The second time the office is broken into, a framed photograph that hangs on the wall in the hallway of a blonde in a red, white, and blue bikini is taken. After the first break-in, Robert no longer keeps money or booklets or checks in the office. Instead, he puts them in a safe and carries the safe to the van and puts the safe in his closet. He and Benny have a good laugh imagining the confusion that must have set in when the alarm went off and the thief found nothing there, nothing in the main hall or where the men met in the morning, except maybe a few leftover doughnuts, which were eaten, and then he must have looked up at Brandi, the nymph of Venice Beach, holding every American dream in the coned cup she made by pushing her two breasts together with the bottoms of her elbows. Her eyes glancing over the tops of her sunglasses, asking the thief if he’s man enough to take her. Does she not belong to him? This dream?
The break-ins are just the beginning of what Robert will later visualize as an implosion of his entire, fragile career out west. The concrete frames and steel beams rise from the desert like machine-made flora. Yet there is no one inside them. The bulldozers and wrecking balls are in a lot somewhere waiting. That summer, Stevie, the three-fingered ex-con and practicing white supremacist who has been working for Robert the last two weeks, gets drunk and climbs into an apartment and fondles a little girl; Toothless Ron, old and diabetic, falls dead from exhaustion after having scored six sales; and Billy Lang, a former state wrestling champ and degenerate horseplayer who has a long scar from the tip of his right ear to the bottom of the left side of his chin from being knifed for failure to pay one of his bookies, has run up to Canada in the company van.
The remainder of the crew disappears over the course of the summer, taking with them their phony postal uniforms, tire gauges, useless discount books they try to sell for a stay in a motel room. In the end, Robert has nothing to play with anymore.
Then Benny leaves. He says he’s going back to Appleton, Wisconsin. He has family there. Robert gives him what little money he has for a bus ticket. They shake hands. Half hug. Two men used to parting ways.
* * *
One night, not long after Benny is gone, Robert drives through the desert to the Red Rocks and stands under the moon smoking a cigarette, listening to the wind surge through the canyons, forming a kind of mass that pushes him back off his feet.
A day and a night of driving east, and he’s finally back in South Bend, Indiana. Initially, he had wanted to experience an old joy—to smell the cut grass in the quad, watch the early risers jog along St. Joseph’s Lake, maybe even light a candle for his father in the Grotto—but it’s cloudy and cold, and he is tired. He passes by campus and into town, where he finds a motel. The woman at the front desk gives him a key, along with an ice bucket and an ashtray. The television gets three channels, the carpet stinks of wet garbage, and there are a dozen or so dead flies in the tub.
That afternoon, lying on the stiff mattress, listening to a farm league baseball game on the radio, someone knocks on his door. He turns down the volume on the radio and opens the door as far as the chain lock will allow. A young woman with a fresh cut on her brow stands at the threshold, taking short, quick breaths, as though she has just been chased through the parking lot.
Robert releases the lock but blocks her from coming in, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone is following her.
“Motherfucker, I’ve been sliced. Let me in,” she says, pushing past him.
“I don’t want trouble.”
“You got it. I picked you. Open the door.”
Robert closes and locks the door.
“Get me a wet towel, please.”
He goes to the bathroom and wets a washcloth under the faucet. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, biting her thumbnail. Robert hands her the towel and she puts the cloth to her face and looks around the room.
“These places are little hells,” she says.
Robert nods.
“I just need to rest awhile and then I’ll go get this stitched up.” She takes the washcloth from her face. “Do you think it needs stitches?”
The cut is about two inches long but not deep. It could have been made by a sharp fingernail.
“Wouldn’t hurt to see a doctor,” Robert says.
“Not about the cut, though, right?”
“I don’t want to get involved.”
“You have a cigarette?”
Robert hands her the pack. She takes it and puts a cigarette between her lips and widens her eyes.
“Light?” she says.
He lights her cigarette and she lies back on the bed and clutches her stomach. Then she weeps.
“Want to talk about it?” Robert offers.
“It’s all so crazy,” she says. “You know what I mean? I’m thirty years old and look at me. It’s you. It’s all men. They make women this way. When they get sense, it’s too late. Then they’re relying on men and they got this sense and no way to get out of what they’ve gotten themselves into, and, shit. Shit. Look.”
A shadow appears in the stained window curtain.
“Be quiet,” she says.
Robert tries not to move, but his body responds to the shadow, to the girl, to the drive and the country. He can feel his muscles relax, preparing for violence.
“Sophie, you in there?” the voice from behind the curtain calls.
The woman puts a straight finger to her lips.
“Sophie,” the man shouts, and knocks on the door. “I just heard you. I swear I heard you. Is someone else in there with you?”
“Yeah!” she shouts back. “And he’s big and nasty!”
“Oh, Jesus,” Robert says.
The man beats on the door as though it’s a paper drum. Such desperation, Robert knows, mean this man will keep knocking all night, until, at some point, the knocking will seem like a generous offer, a sign that he won’t quit on her.
“I’m opening the door,” Robert says.
“No, don’t,” Sophie says. “He’ll kill you. I know it. I just know it.”
Robert pushes aside the curtain and sees the man standing there. He isn’t all that big but looks scrappy, the type of man Robert never liked to fight with in college; they could get at you fast, stun you with quick jabs, never giving you a chance to coil up for a haymaker. The man has on a plaid shirt and jeans and leather boots. Not as nice as Robert’s snakeskin boots but more genuine, or real, because they’ve been lived in.
“I’m opening the door now,” Robert says. “I don’t want trouble.”
“Stop saying that,” Sophie says, annoyed.
Robert opens the door to where the chain hits.
“I was just sitting here listening to the radio,” Robert says through the crack in the door.
“I understand,” the man says.
Robert slides off the chain and slowly opens the door. The man stands just off to the right, still outside, short, scrappy, with fading blond curls and big ears and sunburned lips.
“I’m Sherman Young,” he says, and holds out his hand.
“Robert.”
They shake hands.
“You mind if I come in?”
“Why not.”
Sherman Young steps inside the room. Robert notices a scar on the back of Sherman’s head. The hair has grown around it.
“Listen, now,” Sherman Young says, “I didn’t do that to her. I hope you refrained from calling the police.”
Robert glances at Sophie, then turns back to Sherman.
“Okay? We don’t want to waste any more of your time.”
Sophie is precariously quiet. She looks at Sherman, lips curled, eyes lowered coquettishly.
“How she got that scrape was we were messing around and she fell. That’s all.”
“It happens,” Robert says.
“Sure does. I feel terrible and I tried to tell her that, but you see how unreasonable a woman gets when she’s agitated and she’s had a little too much to drink. Come now, baby. Come and let’s let Robert get some rest.”<
br />
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“That is not what I was hoping to hear, baby.”
“Well, that’s what’s happening. Me and Bobby. I think we got like some kind of connection. Don’t we, Bobby?”
“Like I said. I don’t want to be involved in this. I’m leaving in the morning.”
Sherman Young presses his palms together.
“Look,” he says, “it might be too much to ask, but will you give the two of us a second together? I promise we won’t mess up your room here. I just need to talk to her, and then we’ll be on our way.”
Sophie flings the two fingers holding her cigarette at Robert, as though shooing him away.
“Five minutes,” Sherman Young says.
Robert grabs his wallet and cigarettes and walks to the lobby. He pours himself a cup of coffee and sits in a chair by the door and reads a golfing magazine. The woman at the front desk is whispering into the phone. There’s a half-eaten drumstick and some yellow rice on a Styrofoam plate in front of her. The coffeepot groans.
When fifteen minutes have passed, and Robert has learned how to correct a slice, he walks back to his room. The door is open and Sherman Young is sitting on the bed, bent over, holding his chin. His eyes are watery, as though he’s been whacked in the nose.
“You see. She’s nuts. You’ve never met someone so insane in all your life. My wife died a while back. She was nuts, too, but not like this one.”
Robert hears the sound of screeching brakes. He and Sherman both go to the window. Sophie’s inside a white Buick with a blue top, lying on the horn.
“I think she’s taking off,” Robert says.
Sherman opens the door and jumps out onto the walkway.
“Eat shit, faggots!” Sophie shouts.
The tires squeal as she speeds off out of the parking lot.
Robert walks with Sherman back to his room and sees his clothes and toiletries and a few spy novels piled on the bed. Sherman sits on the bed and checks his bag.
“She didn’t steal anything,” he says. “Well, except for the car.”
“I’m sorry,” Robert says, because, by now, what else is there to say?
“Don’t be. I mean, I’m fifty-one, the things she could do in the sack.”
Of course, Robert has been with crazy women. Not Irene, though sometimes she had an energy that bordered on it. He’s thinking of Candice, of a few quiet girls from St. Mary’s when he was in college, who had forever been told what to do, and the daughter of McRainy, a man who sold sinks to fast-food restaurants and vacationed in Wequaquet every July. She had seen Robert digging an irrigation ditch out in back of one of his father’s houses and asked him up to the house. After iced tea and small talk, they were in her room, and she was naked, and she turned and bent over and told him to pull her hair back and choke her with his belt. He didn’t have a belt. “Does it have to be my belt?” he had said. “What?” she said, as though he wasn’t even in the room. The moment passed, and she became politely wicked, finding the sight of Robert with his shorts around his ankles laughable. “Please,” she had said, “be a dear and climb the trellis down so the maid doesn’t see you.”
Robert sits at the table, watching as Sherman digs through his remaining clothes piled on the bed.
“What were you in town for?” Robert asks Sherman.
“Sophie’s into these gems. Topaz and germanium. I don’t know. She’s got a whole book about them. A self-published book, mind you. And there’s this conference in Chicago and I figured, well, we should at least see the football stadium and touchdown Jesus and all that if we’re going to drive to Chicago. I’m originally from Buffalo—I was a carpenter there, but then some things happened, you know, and I decided to move down to Florida, where I got a job doing grounds maintenance at a nursing home. That’s where I met Sophie. She was selling her gems to the old folks. We shacked up after a few weeks, and when I came home she just wanted sex and to get something good to eat, and it was pleasant living with a woman who seemed about as easy to please as a goat. I talked about my work and she talked about hers and I doubt either one of us cared at all about what the other one was doing, which I think is a pretty good way to relate to another person. So, but, that’s the problem here. Once we got on the road, I realized she was a firm believer in the power of these gems. She wasn’t just trying to make a few bucks. I mean, I knew she felt strongly about making these necklaces and figuring out the meaning of each one and all that, but I didn’t think she was one to believe in karma and spirits and talking to the dead. She was really fucking whacked about these things. Like, believing that where you put a gem in your house gave that house some kind of power or strength, depending. So, she’s got these gems all over the car, and she’s constantly suggesting our safety depends on them. I said one day, you don’t really believe in this crap, do you? And she looked like she was about to explode, shouted for me to pull over, right here, at this dump. I dropped her off and drove up the campus and went to the stadium and it was just like any other place because I knew she was sitting here sulking like a kid.”
“What about the cut on her face?”
“You know the crazy ones, you get to fighting and then you get to fucking, and so we’re going at it and she grabs hold of one of these gems and cuts me here in the arm, and she tells me to cut her, and so I do, but I guess she didn’t mean the face, because she’s got the presentation tomorrow, and that’s when she ran out and over to your room.”
“Why don’t you get some sleep, Sherman. I’ll be up early. You can catch a ride with me.”
“Geez, you sure?”
“It’s no problem, really.”
The next day, Sherman Young has two coffees ready and hands Robert a twenty-dollar bill for gas and snacks.
“Fresh start,” he says, smiling, a boyish dimple in his cheek.
But as Robert drives, Sherman Young begins to remind him of his mother, who had spent her last years smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine, not caring about a thing. She would casually mention wanting to commit suicide as if it was no different than going to the post office. “I might as well just take all these pills at once,” she had said to Robert one day when he visited her senior living complex in Plymouth. “Who would care? What’s that smell? Is that cologne?”
“Yes, Ma,” Robert had said.
“I don’t like it.”
“Back to what you were saying a minute ago.”
“Oh, I’m just being funny,” she said.
The same look of the close-to-defeated, barely-hanging-on, is all over Sherman Young. The scrappy, overconfident cowboy Robert thought he saw outside the motel the day before is not the man who sits in the passenger seat now, one leg crossed over the other, his face twitching in the fierce sunlight spiking through the windshield.
“I mean, we’re supposed to be hunters, right?” Sherman Young says, as though continuing a conversation he and Robert have been having since stopping outside of Cleveland. “But everything we’re supposed to hunt is packaged and prepared, even our damn women. What’s the point?”
They pull off at a truck-stop diner somewhere between Buffalo and Rochester. Sherman Young spends a while at the pay phone near the bathrooms. Robert orders coffee and a Denver omelet. Sherman joins him at the table just as the food arrives. His face is bone white.
“What’s the matter?” Robert asks him.
“I don’t know. Nothing. It just all came over me at once.”
“What did?”
“How nothing I’ve ever done matters, and no one will care when I’m dead.”
NINETEEN
Irene smokes a cigarette by the window, waiting for Phil Donovan to finish whatever it is he has to do in the bathroom right after sex. Probably whacking off, she thinks. He can’t come. He says it’s his medication. Irene, at first, believed it had something to do with her body—her sagging breasts, wrinkled stomach, and the blue veins now visible along her legs. But after a month of seeing each ot
her, she doesn’t know if that’s the case, nor does she really care. Each time they make love now she imagines Phil is a handsome actor from a specific film—Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides, Robert Redford in Out of Africa. Their faces and bodies never age from film to memory. She has her orgasm and listens to Phil struggle until he’s out of breath, and then she dresses and waits for him to leave.
She gets up and makes coffee. The boys will be home from the swim class in an hour. She had signed them up at the Y, where she was able to get an inexpensive membership based on her low income. Like all the men (boys, Neanderthals, troglodytes), even Nathan and Andrew have begun to slip from her understanding. They are sweet to her, but in the kind of way a distant relative is at a wake; she feels they know she has suffered a loss, but they cannot internalize that suffering. After work, she usually goes to Kerrigans on the water and has a beer before driving home to cook dinner. She is lonely. Phil is heavyset, with a bristly mustache that leaves her neck and cheeks red.
She pours the coffee, looks at it, then dumps it out in the sink and takes a beer from the refrigerator. Phil lumbers down the steps and grabs his boots and sits, lacing them up with such careful precision that Irene wonders why the same dexterous, knowing hands are incapable of maneuvering around her body.
“Okeydokey,” Phil says, and stands. Irene cringes. Is there a man in this world who doesn’t revert to childish sayings after sex?
“Is the coast clear?” he says, creepily, as though their act is secret instead of pathetic.
“Yes. The boys won’t be back for another hour. You can go now.”
Phil kisses her on the cheek. She flinches, not expecting that kind of affection.
“Maybe next time we can do it facing each other,” Phil says, and leaves.
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