Portland Noir (10 page)

8

I decided the distribution station was like hell: everyone was there for a reason, and most wanted to talk about it. A man in his forties told jokes about prostitutes and animals between explaining the complexities of paying child support for four children among three ex-wives. A doughy woman who sweated through the same purple sweatsuit every night and smelled of sour milk had three children in private school, though she cheerfully claimed to earn nearly as much delivering newspapers as her husband did selling men’s ties. A man with wavy auburn hair and no teeth loaded his papers into a cardboard television box on a dolly tied to the back of his bicycle—as he pedaled off into the mist, the dolly’s small black wheels bounced and rattled, and the bicycle’s rear tire sent up a rooster tail of spray that glistened orange beneath the streetlights, then disappeared. An aging Deadhead with sunken cheeks, a voice like loose gravel, and spider web tattoos covering his elbows alluded to massive debt from years of substance abuse. His dog barked angrily from the back of his truck at anyone who walked past, and its snarls were the last thing I heard before I drove off to handle my own route.

9

I took my painkillers with my coffee as I drove to the station, but the toughest part was when I first arrived and had to assemble two hundred papers before the meds kicked in. Bagging papers was dull, mindless work, made even more difficult by the Deadhead’s preference for tuning the small radio on his worktable to a station whose playlist seemed to have been culled exclusively from the soft-rock soundtrack of my childhood: Cat Stevens continued exhorting people to board the peace train, Streisand and Gibb continued declaring they had nothing to be guilty of, and Joni Mitchell still wanted us to help her, she thought she was falling in love again. The deejay bragged about broadcasting these laments commercial free between midnight and 3, and the Deadhead would play with the reception until he got it just right, and then tap his foot and nod his head while he hummed along. The love songs and the sentimental childhood memories they evoked in me, juxtaposed with the thuds of stacked papers and grunts of the straining workers, made me feel my life had become the punch line of some arcane conceptual joke. After the Deadhead left to deliver, the remaining employees would talk about how much they disliked his music, but no one ever said anything to him. One night, after listening to Michael McDonald claim he kept forgetting we’re not in love anymore, I decided somebody had to make a stand for sanity, and I asked if there was another station we could tune the radio to.

“You don’t like this song?” the Deadhead asked, incredulous. “That’s the Doobie Brothers, man.”

“I’ve heard this song five hundred times.”

“It’s the only station that comes in good,” he said. “The others are fuzzed out because of all the metal in here, but I guess I can try—I don’t want to annoy anyone.” He started messing with the tuning, and for the next minute we heard nothing but static and garbled, distorted voices, until I had to tell him to forget it and just put it back where it was.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t know it was a problem.”

“Because you never asked,” I replied.

“Shit,” he said. “You’ve been here for a month? I’ve been here for three years. Just relax.”

“How am I supposed to relax when I’m constantly hearing all those shitty songs?”

“So I’ll just turn it off.”

No one said anything else. In the silence that followed, the sounds of everyone working were distracting and overloud. Even though I’d only said what everyone else was thinking, the silence felt like judgment. They considered me the bad guy, and I ended up wishing I’d never said anything in the first place.

10

Before she left, my wife claimed that she and I were driving each other crazy trapped in the house together all the time, and that with herself and the baby out of the way for a bit, I could apply all of my energy to my job search. Besides, she said, her parents would love to spend some time with their granddaughter. That I agreed with her when she said these things is not in dispute.

Olivia was starting to string together her first speculative, surreal statements at this time.
Daddy make a red roof house for Livvy
, she informed me on the telephone shortly after they left, and then repeated the phrase multiple times, as if it held crucial information. Her sentences seemed crafted of some cryptic, dreamlike symbolism that begged analysis, and I turned the red roof house sentence over in my mind for three days until, out of sheer desperation one night, I asked the Deadhead what he thought of it. All he could tell me was that it was pentameter, which I thought would be interesting, until he explained what that meant. I told him I thought maybe Olivia had snatched the red roof house from some song on the radio, but when he started listing old songs with the word “house” in them, I knew we weren’t going to solve it. And we didn’t.

11

When my refills ran out, I decided to find a place where I could get some more. I chose a walk-in clinic in an old hospital in the rougher part of town, and waited my turn on the hard plastic lobby chair, while next to me an old Asian man sat with his head bowed and his eyes shut tight, absorbed by some internal difficulty. Across from me, a stocky man in overalls pressed a thick wad of blood-soaked paper towels to his forearm while he explained in detail what was unsafe about the motion he’d used with a box cutter. At the climax of his description, he lifted the paper towels to reveal the awful result. And there were at least three different exhausted mothers with small children who clung to their legs or lay on the thinly carpeted floors. The children whimpered quietly while streams of gray snot ran down over their bright red lips, and one stared at me suspiciously for upwards of ten minutes. Her eyes were dark, her lashes incredibly long, and I smiled at her once, toward the beginning of the staring, but she didn’t acknowledge it, and never changed her expression.

When I was called in to talk to the pimply young doctor, I complained of back pain—too many hours in the car, I said. I also mentioned neck pain, from craning my head out the window. I felt these were plausible injuries, and found I could speak confidently when I concentrated on the part that was true. When I wanted to demonstrate my pain, I just tensed the muscles in my shoulder, which sent pain rocketing through the joint—pain I ascribed to my back and neck, areas I knew were difficult to diagnose with accuracy. The doctor absently picked at a pimple on his chin and asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. I decided my pain was an eight, a nine being burning to death, a ten, crucifixion. The doctor looked me over, shrugged, patted me on the back, and wrote me a prescription.

12

I kept pills in a vial in the console of my car as I drove past the warehouses and factories and stevedoring businesses that populated my route. I also drove a stretch of undivided highway, two lanes each way, and delivered papers on all of the narrow residential roads that branched off and weaved their way up into the hills outside the city proper. Whole strings of large homes hid within the dense green foliage of those hills, though all a person could see from the road were the rundown little houses on truncated dirt or gravel drives that branched from the side of the highway at random intervals. Those little houses with their peeling paint and rusted motorcycles and long, dirty weeds depressed me, especially when the car’s headlights illuminated a small bicycle, soccer ball, or other toy abandoned in the weeds.

The house with the boy in the sleeper was one of those houses.

13

During the occasional phone calls I received from her, Sara updated me on the places she had taken Olivia: Pike Place market one day, the aquarium another, and always the park. She claimed Olivia enjoyed Seattle, which annoyed me, because how can a two-year-old even know the difference between one city and another? And there were things I wanted to show Olivia too—it’s not as if I didn’t see my share of animals or greenery. Hanging branches whipped past the windows of the car as I drove up a winding road to throw papers at the houses hidden in the hills. I watched opossums scurry along the roadside ahead of the car, and when they turned to stare into the headlights, their eyes flashed like metal discs. Jogging through an industrial park one night as I delivered papers to multiple businesses while the car idled in the lot, I stumbled upon two raccoons ransacking a garbage can. They spun to face me, annoyed by the interruption, and then scampered grudgingly into the darkness, trading outraged bits of chatter. I saw plenty of squirrels and owls as well, and once even saw a wildcat dash into the roadside undergrowth. I thought Olivia would like to have heard about the animals, even if she wouldn’t actually have been able to picture most of them, since the only animals she really knew were cats and dogs. But it wasn’t something I would have been able to make her understand over the telephone.

14

What I thought would be Sara and Olivia’s two-week holiday had quickly become four, and then four became eight. On the telephone, Sara and I took turns telling each other the story of our life together. It turned out that though we were using the same characters, we were each telling a different story, and between our competing installments, we offered each other updates on events in the present. In Sara’s story, for instance, I’d said I would do many things that I actually hadn’t, so I seemed either deceitful, hapless, or both—and also, she and Olivia had found a playgroup right in Sara’s parents’ neighborhood. In my story, I was working like hell to pull through a tough time, but I was finding a conspicuous lack of support—I had also shaved five minutes off my record delivering time the previous night. In her story, there was an entire thread devoted to thoughts on what love was and what it looked like and how it was demonstrated, and her parents had fixed up a room for her and Olivia to stay in. In my story, the characters had definite goals, and it was important to establish what they each respectively and realistically wanted to get out of life, and then to analyze whether the current situation was really going to help them achieve those goals, and also the last week had been so hot that I was sleeping in the basement. One thing our stories had in common were monologues devoted to doubts about whether the stories we were telling even raised the most important issues, and if not, what the most important issues might be, and if we couldn’t figure out what the most important issues were, if it was possible that the important issues weren’t even definable, that they were intangible and invisible but had real effects, like changes in atmospheric pressure, or the erosion of stone. At the end of one particularly confusing evening of competing stories and traded theories, Sara said, “Well, at least Olivia’s having a nice summer vacation.”

15

A hazy, half-realized scene of my wife and daughter backing out of the drive in the car began repeating on a short loop in my memory. I couldn’t even remember if I’d kissed Olivia before they left—I could just see her strapped securely in her car seat, looking at me as I waved to her through the side window. What remained clearest, the thing my memory rendered with the finest, most delicate detail, was the confused expression on Olivia’s face. The memory didn’t include the expression on my own face, of course—how could I see my own face?—but since children are such skilled mimics, maybe my daughter wasn’t actually confused, but was simply mirroring what she saw in my own expression. Or maybe both of our expressions were authentic, and the same. It’s a tough thing to unravel, the origin of an expression.

16

The next time I saw the boy, I was glancing through the screen door as I always did, my eye scanning the bright rectangle of light. The adults were there as usual, smoking cigarettes and watching television, but standing at the door was the child in his sleeper, looking back at me.

After I drove away from the house and accelerated back onto the highway, I found myself so angry that I had to pull the car to the side of the road to try and compose myself. I stood on the gravel-covered shoulder and watched a freight train roll past until its whistle pierced the air for no apparent reason, and then I climbed back into the car and waited for a logging truck to go by. Its trailer was filled with the trunks of felled trees stacked eight or ten high—strings of wet, pendulous moss hung from the trunks, swaying heavily in the breeze as the truck roared away down the road. I pulled back onto the highway to resume my route, but the image of the boy in the doorway stayed with me. The night was one of the warmest of the summer, and though I was sweating profusely, I also felt chilled. I opened the vial in my console to retrieve another pill, but my fingertips found nothing, and I became confused, unable to decide whether the vial had simply gotten low without my noticing, or if I’d lost track and had accidentally taken too many pills. I felt jittery and anxious, and almost started laughing as I watched my hand shake when I reached to turn on the car’s heater. By the time I threw my last paper, a bitter nausea had risen in my stomach, as if my intestines had become entangled within some slowly winding gear.

17

I made it back to the station and into the bathroom in time to disgorge the contents of my stomach into the dirty toilet. After spitting the last of the humid brown stew from my mouth, I sat on the bathroom floor, my back against the wall. When I looked up a few minutes later, the Deadhead was standing in the doorway. “Your car’s running,” he said.

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“You need anything?”

“I’m just a little sick,” I said. “If you could just leave me alone for a few minutes …”

I closed my eyes, but I could sense him standing there, studying me. “What’s your problem?” he said.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

“What’s going on, Dale?” I heard Carl ask, and when I looked up he was standing next to the Deadhead, looking at me like I was an animal that had wandered into the station.

“He’s sick.”

“Is his route done?”