Kindred (7 page)

“That you might have been better off if your animal had been a snake. Your danger then—or assumed danger—might have sent you home before you ever met the patroller.”

“Then … Rufus’s fear of death calls me to him, and my own fear of death sends me home.”

“So it seems.”

“That doesn’t really help, you know.”

“It could.”

“Think about it, Kevin. If the thing I’m afraid of isn’t really dangerous — a rabbit instead of a snake—then I stay where I am. If it is dangerous, it’s liable to kill me before I get home. Going home does take a while, you know. I have to get through the dizziness, the nausea …”

“Seconds.”

“Seconds count when something is trying to kill you. I wouldn’t dare put myself in danger in the hope of getting home before the ax fell. And if I got into trouble by accident, I wouldn’t dare just wait passively to be saved. I might wind up coming home in pieces.”

“Yes … I see your point.”

I sighed. “So the more I think about it, the harder it is for me to believe I could survive even a few more trips to a place like that. There’s just too much that could go wrong.”

“Will you stop that! Look, your ancestors survived that era—survived it with fewer advantages than you have. You’re no less than they are.”

“In a way I am.”

“What way?”

“Strength. Endurance. To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could. Much more. You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” he said with annoyance. “You’re working yourself into a mood that could be suicidal if you’re not careful.”

“Oh, but I’m talking about suicide, Kevin—suicide or worse. For instance, I would have used your knife against that patroller last night if I’d had it. I would have killed him. That would have ended the immediate danger to me and I probably wouldn’t have come home. But if that patroller’s friends had caught me, they would have killed me. And if they hadn’t caught me, they would probably have gone after Alice’s mother. They … they may have anyway. So either I would have died, or I would have caused another innocent person to die.”

“But the patroller was trying to …” He stopped, looked at me. “I see.”

“Good.”

There was a long silence. He pulled me closer to him. “Do I really look like that patroller?”

“No.”

“Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?”

“I need you here to come home to. I’ve already learned that.”

He gave me a long thoughtful look. “Just keep coming home,” he said finally. “I need you here too.”

The Fall

1

I think Kevin was as lonely and out of place as I was when I met him, though he was handling it better. But then, he was about to escape.

I was working out of a casual labor agency—we regulars called it a slave market. Actually, it was just the opposite of slavery. The people who ran it couldn’t have cared less whether or not you showed up to do the work they offered. They always had more job hunters than jobs anyway. If you wanted them to think about using you, you went to their office around six in the morning, signed in, and sat down to wait. Waiting with you were winos trying to work themselves into a few more bottles, poor women with children trying to supplement their welfare checks, kids trying to get a first job, older people who’d lost one job too many, and usually a poor crazy old street lady who talked to herself constantly and who wasn’t going to be hired no matter what because she only wore one shoe.

You sat and sat until the dispatcher either sent you out on a job or sent you home. Home meant no money. Put another potato in the oven. Or in desperation, sell some blood at one of the store fronts down the street from the agency. I had only done that once.

Getting sent out meant the minimum wage—minus Uncle Sam’s share—for as many hours as you were needed. You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory, washed dishes, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise … you did whatever you were sent out to do. It was nearly always mindless work, and as far as most employers were concerned, it was done by mindless people. Nonpeople rented for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. It didn’t matter.

I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours. Finally, I got up and wrote. At one or two in the morning, I was fully awake, fully alive, and busy working on my novel. During the day, I carried a little box of No Doz. I kept awake with them, but not very wide awake. The first thing Kevin ever said to me was, “Why do you go around looking like a zombie all the time?”

He was just one of several regular employees at an auto-parts warehouse where a group of us from the agency were doing an inventory. I was wandering around between shelves of nuts, bolts, hubcaps, chrome, and heaven knew what else checking other people’s work. I had a habit of showing up every day and of being able to count, so the supervisor decided that zombie or not, I should check the others. He was right. People came in after a hard night of drinking and counted five units per clearly-marked, fifty-unit container.

“Zombie?” I repeated, looking up from a tray of short black wires at Kevin.

“You look like you sleepwalk through the day,” he said. “Are you high on something or what?”

He was just a stock helper or some such bottom-of-the-ladder type. He had no authority over me, and I didn’t owe him any explanations.

“I do my work,” I said quietly. I turned back to the wires, counted them, corrected the inventory slip, initialed it, and moved down to the next shelf.

“Buz told me you were a writer,” said the voice that I thought had gone away.

“Look, I can’t count with you talking to me.” I pulled out a tray full of large screws—twenty-five to a box.

“Take a break.”

“Did you see that agency guy they sent home yesterday? He took one break too many. Unfortunately, I need this job.”

“Are you a writer?”

“I’m a joke as far as Buz is concerned. He thinks people are strange if they even read books. Besides,” I added bitterly, “what would a writer be doing working out of a slave market?”

“Keeping herself in rent and hamburgers, I guess. That’s what I’m doing working at a warehouse.”

I woke up a little then and really looked at him. He was an unusual-looking white man, his face young, almost unlined, but his hair completely gray and his eyes so pale as to be almost colorless. He was muscular, well-built, but no taller than my own five-eight so that I found myself looking directly into the strange eyes. I looked away startled, wondering whether I had really seen anger there. Maybe he was more important in the warehouse than I had thought. Maybe he had some authority …

“Are you a writer?” I asked.

“I am now,” he said. And he smiled. “Just sold a book. I’m getting out of here for good on Friday.”

I stared at him with a terrible mixture of envy and frustration. “Congratulations.”

“Look,” he said, still smiling, “it’s almost lunch time. Eat with me. I want to hear about what you’re writing.”

And he was gone. I hadn’t said yes or no, but he was gone.

“Hey!” whispered another voice behind me. Buz. The agency clown when he was sober. Wine put him into some kind of trance, though, and he just sat and stared and looked retarded—which he wasn’t, quite. He just didn’t give a damn about anything, including himself. He drank up his pay and walked around in rags. Also, he never bathed. “Hey, you two gonna get together and write some books?” he asked, leering.

“Get out of here,” I said, breathing as shallowly as possible.

“You gonna write some poor-nography together!” He went away laughing.

Later, at one of the round rusting metal tables in the corner of the warehouse that served as the lunch area, I found out more about my new writer friend. Kevin Franklin, his name was, and he’d not only gotten his book published, but he’d made a big paperback sale. He could live on the money while he wrote his next book. He could give up shitwork, hopefully forever …

“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked when he stopped for breath. The warehouse was in a newly built industrial section of Compton, far enough from coffee shops and hot dog stands to discourage most of us from going out to eat. Some people brought their lunches. Others bought them from the catering truck. I had done neither. All I was having was a cup of the free dishwater coffee available to all the warehouse workers.

“I’m on a diet,” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, then got up, motioned me up. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“To the truck if it’s still there.”

“Wait a minute, you don’t have to …”

“Listen, I’ve been on that kind of diet.”

“I’m all right,” I lied, embarrassed. “I don’t want anything.”

He left me sitting there, went to the truck, and came back with a hamburger, milk, a small wedge of apple pie.

“Eat,” he said. “I’m still not rich enough to waste money, so eat.”

To my own surprise, I ate. I hadn’t intended to. I was caffeine jittery and surly and perfectly capable of wasting his money. After all, I’d told him not to spend it. But I ate.

Buz sidled by. “Hey,” he said, low-voiced. “Porn!” He moved on.

“What?” said Kevin.

“Nothing,” I said. “He’s crazy.” Then, “Thanks for the lunch.”

“Sure. Now tell me, what is it you write?”

“Short stories, so far. But I’m working on a novel.”

“Naturally. Have any of your stories sold?”

“Some. To little magazines no one ever heard of. The kind that pay in copies of the magazine.”

He shook his head. “You’re going to starve.”

“No. After a while, I’ll convince myself that my aunt and uncle were right.”

“About what? That you should have been an accountant?”

I surprised myself again by laughing aloud. The food was reviving me. “They didn’t think of accounting,” I said. “But they would have approved of it. It’s what they would call sensible. They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother. At the very best, a teacher.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “I was supposed to be an engineer, myself.”

“That’s better, at least.”

“Not to me.”

“Well anyway, now you have proof that you were right.”

He shrugged and didn’t tell me what he would later—that his parents, like mine, were dead. They had died years before in an auto accident still hoping that he might come to his senses and become an engineer.

“My aunt and uncle said I could write in my spare time if I wanted to,” I told him. “Meanwhile, for the real future, I was to take something sensible in school if I expected them to support me. I went from the nursing program into a secretarial major, and from there to elementary education. All in two years. It was pretty bad. So was I.”

“What did you do?” he asked. “Flunk out?”

I choked on a piece of pie crust. “Of course not! I always got good grades. They just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t manufacture enough interest in the subjects to keep me going. Finally, I got a job, moved away from home, and quit school. I still take extension classes at UCLA, though, when I can afford them. Writing classes.”

“Is this the job you got?”

“No, I worked for a while at an aerospace company. I was just a clerk-typist, but I talked my way into their publicity office. I was doing articles for their company newspaper and press releases to send out. They were glad to have me do it once I showed them I could. They had a writer for the price of a clerk-typist.”

“Sounds like something you could have stayed with and moved up.”

“I meant to. Ordinary clerical work, I couldn’t stand, but that was good. Then about a year ago, they laid off the whole department.”

He laughed, but it sounded like sympathetic laughter.

Buz, coming back from the coffee machine, muttered, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!”

I closed my eyes in exasperation. He always did that. Started a “joke” that wasn’t funny to begin with, then beat it to death. “God, I wish he’d get drunk and shut up!”

“Does getting drunk shut him up?” asked Kevin.

I nodded. “Nothing else will do it.”

“No matter. I heard what he said this time.”

The bell rang ending the lunch half-hour, and he grinned. He had a grin that completely destroyed the effect of his eyes. Then he got up and left.

But he came back. He came back all week at breaks, at lunch. My daily draw back at the agency gave me money enough to buy my own lunches—and pay my landlady a few dollars—but I still looked forward to seeing him, talking to him. He had written and published three novels, he told me, and outside members of his family, he’d never met anyone who’d read one of them. They’d brought so little money that he’d gone on taking mindless jobs like this one at the warehouse, and he’d gone on writing—unreasonably, against the advice of saner people. He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying. And now, finally …

“I’m even crazier than you,” he said. “After all I’m older than you. Old enough to recognize failure and stop dreaming, so I’m told.”

He was a prematurely gray thirty-four. He had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two.

“You look older,” he said tactlessly.

“So do you,” I muttered.

He laughed. “I’m sorry. But at least it looks good on you.”

I wasn’t sure what “it” was that looked good on me, but I was glad he liked it. His likes and dislikes were becoming important to me. One of the women from the agency told me with typical slave-market candor that he and I were “the weirdest-looking couple” she had ever seen.

I told her, not too gently, that she hadn’t seen much, and that it was none of her business anyway. But from then on, I thought of Kevin and I as a couple. It was pleasant thinking.

My time at the warehouse and his job there ended on the same day. Buz’s matchmaking had given us a week together.

“Listen,” said Kevin on the last day, “you like plays?”

“Plays? Sure. I wrote a couple while I was in high school. One-acters. Pretty bad.”

“I did something like that myself.” He took something from his pocket and held it out to me. Tickets. Two tickets to a hit play that had just come to Los Angeles. I think my eyes glittered.