Carry the One (12 page)

Never much for lingering in the afterglow, she hopped out as soon as they finished. She dried off and jumped into her fancy sweats and set herself up by the bedside phone to set off the flurry of social life that was part of these show weekends. Nick soaked on by himself. He pressed the small of his back up against one of the jets. A decade of carpentry had left him with stretched tendons in his neck, a tricky rotator cuff. All of which he could smooth out with a few heavy-duty painkillers, but these were, of course, not allowed on his current program. It was ironic that, due to long, recreational use of these drugs, he was unfamiliar with ordinary pain, and experienced it in a fresh, crisp way—and could not defend himself against it. But, as Olivia would say: tough. This was how he saw himself: balancing on the event horizon, trying not to get sucked into the black hole, trying to hang on to the light.

As he came out of the bathroom, she said, “You might want to put your jockeys back on.” She had the phone to her ear, waiting for whoever to pick up. The cats had gone feral; this always happened after they had been groomed. They bounced on and off the furniture, chasing each other in a game without a point. “You know.” She covered the mouthpiece. “If you want to hang on to your nuts.”

Nick didn’t kid himself that what he and Olivia had was love. It was more serious than that. He could still smell the prison on her. She’d had to forge a hard interior to make it through all the days she was inside, all the small humiliations, and this had left her composition slightly metallic. There was something erotic about this. He heard from her about the truly tough women inside, and the elaborate hierarchy
and the endless rituals. Goods exchanged for services, services exchanged for protection. Having to get permission to walk by certain cells. Doing laundry, cleaning toilets for women higher up in the pecking order. He knew Olivia slipped under the wing of someone powerful and cruel. “All you need to know is anything I did in there, I did to save my ass.”

She kept him on a tight rein. It was the only way, he understood. Her terms for coming back were that they play by her rules. They married quietly. They didn’t and wouldn’t have kids. Olivia believed they had forfeited that privilege. Fine if Nick wanted to fool around with astronomy, but she wanted to see a regular paycheck, which meant steadily working construction jobs. They didn’t do drugs or drink. If he fell back into that, she’d be gone. He found both comfort and fear in the knowledge that she stood between him and the past, also between him and the world beyond her, where very bad things could happen fast. He didn’t really know why she was with him.

They ate at a restaurant outside town that was on the premises of an abattoir. The red neon
STEAK HOUSE
sign was surrounded by killing barns.

“Here we are,” he said as they pulled into a parking spot, “the aorta of the American heart of darkness.” They were here at the insistence of Olivia’s friends, Randy and Gia—part of the cat crowd who had been here before and thought the place was loaded with local color. By the time Nick and Olivia showed up, Gia and Randy were already half in the bag—flushed and jolly, waving at them from the table. Now that he wasn’t one, Nick found drunks extremely tiresome.

Randy ordered New York strips for all of them. The dinner, he said, was his treat.

“At least you know your meat here is fresh,” he said.

Randy and Gia were from Port Huron, in Michigan. Gia described herself as a fitness specialist, which really meant she worked at a health club teaching classes in ab busting and cardio striptease. She wore a
lot of makeup, but in a nice way. She wasn’t particularly large breasted, but must have worn some kind of bra that pushed what she did have into a perky rack. Randy was an aging frat boy who sold high-end speedboats—broad shouldered, with hair plugs that were still healing. They had a teenage daughter who was off-limits as a conversational topic. She did something so terrible she could never be mentioned. This secret was by far the most interesting thing about them.

Randy talked about his job, which he loved. He said he could sell a boat to anyone, even if they’d never given a thought to boating before.

“I can get people to part with so much money, sometimes I want to cry for them, cry for this whole country full of idiots. Cry all the way to the bank.” He slapped the table a little too hard and set the water glasses jingling. They were in a booth, but Randy sat next to Olivia, Nick next to Gia. This was Randy’s idea, to “mix things up a little.”

Randy and Gia had only one cat, the Duke of Earl, but he was a champion. So what, Nick thought. They had a good cat, but they also had that daughter. Nick thought neo-Nazi. Maybe specialty call girl.

“The Duke is on a winning streak. The Duke can do no wrong,” Randy said as Nick tuned out for a while. He had heard enough cat competition talk to last nine lifetimes. When he tuned back in, he noticed that Randy’s arm had wound itself around Olivia’s shoulder in the middle of some hilarious cat moment Gia was describing and they were all three of them laughing in a way that made it necessary for Randy to give Olivia a little shoulder squeeze. But now they were talking about cat shampoos and the hand lingered. And just as he was noticing this, Nick felt a light pressure on the inside of his thigh, just grazing his tackle. He looked over at Gia, but she didn’t look back, just kept talking shampoo, moving on to a silk conditioner she’d found that made fur positively gleam under the show lights.

“You have to get it by mail order,” she said as she continued to tickle Nick’s balls.

“There’s something about the adrenaline before a show that really gets me going,” Randy said. Nick could see his hot dog fingers cupping
Olivia’s shoulder. Nick looked across at her in what he hoped was a readable code. She looked back and for a nanosecond opened her eyes wide, like a character in an old movie, tied up in a cave with a long fuse sizzling toward a powder keg.

“Have to see a man about a horse,” Nick said, sliding out of the booth as though Gia’s fingers were not hard at work between his legs.

“We must have synchronized bladders.” Olivia gave Randy’s arm the slip.

They didn’t dare look at each other until they were in the long hallway to the johns, which were marked
STEERS
and
HEIFERS
. And then they laughed so hard they fell against the walls.

“What are we going to do? I don’t want to insult them. They’re going to be at every competition from now until the end of time. They probably try this out on everybody. Oh, I’m seeing it all in my mind. I’m screaming in ecstasy, yanking out Randy’s hair sprouts.”

“We could say we’ve been passing a nasty marital infection back and forth.”

“They won’t buy it,” she said. “We’ll say we’ve found Jesus. We belong to something scary now. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or we’re Mormons. I can talk a pretty good game. From my time inside.”

They turned out to be great, embellishing liars. They said they had some religious literature back at the motel and maybe Randy and Gia would like to come and pray with them. Nick worried they wouldn’t buy this, but whether they did or not, the conversation quickly sanitized itself, and moved on to Reagan and Bush, whom Randy thought of as a baton of greatness passed. He thought America should just elect a Republican king and get rid of all the crooks in Congress. It hurt Nick’s teeth to listen to Randy.

At the motel, he put a quarter into the bed to get it jiggling and they fell onto it laughing all over again. Olivia wasn’t a big laugher and so he got her to go over the whole story again just so they could keep laughing and vibrating.

“I wouldn’t mind getting a little fresh air,” he said when things had quieted down. “You want to take a walk with me?” He knew she’d say no.

The Blue Jay was at the top of a small hill. He passed several other motels on the way down. Spring Waters. The Babbling Brook Inn. The All Inn. From the bottom of the hill, it was ten more minutes walking, past a decent restaurant, then two diners, around the corner at the 7-Eleven, and there it was—in the deserted lot of a defunct Midas Muffler shop. There were three cars waiting, parking lights on, radios laying a drift of melody on the heavy summer night air, the glow of cigarettes the only thing visible inside the cars. Nick pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and lit up in a spirit of communion. These strangers were his compadres.

Most people think drugs just waste your time and screw up your life. They don’t understand the happiness. They think you’re off drugs a few months, a few years, you forget about them, put them behind you and good riddance, but this is not the way it goes. Drugs have mass and density. Thick and delicious, they fill every crevice inside you. They offer absolute comfort and well-being. In reverse, their absence leaves you empty and arid.

Sober, he had to keep busy and purposeful, always moving. If he stopped, he immediately heard the sandstorm inside himself, and it terrified him.

He hadn’t smoked his cigarette halfway down when the dealer rolled in, in a Trans Am, flipping his lights off, ready to do business. Nick waited until a transaction got going between the dealer and a woman in a Lexus, then turned to walk back up the hill. He himself was not buying. He just liked to know he could still find the marketplace, wherever he was. This wasn’t difficult. Every place was basically the same. It was like kitchens. You could usually find the silverware drawer and the garbage pail on the first try. You just had to pay a little attention.

game show

Walter and Gracie were by now a rolling ball of dust in the vacant lot, what the old-timers in Chicago call a prairie. Gracie was twice Walter’s size with a bear head and tiny ears. They were good friends, boxing enthusiasts—paws around each other’s necks, grunting and growling, phony as TV wrestlers. Pinning down, sitting on, rolling over, pushing their noses into each other’s privates, then finally lying on their backs exhausted, side by side, occasionally flopping their heads over to lick each other’s mouths.

Gabe was their best audience. He jumped up and down in a squiggle of delight. The dogs were done; they didn’t have an ounce of boxing left in them.

“I think they’ve had it,” Carmen said to Gracie’s human, a young guy named Jack who brought his dog over here for these matches. They agreed this was something dogs needed, a good rumble. Something their humans couldn’t supply.

She and Gabe rushed Walter back home. They were perfecting a system for launching into their days. This involved making their lunches the night before and getting Gabe’s books into his backpack and letting him sleep in his school clothes. He was fine with this. And
he only looked a little rumpled, not so bad that anyone had said anything. Walking back, Carmen looked at her watch and saw that time had closed in on her. She grabbed the dog’s leash and Gabe’s hand, and broke into a slow run. Not just in this moment, but globally, cosmically, she had lost her advantage against daily life. Weeks, whole months passed beneath her notice, or off to the side while she was on the game show that was her life. She ran from pillar to post then on to the next pillar, ringing bells, pressing lighted buttons and buzzers, making wild stabs at answers to questions she wasn’t sure she had heard correctly, walking when she should be skipping, speaking when a song was expected. The show was called Single Parenthood. Added to this was time lost to surgeries—last week was the third—to reconstruct her ear. She would never know who hurt her, or if it was deliberate or inadvertent. The cops closed off the area and did some questioning, but the pro-lifers closed ranks, and no bystander had noticed where the flare had come from. This was not so important to her. She didn’t see herself so much as the victim of a single crazy person as of a whole crazy movement, and of its unfortunate collective unconscious belief that women are the property of men.

Tomorrow, she would have one pair of clean underpants left in her drawer and this was not a good pair. Once while polishing a pair of black shoes, she mistook them for a rag. She really needed all new underwear, and had made a mental note of this, but realistically couldn’t see a day in the near future when she’d be able to go down to Field’s. The only store nearby that sold underwear was on Broadway and it was a sex shop. The only underpants they’d have would be either leather with little zippers or a thong with a heart patch in front. She would just have to do laundry tonight, come what may.

The laundry was the least of it. Really, the whole house had gotten away from her. The crappy mini-blinds were felted with dust. The soles of any shoes crossing the kitchen floor stuck then peeled off with a ripping sound. The bathtub had a grimy ring with an embedded, historical character; moldy grout framed the tiles in a disturbingly
colorful, shimmering way. The refrigerator had filled itself, not with meal-making elements, rather with a hilarious number of jars of mustard. Assorted supplements—bilberry and black cohosh and blessed thistle—that someone swore by and Carmen then bought but as yet had not actually taken, and eventually would forget what ills they were supposed to remedy. Pushed to the back of the fridge were small crushed balls of aluminum foil and a couple of Tupperware boxes long past any point at which they could have been safe to open.

In the van, Carmen took off Gabe’s glasses to wipe the grease off the lenses with a corner of her shirt. She handed him a hairbrush. “See if you can do something with that rat’s nest.” He hated washing his hair.

“I need red and orange and yellow construction paper,” he said. “There’s a project for fall—” He was reading off a Xeroxed sheet he’d just pulled out of his backpack. “Colors of autumn. I’m on the project committee.”

“How could you be on a committee? You’re nine. And you had to have the paper by today?”

“They told us a while ago. I forgot to tell you.”

“Oh. Okay. Let me think.” She U-turned and headed back in the direction of the Walgreens. Because of its expansive hours, she wound up doing a lot of shopping there. In the same way, she bought a lot of groceries—spotted bananas and wildly overpriced head lettuce—at the 7-Eleven. These stores were light-up buttons on the wacky game show.