West of Here (27 page)

“Your mother will come here to live someday soon. You’ll wait for her, you understand?”

Near the end of the row, they came upon a red house with a sloping roof, whose shingles were affixed willy-nilly. Mounting the uneven steps with Thomas in tow, the Potato Counter tapped on the door, and an old fat woman, whose teeth were too far apart, greeted them there. She led them inside and down a hallway that smelled like cooking, to a room with no door, where an old man sat waiting for them in a rocking chair of rough hewn cedar, with a heavy blanket folded over his lap.

The old man smiled at Thomas, but Thomas did not smile back, did not so much as tilt his head or move his lips. The room felt big
and small at the same time. Twice, with the old man’s gaze steadily upon him, Thomas glanced over his shoulder at the doorless doorway. Sensing his uneasiness, Adam took his hand, and to his surprise the boy held it.

Lord Jim scrutinized Thomas head to toe, glimpsing things in those strange blue eyes that he could not comprehend, a world he could not penetrate. The boy did not shrink from his gaze. He stood straight. His lips began to work silently, and he clutched Adam’s hand still tighter.

“This one has a strong will,” observed Lord Jim. “This one doesn’t forget.”

“That I wouldn’t know,” said Adam. “The boy’s a mystery to me.”

Lord Jim nodded his head slowly. “He will reveal himself,
cayci.
And he will cease to be a boy.”

When it came time for Adam to leave, the boy would not let go of his hand. Extracting it at last from the boy’s fierce grip, Adam patted Thomas once on the head and turned to leave, avoiding the boy’s eyes, which he could feel desperately trying to engage him. As Adam passed through the doorless doorway, Thomas tried to follow him, but Adam turned and held him there until Lord Jim stood on venerable legs.

“Don’t be frightened, child. I’ve been expecting you.”

The old man persuaded the boy to come back through the doorway into the room, which felt only big now, and no longer small at the same time. The old man retrieved a high-backed chair from the corner of the room and positioned it directly in front of his rocker.

“Come. Sit.”

But Thomas would not leave the window. With the curtain pulled back, he watched the Potato Counter retreat, and it was as if something were pulling him through the glass.

APRIL
1887

It was spitting rain on Hollywood Beach early in the spring of 1887, when Joseph King came to ask his daughter’s forgiveness. A steady breeze was blowing off of the strait, and a cloud of frenzied seagulls hovered above the receding tide. Beneath her mat shelter, Hoko was sitting cross-legged by a low fire. Thomas squatted beside her at a distance of several feet. Neither of them seemed to notice Joseph standing nearby. Hoko was looking straight ahead, as though in a trance, and the boy was looking down at his feet, scrawling shapes in the sand.

After a moment, Joseph approached a step closer to the fire and announced himself.

“C’tan ek?”

Thomas looked up at his grandfather, but Hoko did not. Soon the boy went back to his scrawling. When the silence became too long to stand in, Joseph ducked in under the roof and lowered himself by the fire across from his daughter.

“The salmonberries are out early,” he observed.

“Ha-tec,”
said Hoko dryly.

Joseph lapsed into silence. Restlessly, he began to stir the fire. He continued to shrink from shame, but also from fear. He’d better speak now while he still had a mouth.

“I have come to ask for your forgiveness,” he said at last.

Hoko still did not look at him. She spoke to him from a great distance. “If that’s what you’ve come for, then you shouldn’t have come at all.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Joseph looked briefly into the fire and then sought the evasive eyes of his daughter. “But you must understand. I was angry.
K’wesen.
”

Hoko’s face hardened. “And I was scared, and alone. You understand? Just a girl.
K’wesen.
You disowned me, you blamed me. You stopped speaking to me. You made me feel like nothing. What is sorry, after that?”

Joseph lowered his eyes, which immediately sought refuge in the fire. “You’re right, sorry is nothing. I am nothing. And only you can make me something again. That is why I’m here.”

“Here, ha! Here is nothing.
Hiya? Uxw’k! There
is where I needed you then. Here you’re no good to anybody.”

“But I’ve come to —”

“You’ve come to a different place,” Hoko said, looking right at him for the first time. “You are a different man; I am a woman. You chose these paths for us.”

It was Joseph who diverted his eyes now. “But you are my daughter, my flesh and blood.”

“
Hiya.
You have no daughter.”

Thomas looked up from the sand to watch his grandfather walk away that day. He walked like a dead man.

JULY
2006

The morning Randy was sprung, Rita called in sick. She combed her hair out in waves beneath the blow-dryer and tucked it behind her ears, how Randy liked it. She painted her toenails ruby red. She donned a denim mini and some pointy black pumps and a fake leather halter. Finally, she applied a smoky blue eye shadow and ruby red lipstick to match her toenails.

The strait was shrouded in fog so thick that Ediz Hook was not visible, but by the time she reached Wagner’s Corner it had lifted, and Rita began to catch sunbeams through the low clouds as she wended her way down a deserted Highway 112. She bit her cuticles and smoked cigarettes and fought off the silence with KBSG. She caught the tail end of “Baby Love,” all of “Brandy,” and the opening bars of the Zombies “Time of the Season” before the signal gave out around Joyce, and Rita was left only with the swishing progress of the Monte Carlo as it sped toward Randy. Gradually her thoughts began to seep in to the silence. One thought in particular assailed her — the thought of how Curtis would never forgive her for taking Randy back.

But how could you explain the complexities of real world love to a sixteen-year-old kid, a kid who hid in his room doing God knew what with empty paint cans? A kid who had trouble forgiving, a kid who held grudges. A kid who was angry at the world. Rita softened at the thought of Curtis in one of two dozen oversized T-shirts, peering out from behind thick bangs. He was a good kid, beneath it all. She didn’t deserve him.

When it had been just Rita and the boy, after Dan, and before Randy, things had been different. Curtis had made an effort. He looked out for her. When Rita dragged in come evening after working a double shift, when her wrist ached as though someone had cut a tendon,
Curtis made macaroni, brought her a beer and three aspirin, watched the news with her, and shared her sullenness. He never asked her for money. He was always on the lookout for deals as they strolled the aisles of Albertson’s or the Dollar Store or Safeway. The Club Card had been his idea. He’d taken the move to the trailer well, all things considered, although she knew he hated the place. It wasn’t until the calls from Randy started arriving from corrections that Curtis took a turn for the worse. That’s when they stopped shopping together. That’s when the door locking began. It got to where she no longer knew whether Curtis was home. When they passed in the narrow hallway, he was sullen and silent.

Any anticipation Rita had felt for greeting Randy turned to dread by degrees with the realization that her future was bound to look a lot like her past. That Randy, for all his charms — his lean musculature, his arrogance, his soft spot for pitbull puppies — was not likely to have changed, to have been corrected, as it were, one iota. Randy simply could not be undone. They could break him down, humiliate him, force him to his knees in the name of correction, but he’d only get harder. Sometimes Rita felt that Randy was her punishment for Dan.

When Rita arrived, Randy was already slouching outside reception in the rain, looking shorter and meaner than she remembered. His nose seemed crookeder. He was wearing jeans and a green wind-breaker and black rubber flip-flops. His hair was cropped to a blue shadow and she could see the little pink scars on his head even at a distance. Rita made a quick inspection of her lipstick and her eye shadow in the rearview mirror as she pulled to the curb, where the Monte Carlo stalled.

Randy dropped his cigarette butt, ground it out with the toe of his flip-flop, and climbed into the car as Rita restarted it. He pulled out another cigarette. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Where you been?”

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Yeah.”

“You look healthy.”

“Yeah, well, what can I say? Ain’t nothin’ better to do in there than stay healthy. Got a light?”

The car ride was mostly silent. Rita could feel Randy’s eyes on her but not enough, never enough. Mostly, he just smoked cigarettes and looked vaguely out the window. It didn’t seem to matter what Randy looked at, there was always a level of disinterest in his gaze.

They stopped at the Hungry Bear where they hardly talked while Randy made quick work of a three-egg omelet and two bowls of peach cobbler. Rita had a green salad with dill pickle wedges in it. Picking absently through the iceberg, she noticed a new tattoo on Randy’s wrist, just visible beneath the cuff of his jacket. It looked like an ice-cream cone with feet. She would come to find that it was the handiwork of someone named Gooch in his cell block and that the subject was in fact none other than Atlas shouldering his burden. And later, when she looked up Atlas at the library, it would occur to Rita that Randy shared absolutely nothing in common with Atlas, who was punished for his strength and determination, while Randy was punished for stealing cars and assaulting cabdrivers. And while Atlas carried upon his shoulders the pillars of heaven and earth, Randy’s only burden was his own baggage. But none of this occurred to Rita as they sat at the Hungry Bear, beneath the constant scrutiny of the proprietor’s eight-year-old daughter, who sat in the adjacent booth picking her nose and wiping it on the underside of the table, while staring unabashedly at what were for the most part silent proceedings.

Randy was apparently unaware of the child’s surveillance. He kept staring at Rita’s tits throughout lunch, until he was finally moved to speech. “Why you gotta put it on parade like that? That’s bullshit.”

They stopped by Gertie’s around noon, just as Mickey fired up the big screen and started restocking the coolers. They drank two pitchers of beer on Rita’s employee discount. They watched
SportsCenter
twice. Three times they ducked out for cigarettes.

“Got a lead on a job,” he said, midway through the second pitcher. “Muffler shop off Lincoln.”

“Mm,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rita watched NASCAR footage unfold without really paying attention. “It means, that’s great. I hope it pans out.”

“It fucking better.”

“There’s a two-bedroom on Lauridson for six fifty,” she said hopefully. “It’s got a pool. And a parking garage.”

“Pff. Like we need a parking garage for that shitpile.”

“We could get a better car. We could fix up the Monte Carlo and give it to Curtis. He’s sixteen now.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he said, fumbling in his jeans pocket. “Give me the lighter, will you?”

They left Gertie’s about two that afternoon and stopped at Circle K for a sixer of Schmidt Ice. On the drive back to the trailer, the Monte Carlo stalled twice.

WHEN CURTIS ARRIVED
home around two fifteen (having skipped Enslow’s class), he found the trailer awash in a blue haze of cigarette smoke. Randy’s green duffel bag sagged off one end on the coffee table, along with three empty Schmidt cans. Randy’s clothing was strewn up and down the hallway. Curtis could hear them fucking in his bedroom, where they hadn’t even bothered to shut the door, his mother grunting with each shunt, her head, or elbow, or some other body part bumping the flimsy wall, as Randy talked to her breathlessly.

Curtis registered it all with disgust. Same old shit. How long before Randy started in with his jealousy bullshit? Before he started watching Rita’s every move like a hawk? When she’d first started working at Gertie’s, Randy used to come in and sit in her section and drink coffee for most of her shift. He waited for her in the parking lot after the restaurant closed. Finally, Mickey had told Randy that he couldn’t sit in there all night long. Curtis had heard them arguing that night.

“Paranoid, my ass! Not with the kind of scumbags that hang out at that place,” Randy had said.

How long before Randy started bossing Curtis around again like he had a right? How long before he came unhinged and started taking shots at his mom? Fuck if he was going to watch that bullshit all over again. Fuck if he was going to so much as look at Randy sideways. Especially not on acid. Why spoil one of the few things worth looking
forward to? Dosing was the greatest escape yet. Better than sleeping. Better than drawing. Better than huffing. To peak on acid was to forget yourself completely, to turn yourself inside out, to broadcast what little mystery was left inside of you and then walk, and grasp, and wander with childlike wonder through a world of your own creation. That was the main thing, to feel like a kid again. Curtis could remember sitting perfectly still as a child, unfocusing his eyes watching the outer world swirl together in a corkscrew of humming colors. He could remember leaving his body altogether. But that was childhood. Ancient history. Now, he was forever stuck
right-fucking-here,
wher-ever that was — a million light-years from the humming corkscrew. But for ten bucks he could get close.

Curtis began to effect a quick escape, though not before he fished around in Randy’s jeans for his wallet. There must’ve been three hundred bucks inside. Filching a pair of twenties, Curtis replaced the wallet and smiled inwardly at the thought of KFC and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. On his way out the door, he snatched a half pack of Salems off the coffee table, along with a waxy red apple and half a Diet Coke.