Where I'm Calling From (12 page)

Leo turns on the porch light and opens the door cautiously. Her makeup pouch lies on the top step. The man looks at Leo across the front of the car, and then gets back inside and releases the handbrake.

“Wait!” Leo calls and starts down the steps. The man brakes the car as Leo walks in front of the lights.

The car creaks against the brake. Leo tries to pull the two pieces of his shirt together, tries to bunch it all into his trousers.

“What is it you want?” the man says. “Look,” the man says, “I have to go. No offense. I buy and sell cars, right? The lady left her makeup. She’s a fine lady, very refined. What is it?”

Leo leans against the door and looks at the man. The man takes his hands off the wheel and puts them back. He drops the gear into reverse and the car moves backward a little.

“I want to tell you,” Leo says and wets his lips.

The light in Ernest Williams’ bedroom goes on. The shade rolls up.

Leo shakes his head, tucks in his shirt again. He steps back from the car. “Monday,” he says.

“Monday,” the man says and watches for sudden movement.

Leo nods slowly. “Well, goodnight,” the man says and coughs. “Take it easy, hear? Monday, that’s right.

Okay, then.” He takes his foot off the brake, puts it on again after he has rolled back two or three feet.

“Hey, one question. Between friends, are these actual miles?” The man waits, then clears his throat.

“Okay, look, it doesn’t matter either way,” the man says. “I have to go. Take it easy.” He backs into the street, pulls away quickly, and turns the corner without stopping.

Leo tucks at his shirt and goes back in the house. He locks the front door and checks it. Then he goes to the bedroom and locks that door and turns back the covers. He looks at her before he flicks the light. He takes off his clothes, folds them carefully on the floor, and gets in beside her. He lies on his back for a time and pulls the hair on his stomach, considering. He looks at the bedroom door, outlined now in the faint outside light. Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. She does not move. He turns on his side and puts his hand on her hip. He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. He remembers waking up the morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming.

That morning she pours Teacher’s over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

I go, “Holly, this can’t continue. This has got to stop.”

We are sitting on the sofa in one of the upstairs suites. There were any number of vacancies to choose from. But we needed a suite, a place to move around in and be able to talk. So we’d locked up the motel office that morning and gone upstairs to a suite.

She goes, “Duane, this is killing me.”

We are drinking Teacher’s with ice and water. We’d slept awhile between morning and afternoon. Then she was out of bed and threatening to climb out the window in her undergarments. I had to get her in a hold. We were only two floors up. But even so.

“I’ve had it,” she goes. “I can’t take it anymore.”

She puts her hand to her cheek and closes her eyes. She turns her head back and forth and makes this humming noise.

I could die seeing her like this.

“Take what?” I go, though of course I know.

“I don’t have to spell it out for you again,” she goes. “I’ve lost control. I’ve lost pride. I used to be a proud woman.”

She’s an attractive woman just past thirty. She is tall and has long black hair and green eyes, the only green-eyed woman I’ve ever known. In the old days I used to say things about her green eyes, and she’d tell me it was because of them she knew she was meant for something special.

And didn’t I know it!

I feel so awful from one thing and the other.

I can hear the telephone ringing downstairs in the office. It has been ringing off and on all day. Even when I was dozing I could hear it. I’d open my eyes and look at the ceiling and listen to it ring and wonder at what was happening to us.

But maybe I should be looking at the floor.

“My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.”

“Holly,” I go.

When we’d first moved down here and taken over as managers, we thought we were out of the woods. Free rent and free utilities plus three hundred a month. You couldn’t beat it with a stick.

Holly took care of the books. She was good with figures, and she did most of the renting of the units.

She liked people, and people liked her back. I saw to the grounds, mowed the grass and cut weeds, kept the swimming pool clean, did the small repairs.

Everything was fine for the first year. I was holding down another job nights, and we were getting ahead. We had plans. Then one morning, I don’t know. I’d just laid some bathroom tile in one of the units when this little Mexican maid comes in to clean. It was Holly had hired her. I can’t really say I’d noticed the little thing before, though we spoke when we saw each other. She called me, I remember, Mister.

Anyway, one thing and the other.

So after that morning I started paying attention. She was a neat little thing with fine white teeth. I used to watch her mouth.

She started calling me by my name.

One morning I was doing a washer for one of the bathroom faucets, and she comes in and turns on the TV as maids are like to do. While they clean, that is. I stopped what I was doing and stepped outside the bathroom. She was surprised to see me. She smiles and says my name.

It was right after she said it that we got down on the bed.

“Holly, you’re still a proud woman,”

I go. “You’re still number one. Come on, Holly.”

She shakes her head.”Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead.

You’ve killed something, just like you’d taken an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.”

She finishes her drink. Then she begins to cry. I make to hug her. But it’s no good.

I freshen our drinks and look out the window.

Two cars with out-of-state plates are parked in front of the office, and the drivers are standing at the door, talking. One of them finishes saying something to the other, and looks around at the units and pulls his chin. There’s a woman there too, and she has her face up to the glass, hand shielding her eyes, peering inside. She tries the door.

The phone downstairs begins to ring.

“Even a while ago when we were doing it, you were thinking of her,” Holly goes. “Duane, this is hurtful.”

She takes the drink I give her.

“Holly,” I go.

“It’s true, Duane,” she goes. “Just don’t argue with me,” she goes. She walks up and down the room in her underpants and her brassiere, her drink in her hand.

Holly goes, “You’ve gone outside the marriage. It’s trust that you killed.”

I get down on my knees and I start to beg. But I am thinking of Juanita. This is awful. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

I go, “Holly, honey, I love you.”

In the lot someone leans on a horn, stops, and then leans again.

Holly wipes her eyes. She goes, “Fix me a drink. This one’s too watery. Let them blow their stinking horns. I don’t care. I’m moving to Nevada.”

“Don’t move to Nevada,” I go. “You’re talking crazy,” I go.

“I’m not talking crazy,” she goes. “Nothing’s crazy about Nevada. You can stay here with your cleaning woman. I’m moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”

“Holly!” I go.

“Holly nothing!” she goes.

She sits on the sofa and draws her knees up to under her chin.

“Fix me another pop, you son of a bitch,” she goes. She goes, “Fuck those horn-blowers. Let them do their dirt in the Travelodge. Is that

where your cleaning woman cleans now? Fix me another, you son of a bitch!”

She sets her lips and gives me this look.

Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey. When we made up our minds to move down here and take this job as managers, we sat up a couple of nights drinking while we weighed the pros and the cons.

I pour the last of the Teacher’s into our glasses and add cubes and a spill of water.

Holly gets off the sofa and stretches on out across the bed.

She goes, “Did you do it to her in this bed?”

I don’t have anything to say. I feel all out of words inside. I give her the glass and sit down in the chair. I drink my drink and think it’s not ever going to be the same.

“Duane?” she goes.

“Holly?”

My heart has slowed. I wait.

Holly was my own true love.

The thing with Juanita was five days a week between the hours of ten and eleven. It was in whatever unit she was in when she was making her cleaning rounds. I’d just walk in where she was working and shut the door behind me.

But mostly it was in 11. It was 11 that was our lucky room.

We were sweet with each other, but swift. It was fine.

I think Holly could maybe have weathered it out. I think the thing she had to do was really give it a try.

Me, I held on to the night job. A monkey could do that work. But things here were going downhill fast.

We just didn’t have the heart for it anymore.

I stopped cleaning the pool. It filled up with green gick so that the guests wouldn’t use it anymore. I didn’t fix any more faucets or lay any more tile or do any of the touch-up painting. Well, the truth is we were both hitting it pretty hard. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.

Holly wasn’t registering the guests right, either. She was charging too much or else not collecting what she should. Sometimes she’d put three people to a room with only one bed in it, or else she’d put a single in where the bed was a king-size. I tell you, there were complaints, and sometimes there were words.

Folks would load up and go somewhere else.

The next thing, there’s a letter from the management people. Then there’s another, certified.

There’s telephone calls. There’s someone coming down from the city.

But we had stopped caring, and that’s a fact. We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled our lives and we were getting ready for a shakeup.

Holly’s a smart woman. She knew it first.

Then that Saturday morning we woke up after a night of rehashing the situation. We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We’d reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.

We got up and got dressed, had coffee, and decided on this talk. Without nothing interrupting. No calls.

No guests.

That’s when I got the Teacher’s. We locked up and came upstairs here with ice, glasses, bottles. First off, we watched the color TV and frolicked some and let the phone ring away downstairs. For food, we went out and got cheese crisps from the machine.

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

When we were just kids before we married?” Holly goes. “When we had big plans and hopes? You remember?” She was sitting on the bed, holding her knees and her drink.

“I remember, Holly.”

“You weren’t my first, you know. My first was Wyatt. Imagine. Wyatt. And your name’s Duane. Wyatt and Duane. Who knows what I was missing all those years? You were my everything, just like the song.”

I go; “You’re a wonderful woman, Holly. I know you’ve had the opportunities.”

“But I didn’t take them up on it!” she goes. “I couldn’t go outside the marriage.”

“Holly, please,” I go. “No more now, honey. Let’s not torture ourselves. What is it we should do?”

“Listen,” she goes. “You remember the time we drove out to that old farm place outside of Yakima, out past Terrace Heights? We were just driving around? We were on this little dirt road and it was hot and dusty? We kept going and came to that old house, and you asked if we could have a drink of water? Can you imagine us doing that now? Going up to a house and asking for a drink of water?

“Those old people must be dead now,” she goes, “side by side out there in some cemetery. You remember they asked us in for cake? And later on they showed us around? And there was this gazebo there out back? It was out back under some trees? It had a little peaked roof and the paint was gone and there were these weeds growing up over the steps. And the woman said that years before, I mean a real long time ago, men used to come around and play music out there on a Sunday, and the people would sit and listen. I thought we’d be like that too when we got old enough. Dignified. And in a place. And people would come to our door.”

I can’t say anything just yet. Then I go, “Holly, these things, we’ll look back on them too. We’ll go,

‘Remember the motel with all the crud in the pool?’” I go, “You see what I’m saying, Holly?”

But Holly just sits there on the bed with her glass.

I can see she doesn’t know.

I move over to the window and look out from behind the curtain. Someone says something below and rattles the door to the office. I stay there. I pray for a sign from Holly. I pray for Holly to show me.

I hear a car start. Then another. They turn on their lights against the building and, one after the other, they pull away and go out into the traffic.

“Duane,” Holly goes.

In this too, she was right.

LD’s wife, Maxine, told him to get out the night she came home from work and found L.D. drunk again and being abusive to Rae, their fifteen-year-old. L.D. and Rae were at the kitchen table, arguing. Maxine didn’t have time to put her purse away or take off her coat.

Rae said, “Tell him, Mom. Tell him what we talked about.”

L.D. turned the glass in his hand, but he didn’t drink from it. Maxine had him in a fierce and disquieting gaze.

“Keep your nose out of things you don’t know anything about,” L.D. said. L.D. said, “I can’t take anybody seriously who sits around all day reading astrology magazines.” “This has nothing to do with astrology,” Rae said. “You don’t have to insult me.”

As for Rae, she hadn’t been to school for weeks. She said no one could make her go. Maxine said it was another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies.

“Why don’t you both shut up!” Maxine said. “My God, I already have a headache.”

“Tell him, Mom,” Rae said. “Tell him it’s all in his head. Anybody who knows anything about it will tell you that’s where it is!”

“How about sugar diabetes?” L.D. said. “What about epilepsy? Can the brain control that?”

He raised the glass right under Maxine’s eyes and finished his drink.

“Diabetes, too,” Rae said. “Epilepsy. Anything! The brain is the most powerful organ in the body, for your information.”

She picked up his cigarettes and lit one for herself. “Cancer. What about cancer?” L.D. said.

He thought he might have her there. He looked at Maxine.

“I don’t know how we got started on this,” L.D. said to Maxine.

“Cancer,” Rae said, and shook her head at his simplicity. “Cancer, too. Cancer starts in the brain.”

“That’s crazy!” L.D. said. He hit the table with the flat of his hand. The ashtray jumped. His glass fell on its side and rolled off. “You’re crazy, Rae! Do you know that?”

“Shut up!” Maxine said.

She unbuttoned her coat and put her purse down on the counter. She looked at L.D. and said, “L.D., I’ve had it. So has Rae. So has everyone who knows you. I’ve been thinking it over. I want you out of here.

Tonight. This minute. Now. Get the hell out of here right now.”

L.D. had no intention of going anywhere. He looked from Maxine to the jar of pickles that had been on the table since lunch. He picked up the jar and pitched it through the kitchen window.

Rae jumped away from her chair. “God! He’s crazy!”

She went to stand next to her mother. She took in little breaths through her mouth.

“Call the police,” Maxine said. “He’s violent. Get out of the kitchen before he hurts you. Call the police,”

Maxine said.

They started backing out of the kitchen.

“I’m going,” L.D. said. “All right, I’m going right now,” he said. “It suits me to a tee. You’re nuts here, anyway. This is a nuthouse. There’s another life out there. Believe me, this is no picnic, this nuthouse.”

He could feel air from the hole in the window on his face.

“That’s where I’m going,” he said. “Out there,” he said and pointed.

“Good,” Maxine said.

“All right, I’m going,” L.D. said.

He slammed down his hand on the table. He kicked back his chair. He stood up.

“You won’t ever see me again,” L.D. said.

“You’ve given me plenty to remember you by,” Maxine said.

“Okay,” L.D. said.

“Go on, get out,” Maxine said. “I’m paying the rent here, and I’m saying go. Now.”

“I’m going,” he said. “Don’t push me,” he said. “I’m going.”

“Just go,” Maxine said.

“I’m leaving this nuthouse,” L.D. said.

He made his way into the bedroom and took one of her suitcases from the closet. It was an old white Naugahyde suitcase with a broken clasp. She’d used to pack it full of sweater sets and carry it with her to college. He had gone to college too. He threw the suitcase onto the bed and began putting in his underwear, his trousers, his shirts, his sweaters, his old leather belt with the brass buckle, his socks, and everything else he had. From, the nightstand he took magazines for reading material. He took the ashtray. He put everything he could into the suitcase, everything it could hold. He fastened the one good side, secured the strap, and then he remembered his bathroom things. He found the vinyl shaving bag up on the closet shelf behind her hats. Into it went his razor and his shaving cream, his talcum powder and his stick deodorant and his toothbrush. He took the toothpaste, too. And then he got the dental floss.

He could hear them in the living room talking in their low voices.

He washed his face. He put the soap and towel into the shaving bag. Then he put in the soap dish and the glass from over the sink and the fingernail clippers and her eyelash curlers.

He couldn’t get the shaving bag closed, but that was okay. He put on his coat and picked up the suitcase.

He went into the living room.

When she saw him, Maxine put her arm around Rae’s shoulders.

“This is it,” L.D. said. “This is good-bye,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say except I guess I’ll never see you again. You too,” L.D. said to Rae. “You and your crackpot ideas.”

“Go,” Maxine said. She took Rae’s hand. “Haven’t you done enough damage in this house already? Go on, L.D. Get out of here and leave us in peace.”

“Just remember,” Rae said. “It’s in your head.”

“I’m going, that’s all I can say,” L.D. said. “Anyplace. Away from this nuthouse,” he said. “That’s the main thing.”

He took a last look around the living room and then he moved the suitcase from one hand to the other and put the shaving bag under his arm. “I’ll be in touch, Rae. Maxine, you’re better off out of this nuthouse yourself.”

“You made it into a nuthouse,” Maxine said. “If it’s a nuthouse, then that’s what you made it.”

He put the suitcase down and the shaving bag on top of the suitcase. He drew himself up and faced them. They moved back. “Watch it, Mom,” Rae said. “I’m not afraid of him,” Maxine said.

L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase. He said, “I just want to say one more thing.” But then he could not think what it could possibly be.