Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  So many times she’d shaded the truth. Fibs, equivocations and evasions. All for a good cause, but what had she achieved? None of it meant to hurt anyone, yet she had. Isaac’s visit confirmed it. Her column, a prancing sham. Her air-kiss relationships staving off real intimacy. Her mentoring, so well-meant, but also advertising her virtue. What had happened to her?

  Ashley’s voice penetrated the room. “Is everything all right?”

  What a strange construct. How could everything ever be all right?

  Ashley hovered, a worried look on her face. “Umm…one question. If you make a 911 call and you don’t need the police any more, are you supposed to cancel—or should we just leave it up to the Lord?”

  “Oh, please tell me you didn’t call.”

  Ashley’s face flushed. “He banged the chair. He was talking wild. You took out your pepper spray!”

  Meg waved Ashley back to her post. Speaking, even moving from here, could endanger this precarious moment of clarity. Going back to the office routine of client care, she might forget what true compassion felt like, might slip back into a more calculating form of empathy that did unto others as you would have them do unto your business.

  She might lose her nerve.

  School on the reservation must be over by now. Brian seemed grounded there but he traveled light.

  “Is this Chosposi?”

  The reply was guarded. “It’s Grace.”

  “We’ve met. I need to reach Brian Mogrin. You helped me before.”

  “Not another messeege...” Chosposi’s laugh sparked through the wire.

  “Can you give him this when he comes in? Or sooner? You win. No, wait. You were right. It’s time. Call me. From Meg.”

  “Oh, he knows who. You think all the girls call him here?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Meg heard a bustling in the lobby. Ashley’s eyes widened, then squinted toward the conference room. Her entire face pitched in to broadcast three silent syllables: The police.

  Tony Martin, Amy Hostetter’s former outreach partner.

  Thank you, Isaac. Yes, coincidence rewards a prepared mind.

  Do you have planned activities each day other than just surviving that bring you happiness and fulfillment?

  —Vulnerability Index Prescreen for Single Adults

  Isaac’s insulated shed had passed winter’s tests, which were rarely severe in the valley. Overnight snow usually disappeared by noon except for lingering patches on north-facing slopes. A January inversion had trapped bitter cold and bad air, leaving the heights warmer than the lowlands, but the sunny days surrounding did not inspire prayers for winter’s end. By every measure except the calendar, spring came in February and April morphed into summer. June might be too hot for him to live inside.

  Events in town fell and melted before he saw them. The Winslowville protest did not survive chill weather and a police strategy that posted targeted streets in advance. An informant was suspected. A church offered to host the Thistletown tent city for the winter but neighbors rose up and the City required a costly temporary use permit. By the time the ACLU got involved, the numbers of willing campers had dwindled to a handful. They tried to occupy the glue factory land and Wesley was arrested as one of the leaders. Isaac had followed the stories in the newspaper but never visited the encampment. How could he, living in his own place for free, tell Wesley he was not welcome to join him? He had agreed to his mother’s conditions. Obeying the rules always meant someone would be disappointed.

  He and his mother had found equilibrium. She had started calling the shed the casita, as a joke or perhaps because it was a happier word. The biffy was gone and he was allowed to use the bathroom and the laundry. He had sprayed the halogetan that sprouted all through her yard and would soon tear out the old landscape fabric, put down a new layer and refresh the gravel. Twice a week she fixed him dinner; twice a week he made her breakfast. Beyond that, they had no schedule or transitional arrangement. He had no desire to live in her house and he could sense she did not want him there, at least, not yet. Trials longer than this one had failed, so…

  The yellow Raleigh remained in service. With less to haul and further to ride, he found the road bike suitable, despite the pesky goatheads.

  He was still adjusting to his work, to the miracle of its appearance.

  A man named Gordon couldn’t get the Colorado driver’s license he needed for work. The license he’d lost was from Pennsylvania; he’d been born in New Jersey; an outstanding warrant for a parking ticket in Maryland somehow followed him to where no one else had. Isaac unwound the rules, found the forms and helped Gordon file the paperwork in the proper sequence. Next, he helped untangle a woman with four different names—birth, marriage, social security and an alias to hide from her abusive ex. Already having looked up four states, he kept going and created a national catalog of procedures and contacts. He had meant it as a self-help guide, but some cases were unique and people were still overwhelmed by the processes. Bureaucratic threads seemed less daunting to him when they bound someone else, so he continued, a walking encyclopedia of lost identity. He took such a load off Catholic Outreach that Sister Rose gave him a desk with a computer and office hours two days a week to handle miscellaneous questions: where to find a cheap haircut; how to get a bus pass; when the soup kitchen stopped serving; how often someone could visit the food shelf; who did free dental work; where to take a sick dog if you had no money; how to find out if your boyfriend was in jail; and how to get your heat back on when you couldn’t pay the bill.

  The library restored his privileges in April. Linda Cornish had heard about the database he had continued to build and asked him what he thought about manning a table next to the information desk. There was no budget to pay him but it was enough when she said any question that comes in the library is a library question.

  The last time he’d heard an engine running outside his shed—the only time someone knocked—it was the driver from the House of Flowers come to deliver a thank you bouquet from Meg Mogrin. Now the door was rattling again.

  Wesley.

  “I heard you were living in a shed and I imagined some old shack. You’re living the dream, my man.”

  The shed was Wesley’s micro-house dream, except this was not Thistletown because Wesley couldn’t live here. Isaac hoped he wouldn’t ask.

  “Your brother told me you were out here. He tracked me down, wanted to write a story about me. I told him I wasn’t the point.”

  It seemed Joe specialized in stories people didn’t want him to write.

  “I heard you were at the glue factory,” Isaac said. “I was looking for you there when some guys ripped me off.”

  “Sorry. I went underground for a while. I was dangerous to be around. The Winslowville thing pissed off the cops. And me telling the cops it was Dexter and Screech’s booby trap pissed off their druggie friends. I thought at first they dropped those fusees on us for revenge. A meth head can be pretty truthful if you catch him right, especially after his head’s going underwater for the third or fourth time. Anyway, the ones I visited swore they didn’t know shit. It seemed kind of pointless to keep dunking people til I found out who actually burned us out. It was pretty plain half the town was happy to see it.”

  “The other half wasn’t, though,” Isaac said.

  “The other half doesn’t care. They want us gone, too. They just don’t want to light the match. Instead, they gave me a deal. No jail time or probation.” Wesley stretched out both arms as if measuring the shed. “Terrell’s waiting in the car.”

  Terrell. Gravy, John, Doug. Isaac had lost track of everyone from the island. “Have him come in.”

  Wesley looked over his shoulder. “He has to keep his foot on the gas so the engine doesn’t die.”

  “When did you get a car?”

  “It was a recent donation.”

  “That’s a big donation.”

  “I turned down a bus ticket
to anywhere. Now we’ve got a Blazer with a full tank. Like I said...”

  A brown Blazer, perhaps twenty years old. Its loosened sheet metal trembled slightly with the elevated rpms. Terrell nodded from behind the wheel.

  “You’re all loaded up,” Isaac said. He saw one seat clear in the back. They could have said something before if they expected him to go along.

  “We wanted to make sure things were going good with you before we took off. Looks like they are.” Wesley cracked his neck bones, left and right.

  They had been in the same situation and now their situations had changed. Sharing an island wasn’t quite the same as being friends.

  A light came on at the rear of the house. His mother’s room. She must have seen the headlights, heard them talking. Now she was watching. Wondering.

  “Where are you headed?” Isaac asked.

  “We’re thinking Utah,” Terrell said.

  Utah was only about one-percent black people, although, with Colorado only four-percent, Terrell probably wouldn’t notice the difference.

  “You sure? From here to Salt Lake there’s only about four little towns, and the Mormons run the whole place.” That was the flaw in Edison’s plan to use technology to take over the country. He should have invented a religion.

  “We heard things are changing there,” said Wesley.

  Religions didn’t change. People were supposed to do the changing.

  Terrell had been nursing the Blazer with sips of gasoline. Now he gave it a dose that made the engine growl. Wesley walked around to the passenger side and climbed in.

  “We’ll let you know,” Wesley said. “You still get your mail at the Day Center?”

  He didn’t get much mail now that his mother had stopped sending the post cards, so what was the point of changing his address? It gave him a reason to stop in and see Sylvia. It let the others know he hadn’t gone all normal on them.

  Isaac’s dream had once been to see the entire world, not one stop at a time like on the interstate or Join the Navy and See the World, but grasping all at once how everything connected to everything down to the atom particles, the same way when he spun the globe he could see the oceans and the land masses as one whole. Like he was an astronaut with x-ray vision. But there was simply no chance of that. Every new discovery that overturned the former schemes led humanity down some new rabbit hole. At some point, it seemed, you either had to believe the old book or just watch the movie.

  Through his window Isaac could see his mother’s silhouette in a yellow square of light. It resembled a stamp from some small country where artists had taken over the postal service and made postage look like art instead of money. She had no reason to continue her watch. Wesley and Terrell had left; he had stayed. He undressed, pulled back the coverlet and switched off the lights. Across the yard, as if awaiting his signal, the house went dark.

  Nightly, dreams calibrated his mind to life’s absurdity and irresolution. Tasks remained incomplete, shapes lost their integrity and actions defied logic. Paperwork got lost. Motion contradicted physics. Out of the blue, his dream self sometimes reacquired a forgotten ability to levitate. No one ever seemed to notice his power but at least it allowed him to float his way out of difficulties. Try as he might, he never felt whole in those dreams, never achieved full clarity or assurance, never reached his goals. Yet again and again his brain dispatched these impulses, as if his exploratory sparks could restore pathways between broken wires. And some mornings he awakened with pleasure, trusting that when the time came, his love of the world would lift him to a place where his bones would recall the lost secret of flight.

  The new banner had been placed on Meg’s home page, her office number set to forwarding, her voicemail messages changed. After rehearsing the bullet points of the personal calls she intended, she found herself unready to manage the conversations. Instead, she composed a terse text. Taking some time off. Focusing on personal stuff. Nothing fatal. No need to call. You’ll hear when I know more.

  Caller ID let her divert the friends who called back, but her client-pleasing reflexes jumped at the unfamiliar number of Lew Hungerman’s assistant, who asked her to hold. His voice echoed with the reverb of a bathroom stall. “Start your break right. Come to the home opener with Idaho Falls, it’ll be great. It’s my community relations kick off.”

  “It’s baseball, not football,” she said.

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “You’ve been a vital part of getting this blimp off the ground. Your ideas were brilliant. Adding the homeless veterans component to the project positioning.”

  “So you’re doing the housing?” This was good to hear.

  “Not really, but with Amy Hostetter throwing out the first pitch, I see both a friend-of-the-homeless angle and a great honoring-the-wounded-warrior aspect.”

  “Well, whatever you decide to do, I don’t want any credit.”

  “That’s what I love about you. You make huge contributions and don’t care about personal recognition. I’m still disappointed you didn’t run.”

  It was so like Hungerman to mistake revulsion for humility. But why hold his absorption against him? The project might still be good for the town. She could take comfort in that, despite her misgivings of how it got this far.

  “Where are you calling from, the visitors’ locker room?” she said.

  “Now you’re being sarcastic.” The quality of the connection suddenly improved. “I was considering opening a call center in Idaho Falls.”

  She remembered what Jules had said about his business moving away from call centers. “I’m sure town fathers everywhere have appreciated your efforts to sow confusion.”

  He laughed. “Does your text mean you’re still considering my offer?”

  You prob’ly think this text is about you, don’t you?

  “You need a different kind of person in that job.”

  “That’s for me to decide. About tonight, come. I’ll leave your tickets at Will Call. They’ll get you into the skybox. It’ll be prime prospecting.”

  “You forget I already know all those people.”

  “But they don’t know you as my new sales director.”

  “All I care about is seeing the pregame, Lew.”

  “The tickets’ll be there. Bring some friends.”

  Meg drives the long gentle slope of Broadway from her house to the river, leaving time for a detour along Riverside Parkway. Spring rains have greened the grasses refreshed by last summer’s fire, though expanses of Las Colonias remain bare. Car dealer-style pennants lag over the bricks of the sugar beet factory, and a sign zip-tied to the cyclone fence notes an upcoming public hearing. A billboard on Donnie Barclay’s adjoining lot displays an architect’s rendering of the proposed Betterment Institute campus. Sparkling buildings rise beyond a flank of mature trees where presently moribund spindles cling to wood-chip mounds.

  Meg crosses Grand Avenue, like the city, named for the river before Congress rechristened it the Colorado. Next, Ouray Avenue, after the Ute chieftain who brokered the treaty tendering this valley from nomads to settlers, and then Chipeta Avenue, honoring his wife, who died far from home on a Utah reservation. As Meg approaches Lincoln Park, an alternate history of growth and progress begins to take shape in her mind, the view of her hometown she should have presented to Hungerman last summer.

  In a few short years bridging World War One, the Great Influenza Epidemic, falling farm prices and social unrest, local investment set in motion changes that still shaped the city. The county fairgrounds on the outskirts of town were purchased for an expansive city park that included sports fields, playgrounds, a zoo, exhibition hall and tourist camp. After an employee’s son drowned in the river, a local department store owner financed a public swimming pool in Lincoln Park, stipulating free admission to children. The original pool and its Italianate bathhouse have been replaced, but the benefactor’s name and a children’s free-day tradition remain. An arboretum was envisioned on soils made arable by the new gov
ernment canal; now sixty-nine varieties of trees leaf throughout the park. A municipal golf course opened nine holes; the forty acres reserved for a back nine were later dedicated to a VA hospital. Across North Avenue, a little two-year college opened its doors. Now a university campus sprawls around the original building. And tonight Lew Hungerman will talk up his vision for the neglected ground of Las Colonias in the ballpark suites overlooking verdant Lincoln Park.

  Was the town any less divided then? Was financial speculation less rampant, the region’s economy less fragile, its government less inept? She did not believe so. In those days, socialist workers wrangled with burghers who marched down Main Street with the KKK. Perhaps change had always been made from part sunshine and part graft.

  In the parking lot, tributaries of fans leave their cars and merge to flow through the entry gate. Some linger, finishing beers and bratwursts and putting away their tailgate hibachis. Among them, eating from a plate set atop her wayward shopping cart, the old woman from Whitman Park, beaming at her fellow celebrants. Did one of them just call her Mom?

  A horse trailer is parked near the exhibition hall. It’s been nearly a year since she saw Amy. Vaughn had told her about Leonard and the rehab rides, but she could not bring herself to look into it. The Amy she wanted in her head was the woman from their softball days who hit laser line drives and knew there were more important things than winning a game.

  Two boys chase past her, slapping each other with ball gloves. Ahead in line, Dan McCallam and his wife claim two of Hungerman’s luxury box tickets. Passing through an incense of mustard, popcorn and beer, she heads for the general admission section. She scans the left field bleachers expecting to see Brian there already. Oh, well. His Jetta is the unreliable one. She has been warned by the attorney not to think too far ahead. The worst thing about going to the authorities will be surrendering her sense of control. They won’t be jailed, he assured her, but it will seem as if they were while the investigation drags on. After all this time, the DA can only pursue a murder charge and must consider whether a jury will convict. Chances are, the case will never go to trial but the story will be all over the place. Resolution will come, he said, but if you expect absolution from the process, you will be disappointed.