Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  Saundra Dluzynski, whom no one any longer called Dlu, and who had married a man with none of Candler’s faults, a thoughtful and generous man who quit drinking during her pregnancy to share more completely in her experience, missed Candler most after dark, when the baby was asleep and her husband too was down, after she had knocked back a couple of Tom and Jerrys and come round once more to recollect the same night that haunted Candler, the night of the lecture and the ghostly appearance of their home, how they made love on the kitchen floor, how desire permitted her to fornicate on the linoleum, and (despite the extent to which it had shamed her) how she still felt that base longing to extricate herself from her nursing bra and suburban split-level and go back to that dark cottage with handsome Jimmy Candler and toss her bare body onto the kitchen linoleum, whose speckled pattern, she recalled, was designed to hide the dirt.

  If some people had misgivings about Candler, no one thought ill of him. If he was not particularly tidy, he was very clean, smelling typically of Ivory soap and scentless deodorant, the naive, endearing fragrances of certain young men. If he was soft in the belly, he was otherwise reasonably fit for man with a running start on his thirties, his hair a brown that was almost blond and neatly cut. He had the sort of attractiveness that a casting director might look for in extras, easy on the eyes and yet would distract no one from the A-list actors. But there was something about him that photographs failed to capture, how he raised his head from his work when Rainyday entered his office, how mischief showed in his eyes when he teased Kat, how his body softened with resignation and friendship when Billy loped toward him, how his eyes zeroed in on Mick sitting across from him as if to view the words as they exited his mouth. Such traits win trust and love in others. Such traits merit love. Candler was loved by the people who knew him well. And the others liked him, even Barnstone, who mostly avoided him, and Dlu, whose heart he had broken, and none of them—with one exception—could have guessed what he would wind up doing this evening, how he would behave in a manner that contradicted the person they thought him to be.

  The exception was Billy Atlas, who knew Candler best, and who understood, too, how circumstances could outweigh character. Billy’s whole life, as Billy himself apprehended it, was an example of this. He had a vague belief that the ability to do the right thing and the ability to do the wrong thing were the same ability, and it existed like a great body of water on which floated your personality, and you could never tell just what might seep through, or in which direction a tide might take you.

  Mick drove slowly through the milky darkness. The summer evening hovered beyond the windshield, bougainvillea blossoms waving in the automotive wind, and the grass in its evening clothes lingering greenly on the lawns. If this were a dream, he might know what the colors meant to tell him, how they seemed to hold true to the world he had once known, and yet how their dreamy disposition also captured this tumbledown way of living he had now.

  Without his meds, he might be flying down the residential lane—colors blending one into another. With his meds, he was five miles an hour, and every blade of grass was a reminder that he was not the boy-behind-the-wheel he’d been before the illness, and he wasn’t even the man he could be when his body wasn’t lethargic from the heavy winter garments the meds insisted he wear. He had acquired his driver’s license before the illness crouched in his chest, and he waited to renew it until he was having a good day. He wasn’t a very good driver, but he never had accidents. His 1992 Firebird was the orange of lava, black racing stripes on the hood, a spoiler on the back. He could not lay hands on the person he used to be. Not that he had amnesia. He knew everyone’s birthday and the theme songs to the TV programs he watched as a child. But what it was like to be a person who would hop into the front seat of a Firebird—he remembered hopping—he could not hope to guess. To recollect doing something but not recall being the person capable of doing it: how was that possible?

  Nonetheless, he believed he was getting better, and one morning he would step into the world as it had been before—bright, solid, and full of meaning—and he wouldn’t need to worry about meds or counselors or progressive treatment protocol or whether his father might drop in to force a conversation. He would stand up straight, and the world would once again part for him when he strode through it.

  Despite his speed, the Hole came into view. It was open twenty-four hours, 365 days a year. Hole coffee tasted burnt and rubbery, as if they added pulverized tires to stretch the grounds. The Hole was near the sheltered workshop, close enough to the freeway to hear the scorching sound of traffic. At this time of night, he was able to park directly in front of the Hole’s big window, which revealed a deep and well-lit stall in an old downtown building. Inside were three customers: a young couple cuddling in a booth and a single man who held a frosted doughnut to his nose as if it were a flower. The building was three stories high and made of brick. The second floor was a plasma donation center. A lot of people from the Center made some cash there, and Mick had given some of them lifts. He didn’t know what was on the building’s third floor. He thought people might live up there, smelling doughnuts and blood and listening to traffic.

  Mr. James Candler was nowhere in sight. Mick had been taught to relax himself whenever he believed he might have made a mistake. He dropped his hands from the steering wheel and took twelve deep breaths. Step two required him to consider possibilities.

  Was he supposed to have gone to the Center to meet Mr. James Candler after all?

  No, he recalled his mother saying Donut Hole and that it was near Alonso’s.

  Was there another place near Alonso’s?

  There wasn’t. He had not made a mistake. He had simply beaten Mr. James Candler to the building—despite driving very slowly. Perhaps that meant his counselor had to come all the way from his house. He lived somewhere in the county. Mick supposed he should feel guilty about making him drive all that way. He took twelve more deep breaths and the anxiety receded.

  Faith Hao, that was sort of funny.

  A car pulled in behind him, an old green Toyota. The woman who got out was short with a solid build. She carried a slip of paper. He climbed from the Firebird to meet her. Ms. Patricia Barnstone paused on the sidewalk to study him. “How are you this evening, Mr. Coury?”

  “I was at a party.”

  “I didn’t expect you to be driving. That’s quite a car, a beauty. It all cherried out?” She bent down to stare through the passenger window. “I dated a NASCAR driver way back when I first moved to Onyx Springs. He was always talking about making the cut, and what a tense life it was if you didn’t have the big backing. You follow racing at all?”

  Mick shook his head. “I got a ticket, though, when I was seventeen, for going forty miles over the speed limit. It was in the Lagunas, the freeway through the mountains, and it was a plane that caught me.” His girlfriend had been with him, her bare feet in his lap. They had been in high school together in Yuma, Arizona. He remembered the details perfectly, but he could not remember the experience of doing it. “I had to go to safe driving school.”

  “You were quite the hell-raiser.”

  He and his girlfriend had committed intercourse that day, after the ticket, on the way back through the mountains. They stopped in a tiny town with an even tinier mountain lake. They ate at a park on a picnic table, and then they lay together on the table, one beside the other. She said, “If we’re going to do it, I want to take off my dress.”

  “I have a note for you,” Ms. Patricia Barnstone said and handed him a sealed envelope. The note within it was handwritten.

  Mick,

  You have to take your meds. Do I need to tell you why? Your mother is freaking, and I have another engagement. Counselors have private lives, too, you know. We’ll talk in my office, regular time.

  Take your meds, doofus.

  James Candler

  The doofus made Mick smile, followed by a surge of an
ger that he had left Karly for nothing but this flimsy wing of paper. The anger quickly dissipated. He was not an angry person. He turned to Ms. Patricia Barnstone. She was dressed in drab pants and a man’s shirt. He felt the odd sensation that there ought to be a picnic table, pine trees. His girlfriend’s name was Peggy Stein. Her family had moved to Yuma from Miami, and when she was naked in the dark, lying on the table, a gold Star of David had dangled from a tiny chain around her neck and glimmered in the moonlight. That was a few weeks before it happened, before his illness skewed the world, before his family left Yuma and moved to the other side of the Lagunas for his rehabilitation. You’re like a Gatling gun, Peggy Stein said to him, meaning the sex. They were in the same American history class, and he knew what a Gatling gun was.

  “What party were you at?” Ms. Patricia Barnstone asked.

  “A friend from the workshop. We were going to watch a movie.”

  “I won’t keep you then. I was watching a movie myself.”

  “I remember driving this car fast,” Mick told her. Peggy Stein seemed to be there too, watching him, smiling slightly—something he could tell about her even though he couldn’t see her. “But I don’t remember being the person who drove this car fast.”

  “Like what? Watching a video of yourself?”

  He shook his head. “It’s like being the person in the video instead of yourself.”

  “You feel flat? Limited?”

  “Maybe,” he said, but he couldn’t make her understand him. “I know I’m the same person, but I’ve lost . . . something.”

  “Lots of people feel they’re not the person they used to be. Count me in the club. It’s a crap feeling.”

  “I feel I’ve lost . . . I’ve lost my atmosphere,” he said, nodding, happy to name it, despite the meds, despite having to leave the party. He remembered that night in the mountains with Peggy Stein, and the moment was lingering, staying here with him, letting him think like the boy he’d been when he was with her. Here was the proof, the best proof yet, that he was improving. Yuma wasn’t so far away. He had lived on one side of the mountains, and now he lived on the other. It should be easy to go back.

  Ms. Patricia Barnstone patted his shoulder. “I’m watching Key Largo at my place. If you’d rather come over there, you’re welcome to. I can start it fresh from the get-go. Bogie, Bacall, a hurricane. Hard to beat.”

  The invitation so surprised him that Peggy Stein, her moonlit body, and the golden star slipped away. “Thank you,” he said, “but my friends are waiting.”

  “No sweat.” She slapped his shoulder this time. “You ought to do exactly what you want to do.”

  On the way back to Alonso’s, Mick realized that Ms. Patricia Barnstone must have written the note. Mr. James Candler would be at home out in the county. He had dictated the message. He tried to imagine what Mr. James Candler would be doing at his home. Reading, maybe. A book with hard covers, thick and important. When he went to work the next day, people would say, Have you read that important book that everyone is talking about? And Mr. James Candler would nod solemnly. I finished it last night. I didn’t go talk to one of my clients to finish it. What might the book be about? It was an election year, but Mick couldn’t quite imagine Mr. James Candler reading a thick book about politics. The book was definitely thick. It might be about the important issues in every person’s life. How to do the right thing, for example. How to be good to the people who love you. How to love people yourself. How to take care of others. How to make decisions that are smart and that do not hurt people. Really, Mick thought, he ought to get this book himself.

  Rhine’s moped was in the space where Mick had parked earlier. He pulled in across the street. At the top of the exterior stairs, he stared through the window. They were watching Wayne’s World. Alonso, Rhine, and Karly sat on the carpet, Alonso with his hand down his pants, Rhine in his gaudy suit, one hand tugging covertly at a stray thread from Karly’s cut offs, and Karly, lovely Karly, sitting with her legs crossed and feet tucked beneath her legs. Indian style, it was called, to sit that way. Was it a racist way of sitting? Could there be mean-spirited postures? He would defend her right to sit that way, he thought, and was almost immediately aware that he had gone off on a tangent. People can sit any way they want. She shifted, her knees rising, her thin arms wrapping round her legs, one wrist held in the other hand.

  Oh, he loved her, all right.

  He slipped in quietly and took his place on the floor. Grace Hao, he thought, Blanche Hao, Felicity Hao. When the time came, he sang the two-word theme song with the others. No one asked where he had been or what he’d been doing. By the time the movie was over, they had forgotten he was ever gone.

  Maura played her boom box at top volume until the attendant tapped on her door. She put on an oblivious smile, as sweet as she could make it, and opened the door.

  “It’s after ten,” the attendant said. He was her father’s age, the same guy who had played Sinatra over and over to sing it with his daughter. He spoke kindly and without condescension, and she felt bad about fooling him.

  She punched the stop button on the boom box. She was in a flannel gown she never wore, and the smile got away from her—a phony, patronizing grin, but fuck it. “I’m so sorry.” So saccharine it embarrassed her. “I was just turning in, anyway.”

  The guard wished her good night, raising his fingers to an imaginary cap. As soon as the door shut, she whipped off the gown and slid a chair to the door, fully dressed. She pressed an ear to the louvered vent. She could not hear his feet on the linoleum, but she would hear the door to the stairs swing open and clink shut. Making him knock was the only way to know for sure that he was on her floor.

  The metallic clank of the door set her into motion again. She had to be fast. She shut off the light and eased her door open. Over the latch, she applied a domino held in place by duct tape. It had taken experimentation to find the right size block, sanding the domino with a fingernail file. The piece permitted the door to close without locking. Bedroom doors on this floor automatically locked at night. For safety reasons, clients—inmates—could leave their rooms, but they could not reenter without the assistance of an attendant. This wasn’t true in all of the dorms and not even all the floors of Danker Dormitory, only the at-risk floors.

  She padded down the hall to the stairs and pressed her ear against the door. When she heard another door close, she knew he was out of the stairwell. She let herself in. There was a monitor on the ground level, sitting at a desk by the entrance, but she went down to the basement, which held offices and storage rooms. No one was there this time of night. A dusty desk was centered beneath a casement window, right where she had shoved it. In less than a minute, she was walking across the grounds.

  She didn’t have directions to Alonso’s place, but it was near the workshop. The party would be winding down by the time she got there, but the only thing that interested her was getting Mick to give her a ride home. She had studied the route the van took to the Center. She wasn’t stupid. Too smart for your own good, her mother liked to say. A lot of the clients at the Center were plenty smart, and just as many were dumb as cheese. Alonso was dumb, but she didn’t mind him. She liked to brush her ass against him so he’d hightail it to the john to jerk off. She didn’t have that kind of power in the real world. She wasn’t a girl men looked at with sugary eyes or that predatory stare that seemed to come as naturally to boys as menstruation to girls. Maura was ordinary, and her personal plan for mental health required her to be honest about it. Accept your mind, accept your body. She was smart and looked as ordinary and dismissible as a tree stump.

  She reached the edge of the Center’s grounds and hopped the low brick wall. This wasn’t a prison or a real asylum, just a private retreat for fucked-up-in-the-head people with money, like herself, or people who had turned over their lives to save their kid, like Mick’s family, or people who needed someplace to store the family problem.
She crossed the highway, which was obviously the old route through town, full of gas stations and rundown motels. She didn’t want to walk beside the road. It was not a walking sort of street, and someone from the Center might spot her. She headed to the backside of the buildings, a gravel alley, and picked up the pace. It was a long walk, but Mick would have his car. All she wanted was to ride in that hideous contraption and talk to him. She was wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and short skirt. She never could have worn the skirt at any other stage in her life. She had nice legs now. Her body wasn’t extraordinary, but she had to use what she had. Bodies mattered. The crochet-brained therapist she had seen back home tried to tell her it was what was on the inside that mattered. “You mean my liver?” Maura had asked. “My gastrointestinal tract?” The bitch was wearing a Danskin and there was an exercise step beside her desk.

  Barnstone just said, “Some of that weight ought to go. You’ll be happier.”

  She smelled garbage. It was hard to see where to put her feet. Mick’s car was a grisly, macho, gear head car. Not that it mattered. He was no longer the person who’d buy such a car. He was sweet and beautiful, blond in a California way. Maura was from Minnesota and knew something about blonds. He wasn’t a Nordic blond, his hair and skin had more color, and he carried his shoulders with a western attitude. If he could get past this mental whatnot, he could have the world. Maura would not then be a candidate for girlfriend. If you can have the world, no fucking way you choose Maura Wood. She wanted him to be well, and she needed him to be ill.