She comes to the entrance and stands with her hands on her hips. “He called me ma’am.”
“Yes, he did,” says Mr. Podrup. “I heard it.”
“Just being polite,” Walker says. He wants to hit something; the feeling rises in him like heat, a column of fire where his spine is. I’m no goddamn boy.
“Well, lunch breaks are necessary,” Mr. Podrup says automatically, not even attending to his own words. Walker moves away from him, surprised at the strength of the urge to strike him.
“Can’t work on an empty stomach,” she says.
Apparently they both think the fact of the lunch break means they’ll all sit and talk. The disappointment shows in their faces as Walker heads for the door. He can’t get away from them fast enough. It’s as if he is the harm that might come to them if they keep talking and keep getting on his nerves as they are.
He goes out and gets into the truck in the bright sun. They’re the ones with the money, doing the remodeling; they’re the ones settled into their lives, certain of things and full of smug assumptions about people like him. Driving too fast to Midtown, he thinks of Jenny and the computer store geek. She couldn’t see anything in him. How could she see anything in him?
At the corner of Cooper and Young, he parks the truck. Children are playing some game in the soft dust of the churchyard up the way, making a racket, and a woman stands watching them, arms folded. He walks up to the Beauty Shop Restaurant, goes in, and sits at the bar. There isn’t anyone else in the place, yet, and for a moment he wonders if they’re open. But then a woman, square and bulky-looking, with long black hair and a brown, round-cheeked face, comes from the back and walks behind the bar, with some wineglasses to put up. “Be right with you,” she says, in a voice that’s surprisingly soft.
He looks out the window at the other side of the street, the Café Olé, and the gas station, and then the computer store, a few doors down from that. When the waitress comes to him, he orders a hamburger and a beer. There doesn’t seem to be any business at the computer store. He watches the entrance. The street itself looks abandoned just now, the leaf shade moving on it in the breezes. He can still hear the voices of the children in the churchyard. The waitress brings him an iced glass of beer, and he drinks most of it in one long gulp, then finishes it, and asks for another. She brings it to him in another iced glass, and he drinks that, too. It’s so cold and crisp, and it goes down smoothly.
“Thirsty,” she says.
“Bring me another one.”
“Really thirsty.”
He slides the empty glass down the bar toward her. “You can just fill that if you want.”
She takes the glass and puts it under the spigot.
A woman with a little boy comes down the sidewalk and crosses to the other side of the street, through the shade and sun. They go by the open door of the computer place. The waitress brings his beer, and he cradles it with his hands, watching the progress of the woman and boy down the way. He drinks the beer without tasting it now. His hamburger comes and he orders still another beer. The waitress smiles at him, but seems a little doubtful, holding the glass under the spigot and not looking directly at him. He bites into the hamburger, and eats a french fry. He sees Disco Bill arrive at the store, in his red Miata. Bill skips around the car and into the store, looking happy. The sun blazes on the little silver buttons of his shirtsleeves. Walker takes another bite of the hamburger, but finds that his hunger is gone. He keeps watching the entrance to the computer store. Some women come into the restaurant, four of them, all dressed as if for something important—suits, needle-point high-heeled shoes, bright-colored scarves, lots of makeup. They’re talking about another woman, someone they all know, and by whom they are all evidently appalled. They go on in excited whispers, following the waitress into the restaurant to a booth.
He finishes his beer and heads to the men’s room, past them. They’re rattling at the waitress now, and it’s clear they are visiting the city for the first time. They ask about Priscilla Presley—is this really the beauty shop where she had her hair done? Walker goes into the restroom, which smells too sweet. He only glances at himself in the mirror. When he’s finished, he returns to his place at the bar, and he sees Bill sitting near the door, talking low into a cell phone. Walker orders another beer and sits half-turned on the stool, hands clasping one knee, looking out at the street but seeing the other man out of the corner of his eye. Watching him, trying to hear. The voice is murmurous and conspiratorial, secretive, and the laugh is low and, Walker thinks, lewd-sounding; there’s something obscene about it. He leans a little in the man’s direction, then stands, moves to the window, and he can hear the words now. “I’m glad for it,” he hears. “Bless the world for it all.” He puts his hands in his pockets and waits, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. “When can I see you? Can you get off early? We could have a couple of hours this afternoon.”
The waitress brings the beer—another iced glass—and sets it down. “Last one, pardner,” she calls to Walker.
“One more after this,” he tells her, and smiles.
“Okay, one more.”
He moves to the bar, takes the beer, and drinks half of it, then goes back to the doorway.
The computer store man laughs softly, looking out at the street. He says, “You wouldn’t.” Then, “You would not.”
“I know who you’re talking to,” Walker says to him.
He doesn’t know he’s being spoken to. He’s listening to whatever she’s telling him. “Describe it,” he says. “I bet you can’t.” He laughs again. “Well come on over. The whole rest of the afternoon.”
Walker finishes the beer, and puts the glass back on the bar. The waitress picks it up, takes it to the end, and puts it under the spigot. She brings it back and sets it down. “Last one.”
“Keep it,” Walker says, and turns, takes three unsteady paces to where Bill sits talking that way into his cell phone, and with a sweeping roundhouse motion of his right arm, punches him on the forehead. The impact sends a shock of nerve-pain all the way to his shoulder, and Bill falls from the chair with a tremendous crash, the cell phone flying from his hand, bouncing from the glass of the window and falling, where it slides the few feet to the side wall. Walker stands there holding his hand, which has already sprouted a big welt. Bill is trying to get up, turning to all fours, groaning and beginning to splutter words. “The fuck—what the—”
Walker puts the heel of his foot at the base of his spine and pushes, so that he lies on his stomach. He hears the waitress yelling behind him, the other women making a commotion of alarm. “Don’t get up,” he says to Bill. “Really. Don’t do it. Don’t even try to. I’ll kill you if you do.”
He steps to the cell phone and brings it to his ear. It’s silent. No one on the other end. He tries to push the button that will show, in the little window, the last number dialed, or the last call received. He can’t find it, and now Bill is getting to his feet. Walker picks up a chair with his good hand and brings it down, hard, on his head.
At the Podrups’ house, he finds that he can’t work very well with the injured hand. It’s very swollen and red, probably broken. Driving with one hand through traffic, coming here, he felt almost happy, elated, utterly without an idea as to what might be next. He’s in the Podrups’ opened dining area, where the cabinets will go, and he can’t do the work, can’t cut away the last of the wall that was there. He’s surprised by how completely the expectation of going on with the day has taken hold. Bill lay very still after the chair. Walker stepped over him and looked at his face, and his eyes were half open; he looked dead. But he was breathing. His lips were moving.
The work is impossible to accomplish with one hand. Podrup has come to the entrance of the room and is watching. “Something wrong?”
“I’ll have to come back,” Walker tells him.
“Are you all right? What’d you do to your hand?”
“Nothing, man. Never felt better.”
“Had a beer,” Walker mumbles.
She speaks to her husband. “He can barely stand.”
“Look,” says Mr. Podrup. “We need this done in a timely fashion.”
Walker feels everything falling to pieces. He wants to strike at them, at everyone and everything. “I’ll come back,” he says. “Or my brother will.”
“We’d like to talk to your brother,” says Podrup.
“Yeah,” Walker says. “You do that.” And he stands very close to the other man, so that he can smell the sourness of his breath—onions mixed with coffee.
Podrup does not give way. The flesh around the thin line of his mouth is white.
“Go right ahead,” Walker says, then turns unsteadily and moves toward the door. Mrs. Podrup gives him a wide berth, and he finds that he can’t quite stay straight down the hallway, has to put the good hand out against the wall to support himself. He makes it to the door, and stands there, vaguely realizing that this is all wrong, all far from him and the kind of person he has always been—a good boy, a hardworking young man. He wants to say something to put things right, but there isn’t anything to say. “Sorry,” he mutters, but the uselessness of the word makes him sputter and laugh. “Shit,” he says. Then he’s outside in the blinding windless sun, cutting through the atriumlike space to the lawn, staggering across dry grass to the truck. They’re standing in the doorway, watching him. He sees them as he gets behind the wheel, and he has the impulse to wave before he starts it up. But they turn and close their door and he is now alone on the street, the rows of houses that look abandoned in the bright light, nothing stirring, all the windows closed and the curtains still as stone. He turns the ignition with his good hand, reaching around to do it. He can’t use the other at all, and the pain is growing worse by the minute. Keeping it sideways on the top of his right thigh, as he would if he were going to do a karate chop with it, he drives through the ponds of shade and sun to the Highpoint house, parks in front, and then sits for a while, his damaged hand held up to his face, where he can examine the swollen redness of the knuckles. Something’s broken, that’s clear. He can’t even bend the fingers.
Carefully he gets out of the truck, and walks around the house, holding the pulsing hand with its prodigious welt. Max is where Max always is at this time of a Saturday, sanding a plank, sitting near the rib cage of wood, his back to the house. He hears Walker and turns, and stares.
Walker comes toward him out of the sunlight. The shade moves over him, no cooler than the sun, and he’s getting the headache he knew would come from drinking that much beer midday.
“What’re you doing here?” Max says.
Walker stops and waits for him to say whatever he will say. But Max just stares.
“Why don’t you quit this?” Walker says to him.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“This,” Walker says, indicating the structure. He bends to pick up a piece of cut plank, and tosses it at the boat. “Christ. Do you know what’s going on?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Max says. He gets to his feet, and now he sees the injured hand. “What in the world?”
“She’s fucking somebody else, Max.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Jenny, goddamn it.”
For a long time neither of them moves, or speaks, and a summer-soft breeze blows over the tops of the trees, raising a little swirl of dust and stirring the shade on them. Walker begins to cry, and he wipes his good forearm across his own face, standing there.
“You better go on home,” Max says. “Sober up. Maybe have a doctor look at that.”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“Go home,” Max says. “Before something happens.”
“It already has, Max. Didn’t you hear what I said? Your wife’s screwing somebody else.”
Max picks up a piece of wood and steps toward him. He comes close, and Walker backs up. Max holds up the wood like a club. “Get out of here, now. Before you really get hurt. Go home.”
“You don’t get it, do you.”
“I’m telling you,” Max says, pushing him.
Walker stumbles back a few paces, then turns and tries to make his way back around the house, but an unevenness in the ground betrays him, and he falls. His older brother stands over him. It comes to him that he is only trying to hurt her, now, by telling Max; it has nothing to do with Max.
“Get up,” Max says.
“You don’t even care what she does,” Walker says, trying to rise.
Max strikes him on the back of the head with the flat of his hand, and Walker, rising, begins flailing at him, even with the broken hand. Max has to fend him off with the piece of wood. They grapple and fall, and roll, and Max hits him, and hits him again with the wood, the size of a policeman’s nightstick. Walker feels the blows, and keeps on, swinging both arms, tasting blood, feeling it run down the side of his head, kicking at the other and trying to hit at him, and being hit, with fists and the club, and then, without any kind of sense of time passing, he finds that he’s sitting against the wall of the house, hands in his lap, feet straight out, looking through a lot of shadow-figures at the skeleton of the boat, and still tasting blood. The shadow-figures are people, standing or moving around him, getting in the light, and the light is blinding when they step out of it. He shades his eyes with the good hand and tries to see who everyone is, all the shapes moving across the light.
“What time is it?” he says to them. “Is everyone all right?”
It’s his mother who tells him, as he lies on the gurney in the emergency room, that the computer salesman may not live. She cries, telling him, in that slight stutter, that the poor man, Bill, has a wife and two children, that his heart stopped at the scene and was restarted; that his skull is fractured. The police are outside, everything’s gone all to pieces and what were you thinking, what were you thinking, oh, what got into you? She cries, her fists down on the blanket over his legs, How could this be? How could this have happened and why, why didn’t you talk to me? Why? He’s all blankness, lying there, looking at her from a far place, a depth of solitude and numbness.
“W-Why, son?”
Faces move around him. He requires stitches in two places, twelve above one eyebrow and seven behind the left ear. He wakes and sleeps while all this is done, and in his sleep he sees himself standing over himself, a tableau from across a room, and the room is white, empty, nothing on the walls, no doors or windows, everything white, the floor and the ceiling, too—white. And he’s outside himself, free, and none of the last few weeks has taken place. It’s as if he’s a little boy again, until he wakes, and sees, through an opening in the curtain that’s been drawn around his bed, two men watching him, and waiting. Police. Walker sees his mother speak to them, and the pleading look on her face as she moves by them and goes on. And then Max is there, talking to them, with Jenny on his arm. Jenny’s crying, looking at the men and not bothering to wipe the tears from her eyes. But then this is all gone, too, and he’s in the dream room again, standing over himself, except that it’s no longer himself, but his mother, and Sean, too, all of them, one body containing everyone, and he wakes to a voice, no voice he knows, a man standing close, with white hairs coming from his nostrils.
“Can you understand me, Mr. Clayfield?”
“No,” Walker says, low. He can’t tell whether he has actually spoken. “Have they given me something for the pain?” he asks. “I hurt my hand.” He holds it up. It’s in a temporary cast.
“We’ll have to do this later,” the man says, across him. Walker turns his head to see that it’s his mother and brother.
“I
hurt my hand,” he says to them.
“Oh, W-Walker,” says his mother, crying. “That poor man didn’t do anything.”
“I’m okay,” he tells her. “My hand.” He holds it up again. He sees Max move away, putting his own hands to the sides of his head. But then Max is there again, frowning at him, mouth slightly open, a dumbfounded man. “I love her, Max,” Walker says, or thinks he says. “I couldn’t stand him talking to her that way. She can’t love him, Max.” His older brother doesn’t move or change expression, and Walker comes to know that no sound at all has issued from him, no words. He looks back at his mother, crying there, faltering, being helped to a chair. And now everything dissolves, crumples, and he can’t open his eyes, can’t see. “Where is she, Max?” No answer. Max is gone, everyone is gone but the man with the silver hairs in his nose, who sits in a chair at the foot of the bed, looking through a magazine.
“Sir?” Walker says. But he still can’t utter a sound. He closes his eyes and feels everything falling from him, as though he has begun rising on a cloud, but then very quickly the sensation changes, and it is he who is falling, drifting away, sailing down. He sees Jenny standing near the frame of the unfinished boat, arms folded, hair pulled back, eyes half closed, unseeing, as the half-closed eyes of Bill the computer salesman were, and Walker turns in the cavernous darkness of himself, searching for that other time, far away, when he was himself, not a man who would fall in love with his brother’s wife; not a man who would cheat or steal or lie; not a man—not that man—who would ever think of causing the slightest harm to another human being.
OVERCAST
Here is how Elaine Woodson attempted to describe things to herself one predawn:
It’s like those times when the whole sky is one smooth whitish dome and you’re not aware of it as cloud cover until the thing glides off in the wind and gives you blue sky. It’s like that. A form of walking pneumonia of the spirit. I’m not even quite aware of the thing until it has lifted.
Something Is Out There Page 16
