Talk to Me

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘I think he got out the front window – is it broken at all?’

  Aimee said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, but let’s have a look.’

  The window had been put back in, but if you examined it closely, you could see that two of the screws were missing – there they were, on the rug, and the screwdriver with them. Even more damning was the bright yellow scrap of a Creamsicle carton stuck to the bottom of the curtains and two more popsicle sticks dropped casually on the kitchen floor.

  ‘What do you know about this, Sam?’ Aimee demanded, crossing the room to stand over him, hands on hips, in full interrogation mode.

  And here was the thing that always amazed her, and she must have told the story a dozen times over the course of the next couple of weeks: Sam lied. Animals didn’t lie. Animals just lived in the moment and if they felt guilt – a dog slinking in the corner after snatching a pork chop from the table or crapping on the floor – it wasn’t so much guilt as fear of retribution, which was something, certainly a higher brain function than most people gave them credit for, but this was something else altogether. At first, Sam pretended he didn’t know what she was talking about, just kept his head in his book, but you could see he knew what was coming because he wouldn’t look at her. She asked again, her voice harsher now. Still nothing. Then she produced the scrap of bright yellow wrapper and waved it in his face, and he looked up and signed something to her.

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ she said. ‘How could Guy do it? Guy’s not even here.’

  Another sign, the long fingers jumping, the eyes dodging away.

  ‘No, he wasn’t. He’s in California, you know that. He didn’t break into that woman’s trailer,’ she said, signing it simultaneously, ‘you did.’

  The way he smiled was to roll up his lips and expose his teeth and gums, which was what he did at that moment, and it was clownish and endearing and something else too, and she saw it now for the first time and it chilled her: he was calculating. He wasn’t a person and he wasn’t an animal but something in between, something deformed and unnatural, even if he’d fooled Father Curran. Well, he wasn’t fooling her, not any more. Here he was, admitting to the crime and begging forgiveness at the same time because he was like a spoiled child. And who’d spoiled him? Who was ultimately responsible? Who was guilty here?

  ‘You know we can’t have this,’ Brenda heard herself say. She was angry, furious really, as if she’d been taken for a fool right from the beginning. ‘You know this is it, don’t you? The final straw?’

  Stony-faced, her shoulders slumped, all the fight drained out of her, Aimee just nodded. ‘I know,’ she said.

  It was just after Thanksgiving when the two men showed up. The day was cold, or cold for Kingman, anyway, in the low thirties when Brenda got out of bed at seven, but the sun was shining and there was no wind so that made it bearable at least. She had the space heater going in the office and was doing the crossword over a microwave burrito and a cup of coffee when a strange car with two men in it swung into the lot and pulled right up to the door. The first man – he turned out to be a professor too – came in without knocking and asked for Aimee while the other one stayed in the car.

  Aimee had made arrangements to have her trailer towed to Delpino’s in Golden Valley at the end of the month, just ten miles away but another universe as far as views and amenities were concerned, because they weren’t picky about who rented space there and pretty much anything went as far as pets were concerned. Last time she and Gary visited Joe Delpino, she saw a llama tied to the tow bar of a Minnie Winnie and standing practically up to its knees in a pile of its own crap, and somebody else had two of the mangiest-looking horses she’d ever seen locked up in a portable corral the size of a refrigerator box, not that it was any of her business. But it was never pleasant having to evict anybody, and she’d felt sorry for Aimee and helped hook her up both with Joe and the Andrelton brothers, who’d been relocating trailers for the tenants at Desert Haven for the past twenty years. Whether Aimee was home at the moment or not, Brenda didn’t know but even after what had happened, she still felt protective of her – protective of everybody in the court, for that matter – and she made it her business to find out who was asking before giving out information to just anybody.

  ‘Yes, she lives here,’ she said.

  Gary was a big man, six-two, 230, but the man standing before her looked to be even bigger, or heavier, anyway. And Gary had gone into town in the pickup to get the brakes fixed, so he wasn’t there for comparison. Or help. There was another thing about the man, aside from his manner and the way he talked, which was nothing short of condescending – he had a patch over one eye and you could see the fine lines of scar tissue wrapped over the bridge of his nose. He said, ‘Well, could you direct me to her?’

  She thought about that for a moment, then took off her reading glasses and set them on the counter, so she could see him more clearly. She couldn’t help recalling how Aimee had come to her out of nowhere, without references or even a previous address, and how eager she’d been to change the plates on her car and then turn around and get rid of it altogether. What she was thinking was that this looked like trouble, and though it was no trouble of hers, she still couldn’t see facilitating it in any way. ‘Does she know you’re coming?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  ‘Well, you’ll have her address then, won’t you? The lot numbers are clearly marked.’

  He took a minute to absorb this, studying her with the long concentrated gaze of his working eye. ‘I’m afraid she didn’t provide me with that information.’

  She was just about to do the same thing she’d done with the last visitor – push the phone across the counter to him – when she asked, almost on a lark, but to delay him too and maybe aggravate him a little, because she didn’t like him one bit: ‘Don’t tell me you’re her professor too?’

  The car was still running in the drive. She could see the other man sitting there in the passenger seat, younger, dressed in what looked to be a muscle shirt despite the cold. She watched him lean forward and fiddle with something – the radio dial. He was a visitor too. And maybe he was bored, but that was nothing to her either.

  ‘In fact,’ the big man said, ‘I am a professor,’ and he gave his name and his title and his affiliation too – Davenport University.

  ‘Davenport? Isn’t that in Iowa?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You’ve come pretty far. What is it,’ she said, and she gave him an acid grin, ‘winter break?’

  ‘All right, listen,’ he said, and she watched him swell out his shoulders and do a little two-step shuffle (and that was another thing that was a bit off – he was wearing a suit jacket, as if he really was a professor, but the same Timberland work boots Gary favoured), ‘I just need to know where she is and I’ll be out of your hair. The fact is, she does live here, didn’t you just say so? And you are the manager of the place’ – he squinted at the nameplate on the desk, which read Brenda Sue Booth – ‘aren’t you? Brenda?’

  She didn’t like him. And she’d made up her mind to toy with him a little bit more just to see how he’d take it. She was going to say, in all innocence, ‘Oh, but I’m not Brenda, I’m Dolly. Dolly Anastasio?’ but he didn’t give her a chance. He was the sort who was used to getting what he wanted. He was the sort who bullied people. And never thanked anybody for anything.

  He said, ‘This is urgent, and I think I have an obligation to tell you that. What I’m talking about is stolen property, a felony, and it would be a shame to let this, whatever it is between us here, get in the way of it, or for me even to have to mention a term like harbouring a fugitive.’ He paused to draw a handkerchief from his inner pocket and blow his nose as if to clear his head. ‘If you won’t assist me,’ he said, ‘my best guess is that the sheriff will. You don’t happen to have his number by any chance, do you?’

  FIGHT KILL DIE

  These were the essential words, the first words,
the words that pricked rage before the fact and landed like bricks after, and he knew them in the way he knew how to breathe and swallow and move his bowels. They were the words of a story, a story already told, because when he was in the story, when it was happening to him, in real time, he didn’t need words – he just acted, or reacted, like any other sentient thing. Which was how it was on the morning when she had the RECORD turned up so high it hurt his ears, and she was too busy putting cans and jars and forks and spoons and knives in boxes to pay attention to him. ‘Not now, Sam,’ she kept saying, no matter what he wanted to do, whether it was go OUT for a WALK or play CARDS or drive in the CAR. ‘Just watch TV, OK? Can you do that for me?’

  He watched TV, though the record – thumping and thumping – fought against the TV and rendered the words of the figures inside it null and void, not that he needed to know what they were saying because he could read their body language even if she shut the sound off altogether, but he turned up the TV anyway. She came across the room, took the CLICKER from him and turned it down. He watched where she put it – atop the refrigerator – and the minute she was distracted, he sidled into the kitchen, sprang up on the counter, retrieved it and clicked the sound back up. ‘No, Sam,’ she said and held her hand out for the clicker, but he wouldn’t give it up even when she stamped her foot and tried to grab it out of his hand, so she went back to what she was doing with the cabinets and the boxes, and Daffy Duck rose up out of the cacophony and squawked, ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’

  Because it was so loud, he didn’t hear the creaking of the three hard METAL steps up to the trailer, which was lost in the thump of her music and the crash and bang of the TV. Then there was the knock. She didn’t hear it, but he did. He was trying to evaluate it, the knock, wondering if it was the knock of Brenda or No Legs or maybe – and here he felt his excitement rising – PIZZA! But it was too early for PIZZA, wasn’t it? And he hadn’t heard her ordering over the phone and she hadn’t asked him what he wanted on it, which was EVERYTHING, piled high – GREEN PEPPERS, ONIONS, TOMATOES, SAUSAGE, MUSHROOMS – so he was confused and curious, and instead of going to the DOOR, he went to her and tugged on her shirt and she said, ‘Will you please stop pestering me, Sam?’ when the second knock came and then the third, louder and louder, and she gave him a look of surprise and called out, ‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’

  There was a hard yellow ray of sunlight radiating through the window in a float of dust, and it distracted him just a moment as she unlocked the door and pulled it back, and a terrible voice insinuated itself between the noise of the record and the noise of the TV, saying, ‘Well, well, Miss Villard, how nice to see you again. I believe you have something that belongs to me?’

  HUG ME, TEASE ME, LOVE ME, SQUEEZE ME

  That was what they were singing, the Talking Heads, doing a variation on a song by Al Green, which was also called ‘Take Me to the River’, or so somebody had told her – Guy? – though as far as she knew she’d never heard the original, which couldn’t have been half as good as this. This had that magnetic bass that always seemed to live right inside of you, and it was still one of her all-time favourites, though by now she supposed it was out of date and people on campus were more into U2 or whoever. Who she liked when she heard them on the radio, but she hadn’t bought any albums in a while now, since they cost money and took up space and Sam could be hard on them. She’d put the record on the stereo and kept the volume cranked up as a means of distracting herself while giving the trailer a good scrubbing and packing her things securely in the boxes she’d got out back of the supermarket (‘Don’t leave anything laying around or it’ll get beat to hell and if you read your contract we’re not responsible, you are,’ Toby, the younger of the two Andrelton brothers, had warned her). She didn’t want to pack. She didn’t want to move. And she hated Delpino’s, which had about as much charm as a parking lot, which was essentially what it was.

  Her attachment to Sam, her love, was unconditional, but there were times – like now – when she felt the burden of it. She’d run from Iowa with him, run from the campground in Utah, and now she was running from here, the only place where she’d been able to catch her breath, really, since she left Santa Maria, but then she wasn’t running exactly – she was being shoved. And what next? She could see a whole succession of incidents shoving her further and further away from any kind of life at all, and what would it be like in a year, five years, ten? At least at the ranch, she could get out once in a while, if only to see a movie or sit by herself in one of the student hangouts and spoon up a bowl of the soup of the day without having to worry about Sam emptying the cupboards or crashing through walls or taking hold of some stranger’s hand in his vice grip and holding on for three hours just for the sheer hilarity of it.

  She wanted to call her mother, wanted to hear her mother’s voice, wanted to go home, but none of that was possible. No cop had appeared on her doorstep, but every time she sat out in the yard and heard the slamming of a car door or a man’s voice raised in conversation drifting across the yard from some hidden corner of the court – barbecue, valve job, bring me another beer, will you, hon? – she froze. Guy had warned her – threatened her – and though she told herself she was just being paranoid, there was always that edge of unease, no matter what she did. Moncrief was coming, that was what he’d said. Moncrief never gave up. Moncrief was a son of a bitch. And, for that matter, so was Guy, as far as she was concerned.

  Sam had been antsy all morning and that was her fault. She hadn’t taken him out for his walk yet because she was too busy, too stressed, and here was the burden brought home to her all over again – it wasn’t as if she could just open the door and let him out to do his business and sniff at the bushes like a dog. Dogs could get in trouble, as anybody at Animal Control would testify. They could bite, run sheep, chase cars, bark for hours on end. Sam was in another category – he could devise trouble in a hundred ways and gradations. He could think. He could plan. Breaking into Dolores Benvenidez’s trailer was symptomatic of a new pattern that had begun that day at Moncrief’s house: an act of wilfulness, delinquency even. If he was in school, they would have expelled him by now.

  She put the chewed-up Tupperware plates in a box, emptied the spice cabinet, set aside the cleaning supplies. She’d awakened early, before it was light out, but she hadn’t got up. She’d just lain there in bed, staring into nothingness until the room began to take on dimension and the black blur beside her metamorphosed into Sam. He was sleeping on his side, his legs drawn up in the fetal position, his head sunk into the pillow beside her. He tended to snore if he slept on his back, the way Guy did, and she’d sometimes have to poke him to get him to turn over, but he was fine now, his breathing easy and barely audible. She watched the light swell against the curtains and creep across the wall to infuse the pale whorls of his upturned ear, pale as a mushroom against the tight dark hairs of his neck and shoulders. The room brightened by degrees. There was no sound anywhere, not even from the birds that flitted in and out of the palo verde trees in front of the office and came to peck in the dirt behind her trailer for whatever they could find there.

  Because she slept with him and because people knew that (Brenda had asked her if he slept in his doggie bed on the nights when they were home and she’d made the mistake of saying, ‘No, he climbs right into bed with me,’ and Brenda, rolling her eyes, said, ‘Oh, yeah, our dog Misty was like that – just try to keep her off the bed’), they made their dirty-minded assumptions. And she knew about it not only from what she could read between the lines with Brenda, but from a snatch of conversation she’d overhead one afternoon when she was doing her laundry, two women sitting outside in the bed of a pickup, drinking beer and listening to the radio while their clothes tumbled in the drier, their voices clubby and confidential, I hear she sleeps with that thing. A laugh. Can you blame her? Shit, I bet he’s better hung than Bill. Another laugh, both of them in chorus. You’re just disgusting, you know that?

  She’d slip
ped out of bed, careful not to wake him, stood under the slow dribble of the shower, ate a bagel – dry, because she was out of cream cheese and not about to restock anything till they moved – and then sat at the table for so long her left calf began to cramp. Then she pushed herself up and began putting things in boxes. The fact was that chimps and humans were basically incompatible for sex because chimps’ penises are much smaller than men’s and they ejaculate within ten to fifteen seconds, but Sam was like any other adolescent and he masturbated freely, which was another kind of mess to clean up and there was no bathtub here, just a stand-up shower, but that was nobody’s business but hers. And Sam’s.

  She tried to be as quiet as she could so as not to wake him, because once he got out of bed, he’d suck up all her attention, as usual, and she had to try to get a handle on all this mess. By eight o’clock, though, there he was in the kitchen doorway, giving her his feed-me look, and she cut up some melon for him and served him a bowl of the granola he liked to sweeten with honey out of the plastic squeeze bottle till it was a mucilaginous yellow sludge, and then she put the record on the stereo, cranked the volume and went back to work. Half an hour slipped by. He kept pestering her to go out and she kept putting him off. He turned on the TV, banged things around, used a crayon on one of the walls. And when she told him to lower the sound, he ignored her till she took the remote away from him and hid it atop the refrigerator, where he got it five minutes later and refused to give it back to her, so that finally she just gave up and let Daffy Duck and the Talking Heads fight it out.