Читать книгу The Talker - Mary Sojourner - Страница 11

KASHMIR

First my dad died. Then Mom found out he’d borrowed from the life insurance right down to the dust on the last nickel. Then she said, “Jenn, I hope you’ll get a part-time job. Otherwise I don’t know how we’ll make it.” I’m sixteen so there’s not a whole bunch of jobs out there—especially in Yucca Valley where lots of people sleep in their cars. But my best friend Liana’s mom works as an aide at Hopecare, a local nursing home. She talked with the head nurse. They said they needed somebody three to seven to help out with meals and visit the residents. And could I start right away? Almost the next thing I knew I was being given a blue and white striped Hope Helper’s apron, handed a vase of silk flowers and a card and told to head down the hall to Room 136 to get it ready for the new resident.

I read the card as I walked down the hall. Welcome to your new home. We hope you’ll like it as much as we do. Nobody had signed it and I wondered if the new patient would wonder if anybody here actually liked it at Hopecare. I set the flowers and the card on the dresser, tugged the bedspread tight over the blankets and sheets and sat in the La-Z-Boy chair next to the window. I could look out on the Vons parking lot behind Hopecare. I watched a couple shaved-head kids playing Bash a Shopping Cart. I remembered when Liana and I had done that. We got caught and had to clean up the parking lot for a month. When the store manager told my dad, my dad had tried to look like he was mad. Later, I heard him talking with my mom and the two of them were laughing their asses off.

I wondered if I would ever be able to look at anything in our town and not think about my dad. He’d been gone three months. There was no warning. One morning my mom woke up next to him in bed and his skin was cold. She shook him and when she knew it was hopeless, she called 911. She woke up me and my brother and sister and sat us down on the bed in my brother’s room. “Something really sad has happened,” she said. I knew right away. “Your father died sometime in the night.” She waited and gave us time to let the words go all the way into our brains. Chris broke first. He threw himself into her arms. Stacy grabbed my hand. I’m the oldest of all of us, so I just looked into Mom’s eyes. She nodded. I knew in that instant my childhood was over.

I watched the kids in the parking lot be kids and cried a while. I was wiping my nose with a corner of my apron when there was a tap at the door. “Incoming,” a wheezy voice said. I looked up and saw a little old guy with a long gray braid being wheeled into the room. He had on a faded black leather vest with patches on it. He wore a silver hoop in his right ear and a string of turquoise beads around his neck. “Hey, little sister,” he said, “where’d you get those flowers? Are they for me?”

“Isn’t that nice, Mr. Guidry,” the aide said. “You’ve got a welcoming committee.” The guy snorted. The aide parked the wheelchair next to me. “I’ll just leave you two alone so you can get to know each other,” she said, set a duffle bag on the bed, fluffed up the pillows and left.

The old guy shook his head. “Ah jeez,” he said, “what a bummer. Not you, missy. Just what the hell am I supposed to do now.” He picked up the card. “My new home? I liked the old one just fine.”

“That vest is so cool,” I said because I couldn’t think of what else to say.

The guy looked down. “I earned every one of them patches,” he said. “I was a real biker, not one of those yuppies you see riding around on fancy-ass—’scuse me—Harleys. I rode with the Half Moon Hellers. You ever heard of them?”

“Nope,” I said. “But my dad was going to get a bike.” I heard myself and wanted to take back the words. The guy shook his head. “‘Going to’ and ‘got’ are two different things. You tell him that. He buys himself a bike, he’ll wonder why he waited so long.”

“Okay,” I said. No way was I going to spill my guts to a grouch.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I forgot my manners.” He reached out his hand. He had a big old skull ring on his thumb and a silver snake around his little finger. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Red Billy. Red Billy Guidry.”

I shook his hand. “I’m Jenn Martin. I just started work here.”

“Well then, that makes us both newbies, right?”

I laughed. “Yep. Red Billy—that’s a great name. If you don’t mind my asking, where’d you get it?”

Red Billy undid the braid and shook his hair loose. “See all this hair. It used to be red, not carrot red—goldy red like Robert Plant. You know who he is?”

“Led Zep,” I said. “My boyfriend Travis says they’re gods. I’m more into stuff like My Chemical Romance.”

Red Billy faked taking a hit off a joint. “Tell me about it.”

“Oh jeez,” I said. “You better be careful.”

“What are they going to do?” He laughed. “Bust me and send me to jail? That’d have to be better than here.”

Just then the aide looked in. “Hey, Jenn, Karen wants to orientate you. She’s at the nursing station.”

“You go on, missy,” Red Billy said. “I gotta get me and all my possessions settled in.” He nodded at the duffle bag. “Should take me about five minutes.”

I got off work at seven and called Liana on my way home. “I have to talk,” I said. “The weirdest thing happened at my job.” She and Trav drove over and we headed up Old Woman Springs Road to get high. I love where I live. It’s big old desert and you can do what you want and nobody ever finds you. Travis parked and we climbed down into a little wash that snakes past the landfill. Somebody had hollowed out a little cave in the side of the wash and set a piece of old carpet on the sand. We crawled in and hunkered down. Liana pulled out her pipe. “So, Jenn,” Travis said, “how’s the new job?”

“Pretty cool,” I said. “First off, all I have to do is take supper trays in to people and talk with them for a few minutes. Some of them are pretty weird, but nobody’s mean. I don’t really have a boss. It’s mostly aides on in the evening and all they want to do is get their jobs done and hang out at the nurses’ station and bitch.”

“Awesome,” Travis said. Liana handed me the lit pipe and I sucked in a good hit. You can’t smoke but one hit of this dope. It would rip out your brain. Travis’ brother has a little greenhouse in his back bedroom and grows some deadly weed. We’re too young for medical marijuana so it’s a good thing Trav and his brother are pals.

I passed the pipe on. “But, what’s the most amazing thing of all is that there’s an old hippie just got brought in to live there. His name’s Red Billy. Guess why, Trav.”

“He’s a socialist? Fuck that.” Travis’ dad hates the president and anybody else he thinks isn’t a patriot. He’s always going on about libtards and socialists and reds and how if they want his gun, etc. etc. Sometimes Travis hates socialists and sometimes he hates his dad.

“Duh,” I said. “No way. He’s got this long gray braid down his back. So when he told me his name was Red Billy, I was like, ‘Huh?’ and he said that his hair used to be all goldy red like Robert Plant and then he asked me if I knew who Robert Plant was and I was like, ‘Of course,’ and then—”

“Whoa,” Liana said, “you’re getting all a thousand miles an hour like you do. Slow down. I do not know why I smoke with you. You might as well as be a tweaker.”

I giggled. Trav giggled. Liana glared at us. “Come on, Jenn, take a deep breath. So the guy is called Red Billy because he once had red hair which he doesn’t anymore because he’s old but he likes Led Zep?”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Now who’s tweakin’?”

Liana whacked my arm. “Okay, smart-ass, but you gotta watch out for one thing.”

“What?”

“What if he’s one of those dirty old men?” she said.

For a second I felt a little sick. Then I thought about how Red Billy hadn’t checked out my boobs, which I have some pretty terrific ones, and how his eyes were so gentle and I felt better. “No way, Liana,” I said. “No freakin’ way.”

We decided to climb out of the wash and lie down and watch the stars. There was an old fallen-down Joshua tree that had a branch sticking up that looked like a big gray Buddha. We threw our coats on the sand near it and lay down next to each other. For all the time we lay there looking up into the shiny black sky, the stars wheeling over us, orange flares bursting up from the Marine Base near TwentyNine Palms, I didn’t think about my dad once—until I realized I hadn’t been thinking about him.

Red Billy wasn’t in his room when I went to work the next day. I checked at the nurses’ station. “He’s in Activities Therapy,” one of the nurses said. “But, they need you in the kitchen. The prep gal didn’t show up and somebody needs to get the trays ready for dinner.”

It took me a while to get the trays set up with napkins and silverware. The whole time, the cook, a scrawny Mexican with only one front tooth, muttered to himself in Spanish. I knew a little Spanish, so I figured out he was calling the missing prep gal’s mother a whore and a miscarriage. I finished up and went looking for Red Billy. He sat at a long table with five old ladies playing bingo. As soon as he saw me, he waved me over. “I need to go to that appointment with the social worker right now?” he said.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to bring you to the office to sign papers.” The activities therapist fake smiled and called out, “G23.” She checked off Red Billy’s attendance slip. “You run along with your little friend, Mr. Guidry. You were supposed to be here till five, you know, but I’ll excuse this once.”

I wheeled Billy into the hall. “You’re slick,” he said. “I thought I’d died and gone to hell and was there for eternity. And the old gal next to me kept farting like a dray horse.”

I didn’t know what a dray horse was, but I laughed. “Where do you want to go?”

“How about the so-called patio?” he said. “I need a smoke.”

I wheeled him to one of the tables on the little concrete slab. A torn chicken wire fence closed in the patio. Somebody had once woven red and green plastic tape through it. “This is right cheery,” Billy said. He pulled out his makings and rolled us both a cigarette.

There was nobody in the Vons parking lot except a gang of scraggly black birds. “I love those guys,” Billy said. “They’re cowbirds. I almost called myself Cowbird. Want to know why?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, first off,” he said, “they love the road. Second, they always get by. Third, they leave their eggs in other birds’ nests to raise.”

We were quiet for a while. One of the cowbirds figured out how to tug on the edge of a garbage bag in the Vons dumpster and the birds chowed down madly.

“So,” I said, “do you have kids?”

Billy winked. “None to speak of.” He must have seen something in my face because he said, “Hang on. I didn’t really mean that. I’ve got a couple sons and daughter. They’re all grown now. My exes pretty much raised them. I don’t know where the boys are, but me and my daughter talk now and then. I used to send her postcards from wherever I was, but she couldn’t write back because I was always moving.” He looked away. “Dang, look at those birds. It’s party hardy time.”

Right then, I almost told him about my dad, but he shook his head and said, “Man, I miss the bad old days.” So all I said was, “So you were a real biker?”

“As real as you can get,” he said. “There was one time back in the early Seventies, me and my buddies decided to take off from Barstow and head for Chicago with no money and full tanks of gas and see what happened. Bluehorse, this squinchy little Indian with one eye who ran with us came up with the idea. He was always trying to sell us Jesus and he figured if we made it to Chicago, it was proof Jesus was real.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think?”

In fact, what he’d said about Bluehorse had made me think about my dad dying and the stupid Jesus shit people said to me at the funeral. “I think you all became atheists.”

“Whoa, missy,” Billy said, “you’re too young to be so cynical. What happened was we made it to Kingman, Arizona. We was running on fumes. One of the brothers was a big tall handsome guy with steel blue eyes. He called himself Odin. He went into an old trading post and when he came out, he had a sassy lady in tow. She tossed him the keys to her trailer which was behind the post and said, ‘There’s beer and hamburger meat in the fridge. I get off work in an hour. You boys fire up the grill and I’ll meet you there.’”

“No way,” I said.

“For sure,” Billy said. “It was different in those days. The lady and us partied till morning. She gave us fifty dollars for gas and we headed for Flagstaff. A couple Navajo guys saw Bluehorse, yelled, ‘Hey, bro,’ and pointed us to the Sunshine Rescue Mission. We ate and got preached at. Bluehorse fell in love with a cute little volunteer with a Jesus is My Co-Pilot t-shirt. A hippie kid gave us a couple joints and twenty bucks and we were back on the road again.

“See, back then the real people recognized each other. We knew we were strays. Then, that frickin’ coke came into the scene and it was all high commerce.”

“Did you make it to Chicago?” I said.

“We did. It was road people watching our backs all the way. When we got to Shakeytown, Odin and a couple of us sold a few ounces we had stashed for emergencies and we rode the long way back, through all this tall grass prairie that was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. Sunset would turn that grass to pure copper.”

“Did it make you believe in Jesus?” I said.

“Shoot, I already did. I’ve always figured he was a road stray. His stories just got cleaned up when somebody figured out how to make money off of him.” Billy reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a little package of crackers. “Toss those over the fence for me, will you? We cowbirds got to take care of each other.”

I threw the crackers as far as I could. The Activities Director stepped out onto the patio. “Miss, miss,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’ll just attract rats.” She took hold of the back of Billy’s wheelchair. “Time for dinner,” she said. “You and your friend can talk more tomorrow.”

Billy looked straight ahead, deadpan. “Thanks for the talk, missy. I hope to see you tomorrow.”

“You bet,” I said.

“That’s enough chat, people,” the Activities Director said. “Mr. Guidry, you don’t want your din din to get cold.”

I was walking home from work when a text from Liana came in. Talk soon. I called her. She picked up on the first ring. “Jenn, we need to talk. As soon as possible.”

“I’ve gotta go home. It’s my turn to cook dinner,” I said. “Meet me at the house.”

Stace and Chris were playing on their phones when I came in. “Mom called,” Chris said. “You’re supposed to figure out which of the vegetables have been in the fridge the longest and cook them.”

Stace giggled. “Ketchup. Right? That’s been in the longest plus it’s a vegetable. Right, Chris?”

He nodded.

“So, we can have hamburgers because ketchup goes with hamburgers and that’s a balanced meal,” Stace said. “That’s fair, Jenn.”

Just then, Liana came through the back door. She has family privileges and doesn’t have to knock. Same with Travis. “You want me to help?” Liana said. “What are you making?”

“I can help,” Stace said. “I can get the ketchup out.”

“Get, Stace,” I said. “You too, Chris. And no spying. Go outside and ride your bikes. You know the rules.”

Stacy slouched out the back door. Chris slammed his phone down on the table. “You are so not the boss of me,” he said.

I put the phone in my pocket. “I so am.”

He slouched out the back door. “I hate it here.”

I checked the veggie drawer. The green beans were limp and the cauliflower had a few little dark spots on it. I tossed the bag of beans to Liana and unwrapped the cauliflower. “So what’s the big deal?” I said. “Did you get pregnant or something?”

Liana set the beans on the counter and flipped me off. “No, Jenn. It’s not anything like that. I want to meet Red Billy. Soon. I want to check him out and make sure he’s not some old pervo.”

“He’s not. Why do you keep bugging me about this?”

“I don’t know. It just freaks me out. It’s not like anything weird ever happened to me or anything. It’s just that old guys are so weird. You know like those geezer hipsters that hang out at the hippie café and try to flirt with the waitresses. They are so pathetic. Plus they are really ugly.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but Billy’s not like that. He’s got like a calm in him and he’s old, but he’s not ugly. I’d love for you to meet him. Trav too. Why don’t you guys come visit tomorrow? There’s hardly ever any visitors, so the staff won’t give a care.”

Trav and Liana picked me up after school. Trav had bought himself a classic Morongo Basin beater, a 1999 Malibu that was so rusted out you could see air through the fenders. He figured some greenhorn easterner had driven it west till it gave out and died. Cars don’t rust out here. The tires melt. You can see old wrecks looking like they had melted down into the sand everywhere outside of Twentynine Palms and J Tree.

“I brought a little treat for this guy and us,” Trav said. “Check out the glove compartment.” It was easy to do that because the door was hanging by one hinge. Liana poked around and came up with a plastic bag with three fat brownies in it. I sniffed them.

“I don’t know, Trav,” I said. “There’s this nosy activities Nazi lady who checks up on Billy every five minutes.”

Trav pulled his dad’s Make War, Not Love hat further down over his eyes. “You let me worry about that. It’s all gonna be good.”

“Okay,” I said, though I remembered the way the last three times Trav’s all-gonna-be-good had played out. The best had resulted in me and Liana grounded for a week with no texting privileges. “Billy’s room is 136.”

I pointed Trav and Liana toward Billy’s room and checked in with the aides to see if there was anything urgent on my to do list. There were three newbies coming in and three silk flower deliveries. As I walked toward the first room, I heard giggles coming from behind Red Billy’s closed door.

I cop-knocked. The giggles stopped. “Just a sec,” Billy said. I waited and Liana opened the door.

“These are good people,” Billy said.

“We are,” Liana said. “Okay, you win Jenn, so is he.”

“Told you so,” I said. “I’ve got to go, you guys. I’ll check in later.”

I finished up the newbie room preps and was headed back to Billy’s room when the Activities Nazi called to me. “Jenn, Ms. Lane said you could help me out for a few hours. I’ll need Rooms 201 through 220 and 106 to 118 brought down for bingo. And I’d like you to call the numbers. Mrs. Cray isn’t feeling well and I don’t really trust anybody else to do it.”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was, “Most of them could call the numbers. You treat these people like they’re little kids.” I just said, “136 has company, but I’ll check on everybody else and see who wants to come.”

The Activities Nazi smiled her dead frog smile. “Well, I’m afraid most of them will have to come whether they want to or not. It’s these activities that keep their brains working.”

I wondered what kept her heart working. I was learning so much about psychology working at Hopecare, more than I could ever have learned in college or anywhere. I nodded. “I’ll bring everybody I can.”

By the time I’d rounded up the twelve folks who wanted to take a chance on winning a pen or an extra dessert or an old Reader’s Digest and we’d endured an hour of B-6 and O-12, six of the residents were asleep and I wanted nothing more than a smoke. I wheeled and walked everybody back. Mrs. Wilkins was the last one. She’s not really Mrs. anymore since her husband died, which is how she came to the home. She always dresses up for meals and activities. And her hair is in a modern cut. I helped her into the chair by the window. She looked up. Her eyes were wet.

“Mrs. Wilkins?” I said. “What’s wrong? Can I help?”

I’m not really supposed to get too involved with the residents. My supervisor says that most of them have detached from the real world and too much closeness upsets them. It’s probably really risky for me to hang out with Billy, so I always have a cover story.

Mrs. Wilkins took a note out of her dress pocket. “I don’t think you can,” she said, “but I need to tell somebody.” She handed me the note. “Jennifer, please read it.”

“My dear Maddy Wilkins,” the note said. “I so enjoy those times when we eat dinner together and talk. With your permission, I shall endeavor to make those times happen more often. Sincerely—I do not write that lightly—Roger Abbott.”

I handed the note back to her. She held it carefully. “You see, don’t you?” she said.

“I’m not sure.”

“I have to decline his offer. Someone is bound to notice and there will be a great fuss made about Roger Abbott and myself. We will be that cute little old couple.” She began to tear the note up.

“Wait,” I said.

“No, child, it’s best this way. I couldn’t bear to be made into a ridiculous joke about two old people finding affection. I couldn’t bear to be made to wear a crown when we are forced to go to the weekly dances. Can’t you just hear that dreadful activities woman, ‘And lets have a round of applause for the Homecare King and Queen of the Week.’”

She tore the note into tiny pieces and handed them to me. “Keep them safe,” she said. “It will be our little secret.”

“I promise,” I said.

“I’ll rest for a while now,” Mrs. Wilkins said. “Thank you.”

I walked down the hall and knocked on Billy’s door. It took him a couple minutes to open it. Liana and Trav were gone and Billy was grinning even more than good dope can make happen.

“Jenn,” he said. “You and your friends just made my day. That Travis kid had me listen to a bunch of tunes. He said they were old school but they sure sounded modern to me. That band, Rage Against the Machine? I couldn’t understand a word they sang, but they sounded for real. I’m not too sure about My Chemical Romance, but Jenn, it doesn’t really matter. You three give me hope for the future.”

“Awesome,” I said. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“Anytime,” he said.

I held out the note scraps. “This has to be a secret, right?”

“Sworn,” Billy said.

I told him what the note said and what Mrs. Wilkins had said. He bowed his head. “This fuckin’ place.” He handed me back the scraps.

“I’m going to keep them safe,” I said.

“Of course you are,” he said. “You get it, right? There is nothing cute about two people falling in love—not if they’re two years old or a hundred and two. We’re like animals in a zoo to these people. For chrissakes, all we are is them forty or fifty years down the road. I sure hope that instant karma stuff is real.”

I knew that very minute what I needed to do next. Billy and I talked till I heard Ms. Lane calling me from the front desk. “I gotta go,” I said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “You and your gang might not be here tonight,” he said, “but I’ve sure got some righteous memories of today to keep me company.”

I walked home that evening. The mad heat of the day had faded into a few sweet warm breezes. I could hear the thump thump of hip hop in some white boy homey’s car. There was a sliver of moon overhead, a few clouds drifting over it and in those twenty minutes I loved where I live more than I ever had.

I imagined what I was going to do and the way Billy would smile when he figured out what was happening. It was when he’d said “old school” that I’d remembered that my dad had once had an old-fashioned Walkman, headphones, and a couple boxes of old tapes. I wasn’t sure what was on the tapes, but I had a hunch.

The kids and I started making tacos for dinner. I was slicing lettuce when my mom came in the back door. I waited till we were at the table eating to ask her about the tapes.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Start in the garage. That old backpack might be the place. It’s up on top of the trunks. Take all of it if you want. I’d eventually have to do something with it.” She turned away. I started to say something, but I knew she didn’t like to have us kids see her upset.

It was twilight by the time I walked into the garage. The trunks were stacked in a corner with the backpack on top. I climbed on the stepladder and hauled it down. It was lighter than I expected.

I took it outside to the backyard picnic table. My heart started beating fast. It was the closest I’d felt to my dad since he’d died. “Dad,” I said, “I know that if you’d had time you would have left this to me. You’re going to love what comes next.”

I opened the backpack. The Walkman was on top, wrapped in a black paisley bandana. I carefully lifted it out, dug down and found a bunch of bootleg tapes: The Clash, Sex Pistols, Ian Dury, The Animals, The Who, Led Zep and somebody named Roky Erickson. I’d never heard of the guy, but later when I was in my room and had put in fresh batteries and listened to his song, “If You Have Ghosts,” I thought how perfect it was for my dad now. But, right that moment, in the garage oven, with sunset burning in the dust that had drifted up, all I cared about was what was on the Zep tape.