Tumbledown
Page 34
He climbed a flight of yellow stairs to a dusty second floor, the only sound of life a humming that might have been a novice harmonica player or a refrigerator that needed balancing. He couldn’t find another flight of steps. An aluminum ladder at the end of the hall finally clued him in. He did not care for ladders, having never counted among his talents the gift of balance, either the literal or figurative type. Above the ladder, as flat as the ceiling, an attic door had the numerals 301 scrawled upon it. Billy had to ascend four rungs to tap on the door.
Vex’s voice called out: “Who is it?”
“Billy Atlas.”
That got no response.
“Billy Atlas from the sheltered workshop. Your supervisor.”
“What do you want?”
“I read your story.”
“ ’Bout time.”
“I want to talk to you about it.”
The attic door swung down from a metal hinge. He had to duck, and the ladder teetered.
Vex scowled through the opening. “Don’t fall,” he said. “If you knock the ladder over, I can’t get out.”
Billy planted his hands on either side of the opening and pulled himself up. I’m doing this, he thought. I’m climbing high on a ladder. To visit a psychopath in his dim attic room. Why am I doing this? The attic was a low-slung garret, all one room, too short for standing upright. The narrow windows were covered with aluminum foil.
“I prefer artificial light,” Vex said. He was wearing the ANGER RUINS JOY T-shirt. “The sun is the last thing I’d try to control, except to keep it out. You got a problem with that?”
In one corner was a toilet and a bathroom sink. The porcelain sink was maybe six inches above the floor, and the bottom of the toilet was set below floor level, on a subfloor of some kind. A shelf beside it was crammed with canned goods, a microwave, and a roll of toilet tissue. A mini fridge stood beside the shelf. The room had garish carpeting that looked like it had come out of a Taco Bell. Several mismatched lamps, all heavily muted by their shades, offered fettered light. On the floor, beside a low table, lay an ax, the blade a bright red, the handle made of pale polished wood, like a great and gently curving bone.
“You don’t have to like the place,” Vex said, “but at least shut your gaping mouth.”
Billy did as he was told. He was bent over awkwardly and holding his head up, like certain long-necked, humpbacked ogres. Vex had the advantage on his knees. Billy gave it a go. “Much better,” he said, rolling his neck. “Quite the place you’ve got here.”
“Did the plumbing myself.”
“I might have guessed that.”
“And the electrical, drywall. You got to sit to pee. Otherwise, it’s no hardship.”
Billy nodded quickly, a quacking sort of nod. The lamps inhabited the room like sullen prisoners, which made the light seem trapped and reluctant.
“You want knee pads?” Vex asked.
“I’m okay.”
“I’m in the middle of something,” Vex said. “Not quite the middle. The premiddle.”
At the far end of the room a tarp was spread over the floor. The tarp was covered with mechanical pieces, a bicycle chain, and a flat shaft of some kind.
“A hobby?” Billy asked. “I used to collect bluegrass albums.”
“You come here to buy dope? I don’t have any to share. My connection dried up, not entirely dried up but he’s no longer . . . moist.”
“I’m not here for that.”
“My story then?” Vex asked. “Am I in trouble?”
“Your story scared the holy shit out of me.”
“That’s what fairy tales are supposed to do.”
The room was hot and stuffy, and Billy’s nostrils were reluctant to carry the requisite oxygen to the familiar destinations. “I came to talk to you face to face, man to man, like,” he said, wishing he could take off his shirt. “I came to ask if you’re a danger to others or me.”
“Yes, kimosabe, I’m a danger,” Vex said, “and don’t you ever forget it. I won’t hurt anybody, though. I’m just dangerous. There’s a difference, like potential energy and the actual pistons cranking.”
“Can I sit somewhere?”
Vex knee-walked to a low table. Billy followed and seated himself on a plaid cushion. The guy was less scary walking on his knees.
“Beer? Soda pop? Water?” Vex said. “The water tastes funny. I don’t get a lot of company. Fucking unannounced visitors.”
“Beer sounds good. It’s kinda hot in here.”
Vex knee-strode to the mini fridge, flipping a switch along the way. A window unit hummed to life, and the cool breeze changed every thing. The place immediately began to grow on Billy. There was the charm of the miniature about it, and the rent had to be minuscule.
“I had a room downstairs,” Vex said. “It was noisy and expensive. Except for the workshop or some other job you guys give me, I have no income whatsoever. Not a cent. My old man is tapped out, and my former employers won’t let me on the premises.” He handed Billy a can of Miller Lite.
“Have you ever hurt anybody?” Billy asked. “ ’Cause your file doesn’t say if you’ve ever hurt anybody.”
“Depends on what you mean by hurt. You ever hurt anybody?”
Billy thought as he popped open the can. “Not counting disappointing my parents, or letting down a landlord, I tried a couple of times to hurt people, especially this one girl, by snubbing her, but no luck.”
“Turns out I may be luckier than you.” Vex had a beer of his own and drank from it. “What of it?”
“I don’t want anyone in the workshop hurt because if you’re like a lunatic or something.”
“I’m something, I guess. Not a lunatic, exactly. What is a lunatic exactly?”
“He hurts people. Like with a gun or a knife or his hands or his feet or that ax over there.”
“What about rape?”
“That definitely qualifies.”
“I’ve never raped anyone, but I was accused of it.”
“Is there a story there?”
“No story. Except when a guy came after me with a tire iron and another time this guy swung a shovel and once when these two guys wanted to cut my balls off with a weed whacker, I’ve never hurt a living person. Dead people, sure. We hurt the dead every minute we’re alive. They depend on us to correct their mistakes, the dumb dead sons a bitches.”
“A weed whacker, really?”
“They were sick motherfuckers who treated that weed whacker like shit. You have to mix in oil with the gasoline. That kind of two-cycle internal combustion job needs it.”
Billy drank his beer thoughtfully. “May I ask why they and the shovel and tire-iron guys were so eager to bash you up?”
“Conflicts.”
“Such as?”
“I ate a candy bar out of the fridge downstairs, and yeah it wasn’t mine, but you take a shovel to the head of somebody who ate your York mint?”
“Not likely.” Billy didn’t like mints. “Okay, check off the shovel.
The tire iron?”
“I might possibly have kicked the jack when he was changing a flat. Humor. A joke that didn’t quite take. His leg wasn’t crushed or he couldn’t’ve run after me.”
Billy nodded resignedly. “My jokes often zip right over people’s heads.”
“Anyone get pissed about it?”
“In high school. Wit’s a big problem in high school. What about the weed whackers?”
“I fucked their sister. She was young.”
“How young?”
“I don’t know. Twenty-four.”
“That’s not so young.”
“I’m twenty-six. And I knew I was pushing my luck. The family kept her sheltered. She’d never even had her picture taken.”
“I don’t think—”
“And she was pregnant. Pretty big in the gullet.�
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“This was consensual sex?”
“No, from behind. Like I said, her gut was like this.” He made the traditional watermelon gesture with his hands.
“But the sex was her idea, your idea, came up out of the blue, what?”
“You kidding? She didn’t want to fuck. My idea.”
“This is where we get into sticky territory. If she didn’t want to do it, then how did it come about that you two fucked?”
“We had a bet. Whether I could put my whole fist in my mouth, which I can. I kept telling her I could, but she didn’t believe me.”
“And if you’d lost?”
“She got to chop off my nuts, but I knew I was gonna win.”
“Still.”
“Thing is, we have a history. I used to be married to a friend of her sister’s, back when I was a welder. You read my file?”
“You were in an accident.”
“Somebody says welding accident and people expect you to be burnt and have those white blotchy scars, like the other person inside you is trying to surface, but I cut a pole too deep and the fucking thing bent and bam, I’m dead. Out of it, anyway. Coma for a while, then I wind up the fucker you see now.”
“You were different before.”
“So they fucking tell me endlessly. What do I care? I ain’t gone to hurt you. Not gone to hurt your gerbils, either. I halfway like them. I fixed the assembly machine, didn’t I?”
“You did that?”
“Took it apart, put it back together. You know what a blind flange is? Yours was cracked to shit. I stole the part. That’s what I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Let’s make like I didn’t say that. Also, I broke into the senior citizen joint to do the work. Wasn’t going to tell you that, either.”
Billy drank from his beer. He was moderately terrified that this guy might take the ax and chop his head off. Also, if he kept drinking beer he’d have to pee, which was almost equally troubling. “Thanks for, ah, fixing my flange.”
“Blind flange. You’re welcome. What about my story?”
“It’s good and all.” He pulled the folded pages from his pocket. “But a little dark, don’t you think?”
“Gingerbread man gets eaten alive,” Vex said. “Hansel and Gretel get cooked in a pot. Beanstalk Jack gets a fucking giant after his ass, smelling blood. What fairy tale isn’t dark?”
“Valid point,” Billy acknowledged. “It’s partly the rape thing. Not too many rapes in fairy tales, and since you’ve got this accusation against you. But you say it was a bet.”
“That was a whole nother thing. Separate incident.”
“I’m confused.”
“People tell me I am, too.” He took a long swallow and crushed the can. “Okay, I guess I forced her, but she was my wife, and after I got hit on the head, she treated me different. We were in bed, see, and we didn’t hardly have any clothes on, and I wanted my wife back.”
Billy had spent hundreds of nights in bed with Pilar wanting to have sex with her. He felt for Vex, but Billy would never force himself on anyone.
“It wasn’t a crime in an alley,” Vex said. “Not like I pushed her up against a wall and pulled her pants down till she smacked me in the head. More like I rolled on top of her. She didn’t push me off or scream or nothing, and I thought if we just did it once, she’d see how I was still . . . Ah fuck, sometimes I get desires I’m not proud of. So what do you do? You make yourself live in a high place no one comes to. You concentrate at work like nothing else exists.” He covered his mouth as he sighed. “She dropped the charges when I agreed to her divorce business. Maybe that was the plan all along. I haven’t had nothing to do with any woman since then.”
“What about smoke breaks with Maura?”
“I wouldn’t never hurt Maura. No more than you’d hurt that Karly.”
“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Billy said.
“Especially not Karly, right? Maybe once I did tug on Maura pants. I wasn’t going to tell you that ’cause she didn’t like it. She hit me, but then she borrowed my papers and rolled herself a smoke. We talked about head injury and humping and she wasn’t even upset.”
“You can’t tug at Maura’s pants in the workshop,” Billy said. “And only elsewhere if she wants you to.”
“I thought she wanted me to. You ever thought someone wanted you to, but she didn’t?”
Billy could only sigh and nod. He indicated the manuscript. “How ’bout you read it to me.”
“Out loud? For fuck’s sake. Give it to me.”
A few lines into the story, Vex burst into tears. “Get out of here. I ought to take your fucking head off for making me do this.” He thrust his head at Billy, his face a furious red, but Billy was no longer afraid of him.
“I want to hear the rest of the story.”
“There wasn’t no welding accident, all right? I fabricated that. Get it? I was a metal fabricator, so it’s funny, trust me.”
“Then what happened to make you this way?”
He shrugged. “I guess I did get bumped on the noggin, but barely enough to knock me out. The coma was only sorta real. The definite story, see, is I just like being this way.”
“Then why are you at the Center?”
“Ah, fuck me, I guess I’d like to be a little different.”
This seemed a lot like therapy, Billy realized, which he probably wasn’t supposed to do for a few months yet.
“That chain saw belongs to Bob Whitman.” Vex pointed at the pile of parts on the tarp. “That ax had a broke handle. I fixed it. It’s Bob Whitman’s ax. Bob Whitman is my counselor. I fix things for him. We pretend it’s therapy so he doesn’t have to pay me much.”
“I can’t fix anything,” Billy said. “I can mop up after a toilet runs over, but I can’t fix it.”
“I’ll fix it for you. There’s nothing made by man I can’t fix.”
“How about a salad? Can you fix a salad?”
“Fuck no, you got me there.” He laughed reluctantly. “You and Maura. Make the laughter come out of me. You ever looked at clouds and realized how they’re like garbage?”
Billy shook his head. “I’ll drink one more beer if there’s a curtain for the toilet.”
Vex shrugged. “I got a blindfold.”
The bag of groceries was getting heavier, Karly thought. It couldn’t really get heavier, so maybe it was because she was lost and wearing two different shoes. One shoe was the sneaker she always wore but the other one was her slipper with pink on it. So she was wearing just one different shoe, and the other was the same. Where its partner was, she didn’t know, or how they got separated and lost from each other, and now she was lost from her house.
The problem was, she got too hungry and walked to the store that Beetle Man used to drive her to and bought one bag of groceries with the money from her spending money, which she kept in her pocketbook, which she finally found in the kitchen, and she only had to put a few things back. The cashier had helped her figure out which ones to put back. She was a very nice cashier, who had gray in her hair and a pale and shaky face, and she was so funny! She wore her glasses for her eyes in her hair! And she called everybody honey.
She said, “Haven’t seen you since I don’t know when, honey.”
And “How you keeping yourself?”
And “Happens to everybody. No skin off my nose.”
And “We got all the time in the world.”
And “You might oughta put in for some detergent. Jeans’re gettin’ kinda ripe.”
All of the popcorn bags went back and the chocolate-covered things and the candy and the Coke drinks and the marshmallows and then she had enough money without using her emergency money. An emergency was when you’re in the hospital or if there was police.
Then she saw the cashier again when she was in the parking lot and the cashier was yelling at the boy with the sparkly car.
The boy had offered her a ride from the store to her home, and Karly had said, “Only to the corner,” but the cashier said she shouldn’t ride in his car at all.
“You forget I’ve seen your driver’s license, Joshua McDowell. I ’member faces and names, and specially when they bounce checks and stuff tall boys down their pants. I ’member you very well, Joshua McDowell, and don’t you forget it. If this girl has any trouble at all, the police is gonna be hearin’ your name, too.”
The she said something very funny because it was loud. “You hear me?”
Karly promised not to take any rides from the boy or anyone, which she would never do anyway except because the car had sparkly paint and seemed like it could be an exception. The boy said nasty words and drove off, and she must have gone the wrong way because when she followed the arrows she had drawn on her hand it got dark and she wasn’t home yet and she was sweaty and some dogs barking at each other wouldn’t stop. If she had a microwave, she could eat the pot pie. She was hungry and tired and the new boy in the workshop yelled a lot and had a funny name he called himself. She just thought of that for no reason.
She had seen every kind of flower on this walk—red, yellow, purple, and blue. It was still Sunday. Her mother was on a trip far away where her cell phone didn’t work, and now Karly’s phone didn’t work. “I’m going with a man,” she had told Karly when their phones still worked. “You haven’t met him, but you will. He’s a nice man. You’ll like him.” Karly could email her mother if she was home and wasn’t lost and her computer was on and the email worked. “They’re so doing it,” Karly’s sister had said when it was her time on the phone. “Mom is all bouncy and absurd. She was singing some absurd commercial in the kitchen this morning. And he’s such a baggo, you won’t believe it. Dad is no doubt crying in his grave.” And there were some other things she said, back when the phones . . . Karly felt funny all at once and took a big breath and got a spinny feeling in her stomach and head. She bumped into a fence.
Being lost gave her a lot of time to think, but the bag was too heavy, and she set it down, and she tried to figure out a plan but she didn’t know what to do and she was so sweaty and she was so really tired, too, she realized, and the one slipper was ruined and when she started walking again, a man’s voice called out from behind her.