by T. C. Boyle
“You know what is going on,” the woman says, holding her ground. “You know,” she repeats, her accent thickening with her anger, “because you are a thief!”
Ormand is big, unshaven, dirty. At twenty-two, he already has a beer gut. “Hell I am,” he says, slurring his words, and the old man realizes he’s been helping himself to the pain pills again. Behind Ormand, Lee Junior bristles. He too, Calvin now sees, is clutching a black bottle.
“Thief!” the woman shouts, and then she begins to cry, her face splotched with red, the big bosom heaving. Watching her, the old man feels a spasm of alarm: why, she’s nothing but a young girl. Thirty years old, if that. For a keen, sharp instant her grief cuts at him like a saw, but then he finds himself wondering how she got so fat. Was it all that blood sausage and beer she sells? All that potato salad?
Now Lee Junior steps forward. “You got no right to come around here and call us names, lady—this is private property.” He is standing two feet from her and he is shouting. “Why don’t you get your fat ass out of here before you get hurt, huh?”
“Yeah,” Ormand spits, backing him up. “You can’t come around here harassing this old man—he’s a veteran, for Christ’s sake. You keep it up and I’m going to have to call the police on you.”
In that instant, the woman comes back to life. The lines of her face bunch in hatred, the lips draw back from her teeth, and suddenly she’s screaming. “You call the police on me!? Don’t make me laugh.” Across the street a door slams. People are beginning to gather in their yards and driveways, straining to see what the commotion is about. “Pigs! Filth!” the woman shrieks, her little feet dancing in anger, and then she jerks back her head and spits down the front of Lee Junior’s shirt.
The rest is confusion. There’s a struggle, a stew of bodies, the sound of a blow, Lee Junior gives the woman a shove, somebody slams into Calvin’s wheelchair, Ormand’s voice cracks an octave, and the woman cries out in German; the next minute Calvin finds himself sprawled on the rough planks, gasping like a carp out of water, and the woman is sitting on her backside in the dirt at the foot of the stairs.
No one helps Calvin up. His arm hurts where he threw it out to break his fall, and his hip feels twisted or something. He lies very still. Below him, in the dirt, the woman just sits there mewling like a baby, her big lumpy yellow thighs exposed, her socks gray with dust, the little doll’s shoes worn through the soles and scuffed like the seats on the Number 56 bus.
“Get the hell out of here!” Lee Junior roars, shaking his fist. “You … you fat-assed”—here he pauses for the hatred to rise up in him, his face coiled round the words—“Nazi bitch!” And then, addressing himself to Mrs. Tuxton’s astonished face across the street, and to Norm Cramer, the gink in the Dodgers cap, and all the rest of them, he shouts: “And what are you lookin’ at, all of you? Huh?”
Nobody says a word.
Two days later Calvin is sitting out on the porch with a brand-new white plaster cast on his right forearm, watching the sparrows in the big bearded palm across the way and rehearsing numbers by way of mental exercise—5,280 feet in a mile, eight dry quarts in a peck—when Ormand comes up round the side of the house with a satchel of tools in his hand. “Hey, Calvin, what’s doin’?” he says, clapping a big moist hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Feel like takin’ a ride?”
Calvin glances down at his cast with its scrawl of good wishes—“Boogie Out!” Lee Junior had written—and then back at Ormand. He is thinking, suddenly and unaccountably, of the first time he laid eyes on the Orem place. Was it two years ago already? Yes, two years, come fall. He’d been living with that Mexicano family out in the Valley—rice and beans, rice and beans, till he thought he’d turn into a human burrito or blow out his insides or something—and then his daughter had found Jewel’s ad in the paper and gone out and made the arrangements.
“What do you say?” Ormand is leaning over him now. “Calvin?”
“A ride?” Calvin says finally. “Where to?”
Ormand shrugs. “Oh, you know: around.”
Don’t expect anything fancy she’d told him, as if he had anything to say about it. But when they got there and were actually sitting in the car out front where they had a good view of the blistered paint, dead oleanders, trash-strewn yard, and reeling porch, she was the one who got cold feet. She started in on how maybe he wouldn’t like these people and how maybe she ought to look a little further before they decided, but then bang! went the screen door and Big Lee and Ormand ambled down the steps in T-shirts and engineer boots. Big Lee folded a stick of Red Man and tucked it up alongside his teeth, Ormand was clutching a can of Safeway beer like it was grafted onto him, and both of them were grinning as if they’d just shared a dirty joke in the back of the church. And then Big Lee was reaching his callused hand in through the window to shake with Calvin. Glad to meet you, neighbor, he murmured, turning his head to spit.
Shit, Calvin had said, swiveling round to look his daughter in the eye, I like these people.
Two minutes later they’re out in the street, Ormand swinging back the door of his primer-splotched pickup, the pale bulb of Mrs. Tuxton’s face just visible beyond the curtains over her kitchen sink. Even with Ormand’s help, the old man has trouble negotiating the eight-inch traverse from the wheelchair to the car seat, what with his bum leg and fractured forearm and the general debility that comes of living so long, but once they’re under way he leans back, half closes his eyes, and gives himself up to the soothing wash of motion. Trees flit overhead, streaks of light and moving shadow, and then an open stretch and the sun, warm as a hand, on the side of his face.
Yes, he likes these people. They might have their faults—Ormand and Lee Junior are drunk three-quarters of the time (that is, whenever they’re not sleeping) and they gobble up his pain pills like M&Ms—but deep down he feels more kinship with them than he does with his own daughter. At least they’ll talk to him and treat him like a human being instead of something that’s been dead and dug up. Hell, they even seem to like him. When they go out visiting or whatever it is they do—house to house, dusty roads, day and night—they always want to take him along. So what if he has to sit there in the car sometimes for an hour or more? At least he’s out of the house.
When he looks up, they’re in a strange neighborhood. Stucco houses in shades of mustard and aquamarine, shabby palms, campers and trailers and pickups parked out front. Ormand has got a fresh beer and his eyes are shrunk back in his head. He stabs at the radio buttons and a creaky fiddle comes whining through the dashboard speaker. “You been noddin’ out there a bit, huh, Calvin?” he says.
The old man’s teeth hurt him all of a sudden, hurt him something fierce, so that the water comes to his eyes—he wants to cry out with the pain of it, but his arm begins to throb in counterpoint and pretty soon his hip starts kicking up where he twisted it and all he can do is just clamp his jaws shut in frustration. But when the car rolls to a stop beneath a dusty old oak and Ormand slips out the door with his satchel and says, “Just hang out here for a bit, okay, Calvin? I’ll be right back,” the old man finds the image of the German woman rising up in his mind like a river-run log that just won’t stay down, and his voice comes back to him. “Where did you get that soda, anyways?” he says.
“I tell you, Dad, I just don’t trust these people. Now, you look what’s happened to your arm, and then there’s this whole business of Lee going to jail—”
Calvin is sitting glumly over a bowl of tepid corn chowder in the Country Griddle, toying with his spoon and sucking his teeth like a two-year-old. Across the bright Formica table, his daughter breaks off her monologue just long enough to take a sip of coffee and a quick ladylike nip at her tuna on rye. She’s wearing an off-white dress, stockings, false eyelashes, and an expression about midway between harried and exasperated.
“He was innocent,” Calvin says.
His daughter gives him an impatient look. “Innocent or not, Dad, the man is in jail—in p
rison—for armed robbery. And I want to know who’s paying the bills and taking care of the place—I want to know who’s looking after you.”
“Armed robbery? The man had a screwdriver in his hand, for Christ’s sake—”
“Sharpened.”
“What?”
“I said it was a sharpened screwdriver.”
For a moment, Calvin says nothing. He fiddles with the salt shaker and watches his daughter get the Dad-you-know-you’re-not-supposed-to look on her face, and then, when he’s got her off guard, he says, “Jewel.”
“Jewel? Jewel what?”
“Takes care of the place. Pays the bills. Feeds me.” And she does a hell of a job of it too, he’s about to add, when a vast and crushing weariness suddenly descends on him. Why bother? His daughter’s up here on her day off to see about his arm and snoop around till she finds something rotten. And she’ll find it, all right, because she’s nothing but a sack of complaints and suspicions. Her ex-husband is second only to Adolf Hitler for pure maliciousness, her youngest is going to a psychiatrist three times a week, and her oldest is flunking out of college, she’s holding down two jobs to pay for the station wagon, figure-skating coaches, and orthopedic shoes, and her feet hurt. How could she even begin to understand what he feels for these people?
“Yes, and she drinks too. And that yard—it looks like something out of ‘Li’l Abner.’ “She’s waving her sandwich now, gesturing in a way that reminds him of her mother, and it makes him angry, it makes him want to throw her across his knee and paddle her. “Dad,” she’s saying, “listen. I’ve heard of this place up near me—a woman I know whose mother is bedridden recommended it and she—”
“A nursing home.”
“It’s called a ‘gerontological care facility’ and it’ll cost us seventy-five dollars more a month, but for my peace of mind—I mean, I just don’t feel right about you being with these people anymore.”
He bends low over his chowder, making a racket with the spoon. So what if Jewel drinks? (And she does, he won’t deny it—red wine mainly, out of the gallon jug—and she’s not afraid to share it, either.) Calvin drinks too. So does the president. And so does the bossy, tired-looking woman sitting across the table from him. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. Even with Lee in jail, even with her two big out-of-work nephews sitting down at the table and eating like loggers or linebackers or something, Jewel manages. And with no scrimping, either. Eggs for breakfast, bologna and American cheese on white for lunch with sweet butter pickles, and meat—real meat—for supper. Damn Mexicans never gave him meat, that’s for shit sure.
“Dad? Did you hear what I said? I think it’s time we made a change.”
“I’m going nowhere,” he says, and he means it, but already the subject has lost interest for him. Thinking of Jewel has got him thinking of her ham hocks and beans, and thinking of ham hocks and beans has got him thinking of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a time before he lost his leg when he and Bobbie Bartro were drunk on a bottle of stolen bourbon and racing up the street to his mother’s Sunday-afternoon sit-down dinner, where they slid into their seats and passed the mashed potatoes as if there were nothing more natural in the world. Off on the periphery of his consciousness he can hear his daughter trumpeting away, stringing together arguments, threatening and cajoling, but it makes no difference. His mind is made up. “Dad? Are you listening?”
Suddenly the lights are blinding him, the jukebox is scalding his ears, and the weariness pressing down on him like a truckload of cement. “Take me home, Berta,” he says.
He wakes to darkness, momentarily disoriented. The dreams have come at him like dark swooping birds, lifting him, taking him back, dropping him in scene after scene of disorder, threat, and sorrow. All of a sudden he’s sunk into the narrow hospital bed in San Bernardino, fifty years back, his head pounding with the ache of concussion, his left leg gone at the knee. What kind of motorcycle was it? the doctor asks. And then he’s in Bud’s Grocery and General Store in Charlottesville, thirteen years old, and he’s got a salami in one hand and a sixty-pound-pull hunting bow in the other and no money, and he’s out the door and running before Bud can even get out from behind the counter. And then finally, in the moment of waking, there’s Ruth, his wife, down on the kitchen floor in a spasm, hurt bad somewhere down in the deep of her. But wait: somehow all of a sudden she’s grown fat, rearranged her features and the color of her hair—somehow she’s transformed herself into the Patio-soda woman. Big, big, big. Thighs like buttermilk. You people, she says.
There’s a persistent thumping in the floorboards, like the beat of a colossal heart, and the occasional snatch of laughter. He hears Ormand’s voice, Jewel’s. Then another he doesn’t recognize. Ormand. Lee Junior. Laughter. Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he swings his legs around and drops heavily into the wheelchair. Then he fumbles for his glasses—1:30, reads the dimly glowing face of the clock—and knocks over the cup with his partial plate in it. He’s wearing his striped pajamas. No need to bother about a bathrobe.
“Hey, Calvin—what’s happening!” Ormand shouts as the old man wheels himself into the living room. Lee Junior and Jewel are sitting side by side on the couch; the Mexican kid—Calvin can never remember his name—is sprawled on the floor smoking a big yellow cigarette, and Ormand is hunched over a bottle of tequila in the easy chair. All three color TVs are on and the hi-fi is scaring up some hellacious caterwauling nonsense that sets his teeth on edge. “Come on in and join the party,” Jewel says, holding up a bottle of Spañada.
For a moment he just sits there blinking at them, his eyes adjusting to the light. The numbers are in his head again—batting averages, disaster tolls, the dimensions of the Grand Coulee Dam—and he doesn’t know what to say. “C’mon, Calvin,” Ormand says, “loosen up.”
He feels ridiculous, humbled by age. Bony as a corpse in the striped pajamas, hair fluffed out like cotton balls pasted to his head, glasses glinting in the lamplight. “Okay,” he murmurs, and Jewel is up off the couch and handing him a paper cup of the sweetened red wine.
“You hear about Rod Chefalo?” the Mexican says.
“No,” says Lee Junior.
“Ormand, you want to put on a movie or something I can watch?” Jewel says. One TV set, the biggest one, shows an auto race, little cars plastered with motor-oil stickers whizzing round a track as if in a children’s game; the other two feature brilliantined young men with guitars.
“Drove that beat Camaro of his up a tree out in the wash.”
“No shit? He wind up in the hospital or what?”
“What do you want to watch, Aunt Jewel? You just name it. I don’t give a shit about any of this.”
After a while, Calvin finds himself drifting. The wine smells like honeydew melons and oranges and tastes like Kool-Aid, but it gives him a nice little burn in the stomach. His daughter’s crazy, he’s thinking as the wine settles into him. These are good people. Nice to sit here with them in the middle of the night instead of being afraid to leave his room, like when he was with those Mexicans, or having some starched-up bitch in the nursing home dousing the lights at eight.
“You know she went to the cops?” Lee Junior’s face is like something you’d catch a glimpse of behind a fence.
“The cops?” The Mexican kid darts his black eyes round the room, as if he expects the sheriff to pop up from behind the couch. “What do you mean, she went to the cops?”
“They can’t do a thing,” Ormand cuts in. “Not without a search warrant.”
“That’s right.” Lee Junior reaches for his can of no-name beer, belching softly and thumping a fist against his sternum. “And to get one they need witnesses. And I tell you, any of these shitheels on this block come up against me, they’re going to regret it. Don’t think they don’t know it either.”
“That fat-assed Kraut,” Ormand says, but he breaks into a grin, and then he’s laughing. Lee Junior joins him and the Mexican kid makes some sort of wisecrack, but Calvin misses i
t. Jewel, her face noncommittal, gets up to change the channel.
“You know what I’m thinkin’?” Ormand says, grinning still. Jewel’s back is turned, and Calvin can see the flicker of green and pink under her right arm as she flips through the channels on the big TV. Lee Junior leans forward and the Mexican kid waves the smoke out of his eyes and props himself up on one elbow, a cautious little smile creeping into the lower part of his face. “What?” the Mexican kid says.
Calvin isn’t there, he doesn’t exist, the cardboard cup is as insubstantial as an eggshell in his splotched and veiny hand as he lifts it, trembling, to his lips. “I’m thinking maybe she could use another lesson.”
In the morning, early, Calvin is awakened by the crackle and stutter of a shortwave radio. His throat is dry and his head aches, three cups of wine gone sour in his mouth and leaden on his belly. With an effort, he pushes himself up and slips on his glasses. The noise seems to be coming from outside the house—static like a storm in the desert, tinny voices all chopped and diced. He parts the curtains.
A police cruiser sits at the curb, engine running, driver’s door swung open wide. Craning his neck, Calvin can get a fix on the porch and the figures of Ormand—bare chest and bare feet—and a patrolman in the uniform of the LAPD. “So what’s this all about?” Ormand is saying.
The officer glances down at the toes of his boots, and then looks up and holds Ormand’s gaze. “A break-in last night at the European Deli around the corner, 2751 Commerce Avenue. The proprietor”—and here he pauses to consult the metal-bound notepad in his hand—“a Mrs. Eva Henckle, thinks that you may have some information for us….”
Ormand’s hair is in disarray; his cheeks are dark with stubble. “No, Officer,” he says, rubbing a hand over his stomach. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t hear a thing. What time was that, did you say?”
The patrolman is young, no more than two or three years older than Ormand. In fact, he looks a bit like Ormand—if Ormand were to lose thirty pounds, stand up straight, get himself a shave, and cut the dark scraggly hair that trails down his back like something stripped from an animal. Ignoring the questions, the patrolman produces a stub of pencil and asks one of his own. “You live here with your aunt, is that right?”