Typical (15 page)

All of us have hope of salvation, I think, except those who actually stuck a rake handle two feet under the skirt of the maid’s quarters and held it there three seconds, then ran, wondering why the rattlesnake had not obligingly attached himself to the handle for ease of magical extraction and his own execution. Some of them are still wondering.

S
PAVINED, CLAVICULAR, AND COW-HOCKED,
with an air not of malice but simply of a leaden determination that seemed to come up from the hard, baking ground itself on which it stood, chained, confined, gravitate to the orbit of earth depressed, moonlike, and polished by its five-foot circular diurnal traveling, looking forward with a low-lidded not scowl or glare but just
look,
the eyes half-lidded and half-rolled, suggesting not insolence or calculation or even sentience but a kind of pride—rear-axled and log-chained for a lifetime to a hot powdery hole in which it is its fate to consider its chances of fighting, the rare times not chained, for its very life—a profound self-esteem that says simply,
I am here, you see that I am here, what need to look you in the eye:
the bulldog bit the corncob truncate.

Truncate?

Into foreshortened segments, not as if—

He busted it all up?

—not as if they had once been parts of a greater piece, but as if they could yet assemble into a piece larger, so profound was their truncation—

Dog bit the corncob?

—there, vanquished at the splayed feet of the animal with an air not canine but not unlike a locomotive, small, furred, steeled, yet without so much a train of cars behind it as the quintessence of linked and smelt earthcore, its log chain—

Dog bit the goddamned corncob?

—yes. Yes. Wait—

In
half
or
what?

Wait. Not halved so much as
no longer whole,
as if in the authority of the bite was contained the undoing of natural history, and if there were two pieces of corncob where there had been one, there might have been now twenty; for the moral, imperative, and inviolate impression made was of a corncob no longer
one.

In half, in the dirt?

In the moted, desiccate, rivulet ground.

I dig where you comin from, but you talkin in circles.

Helically, gyring, for the truth is never at one location but variant, even unto itself: dislocate, inchoate, rubricate of subtler chance—

God, man.
Say
it. We this far, all happen is dog done bit a corncob. I’d have me a dog done kill a horse by now, drag a man out a burning house. And you want you a mean bulldog? He gone bite a
corncob?
Shih. I seen dog so mean he bust up his water dish—a Buick hubcap! And not just once, every time you give him water. Don’t even drink the water first! Whyont you let your dog bust up a bicycle with a kid on it, or bust up lawnmower, a
runnin
lawnmower—

The corncob is integral to this kind of story. You can do a lot with a corncob.

Yours is bust up.

True. You can do a lot with what can no longer happen. Thwarted fate is integral to this kind of story.

Well, integral some action in your story. Git on wid it.

Wait. Wait. Wait.

What else I can do?

Wait.

G
OING UP THE LADDER
after lunch I see Wayne badly handling the stepladder we need to get to the dormer peaks and wonder how he gets away with stuff like that without falling: and then that he does not get away with it and he is falling, falls off the roof, and I wince but do not look down. I wait for the sounds. I wait clenching the ladder where I stand five rungs from the top. There is no sound. Can Wayne have found a soft canopy of tree? Has he tricked me?

I go backwards down the ladder. Not far from it, facedown, Wayne. I kneel and of course think of Rule #1: Don’t move him. Then I see Rule #1 may not apply: Wayne’s head is gone. This, too, looks like a trick. There is no blood or gore and from my angle, behind and to the side of him, no wound visible, just no
head,
as if he’s an incomplete scarecrow.

The woman whose roof we’re fixing comes out.

“Wayne fell off the roof,” I tell her before she fully reaches us, as if to prepare her for a horror that I don’t want to surprise her.

“Wayne’s dead,” she says, and goes back in the house. She didn’t know Wayne and to my knowledge had never heard his name. She has given me a lesson in hard-boil.

Of course, I say to myself. Wayne’s dead, let’s hard-boil. I was afraid to glance ten degrees from Wayne to look for his head. His head would have been too much. But now, hell,
Wayne’s dead
and the lady is back in the house. I see her stop her daughter from running out of the house with a Popsicle. The kid has picked up a signal on its radar and is using a Popsicle to try to get through the lines. “No, you don’t,” her
Wayne’s-dead
mom tells her, turning her with the child’s momentum and aiming her back into the house.

I look around. Suddenly I
want
Wayne’s head. I am its rightful finder. My previous inclination would have been to get up from where I knelt and, not looking one inch either side of Wayne, go into the house, tell the woman to call somebody, and begin drinking beer unasked from her refrigerator, and sit at her cute kitchen bar on one of her expensive blond-wood barstools and wait and drink more beer. But she has cut me off from all that. She has ruled out the feeble.

I get up and begin to look around. I stand still and survey the open ground. Wayne’s head is not in the open, apparently. I change position to see behind things I can’t see behind, and keep looking at the actually open ground, because that is where I’m convinced Wayne will turn up. I do not want to step on Wayne’s head. This makes me take very small, shuffling steps.

Shuffling so, damned near scooting, I circle in and out and around the compressor and the felt and the cooler and the cans of mastic. I am afraid for a moment his head will be on the sofa, and that that will be too much, will undo this steely resolve in which I scoot in figure eights about the job site looking for my partner’s head. The sofa is a comic thing we do. We got it somewhere, some job, and carry it from job to job and sit on it to amuse (and enrage) customers. It’s quite comfortable, except that deep down it is wet, and this will wet your clothes, so we sit on plastic. Because it got wet the sofa is ungodly heavy, too, and we have threatened to abandon it when we find a good place. I am thinking that if Wayne’s head is on it, it’s going to be a good place. I cannot see the seat side of the sofa and must go up and look over the back. Carefully I do this. A weird idea strikes: Wayne hit the sofa and somehow his body bounced over to where he lies now. What could have held his head?

Before looking over the back of the sofa, I see the woman at the screen door watching me. She’s smoking a cigarette and has one hip out as if she’s impatient with me. Her attitude somehow suggests that if I don’t get on with it she’s going to come out here and do it herself, find Wayne’s head. She smokes like Lauren Bacall.

I look and Wayne’s not on the sofa. I am as relieved as if I have found him alive. I cut a glance at the woman that has a kind of
See there?
taunt to it. She can’t bully me around in my search. She can
come
out here herself if she’s so smart, my next long glance at her says. I’ve half a mind to walk in past her and get that beer and say, “Can’t find his head. Have you got a dog? Please go get some good beer, none of this Coors shit, and stop interfering with the search effort.” I am getting irrationally pissed off at this woman and her problem, which was a pissant wind-only leak in her half-million-dollar Texas-fake-ranch shit house, which had to be fixed, which cost me Wayne and Wayne his head. And
Wayne’s dead,
and
she
said it.

“Goddamn, lady,” I say to her, but not loud enough for her to hear it. Because—things are clear now that ordinarily are not, painful things are clear—
I am afraid of her.
I suddenly see that I am afraid of everybody in the world who has any balls. This woman could be
indicted
for her undeserved wealth and asshole lassitude and I’m an honest roofer and I am afraid of her.

Wayne’s head—I suddenly know where it is. I have known all along. It is in an open bucket of mastic, concealed in the stack of closed buckets, it will be there and I hope not facedown, and I know I’ll never know how the body got clear over there. Maybe Wayne ran over there. Hell, he probably walked over there intending to climb back up and find the bitch’s leak. He could have walked
all
around, for all I know; I was quivering on the ladder with white knuckles and closed eyes.

Wayne’s head is in profile in its bed of high-quality, low-asbestos asphalt pookie. As he would be, he is grinning. He looks alive. He looks like he is whispering. I look at the woman, still smoking. Is it the same cigarette or is she smoking a carton of cigarettes watching me?

I can’t hear Wayne. I kneel down.

“What?”

He says something again I still can’t hear. I push the back of his head slightly into the pookie to turn his mouth up toward me.

“Tell that broad to come out here and give me a knobber,” Wayne says. I start laughing.

“I will,” I say. “Relax.”

Never in my life have I been so
complete.
I feel like Achilles, or whoever.
The shit stops here,
I vow. I have a bunch of pookie on my hand from handling Wayne and I Go-jo it off. I put some fresh Varsol on the hand tools—there are none on the roof I know of—close the compressor, take down the ladder, put it on the truck, look in the cooler, wash the Go-jo off in the ice water, dry my hands with a clean rag, put the rag through a belt loop, and walk into the house. My hands are chilled still from the ice water and I warm them by rubbing them together. It is as though I’ve come in from the cold. My hands feel strong and good.

The woman has backed away as if surprised or scared.

“Have you called anyone?” I ask.

“Called
anyone?”

“I think it’s time. Let me have a beer.”

She just stands there. What is this? Lauren Bacall suffers sudden loss of composure.

The refrigerator is packed with every kind of packaged food there is. Wine in the door, exotic mustards, a lot of them. Hebrew National weenies, and nobody’s Jewish. The beer, when I find it, I know will be in whole, unbroken six-packs, or it will be in deli twos. I have a very good feeling about this particular fridge, though. These people are not far from Nolan Ryan, and I’ll bet they know him, and if Nolan drops in, Nolan will want more than two beers, two Löwenbräus. I dig through a bushel of produce, noting the absence of iceberg lettuce. If it weren’t for McDonald’s, iceberg lettuce wouldn’t have no luck at all. I sit down to take a longer look. Look at things from the underside. Pickle jars have a ring of little glass nibs around their lower rim, maybe for gripping? Silver-canned light Coors beer in tallboy, yes two six-packs. The woman is on the phone.

On the barstool I regard her. Not so bad.

“Who’s your husband with?” I ask.

“With?” she says, smiling, I think, rather too broadly.

“Work with.”

“The police are coming.”

“May I ask you what the roof leak damaged?”

“It wet the floor. Awful
bleachy
kind of stains.”

“I see.”

Something of Achilles has been lost, but not much.

“My friend Wayne wants you to give him a knobber.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Some friend I am. Some friend I am. Some friend I am.

She
bursts
into tears. Violent sobbing that scares me. I get off the stool as if to run.

“What did you have to say
that
for?” she asks.

“Say what?”

“I see.
In that way.”

“I take it back. I
don’t
see.”

“My husband—” she starts, and then is overcome with hard crying. She really is not bad at all. I have a vision of eating a meal with her, steaks handsomely char-broiled on the Jenn-Air, and later holding hands strolling the cattleless ranch with her. I have a vision of almost everything. My mind is spongy. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” I think to say to her, but it seems silly.

“There aren’t warts on character,” I tell her. “Character is nothing
but
warts. Character, ma’am, is plate tectonics. The mind is all buckle and shear, buckle and shear.” She pays no attention.

“Ma’am, I hope they get here soon. And I know you do, too. Your husband might be the sort people would kidnap for money, it occurred to me, but this is not probably the sort of thing rational people can afford to worry about.”

Wayne would not hurt a fly, but we had another worker once who had shot and killed a boy after a bar fight. At once I want to see him in this situation, and I do not. He would know what to do.

“Would you mind waiting outside?” I ask the woman.

“What?”

“You go outside awhile. This is
my
house.”

She
does!
Just goes out.

The kid reappears, same kid with as near as I can tell same Popsicle, trotting in the same line. “No, you don’t,” I tell her, but she goes on in stride right out the door.

I wish Nolan Ryan
would
drop in.

The police arrive, arrest me for trespass, you figure that one. They’ve moved Wayne—I don’t see him as I go out, but since I’d taken down the ladder it’s possible I didn’t look exactly in the right place, had lost the bearing.

Y
OU ARE NOT ALLOWED
to be afraid. There is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing, at any rate, to be afraid of that being afraid of it won’t compound. We have nothing to fear but compound fear.

I’m afraid of Mrs. Jenkins. I have no idea who she is. I am certain I would be afraid of her if I knew her. The name is arbitrary.

I am afraid of success, in its full-blown forms and in its tinctures. Of failure, I used not to be afraid, but that was a pose; one embraces failure to deny success. But now I am afraid of failure, too. It is zero, or negative, success, and just as scary.