Round Rock (7 page)

“Remember how Harlow slept when he came here? Laid his head on a hamburger steak one night like it was a boudoir pillow.” This was John, the house manager, a blue-eyed Irishman whose nose and cheeks bore a permanent, bright webbing of red capillaries. John, sober for five years, had no discernible sense of humor, bullied the men, was rumored never to sleep, and otherwise, so far as Lewis could see, provided clear inducement for a person to keep drinking.

A late-night talk show was turned down so low that Lewis had to stop breathing to hear a gospel-pop singer describe her work with Haitian orphans. Then Gene, a tall and doughy ex-football player holding a pot of fresh coffee and mugs, blocked his view.

“Jesus,” Lewis said after his first sip. “No wonder you guys stay up all night, drinking this tar.”

“This ain’t strong,” said Chuck. “Drink a cup over at Red’s. He has that burnt-tasting stuff in little cups.”

“Espresso?”

“Shit, I don’t know.” Chuck had a forearm tattoo of a woman sunk ass-first in a martini glass with a banner that said
MAN’S RUIN.

“Who’s been over to Red’s?” asked Gene.

“He had me over there fixing a drain,” said Chuck.

“He never once asked me over,” said Gene.

“He doesn’t ask anybody over,” said John. “He lives there for a little privacy. I catch one of you over there buggin’ him, you’re out the same as for drinking or drugging.”

“I wish he still lived over here with us,” said Gene.

“Red never lived in this house,” said Chuck.

“That’s right,” said John.

“Did so,” said Gene. “I heard he was here till he was going to get married. Then he fixed up his place. Only the girl dumped him.”

“Pure caca,” said John.

“That’s not what I heard,” said Lee. With long blond hair and rock-star good looks, he was, at nineteen, the youngest guy at the farm. “I heard Red lived here till Ernie chased him out with a shotgun.”

The men in the parlor burst out laughing, even Lewis.

“I’m just telling you what I heard,” said Lee.

“It’s those voices in your head again,” said John.

“I don’t have voices in my head,” said Lee.

“You’re crazier than a rat in an oil drum,” said John. “You all are. A bunch of moody, sad-sack girls. Red this, Red that.”

Lewis slipped from the room. Except for John, he didn’t much mind the men. Or even being here at Round Rock. The almost heady lack of responsibility is how he’d always imagined life in a pricey private mental ward. Things could be a lot worse; he’d already heard stories of treatment programs where residents were made to pick up fields of dog shit, march in formation, and stay in group therapy sessions until everyone was blubbering. Here, nobody said boo as he slumbered through the days. Still, moving on through the dark, shabby rooms, he finally had to park himself on a dusty sofa, light a cigarette, and puzzle out how he, Lewis Fletcher, had come to be in a facility for recovery from alcoholism when, so far as he could tell, he wasn’t alcoholic.

Young Lee had confided at dinner that his last high was an ounce of hash, an eightball of coke, six Quaaludes and a dash of crystal, all hastily washed down with Cuervo shooters as police crossed a dance floor to arrest him for punching a bouncer. “Pooped my pants in the squad car,” he concluded cheerfully. At another meal, the men at Lewis’s table discussed what they drank when the booze ran out. Vanilla extract. Mouthwash. Aftershave. Everybody agreed aftershave was the worst—because of the burps it gave you. Lewis had never owned such a stash as Lee’s, nor had he sampled any one of the potions listed by his tablemates. At worst, he’d been playing a little fast and loose with alcohol in the last term.

He’d taken the last two quarters off to save money and finish a raft of incompletes. Six incompletes. Six incompletes out of nine courses. Without classes to attend, he began to feel peripheral, like the hangers-on lurking around every graduate program. The papers haunted him. “Flaubert and Racism in Late-Nineteenth-Century France,” “Swedenborg, Blake, and Valuation of the Imagination,” “Inscape and Individuation: Concepts of Self in Hopkins and Jung” … Where to start? Always, it seemed, with a little lubrication, a quick stop at the Think Tank, where he invariably ran into a colleague or a professor, someone, at any rate, who bought him one more drink, and one more after that. Many Round Rock residents
blamed their drinking on raging fathers, pillhead mothers, overcontrolling wives and girlfriends. Lewis blamed his on literary culture.

L
AWRENCE
, a sweet homosexual speed freak who manned the clothes room, took Lewis under his wing, at least sartorially. “You have to class up. Beatniks are so passé,” Lawrence said, and slipped him freshly laundered, donated clothing, all of it cleaner, newer, and more fashionable than anything Lewis had left in his professor’s garage.

Chipper in his new clothes and increasingly well-rested—he had a sense of swimming through viscous green liquid toward a dim light—Lewis began to seek out intelligent conversation. Carl liked to talk about waterskiing. Lee punctuated the briefest exchanges with fast, furious jamming on the air guitar. Lawrence spoke knowledgeably of designer labels and suit cuts. The only person who displayed anything resembling a literate sensibility was the head honcho himself. Red Ray was the only speaker at AA meetings who didn’t put Lewis out cold: he was funny and modest, and once he’d even quoted from a Blake poem: “I give you the end of a golden string….” Also, when Red laughed, it was quiet, inward, almost like a sob. Lewis found this endearing, especially in such a large man.

The trouble was, everybody else wanted a piece of Red Ray, too. Whenever he came into the dining room, there was an obvious, communal hush. Hands reached for Red’s hand. Men interrupted their own conversations to greet him. This reminded Lewis of the time he and a girlfriend went to see a man who trained animals for Hollywood. The man had trained a bear for beer ads and a stag for insurance ads and now ran a riding stable. When the three of them walked out to the barn, the farm dogs leapt joyously in front of the trainer, dropping sticks and toys at his feet. In the corral, horses edged toward him, pushing and nudging and surreptitiously nipping at one another to get closer, to be the one spoken to and petted. That’s what it was like when Red Ray came into the Blue House—the same animal magnetism. As Red passed his table, Lewis didn’t reach out a hand, but inside he craned and yearned with the rest of them, one more beast nuzzling up.

O
N HIS
second Sunday, visitors’ day, Lewis felt strong enough—and social enough—to play softball. A diamond had been chalked into the base of the mansion’s gently sloping lawn. The game served primarily as a diversion for residents who, like Lewis, had no visitors, although a few visitors also played, and any number of Round Rock alumni arrived to flesh out the teams. Lewis was instructed to choose a side: Shitheads or Doodads. He chose the former—Red Ray was their pitcher—and thus made what he learned was a lifelong commitment. As the day warmed up, his teammates peeled off their sweatshirts, revealing T-shirts that read,
ONCE A SHITHEAD ALWAYS A SHITHEAD.
Lewis played both the morning and the afternoon game, back to back, a total of twenty-two innings. The next morning, his ninth at Round Rock, he could barely walk and couldn’t move his neck at all. Lewis was, in fact, in worse pain than when he was fresh out of detox, and John informed him that R & R was over and it was time to go to work.

W
HEN
Round Rock first opened, Red started out thinking—his first mistake, he always said—that if he put the drunks to work in the groves, the farm would support itself. This didn’t play out precisely as planned: the groves were in such a state of neglect, the handful of newly recovering alkies so shaky, and Red’s farming knowledge so halting that the first project—removing deadwood from a two-acre grove—took three months.

One day, on his way to the farm-equipment dealership in Buchanan, Red stopped in at Victor Ibañez’s grocería for cigarettes. The small, cavelike grocería was crammed with shelves of canned goods and fishing equipment, and racks of gloves, Chap Stick, sunglasses, and car deodorizers. Faded piñatas and dust-furred coils of chiles hung from the ceiling. Two highway patrolmen sat on stools near the register, and on the counter itself sat Billie Fitzgerald, who lived with her father and son in an historic adobe on the banks of the Rito River. It was Billie who had instigated the court orders to prevent Red from opening his drunk farm.

To give Billie room to leave or move, Red hung back by the bulletin board near the door, pretending to read ads for pygmy goats and lawn mower/outboard motor repair.

“Hey, Red Ray,” Victor Ibañez called out. “What d’ya need?”

“Smokes,” Red said and reached for the flying pack of Pall Malls. “Thanks.” He still had to step forward to pay.

Billie slid off the counter, moving to one side. She was quite tall and fit. Muddy clothes only underscored her imperious, pedigreed good looks. Her neurasthenically pale skin was scrupulously covered even in this dry summer heat.

“What brings you to town so early?” Victor said.

“On my way to pick up an auger,” Red answered quietly.

“What do you need an auger for?” said Billie.

“I ordered a couple hundred trees to fill out a few groves and I need to dig the holes.”

“I thought you were raising souls out there, not fruit.”

“Hopefully, the souls will raise the fruit.”

Billie stared at Red and pulled absently at her springy black hair. She harvested a few long, curly strands in her fingers, then dropped them on the old wood floor. “If I remember right,” she said, “Sally had a couple augers in the warehouse.”

“They went at the auction.”

Billie painstakingly dropped more hair onto the floor.

“I’m gonna make you sweep before you leave,” Victor said.

She ignored him. “Okay, Red.” She sighed as if accepting an endless, onerous task. “I’ll bring you an auger.”

She came that very afternoon, and after a twenty-minute walk down the roadway, she told Red he had to lease the groves if he wanted to save his shirt. “You don’t seriously think,” she said, “you can run a drunk farm
and
a major citrus ranch?”

“That’s the whole idea. The men work the farm.”

“C’mon, Red. You’re too nonprofit to be a farmer. You can’t make money and help people at the same time. And even if you could, farming’s not the way to do it. Now, you can lease ’em to me or you can lease ’em to Sunkist.”

He leased them to her; she, in turn, hired her work crews off the farm. Given her reputation for machismo and slave driving, any resident who worked for Billie soon called her, among other things, the Amazon Next Door.

L
EWIS
didn’t want to work for
any
Amazon, especially one he pictured as a steely older woman wearing jodhpurs and carrying a quirt. Neither did cultivating the organic vegetable garden appeal to him, nor joining the grounds crew. That left the garage.

In his twenties, at a loss at what to do with a B.A. in European history, Lewis had worked in a friend’s garage in Monrovia. Karmachanics hadn’t lasted long; instead of recycling the proceeds, the owner spent them on cocaine, which he ingested or sold to his employees at cost. When the business went under, right about the same time Lewis’s marriage ended, he found a job in an auto parts store in Pasadena.

To be a good parts man—and Lewis had been an excellent one for five long years—you have to be a demon for details and compulsively, even supernaturally, tidy; otherwise chaos boils up so fast that you might as well shut down the store as try to find a Volvo alternator. While Lewis wasn’t particularly neat about his own person or living space, he was used to a workplace where everything had—and was in—its designated place. The Round Rock garage, then, was a version of hell.

On the far end of the farm, near the workers’ village, the garage was an old-fashioned setup with two wide bays that originally served the tractors, trucks, spray rigs, and forklifts of Sally Morrot’s ranch. Instead of hydraulic lifts, each bay had a narrow trough where a man stood to work beneath a vehicle. “It’s like a grave,” Lewis complained to Gene, the only other mechanic. “You know how monks used to sleep in coffins? Well, we get to work all day in graves.”

They were to perform simple, tax-deductible tune-ups and oil changes for the few patient locals who brought in their cars. Since both Lewis and Gene had less than thirty days of sobriety, neither could leave the farm for parts; they had to phone in their orders, then ask someone else to pick them up. Gene liked handling this procedure, having quickly figured out that by asking the
wrong
people, he could delay a single parts delivery for days, during which time he could watch TV in the parlor with impunity.

While Lewis waited three days for an oil filter, he gradated socket sets and crescent wrenches, labeled drawers, and matched various tools to outlines painted on pegboards. Gene, putting in a brief, guilty appearance, said that Lewis was exhibiting the classic symptoms of an adult child of an alcoholic—overresponsibility, workaholism, obsession with control. Lewis wondered to what condition, then, did one attribute avoidance, laziness, and chronic messiness?

After that first, interminable oil change, Lewis resolved to track down his own parts. His next project, the reconditioning of a recently donated, ice-cream-white ’65 Ford Fairlane, might require any number of parts orders. He wrote a preliminary list—
points, plugs, spark plug wires, belts
—and went in search of Red Ray.

A
FEW
hundred yards west of the garage, two shady cul-de-sacs branched off from the roadway, with nine small bungalows scattered
between them. The former fieldworkers’ village looked like tourist courts Lewis had seen in Pasadena, although not as quaint or well preserved. Red’s house and the office, both painted a rustic redwood brown with ivory trim, had been landscaped with lawns and roses and house-swallowing bougainvillea. The other seven cottages were boarded up and sitting in hard dirt like studies in decrepitude: crumbling chimneys, listing porches, silvery clapboard shedding a few last flakes of paint.