-market furniture.”

  “You can talk to Mother,” said Ted. “Or Dad. Try it. Don’t be such a coward.”

  I was out of the booth, straightening the wrinkles in my dress.

  It was just about dark. The parking lot was filling up. A big shiny pickup truck crammed with men in baseball caps slowed down and took a look at me.

  I didn’t care. I let them look. One of them said something, and the rest of them laughed. The truck rolled away, gravel snap crackle pop under the oversize tires.

  Ted called to me.

  “Where are you going?” he said when he caught up.

  “Walking to your place,” I said.

  “You won’t be able to find it,” he said.

  “I’ll find it.”

  “You won’t be able to get in,” he said. “I keep it locked. I bought window stoppers at one of those security stores. The windows won’t slide open.”

  I didn’t bother telling him that if I wanted to get in, I would.

  I was afraid of what I was going to do, but I didn’t have any choice.

  25

  Ted and I didn’t really have much to say for a while.

  I had already made up my mind. I was uneasy when I thought about what I had to do, but I was realistic. I made myself stop thinking.

  We drove the few blocks through the darkness, and when we got there, Lincoln was standing in the front yard, bounding around like he was too happy to stay on the ground, he wanted to practice flying.

  I held the dog by his collar and took him through the house to the back and tied him up again. He kept wanting to jump up and down. I tied a monster knot, one I invented on the spot, and tugged it hard, Lincoln licking my ear. I turned on the spigot at the side of the house and filled u
p his plastic basin.

  Ted wrestled the top off a can of chicken meat and put it in a bowl with some leftover macaroni and cheese. When he took it outside, Lincoln gobbled the food, and when it was gone, he licked the concrete around the plate.

  “What does he usually eat?” Ted asked.

  “Dog food,” I said.

  Ted said he felt like watching television. He said there was rum raisin ice cream in the fridge. He wasn’t sulking, or acting clipped and cold the way Mother did after a fight. He acted like he wanted to avoid me for awhile, maybe hoping I’d get over my mood. He fingered the remote and watched a show with the sound off, penguins standing around.

  I had a glass of water. It tasted like dirt. I went outside and watched the lights of airplanes drift across the stars. Lincoln’s rope wasn’t long enough for him to come and sit beside me. He came as far as he could and lay on his belly. He whined a little, a quiet whistling noise.

  I listened while Ted made a phone call. I tensed up, but he was talking about what dumb videos they had at the mall. I could tell by the way he used his voice, sounding confident and caring, that he must be talking to Connie.

  When he was off the phone, he came out beside me on the patio. “Hear that?” he said.

  Hear what? I wanted to ask. I assumed he was referring to how cool he sounded on the telephone just then, showing off, something he rarely did. Maybe Connie had agreed to leave for Las Vegas tonight, a package marriage—rings, chapel, and deluxe suite—and he was breaking the news.

  I knew that Adler and Mother must be back now. They would be unpacking, or maybe they would leave that for tomorrow, go right to bed.

  “Coyotes,” said Ted.

  There had been a puppylike yammering in the distance, not a sound to catch my attention compared with the faint rumble of jets and the muttering of various televisions in the neighborhood.

  Lincoln was standing still, nose toward the sound.

  “They sound like little dogs,” I said.