The Journey Prize Stories 24 (12 page)

Landing in Barcelona, she wishes to take a taxi, give the name of a hotel where no one could know her and, after putting a few drops of sleeping aid into a cup of hot water, escape into sleep. Jude is courteous, opening the passenger door for her, swinging her suitcase into the trunk. During the ride he keeps his eyes on the road and doesn’t try to force talk, so that for some time the only sound is the smooth hum of the car’s machine and the murmur of a voice on the radio.

After a while, worried her silence might verge on rudeness,
she says, “It was good of your father to let me stay at the apartment.” Jude turns only briefly, smiles.

“He likes you. Anyway, he has other apartments.” Another smile crosses his face. What she wonders is, what does he think she is doing here?

When they arrive, he carries her suitcase up the stairs and says, “My father hoped you’d call him when you recover from the difference in time zones.” On a pad of paper that sits on top of the shoe rack in the hallway, he writes down two phone numbers, Arthur’s and his own.

She thought all she wanted was to sleep, but after he leaves, after she takes off her shoes and her watch and splashes her face with water at the kitchen sink, she then opens the balcony door and steps out onto the tiles, which are warm – it is after ten in the evening, a hot night, though it looks to have rained earlier. She sees people walking on the street, entering buildings, parking their cars and exiting them, talking and laughing and jingling their keys. She can hear their voices. She can hear a distant thump of bass from somewhere in the small building, and a thin sound like an amateur oboe. On the balcony below and to the left of her a man with a fleshy back and light brown hair is lifting undershirts from a clothes line, speaking to someone inside; she cannot understand most of the Spanish, but she picks out the words
mujer
and
dulce
. She can smell warm, wet air and hackberry trees. Her heart begins to beat fast. It is not only fear. It is that she has not slept much in twenty-four hours and has not eaten on the plane. It is that she knows she will have to call home now, and either talk about the Spanish language course or say something true. It is also that she feels the difference between being dead and being alive.
The ugliness deadens one, and then also a hollowness that is hard to ascribe to something specific. Arthur and Jude made her alive, briefly, and now the smells and the people. And her heart also beats fast because she sees that whatever she has begun by coming here, and whether it ends with life or death, this is only the beginning of it, and it will get much worse, before it ends, one way or the other.

Millie finds Earl in front of his laptop, his head down on the table on his hands, headphones on his head. She knows he dozed off waiting for a call from Amanda’s computer. In the nine days since she has left, Amanda’s made some vague but troubling statements. The course did not work out, they found out, but Amanda wants to stay, and extend her ticket even, perhaps. Millie still has the letter she never gave Earl, tucked into the cover of some books that sit on her bedside table. She doesn’t like to think of the letter now. She touches his shoulder lightly; he wakes with a shudder.

He was not exactly asleep; he may have sunk one layer below wakefulness, while thinking of the same things he’s thought about as the other days since she’s been gone – of the fact that it’s been eight years. That he’s not young, and that there is no consolation for him. All he wants, all he’s wanted all along, is Amanda. For her he had let himself get absorbed into her family’s palace, for her he used to, years ago, leave parties early and drive across the city in blizzards, tipsy, so she might take a last cup of tea before bed with Millie and Dan. He wanted to love what she loved. Or he feared that unless he did, he would not last, like her friends never lasted. For her
he’d learned to understand Millie, had accepted the house, the daily precariousness of moods.

“It’s nearly six now,” Millie says, “and Amanda must be asleep over there.” She says it gently. He takes off the headphones, rubbing the ache they have left around his ears.

“I wanted to tell you I talked to Dan. He wants to come home now. What with Amanda and everything.”

“I heard there’s a heat wave in all of southern California.”

“Oh yes, he’s hating it. Here it’s twenty-two degrees, perfect. Will you come outside and eat? The air is so lovely. I baked rolls earlier.”

“I could smell them.”

“We still have to eat,” she said, “don’t we.”

“I
’m gonna hit the can like it hit me first,” my mom says. “Man the booth, Pickle.” She squats, ducks under the table, pops back up on the other side, and, jingling her keys, disappears down the aisles of other booths.

“Hit it like it hit me first” is one of my mom’s classic phrases. She’s been using it since I can remember being embarrassed of her. It’s an okay one, as far as go- to phrases go: not quite smart and not quite funny, but just enough of both of those to elicit at least a smirk. Unless you’ve heard the hell out of it, then your mouth screws up another way. “Night, Pickle. I’m gonna hit the hay like it hit me first. Don’t stay up too late.” “Buckle up, Pickle, and let’s hit the road like it hit us first.” “I’m not against you drinking, Pickle, but keep in mind how your dad would hit that bottle like it hit him first.” She’ll be here all week, folks.

Dad’s splitting has inspired a new number in her repertoire. Everything has to be manned all of a sudden. “Man the apartment, Pickle, while I go out for spaghetti sauce.” “Man the car,
Pickle, while I run in here for a lotto ticket.” “Man the basketball, Pickle, while I go see if those two black kids want to play two-on-two.” As if this one guy – who was never around much anyway, even when he was around – had his finger stuck into some crack in some hypothetical dam and now that he’s hit the road like it hit him first, someone else has to plug that hole so everything doesn’t just gush and break through and drown everything else. It’s like, “Here, Pickle, man the world while I’m gone, will you?”

While my mom’s hitting the can like it hit her first, this big pile of human being comes up to the booth I’ve been left to man. He’s got this mustache on his face, but it doesn’t look like a mustache he grew. More like he couldn’t grow a beard. What he’s got on his face is how I imagine the mustache on the main character in this book I’m reading for school called
A Confederacy of Dunces
.

“What have you got?” the pile of human being wants to know. He looks sad about the boxes that we’ve got opened on the table, and a little tired about them. The good burgundy tablecloth that’s been in the family since before Christ was a cowboy does not, as my mom insists, help.

“There’s some baseball,” I tell him. “Some basketball, some hockey. Some of everything.”

“But what have you
got
?” His eyes look like they’ve been thumbed into his head, like the sunken eyes of a snowman.

“We’ve got what we’ve got,” I tell him.

The pile sighs like air escaping from a chair when it gets sat on. This has to be his first time to this card show, to be coming to our booth, let alone asking us what we’ve got. Every month it’s the same junk collectors and sad sacks and single dads who
come, and they all know that we don’t have anything, and that even if we did have anything, we wouldn’t even know we had it. They come to the booth to flirt with Mom, maybe buy a card on the off chance that it might improve their chances, but that’s about it.

The last Sunday of every month my mom and I pay five dollars to set up our pointless booth at The Arena. This place isn’t even really called The Arena, that’s just the name it’s been given. Where the name was supposed to be, there’s just a big blank space. For a while someone had spray painted a weird-looking dick in that spot, but now it’s blank again. This is the hockey rink that Corbet’s OHL team was supposed to kick ass on. I don’t know what goes on, whether they melt the ice or just put a flooring over top of it, but there’s always a wet chill here and that sweet chemical smell that all indoor rinks have, folded into the pungency of locker-room-sweat stink. The team the rink was built for was going to be called The Corbet Combats. Something with a bat was going to be the logo. There was even a competition to design some lame mascot. I don’t know if someone forgot to carry a one or what, but the way the math of it worked out, the town had enough money for an OHL team or for a rink, but not for both. So we got The Arena for a hockey team, but no hockey team. Now The Arena gets rented out for kids’ birthdays, school skating parties, the circus – not the good circus – Neil Diamond that one time, Tom Jones that other, and, every last Sunday of the month, this crap collectors’ convention.

The human pile’s got a shoulder bag, one of those cheap-ass ones they give away at conventions, and when he adjusts the way it hangs I see that his left hand is a little itty claw.
The other one is in okay shape, though something about the little stubby fingers on it makes me think of baby penises. So with his baby penis fingers he goes through every single card in every single box of Dad’s worthless collection. I guess he needs to find out for himself that we have nothing. And I’ve got to stand there like I’m listening to someone tell a joke I’ve heard a million times because this is my booth to man now, my worthless cards to man. And the pile is mine to man now, too.

I get the feeling that in life you’re rarely lucky enough to know just where the shit has come from that gets cut up and thrown by the blades of your fan. But I can tell you that all of this is Ben Rooney’s fault. Ben Rooney is this guy Dad worked nights with at the chainsaw factory who just disappeared one day. Like a bubble that popped, he was there and then he wasn’t. What happened was Ben Rooney sold his lifelong baseball card collection for a million dollars and then hit the road like it had hit him first. A wife and daughter were left behind. Claire Rooney went to the same school as me for a few years, though not when her pop popped. She was that girl who in kindergarten would come in from recess during the winter and, starting with her snowsuit, just take all of her clothes off, all the way down to her pointless pink body and get laughed at. Her pop was never heard from again, though I heard of him all the time, because fucking Ben Rooney became like this big hero for my pop. And that’s the source of this huge load of elephant dook that got chucked at my fan and got sprayed pretty much all over everything.

“I swear to God,” Pop would always say. “A million dollars.”
Like swearing to God meant anything. Swearing to God for him was just the same as saying “excuse me” after he’d sneak up on me and belch in my ear.

With dollar signs twinkling in his eyes, Pop started buying baseball cards like rations before a disaster. In his mind, whatever that mind was, this was as good as buying money. Seriously: like buying fucking money. Like he was going out and paying one dollar for ten dollars. That’s what he figured out from that Ben Rooney story. I would never ask my mom what on earth she was doing with such an impressive dope because I have this tickling suspicion that I’m the answer. The other answer is that it takes someone just a bit stupider to be with someone so stupid. So, either way, I just don’t ask.

Instead of playing catch or something with me in the backyard we didn’t have, or taking my mother out to fancy restaurants this town doesn’t have, Pop would be sitting there cross-legged in the basement, unwrapping the cards and stuffing them right into the box, the foil packaging glittering around him like fancy garbage. On the off-chance there would be a hard, dusty blade of gum included, he’d give it to me if I asked before he stuffed it into his own breathing mouth. Card gum you’ve got to incubate and soften in the hot wetness of your mouth before you can even threaten to dream of trying to chew it. But in all that time it takes to get soft, you just realize that you don’t want it anyway.

By the time he popped, like his hero Ben Rooney, Pop had amassed twenty-nine boxes of sports cards. Unlike Ben Rooney, he left all his cards behind when he left. He must have realized what they were really worth. The drool on his pillow on the couch hadn’t even dried when Mom packed up those
boxes and spirited them to the city and to the first comics and sports memorabilia store she found in the phonebook.

Pop must not have even looked at the cards. He didn’t care what they were or what they were about. The cards went from package to box untouched, unenjoyed. Just money in the bank. Rudy – the owner of Rudy’s, where we took Pop’s boxes of currency – had to peel the cards off one another. I pretended to browse the stupid store while Mom watched Rudy like a hawk that has no idea what a hawk eats.

Rudy, who was dressed entirely in denim – and I mean entirely: a snap-up denim shirt under a fraying denim jacket covered in buttons of all the major league ball teams, and jeans, and a denim hat from the ’88 Calgary Olympics, and even his beard was that yellow colour that jeans become when they rot – Rudy offered us $300 for all twenty-nine boxes. Mom lost it like the house keys.