When I was about to leave Motts stood and came to offer a final assessment. “You need to pull that,” he said, indicating a plant with a big mustard-yellow bloom that I’d left in the middle of his garden.
“That’s a flower,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmured. “Don’t you know anything? It’s ragweed.”
“Ragweed?” I strolled over to nudge the plant stalk with the tip of my shoe. It wasn’t an unattractive flower, but he was apparently right. My nose started to run, as if to spite me.
“Yes,” he started again. “Ragweed. Weed, as in it’s a noxious plant.”
I pulled the plant out by its roots and held it up so he could see the root tendrils sprinkle dirt on his sidewalk. “It’s gone now.”
“You’re Dandrow, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Of course,” he said. “That explains the shit job you did.”
“What did you say?”
“That you being James Dandrow explains the shoddy work.”
I said, “Screw you,” and walked toward my truck. It didn’t matter what this guy said. I was going to leave, but Motts followed.
He was delusional, thinking he could spook me. If he knew what business I was in he wouldn’t have acted like that. What was he going to do to me that I couldn’t do back to him tenfold? It was like a gym teacher trying to sell protection to the mob.
“I can make things rough for you,” I warned him. “You don’t want to mess with me.”
“Fuck that.” He laughed. “I’m not done with you.”
“Then hit me,” I snapped, taking a step toward him. Motts pushed me, but I bucked against him with my chest and yelled again. “Hit me!”
He reared back, loading up for a haymaker, and while I waited for his fist, he lurched forward and struck me square in the chest with his forehead. At that moment I understood this man was not well.
Both of us were dazed—Motts because of the head trauma, me because I was so baffled by what had just happened. His barrage of complaints had made me forget myself. For a moment I’d wanted to take revenge on him, surely I had. In those seconds, a reflex, my brain mapped out his property and calculated an appropriate amount of punishment to mete out.
I wasn’t going to do this, of course, merely because this crazy man had insulted me. Even though it felt counterintuitive at the time, I knew that the mentally ill hardly ever deserved to get punched.
By this time his girlfriend had come out on the porch. “Jimmy,” she called, her hands on the banister as she leaned toward us. Motts was sitting on the sidewalk then, rubbing the shape out of his hair, blinking.
“I’m leaving,” I said. I climbed into my truck.
“No,” he shouted. He crawled into a teetering squat to face me. “Don’t!”
Motts couldn’t back down, even though the fight had ended.
“This isn’t over, you pussy. You didn’t even throw a punch.”
Somehow, even as I drove away, I knew I’d soon be back.
When I’m alone at night I often think of sitting with my parents in the living room of their old house. We talk about world news and debate theology, but it’s an imaginary dialogue. My parents never sat together on the couch like that, engaging me in their pleasant conversation, no matter how much it eases my mind to pretend they did.
In the fantasy my dad sits with his legs crossed, a look of unyielding compassion on his face. He says, “Get with it, son. Take off out of here.”
He’s wearing a sharp outfit, neutral colors. My mother’s hair is done beautifully. The soft smell of her lotion fills the room.
“You’re smart,” she says. “Make an honest impression on people.”
These dreams hold appeal for me now, they always have, and they surely did in the days I volunteered with CAP. I thought about the ways my life could have been different, if only we’d known the right things to say to each other, me and my parents.
I’m from the dust-bowl part of Nebraska, near McCook, the only child of an Episcopalian minister. My childhood was a chaotic one, filled with self-incriminations and crimes of passion. Everyone knew I was a wild kid, but my father had it in his mind that he could keep me in check.
“Satan isn’t in you,” he’d reassure me, holding my shoulders. “It’s just a restlessness. God has a plan for you.”
It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I was possessed by the devil. Sure, there were things I’d done. Tasteless pranks. More than a few dramatic flashes of brattiness in front of relatives and neighbors. But they didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. They weren’t evil acts.
The real trouble started after I left for college. A string of MIPs and DUIs followed my initiation into a fraternity. My grades were adequate, but my moral certitude was flagging. My father was a strong believer of so-called small-town values. He suggested that maybe the state capital, or a libertine school, wasn’t the best place for me, that I should come home. But I didn’t agree and was eighteen years old. It was important I learned to stay out of trouble on my own, I insisted, then remained in school.
It wasn’t until eight years later that I saw my father again. He bulged around the middle, but the rest of him was sickly, thin, weak from worry, I thought. He was bald, with just a few wisps of red hair around the sides of his head and a sparse mustache.
At the time, my career in corporate hospitality was hanging by a thread, my whole life edifice. I had a job with a good sound to it, but no real money to my name. Nice clothes, but a dirty, one-room apartment behind a Szechuan restaurant. I was living in the student district of Lincoln, which was a major mistake, looking back. If I’d wanted to remain employed, partying six nights a week with undergrads was a poor decision. But I don’t regret it. The past doesn’t work that way. Your whole life is tied together; if one string is pulled, others are going to come with it.
My father summoned me home that summer because he heard a rumor from one of his parishioners about a certain McCook girl. This gossip had the stain of sexual misdeed. A freshman coed tricked into dangerous situations by an older man, plied with alcohol, and, eventually, shuttled to an abortion clinic. I’ve forgotten some of the things he accused me of, but they were all true. She was a student at Wesleyan, a confused thing when I found her. A hippie redneck invested in tie-dye tee shirts, hemp purses, and cowboy hats. I never saw her again.
When he cornered me on it, I told my father that I would never again embarrass him, something neither of us believed.
“Why can’t you treat women right?” he kept asking. “Why can’t you treat anyone the way you want to be treated?”
On this point the pastor didn’t understand me—I was trying to live by that creed.
It was true I’d been a bastard to just about everyone I knew, but life wasn’t exactly kind to me in those years either. My job was beyond saving, even if I’d cared to keep it. My car had been repossessed. My shitty apartment remained the same. Later, there was the car crash that took my parents. (This was my harshest failure, my parents’ deaths—the one that cut closest to my murmuring heart. Do you understand what I mean? I think you do.) I sought out hardship and easily found it, going from one troubled woman to another, unable to love. I was a starvation artist, a masochist, which was okay, so long as it didn’t hurt anybody else. The problem was that I couldn’t control the flow of misfortune. It spread all around me.
Three years later the Big Man discovered me in detox. He did his own recruiting in those fledgling days, lurking in the dark corner of my cell. He was still a young man then, in a gray suit with a silver tie, his hair moussed over his big Italian skull. His was a voice I could listen to. I’d been on a long meandering drunk since my parents died, and MTR offered a job that built character in a certain way. Perhaps I was weak when he found me, or maybe it was restlessness, as my father once believed. Whatever the reason, I accepted his proposal. What the Big Man told me was irresistible—that any man who doesn’t pursue his salvation will
find only ruin. This was my chance to atone for my misdeeds.
MTR was a family business at the time, a dozen of us across four noncontiguous states. The Big Man trained each of us personally, took us to hardware stores to purchase the tools of our trade, stayed for a month’s worth of assignments to demonstrate how revenge work was properly done, accompanied us to twelve-step meetings, and then let us loose to do the job we’d been charged with. He allowed me to throw myself into the work, to mask my grief by burying it in the misfortune of others.
Not long after the incident with Jimmy Motts, Frank called me into his office. He was crouched at his desk with a hand half covering his face, the worn tie dangling between his knees.
“I hate to say it, Dandrow, but you might not be cut out for this kind of work.”
I sat across from him and tried to see what was written in the file he read from.
“There are troubling reports,” he explained. “There are complaints.”
“Was I rude to someone?”
“No, it wasn’t rudeness. They all think you’re a peach of a person. Not sure how you did that, but whatever. If they like you, I can like you too. I appreciate what you’re trying to do.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying and feared it had to do with my past, with MTR or something surrounding the estate of the old man, a lawsuit. It was almost winter then. His office was dark in the weak morning light.
“This isn’t easy to say. You’re bad at charity work.”
He seemed like he wanted to laugh at the absurdity but was resolved not to. His face red from the strain. Frank may not have liked me, but that’s a funny thing to have to tell someone.
“Your heart is there, I believe, but the particulars don’t happen for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mrs. Keen’s gutters, for example. When you cleaned them, you kicked loose some shingles. She then had a leaky roof.”
“Is that true? I can fix it next—”
Frank held up a meaty finger. “The lift chair you found for Mr. Hanson, it had a short circuit, almost started a fire. When you cleared those boxes out of the Sedlak basement, did you notice black mold? That stuff is toxic. Had it been sucked into the ventilation they’d of been goners.”
My chest felt heavy. All I could manage to say was, “Jeez.”
“There’s more.” Frank held up a stack of bound pages. “But I’ll spare you the details. We both know why you’re here.”
“Jimmy Motts.”
“That’s right. Jimmy Motts.”
“Did he tell you that he rammed my chest with his forehead?”
“He told me that you provoked him, that—”
“C’mon, Frank. You don’t believe that bullshit, do you?”
“I don’t have to. Your record speaks for itself.”
“But there’s the woman whose garden I fixed. She’ll vouch for me.”
“Jill’s dead,” Frank replied. “She passed last week.”
I recalled the visage of that now-dead woman, and I questioned myself again.
“Was Motts the auditor on these jobs?”
“Now, don’t start that woe-is-me shit. You knew the rules when you started. With your background, the one thing you absolutely couldn’t do was confront a client.” Frank leaned forward, set his jaw in his hands. “Not everyone we help is a kind-hearted old lady. Sometimes they’re crazy. Sometimes they’re maniacs who probably deserve to get hit. I know that. But it’s our job to help them all. Each and every one of them. We don’t get to pick, okay? How we come to meet these people, how they come to my office, it’s beyond me. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s not up to us.”
Frank stood and walked to the door. As he opened it I could hear the receptionist arguing with someone on the phone.
“We love your effort,” Frank said, holding out his hand. “But I can’t give you any more jobs. Not after all this.” He whispered this last part, pointing toward the folder. “It would be a PR disaster. You’ve worked in corporate. You can understand that.”
No one likes to be fired, particularly from a volunteer position, but as I left Frank’s office that day a sense of relief flickered within me. Honestly, it was a little disarming to work in the daylight, to be welcomed into someone’s home. People let me play catch with their children. I was handed a baby girl once, despite my protestations, embarrassed that I didn’t know how to hold her. It seemed like a mistake when a woman wanted to hug me after I raked her leaves, when her children smiled shyly to reveal lost teeth, saying, “Thanky, Mister James.”
This wasn’t part of the world I knew. Even if these people accepted me, it didn’t mean I belonged there, defrosting their refrigerators.
They said I was a model citizen, some of them. Don’t get me wrong, I knew how full of shit they were. I was still working with Make Things Right at night, of course. I had to get paid somehow. The people I helped with CAP didn’t know how I’d shattered over a hundred windshields, slashed sixty sets of tires, scarred the bark of hundred-year-old family oak trees, stuck cockle burrs in people’s tube socks, set free beloved family pets, and planted child pornography on an elementary school teacher’s home computer—or that this chicanery had paid my bills and taxes. I wondered what they would think of me if they found out.
In many ways the incident that led to my being let go by Citizens Against Poverty was a fortuitous one. It seemed that there were many revolutions to the ups and downs a man must face. No matter what kind of life he’s living, not everything will turn up roses—especially not for a guy who tempts fate like Jimmy Motts.
The fact that we’re at his house now is a case in point. Some people won’t believe this is a coincidence. Maybe you’re one of those people. For you, this is just a simple training exercise, but it means a lot more to me. The universe offers second chances to those open to receiving them. I know this.
Believe me, I don’t hold a grudge against Motts. I’m a professional—there’s no need to recuse myself. He flipped off an old woman in traffic, defamed God in front of her grandkids. That’s why we’re here. We’ll wait as long as it takes, even if Motts is up most of the night, lingering in one room or another, snacking in the kitchen, brushing his teeth. When the lights are doused we’ll be ready.
Maybe it’s true what Frank said about the Furies being a self-reflexive phenomenon—that to invoke their powers is to curse yourself—but I don’t care anymore. It’s who I am.
We may not be able to meddle in fate, of this I’m fairly certain—but it’s also true that we can’t pick our talents. This is the difference between a job and a vocation. Some people just go to work and wait it out till payday. But some of us, people like me, we’d do this stuff for free.
(Carrie Rehbein)
He introduced himself to Carrie Rehbein at a karaoke bar by the freeway. She was from Ashland and had come to Omaha that day to go shopping with her sisters. She had green eyes and red hair, wore a tight yellow tee shirt under her coat and two small gold necklaces around her neck. Her engagement had been broken off the month before, just after Thanksgiving, her sisters said.
It was obvious her sisters were the ones who really wanted Carrie to go home with Aaron. All of them drank tumblers of white wine.
The sisters sang raunchy lyrics they’d improvised over karaoke versions of Mariah Carey and Shania Twain, until the DJ refused to let them go on again. They got Carrie too drunk to drive home and made Aaron promise he’d take care of her.
Carrie was nervous to be alone with him, once they were in her car. She turned and looked out the window, watching for her sisters as he drove her away.
Attend the Way
It’s because he has a train to catch that Rodney leaves his room after suppertime. He puts on dress shoes and his green suit, the one that looks good against his skin. Earlier that afternoon, the big woman next door trimmed his hair. He lives in the Kellogg Rooming House, an old brick building near downtown. It’s a fifteen-block walk to the train
station from his room and he wants to arrive early. It’s a nice evening, the lights of the big buildings downtown popping on. Rodney heads south to Leavenworth. He knows a few people on the street here but doesn’t stop to talk. He doesn’t even care when the boys he knows laugh at him for wearing a suit.
A pair of granite buildings sit on the Tenth Street hilltop. Each of them used to be central stations for rail lines at one time, but the one that’s bright and clean is a museum now and the other sits empty, its exterior smog-gray and mossy-green, The Burlington Station etched at its top. The Amtrak station is a small brick building nestled in a depression behind these old giants. Rodney’s headed for Hastings, a town some hundred-fifty miles away. It will be two in the morning when he arrives. He’d have rented a car if he had a driver’s license and a credit card, but he doesn’t have these things. It’s either the train or a bus for a man with only paper ID and a clip of small bills, and you won’t catch Rodney riding a bus.
He’ll spend as little time as possible in Hastings—his mother’s died there, that’s the reason he’s going—and then he’ll take the train coming home to Omaha.
When Rodney wakes up he’s slumped cockeyed in his seat, leaning against a young man who plunked next to him at the stop in Lincoln. It takes Rodney a moment to realize where he’s at, to lift his head off that shoulder and straighten, to remember he’s on a train in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. “Good morning,” the young man says. Rodney doesn’t respond. He merely rubs his face and looks out the window. The young man smiles, he laughs softly. “Have you come a long way?” he asks.
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