Round Rock (2 page)

He sat back down on the plaid couch in the waiting room swamped with shame that he was such a constant disappointment to his mother. Instead of a son, she had a black hole for an offspring, and in their every encounter, he saw, he had never failed to cause her anguish.

Bobby came over and said if Lewis didn’t have any other relatives, or if he didn’t have a hospital program or halfway house in mind, he could always take a bed upstairs for a month. Lewis had no relatives and didn’t know of any programs, but he would kill himself before spending a whole month in detox. Still, to get Bobby off his back, he agreed to go upstairs and have a look.

The detox center, along with other county agencies, was housed in an old junior high school. As he pulled himself upstairs, Lewis saw initials cut into the wooden banister. Some were enclosed in lopsided hearts. Lewis wondered if anybody who ever went together in junior high school actually got married and stayed married all their lives. He
thought about a girl he went steady with in junior high, a black girl named June with a French last name he couldn’t recall. She was very dark, though her hair was naturally straight. She was the first black girl he’d ever kissed. That he had a black girlfriend was a big deal to everybody. White girls had black boyfriends, but not the other way around. This girl had fine, sharp teeth and liked to bite down on his tongue and lips. A few times, she drew blood. At first, he was surprised and excited by her biting, but soon his mouth was so sore that he lost any desire to kiss her. They broke up, and although they went on to the same high school together, they eventually stopped acknowledging each other. Within two years, they were strangers again. Lewis had run into an old friend who went to their tenth reunion and reported that June what’s-her-name, the biter, had won the award for having the most children: six.

In the first old classroom at the top of the stairs, Lewis found half a dozen beds, each with a dresser / nightstand unit in an area made separate, if not exactly private, by chin-high white Formica partitions. The room looked like a secretary pool, only with beds instead of desks. Three guys had gathered in the first tiny bedroom space, two Latinos and a little guy who was white except for arms and shoulders covered with green tattoos. Lewis recognized them from the AA meeting last night. They took this AA stuff seriously and needed to, because to hear them tell it, their lives were all messed up with crack cocaine, heroin, prison, insane women, you name it.

The next classroom didn’t have any partitions, just five beds in a row, like an old-fashioned hospital ward. None of these beds was taken. Every surface in the room itself, including the bottom half of the windows, had been painted the same dull pale green. Hand-lettered cardboard plaques were stuck on the walls, each with a saying:
EASY DOES IT. LET GO, LET GOD. ONE DAY AT A TIME.

Lewis lay down on one of the beds and lit a cigarette. Somebody had written
JESUS CARES
on the pillow in blue ballpoint pen. He tried to make this meaningful, something that someone had written just for him to find—a divine message, humbly drawn—but he didn’t have the energy for such creative thinking. He didn’t believe in Jesus, except as a man and maybe a spiritual genius, a Buddha for literal white people. Once he had a dream about Jesus and Jesus was nicer than anybody Lewis had ever met, and his hair was long and glossy like in ads for cheap shampoo. Jesus also had long fingernails,
fetishistically long. Frankly, even though he seemed so nice, Jesus had creeped Lewis out.

Lewis smoked his cigarette and listened to his heart thump. He could see the shadow of a tree through the painted glass. Traffic surged outside. The central furnace rumbled. There was a sweet chemical scent of floor wax he recalled from every school he’d known.

No matter how hard he tried, Lewis couldn’t remember how he ended up here, in Ventura County Social Model Detox. Bobby told him that a woman in Oxnard named Clarice Martin had called an ambulance because he was having convulsions in her front yard. “Flopping like a fish in her dichondra,” Bobby put it. Lewis had never heard of Clarice Martin and didn’t have any idea how he got to Oxnard.

The last thing he did remember was being in Westwood at a small party in married-student housing. He didn’t recall whose party it was or what he was doing there, but he was in a knotty-pine kitchen talking to a short, plump girl. Her face was rapt and bright with hope and coming at him like a bucket of fresh milk.

To hold her at bay, Lewis ranted about Rilke, erected a wall of words. Or no, come to think of it, maybe he was lecturing on Goethe. Of course it was Goethe, whom he’d never read. The only thing he knew about Goethe was from an old Time/Life book that said he was the most intelligent man who had ever lived. Someone had estimated Goethe’s IQ and it was higher than everybody else’s, even Einstein’s. Higher by some thirty-odd points than Lewis’s, at any rate. Not that anybody was really sure. Goethe, after all, had never taken an IQ test. His IQ and the IQs of other long-dead geniuses had been based on their capacity for abstraction. Goethe’s abstractions were the most abstract of all, which is why Lewis had avoided reading him: why read someone just to make yourself feel stupid?

If he’d been boring Miss Bright-Eyed Milkmaid, she didn’t show it. She touched his arm. Her face spewed light. Her eyes urged him on. Had he pounced? He had a vague sense of pulling her to him, scrubbing his beard against her incandescent cheeks, stuffing his tongue into her tiny mouth. Yet he couldn’t say for sure if he was remembering this or just imagining it.

He finished his cigarette, then stood up so fast his eyesight exploded into sparks of wormy light. He put one hand on the bedstead and waited for the air to clear.

Back downstairs, Lewis shook his head at Bobby. “Can’t do it,” he said. He resumed his seat on the ugly plaid couch. He kept thinking there were bugs on him, that a line of ants was crawling up his neck and into his hair, but he couldn’t catch a one. After a while, Bobby came over and said that there was a man who might take Lewis in his halfway house. He was lucky, Bobby said, because normally there was a waiting list for this drunk farm, as he called it, but he’d just found out there were a couple of empty beds. How did that sound to Lewis—a month in the country on a sliding scale?

A
BOUT
the time Lewis was staggering down the old schoolhouse stairs, Red Ray was trying to coax Frank Jamieson into the cab of his ’46 Ford pickup. Frank was more interested in the sky, which was full of fast-moving horsetail clouds. Frank, it occurred to Red, was looking more and more like Walt Whitman every day: surging gray beard, disheveled, hoary, vaguely vagrant. Unlike Whitman, Frank always had a cigarette in his mouth. Also, Frank never spoke; he hadn’t said a word to anybody in eleven and a half years.

“C’mon, you old sacka corn.” Red had his arm around Frank’s shoulders and was attempting to steer him over to the truck’s open door. “Upsa-daisy, into the cab.”

Frank was too big to move when he didn’t feel like it. Even though Red probably matched him pound for pound—they both weighed in at over 230—Frank had a lower center of gravity and a way of turning his weight into concrete.

“Come
on
, Franky,” said Red.

Frank raised his right hand, index finger extended, and touched the unlit tip of his cigarette.

“I’ll light the damn thing,” Red said, “if you get in the truck.”

He next tried sitting in the truck as an example to Frank. Closing the driver’s-side door, Red grasped the steering wheel resolutely. “Bus is leaving,” he called, turning the key and gunning the engine. He was parked behind the Blue House, the old Victorian mansion that served as Round Rock’s dormitory. Behind the mansion were orange groves, Washington navels. Plump, ripe, the oranges spun amid dark leaves like spheres of light.

Red lit a Pall Mall for himself, then extended the lighter toward Frank. Frank pointed to the tip of his cigarette.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch,” said Red.

Red used to take Frank with him everywhere—on his morning rounds, to AA meetings, on supply runs, to the Old Bastards Club—but since the farm lost its secretary a few months ago, Red couldn’t take the time. Under the best circumstances, Frank was never what anyone would call Johnny-on-the-spot. Before any outing, he had to be taken to the bathroom, combed, supplied with cigarettes and Life Savers and various other prized items without which he became quite agitated. Red felt bad about neglecting him, but only up to a point, because now, whenever he did try to include him in activities, Frank pulled
this
kind of stunt, turned into this
inert
life form.

It wasn’t as if Frank didn’t want to get out and about: he’d run away from the farm twice in the last month. The first time, a neighbor spotted him sitting on a rock wall about a mile down the road; the last time, Burt McLemoore, the deputy sheriff, found him six miles away, under the Rito River bridge, where he was watching women from the nearby fieldworkers’ camp do their laundry on the big white rocks.

Red rolled down his window and blew smoke outside. Though he’d never tell anyone, Frank’s escapes hurt his feelings. To take to heart anything a big, mute, brain-damaged man did sounded crazy. Still, Red had kept him out of institutions for all these years, so if Red was a little busy for a change, it seemed that Frank could endure some inattention. Frank didn’t have to answer to the board of directors. He didn’t have to do paperwork or run into town or apply for grants or listen to the endless river of anger and self-pity that flowed from the mouths of the newly sober. Frank didn’t have to write schedules or mop up after suicide attempts or make sure the citrus groves were picked and cultivated and sprayed and irrigated. If anyone deserved to run away, Red thought he himself should have that privilege.

Red smoked and thought about where he’d run. He’d probably go to the mountains, hole up in a cave or some old hunter’s shack slumping into the ground. He’d avoid people, become a hermit, even a rumor, like Big Foot. Hikers would tell how when they were lost, he materialized and led them back to their trails. They would show off the splint he made for their broken bones, recount how he fed them elderberry juice and watercress salad and smoked squirrel meat. (Red had eaten squirrel, and it wasn’t bad—a little gamy, maybe, but the smoking would help.) The only thing he’d ask for in return would be
books—best-sellers, guidebooks, hand-scrawled journals, whatever written matter the hikers carried. He’d accumulate a library, and in the winter he’d read.

In the army, Red had once spent a winter reading books up in Alaska. On one training maneuver, he and another officer built an ice cave, a six-by-eight-foot room dug deep into the snow. They lived there for ten weeks. The ceiling was a tarp, the entrance an L-shaped dogleg dug off to one side. They carved out little sleeping shelves and niches for their food and gear. On their first day, after the warmth from their bodies made the walls sweat, they rolled back the tarp and the walls froze as shiny and hard and refractive as glass. A single candle then threw enough light to read by. Since either Red or his partner was always on watch, privacy was absolute—at least in the beginning. These maneuvers were all part of a staged war, and after a while the enemy developed the bad habit of showing up and asking for a slug of Red’s vodka. But before the enemy became a nuisance, there was that warm, brilliant cave of pure silence, and Red missed this more than any other part of his life—certainly more than his childhood, his marriage, or even the heady first years of the farm.

The truck creaked and bounced a little as Frank climbed inside. “Hey, Franky,” Red said. “Attaboy.” He lit Frank’s cigarette, plus a new one for himself, then reached over and closed Frank’s door. Just as Red put the truck into gear, Ernie Tola came out of the Blue House waving his arm. Ernie was Round Rock’s full-time cook. In his fifties, he looked and often acted like a well-coiffed, temperamental woman with a goatee.

“You might as well bring Frank right back in here,” Ernie called out. “Detox just phoned and they got a live one for you.”

Red turned to Frank. “Damn it all, Franky, did you hear that?” Then he yelled out the window, “Anybody we know?”

If it was a repeat customer, Red thought, he could leave Frank in the truck, because they—the drunk and Frank—would already be acquainted. But a brand-new fellow might not appreciate such a dramatic example of what drinking can do to you if it doesn’t kill you first.

“Naw, just some young drunk who likes his coke,” Ernie hollered. “But Bobby thinks you’ll take to him.”

“Yeah, right.” That Red didn’t much like cokeheads was no secret. In his opinion, the average alcoholic was above average in
intelligence—intelligent about everything, that is, except his drinking. The drug addict, Red found, too often fell into one of two categories: the grandiose, ego-bound hotshot, or somebody so down and out it was hard to locate even a germ of self that could help him begin to recover. On principle, as long as they also identified themselves as alcoholics, Red didn’t turn away drug users at Round Rock. Personally, given his own experience, he’d take a garden variety alkie any day.

T
WELVE
years earlier, Red Ray had bought the old Sally Morrot ranch near Rito as an extravagant, hysterical ploy to distract himself from drinking and thus save his marriage.

The ranch had been part of Henri Morrot’s original holdings. A month before he died in 1915, Morrot parceled out his land, in what he believed to be an equitable manner, to his seven children. Famous for their contentious natures even as infants, six of the heirs felt gravely wronged. Old sibling rivalries intensified in the public arena of the courtroom. Feud fueled feud, hostilities became generational, and litigation replaced ranching as the Morrot family business. The courts impounded acre after acre for costs, and the Fitzgeralds bought up the land at auction for a fraction of its worth. After three generations, the Morrot empire had shrunk like a vast landlocked lake until only a few groves remained in the family name.