by T. Greenwood
“He had you here,” Ben offered. “Maybe he wanted to be closer to you.”
“He drove me crazy!” she said, wiping her tears hard with the back of her hand. “I asked him to move out because I couldn’t stand him living with me. His music, all day and all night. He’s messy,” she said, pointing to a crumb-covered dish and a glass with a hard disk of orange juice at the bottom. “He always told the dumbest jokes. His feet smelled. He was so big! There wasn’t room for him.”
Ben suddenly felt awkward holding on to Shadi, and he lifted his arm off her shoulders and coughed so he’d have something to do with his hands.
“Ben, what do you think happens when people die?”
Ben took a deep breath. After Dusty died and they went home from the hospital without her, he’d curled up in his bed alone. He’d waited for someone to come and explain to him what would happen next. What to expect. Not for him, for them, but for her. But neither his mother nor father offered anything. There was no heaven in his house, no God.
Ben shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Shadi wiped away her tears. “My people believe that you shouldn’t cry when someone dies. That too much emotion can interrupt their journey to the underworld. That the dead person’s spirit might attach itself to you, or to a place, or to an object if the journey is interrupted. Do you think that’s possible?”
This time, he nodded. Without heaven, without angels,
Dusty became a ghost. She lived in every particle of dust, in every shadow. She lived in all the empty places; maybe she still did.
“Well,” she said, standing up from the bed. “At least it shouldn’t take long to clear this shit out.”
Shadi put everything into the laundry basket (the books, the clothes, the TV, a small amplifier, and a carton of cigarettes), which Ben carried, and she rode her bike next to him to the truck, the guitar slung over her back. “Thanks for helping me out,” she said.
“No problem,” he said, shrugging.
She took the pears out of the bike basket and threw her bike and Ricky’s stuff into the bed of the truck. Ben drove up Humphreys so they wouldn’t have to pass the doctor’s office on San Francisco and then pulled out onto Fort Valley Road.
When they drove into her spot at the RV park, she got out of the truck and he got out to help her. “It’s okay, I’ve got it,” she said, lowering the bike to the ground and grabbing the rest of the stuff. “Listen, thanks for helping me out and I’m sorry about that earlier. I didn’t mean to fall apart like that. It’s not usually my way.”
He waited for her to invite him in. It was early; Sara wouldn’t be home from work for another couple of hours, and he didn’t have to work that night. He wanted to keep talking to her. He wanted to stay.
“Okay, I’ll see you,” she said.
His heart sank a little. He got in the truck, and she started to chain her bike to the trailer. He leaned over to the passenger side and rolled the window down.
“Hey, I’m going to see if I can find anything out about the other places Ricky might have gone that night. I’ve got friends who tend bar at some of the other places he might have been hanging out. Somebody had to have seen something.”
She stood up and smiled. She came over to the window and handed him a pear. “Thanks,” she said, and then she unlocked the trailer door and disappeared inside.
He sat in the driveway for a minute. He couldn’t believe she and Ricky had lasted as long as they had, sharing such a tiny space. He wondered what it looked like inside. He wondered what she was doing in there. And then he shook his head, no, this was crazy, and he put the key in the ignition and backed out. On the way home, he ate the pear, just a couple of bites. It wasn’t ripe yet, though, too hard and too green, almost bitter.
“Ben?” Sara’s voice came from the kitchen as Ben walked the door.
He took off his coat and poked his head around the corner. She was standing at the counter, making lasagna, layering noodles and sauce and cheese. Ben’s favorite. She’d changed out of her scrubs and was wearing a soft pair of Levi’s and one of his sweaters. Barefoot, her hair loose around her shoulders.
She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. Her chin trembled. “I’m sorry. I’m just a mess. I didn’t mean to be such a bitch the other day. God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Ben. I think everything with that kid, it just finally got to me. I see broken bones and bloody faces all day long, but this is different. At work I feel like I have control over things. That’s why I couldn’t work in the ER. It’s just too much. I can give shots and draw blood and hand out stickers to scared little kids, but I can’t deal with death like this. I’ve been rattled all week. And then that stupid stuff about the wedding … I’m just …” She took a deep breath. “Sorry.”
She must have been saving this up for days.
“It’s okay,” he said. He hated seeing her like this.
She turned to him and shook her head. “It’s not okay. It’s like things are changing between us, and I don’t want to be so angry all the time. I want to be who we used to be. God, what happened?”
And then she was leaning into him, pressing her cheek against his chest, and his chest ached. He rested his chin on the top of her head and closed his eyes hard. The house smelled like her mother’s homemade tomato sauce. There were candles burning on the dining room table.
“Did you do this for me?” he asked.
She pulled away from him and looked up, smiling. “I got the sweet sausage you like, and I made homemade garlic bread.” She went to the pan, covered it with foil, and put it in the oven.
“What time is it?” he asked, glancing down at his watch. It was only five.
“I left work early. I just wanted to come home and be with you. Start the weekend right.”
He raised his eyebrow at her. She was pressing her whole body into him now, and he could feel himself giving in to that old feeling, that wonderful feeling of Sara, Sara. God, what had happened to them?
And then she took his hand, leading him out of the kitchen, through the living room and down the hallway to their bedroom. She put her hand against his chest, pushing him down on the bed. She pulled the heavy curtains, and in the darkness he went through the motions, trying to remember what it meant to love Sara.
On Tuesday morning, he walked down the rows of seats, handing back the graded essays. He was met with all of the requisite groans and sighs. He hated teaching at eightA.M., but it came with the territory of being an adjunct. The fulltime faculty got first picks with the schedule, and the rest of the available courses were doled out to him and the rest of his colleagues at the bottom of the academic totem pole.
There are two types of kids who take eight o’clock classes: the overachievers and the underachievers. The overachievers are the ones who wake up ready to go each day, the ones who go to bed early during the week, the ones who do their homework and visit during office hours. These are the students who manage to graduate in four years, which is no small feat in a town with so many opportunities for distraction. The underachievers are the ones who forget to register for their classes until all of the sections held at reasonable times are full. These are the second-or third-or fourth-year seniors who have to have this class to graduate. The ones who have spent more time snowboarding than studying. More time at the bars than at the library. And this makes for a terrible classroom dynamic. The overachievers sitting in the front row, raising their hands, eagerly jumping in anytime Ben poses a question while the underachievers hold court in the back rows, fighting off sleep or texting their grievances, clackety-clack, all through class.
This morning as Ben began his lecture on American colonialism, Hanna Blum, fresh out of the shower and Starbucks in hand, raised her hand to ask a question, and Joe Bello yawned in the back. It was a big yawn, an exaggerated yawn. The kind of yawn that is meant to send a message.
“Joe?” Ben said. “Am I boring you?”
There were some chuckles in the back. His bu
ddy, Drew Miller, punched his arm. “Wake up, dude.”
Joe had been a pain in the ass all semester. He was a rich kid from Scottsdale, probably on his third or fourth school. His parents had likely sent him here thinking there would be fewer temptations than back home. He was a frat kid, but he probably had an apartment off campus, a BMW, top-of-the-line skis. He probably woke up this morning with a bong next to his bed, smoking $500-an-ounce weed for breakfast. Ben was pretty sure Joe had a job all lined up working for his daddy or one of his daddy’s friends back in the valley after graduation next spring. School simply did not matter.
Ben thought about Ricky, about him coming to Flagstaff to make a better life. About his not being able to afford to go to school. It was probably a prick like Joe who beat him up. Some entitled little shit.
Ben kept talking, talking, talking. Emphasizing his points with random scratches on the whiteboard. Behind him he heard the clackety-clack of a BlackBerry and his neck stiffened. He stopped talking and turned around.
Nestor Yazzie in the front was about to ask a question, but Ben held his finger up in a wait a minute gesture and looked down the rows to the back, where Joe was now sitting upright, hoodie pulled down over his head, hands in lap. Clackety-clack.
Ben set his Expo marker on his desk and walked down the aisle between the seats. He got to Joe before Joe even realized that he was coming. He held out his hand, palm up, and said, “Give it.”
Joe looked up from whatever electronic missive he was tapping out and said, “I’m done.”
“Mr. Bello, I said give it to me.”
“You’re not taking my phone,” Joe said.
Ben planned on taking the phone, confiscating it until the end of class, and then giving it back when class was over. But as he stood there, he felt his skin prickling, anger swelling inside him. “Why are you here, Joe?” Ben finally asked.
“What?”
“I said, Why. Are. You. Here?”
Joe shrugged.
“You’re a waste of time,” Ben hissed. “A waste of all of our time. A waste of your folks’ money. A waste of fucking space. Give me the goddamn phone.”
“Dude, chill out,” Joe said, setting it down, raising his hands in some sort of stupid surrender. “Forget it. It’s off.”
Ben watched his hand grab the phone. He—and Joe—watched as he hurled it across the room. He—and everyone else in the class—watched in disbelief when it hit the back wall and shattered, its electronic innards splattered all over the floor.
And then he went to the front of the room, picked up his briefcase, and said quietly, “There will be a test on Jamestown on Tuesday.”
It took about ten minutes for word to spread across campus that Ben Bailey had lost it in his eight o’clock. His next class looked terrified. A few nervous whispers but not a single text message sent during class. Ben was feeling pretty good about himself as he made his way to the History Department to get his mail.
The second he poked his head in to say hi to Rob, the interim chair of the department, he realized he’d screwed up.
“Hey, Bailey, I just got a call,” he said, motioning for Ben to come into his office.
“From?”
“Martin Bello. His son is in your eightA.M. American history class? He said there was an altercation this morning.”
Ben wondered how Joe had managed to get ahold of his father so quickly without his cell phone.
Rob’s face was red, his already large eyes popping. “What the hell were you thinking, Ben?”
Ben knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking he was sick and goddamned tired of getting paid $15,000 a year to stand in front of a bunch of entitled brats, compressing the entire early history of this nation into thirteen weeks as they slept or texted. He was tired of not being able to answer Nestor Yazzie’s questions because of the douche bag sitting in the back. He was tired of pretending that anything he had to say or think about America’s history had any impact on America’s future because obviously this was not the case. Because nothing had changed. Not here.
Someone beat the shit out of Ricky Begay and left him for dead in the snow. And no one seemed to care.
“Ben, I hate to do this to you, buddy, but this just can’t happen. This has to be a safe place for these kids. They can’t be worried that their profs are going to hurt them.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He’s threatening to press assault charges,” Rob said.
“For throwing his cell phone at the wall?”
“Never mind what the university might do.”
“What are you saying, Rob?”
“I’m saying that Martin Bello, Joe Bello’s father, is in the Arizona state house of reps. He’s also an alumnus and a significant donor to the school. What I am saying is that you draft a formal apology to Joe and his family. We’ll transfer him into a different section. Maybe with Rose? You just need to make it through the next month until the end of the semester without any more incidents, and then maybe you can take a little sabbatical after that. Joe Bello graduates in May. We can start a new contract for you next fall if there are some sections available.”
“A sabbatical is a paid leave,” Ben said, seething.
Rob shook his head sadly. “Not for adjuncts.”
Ben was grateful for the mind-numbing routine of washing and sanitizing the glasses, dusting the bottles of liquor, sweeping the peanut shells off the floor. He relished the mundane tasks: wiping down the bar, slicing lemons, cleaning the mirror that reflected the patrons’ faces. There was only one customer today, a regular who sipped slowly on his Jack and Coke. Ben refilled his glass about once an hour.
He hadn’t told Sara about his conversation with Rob at school, about the great cell-phone fiasco. Since the weekend, she’d been so happy. He didn’t want to wreck it.
On Saturday they had gone for a hike down in Oak Creek Canyon. It was at least twenty degrees warmer down there, sunny and so quiet. Sara had made a picnic lunch and brought a six-pack of Sierra Nevadas. They spent the whole day hiking and got home Saturday night sunburned and exhausted. On Sunday they’d curled up on the couch together all day watching football and eating bean dip.
For a little while, it was as though they had spun backward through time, as though none of this had happened. It was an amnesiac weekend, when Ben began to wonder how he could ever have thought about leaving Sara. Thoughts of Shadi became whispers, like a hazily recollected dream. And this is what Sara had wanted, wasn’t it? Perhaps this was proof that Ben’s theory about her was true; things always worked out for Sara. She always got what she wanted. Her glass was not just half full but brimming.
They didn’t talk about Ricky once.
But here he was two days later, and everything had gone to shit. And it was all his fault. He had no idea how to tell Sara that he’d lost his job, that he was now officially the only fulltime bartender with a PhD in town. He imagined how angry she would be, how disappointed. He could already see the furrow of her brow, the lines in her forehead, the ones he’d certainly put there, deepening with another new worry. And then, as he was sweeping up the shards of a glass that had slipped through his soapy hands, Shadi came in through the heavy doors of the bar, breathless.
“Ben,” she said.
“Hey,” he said, startled but happy to see her.
She sat down on one of the bar stools and set her purse on the bar. She looked anxious. She leaned in close and said softly, “There’s a kid bragging about being the one who beat up Ricky.”
“What?”
“My girlfriend who works over at the Laundromat on Milton said that she overheard some guy talking about tipping Indians on Halloween.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he asked.
“You know, find a drunk Indian and knock him over?”
“Jesus,” Ben said, wiping his hands on his apron. “Did she tell you what he looked like?”
“Belagana, white guy, college age. Blo
nd hair, baseball cap.”
“That could be anybody.” Half of the guys at the university fit that description.
“Wait,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “She said he was driving a Mustang. A bright blue one.”
“That should narrow things down,” Ben said.
He swept the broken shards into a dustpan and dumped them in the trash.
“You want something to drink?” he asked.
“Coke,” she said. “Please.”
He scooped some ice into a pint glass and filled it with Coke from the fountain behind the bar. “Straw?”
She shook her head. “Did you get a chance to talk to anyone else about it this weekend?”
“I didn’t have time this weekend,” he said, feeling strangely guilty that he’d been at home with Sara. “But I will. I actually get off around ten tonight, and I can stop by a couple of places before I go home.”
“Do you think we should talk to the cops too? If we can find this guy, maybe they can question him.”
Ben thought about how quickly the cops had dismissed Ricky. How determined they were to wash their hands of the whole thing.
Shadi took a drink of the Coke and then rifled through her purse. “Hey, have you got fifty cents I could borrow?”
He dug into his front pocket and pulled out two quarters. She snatched them out of his palm and went to the jukebox in the corner.
She studied the glowing menu of songs, flipping through until she found what she was looking for. Then she dropped the coins in, and the music started. She returned to the bar, smiling.
“Shake your hip, babe,” sang Mick Jagger against a bluesy bass.
“Exile on Main Street was our daddy’s favorite album,” she said. “It’s what made Ricky want to learn guitar. He listened to that record so many times, the grooves wore out.”
She sat back down at the bar and ran her finger down the glass, drawing a line through the condensation. She peered into the cola as though she were peering into a crystal ball. When she looked up again, she sighed. “Our daddy was a drunk. A nasty, mean drunk. And we were scared to death of him.”
