T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Calvin glances down at his cast with its scrawl of good wishes—“Boogie Out!” Lee Junior had written — and then back at Ormand. He is thinking, suddenly and unaccountably, of the first time he laid eyes on the Orem place. Was it two years ago already? Yes, two years, come fall. He’d been living with that Mexicano family out in the Valley — rice and beans, rice and beans, till he thought he’d turn into a human burrito or blow out his insides or something — and then his daughter had found Jewel’s ad in the paper and gone out and made the arrangements.

“What do you say?” Ormand is leaning over him now. “Calvin?”

“A ridge?” Calvin says finally. “Where to?”

Ormand shrugs. “Oh, you know: around.”

Don’t expect anything fancy, she’d told him, as if he had anything to say about it. But when they got there and were actually sitting in the car out front where they had a good view of the blistered paint, dead oleanders, trash-strewn yard, and reeling porch, she was the one who got cold feet. She started in on how maybe he wouldn’t like these people and how maybe she ought to look a little further before they decided, but then Bang! went the screen door and Big Lee and Ormand ambled down the steps in T-shirts and engineer boots. Big Lee folded a stick of Red Man and tucked it up alongside his teeth, Ormand was clutching a can of Safeway beer like it was grafted onto him, and both of them were grinning as if they’d just shared a dirty joke in the back of the church. And then Big Lee was reaching his callused hand in through the window to shake with Calvin. Glad to meet you, neighbor, he murmured, turning his head to spit.

Shit, Calvin had said, swiveling round to look his daughter in the eye, I like these people.

Two minutes later they’re out in the street, Ormand swinging back the door of his primer-splotched pickup, the pale bulb of Mrs. Tuxton’s face just visible beyond the curtains over her kitchen sink. Even with Ormand’s help, the old man has trouble negotiating the eight-inch traverse from the wheelchair to the car seat, what with his bum leg and fractured forearm and the general debility that comes of living so long, but once they’re under way he leans back, half closes his eyes, and gives himself up to the soothing wash of motion. Trees flit overhead, streaks of light and moving shadow, and then an open stretch and the sun, warm as a hand, on the side of his face.

Yes, he likes these people. They might have their faults — Ormand and Lee Junior are drunk three-quarters of the time (that is, whenever they’re not sleeping) and they gobble up his pain pills like M&Ms — but down deep he feels more kinship with them than he does with his own daughter. At least they’ll talk to him and treat him like a human being instead of something that’s been dead and dug up. Hell, they even seem to like him. When they go out visiting or whatever it is they do — house to house, dusty roads, day and night — they always want to take him along. So what if he has to sit there in the car sometimes for an hour or more? At least he’s out of the house.

When he looks up, they’re in a strange neighborhood. Stucco houses in shades of mustard and aquamarine, shabby palms, campers and trailers and pickups parked out front. Ormand has got a fresh beer and his eyes are shrunk back in his head. He stabs at the radio buttons and a creaky fiddle comes whining through the dashboard speaker. “You been noddin’ out there a bit, huh, Calvin?” he says.

The old man’s teeth hurt him all of a sudden, hurt him something fierce, so that the water comes to his eyes — he wants to cry out with the pain of it, but his arm begins to throb in counterpoint and pretty soon his hip starts kicking up where he twisted it and all he can do is just clamp his jaws shut in frustration. But when the car rolls to a stop beneath a dusty old oak and Ormand slips out the door with his satchel and says, “Just hang out here for a bit, okay, Calvin? I’ll be right back,” the old man finds the image of the German woman rising up in his mind like a river-run log that just won’t stay down, and his voice comes back to him. “Where did you get that soda, anyways?” he says.

“I tell you, Dad, I just don’t trust these people. Now, you look what’s happened to your arm, and then there’s this whole business of Lee going to jail—”

Calvin is sitting glumly over a bowl of tepid corn chowder in the Country Griddle, toying with his spoon and sucking his teeth like a two-year-old. Across the bright Formica table, his daughter breaks off her monologue just long enough to take a sip of coffee and a quick ladylike nip at her tuna on rye. She’s wearing an off white dress, stockings, false eyelashes, and an expression about midway between harried and exasperated.

“He was innocent,” Calvin says.

His daughter gives him an impatient look. “Innocent or not, Dad, the man is in jail — in prison — for armed robbery. And I want to know who’s paying the bills and taking car of the place — I want to know who’s looking after you.”

“Armed robbery? The man had a screwdriver in his hand, for Christ’s sake—”

“Sharpened.”

“What?”

“I said it was a sharpened screwdriver.”

For a moment, Calvin says nothing. He fiddles with the salt shaker and watches his daughter get the Dad-you-know-you’re-not-supposed-to look on her face, and then, when he’s got her off guard, he says, “Jewel.”

“Jewel? Jewel what?”

“Takes care of the place. Pays the bills. Feeds me.” And she does a hell of a job of it too, he’s about to add, when a vast and crushing weariness suddenly descends on him. Why bother? His daughter’s up here on her day off to see about his arm and snoop around till she finds something rotten. And she’ll find it, all right, because she’s nothing but a sack of complaints and suspicions. Her ex-husband is second only to Adolf Hitler for pure maliciousness, her youngest is going to a psychiatrist three times a week, and her oldest is flunking out of college, she’s holding down two jobs to pay for the station wagon, figure-skating coaches, and orthopedic shoes, and her feet hurt. How could she even begin to understand what he feels for these people?

“Yes, and she drinks too. And that yard — it looks like something out of ‘Li’l Abner. ’” She’s waving her sandwich now, gesturing in a way that reminds him of her mother, and it makes him angry, it makes him want to throw her across his knee and paddle her. “Dad,” she’s saying, “listen. I’ve heard of this place up near me — a woman I know whose mother is bedridden recommended it and she—”

“A nursing home.”

“It’s called a ‘gerontological care facility’ and it’ll cost us seventy-five dollars more a month, but for my peace of mind — I mean, I just don’t feel right about you being with these people any more.”

He bends low over his chowder, making a racket with the spoon. So what if Jewel drinks? (And she does, he won’t deny it — red wine mainly, out of the gallon jug — and she’s not afraid to share it, either.) Calvin drinks too. So does the president. And so does the bossy, tired-looking woman sitting across the table from him. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. Even with Lee in jail, even with her two big out-of-work nephews sitting down at the table and eating like loggers or linebackers or something, Jewel manages. And with no scrimping, either. Eggs for breakfast, bologna and American cheese on white for lunch with sweet butter pickles, and meat — real meat — tor supper. Damn Mexicans never gave him meat, that’s for shit sure.

“Dad? Did you hear what I said? I think it’s time we made a change. ”

“I’m going nowhere,” he says, and he means it, but already the subject has lost interest for him. Thinking of Jewel has got him thinking of her ham hocks and beans, and thinking of ham hocks and beans has got him thinking of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a time before he lost his leg when he and Bobbie Bartro were drunk on a bottle of stolen bourbon and racing up the street to his mother’s Sunday-afternoon sit-down dinner, where they slid into their seats and passed the mashed potatoes as if there were nothing more natural in the world. Off on the periphery of his consciousness he can hear his daughter trumpeting away, stringing together arguments, threatening and cajoling, but it makes no dif ference. His mind is made up.