The Full Catastrophe

by David Carkeet

  They measured eight-foot intervals and dug postholes. Robbie returned and gave his father a somewhat positive report about his friend’s interest. Then he went inside to talk to his mother. He was sad, but he seemed to be coping, as Beth had said. Dan and Cook worked until after dark, digging the final holes by the outdoor spotlights on the deck. It was an unusually cool night, with erratic gusts of wind that made Cook look up into the tree branches several times.

  When they finished, they went inside, ate some leftover cold spaghetti, and went upstairs. The master bedroom door was closed. They looked in on Robbie. He was sound asleep in his room, lying fully dressed on his bed under the bright overhead light. Dan took off Robbie’s shoes and turned out the light. He whispered to Cook that Robbie often fell asleep like this after a tough day.

  Dan said good night to Cook and opened the bedroom door. Cook glimpsed a nightstand light—Beth was still up. But as soon as the door opened, she turned it off, and in the light from the hall Cook could see her gather the blanket over her shoulder and turn her back to Dan.

  Dan closed the door behind him. Cook paused a moment at the stairs before going on up, but he heard nothing.

  When Cook went down for breakfast, the new day was well under way. Beth was slicing a grapefruit at the table while she talked on the phone, which she wedged against her ear with a cocked shoulder. Dan was hunched over the sports section of the newspaper. Robbie was talking nervously and no one was listening to him.

  “Hey,” Robbie said, brightening to see Cook, “I’ll ask you, Jeremy. You’re supposed to know about this stuff. What does ‘Missouri’ mean?”

  “I have no idea,” said Cook.

  “Really? How about ‘Mississippi’?”

  Cook shrugged. “Search me. Is there any Malt-O-Meal left?”

  Beth jabbed a finger toward the stove while she laughed into the phone.

  “You don’t know what ‘Mississippi’ means either?” Robbie frowned and looked around for someone with whom he could share his surprise at Cook’s deep ignorance. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you. ‘Mississippi’ means ‘big river,’ and ‘Missouri’ means ‘canoe.’”

  “Yeah?” Cook called from the stove.

  “They don’t mean ‘big muddy.’ People think one of them means ‘big muddy.’ But they’re wrong. Neither one does. It’s a mistake. And you’ve got a whole camp named Big Muddy. The whole name is this huge, big, colossal mistake.” He spread his arms to indicate its enormity.

  Dan folded his newspaper and said to Cook, “Robbie’s a little nervous about Big Muddy this morning.”

  “Hunh!” said Robbie. Cook took this for a denial, but then Robbie said, “A little?”

  Beth hung up the phone and said to Robbie, “Nancy and Phillip will be here in about fifteen minutes, honey. They’re really excited about it. She says if they like it he’ll definitely go.”

  Robbie rolled his eyes. “Wow,” he said without enthusiasm.

  “Come on,” Beth said. “He’s a good friend.”

  “He’s an okay friend.”

  “She’s going to call Tommy Freneau’s mom, too, to see if they’re interested in looking at it.”

  “Hmph,” said Robbie.

  “Just try to keep an open mind, okay? We’ll give it a good look.” She turned to Dan. “And don’t you minimize his nervousness. He has a right to be apprehensive.”

  Dan’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t mean to. I just—”

  “Are you coming, Jeremy?” Beth asked as he settled down at the table with a bowl of Malt-O-Meal.

  “Where?” said Cook. “To Big Muddy?”

  “Do you really think he has to?” Dan asked.

  “That’s for him to decide,” Beth snapped.

  “Fine,” Dan said in a quick high monotone. He was in a good-boy mode.

  Robbie said, “I mean, they’ve got to be stupid to pick a name like that. Does everyone sleep in the mud? Do they paint themselves with mud?”

  Cook asked Robbie to pass the brown sugar. Robbie did, and then he leaned back in his chair to look at the clock. “My class’d be starting English now, except it’s the last day of school, so they’re probably starting on the brownies and ice cream.” He gave his parents a look. “Wait!” he said, breaking into a grin. “She was gonna make us go over inter-junctions today, because we messed them up on the test. Ha!”

  “Isn’t it ‘interjection’?” Dan said, looking at Cook.

  Beth made an obscure scoffing noise.

  “Interjunctions, interjections,” said Robbie. “Who cares?”

  “It is a dumb part of speech,” Cook agreed.

  “They’re all dumb,” said Robbie.

  “Well, some are more—”

  “They’re stupid!”

  “That’s enough, Robbie,” Beth said.

  Robbie emoted with some body language, just to have the last word. Beth asked Dan for the paper, and he handed it to her.

  “Not the sports,” she snapped.

  “I’m giving you the whole thing,” Dan protested. Cook looked at the stack in his hand. The sports section was simply on top.

  Beth snatched the stack with a sigh. Cook sensed that Dan was doomed today. If a U.N. observer were to shadow him, the objective report at day’s end would probably show no offenses whatsoever. But Beth would be on him all day.

  The phone rang. Robbie said, “Probably Big Muddy. Canceled because no one wants to go.”

  “Canceled on account of a mudslide,” Cook said, and Robbie laughed and slapped the table. Beth frowned at Cook as she picked up the phone. She said hello, and as she talked she grew animated.

  “Great!” she said. “We’ll go as soon as you can get here. Bye.” She hung up and said to Robbie, “Tommy and his mother are coming, too. He’s already gone to school. She’ll come by here and we’ll stop at school and pick him up on the way.”

  “That’s great,” said Dan.

  Beth looked at Dan as if he had spoken entirely out of turn—as if he were a plumber shouting out comments on their table talk from under the sink. She dug into her grapefruit. “Let’s see,” she said. “That makes seven. The van only holds seven, so I guess that lets you out, Jeremy. We’ll be back by dinner.”

  Cook nodded.

  “Hey, Jeremy,” Robbie said, holding his orange juice glass up. “Here’s mud in your eye.” Robbie laughed and laughed.

  “Honey,” Beth said to Robbie, “if you’re finished you can clear your place and go brush your teeth.”

  “Hey, Jeremy,” Robbie said as he rose and picked up his dishes. “I’ll bet they brush their teeth with mud, hunh? I’ll bet they—”

  “All right, all right,” Beth interrupted. “Go.” She watched Robbie leave the room and sighed.

  Cook wondered what he would do all day. He decided he should wash his clothes and he asked Beth about it. She gave him instructions about the washing machine and dryer. Dan stood up and took his dishes to the sink. The phone rang and he grabbed it.

  “Hello? Oh, hi, Rose. Beth’s right here. … Hunh? Yeah, I’m still home. It takes 2 heap o’ livin’, and all that. Here’s—… Yeah, we’re just about on our way to go check it out. Beth can fill you in.” He jerked the phone hard away from his ear and held it at arm’s length, as if that were the only way to free himself from it. Cook sensed Dan wanted to do one of his phone routines—some charade, some mimed act of long-suppressed violence—but Beth was watching, ready to condemn any behavior from him more ambitious than metabolism. He simply handed her the phone and went out the swinging door.

  Beth talked to her mother in a loud, fast, friendly voice. It made Cook want to get out of there. He took his bowl of cereal and a few sections of the newspaper out onto the deck. He imagined Dan upstairs, gritting his teeth, closing doors against Beth’s noisy talk.

  A few minutes later, Robbie came out and stood across the table from Cook. Cook looked up and nodded in greeting and went back to his paper, but the way Robbie stood there made him look
up again. He was eyeing Cook and swiveling a hand back and forth, in imitation of one playing Ping-Pong. His eyebrows were at their highest.

  Cook laughed. “Is this your way of suggesting we play?”

  “Hunh?” said Robbie, all innocence. “Ping-Pong? Hey—great idea.” He ran inside for the paddles and balls.

  When Robbie came back out, Cook said, “Do you think you’re going to like the camp?”

  “I don’t know. You serve.” He bounced a ball across the table to Cook.

  “I hope you do. And I hope your friends do. I’m rooting for you.”

  “Well, right now you better root for yourself, sucker, because I’m gonna whip your butt.” He slapped the table with the palm of his hand. “Ha! They’re studying interjunctions and I’m playing Ping-Pong.”

  Their game quickly developed into a grammar lesson, however. Cook began to utter interjections upon the completion of every point—a different one every time, positive if he won, negative if he lost. Robbie picked it up and tried to match Cook, though sometimes their play stopped for long stretches while he stared up into the sky and struggled to think of a new one.

  Dan wandered out and watched for a while. He asked Robbie if he was ready to go. Robbie said yes. They continued to play.

  A little later, Beth opened the door and said, “Come on. Let’s go. They’re all out in front, waiting.”

  “All right,” Dan said, trying to meet her irritation calmly.

  “I sent you out here to get him, not to play Ping-Pong.”

  “You just said to make sure he’s ready. He’s ready.”

  “I want to get a book,” said Robbie. “And I’ve got to go to the bathroom.” He hurried into the house past his mother.

  Beth gave Dan a sharp look. “He’s ready? Christ.” She went back into the house.

  Before following her, Dan made a small gun out of two pointed fingers and an upraised thumb, and with it he silently shot himself in the head.

  Cook roamed the house, fighting off the dogs of loneliness. He washed his laundry, fussily separating it into numerous small piles—more to stretch out the task than to prevent colors from running, a concept that had always mystified him. He tried to read the paper, then a book, then a magazine. He couldn’t concentrate. He wandered the rooms. He ended up in Dan and Beth’s bedroom, staring out the bay window. He watched an English sparrow fly from a branch to the gutter overhead and back to the branch, over and over—a distance of about ten feet.

  The phone rang, giving him a jolt. He grabbed it.

  “Jeremy. We don’t have time to chat. She’s waiting for you.”

  “Who might that be, Roy?”

  “Your date. She’s at Topper’s. They serve a nice lunch, I’m told.”

  Cook sighed. “My date.”

  “Yes.”

  “At Topper’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t give me much notice, Roy. I might not have been here.”

  “Where would you have been?”

  “Out with my couple. Who knows?”

  “The point is you are there. Let’s not get bollixed by hypotheticals. She’s waiting, so get going. Give me a call afterward. I’m most curious about this. Most curious.”

  As Cook hung up, he resolved to add this use of “most” to his hate list in future editions of The Woof of Words.

  “Jesus Christ. Look at that guy ordering his lunch. No, not that one. The table in the corner. Yeah. Him. He’s been talking to the waiter for ten minutes. Jesus Christ. You’d think he was giving him confidential instructions about when to cut off his life supports, or something like that. Jesus Christ. I hate that. My view is ‘Okay, you’re my waiter and your name is John. Now gimme my food and get the fuck out of here.’”

  Her name was Rita. Cook listened to her, fascinated. It would be wrong to say he was trying to get a handle on her. Her handles stuck out all over—she thrust them at him and made him grab them. It would be wrong to say he didn’t like her, because he did, a lot. But there was something it wouldn’t be wrong to say that kept eluding him.

  She was short—“compact” was the word Cook thought of—with short auburn hair and a sexily tomboyish face from which Cook couldn’t take his eyes. He kept wanting to get near it, to nuzzle against it, to explore it. Luckily, she seemed to think well of him. Her first words when he stepped out of the elevator and saw her sitting there waiting for him were “Jeremy? Hey! You’re a good-lookin’ guy!”

  Their waiter brought them their drinks. When he left, Cook said, “You don’t drink?” Rita’s order had been the same as his—sparkling water with lime.

  “No,” she said. “I did. But it was a problem. So I stopped. Which means I’ve got a problem, but it’s less of a problem than I’ve got when I drink.”

  Cook could have spoken the entire thought for her. “Me too,” he said.

  “Really? When did you quit?”

  “It’ll be a year in two more weeks.”

  “Hey! That’s great. Two and a half years for me. You miss it?”

  “Oh … all the time.”

  Rita nodded. “Like now. Scotch on the rocks.”

  “Right.”

  “The smell. Like gasoline. The shock of the first taste. The clink of ice. The dew on the glass. The weak taste at the end, diluted, before you reach for another. Then it hits your system. That first hit—the onset. That’s the best part. When I was drunk I used to wish I was sober so I could start all over and feel that first effect.” She picked up her sparkling water and emptied it in one long drink.

  “So why did you quit?”

  “Same reason as you, probably. Why take poison every night?”

  “You drank at night?” said Cook. “Alone?” This had been his practice.

  “Yeah. If I was gonna get drunk I wanted to be alone so I could concentrate on it. No drinking buddies for me. I never understood that notion—drinking buddy.”

  “Did you say any of this on your questionnaire?”

  Rita scrunched up her face as she thought. “Can’t remember. Maybe. The damn thing was so long I might have.”

  Cook smiled. How had Pillow found her? He had been shocked to learn how far Pillow had gone for her—Laramie, Wyoming, where she had lived all of her life. She said she had received a letter from Pillow early that week with a hundred-dollar bill enclosed and a promise of a large check to come if she filled out the enclosed questionnaire. She did so and returned it by express mail, as instructed. The next day she received a phone call from Pillow proposing this date with Cook, for a payment Rita would not reveal. She said she hated it when people talked about money. In fact, she went on a rampage about the subject, wryly imitating the many subtle ways “true assholes” revealed their salaries. So she simply said Pillow’s payment was “so large it would make you sick, it would make you vomit, you would get down on your knees and puke.” Rita had no idea what prompted Pillow to contact her to begin with. She had no ties to St. Louis, or any to the Pillow Agency, Dan and Beth, or linguistics. How could she? She was an auto mechanic for a Chrysler dealership in Laramie.

  Their salads came. Rita dug into hers. She was as fast an eater as he was. She asked him about his work. He told her about his days at the Wabash Institute. As they talked, Cook noticed a fidgetiness about her. He remembered seeing a TV science show late one night—when he was drunk, probably—about obesity in Pima Indians. It showed a fat Pima who just sat; when he sat, he really sat. Then it showed a fidgety Pima, for whom sitting was a kinetic activity. This guy was as lean as a strip of beef jerky. Rita fidgeted the same way.

  This made Cook look at himself. He had finished his salad, and his right hand was shredding a book of matches he had evidently begun to play with some time before. His left hand was moving his water glass from square to square on the patterned tablecloth, as in a board game. His feet, crossed at the ankles, twitched like a hummingbird’s wings. His anus contracted on a schedule beyond his understanding. He felt as if he were sitting in the mids
t of a vast industrial complex. And Rita matched him. She was all over the place. Her water glass advanced, retreated, moved from side to side. Soon Cook would jump it with his own and take possession of it.

  Rita asked him what he did for the Pillow Agency. When he answered this, she burst out laughing.

  “Where do you hang out?” she asked. “Under the bed?”

  “No,” said Cook. “The bedroom is forbidden.” He tried to remember how Pillow had expressed it the day he was hired. “Bedroom activities are better learned about in after-the-fact reports by both parties than by direct observation.”

  “Oh, balls,” Rita said. “That’s no fun. You know, it’s funny how I’ve never actually watched. Very few people have, I suppose—I mean watched someone else, in person, doing it. Such an important thing, and we’ve never watched anyone else. I’ve done it, many times, and I hope to again this afternoon, but I’ve never actually watched. How about you?”

  Cook’s grin was both tense and joyful. He looked at her. She smiled and looked away, suddenly self-conscious. But she filled the conversational void with a nonverbal: her toes began tickling the inside of his thighs under the table, working their way to his crotch. His reaction? A quick survey of the restaurant to see that they were unobserved, followed by a glance at the tablecloth to check its length. His deeper reaction? The brutal truth was that he had always wanted a woman to do this to him, and here she was! When her toes reached their destination, one of the places his blood rushed to was his ears, and he seemed to hear all four Beatles sing out at once, “RITA!”

  He undertook part two of his fantasy. Slipping his right foot out of his shoe and congratulating himself for putting on clean socks for the occasion, he began his own under-the-table journey into the unknown. He watched her face. She was still looking off to the side—a modest touch he deeply appreciated. She smiled dreamily. His foot made steady progress, and it arrived along with their entrees, which the waiter set before them. Cook thanked him more loudly than necessary, and they both sat up, reshod themselves, and began to eat.