Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “No,” said Frank. “To me.”

  They drank draft beer in pool halls, Rob Roys in hotel lounges, told bartenders and fellow customers, “We’re on a drinking tour of the Southland….” Skirting the border, they turned east: Calexico, Mexicali, Yuma, Arizona. Between hangovers and sunsets, Motel 6s and cramped nights in the car, they kept driving. As Frank drove, he sang:

  My daddy loved his bottle

  Lord, it drove him to his grave

  My mama loved her bottle too

  And it done her just the same

  Now there’s no one left to love me

  And that old whiskey fills my days …

  In a town whose name Red never knew, Frank swung too wide at an intersection, jumped the curb, and hit the side of a brick building. Red flew from the cab, then skidded to a stop in an alley. It was dawn in a grimy industrial zone. The sky was wintry overhead. Red saw the links of his watchband mashed into his wrist. He heard footsteps, saw dark forms standing over him, clouds of steam billowing from mouths. Shoes were tugged from his feet, his clothes were patted and probed, the watch extricated from flesh. A man’s voice said, “That other one’s a goner.” And silence. Red rolled over on his stomach. One leg would not work. Blood ran into his eyes, a hot red curtain. He dragged himself along the pavement, inching his way around the back of the truck until he saw Frank hanging halfway out of the cab, his left ear snagged on the handle of the sprung door.

  RED RAY rose from that curb a sober man. He spent three weeks in the VA hospital in San Diego, then six months in an alcohol recovery house in Los Angeles. He underwent two operations to repair the splintered bones in his left leg. Except when he was bedridden, he attended AA meetings three times a day. He wrote letters to his accountant and creditors and straightened out his finances. He ate three squares, gained back some of the forty pounds lost on his three-month liquid diet. He lifted weights, read mystery novels, and talked endlessly with his fellow drunks.

  In September, he signed himself out and drove north in a rented car. In the Tehachapis, he heard on the radio that a band of anticommunist and anti-Japanese Koreans had met in a plaza in downtown Seoul, chopped off their little fingers, packaged the digits, and mailed them to the Japanese premier. The premier, however, was in Mexico donning sombreros for reporters. And the Pope was in the Southwest donning feathered headdresses for other reporters. Red snapped off the radio. Finally sober and the world stays drunk.

  The pale blond hills were dry and shiny with dead grass. He was on his way to Rito to check on his property before putting it on the market. He planned to return to San Francisco, join up with his old law firm, be a weekend father to his son. The sky was a soft talc blue. He drove west on the tiny two-lane blacktop that meandered like a dry river through the Santa Bernita Valley. Rounding a bend, he was suddenly, unexpectedly charmed by the vista of orderly orange groves, blue foothills, and distant purplish peaks. He’d been steeling himself to come here, to return to the scene of his consummate alcoholic crimes, where he had systematically relinquished and destroyed everything that was precious to him. He’d feared a relapse of fiery thirst, helpless remorse, clouds of pure pain. Instead, he was enchanted. A man could live peaceably in this valley. He could work outside in the air and the trees and soak up strength like sunlight.

  Red spent weeks cleaning up after the last siege of vandalism in the mansion. He drove to Rito for meals at Happy Yolanda’s, but he drank only 7-Up or tomato juice. Nights, he drove to Buchanan or Ventura for AA meetings. He asked Doc Perrin, a gruff old-timer with eighteen years of sobriety, to be his sponsor. Red called Perrin every day, sometimes twice. “I’m thinking of letting rooms to drunks,” Red told him. “Turning the place into a kind of halfway house.”

  Perrin laughed and wheezed into the phone until Red worried for his health. “There’s an idea,” Perrin gasped.

  “You think it’s a bad idea?”

  “Not if it keeps you sober. Better get yourself a good strong board of directors just in case….”

  Red moved into one of the bungalows in the workers’ village on the far side of the estate. He made his intentions known at AA meetings, and by mid-October a volunteer work crew was showing up daily. By the middle of November, the job was done. The mansion was not the restored gingerbread castle of Yvette’s blueprints; historical societies would strike it from their records. The repairs were basic, sound, institutional in flavor, heavy on stainless steel and pre-waxed linoleum.

  A neighbor filed three appeals to halt the zoning changes, but the court threw them out. So Red hired a full-time cook, a local recovering alcoholic named Ernie Tola. He sent word to all the jails and hospitals, detox centers and halfway houses in a fifty-mile radius that Round Rock Farm for Recovering Alcoholics would open its doors on December first. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Red drove down to San Diego to pick up the first and only permanent resident that Round Rock would ever have: a speechless, witless, barely ambulatory Frank Jamieson.

  LEWIS itched. Having run out of cigarettes, he was smoking butts pinched from ashtrays, first his own Camel straights, then anything that didn’t look mentholated. The muscles in his legs and shoulders and back were sore to the touch. He didn’t have conscious memories of seizures, only the physical sense that his body had been wrung out like a washrag. Bobby said the seizures were DTs, delirium tremens. Lewis doubted that. More likely, he had smoked some questionable pot at that party, or done a line of something that was supposed to be cocaine. Drugs in academia were always suspect. Undergrad kids drove over to Ramparts, bought whatever was shoved through their car windows, and cut it with baby laxative, veterinary antibiotic, photographic chemicals.

  Which is not to say Lewis didn’t drink. He drank almost every day. But he didn’t, like, drink drink, or go crazy to get the top off a bottle or anything. He knew some legendary drinkers, and he, clearly, wasn’t one of them. He once drank with a famous writer from Montana who’d ordered round after round, and although Lewis drank hard to keep up, a long avenue of amber-tinted bourbon-and-waters soon stretched out in front of him. Nobody ever called that famous writer an alcoholic, so how could he, Lewis, be one?

  Around noon, Bobby wandered up and asked if he wanted a sandwich or a piece of fruit. Lewis preferred not to take food from this small, balding bureaucrat. “That’s okay,” he said, only you might’ve thought he’d said, “Sit down and tell me your whole life story, Bobby.” It was an AA thing, Lewis surmised: in the two, three days he’d been in detox, several people had launched into long, earnest secular testimonials.

  Bobby had a short beard and thick tortoiseshell glasses. As he talked, he patted Lewis’s forearm. “I wish you’d eat something.” Pat. He just wanted Lewis to know how glad he was to have met him. Lewis reminded him so much of himself when he first got sober. It was important to remember what that used to be like. Bobby had run a sheetrock business that was so successful, he had everything: the car, the house, the gorgeous wife, the kids, the boat, even a plane. Another pat. Did Lewis ever fly a plane? Well, Bobby had discovered how fast you can get drunk in a plane; he’d take his Cessna up to ten, twelve thousand feet and chug a half-pint. After his wife left—because of the drinking, of course—and after he stopped going in to work, all he did was fly and drink. “I figure my last drink was a pint of bourbon at twelve thousand feet.” This last glugging episode made him so drunk and lost—here Bobby gripped Lewis’s arm—he landed on the first runway he spotted, which happened to be a military airstrip out in the Mojave. He opened the door to a dozen MPs with their guns trained right on him. An amplified voice told him to lie facedown on the tarmac—not that he had any choice, drunk as he was. He detoxed in the stockade for twenty-four hours before receiving any medical attention. He was lucky he didn’t choke to death on his tongue or fracture his skull during the seizures. “That was fifteen years ago.” A concluding pat, then a pause. “I never did get my plane back.”

  Lewis didn’t know or care why any of this reminded Bobby of h
im. He let the guy talk and pat away to his heart’s content because it seemed to brighten him up, give him a charge. Helping other alcoholics, Bobby said, was the best life he ever could’ve imagined for himself. This made Lewis sad—that anybody could be so pleased with a crummy administrative job in such a depressing place. Okay, Lewis thought, fine: I can listen. Why not let some poor guy cheer himself up?

  Bobby went off in a great mood and came back with Lewis’s knapsack. The knapsack held Lewis’s notebooks, a few pens, matches, and a falling-apart paperback edition of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bobby also handed him an envelope containing the contents of Lewis’s pockets when he’d been signed in: matches, keys to the apartment he no longer rented, keys to the car he junked three months ago, a three-inch length of plastic straw. Bobby plucked the straw out of the envelope. “Let’s toss this,” he said. There was also under two dollars in change. No mention of the $250 Lewis had at last count.

  When Bobby went back to his desk, Lewis tried to read a poem. He’d been working on a paper about Hopkins’s concept of “inscape” for a Ph.D. seminar in nineteenth-century British literary culture. I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me. … He was too tired to unravel such syntax. He dozed, woke up to the ancient detox doctor jiggling his shoulder.

  “Achy? Shaky? Lacka appetite?” the doctor asked, then grabbed Lewis’s chin and pulled his lower eyelids down with his thumbs. Lewis looked back into rheumy blue eyes in a face of a thousand wrinkles. “Looking good,” the doctor said. “Not so yellow today. Still, we’re gonna keep an eye on that liver, friend.”

  Given the doctor’s advanced age and broad body vibrato, Lewis assumed he was a retiree who’d volunteered his antiquated expertise to this shabby institution. The old gent wavered so much that it was like looking at someone through water. Keeping an iron grip on Lewis’s cheeks, he said, “Hear you’re going out to Red’s place.”

  “I ’on’t ’ink so,” Lewis said.

  The doctor released Lewis’s face and scribbled on a clipboard. “You want Antabuse?”

  “I just want a cigarette.”

  “Can’t help you there.” He scribbled some more. “You’ll like Red’s. You won’t want to go home after your thirty days are up.”

  Lewis didn’t particularly relish going home, period, considering he’d been living in his philosophy professor’s garage, sleeping on a foam pad between the washer and dryer and the BMW. Every morning he’d wait until Sam and his wife went to work, then go into the house and shower, read the paper, and drink whatever coffee was left cooling in the pot. The first month, Amanda—the wife—left him a fresh half-pot and something to eat. “There’s bread in the toaster for you,” she’d call as she climbed into the BMW. “Pancakes in the oven … muffins on the table …” Soon, however, there were no baked goods, and she got into her car ignoring the fact that Lewis was a couple feet from her right-front wheel well. He didn’t know what bent her cross. They used to talk, be close. She’d admired his work, especially a paper he’d published in New History Journal. Without warning, she’d stopped being friendly. Lewis took the hint and steered clear. The last night Lewis was there, Sam had called him into the kitchen for a drink. “We haven’t seen you,” he said. “Are you okay? Staying warm enough out there in the garage?”

  In fact, the cement slab was like a block of ice, but before Lewis could answer, Amanda said, “If you get too cold, you can always take a spin in the dryer,” and laughed heartlessly.

  Oh, sitting there in detox thinking about how Amanda stopped liking him, and how his mother wouldn’t come and get him, it seemed to Lewis as if everyone who was ever nice to him had pushed him away in the cruelest way possible.

  The old doctor’s pencil scratched. His breath whistled, broke into high-pitched chords. “Whaddaya weigh? One forty?” Frowning, gave Lewis an appraising look. “Month of Ernie’s cooking oughta put some meat on those bones.”

  IN THE canned-vegetable aisle at Smart and Final, Red heard someone call his name. Julie Swaggart, his ex-secretary, pushed toward him, her dolly loaded with cases of Murphy’s Oil Soap, popcorn, and Tampax. With her rippling hair, shapeless batik dress, and fringed shawl, she looked the same as always, only happier.

  Julie once had been a well-known R&B singer, and back then her drugs of choice had been marijuana, red wine, and barbiturates. These substances had so shaped her behavioral style that even after many years clean and sober, her manner was still leisurely, as drowsy and vague as if she’d just pulled herself up off a massage table. “Hey, you,” she said in her just-woke-up voice, giving Red a hug. Her shawl folded around him like patchouli-scented wings. “How’s life at the ranch?” she asked.

  “Going all to hell.”

  She laughed, but they both knew he wasn’t lying. Despite her apparent languor, Julie had run a tight ship. In her reign, paperwork was completed. Quarterly taxes duly filed. Unpaid accounts relentlessly pursued. She’d been gone four months and he hadn’t replaced her. He was missing luncheons and speaking engagements because nobody had updated his calendar. He missed the deadline for a major government grant that the farm had really counted on. For the first time in years, there were vacant beds at the Blue House; he’d misplaced the waiting list.

  After five years at Round Rock, Julie had decided to open a recovery house of her own, the White Cottage for Women, over by Somis. When she’d told Red, he was stunned. “I wish you w-well,” he stuttered. “But you have to be crazy to open a drunk farm. If I’d known what I was in for, I never would’ve started Round Rock. But I wasn’t even a year sober. I was crazy. I hope you know it can consume your entire life….”

  Today, she looked so satisfied, so radiant, that he knew his advice had been wrongheaded. Then again, for the first four or five years at Round Rock he couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, and working with drunks had seemed, finally and irrevocably, his life’s calling.

  “How are your women doing?” he asked.

  “Working with women is a whole different ball game,” she said. “They’re so much more willing to look at themselves, examine their behavior. The egos aren’t so well defended.” There was no remorse in her voice, nor the faintest constriction of regret. “I’m having the time of my life.”

  “Lucky you.”

  She searched his face. “You still haven’t found anyone.”

  “Still looking,” he said, though he hadn’t even interviewed any applicants for Julie’s job. Some kind of mental block, he supposed. A protest at her leaving. Maybe he’d run the whole farm into the ground. That’d show her.

  She was on the verge of saying something, Red could tell, but restrained herself. They smiled at each other—he wistfully, she with a little shake of her head—and pushed off down the aisle in opposite directions.

  Red stopped next at the auto parts store, the hardware store, the produce stand. In the detox parking lot, he sat in the truck, window cracked, and smoked. The day was cold and clear. He could see down the hill to the ocean and, across the dark blue water, the craggy shadows of the Channel Islands. On one of those islands, a woman had lived alone for a dozen years. A Chumash Indian woman. She’d lived by foraging, snaring fish and game, weathering storms in shallow caves. She’d done fine, too, until rescued. Taken to the mainland, given clothes, a bed, human company, and medical treatment, she died within the year.

  APPROACHING the detox reception desk, Red was intercepted by Doc Perrin. “C’mon, Husky,” Perrin said. “We got test results.”

  In Julie’s absence, Red had also fallen so far behind on staff medical insurance that the policy had been canceled. To be reinstated, the company told Red, he needed a physical examination. He’d called on Perrin, his sponsor and friend, expecting him to fill out the insurance forms over a cup of detox’s pisswater coffee. Instead, the old sawbones merrily administered an electrocardiogram, a treadmill test, hammered on Red’s knees, listened to his lungs, pinched, prodded, and stuck
a finger up his ass.

  In Perrin’s office, they sat down across from each other, the desk between them. “You gotta lose forty pounds, friend,” Perrin said with more gusto than Red felt was called for. “And cut out caffeine and stop smoking. And that’s for starters. You get that licked, we’ll work on cholesterol and sugar. First thing, though, you gotta lower that stress level.”

  “Right,” said Red.

  “Might think about cutting down your work load.”

  “Right.”

  “Got a new secretary yet?”

  “Thinking about it.”

  Perrin cackled. “Face it, Blue Eyes. You’re nothing but a dried-out old drunk still hellbent on self-destruction.”

  This was hardly news to Red. When his head hit the pillow and he was alone with the sibilance in his lungs and the furious working of his heart, he vowed to quit the coffee, the sugar, the two-to-three packs a day. In the morning, he’d have half a pot of mud and a dozen Pall Malls and be midway through his rounds before he was awake enough to recall these promises. When he did try to go an hour or two without nicotine, the intensity of his craving astonished him. Who would guess that a fifty-two-year-old body could harbor such focused, shameless appetites!

  “This kid you’re picking up?” Perrin shifted his attention to another open file. “Skinny as a POW. Some liver damage, but I’m not sure the message has gotten through. You might like him, though. Smart.”

  AN ETERNITY had passed on the hideous waiting room couch, an eternity plagued by crawly bugs, vague, ominous dreams, and Bobby, who insisted on waking Lewis every few minutes: Glass of water? A final Dilantin? This time, Bobby introduced a large, fair man. “Here’s Red Ray,” Bobby said, and to Red, “I’ll leave you to it.”

  The guy had a gut that swelled out over the waistband of his jeans. From Lewis’s vantage point on the sofa, he had a double chin and a protruding, snouty face. His eyebrows, half red, half white, were long and bristly, like a badger’s. His fairness seemed a painful, delicate condition.