Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  He was utterly sincere. Candler decided to respond to the offer of confidence rather than the detachment from reality. “You can never tell,” he said, “when you might need to escape.”

  Darringer nodded. “Least you’re honest about it.”

  “It doesn’t fly so well, anymore. I’d only use it in an emergency.”

  “Fuel prices, too,” Darringer said. “Fuel companies are gouging our hearts and eyes out.”

  “That’s right,” Candler agreed. “It’s not cheap to operate a spaceship, and they’re not as safe as they used to be. I don’t know what it would take for me to get into one. What about you? What would it take for you to step in and fly away?”

  “Just between us?” Darringer checked over both shoulders. “If it would take me to the mountains.”

  “You’d go if . . .”

  “I’d spend my last Demerol,” he said. “I grew up among mountains. My mother and what remained of my father. That was Montana. I was younger than that one.” He aimed a finger at Kat. “Waking in the pines, my mother and father and me, chilly winter air, and feeling, you know, like that . . . feeling mountainous.”

  Candler nodded attentively but his mind slipped back to the Cabbage notebook, another of the Jack Cartwright entries.

  The past doesn’t adhere to the same rules as the present. Amazing things are possible. People know themselves. They understand their desires. It’s a whole different planet, and we show the signs of transport—gray hair, wrinkled skin, the distance in our eyes that tells you where we’d rather be. Only you can’t get there from here, and it never existed.

  “What if I arrange a drive for you?” Candler said. “Montana is a long ways, but the Laguna Mountains are practically next door. I could arrange a van.”

  “Just like that?” Suspicion resided again in Darringer’s eyes. “You identified the spaceship.”

  He nodded and his expression softened. “That I did.”

  “I’ll ask for a van. I’ll get you a drive to the mountains.” Darringer let out a big breath. Tears rimmed his eyes. He placed his hand gently on Candler’s shoulder, saying, “Give me another one to do, boss.”

  DAY 6:

  Even though Billy had worked less than a week at the sheltered workshop, he understood that this was the best job he’d ever had. There were only six clients, and they all liked him. They were nice people. They paid attention when he spoke. All he had to do was set up the assembly machine, track their work, take a few notes, pay them, and talk to them. He enjoyed talking to them. Especially the babe, Karly, but he tried not to let his preference show. He joined them on the assembly line to see what the work was like, tossing the boxes he made into one person’s pile and then another’s. He didn’t play favorites.

  And it would be no trouble with this job to keep up his exercise regimen. While he was looking over their shoulders as they folded boxes, he secretly went up and down on his toes, an exercise that had an impressive-sounding name he couldn’t recall. He needed to lose eighteen and a half pounds. Not that he was fat. No one would call him fat. Well, one girl had called him fat, but that was in a fit of jealousy, or not jealousy exactly, more like dislike, and it was meaningless—though it had been, come to think of it, the reason he began exercising. She was one of his regulars at the U-TOTE-M, the convenience store in Flagstaff he had managed, and she came to the store and talked to him every day for a year, but when he finally asked her on a date, she said she wouldn’t go out with him because he was fat and married and stuck in a dead-end job.

  “I’m not fat,” Billy replied. The worst part was that she wasn’t even upset, just stating the facts. As for being married, he told her (withholding her change to make her listen) his wife had filed for divorce, and that was why he never asked her out before. He thought she might’ve been pissed that he waited so long to pull the trigger.

  She pursed her lips in the most dismissive act of lip pursing Billy had ever witnessed and said, “Dead-end job still holds.” She had a gold nose stud but no earrings, and a tattoo on her back, just above her butt, of a Native American–type sun.

  “I’ll quit,” he said.

  “Don’t quit on my account,” she told him. “I still won’t go out with you.” When he remained reluctant to hand over her change, she sighed. “I have buttons and you don’t push them.” She left the store without her change and never returned.

  What would she think if she saw him in this job and witnessed how he was rising on his toes even as he thought about her? He weighed just eighteen and half pounds more than he had in high school. Not that he was exactly slim back then, but still. And this job had benefits, a retirement plan, and a title: Technician, Level Three, Probationary.

  He had already diagnosed all of the clients under his watch, which wasn’t even required. The easiest to peg was Bellamy Rhine, who was a clinically measurable nerd. Billy’d had plenty of association with nerds, many of whom were nice guys, though all were utterly hopeless losers. Rhine was a nice guy, but his head was so far up his ass he had to stare out his belly button. Not that Billy himself hadn’t gone through a period or periods when he was almost as much a goof as Rhine. He had a thing for chess briefly, flying the old nerd flag. And twice he noted that certain losers in high school seemed to be wearing the same shirts he wore, which Jimmy explained was because they were hideous shirts that appealed only to buffoons. Billy took the shirts to Goodwill to keep from accidentally wearing them again, and he bought shirts identical to Jimmy’s. How else to know what was okay? Jimmy got all annoyed, and for a week they called each other to make sure they weren’t dressing alike, until Jimmy quit noticing.

  Billy made a mental note to bring to work some book related to science or math to give Rhine. Had he packed his chessboard? It might be in the trunk of the Dart. He would find the kid’s strength.

  Maura Wood’s diagnosis was also cake. She was a rebel without a cause. She had a nice face with some evil and some kindness in it, which made him think she would grow out of her trouble. A nice face meant something, and women grew out of the rebel stage faster than men, considering that some men never grew out of it. Maura carried around a lot of anger, mainly, he reasoned, because the phase demanded it. Billy knew not to take her comments personally. It was just the rebel in her. She didn’t think the world was fair, and who could argue with that? What she’d decided to do about it was carp. Her whole therapeutic deal, he was fairly certain, was just learning to act instead of carp. Billy was often attracted to women rebels, who tended to keep things lively. Male rebels tended to get everybody’s noses broken.

  Logically speaking, what a rebel without a cause needed was a cause. He had to find something for her to believe in. Nothing as obvious and over publicized as the environment or civil rights or children. It had to be specific, like when he read that porn actors were going on strike for better working conditions. That turned out to be a publicity stunt but Billy read maybe twenty online articles about it. Maybe that wasn’t a cause, exactly, but he needed to find something that would light up Maura’s brain the same way his had been lit.

  As for Alonso, he was as dumb as a sack of stupid. Not his fault, and he had a very healthy libido, but he was no Einstein. Billy had plenty of friends who weren’t the sharpest wrench in the tool kit. Pook came to mind. He’d been strong and basically kind, even though he sometimes liked to hit things and/or Billy. But he couldn’t think his way out of an elevator. He was a very loyal friend, though, and Billy thought that he would add a comment about Alonso saying that he was undoubtedly very loyal. This would impress everybody. It took us years to figure that out.

  The genuinely stupid people he’d known all liked (1) chewing gum, (2) comic books, and (3) television. Actually, Pook hadn’t liked television, and Billy crossed that one off. He decided to keep working on the list and use it to motivate Alonso.

  Karly was a sad story, a fantastic looker but none too bright. Smarter th
an Alonso but several of her crayons were missing from the pack and none of them held a point. Not that smarts were everything. Intelligence was way overrated. Handy now and then, but what had his brain gotten him? Mostly into trouble, like for thinking up comeback lines that got him punched or kicked or laughed at or stuffed into an old refrigerator for what seemed like an hour. Guffawed at? Had he ever heard a laugh that sounded like guff-aw? Was the bee sound really buzz, or more like enn-n-n-n? Where had he been going with all this? Oh yeah, Karly’s diagnosis and how intelligence wasn’t always the cat’s meow. Also, beauty could be a hardship. From the way Karly moved about in a constantly sexy way, he deduced that she had maybe been raped or molested. Possibly not literally raped but she’d been taught by the behavior of others that there was nothing to her but her beautiful body and beautiful face, and they were impossible to ignore, and—true—she wasn’t ever going to be one for big ideas or even lengthy conversations, which meant maybe there was no one to blame for people seeing these obvious qualities and missing what was on the inside. But that had to be what was wrong with her. Too much attention to her hot bod and not enough to her not-so-bright but still (he could tell) nice insides. Which meant she just needed personal time, and he was glad she was taking it in the sheltered workshop. She was great to look at, no denying that, and he would find out about her inner whatnot—he promised himself to do it—and he’d be careful to do nothing to make her afraid of him.

  Billy had only ever known one woman who was actually raped, and that was Dlu, who called him from the hospital looking for Jimmy. It was a couple of years after they broke up, and Jimmy had moved to L.A., but Dlu didn’t know that, and she wanted Jimmy to come be with her. Billy went instead. Someone had pried open her apartment door and raped her in her own bed. Billy stayed with her through the hospital and police episodes, and he put in deadbolts. He spent the night with her, sleeping on the carpet beside her bed. He wound up spending four nights on her carpet because she didn’t want to be alone in the dark. Finally, Dlu told her parents, and her brother flew in and Billy thought he ought to go home even though he didn’t want to leave her. He liked sleeping beside her bed. He felt useful, as if for once he knew exactly where he should be, and he understood that he was competent to do what was asked of him—sleep beside her bed, put in deadbolts, check and double-check all the windows and locks, let her talk when she wanted to talk, hold her when she needed to cry.

  Karly probably needed some of the same—deadbolts, a guy on the carpet, family. Maybe some gum and comic books, too.

  Dlu had sent Billy a card, maybe a month later. She thanked him for staying with her during my personal trauma. This was such a weird way to put it that he understood it was still going on. He went by her place but she had moved out. He thought about taking the deadbolts back. The card had no return address, and Billy to this day had not seen her or heard from her. Dlu had gone to bed with him that one time, back when she and Jimmy were a couple, and he thought that put a bad spin on his caring for her. Made her nervous or feel beholden, sexually beholden. And sure, he would have loved to go to bed with her again, but he wasn’t thinking about that while he slept on her carpet. Maybe he wasn’t all the time thinking about her, either, more what he should be doing for her, what another person—someone more used to intimate human behavior—would do. Recalling all of this saddened him, but he had done the right thing that time, hadn’t he? And wasn’t it better that he got nothing in return?

  Cecil was about the size of a fireplug with a fireplug’s IQ. He was a chatty little retard, and according to the papers that came with the job, he was only there on a temporary basis. There was no way he could put together more than maybe five boxes an hour if he stayed in the workshop till kingdom come. He’d be shipped out and taught something simpler, like counting cars on the highway. If he could count. Some of the things he said, though, resembled thoughts Billy himself had had but had known to keep to himself. Like Cecil said his dog Pooch could sing some song, and several years ago Billy tried to teach this dog Jimmy and Dlu owned, Flannery, how to keep time with her paw. It’s a dog’s life, baby, Billy would sing, a dog’s life from head to tail. Billy had been into the blues, and while he couldn’t play any instrument and his singing voice required a dog for distraction purposes, he imagined a career for them that included, at the very least, a visit on Letterman. Go to sleep in dog heaven, wake up in dog jail. Flannery’s paw kept perfect time when he sang it, but Billy figured out that she wasn’t listening to the music but watching his head nod, and that took the wind out of his sails. The point being, it was a bonehead idea but while he pursued it he didn’t let on about his Letterman plans to anyone but Jimmy. He could maybe try to teach Cecil discretion. It would be a challenge.

  Mick was the only one actually crazy. But it was only a half-assed craziness. Billy knew a lot of guys who were half-assed crazy. Most of the time they were okay, but they’d get pissed about money you owed them or the way you pronounced their girlfriend’s name or the deodorant you were wearing that made them sneeze. Not that Mick was the angry type. Billy remembered a guy whose name was something like Belltower, a guy he knew from college, the third time Billy tried college. They were in a sociology or anthropology or one of those kinds of classes together, and this guy Belltower knew way more about whatever –ology it was than Billy, but he completely blew the test, and Billy saw him hiding his face in the hallway right after the exam. Billy led him to the Brick Tavern so the guy could at least hide his face in a bar.

  Belltower had been so nervous about the test that he didn’t sleep all night, and he was so wiped out that he couldn’t come up with the right answers, and he said, “Swear to god you won’t tell,” but the letters on the test page had folded in on themselves and then unfolded and become notes of music, and Belltower, as it happened, could read music and recognized “Candle in the Wind.” He burst out bawling in the Brick Tavern. Billy consoled him by saying that was the kind of suck-ass song that would make anyone flunk.

  What Billy did for Belltower—was that his name? what the heck was it?—was talk to the teacher, who let Belltower do the test over the next class without telling him in advance, so the guy could get some sleep, and with no time constraints, so the guy wouldn’t fret, and Belltower got a 100 on the test. Billy, ironically, got a 56 and dropped out of school for the semi final time. He never went full time again, anyway, eking out a degree after ten arduous years.

  Not Belltower, Hornblower. That was it.

  Anyway, to help Mick, Billy decided he had to find some way to loosen up his strings and get him to sleep better. He heard Maura tell him to try smoking pot. That made good sense. Just a joint or two per day at the beginning.

  This was a job he could sink his teeth into.

  DAY 7:

  Maura wouldn’t have thought it possible that she might miss having Cecil Fresnay, but Thursday morning Billy announced the twerp was gone, replaced by a foaming-at-the-mouth feral creature who insisted on being called Vex. To make things worse, Mick was still giving her the oblivious shoulder, though not unkindly. Mick didn’t know how to be unkind. He was simply more interested in Karly than he was in Maura. She could hardly blame him. They were getting married, for fuck’s sake.

  Vex was a bony, gaunt, scary-skinny guy who, on day one, told Billy Atlas, “You’re full of empty and don’t fake it very well.” He looked late twenties with black close-cropped hair and a beard that hid just below the skin. His eyes were light brown, like a dinner table with a cheap stain, and his face seemed fashioned out of something harder than skin and bones. Maura had an ugly desire to flick her fingers against his cheek and see if it clanked. He assembled 112 boxes during his first hour of the workshop.

  “You’re certainly catching on, Mr. Vex,” Billy said, that cow grin of his like a saddle on his face, as he paid him at the end of the hour.

  “It’s just Vex,” the man said. “No mister here. I’m not titled. Not entitled to a title. Ve
x.”

  The guy exuded violence the way Mick radiated intelligence and sweetness. How the holy fuck had he ever gotten accepted into the Center?

  “Vex it is,” Billy said, patting him on the back.

  Vex stiffened, his back bunching up beneath his shirt. “Don’t touch Vex,” Vex said.

  Billy opened his mouth to respond to the freaky nutcase but he quite clearly could think of nothing to say.

  “He’s a fruit bat,” Maura said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “They don’t like human people touching them.”

  “That’s so funny,” Karly said. No one laughed but Billy, a phony and frightened gargle, and tension squeezed the air out of the room, but Vex did not look up from his manic, depraved box folding, and they all got back to work.

  Maura’s diet did not permit trips to fast-food restaurants, and she ate her sack lunch in the parking lot, sitting on the concrete with her back against the wall. Sometimes Alonso sat with her, but he often rode with Mick and Karly to the KFC or McDonald’s, trailed by Rhine on his scooter. After eating, she smoked a cigarette, and now Vex joined her. She balanced the Carlton Hotel ashtray on one of several short concrete poles designed to keep people from crashing into the building. The Carlton Hotel teetered on its perch, sunlight winking off it, flashing in their eyes as if to convey meaning: SOS. I’m smoking with a maniac.

  “We supposed to use that?” Vex nodded at the ashtray.

  Maura returned his nod and lit a cigarette.

  “You smoke what they put in packages,” he said, “and you inhale what filler they can get away with.” Vex rolled his own cigarettes. He had an unusual voice: the words seemed to be compressed out of him. Maura flashed on her mother writing on a birthday cake with a big metal hypodermic. “What’s a hundred percent beef?” he went on. “In a wiener, maybe sixty to sixty-three-point-five percent. And cigarettes? You don’t know what you’re sucking in.”