Where I'm Calling From (23 page)

She said something that he didn’t catch.

“Say again,” he said.

She shook her head and turned back to the stove. But then she turned again and said, loud enough and slow enough so he could hear it: “I found your stash in the bathroom.”

“I’m trying to cut back,” he said.

She said something else. “What?” he said. “What’d you say?” He really hadn’t heard her.

“We’ll talk later,” she said. “We have things to discuss, Lloyd. Money is one thing. But there are other things, too. First we have to see about this ear.” She put her finger into the pan and then took the pan off the stove. “I’ll let it cool for a minute,” she said. “It’s too hot right now. Sit down. Put this towel around your shoulders.”

He did as he was told. He sat on a chair and put the towel around his neck and shoulders. Then he hit the side of his head with his fist.

“Goddamn it,” he said.

She didn’t look up. She put her finger into the pan once more, testing. Then she poured the liquid from the pan into his plastic glass. She picked up the glass and came over to him.

“Don’t be scared,” she said. “It’s just some of your landlady’s baby oil, that’s all it is. I told her what was wrong, and she thought this might help. No guarantees,” Inez said. “But maybe this’ll loosen things up in there. She said it used to happen to her husband. She said this one time she saw a piece of wax fall out of his ear, and it was like a big plug of something. It was ear wax, was what it was. She said try this. And she didn’t have any Q-tips. I can’t understand that, her not having any Q-tips. That part really surprises me.”

“Okay,” he said. “All right. I’m willing to try anything. Inez, if I had to go on like this, I think I’d rather be dead. You know? I mean it, Inez.”

“Tilt your head all the way to the side now,” she said. “Don’t move. I’ll pour this in until your ear fills up, then I’ll stopper it with this dishrag. And you just sit there for ten minutes, say. Then we’ll see. If this doesn’t do it, well, I don’t have any other suggestions. I just don’t know what to do then.”

“This’ll work,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll find a gun and shoot myself. I’m serious. That’s what I feel like doing, anyway.”

He turned his head to the side and let it hang down. He looked at the things in the room from this new perspective. But it wasn’t any different from the old way of looking, except that everything was on its side.

“Farther,” she said. He held on to the chair for balance and lowered his head even more. All of the objects in his vision, all of the objects in his life, it seemed, were at the far end of this room. He could feel the warm liquid pour into his ear. Then she brought the dishrag up and held it there. In a little while, she began to massage the area around his ear. She pressed into the soft part of the flesh between his jaw and skull. She moved her fingers to the area over his ear and began to work the tips of her fingers back and forth. After a while, he didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there. It could have been ten minutes.

It could have been longer. He was still holding on to the chair. Now and then, as her fingers pressed the side of his head, he could feel the warm oil she’d poured in there wash back and forth in the canals inside his ear. When she pressed a certain way, he imagined he could hear, inside his head, a soft, swishing sound.

“Sit up straight,” Inez said. He sat up and pressed the heel of his hand against his head while the liquid poured out of his ear. She caught it in the towel. Then she wiped the outside of his ear.

Inez was breathing through her nose. Lloyd heard the sound her breath made as it came and went. He heard a car pass on the street outside the house and, at the back of the house, down below his kitchen window, the clear snick-snick of pruning shears.

“Well?” Inez said. She waited with her hands on her hips, frowning.

“I can hear you,” he said. “I’m all right! I mean, I can hear. It doesn’t sound like you’re talking underwater anymore. It’s fine now. It’s okay. God, I thought for a while I was going to go crazy. But I feel fine now. I can hear everything. Listen, honey, I’ll make coffee. There’s some juice, too.”

“I have to go,” she said. “I’m late for something. But I’ll come back. We’ll go out for lunch sometime.

We need to talk.”

“I just can’t sleep on this side of my head, is all,” he went on. He followed her into the living room. She lit a cigarette. “That’s what happened. I slept all night on this side of my head, and my ear plugged up. I think I’ll be all right as long as I don’t forget and sleep on this side of my head. If I’m careful. You know what I’m saying? If I can just sleep on my back, or else on my left side.”

She didn’t look at him.

“Not forever, of course not, I know that. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do it the rest of my life. But for a while, anyway. Just my left side, or else flat on my back.”

But even as he said this, he began to feel afraid of the night that was coming. He began to fear the moment he would begin to make his preparations for bed and what might happen afterward. That time was hours away, but already he was afraid. What if, in the middle of the night, he accidentally turned onto his right side, and the weight of his head pressing into the pillow were to seal the wax again into the dark canals of his ear? What if he woke up then, unable to hear, the ceiling inches from his head?

“Good God,” he said. “Jesus, this is awful. Inez, I just had something like a terrible nightmare. Inez, where do you have to go?”

“I told you,” she said, as she put everything back into her purse and made ready to leave. She looked at her watch. “I’m late for something.” She went to the door. But at the door she turned and said something else to him. He didn’t listen. He didn’t want to. He watched her lips move until she’d said what she had to say. When she’d finished, she said, “Goodbye.” Then she opened the door and closed it behind her.

He went into the bedroom to dress. But in a minute he hurried out, wearing only his trousers, and went to the door. He opened it and stood there, listening. On the landing below, he heard Inez thank Mrs. Matthews for the oil. He heard the old woman say, “You’re welcome.” And then he heard her draw a connection between her late husband and himself. He heard her say, “Leave me your number. I’ll call if something happens. You never know.”

“I hope you don’t have to,” Inez said. “But I’ll give it to you, anyway. Do you have something to write it down with?”

Lloyd heard Mrs. Matthews open a drawer and rummage through it. Then her old woman’s voice said,

“Okay.”

Inez gave her their telephone number at home. “Thanks,” she said.

“It was nice meeting you,” Mrs. Matthews said.

He listened as Inez went on down the stairs and opened the front door. Then he heard it close. He waited until he heard her start their car and drive away. Then he shut the door and went back into the bedroom to finish dressing.

After he’d put on his shoes and tied the laces, he lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. He let his arms rest under the covers at his sides. He closed his eyes and pretended it was night and pretended he was going to fall asleep. Then he brought his arms up and crossed them over his chest to see how this position would suit him. He kept his eyes closed, trying it out. All right, he thought. Okay.

If he didn’t want that ear to plug up again, he’d have to sleep on his back, that was all. He knew he could do it. He just couldn’t forget, even in his sleep, and turn onto the wrong side. Four or five hours’ sleep a night was all he needed, anyway. He’d manage. Worse things could happen to a man. In a way, it was a challenge. But he was up to it. He knew he was. In a minute, he threw back the covers and got up.

He still had the better part of the day ahead of him. He went into the kitchen, bent down in front of the little refrigerator, and took out a fresh bottle of champagne. He worked the plastic cork out of the bottle as carefully as he could, but there was still the festive pop of champagne being opened. He rinsed the baby oil out of his glass, then poured it full of champagne. He took the glass over to the sofa and sat down. He put the glass on the coffee table. Up went his feet onto the coffee table, next to the champagne. He leaned back. But after a time he began to worry some more about the night that was coming on. What if, despite all his efforts, the wax decided to plug his other ear? He closed his eyes and shook his head. Pretty soon he got up and went into the bedroom. He undressed and put his pajamas back on. Then he moved back into the living room. He sat down on the sofa once more, and once more put his feet up. He reached over and turned the TV on. He adjusted the volume. He knew he couldn’t keep from worrying about what might happen when he went to bed. It was just something he’d have to learn to live with. In a way, this whole business reminded him of the thing with the doughnuts and champagne. It was not that remarkable at all, if you thought about it. He took some champagne. But it didn’t taste right. He ran his tongue over his lips, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He looked and saw a film of oil on the champagne.

He got up and carried the glass to the sink, where he poured it into the drain. He took the bottle of champagne into the living room and made himself comfortable on the sofa. He held the bottle by its neck as he drank.

He wasn’t in the habit of drinking from the bottle, but it didn’t seem that much out of the ordinary. He decided that even if he were to fall asleep sitting up on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon, it wouldn’t be any more strange than somebody having to lie on his back for hours at a time. He lowered his head to peer out the window. Judging from the angle of sunlight, and the shadows that had entered the room, he guessed it was about three o’clock.

J.P. and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin’s drying-out facility. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin’s, J.P. is first and foremost a drunk. But he’s also a chimney sweep. It’s his first time here, and he’s scared. I’ve been here once before. What’s to say? I’m back. J.P.’s real name is Joe Penny, but he says I should call him J.P. He’s about thirty years old. Younger than I am. Not much younger, but a little.

He’s telling me how he decided to go into his line of work, and he wants to use his hands when he talks.

But his hands tremble. I mean, they won’t keep still. “This has never happened to me before,” he says.

He means the trembling. I tell him I sympathize. I tell him the shakes will idle down. And they will. But it takes time.

We’ve only been in here a couple of days. We’re not out of the woods yet. J.P. has these shakes, and every so often a nerve—maybe it isn’t a nerve, but it’s something—begins to jerk in my shoulder.

Sometimes it’s at the side of my neck. When this happens, my mouth dries up. It’s an effort just to swallow then. I know something’s about to happen and I want to head it off. I want to hide from it, that’s what I want to do. Just close my eyes and let it pass by, let it take the next man. J.P. can wait a minute.

I saw a seizure yesterday morning. A guy they call Tiny. A big fat guy, an electrician from Santa Rosa.

They said he’d been in here for nearly two weeks and that he was over the hump. He was going home in a day or two and would spend New Year’s Eve with his wife in front of the TV. On New Year’s Eve, Tiny planned to drink hot chocolate and eat cookies. Yesterday morning he seemed just fine when he came down for breakfast. He was letting out with quacking noises, showing some guy how he called ducks right down onto his head. “Blam. Blam,” said Tiny, picking off a couple. Tiny’s hair was damp and was slicked back along the sides of his head. He’d just come out of the shower. He’d also nicked himself on the chin with his razor. But so what? Just about everybody at Frank Martin’s has nicks on his face. It’s something that happens. Tiny edged in at the head of the table and began telling about something that had happened on one of his drinking bouts. People at the table laughed and shook their heads as they shoveled up their eggs. Tiny would say something, grin, then look around the table for a sign of recognition. We’d all done things just as bad and crazy, so, sure, that’s why we laughed. Tiny had scrambled eggs on his plate, and some biscuits and honey. I was at the table, but I wasn’t hungry. I had some coffee in front of me. Suddenly, Tiny wasn’t there anymore. He’d gone over in his chair with a big clatter. He was on his back on the floor with his eyes closed, his heels drumming the linoleum. People hollered for Frank Martin. But he was right there. A couple of guys got down on the floor beside Tiny. One of the guys put his fingers inside Tiny’s mouth and tried to hold his tongue. Frank Martin yelled, “Everybody stand back!” Then I noticed that the bunch of us were leaning over Tiny, just looking at him, not able to take our eyes off him. “Give him air!” Frank Martin said. Then he ran into the office and called the ambulance.

Tiny is on board again today. Talk about bouncing back. This morning Frank Martin drove the station wagon to the hospital to get him. Tiny got back too late for his eggs, but he took some coffee into the dining room and sat down at the table anyway. Somebody in the kitchen made toast for him, but Tiny didn’t eat it. He just sat with his coffee and looked into his cup. Every now and then he moved his cup back and forth in front of him.

I’d like to ask him if he had any signal just before it happened. I’d like to know if he felt his ticker skip a beat, or else begin to race. Did his eyelid twitch? But I’m not about to say anything. He doesn’t look like he’s hot to talk about it, anyway. But what happened to Tiny is something I won’t ever forget. Old Tiny flat on the floor, kicking his heels. So every time this little flitter starts up anywhere, I draw some breath and wait to find myself on my back, looking up, somebody’s fingers in my mouth.

In his chair on the front porch, J.P. keeps his hands in his lap. I smoke cigarettes and use an old coal bucket for an ashtray. I listen to J.P. ramble on. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning—an hour and a half until lunch. Neither one of us is hungry. But just the same we look forward to going inside and sitting down at the table. Maybe we’ll get hungry.

What’s J.P. talking about, anyway? He’s saying how when he was twelve years old he fell into a well in the vicinity of the farm he grew up on. It was a dry well, lucky for him. “Or unlucky,” he says, looking around him and shaking his head. He says how late that afternoon, after he’d been located, his dad hauled him out with a rope. J.P. had wet his pants down there. He’d suffered all kinds of terror in that well, hollering for help, waiting, and then hollering some more. He hollered himself hoarse before it was over. But he told me that being at the bottom of that well had made a lasting impression. He’d sat there and looked up at the well mouth. Way up at the top, he could see a circle of blue sky. Every once in a while a white cloud passed over. A flock of birds flew across, and it seemed to J.P. their wingbeats set up this odd commotion. He heard other things. He heard tiny rustlings above him in the well, which made him wonder if things might fall down into his hair. He was thinking of insects. He heard wind blow over the well mouth, and that sound made an impression on him, too. In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well. But nothing fell on him and nothing closed off that little circle of blue. Then his dad came along with the rope, and it wasn’t long before J.P. was back in the world he’d always lived in.

“Keep talking, J.P. Then what?” I say.

When he was eighteen or nineteen years old and out of high school and had nothing whatsoever he wanted to do with his life, he went across town one afternoon to visit a friend. This friend lived in a house with a fireplace. J.P. and his friend sat around drinking beer and batting the breeze. They played some records. Then the doorbell rings. The friend goes to the door. This young woman chimney sweep is there with her cleaning things. She’s wearing a top hat, the sight of which knocked J.P. for a loop. She tells J.P.’s friend that she has an appointment to clean the fireplace. The friend lets her in and bows. The young woman doesn’t pay him any mind. She spreads a blanket on the hearth and lays out her gear. She’s wearing these black pants, black shirt, black shoes and socks. Of course, by now she’s taken her hat off.

J.P. says it nearly drove him nuts to look at her. She does the work, she cleans the chimney, while J.P. and his friend play records and drink beer. But they watch her and they watch what she does. Now and then J.P. and his friend look at each other and grin, or else they wink. They raise their eyebrows when the upper half of the young woman disappears into the chimney. She was all-right-looking, too, J.P. said.

When she’d finished her work, she rolled her things up in the blanket. From J.P.’s friend, she took a check that had been made out to her by his parents. And then she asks the friend if he wants to kiss her.

“It’s supposed to bring good luck,” she says. That does it for J.P. The friend rolls his eyes. He clowns some more. Then, probably blushing, he kisses her on the cheek. At this minute, J.P. made his mind up about something. He put his beer down. He got up from the sofa. He went over to the young woman as she was starting to go out the door.

“Me, too?” J.P. said to her.

She swept her eyes over him. J.P. says he could feel his heart knocking. The young woman’s name, it turns out, was Roxy.

“Sure,” Roxy says. “Why not? I’ve got some extra kisses.” And she kissed him a good one right on the lips and then turned to go.

Like that, quick as a wink, J.P. followed her onto the porch. He held the porch screen door for her. He went down the steps with her and out to the drive, where she’d parked her panel truck. It was something that was out of his hands. Nothing else in the world counted for anything. He knew he’d met somebody who could set his legs atremble. He could feel her kiss still burning on his lips, etc. J.P. couldn’t begin to sort anything out. He was filled with sensations that were carrying him every which way.

He opened the rear door of the panel truck for her. He helped her store her things inside. “Thanks,” she told him. Then he blurted it out— that he’d like to see her again. Would she go to a movie with him sometime? He’d realized, too, what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to do what she did. He wanted to be a chimney sweep. But he didn’t tell her that then.

J.P. says she put her hands on her hips and looked him over. Then she found a business card in the front seat of her truck. She gave it to him. She said, “Call this number after ten tonight. We can talk. I have to go now.” She put the top hat on and then took it off. She looked at J.P. once more. She must have liked what she saw, because this time she grinned. He told her there was a smudge near her mouth. Then she got into her truck, tooted the horn, and drove away.

“Then what?” I say. “Don’t stop now, J.P.”

I was interested. But I would have listened if he’d been going on about how one day he’d decided to start pitching horseshoes.

It rained last night. The clouds are banked up against the hills across the valley. J.P. clears his throat and looks at the hills and the clouds.

He pulls his chin. Then he goes on with what he was saying.

Roxy starts going out with him on dates. And little by little he talks her into letting him go along on jobs with her. But Roxy’s in business with her father and brother and they’ve got just the right amount of work. They don’t need anybody else. Besides, who was this guy J.P.? J.P. what? Watch out, they warned her.

So she and J.P. saw some movies together. They went to a few dances. But mainly the courtship revolved around their cleaning chimneys together. Before you know it, J.P. says, they’re talking about tying the knot. And after a while they do it, they get married. J.P.’s new father-in-law takes him in as a full partner. In a year or so, Roxy has a kid. She’s quit being a chimney sweep. At any rate, she’s quit doing the work. Pretty soon she has another kid. J.P.’s in his mid-twenties by now. He’s buying a house.

He says he was happy with his life. “I was happy with the way things were going,” he says. “I had everything I wanted. I had a wife and kids I loved, and I was doing what I wanted to do with my life.”

But for some reason—who knows why we do what we do?— his drinking picks up. For a long time he drinks beer and beer only. Any kind of beer—it didn’t matter. He says he could drink beer twenty-four hours a day. He’d drink beer at night while he watched TV. Sure, once in a while he drank hard stuff.

But that was only if they went out on the town, which was not often, or else when they had company over. Then a time comes, he doesn’t know why, when he makes the switch from beer to gin-and-tonic.

And he’d have more gin-and-tonic after dinner, sitting in front of the TV. There was always a glass of gin-and-tonic in his hand. He says he actually liked the taste of it. He began stopping off after work for drinks before he went home to have more drinks. Then he began missing some dinners. He just wouldn’t show up. Or else he’d show up, but he wouldn’t want anything to eat. He’d filled up on snacks at the bar.

Sometimes he’d walk in the door and for no good reason throw his lunch pail across the living room.

When Roxy yelled at him, he’d turn around and go out again. He moved his drinking time up to early afternoon, while he was still supposed to be working. He tells me that he was starting off the morning with a couple of drinks. He’d have a belt of the stuff before he brushed his teeth. Then he’d have his coffee. He’d go to work with a thermos bottle of vodka in his lunch pail.

J.P. quits talking. He just clams up. What’s going on? I’m listening. It’s helping me relax, for one thing.

It’s taking me away from my own situation. After a minute, I say, “What the hell? Go on, J.P.” He’s pulling his chin. But pretty soon he starts talking again.

J.P. and Roxy are having some real fights now. I mean fights. J.P. says that one time she hit him in the face with her fist and broke his nose. “Look at this,” he says. “Right here.” He shows me a line across the bridge of his nose. “That’s a broken nose.” He returned the favor. He dislocated her shoulder for her.

Another time he split her lip. They beat on each other in front of the kids. Things got out of hand. But he kept on drinking. He couldn’t stop. And nothing could make him stop. Not even with Roxy’s dad and her brother threatening to beat the hell out of him. They told Roxy she should take the kids and clear out.

But Roxy said it was her problem. She got herself into it, and she’d solve it.

Now J.P. gets real quiet again. He hunches his shoulders and pulls down in his chair. He watches a car driving down the road between this place and the hills.

I say, “I want to hear the rest of this, J.P. You better keep talking.”

“I just don’t know,” he says. He shrugs.

“It’s all right,” I say. And I mean it’s okay for him to tell it. “Go on, J.P.”

One way she tried to fix things, J.P. says, was by finding a boyfriend. J.P. would like to know how she found the time with the house and kids.

I look at him and I’m surprised. He’s a grown man. “If you want to do that,” I say, “you find the time.

You make the time.”

J.P. shakes his head. “I guess so,” he says.

Anyway, he found out about it—about Roxy’s boyfriend—and he went wild. He manages to get Roxy’s wedding ring off her finger. And when he does, he cuts it into several pieces with a pair of wire-cutters.

Good, solid fun. They’d already gone a couple of rounds on this occasion. On his way to work the next morning, he gets arrested on a drunk charge. He loses his driver’s license. He can’t drive the truck to work anymore. Just as well, he says. He’d already fallen off a roof the week before and broken his thumb. It was just a matter of time until he broke his neck, he says.

He was here at Frank Martin’s to dry out and to figure how to get his life back on track. But he wasn’t here against his will, any more than I was. We weren’t locked up. We could leave any time we wanted.