The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (23 page)

“You should really get rid of this thing,” his mother suggested on the drive home from the hospital. She rode in the backseat, which was grimy with sawdust. “Don’t you need a truck for your business?”

“Lardass doesn’t like anything
old,
” his father put in.

“Call her Caddy, please,” Paul replied. He found his mother in the rearview. “The trunk’s enormous. All of creation would fit in that thing.”

He had no intention of selling the Mercury. Always in friends, there were little traits one had to excuse.

Paul’s only job was to take Edmund on afternoon drives. Caddy needed an hour of uninterrupted silence, which didn’t seem like much to ask, but an hour had never seemed so long. Thinking his mother’s Corolla was at fault, he switched to the Mercury, which his father came to prefer because Paul let him smoke in it.

Edmund Lann tapped the car window with his wedding ring. “This damn thing will die,” he said. The gold ring caught the sun. It didn’t blind Paul, but he couldn’t see past it and braked. “Right there,” the bad voice insisted. The ring struck the window again. Beyond the sidewalk, in a lush yard, water flowed from the end of an elevated garden hose, soaking a leafy plant. There had to be a person holding the hose, but all Paul could see was a canvas glove gripping the nozzle.

“Remember this street,” his father said. “Can you manage that?”

“It’s Calgary Street,” Paul said.

“Unless you’re an idiot, you don’t water leaves in this kind of heat,” his father said. “It sucks the life out of them.” As if to underscore the words, the air conditioner belt squealed. The rush of air through its vents became audible, a strained quality to the sound, as if the car could not catch its breath.

“I don’t see how water can make a plant dry up,” Paul replied.

Edmund waved his hand at the window, which meant they should move on. Paul pressed the accelerator. The engine revved but the car resisted for a moment before heaving forward.

“Where to?” Paul asked.

Edmund gripped the exposed foam of the armrest. “Anywhere,
dope.
”

The bad voice was never deeply submerged. It lurked below conversations, ready to show its scaly head. In the past, it had disappeared after a few days. But Paul had been in town a week, and the voice still dominated his father.

“Keep this heap moving,” it said.

The territory damaged by a stroke determines the nature of the human consequences. His father’s strokes resulted in general diminishment rather than the paralysis that selects one side of the body over the other. Why his blood vessels deteriorated in a single region of the brain, doctors could not explain. One specialist, pointing with a red laser at a cranial map, made a little circle at the back of the skull. “It’s as if it has a mind of its own,” he said, seeing no irony in the comment. The whirling laser had created the image of a target.

The car grew sluggish and slowed. Paul signaled and turned onto a side street to disguise the trouble. He was tired of people complaining about his car. After a moment, the Mercury recovered. It always did.

“Isn’t there a Negro spiritual about Calgary Street?” his father pondered, his voice seeming to soften. But it immediately changed back. “I
knew
you’d turn here.”

“You said ‘anywhere.’ I don’t care where we go.”

“You can’t keep away from it.”

“Am I to supposed to think that makes sense?”

Paul had learned to remain calm during Edmund’s tirades, but it wasn’t easy. The first stroke had sent his father plummeting from a kitchen chair. His fork had spun through the air and then caught in the carpet’s weave, which made it stand on its tines. Paul hadn’t been there, but his mother had described it repeatedly, as it were a historic event. She never neglected the detail of the tumbling fork. “We were using the good silver,” she liked to note.

“There, buster,” his father croaked. He poked his finger at the car window.

An expanse of grass came into view beyond the passenger window, walled off by the stucco face of a stubbornly ugly house. The Mercury took them past it and to the end of the block before Paul realized it was the former and current residence of his ex-wife.

“I didn’t even notice we were on her street,” Paul said.

A pickup flew past, tossing a rock against the windshield.

“You don’t notice every day,” his father replied.

Had he been hoping to catch a glance of Laura? He didn’t think so. He had just been driving. The Mercury coughed as they rounded the corner. The air conditioner belt whined every time the car slowed. Paul needed to get back to his work. Hardwood from South America was already on its way to his converted garage. He had done his duty to his parents. It was time to go home.

His father’s ring again tapped the passenger window, this time to refer to the automobile itself.

“It’s like me,” he said. He leaned forward to touch the tiny chip in the windshield made by the rock. “Not long for this world.”

The Mercury lurched. Paul steered it toward the desert.

“We’ll get out of the city,” he said.

Edmund did not reply, slipping at last into the silence he would eventually find during each of their drives. Paul wondered whether he was brooding or simply separated from language altogether, wordless among the million things he daily encountered. Marooned in a sea of unnameable objects. The desert sprang up just beyond the city. Ears of giant prickly pear wobbled with each passing car, and Edmund stirred to life. He lit a cigarette and asked Paul about his job.

“I quit the paper. Did Mom tell you?”

“She doesn’t tell me a goddamn thing.” The cigarette raged crimson in his mouth. “But she did tell me that.”

“I make furniture full-time.”

“You always liked wood,” he said. The hand that held the cigarette motioned to the windshield. The chip in the glass had already turned into a crack.

In high school, Paul had built a complex receptacle that still covered one wall of his parents’ living room, holding a television and stereo, potted plants, books, videotapes, the swollen pile of mail no one could face. His mother had recently added a collage of photographs—Laura and Paul in their wedding clothes, Caddy as a girl in west Texas, and Edmund Lann wearing the face he wore before the lacunae formed in his brain.

“Wood can’t be forced,” Paul had told Laura when they were children and tormenting each other with their bodies. He had taken her home to show her his wall of shelves. “You have to discover the form within it.” He had heard someone say this about marble.

She had not been impressed. “You found a tree that wanted to be an entertainment center?”

If he could relive that moment—as he had in his head a thousand times—he would tell her the passions of wood were every bit as mysterious and furtive as the passions of people. And then, before she could ridicule him, he would kiss her.

His father’s ring tap demanded his attention. “Wheat,” he said. The green field waved at them, wind blundering over its surface, a movement oceanic, peaceful, friendly. At this distance from his last nap, his father grew incapable of sentences. “Saguaro,” he said of the giant cactus. His voice had begun to accumulate the slats of sleep. “Ruined,” he decreed a ramshackle hut. He must have thought it abandoned despite laundry flapping on a line—a child’s pink pajamas walking in the wind.

“Fire,” Edmund said.

On the road’s shoulder, a car blazed. Flames rose up from the underside and licked the deep blue doors. A man sat cross-legged, like an insect, before it. He waved them off when Paul slowed the car. He wanted no company.

“Damn,” Paul said.

His father roused himself, looking about, expecting, perhaps, an artificial reservoir. The rearview mirror showed the flames for a long while and then a black question mark of smoke. Ahead, heat lifting from the asphalt made the road ripple and writhe, like the long black spine of a reptile.

He had to carry his father inside, an awkward package, but Paul negotiated the doorway and deposited his father in the recliner. His mother came in to watch.

“You’ve worn him out,” she said approvingly. Her hands methodically worked a dish towel. “Cards?”

They played honeymoon bridge. She relayed news about the neighborhood: fresh tan paint on a house down the street had dried to a pumpkin shade, the limbs of a pine tree on Lavender were growing crooked to skirt a peaked roof, a new driveway another street over cracked the week it was poured but the fractures miraculously disappeared.

“Concrete is different now,” she said.

Paul discerned the direction of her conversation, a sequential geographical journey that would take them to Laura’s house. Subtlety in some people proceeds at such a deliberate pace and with such a logical stride that one cannot help running ahead and opening the door.

“How’s Laura doing?” he asked.

“She still thinks of us as family. Coming to the hospital and all.”

“Nice of her to make an appearance.”

His mother’s great hair trembled, and Paul changed the subject.

“I don’t know how you can stand it,” he said. “Every day with him. He’s so rude… he’s not even—”

“Your father’s always been a little mean,” she said, dealing their hands. “Now he has no other resource. I could hardly wish to deny him the one thing he can still feel.”

“I don’t remember
any
meanness in him.”

“That’s good,” she said. “I’m glad you feel that way.” She was the type of cardplayer who plucked and rearranged her cards, as if they were constantly shifting allegiances. “I don’t have that kind of hole in my memory. We all have meanness in us.”

This sounded like an accusation, but he let it pass.

She won every hand. Cards spilled from her grip in a natural procession, like the movements of a symphony, the acts of a play, the events of an orderly life.

In the other room, the television came alive, meaning that Edmund’s nap had ended.

“You should see the child,” she said. Before Paul could protest, she added, “I know he’s not your son, but she
was
your wife. And that child does bear a startling resemblance to you.” Her hands leapt up to keep him from interrupting, and the cards escaped, dropping to the table. “I don’t need to hear about the yearlong gap. I believe that he’s not your boy. You should still go see them.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“You love her.” She scooped up the cards. “Lie to yourself if you have to, but don’t lie to me.”

She began dealing a hand of solitaire.

The Mercury had come from the factory white, but now its paint was gray and pitted like unhealthy skin. The interior was worse: dashboard gutted, radio gone, idiot lights dead, even the glove box—door and all—vanished, leaving only a gaping metal sneer. The add-on air conditioner sagged beneath the skeletal dash and beside a toggle switch for the headlights, which hung loose in the air from an awkward gathering of wires. A red wool blanket that had once covered Paul’s childhood bed camouflaged the front seat. The engine idled nervously before the house where Laura lived. The shudder of the headlights suggested the flicker of flashback in movies, but Paul resisted memory. The air conditioner belt began to slip, and the engine died. Heat swept in and slid its dry hand over his mouth. Before he swung the car door fully open, Laura stepped from the corner of the house as if from the corner of a dream. She wore a sleeveless white blouse and yellow pants stretched tight over her hips. A garden hose gushed in her hand, while her bare feet crushed the grass. Paul hesitated on the Mercury’s seat. The dome light decided to work and turned the windshield into a mirror. The crack had spread across the glass, separating the top of Paul’s head from the bottom.

Laura watched him climb from the car, her brows rising as if she couldn’t quite recall who he was. She carried the hose to the outdoor faucet and twisted the handle. The water slowed and stopped, yet she held on to the hose as she approached him, water rising and gagging out, as if from the mouth of a child who had almost drowned.

“Have you come to see me or him?” She dropped the hose and the spray hit his ankles. “Sorry,” she added.

“You look like yourself,” he said.

She offered her hand and he took it. They had once made love in a public park, beneath monkey bars, the night sky divided into neighborhoods by symmetrical metal tubes.

Her front door made a familiar rasp.

“My mom’s not home,” Laura said. “She’s learning to throw pots.” She guided him inside and to the couch. “I’m a teller.” She named the bank that employed her. “It’s only temporary. Mostly, I take care of Cliff.”

Paul told her he did nothing anymore but make furniture.

“Eventually, the money might be good.” He tried to articulate his dilemma, the split between art and commerce, but it sounded foolish to him. “I’m happier,” he said, “being around lumber.”

When the child tottered into the room, Paul’s voice faltered. It was not in the boy’s features, exactly, that they shared a resemblance. Not in the curl of his brown hair, although Paul’s brown hair curled if he let it get long. Not in the shade of his eyes, despite the identical green. A thousand others in this town had the same eyes and hair, the same western slant of shoulders and shape of mouth. Rather, it was in the lope this boy had, the hesitation every other step, the slight turn of the body away from the direction set by the head.

“Cliff,” Laura called and her son came to her. She had never changed her surname after the divorce. The boy’s last name was Lann. She said, “I thought it would be too strange to send you pictures.”

Paul asked the boy the only questions he could think of, the generic questions adults always asked. The thumb of Cliff’s right hand held down the pinkie, the remaining three announcing his age. His school was called Paper Tigers. He told Paul that Laura’s mother did not like to be called Grandma, a bevel of concern appearing on his forehead as he spoke the word. Then he announced that he had to go, his eyes veering anxiously in the direction of his room. Paul understood. The boy’s things demanded his attention—the little plastic men and their resilient cars, the interlocking blocks and animals filled with down. They called for him, and he had to go.