Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

He was so human, but at the same time he wasn’t, as if the whole point of him was to undermine the human species. All her life she’d found herself stepping back mentally at the oddest moments, seeing people in a sudden flash as just big animals tricked out in clothes, old people especially, with their elongated ears and cratered nostrils and skin rippled like a lizard’s, and here was the reality come home to her. She shook Sam’s hand with its long fingers and callused knuckles, and it was just like shaking hands with anybody else. He held on a fraction of a moment too long, then dropped her hand, looked up to be sure she was watching and began spinning out signs with his fingers the way deaf people do. Which just made the whole thing all the stranger. She looked to Aimee. ‘Is he trying to say something?’

  Aimee’s eyes had gone soft. She had the sort of look mothers get when their children are on display, first day of school, spelling bee, gold star for deportment. ‘He’s saying. “Pleased to meet you, my name’s Sam, what’s yours?”’

  That was the moment she felt her heart going out to him. It was hard to explain, and she supposed it did have to do with the human part of him, and why not? That was what gave him his personality, that was what made him so phenomenal, light years ahead of all the dogs and cats in the world combined. And she was a dog lover herself, though she and Gary had decided not to get another one after Misty died because at their age it was just too much trouble, especially breaking in a puppy – and Gary was adamant about not wanting to adopt any shelter dogs, which to his mind were nothing but the dregs, the reflexive biters and rug-chewers other people had already rejected. She bent forward, smiling so hard her face ached, and said, ‘My name’s Brenda, pleased to meet you.’

  He spun his hands in reply and she turned back to Aimee and asked her what he’d said.

  Aimee laughed, a soft rippling trill of a laugh that lit up her face so you could really see the beauty of her. ‘He said, “The pleasure’s all mine.”’

  For the first month or two, Aimee kept pretty much to herself. Mornings and evenings she took Sam for long walks, not only in the wash and the flats around the property, but up on the sun-polished mesa that hovered over the place and made Desert Haven the prettiest trailer court in the greater Kingman area (of course, there wasn’t much competition since the rest of them pretty much defined low-rent, lacked any kind of scenic views and didn’t even have gravel in the drive, just dirt). You’d look up first thing in the morning and there they’d be, way high up – hundreds of feet above the court – just climbing and climbing. She was in great shape, Aimee (which she herself was not, sadly; she’d never been up there or even partway up because she knew full well the climb would all but kill her, not that she had any desire to scramble around a bunch of blistered rocks that were probably crawling with rattlesnakes and ready to give way under your feet every step you took), and Sam, of course, was in even better shape. It was like taking a dog for a walk, she supposed – you walk a mile, the dog runs ten. He loved to have her chase him or play hide and seek – you could see her way up there, climbing steadily, while he disappeared behind a rock only to pop up ten feet behind her and streak on ahead like a strip of felt whipped along at high speed. Gary said they both had to be at least 50 per cent mountain goat.

  During the daytime, the two of them stayed in the trailer and hardly ever went anywhere, though Aimee told her sometimes at night she’d take Sam out in the desert and let him run free where nobody could see him, though there were problems with that too (cactus spines, specifically) since he didn’t wear any shoes, let alone hiking boots, and half the time he was down on his knuckles and she wasn’t about to get him a pair of gloves, which she claimed would hamper him too much (‘Just look at his fingers’), though that was the first thing she herself suggested. As to why Aimee wanted to keep him from the public view, at least during those first few months, she never said – maybe she didn’t want the hassle because he was sure to draw a crowd or maybe she needed a special licence for him or something, who could say? One way or the other, she valued her privacy, and Brenda respected that – as did most of the other residents, who’d come here for the natural beauty and the feeling of community, but at the same time liked the independence and privacy a trailer gave them, especially one that was off the beaten path. It took all kinds, and over the years they’d had their share of druggies and desert rats along with the better types, mostly retirees getting by on pensions and Social Security, but they were a community, that was the important thing, and they exhibited all the pluses and minuses of communities anywhere. Sam seemed harmless enough and if anyone objected (like Millie Vogel, who lived in the trailer next to her and Gary’s and told her he scared her, He’s a wild animal, Brenda, don’t you get that?), more often than not she found herself defending him.

  Besides which, no animal could even come close to causing the kind of trouble she and Gary had had to put up with over the years from the members of the human race, fist fights, theft, vandalism – even a murder. Which came out of nowhere and plunged her into the worst day she’d ever lived through, SWAT team and all. It was a winter day, three or four years back, temperatures in the thirties and the sun as weak as milk and nothing, absolutely nothing, happening anywhere, boredom factor 10 out of 10, when there was the sudden crack of a rifle, loud as a thunder blast, and she knew immediately it wasn’t coming from any hunter up on the mesa, where you weren’t allowed to hunt anyway, for obvious reasons of safety around a populated area. Her first thought was for Gary, who’d gone over to have a little chat with Bill Terry about the fact that his rent was a week late, and call it intuition because as it turned out that shot was meant for him, but by the grace of God it missed. Her second thought was to dismiss it in the way we always try to minimise our fears, else how would we even get through a single day without having a nervous breakdown, telling herself it was probably just some jackass shooting at a can propped up on a rock. And it was only the one shot. She held her breath, bracing herself for the next one and the one after that, but they never came. What had happened – and Gary was white-faced when he burst through the door to dial 911 and blurt it out to the dispatcher – was that Bill Terry, drunk and depressed over losing his job, had decided to take it out on Gary because Gary was the one standing there, knocking on his door and ragging him about unpaid rent. They argued. Bill told him to go fuck himself and slammed the door shut, and Gary, who’d had it up to here, shouted some threat about getting the sheriff after him and stalked away and hadn’t got halfway across the lot before he ran into Stu Brazile, who stopped to chat a minute about whatever was on his mind at the time, which was plenty, because Stu was the sort of person who had theories about everything.

  The single shot, fired from Bill’s Marlin 336 as he stood on his porch, framed by the open aluminium door, missed Gary, but hit Stu in the back of the head, killing him instantly. He fell face down in the gravel and Gary, who’d been in the army in Korea, went to ground right beside him. Bill could have picked him off, but once it was all over and the SWAT team had come and Bill, inside the trailer, had put the barrel of the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger, people theorised that he hadn’t actually meant to shoot anybody, least of all Stu, and the realisation of what he’d done had stopped him. But there was the fact, one of their own residents, a member of the Desert Haven community, lying face down in the gravel in a soup of his own blood and brains, and she was sorry to have to tell it that way whenever the subject came up, but she was still shocked and angry over the senselessness of it. So when Millie complained about Sam, she just reminded her of that little incident, because if you want violence, you don’t have to look any further than the members of your own species, especially the ones wearing beards and hand-tooled boots with a rifle in easy reach.

  Then there came a day when a strange car pulled into the lot – a rental car, with a Phoenix airport sticker in the lower left-hand corner of the windshield – and a man in his thirties with blond hair hanging in his eyes, thumped up the steps to the office
, asking for Aimee. The weather had changed – it was fall, best season of all here, the air crisp and sweet and the sun something you sought out rather than hid from – and she’d left the door propped open to take advantage of it. The man was silhouetted there against a scene she could have painted with her eyes closed, Norv and Betty Norbert’s double-wide with their candy-apple red Chevy C/K pickup parked out front and the dun slab of the mesa rising out of view. She didn’t get up from her chair. She said, ‘Who’s asking?’

  He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a jeans jacket, and instead of the boots every man in the state of Arizona wore from birth till death, he had on a pair of soft blue running shoes with a gold flare on either side, as if he’d just come from a track meet. He gave her a megawatt smile and came right up to her desk to show her he had nothing to hide, and he wasn’t an insurance salesman or repo man or Seventh-day Adventist, she could see that at a glance. ‘I’m her professor?’ he said, making a question of it.

  That was about the last thing she expected to hear and yes, she was protective of all the residents here, but Aimee especially, who was the type who just wanted to be left in peace, cordial enough, sweet really, but sufficient in herself. Which she respected. Because she wasn’t one to pry, no matter how curious she might get. ‘I didn’t even know she was in college,’ she said. ‘She never mentioned it to me, anyway – what college did you say you were from?’

  ‘UC Santa Maria. I’m in the psychology department? Guy Schermerhorn? She must have mentioned me…’

  ‘Not that I can recall.’ And then – she couldn’t help herself – she said, ‘What, does she have a late paper due?’

  He laughed then and said that if truth be told, they were a little closer than professor and student – friends, really. Good friends. ‘She’s expecting me. I mean, this is Desert Haven, isn’t it?’

  She didn’t answer. ‘Why don’t you call her and have her come get you?’ She pushed the phone across the desk. ‘Be my guest.’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t have her number. Fact is, she called me. But really, if you don’t mind, can I just look around? I’d recognise her car. And Sam – Sam’s with her, isn’t he?’

  ‘You know Sam?’

  He looked as if he wanted to give a whole dissertation on the subject, but he just nodded.

  ‘Number twenty-six,’ she said. ‘Last one down the second row to your left – right where those big boulders are?’

  One of the mysteries about Aimee was where she got her money from. After paying rent for the first two months, she decided to buy the trailer, as is, and just sat down and wrote a cheque for the full amount, which was $4,495, because it was only two years old and the previous owners, Chase and Carol Abbott, had kept it in tip-top shape before Chase had his stroke and they had to move to assisted living. Aimee did eventually get a job, four nights a week, cleaning doctors’ and dentists’ offices, but that was strictly minimum wage, not that it seemed to bother her – she said it was the best she could do under the circumstances, which meant that she could bring Sam along with her and nobody the wiser. He went to bed at eight – went down hard, according to her – so she bought an extra-large doggie bed at K Mart, stuck it in the back seat of the car and let him sleep while she worked. One thing she never did, as far as anybody could see, was leave him alone. Ever. And when she asked her about that one day when Aimee was coming across the lot from the laundry next to the office, Sam ambling along beside her and every eye in the whole place glued to them for the sheer entertainment value of the spectacle he provided, Aimee told her he got separation anxiety.

  They were standing in the shade of one of the palo verdes Gary had planted when the two of them had first come here all those years ago, Sam settling down on his haunches in the gravel and gazing up at her benevolently. She said, ‘You mean he misbehaves?’

  Aimee nodded.

  ‘We had a dog like that once – Misty? First time we left her alone, she crapped all over the carpet – second time, she tore a divot out of it that must have been three feet long, and after that we took her with us everywhere we went.’

  Aimee nodded again. ‘He gets scared when he’s alone. And it’s not so much the carpet I’m worried about but the whole structure, the walls, the windows, the door – he doesn’t know his own strength, do you, Sam?’

  They both looked down at him, where he’d begun playing with the slack in his leash while Aimee balanced the laundry basket on one hip. He pulled back his lips in a grin. Whether he understood the question or not, Brenda couldn’t say – he didn’t roll out any of his signs, but then the question was a rhetorical one and really didn’t need an answer. And then Aimee added, ‘You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Sam?’ and Sam bobbed his right fist up and down, which meant yes, yes, he was a good boy who would never tear up the carpet or dent the walls or rip the door from its hinges.

  There was something about him, about the way he responded, that just made you want to hug him. ‘He’s adorable,’ Brenda said. ‘Cute. Cute as a button.’

  And Aimee, who was about as expansive that day as she’d ever been, smiled at her and said, ‘That’s what we pay him for. All that Monkey Chow, fresh pineapple, cheeseburgers – that’s it, that’s the contract. Right, Sam?’

  He bobbed his fist, then spun out a whole panoply of signs, his fingers a blur, until she had to ask, ‘What’s he saying?’

  Aimee shrugged, shifted the laundry basket to her other hip. ‘He’s saying it’s lunchtime, and why I ever mentioned a c-h-e-e-s-e-b-u-r-g-e-r, I don’t know, but once he gets his mind fixated on something…’ She trailed off.

  ‘I know how it is,’ she said. ‘Gary’s the same way.’

  The man who’d come calling – the professor (her boyfriend, actually, which was obvious the minute you saw them together) – stayed overnight. About an hour after he’d ambled across the lot in search of #26, he came back into the office and asked her if it was all right to park his car next to Aimee’s trailer, and she told him each trailer got parking for two cars – so as long as Aimee was good with it, she was too. He’d mentioned earlier that he’d recognise her car, which would have led him right to her, but what he hadn’t thought of – and she hadn’t either – was that Aimee had sold her Caprice with the California plates and bought a newer model Ford van, also white, which had temporary plates on it while she waited for the permanent ones to come through in the mail. Arizona plates, that is, which told her Aimee meant to stay. What she didn’t know or even suspect was that there might be other people looking for her besides her professor and that she’d got rid of the car as soon as she could, so as not to give herself away. But that was the case, as would eventually come out.

  Around five or so that evening, she saw Aimee and the professor driving out of the lot with Sam in back, pressing his face to the window. She was in her own trailer at the time (#1, right next to the office, where she and Gary could keep an eye on the comings and goings, especially with regard to Lucy Devlin in #37, who she suspected was selling drugs; either that or she had an awful lot of boyfriends), and she just happened to glance up from the chopping board, where she was dicing carrots, onions and celery for the Crockpot and saw the rental car go out through the gate and turn left on Route 66, heading towards town. Dinner, was what she thought. The professor was taking her out for a nice dinner, but then she thought no, because what were they going to do with Sam? They couldn’t very well bring him into a restaurant. No restaurant she knew of allowed dogs even, except for the blind, and there were health codes too, of course. For a minute there she entertained the picture of Sam perched on a chair at La Fonda, the best sit-down Mexican place in town, a napkin tucked into his overalls and his long leathery fingers plying fork and knife like anybody else, and that was hilarious, hilarious enough to call out to Gary, who was in the BarcaLounger watching football on TV. ‘He’s taking her out to dinner, can you imagine?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The professor. Aimee’s professor.’
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br />   ‘So?’

  ‘They’ve got Sam with them.’

  ‘What are you saying, how does he like his steak cooked?’

  ‘I’ll bet anything they’re going to get takeout.’

  Gary laughed. ‘I’m not a betting man, you know that.’

  Sure enough, they were back half an hour later, Sam hanging his head out the window to catch the breeze, the car crunching across the gravel till it turned down the second row and disappeared from view, but the point was that half an hour wasn’t long enough for a sit-down dinner, so they must have gone to Taco Bell or Burger King or wherever. Not that it mattered to her – people could eat whatever they wanted, whether it was healthy or not, but at least she and Gary were getting a nice home-made beef stew that positively screamed vitamins. After dinner, she watched an old movie on TV – Jimmy Stewart and Irene Dunne, or was it Jean Arthur? – while Gary snored in the recliner, and she forgot all about them.

  But the next morning, there they were, the three of them, gambolling over the rocks up on the mesa, so high above the court they might have been parachuted there overnight, Sam so excited with two people to chase after he was just a blur, even with the binoculars. And how did that make her feel? Wistful, she supposed. They were young, they were in love, Sam was their surrogate baby, and whatever had happened between them in the past – late papers, bad grades, a bitter break-up, or maybe he was married already because that was the way professors were, wasn’t it? – it didn’t seem to affect them now. Or when they went out at lunchtime, anyway, the nuclear family, everybody all smiles, even Sam. Not that it mattered to her – she was no busybody – but it was just that she’d grown so fond of Aimee and Sam too and couldn’t help feeling protective, or at the very least interested.

  Yes. And then it was night, Saturday night, and everything went to hell. It was just after dark, the desert sky like the Hayden Planetarium when she was a kid on a school trip to New York, the coolness of the night muffling the sounds of people’s TVs and stereos because they were all inside with their doors and windows shut. She and Gary were watching TV and enjoying a glass of the Dewar’s Gary’s brother had sent him for his birthday – neat, for the warming effect – and she was already in her nightgown. The movie they were watching, a crusty western about a man who just wants to be left alone but gets tormented from the opening scene on by a gang of sadistic cowboys until he explodes and blows them all away, featured enough gunfire in the climactic scene to awaken the dead – until she snatched up the remote and turned the volume down, which was when she first heard the sound, a high-pitched keening like a fire alarm going off. ‘Jesus,’ Gary said. ‘What the hell is that?’