Читать книгу The Ambidextrist - Peter Rock - Страница 12

SIX

BEAUTY

At the pharmaceutical companies, sometimes the drugs are tested on animals first, and other times those tests are simultaneous. At a place like that, they don’t know what a person is—not that most of the subjects give them much to think about. It changes you, Scott knows, wears you down. They can search you at any time, and you’re never allowed to leave when you want, no visitors, surrounded by drunks and addicts who purge their systems to get in, people who then binge away thousands of dollars in just a few weeks. In the trials, you can only use the payphones—some say all calls are listened to, recorded—and you can get kicked out, no pay, for even touching another phone. People turn on each other for nothing at all; first there’s the slither as someone takes off his belt, and then the slaps and the cries and the air whipped all around. Anyone who tells or complains will be found later, on the outside, where there are no orderlies.

Scott had been willing to put up with all this—and there were always clean sheets, actual mattresses, and hot showers, not to mention the money—until his last trial, which was over a month back. That was where he got crossed.

They’d been testing some kind of cold medicine. He’d gone in with Oliver, an acquaintance he’d met down next to the river. Oliver was experienced, an expert, full of knowledge. Some subjects stole drugs indiscriminately, ending up with bottles of stool softeners or worse, but Oliver knew the prescription names better than a pharmacist. More importantly, he always knew where the most lucrative trials were, or where they would be.

In that trial they got checked with the tongue depressor and the flashlight, after every pill. Only half the subjects were on the cold medicine—Scott was—and the rest were on the placebo. While he’d been unable to stay awake, those on the placebo, like Oliver, must have been jacked up on some kind of speed. They never slept.

This was back when Scott carried substantial amounts of cash on his body, before he knew better. The company provided lockers for valuables, but no one trusted them. Half-awake, fighting to rise, he had found the money gone. Oliver sat in the next bed, staring at him, though the television was on. He denied the accusation before Scott even got it all the way out.

“No, man,” he said. “I been watching you the whole time, to make sure nothing like that happened. I only stepped out once or twice, sneaking a smoke, and some fucker must’ve slipped in then.”

That was the end of drug trials for Scott. He disliked the idea of Oliver watching him while he slept, and the likelihood that he’d touched him made it even worse. It was the money and the principle of the thing, both, neither one more than the other. Never again will he let himself be locked into a place with friends who aren’t friends.

Now, sitting on the steps of the museum, he can only remember this. It’s the middle of the day and the sun is straight overhead. There are no shadows. It’s not so hard putting up with these temperatures, since it means the nights don’t get too cold; he’s not yet sure what he’ll do once winter returns. Now heat shivers the air, makes it harder to see. He squints. A man sits facing away from him, on a bench at the bottom of the steps. Two girls rollerskate past.

The waist of these pants is cinched in with a safety pin. In the drug trials, once, they’d been given leather hobby kits, and he’d made a belt—he’d meant to center his name, right across the back, but misjudged how skinny he was, so it rode above his hip. The belt had been stolen with his other pants, a few nights before. These pants are not as good, their hems gone ragged; taking out a match, Scott singes off the loose strings.

He’s found a new backpack, but one of the straps is gone and he’s replaced it with a piece of twine, doubled back. Next to him, and a step down, his boots stand with the socks draped across their tops. His T-shirt dries on his other side; he reaches for it, flips it over. He’s rinsed it in the fountain, along with the socks, after his hair. He rakes his bangs back, wanting them to dry right, feathered over his ears. It’s important to look good, he knows, if he wants to be treated decently; he has a trial tomorrow, at the hospital, where he won’t have to deal with any other subjects, won’t be taking any drugs. They’ll just be taking pictures of the inside of his head, checking to see what his brain looks like when he puts it in motion.

He has been watching the man at the bottom of the steps for over a half hour now. Plenty of people look alike, and sometimes he has to see someone move, hear them speak, before he is certain. Whether or not this man is Oliver, the similarity has made Scott remember those times. That has made him anxious.

He moves closer, quietly, and it’s clear before he gets halfway there. Oliver always wears a stocking cap, regardless of the heat. He is eating a stick of beef jerky, drinking a can of V-8, and there’s probably some strategy in that—some say drinking four gallons of water the night before will hide a dependency; others drink mineral water or vinegar, eat pounds of raisins and spinach, liver barely cooked. Scott’s heard all the tricks, though he doesn’t need them; he thinks that’s selfish, dishonest. If it throws off the tests, it could hurt someone down the line.

He stands transfixed, twenty feet from Oliver, whose back is still turned. He is about to retreat when Oliver, with a quick jerk, looks over his shoulder.

“Scotty!” he says. “Wondered if that was your ass, sitting up there.”

“It was,” Scott says. “It is.”

“Come on over here.”

Oliver wears running shoes with no socks, a tweed vest with nothing underneath it. His age always seems to vary, swinging between forty and sixty; today he looks old. His face is fleshy, and blood vessels line the bridge of his nose.

“Been missing my sidekick,” he says.

“Where is he?” Scott says.

“Talking about you, of course. Spare a few bucks?”

“No. How about you?”

“Touché,” Oliver says, chuckling. His brow folds down, almost hiding his eyes. The stocking cap is brown, a white stripe around it. “Haven’t seen you around the trials,” he says. “You haven’t done something stupid like getting a job, have you?”

“Nothing like that,” Scott says. He takes off his sunglasses, rubs the lenses on his pantleg, then puts them back on. What frustrates him most is he can’t prove Oliver crossed him, though they both know what happened. That knowledge is in the tone of Oliver’s voice.

“Word is there’s real money in St. Louis,” he’s saying, “and four thousand a month down in Baltimore.” He tears the jerky with his teeth, talks as he chews. “Play pool, watch movies, eat free food.”

“That’s not for me,” Scott says.

“Networking,” Oliver says. “Some of these trials I’m talking here haven’t even been posted. What’s your problem?”

“I’m tired of moving all the time, is what it is. Feel like staying in one place for a while.”

“And you picked this one?” Oliver says. “Sometimes, though, sometimes I almost know what you mean. Right now, for instance, I got a woman in a place over on Market Street.”

Scott yawns to show Oliver how impressed he is.

“One quarter at a time, I admit that, but she knows I’m there, she talks to me.”

“Pathetic,” Scott says.

“Scotty, Scotty.” Oliver crushes the V-8 can in his fist. “I got to love your high horse. Missed it. You know, we’re going to have a little get-together tonight, little party. You might do a little better for yourself if you mingled more. Could make it easier on yourself.”

“Never said I wanted it easy.”

“You’ve got to come down a little, is all’ Oliver says. “Or someone’ll bring you down.”

A cheap metal ringing sounds, and then the bicycle clatters by—horns and flashlights lashed to the handlebars, music blaring from the single speaker, a tangle of wire bending and recoiling over the back wheel. The old man’s legs spin as he sits rigid, churning past, not even glancing at Scott.

“Wow,” Oliver says.

“Have to talk to that guy,” Scott says, turning away.

“Hold on,” Oliver says, “I’m not through with you,” but Scott’s already gone.

Vaulting up the steps, he jams his feet into his socks, then his boots. His damp shirt in one hand, he throws his pack over his shoulder. Stumbling, he picks up speed as he heads along the paved path, around the side of the museum. He meant to follow only beyond where Oliver can see, to escape him; then he sees Ray—fifty feet away, stopped, not looking back; he begins to ride again, unsteady until his balance finds its speed.

Scott doesn’t stop running. He rocks from one leg to the next on the heels of his boots, passing joggers, almost tangled in the leashes of dogs. He’s not sure why he’s following, but he doesn’t want Ray to escape, to believe he’s put one over.

“Whoa there, cowboy,” someone says.

The twine cuts into his armpit, and still he runs. He hears voices, music, on Ray’s radio; classical music floats back like a soundtrack to his pursuit. When he doesn’t feel he can run any more, he lets momentum take over; he forgets about stopping. Past boys carrying long oars, around women with baby carriages. Ray could lose him if he wanted to, and Scott suspects he’s visible in the bicycle’s rearview mirrors. He suspects the old man is leading him somewhere. If he is not catching Ray, he is at least falling no farther behind. His curiosity grows with every step.

Then Ray rides straight across the brick border, clattering and weaving through the two-way traffic on Kelly Drive. Scott follows—cars honk and swerve around him—into the park, onto a small side road, under the trees. And it’s not long before the old man leaves the road altogether and heads straight into the woods.

Scott crashes down the path, after him, unable to see him any longer, and finally slows—no reason to rush if he gets headed in the wrong direction, and he doesn’t want to overtake Ray, either. He keeps moving along the path, his skin gone from slick to cool, leaves slipping along his arms, his ribs. He’d slept out here once, built a lean-to of a couple pallets; he’d still felt exposed.

Out in the west, he’d seen spraypaint on trees and been told it was the mark of loggers, choosing which ones they’d take. Here it serves no purpose, but blue and yellow lines, initials mark the trunks. The bicycle’s trail is one line in the dirt, sometimes splitting in two and then coming back together where the rear tire followed the front. Ray’s pushing it, now, his footprints on the left.

And here the old man has left the path—leaves are overturned, showing their colors, not their burnt-out, dusty sides. Here, the bicycle’s pedal has scored the bark from a tree trunk Scott follows. The sun clips by, through the leaves of trees. A spot off to the left shimmers for an instant, in the corner of his eye—behind him, down in the bushes. For a moment, he fears the old man has crashed; leaning down, he sees it’s only that the bicycle has been stashed there, back under the foliage. He smells the dirt, the dry leaves, a hint of cinders in the back of his throat. Twenty feet away, he sees a gap in the brush. That’s where the old man has gone. He’s close.

Their branches growing together, up high, the bushes form a kind of tunnel. Scott pauses; he doesn’t know what he expects Ray to be doing when he finds him, whether he’ll be waiting or setting an ambush. Scott moves slowly, into the tunnel of leaves and twigs. Fishing line, weighed by little round bells, hangs here and there; he slips by without touching them, muffles the bells in his fists. Halfway in, afraid of leaving footprints, he takes off his boots and socks and carries them.

A light shines from the ground. A round pond, water reflecting, the brightness torn only by the shadows of leaves. Scott stands perfectly still, hardly breathing, moving only his eyes. What he sees makes no sense at all, and that intrigues him.

One chair sits at the far end of the pond, and the whole area is only five feet wide, ten feet long, bordered by refrigerator shelving sunk into the ground like a miniature fence. Everything is packed so tightly it’s only possible to walk along the edge.

Close to him, flat stones have faces painted on them, eyes and mouths the colors of fingernail polish. Spoons stand with their handles stuck in the dirt, and photographs of faces have been cut from magazines and affixed to their other ends; actresses and sports stars smile, their colors faded. Plastic flowers rise among the spoons, the tiny faces stuck inside the blossoms, encircled by petals. Across the pond, the limbs of dolls and mannequins jut from the dirt, as if their bodies lie below and are about to surface.

The ground has been pounded, polished, so it is smooth and shiny. Scott balances along the edge, nearer the chair. Broken glass spins colored patterns, twisting with keys and bottlecaps, marbles, pieces of brick, all embedded in the burnished dirt.

The chair’s splayed legs are sunk into the ground; it was clearly once a rocking chair, but now its runners are gone. Scott sits, rests his bare feet in the grooves Ray’s have made. He doesn’t know whether Ray is hidden, watching him, and he’s not certain if that would make him take less pleasure, or more, from the garden.

Light gathers. At his feet lie tiny human-looking skeletons, built from chicken bones. Lizards and lions, carved from wood and plastic, ring the pond, as if coming to get a drink. Horses and monkeys and elephants, inches high. Black plastic garbage bags line the pond’s bottom, weighed down with stones. The old man must lug buckets up here to keep it full. Scott looks over the garden and wonders about Ray. This is hours and hours of work. Days and weeks and months. And for what? The only answer he can think of is this: because it’s beautiful.