Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (12 page)

“Trash,” she said, throwing the magazine down and pushing her chair back. “Why do I read this trash?”

Charlie froze. Was he supposed to answer that? He steeled himself for whatever was coming next—he was making a racket with the spoon, or his beans were stinking up the house, or he was breathing too loud.

“I'll tell you something. Those Jesus boys. They hate a goat. I
know
they've got plenty of hay back there in their barns. But now that the stuff's as good as gold, they just don't want to see it go to a goat. Cows? Yes. Horses, sure. But wait till old Lucy drives up wanting a few bales for her goats—then it's ‘No deal, ma'am, sorry I can't help you, but I sure can't. Why don't you try on down the road?'”

“Don't call them that,” Charlie said. He'd been so ready for an insult that this one seemed directed at him. And it was, wasn't it? She looked down her nose at
everybody
.

“Why not?” She turned to him, seeming genuinely to want to know.

Charlie shrugged, thrown off guard. “It ain't right,” he said lamely.

She turned away, slapped her hand on the magazine, pulled it back towards herself, and opened it. “Well, Charlie? I wonder what they call
me
? Twenty-five years they've kept me shut out. Not a single one of them has ever offered me a hand. Sniffing around this place like vultures, wondering when I'm going to throw in the towel. Meanwhile, half the time I'm out here with no help, and there's just simply some things a woman can't do by herself.”

Really? he thought. That's not what
you
say. He shifted his weight. “Still ain't right.”

She let out a violent rush of air, put her hands on top of her head. “This is not an easy life, Charlie. It is one hell of a life. I'll tell you, when I was your age”—she looked at him—“how old are you?”

“Eighteen.” Here it comes, he thought, putting his spoon down and clenching his fist. All right. Give me the lecture. Tell me I should go home. Go on. I can take whatever you've got.

She looked up towards the ceiling, as if searching for something. “Eighteen. When I was your age—no, maybe a little older—I thought I had figured out the secret. My parents' life, it was a trap, I could see that. All about appearances. They were just consumed with keeping up appearances. My father worked himself to death so we could live in the right neighborhood. And my mother. God, my mother. Cocktail parties and bridge games. She had these guest towels—the guest linens, she called them—and she took them out of the closet and ironed them and put them out in every bathroom when company was coming over. It seemed like that was all she was ever doing—unfolding the ironing board to iron the guest linens, hanging them up, folding them up, and putting them back in the closet—and God forbid anyone should ever use these towels to actually dry their
hands
.

“The thing was, all my friends were buying into it. Getting married straight out of college, moving into houses just like their mothers' with a monogrammed set of towels all their own. Not me. Oh, no. I was too smart for that. I got out. I started new. Never mind that I wouldn't have any money. I'm going to live simply, I told myself. I'm going to live simply and close to
the land. Get my hands dirty and find real satisfaction, and I found a man who said that was what he wanted, too.

“But it turns out—it turns out. One more year, I always tell myself, one more year and it will be running like clockwork. Every year I think, just make it through kidding season, Lucy. And then kidding season comes, and something happens like that little white kid, and it takes years off my life.
Years
. No matter how hard you work, it's a gamble and the house always wins. Like the weather. Lord. I don't think we'll ever see rain again.”

Charlie felt flushed and disoriented, not sure which way was up, the feeling of falling in a dream. What was she trying to say to him? “It will break sometime,” he mumbled, failing in his attempt to sound like a man. Wasn't that what she wanted him to do? Comfort her?

She let the magazine slap shut. “Of course it will, Charlie. Don't think I don't know that. I've been at this longer than you've been alive. Of course it will break. That's not the point. It will break and then it will dry up and then it will break again. They'll stop eating whatever it is they're eating out there and the milk will get back to normal and there'll be money coming in again. So it goes. That's not the point. The point is, Charlie, we're in for a hell of a fall.”

We? Charlie looked around the kitchen in a panic.
We?

 

A week later Lucy headed out to Georgia on a tip she'd gotten on some cheap hay. She would be gone overnight, staying with friends, and her preparations for leaving had the feeling
of a much larger event. Early that morning, she checked and triple-checked things up at the barn, made long lists for Charlie on the backs of envelopes. She put makeup on.

Charlie followed her around, nodding as she ticked off instructions, biting his tongue and reminding himself that for twenty-four blessed hours, he would have the place to himself. Lucy was like he'd never seen her, giddy with excitement.

Finally, satisfied with everything, she went up to her truck and threw her bag in the back. Charlie stood a few feet away, shaded his eyes, and lit a cigarette, watching.

One foot on the running board, she turned. “Let me have two of those.”

He raised his eyebrows and shook two cigarettes out of the pack, stepping forward. She plucked them out of his hand and then pointed them at him. She narrowed her eyes, but her voice was playful. “I don't want to hear one word out of you. Not one word. I'm entitled to two cigarettes every once in a while.” She held them up in front of her nose. “One to get me to Georgia. And one to get me back.” She tucked one behind each ear and smiled at him.

Charlie smiled back. He held up his hands. “I ain't saying nothing.”

She got in the truck and pulled the door shut. “Listen,” she said, rolling down the window and smiling again. “Try not to burn the place down, all right?”

Charlie raised his hand again to shade his eyes, squinting into the morning sun. He felt fifty pounds lighter, celebratory. He grinned. “Can't be making no guarantees.”

 

As the hours wore on, his freedom turned into a burden, and Charlie was overwhelmed by the mounting pressure to make the most of his time. After morning chores, he ended up sleeping most of the day, sweating, the blanket over his face to keep off the flies. In the afternoon he went down to the house to watch television, but the only thing he could find was the local news. A church full of men, clasping hands and swaying, prayed for rain. A ticker at the bottom of the screen reported over and over that there had been three heat-related deaths in a town just twenty miles away. Charlie stared blankly at the screen. He could not draw the connection between the world of those men in the church and the world of the farm, between the heat that beat on the barn and the fields and the heat that was killing people—
killing
people—right down the road.

He switched the TV off. Why bother praying, anyway? What good was that going to do? What you had to do was take things in your own hands. Write your own story. God or anybody wasn't going to just
give
it to you.

He got up and walked around. Creaking under his feet, the floorboards were hot, as if embers were smoldering beneath them. He had a strange sensation that the place itself was judging him. Even the furniture seemed to watch him with critical eyes.

He made a sudden turn and, feeling bold, walked down the hall to Lucy's bedroom. He had never been inside, but he had seen, from the yard, the air-conditioning unit in her
window, and had envied the sound night's sleep he imagined she got in the cool air.

When he opened the door, an orange-and-white flash of fur sprung out at him, and he wheeled around as if he had sprung a booby trap, expecting to see her in the hall behind him. Go on, he told himself, his heart pounding. She's miles and miles away.

The bed—unmade, a nest of green and yellow daisy print sheets, an old tattered quilt, one pillow—was just a mattress on the floor, not much thicker than his own foam pad in the barn. He sat down on it. A sheet of plywood half covered a broken floorboard. Another cat slit its eyes at him from a pile of clothes in the corner. The air conditioner was unplugged, sagging, covered with dust, and obviously hadn't worked in years. The afternoon sun streamed in through the window. It was hot in there.

Though it shocked him to realize, it was somehow sexy, too, in the way that the few girls' rooms he'd been in were all sexy—the bra tossed carelessly on the chair, the mysterious jars and bottles on the nightstand. Mostly, though, it made him sad—the vase of withered wildflowers that should have been thrown out weeks ago, fruit flies hovering over it, the stack of well-leafed magazines on the floor—and the sadness and sexiness all wrapped up together confused him. An old pack of cigarettes was hidden in an enameled box next to the bed. Hidden from who? He picked up a corner of the quilt and let it drop. He smelled unwashed sheets, a faint scent of Lucy's shampoo, her sweat, the goat stench that he had long
since stopped noticing on himself. Her smell had become so familiar to him that it gave him a wave of nostalgia, as if he was remembering it from somewhere long ago. He felt so lonely that, for a minute, he wished she was there.

Ah, come on, he thought, and stood up. Come on, Lucy. He kicked at the pile of laundry. You didn't have to settle for this. What are you trying to prove? He pulled a dresser drawer open with a jerk and rooted around behind the clothes. Opened another, and then another, then turned back to the pile of clothes strewn on the floor. In the pocket of a pair of jeans, he found a wad of bills. He smoothed them out with shaking hands and counted them. Less than the price of a tank of gas. Would hardly get him over the state line. He stuffed them into his pocket anyway. “Sorry, Lucy,” he said aloud, realizing as he said it that he mostly meant it. But you owe me, he thought, kicking the clothes back into a pile and thinking of Darryl. Best advice that asshole ever gave me. It ain't stealing when you're owed.

 

Back up at the barn, his heart pounding, feeling rotten and hollow as an old stump, he walked in on a scene of destruction. The goats had broken into his room.

They did it to spite me, he thought, frozen in the doorway. Not out of hunger. Out of pure spite. The grain bags in the corner were ripped and torn, feed scattered everywhere. There was a hole chewed in his duffel bag, bullet-shaped turds in his clothes. They had pissed all over the mattress,
left the sheets in a tangle. As if they had gathered there for a final victory dance.

They'd been planning it. He reached down for his chewed-up sunglasses and then let them drop again to the floor. They'd just been biding their time.

He walked out of the barn. The sun was setting red over the hills. The house glared at him. There was not a single welcoming corner of the place, nowhere to take shelter. He went back into the barn, pulled the sheets off the mattress, dragged it into the yard, and soaked it with the hose. He threw the sheets on the burn pile, though there had been a burn ban on for months. He went into the paddock and nailed a two-by-four across the splintered board where they'd broken through the wall. The goats were in a nervous cluster under the pear tree, eyeing him. He swept his arm into the air and shouted and they took off down the hill.

The mattress dried fast in the last light of the day, but when dark finally fell and he lay down to sleep on it, it still reeked of piss. He tried to sleep anyway, desperate to escape for a few hours. He squeezed his eyes shut. With no sheets to pull up over his face, the flies dropped to his lips. Mice scurried over his legs, then something bigger. The goats had made their way back up to the paddock. He could hear them out there, rubbing their bodies against the dry wall of the barn. He heard their bells, the drag of the buck's tire and chain. The buck began to scrape his horns back and forth along the wall, a tin cup along the bars of a cell. Back and forth, back and forth, until the sound seemed like it was coming from
inside Charlie's skull. He covered his ears but still heard it.
Come out!
they were saying. Charlie lay still, afraid to move or make a sound.
Come out!
He reached down and groped for the sheets, forgetting there were no sheets.
Come out! Come out! Or we are coming in!

An hour or so before dawn he got up and ran. As if pulled by a greater force. Crossing the yard towards the truck in the dark he was cool as a breeze in the night air.

 

Charlie made it to the Gulf a couple of months after hurricane season. When he first saw the blue-gray water, he went down to the beach and dipped his hand in, to be sure he wasn't dreaming. He found a job his first week, working construction on new condominiums along the shore. He made good money, enough to rent a place of his own. After a few months, he was promoted to assistant foreman, if only because he was the one native speaker of English on the crew. From the men he worked with, he picked up a little Spanish—mostly words having to do with the weather, because it was what everyone talked about on the job.

The winter was mild, even for the Gulf, warm and still. After work they would all go down to a bar at the old marina that didn't bother to check IDs. Charlie usually bought the first round. They would sit out on the deck for hours and Charlie would look out at the piers and the few boats in the water and marvel at his good fortune. Sometimes he still couldn't believe he'd made it. He heard that the southeast had been hit
with freak snowstorms, record lows, ice that snapped power lines. Who's too close to the sun now? he thought, but fought a feeling of unease at the wild swings of extremes. When he heard a special report on the radio one night at the bar about a blizzard there, he couldn't even picture the place they were talking about. Still, he whistled through his teeth, as if he'd made a close call.
Está nevando,
he said to the others at the table, and pointed north, because he hadn't learned the word for
home.