Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  In a certain way, of course, he would be right.

  Never judge a book by its cover, the adage advises, but when humans encounter another of their kind such judgment is inevitable, and anyone encountering Karly Hopper or the boy waiting for her in his car would imagine that they came from the finest chromosomological clay, superior to that of James Candler, for all his personal charm, or Lise Ray, despite the allure of her recent metamorphosis. But for tiny acts of fate—a swimming accident, the mysterious descent of schizophrenia—Karly Hopper and Mick Coury would stride the planet like Titans, their agile, active minds the equal of their lovely, lithe bodies.

  (Perhaps this is what those ancient gods experienced when they took human guise, their divinity evident but the expression of it limited by the mortal vessels containing them. Honestly, wouldn’t it explain the foolish things they did?)

  Candler waited for her to appear again. He had sent Karly and Mick to the sheltered workshop for different reasons. It was a protected workplace where clients packaged pantyhose for a local company, proceeding at their own rate, with the hope that they would improve over time and eventually take jobs at the factory. This was the goal for Karly Hopper. The workshop also doubled as therapy. The concentration it took to succeed on the assembly line should bleed over into other parts of their lives. And this was the goal for Mick Coury, that he could eventually corral his good thoughts and ignore the rest. Mick and Karly had nothing in common but the workshop; Candler had inadvertently played matchmaker.

  Karly stepped again into the dappled morning light and paused at the edge of the stoop, a strategy Candler himself had taught her. She examined her shoes—the flip-flops were gone, replaced by sneakers—her jeans, belt, shirt. She patted her shoulder and smiled once more as she went back inside. Moments later she returned with her purse and went through it all again. This time she walked past Candler’s car without a glance and continued up the street to join the patient Mick Coury and his burnt-orange Firebird, an anachronism from the life the boy led before the onset of schizophrenia. He drove so slowly now that he was a different hazard altogether.

  As soon as the couple departed, Candler sat up. Karly’s house was one-story and made of blond brick. The lawn needed mowing. Her family had placed her in Onyx Springs when she was eighteen, putting her in a halfway house, which was less expensive than the Center’s dormitories. Men began appearing in her room—other clients, strangers, even members of the staff. Her family arranged this house for her. They didn’t want anyone to know where it was, even the professionals at the Center. If Mick had not described waiting for her on the corner of Lantana Avenue, Candler would not have known where to look. He did not particularly care where Karly lived—though he copied down the address—but with whom she lived. She had run through a number of roommates, starting with a cousin and including an elderly woman who answered an ad the family placed in the local paper. If she was now living with a man, she had kept it secret from Mick Coury, and he was not a boy who liked surprises.

  Candler rang the doorbell. A thumping of feet led up to the entrance but the door didn’t open. Candler rapped on it. “I can hear you in there,” he said and knocked again. He was running short of time. “I’m from Onyx Rehab. Just need a second or two.”

  That he could not get a response felt like defeat, as if the Road Runner had been sacrificed for no good reason, lives put at risk for nothing. Candler knocked on the door a few more times before grudgingly returning to his car and reaching for the glove box. He retrieved a Swiss army knife. The brownies’ pan was still warm. He wanted a corner piece, comfort food, but the blade would not pierce the flat of brownies. He lifted the knife and jabbed, but it bounced off. The brownies were a solid tablet.

  Those fucking eggs.

  The curtain in the front room of Karly’s house ruffled, revealing masculine fingers along the hem. Candler shoved the pan aside and leapt from the car. He flew across the yard and hammered on the door. This time it swung open. A rough-looking man, maybe forty, squinted from Karly’s entry. He was barefoot, his thinning hair long on the sides. He sported a patchy beard. Disreputable was the word that sprang to Candler’s mind.

  “My supposed to know you?” the man asked.

  “If you live here with Karly Hopper,” Candler said, “you ought to know me.” He heard the anger in his voice and pocketed his hands, which had made themselves into fists. As appalling as the situation might be, Karly had to have someone staying with her. Independent living was a goal of her work at the Center, but she was not yet ready.

  “Where’d you come from?” the man asked.

  “I’m a counselor at Onyx Rehab, and Karly, as you must know, is also a part of the Onyx Rehab family.” Rules of confidentiality did not permit him to say that Karly was his client.

  “What the hell’s Ox Rehab?” The man held a toothpick, which he inserted like a bookmark between his teeth. His body gave off a sour morning odor.

  “Onyx Rehab is one of the largest rehabilitation centers in the United States,” he said evenly, “and it’s right here in town.”

  “Karly’s a drunk?” The toothpick waggled with each word. “A druggie? What?”

  “May I come in for a minute?”

  The man’s head gave a quick shake, yanked by an invisible cord. “We can talk right here.” He stepped through the door, pulling it shut behind him.

  Discounting the unruly hair, he was an inch or so shorter than Candler and thin—an ashen thin that had nothing to do with exercise or hunger but was the product of self-imposed malnutrition. He was in sweatpants and a T-shirt that advertised an Oklahoma City radio station, its red tower making parenthetical waves across his chest. His feet were so white as to seem silver in the early sunlight, like beached fish.

  “Karly’s gone to work.” The man spat the toothpick into his hand and inserted it in the hair above his ear. “She just left.”

  “I’m aware of that.” A specific anger squeezed Candler’s throat: he wanted to punch this bastard. “Let’s start over.” He introduced himself and offered his hand. “I’m a counselor at Onyx Rehab, and I’m here on home inspection.”

  The hand was ignored. “You got a warrant?”

  “I need to know your name and the nature of your relationship with my client.”

  “What, you’re a goddamn lawyer now?”

  “I’ve already told you who I am.” Candler put a finger to the man’s chest. “You haven’t told me who you are.”

  “A friend,” he said, brushing away Candler’s finger. He retrieved the toothpick from his hair. “I stay with Karly off and on. I don’t got to give you my name.”

  “You do or do not live here?”

  “I come and go. Drive a truck. Can’t park it on the street ’cause of these stupid trees. Only part of town’s got so many stupid trees.” He stared angrily at the giants lining the street. “What’s wrong with Karly that she’s got to have rehab?”

  “I can’t discuss—”

  “You mean that she’s a dunce?”

  “I can’t talk about Karly without the permission of her guardian.”

  “She told me she was twenty-one.” After a moment, his head gave a half shake. “It’s not me you want. It’s the guy who had this route before, you know? When I inherited it, he let on like Karly was part of the package.”

  “Jesus,” Candler said, “what have you been doing?”

  “I take care of her,” he said. “When I’m here. Nothing wrong with it. She ain’t so dumb. Can’t cook or do laundry worth a damn, but who cares ’bout that shit?”

  Candler’s arms flapped once, like a bird’s wings. “What kind of person are you?”

  “Long haul. Got a place in Stillwater, so technically I don’t live here. I’m a guest. You got a problem with that?”

  “How many days a week do you—”

  “None a your business.” A wry smile crossed his face. “I can park
my rig wherever I please.”

  The porch floor shifted beneath Candler’s polished shoes. He closed his eyes, but the Road Runner elevated over the asphalt, the chrome grill a grimacing mouth laced with braces. He understood what the car’s driver had said when he waved Candler on, what he mouthed behind the state trooper’s back: You win.

  “Don’t shut your eyes,” the truck driver said. “You’re no better than me. Look it here.” Candler felt a tiny prod against his belly. “You got a stain.” The toothpick pushed against Candler’s pristine tie. When he glanced down, the man flipped Candler’s chin. He laughed. “Tell a truth, man. You’re just here to eyeball Karly in her panties.”

  Candler swung from the hip. The punch caught the truck driver on the jaw, and he crumpled to the tile. He scooted on his back to the corner of the porch, raising one appendage protectively. “All right.” His front teeth were bloody. “You made your point.” He pulled in a ragged breath, crooking his elbow protectively. “She’s your girl.”

  “Red makes blood,” the new one announced.

  He had only just started at the sheltered workshop and already Maura Wood disliked him. He was short with tiny hands and, generally speaking, she didn’t like little men. She was tall and substantial. Puny guys made her feel all Easter Island. This one was a miserable-looking shrimp, with big ears, black-rimmed glasses, and the unmistakable stamp of stupidity dominating his face instead of the normal features. Nose, eyes, brows, lips—he had them but they were beside the point. Maura didn’t need to look at the spider cartons to assemble them. She could stare at the witless stump and do her work. She could jaw with Mick and do her work. She had the feeling she could sleep and do this stinking work.

  “If we didn’t have red,” the new one continued, “we wouldn’t bleed.”

  “What’s his name again?” she asked Mick.

  Mick Coury finished packing the spider carton in his hands before answering, his fingers nimble and confident. Normally he was a sludge brain until noon, but today he zipped through the boxes, which meant he hadn’t taken his meds. Maura didn’t mind him slow-thinking in the a.m. It seemed like a kind of intimacy, like seeing someone in his underpants, but she preferred him like this—quick, loose, slightly out of control.

  “Cecil,” Mick said, whipping into another carton. “Cecil Something Something. Rhymes with Wednesday. Sort of rhymes. Like that rhyme when the nut’s not on the bolt the whole way. Cecil Something Something.”

  The weenie looked up at Mick. “I’m Cecil.”

  “We’re not talking to you,” Maura clarified, “we’re talking about you.”

  Cecil’s smile was as twisted as the mangled spider carton in his hands. He was still on his first one. Daddy Long Legs packaged its pantyhose in an asinine box that looked like a tarantula. Line workers assembled the boxes (three folds, two tucks), inserted flat plastic envelopes that held the pantyhose, twisted shut the spidery arms, and placed them in a shipping container. To do a hundred in an hour took concentration, and even Maura, who found the work unspeakably boring, wanted to do it well. When she started out, a few months earlier, she had packaged five per hour—a deliberate deliberateness, she’d called it. She had hated the Center and expressed her contempt by doing nothing but bitch and talk about sex, which would force Alonso Duran to leave for the bathroom to masturbate.

  But who didn’t need money? Cigarettes, for example, cost plenty, and the water in Onyx Springs tasted green, which meant she had to keep bottles in her room. Besides all that, she decided to be faster than Karly Hopper, who had hit a plateau in the sixties. Maura averaged eighty-seven per hour. If she had been a chain smoker, she could have done a hundred. Eighty-seven got her what she had to have. Mick was a spider carton genius. He could box one hundred twenty per hour if he tried, but he wanted to stay in the workshop until Karly got up to speed. Once you hit a hundred, they sent you to the real factory. Maura liked that he put loyalty ahead of cash. It was loyalty to a ditz-brain but loyalty nonetheless.

  The unpredictable one was the little fucknut Bellamy Rhine, a finicky, twitchy simpleton who stood too close to people and was exactly as tall as Maura’s breasts. If she ever needed to, she could smother the little prick without even bending over. Rhine could go as fast as eighty early on, but as the day continued his speed fluctuated. He seemed to over concentrate or would carefully spread the tentacles of a carton he had already packed, suddenly uncertain he had done the work. He was fine-featured and delicate looking, as if made of paper, and the part in his hair was so perfect it was like a crease. Some days his totals were as high as Maura’s; other days, Alonso Duran made more money than Rhine.

  Not counting this Cecil character, Alonso was the only one of them visibly weird. His eyes were too lidded and his mouth showed its tongue, and not just the tip. Each of his shirts had permanent drool stains from that open yapper. There was something else odd about his appearance, something she couldn’t quite name, like his face was slightly askew on the front of his head. He barked when he talked, but he could package ninety boxes an hour. What kept his average down were his breaks, which he spent in the bathroom. Even though he had been around longer than anyone else, Alonso was still paid cash every hour. They had all been paid that way at the beginning. Immediate reinforcement and that bunk. After a while you were paid daily, then weekly, and then biweekly, just like the real employees of Daddy Long Legs.

  Maura made a point of knowing where she stood with the others, but Mick was the only one in the workshop who interested her beyond freak value. He was also the only one who was faster than she was, and that suited her fine. She wasn’t competing with Mick, she was competing for him.

  The sheltered workshop was new enough to be an orphan, housed not in the shining white buildings on the Center’s campus but across town in the cafeteria of a gruesome concrete-block composition known as the Onyx Springs Senior Citizens Facility, which smelled today of spaghetti. About half the time, the dump smelled of spaghetti. Down the linoleum hallway, old men and women learned dance steps or yoga or needlepoint or poetry. They painted landscapes, fox-trotted, studied German. The sheltered workshop only rented the space, and at noon the pantyhose assembly line was folded up and rolled to the corner so the old farts could eat their damn spaghetti.

  The assembly mechanism looked like a butterfly on wheels. When rolled away from the wall and flapped open, it had a motorized conveyor belt onto which plastic packets were dropped from tall bins that their supervisor, Crews, filled each morning. It wasn’t exactly like the real Daddy Long Legs plant (Maura had gone on the field trip), but it was the same basic setup. At the real factory, the assembly line was enormous and the workers stood on either side of the belt. They decorated their work spots with photos of their kids, maybe to remind them why in hell they had to keep their shitty jobs. There was no way Maura would ever work at a factory. She was missing her senior year of high school, but she had passed the GED without even studying. She knew she was smarter than nine out of ten people, which wasn’t saying that much, given that the planet was teeming with dimwits. Still, she wasn’t going to wind up on an assembly line.

  Well, she was on an assembly line at the moment but it was temporary and meaningless, like most things in life. She was intent on discovering what those other things might be, the ones that were permanent and meaningful. There was death, but that could hardly be the whole menu. People had been around for fucking ever. Somebody had to have come up with something besides the bullshit stuff—god, country, family: a figment, imaginary geography, and a conniving crew of flesh eaters, respectively.

  If there was anything that did matter, she suspected it had to do with Mick Coury, but when she tried to name what that thing might possibly be, she got stuck with crapola like Whenever I’m around him, I feel great. This was a disafuckingpointing line, and not just because it failed to capture the thrilling, enigmatic lunacy of hanging with him. He made her feel nice. Was that really the be-all and
end-all? There were forty million songs and twice that many poems about love, and as far as she could tell it all dwindled down to some skinny schizo fucker who could put together moronic boxes designed to look like cartoon spiderwebs faster than the nearby completely incompetent vacuum-heads, and yet this guy made her skin feel blistered and her breathing clog up. That had to be bullshit. Why, in the past million or so years, had no one got on top of this?

  And what was she supposed to do about this age-old problem while she was committed to this swanky asylum? She might as well do what she liked. For example, she liked to be next to Mick, so she parked herself there. Worker ants at the real factory were permitted to talk, so they were free to natter here, too. This meant she liked coming to work. Karly could have taken her spot if she wanted. Maura knew this and had no intention of fooling herself about it. Luckily, Mick liked to be across from Karly so he could watch her. He was gaga for the twit.

  “I’ve got an itch for adventure,” she told Mick, but it was hard to speak over the noise of the assembly butterfly without broadcasting to the whole squadron.

  Before Mick could respond, Karly spoke up. “I know what.” She pulled a slip of paper from her jeans pocket. Karly liked to tell jokes and she was miserable at it. Some people could not be funny. She looked over her notes. This alone was a bad sign: joke notes.

  “There are two cannibals,” Karly said, “real ones that eat people. And they’re eating people. They’re eating a funny clown. I guess he would be dead before they’re eating him. And one of the cannibals says to the other one of the cannibals, Is this funny?” She laughed. “Get it?”