“I’ll give you a ride.”
“Nah. I got my bike out there.”
“I don’t mind. We’ll put it on my bike rack.”
“I guess. I gotta go say good-bye to Miss Liza.”
THEY RODE BACK to Arlene’s house in silence.
Why had he suggested driving the boy home? He asked himself that question all the way there. If he really didn’t want to see her, and he really didn’t, why hadn’t he just let Trevor pedal home the way he always had?
He wanted to ask Trevor if his mother was home or at work, just to prepare himself somewhat, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the words.
He pulled up across the street. Her car wasn’t parked out front. A wash of relief and disappointment struck, warring, with Reuben as the unfortunate battleground.
He cut the motor and they sat quietly for a minute, listening to an odd, intermittent crashing sound, like a series of small car accidents. It seemed to be coming from nearby.
“I wonder what that is,” Reuben said absently. He didn’t feel particularly motivated to drive away again.
“I’ll see.” Trevor got out of the car, leaving the passenger door open, and walked a few paces. He stopped opposite his own driveway with his hands in his pockets. Then he came back and sat down in the car beside Reuben.
“It’s my mom. She’s pounding the heck out of that truck with a baseball bat.”
A wave of cold numbness struck deep in Reuben’s gut. His ear began to ring again, and this time he could hear his own blood rushing around in his head, like the ocean in a conch shell.
“I thought she wasn’t home.”
“No. She’s home.”
“Her car’s not here.”
“It broke down. Now she has to take a bus to work. I think that’s why she’s all mad at the truck. She still has to pay for it. And now she’s gotta take a bus to two jobs. She had to go back to the Laser Lounge nights.”
“Since she threw your dad out?”
“No. All along. He never really made much money or anything.” The ugly metallic sounds of her pounding punctuated their words and their silences. “That’s my baseball bat, too. Man. That thing’s never gonna be the same.”
I wish I could do that, Reuben thought. It made him feel itchy and explosive, feeling how much he had to vent.
“Did you want me to get her a new car, is that it?”
“No. That wasn’t it.”
“You wanted me to give her rides home from work at three in the morning? I guess that is a dangerous time to ride the bus.”
“I don’t think the buses even run that late. No, Harry the bartender drives her home.”
Pound. Pound. Always the give of metal. No breaking glass. Reuben tried to remember if the truck still even had glass. “What, then?”
“What, what?” Trevor seemed distracted by the noise, too.
“What does your mother need that only I can do?”
“For you to give her another chance. She knows she really screwed up. She knows that now. She does that a lot. Screws up. You know, like, sees a good thing and a bad thing and takes the bad one. She’s not dumb. She knows. I don’t know why she does it if she knows. It’s just this thing she does. She says you’ll never forgive her. But I figured, well, you could. It would be a really big thing. But you could. If you wanted to do a really big thing. For somebody. I mean, I remember you asked me once how you do something really big like that. Remember? And I said, well, you just look around. And find somebody who needs something. So, she does. Need something. I just thought you’d want to know.”
The interior of the car rang with the absence of words. The pounding continued outside. Reuben could hear Trevor’s breathing. He wanted to hug the boy because he missed him, but nothing moved. “I’m sorry, Trevor. I can’t.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay. She said you’d say that.”
“You talked about this with her?”
“Not exactly. She just said you were upset and you wouldn’t ever forgive her. But I said she should ask. But she won’t, ’cause she knows you’ll just say no. So I asked.”
“I’m sorry, Trevor.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
The pounding stopped suddenly. The unfamiliar silence felt strange and stunning.
Trevor got out of the car without saying good-bye. He took his bike down and walked it across the street. Reuben waited and watched until Trevor closed the front door behind him. He started up the engine.
As he cruised by the mouth of the driveway he braked slightly. He didn’t tell his foot to do that, but it did.
Arlene stood with the bat on her shoulder, panting and sweaty. She looked up and saw him immediately. The bat clattered onto the driveway.
Reuben pushed the accelerator to the floor. The little engine sagged, then picked up. In his rearview mirror he saw her standing in the middle of the street. He heard her shout his name.
“Reuben. Reuben, wait.”
He swung around a corner, though it would have been more direct to go straight.
From Those Who Knew Trevor Speak
She told me later that she tried to call me. She said she called me every day after that and I didn’t answer. And I thought, How did she know I was home and not answering? Why couldn’t I have been out? Nobody ever thought of me as someone who could just have been out. Well. I wouldn’t say I was going out a lot at that time. But I didn’t just sit there and let the phone ring. I never did that. I don’t know why she thinks I did, particularly.
Maybe it was during that time I was having trouble with my phone.
HE LAY ON HIS BACK IN BED, pretending to watch the eleven o’clock news. The cat lay curled on his chest, making it hard to breathe deeply, but he didn’t move her.
The phone rang, and as he reached for it the cat stepped off him and onto the bed. As he picked up the receiver, he already knew who it would be. He didn’t even say hello. Just held it near his ear as though it might be dangerous.
“Reuben, please don’t hang up.”
He hung up.
When it rang again he lifted the receiver and set it on the bedside table. He got up and walked into the living room, just to be sure he wouldn’t hear anything, if anything was said.
He paced around a little, but it made him feel awkward to be naked and exposed, even in the privacy of his house. He walked back into the bedroom and found Miss Liza sniffing the receiver. He picked it up and heard Arlene talking, a long string of breathless sentences, none of which he made out.
He yanked the cord out of the wall and threw the phone through the bedroom window.
He thought it might make him feel better, like beating a wrecked truck with a baseball bat. It proved disappointing, though. Now, instead of an awkward naked man standing in his room alone, in his life alone, he was all that with a broken window. And a warm wind on his naked body. And no telephone.
He should have known he wasn’t the venting type.
Chapter Twenty-Five
ARLENE
Trevor had gone to Joe’s on an overnight. Arlene sat home alone, thinking how she’d drive by Reuben’s if she had a car. Maybe she’d get her courage up, even knock on the door. If she had a car. Which she didn’t. And the fact that she didn’t made her mad. But her arms ached and trembled from her last attack on the carcass of that old beast in her driveway. How much more could either of them take? And it wasn’t really the truck’s fault, she had to admit. What the hell had she been thinking, cosigning that shiny new thing while she drove that awful old Dodge Dart? No wonder she was so sure Ricky would come home sooner or later. What a sweetheart deal.
Then she got madder thinking of that nice collector’s item GTO he drove. All rebuilt from the ground up with shiny chrome headers and a new front end and differential and those big, brand-new monster tires. How did he dare drive off with that thing and leave her with the payments on that truck he totaled?
Here it was her
one night off from the Laser Lounge and she couldn’t even go anywhere. With no strength left in her arms to beat or break anything, all that anger was getting to be a problem. There was a bar on the Camino, just a short walk away. But she must not have wanted to take that route, because she called Bonnie at home.
“Now what?”
“Geez, Bonnie. Get in trouble if I don’t call you, then you don’t seem glad when I do.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t glad. Just waiting to hear what trouble you got in now.”
“Nothing, really. Just my car died.”
“So now you’re thinking about taking a drink.”
“Yeah. But that ain’t why.”
Bonnie let the silence fall, gave Arlene the time she needed to sum it all up. But it seemed a little harder now. She was mad at Ricky. Right. Bonnie’d probably say, Duh. You and everybody else whose path he ever crossed.
But she really did her best to explain it. How mad it made her to think about him running around with Cheryl in that nice car, leaving her with that old hulk to pay off. Coming home and saying he’d go sober and be what he always should have been for her, then going right back to the same old crap, and now it was too late to ever get Reuben back.
Bonnie listened quietly, until the part about Reuben. Then she said, “Bingo.”
“Did I say something smart?”
“I think you just said what’s really eating you. But I can understand. You’re mad at Ricky. So mad you want to hurt him bad. So you’re going to walk down to the bar and throw away a clean year of sobriety. Boy, that’ll teach him. Every time you throw a punch, girl, you break your own jaw.”
Arlene sighed. Waited for the tears to come, but they didn’t. They just came up missing somehow. She breathed again and decided she felt a lot clearer.
“Naw, I won’t, Bonnie. You know that. If I was gonna do that I wouldn’t have called you.”
“I know. You just needed to talk.”
“I feel a little better now.”
“Call again if you want.”
“Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I think I’ll hike over to Cheryl’s and bend Ricky’s ear. Give him a taste of what I’m mad about.”
“If it’ll help you, go ahead. You know damn well it ain’t gonna help him.”
JUST AS SHE WAS LEAVING THE HOUSE, she realized she hadn’t packed up Ricky’s shotgun. She had begun to feel a little quieter and more centered, so she took it along. It was a longer walk than she remembered. It didn’t feel right, her having to go on foot, her having to be the one with two jobs, walking, but she had to follow this thought through.
Cheryl answered the door in her bathrobe, then almost closed it again; Arlene could see that little reflex.
“Too late to change your mind now,” Cheryl said.
“Oh, I didn’t. Just that Ricky’s got something of mine and I got something of his. I just want to trade up. Then we’ll be all settled and done.”
A familiar voice, faint, calling out from the bedroom. “Who is it, hon?”
“Never mind,” Arlene said, pushing past. “I’ll tell him who it is.”
She stepped into the bedroom with Cheryl dogging close behind, and found him in bed, the sheets pulled up to his waist. It was a hot night, and no cooler in Cheryl’s bedroom.
“Arlene, what the hell?”
“You folks turn in early, huh? Well, I won’t stay and chat. Where’s the keys to the GTO?”
“Why? Why do you ask? I don’t like nobody driving my car, you know that.”
“Well, that don’t matter now, Ricky, because it’s not your car. You’re giving it to me.”
“Hell I am. I built that car from the ground up. It’s my baby. No goddamn way, Arlene. Where the hell do you get off?”
Cheryl gave Arlene’s shoulder a little pull and said, “Get the hell out of here or I’m calling the police.”
Arlene opened the shotgun case. She was able to do it quickly, because she’d left the lock at home. It was her lock, after all. She turned around, not so much to point the gun at Cheryl, but of course it pointed where Arlene did.
“Go on and do that then, Cheryl. They’re pretty damn slow and this won’t take long.”
She turned back to Ricky, who’d managed to plaster himself to the headboard. “Here’s where I get off, Ricky. You sweet-talked me into cosigning that truck. You swore on your honor you’d never let me down. Then you totaled it, left me to work two jobs to pay it, and got something else real nice. Now you got two choices. Pay me every cent I’m out for that truck, or give me the damn GTO.”
He held up his hands in calm, slow gestures, as if to hypnotize the violence out of her. But really she wasn’t feeling violent. Just set on clearing things up. “Put the gun down, baby, we can talk.”
“I think we’ll have a better talk this way. You know, Ricky, I used to feel so bad for you, ’cause you told me them stories about all the women in your life tried to kill you. How your first wife held a loaded gun in your face and Cheryl threw that blanket over you and beat you with a skillet, and that one in between took that knife to you. I thought to myself, poor Ricky. Getting mixed up with all these crazy women. But you know, I really understand now. Get a piece of paper, you can write me out a bill of sale.”
He scrambled for a little message pad in the drawer of the bedside table. Cheryl threw him a pen.
Arlene hadn’t heard her call the police, and didn’t much care if she had. This was just a nice calm business transaction.
“So, I’m selling you my GTO.”
“Damn straight.”
“Make it out for how much?”
“One dollar and other valuable considerations. Don’t try putting the wrong license number. I’m not too dumb to check.”
“What are the other considerations I get?”
“I think it would be very considerate of me not to shoot you. Don’t you think so?”
He put his head down and concentrated on a flurry of scribbling, then handed the slip over, reaching out carefully, ready to jump back.
She read his scribbling. “You forgot to sign it.”
“Oh, yeah.”
He signed it and handed it back.
“Where’re the keys?”
He balked a moment, sulked almost, like a little boy, then he said, “Better get her the keys, Cheryl.”
Arlene took them on her way out the door.
“Thanks. Here’s Ricky’s shotgun. Now we’re all even. Oh, wait. I forgot.” She dug a dollar out of her pocket and threw it on the living room floor.
She left the gun in Cheryl’s arms and walked to her new car. She liked it. It was kind of slick. Nice new race-car paint job, though maybe orange was not ideal. Pretty under the hood. She’d have to replace those old glass-pack mufflers, of course, so the whole goddamned world didn’t have to hear her coming.
At her back she heard Ricky say, “Damn. I really loved that car.”
She sat in the driver’s seat and started it up. It rumbled underneath her while she adjusted the seat to fit her legs. Before she could shift it into drive Ricky arrived at the window with the shotgun and stood spraddle legged and angry, aiming through the window at her head.
“Get out right now, Arlene, I mean it. Gimme that bill of sale back and nobody gets hurt.”
She rolled the window halfway down. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I don’t keep it loaded. And I didn’t bring back any shells. I bought those, remember?”
In the red glow of her taillights she enjoyed the look on his face for an instant; then he faded into the night, the dark. The past.
SHE STOPPED AT THE AUTO PARTS STORE on the Camino, which was open until nine, and bought one of those club things for the steering wheel. Then she took it out for a ride, just for the joy of riding. It had a lot of power. It would get her around.
She was beginning to feel a little better.
She had no special place to drive, so she drove by Reuben’s house. A light burned in the bedroom, and his car was parked out front.
She circled the block and drove by again.
On the third trip she stopped and cut the engine, and just sat awhile. Looking. Thinking about a time when she was welcome there and could have knocked and gone right in. Thinking about how the cat used to rub under her chin to wake her up, and how they would have been married by now and could have pooled their financial resources to get her a new car. He would have helped, she knew he would. That was just the kind of man he was.
Something big and heavy sat in her chest. It felt harder and harder to breathe around it.
After a while she drove home. She put the club thing on the steering wheel and locked it up for the night.
He might come back for it. But she’d report it stolen if he did. She had a bill of sale, all nice and legal.
She’d tell the cop, “I demanded my money for the truck, but he couldn’t pay it, so I said I’d take the GTO. He signed it over to me. He didn’t have to, you know. Nobody held a gun to his head.”
Then she remembered that Ricky had two outstanding warrants in this state, and felt much better about her chances of finding the car in her driveway in the morning.
She tried calling Reuben, but he didn’t answer the phone. It wasn’t very late. How did he even know it was her? She tried to lie down and sleep, but nothing happened. Other than the thoughts that rolled around in her head, like all the things she’d said to Reuben on the phone last night, and whether he’d even been listening or not.
She got up and dressed again, and checked the car, which was still there. She drove over to Reuben’s again and sat outside for an hour. When she saw the lights go out, she knew it must be time to move, one way or another. Go in or go home. No point to just sit there all night.
Her heart pounding in her ears, she walked around to his back door and knocked. The bedroom light came on again. The back door opened and Reuben stood in the doorway in his bathrobe. He didn’t look angry. Big and imposing, that he looked. And yet at the same time vulnerable somehow, like he couldn’t really make her go away, even if she were to physically drive home.
Pay It Forward Page 19
