A Stranger in This World (8 page)

Margaret had a deadly eye. Some places she wouldn’t even let me stop, others she’d dart for the pile of junk they hadn’t sorted out yet, rooting through the puzzles and picture frames and orphan silverware. She’d go a dollar for a blender, fifty cents for a toaster. The sellers would take it, almost always, no matter how optimistic the price was on the masking-tape tag—they knew she was a professional. Fifteen dollars for a broken mixer, seven-fifty for a popcorn machine that only blew cold air, these prices were the dreams of greed when Margaret came to the yard sale. “Junk,” she’d say, holding a blender by the cord and scowling at it. “I’ll go a buck.”

Part of my mind was on the side of the sellers. I knew what they were thinking: look how much of this thing is perfectly fine, look at how much still works perfect—the mixer bowls, both the original beaters, all this chrome and enameled steel—it
should
be worth more. Only a little part of this is broken. It isn’t right, I could hear them thinking. I’m being took. They got it confused, to where it was more about pride than money.

“I don’t think so,” this one woman told her. “For that kind of money, I guess I’d just as soon keep it.” Clutching her little busted mixer, like Margaret had tried to steal it from her.

Margaret just shrugged her shoulders and got in the car. There was another broken mixer someplace. Maybe some optimist would come along and pay the asking price, I thought, though it didn’t seem likely. Sell it or get stuck with it.

By two o’clock the garage sales had dried up and Margaret had filled the trunk of her Subaru with broken toasters. It was a big day for toasters. Time to take the kids to McDonald’s. They were worn out from the effort of being good all morning and they didn’t have anything to show for it, so it was the Happy
Meal. They sat in the corner booth and the whole town was passing by them, Saturday afternoon at McDonald’s, everybody knew everybody else and they were talking. I lifted one corner of the bun and looked down at the gray circle of meat. “Do you suppose it’s true?” I asked.

“What?” Alicia said.

“The thing they say about the meat, where it comes from?”

“Don’t be smart-ass around my kids,” Margaret said. I thought she was kidding at first, but I looked up and she was looking at me cold serious through the heavy black glasses she wore and I thought she looked beautiful, defending her children, like some wild thing. “They get enough of that at school,” she said, “all the smart-ass about everything. What’s in here is just regular cow meat.”

“From Brazil,” I said.

“Kids have to believe in something,” Margaret said. “They can’t just believe in nothing.”

Shane paid no attention to his mom and asked me, “What did they say was in the hamburger?”

“You never mind,” Margaret said, and gave me a look. I wanted to ask her, Just because you have to believe in something, does that mean you have to believe in McDonald’s? But I didn’t. It was good to see her standing up for her kids even if she was wrong. She looked beautiful when she was angry like that. Sitting in Mickey D’s in the smell of french-fry grease, I thought about how beautiful she was: long dark hair and a long neck, thin, with that Crow wildness in her face. She was good-looking to where her looks could get her in trouble, which is what happened when she was nineteen and afterward for a while. So I heard.

“It was rat, wasn’t it?” Shane asked. “They put rat in the hamburgers.”

“You shut up and eat,” Margaret said. “Parker didn’t mean anything like that.”

“That’s right,” I said, although that was exactly what I was going to say. Not that I actually thought there was rat in the hamburgers, but it would impress the kids. Plus you couldn’t tell what was in there by looking.

Alicia lifted the corner of her bun and looked in and then looked at her brother. “You are a disgusting human being,” she said. “I wash my hands of you.”

“All right, enough,” Margaret said. “Sit up and eat, sit up!” And when the kids were eating their hamburgers again, she turned to me, serious again. “No more kids,” she said quietly, for adults to hear. “I’ve got two kids and my husband was a kid and it just wears me out, OK? Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah I do.”

“I don’t mind a little smart-ass, not from you,” she said, blinking at me through her glasses. “I mean, you’ve got to be good for something.”

“Well thanks, I guess.”

“I don’t know if it was a compliment or not,” she said. “Eat your hamburger.” And she wasn’t looking at me then and I don’t know what she meant or how she meant it, but I felt this warmth all around my body, like I was inside of something, some kind of bubble or cloud with me and Margaret and the kids inside it, and I liked that feeling. Like it wasn’t me that was sitting there but some other man who was lucky about these things, lucky about love and about people.

And then we were gone out of there and Margaret was dropping me off at my room at the Sacajawea Apartments and
I saw the turquoise Thunderbird from down the block. It was Dorothy’s car, my wife. She had that car since high school, a ’66, with a white interior and a white vinyl top, a beautiful thing. I noticed that she had Arizona plates on it now, with the little cactus in the middle. I could see the back of her blond head.

“You want to come out to the swap meet tomorrow?” Margaret asked. “I’ll pick you up if you want.”

“I’ll call you,” I said. Suddenly I was nervous to get rid of her, not for her, just so I could think clearly. I was trying to remember how long it had been since I saw Dorothy. Over a year anyway. Two years? Suddenly I was bookkeeping again.

Margaret said, “Well, I can’t get hold of you, so call me if you want to go.”

She leaned across the front seat and kissed me, right in front of the kids, and we both said good-bye, good-bye, while I got out of the car. I couldn’t even think about them. I watched her little Subaru roll down the street and around the corner, but really I was waiting for the door of the Thunderbird to open. Which it did.

One of the things about Dorothy was that whoever made up these Western girl clothes had her in mind exactly. She had on a fringe jacket and spray-on jeans tucked into her boots and she was smoking a cigarette. She was older, though, which was a surprise. There were dark circles under her eyes and wrinkles around her mouth, and you could really tell it by her hands. I saw this with a kind of panic—this was never supposed to happen—as she walked up to me slowly with a grin on her face, not too nice.

“Who’s the squaw?” she said.

This was her style, ice water in the face. I stood there
blinking for a minute, wondering whether to slap her, and then I remembered: if I slapped her, I lost. Life with Dorothy was one long game of cool.

She said, “I never pictured you as a family man, exactly.”

“I just met the woman,” I said, although I’d known Margaret for three months then.

“That isn’t what it looked like,” Dorothy said. “It looked like Mom and Dad on the way to work. Can I come in?”

She didn’t wait for an answer but went into the hallway and waited for me to show her which door was mine. And then it was like she never left.

“Jesus, Parker,” she said, looking around the little room: one bed, one chair, a TV, a desk with my books from the Vo-Tech on it. “Are you sure this is depressing enough? Is that a bloodstain?”

She pointed to a blotch on the wall that I’d wondered about myself. But I said, “No, it’s just rust or something.”

“Well, it looks like blood to me. Have you got a beer?”

She didn’t wait but opened up the little dormitory refrigerator and took the last beer and opened it. She drank it like a drowning man, half at once. Then sat down at the table and started chopping out a line of something, crank I guessed, onto my one clean dinner plate. A little silver hunting knife with lumps of turquoise in the handle was the weapon. She chopped it fine and then took a hit in each side of her nose off the sharp point of the blade. Tears welled up in her eyes as she shook her head. “Jesus, that’s good,” she said. “A little eye-opener. Want some?”

“No, thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, dipping the point of the blade into the crank again and lining it up her nose. I watched her
like a hungry dog watching a person eat, following the point of the knife with my eyes. I’m not that kind of person anymore, I told myself. I’m done with that.

Eyes still shut, making a face from the pain of the hit, she said, “I need some money, Parker. I’m sort of in trouble.”

Fuck you, I thought, and then I said it: “Fuck you.” Back in town for thirty seconds and already we were playing by her rules and my own life had shrunk to nothing. “You come around here,” I said, trying to find the words. “I haven’t even seen you for a year and a half …”

She just looked at me calm and straight-faced until the words dried up completely. “I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t need your help,” she said. “You know that.”

“So what?”

“I’m just asking for mine,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Are you talking about the house?” She looked up, and it was the house, and I started to laugh.

“I’m not kidding you,” Dorothy said. “I was your wife for all the time we were making payments on that place. I’m entitled to something.”

“You never put a nickel into that house,” I said, still laughing. “I mean, don’t bullshit me. But it don’t matter anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“That money’s gone, darling. That money was gone a year ago.”

She was all business now, a skinny mean-faced woman, just the way I always liked her. She asked me, “Where exactly did the money go?”

“I don’t know, darling,” I said, and there was a kind of
glory in it. This was not a regular mistake but a big one, a disaster, and I felt a kind of roller-coaster excitement at the memory. Nothing that was good for you. I said, “Most of it I can’t remember.”

“That was thirty-two thousand dollars,” Dorothy said.

“Not after the lawyers got their cut—the lawyers, and then the neighborhood association that started the lawsuit got a percentage. And then a big chunk of the rest went into that idiot Ford pickup. You know I wrecked it.”

She shook her head.

“Put it around somebody’s mailbox out by Ripton. I didn’t total it but pretty close.”

“You didn’t have insurance on it?”

“They canceled me out a couple of days before. I guess I didn’t pay the bill. I don’t know. I never found the letter. But then when the bank took the pickup back, I had to pay the difference. That and the Visa bill we ran up, and after that I don’t know. I mean, it went somewhere, I guess. It’s gone.”

“Thirty-two thousand dollars,” she said again, and thought about it for a minute. “Jesus, Parker, you spent that money like it was a dime.”

I bobbed my head, like she had just paid me a compliment, and it felt like that: this was the one thing I’d done, the thing they couldn’t take away from me. This was the only time I’d ever be bigger than life.

“That was it,” I said. “The house, the truck, I quit showing up for work over at the carbon black plant and they canned my ass over there. Did you hear about the guy who played the country record backwards?”

Dorothy shook her head.

“He got his job back, he got his dog back, he got his wife back …” I looked down and noticed that Dorothy’s hands were trembling. She was holding one of her hands just off the tabletop and watching it shake, like it was somebody else’s hand. “What’s the matter, baby?” I asked.

“I’m not your baby.”

“Whatever you are.”

“I’m not kidding about being in trouble,” she said. “Your buddy Coy, up here, he’s in with a rough crowd.”

“How long have you been in town?”

“I’ve been in and out, the last few months.”

I sat on the edge of the bed wondering how I missed her in a town this small, while she went on looking at her hands. I was thinking about Coy, my high school buddy, old junkie friend. I hadn’t seen Coy in a while, imagined him fucking Dorothy. I asked her, “What does Coy have to do with it?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said. “I didn’t come here to explain myself, I came because I was in trouble and I was hoping you could help me out. I guess I was wrong.”

She started to fold the powder back into the little paper envelope and I didn’t want her to go. I don’t know why, I just have to try to put it together, looking back. I could have let her go and none of the rest of it would have happened, and my reasons, when I try to put them together, are not all that good. Part of it was that I expected to fuck her, not exactly that I wanted to, although I did. But every time since high school there was always that charge, the one constant. Our bodies fit each other and I knew that if I touched her, if she let me inside, we would be the same as we ever were. If she left, the chain was broken, that part of my life was over and I’d be left behind
with the others—the good students, churchgoers, bookkeepers. I didn’t want to be ditched, maybe it was simple as that.

Nobody to blame but myself.

“What do you need?” I asked her.

That next day, Margaret took me along with the kids out to the big swap meet at the Go West drive-in, four hundred cars packed in backwards on the humps, card tables and milk crates, an old turkey-necked buzzard with one cardboard box only, a hole cut in the top:
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$5.00. I was tired and spaced and it was a lie for me to be there. Setting up the folding tables, setting out the popcorn makers and blenders that Margaret brought to sell, I remembered the tangle of Dorothy’s legs and mine and the taste of her neck and the burn of the crank as it went down, the old pain and then the rush. But it was a cool clear day with a breeze and after a while my blood started to move. Actually I started to like it.

My job was to hold down the fort, along with Alicia, while Shane and Margaret scoured the back rows for fixable junk. There wasn’t any clear line between buyers and sellers at the Go West. Half the business was trades, my junk for your junk, but there was quite a bit of movement here, quite a bit of life. This was hope of a practical kind, people trying to get somewhere. I was a spy in their house, a double agent. I was sitting in my chair watching them and keeping my secrets: Dorothy’s laughter and her voice,
Book
keeping
? Book
keeping
?
Jesus, Parker, that’s funny … There is no other life, I wanted to tell them, the person that you are is the person you’re going
to be. Though it was tempting to pretend. Something beautiful in all the movement, all the scurrying around in the clear light, buying and selling, moving forward.