The woman whose roof we’re fixing comes out.
“Wayne fell off the roof,” I tell her before she fully reaches us, as if to prepare her for a horror that I don’t want to surprise her.
“Wayne’s dead,” she says, and goes back in the house. She didn’t know Wayne and to my knowledge had never heard his name. She has given me a lesson in hard-boil.
Of course, I say to myself. Wayne’s dead, let’s hard-boil. I was afraid to glance ten degrees from Wayne to look for his head. His head would have been too much. But now, hell, Wayne’s dead and the lady is back in the house. I see her stop her daughter from running out of the house with a Popsicle. The kid has picked up a signal on its radar and is using a Popsicle to try to get through the lines. “No, you don’t,” her Wayne’s-dead mom tells her, turning her with the child’s momentum and aiming her back into the house.
I look around. Suddenly I want Wayne’s head. I am its rightful finder. My previous inclination would have been to get up from where I knelt and, not looking one inch either side of Wayne, go into the house, tell the woman to call somebody, and begin drinking beer unasked from her refrigerator, and sit at her cute kitchen bar on one of her expensive blond-wood barstools and wait and drink more beer. But she has cut me off from all that. She has ruled out the feeble.
I get up and begin to look around. I stand still and survey the open ground. Wayne’s head is not in the open, apparently. I change position to see behind things I can’t see behind, and keep looking at the actually open ground, because that is where I’m convinced Wayne will turn up. I do not want to step on Wayne’s head. This makes me take very small, shuffling steps.
Shuffling so, damned near scooting, I circle in and out and around the compressor and the felt and the cooler and the cans of mastic. I am afraid for a moment his head will be on the sofa, and that that will be too much, will undo this steely resolve in which I scoot in figure eights about the job site looking for my partner’s head. The sofa is a comic thing we do. We got it somewhere, some job, and carry it from job to job and sit on it to amuse (and enrage) customers. It’s quite comfortable, except that deep down it is wet, and this will wet your clothes, so we sit on plastic. Because it got wet the sofa is ungodly heavy, too, and we have threatened to abandon it when we find a good place. I am thinking that if Wayne’s head is on it, it’s going to be a good place. I cannot see the seat side of the sofa and must go up and look over the back. Carefully I do this. A weird idea strikes: Wayne hit the sofa and somehow his body bounced over to where he lies now. What could have held his head?
Before looking over the back of the sofa, I see the woman at the screen door watching me. She’s smoking a cigarette and has one hip out as if she’s impatient with me. Her attitude somehow suggests that if I don’t get on with it she’s going to come out here and do it herself, find Wayne’s head. She smokes like Lauren Bacall.
I look and Wayne’s not on the sofa. I am as relieved as if I have found him alive. I cut a glance at the woman that has a kind of See there? taunt to it. She can’t bully me around in my search. She can come out here herself if she’s so smart, my next long glance at her says. I’ve half a mind to walk in past her and get that beer and say, “Can’t find his head. Have you got a dog? Please go get some good beer, none of this Coors shit, and stop interfering with the search effort.” I am getting irrationally pissed off at this woman and her problem, which was a pissant wind-only leak in her half-million-dollar Texas-fake-ranch shit house, which had to be fixed, which cost me Wayne and Wayne his head. And Wayne’s dead, and she said it.
“Goddamn, lady,” I say to her, but not loud enough for her to hear it. Because—things are clear now that ordinarily are not, painful things are clear—I am afraid of her. I suddenly see that I am afraid of everybody in the world who has any balls. This woman could be indicted for her undeserved wealth and asshole lassitude and I’m an honest roofer and I am afraid of her.
Wayne’s head—I suddenly know where it is. I have known all along. It is in an open bucket of mastic, concealed in the stack of closed buckets, it will be there and I hope not facedown, and I know I’ll never know how the body got clear over there. Maybe Wayne ran over there. Hell, he probably walked over there intending to climb back up and find the bitch’s leak. He could have walked all around, for all I know; I was quivering on the ladder with white knuckles and closed eyes.
Wayne’s head is in profile in its bed of high-quality, low-asbestos asphalt pookie. As he would be, he is grinning. He looks alive. He looks like he is whispering. I look at the woman, still smoking. Is it the same cigarette or is she smoking a carton of cigarettes watching me?
I can’t hear Wayne. I kneel down.
“What?”
He says something again I still can’t hear. I push the back of his head slightly into the pookie to turn his mouth up toward me.
“Tell that broad to come out here and give me a knobber,” Wayne says. I start laughing.
“I will,” I say. “Relax.”
Never in my life have I been so complete. I feel like Achilles, or whoever. The shit stops here, I vow. I have a bunch of pookie on my hand from handling Wayne and I Go-jo it off. I put some fresh Varsol on the hand tools—there are none on the roof I know of—close the compressor, take down the ladder, put it on the truck, look in the cooler, wash the Go-jo off in the ice water, dry my hands with a clean rag, put the rag through a belt loop, and walk into the house. My hands are chilled still from the ice water and I warm them by rubbing them together. It is as though I’ve come in from the cold. My hands feel strong and good.
The woman has backed away as if surprised or scared.
“Have you called anyone?” I ask.
“Called anyone?”
“I think it’s time. Let me have a beer.”
She just stands there. What is this? Lauren Bacall suffers sudden loss of composure.
The refrigerator is packed with every kind of packaged food there is. Wine in the door, exotic mustards, a lot of them. Hebrew National weenies, and nobody’s Jewish. The beer, when I find it, I know will be in whole, unbroken six-packs, or it will be in deli twos. I have a very good feeling about this particular fridge, though. These people are not far from Nolan Ryan, and I’ll bet they know him, and if Nolan drops in, Nolan will want more than two beers, two Löwenbräus. I dig through a bushel of produce, noting the absence of iceberg lettuce. If it weren’t for McDonald’s, iceberg lettuce wouldn’t have no luck at all. I sit down to take a longer look. Look at things from the underside. Pickle jars have a ring of little glass nibs around their lower rim, maybe for gripping? Silver-canned light Coors beer in tallboy, yes two six-packs. The woman is on the phone.
On the barstool I regard her. Not so bad.
“Who’s your husband with?” I ask.
“With?” she says, smiling, I think, rather too broadly.
“Work with.”
“The police are coming.”
“May I ask you what the roof leak damaged?”
“It wet the floor. Awful bleachy kind of stains.”
“I see.”
Something of Achilles has been lost, but not much.
“My friend Wayne wants you to give him a knobber.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Some friend I am. Some friend I am. Some friend I am.
She bursts into tears. Violent sobbing that scares me. I get off the stool as if to run.
“What did you have to say that for?” she asks.
“Say what?”
“I see. In that way.”
“I take it back. I don’t see.”
“My husband—” she starts, and then is overcome with hard crying. She really is not bad at all. I have a vision of eating a meal with her, steaks handsomely char-broiled on the Jenn-Air, and later holding hands strolling the cattleless ranch with her. I have a vision of almost everything. My mind is spongy. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” I think to say to her, but it seems silly
.
“There aren’t warts on character,” I tell her. “Character is nothing but warts. Character, ma’am, is plate tectonics. The mind is all buckle and shear, buckle and shear.” She pays no attention.
“Ma’am, I hope they get here soon. And I know you do, too. Your husband might be the sort people would kidnap for money, it occurred to me, but this is not probably the sort of thing rational people can afford to worry about.”
Wayne would not hurt a fly, but we had another worker once who had shot and killed a boy after a bar fight. At once I want to see him in this situation, and I do not. He would know what to do.
“Would you mind waiting outside?” I ask the woman.
“What?”
“You go outside awhile. This is my house.”
She does! Just goes out.
The kid reappears, same kid with as near as I can tell same Popsicle, trotting in the same line. “No, you don’t,” I tell her, but she goes on in stride right out the door.
I wish Nolan Ryan would drop in.
The police arrive, arrest me for trespass, you figure that one. They’ve moved Wayne—I don’t see him as I go out, but since I’d taken down the ladder it’s possible I didn’t look exactly in the right place, had lost the bearing.
Fear and Infinitude
YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED to be afraid. There is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing, at any rate, to be afraid of that being afraid of it won’t compound. We have nothing to fear but compound fear.
I’m afraid of Mrs. Jenkins. I have no idea who she is. I am certain I would be afraid of her if I knew her. The name is arbitrary.
I am afraid of success, in its full-blown forms and in its tinctures. Of failure, I used not to be afraid, but that was a pose; one embraces failure to deny success. But now I am afraid of failure, too. It is zero, or negative, success, and just as scary.
Of lunatics I am glibly, blithely unafraid. Unless they get near me, particularly if they are undiagnosed. Of lunacy I am afraid: my own. Of course. Being afraid of only the common scary things in life is scary. There is more to be afraid of, and to be more afraid of, than the putative fearful.
I am afraid of stupidity—as in lunacy, my own. The stupidity of others is, usually, a comfort. Not always.
It’s comforting to be well off in terms of money, but even a sackful of money is a temporary phase of a sack of nothing, and therefore money can give you real creeps.
Sex. Who is not afraid of sex? One is afraid of sex outright (rare), afraid of one kind of sex, afraid of certain acts of sex, afraid of not having some kind of sex or enough sex or of not having any sex at all—of sex, who is not, somewhere, sometime, afraid?
There’s a high-singing dude behind a door where I sit and have coffee right now. I doubt that he is afraid of anything at all. He’s not afraid, for one thing, of sounding more like a woman than a woman can. I wouldn’t be either, come to think about it, but I can’t begin to do it. I’ll wager—just natural laws—he’s afraid of something, but I suspect it’s trivial if it exists at all.
The trivial for me is, of course, one of the truly frightening things in the world. Again: one’s own is the corker here, and yet one practices triviality all one’s life in preparation for coming to terms with it; one trains for an entire fifteen rounds of being pronounced trivial, and then, right at the end, one relaxes and gets knocked out by the fact of one’s triviality. Very scary, this bugger.
Now is a scary item if ever there was one. I have, I suspect, never not miffed the now. Now is too fast for me. Now leads to drinking. Drinking undoes now handsomely. Dismantles the whole onslaught. And in that refuge, respite of straight time, you can be afraid to come back, very very afraid. Very. Very.
I think of Mrs. Jenkins. I wish I knew her. I’d have her sexless, therefore free of that kind of fear. Yes: the only sexual fear pertaining to Mrs. Jenkins is the feeblest one: of not having any at all. No sex with Mrs. Jenkins. Let’s establish that. It’s out of the way. Of no concern, to us or to Mrs. Jenkins. Mrs. Jenkins, whatever else might plague her, is not afraid of having no sex with us either. Or with anyone. Mrs. Jenkins is, as the phrase goes, whatever it means actually (but we’ve established our own meaning), sexless, save for her marital relations. God, I like her already. To Mrs. Jenkins you will not sing, If you want to be a friend of mine, bring it with you when you come. You won’t sing it because, if she understands it, it’s bad form, and if she doesn’t, it’s pointless, leads to explication, embarrassing self-explication.
Embarrassment, taken to soaring heights, can be scary.
So: with Mrs. Jenkins we will observe correct manners. We are getting to know her. We are going to neither broach nor have sex with her, and we will be correct in all dealings with her. As correct as an etiquette book, if possible. Though here we will have to guess, not ever having read one, except for amusement, and then only parts, of course. One might consider reading etiquette books entire, even current ones, if they exist, and remaking oneself in their image, but I find this scary and probably unnecessary for our relationship with Mrs. Jenkins. With Mrs. Jenkins, I should think a program of simple but vigilant common decency would be sufficient. Mrs. Jenkins should not be judged boring by this prescription for our deportment with her. We will be boring.
Mrs. Jenkins will be so interesting she will scare you.
Will we want to know about her husband? Even though we ourselves are not to be sexually interested in Mrs. Jenkins, still we might, within the boundaries of common decency, determine that Mr. Jenkins is himself a cad unworthy of Mrs. Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins is probably just a middling kind of oaf very much like ourself, but he is enjoying the advantages of and therefore our vague scorn for his no-cut contract on the Mrs. Jenkins team.
Mrs. Jenkins makes love to Mr. Jenkins with a lot of jewelry on.
Mrs. Jenkins will atomize perfume into the sheets, a cloying sweetness that suggests Ding dong! Avon calling! and prevents you from breathing properly and makes you feel superior to people (like Mr. Jenkins) afraid of human odors and all the funky delights found beyond the gates of excess as you in your superior way regularly find and love them.
Mrs. Jenkins may even work herself out of a girdle. She may have a cellulite problem. It is possible, though, given her manner—a kind of quiet, Come home, boy attitude she manages by patting the mattress twice beside her hip—that Mrs. Jenkins is the most powerfully attractive woman we have ever seen and we may champ at the bit of our contract with her, that clause about not having sex with her which we agreed to early in the imagining of her, and which was necessary for the imagining of her, but which we now, as we smell her room odiously sweet and see her bashfully and yet boldly pat the bed beside her inviting, dimpled thighs, regret. And in that regret, within the boundaries of common decency, we assault the privileged Mr. Jenkins, who usurps our place in all that perfume.
Mr. Jenkins probably has more and better diplomas than we have, and yet has arguably not done much with them. We have done more with our few, poor certificates. Mr. Jenkins has never really not had money, and that he has not had a lot has never bothered him. Mr. Jenkins is some kind of asshole on cruise control. It would not be inappropriate, within the boundaries of common decency, if we were to lift him from his Masters-and-Johnson-guided toils upon Mrs. Jenkins by a wire garrote around his neck.
Here we would have a problem. Mr. Jenkins is the kind of guy who would, somehow, get both hands under the garrote before you hoisted him up to the ceiling and, though capable of talking, say nothing. Out of some kind of prudence, too, rather than fear. Mr. Jenkins has a manual in his head for all occasions. The best thing to do, in case of wire garroting when making love to your wife, is, after you have inserted your hands under the garrote to prevent serious injury to your neck, say nothing to your assaulter, who anyway may be, and in many cases is, invisible. Do not try to reason with the invisible lovemaking garroter. He can be made more dangerous.
“We will let you down if you’ll talk,” you tell him
, but he will still just hang there, breathing a mite harder perhaps than he was moments before, his eyes very slightly widened, perhaps.
Mrs. Jenkins, yes: all that perfume, dimpled flesh, bangles bangling! Mr. Jenkins levitated, prudent, above us. If the invisible lovemaking garroter assumes your position with your wife, remain calm. An outburst on your part, even a show of agitation, can be disastrous. The garroter need not, should not, for example, see you wiggle your legs or run in space above him. Hang motionless. He will forget you.
If you could figure out what to do with the Mr. Jenkinses of the world, both before and after you’ve garroted them to the ceiling, you’d be a lot better off, infinitely better off, infinitely.
Labove and Son
LABOVE WAS SCARED. HARD not to be, in those circumstances. I’m scared, too. My circumstances are different.
I’ve changed my name, to Bobby Love II. You change your name when your schemes don’t work out and you move to Texas—the kook who wrote the book says so—and my father had done all but the name changing, so I added that.
One thing that will scare you is reading about your old man in a book, and scare you more if the book is not supposed to be true but is. Everything else in the book is made up, probably, but my father’s part. He put a proposition to a student and she was young and he lit out, had to—there was a fat, deranged, older-brother type he was scared of, and what the book doesn’t say is where he landed.
He landed in El Campo, Texas, schoolteaching, this time pawed the oldest, skinniest, safest girl in town, and had me, and I got rid of the Labove as fast as possible. My father was haunted by the memory of touching the Varner girl for all of five seconds the rest of his life. There was nothing subtle or serious about it, except that he was scared. After a time he was scared of fruit.
“What she was like, I need Italian to tell you,” he said once. Once, he cut up a melon into pieces so small we couldn’t pick them up on a knife as you might peas.
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