Tumbledown (22 page)

Candler transcribed the man’s utterance in the notebook: “Eve was the apple peddler, but men got twice the sin in one ball as women’s got in box and brain combined.” Many of the pages of
Cabbage
belonged to a single, madly voluble schizophrenic named Jack Cartwright.

Cartwright was a constant talker, always in complete sentences, often fascinating, rarely incoherent. With a tiny bit of self-control, he could have been a writer, an analyst, or
something,
if he could only close his mouth long enough to write down his thoughts. There was no topic he could not talk about with amazing fluency, but he couldn’t turn it off. His IQ was the highest Candler had ever measured, but intelligence was no help. He was one of Candler’s most disturbing failures. After a two-week evaluation, Candler knew only that Cartwright could not shut up.

Beneath
Cabbage
lay the unfinished report for Guillermo Mendez. For the first time in his professional career, Candler could not finish an evaluation. The Jack Cartwright report had been weak, but at least he’d written the damn thing. The Mendez eval was a different matter. Admitting defeat would put the kid back in combat, and yet what could he legitimately do about it? He had to write something. Tomorrow, maybe. He left his desk. This weekend at the latest.

On the evaluation floor, Kat McIntyre observed Lowell Darringer on the station called
full body range of motion,
a tall platform with three differently angled planes. Each plane held a pattern of bolts and the client had to move plastic templates from one plane to the next, screwing them off and on. The exercise was meant to measure the ability to work in different physical positions—squatting, hands above head, and so on. The eval hub held twelve workstations, spaced evenly about the room like trees with great root systems. Kat casually showed Candler her stopwatch: forty-five minutes and counting. The task usually took no more than fifteen minutes. Some clients could do it in eight.

Clay Hao joined them. He asked Kat about another of the clients, a bone-thin man across the room who called himself Vex.

Candler answered for her. “One of Bob’s clients.”

Hao smiled. “A floater.”

Bob Whitman had a few months yet before his retirement, but in most ways it seemed that he had already vacated the premises. His client worked at a furious pace, as if the floor beneath his feet were electrified.

“Mr. Vex is focused, but a wee bit
combative,
” Kat said. “That’s the term I’m going to suggest to Bob.” She put her hand on Candler’s arm to ask if he agreed. She smiled, displaying her braces. He’d never had the nerve to ask about them. She’d had them the whole time of their acquaintance, more than two years. Could they be merely decorative? Jewelry for the teeth? How out of touch was he?

“Vex is wound a little tight,” he agreed.

“When does your lady get here?” Kat asked. A playful, nervy light animated her eyes.

“A week from Saturday.”

“Last few nights of freedom,” she said. “Soon you’ll be an old married man.”

It sounded like an invitation. He pretended to miss it. If he weren’t already cheating on Lolly with Lise, would he find himself over at Kat’s house again? She seemed to want a final fling with him before Lolly arrived for the same reason that he had wanted to sleep with Lise—the wicked thrill of it. Half-remembered lyrics to a song played in his head:
Kicks just keep gettin’ harder to find . . .

“You’ll meet her,” Candler said. “Egri is throwing a party.”

“I heard.” She displayed that decorative smile again. “The Calamari Cowboys ride again—for the first time.”

“Hee-haw,” Hao said and swung an imaginary lariat.

Darringer laboriously checked and double-checked the templates. He inevitably turned the nuts the wrong way and offered a semi-continuous rumbling commentary: “Think you can stop me, widget?” Across the room, the one called Vex banged on the table that held the mechanical aptitude workstation—either in frustration or excitement, Candler could not say which. The tech observing him took a tiny step back. Kat’s body brushed against Candler’s, and he understood how easily he would have tumbled. Only the fact of Lise kept him from a good-bye fuck with Kat. What kind of man did that make him? Certainly not one belonging to any of the first several ranks.

At long last, Darringer finished his task. Candler listened while Kat asked him the standard series of questions. He answered with affirmative or negative grunts, and then Candler stepped in. “That looked like a tough one.”

“Not so bad,” Darringer said, “but I want to know something.”

“What would that be, Lowell?” Candler made a point of using clients’ names, establishing rapport, encouraging intimacy. He had to decide what recommendation he could write for this unfortunate man.

“Not sure it’s proper protocol to ask publicly,” Darringer said, eyeing Kat and Hao with suspicion.

Hao took the cue. “I’d better get back to my reports.”

“I’ve got to run, too,” Kat said.

“All right, Lowell,” Candler said after they were gone, “what do you think of this workstation?”

“It was tolerable in terms of the physical body,” he said and leaned in close, putting his mouth to the back of Candler’s head. He spoke softly. “But why do you have me working on this spaceship?”

He was utterly sincere. Candler decided to respond to the offer of confidence rather than the detachment from reality. “You can never tell,” he said, “when you might need to escape.”

Darringer nodded. “Least you’re honest about it.”

“It doesn’t fly so well, anymore. I’d only use it in an emergency.”

“Fuel prices, too,” Darringer said. “Fuel companies are gouging our hearts and eyes out.”

“That’s right,” Candler agreed. “It’s not cheap to operate a spaceship, and they’re not as safe as they used to be. I don’t know what it would take for me to get into one. What about you? What would it take for you to step in and fly away?”

“Just between us?” Darringer checked over both shoulders. “If it would take me to the mountains.”

“You’d go if . . .”

“I’d spend my last Demerol,” he said. “I grew up among mountains. My mother and what remained of my father. That was Montana. I was younger than that one.” He aimed a finger at Kat. “Waking in the pines, my mother and father and me, chilly winter air, and feeling, you know, like that . . . feeling
mountainous.
”

Candler nodded attentively but his mind slipped back to the
Cabbage
notebook, another of the Jack Cartwright entries.

“What if I arrange a drive for you?” Candler said. “Montana is a long ways, but the Laguna Mountains are practically next door. I could arrange a van.”

“Just like that?” Suspicion resided again in Darringer’s eyes. “You identified the spaceship.”

He nodded and his expression softened. “That I did.”

“I’ll ask for a van. I’ll get you a drive to the mountains.” Darringer let out a big breath. Tears rimmed his eyes. He placed his hand gently on Candler’s shoulder, saying, “Give me another one to do, boss.”

DAY 6:

Even though Billy had worked less than a week at the sheltered workshop, he understood that this was the best job he’d ever had. There were only six clients, and they all liked him. They were nice people. They paid attention when he spoke. All he had to do was set up the assembly machine, track their work, take a few notes, pay them, and talk to them. He
enjoyed
talking to them. Especially the babe, Karly, but he tried not to let his preference show. He joined them on the assembly line to see what the work was like, tossing the boxes he made into one person’s pile and then another’s. He didn’t play favorites.

And it would be no trouble with this job to keep up his exercise regimen. While he was looking over their shoulders as they folded boxes, he secretly went up and down on his toes, an exercise that had an impressive-sounding name he couldn’t recall. He needed to lose eighteen and a half pounds. Not that he was fat. No one would call him fat. Well, one girl had called him fat, but that was in a fit of jealousy, or not jealousy exactly, more like
dislike,
and it was meaningless—though it had been, come to think of it, the reason he began exercising. She was one of his regulars at the U-TOTE-M, the convenience store in Flagstaff he had managed, and she came to the store and talked to him every day for a year, but when he finally asked her on a date, she said she wouldn’t go out with him because he was fat and married and stuck in a dead-end job.

“I’m not fat,” Billy replied. The worst part was that she wasn’t even upset, just stating the facts. As for being married, he told her (withholding her change to make her listen) his wife had filed for divorce, and that was why he never asked her out before. He thought she might’ve been pissed that he waited so long to pull the trigger.

She pursed her lips in the most dismissive act of lip pursing Billy had ever witnessed and said, “Dead-end job still holds.” She had a gold nose stud but no earrings, and a tattoo on her back, just above her butt, of a Native American–type sun.

“I’ll quit,” he said.

“Don’t quit on my account,” she told him. “I still won’t go out with you.” When he remained reluctant to hand over her change, she sighed. “I have buttons and you don’t push them.” She left the store without her change and never returned.

What would she think if she saw him in this job and witnessed how he was rising on his toes even as he thought about her? He weighed just eighteen and half pounds more than he had in high school. Not that he was exactly slim back then, but still. And this job had benefits, a retirement plan, and a title: Technician, Level Three, Probationary.

He had already diagnosed all of the clients under his watch, which wasn’t even required. The easiest to peg was Bellamy Rhine, who was a clinically measurable nerd. Billy’d had plenty of association with nerds, many of whom were nice guys, though all were utterly hopeless losers. Rhine was a nice guy, but his head was so far up his ass he had to stare out his belly button. Not that Billy himself hadn’t gone through a period or periods when he was almost as much a goof as Rhine. He had a thing for chess briefly, flying the old nerd flag. And twice he noted that certain losers in high school seemed to be wearing the same shirts he wore, which Jimmy explained was because they were hideous shirts that appealed only to buffoons. Billy took the shirts to Goodwill to keep from accidentally wearing them again, and he bought shirts identical to Jimmy’s. How else to know what was okay? Jimmy got all annoyed, and for a week they called each other to make sure they weren’t dressing alike, until Jimmy quit noticing.

Billy made a mental note to bring to work some book related to science or math to give Rhine. Had he packed his chessboard? It might be in the trunk of the Dart. He would find the kid’s strength.

Maura Wood’s diagnosis was also cake. She was a
rebel without a cause.
She had a nice face with some evil and some kindness in it, which made him think she would grow out of her trouble. A nice face meant something, and women grew out of the rebel stage faster than men, considering that some men never grew out of it. Maura carried around a lot of anger, mainly, he reasoned, because the phase demanded it. Billy knew not to take her comments personally. It was just the rebel in her. She didn’t think the world was fair, and who could argue with that? What she’d decided to do about it was carp. Her whole therapeutic deal, he was fairly certain, was just learning to act instead of carp. Billy was often attracted to women rebels, who tended to keep things lively. Male rebels tended to get everybody’s noses broken.

Logically speaking, what a rebel without a cause needed was a cause. He had to find something for her to believe in. Nothing as obvious and over publicized as the environment or civil rights or children. It had to be specific, like when he read that porn actors were going on strike for better working conditions. That turned out to be a publicity stunt but Billy read maybe twenty online articles about it. Maybe that wasn’t a cause, exactly, but he needed to find something that would light up Maura’s brain the same way his had been lit.

As for Alonso, he was as dumb as a sack of stupid. Not his fault, and he had a very healthy libido, but he was no Einstein. Billy had plenty of friends who weren’t the sharpest wrench in the tool kit. Pook came to mind. He’d been strong and basically kind, even though he sometimes liked to hit things and/or Billy. But he couldn’t think his way out of an elevator. He was a very loyal friend, though, and Billy thought that he would add a comment about Alonso saying that he was undoubtedly very loyal. This would impress everybody.
It took us years to figure that out.

The genuinely stupid people he’d known all liked (1) chewing gum, (2) comic books, and (3) television. Actually, Pook hadn’t liked television, and Billy crossed that one off. He decided to keep working on the list and use it to motivate Alonso.

Karly was a sad story, a fantastic looker but none too bright. Smarter than Alonso but several of her crayons were missing from the pack and none of them held a point. Not that smarts were everything. Intelligence was way overrated. Handy now and then, but what had his brain gotten him? Mostly into trouble, like for thinking up comeback lines that got him punched or kicked or laughed at or stuffed into an old refrigerator for what seemed like an hour. Guffawed at? Had he ever heard a laugh that sounded like
guff-aw?
Was the bee sound really
buzz,
or more like
enn-n-n-n?
Where had he been going with all this? Oh yeah, Karly’s diagnosis and how intelligence wasn’t always the cat’s meow. Also, beauty could be a hardship. From the way Karly moved about in a constantly sexy way, he deduced that she had maybe been raped or molested. Possibly not literally raped but she’d been taught by the behavior of others that there was nothing to her but her beautiful body and beautiful face, and they
were
impossible to ignore, and—true—she wasn’t ever going to be one for big ideas or even lengthy conversations, which meant maybe there was no one to blame for people seeing these obvious qualities and missing what was on the inside. But that had to be what was wrong with her. Too much attention to her hot bod and not enough to her not-so-bright but still (he could tell)
nice
insides. Which meant she just needed personal time, and he was glad she was taking it in the sheltered workshop. She was great to look at, no denying that, and he would find out about her inner whatnot—he promised himself to do it—and he’d be careful to do nothing to make her afraid of him.