Taking It

by Michael Cadnum

  “They aren’t little,” he said. “They aren’t dogs.”

  Ted liked sounding this way, knowledgeable, tough. I realized how little I knew. I tucked my feet under the chair I was in, a folding aluminum chair with little corrosion bubbles on the arms. Rattlesnakes, I thought. Scorpions.

  I felt his touch in my hair. I don’t like to be touched there. It just messes it up, even though I keep it casual, wash and wear. The sun around here would color it, not to mention fry it dry. “I didn’t bring enough clothes,” I said.

  “You don’t make a lot of sense sometimes,” said Ted.

  I had forgotten my cigarettes again, left them in the living room. Maybe I wasn’t a cigarette smoker anymore. It happens: You aren’t what you used to be.

  The phone rang in the kitchen. Ted had one of those houses where everything was out of date, the telephone fastened to the wall, the refrigerator with a plastic ice tray you had to bend in your hands to loosen the cubes.

  Ted didn’t move, looking down at me.

  I made a gesture—go ahead and answer it.

  I think we both knew who it was before he even approached the kitchen. I could hear him inside, the way he said, “Hello, Mom,” a little loudly so I could hear.

  Yes, I heard him say. She’s here. There was a longer pause, and I knew what kind of questions she was asking.

  Instead of answering questions, though, Ted was just saying, “Yes. Sure,” listening, making encouraging sounds. “That’s right.”

  If you didn’t know Ted, you’d think he sounded casual, easygoing, an ordinary guy talking to his mom, no problem. I could hear it, though, the tension resurrecting itself. Mother had fought with each of us, swearing that we would send her to a mental hospital.

  I have to wonder sometimes what animals are trying to say, they spend so much time making noise.

  “I don’t think she wants to talk,” said Ted. “She’s out on the patio, looking at the stars.”

  I could imagine what my mother pictured. She imagined a luxuriant patio with broad-leafed plants, a little fountain trickling in the corner, ferns. Adler was probably in the same room with her, his hands folded, waiting patiently for her to get off the phone.

  “I won’t,” Ted was saying. “Don’t worry,” he said with a tired chuckle.

  The coyotes were there, yammering like puppies in pain.

  26

  A couple of crickets started up, over by the hibiscus. Ted stayed on the phone for a while, and I gazed up at the sky.

  The stars were an invisible net stretched tight by tiny silver pins. I can feel the net attached to my own private darkness, my secret sky.

  Maureen would know what I was talking about, but she would be distracted by things that didn’t bother me. She would hear the clatter of a trash can lid several houses away and say she bet nobody recycled cans around here, just threw them away.

  He was off the phone, there beside me on the patio, hands in his pockets, his shadow, in the light from the kitchen, falling all the way to the fence.

  “She’s worried,” he said. “She wants you to call her.”

  I didn’t bother to respond.

  “You should,” he said.

  “What were you saying?” I asked.

  “Mom told me not to let you drive me crazy,” he said.

  How nice of her, I thought, to show such interest in both of us. “She’d be shocked,” I said, “if she knew you couldn’t afford new work boots.”

  He looked down at his feet. “These are just getting broken in, Anna.”

  No more Anna Teresa. No more brotherly calm. He was impatient, weary. “I pay my own rent,” he said. “I buy my groceries. I’m learning how to lay sprinklers.”

  “That’s an amazing branch of science,” I said. “Sprinklers.”

  He shook his head, took a deep breath and let it out. I could sense him full of things he wanted to say.

  “Maybe Wade’ll start you in on weed pulling,” I said. “Let you study that for a few years.”

  “You can’t get far in Southern California landscaping without a feel for irrigation,” he said.

  “The drip system,” I said. “Tubes leading right to the base of each little plant.”

  “It’s efficient,” he said.

  I looked around at the blank concrete for a moment, knowing his eyes were on me. “I counted on you. I thought you were special, Ted. I thought you, of all people, could really do something wonderful with your life.”

  I couldn’t stop myself.

  I wanted to tell him I was sorry, that I didn’t mean what I was saying, but he was walking back toward the house, a figure like my father, too much on his mind.

  I got up out of the chair, and the frame was trapped around my leg, dragging along with me until I shook myself free. He was already inside, back in the living room, probably, sitting on the sofa. I bit my knuckle until it hurt.

  I knew what I had to do. If I stayed here, I would keep after him, sting him like this again and again. There was nothing I could do about it. I would turn into a cartoon version of myself, like the Aquascan man, a little body and a big mouth that wouldn’t shut up. I would cripple his life. There was only one favor I could do him, and I knew what it was.

  27

  I told him that I appreciated all his help. He turned and looked at me, his hand on the light switch. His look was hopeful, skeptical, half giving up on me. “Anything I can do,” he said.

  When people say things like this, they don’t mean it. What they mean is that they care what happens to you, that you aren’t alone.

  We were being very careful not to start a conversation with any feeling in it. I wore one of his shirts, a T-shirt several sizes too big, a washed-out pool-bottom blue. He was pink and tousled from a hot shower, and he looked drained, too tired to stand there talking.

  Lincoln had whined so much Ted had let him in. Now the dog was wedged between the easy chair and the coffee table, half asleep. When he took a deep breath the table shifted a little.

  “You haven’t really changed,” I said. “You’re still Ted, inside.”

  He smiled, lifted one shoulder, let it fall: maybe.

  “Mother’s still the same, too,” I said. “Inside she still can’t stand either one of us.”

  He wanted to say something, a little crease between his eyebrows. People communicate so much with their eyes, and their eyebrows, more than they do by talking.

  “I think Connie’s crazy not to live with you,” I said.

  His expression lightened. “You’d like her. Maybe I’ll have her over tomorrow …”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said, and he knew me well enough to shut up. He could tell. Maybe he wasn’t conscious of it, but he could tell what was going to happen. He stood there for a while, feeling this doubt, this awareness.

  And then he went into his room, turning the lights off as he went.

  I slept.

  It was automatic, even on the three bulging cushions, my body rising and falling unnaturally, a giant lying down on a countryside to sleep, having to put up with valleys and mesas, knee in the parking lot, ear in someone’s front yard.

  I woke and I could tell Ted wasn’t asleep yet. I don’t know how—I sensed it.

  Maybe I was attuned to the rhythm of his breathing, used to it from the time I was an infant. We had to take naps, and I would lie beside my mother and hear her drift off, beginning to dream, my brother older, restless, playing with his cars and trucks in his bedroom until at last he was asleep, too, and the house belonged to me as I lay wide awake, the only one who was aware of the earth.

  I was on my feet in the darkness, dressing quietly.

  Lincoln was the hard part. As soon as I got up in the dark, he was jumping, frantic. Finally I seized his scruff, took a fistful of fur. I put my face down to his and hissed, “Sit still!”

  He calmed down but continued to shiver with anticipation as I slipped on my shoes. There was a weak place in the floor, a soft place in the floo
rboards that sagged a little and creaked. I avoided it, and I avoided the angle of the coffee table in the darkness, quiet, like someone who wasn’t really there.

  Lincoln is too much trouble, I thought. Leave him here.

  But he would yammer. The noisy, speechless animal would yowl, waking Ted. I gave him a pat, liking the way he leaned into me, still shivering a little, but trying to be patient.

  I told him to stay where he was until I got back.

  I could feel his doubt, his eagerness.

  I told him again, in a low voice, like I would kill him if he moved.

  It didn’t take long. I knew what to do. When I had everything I needed, I walked as quietly as possible to the front door and turned the doorknob. I caught my breath, releasing the lock. It made a high-pitched squeak.

  Lincoln was patient now, clued in on the general plan. His tail thumped the rug quietly. The lock was stuck. It was half steel, half rust, and no one had oiled it in decades. The walls of the house crept in a little closer, a worn-out bungalow with a landlord who lazed around in the desert and never dropped by to fix anything as obvious as a frozen deadbolt.

  It squeaked again, but more faintly. There was a long moment of tension, Lincoln’s tail thudding the floor.

  And then I was outside.

  28

  The night was quiet, one cricket out by the curb. There was a whispery hush, a town asleep, a light on in a house at the end of the street.

  I felt free, but I felt exposed, too. This time I wasn’t just playing a private game with myself, a little test to see if I could make life a little more interesting, give the security people something to do.

  Lincoln stayed right beside me, pressing against me as I yanked on the car door, having trouble getting it open. The car was parked at the curb, not parked all that well, the rear out too far. The car door was not locked. I might as well have put a sign on the windshield, HELP YOURSELF—FREE CAR.

  The coyotes had stopped. The stars were shivering, the light still finding its way through the air pollution. The mountains were invisible, but it was easy to see where they were, blocking the stars.

  Lincoln leaped into the car and took his seat on the passenger’s side. I put the key in the ignition, and the Mustang whined, probably a remanufactured starter. I winced as the engine caught.

  I knew it had awakened Ted. I knew my brother, and I knew he had been sleeping with a clear memory of how a Mustang would sound if it started up outside.

  I made a quick inventory, map on the backseat, unfolded, spread all over the place, a little flattened. We had left Lincoln’s rope—too bad, but maybe we wouldn’t need it. Between Lincoln’s legs was my straw purse with everything that would take me where I was going.

  A light switched on in the house. I shifted the transmission out of park and into drive, and let the car roll away from the curb. I might have heard Ted calling me as I hit the accelerator harder than I wanted to, the car jerking out beyond the double line down the middle of the street.

  I remembered to turn on the headlights after driving a few blocks, and I regretted having to do it. I asked myself if Ted would call the Highway Patrol to tell them his sister was on her way God knows where.

  I wondered what they would tell him—that lost seventeen-year-old sisters were not a major problem, the world the way it is? I was pretty sure he’d call Dad, although maybe he’d wait until morning, let Dad have a night’s sleep.

  Maybe Mother had warned him that I was going to be more trouble than he imagined.

  I pulled to the curb for half a minute. The interior light didn’t work and probably hadn’t worked for twenty years, the kind of thing nobody bothered to fix. A streetlight beside an elementary school shed just enough light to let me make sense out of the map. I tossed the map into the backseat, where it was a shape like a paper pyramid.

  I made it to an on-ramp, the freeway familiar, a kind of homey feeling to the green, white-lettered signs. Some people spend years like this, driving from one place to another.

  The traffic was not heavy, but it was still a surprise to see how many people were going someplace. It was easy for me to find the highway I wanted, following Interstate 15 toward Barstow. There was a mountain pass, vague shapes of hills beside the highway. If a Highway Patrol car was going to slip up from behind, it would be right about now.

  Enough time had gone by for Ted to make his discovery, but I don’t think he would really know what had happened until morning. Days might go by, because for all his intelligence and his ability to work hard, Ted believes in reality, that it basically makes sense. All you need is to get up in the morning and work, drag rocks, eat lunch in the sun.

  It’s a sure thing, Ted thinks: You save up money and after a while you go out and buy a nice new stereo television, and maybe a sofa you can lie down on without permanent paralysis.

  Ted doesn’t realize that Socrates’s questionnaire, How to Examine Your Life in Twenty Easy Steps, was obsolete. It was missing a few pages that should have been collated over the centuries between then and now. The old philosopher had been teaching too long, handing out the same midterms to too many students.

  I knew how it was done. I knew how to disappear.

  I worked my hand into the purse and wrapped my fingers around the wad, the money I had stolen from Ted.

  29

  Every car looks like a police car from a distance.

  They rise up out of nowhere, coast along in the rearview mirror. The old rearview didn’t have an antiglare feature. You couldn’t tilt it down and set it so headlights didn’t blind. Cars crept up behind me, all light and mystery, and then they passed.

  I kept steady, fifty-eight, fifty-nine miles per hour. I couldn’t believe how hot it was. Night, day, it didn’t matter to the desert.

  Lincoln sat there stunned, his tongue hanging out. He pressed his nose against the window, smearing it with fresh snout prints. He smelled very much like a dog, and I wondered if they sold mouthwash for animals.

  I was sticky, armpits, the insides of my thighs. My tongue was paste. I left the freeway in Barstow, found a Chevron station. I let Lincoln have a nice long drink from the rubber hose, and when the water splashed on me it felt good.

  I pumped some super unleaded. I was going to check the fluid levels, the coolant, the oil, but a police car cruised by, looking at people on the sidewalk, slowing to look at the gas station, checking out every living thing, so I made it quick. I hurried to the pay booth and peeled off some money.

  There was a lot of it. Ted had saved for a long time.

  I could hear my dad’s voice: Watch the fluid levels. If the car gets overheated, you’re in trouble.

  I could hear Ted’s voice going on about how good Mahler would sound when he had new speakers, a better television.

  The woman in the booth said something to me, talking into a microphone, her voice coming out of a speaker. I didn’t understand what she was saying, this loud, brassy voice from someone right in front of me like bad lip-synching.

  “Have a good evening,” she was saying, a woman with drawn-on eyebrows, her natural brows growing in, needing to be shaved.

  She was a little heavy, pretty in a tired way, up all night selling gas. People lived like this, I thought. They start out fresh and full of excitement and pretty soon they’re repeating themselves into microphones in the heat, trying to be polite.

  One of the chilling things about having a brother is that you know how he thinks. You know he keeps his savings in the closet. And you know it won’t be long before he makes the discovery. He’ll pace for a while, swearing in a fierce whisper the way Dad does when he’s mad.

  He’ll be in among the pile of shoes, tossing aside those worn work boots, fumbling into his black oxfords, the ones like new because he never puts them on.

  What will he do then? I asked myself.

  What would I do?

  I would call the police, everyone. I would never forgive.

  I didn’t want to think this way,
but I even found myself standing in front of a telephone. I associate night with cool weather, but this was like inhaling for the first time, hot cigarette smoke all the way into the lungs. I stared at the phone, running my mother’s phone number through my head, telling myself I couldn’t remember it, but I could.

  In my mind I heard the phone ringing. I saw Adler stirring, thinking it must be a patient of his, an emergency, expecting an answering service, answering the phone half-awake and concerned.

  I could talk to him, that’s what I would do. I could tell him how I felt. I could explain, and Adler would be understanding. He knew things. He might have guessed how I felt by now. That was it: He already knew. It would be a relief to have it all out in the open.

  In my mind I had Adler and my mother married for years, a dresser packed with his shirts and her sweaters, folded neatly, fresh from the cleaners, the dresser top crowded with framed pictures, both of them smiling.

  The handle of the car was warm, almost hot. Nobody could stand to live here, and yet there were people out on the sidewalks, one of them sitting on the curb, drinking from a can in his hand. Up the street the police had found what they wanted, talking to a group of men.

  I drove slowly. One of the policemen let a flashlight beam shine upward, into a man’s face. The man’s features were illuminated, shadows cast upward so his face was a mask. He was explaining something to the police with no apparent concern, talking his way out of it.

  The police were busy. But not so busy that one of them didn’t look my way as I waited for the light to change from red to green.

  Even the sound of the engine attracted attention sometimes, a solid rumble the newish muffler didn’t do much to disguise. The cop took a long look, liking what he saw, maybe, enjoying the sight of a woman in a classic Mustang, and maybe starting to wonder. I felt tight inside.

  The light was green. I let myself go slow, forced myself to drive by the book, letting the signal blink for a while before I changed lanes, left the city street, took the on-ramp toward Bishop and Las Vegas.