Tumbledown (40 page)

“Turns out I may be luckier than you.” Vex had a beer of his own and drank from it. “What of it?”

“I don’t want anyone in the workshop hurt because if you’re like a lunatic or something.”

“I’m
some
thing, I guess. Not a lunatic, exactly. What is a lunatic exactly?”

“He hurts people. Like with a gun or a knife or his hands or his feet or that ax over there.”

“What about rape?”

“That definitely qualifies.”

“I’ve never raped anyone, but I was accused of it.”

“Is there a story there?”

“No story. Except when a guy came after me with a tire iron and another time this guy swung a shovel and once when these two guys wanted to cut my balls off with a weed whacker, I’ve never hurt a living person. Dead people, sure. We hurt the dead every minute we’re alive. They depend on us to correct their mistakes, the dumb dead sons a bitches.”

“A weed whacker, really?”

“They were sick motherfuckers who treated that weed whacker like shit. You have to mix in oil with the gasoline. That kind of two-cycle internal combustion job needs it.”

Billy drank his beer thoughtfully. “May I ask why they and the shovel and tire-iron guys were so eager to bash you up?”

“Conflicts.”

“Such as?”

“I ate a candy bar out of the fridge downstairs, and yeah it wasn’t mine, but you take a shovel to the head of somebody who ate your York mint?”

“Not likely.” Billy didn’t like mints. “Okay, check off the shovel.

The tire iron?”

“I might possibly have kicked the jack when he was changing a flat. Humor. A joke that didn’t quite take. His leg wasn’t crushed or he couldn’t’ve run after me.”

Billy nodded resignedly. “My jokes often zip right over people’s heads.”

“Anyone get pissed about it?”

“In high school. Wit’s a big problem in high school. What about the weed whackers?”

“I fucked their sister. She was young.”

“How young?”

“I don’t know. Twenty-four.”

“That’s not so young.”

“I’m twenty-
six.
And I knew I was pushing my luck. The family kept her sheltered. She’d never even had her picture taken.”

“I don’t think—”

“And she was pregnant. Pretty big in the gullet.”

“This was consensual sex?”

“No, from behind. Like I said, her gut was like this.” He made the traditional watermelon gesture with his hands.

“But the sex was her idea, your idea, came up out of the blue, what?”

“You kidding? She didn’t want to fuck. My idea.”

“This is where we get into sticky territory. If she didn’t want to do it, then how did it come about that you two fucked?”

“We had a bet. Whether I could put my whole fist in my mouth, which I can. I kept telling her I could, but she didn’t believe me.”

“And if you’d lost?”

“She got to chop off my nuts, but I knew I was gonna win.”

“Still.”

“Thing is, we have a history. I used to be married to a friend of her sister’s, back when I was a welder. You read my file?”

“You were in an accident.”

“Somebody says
welding accident
and people expect you to be burnt and have those white blotchy scars, like the other person inside you is trying to surface, but I cut a pole too deep and the fucking thing bent and
bam,
I’m dead. Out of it, anyway. Coma for a while, then I wind up the fucker you see now.”

“You were different before.”

“So they fucking tell me endlessly. What do I care? I ain’t gone to hurt you. Not gone to hurt your gerbils, either. I halfway like them. I fixed the assembly machine, didn’t I?”

“You did that?”

“Took it apart, put it back together. You know what a blind flange is? Yours was cracked to shit. I stole the part. That’s what I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Let’s make like I didn’t say that. Also, I broke into the senior citizen joint to do the work. Wasn’t going to tell you that, either.”

Billy drank from his beer. He was moderately terrified that this guy might take the ax and chop his head off. Also, if he kept drinking beer he’d have to pee, which was almost equally troubling. “Thanks for, ah, fixing my flange.”

“Blind flange. You’re welcome. What about my story?”

“It’s good and all.” He pulled the folded pages from his pocket. “But a little dark, don’t you think?”

“Gingerbread man gets eaten alive,” Vex said. “Hansel and Gretel get cooked in a pot. Beanstalk Jack gets a fucking giant after his ass, smelling blood. What fairy tale isn’t dark?”

“Valid point,” Billy acknowledged. “It’s partly the rape thing. Not too many rapes in fairy tales, and since you’ve got this accusation against you. But you say it was a bet.”

“That was a whole nother thing. Separate incident.”

“I’m confused.”

“People tell me I am, too.” He took a long swallow and crushed the can. “Okay, I guess I forced her, but she was my
wife,
and after I got hit on the head, she treated me different. We were in bed, see, and we didn’t hardly have any clothes on, and I wanted my wife back.”

Billy had spent hundreds of nights in bed with Pilar wanting to have sex with her. He felt for Vex, but Billy would never force himself on anyone.

“It wasn’t a crime in an alley,” Vex said. “Not like I pushed her up against a wall and pulled her pants down till she smacked me in the head. More like I rolled on top of her. She didn’t push me off or scream or nothing, and I thought if we just did it once, she’d see how I was still . . . Ah fuck, sometimes I get desires I’m not proud of. So what do you do? You make yourself live in a high place no one comes to. You concentrate at work like nothing else exists.” He covered his mouth as he sighed. “She dropped the charges when I agreed to her divorce business. Maybe that was the plan all along. I haven’t had nothing to do with any woman since then.”

“What about smoke breaks with Maura?”

“I wouldn’t never hurt Maura. No more than you’d hurt that Karly.”

“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Billy said.

“Especially not Karly, right? Maybe once I did tug on Maura pants. I wasn’t going to tell you that ’cause she didn’t like it. She hit me, but then she borrowed my papers and rolled herself a smoke. We talked about head injury and humping and she wasn’t even upset.”

“You can’t tug at Maura’s pants in the workshop,” Billy said. “And only elsewhere if she wants you to.”

“I thought she wanted me to. You ever thought someone wanted you to, but she didn’t?”

Billy could only sigh and nod. He indicated the manuscript. “How ’bout you read it to me.”

“Out loud? For fuck’s sake. Give it to me.”

A few lines into the story, Vex burst into tears. “Get
out
of here. I ought to take your fucking head off for making me do this.” He thrust his head at Billy, his face a furious red, but Billy was no longer afraid of him.

“I want to hear the rest of the story.”

“There wasn’t no welding accident, all right? I
fabricated
that. Get it? I was a metal fabricator, so it’s funny, trust me.”

“Then what happened to make you this way?”

He shrugged. “I guess I did get bumped on the noggin, but barely enough to knock me out. The coma was only sorta real. The definite story, see, is I just like being this way.”

“Then why are you at the Center?”

“Ah, fuck me, I guess I’d like to be a
little
different.”

This seemed a lot like therapy, Billy realized, which he probably wasn’t supposed to do for a few months yet.

“That chain saw belongs to Bob Whitman.” Vex pointed at the pile of parts on the tarp. “That ax had a broke handle. I fixed it. It’s Bob Whitman’s ax. Bob Whitman is my counselor. I fix things for him. We pretend it’s therapy so he doesn’t have to pay me much.”

“I can’t fix anything,” Billy said. “I can mop up after a toilet runs over, but I can’t fix it.”

“I’ll fix it for you. There’s nothing made by man I can’t fix.”

“How about a salad? Can you fix a salad?”

“Fuck no, you got me there.” He laughed reluctantly. “You and Maura. Make the laughter come out of me. You ever looked at clouds and realized how they’re like garbage?”

Billy shook his head. “I’ll drink one more beer if there’s a curtain for the toilet.”

Vex shrugged. “I got a blindfold.”

The bag of groceries was getting heavier, Karly thought. It couldn’t really get heavier, so maybe it was because she was lost and wearing two different shoes. One shoe was the sneaker she always wore but the other one was her slipper with pink on it. So she was wearing just one different shoe, and the other was the same. Where its partner was, she didn’t know, or how they got separated and lost from each other, and now she was lost from her house.

The problem was, she got too hungry and walked to the store that Beetle Man used to drive her to and bought one bag of groceries with the money from her spending money, which she kept in her pocketbook, which she finally found in the kitchen, and she only had to put a few things back. The cashier had helped her figure out which ones to put back. She was a very nice cashier, who had gray in her hair and a pale and shaky face, and she was so funny! She wore her glasses for her eyes
in her hair!
And she called everybody
honey.

She said, “Haven’t seen you since I don’t know when, honey.”

And “How you keeping yourself?”

And “Happens to everybody. No skin off my nose.”

And “We got all the time in the world.”

And “You might oughta put in for some detergent. Jeans’re gettin’ kinda ripe.”

All of the popcorn bags went back and the chocolate-covered things and the candy and the Coke drinks and the marshmallows and then she had enough money without using her emergency money. An emergency was when you’re in the hospital or if there was police.

Then she saw the cashier again when she was in the parking lot and the cashier was yelling at the boy with the sparkly car.

“I know ’zactly who you are and who you ain’t, and you ain’t nobody this girl needs to talk to nor get a ride from.”

The boy had offered her a ride from the store to her home, and Karly had said, “Only to the corner,” but the cashier said she shouldn’t ride in his car at all.

“You forget I’ve seen your driver’s license, Joshua McDowell. I ’member faces and names, and specially when they bounce checks and stuff tall boys down their pants. I ’member you very well, Joshua McDowell, and don’t you forget it. If this girl has any trouble at all, the police is gonna be hearin’ your name, too.”

The she said something very funny because it was loud. “You hear me?”

Karly promised not to take any rides from the boy or anyone, which she would never do anyway except because the car had sparkly paint and seemed like it could be an exception. The boy said nasty words and drove off, and she must have gone the wrong way because when she followed the arrows she had drawn on her hand it got dark and she wasn’t home yet and she was sweaty and some dogs barking at each other wouldn’t stop. If she had a microwave, she could eat the pot pie. She was hungry and tired and the new boy in the workshop yelled a lot and had a funny name he called himself. She just thought of that for no reason.

She had seen every kind of flower on this walk—red, yellow, purple, and blue. It was still Sunday. Her mother was on a trip far away where her cell phone didn’t work, and now Karly’s phone didn’t work. “I’m going with a man,” she had told Karly when their phones still worked. “You haven’t met him, but you will. He’s a nice man. You’ll like him.” Karly could email her mother if she was home and wasn’t lost and her computer was on and the email worked. “They’re so doing it,” Karly’s sister had said when it was her time on the phone. “Mom is all bouncy and absurd. She was singing some absurd commercial in the kitchen this morning. And he’s such a baggo, you won’t believe it. Dad is no doubt crying in his grave.” And there were some other things she said, back when the phones . . . Karly felt funny all at once and took a big breath and got a spinny feeling in her stomach and head. She bumped into a fence.

Being lost gave her a lot of time to think, but the bag was too heavy, and she set it down, and she tried to figure out a plan but she didn’t know what to do and she was so sweaty and she was so really tired, too, she realized, and the one slipper was ruined and when she started walking again, a man’s voice called out from behind her.

“You forgot your bag, young lady,” the man’s voice said. He was an old man with a white beard and dark-brown skin. He was on the other side of the fence she had bumped into, and Karly was on the different side.

“It’s too heavy,” she said. “It wasn’t at first, but now it is. Isn’t that so funny?”

“Where you going?”

“Home.”

“Where’s that?”

She didn’t know how to answer, but she pointed in the direction she was walking.

“Hardly any homes out that way, less you live in the salvage yard.”
Salve-itch-yard.
What a word. It meant something. But she didn’t think she lived there.

“You want to use my telephone?” he asked. His eyebrows moved a lot. Roly-polies. “I can bring it out here to you, if you like.”

“Who should I call?” Karly asked.

“You got me there, but it’s dark and there must be someone. Isn’t there someone?”

“Of course, silly,” she said. “There are a lot of someones.”

He opened the gate to his yard and picked up her bag. “I’ll get you the phone.” He directed her to a folding chair with flat cushions. Whoever heard of cushions on an outside chair? She laughed. It felt so good to sit down.

The man with the yard and the gate and the dark skin and the white hair walked funny. Like he had a flat tire. She could hear him inside talking to another person. Then a woman came out. She was in pants and carried a glass of water that she gave to Karly.

“Goodness,” she said. “You’re red as a beet. Are you homeless?”

Karly smiled and drank the water, wondering what kind of beat she meant and if she was homeless and where had the man gone and who could she call if he came out with a phone.