The Humanity Project (17 page)

Conner said, “The vet gave me this special food for him. I’ll try some when he gets up.”

Sean hadn’t said much to Conner and he didn’t say anything now. The dog looked bad, but maybe that was just from the operation. Conner was in the kitchen, washing his hands in the sink. Sean stood in the door, watching him. “What did the vet say?”

“He thought he got it all.”

“Got what?”

“The cancer.” Conner looked around for something to dry his hands with, found nothing, and wiped them on his jeans.

“We need some, what are they, dish towels.”

“Uh-huh.” Conner seemed to want to go in the next room and tend to the dog, but that would have meant walking past his father, and so he took his phone out of his pocket and flipped through the screens.

“Are you going to tell me how much of a vet bill we’re looking at?”

“You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Yeah, you already said that. How much?”

“It’s covered.”

“Yeah? Where’d you get the money?”

Conner had run out of ways to not look at him, and put his phone away “From somebody who has money.”

“That’s good to know. What did you have to do to get it, huh? What’s going on here that all of a sudden, you got money?” It made him furious that in all their time of barely getting by, or not getting by, it was only the dog that called up this kind of effort. “You better tell me what you been up to, sport.”

“Just drop it, OK?”

They stared at each other. There had been those times, in Conner’s growing-up years, when he seemed to take a leap into some new phase of growth, baby to toddler, toddler to little kid, and so on. Now he had a man’s height and a man’s hard arms, and there was something both wonderful and sorrowful in this, because now he would be left behind.

So he dropped it, because what other choice did he have. He’d started off all wrong and fumblefucked. It shook him up to see the dog so sick. And if the dog died, he couldn’t think of one reason for Conner to stay here.

You could get another dog, the same way you could get more sheep, he guessed. But what was so great about getting all new children? What the hell was God thinking?

Sean lay on the sofa next to the dog’s bed. They took the cone collar off to give him a break, and Sean scratched him under his chin the way he liked. Conner fed him a plate of the special food, and Sean said that he looked a little better, and Conner agreed, and that was at least a start at conversation.

Later Conner coaxed the dog to his feet, and took him out in the yard to hobble around and pee. Sean got up and went into the kitchen. The cans of dog food were on the counter, along with a sheet of post-surgical instructions, and a small plastic bag that Sean inspected. Inside was a bottle of tramadol. He shook it, then opened it and counted out the pills, twenty of them.

“What are you doing?”

Conner standing at the back door, incredulous. Sean let the pills rattle back into the bottle. “Just . . . nothing.”

“Those are for Bojangles! I don’t believe you.”

He didn’t have any good reason for opening the bottle. He had acted without intention. He said, “I wasn’t going to take any of them.” Although maybe he would have. He didn’t know. “Here,” he said, handing the bottle to Conner. “Take em. Put them some place and don’t tell me.”

In the bathroom Sean scooped up every pill bottle he could find: the Percocet, Vicodin, Dilaudid. The Oxys.

“You don’t have to make a big production out of this,” Conner said, when he came back into the kitchen and dumped them on the counter.

“Call it whatever you want.”

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

“I don’t care. Flush em. Sell them. No, don’t do that.”

“Yeah, you can always go get more.”

“I can but I won’t.” He didn’t know if he meant it. But he wanted to mean it.

“Come on, Dad,” Conner said, sounding weary. Like this was just one more dumb stunt.

Sean raised his hand, enough. He was through with talking. With everything that went into or came out of his mouth.

He got ready for bed and laid himself down. He didn’t figure on sleeping. God was a whirlwind, ready to blow him to bits. Was there still such a thing as love in the world, and could he latch on to some corner of it?

And just at that moment, someone somewhere tapped out letters on a keyboard, and the letters were converted into electrons, and the electron stream sped along a connection that spoke to a specified server, a specified account. The electrons were retranslated into a pattern of light and dark and blink, a line of type waiting to be called up out of the hum and glow:
Steve, is that really you?

A
fter the morning’s class session, in what he meant to sound like a spur-of-the-moment idea, Art had asked one of the other instructors in the tutoring program if she wanted to grab some lunch. She had surprised him by saying yes, so that he didn’t have to produce any of the regrets or backpedaling speeches he’d rehearsed. Half an hour later they were sitting on a creosoted log at Rodeo Beach, trying to keep their sandwich wrappers and paper napkins from blowing away in the walloping ocean breeze. The takeout sandwiches and the beach had been her idea, and Art was glad, since that meant he didn’t have to apologize for the inconvenience of attempting to keep sand out of their food. Not that she was apologizing. She was delighted, she was chatty chatty chatting away, while Art made ignoble attempts to look down the front of her shirt.

The woman’s name was Beata, and she was Polish, had been in this country since she was a teenager. Her English was very good, certainly good enough to coach the program’s glum underachievers, with a faint, lilting accent that occasionally made the emphasis land in unexpected places, as in, “Good morning,
happy
people!”

She had a small head with straight black hair cut to chin length. Every so often the tops of her ears showed through, like a child’s. Her eyes were wide and gray, her skin thin and blue-veined and bruisable-looking. Art guessed she was somewhere near thirty. He found her only fitfully attractive, but he had to start somewhere. Worse men than him—dumber, uglier, meaner—had girlfriends. Sex lives. You saw it all the time.

Beata wore clothes that made her seem older, or maybe just Old World: filmy scarves arranged over one shoulder, then belted at the waist. Blouses with crocheted sleeves. Quantities of twinkling glass jewelry. Today she wore a woolly blouse with folkloric embroidery and a dark full skirt that wadded up around her and made it difficult to see her figure, let alone imagine her naked, as Art’s base instincts urged.

“Look, look!” Beata pointed out over the water. She had an enthusiastic disposition. “You can see so many miles! There is such a great big boat!”

“Yeah, probably a tanker.” Art tried and failed to find anything remarkable about it, but chose to humor her. “Like, an oil tanker.” He didn’t know if there was any other kind.

“A beautiful day,” Beata said, gazing around her with approval, and Art agreed with this also, although he was too full of edgy lust to get into the right carefree mood. It was windy but bright, and warm enough for families to lay down beach towels, and for rampaging kids and dogs to run through the shallowest waves, and for an old VW van in the parking lot to serve as headquarters for a group of surfers, their boards and gear and coolers and lawn chairs set out under an awning. The wind made it hard to carry on much conversation, the kind of mandatory getting-to-know-you conversation he’d imagined, but maybe that was all right. Maybe they could just nuzzle and smell each other, end up in some friendly place.

Because he didn’t really know her, had only traded hellos and small talk in the hallways of the community college where the summer tutoring program had set up shop. They’d groaned and raised their eyebrows in mock despair, which was meant to disguise their real despair, at their students’ lack of basic reading skills, motivation, civility. “If I can learn English,” Beata said, “you would think the big babies who are born here can too.”

Maybe she had a boyfriend. Girlfriend. You never knew. Once they spoke for a few minutes as they walked to their cars, their longest conversation. He mentioned that he had a teenage daughter. He figured it was something that women would like to hear, it gave him an air of responsible maturity. At least, as long as he didn’t get into the particulars. He was fishing around, waiting to see if Beata volunteered any children or other domestic entanglements of her own. But she had only shaken her head and said that not for any money, or in any country, would she wish to be a girl again, that miserable state of wanting, wanting, wanting, with no chance of having.

But what did Linnea want? She wouldn’t say. She slumped around the apartment, and the bathroom filled up with her makeup and tampons and shampoo bottles, and her music elbowed his out. These days, with the issue of her immediate future still unresolved, there was a bulky fake politeness between them that they kept bumping into. She was mad at him for everything that was his fault, but also for everything that wasn’t.

Art watched Beata throw a piece of bread crust to a parading seagull. “Uh-oh. Now you’ve done it. These guys are professional beggars.”

“Well, I am a professional feeder.” She wrinkled her nose. “Not a word?”

“It’s sort of a word.” He tried to realign his ass on the log perch. The wind lifted Beata’s cap of black hair into a crest. He didn’t like to think what his own untidier scalp looked like. Not that she seemed to be paying him any particular attention, which was a little disappointing, even if this wasn’t really a date, even if he’d gone out of his way to make it seem like it wasn’t. He obviously needed to put himself out there. Grow a pair.

“So,” he said, making an effort at flirtation. “I guess you’re kind of a nature girl?”

She turned and gave him a brief smile. “We are all of us a part of nature.”

“Yeah, I just meant—” Art tried to formulate exactly what he meant. Not that much. It was only lighthearted conversation, rapidly gaining ballast. “You really seem to enjoy it. Because some people, they spend all their time in front of a computer, or watching television. They wouldn’t have thought about going to the beach.” Of course, he had not thought of it himself.

Beata said, “I live in the city”—her speech giving it the rising tone of a question: I live in the city?—“and this is an easy beach to visit after work. I come here when I can. You are so lucky, you live so close. You are a nature boy?”

There was a hint of teasing in this, and Art rallied himself to meet it. “Oh, not really. Maybe you could teach me how. We could run away together, live in a tree.”

She giggled. Art found this encouraging. “Like Tarzan and Jane,” he added daringly, but just then Beata was distracted by a howling child, a little boy knocked over by an incoming wave and sitting on his bottom at the water’s edge. Before Art could fathom what she was doing, Beata jumped up and went to him, her big dark skirt flapping around her like a witch costume. She bent over the screaming boy, who didn’t appear to have anything wrong with him except the indignity of having fallen, making solicitous inquiries.

Then a fattish woman in shorts and a tank top approached, hoisting the boy up by one arm and marching him off. She gave Beata a narrow, unfriendly look.

Beata gazed after them, then returned to Art and sat down on the log, her face clouded over. “What is wrong with that lady? She acts like I will steal her child. And she not even watching him!”

“Just grouchy,” Art said, though he guessed the mother, who in fact had not been paying much attention to the boy, was angry at having this publicly demonstrated, and that Beata, with her peculiar clothes and pale Polish skin, was the perfect target for righteous, misplaced indignation. “Maybe she was trying to teach him not to talk to strangers.”

“Ridiculous. What is she doing instead, while her child cried? Or drowns? Eating disgusting food.”

The woman was consoling the boy with a cellophane bag of potato chips, holding it so he could pull the chips out in fistfuls. “Oh well.” Art felt moved to offer some defense of inadequate parents. “Sometimes, you know, just to calm them down . . .”

Beata didn’t answer. She was still staring at the mother and child, preoccupied with her disapproval, so he pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Excuse me a minute.”

He’d been trying to reach Linnea, without success. This morning Art had asked her if she’d thought any more about schools, if she’d come up with any new ideas about schools. Linnea said she was keeping her options open. He hadn’t liked the sound of that, snotty and menacing, but he hadn’t said anything. He’d missed one more opportunity, hadn’t chosen to confront her. Had more or less let it slide. He guessed he’d been handing out his own kind of potato chips.

The phone clicked, sending him to Linnea’s voice mail. Art hung up without leaving a message. He’d already left a couple. He was never at all sure where she was, how she spent her time. When asked, she said she was just hanging out, or had walked down to the market for something, or taken a bus to the mall. He assumed she was being untruthful, at least part of the time, on principle.

Whenever he spoke with her mother, Louise talked about Linnea as if she were something broken that could not be fixed. “She’s three years away from eighteen,” Louise said soberly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When she’s eighteen, she’s a legal adult. Responsible for herself.”

“You sound like you can’t wait.”

“No, Mr. Clever, please do not presume to tell me what I sound like. It means that once she’s eighteen, whatever trouble she gets into is adult trouble.”

“She hasn’t gotten into any trouble out here,” Art said. He didn’t really count her filching his marijuana as trouble. It was more like bad manners. “She’s just kind of difficult. In a kid way.”

“Could I make a suggestion? Birth control.”

“Come on, Louise. She isn’t doing anything with boys. She doesn’t know any boys.” Although once he said it, doubts set in. Just because he hadn’t seen boys didn’t mean there weren’t any. Like having mice, or termites.

Louise said that there was this narrow window of time when they would be able to function as parents. It was unclear whether she meant herself and Art, or herself and Jay, or perhaps all three of them. Parents could still make decisions for their minor children, therapeutic choices. She started in talking about the Montana school again, the desirable combination of discipline and support, the beautiful ranch setting, the not inconsiderable amount of money she and Jay were willing to pay out. Art let her talk on. He’d seen the brochures too. He was supposed to present them to Linnea, but he hadn’t dared. It was too easy to imagine her scorn and fury at those bright pictures of happy, chastened young people sitting around campfires, or paddling canoes, or bonding with horses.

He came to realize, not while Louise was talking, but later, thinking about it, that she had mentioned how expensive the school was not just to prove how much money and effort she was willing to put forth for Linnea’s sake (Art had not been asked to contribute), but because the cost of the place was a point in its favor, a measure of its worth. Serious money produced serious results.

He and Beata had finished their sandwiches, and Art gathered up the wrappers and napkins and paper bags, stood, then realized the trash can was all the way over in the parking lot and sat back down again. Beata had turned away from the distressing family group and was once more looking out over the rolling waves. Art tried to get absorbed in them, but really, they were just waves, doing the same thing over and over. “Well,” he began, signaling that they should get going. He was giving up on the idea of her as a frisky date.

Beata said, “When I first came here, to the United States? I had no idea how big a country could be. Back home, countries are one next to the other. A train ride. First we lived in New York. On the other ocean. Then here I come to go to college, San Francisco State.”

“Come here to go to college,” Art corrected her, but she only looked perplexed. Her eyebrows, he noticed, had been drawn into thin antenna lines with hard pencil. “Never mind.”

“And everything was different. Different weather. More cars, less people. Even this different ocean. And I was different too. Before, I was so very shy. Hard to imagine? What could I say in English? I was still learning. And who to speak to in Polish, but my mother and father? So once I came here, I decided, I would be a cheerful person. Talk to everybody, go everywhere, be brave, be someone not expected.”

“That’s very positive. Good for you. We should probably start back.” He checked his phone again to see if Linnea had called, but she hadn’t. He was wondering if he should text her instead of calling. There was probably something dumb and parental about voice mail.

Beata stood up and brushed the sand and crumbs from her skirt. Art watched his feet as he followed her, trying to keep his ankles from collapsing sideways in the sand. Beata kept turning back to look at the ocean, making little regretful sighs that struck him as affected. There was a reason he usually avoided the cheerful types.

Once they were in the car, Beata insisted they stop to see the seals at the rescue place up the hill, a new building that was half zoo, half hospital. “More nature stuff!” Art, heavily patient, trooped after her. At the rescue facility, workers in yellow rubber coveralls hosed down the concrete. The seals lay around like fat gray sausages. The seals made an
awk awk
racket. Some of them were wriggling up the ramps to flop into raised tanks, where they dove and bobbed to the surface. They looked out over the edge of the tank with big wet black eyes. The workers held up fish by their tails and dangled them. The seals rose up to take them, swallowing them down whole in an instant.

There was a fishy stink to the place, not that unpleasant until you thought about it. There were a number of educational exhibits, and Art dutifully read these displays as Beata exclaimed over them. The text was about the fragility of the oceans, the threat to marine life from pollution, floating trash, depletion of fishing grounds, climate change, and so on. The place depressed him. Most places depressed him these days. He wasn’t sure what he was meant to do about the never-ending supply of bad planetary news. He felt like some overlarge and overdeveloped mammal who had strayed out of its range.

Maybe he would have been more successful at being a different kind of creature, all instinct and no confusion of motives or choices. Everything would come naturally: eat, fight, migrate, breed. He guessed he might just as well turn out to be a failed animal. A woodpecker hammering away at a concrete post. A scrawny hyena pushed out of the pack.