The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  “I should go to a real psychic?”

  Her mother offered a polite laugh. Helen wanted to tell her that the weatherman was something like a psychic, an oracle who forecasts the future, details the past, and ascertains from the incalculable morass of existence the high temp for the upcoming day and the low for the night.

  “He’s pretty,” Helen said at last. “Like an antelope.”

  “Like an antelope on television,” her mother said. “Get yourself a real antelope. You’re still an attractive woman.”

  That had made Helen ready to hang up.

  “I suppose that means I’m ancient,” she said and changed the subject without letting her mother reply.

  Helen had booked a final flight to Arizona, but her mother died the weekend before. Helen canceled the trip. She did not want to see the emaciated body, and there was no one there with whom to mourn. Her father had left them when she was an infant, and her mother had destroyed every photograph of him. But she had kept the name Swann.

  “It’s the only thing he ever gave me that he didn’t later take back,” her mother explained.

  Helen had thought, What about me?

  For years Helen tried to conjure from memory the image of her father. She found family albums among the things in the shed. One eight-by-ten showed baby Helen standing on tiptoes between her mother and a man, but the man’s face and body were covered by a picture of a swan clipped from a magazine—her mother’s idea of a

  joke. Helen pulled the clipping away carefully, but glue had damaged the photo, erasing most of him. Her father was tall, she could determine, with narrow shoulders. Either he wore a hat or he had a pointed head. Helen slipped the photo into a cheap frame and it hangs in the storage shed, the incomplete shape of her father drawing the eye away from the smiling woman and pretty little girl. She has not made much progress emptying the unit. She gave her mother’s clothing to Goodwill and threw away the porcelain figurines that were broken in shipping. Her mother had collected the figurines for decades, but Helen did not feel obliged to glue together their hollow bodies. She never understood the attachment.

  A motorcyclist slips through the gap between the bus and the curb, the blank space needed for the colossus to make a turn. A contemptible red motorcycle, like a fire ant. A car pulls in behind it, a pieced-together creature, the front half a Mustang and the rear of something cheaper, like a Cavalier. Auto titles and death certificates are handled with equal aplomb by Helen’s new software program. One format for all public records. If she clicks on “Marriage License,” certain boxes are highlighted and the cursor moves to them automatically. If she clicks on “Death Certificate,” some of the same boxes but also different ones are illuminated. It will simplify her work once she feels comfortable with it. She doesn’t look forward to her elementary job becoming even more rote, but neither does she wish to be slow to learn it.

  “Out,” Outis calls, and the herd do as they’re told. They are at the corner of Laurel and Main, halfway through her daily odyssey. A man takes the seat in front of her, although there are plenty of empties—a newcomer, a stranger to their customs. His long coat is made of camel’s hair or ermine or the pelt of some more exotic creature. He turns sideways in the seat to face her. He speaks her name.

  “Don’t tell me,” he says. “Your car broke down, too. These things tend to happen in bunches.”

  It is Henry Alt, who also works at City Hall.

  “I always ride the bus to work,” Helen replies. “Better for the planet, saves wear and tear on my car.”

  “Really?” Henry Alt says. “I guess. Although you know what they say—something there is that doesn’t like a bus.”

  He doesn’t smile but grins at her. He is likely forty-five and the hair at the front of his head is scarce, but the women at the Hall think of him as handsome. Helen has never participated in the speculation as to why he lives alone. The consensus is that he drinks too much.

  His eyes patiently roam her face, which embarrasses her. She studies her lap and thinks about the software, the mistakes she made the day before. She needs a new computer, one that can run the program as quickly as she can type, but she dreads learning the quirks of a new machine.

  “Does the bus go left on Olive?” Henry Alt asks her.

  Helen nods.

  “You’ve seen him then?” He leans in closer. His shirt is made of yellow silk, the shade of old leaves. “The fellow who works that corner?”

  Fellow, she thinks. Who says fellow anymore?

  “I’m not sure,” she says. “Who do you mean?”

  “I always drive by—look at that!” He aims a finger out the window.

  A snowman stands on the steps to the library, a gold crown on his head, something peculiar for a nose, an open book jabbed into his frozen abdomen as if he’s reading. Charcoal briquettes serve as eyes, but one has fallen out. Henry Alt laughs heartily. The snowman’s nose, Helen sees, is the toe of an old shoe. Either the shoe has been cut in half, or the remainder of it is packed inside the snowy head.

  “My god, when I was a boy,” Henry Alt says, shaking his head happily, “how I loved snow. Snowmen, snow angels, sledding, sliding, rolling down that hill in Penny Park, you know the one?”

  “No,” Helen says. “I didn’t grow up here.”

  “Neither did I,” he says. “Upstate New York. You ever been there?”

  “No,” she says again.

  He is handsome, she decides. There had been a meeting last fall when he sat beside her. He made a joke about the mayor and everyone laughed. His breath had smelled of wine, but it was right after lunch. People often have wine with lunch. He wears a suit every day, and a laundered shirt. He has an array of ties. Evidently he has income from sources besides the city. Or he has family money. She cannot recall the kind of car he drives.

  “I spent a few winters here as a boy,” he says. “I guess that’s why I live here now, those winters. Little islands of happiness.”

  “Out,” Outis calls.

  They’re stopped at the intersection of Laurel and Sacker. The bus takes in a few additional people. Henry Alt seems to be musing over his youth, his lips pursed in memory. He has been passed over for promotion, Helen knows. One of the men in his office is ambitious and clever, and has skipped ahead of Henry Alt, who seems naive about such things. His tie today is made of alternating diamonds of black and gold. It, too, is made of silk. She doubts that he needs the job at City Hall. She considers telling him that it is her birthday. What would such a man do with this information? He would feel obliged to do something, she thinks. Take her to lunch, perhaps. Or, at a minimum, burst into song.

  The rear tire of the bus rides up over the curb as they make the turn. Henry Alt’s eyes widen comically, and he lifts himself from the seat to examine the street corner.

  “Hope we didn’t flatten any feet.”

  “The bus always does that,” Helen tells him.

  Does he really need to be told? It has to be obvious that nothing so large can change directions easily. Something has fallen against her shoes—his briefcase. She gives it a kick to push it back beneath the seat.

  “It’s coming up,” Henry says. “You must have noticed the guy on the corner. He showed up a few weeks ago, with one of those signs. Vietnam Veteran. Stranded. That was all. Then he modified it: Vietnam Veteran. Need Ticket Home. God Bless You.” Henry Alt laughs once more. “Do you remember when suddenly every homeless guy had a sign saying Will Work for Food? I always wondered how such a thing could sweep the nation. Do they have an underground network? ‘Hey, guys, put the words God and Home in your sign and you’ll get more money. Pass it on.’ That sort of thing?” The wrinkles by his eyes are deep. He continues smiling as he speaks. “So last week, I’m at that corner and the guy now has a dog.” He says dog as if the word is inherently funny. “And the following day, he has a bowl with the dog’s name on it: Sarah. Can you imagine? A dog named Sarah.” Sarah has become an even funnier word than dog. “Now his sign say
s Spare Change for Dog Food Appreciated.”

  Helen nods and smiles at appropriate moments. She is perfectly competent at social interaction. The last time she and her mother spoke, her mother had said, “Take a husband. Buy a house. Become a slave to your mortgage. Let the children climb all over you.”

  Helen had laughed into the phone. “You make it sound awful.”

  “Make mistakes,” her mother insisted. “Go ahead. Live.”

  It had made Helen think of her father and the mistake her mother had made.

  Henry Alt is still talking. The neighborhood where he boarded the bus is full of old and dignified homes. She imagines his house, can see him walking about in a grand place, shifting from window to window, a hearth fire providing light, wineglass in his hand, wine dark curtains framing him. He touches the curtains and then waves to someone across the street. Helen’s imagination glides across the pavement, where she finds herself, ensconced in her storage shed and waving back.

  “What have we got here?” Henry Alt asks. The bus has come to a stop in traffic. He lifts himself again and stares through the windshield. “No accident,” he says. “Just roadwork. There are those cones all around a manhole. What a job that must be.”

  Helen rises in her seat to look. Gloved hands lift a great coin from the street and reveal the round cavity beneath.

  “Can you picture it?” Henry Alt asks her. “Spending your days down there? Living under the city?”

  We all live under the weather, she thinks.

  “Just what kind of network is there beneath us?” he asks. “Sewers and power lines, sure. Catacombs, do you think? Not likely, but there could be. An underground universe.”

  Why is this man so happy and handsome, but also frivolous and without ambition? Helen wonders but has no answer. He’s attractive, and yet he is alone. He’s intelligent, and yet he has a dead-end career. He clearly has money, but here he is riding the city bus with Helen to the same place of employment. Henry Alt annoys her. She thinks again of the software program. She entered the wrong information first for several days, misunderstanding the error messages. In some cases, her entry told the computer that she was recording birth certificates, when she had been attempting to record deeds of sale, marriages, deaths. She has to recall the mistakes, delete them, and begin over. The prospect of it tires her, although it is really no different from entering them in the first place, no more difficult or complicated. She will be working eight hours today filing one thing or another. Why should the prospect of redoing these files be more fatiguing than entering new records? A better computer would make her work go faster, but, following this reasoning, she understands it will make it no easier. She will be there eight hours a day, either way. There will never be an end of things to record and file.

  There is, however, no record of her secret life. If she fails to imagine it, it disappears. Thinking this pleases her. Her world is hers alone.

  The bus staggers forward, and Henry Alt’s briefcase slides against her feet once more. When she and the boy ran off, they did not even pack a suitcase. Failed to think of clothing. The boy could have avoided doing time if he had agreed to stay away from her. A romantic, stupid child. She had hardly known him, really, and cannot say what has become of him. She never saw him after the motel, never spoke with him, although she heard things from time to time—the news of his release from prison, the report of a broken rib following a fight in a bar. But for years now, nothing. No word. As far as she knows, he never tried to reach her after he got out. A condition of his parole, no doubt.

  She had not loved him, but she had loved the flight. All vehicles for human transportation are divine in the world she creates. Nothing unmoving is immortal. The weatherman alone mediates between the mortals and the gods, and only Helen is witness to it all. The people around her look at the same world, but they don’t see what she sees.

  She reaches down for the offending briefcase, a tan box, pliant to the touch, as if it were covered with skin. She passes it over the seat to Henry Alt. What would he say if she explained to him that to endure her life she has to imagine this bus as a minor deity? Would he think her deranged?

  The truth, she believes, is the opposite. Her secret life permits her to hold tight to her sanity.

  Henry Alt thanks her for the briefcase. “I’m lucky it didn’t scoot all the way to the back of the bus,” he says, tapping its leather hide. “I would’ve hopped off and not realized I’d forgotten it until lunchtime.” He laughs at himself, and then lowers his voice. “Not one paper in here. Sack lunch and a bottle of vino for my secretary. I owe her. A bet.”

  Helen understands she is supposed to ask about the bet, but she declines to do it. Her breath on the window is turning to frost. Traffic has let up, but there are still two more turns and another three stops before they reach the Hall. She is eager to be through with this trip, and beginning to be angry with the weatherman for the cold. A warming trend, he had said. She feels foolish in shirtsleeves and hopes Henry Alt’s car is already at a garage being repaired. What is the point of such a man? What good is his handsome face? What’s the advantage of a big house if he lives alone? What’s the value of his money if he works at a job no better than hers?

  “It’s easier to watch my weight if I make my own lunch,” he says, patting the briefcase again. He is almost as thin as Helen. “I’m lucky—” The bus stops and he leaps from the seat, the briefcase clattering to the floor as he trots up the aisle. “Here we are,” he calls out.

  They are not at their stop. She thinks to tell him, but he has already run to the front of the bus. They are not at any stop but waiting at a traffic light. Henry Alt says something to Outis, who shakes his squat head. Henry Alt continues speaking, gesturing with his arms, the coat spreading wide as if the man within it were expanding. He must know the enchanted words, Helen thinks as the mechanical doors open.

  Henry Alt hops down the stairs and sprints around the bus. She follows the top of his head as he runs to the concrete island. She shifts in her seat, rising to track him. “Hey,” he yells, loudly enough for her to hear. For an instant, she thinks he is calling to her. “I haven’t forgotten you,” he says.

  Sitting on the island is a bearded man with a dog. The dog bowl reads Sarah. The cardboard sign says:

  Veteran and Family

  Stuck Here

  Can’t Get Home

  God Bless

  The transparent manipulation of Family for a man and a dog insults Helen. Static invades the air, as if the window providing her view were a television losing its signal. It’s snowing, she realizes. The man’s face has about it the roughness of hard living and the swollen scarlet features of a drunk. He wears a woolen hat with an incongruous ball of thread at the top. Henry Alt hands him a few bills. They exchange words, a shake of hands, then Henry strides away into the street. The red-faced man examines the cash. Helen sees then that a woman is with him. She had been invisible. It occurs to Helen that this is all it takes—add one person and you become a family.

  A cold draft from the open door initiates the trembling. She will freeze today without a coat. The weatherman has betrayed her. The woman on the traffic island lifts her arm high above her head as she calls out to Henry Alt. Helen sees that she is wearing one of her mother’s dresses. Helen gave them to Goodwill, and now this woman begging at an intersection is wearing one. A tattered, quilted coat covers the top of it, but the pattern on the dress is clear and familiar. Helen cannot hear the woman’s words but watches her dark hair as it is lifted by the wind of a passing vehicle. Her mother’s hair was not quite so dark. The man joins her. Helen imagines that this man is her father. He is about the right age, the right height. He puts his arm around the woman’s waist, and it seems to Helen that the twelve years she spent recording the events of other people’s lives did not really happen. The memory of that time is like the memory of a movie: she witnessed it, but it did not happen to her.

  Henry Alt leaps up the steps onto the bus, thanking
the driver, who nods and yanks the shiny handle to shut the doors. On the floor, by Helen’s feet, wine bleeds darkly from the fallen briefcase, discoloring the leather and sweetening the air. The leviathan lurches and then gently rocks as it resumes its movement forward. Helen feels the pitch inside her, startled at the motion, coming after such a long stall. Henry Alt spreads his feet to steady himself in the aisle. The stained briefcase slides beneath her seat and disappears, leaving a dusky, elliptical trail.

  Henry Alt is the hero, Helen thinks. He was drawn to this city to be near her. He has kept at his meaningless job for years with the vague faith that his future will announce itself. She is that future. She can see the work of gods in their union. As Henry Alt comes down the aisle, she understands the weatherman’s lie about the cold. It was all done for her. The gods work in mysterious ways.

  Henry Alt walks carefully, his hands lighting on the metal rails that top the seats, one and then another. He removes his coat as he approaches. He is going to present it to her. The offering bears epaulets of fresh fallen snow.

  It’s my birthday, she thinks. The words bloom on her tongue.

  GUESTS

  Bobby Bell’s fingers numbered four to a hand. His thumb and pointer were identical to God’s, but the others were just fleshy stubs, stunted and fused, and only two, on each slender paw. He was a dumb kid, besides, if progress in school is a fair measure. He sized me up my first week in town, came by my locker to demand a fight, the fall of 1967.

  We’d moved to New Mexico from Illinois because my father was sick. How the change was supposed to help, I didn’t know. When I asked, my father removed his glasses as if the problem were with the black-rimmed lenses. His head tipped slightly on its thin scaffold of bone. I felt a corresponding tilt in my senses.

  “I’m host to a disease,” he said. A smile flickered across his lips.

  I began to tremble.