Fallen Land (18 page)

“Why do you want my truck?” Paul asks as the kid speeds through the curling streets of his neighborhood, the houses half as big again as any Paul built.

The boy furrows his brow and squints across at Paul in the late afternoon light. “What do you mean?”

“Watch the road, kid. You could have any truck you want.”

“But I like your truck. It’s solid. And it’s cheap. It’s badass.” They return to the kid’s house where he pulls to a stop in the driveway. He offers Paul half the asking price.

“Do me a thousand better.”

“Sure man, I’m feeling generous.”

“I just don’t get it. You don’t need this truck.”

“My parents don’t want me to take my car when I go skiing,” the kid says, nodding at a black convertible in the five-car garage.

Paul bites down hard on his lower lip, tastes salt, chews off a flap of dry skin, and agrees to the sale. They drive to the DMV and take care of the paperwork. The kid turns over a roll of bills, which Paul stuffs in the pocket of his jeans.

“You think maybe I could have a lift?” Paul asks.

“Sure, I’ll give you a lift. See what a nice guy I am?” the kid smirks, patting Paul on the back as if he were a child.

W
ITHOUT THE TRUCK,
PAUL HOISTS
his backpack onto his shoulders, covers himself in a green camouflaged hunting poncho, and spends each day walking in the rain, checking the construction sites and always getting the same answer: No work here. One of the guys he has long considered a friend asks him not to come around again, telling him the answer will not change; he isn’t the only one looking for work and there are lots of younger and hungrier guys than Paul who need a hand. “Illegal ones, is what you mean. Guys who work for nothing,” Paul says.

“Listen, Paul,” his friend says, “you did it too. I know you did. All us guys do it, and these days it’s the only way I can make ends meet. You’ve played your cards, man. This ain’t a world of second chances anymore. I’m sorry, buddy. I feel for you. It could be me next year. Don’t think I don’t know that. Are you hungry?”

“I eat,” Paul said, and turned away, trudging into a wall of rain.

He has plenty of food in the bunker, enough to last three months, six if he cuts the rations in half and supplements them with what he can hunt, glean, or gather. Foraging can be learned and he already knows how to kill. He has nothing left to sell except his labor and he cannot ask his mother for help; she has little that is hers to give, nothing that is valuable apart from her own labor, and his father, who believes fanatically in self-reliance, will never do anything for him. This is, Paul knows, not a position of cruelty, but one of principle: self-reliance is his father’s church and most profound conviction. “I love you, Paul,” his father would say, “but a man must stand by the force of his own power. I would be doing you a disservice if I bailed you out.”

Everywhere Paul walks he is careful to look where he is going, afraid of tripping and falling and breaking a bone. Being a pedestrian in a world designed for cars makes him realize how fragile he is. The newer shopping developments have sidewalks only in front of or around the stores, isolated islands in oceans of parking lot. He is conscious of people staring at him, and wonders if he has allowed some betraying signs of desperation or delinquency to surface, or if it is simply because the world expects a man like him not to be walking, his proper place behind the wheel of a truck. The body he inhabits, the body that confines him and determines how the world perceives him, a body he has worked hard to fashion into a titan’s, has to learn all over again how to walk in a world that has always been hostile to man, which has become ever more hostile through man’s own dominion over the world.

Humanity
, Paul hears his wife saying,
Humanity instead of Man. You’re such a Neanderthal.

As he walks, thinking about his family, he finds himself looking at women who resemble Amanda or staring at boys and even girls who remind him of Carson and Ajax. One day he catches himself looking at a mother and her two children. The woman notices Paul staring and pulls the girls closer to her, away from this man, tall and muscular, tented in waterproof green nylon, who stares at small children.

He phones the numbers that no longer belong to his wife or her parents. New people answer in each case.

“Amanda baby?”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“I know she’s there. Let me talk to her. I want to talk to my boys.”

“Sir, you’ve got the wrong number.”

“Don’t hang up the phone, please, I just want to talk to my wife. Tell her it’s okay, it’s Paul. I just need to talk to her.”

“I’m hanging up now, sir.”

“If you hang up I swear to God I’ll come and get you. I’m going to find you.”

The woman on the other end hangs up. Paul looks at his reflection in the windows of a fast food restaurant, the jeans hanging loose on his legs, hood over his head, a hump of backpack growing beneath his poncho, pressing him into a stoop. He will find no one. He has too little money to travel, and even if he spent the last of his cash getting to Florida he would have nothing left to undertake the search that would be necessary to find his family. There is no choice but to stay here in the city he knows, fighting to reclaim the house that he is certain would bring his wife and sons back to him.

Although it rains most days he avoids malls with their private security guards who will not tolerate a man sitting for hours on a bench. Last Thursday, however, it rained so hard he had no other choice and ventured inside a mall where he walked back and forth for eight hours, asking at every shop if they had any work. They all told him no, but gave him application forms to complete, which they promised to keep on file in case any opening arose. Every form asked about previous retail experience. In one case he had to fill out a personality test with questions so baffling he had no idea which of the multiple choice answers could possibly be correct:

A co-worker who is struggling with debt confides in you about his/her predicament. Later in the week you see the same co-worker taking money out of the cash register and putting it in his/her pocket. You decide to:

a) tell your manager

b) confront your co-worker

c) offer to lend your co-worker money

d) call the police

e) secretly replace the money your co-worker stole from the cash register

f) ask your co-worker to cut you in on the theft.

An obese customer asks you if a dress she tries on makes her look fat. The dress is a size too small for her, and you do think she looks fat in it. You decide to:

a) tell the woman she looks fat

b) suggest she should try a different size

c) tell her she looks great and offer to ring up the dress

d) tell her about an effective weight-loss program

e) suggest she should go on a diet

f) ask a co-worker to handle the customer for you.

In that case he chose answers at random, assuming he would fail whatever test of character they wanted him to pass. Completing the application forms was not without its pleasures. He pictured himself working in many different kinds of stores, became acquainted with the qualities of various ballpoint pens, developed a fondness for black ink over blue, appreciated forms printed on heavy paper that took the ink with a voluptuous embrace rather than thin paper that seemed to resist the pen only to break apart when he applied too much pressure. After exhausting the business of filling out forms he walked the length of the mall again, upper and lower levels, passing empty windows with
TO LET
signs, looking at all the products in the remaining stores, and the few people who were buying. Late in the afternoon a security guard approached him.

“Hey buddy,” the guard said in a loud voice. The man was older, a head shorter than Paul and a hundred pounds lighter, but he had a baton, a taser in his belt, and an embroidered badge on his chest with the letters EKK. “I’ve noticed you’re doing a lot of walking.”

“Is there a rule against walking?”

“I kind of wondered if you might be casing the joint.”

“I’m looking for work.”

“Have you found any?” the guard asked.

“No. I haven’t found any.”

“You got any shopping to do?”

“No. I don’t have any shopping to do.”

“You see that
NO LOITERING
sign?” the man said, pointing at a placard outlining the mall’s rules and regulations. Paul nodded. “Then I think it’s time for you to go,” the guard said. “Let me show you out.” The little man walked him to the nearest exit and stood at the doors, watching as Paul took the poncho from his backpack, slipped it over his head, and navigated across the wet parking lot to the street. Once on the city sidewalk he turned to the guard and waved through the torrential rain; for an instant the guard began to raise his hand but then lowered it again, shook his head, and retreated into the darkness of the mall. One of the anchor stores had shut down two years earlier and was still standing abandoned, its exterior walls covered with vines, weeds and small trees growing out of its roof, the windows and doors boarded up, clattering in the wind.

After that encounter Paul has avoided shopping centers. Yesterday he went to a park and spent a dry afternoon sitting on a bench, watching squirrels prepare for winter, losing track of time until night began to fall. A gray sedan drove past, parked nearby, and an older man in a business suit got out and walked toward him. The man circled the park on foot, came back, and sat down on the bench next to Paul.

“So, how much?” the man asked.

“How much of what?” Paul said.

“Come on, kid. Don’t be coy.”

“I’m not a kid. How much what?”

“You know how much what. So how much?”

“Listen, man, I don’t have any drugs. Buzz off.”

“I’m not looking for drugs, kid,” the man said, putting a hand on Paul’s knee. “You know what I’m looking for.”

Paul was so stunned he began to hyperventilate. He stood and ran away from the man, out of the park, through residential streets, until he reached a busy thoroughfare and slowed down to catch his breath. When he stopped, slumping down in a bus shelter, he found himself wondering how much money he could make selling his body instead of his labor, and what precisely would be involved in such a transaction. Perhaps one day it would come to that.

Another day he walked twenty-two miles round trip to see his mother. She had phoned his cell to ask how he was, where he was, and why she had not heard from him in weeks. His father had gone elk hunting and she invited Paul to come for lunch. He had to leave the bunker at eight in the morning to reach his parents’ house just before noon. It had been months since he last saw his mother, before the foreclosure auction, when she had offered to help him move his things into the apartment he claimed to have rented.

“Are you working, Pablito?”

“Don’t call me that, mama. I’m still trying to find a job.”

“But you’re doing okay? You look like you need new boots. Where’s your truck?”

“In the shop. I took the bus.”

“Where’s that apartment you got, Pablo? I don’t even know where you live.”

“It’s just a small place, out on Central, near the mall. If you want to know the truth, I’m embarrassed for you to see it. I’ve got leads, though. I’m getting things back together but right now I’m in the trough, mama. I promise you won’t ever see me this low again.”

Looking at his mother was like staring into a funhouse mirror image of himself: shorter, rounder, feminine, much darker skinned, but otherwise the same. He was blond as a boy and then, as a teenager, his hair turned almost as panther-dark as his mother’s. People said he looked Italian or Greek and it was a misconception he had rarely felt moved to correct. They sat across from each other in the dining room, Paul’s legs extending under the table, his feet coming out the other side, enclosing his mother’s chair, almost encircling her. Glancing at himself in the gold-framed mirror behind her, he looked like a man trying to get out, who could not be safely contained, hardly a man at all, a jaguar god, his eyes glinting turquoise shards, each looking in their own direction, a double-headed snake. For an instant he studied his own eyes, too pale and luminous for the olive complexion around them. He saw them at last for what they were: the eyes of his father transposed onto a thinner, harder, more pointed version of his mother’s face, with a stronger nose and a ledge of brow. A person could jump from his forehead, jump and plummet to death down the whole length of his improbable body.

“Take a breath,” Dolores said, “slow down,
chiquito
. Don’t you eat?”

“I eat,” he said. “I’m on a special diet.”

“You’re too thin. I’ll send home some food with you.”

After lunch they stood drinking cocoa in the living room, gazing out at the office park across the street, where, until only a few years ago, there was a racetrack. Although a line of trees blocked their view of the track when they first moved in, it was always audible, the announcer calling races on the loudspeakers, and out of the racing season rock concerts so loud his mother’s collection of cow figurines would rattle in the china cabinet. When developers replaced the racetrack with an office park, they cleared all the trees.

Dolores sighed, turning her back on the bright white haze of concrete and glass. Where there are now acres silvered with asphalt and cars, horses once grazed, right in the middle of the city. They moved to this house when Paul was in junior high and it was not long before he found his way into a group of neighborhood boys who stole the ornamental chrome valve stem caps from car wheels, kids whose fathers took them to gun safety lessons so the boys learned how to shoot before they were old enough to own a weapon, kids who went on hunting trips over long weekends and came back bragging of kills, sharing stories of skinning deer and shooting squirrels for sport, blasting robins and red-winged blackbirds because they could. Paul no longer remembers whether he pressured his dad to join in these activities or vice versa, but he and Ralph soon became part of the group. Trophies still hang in his parents’ living room. That day after lunch, Paul reached up to stroke the fur under the chin of the first buck he’d killed.