Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  “Sure man, I’m feeling generous.”

  “I just don’t get it. You don’t need this truck.”

  “My parents don’t want me to take my car when I go skiing,” the kid says, nodding at a black convertible in the five-car garage.

  Paul bites down hard on his lower lip, tastes salt, chews off a flap of dry skin, and agrees to the sale. They drive to the DMV and take care of the paperwork. The kid turns over a roll of bills, which Paul stuffs in the pocket of his jeans.

  “You think maybe I could have a lift?” Paul asks.

  “Sure, I’ll give you a lift. See what a nice guy I am?” the kid smirks, patting Paul on the back as if he were a child.

  WITHOUT THE TRUCK, PAUL HOISTS his backpack onto his shoulders, covers himself in a green camouflaged hunting poncho, and spends each day walking in the rain, checking the construction sites and always getting the same answer: No work here. One of the guys he has long considered a friend asks him not to come around again, telling him the answer will not change; he isn’t the only one looking for work and there are lots of younger and hungrier guys than Paul who need a hand. “Illegal ones, is what you mean. Guys who work for nothing,” Paul says.

  “Listen, Paul,” his friend says, “you did it too. I know you did. All us guys do it, and these days it’s the only way I can make ends meet. You’ve played your cards, man. This ain’t a world of second chances anymore. I’m sorry, buddy. I feel for you. It could be me next year. Don’t think I don’t know that. Are you hungry?”

  “I eat,” Paul said, and turned away, trudging into a wall of rain.

  He has plenty of food in the bunker, enough to last three months, six if he cuts the rations in half and supplements them with what he can hunt, glean, or gather. Foraging can be learned and he already knows how to kill. He has nothing left to sell except his labor and he cannot ask his mother for help; she has little that is hers to give, nothing that is valuable apart from her own labor, and his father, who believes fanatically in self-reliance, will never do anything for him. This is, Paul knows, not a position of cruelty, but one of principle: self-reliance is his father’s church and most profound conviction. “I love you, Paul,” his father would say, “but a man must stand by the force of his own power. I would be doing you a disservice if I bailed you out.”

  Everywhere Paul walks he is careful to look where he is going, afraid of tripping and falling and breaking a bone. Being a pedestrian in a world designed for cars makes him realize how fragile he is. The newer shopping developments have sidewalks only in front of or around the stores, isolated islands in oceans of parking lot. He is conscious of people staring at him, and wonders if he has allowed some betraying signs of desperation or delinquency to surface, or if it is simply because the world expects a man like him not to be walking, his proper place behind the wheel of a truck. The body he inhabits, the body that confines him and determines how the world perceives him, a body he has worked hard to fashion into a titan’s, has to learn all over again how to walk in a world that has always been hostile to man, which has become ever more hostile through man’s own dominion over the world.

  Humanity, Paul hears his wife saying, Humanity instead of Man. You’re such a Neanderthal.

  As he walks, thinking about his family, he finds himself looking at women who resemble Amanda or staring at boys and even girls who remind him of Carson and Ajax. One day he catches himself looking at a mother and her two children. The woman notices Paul staring and pulls the girls closer to her, away from this man, tall and muscular, tented in waterproof green nylon, who stares at small children.

  He phones the numbers that no longer belong to his wife or her parents. New people answer in each case.

  “Amanda baby?”

  “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “I know she’s there. Let me talk to her. I want to talk to my boys.”

  “Sir, you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Don’t hang up the phone, please, I just want to talk to my wife. Tell her it’s okay, it’s Paul. I just need to talk to her.”

  “I’m hanging up now, sir.”

  “If you hang up I swear to God I’ll come and get you. I’m going to find you.”

  The woman on the other end hangs up. Paul looks at his reflection in the windows of a fast food restaurant, the jeans hanging loose on his legs, hood over his head, a hump of backpack growing beneath his poncho, pressing him into a stoop. He will find no one. He has too little money to travel, and even if he spent the last of his cash getting to Florida he would have nothing left to undertake the search that would be necessary to find his family. There is no choice but to stay here in the city he knows, fighting to reclaim the house that he is certain would bring his wife and sons back to him.

  Although it rains most days he avoids malls with their private security guards who will not tolerate a man sitting for hours on a bench. Last Thursday, however, it rained so hard he had no other choice and ventured inside a mall where he walked back and forth for eight hours, asking at every shop if they had any work. They all told him no, but gave him application forms to complete, which they promised to keep on file in case any opening arose. Every form asked about previous retail experience. In one case he had to fill out a personality test with questions so baffling he had no idea which of the multiple choice answers could possibly be correct:

  A co-worker who is struggling with debt confides in you about his/her predicament. Later in the week you see the same co-worker taking money out of the cash register and putting it in his/her pocket. You decide to:

  a) tell your manager

  b) confront your co-worker

  c) offer to lend your co-worker money

  d) call the police

  e) secretly replace the money your co-worker stole from the cash register

  f) ask your co-worker to cut you in on the theft.

  An obese customer asks you if a dress she tries on makes her look fat. The dress is a size too small for her, and you do think she looks fat in it. You decide to:

  a) tell the woman she looks fat

  b) suggest she should try a different size

  c) tell her she looks great and offer to ring up the dress

  d) tell her about an effective weight-loss program

  e) suggest she should go on a diet

  f) ask a co-worker to handle the customer for you.

  In that case he chose answers at random, assuming he would fail whatever test of character they wanted him to pass. Completing the application forms was not without its pleasures. He pictured himself working in many different kinds of stores, became acquainted with the qualities of various ballpoint pens, developed a fondness for black ink over blue, appreciated forms printed on heavy paper that took the ink with a voluptuous embrace rather than thin paper that seemed to resist the pen only to break apart when he applied too much pressure. After exhausting the business of filling out forms he walked the length of the mall again, upper and lower levels, passing empty windows with TO LET signs, looking at all the products in the remaining stores, and the few people who were buying. Late in the afternoon a security guard approached him.

  “Hey buddy,” the guard said in a loud voice. The man was older, a head shorter than Paul and a hundred pounds lighter, but he had a baton, a taser in his belt, and an embroidered badge on his chest with the letters EKK. “I’ve noticed you’re doing a lot of walking.”

  “Is there a rule against walking?”

  “I kind of wondered if you might be casing the joint.”

  “I’m looking for work.”

  “Have you found any?” the guard asked.

  “No. I haven’t found any.”

  “You got any shopping to do?”

  “No. I don’t have any shopping to do.”

  “You see that NO LOITERING sign?” the man said, pointing at a placard outlining the m
all’s rules and regulations. Paul nodded. “Then I think it’s time for you to go,” the guard said. “Let me show you out.” The little man walked him to the nearest exit and stood at the doors, watching as Paul took the poncho from his backpack, slipped it over his head, and navigated across the wet parking lot to the street. Once on the city sidewalk he turned to the guard and waved through the torrential rain; for an instant the guard began to raise his hand but then lowered it again, shook his head, and retreated into the darkness of the mall. One of the anchor stores had shut down two years earlier and was still standing abandoned, its exterior walls covered with vines, weeds and small trees growing out of its roof, the windows and doors boarded up, clattering in the wind.

  After that encounter Paul has avoided shopping centers. Yesterday he went to a park and spent a dry afternoon sitting on a bench, watching squirrels prepare for winter, losing track of time until night began to fall. A gray sedan drove past, parked nearby, and an older man in a business suit got out and walked toward him. The man circled the park on foot, came back, and sat down on the bench next to Paul.

  “So, how much?” the man asked.

  “How much of what?” Paul said.

  “Come on, kid. Don’t be coy.”

  “I’m not a kid. How much what?”

  “You know how much what. So how much?”

  “Listen, man, I don’t have any drugs. Buzz off.”

  “I’m not looking for drugs, kid,” the man said, putting a hand on Paul’s knee. “You know what I’m looking for.”

  Paul was so stunned he began to hyperventilate. He stood and ran away from the man, out of the park, through residential streets, until he reached a busy thoroughfare and slowed down to catch his breath. When he stopped, slumping down in a bus shelter, he found himself wondering how much money he could make selling his body instead of his labor, and what precisely would be involved in such a transaction. Perhaps one day it would come to that.

  Another day he walked twenty-two miles round trip to see his mother. She had phoned his cell to ask how he was, where he was, and why she had not heard from him in weeks. His father had gone elk hunting and she invited Paul to come for lunch. He had to leave the bunker at eight in the morning to reach his parents’ house just before noon. It had been months since he last saw his mother, before the foreclosure auction, when she had offered to help him move his things into the apartment he claimed to have rented.

  “Are you working, Pablito?”

  “Don’t call me that, mama. I’m still trying to find a job.”

  “But you’re doing okay? You look like you need new boots. Where’s your truck?”

  “In the shop. I took the bus.”

  “Where’s that apartment you got, Pablo? I don’t even know where you live.”

  “It’s just a small place, out on Central, near the mall. If you want to know the truth, I’m embarrassed for you to see it. I’ve got leads, though. I’m getting things back together but right now I’m in the trough, mama. I promise you won’t ever see me this low again.”

  Looking at his mother was like staring into a funhouse mirror image of himself: shorter, rounder, feminine, much darker skinned, but otherwise the same. He was blond as a boy and then, as a teenager, his hair turned almost as panther-dark as his mother’s. People said he looked Italian or Greek and it was a misconception he had rarely felt moved to correct. They sat across from each other in the dining room, Paul’s legs extending under the table, his feet coming out the other side, enclosing his mother’s chair, almost encircling her. Glancing at himself in the gold-framed mirror behind her, he looked like a man trying to get out, who could not be safely contained, hardly a man at all, a jaguar god, his eyes glinting turquoise shards, each looking in their own direction, a double-headed snake. For an instant he studied his own eyes, too pale and luminous for the olive complexion around them. He saw them at last for what they were: the eyes of his father transposed onto a thinner, harder, more pointed version of his mother’s face, with a stronger nose and a ledge of brow. A person could jump from his forehead, jump and plummet to death down the whole length of his improbable body.

  “Take a breath,” Dolores said, “slow down, chiquito. Don’t you eat?”

  “I eat,” he said. “I’m on a special diet.”

  “You’re too thin. I’ll send home some food with you.”

  After lunch they stood drinking cocoa in the living room, gazing out at the office park across the street, where, until only a few years ago, there was a racetrack. Although a line of trees blocked their view of the track when they first moved in, it was always audible, the announcer calling races on the loudspeakers, and out of the racing season rock concerts so loud his mother’s collection of cow figurines would rattle in the china cabinet. When developers replaced the racetrack with an office park, they cleared all the trees.

  Dolores sighed, turning her back on the bright white haze of concrete and glass. Where there are now acres silvered with asphalt and cars, horses once grazed, right in the middle of the city. They moved to this house when Paul was in junior high and it was not long before he found his way into a group of neighborhood boys who stole the ornamental chrome valve stem caps from car wheels, kids whose fathers took them to gun safety lessons so the boys learned how to shoot before they were old enough to own a weapon, kids who went on hunting trips over long weekends and came back bragging of kills, sharing stories of skinning deer and shooting squirrels for sport, blasting robins and red-winged blackbirds because they could. Paul no longer remembers whether he pressured his dad to join in these activities or vice versa, but he and Ralph soon became part of the group. Trophies still hang in his parents’ living room. That day after lunch, Paul reached up to stroke the fur under the chin of the first buck he’d killed.

  “When you and your dad started hunting, you were a natural. But you didn’t really like it. I know you didn’t enjoy it.” His mother unlocked the china cabinet to adjust the position of a porcelain cow.

  “What the hell are you talking about, mama? Of course I enjoyed it. I loved those hunting trips.”

  “But it wasn’t your best subject. Your best subject was art. You take after me that way, not your dad.”

  “Hunting isn’t a subject.”

  His mother did not seem to hear what he said. “You come from a long, long line of artists and builders. You just didn’t know it. I never told you enough about all that.” As she picked up one of Paul’s carvings, a wooden cow he’d made for her from a piece of the cleared poplar wood, he knew what she was going to say, the way she would lapse into reveries of a great lineage, distant cloud people, ancient places, vast cities and temples, a legacy of building that was his greatest inheritance, the skill in your fingers, chiquito. When she put the cow in his hands he was surprised at the intricacy of his own carving, the way the staring glass eyes and wooden flanks looked real. “What kind of cow you say this is, Pablo?”

  “Greek Shorthorn.”

  “That’s right. Rare breed.”

  He used to make all kinds of fine little things for his mother. In the den are his duck decoys: mallard, canvasback, even a Canada goose, each so detailed it looks like it might turn to snap off a finger with its varnished wooden beak.

  Dolores returned the cow to the bottom shelf of the cabinet, closing the doors and locking them with the key she has always kept on a silver chain round her neck. “You shoulda been an artist I think,” she said. “You have so much talent.”

  “Can we stop talking about me?”

  She ignored him and from a drawer in her sideboard pulled out a folder of Paul’s childhood drawings. Most of the earliest ones were traced from magazines: fighter jets and soldiers in action, fantasy monsters and cyborgs. But as she continued to page through the sheets of paper, Paul noticed a shift in subject matter to precise drawings of houses. All the houses he drew as a boy were larger and more elegant
than any of the humble places they ever lived. “You were always drawing your dream house. You always said you were gonna build me a house all my own, you know, where I could live alone.”

  “Yeah, I know, mama. Maybe some day I will.”

  BY THE END OF EACH day’s vagabond walking, always eating the sandwiches he makes for himself and carries in a backpack, buying nothing if he can avoid it with the money he has left from the sale of the truck, he tramps back westward along Poplar Road, pausing at wet intersections, waiting for lights to change, risking his life even when the light is in his favor because drivers ignore signals, as he himself once ignored them, distracted by the radio or a call from his wife or racing in the urge simply to be back home.

  Half a block before Dolores Woods he steps into the forest, hidden within the shaw and picking his way through the brake, tensing his body into the coyote crouch that carries him back to his burrow.

  At night, in the bunker, he eats bowls of pasta and sits in silence, concentrating on the hum and heat of the lights above him until he switches them off and tries to sleep. In the darkness he is oppressed by the sounds of the house: water running through pipes, plugs pushing into sockets, music and telephone calls and shouting from one room to another, the television and dishwasher and washing machine and dryer, the air conditioners and dehumidifiers and hot water heaters and chest freezer, or the sounds of the woman at her bench in the basement workshop: the piercing screams and queer frequencies that pitch and roll, the juddering drill that shakes the foundations of the house, all those noises condensing, drawn into the pantry, through the hatch, exploding into his cell.

  Then, after the house finally goes silent, there are other sounds as well, rising up beneath the bunker, coming from deep below in the earth, scrambling, scuffling noises that flutter and dodge through the dense mixture of silt, sand, and clay, moving closer, drilling toward the bunker, and then turning, scrambling around and alongside the walls of Paul’s burrow, a horrible clawing, scuttling, snuffling noise, sharpened nails scratching against the lead lining. The first night it happened he thought he was imagining it, believing the next morning it was a dream, but when it happened again the next night, and has gone on happening every night thereafter, growing louder and louder each time, he knows it is real. Something ancient and angry is there, in the soil that surrounds him, clawing at the walls of his burrow, trying to get in.