Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “I’m not the most easy guy to be with, I’ve been told,” Crews is saying, “but she liked me some. I liked her. It’s just that it takes money to make a family.”

  “Want a beer?” Candler asks, indicating the bottle on the tray that Crews himself delivered. “Or I’ve got a bottle of pretty good scotch.”

  “None of the hard stuff for me,” Bob Whitman replies. “I used to enjoy a good whiskey, but I’ve got too many miles on the old pumper. I stick to beer.” He takes another swallow. “You think Clay’ll do a good job, then?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Candler asks. “Look, Bob, I don’t have a good reason for withdrawing. I can tell you’re interested, but I just decided . . . I don’t know. It’s not what I want to do. I could use the money, and there are plenty of things to like about being in charge, but it’s not what I intended to do when I picked this line of work. I was in a PhD program—”

  “That weekend program,” Bob says.

  “It’s a legitimate program,” Candler says patiently, “a really good program, actually. I’ll re-enroll. If all goes well, I’ll be a psychologist in a few years’ time. That’s more in line with my plans. I never wanted to be an administrator. I just didn’t have the sense to say no to it.”

  “I understand completely,” Bob says. “Leadership takes something out of you. All that stress. The decision making. The weight of the world on your shoulders. The part I wouldn’t like is fund-raising. I don’t think Clay will care for that part of it, either.” He lifts the bottle again but before it touches his lips, he says, “Is John Egri angry with you?”

  Candler sighs. “I imagine that he’s furious. I haven’t returned his calls. Or even listened to them. Fortunately, my cell phone doesn’t work up here.”

  Bob nods. “What about that fiancée of yours? Lovely girl, by the way.”

  “After I got fired, she picked this guy who installs cable over me,” Crews says. “I told her it’s a bad job ’cause everything’ll be wireless in another hour or two, but how can I talk now? What am I now but some guy in a red jacket running errands a child could do—toting trays and picking up laundry and parking cars. Some people put their shoes out to be polished.”

  Candler takes a beer from the tray and hands it to him.

  “I shouldn’t,” Crews says, sitting on the bed as he accepts the beer. “I know you’ve got a house out on Liberty Highway. What’s got you holed up here?”

  “Something happened,” Candler says.

  “I guessed that much.”

  “I got distracted by one thing and another, and a boy who was under my care, he killed himself.”

  “Wasn’t Mick Coury, was it?” Crews drinks from the bottle of beer.

  “How’d you know that?”

  He swallows and shrugs. “That retarded girl give him the bounce?” Candler nods, and Crews continues. “You shouldn’t blame yourself too much. You weren’t cutting lawns on the side. Blame me. I should’ve told you weeks ago that he was gonna be in for a tough fall.”

  “I worked it out anyway,” Candler says, “but I didn’t handle the whole business very well, and it cost Mick his life.”

  “I can’t figure it that way.” Crews takes another long drink and the bottle is empty. He holds the bottle at eye level and shakes it. “The kid’s got some loose wires and something’s going to cause a short sooner or later. That Karly is heating up his wires something fierce, and so, okay, he shorts out. It’s not her fault and it’s definitely not yours. It’s the wiring.”

  “Everything’s on hold at the moment,” Candler explains.

  “She wanted you to take the promotion,” Bob Whitman says, “didn’t she?”

  “She may have, but she’d support whatev . . . Aw hell, Bob, do we have to talk about this?”

  “No, of course not,” Bob says, “though it might be the best thing for you. Here’s what I think, the success of a marriage—or any romantic bond—is two parts mystical and three parts practical. The mystical, that’s what everybody thinks about, the magical sense of attraction, sex, and all that locomotion. But the practical—making a living, sharing duties around the house, talking over troubles—that’s the heart and soul of a marriage.”

  “Well,” Candler says. “Okay.” He upends the beer bottle and takes a long chug. He is desperate now to drive Bob Whitman away. He considers inventing lies about his sex life with Lolly—dark, disturbing episodes that would make Bob worry for his cabin and hurry home to tell his wife. The beer is delicious.

  “Not that there’s any reason you should listen to me,” Bob says, “except that I’ve been happily married forty-two years. Longer than you’ve been alive, I daresay.”

  “I’ve been unfair to Lolly,” Candler says, “and coming up here is another chapter of it, I’m sure. But I had to take bold steps. My life was . . . I don’t know. It was . . .”

  “Spinning out of control?”

  “Another way to look at it,” Crews says, “you and me, we’ve been fucked over lately by various shit. But we’re stronger than Mick. We’re not about to kill ourselves. We’re men and we’ll tough it out. We’ll maybe break some furniture and move to a different neighborhood and sit in the dark doing nothing for hours and hours until finally we think it’s maybe possible to sleep, but we’re not going to kill ourselves. You got to be strong—ah, fuck, I’m not strong, but you know . . . not too weak. Durable. Or something like that. And Mick wasn’t. I’m sorry he’s dead and all, but it’s like—”

  “My big brother killed himself when I was twelve.”

  “Ah, Jesus, that makes it hard on you then. Fuck.”

  “I keep thinking about him.”

  “But you had to know, going into counseling, that there were going to be fucked-up kids thinking about slashing their arms or hanging themselves like nine thoughts out of ten. Why’d you go in for a job that sooner or later pretty much guarantees to put you in this hotel room, drinking like a fish? Seems to me if my brother kills himself, then I do anything other than counseling, you get me?”

  Candler drinks his beer.

  “Another way to look at it, see, there’s all this stuff coming out now about 9/11 and how the whole attack never should have happened, how the government should’ve been able to stop it,” Crews says. “What they never talk about is that during the Clinton years these bastard terrorists were trying the same shit, and he stopped them. Just barely, and luck was involved, from what I’ve read, but my point is, he gets no recognition. A bomb doesn’t go off—that doesn’t make you a hero.”

  “I can’t see where you’re going with this,” Candler says.

  “You’ve had a ton of guys under your care who didn’t kill themselves, but you give yourself no credit. Eventually some Mick’s going to come along and do himself in, and as far as you can see, your record is 0–1, ’cause how do you know how many kids you’ve saved?”

  “You’re saying I set myself up for failure?”

  “I could say the same shit about myself and this girl, this crazy girl I can’t quit thinking about. Why her? Why her when I know it’s going to be complicated as all get-out? The world is full of women, so why go for a difficult one? And if I hadn’t tried to squeeze in those yards while I was supposed to be at the workshop, my son or daughter would still be in the womb. Instead, I lose my job and she gets an abortion. Feels like a mortal mistake.” He tilts the bottle to let the remains dribble on his tongue. “You get me?”

  “Don’t burn your bridges,” Bob says. “That’s my advice.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Candler replies.

  Bob finishes his beer and as he stands, he slips the bottle into the giant pocket, where it bulges obscenely. “Make yourself at home now,” he says, as if Candler hasn’t already been there for three days. “Mi casa es su casa. I may even send up another care package for you.”

  “No need to do that,” Candler says quickly. He thanks Bob con
tinuously on the walk to the Jeep, leaving no opening for further stories or commentary. He veers onto the path that will take him to the lake. He passes within a few feet of the bear, the bear that has been watching him, a black bear, an adult male, a little over three hundred pounds. The bear is curious. Curiosity in bears, as in humans, is not doled out equally. This is an especially curious bear, rising again to his hind legs as the man approaches, ready to adopt a threatening posture, but the man does not see him, does not smell him, does not hear him breathing. How can such a creature survive?

  Candler makes the short hike to the lake, the color of the water deepening as light flees the sky. The people who populate his life are passing through him—there’s no other way to put this, as he is not thinking about them in words or images, and yet some quality of them inhabits him. It is an uncomfortable feeling, but he has come down to the lake to experience it. Strange sounds skim the water. Candler believes there is something he does not understand, to which he has been blind, of which he has been ignorant, something large and meaningful for which he has no name. The sounds are not coming from the water. Candler pivots as a black bear ambles past him, within arm’s length. The bear pauses at the lake to drink, turns to take a final look at Candler, and then trots round the water’s edge to some indefinable spot, where it steps into the underbrush and disappears into the trees.

  “I keep going over that day I got fired,” Crews says. “I keep imagining that I didn’t go off, that I just stayed there and did my job.” He shakes his head. “I better get back before I fuck this job up. You got to sign for this.”

  Candler writes in a ridiculous tip.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Crews says, “though I can use the dough. Thanks.”

  “Take care of yourself,” Candler says.

  “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, James, you get hold of me and consider it done.”

  “Good luck with the girl.”

  He squints and his head dips, as if he’s been slapped. “She’s gone. Might as well be dead. I’ll never see her again.” After a second’s pause, he says, “You paint that?”

  Candler shakes his head. “My brother.”

  “The dead one?”

  Candler nods.

  “It’s got a quality to it,” Crews says, and then he’s out the door.

  Candler settles on the bed. His steak is overcooked but otherwise good. He finishes the last of the beer and pours the remainder of the scotch into the tub. The drain is shut, and he has to reach in and lift it. He rinses his fingers and sits again on the bed to scroll through the channels. There is nothing on television he wants to see. He goes to the balcony: the traffic, the sun under the water now but the sky still light, the air cooling. How long does he stand there? Thousands of people cross below—people on foot, people in cars, people on the boardwalk, people barefoot on the sand. Headlights and yellow windows, and on the beach, the flare of a single lighter. Candler is thinking, though it doesn’t feel like thinking. He stands at the rail while the world goes dark. Until there’s a knock on the door once again, and Candler goes to it.

  Lolly stands on the plank porch. She’s wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. Her skin is pink from the sun. Behind her is Bob Whitman’s Jeep.

  “You’re sunburned,” Candler says.

  “I’m supposed to say that I’m your care package. Bob Whitman insisted. He was at the house when Vi and I got back from the beach.” She is embarrassed and looks at her feet. The accent is gone. “According to him, you want me up here. If he’s not right about that, I’ll leave right this second.”

  Candler feels a number of things, ranging from annoyance and indignation to something pleasant, an easing of pain, a small nodule of relief. In any case, Lolly has done nothing wrong, and he steps aside to let her enter.

  “I’m making chili,” he tells her.

  “I have a bag in the Jeep,” she says. “Should I get it?”

  “Okay,” he says. “If you want.”

  “Maybe I’ll wait,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see how it goes.”

  It’s Les Crews, of course, at the door again. No one else knows where Candler is. He says, “I got something for you. A present like. Something small. Don’t thank me.” He hands Candler a tiny shopping bag and says, “I’ll leave you alone now.”

  Crews pulls the door shut on himself before Candler can look inside the bag. He carries it to the bed and dumps the contents onto the mattress. It’s a silver key ring. It has the name of the place engraved on it: The Carlton Hotel. Candler sits on the bed to work his keys onto the ring, but what’s the point of including his house key? He’s never going back to that house. His car is sold and that key is gone. There are just the keys to the Hahn Building and his office, and he decides in this moment that he will not return to the job. He throws the keys into the plastic bin and slips the empty key ring into his pocket.

  Pushing the room service tray to one side, he stretches out on the bed. He is still in his clothes, but he crawls beneath the sheet and bedcover. A television in the next room murmurs inconsolably. He has left the sliding door open, and there’s the sound of traffic and the ocean.

  Wind off the water, a wet and heavy wind, and cold now, sweeps up the side of the Carlton Hotel and chills the room.

  How do people who have made terrible mistakes—mistakes that cannot be rectified—continue with their lives?

  When he was a boy, in the weeks and months after Pook’s suicide, Jimmy Candler made an effort every night to imagine his brother. He imagined him as Same Man, battling against the forces of evil, but also he imagined his brother in the yard, among the cats, with The Dog, with Jimmy and Billy, dipping his head in the cistern, painting, climbing a ladder but refusing to step onto the roof, riding the bicycle without a seat. To stop imagining his brother was to let him go, was to let him die all over again. But eventually there came a night when Jimmy fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. And some time later still, a series of such nights.

  Lying in the hotel bed beside the silver tray, Candler tries to conjure his brother. As might be expected—of course, naturally enough, it goes without saying—he pictures instead Mick Coury. This is the evening of the day that Mick was going to guide Lolly and Violet and the others to a secluded beach. Candler imagines who else would be on the trip. He imagines what each would wear. He puts them in vehicles and starts the wheels turning. He takes the Carlton Hotel stationery and the Carlton Hotel pen, and jots down some notes.

  Mick Coury is dead and alive and driving on the freeway. In the world Candler creates, everyone is dead and alive and driving on the freeway.

  They eat the chili on the porch. She tells him about Mick pulling her out of the ocean, but she does not mention the rest of it. (She will never tell him about the rest of it.) She reveals Violet’s plan to move to Tucson. He listens. He brings up the book he’s reading. He describes the strange encounter with the bear. They wash the dishes together. She puts herself in his arms. They make love on the double bed. There is no urgency in their lovemaking. They begin their real relationship, which is also imperfect but proves to be enough around which to build their lives. He resumes the PhD program, and she finds a job in the city. The wedding is small. Billy is his best man. Violet is maid of honor. Their first born is a boy, healthy and well formed and as loud in his cries as any baby the maternity nursing team has ever heard, to whom they give the name Paul. “What if Bob Whitman hadn’t made me drive up the mountain?” Lolly asks from the hospital bed, from her perch in the conceivable future, baby Paul in her arms and her husband beside her, the permanence of this child granting her the permission to ask, to wonder about the alternate paths, the echo trajectories, the shadow lives that trail after all of us at every turn, and lend to the single life we lead the definition that gives it meaning.

  In the car, on the way back from the beach, on the long stretch of freeway from San Diego to Onyx Springs, Mick fe
els that he is coming to—a feeling that often overcomes him when he hasn’t taken his medication—and he does not know what has transpired in the past half hour, and he understands that he is not well, that he cannot make his mind quit racing, and that he is driving twenty miles over the speed limit. He lifts his foot from the gas.

  “Did you like fucking her?” Maura asks.

  Evidently, he told Maura about sex on the beach with Mr. James Candler’s fiancée.

  “I think I did,” he says, while his brain piles on multiple answers about the sand and the twin rises, no curls, like wave curls, of her bottom, and that bathing suit off her, how she looked less naked without it, and her hand on his thigh—that was after—which he didn’t like, but he felt a sweetened purity when he had the orgasm, the o in orgasm also like a wave, sort of, and—“What?”

  “I’m glad you fucked her,” Maura says. “I’ve been hoping to see a bump in your libido.”

  He nods, keeping his mouth shut. As long as he doesn’t rag on like a, like a, like a . . .

  “I mean I’d rather you direct your business toward me, of course,” she says, turning shy before she can get the sentence out, swiveling from him to the highway. “Not that I’ve ever done it, but I’m ready to try it out. Whenever you’re ready.”

  He offers that same nod, which she may have seen even though she’s not looking at him. He is way up over the speed limit again, and he lets his foot off the accelerator.

  “You need cruise control,” Maura says. “This car is too old for it, which is kinda pathetic. I’d rather go too fast than too slow, though. Not that I drive worth a fuck.”

  If he doesn’t say anything crazy, doesn’t do the rag, then he isn’t crazy, no matter how much it goes on in his head. That’s what the fucking beach with Lollipop on his lollipop . . . He takes a big breath and checks behind him before pulling into the slow lane. He hates thoughts like that, like lollipop, but they’re just thoughts, and what is it about Lolly? How on the beach he saw that she had her own inside problems, and everyone knows she’s sane and not like him—schizophrenic. He makes himself pronounce the word in his head over and over.