by Brady Udall
“I can’t help you,” I tell Hannah.
I have a heart of my own to deal with.
The girl’s name is Victoria. She lives in a condo and has a nervous system disorder with a complicated name. All this I found out from Hannah, who works in the records office. Hannah seems to be always underfoot these days. I guess she has to have a man in her life at all times and right now, I am it. I’ve explained my feelings to her so she won’t have any expectations. When you get right down to it, it’s kind of nice this way.
Victoria is a sophomore in botany. I’ve been reading about plants and flowers and I’m looking into buying a fern. Whenever I do any thinking these days it’s about my paper or Victoria, who I’ve seen again, this time at the library. She was paging through a book as thick as a birthday cake. I watched her through rows of Jonson and Donne like some kind of peeping Tom. I couldn’t see her face, just her long, blue-black hair. Her hand was jerking so bad she ripped some of the pages when she turned them.
Hannah has gone to the supermarket to buy tortillas for chimichangas, which are my favorite. I’m not sure why she does all this for me. Morris says he would put his five dollars on her deep-seated desire to nurture. She makes my bed when she comes over. She washes my socks.
I’m waiting on Rabbi, who is coming over for lunch. I’ve figured it up and this will be only the fourth time he has ever come to visit. He drives up in his jacked-up Dodge. One of the more difficult questions I’ve been asking myself lately: why do we all have trucks if the only thing we use them for is to throw empty beer cans in the back?
Rabbi does not work at the moment but would join the circus before asking any help from me. He lets himself in and hangs his hat on the antelope antler above the door.
“Where’s the girl?” he says. Rabbi is one of those big men who never feels the need to say anything nice. We have the same straight hair and long chin and our noses are similar, except his is a larger version which has been broken a time or two.
I say, “She went out for food. Chimichangas.”
Rabbi nods and pages through an old issue of Outdoor Life. I get up and grate some cheese and he says, “I’m looking into gold mining. I have a friend who made twenty thousand in only two months up to the Yukon.”
“Think you might go?” I say.
Rabbi shrugs. “We’ll have to see. So what’s with this girl? Living together, even. Never thought you had it in you.”
“Hannah doesn’t live here. She’s just around a lot. There’s nothing going on.”
Rabbi tilts his head back and scratches his neck, looking down the bumpy length of his nose at me.
Hannah comes busting through the door with sacks of groceries and a messed-up hair-do. She says, “Lines.”
I introduce them and Rabbi gives Hannah a look-over like he’s making an appraisal on a car. Hannah nods at him and takes the cheese from me and begins to grate. Outside, a long line of honking cars passes, with people hanging out the windows, whooping and yelling. The aftermath of a Mexican wedding.
“You would think somebody would have a pineapple, for God’s sakes,” Hannah says, grating with a vengeance. “I looked all over town so we could have fresh piña coladas. There wasn’t so much as a coconut.”
Rabbi looks at me. The way Hannah is acting you would think she is somebody’s wife.
We sit down to eat and there is a general silence until Hannah says, “Rabbi’s an interesting name. You don’t do bar mitzvahs do you?”
Rabbi looks at her for a second, then says, “Never.”
In my paper, I’m using Rabbi, whose real name is Lyle. I was there when Lyle’s nickname was born. This was back when we were kids living in Oregon. We were the only ones home and I was inside watching cartoons and he was out climbing around on the oak trees behind the house. One particular tree had a good-sized laundry line hook screwed into one of its big lower branches. It seems that Rabbi forgot about that hook. He straddled the big branch and slid down it, butt-first. When he came up to the sliding glass door and tapped on it, his face was as gray as ashes and black streams of blood stained his jeans down to the knees. I opened the door for him and he said, “I think my tally-whacker’s cut off.” I called an emergency number from a bulletin board by the phone while he sat on the couch like a zombie and watched Woody Woodpecker. The medics came and took him away and left a note for my folks about where Rabbi was, where to call, etc. When my mother got home and saw blood all over the couch she wanted to know what happened. I told her that Rabbi had cut off his tally-whacker and two guys in orange shirts came in the house and carried him away. My dad used to say my mother was never quite the same after that.
Rabbi didn’t lose his tally-whacker after all, but it took twenty stitches to keep him in possession of it. We like to say that he was the first Rabbi ever to perform his own circumcision.
I tell this story to everybody. Rabbi hates me for it.
When he is done eating, he wipes his mouth with the tablecloth, stands up, slaps his hat on his head, says, “We’ll be seeing you. Stay sober if you get the chance.”
When we’re on the porch and out of Hannah’s earshot, Rabbi gives me the old elbow nudge and says, “You’re not getting any nookie?”
I don’t know if it was the nickname incident or what, but Rabbi never has had any luck with women.
There is nothing sadder than a Camp Fire girl gone bad. This is what Hannah says to me one night after our language class. She has convinced me to sit on the campus lawn with her and look for meaning in the stars.
I say, “You were a Camp Fire girl?”
She says, “I was.”
“Have you ever eaten a lizard?” I say.
She says, “No.”
“I have,” I say.
Hannah snorts like a farm animal. “At one of our meetings we made goals for our lives and put them in a time capsule. We dug a hole with those tiny gardening shovels and buried it out in front of the community center.”
“For posterity,” I say.
“No,” she says. “For ourselves. Our leader, Mrs. Teal, dug them up and sent them to each one of us. Mine said I was going to find the cure for a big disease and become the governor of Texas.”
“There’s still time,” I say.
Hannah props her head against my shoulder and we take in the universe. It seems that Hannah has fallen for me. She has seen me fix furnaces and light fixtures. Her toothbrush is now a permanent part of my medicine cabinet.
I am coming to know myself as a coward. I can’t tell Hannah to leave and I can’t approach Victoria. I saw her today—for the first time in a week. She was in the computer lab typing, one quivering finger at a time. It took me an hour just to calm myself down.
I don’t say anything about Victoria to Hannah, like I used to. I know it would make her like me all the more. Instead, I talk to myself about Victoria. I carry on the most private of conversations. I imagine what I would say to her, what questions I would ask. Maybe I would ask things like: Do you write poetry? Have you ever considered suicide?
The tag on my jockstrap reads, “The Duke.” “The Duke” is the only thing I have on at the moment. I am jumping around on my bed with an invisible microphone in my hand and I’m singing “Helter Skelter” along with the Beatles. I pause to feel ridiculous now and then.
Hannah comes in without knocking and I bounce right off the bed and into the closet. I cover myself with a stray towel.
She comes in my room and turns the music down. She is a shiny wonder in spandex. I have never noticed her body until now. There is some definite firmness there.
“How about a run?” she says.
“I’ve got basketball today,” I say, tucking the towel around my waist.
Her shoulders make a sudden drop and she lets out a sigh. “God, you’re busy,” she says.
I shrug as I tiptoe into the bathroom where my clothes are. I put on my shorts and tanktop while she picks up things off the floor.
“Can I go with you?
” she says. “I’m going with you.”
“No.” I say. “You’ll hate it.”
“What, you don’t allow women? What is this?”
“It’s not that. No woman has ever wanted to go.” This is a lie—on a few occasions a wife or a serious girlfriend has attended a game at the Junk Court. I’ve never been good at lying but I hope this one will stick.
“I’ll be the first then,” Hannah says. She finishes making my bed and goes out to wait for me in the truck. If I had any spine to speak of I would go out there right now and command her to stay home. But like I said before, I’m soft and a coward.
When we pick Morris up he gives me a look like I have just set his mother on fire. Hannah ignores Morris completely. Morris and Hannah hated each other from the first time they met. I’m still not sure why.
I am worried that Hannah’s coming with me to the Junk Court will be interpreted in the wrong way. I give it a week before people start asking us when we plan to tie the knot. At least I can carry on my obsession with Victoria in private. I have written poems to her, poems that are filled with crusty language that rhymes. I’ve made up a song on my guitar about her that can be sung with a twang. Nobody knows it, but I’m a tortured man.
None of the boys pay too much attention to Hannah. My worst fear was that she was going to ask to play. But she just sits in the truck looking sour. Of course, I get all the dirty jokes and questions from everybody on the court. I’m glad Hannah has her windows rolled up.
We wait for Rabbi and Mugsy to show, but when Mugsy comes, he’s got somebody else in the seat next to him. He announces that Rabbi is getting ready to leave for the Yukon in search of gold, so he brought a friend of his, Red Hall, to take Rabbi’s spot.
Red is tall and skinny and has a shaved head that gives him the look of a Holocaust survivor. He has a tattoo on his arm that says in plain letters, Generic Tattoo. This is the man that is replacing my brother.
As we get into it, I feel my eyes get blurry and my body gets a little weak. My first four shots rip the net and I know that I’m riding a hot streak, an unnatural phenomenon that happens to me every once in a while. I am not Larry Bird anymore, but an incarnation of Dominique Wilkins, slashing down the lane, pumping and wheeling, dunking hard with two hands. The guys on my team just feed me the ball and watch. Red, who is guarding me, has something akin to fear in his eyes. It’s not fair to humiliate him his first day out, but I can’t make myself slow up. I feel empty and loud like a desert wind. Nothing can stop me from taking it to the hole.
The game ends and we have blown the Shirts out of the water. I lie down in the dirt by the court and watch a crow slip across the sky. I decide I better get up and interview Red about the history of his nickname. I have shin splints and one of my fingers is dislocated. There is a long, bleeding scratch on my forearm. The pain lets me know I’m alive.
Rabbi must be in Montana by now. After the basketball game I went home and found a note on my screen door. It was written on the back of a grocery receipt and said, Borrowed your tent. Buy you a new one. See ya later, Lyle.
Hannah is cutting my hair in the kitchen and Morris has arranged himself on the couch with a bowl of Corn Pops. It is early Friday night and I just got finished draining the water heater of an extensive Taiwanese family in A-16. The heater was making ticking noises and they were sure it was going to explode. While I drained the sediment out of it, they kept on making explosions with their hands and mouths and pointing to the water heater.
“Bach,” Hannah says, “sit still.” She says my name the way a chicken would.
Hannah is a graduate of beauty school and wants to do something with my hair. I tell her to keep her somethings to herself and just chop it off. She giggles and keeps on snipping. We’ve been at this for an hour now.
I forget to sit still and Hannah puts a notch in my ear with the scissors. Hannah shrieks and I lean forward saying, “Oh, crap, oh.” Hannah grabs my head and sucks the blood from my ear like she’s administering to a rattlesnake bite. When she’s finished she smacks her lips.
Morris is watching Jeopardy and getting most of the questions wrong. He’s mad because we don’t argue much anymore. He doesn’t like it that I practically have a woman living in my house who I don’t even love. He thinks Rabbi is an asshole for not saying goodbye to me before heading to the Yukon. He says Rabbi never knew shit from Shinola.
Truth be known, I don’t know the difference either, but I’ll never admit it.
I have been forced into a Saturday night lie. Hannah wanted me to go with her tonight to see a Zuni fertility dance with her anthropology class. I told her I had already made plans with Chief and Morris to play poker, when in fact I’m going to meet Victoria and get this over with. Somehow I’m lying to a girl I have never kissed for a girl I don’t even know.
It’s a windy night and I have dust in my teeth. Victoria’s condo is next to a squatty little Catholic church that looks as if it was slapped together with mud a few hundred years ago. A cross stuck in the top is lit with Christmas lights. Most likely it is the church where the Mexicans had their wedding the other day.
Victoria lives on the second floor. I park my truck at the curb and creep up the outside stairs like a burglar. My stomach feels like there’s something dying in it. I stand in front of her door without any idea of what to do, looking for clues in the woodgrain. Today I woke up and decided that I can’t be a coward any longer, that this thing with Victoria is one of those now or never kind of things.
I contemplate the door, feeling quite lousy at this point. It takes me a minute to work up enough gumption to press the doorbell. A chunky, over-made-up girl answers the door. She is the kind of girl my father would have fondly called a “heifer.”
“Victoria here?” I say.
The girl retreats into the hallway and comes back saying, “She says you can go back there, second door on the left.”
I cough out a thanks and head back into the dark hallway, feeling like I’m making the descent into hell. Victoria’s door is open and she’s sitting on her bed, staring at the opposite wall. There are plants hanging from the ceiling. A large sketch of a nude woman is tacked to the wall over her head and there are other drawings around it.
She says, “Hello,” and I stare at the sketch of the nude.
“You can sit down if you want,” she says. Her skin is bone-white and dotted with the tiniest freckles. Her hair reflects the light of the lamp and her voice is huskier than I imagined. The rest of her is covered with an afghan. She looks very sleepy. She stares at me for a long time.
“Nice to meet you,” I say. “I just came over to talk.”
She gives me another long, droopy-eyed stare. She says, “I’ve just taken my medication. It slows me down some.”
I notice that her body isn’t jerking or twitching. I sit on the cedar chest across from her bed. During the day I concocted all kinds of excuses for being here, but I can’t think of any of them right now.
“Are these your drawings?” I say.
She says, “Bingo.”
I nod.
“I’ve never seen you before,” she says.
“No,” I say. “I just stopped by to visit.”
This seems to be enough of an explanation for her. She puts her head back and stretches her arms. She says, “I’m thirsty. Could you get me some water?”
I go out to the kitchen. The heifer is planted on a bean bag watching a real-life show about sex scandals and murders.
“Victoria needs a glass of water,” I say.
“Cupboard over the sink,” she says without looking my way.
When I get back to Victoria I find her doubled over with her face in her lap. She looks up at me and says, “I could be better.”
She takes the water in great gulps, streams of it running out the sides of her mouth. I put my hand on her back and take the glass from her. She leans into me and says, almost with a drawl, “Let’s have the lights off.”
I turn off t
he lights and go back to her. She pulls the blanket around me and puts an arm around my neck. She says into my ear, “I don’t know who you are.” We lie there in the dark until she struggles off the bed and crawls into the bathroom across the hall. I stand over her as she vomits into the toilet. In the bright light of the bathroom there are little whales on the walls, spouting water into the air. I clean her up and help her back to bed. She shudders and puts her hands between her knees. Cars hum by below the window. I listen as her breathing slows down and levels off.
A couple of times in the night I wake up and she is making a high wailing sound. It is a sound that makes me afraid. I think about putting a pillow over her face or holding her so tight that she can’t make the noise anymore, but she stops and stays quiet. I wake up again at six-thirty and stand up, rubbing the grit out of my eyes. I feel like I’ve been sleeping on a pile of rocks. Victoria is curled up in her blanket, her hair spread around her, quiet as a handkerchief.
I go out into the kitchen and the girl from last night is there, making coffee. She is wearing some kind of fast-food uniform.
She says, “Have you been here all night?”
The girl offers coffee and I take it. She sizes me up over the rim of her mug.
“She threw up last night,” I say.
“The medicine she has to take to help her sleep makes her sick. She throws up every night.”
“She can’t get other medicine?” I say.
The girl shakes her head. “It’s all there is.”
The coffee burns my tongue. I get up and give my legs a good stretch. As I go out the door the girl says, “She has a boyfriend. He’s legally blind.”
I sit in my truck with my hands on the steering wheel. I can’t find my keys. It is still dark but the sun is waiting just below the blue mesas. It is chilly and the air smells like wood smoke.