—Vulnerability Index Prescreen for Single Adults
Mishner and Ford sat opposite each other in the Day Center vestibule. They were not allowed inside when they were hard-over drunk, which was most of the time, but their less toasted buddies would bring out coffee for them. Mishner’s rosary bead eyes rose from the steaming cup to fix on Isaac. Ford didn’t look up. He glumly peeled the plastic from a cold quick-stop burrito as if it were his last meal.
Mishner and Ford. Isaac didn’t know their first names, so he was surprised to hear Mishner call him. “Hey, Isaac, where you hanging these days?”
Isaac was out of the storage unit now, living in a tiny rental house across the tracks from downtown. This was not information he shared because when word got around about a place the wrong people always showed up. In exchange for attending a Stage IV lunger in his dwindling days, Isaac got to use the kitchen and sleep on the couch. Because of all his pain medications, Ron Gudmunson needed a housemate who was reliable and drug-free. Ron’s caseworker had talked to Sylvia and Sylvia told Isaac.
“You still looking for Wesley Chambers?” Mishner said.
“Has Wesley been here?” Isaac asked.
“He was looking for you. I hear he’s taken over that old glue factory.” Mishner looked to Ford for confirmation. Ford watched strands of limp factory lettuce sprinkle the floor.
Nice to know where Wesley was. The situation with Ron Gudmunson wouldn’t last forever. The glue factory seemed like a genius move. Who would care if anyone took over that rotten place? Maybe Wesley was trying to regroup the guys from the island to help start Thistletown. For the first time in months, Isaac felt as though something good could happen.
The computer had not gotten him into the trouble that Shelly had predicted, but it did lead into tunnels of distraction. He looked up Reagan’s lazy eye and discovered that Lincoln and Kennedy also had similar conditions. Three popular presidents who had all been shot. That sent Isaac after William McKinley, who reportedly had a direct, piercing gaze. Before long, Isaac was reading about how Edison had sent an x-ray machine to locate a stray bullet in McKinley’s body, and the McKinley-Edison trajectory turned up Edison’s Conquest of Mars, a science fantasy in which the president and Congress select Edison to direct earth’s war against the Martians.
“Give me carte blanche,” replied Mr. Edison, “and I believe I can have a hundred electric ships and three thousand disintegrators ready within six months.”
“Your powers are unlimited,” said the President, “draw on the fund for as much money as you need,” whereupon the Treasurer of the United States was made the disbursing officer of the fund, and the meeting adjourned.
Once Isaac would have been excited by that ridiculous passage but now it made him sad. Industrialists controlling the treasury was not a revelation; it was an American tradition. He thought of all his work assembling the evidence node-by-node and page-by-page to portray the great General Electric plot. The tape holding his master diagram together had yellowed and crackled. Unfolding it and layering in his meticulous footnote cards for display would require a gymnasium floor. Even if he could scan all the material, it would be incomprehensible at the scale of a computer screen.
None of his newer projects had gone anywhere, either. His poetry cards, the idea he had lifted from Gravy, had confused drivers already buried in text messages. His glass eye posters drew a warning from the cops and those not torn down had disappeared under notices from housepainters and owners of lost cats. He’d received no queries at the Day Center and heard nothing from his Craigslist ad. Local eye clinics would not share patient information and his emails to oculists were never answered. Joe brushed off the idea of a newspaper story. The finder keeper needs the loser weeper, his brother said. Get back to me if you find him.
Ron spent his days in his bedroom. The room was small and made smaller by the sounds of Ron’s television and the miasma from Ron’s labored breaths. Isaac carried in a chair when Ron wanted to visit and carried it out again when their time together was over for the day. Ron had been a parts and warehouse man, steady in a job that called for steadiness. He had received and unpacked shipments, moved pallets, stacked boxes and found them again, made deliveries, tracked paperwork and filed it. It was not a life history that gave him much to talk about, so when he heard Isaac was a librarian, he was happy to have the company. Ron thought they had their work in common, moving rectangular packets in and out of storage, and Isaac did not disabuse him.
Ron claimed he had an almost photographic memory. He could call up part numbers and lines on waybills, pinpoint boxes and skids from his desk and route shipments anywhere in the country without looking at a map. An entire warehouse in his head. After he got laid off and before he got sick, he worked at Home Depot, sending customers to the precise locations of the products they sought. Isaac understood. When he had trouble sleeping, he still wandered the aisles at Safeway.
“We thought computers’d make our jobs easier. Hah! The simpler work became, the worse it got. Brains and memory didn’t matter any more. We were arms and legs. The computer peckers in the office didn’t just track the parts, they tracked us. Go fetch, chop-chop! Scan a sticker. Run it over there. If you did it fast, they wanted it faster.”
Ron wanted company while he watched The Cannonball Run, a screwball comedy about an outlaw cross-country road rally. Isaac had never sat through the whole thing. Ron had seen it many times and knew all the lines, so he had suppressed the volume. He watched listlessly except when Farrah Fawcett appeared. Walleyed Jack Elam played the doctor who kept her drugged in the back of the ambulance driven by Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. Sammy Davis Jr. drove up with Dean Martin in a red Lamborghini. Isaac remarked how it was strange they’d cast Elam and the glass-eyed Davis in the same movie.
Ron knew about his search. He said, “That’s ’cause glass eyes are funny. You take it too seriously. Dean Martin did this long prank to buy a drink with a glass eye in The Sons of Katie Elder. You seen that one?”
He hadn’t. He hadn’t researched any movies because they weren’t real. Maybe there was a whole other layer of this he had missed.
“It’s probably on YouTube,” Ron said.
Ron didn’t have Internet. Isaac thought he might look for it later. After a time, Ron drowsed. Isaac stirred to leave and Ron pinned Isaac’s arm to the bed. He pointed at the screen and smiled. All the racers joined in a brawl with a biker gang led by Peter Fonda. Like the rest of the film, the scene was a broad parody of movie cliches—bodies flying through windows, impossible kung fu leaps, invincible noggins, accidental knockouts, clobbering your own man and last-second reversals. Ron watched to the end of the fight. Then his head tilted again.
Isaac sat a while longer, half watching the cartoonish action and half listening to the respirator tap at the end of each breath. All the driving teams were stereotyped odd couples—blonds and brunettes; black and white; masculine and effeminate; fat and skinny; sane and crazy; drunk and sober. Having a buddy was all that mattered on the race to the finish.
Ron knew he was done for. He didn’t need a roommate to bring him pills or run errands. He wanted a compadre who had his back, who knew his pain wasn’t just from the cancer. Even if it was too late for his co-pilot to hurtle in at the last second and clonk Death over the head, Ron deserved that guy. Everybody did.
Isaac took out the chair and left the television on in case Ron awakened while he was gone. Then he shouldered his backpack and locked the front door behind him. He told himself he’d grab some wi-fi and cheer himself up with that Dean Martin clip, but instead he kept walking.
Since the warehouse was the most solid building at the rendering plant, Isaac began looking for Wesley there. Someone had clearly been inside recently. The plywood over the front entry had been pried back. Isaac fixed his headlamp and stepped inside. The interior had the peculiar odor of abandonment—urine and smoke composted with newspapers and wool. The floor was littered with broken beer bottles and
miscellaneous party trash. Graffiti ran wild over the walls. The office divider walls had been torn out for firewood. Plumbing and electrical wiring had been stripped.
He thought he heard footsteps and voices deep inside the warehouse. “Wesley?”
No answer. Why would there be? No one was supposed to be in here. He stepped deeper inside. Past the offices, the interior opened up to a cavernous space. He called again. “It’s Isaac.”
This time, a voice. Back here. A flashlight illuminated a far wall, silhouetting a figure seated on an overturned bucket.
“Wesley?” He passed a stack of barrels, a few knocked from formation and rolled on their sides. Broken glass crunched underfoot. He bore carefully over the debris, nudging a path with his headlamp.
Something flew at him and fluttered overhead. Bats. He hunched along. He sensed something snatch at his head and as he ducked, his headlamp lifted. A bright swirl as the light went out. The flashlight in the distance switched off, too. His blood coursed in his ears, his scalp primed to leap off his skull.
“What did you bring us?” That was definitely not Wesley’s voice.
The blackout was seamless. Two men in here, maybe more. No reason yet to think them unfriendly. He’d surprised them. “I don’t have much—some cheese and crackers.”
The first man rose from his seat. A rattle and squawk as the bucket scraped the floor. A painfully bright pinpoint beam approached. With his hand, Isaac blocked the light from the tactical flashlight and turned to locate the other man. The light had burned an afterimage in his retinas.
“Crackers? We were hoping for an Apple.” The invisible men cackled.
His computer. It had to be Mishner and Ford. They must have seen him with it.
“It’s just a Toshiba.”
“Better than nothing,” said the voice behind him. Ford.
Mishner aimed his light at the floor. “Drop the pack.”
Isaac carefully laid down the pack. Besides the computer, it contained his key with the Samsonite tag, which they probably wouldn’t figure out went to his storage unit. His notebook and pencils. A windbreaker. Socks. Vending machine crackers. Nothing major. Ford slid the pack across the floor with his foot.
“You said Wesley was here.”
“Your darling Wesley. He talks like he’s king of the river but he’s a chicken shit. He ratted out Screech and Dexter for hurting that cop. But when Dexter’s buddies torched him out, he ran like a bitch.”
Isaac took the news in his gut. Is that what happened? The fire was set to get Wesley? Mishner might be making that up, too.
“Now pockets.”
He had nothing but five dollars and the key to Ron Gudmunson’s house. He held out the bill in one hand and dropped the key on his foot so it wouldn’t make a sound when it hit. It pinged away somewhere on the floor.
“Where’s your wallet?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Fuck, Samson, what’s wrong with you?”
Ford put hands on him. Jake’s knife, Isaac thought. He started down for the sheath in his boot. Shit—he’d left it on a side table next to the couch. Ford’s knee hit him in the face, then something else across the back of his neck. A kick in the ribs and another close to his kidneys.
“You asked for it, fucker. Stay down or I’ll stick you.”
The lights retreated toward the door. A copper penny taste in his mouth. He groped around for the pack but it was gone.
“You never saw nothing.”
They were right. He blindly patted the floor for Ron’s key, finding only glass and nails and bits of the unknown. He gave up searching before he lost track of where he’d seen the lights disappear. Reaching outside, he vomited against the building. He could already feel swelling over his cheekbone; he’d have to wait and see about the ribs. The police station was on the way to Ron’s house but what would they do? Some trespassing vagrants got in a fight. What else is new? Mishner and Ford would say he was mistaken. Or he started it. Crazy Isaac. They never saw a computer. Two against one. Their word against his.
The doors to the house were locked. The only light, a blue flicker from the bedroom window. Isaac peered in. A slight lift to the sheets, Ron’s open mouth a dark circle. The play of colors from the unseen screen. Isaac imagined Ron in a morphine fog wandering his fading warehouse, where work blended into obsolescence, dreams into computers, Dean Martin buying a drink with Sammy Davis’s eye, Cannonball Run meets Katie Elder. Ron’s photographic memory soon to be unrecoverable. Isaac had been stupid. A loser like him had no right to rouse his frail host. He found a tarp stuffed in the rafters of the empty carport. He rolled himself up in it and lay against the bottom of the back door as if he might stop a draft from seeping through the crack into Ron’s house.
Home is your life’s grandest display and the first place you go to hide.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
An expanse of dark and undefined scrub lay between the campito and the alleged cellular hotspot. Brian carried an elbow-shaped metal flashlight that might have served in World War II. Its dim yellow ray was close to expiring, more turn signal than headlight, but it could still do damage in hand-to-hand combat.
He led her into a web of trails that seemed to have grown out of the land rather than been worn into it. The one he chose, scarcely a foot wide and crossed by quail runs, seemed well-traveled.
“I thought you were alone out here,” she said.
“It doesn’t take much traffic to lay down a trail on this ground. Coyotes find routes. I follow the coyotes.”
“How do you know where you are?” she said. “I got lost in broad daylight.”
“You learn,” he said. “All these paths connect to something else, so eventually I can get anywhere on foot.”
“Even across Hopi land?”
“If we were Navajo grazing sheep here, it’d be a different story, but we’re away from the closed areas.”
She risked one of Brian’s discourses to ask, “Why is it all tribes claim their land is sacred?”
“Because it is, no matter how harsh. Being there makes it the center of the world. They take care of it because the homeland sustains them and vice versa. If they spoil what they have, they’re forced to wander. The tribe next door doesn’t want their company and the spirits of their ancestors will be pissed if they leave. Staying in place makes so much sense. They call home sacred and populate the other regions with ghosts and monsters. Then there’s even less reason to stray.”
He described what he called the white man’s version of the Hopi emergence legend: lost people found their way from a failed world to the next one. They chose hard work and humility and accepted the job of holding the world together. With their sacrifice, the human journey was supposed to turn out better this time.
“This center of the world stuff isn’t just about putting earth’s well being above everything. It’s about individuals taking seriously their responsibility for where they dwell. If you live selfishly, you destroy your home. The white man has this only figured out halfway. To satisfy our desires, we surround ourselves in luxury and destroy other places instead.”
She had missed Brian. Her Grand Junction friends were sensitive and well-read, but they were more absorbed in work and family. Brian uncoupled from his work without neglecting it, making her wish she could, too. Around him, she felt connected to ancient wisdom without the flightiness of the homeospiritual crowd. Did he know the effect he had on her? How he made her want to be better than she was?
They had been climbing gradually. He stopped at an outcrop above a series of rocky switchbacks that dropped to a long incline. Two water tanks squatted in the distance, backlit by a glow from the town tucked below them.
Brian said, “I should’ve asked about your life instead of blabbing all the way. Try your phone here. You’ll find some motels in Chinle.”
Meg had passed through a roundabout at Chinle. She imagined returning, pulling in late and alone; the motel’s
generic lobby with an appliqué of Native symbols; the smell of bleach in the cold sheets; the senior citizens waiting for the morning bus tour blinking at powdered eggs and fry bread for breakfast. Unbearable. Booking a decent room before she left was such an obvious precaution. Now here she was, splayed like an open suitcase in the middle of Brian’s retreat. He had a right to be confused. And it was only going to get more complicated. There was nowhere else she wanted to spend the night.
The promised two bars appeared and her phone displayed the missed calls that had come while her phone sat in the car. Eve. A client mulling a counter-offer. Lew Hungerman. And a fourth number that wasn’t in her caller ID. She asked Brian for fifteen minutes, enough time to call around to motels—and deal with this business. He handed her the flashlight, checked his Casio and trotted down the trail.
He doesn’t even know my phone’s a hundred-times better light.
The clients had made up their minds about the house; they simply needed reassurance they weren’t suckers if they agreed to pay a few thousand dollars more. Meg left instructions at her office to prepare the offer sheet so it could be sent in the morning. She moved on to Eve’s message.
Meg. We haven’t talked since your tour with Lew. How did it go? Listen, have you heard anything about Betterment courting other cities? The Chamber swears we’re it, but I smell something. I just don’t want to be blind-sided. Okay, call me.
So Meg wasn’t the only one. Courting other cities sounded like Idaho Falls. She thought she’d better check Hungerman’s message before returning Eve’s call.
Hi. It’s Lew. Just wondering if you’ve given more thought to my invitation. I’m scheduled for a fly-in on Thursday, exact return TBD, but I could have you back Saturday or Sunday. No pressure. Separate rooms, of course, if that’s what you’re concerned about. I might’ve come across as too...I don’t know, eager in some respect. If not, I understand. It’s short notice. Anyway, I’m not giving up on getting you involved. So...let me know.
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