Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  We climbed inside and I started up the motor. It was a reassuring sound. I turned to Jack: “What a joy to hear that engine turn over and feel that AC,” I said somewhat giddily.

  “Fucking A, brother. Fucking A.” He clapped his hands together. “We’re just lucky this baby didn’t get boosted.”

  “Or towed.”

  “Or towed.”

  Back at the Marriott, Joy brought my bathed and groomed mother to the lobby and we made our way over to the Courtyard Café. A typical corporate hotel breakfast spot: green carpeting, Naugahyde chairs, cheap wood tables, Styrofoam-paneled ceiling and large plate-glass windows letting in way more light than Jack or I cared for in our current condition. While Joy pushed my mom through the buffet, which she insisted on, Jack and I ordered from the a la carte menu, too hung over to deal with the congested line of predominantly corpulent Courtyard guests pigging out at the buffet in an apparent state of permanent insatiety.

  After we had ordered, Jack, unshaven, asked the teenaged waitress, “Can I get, like, a Bloody Mary from the bar or something?”

  “We don’t have a bar, sir,” she said.

  “Jesus, what kind of a hotel is this? No bar? Wow.”

  I leaned across the table and said to Jack, “We’ve got at least another bottle of Foxen Chardonnay in the cooler. Let’s just get through this breakfast.”

  Jack looked unappeased. “I need a drink, man.”

  “I know you do. So do I. But, let’s just ride it out and let my mom have her breakfast, okay?”

  “And do we really have to go see her brother Bud who she hasn’t seen in fifty years?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “It’s fucking hotter than a blast furnace here.”

  In my peripheral vision, Joy came rolling my mother back to the table. “Jack, I’m paying you good money on this trip, right? Money you need, right?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “You’ve been getting laid, you’ve been drinking wines way out of your price and palate range, and feasting like Lucullus. Let’s just slow down a little; we’ve got a long way to go yet.” Jack grew sullenly silent. “How’s your…?”

  “The bleeding’s stopped but it still hurts like shit where he stuck the needle.”

  “I’ll bet. He sunk that fucker in deep. Take a couple Vikes, it’ll take the edge off.”

  Jack uncapped his vial of painkillers and popped two. Joy pushed my mother into the empty space at the table where a chair had been removed, and lifted the tray of food my mother had selected from her lap. Jack looked like he was going to hurl when he got an eyeful of her spoils.

  “Jesus, Mom, are you going to eat all that?”

  She shrugged like a shy little girl. Maybe it was because she’d had parents who went through the Great Depression. Or the fact that my father was so parsimonious that she took any opportunity for gluttony at someone else’s expense, as if to spite him.

  She damn near ate it all: the waffle with butter and maple syrup, the Denver omelet, the two pieces of toast slathered with butter and strawberry jam, and the three greasy-looking pork links. Jack and I, our stomachs unsettled from all the wine, picked desultorily at our scrambled eggs. Joy daintily, and slowly, picked at a bowl of granola topped with fruit and a dollop of yogurt. Now and then I couldn’t avoid noticing that my mother was working the abscessed tooth with her tongue.

  “How’s the tooth feel this morning, Mom?”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Think you can make it to Portland? I’ve got connections up there.”

  “Oh, yes. No problema.”

  “Are you looking forward to seeing Bud?”

  Her eyes half-shut with tears and she nodded.

  We finished up breakfast, retrieved Snapper, and converged on the Rampvan, getting the AC fired up. I punched in Bud’s address on the GPS and let the monotone, English-accented feminine voice guide me to where he resided.

  My mother’s brother, whom she earlier admitted had fallen on hard times, lived in a three-story heap of weathered brick adjacent to the Fresno freight yards. The asphalt lot was weed-fissured and badly buckled in sections, having surrendered to erosion and lack of the necessary funds to repair it, and the white lines had long since faded to ghostly reminders of parking spaces. They didn’t need many because it looked like most of the residents of the Ponderosa Hotel were pensioners, lone men subsisting on meager fixed incomes in squalid shoebox-sized quarters, each with one window and one mattress and one hotplate to his name.

  We all clambered out of the Rampvan. It was hot out, the kind of hot that envelops you like an equatorial prostitute in an un-air-conditioned motel room. Nearby, an anaconda of a freight train, most of the flatcars loaded with felled and exfoliated trees, lay still in the intense sun.

  I got behind my mother, took the handles of her wheelchair and turned to Jack and Joy, “I’ll take her up.”

  “All right,” Jack said, sipping a Sierra Nevada he’d squirreled away in the cooler, massaging his hangover. Joy fingered her tin of marijuana, no doubt itching to light up. Snapper, tethered by his leash, was jumping up and down and barking, straining for a run.

  I rolled my mother over the bumpy asphalt toward the entrance. The Ponderosa must have been built in the early 1900s, when there were no ADA laws, and I had to turn her around and dolly-bump her up the short flight of concrete steps to the entrance.

  The dusky, mote-swirling lobby reeked of disinfectant. The threadbare wall-to-wall looked like it had absorbed its share of urine and vomit and God knows what else. A gray-haired desk man with a cadaverous face, fissured as the asphalt outside, sucked on a cigarette as we approached the tiny reception cubicle. A tarnished antique hand bell rested on the desk. Alerted by footsteps, I turned and watched an elderly man, stooped over, obviously drunk, stagger out the door and into the blinding sunshine like some kind of prehistoric bird with a maimed wing.

  “We don’t have any rooms to let,” the man said in a sinister growl, taking a hit on his cigarette and setting it in an ashtray where it smoldered.

  “We’re here to see Bud Kuchta. What room is he in?”

  “Bud? 311.”

  “Thank you.”

  I turned my mother away and pushed her down the ill-lit hall that looked like one of the rejected set designs from Barton Fink. Rejected because it was too depressing.

  My mother’s wheelchair barely fit in the creaky elevator, which I imagined being winched up by a pair of bald, tattooed men, it shuddered and shook so much in climbing just two floors.

  We came out into another dimly lit corridor with more threadbare carpeting and that same rank smell of industrial-strength disinfectant.

  We came to a halt at 311. I let my mother knock on the door. A cigarette-hoarse voice called out from behind the door, “It’s open.”

  I turned the burnished brass knob and pushed open the door, my outstretched arm reaching across my mother’s shoulder. We were welcomed–if that’s the right word!–by a small rectangular room scarcely more commodious than a prison cell. To the left lay a gray-and-white patterned mattress with no linens, just a filthy army blanket. To the right was what amounted to a tiny kitchen with a shelf fashioned out of a 1x6 board nailed crudely to the wall and lined with cans and cans of food. A hotplate rested atop a miniature refrigerator. Jaundiced sunlight streamed through yellowed and rent curtains illuminating a space petrified with dust, a room that hadn’t had a proper cleaning in years.

  Bud sat slouched at a wooden desk by a dirt-streaked window, staring out at the freight yard. He was a hollow shell of a man in his seventies with a pallid complexion, thinning gray hair and a fragilely emaciated body as if he didn’t get much nourishment, and certainly no exercise. An unfiltered cigarette burned between tremulous fingers. Next to an ashtray overflowing with butts, an uncapped pint of Popov vodka gleamed in the sunlight. I positioned my mother in the middle of the room, which placed her very close to her long-lost baby brother. I couldn’t imag
ine what must have been going through her stroke-addled brain.

  “Hi, Bud,” she said.

  Slowly, as if it hurt, Bud turned to face us. I wasn’t sure whether he was happy to have the company, or if seeing his sister after fifty years only reminded him what a squanderingly lousy mess he had made of his wretched life. Then, too, he was seeing his sister for the first time after half a century in a wheelchair, a victim of a stroke. The mutual sibling dereliction was both pathetic and heart-rending.

  Bud croaked in a barely audible voice, “Hi, Phyllis.”

  I pushed my mother a little closer. “This is my son, Miles.”

  “Hi Bud,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  He nodded without meeting my gaze or offering his hand to be shaken. He reeked of tragedy. If there was a scintilla of life spirit left in him it was buried so deep it would have taken an earthmover to excavate it.

  Uncomfortable at this moribund reunion, I backed away from the chair. “I’ll leave the two of you alone. Come back in an hour. We’ve got to get on the road, Mom.”

  I walked out of the Ponderosa Hotel as if Death himself, with scythe and monk’s cowl, were stalking me.

  I found Jack leaning against the Rampvan, amber bottle of ale clutched in hand, lit cigarette dangling from his lips, checking his messages. Joy had wandered off with Snapper toward the rail yard and its labyrinth of rusted tracks. Holding him by the leash, she stood silently, dwarfed by all the freight trains resting inanimately in the distance, awaiting their marching orders. The sun was starting to climb into the sky and the asphalt baked from its intensity.

  Jack clicked off his phone and looked up at me, the beer having cheered him up. “Mom meet Bud?”

  “Pretty grim in there,” I said, shaking my head. “Pretty grim.”

  Jack cast a backward glance at the dilapidated hotel. “Looks like I’ve got a shot at getting on this reality show,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, Rick left a message. Said they need an A.D. So, it’s not directing, but…”

  “That’s great,” I said. “When would you have to start?” I asked, worry creeping into my voice.

  “I don’t know, I have to call him. Don’t worry, Miles, I’ll make it to Sheboygan. I’m sure it doesn’t go until the fall.”

  The depressingly desolate freight yard and the brief encounter with Bud foundered me to a level of despair I hadn’t experienced since before the sale of the novel. I rummaged in my pocket for my cell, scrolled through my directory, stopped at Laura. I had saved a picture of her I had taken and now her youthful, smiling face with those luminous eyes was boring straight into the emptiness of my soul. I scrolled to her name in my contacts and tapped it. After five rings I got her voicemail.

  “Hi, LAU-ra. This is Miles. I just wanted to habla you and see if you got back to Bur-celona okay. I miss you. Call you again.”

  Jack, eavesdropping, remarked, “You really miss her, or you just keeping the fish on the hook?”

  “No. I miss her. I’ve never made it with a European before. I got to get out of this California rut. These aerobicized, surgically enhanced bleached blondes experimenting with polypsychopharmacology. Neurotic nut bags. Laura’s the real deal. Plus, she’s got this beautiful silky armpit hair and that turns me on.”

  Jack laughed. “So, are you going to move to Spain?”

  “I’m going to move somewhere. I need a whole change of venue, Jack,” I said morosely, the visit with Bud bumming me out and eliciting a rainbow of surging emotions around my current state and my uncertain future. “I’m sick of this monster I created. Drink. Fuck. Drink. Fuck. I need to get back to my true self,” I concluded, nodding affirmation of my newfound resolve. “Not that I’d even recognize it. But hey, depressing visits with broken-down uncles can have a salubrious effect on one.”

  “Salubrious?” Jack said. “We all need some salubriousness.”

  “Salubrity.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Joy rejoined us with a panting, happy Snapper. We waited a clock-ticking hour, confabulating desultorily, before I returned to the mausoleum of the Ponderosa Hotel to reclaim my mother.

  I re-entered Bud’s room to find the two of them awkwardly embracing, brother jackknifed at the waist like someone with scoliosis, sister extending her one good arm across his emaciated torso. Likely due to the fact that the pint of Popov was nearly empty, Bud seemed in a markedly more upbeat mood. Wrapping up his goodbyes with my mother, he lurched toward me like a human scarecrow and pulled me down into a bony hug. The stench of booze and the sour smell of someone who rarely showered discharged from his pores. It was the malodorousness of death. “Take good care of my sister,” he effused. “She’s a saint. A real saint.”

  “I will,” I said, a little confused at his transformation. Perhaps my mother was a saint?

  “Bye Bud,” she croaked through a shroud of tears. “Get on that train and come visit Alice and me.”

  “I will, Phyllis, soon’s you get settled in,” a florid-faced Bud said, waving goodbye, smiling through his eroded landscape of a face.

  In the elevator I said, “Your visit really cheered him up, huh?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He’s lived a hard life.”

  “How come I never met him?”

  “We never knew where he was most of the time. He was homeless. Rusty used to get so angry when he would call collect and then ask for a handout.”

  I flashed on a memory of my parents having gotten in an argument after a phone call that seemed to unnerve them. I remembered asking them what was wrong, and all my stoic, Czechoslovak mother’s having said was: “Your Uncle Bud needs help.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said now. “He used to call all the time.” Tears leached from her eyes. “I’m so glad he’s got a place to live.”

  I wheeled her out of the flophouse, backed her down the short flight of concrete steps and bumped her across the buckled asphalt parking lot back to the Rampvan. Family-reunion mission accomplished. As Joy took the reins I said to Jack, “Get thee to a winery!”

  “Amen, brother. Amen.”

  We loaded everybody up and took off, Jack at the helm. I admonished him to go light on the beers, that we had a ways to go to the Sonoma Valley, where we planned to stop for a late lunch and a little wine tasting–at “primo Pinot properties” I exulted to Jack–before getting at last to the end of this leg of the trip: picturesque seaside Mendocino.

  Freed from the depressing Ponderosa Hotel and the desolate freight yard, we were all happy to be back on Highway 99 and bearing north, putting the miles behind us. I continued to worry about my mother’s infected tooth and making it all the way to Wisconsin where she could get it properly taken care of before it exploded on her, but other than that an amicable atmosphere of calm pervaded the Rampvan.

  Half an hour out of Fresno, a green highway mileage sign read: “Merced 18 mi.”

  I turned and faced my mother and said excitedly. “Mom, we’re going through Merced.”

  “That’s where you were born,” she said.

  My father had been briefly stationed at Castle Air Force Base in Merced when we were young. My memories of the small town were fragmented into snippets of blurry, indistinct images because we’d moved away when I was three. The story, as told by my father, was that he was grounded and didn’t want to have anything more to do with the Air Force if he couldn’t fly. So, he took early retirement with no benefits, which always struck me as a little implausible. But after he died and I had moved my mother into the assisted-living facility I sifted through her personal belongings to see what was worth saving. In one of the many boxes they’d had in storage, I found a file. Inside it, I discovered yellowed pages typed by someone on a manual machine, presenting a radically different account of why my father had left the service. According to these documents typed up by some anonymous party, my father, drunk on his ass in the Officers’ Club, had cold-cocked a senior officer (a full colonel no less!) and put him in
the hospital with a broken nose. He narrowly averted a court-martial by agreeing to a dishonorable discharge. When my mother regained some of her sentience following her stroke, I questioned her about the information in these official documents. After some hemming and hawing, she grudgingly admitted it was all true. She’d no doubt been sworn to secrecy, so as not to besmirch the family name and vitiate the esteemed image the children erroneously held of their charismatic father.

  “You remember what street we lived on, Mom?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, her memory remarkably lucid when it came to long-ago events and places. “East Alexander. 727.” She pointed her right index finger to the ceiling to ward off tears. “I always remembered it because that’s my birthday.”

  “Do you want to stop and see the old place, Mom?”

  “Oh, yes. Please.”

  I turned to Jack, already scowling at the prospect of another spontaneous detour. “Half an hour, tops,” I said. “It’s where I was born.”

  “It’s cool,” he said, a second ale having sanded the ragged edges off his hangover.

  At the off-ramp for Merced we pulled into the first gas station. I punched 727 E. Alexander into the GPS. Jack returned from the convenience store with some Red Bulls–his preferred transition beverage–and Joy wheeled my mother out of the bathroom and back into the Rampvan, her reddened eyes indicative of her being–and justifiably so!–stoned out of her coconut. Jack fitted the ramp back into the undercarriage and settled into the passenger seat, popped open a Red Bull and sucked on it thirstily.

  “Where’s Snapper?” my mother asked, rapidly growing alarmed.

  “Where’s the little guy, Joy?” I said.

  “He was in here.”

  “He’s not in here!” my mother shrieked. “Oh, no!”

  I leapt out and frantically looked around. Across the street I spotted Snapper lifting his leg against a car in front of a Denny’s. I sprinted across the busy street and called out his name. Ears pricking up at the familiar timbre of my voice, he came running, leash trailing behind. I grabbed it and scolded him like my mother would: “Snapper. Don’t go running off like that. Bad dog.” I gave him a little rap on the head and he whimpered. Christ, I thought, now I’ve anthropomorphized him!