Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “Like tobacco is good for you anyway,” she said.

  The cigarette he rolled was fat in the middle, and the paper was wrinkled in an unappealing way. He kept licking it, displaying the purple underside of his tongue. He was wearing a T-shirt advertising the Bitter Hole Hunting Lodge. A bad transfer had given the deer or elk or whatever it was on his chest big rosy cheeks. A Goodwill shirt, a twenty-five-cent-max piece of apparel.

  “Nothing’s good for you,” Vex said, lighting the veiny thing by sucking hard and fast with several quick repetitions, a frantic urgency to the act. “Not even breathing.”

  His weird lighting ritual reminded her of a time the lowlifes had stolen gasoline by siphoning, and a boy had sucked on a tube shoved down a car’s tank, sucked and quit, sucked and quit, hoping not to get gasoline in his mouth.

  Vex pointed to the sky. “Clouds make me think of garbage, white garbage in the deep blue. They ever make you think of garbage?”

  “No. Never. Not once.”

  “There are worse things than garbage. A lot worse.”

  “What is it you’re smoking? It smells like mold.”

  “Least I know what I’m smoking.” He gestured with the repellent cigarette again, this time to indicate her. “Clothes, you know what I mean, they’re making them flimsier all the time. Clothing research now, they got all these scientists trying to make clothes out of what? What is it we got no shortage of? Talk, that’s what.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  “This time next year you’ll be wearing a murmur. You’ll be wishing you had a declaration or some pleading.”

  “I hope to god you’re putting me on.”

  “Putting you on my ass. You ever had a dream? At night? When you’re supposed to be asleep? Huh?”

  “Everybody has dreams.”

  “Trained myself out of them. That’s how they get inside your brain. You don’t believe me? Why is it I’m different, huh? They can’t get their commercials inside my head.”

  “You can’t train yourself not to dream.”

  “Set an alarm for every three minutes. Not three-oh-fucking-one. Three minutes. All night. Every night.”

  “No wonder you’re crazy as a fucking butt-faced elk.”

  He laughed. “Butt-faced elk. I like that.” He surreptitiously glanced at his T-shirt.

  “How are you so fast on the assembly line when you only just started?”

  He rocked his head and stared at the floating garbage above him. “Mind stuff.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “I could teach you. Ever caught a mosquito with your tongue? Hunh? Put out a flame with your eyes? Stopped a moving stream with your concentration? Quit peeing in mid-pee?”

  “I’m going to pass on the lessons. I prefer not to eat chicken heads and lick my own ass.”

  “Chicken head soup, sister. Delicious if you’re hungry enough. Gotta get the feathers off is all.”

  “Don’t forget asslick soup, yum.”

  He laughed again. “Ain’t easy to make me laugh like this. You’ve achieved something.”

  Billy Atlas threw the door open, and they went back in to work. “You’ve achieved something,” Vex repeated.

  “So bring me a trophy,” Maura told him, aware that she was flirting.

  “Artists invent their own traditions,” Frederick Candler told Jimmy. The family was packed into the old station wagon, touring the neighborhood on garbage day—Frederick and May in the front, with Jimmy sitting between them. Pook rode alone in the back because Violet was working. Once a month residents set out for removal items too big for the trash can, and the Candler family ritually inspected the booty the night before. On this particular tour, they investigated a rocking chair and a slightly cracked bird bath, but they scavenged nothing. Summer was the wrong season for discards.

  Jimmy’s favorite family tradition involved Christmas. The family went out every Christmas Eve in search of a tree. Whatever misshapen evergreen they’d find in a tree lot, they would prop up, decorate, and celebrate, no matter the foliage gaps, bent trunk, or drooping branches. “No one could love this tree but us,” his father would say. Jimmy adored this practice, which made Christmas uniquely theirs. It wasn’t until he was twenty and overhead his father telling a friend how he’d never paid more than ten dollars for a tree that Candler under stood the family ritual was about being cheap.

  Oh, cheap was not the right word. It might be the right word if it was applied to another family, but not to his. It wasn’t frugality, either, or parsimony. It was not wanting to be taken in by a capitalist cultural event—Christmas as commercial enterprise—yet not wanting to deny the children the pleasure of the holiday. Their father found ways to celebrate Santa without completely caving in. Coincidentally, they didn’t cost much.

  Frederick Candler’s paintings appeared in museums around the country, though rarely more than one work in any particular museum, and he was excluded from the list of important American artists as often as he was included. He was known for a quotation: “Art does not exist in nature. Art is a repudiation of the natural world.” A middling-famous artist was Frederick Candler, recognized by anyone serious about contemporary art but such recognition did not always mean that he was admired or revered. Some of his paintings sold for six figures, but he could never anticipate which, and it usually took several years for the work to accumulate that value. By the time the paintings earned any real cash, they were no longer his and the profit belonged to some lucky bastard who had purchased Frederick’s work early on for next to nothing.

  Little wonder that he distrusted capitalism.

  He could have held on to certain paintings and let their value accumulate, but he was always short on cash. This was inevitably true despite his university salary and his wife’s community college salary. Money simply evaporated.

  He had been a reasonably successful artist all of his adult life, and sometimes he thought this was a fatal limitation, that he could not draw on the years of frustration and difficult economic times that other artists bitched about. In such moments, he would seem to himself like a watchdog who knows the route around the fenced property so well that he can take no pleasure in it, and what he wishes for is an intruder, an enemy, a justification for all this circling, and he comes to love the imagined intruder that would give him reason to bark and attack, and in his misery he comes to mistake those he loves for those he hates and he wants to bite their heads off. In particular, in the summer of 1987, his patience with Pook was giving out, like the flickering, rolling screen of an old television that would soon go black.

  In their family, not counting the animals, only Jimmy and his sister Violet were not artists, and they were not artists for different reasons. Violet had the talent but did not envy the life. Jimmy had no talent and even his stick figures were wobbly and uncertain, like television with bad reception. Though Violet was closer to him in age than Pook, Jimmy saw a lot less of her. They did not become close until after Pook died and she went away to college. But she was there, too, that summer, sixteen years old and in her room or off at her summer jobs—scooping ice cream or shelving books at the library or taking tickets from the sweating patrons who wished to escape the heat in the dark of a movie theater. Three jobs, but it was the one at the cineplex that defined the summer of 1987. She made a new set of friends at the theater and they got to see movies free, plus a discount on popcorn and sodas. She did not see every movie released that summer, but she kept a list of the ones she saw: Creepshow 2, River’s Edge, Ishtar, Beverly Hills Cop II, Ernest Goes to Camp, The Untouchables, Harry and the Hendersons, The Witches of Eastwick, Roxanne, Dragnet, Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, Robocop, Full Metal Jacket, Jean de Florette, Adventures in Babysitting, Summer School, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, La Bamba, The Lost Boys, No Way Out, Dirty Dancing, The Big Easy, The Princess Bride. She could have sneaked the boys in, but then they
’d be there every night, Jimmy talking about some inane action figure or baseball player, Billy-the-Blob blubbering happily alongside him, and Pook, her sweet and silent and ultimately scary big brother, for whom movies were a torture, shadowing the younger boys and bothering her new friends with his size and silence and the hibernating violence that now and again woke within him.

  Because he had flunked two grades, Pook was in Violet’s classes during her freshman year of high school, and she had seated herself beside him and whispered to him, and guided him as best she could, losing most of her long time friends in the process. He still did not pass and still got into fights, and she never had close friends again while she was in high school, except for a boy at the cineplex, whose name was Armando Sandoval, two years older than Violet and from the other side of town, already enrolled at the University of Arizona. Armando was handsome and funny and homosexual, and he had a car. He drove her to work and bought her presents, just like a real boyfriend, but without the pressure of romance and disrobing and sex. Except with Violet, he pretended to be straight.

  Violet was legitimately straight but a virgin, and she liked having Armando as a boyfriend. “Keep in mind,” May Candler advised her, “all the things that attract you to him now will eventually drive you crazy.” They went to a lot of movies together. Armando preferred big hits and liked to analyze their success—not what the movies were about but why the public lapped them up—a love of commerce over art that Violet found entertaining. She dragged him to one dark, artsy film (River’s Edge), which he absitively loathed. “The director is showing off how serious he is,” Armando argued, “like those boys who wear capes to parade their suffering.” Any movie that wasn’t at least trying to be a blockbuster didn’t interest him.

  What Jimmy had in common with his sister: they both liked to read. In 1987 Jimmy had a strong preference for comic books, baseball novels, and the Hardy Boys (though Frank and Joe’s hold on him was giving out), or books with sexy covers and descriptions of girls putting their slender arms around boys’ muscular necks. Violet gave him On the Road, but he never got beyond the first few pages. She loved Jane Austen, rereading three of the novels that summer (Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion), and the Brontës (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre) and Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence twice), but she also read The Exorcist, which she found in a stack on the floor of her parents’ closet, and Valley of the Dolls, which was also in the stack, and The World According to Garp, which her mother checked out of the library and lined up on the lowboy in the hall, along with her other library choices (The Prince of Tides, Crooked Hearts, It, A Perfect Spy), all of which Violet read before her mother completed Garp, and the only hardback her parents purchased new: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow.

  Violet and Jimmy both imagined that they’d be writers, the creators of worlds within worlds, but Violet had turned her back on comic books (it was Armando who insisted they see Superman IV) and Jimmy wasn’t yet reading the novels she loved. The only time this shared interest provided them with a moment’s intercourse was when each agreed to cast the other as a character in a single sentence involving a simile. This was Violet’s idea, and she had to explain to her brother what a simile was. Her goal was to teach her brother the difference between the books she loved and the junk he read.

  Description of Jimmy, as written by Violet:

  He charged about dirtily from one meaningless undertaking to the next meaningless undertaking like an unquenchable hummingbird in a store that sold nothing but plastic flowers.

  A description of Violet, as written by Jimmy:

  She combed her hair and made up her face with the precision of a watchmaker and so became invulnerable to the passage of time and the things she touched with the fingertips of her left hand got younger instead of older and she knew in her heart she had to use her power for goodness instead of evil.

  “That’s more than one sentence,” Violet said, annoyed, because anyone could see that if he cut out the comic book elements his description would be better than hers. “I’m so sick of superheroes,” she went on. “Why can’t you accept the world the way it is?”

  “I do,” Jimmy said. “But think about it. In the whole world there are billions of people, right? Billions and billions and billions, to be accurate, and surely one of them must have powers that he keeps hidden. I mean, what are the odds that no one would have any superpowers? Not even one out of the ten hundred billion who are alive or used to be alive?”

  “One hundred percent against,” she replied.

  “No way. Like what about Pook, who can talk to animals in their language?”

  “He cannot.”

  “Then why do the animals like him?”

  “That’s not a superpower, that’s just—I can’t talk to you. You need a bath.”

  “Here we go with the bath again. I was in the cistern like ten minutes ago.”

  “Soap. Shampoo. Scrubbing. Why don’t you become Mr. Superclean?”

  “If it’ll make you happy.”

  After that conversation, Violet decided she did not want to be a writer but rather a librarian or bookseller or editor, and Jimmy took a bath. The contest took place the last week of July of that fateful summer. At this point in their shared life, Jimmy and Violet would both have described the family as happy, despite Pook’s getting kicked out of school, despite Frederick’s intermittent anger, despite May’s distance. Later on, of course, the children would hear about their father’s indiscretions and May’s bouts of depression, how he would get drunk and insult his colleagues at the university, how she would go months without letting him into her bed, but these adult secrets did not tarnish the narrative to which the children held tightly—that everything had been good until Pook died.

  5

  DAY 8:

  By the time lunch came around Friday, Maura and Vex had a routine. Overnight, he had fashioned a giant rubber gasket that fit over the end of the stubby concrete pole and connected perfectly with the Carlton Hotel. When break time came, she grabbed the ashtray and he, the gasket. He lit her cigarette and she lit his, using his flip-top lighter that produced several inches of flame. He taught her how to roll cigarettes, how to tie various knots that were superior to the traditional figure eight, and how to tell time by the concrete pole’s shadow.

  “What if it’s nighttime?” she asked.

  “Then you’re off the clock,” he said.

  He told her about mental exercises that permitted him to look around corners, vaginal exercises that permitted women to make themselves impenetrable to men, and an insane but systematic reason why no one should have hair more than a quarter inch long. “The Samson story was reversed, see, to keep people in the dark. It’s growing hair that makes you weak, not cutting it off.” In the workshop, he threw fits, yelling terrible red-faced curses. Crews would have given him the boot, but Billy just made him sit in a corner until he could pretend to be rational. Vex hated to lose assembly time and squirmed in the seat, but obediently sat when he was told to and stared at his hands. When he was alone with Maura in the parking lot, he never yelled or threatened and she enjoyed his company.

  “Why don’t you want anybody to touch you?” she asked him. “Says who?”

  She made her voice low and ridiculous. “Nobody touch Vex!”

  His laughter was sly and skittish. “I got a few topics of nobody’s business. Chaos in the hacky sack.” He pointed with the cigarette at his head. “Chimney up your thoughts long enough and see for yourself. Like when you were in there sparking at that boy Whine.”

  “His name is Rhine.”

  “Nobody’s name is Rhine. Another trick, you gotta wise up. What’ve I been saying all day?”

  “A lot of incoherent loony-ass shit.”

  “A loon shits, that’s guano.” He coughed out a laugh. “I can joke, too. See? But serious here, a man’s got clefts in him, woman too, and gorges and deep, deep divides. You thin
k you can build a bridge? You think this here is bridge-building school? Pack life into a box of your own making is it. But how do you do it, right?”

  “Which leads me to the obvious question,” Maura said, stubbing out her smoke. “Were you born a muddle-headed trout or did something happen to you?”

  Vex offered his sly chuckle. “I’d let you touch me.”

  “I’d rather chew on electrical cord.”

  “If I still had a thing for women, I’d have a thing for you.”

  “Switch over to household pets?”

  “I’m making my mind pure, like the deep down in the planet water that takes days to get to the surface, even with a high-efficiency submersible pump and the horsepower of a Silverado. Pure mind can see inside the mechanics of anything. You walk from here to there, I see ball joints, bone pistons, hinges. Go ahead, walk. You’ll see me see you.”

  She tried it. It was a lot like being naked. He nodded appreciatively and she blushed.

  “Built exactly right,” he said, “balanced and sturdy and strong, like a perfect backhoe.”

  It wasn’t an ideal compliment but she blushed again.

  “Sex is all about practice.” He gestured with his cigarette. “Like pistons and rings. You have to run the engine high and low, vary the RPMs, or the rings don’t set right. You follow?”

  She replied by crushing her cigarette in the Carlton Hotel, noticing that she had only just lit it. The words virgin smoke popped into her head. Here I am crushing my virgin smoke, she thought. Smoking, too, had required practice, as had drinking beer.

  “Having too much sexual bounty has been a mixed dressing.” He lifted his hand-rolled cigarette to her face. “Look how evenly that burns.”

  Billy Atlas took her aside that afternoon to ask her if Vex was a problem for her.

  “He’s weird,” she said, “and creep city half the time. I maybe like him, though. In small doses. He’s okay enough.”