The Hermit's Story (6 page)

It was in Houston that Dave met and married his new wife, Nancy, and had the new baby, who to him is just as precious as the first. Because Dave owes his ex-wife $896.12 each month in child support, Dave and Nancy and the baby live in a small apartment in a not-very-safe neighborhood. They can't go for walks at night and, afraid of drive-by shootings, they sleep with lightweight bulletproof flak jackets, with the baby in between them. Dave's learning to be a real estate appraiser, and in his work he has seen how easily bullets can penetrate thin hollow plasterboard walls. He appraised an apartment in Phoenix into which a pistol had been fired, and he was amazed to see that the bullet had traveled through six walls before going through a refrigerator door.

Nancy took six weeks off from her job when the baby was born but has now been back at work for a couple of months. There's a woman they pay over in Bellaire—a forty-minute drive in good traffic, an hour in bad traffic—to watch the baby each day. Under the terms of her maternity leave, Nancy could have taken off eight weeks, but she's heard that her boss rewards employees who come back to work early.

Dave has not been at his job as long as Artie has, but he's better at it, more confident with both people and numbers, and so already he's a little higher in the company than Artie. The boss likes Dave, and likes the way the work isn't the most important thing in the world to Dave. The boss knows that Dave's daughters are what matter to him, and that because of this he doesn't have to worry about his loyalty: knows Dave's not going anywhere. And Dave always gets his work turned in on time; he hasn't been late with a project yet.

Dave is pleasant-looking, tall, friendly, with blue eyes. He smiles a lot, laughs easily, hides from everyone the thing that used to be rage and despair, about his wife taking his daughter away from him, the thing that is now neither rage nor despair, but some harder, sadder, more deadened thing. You couldn't tell that thing was in him unless you cut him open with a knife, or unless he opened up and told you—which he isn't going to do.

Artie is dark, heavy, sulky. He doesn't know how to laugh. He can pretend-laugh, can ridicule things, but he hasn't opened up and laughed, hasn't felt the cleansing opening-up trickling of simple, gurgling laughter since he was about ten or twelve. His skin is as dark as a plum, as if he's bruised. His eyes are hooded from nonspecific worries, from chronic frowning. He's about twenty pounds overweight. When he drinks beer he gets friendlier, though not happier. Artie listens to conservative radio talk shows and feels strongly an impending sense of disaster, as if he is in a fast car that is racing flat-out and hard for a concrete wall. He and Dave and Wilson have taken off a Monday from work to go fishing down near Galveston. They've hired a guide, whom they're supposed to meet at daylight, down at one of the Texas City piers on the Gulf. The guide has said that he will take them to wherever the fish are biting. Artie is worried that they won't catch anything, that the money will be wasted, and on the drive down he keeps pressing Dave and Wilson to reassure him that this is a good guide. Dave and Wilson have been fishing with this guide once before and each caught his limit of speckled trout in only a few hours, though it does not always work out that way, and they tell him this.

Wilson is driving. He's got a new truck with leather seats. He doesn't have a car phone, even though he sells them. He's read that they cause brain cancer, and so instead all he has is a digital pager, which records the number of messages coming into his answering machine back in Houston. Wilson bought a computer program that pointed out to him that, based on last year's data, each incoming phone call brings him—on the average—another $152.18 of business.

The pager is hooked to the sun visor of his truck, and each time it goes off—a rapid series of beeps and clicks—all three men whoop and tally the total: Dave counting with true gusto, elated for his little brother, and Artie sick with green envy but happy at the thought that at least somebody, somewhere, is getting gouged.

It's a lot of work for Wilson to go out and answer each of those calls—to drive out and fix whatever's wrong with the system or to install a new one—but he does it. He has no employees. He's a one-man show. He won't even be twenty-nine for another ten months. It makes him seem richer than he already is, though in his mind, it's a little bit like he's drowning, or gasping for air—like he can't quite get enough air—and he doesn't like that feeling, and he's trying not to worry about the business so much.

Fishing trips, such as this one, with his brother, help.

***

Even though it is still an hour before daylight, the pager's going off about every ten minutes. If the pager gets too full—it will hold only a certain number of messages, depending on their length—Wilson can stop and get out and make a few calls from a pay phone, but he hopes that doesn't happen today.

As they drive, all Artie talks about—sitting in the back seat and watching the digital glow of the pager, waiting for its red light to blink in the dark, waiting for the beeping to go off again—is his and Dave's work. Even though they saw each other on Friday, they go over it again, shooting the shit about each employee in the office—talking about their work in the familiar but also exploratory manner of raccoons crouched by the side of a creek, fishing for mussels in the night: turning them over with their paws, feeling every ridge, every bump. There is the one who is getting fired, and the one who does not get her reports in on time. There is the good-looking one and the plain one. There is the asshole and the brown-noser, and they laugh and talk about the brown-noser for a while.

Then they talk about the handsome one, whom they dislike intensely because he is arrogant, and finally, after several miles, they settle on the scapegoat, the gullible one, Clifford.

They savage Clifford; it is as if he is meat and they are eating him. It is as if they are cutting him up and swallowing him. Every week there is something new that Clifford's done, or which they've done to Clifford, some small thing to share and to revel over. This morning Artie is telling Dave about how he bad-mouthed Clifford's new truck, a Chevy, as not being nearly as strong as Artie's old truck, a Dodge.

“Oh, he was hot!” Artie hoots. “He started stuttering and saying that all his friends who had horses and who trailered them out to the country each weekend used Chevys, and I interrupted him and said, ‘Well, yeah, they're okay trucks for little
weekend
pullers.'” Artie imitates the brush-away hand-waving motion he'd given Clifford—and Dave laughs, too.

“
Weekend
pullers,” Dave says. “That's a good one. Him and those damn horses.”

Clifford, who is slightly ahead of them in hierarchy, though not a real boss, has been going out to the new racetrack by the airport and has been buying the bargain horses, the ones that are not quite fast enough.

“It's like a compulsion,” Artie says. “He's bought about fifty of them so far, and he doesn't show any fucking sign of stopping.”

“I could kill him,” Dave says, from out of the blue.

Wilson looks at his brother in surprise. Artie laughs a mean laugh.

“I had to go over to his house for a barbecue once, while you were out of town,” Dave tells Artie. “Some bullshit office party. He had just been out to the racetrack that day and had brought home two more horses. He had them in his back yard and was feeding them apples and hay and making everyone
touch
them,” Dave says. “He kept making everyone pat their flanks, their rumps. ‘
Feel that,
' he'd say,
‘Feel how hard that is.'
I'd never seen such sad pieces of shit in all my life. He says he's going to sell them as polo ponies. He thinks that because they almost ran races, they're some kind of super-horses, and always will be. He thinks almost is real close, instead of real far.

“When he comes in my office to ask me something,” Dave goes on, “the first thing I ask him, right away, before he can say anything, is ‘How long are you going to be in here?'”

“You tell him that?” Artie says.

“Hell yes,” says Dave. “He doesn't like it, but there's nothing he can do. Just because he's above me doesn't mean he can fire me. Besides, he doesn't know shit. He's always asking people to help him fill out his reports. He'll ask the same question five days in a row.”

“He does that, doesn't he?” Artie says. “Asks the same question twice.” Artie's speaking slowly now, and where before he had a kind of cocksure glittering anger in his dark eyes, doubt is now starting to seep in, and it comes into his voice, too, a change that is so noticeable that Wilson, driving, looks in the rearview mirror to see what's going on.

“Hey, Dave,” Artie says—and Wilson recognizes the change-in-voice immediately, recognizes it from his customers: the bargaining mode, the favor-asking mode. “How do you get all those apartment jobs, now? Apartments are easy. I always get the warehouses,” he says.

Dave shrugs. What can he tell Artie? That Artie is raw meat, chum for the company? That his sole purpose for the company, and therefore perhaps in life, is to pull his suit on each morning and hurl his body at the stacks of dull paper, earning his 3 percent, passing on the rest of the bloated profit to the absentee, do-nothing owner of the company, until Artie's body is gray and bent and lifeless and all joy and spontaneity has been sucked from his brain?

Dave shrugs again, looks in the mirror at Artie. Dave heard the waver in Artie's voice, too.

“I just ask for 'em,” Dave says, and that is as close to the truth as he wants to come—that he, Dave, gets them, and that Artie does not.

“Warehouses are big,” Artie complains. “So fucking big and empty. Nothing in them. A hell of a lot of work,” he says. “Shit. Apartments are easy. I could knock out apartments in no time.”

“Look,” Dave says. He points up the road to a dingy white bus that's traveling the same direction as they are. It's a prison bus from Huntsville: an aging school bus. It's lit up inside with a yellow glow like the light that comes from old bug lamps. Riding through the night like that, it looks as if the prisoners are up on some kind of stage for exhibit, or are floating in light.

The prisoners are jammed shoulder to shoulder, three to a seat, and they are staring straight ahead. Perhaps a hundred of them are packed in there. They are so motionless, so locked into their straight-ahead stares, that it seems certain they must be handcuffed.

There is wire mesh, like a cage, all around the bus's windows, and the bus is moving slowly.

Wilson pulls closer to the bus, on its left, and begins passing it; as he does, the three men are struck by a horrible, giddy kind of silliness. They begin making faces at the prisoners, first Artie and then Dave and then Wilson. They leer and hold their hands up to their ears and pantomime and grin, making taunting gestures of nonsense to the prisoners, and then pass on.

But almost immediately, as if some shell or husk has come back over them, or has instead been peeled back again to reveal who they really are, the three men are a bit remorseful, and embarrassed—a bit shocked—by what they have done. They ride on in silence.

Wilson has switched on the mute button on his pager, but in the darkness, it blinks red again, and Artie utters a quiet “Whoop!”

“Which exit is it?” Wilson asks. “Texas City, or League City?”

“Texas City,” Dave says. “I told you that. You'd better slow down and get over. You're going to miss it.” Already, there's a lot of traffic, men going to work in the refineries at Baytown, Texas City, and Galveston. The oil comes straight in to the Gulf from the Middle East, from Africa and Russia, from the North Sea, China, and South America, and is refined there on the shore. Refineries and smokestacks line the beach like skyscrapers. The orange and yellow plumes of flare-gas flutter raggedly in the night, but the sight is strangely pretty, oddly comforting. Wilson pulls into the right lane and slows down, watching for the exit. Dave looks back to see where the prison bus is, and he is alarmed to see that it's gaining on them.

“If you speed up and get a ticket,” he tells Wilson, “I'll pay for it, as long as you don't let them catch up with us.”

Wilson cackles and slows down further.

“I'll get you for this, Wilson,” Dave says to his younger brother, and slumps down in his seat. He averts his face as the prison bus passes them once more; but still he cannot help but look.

The driver is giving them a malevolent stare. He's a big man in a uniform, with a crewcut, and for a moment, with his eyes alone, he drills holes in their truck. He's gripping the steering wheel so tightly with his big fists that it seems he will break it off.

“Oh, lovely,” Dave says. And is it his imagination, or as the bus passes are all the prisoners on that side of the bus watching out of the corners of their eyes? They are still staring lock-solid straight ahead, as they must have been told to do, but doesn't it seem, too, that there is some hint of peripheral vision, that the prisoners are casting sidelong corner-eyed glances of rage down at them? Memorizing their faces, perhaps, their license plate, their existence, for the prisoners to hold clenched in their hearts for all the rest of their days—gripping that knowledge so tightly until it seems it will crack, and waiting for the day they get out, then, to go looking for them?

And if they do, will they find them? Would they know where to look? Might it be an easy thing for the prisoners to hold on to even a tiny rage for a very long time, given their predicament?

The three men feel strongly that they have made a mistake, in their one errant moment of lightheartedness: some crooked, mistaken flight of frivolousness.

The prison bus gets off ahead of them, at the same exit they're taking.