Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  She tore the map out of the phone book and found her way to the bank, which was open still, a small miracle, but the woman in new accounts told her it would take five business days – that is, till next Monday – before the funds would clear, and that was the final blow. She wouldn’t be able to pay for the car, or the motel either. It was all she could do to murmur, ‘Thanks, anyway,’ and push herself up out of the chair. It was getting dark. There was a wind. Her coat – all her things except the backpack – were in the car and the car was at the service garage, and if she went to the garage, Jules would ask her if she wanted Chinese and she didn’t want Chinese or anything to do with him till she picked up the car and drove out of here – but how was she going to do that with no money?

  She called her mother, collect, from the phone booth in front of the motel. She couldn’t stop shivering. There was graffiti on the inside of the glass, the usual sort of thing, crude drawings of penises and testicles and women’s naked torsos, and beyond it, the soft declining light of a town she’d never even imagined before, cars cruising by, traffic lights flashing their colours, stringy clouds hovering over the rooftops like tears in fabric. Her mother answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hi, Mom,’ she said, after the operator had asked her mother if she’d accept charges and her mother, in a puzzled voice, had said yes.

  ‘Collect? What’s up? Where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s kind of a long story? But’ – and here she broke down, here it all came out of her, here she started crying, which she’d told herself she wasn’t going to do – ‘they took Sam.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who took him?’

  ‘Guy’s professor?’

  ‘Guy’s professor? I thought he was the professor?’

  She sniffled, wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘His old professor? Dr Moncrief ? The one in Iowa?’

  ‘Don’t tell me that’s where you are? Iowa? What’s in Iowa?’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘And you’re doing what, trying to get him back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. But I need your help’ – and here she almost lost it again – ‘OK? Because the car broke down. In someplace called Glenwood Springs? In Colorado? And I’m going to need the money to fix it…’

  ‘Is Guy there, is he with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what does he have to say about all this?’

  ‘He doesn’t know – I just got in the car and left when they took Sam to the airport, because he was part of it, he didn’t stop them, he didn’t even try—’

  ‘Wow, honey, Jesus, this is really coming out of nowhere. All this because of a pet chimpanzee?’

  ‘He’s not a pet. And he’s the most important thing in my life – he is my life, and I’m his. Don’t you get it?’

  ‘Actually, no. And where are you going to live, what are you going to do for a job, because I thought you were on track for your degree and making at least decent money and Guy was a big part of it – or was I wrong? Aren’t you two a couple? Didn’t you tell me that?’

  ‘I don’t care about any of that. I just need to get to Iowa.’

  There was a moment’s silence and when her mother’s voice came back over the line, her tone had shifted. She said, ‘OK, honey, OK. I’m here for you. Just tell me how much you need and where I can wire it – you know where I can wire it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never, I mean—’

  ‘Usually it’s Western Union. They do it in places like Rite Aid – is there a Rite Aid there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK, listen, you find out and call me back – or no, why don’t I call you because this is costing a fortune. Are you at a phone booth? OK, give me the number. And what about tonight – you have a place to stay? Pick someplace safe, like Best Western or—’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said.

  After she hung up, she realised she was starving, nothing on her stomach all day but the coffee and powdered donuts she’d got that morning in Green River when she was still suffering under the delusion that her car was going to get her to Iowa. She stepped out into the cold wind, and she couldn’t tell whether it was blowing up from the plains or down from the mountains, not that it mattered – it was wind. And it was cold. She walked two or three blocks, pinching the collar of her jacket, passing up McDonald’s in favour of Burger King, just to mix it up, and yes, when she got to Iowa she was going to eat salad, nothing but salad, for a week. Nobody paid any attention to her – she was just another customer at the counter of a fast food restaurant – and she could have sat in a booth and taken her time, but after the day she’d had, she just wanted to disappear and decided to take her two cheeseburgers and fries back to her room. And instead of her usual Diet Coke she thought she’d go up the street to the 7-Eleven and get a six-pack to soothe her while she worked her way through the TV channels and tried to forget where she was and put off calling Guy till she got where she was going so he couldn’t protest or berate her or try to talk her out of it.

  She picked Coors because she was in Colorado and figured she’d give a nod to the local brew, though beer wasn’t really her thing – she’d got used to Guy’s Pinot Noir and the gin and tonics she drank with Sam and Guy and whoever else was around – Josh, Barbara, Sid, Janie – almost every night at cocktail hour. Was she becoming an alcoholic? Did she need alcohol every day? Did she drink alone? Well, no, no and no. It was just that today had been so awful – and yesterday, and frankly, the past few weeks leading up to it, and the doom that had hung over them all and sapped everybody of any kind of joy and satisfaction they could take from their work. With Sam. Who was in Iowa. In a cage. So she bought a six-pack of Coors and some nuts and potato chips and a not-too-stale American cheese on white wrapped in cellophane for breakfast and headed back out into the wind.

  She’d walked a block or so, already familiar with the streets, when the traffic seemed to slow, and her sixth sense told her that someone was behind her or alongside her, watching her. She heard the sound of an engine – some sort of muscle car – rumbling in low gear, but she just stared right ahead and kept on walking, clutching the food and beer in one hand, the other pinching her collar shut. ‘Hey,’ a voice called out. ‘Aimee!’

  It was Jules, leaning over the wheel of a Charger or Mustang or something like that, a Mexican guy in the seat beside him, the passenger’s side window rolled down and the car creeping along at a walking pace. She didn’t know what to do, so she stopped. And the car stopped too. Jules leaned over the Mexican guy, who must have been Luis, his main man, the one who was going to get her a rebuilt transmission in Denver, or maybe he already had. ‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘You need a ride?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, hell, we don’t bite. This is Luis, by the way, who’s going to be doing you a big favour first thing tomorrow morning, right, Luis?’ Luis was young too, Jules’ age, and he was wearing a baseball cap with an orange brim and the figure of a horse’s head on the crown. He gave her a stone face and said, ‘Right.’

  She was taken by surprise, that was all, and all she really wanted to do was lock herself in her room and eat her burgers and fries and drink her beer to the accompaniment of the TV and see how deep her despair and anger went, but she just stood there rooted to the sidewalk because they were doing her a favour, kind of, even if it was a 500-dollar favour, and she didn’t want to just blow them off. She said, ‘I’m OK.’ Struggled for a smile. ‘Really.’

  The exhaust rumbled. Jules’ face was split wide open with his grin that would have been almost like a chimp’s if he could have everted his lips. He said, ‘Oh, come on, lighten up. What else you got to do?’ He let out a laugh. ‘I mean, it’s not as if you’ve got anywhere to go, right? And Glenwood Springs might not be like what you’re used to in California, no movie stars here except when they stop to gas up on their way up to Aspen, right, Luis? Didn’t we see Robert Redford once? Or maybe we did – i
t was at least a strong maybe…’ The smile faded, came back again. ‘So we can’t offer you any movie stars, not tonight, but how about a drink? We’ve got miles of pool tables and there’s this one place – Marv’s? – with a jukebox you could die for… so what do you say?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She was freezing. Her burgers were getting cold. ‘I’m like really tired? From the drive? And, and—’ She waved a hand to fill in the rest.

  Both doors suddenly swung open wide and Luis was right there at her elbow and Jules slicing round front of the car in a quick explosion of light, and Jules was saying, ‘Come on, just get in the car,’ and then, to Luis, he said, ‘You get in back and let her sit up front,’ and then he put a hand on her elbow as if to guide her and she tried to step back, step away, but bumped up against Luis, who was right there, right on her heels…

  ‘No,’ she said, jerking her arm away, the beer swinging its weight in the white plastic bag till she almost lost her balance, and Luis, recapitulating Jules, said, ‘We don’t bite,’ and now he had a hand on her other arm and she jerked that one away too.

  She would have just run, just turned around, dropped her food and her beer, and run, but it was too embarrassing and the moment froze her right there to the spot, which meant that she was going to go with them whether she wanted to or not in the same way Sam – Sam! – had gone with Moncrief and his grad student, and she was already telling herself it was going to be all right, they were nice guys, just trying to be friendly… when the patrol car pulled up to the traffic light across the street and she sidestepped them both and walked straight for it.

  For the next two days, she didn’t leave the room at all except to go to the Western Union for the money her mother wired her and the 7-Eleven – in broad daylight – to get cheese sandwiches and microwave burritos and beer, more beer, enough beer to float her through the interminable hours shut in that room that wasn’t much more than the cage they’d thrown Sam in. The TV gave her nothing, numbness only, but numbness was what she wanted. One channel even showed reruns of old shows, including To Tell the Truth, which was no longer on because it had outlived its time and was as lame as TV could get. She watched it though, hoping they’d run the episode with Guy and Sam – she’d give anything to see that – but the shows were the early ones, from the fifties, with Bud Collyer as host and Peggy Cass, Tom Poston, Orson Bean and yes, Kitty Carlisle, on the panel.

  On Thursday morning, right at eight when they opened, she called the garage. An older man answered – the father? – and told her that yes, her car was ready. She stuffed her things in her backpack, which were at least clean because, thankfully, there was a laundromat next to the motel, strapped it on and walked down the street to the garage. She was in a hurry, as much of a hurry as she’d ever been in, and yet when she was half a block away, she began to slow down, as if unconsciously – she did not want to talk to Jules or even see him, though nothing had happened really, and she might have been misreading him all along – but she steeled herself and pushed through the door of the little square box of an office behind the plate-glass window that read Wanner’s Auto Repair in black foot-high letters.

  The man she’d spoken to – the older man, the father – was seated in a swivel chair pushed up to a metal desk buried in paper, magazines and car parts. He looked like Jules, only an older version, with the hair gone on top of his head. He gave her that same look they all did, then smiled. ‘You’re the little lady with the Caprice?’

  She nodded.

  He sat up, clapped his hands together and fished her invoice out of a tray on the far corner of the desk. ‘You’re all set to go. We gave it a test drive and everything’s fine, better than fine – your troubles are over.’ He ran a hand through what was left of his hair, smiled. ‘My son? Jules? He worked on it himself, and I have to say he’s really got the touch, puts his old man to shame. Will that be cash or credit card?’

  The keys were in the car. Jules was nowhere to be seen. Luis either. She slid into the driver’s seat, turned over the engine and headed out on to the highway where it gleamed and flitted and rose up into the snow-capped mountains beyond.

  SEEING HER, SMELLING HER, HEARING HER, TOUCHING HER

  There was no night and no day and the stink of shit burned up his nostrils and nothing happened except when the food slid through the slot in the door, and he shoved past the BUG and took it and fed it into his mouth though it wasn’t like any food he knew, wasn’t a CHEESEBURGER, wasn’t a PIZZA, wasn’t SPAGHETTI. As much as anything, it was the food that impressed on him the truth of the situation. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he’d been abandoned. But why that was or where he was now remained a mystery to him, an insufferable weight pressing him down and down till he was like a speck on the stony floor. When the BUG came to comfort him, he pushed her away. When the two came with the hose, he screamed at them. When the other BUGS screamed, he screamed too. But the weight. The weight kept crushing him. He pulled his hair out. He stopped eating. And then he gave up and fell into some deep place inside him, a place that was black and hopeless, where his senses were paralysed and nothing moved in the space of his skull, not words or images or wants or needs.

  He understood punishment, the concept of it, not in the sense of right and wrong, polarities that had no meaning for him, but as an assertion of dominance, like when the BIG MAN came with his stinger, or he’d bitten someone at HOME because the wires snapped in him and his teeth were doing what they were doing before he was aware of it and Guy or Josh or Aimee made him go to his room and they locked him in so he could scream and rage and shatter his toys and tear his blankets until they opened the door and he could scream some more. That was BAD. He didn’t like it. It made him furious. But they always came and opened the door, and there was the sun riding across the high blue cloud-flecked SKY again, and she petted him and she held him until whatever it was had passed. It wasn’t like that here. Here was nothing, neither reason nor redemption. Here he could fling his shit at them, he could scream and rage or just slump there in a stupor, and the BIG MAN would come with his stinger anyway, come to make him HURT.

  The change came as swiftly and suddenly as if he’d been darted in reverse. He heard a faint whisper leaching down the corridor, the sound of a voice weaving in and out of the grunting, howling, hooting racket that made up the aural tapestry of this place: her voice. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? He sprang to his feet, pressed his ear to the bars, riveted his attention. There it was again. She was here! She was coming!

  And now the door flung open in a fierce, blinding flash of light and she was silhouetted there, the real her and not some imposter, her in the flesh, her hips, her feet, her face, her hair, and one of the hose men with her and she was calling to him, calling his name, ‘Sam, Sam, Sam,’ even as the BUG came rushing the bars to see what this was, and he jerked back and slammed her so hard she flew like a ball of paper to the back of the CAGE, and then she was there and he reached his hands to her, his lips, kissing her through the mesh and the hose man was shouting something and he didn’t care.

  ‘Sam,’ she said, crouching outside the bars and touching her hand to his through the slot at the bottom of the door, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and she was crying, water on her face, and the BUG was hooting and all the rest of the BUGS were taking it up now, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered: she was here.

  THE FIRST CONVERSATION HE HAD WITH HER

  The first conversation he had with her, on the telephone from where she was staying in Davenport, could have defined fruitlessness. And circularity. It had been a week and he’d heard nothing from her, not a word, zero – she hadn’t even left a note. She’d just disappeared. Her backpack was gone and most of Sam’s things too: clothes, toys, even the two bags of Monkey Chow they’d begun working into his diet to prepare him for what lay ahead. That mystified him. And more than that, it pained him – to think that she didn’t trust him enough to confide in him after all this time? She was hurting, he understood that,
but so was he, so was everybody. Yet when he’d got back from the airport, feeling hopeless and impotent, and wondering what he was going to say to her and how they were ever going to get through this, the first thing he noticed was that her car was missing – where it had stood for the past three years, as much a part of the landscape as the oaks and boulders and the cedar-shake roof of the house, was an empty space, a car-sized patch of bare earth. He told himself it could have meant anything – she might have gone to the airport to make some sort of final desperate plea, but he immediately ruled that out because he’d stayed there till Moncrief and his new golden boy had secured Sam in back, settled into the cockpit and lifted off into the air. Which was just as well because knowing her, she probably would have darted out on the airstrip and thrown herself under the wheels.

  His second thought was that she must have gone to the beach, to Pismo or Point Sal, to walk off her sorrows, which was something she did whenever things got too much for her – and on those occasions she pointedly didn’t want any company, just got in her car and left. Or maybe she’d gone to a movie, another thing she liked to do. Alone. Especially when she was upset. But of course if that was the case, then why had she taken her things with her?