Round Rock (6 page)

“How are your women doing?” he asked.

“Working with women is a whole different ball game,” she said. “They’re so much more willing to look at themselves, examine their behavior. The egos aren’t so well defended.” There was no remorse in her voice, nor the faintest constriction of regret. “I’m having the time of my life.”

“Lucky you.”

She searched his face. “You still haven’t found anyone.”

“Still looking,” he said, though he hadn’t even interviewed any applicants for Julie’s job. Some kind of mental block, he supposed. A protest at her leaving. Maybe he’d run the whole farm into the ground. That’d show her.

She was on the verge of saying something, Red could tell, but restrained herself. They smiled at each other—he wistfully, she with a little shake of her head—and pushed off down the aisle in opposite directions.

Red stopped next at the auto parts store, the hardware store, the produce stand. In the detox parking lot, he sat in the truck, window cracked, and smoked. The day was cold and clear. He could see down the hill to the ocean and, across the dark blue water, the craggy shadows of the Channel Islands. On one of those islands, a woman had lived alone for a dozen years. A Chumash Indian woman. She’d lived by foraging, snaring fish and game, weathering storms in shallow caves. She’d done fine, too, until rescued. Taken to the mainland, given clothes, a bed, human company, and medical treatment, she died within the year.

A
PPROACHING
the detox reception desk, Red was intercepted by Doc Perrin. “C’mon, Husky,” Perrin said. “We got test results.”

In Julie’s absence, Red had also fallen so far behind on staff medical insurance that the policy had been canceled. To be reinstated, the
company told Red,
he
needed a physical examination. He’d called on Perrin, his sponsor and friend, expecting him to fill out the insurance forms over a cup of detox’s pisswater coffee. Instead, the old sawbones merrily administered an electrocardiogram, a treadmill test, hammered on Red’s knees, listened to his lungs, pinched, prodded, and stuck a finger up his ass.

In Perrin’s office, they sat down across from each other, the desk between them. “You gotta lose forty pounds, friend,” Perrin said with more gusto than Red felt was called for. “And cut out caffeine and stop smoking. And that’s for starters. You get that licked, we’ll work on cholesterol and sugar. First thing, though, you gotta lower that stress level.”

“Right,” said Red.

“Might think about cutting down your work load.”

“Right.”

“Got a new secretary yet?”

“Thinking about it.”

Perrin cackled. “Face it, Blue Eyes. You’re nothing but a dried-out old drunk still hellbent on self-destruction.”

This was hardly news to Red. When his head hit the pillow and he was alone with the sibilance in his lungs and the furious working of his heart, he vowed to quit the coffee, the sugar, the two-to-three packs a day. In the morning, he’d have half a pot of mud and a dozen Pall Malls and be midway through his rounds before he was awake enough to recall these promises. When he did try to go an hour or two without nicotine, the intensity of his craving astonished him. Who would guess that a fifty-two-year-old body could harbor such focused, shameless appetites!

“This kid you’re picking up?” Perrin shifted his attention to another open file. “Skinny as a POW. Some liver damage, but I’m not sure the message has gotten through. You might like him, though. Smart.”

A
N ETERNITY
had passed on the hideous waiting room couch, an eternity plagued by crawly bugs, vague, ominous dreams, and Bobby, who insisted on waking Lewis every few minutes: Glass of water? A final Dilantin? This time, Bobby introduced a large, fair man. “Here’s Red Ray,” Bobby said, and to Red, “I’ll leave you to it.”

The guy had a gut that swelled out over the waistband of his jeans. From Lewis’s vantage point on the sofa, he had a double chin and a protruding, snouty face. His eyebrows, half red, half white, were long and bristly, like a badger’s. His fairness seemed a painful, delicate condition.

“So,” he said. “You want to come to Round Rock.”

Ahh. A friendly sort, with a distinctly visible nimbus of goodwill, a light-flecked shading surrounding his face. Lewis managed to sit up straight. Then again, there was a light-flecked shading around everything—thanks, no doubt, to the many meds he’d been given in detox. “What I want,” Lewis said, “is to get outta here. Why can’t I just leave?”

“With your record, you walk out of here, get drunk, and hurt someone, detox is liable. So somebody else needs to take responsibility for you.”

“Yeah, but I can’t ask anyone to drive a hundred miles up here on a stupid bureaucratic technicality.”

“Why not?”

“No,” Lewis said darkly. “I just couldn’t.”

“I’m sure Bobby told you there are beds upstairs.”

“I couldn’t stay here.”

“If you don’t come with me, you know, they’ll send you over to the state hospital.”

This was the first mention Lewis had heard of a state hospital. “And where would that be?”

“Camarillo,” said Red Ray. “The alcoholism ward. It’s not so bad. Can get pretty hairy, but some guys actually like it.”

Lewis knew about Camarillo. Who didn’t? The big nuthouse. One time he’d been driving with a girl through the Santa Monica Mountains, trying to find a route back over to the coast, and they ran across the place. Tucked up against green rolling hills, the hospital formed a whole little town unto itself. There was no checkpoint, no guard, and they drove right onto the grounds. All the buildings were white with red tiled roofs. The streets were wide and freshly oiled and lined with healthy, thick-trunked palm trees. Expanses of green, closely cropped lawns shimmered in the sun. The girl he was with said she wanted to make love. It would be funny, she said, to have sex at the nuthouse. They drove around looking for a likely spot. The flower beds were all low to the ground, and there were no shrubs. No walls, no nooks.
That was the thing about a nuthouse, Lewis guessed: no privacy. Curiously, nobody came out and asked why they were driving around in slow-motion circles. In fact, the only person they saw was a huge-headed man tottering down a red-painted sidewalk. Lewis suggested they do it in the car. The girl said that wouldn’t work for her, so they drove on down the coast.

Lewis was shocked to hear they’d ship him to Camarillo. He was angry, too, that neither Bobby nor the breathing-impaired doctor had mentioned this possibility. On the other hand, it would be ironic if he did wind up inside. He could call that girl and say, “You’ll never guess where I am. Here’s a hint: no place to do it.”

Red, meanwhile, was standing with his hands splayed on his hips, fingers drumming at high idle.

“Sorry,” Lewis said. “Just thinking about this girl I used to know….”

Red regarded him without interest. Not in the mood for reminiscence, Lewis guessed. “And, uh, your place—what goes on there?”

“You’d work. Go to AA meetings. Get back on your feet. There’s counseling. Three squares a day. Softball on Sunday.”

Lewis knew about AA, and not only from the meetings at detox. He’d had to go to six meetings after he got that DUI. He’d heard a few good stories about people shooting dope with famous musicians, stuff like that. Once, a leader had called on him to speak—or rather, to “share.” Would he like to share? No, he wouldn’t, but he didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings, either. He told that meeting he was impressed by the rigor with which they were trying to solve their problems. He had no doubt that their efforts would pay off. When he finished talking, the man next to him thumped Lewis on the shoulder. “Keep coming back,” he’d said.

“I’m not crazy about AA,” said Lewis.

Red shrugged. “We do have one requirement, and knowing it might save us both some time. The only requirement is a desire to stop drinking.”

Lewis had heard that phrase before, in the AA rules. His first impulse was to say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s just forget it then, but his present options were beginning to compute. Upstairs. Nuthouse. Remote drunk farm. He felt compelled to cry out against the mounting absurdity. “I’m just not so convinced I
need
any of this. It feels like a big mistake, as if I’ve been caught up in the system, like I’ve found
myself in a tomato soup factory, only I’m not a tomato. I’m not a tomato, I tell all the machines, but they say, Well, you’re on the conveyor belt, you’re in the boiling vat—as far as we know you
are
a tomato.”

Red chuckled. “Oh, hell,” he said. “You can get out of here
like that.
Call a friend, anybody—that girl you were thinking about. Have her pose as your sister and sign you out. They won’t check. They just want a signature.”

Lewis focused on a few square inches of the brown plaid couch and thought about who to call. Sam, his philosophy professor, would probably come, but in a year or two, Lewis would be asking him for recommendations.
He was a brilliant student, but I did have to bail him out of the drunk tank.
As for the girl who’d been to Camarillo, she might not be so pleased to hear from him. He wished he knew the name of that girl at the party, the one with the bucket-of-milk face. And there was Sergei, a Russian physicist whose papers he edited, but with all the vodka Sergei swilled, Bobby would probably take one whiff and lock
him
in the rubber room.

Lewis couldn’t think of anyone else, anybody he wouldn’t be too ashamed to ask. Fear set in at a low hum. Dark winged things flickered in the corners of his eyes. Or maybe he was just glimpsing Red’s fingers drumming with impatience. Down the hall, someone was cheerfully whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Lewis reached for his knapsack and stood up. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

Lewis’s abrupt lurch upwards startled Red Ray, and it practically made Lewis pass out. His blood still wasn’t moving at normal speed, and the room burst into bright squiggles.

“Easy now,” Red said, grabbing Lewis’s shoulders. They swayed, and briefly it seemed that they might go down together. Red recovered first, then righted Lewis. “I take it,” Red said, “you want to come with me.”

L
EWIS
slept all the way to Round Rock and through much of his first week there, or as much of it as he could. He was awakened for meals and also for AA meetings, where he stayed conscious long enough to say, during check-in, “Lewis, alcoholic.” In detox he’d learned it was easier to go with the flow than explain to a room of the newly converted that he personally was not a member of their tribe.

He shared a room with Carl, the snoring virtuoso. Carl was a high-school biology teacher; he had a wife and three towheaded little girls whose pictures occupied the nightstand between his and Lewis’s single beds. A binge drinker, Carl kept getting arrested with underage hookers he picked up at a bar in Oxnard called the Joy Room. After arrest number three, Carl’s wife had thrown him out of the house and he had come here, to Round Rock, presumably to wreck Lewis’s run on sleep. Lewis, awakened in the early morning hours, swore the curtains rose and fell—indeed, that the entire room shuddered—with each of Carl’s snores. There was nothing to do but get dressed and wander around.

He didn’t know, really, where he was. He hadn’t seen a map. He knew he was north of L.A., north of the San Fernando Valley, and perhaps not far from the ocean. Sometimes, as he roamed the house at night, he watched fog billow up against the windows, a series of ghostly shoulders. By day he noted citrus groves, clear skies, a thick yellow afternoon light.

The mansion itself seemed a comic travesty—a ravaged, once-lavish confection, a villa turned loony bin. It was called the Blue House, but the name barely hinted at its peculiar exterior color, an insistent, almost process blue, the color of robins’ eggs, swimming pools, or glacial fissures. Inside, rooms with twenty-foot ceilings were cluttered with sprung sofas, ugly coffee tables, and folding chairs;
parquet floors were strewn with fake Persians and rag rugs. AA meetings took place in the ballroom, whose pillars were carved into ornate hanks of twisted rope, the slate floor hand cut in a wild sunflower pattern clearly inspired by van Gogh’s work at Arles. Meals were eaten in the formal, wood-paneled dining room at six chrome dinettes, the kind Lewis spilled milk on as a child, with surfaces that looked like cubed Jell-O. Rackety older white refrigerators were shoved up against the dark wood wainscoting and stocked with milk and juices and packaged pastries you could heat up anytime in battered toaster ovens. Experienced residents said this was Round Rock’s biggest selling point over other recovery houses: always enough to eat.

Lewis located two pay phones in closets off the living room and the lobby. Once, he shut himself in and, depositing the last of his change, called his philosophy professor. Amanda answered, and Lewis hung up without speaking.

He bummed cigarettes until Carl told him he could get small loans from the house manager—it would all show up on his bill. The notion of a bill caused a twinkle of alarm and then was blissfully forgotten, a twenty-dollar loan immediately sought and granted.

On his second Friday night, after dinner, Lewis squeezed into a Buick with five other men and rode through rural darkness to a town called Buchanan, where a large AA meeting was held in the domed auditorium of a former Masonic Temple, now a Teamsters union hall. There were women present, the first Lewis had seen in days. He sat next to one, a plump and fortyish knitter, who kindly gave him an unpleasantly sour lemon drop. He stayed awake for some of the speaker’s story, so as not to appear rude; but the lulling tick of her needles wore him down and sleep, in a heavy green wave, reclaimed him.

On one early-morning ramble, Lewis slipped into the parlor, where the TV played all night to a host of chronic insomniacs. “If it isn’t Rip Van Winkle,” said Chuck, a small old guy with a white butch cut. A plumber, Chuck had retired to tend bar in a two-bit beer joint in Castaic and promptly drank himself into bankruptcy. Even sleeping through most AA meetings, Lewis had absorbed more biographical data about his companions than he cared to know. He knew, also, that this was Chuck’s second visit to Round Rock; after
his first discharge, he’d made it as far as the bar in Rito called Happy Yolanda’s before his first scotch rocks.