The words from Jules dropped like ice cubes into a cocktail shaker. “The Clarion’s socialist business reporter...just described... most real estate ventures! Destination medical is a real trend and Betterment’s niche makes sense in a recreational community like this.”
“Granted. In fact, Hungerman’s been looking at some other places like this: Idaho Falls, Spokane, St. George.” He seemed pleased to note their surprise. “That’s the great thing about private aircraft; I couldn’t track him if he flew commercial. So what do you think? It’s a free country. Is he playing us? My editor says we’re not writing anything to derail this. Fine, let him unveil his project his way, but if we’re up against other cities, we should know what’s being peddled to them. Jules, I’m just a journalist, not a socialist. Think of me like the hometown guy covering the Broncos. I love them but I’m going to say what they’re doing wrong. I do want private enterprise to win. I just don’t want it to run up the score.”
He passed the menu and place setting over to Jules. “Right now, for the benefit of this developer, the city is putting the squeeze on people who have nothing. We’re petrified he might take his marbles somewhere else—but nobody wants to talk about the people he’ll displace.”
“There’s a whole public hearing process,” Jules said.
Joe snorted. “It’ll all be decided by then. This isn’t about some sidewalk cafe. Millions are going to change hands. There’s been private politicking for months, good old boys making deals. They’ve convinced themselves. When some shit land turns to gold, who’s going to care about the derelicts and crazies who thought it was theirs?” He tried to smile over the tremor in his voice.
Isaac’s story was the one Joe wanted to write, but he couldn’t. He was only the business reporter. His brother was on the wrong side of the deserving/undeserving homeless divide. The town needed to believe in itself, and Hungerman offered the validation it wanted so badly. Sacrifices had to be made, and Joe knew it as well as she did. There was no ram in the thicket to save this Isaac. Wesley’s old boots, No and Go, mocked them all.
“Your editorial board—did Hungerman say where the project was going?”
Joe nodded.
“Then you should talk to Wesley Chambers and you should also warn him. He has no idea he’s in the path. There’s a triangle of woods east of the glue factory. Look for a trail close to the river.”
“Joe can be such a prick,” Jules said. “I should call Ian.”
The Clarion’s publisher. Jules had dated him until Ian got too serious.
“Don’t. Joe already knows he’s living in the wrong town if he wants to write exposés.” Nothing was going to stop this unless some other city could top them—or the valley was truly cursed. Perhaps Wesley and Zack and Sister Rose spoke for deep human values, but this was economics, and it spoke for humanity, too.
Jules examined the menu. “I’m not worried about the homeless backlash, but privatizing the park could be a battle. It’s a dealbreaker if the City doesn’t give Betterment control. I can’t begin to tell you the contortions Lew’s going through with land swaps, layers of financing, reorg of his company. They don’t service as much through call centers any more. Most staff locates where they have provider contracts. He’s having trouble attracting executive talent to Detroit. His investors like the Betterment Institute venture but don’t see it tied to the core business and don’t see Lew running it. They’re bringing in an exec from a luxury hotel brand. Once that happens, a Scottsdale bank is in. Meanwhile, Lew is pushing for the homerun land deal he can leverage to reinvent his company and change his life. His father and uncle own a chunk of Betterment Health. He’s got vice presidents on the payroll, deadwood relatives from the old days, who used to repo cars. And let’s not even talk about his ex.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Lew’s not as superficial as I thought he was. He just has to maintain this facade.” Jules raised a finger to her lips. “I’m thinking the Red Bull Mimosa. It’s Friday, and I’m flying to St. George tonight.”
“You’re not...”
“Don’t worry, I’m a big girl.”
Meg didn’t worry about Jules. She wondered who Lew had invited to Spokane.
Where did you live prior to becoming homeless?
—Vulnerability Index Prescreen for Single Adults
Isaac didn’t mind walking but he hated walking his bicycle, hated the cars passing too close to the shoulder, hated looking to drivers like someone who wouldn’t plan ahead, didn’t carry a spare tube and couldn’t patch a flat, when he’d done nothing except fix flats since he’d started riding Joe’s Raleigh. Done nothing except watch the air go out of everything. Ron Gudmunson dead, discovered locked alone in his house while Isaac was out looking for Wesley, who was gone or underground. A letter back from Rudy Hefner saying he had no idea how the glass eye got in the canyon. Trow facing a sentence of either another rehab or a psych stay. Irene and Edward, their Tercel packed above the seat tops, hoping to reach Durango before they ran out of gas. Everyone pressed by this invisible force to keep them moving, fearful and sleep-deprived—tortured for their own good until they lost it completely and came in for repairs. Or they ended up like Jimmy, surrendered to the river, his dazed mother wading back from his wrong-way baptism.
Isaac had tried being a good son, a diligent student, a reliable worker, a faithful Catholic, a grateful recipient, a compliant patient. He had consulted doctors, endured tests, ingested pills, tolerated counselors, attended groups, woven potholders and painted by numbers, hung dream catchers, let priests and preachers and crystal gazers lay hands on him, exercised, immobilized, cleansed and fortified his body, read and written, gone mute and screamed his lungs out, masturbated himself to sleep and movie-marathoned himself into a stupor. And still this clamor: submit. Submit and survive.
Walking with his back to traffic on this road, he was just asking for it. A citation, a beer can in the back of the head or a sudden swoosh in the gravel behind him. Real funny, going to get his birth certificate gets him killed and they can’t identify the body because there’s no ID.
Isaac had checked the pawnshops and found his computer with Ford’s name on the ticket. Without a receipt he couldn’t prove anything and he couldn’t get a receipt without Shelly’s help since her credit card made the purchase. Plus, he didn’t want to hear I told you so this soon after she had told him so. Even with a receipt he’d still need an ID and a police theft report, which would mean admitting to the cops he was trespassing. The humiliation wasn’t worth the price.
A voice out of nowhere startled him.
“Need some help?”
Isaac turned to face a fierce red beak with sculpted nostrils. A helmeted man hovered above him, limbs joined to a bicycle, his cheetah body standing tall on the pedals. Composed. A carbon fiber centaur in sport glasses.
“I’m okay,” Isaac said.
The cyclist made minute adjustments with his front wheel and cleated feet to keep aloft without moving forward. He cocked his head at Isaac’s fat cheek and purple eye and must have determined the injuries did not need attention. After a quick sweep over Isaac’s bike (vintage but not sufficiently classic to be interesting) he turned his notice to the tire. “I’ve got a spare tube you can have.”
Isaac didn’t want the man’s tube. He wanted his effortless balance, his power to float like that.
“I’m almost home,” he said.
“Okay, man, your choice. Have a good one.” The rider powered away, the bike wagging between his legs as he cranked over the hill.
Isaac had meant to say he was almost to his mother’s house.
He could’ve walked the last hundred yards with his eyes closed. Marian had wanted a winding driveway but Carl had toted up the cost and run it straight as a landing strip aimed at the garage. Nothing looked much different. Trees grown taller. The pond dry, its liner showing. The Ramada Inn entry pillars, blistered by the southern exposure. A bird at the edge of the por
ch. A bead of its blood on the concrete, a smear on the beak, a clot of shit on one talon. He cupped it in his palm and pressed two fingers to the firm breast. A phoebe, he thought, the body warm, still capable of being alive. But the head lolled and under the ruff its neck was pliant as a blood vessel. He looked for a mark on the clerestory above the door where the glass reflected treetops under blue sky. Exactly the phoebe’s sky, except impenetrable. As he laid it under a barberry, he felt its essence pass from air into his memory.
He knocked four times. Evenly. Not urgent, not slow and ominous, the restrained sound a son should make at his mother’s door after some years away. He waited. Had she heard? Was she waiting, too? How long before trying again? Should he vary the pattern? Volume? Three knocks or five? Was he expectant or beseeching or simply awaiting a response? Perhaps she’d seen him approach and had taken him for a missionary. How many times did a missionary knock before giving up? Wait, the Mormons came in twos wearing CamelBaks and ties. The Witnesses drove cars and wore suits. He tried the doorbell. Didn’t the police knock instead of ring? God, he should’ve rung first. He could hear the bell through the door. Maybe she wasn’t home.
Maybe she was calling the police.
Marian Samson had let the halogeton live all summer but soon the weed’s succulent green would wither to brittle, brown, seed-scattering skeletons. She straightened from her work in time to see the man with the yellow bicycle while he was still on the road. She recognized him the way she identified autumn’s approach, sensing a familiar change before the details arrived, before the bicycle obeyed the hand rested on its seat and turned up the driveway. Marian stripped her sticky garden gloves and slipped in the back door, locking it behind her, then went straight to secure the front.
Marian had almost given up thoughts of Isaac’s return. One can only live in anticipation for so long. She had hoped for an apology first, a letter filled with insight and regret, something rigorous like a college application essay. Better, they would conduct a prolonged correspondence, since Isaac could be focused and coherent in bursts. Even a phone call. But he had never grasped the importance of social attachment, so how could he master the etiquette of being a longlost son? She used to think prodigal meant peripatetic until she tried to fit the eleven letters in her crossword. No, the correct answer was spendthrift. Isaac, the child most like her, had wandered but he was hardly a wastrel. He had squandered nothing except a life.
For the moment, she appreciated her unwelcoming front door, drawbridge-heavy and studded with hammered wrought iron clavos in the colonial Spanish style. The contractor had suggested installing a roller on the corner but the massive entry had been Carl’s idea and he would not be questioned. Regular visitors knew to assist with a shoulder when Marian answered or they simply came to the back of the house. When the door fell out of plumb and had to be rehung, Carl blamed Marian for opening it wrong.
After Carl died, she called in a new contractor who told her replacing the door would involve reconstructing the entire entry. The price was shocking but the real deterrent was knowing that even if she repainted the interior, sold the outsized furniture and replaced the cowboy primitive light fixtures, the house would still reflect Carl’s decisions about the location, layout, dimensions and internal systems. Everything she did within its space—looking out a window, walking to the bedroom, sitting on a toilet, leaving out-of-reach shelves unused or calling an electrician to change light bulbs in the ceiling—was a product of Carl’s overbearing will. Erase his influence? It would be easier to redecorate an asteroid.
She knew there were twenty-eight clavos in the door and counted them anyway, adjusted the entry rug so it was square with the tiles and counted the clavos again to measure a minute of their impasse. She had always counted but only at moments like this was she conscious of it. Counting reassured her that the universe had not rearranged itself while her attention strayed. She counted steps, counted days, counted blessings, counted boys she had kissed instead of sheep. Counted beats to the measure, beads of the rosary, beans as she snapped them. She supposed she had been counting the weeds she pulled right up until Isaac’s arrival. However, there was no counting Isaac. He did not add up.
She still loved him as the child she had raised but was also fearful of the stranger he had become. Such a beautiful boy—everyone had said so, going above and beyond the adoration to which all babies are entitled—and when he began to have problems everyone said, look at all you’ve done, look at your other boys, as if that proved she was not at fault, as if the other sons had not fled as soon as they could. Jacob went straight to the Navy, found a Japanese wife in Okinawa and established a life over unbridgeable waters. Joseph, off to a good journalism school, stayed for big city opportunities. The knock from the banished one came to her like the late-arriving light from an extinguished star.
Isaac stared at the hulking door so dark and distressed it might’ve been salvaged from a sacked cathedral. The door did its job, making clear he was not welcome. All he had to do was request his birth certificate and walk back to town. But right now he had a calf ’s liver for a tongue; his skin, a salty rind, his scalp peppered with oily flakes; mush warmed in the spaces between his toes; each step produced a habanero burn in his crotch; bones flared in their sockets; every nerve begged to go off duty. If there were a name for this weary condition, his ransacking brain would have exhumed it by now.
A car shushed past on the road. The earth ticked toward sunset. The broken-necked phoebe said: It’s not so bad to give up. He lowered himself to the concrete—a long delicious slide against the warm wall—and submitted his surrender.
The rattle of Joe’s old four-banger Subaru woke him. His brother sat in the car so long Isaac wondered if he was expected to get in. “Is she home?” Isaac said.
Joe tucked a phone in his pocket and got out. “She’s concerned. It’s been a long time since she saw you. Are you okay?”
He was not okay but that was not the right answer. “I’m not freaking out, if that’s what you mean.”
“Your face.”
“I tripped in the dark.”
“You understand why she might be worried about you suddenly showing up out of nowhere.”
“She’s always worried about something. You know that.”
“Isaac, I didn’t drive out here to debate. What are you after?”
“My birth certificate.”
Joe made a show of patience but his tone grew sharper. “Don’t tell me you rode all the way out here for that. You could’ve called and asked her to mail it.”
“It’s the original. It could get lost in the mail. And I didn’t ride all the way. I’ve had two flats today on that stupid bike.”
Joe eyed the Raleigh. “Glad to see you’re finally riding it. You should carry a repair kit. Everybody gets flats from the goatheads.”
As if Isaac needed bicycle tips from Joe. It happened all the time, people assuming he must be stupid. He didn’t need that deflating shit from his family, too.
“And why are there goatheads? They’ve invaded because the soil was disturbed by roads and shopping centers. They’re deployed all around the city to keep me out.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Goat heads are Tribulus terrestris—it means affliction of the earth. They’re in the caltrop family. The Romans invented the caltrop to cripple their enemy’s horses and troops. Look it up.”
“Jesus, Isaac! Why do you have to make everything so complicated?”
“Because everything is.” Joe should know. That’s why he had a job—to simplify the world, summarize the hard stuff and pull out the juicy parts.
“She’s not opening the door unless I tell her it’s safe. So far this conversation isn’t helping you.”
“It is safe. I have never, ever hurt anyone.”
“If that’s what you believe, brother, you have a pretty narrow definition of hurt.”
Marian heard the boys talking on the…terrace, stoop? Sometimes she cou
ld still not retrieve the word she wanted. After her stroke names for things hid or showed up disguised as another word. People smiled at her sentences as if she were wearing unmatched socks. It helped doing crosswords and watching Jeopardy! Soon, she would write limericks to show she’d recovered.
There once were three boys all named Samson
In varied degrees they were handsome
They left home, to a man,
One as far as Japan
Now the other two wait at her transom!
Carl’s death had brought her sons back together only momentarily—so they could, in Jake’s horrid phrase, make sure he stays under. It had taken more than her being alone for Joe to move back from Missouri with Shelly and the children. Her stroke, a stroke of luck. She remembered little from that two years of confusion. Soliciting rides to church and then insisting that Carl would take her. Returning calls she’d already returned while forgetting others. Wandering lost on the canal road behind the house, though there were only two directions she could go. Friends can only put up with that kind of nonsense for so long. She worked hard to become herself again. Thank God she didn’t end up a vegetable, although if she had, Isaac might have taken an interest in her.
She had been fooled before. They both had. She had been soft and Carl hard, one forgiving, the other resolute. Marian had accepted Isaac’s condition as an illness while Carl considered it a character flaw. Love did not cure him nor did tirades set him straight. She was resigned to her postcard returning one day. Or claiming his body. Well, here he was—the word alighted—on her threshold.
Marian slid the deadbolt and grasped the iron ring with both hands. Then she counted to twenty-eight and leaned back with all her might.
She should have welcomed Isaac, spoken his name first, but his appearance overwhelmed her. His face half-purpled. His clothes looked slept-in. He had not shaved for days. His bleary eyes shifted without making contact. She blurted, “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
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