The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (18 page)

The rear tire of the bus rides up over the curb as they make the turn. Henry Alt’s eyes widen comically, and he lifts himself from the seat to examine the street corner.

“Hope we didn’t flatten any feet.”

“The bus always does that,” Helen tells him.

Does he really need to be told? It has to be obvious that nothing so large can change directions easily. Something has fallen against her shoes—his briefcase. She gives it a kick to push it back beneath the seat.

“It’s coming up,” Henry says. “You must have noticed the guy on the corner. He showed up a few weeks ago, with one of those signs.
Vietnam Veteran. Stranded
. That was all. Then he modified it:
Vietnam Veteran. Need Ticket Home. God Bless You
.” Henry Alt laughs once more. “Do you remember when suddenly every homeless guy had a sign saying
Will Work for Food
? I always wondered how such a thing could sweep the nation. Do they have an underground network? ‘Hey, guys, put the words
God
and
Home
in your sign and you’ll get more money. Pass it on.’ That sort of thing?” The wrinkles by his eyes are deep. He continues smiling as he speaks. “So last week, I’m at that corner and the guy now has a
dog
.” He says
dog
as if the word is inherently funny. “And the following day, he has a bowl with the dog’s name on it:
Sarah
. Can you imagine? A dog named Sarah.”
Sarah
has become an even funnier word than
dog
. “Now his sign says
Spare Change for Dog Food Appreciated
.”

Helen nods and smiles at appropriate moments. She is perfectly competent at social interaction. The last time she and her mother spoke, her mother had said, “Take a husband. Buy a house. Become a slave to your mortgage. Let the children climb all over you.”

Helen had laughed into the phone. “You make it sound awful.”

“Make mistakes,” her mother insisted. “Go ahead. Live.”

It had made Helen think of her father and the mistake her mother had made.

Henry Alt is still talking. The neighborhood where he boarded the bus is full of old and dignified homes. She imagines his house, can see him walking about in a grand place, shifting from window to window, a hearth fire providing light, wineglass in his hand, wine dark curtains framing him. He touches the curtains and then waves to someone across the street. Helen’s imagination glides across the pavement, where she finds herself, ensconced in her storage shed and waving back.

“What have we got here?” Henry Alt asks. The bus has come to a stop in traffic. He lifts himself again and stares through the windshield. “No accident,” he says. “Just roadwork. There are those cones all around a manhole. What a job that must be.”

Helen rises in her seat to look. Gloved hands lift a great coin from the street and reveal the round cavity beneath.

“Can you picture it?” Henry Alt asks her. “Spending your days down there? Living under the city?”

We all live under the weather
, she thinks.

“Just what kind of network is there beneath us?” he asks. “Sewers and power lines, sure. Catacombs, do you think? Not likely, but there could be. An underground universe.”

Why is this man so happy and handsome, but also frivolous and without ambition? Helen wonders but has no answer. He’s attractive, and yet he is alone. He’s intelligent, and yet he has a dead-end career. He clearly has money, but here he is riding the city bus with Helen to the same place of employment. Henry Alt annoys her. She thinks again of the software program. She entered the wrong information first for several days, misunderstanding the error messages. In some cases, her entry told the computer that she was recording birth certificates, when she had been attempting to record deeds of sale, marriages, deaths. She has to recall the mistakes, delete them, and begin over. The prospect of it tires her, although it is really no different from entering them in the first place, no more difficult or complicated. She will be working eight hours today filing one thing or another. Why should the prospect of redoing these files be more fatiguing than entering new records? A better computer would make her work go faster, but, following this reasoning, she understands it will make it no easier. She will be there eight hours a day, either way. There will never be an end of things to record and file.

There is, however, no record of her secret life. If she fails to imagine it, it disappears. Thinking this pleases her. Her world is hers alone.

The bus staggers forward, and Henry Alt’s briefcase slides against her feet once more. When she and the boy ran off, they did not even pack a suitcase. Failed to think of clothing. The boy could have avoided doing time if he had agreed to stay away from her. A romantic, stupid child. She had hardly known him, really, and cannot say what has become of him. She never saw him after the motel, never spoke with him, although she heard things from time to time—the news of his release from prison, the report of a broken rib following a fight in a bar. But for years now, nothing. No word. As far as she knows, he never tried to reach her after he got out. A condition of his parole, no doubt.

She had not loved him, but she had loved the flight. All vehicles for human transportation are divine in the world she creates. Nothing unmoving is immortal. The weatherman alone mediates between the mortals and the gods, and only Helen is witness to it all. The people around her look at the same world, but they don’t see what she sees.

She reaches down for the offending briefcase, a tan box, pliant to the touch, as if it were covered with skin. She passes it over the seat to Henry Alt. What would he say if she explained to him that to endure her life she has to imagine this bus as a minor deity? Would he think her deranged?

The truth, she believes, is the opposite. Her secret life permits her to hold tight to her sanity.

Henry Alt thanks her for the briefcase. “I’m lucky it didn’t scoot all the way to the back of the bus,” he says, tapping its leather hide. “I would’ve hopped off and not realized I’d forgotten it until lunchtime.” He laughs at himself, and then lowers his voice. “Not one paper in here. Sack lunch and a bottle of vino for my secretary. I owe her. A bet.”

Helen understands she is supposed to ask about the bet, but she declines to do it. Her breath on the window is turning to frost. Traffic has let up, but there are still two more turns and another three stops before they reach the Hall. She is eager to be through with this trip, and beginning to be angry with the weatherman for the cold.
A warming trend
, he had said. She feels foolish in shirtsleeves and hopes Henry Alt’s car is already at a garage being repaired. What is the point of such a man? What good is his handsome face? What’s the advantage of a big house if he lives alone? What’s the value of his money if he works at a job no better than hers?

“It’s easier to watch my weight if I make my own lunch,” he says, patting the briefcase again. He is almost as thin as Helen. “I’m lucky—” The bus stops and he leaps from the seat, the briefcase clattering to the floor as he trots up the aisle. “Here we are,” he calls out.

They are not at their stop. She thinks to tell him, but he has already run to the front of the bus. They are not at any stop but waiting at a traffic light. Henry Alt says something to Outis, who shakes his squat head. Henry Alt continues speaking, gesturing with his arms, the coat spreading wide as if the man within it were expanding. He must know the enchanted words, Helen thinks as the mechanical doors open.

Henry Alt hops down the stairs and sprints around the bus. She follows the top of his head as he runs to the concrete island. She shifts in her seat, rising to track him. “Hey,” he yells, loudly enough for her to hear. For an instant, she thinks he is calling to her. “I haven’t forgotten you,” he says.

Sitting on the island is a bearded man with a dog. The dog bowl reads
Sarah
. The cardboard sign says:

The transparent manipulation of
Family
for a man and a dog insults Helen. Static invades the air, as if the window providing her view were a television losing its signal. It’s snowing, she realizes. The man’s face has about it the roughness of hard living and the swollen scarlet features of a drunk. He wears a woolen hat with an incongruous ball of thread at the top. Henry Alt hands him a few bills. They exchange words, a shake of hands, then Henry strides away into the street. The red-faced man examines the cash. Helen sees then that a woman is with him. She had been invisible. It occurs to Helen that this is all it takes—add one person and you become a family.

A cold draft from the open door initiates the trembling. She will freeze today without a coat. The weatherman has betrayed her. The woman on the traffic island lifts her arm high above her head as she calls out to Henry Alt. Helen sees that she is wearing one of her mother’s dresses. Helen gave them to Goodwill, and now this woman begging at an intersection is wearing one. A tattered, quilted coat covers the top of it, but the pattern on the dress is clear and familiar. Helen cannot hear the woman’s words but watches her dark hair as it is lifted by the wind of a passing vehicle. Her mother’s hair was not quite so dark. The man joins her. Helen imagines that this man is her father. He is about the right age, the right height. He puts his arm around the woman’s waist, and it seems to Helen that the twelve years she spent recording the events of other people’s lives did not really happen. The memory of that time is like the memory of a movie: she witnessed it, but it did not happen to her.

Henry Alt leaps up the steps onto the bus, thanking the driver, who nods and yanks the shiny handle to shut the doors. On the floor, by Helen’s feet, wine bleeds darkly from the fallen briefcase, discoloring the leather and sweetening the air. The leviathan lurches and then gently rocks as it resumes its movement forward. Helen feels the pitch inside her, startled at the motion, coming after such a long stall. Henry Alt spreads his feet to steady himself in the aisle. The stained briefcase slides beneath her seat and disappears, leaving a dusky, elliptical trail.

Henry Alt is the
hero
, Helen thinks. He was drawn to this city to be near her. He has kept at his meaningless job for years with the vague faith that his future will announce itself. She is that future. She can see the work of gods in their union. As Henry Alt comes down the aisle, she understands the weatherman’s lie about the cold. It was all done for her. The gods work in mysterious ways.

Henry Alt walks carefully, his hands lighting on the metal rails that top the seats, one and then another. He removes his coat as he approaches. He is going to present it to her. The offering bears epaulets of fresh fallen snow.

It’s my birthday
, she thinks. The words bloom on her tongue.

Bobby Bell’s fingers numbered four to a hand. His thumb and pointer were identical
to God’s, but the others were just fleshy stubs, stunted and fused, and only two, on each slender paw. He was a dumb kid, besides, if progress in school is a fair measure. He sized me up my first week in town, came by my locker to demand a fight, the fall of 1967.

We’d moved to New Mexico from Illinois because my father was sick. How the change was supposed to help, I didn’t know. When I asked, my father removed his glasses as if the problem were with the black-rimmed lenses. His head tipped slightly on its thin scaffold of bone. I felt a corresponding tilt in my senses.

“I’m host to a disease,” he said. A smile flickered across his lips.

I began to tremble.

He continued, “You could say it’s a landlord and tenant affair.” When he focused on my expression, his attitude shifted. He slipped the glasses on again, which made his eyes the wrong size for his face. “You’re worried.” His hand lighted like a butterfly upon my head. “All right. I’m host but there are no tenants, just uninvited guests, too small to see.” His lips crinkled, a modest grin. “Too small,” he assured me, “to even imagine.” His head tilted once more. “You won’t worry, all right?”

I promised.

I had inherited my father’s slight build, which must have cheered Bobby Bell, to think he’d found a frame, at last, more flimsy than his own. I colored easily, as well, which provided him a hope even he knew to leave unsaid: blood that surged so close to the surface would wet his wrinkled shirt, spatter his shoes, and saturate the dirt where they paced. From the moment I met him, even before he required a fight, I understood that his world was neatly cleaved into those who could beat him and those he could enslave. The division, extravagantly uneven, presented him his quest—to find someone over whom he could have dominion—all of this written upon his face, as the truth of my father’s condition was written upon mine. Which might have been why Bobby Bell thought he had an edge, as I was taller and only barely thinner. Why would he think my eyes were asking to be blackened but for a father frail as a child’s pledge?

During that time, my mother came to my bed every night to take from me whatever book I was reading and point to the ticking clock above my head. She’d sit on the mattress and tell me how well my father was doing, how this move could make all the difference.

“Friends will come,” she said the night before the fray, meaning that I would make some eventually, that perspective was the larger test—we were here to save a life, to protect him from the guests that lived within.

What a good boy I was, wanting to believe and then, after I no longer could, willing to pretend. When she left, shutting the door and light, the room drifted away in a darkness that knew no end, which I would close my eyes against, and wait for the smaller dark of sleep.

Later that night I woke and stumbled into the hall—disoriented, still in Illinois. Light at the far end of the house drew me. My mother knelt by the easy chair to fit a pillow beneath my father’s sleeping head. He wore the top to his striped pajamas, the dark hair on his thin legs exaggerated like the carbon filaments I moved with a magnet to whisker a cartoon face. Mother’s gown rose up her legs as they straightened, covering her to the hips, the tan of her legs ending abruptly in the buttocks’ white exclamation. I retreated to the hall, watching her float a flowered bedsheet over him, then touch her lips to his temple, her solemn nakedness like a holy garment—in itself a kind of prayer.

How distant I lived from Bobby Bell.

The fight I remember with a clarity that defies time, as if I had more than lived it, as if it had not yet happened. We met at the bus stop, two stupid savage children, enveloped by a crowd of onlookers I sensed more than saw. Bobby Bell pointed at my narrow chest.

“
Fairy
,” he accused, a rage in his throat, an evil passion in his eyes.

I had no decent reply, but spoke what first popped into my mouth.

“
Pixie
,” I said, wanting to laugh, but the finger, that deformed hand thrown out at me, seemed a kind of reminder, like the mechanical voice in the underground that reminds you you’re on a train, like my father’s dry cough even on a morning following a rain, the sky pristine with sunlight and the cleansing smell of creosote.

We wrestled on a patch of ground made bare by children’s shoes, exhaust from the school bus lingering in the air. We lunged and grappled like things less than human. A friend of Bobby Bell’s invented a jeer.

“You fucking Mr. Happy,” he yelled, his breath close and bitter, as if he might not be well.

Did my mother choose my father for his weakness, as Bobby Bell had chosen me? Is it cruel to suggest that she loved him most when he was his weakest? What of the girl, a few years later, who claimed to be drawn to my silence? Was she Bobby Bell in feminine guise, her white thighs holding me with such gentleness that I wept? What of the women I later met, who picked me less as a man than as a mission, and whom I treated like guests who’d overstayed their welcome? I don’t understand the first thing about love, especially that first thing, when passion inhabits your body before you’re aware, a passion you come to detect by the symptoms that endure.

As it turned out, I was weaker than Bobby Bell could suppose, and quicker, too, throwing him to the dirt, shoving his nose against the hardened ground, the blood that colored his shirt, his own. I can still hear his single cry, as I bent his arm beneath my knee. His skull I tethered by his hair to my fist, and I might have gouged a hole with it, but his arm escaped. I had to make a dive.

Shall I attempt to describe the feel of that inhuman hand in mine?

“You’ve made your point,” another boy said, as if it were a debate I’d won.

I climbed off Bobby Bell and backed away, studying the crowd to see who might be pleased I’d won and who might jump me if I turned. That act of accidental compassion—my world, like Bobby Bell’s, cleaved—caused in me a peculiar response. I could see Bobby Bell, his body in a twisted sprawl, but I could not see the others. As if my vision had grown too small, I could not hold them in a single frame.

“That don’t make no never mind,” consoled his friend, touching the place on Bobby Bell where my knee had pinned his knobby spine.

The others huddled—or hovered—about the fallen boy, but they were impossible to take in, the many guests, witnesses to that unfortunate accomplishment.

To be truthful, I’ve never had trouble imagining the small. I pictured the microscopic company my father kept with a clarity that was almost scientific. And I could see how, in Bobby Bell’s eyes, each thing claimed only the value of its use to him: a tool, or not a tool. Viewed in this fashion, all of creation could be made minuscule. How unlike Bobby Bell was my father, who always saw the other side even in his own slipping away.

“Such beauty,” my father said to me, gripping the rail of the bed. “I might have missed it otherwise.”

We’re fifty-three now, Bobby Bell and I, wherever he lives, whatever small place he now calls his. We have our own uneasy children. And still, I can’t retreat far enough to see them all, those bodies assembled about the fallen one. How, precisely, do they gather? How, exactly, do they stand? I think it matters. Are they stooped or standing erect? Has one covered her ears, another closed his eyes? Does that head swivel to miss the farce? Or is she laughing, giant that she has become, at the grappling of such silly and malignant boys? I carry them all with me—a fist that rises in what might be fear, shoulders that turn in what might be submission, hands that rest on what might be knees.

He told me what threatened him was too small to imagine, as if, given this, I could be spared the rest, but it wasn’t the microbes that troubled me after his death. He had it wrong, my father and his tiny beings. The guests that stubbornly remain haunt us because they’re larger than visible things.