Tumbledown (23 page)

Billy had only ever known one woman who was actually raped, and that was Dlu, who called him from the hospital looking for Jimmy. It was a couple of years after they broke up, and Jimmy had moved to L.A., but Dlu didn’t know that, and she wanted Jimmy to come be with her. Billy went instead. Someone had pried open her apartment door and raped her in her own bed. Billy stayed with her through the hospital and police episodes, and he put in deadbolts. He spent the night with her, sleeping on the carpet beside her bed. He wound up spending four nights on her carpet because she didn’t want to be alone in the dark. Finally, Dlu told her parents, and her brother flew in and Billy thought he ought to go home even though he didn’t want to leave her. He liked sleeping beside her bed. He felt useful, as if for once he knew exactly where he should be, and he understood that he was competent to do what was asked of him—sleep beside her bed, put in deadbolts, check and double-check all the windows and locks, let her talk when she wanted to talk, hold her when she needed to cry.

Karly probably needed some of the same—deadbolts, a guy on the carpet, family. Maybe some gum and comic books, too.

Dlu had sent Billy a card, maybe a month later. She thanked him for staying with her during
my personal trauma.
This was such a weird way to put it that he understood it was still going on. He went by her place but she had moved out. He thought about taking the deadbolts back. The card had no return address, and Billy to this day had not seen her or heard from her. Dlu had gone to bed with him that one time, back when she and Jimmy were a couple, and he thought that put a bad spin on his caring for her. Made her nervous or feel beholden, sexually beholden. And sure, he would have loved to go to bed with her again, but he wasn’t thinking about that while he slept on her carpet. Maybe he wasn’t all the time thinking about her, either, more what he should be doing for her, what another person—someone more used to intimate human behavior—would do. Recalling all of this saddened him, but he had done the right thing that time, hadn’t he? And wasn’t it better that he got nothing in return?

Cecil was about the size of a fireplug with a fireplug’s IQ. He was a chatty little retard, and according to the papers that came with the job, he was only there on a temporary basis. There was no way he could put together more than maybe five boxes an hour if he stayed in the workshop till kingdom come. He’d be shipped out and taught something simpler, like counting cars on the highway. If he could count. Some of the things he said, though, resembled thoughts Billy himself had had but had known to keep to himself. Like Cecil said his dog Pooch could sing some song, and several years ago Billy tried to teach this dog Jimmy and Dlu owned, Flannery, how to keep time with her paw.
It’s a dog’s life, baby,
Billy would sing,
a dog’s life from head to tail.
Billy had been into the blues, and while he couldn’t play any instrument and his singing voice required a dog for distraction purposes, he imagined a career for them that included, at the very least, a visit on Letterman.
Go to sleep in dog heaven, wake up in dog jail.
Flannery’s paw kept perfect time when he sang it, but Billy figured out that she wasn’t listening to the music but watching his head nod, and that took the wind out of his sails. The point being, it was a bonehead idea but while he pursued it he didn’t let on about his Letterman plans to anyone but Jimmy. He could maybe try to teach Cecil discretion. It would be a challenge.

Mick was the only one actually crazy. But it was only a half-assed craziness. Billy knew a lot of guys who were half-assed crazy. Most of the time they were okay, but they’d get pissed about money you owed them or the way you pronounced their girlfriend’s name or the deodorant you were wearing that made them sneeze. Not that Mick was the angry type. Billy remembered a guy whose name was something like Belltower, a guy he knew from college, the third time Billy tried college. They were in a sociology or anthropology or one of those kinds of classes together, and this guy Belltower knew way more about whatever –ology it was than Billy, but he completely blew the test, and Billy saw him hiding his face in the hallway right after the exam. Billy led him to the Brick Tavern so the guy could at least hide his face in a bar.

Belltower had been so nervous about the test that he didn’t sleep all night, and he was so wiped out that he couldn’t come up with the right answers, and he said, “Swear to god you won’t tell,” but the letters on the test page had folded in on themselves and then unfolded and become notes of music, and Belltower, as it happened, could read music and recognized “Candle in the Wind.” He burst out bawling in the Brick Tavern. Billy consoled him by saying that was the kind of suck-ass song that would make anyone flunk.

What Billy did for Belltower—was that his name? what the heck was it?—was talk to the teacher, who let Belltower do the test over the next class without telling him in advance, so the guy could get some sleep, and with no time constraints, so the guy wouldn’t fret, and Belltower got a 100 on the test. Billy, ironically, got a 56 and dropped out of school for the semi final time. He never went full time again, anyway, eking out a degree after ten arduous years.

Not Belltower,
Hornblower.
That was it.

Anyway, to help Mick, Billy decided he had to find some way to loosen up his strings and get him to sleep better. He heard Maura tell him to try smoking pot. That made good sense. Just a joint or two per day at the beginning.

This was a job he could sink his teeth into.

DAY 7:

Maura wouldn’t have thought it possible that she might miss having Cecil Fresnay, but Thursday morning Billy announced the twerp was gone, replaced by a foaming-at-the-mouth feral creature who insisted on being called Vex. To make things worse, Mick was still giving her the oblivious shoulder, though not unkindly. Mick didn’t know how to be unkind. He was simply more interested in Karly than he was in Maura. She could hardly blame him. They were getting married, for fuck’s sake.

Vex was a bony, gaunt, scary-skinny guy who, on day one, told Billy Atlas, “You’re full of empty and don’t fake it very well.” He looked late twenties with black close-cropped hair and a beard that hid just below the skin. His eyes were light brown, like a dinner table with a cheap stain, and his face seemed fashioned out of something harder than skin and bones. Maura had an ugly desire to flick her fingers against his cheek and see if it clanked. He assembled 112 boxes during his first hour of the workshop.

“You’re certainly catching on, Mr. Vex,” Billy said, that cow grin of his like a saddle on his face, as he paid him at the end of the hour.

“It’s just Vex,” the man said. “No mister here. I’m not titled. Not entitled to a title.
Vex.
”

The guy exuded violence the way Mick radiated intelligence and sweetness. How the holy fuck had he ever gotten accepted into the Center?

“Vex it is,” Billy said, patting him on the back.

Vex stiffened, his back bunching up beneath his shirt. “Don’t touch Vex,” Vex said.

Billy opened his mouth to respond to the freaky nutcase but he quite clearly could think of nothing to say.

“He’s a fruit bat,” Maura said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “They don’t like human people touching them.”

“That’s so funny,” Karly said. No one laughed but Billy, a phony and frightened gargle, and tension squeezed the air out of the room, but Vex did not look up from his manic, depraved box folding, and they all got back to work.

Maura’s diet did not permit trips to fast-food restaurants, and she ate her sack lunch in the parking lot, sitting on the concrete with her back against the wall. Sometimes Alonso sat with her, but he often rode with Mick and Karly to the KFC or McDonald’s, trailed by Rhine on his scooter. After eating, she smoked a cigarette, and now Vex joined her. She balanced the Carlton Hotel ashtray on one of several short concrete poles designed to keep people from crashing into the building. The Carlton Hotel teetered on its perch, sunlight winking off it, flashing in their eyes as if to convey meaning:
SOS. I’m smoking with a maniac.

“We supposed to use that?” Vex nodded at the ashtray.

Maura returned his nod and lit a cigarette.

“You smoke what they put in packages,” he said, “and you inhale what filler they can get away with.” Vex rolled his own cigarettes. He had an unusual voice: the words seemed to be compressed out of him. Maura flashed on her mother writing on a birthday cake with a big metal hypodermic. “What’s a hundred percent beef?” he went on. “In a wiener, maybe sixty to sixty-three-point-five percent. And cigarettes? You don’t know what you’re sucking in.”

“Like tobacco is good for you anyway,” she said.

The cigarette he rolled was fat in the middle, and the paper was wrinkled in an unappealing way. He kept licking it, displaying the purple underside of his tongue. He was wearing a T-shirt advertising the Bitter Hole Hunting Lodge. A bad transfer had given the deer or elk or whatever it was on his chest big rosy cheeks. A Goodwill shirt, a twenty-five-cent-max piece of apparel.

“Nothing’s good for you,” Vex said, lighting the veiny thing by sucking hard and fast with several quick repetitions, a frantic urgency to the act. “Not even breathing.”

His weird lighting ritual reminded her of a time the lowlifes had stolen gasoline by siphoning, and a boy had sucked on a tube shoved down a car’s tank, sucked and quit, sucked and quit, hoping not to get gasoline in his mouth.

Vex pointed to the sky. “Clouds make me think of garbage, white garbage in the deep blue. They ever make you think of garbage?”

“No. Never. Not once.”

“There are worse things than garbage. A lot worse.”

“What is it you’re smoking? It smells like mold.”

“Least I know what I’m smoking.” He gestured with the repellent cigarette again, this time to indicate her. “Clothes, you know what I mean, they’re making them flimsier all the time. Clothing research now, they got all these scientists trying to make clothes out of what? What is it we got no shortage of?
Talk,
that’s what.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“This time next year you’ll be wearing a murmur. You’ll be wishing you had a declaration or some pleading.”

“I hope to god you’re putting me on.”

“Putting you on my ass. You ever had a dream? At night? When you’re supposed to be asleep? Huh?”

“Everybody has dreams.”

“Trained myself out of them. That’s how they get inside your brain. You don’t believe me? Why is it I’m different, huh? They can’t get their commercials inside my head.”

“You can’t train yourself not to dream.”

“Set an alarm for every three minutes. Not three-oh-fucking-one. Three minutes. All night. Every night.”

“No wonder you’re crazy as a fucking butt-faced elk.”

He laughed. “Butt-faced elk. I like that.” He surreptitiously glanced at his T-shirt.

“How are you so fast on the assembly line when you only just started?”

He rocked his head and stared at the floating garbage above him. “Mind stuff.”

“I should have guessed.”

“I could teach you. Ever caught a mosquito with your tongue? Hunh? Put out a flame with your eyes? Stopped a moving stream with your concentration? Quit peeing in mid-pee?”

“I’m going to pass on the lessons. I prefer not to eat chicken heads and lick my own ass.”

“Chicken head soup, sister. Delicious if you’re hungry enough. Gotta get the feathers off is all.”

“Don’t forget asslick soup, yum.”

He laughed again. “Ain’t easy to make me laugh like this. You’ve achieved something.”

Billy Atlas threw the door open, and they went back in to work. “You’ve achieved something,” Vex repeated.

“So bring me a trophy,” Maura told him, aware that she was flirting.

“Artists invent their own traditions,” Frederick Candler told Jimmy. The family was packed into the old station wagon, touring the neighborhood on garbage day—Frederick and May in the front, with Jimmy sitting between them. Pook rode alone in the back because Violet was working. Once a month residents set out for removal items too big for the trash can, and the Candler family ritually inspected the booty the night before. On this particular tour, they investigated a rocking chair and a slightly cracked bird bath, but they scavenged nothing. Summer was the wrong season for discards.

Jimmy’s favorite family tradition involved Christmas. The family went out every Christmas Eve in search of a tree. Whatever misshapen evergreen they’d find in a tree lot, they would prop up, decorate, and celebrate, no matter the foliage gaps, bent trunk, or drooping branches. “No one could love this tree but us,” his father would say. Jimmy adored this practice, which made Christmas uniquely theirs. It wasn’t until he was twenty and overhead his father telling a friend how he’d never paid more than ten dollars for a tree that Candler under stood the family ritual was about being cheap.

Oh,
cheap
was not the right word. It might be the right word if it was applied to another family, but not to his. It wasn’t
frugality,
either, or
parsimony.
It was not wanting to be taken in by a capitalist cultural event—Christmas as commercial enterprise—yet not wanting to deny the children the pleasure of the holiday. Their father found ways to celebrate Santa without completely caving in. Coincidentally, they didn’t cost much.

Frederick Candler’s paintings appeared in museums around the country, though rarely more than one work in any particular museum, and he was excluded from the list of important American artists as often as he was included. He was known for a quotation: “Art does not exist in nature. Art is a repudiation of the natural world.” A middling-famous artist was Frederick Candler, recognized by anyone serious about contemporary art but such recognition did not always mean that he was admired or revered. Some of his paintings sold for six figures, but he could never anticipate which, and it usually took several years for the work to accumulate that value. By the time the paintings earned any real cash, they were no longer his and the profit belonged to some lucky bastard who had purchased Frederick’s work early on for next to nothing.