Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  Eight years ago, a private investigator sobered up at Round Rock and Red let the man work off his bill in trade. Red asked him to locate his father, an assignment both assumed would result in the address of a cemetery. Within a week, however, Jack was found traversing the country in a mid-size motor home with a Choctaw woman named Winnie. Red sent a telegram to a Kansas KOA campground, and ten days later Jack and Winnie rolled into Round Rock. Almost forty years had passed since Red had seen his father. Jack was now a fragile stick of a man, face wattled in loose skin, head crowned by a wavering white flame of hair. Jack and Winnie parked the motor home next to Red’s bungalow and drank gin around the clock until Red had to ask them to leave. Two years later, Red was summoned to Monrovia to identify his father’s body and collect his possessions: one green woolen overcoat, one pair of black steel-shank boots, sixteen dollars and change.

  Since his father’s death, Red had had a recurring dream. There was no story or sequence of events, merely landscapes of water: hills and mountains of water, and, of course, gardens, with sparkling clear dahlias, surging hedgerows, weeping willows.

  Red smoked and reread Yvette’s note until he knew for certain no rebuke or threat simmered between the words. He laughed a little at the strength of his own inexhaustible fears. The boy just wanted to run track, for Christ’s sake, to be on a team with other boys. Red could go up there to see him. Cheer him from the sidelines. There was still hope, after all: it was just possible that he and Joe would not end up lost to each other, two heartbroken strangers.

  LEWIS showed up in Red’s office the following afternoon.

  “Yes?” Red looked up from the computer.

  “I finished that writing.”

  Red looked confused, so Lewis held up a sheaf of pale-green paper covered with blotchy ballpoint scrawl. “My drinking history,” he said.

  Red’s face cleared. “That was fast! What’d you do? Stay up all night?”

  Lewis shrugged—three a.m. was all—and started to hand the pages to Red.

  Red crossed his arms. “Read it to me.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. You can read it.”

  “I’d rather hear it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Really? Right now?”

  “Is there something else you need to do?”

  “No. But you …” Lewis couldn’t imagine that Red didn’t have other, more pressing items on his agenda.

  “I’m here. I’m ready. I’m listening.”

  Lewis sat in the green armchair closest to the desk. “All of it?” he asked.

  “All of it.”

  Lewis straightened the pages and began to read.

  FAMILY DRINKING PATTERNS

  The one grandmother I knew, my mother’s mother, went to a bar every afternoon. The bar, on Loden Street, was called Lloyds of Loden, which made my parents laugh and laugh—I didn’t understand why for years. When this same grandmother took us trick or treating, she wore a big heavy serape and a wide brimmed hat and carried a heavy coffee mug. At each door, she held out the mug and boomed, “Me want firewater!”

  “Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?” Lewis asked. “Precisely. But slow down, please. And speak up.”

  My parents had cocktails every night, and when I was very young, they threw cocktail parties. The specialty glassware came out of its closet. The parents of my nursery school classmates arrived, the men in starched white dress shirts unbuttoned at the neck, the women in floral prints and spaghetti straps. My father was loud and jolly in a way he never was with us. My mother bared her shoulders, drank martinis, and kissed her way through the room, leaving a wake of smeary red lipstick.

  In the morning, my older brother Woody and I drank all the unfinished drinks.

  Red was smiling.

  “What?” Lewis said.

  “I’d say you wrote the hell out of it.”

  My father drank bourbon. Gin, my mother’s drink, disagreed with him, although he never did refuse a martini. A short time before he moved out—I must have been nine or ten—I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and he was drinking straight from a bottle in big long chugs, like he was dying of thirst. He’d take the bottle away from his lips and pant until he caught his breath, then drink more.

  Years later, his second wife told me he had to stop drinking—doctor’s orders. She said he had drunk so much that not only his liver but his eyes and his bone marrow were damaged.

  “That’s it for ‘Family Drinking Patterns,’ ” Lewis said.

  Red leaned forward. “What about your brother? Does he drink?”

  “Woody?” Lewis squinted at the fireplace. “Maybe. He’s in the merchant marines, I hardly ever see him. He’s more into pot, always has some gourmet bud or opiated hash.”

  “Okay,” said Red. “Go on.”

  “Let’s see. ‘My first drink’?

  Sips from my parents’ glasses. Wine. Beer. Liqueur. And those party leftovers Woody and I drank—I still remember how they made me feel rubbery, hot, bursting with energy.

  I smoked pot for the first time when I was twelve. A neighbor kid stole a joint from the stash hidden in his stepfather’s shoulder holster. Woody and I also filched pills—white crosses, Dexedrine, Seconal—from my mom.

  I went to my first kegger at fifteen. I remember rolling on the grass, laughing like crazy, then throwing up in someone’s car. My friends dropped me off down the street from my house. I slept for two days.

  I had my first bourbon at sixteen. We were on a rooftop smoking pot when an older guy showed up with a quart of Bourbon Deluxe. Even at the time it seemed one of those signifiers of adulthood, like a first cigarette, a first pair of dark glasses. In the mercury vapor streetlight, I looked at the clear, shiny brown and thought, Here it is, here it is.

  Drinking was never the focus in high school. Only jocks and parents drank seriously. We took drugs to have visions, push through the cracks. Pot was weaker then, more fun. It arrived from Mexico in sugary bricks the size of shoeboxes; you could smoke a whole joint and all you’d do is laugh and eat everything in the fridge.

  I got busted once, with friends, for smoking a joint in somebody’s front yard. When my mom’s boyfriend came down to get me, the cops arrested him for all the unpaid parking tickets I’d accumulated on a car registered in his name.

  “I laugh about it now.” Lewis glanced up. “But when he got me alone, he broke two of my ribs.”

  I dropped acid and mescaline in college until I had a bad trip on some so-called psilocybin. Psilocybin’s supposed to be so benign, but on this stuff, dark, glittering chasms opened up between blades of grass, along rooftops, around people’s faces. The civilized world seemed the flimsiest construct, frantically devised to shore up against the pure terror of existence. It was hours before I came down and years before I went a whole day without seeing dark chasms in the edges of my eyesight.

  No more psychedelics after that. I couldn’t even smoke pot without rekindling terror. Booze was okay. Booze was all I did, until I discovered cocaine.

  My ex-wife Clare and I discovered cocaine together, but once we got married, she decided coke was too expensive. I was working at a garage and the owner sold us blow at his cost; still, by the end of the week, when I went to get paid, I often owed him a hundred dollars.

  After the divorce, I took a job at a parts store and went out with the guys after work. Prodigious drinkers, they ordered round after round. A few times, I woke up the next morning without knowing how I got home.

  I quit the store when I was twenty-nine. I didn’t want to be thirty years old and working in parts. I stopped drinking. I started running seven to ten miles a day, applied to grad school. When I started drinking again, sometimes one beer made me drunk. Another time, I could drink half a quart of bourbon and not feel a thing. I got a DUI after just one drink. (Maybe I shouldn’t have sung the alphabet.) I was fined nine hundred dollars and sent to six AA meetings.

  So, in the last two years I o
nly drank on weekends or at social functions. Recently, because I took time off from school, I was drinking more often. No more than four, five drinks a night, though. I only got drunk once or twice a week, usually when I did editing for an expat Russian physicist—he’d always give me ice tea glasses of frozen vodka.

  I don’t remember my last drink. I remember being at the Russian’s house and, less clearly, at a party in married student housing. Then I woke up in my underwear in the detox rubber room.

  “That’s it.” Lewis folded his writing, set it on the desk, and looked at Red.

  Red was sunk in thought. His index fingers pushed his lips up toward his nose. “What I want to know, Lewis …” he said, and focused slowly, “is how, after writing all that, you can have any doubt whatsoever that you’re an alcoholic?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Lewis was flattered that Red thought his paltry story measured up. Still, the diagnosis, delivered so unequivocally, felt like a punch in the chest. He’d drunk heavily at times, sure. But he never drowned any cats or committed vehicular manslaughter or had to glug alcohol in the middle of the night. He never even thought about alcohol all that much, and wasn’t alcoholism an obsession? “What makes you so sure?” he said.

  “What normal drinker could write a document like that?”

  Lewis drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. Any guy he knew, any guy he went to school with, could produce a similar narrative, if asked. The misunderstanding, Lewis thought, was generated by the structure of Red’s assignment: the form alone pre-empted the content. “I can see that it sounds like I had a big long thing with alcohol,” Lewis said. “But if I’d written an essay concentrating only on all the times I’ve laughed you’d think I was a total laughing fool. Yet I’m not a big laugher.”

  “And so?”

  Lewis rested his forehead on his knees, breathing his own scent: tobacco, motor oil, almond-scented solvent, a whiff of goaty sweat.

  “Sit with it for a few days,” Red said. “See how you feel.”

  “Well, here.” Lewis tried to hand Red the written pages. “Don’t you want it?”

  “Hang on to it for the time being. Might be useful later.”

  Lewis was baffled: if the drinking history was so well written, and smacked so conclusively of bona-fide alcoholism, why didn’t Red snatch it up for one of his brochures?

  AT 5:30 A.M., Libby Pollack Daw curled over her journal and listed everything she missed about Stockton, her ex-husband. The flood of divorce-inspired fury had finally subsided, and in its wake lay a most alarming nostalgia for: (1) That formal thank you kiss before he sat down to meals. (2) All his highbrow charm. (3) Good, smooth lips. (4) Well-shaved jaw. (5) The great pleasure of making him laugh in bed.

  Libby regarded this list, then wrote: Am I turning into a Tennie? Tennie had been a next-door neighbor on Carondelet Street in New Orleans. When Libby first met her, Tennie was a bright, normal, divorced hospital technician, dating a Cajun shrimper, and moderately unhappy like everybody else. Tennie had two kids her ex-husband was good about seeing and supporting. Then Tennie was born again in some Pentecostal sect and decided that her ex was her one true husband under God, and that no man, including any judge or even the former husband himself, could put it asunder. They’d been apart three or four years by then, and the ex had married someone else, but Tennie began to cook dinner for him every night, setting his place at the head of the table. She’d call him up across town: dinner’s ready, honey. Before long, there was a restraining order and threats of a custody battle.

  Tennie relayed these developments matter-of-factly. When Libby, benumbed secondhand by the humiliation, asked what his new wife thought of all this, Tennie replied, “I’m his one true wife and the mother of his children.” Libby didn’t challenge or contradict her, partly because Tennie seemed nuts and partly because, well, what if she was on to something? What if Tennie eventually wore him down and he capitulated, sat himself down before his steaming plate of limas and rice?

  “Come home, husband—it’s dinner time” … imagine trying that out on Stockton! Libby could see his lips curl back like razor-cut paper. Still, she now could admire the mad plunge of Tennie’s approach, the disregard of civility and civil law in lieu of a higher administration. “Your bed is made, dear, your clothes laundered and laid out.” In thrall to such devotion, Libby thought, one simply bows to the yoke of contempt, welcomes it, suffers it gladly in Jesus’ name. …

  She wrote: I’d rather stick my head in the oven.

  She pushed her hair back from her face and began writing in earnest. She’d been keeping a journal long enough to know that self-indulgent speculation, however gratifying in the moment, wasn’t half as fascinating or useful in a month’s time as brief, factual notes that could evoke otherwise forgotten days. Dinner last night with Billie and the Bills. Rack of lamb cut into little chops, tiny yellow potatoes. Wine so good it made me want to cry. They ridicule environmentalists. Their ranching is an unrepentant rain of herbicides, miticides, pesticides, fungicides, etc. Am surprised, as ever, they want me around. They don’t, can’t, have any sense of who I am, but have decided, for reasons not apparent, that they like me. …

  Libby closed her journal and dressed for work. She packed jeans for practice later with the Cactus Pharaohs, a not-bad band who, in addition to all the sappy covers required at every wedding, played a mix of Western swing and barnyard jazz. Grabbing fiddle and purse, she left the trailer.

  Libby’s car was a 1960 baby-blue Ford Falcon. Reaching for the driver’s-side door, she paused. Every little hair on her body rose up, as if an army of tiny bugs blanketing her skin all raised their antennae at the same time. Her crazy first thought was, I’ve been cut in two at the stomach. Then time slowed down, way down, and she actually observed her mind filter the information before her: the huge, bearded man sleeping in the backseat of her car.

  Libby stepped back carefully, soundlessly, and dashed to the trailer in two or three bounds. She locked herself in and, fingers noodly, called the sheriff. The phone rang and rang—she could have been stabbed fifty times at least—before the woman dispatcher picked up.

  “There’s a guy sleeping in my car,” Libby said, “and I have to go to work.”

  The woman took her name and address, then asked for a description.

  “He’s big and has a gray beard and … I don’t know. He looks like he lives in a pumpkin patch.”

  “Keep your door locked,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll send Burt over.”

  Libby was about to call Billie Fitzgerald, but remembered Billie and her father, Old Bill, drove her son, Little Bill, to prep school in Ojai every morning.

  Libby sat at the kitchen table, where she could see the car. Nothing moved. She took a knife out of the drawer: a well-weighted twelve-inch chef’s knife. She considered sharpening it, since you were supposed to do so before each use.

  She blamed Stockton for abandoning her out here like a litter of kittens. He would say, You should’ve locked your car doors. But wasn’t no locked doors one of the pleasures and payoffs of living in the country? Libby never locked her trailer, either. Thank heavens her visitor liked car seats.

  She jumped when the phone rang, Victor Ibañez calling from the grocería. “Heard you got Frank over there,” he said.

  “Victor! God!” Libby said. “Who’s Frank?”

  “Big old guy with a bushy gray beard. Probably wearing slippers. Looks like he lives in a pumpkin patch.”

  Would small-town telegraphy ever cease to astonish and appall her?

  Victor laughed through his nose, like a snuffling dog. “A pumpkin patch! That’s perfect!”

  “Victor,” Libby said. “This is not funny.”

  “Frank won’t hurt you, honey,” Victor said. “Just light his cigarette, you’ll make a friend for life.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near him! Is Burt there? You tell Burt to get over here.”

  “Just a moment.” Without c
overing the phone, Victor said, “It’s your wife, Burt. Are you here?” Into the receiver, Victor said, “Burt says he’s not here.”

  “Come on, Victor. Please,” Libby said. “I’m seriously freaked out. If you don’t let me talk to Burt, I’m going to call the marshal.”

  “She’s gonna call the marshal, Burt,” said Victor.

  “Damn it, Victor.”

  “Now, now,” Victor said. “Burt’s already on his way. I just wanted to call ahead to say Frank’s harmless. But lately he’s been taking these little walks away from home.”

  “I don’t think going around and terrifying single women who live alone in the country’s exactly harmless.”

  Libby heard gravel crunching outside as Burt McLemoore pulled into her driveway.

  LEWIS woke up early in the morning from a dream in which the earth had tilted off its axis and everything was sliding away from everything else. Chairs flew from tables, pillows popped from sofas, highways lifted off the ground like kinked ribbons. In the next bed, Carl snored pianissimo, almost a purr.

  Lewis decided to go running. He pulled on pants and loped downstairs. Movement was good. He pushed through the front door, jogged down the driveway, one footfall between each palm tree. It was cold out, gray and dewy, and Lewis’s wool sweater produced a faint wet-dog stink that intensified as he warmed up. His hands grew pink. Was it possible that his jerky start-and-stop pattern of drinking constituted a real disease, the same one his father had? His father seemed another species: a red-faced television exec, a five-martini luncher fixated on racehorses, already on his third family and second open-heart surgery.

  Lewis hit flat ground and picked up speed. Light seeped slowly into the sky. As if hand-tinted, oranges and lemons acquired the faintest pastel hues. Near the garage, he heard the familiar glass-packed rumble of Red’s truck and looked around for a place to hide in case he was doing something wrong by being out at this hour. It felt like he was. Then again, he usually did feel like he was doing something wrong.