Read Where I'm Calling From Online

Authors: Raymond Carver

Tags: #Literary, #Short stories, #American, #Short Stories (single author), #Fiction

Where I'm Calling From (41 page)

BOOK: Where I'm Calling From
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At least I think they’re calling to each other.

Suddenly a car door slams. Mr. Baxter is in his car in the drive with the window rolled down. mrs Baxter says something to him from the front porch which causes Mr. Baxter to nod slowly and turn his head in my direction. He sees me kneeling there with the rake, and a look crosses his face. He frowns. In his better moments, Mr. Baxter is a decent, ordinary guy—a guy you wouldn’t mistake for anyone special.

But he is special. In my book, he is. For one thing he has a full night’s sleep behind him, and he’s just embraced his wife before leaving for work. But even before he goes, he’s already expected home a set number of hours later. True, in the grander scheme of things, his return will be an event of small moment—but an event nonetheless.

Baxter starts his car and races the engine. Then he backs effortlessly out of the drive, brakes, and changes gears. As he passes on the street, he slows and looks briefly in my direction. He lifts his hand off the steering wheel. It could be a salute or a sign of dismissal. It’s a sign, in any case. And then he looks away toward the city. I get up and raise my hand, too—not a wave, exactly, but close to it. Some other cars drive past. One of the drivers must think he knows me because he gives his horn a friendly little tap. I look both ways and then cross the street.

Elephant

I knew it was a mistake to let my brother have the money. I didn’t need anybody else owing me. But when he called and said he couldn’t make the payment on his house, what could I do? I’d never been inside his house—he lived a thousand miles away, in California; I’d never even seen his house—but I didn’t want him to lose it. He cried over the phone and said he was losing everything he’d worked for. He said he’d pay me back. February, he said. Maybe sooner. No later, anyway, than March. He said his income-tax refund was on the way. Plus, he said, he had a little investment that would mature in February. He acted secretive about the investment thing, so I didn’t press for details.

“Trust me on this,” he said. “I won’t let you down.”

He’d lost his job last July, when the company he worked for, a fiberglass-insulation plant, decided to lay off two hundred employees. He’d been living on his unemployment since then, but now the unemployment was gone, and his savings were gone, too. And he didn’t have health insurance any longer. When his job went, the insurance went. His wife, who was ten years older, was diabetic and needed treatment. He’d had to sell the other car—her car, an old station wagon—and a week ago he’d pawned his TV. He told me he’d hurt his back carrying the TV up and down the street where the pawnshops did business. He went from place to place, he said, trying to get the best offer. Somebody finally gave him a hundred dollars for it, this big Sorry TV. He told me about the TV, and then about throwing his back out, as if this ought to cinch it with me, unless I had a stone in place of a heart.

“I’ve gone belly up,” he said. “But you can help me pull out of it.”

“How much?” I said.

“Five hundred. I could use more, sure, who couldn’t?” he said. “But I want to be realistic. I can pay back five hundred. More than that, I’ll tell you the truth, I’m not so sure.

Brother, I hate to ask. But you’re my last resort. Irma Jean and I are going to be on the street before long.

I won’t let you down,” he said. That’s what he said. Those were his exact words.

We talked a little more—mostly about our mother and her problems —but, to make a long story short, I sent him the money. I had to. I felt I had to, at any rate—which amounts to the same thing. I wrote him a letter when I sent the check and said he should pay the money back to our mother, who lived in the same town he lived in and who was poor and greedy. I’d been mailing checks to her every month, rain or shine, for three years. But I was thinking that if he paid her the money he owed me it might take me off the hook there and let me breathe for a while. I wouldn’t have to worry on that score for a couple of months, anyway. Also, and this is the truth, I thought maybe he’d be more likely to pay her, since they lived right there in the same town and he saw her from time to time. All I was doing was trying to cover myself some way. The thing is, he might have the best intentions of paying me back, but things happen sometimes. Things get in the way of best intentions. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. But he wouldn’t stiff his own mother. Nobody would do that.

I spent hours writing letters, trying to make sure everybody knew what could be expected and what was required. I even phoned out there to my mother several times, trying to explain it to her. But she was suspicious over the whole deal. I went through it with her on the phone step by step, but she was still suspicious. I told her the money that was supposed to come from me on the first of March and on the first of April would instead come from Billy, who owed the money to me. She’d get her money, and she didn’t have to worry. The only difference was that Billy would pay it to her those two months instead of me. He’d pay her the money I’d normally be sending to her, but instead of him mailing it to me and then me having to turn around and send it to her he’d pay it to her directly. On any account, she didn’t have to worry. She’d get her money, but for those two months it’d come from him—from the money he owed me.

My God, I don’t know how much I spent on phone calls. And I wish I had fifty cents for every letter I wrote, telling him what I’d told her and telling her what to expect from him—that sort of thing.

But my mother didn’t trust Billy. “What if he can’t come up with it?” she said to me over the phone.

“What then? He’s in bad shape, and I’m sorry for him,” she said. “But, son, what I want to know is, what if he isn’t able to pay me? What if he can’t? Then what?”

“Then I’ll pay you myself,” I said. “Just like always. If he doesn’t pay you, I’ll pay you. But he’ll pay you.

Don’t worry. He says he will, and he will.”

“I don’t want to worry,” she said. “But I worry anyway. I worry about my boys, and after that I worry about myself. I never thought I’d see one of my boys in this shape. I’m just glad your dad isn’t alive to see it.”

In three months my brother gave her fifty dollars of what he owed me and was supposed to pay to her.

Or maybe it was seventy-five dollars he gave her. There are conflicting stories—two conflicting stories, his and hers. But that’s all he paid her of the five hundred—fifty dollars or else seventy-five dollars, according to whose story you want to listen to. I had to make up the rest to her. I had to keep shelling out, same as always. My brother was finished. That’s what he told me—that he was finished—when I called to see what was up, after my mother had phoned, looking for her money.

My mother said, “I made the mailman go back and check inside his truck, to see if your letter might have fallen down behind the seat. Then I went around and asked the neighbors did they get any of my mail by mistake. I’m going crazy with worry about this situation, honey.” Then she said, “What’s a mother supposed to think?” Who was looking out for her best interests in this business? She wanted to know that, and she wanted to know when she could expect her money.

So that’s when I got on the phone to my brother to see if this was just a simple delay or a full-fledged collapse. But, according to Billy, he was a goner. He was absolutely done for. He was putting his house on the market immediately. He just hoped he hadn’t waited too long to try and move it. And there wasn’t anything left inside the house that he could sell. He’d sold off everything except the kitchen table and chairs. “I wish I could sell my blood,” he said. “But who’d buy it? With my luck, I probably have an incurable disease.” And, naturally, the investment thing hadn’t worked out. When I asked him about it over the phone, all he said was that it hadn’t materialized. His tax refund didn’t make it, either—the I.R.S. had some kind of lien on his return. “When it rains it pours,” he said. “I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“I understand,” I said. And I did. But it didn’t make it any easier. Anyway, one thing and the other, I didn’t get my money from him, and neither did my mother. I had to keep on sending her money every month.

I was sore, yes. Who wouldn’t be?

My heart went out to him, and I wished trouble hadn’t knocked on his door. But my own back was against the wall now. At least, though, whatever happens to him from here on, he won’t come back to me for more money—seeing as how he still owes me. Nobody would do that to you. That’s how I figured, anyway. But that’s how little I knew.

I kept my nose to the grindstone. I got up early every morning and went to work and worked hard all day. When I came home I plopped into the big chair and just sat there. I was so tired it took me a while to get around to unlacing my shoes. Then I just went on sitting there. I was too tired to even get up and turn on the TV.

I was sorry about my brother’s troubles. But I had troubles of my own. In addition to my mother, I had several other people on my payroll. I had a former wife I was sending money to every month. I had to do that. I didn’t want to, but the court said I had to. And I had a daughter with two kids in Bellingham, and I had to send her something every month. Her kids had to eat, didn’t they? She was living with a swine who wouldn’t even look for work, a guy who couldn’t hold a job if they handed him one. The time or two he did find something, he overslept, or his car broke down on the way in to work, or else he’d just be let go, no explanation, and that was that.

Once, long ago, when I used to think like a man about these things, I threatened to kill that guy. But that’s neither here nor there. Besides, I was drinking in those days. In any case, the bastard is still hanging around.

My daughter would write these letters and say how they were living on oatmeal, she and her kids. (I guess he was starving, too, but she knew better than to mention that guy’s name in her letters to me.) She’d tell me that if I could just carry her until summer things would pick up for her. Things would turn around for her, she was sure, in the summer. If nothing else worked out—but she was sure it would; she had several irons in the fire—she could always get a job in the fish cannery that was not far from where she lived. She’d wear rubber boots and rubber clothes and gloves and pack salmon into cans. Or else she might sell root beer from a vending stand beside the road to people who lined up in their cars at the border, waiting to get into Canada. People sitting in their cars in the middle of summer were going to be thirsty, right? They were going to be crying out for cold drinks. Anyway, one thing or the other, whatever line of work she decided on, she’d do fine in the summer. She just had to make it until then, and that’s where I came in.

My daughter said she knew she had to change her life. She wanted to stand on her own two feet like everyone else. She wanted to quit looking at herself as a victim. “I’m not a victim,” she said to me over the phone one night. “I’m just a young woman with two kids and a son-of-a bitch bum who lives with me. No different from lots of other women. I’m not afraid of hard work. Just give me a chance. That’s all I ask of the world.” She said she could do without for herself. But until her break came, until opportunity knocked, it was the kids she worried about. The kids were always asking her when Grandpop was going to visit, she said. Right this minute they were drawing pictures of the swing sets and swimming pool at the motel I’d stayed in when I’d visited a year ago. But summer was the thing, she said. If she could make it until summer, her troubles would be over. Things would change then—she knew they would.

And with a little help from me she could make it. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Dad.” That’s what she said. It nearly broke my heart. Sure I had to help her. I was glad to be even halfway in a position to help her. I had a job, didn’t I? Compared to her and everyone else in my family, I had it made. Compared to the rest, I lived on Easy Street.

I sent the money she asked for. I sent money every time she asked. And then I told her I thought it’d be simpler if I just sent a sum of money, not a whole lot, but money even so, on the first of each month. It would be money she could count on, and it would be her money, no one else’s— hers and the kids’. That’s what I hoped for, anyway. I wished there was some way I could be sure the bastard who lived with her couldn’t get his hands on so much as an orange or a piece of bread that my money bought. But I couldn’t.

I just had to go ahead and send the money and stop worrying about whether he’d soon be tucking into a plate of my eggs and biscuits.

My mother and my daughter and my former wife. That’s three people on the payroll right there, not counting my brother. But my son needed money, too. After he graduated from high school, he packed his things, left his mother’s house, and went to a college back East. A college in New Hampshire, of all places. Who’s ever heard of New Hampshire? But he was the first kid in the family, on either side of the family, to even want to go to college, so everybody thought it was a good idea. I thought so, too, at first. How’d I know it was going to wind up costing me an arm and a leg? He borrowed left and right from the banks to keep himself going. He didn’t want to have to work a job and go to school at the same time. That’s what he said. And, sure, I guess I can understand it. In a way, I can even sympathize. Who likes to work? I don’t.

But after he’d borrowed everything he could, everything in sight, including enough to finance a junior year in Germany, I had to begin sending him money, and a lot of it. When, finally, I said I couldn’t send any more, he wrote back and said if that was the case, if that was really the way I felt, he was going to deal drugs or else rob a bank—whatever he had to do to get money to live on. I’d be lucky if he wasn’t shot or sent to prison.

I wrote back and said I’d changed my mind and I could send him a little more after all. What else could I do? I didn’t want his blood on my hands. I didn’t want to think of my kid being packed off to prison, or something even worse. I had plenty on my conscience as it was.

That’s four people, right? Not counting my brother, who wasn’t a regular yet. I was going crazy with it. I worried night and day. I couldn’t sleep over it. I was paying out nearly as much money every month as I was bringing in. You don’t have to be a genius, or know anything about economics, to understand that this state of affairs couldn’t keep on. I had to get a loan to keep up my end of things. That was another monthly payment.

So I started cutting back. I had to quit eating out, for instance. Since I lived alone, eating out was something I liked to do, but it became a thing of the past. And I had to watch myself when it came to thinking about movies. I couldn’t buy clothes or get my teeth fixed. The car was falling apart. I needed new shoes, but forget it.

Once in a while I’d get fed up with it and write letters to all of them, threatening to change my name and telling them I was going to quit my job. I’d tell them I was planning a move to Australia. And the thing was, I was serious when I’d say that about Australia, even though I didn’t know the first thing about Australia. I just knew it was on the other side of the world, and that’s where I wanted to be.

But when it came right down to it, none of them really believed I’d go to Australia. They had me, and they knew it. They knew I was desperate, and they were sorry and they said so. But they counted on it all blowing over before the first of the month, when I had to sit down and make out the checks.

BOOK: Where I'm Calling From
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