The Slide: A Novel (9 page)

Look hard enough into eyes and you can see through them, glimpse the machinery operating these faces, the classical distaste for untested youth. The squint of judgment, the vacant gaze of absolute indifference, the steely eyes of those gauging privilege. The child sits among men, quivering.

“I don’t plan on letting anyone down.”

“Then I suggest you pull that ass back here at eight o’clock tomorrow
A.M.
Prompt.”

At home, I found a new package sitting at the foot of the table inside the front door. White and rectangular, no bigger than a shoebox, with one top corner covered in postage and international ink stamps.
Poste Italiane.

No, no, I would not let this one beat me. This inanimate
box
. Upstairs I set it on the bed while I peeled drenched cotton from my frame. I carried it into the bathroom, closed the toilet lid, and placed the box on top. Then a shower, shock of cold water on filthy-hot skin, the slowly achieved equilibrium. I dried with a very soft and very large towel.

I was still naked when I opened the box. I stood in front of the sink and cut the tape with a nail clipper, then probed inside with a finger. Counted two objects, smooth and cool and rock solid. Spheres. There was a note also, which I set aside while I let the balls roll around my palm and clack together. There was a redemptive, simple beauty to these balls—a peacefulness I could appreciate after a full day of adult labor. They arrested and calmed.

With the other hand I opened the letter:

P
otter—

I don’t believe I know anything right now, but something is making me think this trip should be longer. So we extended our train passes and shaved our heads. Carmel’s looks like a peanut. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re well.

Loves, 
Audrey

I checked the postmark. Nine days. For nine days Audrey knew she wasn’t coming back on schedule while I carried ignorantly on. I dropped the note into the toilet. I opened the window and threw the balls into the neighbor’s backyard. I flushed the toilet. Then I got dressed and drove to Stuart’s pool, where I drank and drank and then slept with my green shirt as a pillow. The next morning I woke up, put the shirt on, and drove to my first ever day of professional work.

Pine Ridge Water abided by no real system of inventory, neither for bottles nor coolers, so I erred on the side of abundance. I pulled bottles from great four-by-three-by-four metal racks and wheeled them to the van on a splintering dolly. Loaded one at a time, forty pounds each, gripping around the neck and pinching. I leaned and pushed shut the rusty door, climbed behind the wheel, and reversed out of the warehouse.

The van was old and white and windowless. And
creepy
. Only a Pine Ridge door magnet distinguished it from the gazillion cable and plumbing and child-molesting vans like it. With just one exterior mirror, cracked badly, the van gave little more than a vague idea what was behind me at any time. But it did move, and this was key.

In North City neighborhoods famous for criminal desperation, low-pressure fire hydrants sprayed sad arcs of water while unimpressed children sat on nearby stoops, clenching bright Popsicles that melted over their hands. I’d never used this word,
stoop,
but these couldn’t have been anything other. Roughly every third building’s windows were boarded, shattered, or simply gone. I scanned the few addresses I could find and smiled at the kids. The green polo and rusted van and the cooler I carried all functioned as camouflage. Behind an open door I saw five grown men in folding chairs, cardboard scattered across the floor. One more man than fans: two rectangular box fans resting in window frames while a standing fan occupied the room’s corner, oscillating in stuttered bursts, the fourth shaking as it spun overhead.

“Damn if it isn’t about time.”

One of the men stood and introduced himself as
Carl, fella
who’s been calling over and over again.
I smiled. The others laughed and then coughed from laughing too hard. Carl said he didn’t care where I put the cooler, as long as it worked. Warm air circulated through the room. They continued to laugh and I threw in a sleeve of paper cups, then thought what the hell and added two Premium bottles, gratis. Harmless gift. The old men clapped and whooped and laughed and coughed.

Other deliveries were as brief as setting bottles on a porch, collecting empty bottles, and tossing them into the back of the van. Mine was an antiroute of sorts, half drawn from the MUST DO stack of complaints in the office, half in response to the Summer Special. Into the kitchen nooks of houses bigger and colder than museums of modern art, switching out bottles while housewives looked through Lands’ End catalogs. Audrey now hairless, Audrey now at the hands of the robot with her emotionless finalities, her ones and zeros. Meanwhile, my daily routine was to become one of penetration into these homes dense with history, displayed like exhibits for a highly specific and private audience, which suddenly and mysteriously was me. The water guy. Potter Mays.

I was the first back to the warehouse and rushed through my paperwork with the immediacy of a man pursued. Back home I found a small collection of luxury sedans and medium SUVs parked in front of my house. My father was on a trip to Detroit for a convention on the Decline of the American City. I could hear my mother’s company as I went immediately upstairs from the front door, a chorus of loaded laughter echoing through the house. I took my time showering before returning downstairs. I stood at the border between kitchen and living room, clinging to this small bit of separation. The room was full of divorced women drinking white wine. Six of them plus my mother over by the window, all smiling now at my appearance. I sensed that these women all knew something I didn’t, a secret gained through the emergence from the wreck of failed marriage. I remembered that this was supposed to be a book club, and I began to worry for my mother, slumming it with these divorcées. What kind of influence was this? Quiet comparisons going on across the room, inquiries into my life, my plans.

“Yes,” I answered. “Still with the same girl.”

Later I sat with Stuart at the pool’s deck table, the candle’s orange flame glowing into an otherwise silver dusk. I was admiring the abrasions on my hands, the blisters-turned-open-wounds. I watched my friend lean forward to light a cigarette from the candle, then held one of my hands up for him to see. He squinted and nodded approvingly.

“I have to like what you’ve done about work. I’m impressed, Poot.”

“Mostly I needed a steady reason to get out of the house. There’s something afoot in that home, something weird.”

“Let’s linger a second on these hands of yours,” he said. “How did you and Audrey treat the holding-hands question?”

“We disagreed,” I said.

Our respective heights were such that to hold hands while walking, I would have to effect a slight shrug, or lean just a little bit away from her, in order for our hands to meet. I had on several occasions tried to explain this to her.

“Then how about standing still?” she countered. “It would I guess kill you to take my hand once in a while just to say hello.”

And I said, side by side? Standing still and holding hands as if overlooking some gorgeous view?

“It’s not some mystery or riddle, Potter. You know how much I like it.”

But over time I began to suspect it wasn’t about
liking
at all. For Audrey, holding hands represented a sort of proof, and I sometimes took exception to this ongoing need to prove what should otherwise be assumed.

But that was
love,
she told me. That’s what I didn’t understand about proof.

“You think it’s some like chore. When really it’s supposed to be a joy. That’s love: proving over and over. Lovers hold hands because they want to. If it feels like work, then it’s not proof.”

And one morning, I remembered, she woke me with an elaboration on this point and spoke of an isolated beach she imagined, a trite piece of Caribbean fantasy. She must have been awake for a while. In her fantasy we woke up each morning and had our sweaty sex in the bamboo hut, or lean-to, or however she saw it. Then we would gather our things and walk to the beach, holding hands the whole way.

“And then you go fishing while I sit down with needles and yarn, because I love you, and I want to knit you a cap.”

“Knit cap,” I said, rolling over. “On the beach.”

“Shut! Up! Look. I sit down in the sand and make something for the man I love. Anything. And I watch you go down to the rocks and stand over the water with your
spear,
and this is how the morning goes. I knit and you fish. And then at some point I hear you scream out in joy, and I look to see you smiling at me, holding up the spear with our breakfast on it. And you are smiling hugely and bursting and overcome with joy.”

“So in this fantasy I’m the hunter and you’re the domesticator. Meanwhile, you’re about to have a minor in women’s
studies
.”

“It’s our beach, Potter. It’s all ours and there’s no one there but us. No eyes no nothing, just us. Nobody is watching and we hold hands because we want to. No other reason. We made the view, it’s ours, and we hold hands because from where we’re standing, the world
is
a beautiful view. Do you see?”

Stuart left briefly and returned with two more beers. I held the cold can between my injured hands. The labor was good, he had said so himself. No need to rehash these details of our past, or of Audrey’s postponed return, the metallic balls. I opened the beer and sat there with my friend, quietly, resting after a day of work.

My brain would simply not complete the steps required to imagine Audrey bald.

How silly I’d been before this job to think I knew what it meant to sweat. I threw myself into my new labor, driving and lifting and working. And
sweating
. Driving brought minor relief, but with no air conditioner, the sweat was constant. To accompany the tinny sound of radio through one blown speaker, I found myself reading road signs out loud in my normal speaking voice. I passed beneath billboards with huge radio call letters and an alluring catchphrase. A lamppost banner said,
Hooray™ Downtown:
Progress—Fun—Character.
I wore a backwards Cardinals hat stained with a mountain range of sweat. I sweated a
V
onto my green shirt, the kind of sweat I had previously associated with tennis pros and middle-age pickup basketball.

Sprawl
—say the word slowly and it begins to make sense. Sspraaawwwwll.

The current goal was Oakville, on the very southern edge of St. Louis County, which bore all the signposts of regional development. Empty lots cordoned off and marked for construction, immense corner gas stations facing each other across the street, brilliantly colored and glistening new. This was my father’s competition; downtown’s offspring growing into its own self-sustaining world, the implicit patricide. All these shiny, colorful places to consume set among aboveground pools, granite quarries, baseball diamonds, and go-kart tracks. I saw my turnoff as I passed it and threw all of my weight onto the brakes, sending a vanload of hollow plastic bottles tumbling. Cars honked halfheartedly, geese on quaaludes.

There were kids playing tag in the yard on my right, lunging and sprinting after one another like sparring hyenas. Houses here were low and wide and brick, with cramped yards and garages full of hardware and bed frames and garden hoses. I saw stubby driveways and zoysia, plastic sunflowers that would spin if there were a breeze. I idled, scanning faded mailboxes and front doors. The invoice read:
T. Worpley, 1427 Waldwick.
I saw 1419, 1425, then 1431. I turned the van around, then backtracked even slower than I came. I stepped out of the van. I had until recently considered myself an intelligent young man.

Leading from the sidewalk through a swath of dead grass was a dusty brown rut barely distinguishable from the yard. At the end was a small white building, not much bigger than a garage. I lifted a cooler from the van and carried it awkwardly along the path. Nailed into wooden siding, paint chipped away in long horizontal strips, were the bronze numbers 427. I climbed two concrete steps onto a small wooden porch. Behind a screen door the house was a cave. I craned my neck to wipe a temple with an already drenched shirtsleeve, then knocked. Echoes of television garble leaked from inside. A chip of paint came loose under my fingernail. I knocked again. On the third knock a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, appeared behind the screen door.

“You’re from the company?” He spoke carefully—candy and strangers. “You brought the free water?”

“I am. And I did.”

The boy held open the screen. Inside, windows were drawn and lamps were off, the TV the only source of light. The house was a phenomenal mess. An overturned floor lamp rested along one wall, a detached closet door against another. The couch in front of the TV was threadbare and saggy. There were unwashed bowls and plates stacked at the foot of the sofa, Underoos draped flaccidly across the back of a chair, a scene of sustained neglect. It looked like I imagined a frat house would look if everyone became really interested in soda.

“Over here.”

In the kitchen a stack of dishes sat in and around the sink. The contents of open boxes of cereal spilled across a counter sticky with residue unknown. A refrigerator sat silently in one corner, door missing and shelves barren.