by Brady Udall
“I’m still trying to get a hold on this.” He kicked the wall and tried to laugh but wasn’t really able to pull it off. He looked ready to tear the house apart with his hands. “I come home off the mountain last Sunday, tired and dirty and ready for a little female attention and Mary is gone, along with most of her stuff. She is now, at this moment, shacked up with Wallace Greer, a big worthless layabout with the mind of a shrieking chihuahua. The year Mary and me moved here from Baton Rouge, before I started up on the mountain, we’d go bowling Friday nights and he was always there and I’d catch him looking at her. I noticed, but I didn’t think twice. I’d been saying to myself: I’m gone a lot, we’ve had our problems, our shouting matches, but Mary is good and faithful, Mary would never do such a thing, Mary wouldn’t let a creeping Jesus like him come and steal her away, Mary is my wife.”
Custer went over to the stack of milk crates and picked up a blue flannel shirt that was draped over one of them, held it out in his bony fist. His green eyes were burning in his head. “This is his shirt. I come home off the mountain and this man’s shirt is on my bed. Right now, up on the mountain, lions are coming out of the trees and taking calves, and I’m down here, drinking too much and trying to find the guts to do something about this.”
Custer took an antique-looking glass kerosene lamp off the table and fiddled with it, trying to bring the wick up, his battered fingers trembling. It was almost full dark now.
“Damn, I’m sorry,” Custer said. “I didn’t bring you here to air out my sorrows. I’m mouthing off like a lunatic. Why don’t you tell me something about yourself? Only thing I know about you is your name is Goody and you have a shitty dentist.”
Goody just stared up at him and Custer said, “Do you have a job or something?”
Cleaning toilets, Goody wrote.
Custer nodded. “Girlfriend?”
Left me high and dry.
“Hell,” Custer sighed.
Goody wrote, You said it.
The fact of it was, Goody didn’t know what to say to Custer. He had only questions of his own: Was it really this bad? Was the world chock-full with the frustrated and betrayed? Everybody he met these days—mostly in bars, it was true—seemed to be stricken with heartache and fracture and fallen hopes. Goody could tell him something like, Hey, I can relate to what you’re going through, but that would be about as comforting as a glass of ice water in the face.
Goody thought about what he might say about his life, about his father, king of the country club, and his alcoholic mother and his insurance salesman brother and wife and her beautiful, fake breasts and capped teeth. He thought about Dottie and the little lost baby, fetus, whatever it was, that they had made together, and he began to write it all on the wall, tried to make it come out with some sense so Custer could understand, but what came out instead were phrases and names and words and tangled scribbles that had no meaning at all except to express the blackness inside him; now that the Demerol had taken care of the pain in his mouth he could focus without distraction on the pain in his soul. He knew, as he wrote, that it was a jumbled mess, but he couldn’t stop himself, he had that same driven feeling that came over him when he wrote fifteen-page furious, ranting letters to Dottie late at night; he wrote about plagued lives and human failure and our hapless attempts at fulfillment and the slow burn of anger and bitterness. He wrote all over the damn wall, standing up from the couch, his arm moving with a jerking twitch. Phrases such as the milk of hatred and so many awful pleasantries showed themselves; words like trash and mockery and outrage popped up occasionally, but mostly it was just a dark impulsive scrabbling that continued, almost with a life of its own, until the marker ran out of ink.
Goody hadn’t noticed that the shadows in the room had fused together and night had moved in. Custer took a Zippo from his pocket and lit the kerosene lamp, holding it up to the ink-covered wall like an archeologist getting his first look at ancient hieroglyphics in a cave.
“Damn,” he said in a low voice, putting his hand on Goody’s shoulder. “What the fucking hell.”
Goody sat slumped on the couch feeling nothing at all. He could hear Custer outside, clomping up and down the porch steps, loading things into the trunk of the Le Mans. He came into the house, his skin slick with sweat, even though it had turned into a cool night. Goody could tell, even in the indefinite light, that an unnatural calm had come over Custer. “I believe I’ve come to a decision here,” he said, his features a patchwork of shadows. “I hate to ask, with the condition you’re in, but I could use a little assistance.”
Goody nodded: of course, anything at all. This man had gone out of his way to help him and even though he’d known him for only a few hours, and not under the best of circumstances, he felt closer to Custer than he had to anyone in quite awhile.
Outside the crickets were going mad, an almost deafening sound, and the air was piney and sweet. He followed Custer to the gate of the kennel and the dogs were gathered there, the whole clustered pack of them, yapping and wagging their entire bodies, saliva swinging from the loose folds of their mouths. There were eighteen of them in all—black and tans, blue ticks, treeing walkers, redbones, a couple of bloodhound mixes—and their coats were oiled and sleek and their molten eyes like dozens of tiny perfect moons.
Goody helped Custer clip leashes to each of the dogs’ collars and Custer put nine of them into the back and front seats of the Le Mans, and nine into the bed of the El Camino. “When she left, she took the pickup,” he explained, a little embarrassed. “Technically it’s hers. Her daddy gave it to us before we left. Anyway, I’m going to need you to drive one of the cars. Just follow behind—we won’t be going too far.”
Even if Goody wanted to ask what was going on he couldn’t have. He sat in the El Camino and watched Custer go into the house one last time. When he came out, he lingered in the doorway, looking into the house for a moment, then pitched the kerosene lamp into the middle of the living room. Goody could hear the sound of the lamp’s glass breaking, followed by the thwump of the kerosene igniting, and through the porch window he could see a blaze leap up, a flash that lit up the whole house, quickly died down, but didn’t go out.
By the time they were out on the highway after driving one or two miles on a muddy two-track, Goody looked back and couldn’t see flames, but there was definitely a smoky yellow glow lighting up the sky just over the tops of the trees. They drove north on the highway, eight or nine miles, up through Quemado Pass, until Custer pulled over next to a shiny red Dodge pickup parked at the side of the road.
A cool breeze was coming down off the peaks, rustling the grass in the meadow that stretched out until it reached a dense line of ponderosas, a ragged black cutout against the galaxy-filled sky. Other than the wind, the only sound in Goody’s ears was the fierce thump of his heart.
Custer gathered the dogs, knotted their leashes together and handed them over to Goody. The dogs snapped and pranced and yowled, their own tiny mob. “Stand there real firm and they won’t get away from you,” Custer said. “They’re a little crazed tonight. I haven’t fed them in three days.”
Custer went around to the passenger side of the Le Mans, reached through the window, and came back holding Wallace Greer’s shirt, a ratty old flannel shirt that now seemed terribly significant in the blue mountain light. “I’ve been following him around the past week,” Custer said, his face grim and alive. “He comes out here every night to pick the mushrooms that grow along the river about a half mile down that little valley. Kind of mushrooms make you see crazy things. He makes a bit of money selling them to the high school kids and keeps the rest for himself. This is the son of a bitch my wife ran off with.”
Goody and Custer stood there for a moment, staring at each other, and something like agreement or acceptance passed between them. It felt to Goody like his insides, his brain, all of him, was vibrating like a tuning fork.
Custer squatted down and held the shirt in front of the dogs’ noses and said, in a
low growling voice,” Seek out, seek out,” over and over again, almost like a chant. At the sound of the command the dogs went haywire, sniffing and biting the shirt until one ripped it out of Custer’s hand and all of them dove in on it, slashing it to tatters. They were pulling so hard the leather was biting into Goody’s hands—it was all he could do to hold on—but when Custer released them from their leashes, one by one, something loosened and gave way inside Goody and he stepped forward and shouted—a strangled cry that barely made it past his tongue and clenched teeth—urging the dogs on, feeling a strange, hot thrill run through him as he watched their black shapes moving across the meadow, howling like demons, charging through the dark beautiful night and into the trees.
The Opposite of Loneliness
Though she doesn’t like to admit it, the fact that I live with three crazy people is the reason Ansie won’t stop by the house to visit. She’s a little uncomfortable with Tormey and Iris, but Hugh makes her really edgy; he’s the one that greeted her at the front door a few months ago with his withered, low-slung balls dangling out the fly of his boxer shorts. It was the first and only time she ever dropped by. “How can you sleep in the same house with them?” she asked me once. “For all you know one of them could be a murderer or a sex maniac. One morning you could wake up with a fork in your eye or somebody’s hands in your shorts.”
For a while after I first met her she referred to them as “those crazy people,” but now, at least, I have her calling them by their names. She told me that when she was a little girl living in Denver, she had a whacked-out uncle who would occasionally escape from the mental hospital and show up at her house in the middle of the night, usually buck naked except for a pair of aviator’s sunglasses, yelling obscenities and digging up the front lawn, searching for the remains of his pet parrot, Percival, who he remembered burying there years ago. She says ever since then she’s had a certain fear of lunatics.
I keep telling her that they aren’t lunatics, that they aren’t really even crazy—just a little different from the rest of us. Once when I was trying to convince her of this she stopped me cold, waving her hands in front of my face, and said, “My fears are my own and they’re not negotiable.” I didn’t really know what she meant but I haven’t pushed the issue since. I’m certain that if I can get her together with them long enough she’ll realize how paranoid she’s being.
Ansie is my best friend and a woman. I am still trying to come to grips with this. After my first marriage came to a quick end six years ago, I’ve been a little wary of females. I’ve gone on dates, had my share of relationships, but they never worked, never moved anywhere beyond the misunderstandings and pettiness that so frequently occur between two people who are trying to love each other. But it’s different with Ansie and me. A few nights a week we get together at The Dive, drink beer and exaggerate our lives. Sometimes we catch a movie or play gin rummy and watch TV in the souvenir shop she owns and lives in. There has never been anything like romance between us, that is the key. Romance and real friendship cannot happen simultaneously—it has taken thousands of years of civilization for us to understand this. Ansie and I are buddies; I’ve never had a better friend. But there’s still this thing about her coming over to the house.
A couple of days ago I was at the grocery store, throwing things in my cart as if there was a war on. I had come up with this idea of having a feast in commemoration of no more snow; snow had covered everything for so long and now there was none. I’m a native of Phoenix, and though having snow around was a novelty at first, snow, like anything, gets old after awhile. The sun had come up that day and eaten away the remains of winter, chunk by chunk, until all that was left was spring. I danced around the store and pitched produce into my cart; I felt like running a marathon.
I was out in the parking lot loading bags into my Subaru when I saw Ansie across the street test-driving a bright green wheelbarrow in front of the hardware store. She was doing figure-eights and ninety-degree turns on the sidewalk. She picked up her little dog Gogo, a horrid-looking chihuahua-boxer mix, and put him in it. He slid around on its slick painted surface, too scared to yap, his oily eyeballs rolling in his head.
I trotted across the street and invited Ansie to dinner. I told her she could bring Gogo too as long as he didn’t puke all over everything.
“He only vomits when he eats milk products,” she said, swinging her long black hair at me defensively. “I told you not to let Iris feed him that cheddar soup.”
Even though she is on the downside of thirty-nine (a year older than me) she has smooth, light brown skin that most women would murder for. The turquoise rings she wears on her fingers are the same color as her eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “No cheese for Gogo. Butter and yogurt will be banned. No way you can refuse now.”
“Is this dinner just you and me, or everybody?”
“Well, I thought we could celebrate the changing of seasons. Maybe act like pagans for a few hours. I’m thinking dig a hole in the backyard and roast something on a spit. I would have to say that a celebration, at the very least, requires five people. If you and Gogo come there’ll be six of us. I bought enough grub to feed the House of Representatives.”
“Tonight?” she said, checking the pockets of her jeans and denim jacket, looking up at the empty sky for inspiration. She needed an excuse, but wasn’t having any luck coming up with one.
“If you don’t want to come, just say so,” I told her.
“You said it, I didn’t.”
This Ansie is a tough one. I went back across the street and yelled over passing traffic that if she decided she wanted to be sociable, she could still stop by and maybe we’d share the leftovers with her. On the way out of the parking lot as I passed the hardware store, she stood on some bags of fertilizer, a wide, pretty grin on her face, and flipped me the bird.
The house we live in, a big ornate structure that was built by a polygamist family a century ago, sits back off the road in a stand of old aspens, just outside the city limits of Payson. It used to be the summer home of Frank Berger Jr., citrus kingpin of Arizona, who donated it to the city before he died. It sat around for a few years until the city came up with a good use for it: to house Payson’s “developmentally challenged”—one of those gracious terms for people who are healthy and fairly self-reliant, but don’t have all the faculties to make do entirely on their own. The idea was to take these people out of the state homes, or out of situations in which they were burdens on their families, and put them in a setting where they could be productive and more independent. All they needed was someone to supervise.
I saw the ad in the Payson Primer last June when I was up here trying to sell Kotex and condom machines to the bars and convenience stores. If there is a job worse than a traveling tampon and condom dispenser salesman, I would like to know about it. I went for an interview (one of only four applicants, I learned later) and began outlining anything in my background I thought might be relevant to the job: my three years in the Peace Corps, my Eagle rank in the Boy Scouts, my sociology degree; but the woman stopped me and said that no professional qualifications were required, that other than a clean criminal record, all I needed was patience, responsibility and love. I told them I’ve had those things my whole life and was just waiting for a chance to put them to good use. So eight months ago I traded the heat and bad water in Phoenix for the cool, piney air of Payson.
Right now we’re all in the kitchen, getting our feast ready. I have the whole downstairs to myself and the others have their own separate rooms upstairs. Iris is pressing cloves of garlic and I’ve got Hugh at work stuffing peppers. Tormey is over by the stove watching the water boil. I consider myself lucky that there are only three of them for the time being. The city council is actively recruiting other candidates; they want to be able to claim that the house and the small budget that goes with it are being put to good use.
“Never, ever again,” Tormey says to the water. He’s dressed in his dark b
lue suit and quilted pink booties. He’s seventy-four and his features are smoothed and blunted, worn down by the friction of passing years.
When I first started out, the state-appointed mental health specialist who drops by every other month or so advised me that, among other things, I should provide my charges with as much physical contact as possible. Though I didn’t feel entirely comfortable doing it, I tried giving everybody hugs for the first few days. I’ve long since quit doing that, but Tormey picked up on it and now gives me a hug every time he sees me. I’ll leave the room to use the john and when I come back I get the kind of sincere embrace normally reserved for someone who has just returned from battle. Although, like Tormey, her mind and memory have been splintered by senility, Iris hasn’t lost her savvy when it comes to cooking. She has a part-time job cooking for the inmates at the county jail. It’s a sure thing those prisoners have never eaten better in their lives; whenever they see her, they propose to her, give her love notes, ask her for recipes. Last year around Christmas, a guy who had been in for auto theft stopped by after he got out and offered Iris twenty dollars to make him a batch of her raspberry-lemon scones.
She slices mushrooms and green onions like a Japanese chef and in that jangly voice of hers sings one of the hip-hop songs she listens to on the radio. These songs are full of sexual innuendo and downright vulgarity and she sings them in the sweet, thoughtless way a child sings a nursery rhyme. She is two years younger than Tormey, and like him, is as physically healthy as any retirement-age person could hope to be.
We get the food on the table and I attempt to make a speech about the renewal of spring and the changing of seasons, but Hugh keeps interrupting me, asking if he can say grace. Hugh is forty-three, not an inch over five feet, and has huge veiny ears. He is not senile like the other two, but has been slightly out of his mind since birth. He can tell you all the moons of Jupiter, but has trouble tying his own shoes.