The Humanity Project (29 page)

“All of a sudden he’s this sensitive subject?”

“Pull over. I want to get out.”

“Come on, Linnea.”

“You’re just a big turd, you know?”

“Thanks. Constructive criticism, always good.”

“Everybody thinks I’m some big joke.”

“I do not think you’re a big joke.”

“Say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry, Christ. Don’t keep messing with the radio. It’s annoying.”

“Yeah, you’re the only one allowed to be annoying.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I know you’re upset about your dad, but you don’t have to be a total asshole.”

“There’s that potty mouth,” he reminded her.

“I beg your pardon. I mean, a total douche.”

“Tell me more about Mr. Wonderful.”

“Only if you really want to hear it.”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not. What’s his name?”

She gave him a sideways look and Conner had to figure that at least some of what she had to say was lies, but it was hard to tell how much or what part. “His name’s not important.”

“It’s usually considered kind of important.”

“It’s not important for you to know it.”

“OK, fine. Did he shoot a lot of people?” He hoped he wasn’t going to have to keep playing Twenty Questions. “Was he in a gang or something?”

“No,” Linnea said, like this was a dumb thing to ask.

“So tell me about his life of crime.”

“He killed these people, three of them. One of them was my stepsister.”

“All right,” Conner said after a moment. He didn’t think he believed it but his heart was sending the blood up into his ears, pounding away. “Stepsister, how is it you had a stepsister?”

“My mom married this guy, a long time after her and Art split up, and he already had this daughter. So she was a stepsister. Like Cinderella.”

“Why did he, what, he was at your house or something?”

“No.” Again, using her pitying, aren’t-you-ignorant voice. “She didn’t even live with us. She was one grade ahead of me. She was kind of a bitch. I know how that sounds, because she’s dead and all, but it’s true.”

They drove in silence. Except for the dash lights and the moving lights around them, everything was black. Conner kept waiting for her to say more. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more. But waiting made him feel like something was creeping up the back of his neck. He said, “How about the other two?”

“I didn’t know them. I don’t know why he shot them, he was kind of crazy.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he muttered.

“He shot my stepsister because he knew I didn’t like her.”

The truck jittered on the curves. Conner had to clamp down on the wheel so they wouldn’t go sailing off into the blackness. Linnea said, “I didn’t ask him to. It wasn’t anything l made happen. But I got blamed for it anyway.”

Conner coughed and tried to get his throat working right. It was rasped dry. “You didn’t shoot anybody.” He was pretty sure she hadn’t, whatever else she said.

“No, but I kind of wanted to.”

Then she said, “That was why I got shipped out here, you know. Because my mom decided I was this evil creature.”

“Evil, come on.”

“Well, I did some sort of evil stuff afterwards.”

After a while Conner asked, “How long is this guy in jail for?” He still wasn’t sure how much of it he believed.

“He’s in the crazy jail, they can keep him as long as he’s crazy.”

“I guess you don’t miss him.”

“I do and I don’t.” She’d been slouched down in the seat on her tailbone and now she wriggled her way upright. “I sure do think about him.”

They were coming up on San Rafael and the traffic slowed. Linnea said, “When somebody you know is dead, they’re like a ghost in your head. They keep on bugging you. It pretty much sucks.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Conner said.

“That’s because you don’t have any.”

Maybe his dad was a ghost by now. It was lonesome to think it. His dad would be one of those sad ghosts who kept coming around wanting something, and trying to get you to laugh at some dumb joke so you’d be more inclined to give it to them.

He said, “Remind me not to spend next Halloween with you.”

“You are so, so hilarious. Maybe I should just go home. Unless you have some other big fun plans.”

He guessed he’d given up on finding his dad tonight. He couldn’t think what else to do or where to go. He’d talked himself into the notion that anything he did really mattered.

Linnea said, “Like, we could find a party and knock on the door and say, ‘Is this the Halloween party I was invited to?’”

“Don’t tell me you ever really did that.”

“No,” she admitted. “But I heard some people talking about doing it.”

There wasn’t anywhere left for them to go. They could drive up and down the freeway all night, going nowhere. It was like they were the ghosts. What if he was the one who suddenly disappeared? Would anybody notice? His mom, sure. And Mrs. Foster, until she found somebody else to take out the trash and clean up after the cats.

And if Linnea was gone, her dad would miss her, and the mother she was always so mad at. But she was like him. She didn’t belong to much of anything except herself.

They were almost to her exit when Conner asked her if she wanted to go get something to eat. She gave him a quick, startled-rabbit look. “Sure.”

“Is pizza OK?”

She said it was. Conner took the exit to the shopping center to one side of the freeway.

He parked in front of the pizza place, got out, and waited for her to catch up with him. “Are we getting takeout?” she asked.

“No, we can go in and sit down.”

He saw her thinking this through. They’d never done such a thing as sit together in a restaurant before, like a couple. It was no big deal. Ordering a pizza together wasn’t like getting engaged.

They found a table and opened the plastic-coated menus. Conner watched her read her menu. She’d done some new thing to her hair in the last couple of days, put some all-over bright brown color on it and got it cut so it stayed out of her face. He hadn’t noticed it until now because it actually looked good. She saw him watching her. “Something bugging you?”

“Nothing. You know what you want?”

“Green peppers, mushrooms, and black olives. And whatever you want on it. Except pepperoni. Pepperoni gives you pepperoni breath.”

“Can’t have that.” It confused him; was she saying she didn’t want him to have bad breath, it was something she cared about?

“Ever since I mostly quit smoking, I have a more sensitive, uh, palate.”

“I guess you would, yeah.”

The waitress took their order and brought them Cokes in tall glasses. They looked out over the room without saying anything. It was like talking was something they could only do while driving. Conner was thinking about all the weird things that had to happen for the two of them to end up here, sitting at the same table. First he guessed they both had to get born, and their parents had to get born too, and all the generations before them. Linnea had to get herself mixed up with some wild bad trouble that either was or wasn’t her fault, and either had or hadn’t really happened in the first place, anyway, whatever she’d done to get herself shipped out here to live with her dad.

And if Conner’s dad hadn’t gotten himself smashed up and useless, Conner would probably be in school by now, the community college in Santa Rosa, taking computer courses.

He’d have a normal life. It was all just stupid random shit that happened for no reason and nothing you could do about it.

The pizza came. Linnea ate just as much as he did, slice for slice. She said that when you stopped smoking, you got this huge appetite, and Conner said if she didn’t watch it, she was going to get fat. “Show me where I’m fat,” she said, pulling her jacket open, and Conner got a view of her unbuttoned shirt front and the undershirt beneath it and some little black straps beneath that.

“Nice,” he said. “Flashing the whole restaurant.”

She yanked her jacket shut. “You are vile.”

“Ha-ha.” But he’d seen what he’d seen. Her nipples stood out like twin targets.

They finished eating and Conner paid the bill. Linnea dug in her bag looking for her wallet and he waved her off. “I got it.”

He saw her trying to figure it. “Well, thanks. I have to go to the restroom.”

Conner watched her get up and walk away from him. She wore one of those shortie skirts over a pair of jeans, like he’d seen other girls wearing. It was disappointing when you couldn’t see the girl’s ass. Well it was, he couldn’t help thinking it.

He waited at the front door for her, then pushed it open so that she walked beneath his arm. They got into the truck and he started the engine. Linnea said, “Got any ideas?”

“What?”

“Is there anywhere else you wanted to go? Or maybe I should just boogie on home.”

“Yeah, I’ll run you home.” It wasn’t that late, only around eleven. She lived just on the other side of the freeway and it didn’t take more than a couple of minutes to make the turn onto the frontage road. Her apartment building was almost at the end. He was tired from all the driving but restless too. He had nothing to show for himself, tonight or any night.

Conner pulled into a far corner of the parking lot and kept the engine running. Linnea said, “I’m sorry we didn’t find your dad.”

“Well, we tried.” He didn’t want to think about his dad. He didn’t want to be reminded of everything that was lost, failed, lonesome.

“Crap.” She had dumped her purse on the floor of the truck and she bent over to pick it up. Her hair fell to one side and the back of her neck was bare. Conner reached over and held the palm of his hand just above it, close enough to feel the warmth from her.

Headlights swept over them. He pulled his hand away and Linnea straightened up. “Hey. It’s Art.”

They watched the car pull into its space across the lot. Linnea said, “I don’t see Bombshell. I guess it’s no sugar tonight for the Artster.”

“Heh-heh, yeah.” Conner tried clearing his throat. It made a thick, bestial sound, like a warthog in rut.

The taillights shut off, and a moment later Art got out. He wore a huge shaggy black wig with a dent in it, as if he’d slept wrongways on a pillow, and drooping leopard-print shorts. There was some kind of leopard top also, slung around one shoulder. He started up the stairs, then turned back, unlocked the car, and rummaged around in it. He emerged with a club shaped like an oversized drumstick. This he balanced on his bare shoulder as he trudged up the stairs, opened the front door to the apartment, and shut it behind him.

Conner and Linnea looked at each other. Linnea said, “Seriously. WTF.”

“No words,” Conner agreed.

Linnea opened the passenger door. “I’m going to count to one hundred real slow, then go up. Call me, OK?”

He waited until she was inside, then drove off. There was the totally random shit of the universe and then there was a whole other, stranger universe you didn’t even know you lived in until it showed its face.

•   •   •

C
onner posted a picture of Bojangles on Craigslist and offered a cash reward. He found out there were a lot of black dogs running loose in the North Bay, or maybe a lot of people willing to trade a dog for money. For the next ten days people wrote in about dogs that were female, or spotted, or Chihuahuas, or other depressing bad ideas. A woman in Fairfax wrote to say she was feeding a stray that might have come down from the hills, and Conner drove out to see it. He found a dog that was so lean and grizzled and weary that, even after it padded toward him and buried its head in his lap and thumped its tail, he had to check its collar and find the extra star-shaped hole he’d punched himself to convince himself that it really was Bojangles. His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.

S
ometimes he thought he’d discovered something amazing: the peeling-away process of all his worries and hassles, his shoulds and oughts, which left him feather-light, unencumbered, free. Like being a monk, maybe. An economic monk. He’d taken a vow of poverty, or more like, somebody else had drawn up the paperwork and handed him a pen to sign with. Anyway, once they kicked your legs out from under you, and stomped on your knees, and spat in your face, what else could they do to you?

Now he was free to look at the sky and think sky-thoughts. He smoked weed and let the clouds in his head drift and lumber into one another. He was fine, he was getting by, and he felt sorry for all those poor rat bastards who were sweating it night and day, hating their jobs and all the things that went along with the jobs. His life had been whittled or polished down, and was now so beautifully, beautifully simple.

Then there were other times, when the mechanics of living, matters of food and hygiene, exasperated and defeated him, when there was nothing to do and all day in which to do it. And then the next day and the one after that, each with its privations and inadequacies. He had his clothes and tools and a few other things he’d saved from the wreckage of his house under a tarp in the truck bed, packed into plastic bags and five-gallon buckets like a goddamn hobo, which he guessed he was now. When it rained, he stayed in the truck. When someone made him, he moved the truck from one place to another. Sean slept in the front seat, the dog in the small backseat. He figured that he and the animal smelled pretty much the same by now.

His clothes were still good enough to go into Home Depots or bookstores and use the bathrooms. He tried to walk briskly on his crippled hip. No matter who you were or what your circumstances, people looked at you cross-eyed if you had something wrong with you that showed, as if they were afraid your bad luck was catching. One of the colleges, the trusting kind that didn’t always ask for IDs, had a locker room with blissful hot-water showers. At McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants he ordered the dollar specials. He lingered over his coffee and a newspaper, taking note of everyone else doing likewise, the people he kept seeing in such places, none of them ever acknowledging the others.

Nothing stayed the same. Not the place he went to sleep or the place he woke. Not hope or the lack of hope. The difference between a good and a bad day as small as the presence, or the absence, of clean socks. Sometimes he was pleased with his own resourcefulness. He had it knocked, and if he wasn’t good enough for some people, namely his ungrateful son, screw them. Then a bleak black mood would slam him sideways. Who was he kidding, trying to shine up the piece of shit that was his life?

For the last three nights he’d stayed in Bolinas, with a woman he’d met here. Sometimes a thing like that just came your way. He’d been sitting on the beach, with the dog hunkered down next to him, watching the kids on their boogie boards. The kids wore wetsuits because of the cold ocean, and it was pretty cold on the beach too, so he’d brought a piece of cardboard to sit on. You couldn’t camp on the beach, just sit. But the sun was out and he had a paper cup of hot coffee to warm his hands and the waves were the perfect entertainment for somebody who had nothing else to do but to watch them. Did anybody ever ask a wave if it had plans, or prospects, or any business taking up space? Not likely.

He could have slept right there. Curled himself up next to the dog. But he kept an eye on the kids, who had come out of the water now and were hanging out at one end of the beach, milling around and jeering at one another. A couple of years ago, in this same little peace-and-love hippie town, on this same beach, a bunch of kids, not these same kids but some just like them, had beaten a homeless guy half to death with skateboards and bottles.

A woman walked past him on the sand and stopped. “Hi.”

Sean squinted up at her. She had silver hair, trailing down past her shoulders. She wore a long skirt and silver bracelets around one ankle. “Hi,” he said back to her.

“What’s your dog’s name?” She said it like it was some kind of test question.

“Bojangles. After the famous dancer.”

“Does your dog dance?”

“Not while I’ve been watching him.”

“How about you, do you dance?” She did a little dipping, twirling step in the sand. Her feet were bare except for flat sandals. She looked like somebody’s crazy grandmother.

“Nope. My dancing days are over.”

“Well that’s a shame.”

“Uh-huh.” He wasn’t so sure. Dancing wasn’t one of those things he spent time feeling bad about.

The woman gathered her skirts up in a flounce and sat down next to him—that is, next to Bojangles, who was next to Sean. Bojangles wiggled his nose into her side to get himself petted. “Pretty pretty boy. I like dogs. Is he OK with cats?”

“He and cats usually work things out.”

“Because I’ve got two cats.”

“That’s nice,” Sean said. It was easiest to keep on being agreeable. She wasn’t as old as he’d thought at first, at least not as old as her hair. Maybe she wasn’t much older than he was. He was waiting to make up his mind about her. He figured she was one of the town’s herd of hippies, people who went around talking about energy and astrology and who grew psychedelic mushrooms in their closets. “I like your necklace,” he said. It was made up of yellow stones that were the size of gravel. Admiring the necklace gave him an excuse to look down her shirt.

“It’s amber. That’s fossilized tree resin.” She picked up one of the stones and held it for him to see. “This one has a little bit of something inside it, maybe part of an insect.”

“Oh, yeah. Pretty cool.” He leaned in closer to look. He didn’t think she was wearing a bra. Her skin and clothes gave off a smell that was part ashtray, part incense, part cat. An unfresh smell, soft around the edges, like the crumbs you found in the bottom of a coat pocket.

“Or a dinosaur. Because they had dinosaurs back then. My name is Dawn.”

“Sean. Nice to meet you.” He put his coffee down and held out his hand and they shook. Unlike most women, who didn’t put any effort into a handshake, she pumped his hand up and down, cowgirl-style.

They sat and watched the waves pile up. Sean drank his coffee. He hadn’t spent a lot of time talking lately and he was out of practice.

Dawn said, “Which one’s the biggest ocean, do you know?”

He tried to remember the other oceans. Atlantic, Arctic, Indian. Were there others? “I guess I don’t know. It might be this one.”

“Well it doesn’t seem all that big from right here. You probably have to look down on it from outer space.”

“Uh-huh.” Maybe she was stoned. It was the kind of thing stoned people got really intense about.

“Which do you think is more important, air or water?”

Stoned. Or something. There was an annoying little-kid quality to her questions. He said, “I guess it depends if you’re a fish.”

“Ahh.” She nodded. “That’s funny.”

It wasn’t all that funny. “Ha-ha,” he said obligingly. Maybe she was some kind of village idiot, or a burned-out druggie casualty. He decided she wasn’t bad-looking. Just a little crispy around the edges, like she’d spent too much time in the sun. “So, Dawn, you from around here?”

“These days I am. Uh-huh.”

Some old dread rose in his throat,
you from around here?
But he was just spooking himself. He said, “You mean, you moved here from someplace else?” She didn’t answer, only occupied herself with pushing her tongue around the inside of her mouth in a systematic fashion, as if she’d lost something in there. “Never mind,” Sean said.

The dog rolled over on his back and Dawn rubbed his stomach. “Why did you name him that really? Bojangles?”

“I dunno. It was just one of those names that wasn’t nailed down. Nobody else was using it.” He didn’t want to tell her that it had something to do with drinking a lot of beer and watching an old movie and making the clever observation that the dog, like Bojangles, was black.

“You can change a dog’s name, can’t you?” She asked it like she really didn’t know.

“Well yeah, it’s not illegal or anything. But then the dog wouldn’t know when you were calling him. Why would I want to change his name anyway?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t look happy. Sometimes the wrong name can do that.”

“He’s fine,” Sean said. He didn’t want some nutty woman telling him he couldn’t take care of his own dog.

“See, if you change a name, the universe will call you by the new name.”

“All right. Fair enough. I’ll put it on the to-do list.” It was just mystic hippie talk, like crystal healing. He guessed if he was going to hang around here, he ought to learn the lingo.

“Sean. Hey! It rhymes! Sean and Dawn.”

“Yeah. Who knew.”

“What kind of a name is that, Sean?”

“Celtic. You know, Irish. Some places in Ireland, it’s pronounced ‘Shayne.’ It’s a form of John, and, ah, the French ‘Jean.’ ”

“So you really have a whole lot of names.” She made it sound as if he’d said he had a whole lot of money.

“If you look at it in a certain way, yeah.” His name was Shit For Brains, and Broke Ass, and Gimp.

Dawn got up and brushed the sand from her skirt. “You want any vegetarian chili? I made some last night.”

“As it happens,” Sean said, “I’m a huge fan of vegetarian chili.”

And that’s how he’d come to be sitting on Dawn’s front porch three days later, with his truck parked in the driveway and his dog in the yard and his boots under her bed. He’d felt sort of bad at first, like he was taking advantage. There was probably some law meant to protect the borderline mentally deficient or the seriously high—he still didn’t know which she was, or maybe she was both—from, well, from people like himself. But she was allowed to run around loose and walk the streets on her own. Though in this particular town, home to the spiritually inclined and the drug-inclined and people who called themselves poets or artists because nobody told them they weren’t, that didn’t signify much. Anybody could, and did, have full citizenship rights here.

After the first night he stayed there, he woke up with the fattest of the two cats perched on the end of the bed, staring him down. It was an orange cat with flat green eyes, and Sean’s heart seized up like somebody had injected solder into it, but really, the cat was no stranger than anything else he’d woken up to, namely this bed with a woman in it, and so he calmed himself and wiggled his toes for the pleasure of feeling the sheets around them.

Dawn said she used to live in Utah, in the desert. She said she used to have a husband and three children. In Utah! Then one day she had been struck by lightning, lightning in her head. After that everyone “kept trying to make me stay inside.” So she ran away and came to the ocean, because all along she had really been a water person. She had changed her name too, although she wouldn’t tell him her old name because then her old life might hear it and track her down.

Sean said Well, that sort of thing could happen. The old lightning-in-the-brain problem.

It wasn’t exactly an explanation, but it sort of explained things. She surely didn’t seem to like staying inside, and often enough Sean was left alone with the cats to make himself at home. On one such occasion, he nosed around and found some Social Security check stubs made out to Cheryl Krupalija.

He tried to find out just how much money Dawn had, both because he was curious and for more suspect motives that he didn’t care to admit to himself. She had a small coin purse, like a child’s, and she kept her paper money in it, folded up like origami. There didn’t seem to be that much of it, but he hadn’t seen her buy much either. The Social Security checks weren’t very large, not enough to pay a lot in the way of rent. Her shingled cottage had only two rooms, a bedroom and everything else, but here in the Land of Ridiculous Real Estate, it was probably worth a few hundred thousand dollars. How did any of the longhairs and people who made driftwood sculptures get by around here? Did they all sell drugs?

He’d noticed that just up the hill from Dawn’s place, at the far end of the same driveway, was another, grander house, shingled in the same style as hers. You saw a lot of such add-ons, or studios, or guest cottages tacked on to larger properties. “Who lives up there?” Sean asked her.

“Roberto,” Dawn said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, pushing marijuana stems through a screen. The resins collected on a small mirror below.

“And who’s he when he’s at home?”

“He isn’t home right now.”

“It’s just a way of speaking. Forget it.” He should have known better than to attempt any kind of clever conversation with her. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes. But he’s allergic to the cats.”

“Uh-huh.” Sean watched her to see if she might be interested in coming back to bed, but she was hell-bent on processing the bag of stems. She tended to get involved in a project once she started it. Sean went out to the front porch. It was one of those mornings of high overcast and fog you got so often along the coast, the gray air blotting out all the colors of the world. It made you feel like you were inside of something and couldn’t get out. He wondered what Conner was doing right now. Following that rich woman around and cleaning up after her.

He was going to call Conner, once he got his feet underneath him and had something to show for himself and didn’t have to put up with a lot of pissy attitude. After all, who was it that had raised the kid pretty much single-handed after Conner’s mother bailed on them? Who’d paid for his food and clothes and all his computer toys? If you turned it into math, calculated his effort times days and weeks and months and years, wasn’t that enough to earn him some credit in the lean times? Buy him a little forgiveness if he’d done a few things wrong?

He was down right now but he could still get himself back up. Already Sean was sketching out a life for himself here. He still had his tools, and there was work he could do if it didn’t involve climbing or too much lifting. He could fix a few things up for Dawn. Make some contributions to the household.