“Everybody’s got to eat, right, Ray? Am I right?”
Raymond didn’t have an opinion. He wanted to go get another bottle before the stores closed, but his money was gone.
“I don’t know,” the woman said doubtfully.
But Sky roused them, and a moment later they were all three stumbling through the sand to the sidewalk and along the sidewalk to the boulevard, Pal leading the way with his tail thrust up like a banner. It was unnaturally quiet, everything held fast in the grip of the fog. Cars drifted silently by as if towed on a wire, one pulled along after the other, their headlights barely visible. There was a faint music playing somewhere, saxophone and drums, and it came to them in snatches as they walked in the deep shadow of a bank of condos thrown up for the convenience of the tourists. Raymond didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going, and he didn’t care, because Sky was there and Sky was in command. His feet hit the pavement and he tried to keep from lurching into the shrubs that bristled along the high stucco walls of the condos. At one point the woman bumped up against him and he put his arm out to steady her, and in that moment of casual intimacy, he mumbled something along the lines of “You know, I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Her name’s Knitsy,” Sky said over his shoulder. “Because her fingers are always knitting in the air—isn’t that right, Knitsy? I mean, knitting nothing, right?”
Her voice was breathy and shallow, with a sharp rural twang to it. “Sure,” she said, “that’s right.”
“And what’s that rhyme with—ditzy, right?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Raymond wanted to ask her about that, make a joke, but it would have been a cruel joke, and so he kept it to himself. Knitsy. Let her knit, and let the guy with the broken glasses stare out at the world like an ambassador with a pince-nez and let Sky lord it over everybody. What difference did it make? The world was nothing but cruelty and stupidity anyway. And he himself? He was drunk, very drunk. Too drunk to keep walking and too drunk to lie down.
They were away from the beach now, trailing down the alley behind Giulio’s Pizza Kitchen and the One-Stop Travel Shop. Sky motioned for silence, and they hung back in the shadows, whispering—hide-and-seek, that’s what it was, hide-and-seek—while Pal trotted across the pavement to reconnoiter the Dumpster. Reeling, watching the spots swell and explode before his eyes, Raymond felt Knitsy’s cold rough hand snake out and take hold of his own. His heart was thrumming. The fog sifted through the alley, etherized and unreal. Lit by the dull yellow glow of the streetlight on the corner, the dog might have been onstage somewhere, on TV, in a video, going through the repertoire of his tricks, and they watched as he sniffed and squirmed, prancing back and forth, till he finally went up on his hind legs and began to paw at the belly of the Dumpster. And then Sky was there, lifting the metal lid and retrieving the two large pies, still snug in their boxes, one decorated with pepperoni, the other with pineapple and ham.
—
In the morning—the morning, that was the hurtful time—Raymond woke to a shifting light, the peeling tan upthrust trunks of a grove of eucalyptus, and the sky revealed in a frame of leaves. He was on his back, something underneath him—a plastic tarp—and a blanket, heavy with dew, thrown over the cage of his chest. Beside him, snoring lightly and twitching in her sleep, was a woman with dirty fanned-out blondish hair and the deep indigo tattoo of a scorpion crawling up her neck. But that was no surprise—nothing was a surprise, unless it was the sidewalk, and this wasn’t the sidewalk. This was—he lifted his head to take in the half-collapsed teepee fashioned of blue tarps backed up against a chain-link fence, the scrub at his feet, the trash scattered over the leaf litter and the pregnant rise of the mound giving onto the railroad tracks—this was the woods. He saw Pal then, Pal poking his whiskered head out of the teepee to give him an unfathomable look, and beyond Pal, Sky’s red Mongoose mountain bike, for which—and it was all coming back to him now—Sky had paid nearly a third of his monthly SSI disability check. So this was Knitsy, then, and that was Sky inside the collapsing teepee. Or wigwam. Call it a wigwam. Better sound to it.
His head slipped back to the tarp. He tried to close his eyes, to fight down the stirring in his lower abdomen that was like the first stab of stomach distress—what his mother used to call the runs—but the thirst wouldn’t let him. It was there again, powerful, imperious, parching him all the way from his throat up into the recesses of his skull. I’ve got to get out of here, he was thinking, got to get up and out of here, find money, find work, a toilet, a tap, four walls to hide myself in. But he couldn’t move. Not yet.
That first night, the night she locked the door on him, they’d been drinking bourbon with beer chasers, and all his muscles were sapped—or his bones, his bones seemed to have melted away so that all he wanted to do was seek the lowest point, like water—and the best he could do was hammer on the door and shout the sort of incoherent things you shout at times like that until the police came and she told them she paid the rent around here and she didn’t know him anymore and didn’t want to. He wound up sleeping in the back of the building, under the oleanders against the fence, which made his face and hands break out in shining welts that were like fresh burns. He was planning on using his key after she left for work, but she didn’t leave for work, just sat there in the window drinking bourbon and waiting for the locksmith. That night he pounded on the door again, but he melted away when he saw the police cruiser coming up the street, and after that, he gave it up. First month, last month, security: where was he going to get that? He tried calling his brother collect in Tampa but his brother wouldn’t take the call. The bars were open though, and the corner stores with the Coors signs flashing in the windows. He got loaded, got hammered, wound up on the sidewalk. Now he was here.
He dozed. Came to. Dozed. And then, out of some beaten fog of a dream, he heard footsteps crunching gravel, a yip from Pal, and a voice—Sky’s voice—raised in song: “Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane.”
Knitsy stirred, and they both came up simultaneously into the bewilderment of the day. Her hair was bunched on one side, her dress torn at the collar to reveal a stained thermal T-shirt beneath it. A warm, brewing odor rose from her. She looked at Raymond and her eyes retreated into her head.
Sky was standing over them now, a silver twelve-pack of beer in each hand. “Hey, you two lovebirds, Christmas came early this year,” he said, handing a can first to Raymond, then Knitsy. The can was cold; the top peeled back with a hiss. Raymond didn’t want a beer—he wanted to clean up his act, go back to Dana and beg her to let him in, if only for a shower and a shave and a change of clothes so he could go back to his boss—his ex-boss, the smug, fat, self-satisfied son of a bitch who’d canned him because he had a couple of drinks and came back late from lunch once or twice—and grovel at his feet, at anybody’s feet, because he was out of money and out of luck and this was no way to live. But he took that beer and he thanked Sky for it, and for the next one after that, and before long the sun got caught in the trees and every single thing, every little detail, seemed just as fine as fine could be.
—
When the beer was gone and he could taste nothing in his throat but the rinsed-out metallic sourness of it, he pushed himself up and stood unsteadily in the high weeds. Judging from the sun, it must have been past noon, not that it mattered, because Dana didn’t get home from work till five and if he went over there and tried the door or the windows or even sat out back in the lawn chair, the old lady next door would have the cops on him in a heartbeat. She was his enemy, in collusion with Dana, and the two of them were out to destroy him, he saw that much now. And what had he done to deserve it? He’d got drunk a couple times, that was all, and when Dana came needling at him, he’d defended himself—with his hands, not his fists, his hands—and she’d gone running next door to Mrs. Ruiz and Mrs. Ruiz had called the cops for
her. So he couldn’t go there, not till Dana came home, and even then it was a stretch to think she’d open the door to him, but what choice did he have?
There was a smell of menthol on the air, and he couldn’t place it at first, until he looked down and saw the litter of eucalyptus buds scattered underfoot, every one a perfectly formed little nugget awaiting a layer of dirt and a little rain. They were beautiful in their way, all these silver nuggets spread out before him like spare change, and he fumbled open his fly and gave them a little dose of salts and urea to help them along, a real altruist, a nature boy all the way. Was he laughing? Yes, sure he was, and why not? Nature boy. “There was a boy, a very strange and something boy,” he sang, and then he was singing “Here Comes Santa Claus,” because Sky had put it in his head and he couldn’t get it out.
Beyond the railroad tracks was the freeway, and he could hear the continuous rush of tires like white noise in the background of the film that was his life, a confused film begun somewhere in the middle with a close-up of his dangling empty hands and pulling back for a shot of Knitsy passed out on the tarp, her head thrown back and her mouth hanging open so you could see that at least at some point in her life she’d been to the dentist. Pal wasn’t in the frame. Or Sky either. Half an hour ago he’d slipped a couple of beers in his pockets, whistled for the dog, and headed up the tracks in the direction of the pier. Raymond looked off down the tracks a long moment, looked to Knitsy, sprawled there in the weeds as if she’d been flung off the back of the train as it roared by—Lovebirds? What in Christ’s name had Sky meant by that?—then started up the slope to where the rails burned in the light.
He wasn’t a bum and he wasn’t a drunk, not the way these others were, and he kept telling himself that as he made his way along the tracks, lit up on Sky’s beer under the noonday sun that was peeling the skin off the tip of his nose. He’d always had a place to stay, always fended for himself, and that was the way it was going to be this time too. All it was was a binge, and the binge was over—it was over now—even if he didn’t want it to be. He was out of money, and that was that. He was going to walk into town, find the unemployment office, and put in an application, and then he was going to see if he could patch things up with Dana, at least until he could collect his first check and find himself a room someplace—and no sense kidding himself, Dana was nothing but a pain in the ass, dragging him down with her bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, and he was through with her. Finally and absolutely. He didn’t even like bourbon. Please. Give him vodka any day.
The tracks swept around a bend ahead and followed a trestle over the boulevard that ran along the beach, and he was thinking he didn’t want to risk the trestle—you were always reading about somebody getting hit by a train out here, the last time a deaf-mute who couldn’t hear the whistle, and that was pathetic—when he saw a figure approaching him in the distance. It was Dougie—or Droogie—and he had something in his hand, a pole or a stick, that caught the sun in a metallic shimmer. When he got closer, Raymond saw that it was a length of pipe ripped out of one of the public restrooms in the park or lifted from a construction site, and Dougie kept swinging it out away from his body and clapping it back in again as if he were trying to tenderize the flesh of his leg. He stopped ten feet from Raymond, and Raymond stopped too. “You seen Knitsy? Because I’m going to kill the bitch.”
Raymond didn’t answer. The beer had made him slow.
“What are you, deaf, motherfucker? I said, you seen Knitsy?”
It took him a minute, staring into the slits of the man’s eyes as if he could find the answer there. He was conflicted. He was. But the pipe focused his attention. “I don’t know, I think she’s”—he gestured with a jerk of his head—“back there, you know, in the trees back there.”
The man took a step closer and swiped at the near rail with the pipe till it clanged and clanged again. “Son of a bitch. It’s Sky, then, right? She’s with Sky? Because I’m going to kill his ass too.”
Raymond didn’t have anything to say to this. He just shrugged and moved on, even as Dougie cursed at his back. “I won’t forget you either, you sorry son of a bitch. Payback time, I’m telling you, payback,” but Raymond just kept going, all the way down the tracks and across the trestle and into town. It was nothing to him. He was out of this. He was gone. Let them work it out among themselves, that’s what he figured.
—
He waited till six, when he was sure she’d be there, and walked up the familiar street with its kids and dogs and beat-up cars and the men home from work and sitting out on the porch with a beer to take in the lingering sun, another day down, a job well done and a beer well deserved. Nobody waved to him, nobody said a word or even looked at him twice, and you would have thought he’d never lived here, never paid rent or electric bills or brought back a distillery’s worth of bourbon in the plastic two-liter jug, night after night for a year and more. All right. Well, fuck them. He didn’t need them or anybody else, except maybe Dana and a little sympathy. A shower, a shave, a couple of bucks to get him back on his feet again, that was all, because he’d had enough of sleeping in the bushes like some vagrant.
The only problem was, Dana wasn’t home. He didn’t hear the buzz of the TV she switched on the minute she came in the door and kept going till she passed out in front of it at midnight, or the canned diarrhea of the easy-listening crap she played on the radio in the kitchen all the time. He knocked. Rang the buzzer. Leaned out away from the porch to cup his hands over the shifting mirror of the front window and peer inside. But by this time Mrs. Ruiz was out on her own porch, twenty feet away, giving him an uncompromising look out of her flat black old-lady’s eyes.
He thought of the Wildcat then—that’s where she’d be, sitting at the bar with one of her hopeless, titanic, frizzy-haired friends from work with their dried-blood fingernails and greasy lipstick, knocking back bourbon and water as if they were afraid Prohibition was going to start up again at the stroke of the hour. It would be a walk—two miles, at least, but he was used to walking since his last DUI, and he had nothing better to do. The afternoon had been an exercise in futility, because by the time he got to the head of the line at the unemployment office he realized he was wearing the pussy hat (no choice, what with the state of his hair) and that they’d probably laugh him out of the place, so he just turned around and walked out the door. He was hungry—he hadn’t put anything on his stomach since the pizza the night before—but he wouldn’t go to the soup kitchen or the mission or whatever it was. That was where the bums went, and he was no bum, not yet anyway. Once the effects of the beer wore off, he wanted a drink, but without money or an ATM card or a bank account to go with it, he just couldn’t see how he was going to get one. For a while there he’d lingered in the back of the liquor department at the grocery store, thinking to liberate something from the cooler, but they had television monitors mounted on the walls and a vigilant little smooth-skinned guy with a mustache and a tie who kept asking if he could help him find anything, and that was probably the low point of his day. Till now. Because now he just backed down off the porch, shot Mrs. Ruiz a look of burning hate, and started walking.
There was some coming and going at the Wildcat, people milling around the door in schools like fish, like barracuda—or no, like guppies, bloated and shining with all their trumped-up colors—but he peered in the window and didn’t see Dana there at the bar. In the off chance she was in the ladies’ or in the back room, he went in to have a look for himself. She wasn’t there. It was crowded, though, the speakers were putting out music and there was a pervasive rising odor of rum and sour mix that brought him back to happier times, like the week before last. He took the opportunity to duck into the men’s and wash some of the grit off his face and hands and smooth back the gray-flecked scrub of a beard that made him look about sixty years old, though he was only thirty-two—or no, thirty-three. Thirty-three, last birthday. He thought to reverse the hat, too, just for th
e sake of respectability, and then he stood at the bar awhile, hoping somebody would turn up and stand him a couple of drinks. Nobody did. Steve, the bartender, asked him if he wanted anything, and he asked Steve if he’d seen Dana. Yeah, she’d been in earlier. Did he want anything?
“Double vodka on the rocks.”
“You going to pay for it this time?”
“When did I never pay?”
There was a song on he hated. Somebody jostled him, gave him a look. Steve didn’t answer.
“Can I put it on Dana’s tab?”
“Dana doesn’t have a tab. It’s cash only, my friend.”
He got loud then, because he wanted that drink, and they knew him, didn’t they? What did they think he was, some kind of deadbeat or something? But when Steve came out from behind the bar he felt it all go out of him in a long hissing rush of air. “All right,” he said. “Okay, I hear you,” and then he was back out on the street.
His feet hurt. He was at the tail end of a week-long drunk and he felt sick and debilitated, his stomach clenched around a hard little ball of nothing, his head full of beating wings, the rasp of feathers, a hiss that was no sound at all. Dana was out there somewhere—it wasn’t that big a town, a grid of palmy streets configured around the tourist haven of the main drag, and a bar and T-shirt shop on every corner—and if he could only find her, go down on his knees to her, abase himself, beg and whine and lie and wheedle, she would relent, he knew she would. He was heading back up the street with the appealing idea of forcing a back window at the house, climbing in, making a sandwich and washing it down with bourbon and just crawling into bed and let come what will, when he spotted Dana’s car in the lot behind the movie theater.
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 51