Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  She wasn’t a chickenshit, at least. She did what she set out to do. Letting that guy finger her had been dumb, but it was the type of thing she used to do all the time. Now at least she felt fucked over by it. That meant something, didn’t it? How could she measure her progress when she didn’t know what it felt like to be anyone but herself?

  Mick’s whole deal with Karly had bumped up a notch, the way he cozied up to her, like he couldn’t leave the ditz alone for ten minutes. Maura tried to concentrate on the insipid spider cartons. Who on earth bought all this pantyhose? She’d worn pantyhose maybe twice in her life. Once for her cousin’s wedding, and once when she had a role in a play as the mother. She’d been in the school theater club and was always cast as the mother or some part meant for a man because she’d been fat. Part of the reason she was willing to put up with this place was that she had lost so much weight. Barnstone’s sessions were always outside and they walked while they talked. The cafeteria only served healthy food, and the whole craving, the daily filthy desire to stuff her mouth, had vamoosed. Who knew the reasons? Maybe there was something in the water. Not that she drank the water.

  Mick, not even beside her today on the assembly line, worked at a furious pace. He had cut down on his meds or quit using the stuff entirely. This was his ongoing drama—to take the dope or not. He was definitely more fun without it. She wanted him to drop the meds but smoke pot, which ought to slow him down just enough to keep him in the sane spectrum. If she could keep him stoned, he’d be fine.

  “It’s not just the cash register,” the supervisor was saying. This Billy used to run a convenience store in Flagstaff, Arizona, and he was telling everybody about the requirements of the working world. “I stocked the shelves, kept the cooler filled, mopped the floor, cleaned the toilet, did the inventory.” He counted on his fingers. “There’s a lot goes into it.”

  “That’s so great,” Karly said. “Mick, isn’t that so great?”

  “I bought lunch at the Pic Qwik last Tuesday during lunch break,” Rhine said. “That’s a convenience store. The Pic Qwik.”

  “Do you get a lot of nickels?” Karly asked.

  “Nickels, dimes, quarters,” Billy Atlas said expansively, “ones, fives, tens, twenties, and the occasional fifty- or hundred-dollar bill.”

  “I know who’s on the hundred-dollar bill,” Rhine said. “Karly, do you know who’s on the hundred-dollar bill?”

  “I like stores,” Karly said. “I make a shopping list before I go to the grocery store.” After a second’s pause, she added, “But I hate nickels.” Billy shrugged. “You get used to them.”

  “Karly, do you know who’s on—”

  “Just fucking tell us, will you?” Maura said.

  “Oops,” Billy Atlas said. He smiled at Maura, showing his horse teeth and that dopey smile that would not stay off his face. “They discourage swearing at the factory, so I have to discourage it here.” He shrugged expressively. “Them’s the rules.”

  “Tom Cruise is on the hundred-dollar bill,” Rhine said.

  “Everybody knows that,” Karly said happily.

  “Are you genuinely an idiot?” Maura directed the question to Rhine. “Or are you trying to be funny?”

  A tinkling alarm sounded, indicating it was time for their morning break.

  “Idiot is one of the words the Center doesn’t want you using,” Billy said. “They don’t want a lot of labels tossed around.” He showed her his fat teeth again. You could crack walnuts with teeth like that. He examined the transport boxes. “I think all of you made more than me.”

  “We been here longer,” Alonso Duran said, his voice today like a locomotive. “I been here longer, Rhine’s been here longer . . .” He continued his list as he headed for the bathroom to masturbate.

  Maura grabbed her ashtray and led Mick to the parking lot. She had to pull on his arm to keep him from wandering over to make moon-eyes at Karly. “You can’t make me smoke alone,” she said. “It’s inhumane.”

  The day was sweltering. When had it gotten so hot? She rarely noticed the weather since coming to California. In Minnesota, people talked about it all the time, checking the Weather Channel and sometimes, before a trip, calling the Highway Patrol. Were the roads open? Was the street passable? Out here, there was hot, warm, and not particularly warm. What difference did it make? She lit up, thinking about words for hot as hell that made the temperature appealing—sultry, for example, sunny. She didn’t feel quite right. She’d had the opportunity to ream Rhine, but her response was half hearted. He had given her a ride on his scooter back to the Center from Alonso’s house, telling her whenever he was going to turn or slow down. He was a fuck-berry, but she had appreciated the ride and liked the wind in her hair.

  “You’re going to die.” Cecil Fresnay had followed them outside. He was pointing at her cigarette.

  Maura blew smoke into his face. “Now we’re going together, numbnuts.”

  Cecil laughed. He liked the smoke. “Do it again.”

  “What’s that?” Maura said, cocking her head. She put her hand to her ear. “I hear Billy calling for you.”

  “Crews doesn’t work here anymore,” Cecil said.

  “Billy’s going to be angry if you don’t hurry.”

  Cecil moved his mouth around—smiling, slobbering, about to cry, some damn thing—and left them. The roach stub had a hideous mouth.

  “Don’t you think it’s insulting to be on the same work line as that drooler?”

  Mick needed no time to think. “No. Nope. Unh-uh.”

  “I’m insulted enough for the both of us.”

  “We’re all different. Effervescent,” Mick said. “Dance to your own whatev you call it.”

  “Cecil’s practically a four-year-old.”

  “I like four-year-olds.” He nodded at the cigarette. “I used to smoke. Puffed at parties, my car. Before the wheezus, of course.”

  “Before you got loony?”

  He nodded again. “Tried to quit. Couldn’t. Tried. Couldn’t. Too craving, like it was inside my skin.”

  “But you have quit.”

  “The want to smoke went away with . . .” A tremor ran through him, as if he were cold. “Rhine keeps a surgical mask in his scoot scoot scooter for in case people’re smoking.”

  “Rhine has a pinecone shoved so far up his ass he smells the mountains.”

  Mick laughed. “He can be irrigating, but I like Rhine, dig that boy, also Alonso and of certainly Karly, and not to mention, but I do mention, the incomparable Maura Wood, who chimneys and wheedlesque humor.”

  “I know who skipped his morning cocktail.”

  Mick’s smile disappeared and he nodded. “Half skipped. Ski-doodled. Less than half. Less I forgot the half.”

  “Go ahead and jabber if you want. I can’t make sense of it, but I don’t mind.”

  Mick laughed, harder than he expected, harder than was called for. “It’s just this wrinkling in the words going from here to ’ternity in their cable cars, and what do I care if I can’t get every single one to line up like we did—’member?—in grading school with the pink skirts that you weren’t supposed to, if you were me, touch and that time after dance class when I stuck my head through the dance curtain where the dance girls were dressing and they giggled and covered and stars were shining in their hair.”

  “You have the wildest mouth,” Maura said.

  “We’re engaged,” he replied. “Me. With Karly.”

  “You’re what?”

  Mick tried to slow his tongue, but there seemed to be mercury flowing over it, as if from a busted thermometer, and he could not stop the metallic flow. “I wanted to tell you” earlier but “the others” were there and those clowns . . .

  “You told the others and not me?”

  “No. No. No. I didn’t tell because the others were, and everyone, with that one saying rudely, and I didn’t want with the
m.”

  “You proposed?”

  He nodded and breathed deeply.

  “You asked her to marry you? Karly?”

  He nodded again.

  “She said she would marry you?”

  He kept nodding.

  “That’s why you’ve been so . . . why you’ve been hanging with her so much? That’s . . . that’s wild.” Her voice caved at the end, her chest having developed a hole that was widening, like the top of a tornado. Hey, sweetheart, want a ride?

  “What’s wild?” Billy Atlas had come outside to advise them that the break was ending.

  “Mick is getting married,” Maura said. To Mick, she added, “No shit?”

  “No shit whatsoever,” he said. “I’m going to engage a bride in the aisle.”

  “I used to be married,” Billy said. “Who’s the bride?”

  “Karly Hopper,” Maura said, “the complete bingo head.”

  Mick laughed again.

  “She’s a hottie,” Billy said. “I’ve promised to teach her nickels.”

  “Yeah yeah,” Maura said. “Teach her pocket change.” She colored, embarrassed by her anger, but what would Mick be to her but pocket change? She charged past the men and through the door to the assembly butterfly, surprised to discover that she was not going to cry. Surprised and proud. And devastated. She was such an ass. As stupid as any of them.

  DAY 2:

  The front porch of James Candler’s childhood home was made of wooden planks all in a row, like piano keys, and painted a soft off-white, also like piano keys. It faced north, making it the coolest place in summer for the boys to play if they had to be outside, and they almost always had to be outside. May Candler did not want them in the house, which was old and made of adobe, impossible to keep clean, the exterior walls as thick as a grown man was wide, with fine dust, like the ash of a paper fire, continually descending from the walls to the furniture and floor. May didn’t want the boys adding to it with their grime. Sometimes they were even given their dinner on the porch.

  The Candlers lived west of the freeway on what was, at that time, the unfashionable side of Tucson. Their street had mesquite trees, oleander hedges, and old houses that had been tacked on to over the years and that spread out unevenly across the sandy lots like unfolded luggage. Their home had once been the bunkhouse for a ranch and was set far back from the residential street, connected by a long sandy drive. Behind the house ran a crooked yard, the lot so lengthy that three cross streets would dead-end along its border. The entire property was enclosed, the quality of the fencing deteriorating the farther it got from the road, a handsome wooden fence turning to chain-link, which connected to a crumbling concrete-block wall. The back of the property had posts of upended railroad ties connected by crimped field wire, into which were strung vertical ocotillo stalks, most of them alive and taller than any man. The fence bloomed in the spring, the tips of the stalks engorged with the nectar that brought the hummingbirds the boys loved, their nearly invisible wings propelling them through the wholly invisible air.

  “I’ve got three Wade Boggses,” Jimmy Candler said. He kept his baseball cards in a shoebox covered with comic book stickers. The cards within were habitually bundled in rubber bands, segregating them into teams.

  “I got three bogs to wade,” Billy Atlas replied. His cards were in a faux-Tupperware box, which he always brought when he spent the night but this day was reluctant to open, a curling crack in one of its transparent sides, over which he had applied a long strip of tape, now yellowing, a big-mouthed frown, an indignant catfish of tape. He clung to the box and to a residual understanding that he always got the short end of the stick in their deals.

  These two were sitting on the floor of the front porch, Jimmy in cutoff jeans and a blue T-shirt, Billy in long green pants with cuffs and holes in the knees, a white T-shirt that stretched unappealingly over his gut. They both wore sneakers and white socks. They were twelve years old.

  “And I’ve got two Danny Tartabulls,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m not making any trades,” Billy insisted.

  “What’s the point if we don’t make trades?”

  “Baseball doesn’t have to have a point,” Billy said, “it’s baseball.”

  Nineteen eighty-seven, the middle of June, 8:22 in the morning, and they had been up since 6:00. The expected afternoon temperature was 104 degrees. In those days, the morning had several stages and each stage could hold a dozen surprises and the distance between waking and sleeping was too great to be measured by anything so flimsy as hours. So far they had eaten breakfast, played catch, run through the sprinkler, watered the garden, raced sticks in the irrigation canal, imagined the end of the world by fire, eaten a snack, wrestled with the dog, and examined Jimmy’s baseball cards. It was one of many broad-handled summer days that could not be grasped by a single fist or contained in a single sentence, and it was just beginning. They decided—abruptly, for no evident reason—to take their first dunking of the day.

  At the rear of the property was an old cistern, an uncovered brick rectangle the size of a truck bed with which, by means of an elaborate system of canals and culverts, the Candlers watered the yard, and into which the boys dipped themselves during the long Arizona summer. The big trees on the lot—sycamores and mulberries and oaks—had never been trimmed, except for the haphazard cuts made by the boys to accommodate their tree houses, which permitted them views of the long stretches of high grass, a fenced garden tended erratically by Jimmy’s mother, the shallow concrete irrigation canals, the adobe rubble of smaller dwellings behind the main house, and in the far back, a stretch of unmolested desert, with ocotillo, creosote, yucca, barrel cactus, prickly pear, and two giant saguaros—and beyond that, the living fence.

  The boys took off their shoes and socks and Jimmy shed his T-shirt. They leapt into the cistern, sinking to the depths, the sun on the surface of the water above their heads like tossed coins of light floating uneasily on the waves. Though the water was clear and they could see far into it, the cistern seemed to have no bottom. They had tried, numerous times, to swim to the base of the well, and never succeeded. They imagined that it had no floor, that it continued indefinitely through the center of the earth and up to the surface on the other side of the globe, a rectilinear tube of water connecting disparate continents. They imagined surfacing in Africa or the Soviet Union or some island populated by smiling girls who wore flowers instead of shirts.

  The desert, Jimmy’s father taught them, had ephemeral rivers on the surface and covert rivers beneath the surface, and cracks and caverns down below, along with arroyos and mesas and crags and cliffs above. The cistern was fed, Mr. Candler had explained, by an underground stream, whose irregular passage caused the water to rise and fall, as did the metal gate the boys raised by means of a wheel—like a horizontal steering wheel—to fill the shallow irrigation canal, which would flood the various patches of grass, the garden, the dirt around the trees, according to which of the gates were lifted and which were lowered, a miniature mechanical system of locks and troughs and dams. If the water in the cistern was low, they worked the handle on the metal pump, which would shoot water into the canal. The pump was painted green, the same shade as the big cacti in the yard, and bare metal showed like wounds beneath the flaking paint, lesions the color of steel.

  When the water was more than a few inches from the top of the cistern, it could be difficult climbing out, hands on the top bricks, muscles straining in the forearms. They each managed it without assistance, though Billy had to lie on his belly and roll forward, his wet clothing picking up long slashes of dirt. They put on their shoes and socks, once again, and Jimmy thrust his head into his shirt. Even though it was not yet nine a.m., they were almost dry by the time they reached the porch. Their damp pants left ovals on the plank floor, like mouths, like the wet places lips were always making, like the coloring on a topo map that indicated forests or high elevation
or great swamps.

  On the west end of the plank porch was a card table with folding chairs, and on the east end, a formerly maroon, once-velvet couch beneath a wide window, which was unscreened and cracked open all summer, the evaporative cooler pushing cool air out through the gap, over the ledge, and down onto the couch, where the dog, who was not permitted in the house, perpetually lay, a fat brown corgi, slightly cross-eyed and sternly proud, often accompanied on the couch by one of the boys, who would pause on the hairy cushions to catch some of the cool air bleeding through the window and pet the dog, whose name was The Dog—his parents’ idea of humor and Jimmy thought it was funny, too, and further evidence that his family was extraordinary. (A boy didn’t need much proof to think his family was like no other, better, smarter, braver, stronger, more beautiful, more kind.)

  The Dog would settle on the left cushion, always that same cushion, would bark at you if you sat there. The windows had no screens and yellow curtains fluttered in and out—an image that Jimmy’s mother had painted, managing somehow to capture the motion. When ever she set up her easel on the porch, the boys knew they had to leave. Jimmy’s father might set up his easel in the yard, in the long grass or the shade beneath the trees, and the boys would make loops around the man and the tall transparent pitcher sweating on the tiny table that Frederick Candler would park next to his easel. He would fill his glass from the pitcher, that bubbling, sweating pitcher with an indefinable smell, which, years later, Jimmy—by then James—would identify as tonic, a pitcher of gin and tonic, and the adult James could be carried back by that slight smell to his youth, the rambling house in the high Sonora, and the expansive sense of possibility, as wide as the desert sky.