Where I'm Calling From (42 page)

After one of my letters where I talked about moving to Australia, my mother wrote that she didn’t want to be a burden any longer. Just as soon as the swelling went down in her legs, she said, she was going out to look for work. She was seventy-five years old, but maybe she could go back to waitressing, she said. I wrote her back and told her not to be silly. I said I was glad I could help her. And I was. I was glad I could help. I just needed to win the lottery.

My daughter knew Australia was just a way of saying to everybody that I’d had it. She knew I needed a break and something to cheer me up. So she wrote that she was going to leave her kids with somebody and take the cannery job when the season rolled around. She was young and strong, she said. She thought she could work the twelve-tofourteenhoura-day shifts, seven days a week, no problem. She’d just have to tell herself she could do it, get herself psyched up for it, and her body would listen. She just had to line up the right kind of babysitter. That’d be the big thing. It was going to require a special kind of sitter, seeing as how the hours would be long and the kids were hyper to begin with, because of all the Popsicles and Tootsie Rolls, M&M’s, and the like that they put away every day. It’s the stuff kids like to eat, right? Anyway, she thought she could find the right person if she kept looking. But she had to buy the boots and clothes for the work, and that’s where I could help.

My son wrote that he was sorry for his part in things and thought he and I would both be better off if he ended it once and for all. For one thing, he’d discovered he was allergic to cocaine. It made his eyes stream and affected his breathing, he said. This meant he couldn’t test the drugs in the transactions he’d need to make. So, before it could even begin, his career as a drug dealer was over. No, he said, better a bullet in the temple and end it all right here. Or maybe hanging. That would save him the trouble of borrowing a gun. And save us the price of bullets. That’s actually what he said in his letter, if you can believe it. He enclosed a picture of himself that somebody had taken last summer when he was in the study-abroad program in Germany. He was standing under a big tree with thick limbs hanging down a few feet over his head. In the picture, he wasn’t smiling.

My former wife didn’t have anything to say on the matter. She didn’t have to. She knew she’d get her money the first of each month, even if it had to come all the way from Sydney. If she didn’t get it, she just had to pick up the phone and call her lawyer.

This is where things stood when my brother called one Sunday afternoon in early May. I had the windows open, and a nice breeze moved through the house. The radio was playing. The hillside behind the house was in bloom. But I began to sweat when I heard his voice on the line. I hadn’t heard from him since the dispute over the five hundred, so I couldn’t believe he was going to try and touch me for more money now. But I began to sweat anyway. He asked how things stood with me, and I launched into the payroll thing and all. I talked about oatmeal, cocaine, fish canneries, suicide, bank jobs, and how I couldn’t go to the movies or eat out. I said I had a hole in my shoe. I talked about the payments that went on and on to my former wife. He knew all about this, of course. He knew everything I was telling him.

Still, he said he was sorry to hear it. I kept talking. It was his dime. But as he talked I started thinking, How are you going to pay for this call, Billy? Then it came to me that I was going to pay for it. It was only a matter of minutes, or seconds, until it was all decided.

I looked out the window. The sky was blue, with a few white clouds in it. Some birds clung to a telephone wire. I wiped my face on my sleeve. I didn’t know what else I could say. So I suddenly stopped talking and just stared out the window at the mountains, and waited. And that’s when my brother said, “I hate to ask you this, but—” When he said that, my heart did this sinking thing. And then he went ahead and asked.

This time it was a thousand. A thousand! He was worse off than when he’d called that other time. He let me have some details. The bill collectors were at the door—the door! he said—and the windows rattled, the house shook, when they hammered with their fists. Blam, blam, blam, he said. There was no place to hide from them. His house was about to be pulled out from under him. “Help me, brother,” he said.

Where was I going to raise a thousand dollars? I took a good grip on the receiver, turned away from the window, and said, “But you didn’t pay me back the last time you borrowed money. What about that?”

“I didn’t?” he said, acting surprised. “I guess I thought I had. I wanted to, anyway. I tried to, so help me God.”

“You were supposed to pay that money to Mom,” I said. “But you didn’t. I had to keep giving her money every month, same as always. There’s no end to it, Billy. Listen, I take one step forward and I go two steps back. I’m going under. You’re all going under, and you’re pulling me down with you.”

“I paid her some of it,” he said. “I did pay her a little. Just for the record,” he said, “I paid her something.”

“She said you gave her fifty dollars and that was all.”

“No,” he said, “I gave her seventy-five. She forgot about the other twenty-five. I was over there one afternoon, and I gave her two tens and a five. I gave her some cash, and she just forgot about it. Her memory’s going. Look,” he said, “I promise I’ll be good for it this time, I swear to God. Add up what I still owe you and add it to this money here I’m trying to borrow, and I’ll send you a check. We’ll exchange checks. Hold on to my check for two months, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll be out of the woods in two months’ time. Then you’ll have your money. July ist, I promise, no later, and this time I can swear to it. We’re in the process of selling this little piece of property that Irmajean inherited a while back from her uncle. It’s as good as sold. The deal has closed. It’s just a question now of working out a couple of minor details and signing the papers. Plus, I’ve got this job lined up. It’s definite. I’ll have to drive fifty miles round trip every day, but that’s no problem—hell, no. I’d drive a hundred and fifty if I had to, and be glad to do it. I’m saying I’ll have money in the bank in two months’ time. You’ll get your money, all of it, by July ist, and you can count on it.”

“Billy, I love you,” I said. “But I’ve got a load to carry. I’m carrying a very heavy load these days, in case you didn’t know.”

“That’s why I won’t let you dowri on this,” he said. “You have my word of honor. You can trust me on this absolutely. I promise you my check will be good in two months, no later. Two months is all I’m asking for. Brother, I don’t know where else to turn. You’re my last hope.”

I did it, sure. To my surprise, I still had some credit with the bank, so I borrowed the money, and I sent it to him. Our checks crossed in the mail. I stuck a thumbtack through his check and put it up on the kitchen wall next to the calendar and the picture of my son standing under that tree. And then I waited.

I kept waiting. My brother wrote and asked me not to cash the check on the day we’d agreed to. Please wait a while longer is what he said. Some things had come up. The job he’d been promised had fallen through at the last minute. That was one thing that came up. And that little piece of property belonging to his wife hadn’t sold after all. At the last minute, she’d had a change of heart about selling it. It had been in her family for generations. What could he do? It was her land, and she wouldn’t listen to reason, he said.

My daughter telephoned around this time to say that somebody had broken into her trailer and ripped her off. Everything in the trailer. Every stick of furniture was gone when she came home from work after her first night at the cannery. There wasn’t even a chair left for her to sit down on. Her bed had been stolen, too. They were going to have to sleep on the floor like Gypsies, she said.

“Where was what’s-his-name when this happened?” I said.

She said he’d been out looking for work earlier in the day. She guessed he was with friends. Actually, she didn’t know his whereabouts at the time of the crime, or even right now, for that matter. “I hope he’s at the bottom of the river,” she said. The kids had been with the sitter when the ripoff happened. But, anyway, if she could just borrow enough from me to buy some secondhand furniture she’d pay me back, she said, when she got her first check. If she had some money from me before the end of the week—I could wire it, maybe—she could pick up some essentials. “Somebody’s violated my space,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been raped.”

My son wrote from New Hampshire that it was essential he go back to Europe. His life hung in the balance, he said. He was graduating at the end of summer session, but he couldn’t stand to live in America a day longer after that. This was a materialist society, and he simply couldn’t take it anymore.

People over here, in the U.S., couldn’t hold a conversation unless money figured in it some way, and he was sick of it. He wasn’t a Yuppie, and didn’t want to become a Yuppie. That wasn’t his thing. He’d get out of my hair, he said, if he could just borrow enough from me, this one last time, to buy a ticket to Germany.

I didn’t hear anything from my former wife. I didn’t have to. We both knew how things stood there.

My mother wrote that she was having to do without support hose and wasn’t able to have her hair tinted.

She’d thought this would be the year she could put some money back for the rainy days ahead, but it wasn’t working out that way. She could see it wasn’t in the cards. “How are you?” she wanted to know.

“How’s everybody else? I hope you’re okay.”

I put more checks in the mail. Then I held my breath and waited.

While I was waiting, I had this dream one night. Two dreams, really. I dreamt them on the same night.

In the first dream, my dad was alive once more, and he was giving me a ride on his shoulders. I was this little kid, maybe five or six years old. Get up here, he said, and he took me by the hands and swung me onto his shoulders. I was high off the ground, but I wasn’t afraid. He was holding on to me. We were holding on to each other. Then he began to move down the sidewalk. I brought my hands up from his shoulders and put them around his forehead. Don’t muss my hair, he said. You can let go, he said, I’ve got you. You won’t fall. When he said that, I became aware of the strong grip of his hands around my ankles. Then I did let go. I turned loose and held my arms out on either side of me. I kept them out there like that for balance. My dad went on walking while I rode on his shoulders. I pretended he was an elephant. I don’t know where we were going. Maybe we were going to the store, or else, to the park so he could push me in the swing.

I woke up then, got out of bed, and used the bathroom. It was starting to get light out, and it was only an hour or so until I had to get up. I thought about making coffee and getting dressed. But then I decided to go back to bed. I didn’t plan to sleep, though. I thought I’d just lie there for a while with my hands behind my neck and watch it turn light out and maybe think about my dad a little, since I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. He just wasn’t a part of my life any longer, waking or sleeping. Anyway, I got back in bed. But it couldn’t have been more than a minute before I fell asleep once more, and when I did I got into this other dream. My former wife was in it, though she wasn’t my former wife in the dream.

She was still my wife. My kids were in it, too. They were little, and they were eating potato chips. In my dream, I thought I could smell the potato chips and hear them being eaten. We were on a blanket, and we were close to some water. There was a sense of satisfaction and well-being in the dream. Then, suddenly, I found myself in the company of some other people—people I didn’t know—and the next thing that happened was that I was kicking the window out of my son’s car and threatening his life, as I did once, a long time ago. He was inside the car as my shoe smashed through the glass. That’s when my eyes flew open, and I woke up. The alarm was going off. I reached over and pushed the switch and lay there for a few minutes more, my heart racing. In the second dream, somebody had offered me some whiskey, and I drank it. Drinking that whiskey was the thing that scared me. That was the worst thing that could have happened. That was rock bottom. Compared to that, everything else was a picnic. I lay there for a minute longer, trying to calm down. Then I got up.

I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table in front of the window. I pushed my cup back and forth in little circles on the table and began to think seriously about Australia again. And then, all of a sudden, I could imagine how it must have sounded to my family when I’d threatened them with a move to Australia. They would have been shocked at first, and even a little scared. Then, because they knew me, they’d probably started laughing. Now, thinking about their laughter, I had to laugh, too. Ha, ha, ha. That was exactly the sound I made there at the table—ha, ha, ha-as if I’d read somewhere how to laugh.

What was it I planned to do in Australia, anyway? The truth was, I wouldn’t be going there any more than I’d be going to Timbuktu, the moon, or the North Pole. Hell, I didn’t want to go to Australia. But once I understood this, once I understood I wouldn’t be going there—or anywhere else, for that matter—I began to feel better. I lit another cigarette and poured some more coffee. There wasn’t any milk for the coffee, but I didn’t care. I could skip having milk in my coffee for a day and it wouldn’t kill me. Pretty soon I packed the lunch and filled the thermos and put the thermos in the lunch pail. Then I went outside.

It was a fine morning. The sun lay over the mountains behind the town, and a flock of birds was moving from one part of the valley to another. I didn’t bother to lock the door. I remembered what had happened to my daughter, but decided I didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway. There was nothing in the house I couldn’t live without. I had the TV, but I was sick of watching TV. They’d be doing me a favor if they broke in and took it off my hands.

I felt pretty good, all things considered, and I decided to walk to work. It wasn’t all that far, and I had time to spare. I’d save a little gas, sure, but that wasn’t the main consideration. It was summer, after all, and before long summer would be over. Summer, I couldn’t help thinking, had been the time everybody’s luck had been going to change.