Walt stayed with Marcia and Charlie for a couple of years, giving his nephew a hint of what a father could be, and initiating him into the clanging magic of engines. But Walt never made peace with the city.
But by the time Charlie had worked his way up to star forward on his high school basketball team, Marcia’s roof was feeling too low for her brother. Against her pleas, Walt made his way back to Prosperity—to drink himself to death, Marcia said. To take care of the old house, he said.
“The kid doesn’t need anything I can give him.” Charlie’s assimilation into urban life freed Walt from any sense of responsibility to his nephew. “He’s found his place.”
***
But what Walt saw in Charlie’s aggression on the basketball court wasn’t so much an assimilation to urban life as the accommodation of a young man at war with mounting internal demons. The landscape of Charlie’s dreams had remained the mountains and the towering trees of Prosperity. The city jangled him and set his nerves on edge, filling him with fears he couldn’t explain. On the basketball court, he ran that frenetic energy down to a place where he could breathe and sleep.
Marcia pushed Charlie into college, harping on it as the only way to a decent life. But once he got there, his mother’s predictions about his future faded, as the demons of anxiety blossomed. Charlie knew he couldn’t go on sitting in a classroom taking notes on American history and sociology. He needed to be doing something. The intimacy of a dorm room made him claustrophobic.
At the end of the first week of his sophomore year, he was standing on the porch while his mother spat at him, “All the sacrifices I made to get that money together! You’re a damn fool, Charlie. You’ll end up a con man like your father. Or worse—chopping logs. Everybody knows that’s a dead end.”
Then she turned her back on him and slammed the front door. That was the last image Charlie carried of her—the fury of her red face, the tremble of that slam shuddering through his body.
He’d almost shouted back at her, reminded her that his father had a college education, well, a couple of years in college anyway, and look at where that led. But he knew it wouldn’t do any good. His mother was a stubborn woman. He assumed she’d calm down in time, but meanwhile he had to find a way to support himself.
There was lots of work in the woods that year—forest managers around Washington were setting the limits as high as they could—but Charlie didn’t have the kind of connections that he needed to get a logging job. He couldn’t trade on his father’s name, that was certain. Aside from his parents, his only other living relative was his uncle Walt.
“What do you mean you left school? Are you a damn fool?” Had his uncle spoken with his mother? Charlie was blindsided by Walt’s reaction.
“But you know what it’s like, Walt. You told me yourself, you couldn’t stomach classrooms.”
“Yeah, well, that was me and I’m nobody you want for a role model. What do you plan for your next round, becomin’ a drunk?”
“I thought… Well, I just want to work in the woods. You know guys. I thought you could maybe…”
“You really think the guys I know are gonna want somebody with my blood cutting trees next to them? Wake up, Charlie! You got a couple of big strikes against you around here—me and your dad. You’ll have to go down to Oregon or California, where nobody knows you or your family. Good luck with that.”
Without any family connections, Charlie knew he’d have to have a lot more skill than he did to get any logging company to hire him. If Walt couldn’t help, he was really on his own.
So, he’d taken the only other path he knew anything about and started driving an eighteen-wheeler. He’d learned the basics from a truck-driving course advertised in the classifieds of the Seattle P-I. And soon his home was the cab of a truck.
Charlie drove over-the-road for few years. The constant movement kept his demons at bay and the money wasn’t bad. Not a lot by most standards, but Charlie had virtually no expenses. He had no wife, no family to support; he had no house, not even a car. All he bought was his daily food, an occasional night in a hotel when he couldn’t stand the truck for another minute, a rare change of clothes, and his union dues. Everything else he earned went into the bank. His goal was the down payment on a log truck. Being an independent log truck driver sounded like heaven back then.
During those over-the-road years a white plastic alarm clock with its glowing numbers oriented him when he woke in the dark. He would rise from his narrow bunk in the back of the cab, dress quickly in the jeans and T-shirt he had folded on the seat the night before. Breakfast was bad coffee in a Styrofoam cup and a donut with hard icing, usually white, that shocked his teeth.
To keep the demons appeased, Charlie followed a careful ritual as he prepared to roll out onto the highway. First, he circled the truck checking for any signs of tampering in the night. He’d test the tires, the lights, the turn signals, the mirrors. If he stumbled at any point or the order of his routine was interrupted, he would be haunted all day by images of lacerated cars with their doors ripped off and their smoking, bloody innards exposed. He coped with this constant shadow of anxiety by building elaborate, detailed stories that filled the void of his what-if worries.
Compulsively he grasped small details in his daily life and divined their potential for trauma, their possibility for disaster. And then he rehearsed. If he noticed a young woman pull into a truck stop to fill up, as she headed toward the mini-mart to pay, he might conjure exploding tanks blowing her car across the lot, shooting her body through the plate glass storefront. Seeing a stray dog wandering along the street near the freeway, he pictured it running into traffic and being flattened by his tires.
He placed his faith in this belief: if he could imagine it, make it vivid in his mind, it would never happen. His life had taught him that having dreams and wishing for positive outcomes led to disappointment, so he turned that lesson on its head. He believed that by picturing disasters he could prevent them.
One disaster Charlie had never imagined was his mother’s death.
Marcia had a heart attack while Charlie was on his first job trucking. He was twenty-one and they hadn’t spoken in a year.
Walt’s phone call had found him down near Sacramento, hauling a load of something useless under a short deadline, keeping an eye out for cops.
“Charlie, you need to pull that rig over. I got some bad news.”
The suddenness of a heart attack seemed the right way for her to go, once he considered it. She was a black-and-white woman, all or nothing, love or hate. And she would have hated a drawn-out dying. But they’d never had the reconciliation Charlie had expected.
Walt said he could see to the arrangements if Charlie wanted. Even as much as she railed against it, she’d have wanted to be buried with her kin in Prosperity. Didn’t Charlie agree? Sure. She’d never gone to church after they moved to the city. Never talked about things like that. Whatever Walt did was fine.
Charlie didn’t tell his boss or the dispatcher, the few folks he spoke with regularly, about his mother’s death. He never took any time off, wasn’t there when she was buried. She’d shut him out and hadn’t tried to reconnect; he didn’t feel entitled to open grieving.
His dropping out of college had infuriated her, but it didn’t explain her complete rejection. Charlie suspected the real reason—the one that had always hung between them: He reminded her of Nathan, the man who had betrayed her. There was nothing Charlie could ever have done to fix that.
Chapter 9
As Charlie walked the few blocks from the mill to the house where he grew up and where his uncle lived, the moist mountain air calmed him, welcomed him home. Some things had changed in this town, but the Bullhook was still there, the school, even the café.
Walt’s front door was worn, the paint peeling, and Charlie felt his age as he knocked.
“Jesus, Charlie, get in here,” Walt pulled his nephew through the front door, then stuck his head out, looking up and dow
n the street.
“Guess it’s late enough no one saw you. We can do without Dorianne Travers announcing your arrival and reminding the whole town who I’m related to.”
“Hey, Uncle Walt, good to see you, too. It’s been a long time.” Charlie grinned and patted his grizzled uncle on the back. The two men shared curly hair—though Walt’s had gone pale and thin—and the cleft in Charlie’s chin was mirrored in his uncle’s face. Charlie had often been told he looked more like his mom’s side of the family than Nathan’s. He’d counted that as a positive.
Looking around at the unkempt space, the house where he’d spent his first twelve years, Charlie’s memories were bombarded by this altered present.
A wooden hat rack had stood to the right of the door, its brass hooks laden with worn jackets that marked his moves through soccer, baseball, and Boy Scouts; his mother’s red raincoat with the frayed cuffs; his father’s hard hat and orange vest; at its base a pair of tall black rubber boots caked with mud—the ones he’d slid his six-year-old feet into to follow his dad to work one morning, the ones that had caused him to trip and fall down the steps, chipping his front tooth. Charlie’s tongue found the rough edge now, though the boots, the jackets, and the hat rack were gone. There had been a braided rug, oval and slightly lumpy, seasoned with rain, mud, snow, dead leaves, bits of fir cones and pine needles—the debris that trailed anyone who walked through the door. The floor where he stood was bare weathered wood now. In front of him the staircase was the same, though the carpet, once a deep rose, was worn flat and colorless.
And on the third step there was the stain from the cup of coffee his father had thrown as he’d stormed out, yelling, “Marcia, just shut up for once and leave me alone!”
His mother had made a point of leaving the coffee puddle to sink into the carpet. Charlie remembered picking up the pieces of broken cup, blood blossoming on the pad of his thumb.
“You’ve made a few changes to the place, eh, Walt?”
“Shit, Charlie, it’s been fifteen years, hasn’t it? Not like I had any money to keep it up proper, but I do my best.”
“Actually, it’s been seventeen years since Mom and I left.” Charlie dropped his duffel at the base of the stairs and faced his uncle. The disorientation he’d felt driving into town rocked him again. He remembered his uncle’s thick black hair—folks laughingly accused him of slicking it back with axle grease. What grew on Walt’s head now was thin and nearly white. The once robust, alcohol-reddened face was ragged, the eyes sunken. Charlie could smell the whiskey on him. That, at least, was familiar.
“How are you, Walt? How are things going around here?”
Walt walked down the hall and into the kitchen, leaving Charlie to trail behind. An open bottle of whiskey sat on the battered wood table in the center of the room.
“Want a drink?” Walt poured brown liquid into a glass and held it out to his nephew, then he took a swig from the bottle. “Listen, Charlie, I know your daddy sent you here with some idea that you could make him a few bucks and find yourself some work, but I’m not for it.”
Charlie took the glass and looked at the smudged rim. He put it down on the table and sat on one of the ladder-back chairs that looked vaguely familiar.
“Yeah? You got a better idea?”
Walt took another swig and leaned back against the countertop. “They could use a decent mechanic in this town.”
“Walt, I’m a truck driver, not a mechanic. And I’ve got truck payments.” He wished he could get some of that whiskey down his throat without putting his lips to the filthy glass. “Jackson still got guys cutting wood that needs hauling or not?”
Walt shook his head slowly. “Boy, you don’t know nothing. Jackson Dyer ain’t got any work for you. He’s dead and buried.”
Charlie leaned forward and slapped his hands flat on the table. “What are you saying? Jackson’s dead? When? Jesus. Is the mill shut down then? Goddamn, Nathan!”
Walt was silent for a while.
“No, mill’s not shut and they got some kinda wood to haul.” He sat down and looked at his nephew through rheumy eyes.
“How much of your father you got in you, Charlie?” He leaned forward and with great care laid his head on the table and closed his eyes.
Charlie sat there for several minutes considering the question his uncle had asked. When he heard Walt snoring he rose and made his way upstairs to his childhood bedroom. A single bed with a thin chenille bedspread, yellowed with age, was all that remained to testify to his years of residence.
He walked over to the window next to the bed. His footsteps echoed off the empty walls and dust coated the windowsill, but the night view made him catch his breath. As a boy he had stared out at the sky on the cloudless nights of summer, dreaming of space travel, wishing on a million, billion stars. When he moved to the city, the loss of dark sky had been as painful as the absence of his father; yet, over the years he’d forgotten. Now he lifted the window and leaned against the sill, remembering.
***
The next morning Charlie was groggy as he dragged himself from bed. When he slept in a bed he hadn’t prepared himself, he never slept well. At dawn he stumbled downstairs and found that Walt had made it from the kitchen chair to the sofa in the living room before passing out again. Charlie searched the cupboards for cleaning products; he needed to scour the bathroom before he’d be able to get himself ready for the day.
Beneath the sink he found some old, rusted containers of Bon Ami and a bottle of ammonia. He wondered if these could possibly be the same containers his mother had used. Didn’t appear that Walt had put them to much use, but the place wasn’t quite the wreck Charlie had expected. He pulled a roll of paper towels, some dishwashing soap and the scouring powder out of the cabinet and lugged them upstairs to the bathroom.
He’d finished the sink and tub and was just beginning on the toilet when Walt banged on the bathroom door.
“What the hell, Charlie?”
“Morning, Walt. It’s not half as bad as I expected, you know. You had a woman living here?”
Walt grunted and turned away.
“I’ll go piss in the yard. “
“No, no, Walt. Here, I’ll get out. You go ahead.”
“Goddamn, Charlie, your mother got herself all inside your head, didn’t she? Thanks for lettin’ me use my own goddamned shitter.” Walt pushed past his nephew and slammed the door behind him.
Charlie leaned against the door.
“Seriously, Walt, you got a girlfriend or something? I don’t want to get in the way of anything. I can go sleep in my truck or, hell, I can grab a tent and sleep in the woods.”
“Shut your mouth, boy. You just got here, you ain’t going nowhere.” The sound of Walt’s peeing was loud enough to make Charlie step back from the door.
“You can do my cleaning if you want. Grace used to handle that but now she’s runnin’ the café, she don’t have time for me.”
“Grace?”
Walt pulled open the bathroom door and looked at Charlie.
“You just keep your distance from Grace, Charlie. She don’t know nothin’ about your no-good dad and all that and you’re not the one to be tellin’ her. You got that?”
“Who the hell is Grace? What are you talking about, Walt?”
“Listen to me, Charlie,” Walt grabbed the front of Charlie’s work shirt and pulled his nephew’s face close to his own. His breath made Charlie pull his head back so forcefully he nearly dragged both of them off their feet. Walt let go and grabbed the doorjamb to steady himself.
“She’s none of your business and you are going to stay clear of her. You hear me?” Walt’s command was so unexpected that Charlie could only nod, bewildered.
Walt found his footing and started for the stairs, “All right then. I’m going down to the café for my coffee. You can get yourself something at the gas station. Then, if you’re stuck on doing what your daddy tells you, you go to the mill and ask for Pat.”
A
fter he heard the front door close behind his uncle, Charlie began to wonder how soon he could get over to the Hoot Owl and have a look at this Grace.
***
“Name’s Charlie. You Pat?” Charlie stuck out his hand to the young guy standing near the pile of logs at the back of the mill. “That’s my truck. I hear you guys could use a hauler.”
“Where’d you hear that from?” This guy wore a brown Carhartt jacket that had seen better days. There was a gash in the right elbow that revealed the filthy lining; his pants might once have been blue jeans but now were mostly dirt. He kept his head turned to the side as he spoke to Charlie, his eyes trained on the logs in front of him. He used his hands to guide the driver of the log lifter working in front of where they stood. As Charlie waited, one log after another was raised off the pile in the jaws of the lift and deposited on the nearby scale.
“Walt deVore’s my mother’s brother. He and I are kinda close.”
“Yeah? You a drunk too?” Now Pat folded his arms across his chest and looked straight at Charlie. His expression said he believed he knew what he was dealing with.
“No, sir. I am not. What I am is a damn good log hauler and I understand you might need one.” This was one cocky punk, but if there was any chance of work Charlie was willing to pretend respect.
Pat looked over at the log truck Charlie had pointed to and raised his hand to the lift driver, signaling him to stop. “Hey, Henry, come down here. Check this guy out.”
Charlie looked up into the lift and grinned. “I’ll be damned! Henry Martin. It’s Charlie Roberge.” Henry was a bit bulkier, but otherwise looked as if the seventeen years had skimmed right over him. Charlie would have recognized him anywhere. The orange safety vest and ear protectors had initially rendered him invisible, but now Charlie could see his old friend’s dark eyes and the familiar open grin.
“Jesus,” was all he said as he slowly climbed down. “Jesus.” He looked at Charlie with that old mixture of tolerance and condescension. “What the fuck you doin’ here, man? Jesus.”
What We Take For Truth Page 12