Читать книгу The Bewildered - Peter Rock - Страница 10

3.

NATALIE SAT IN THE CAB OF HER TRUCK, parked later that same night, once again on East Burnside, watching her children skate away. Her black boots stood on the seat next to her, the sandals on her feet a nightmare to drive in—she’d been in a hurry after the blackout, eager to check on the children, to see how involved they were. And something was up with those three, something; they were too scared to admit it, happy with their secrecy and that was fine, none of it mattered except that they got the wire, wire she had hopes for. She chuckled as she watched them disappear—laden with their backpacks, their instrument cases, staying tight together as they rolled down the sidewalk, startling pedestrians.

She shifted into gear, eased into the sparse nighttime traffic, turned south on MLK, past the Mexican restaurants and strip clubs, the clown supply warehouse. The girl, Kayla, had switched the radio to this terrible classical station, and now Natalie spun the dial into static. Once, perhaps, she’d been able to listen to classical, even enjoy it on a wound-up night like this; she suddenly recalled that she had really used to love the blues; names came from nowhere—Buddy Guy and Robert Johnson and Johnny Winter. These days she couldn’t really bear any music; she preferred the static, the bristles rising and twisting higher, magnetic as the storms passed over. As she drove she could hear the balls of wire, cutting through the static: they rolled their way around the bed of the truck—a scratching, a muffled ricochet—as if charged and trying to work their way free.

She was ravenous! She accelerated, swooping up the Tacoma exit, then back over MLK, toward her place off Johnson Creek. She passed through the dark streets, the run-down houses, the wet dogs with their raspy, worn-down voices. The street she lived on went from blacktop to gravel to dirt; she could drive the last eighth of a mile with her eyes closed, and often practiced doing so.

Her only neighbor was an abandoned, boarded-up house, and her trailer wasn’t even a double-wide, and it wasn’t level, cinderblocks sinking into the soft ground. Pale blue, with a white stripe under the windows, rusted, dented on the far side where it likely tipped over in some past transport. She liked the sense that her house, too, had a past, that it had lived other places, housed other people and possibilities.

She skidded under the tall cedar, switched off the ignition, the radio static out of her ears and—boots in hand, truck door slamming, chain-link gate dragged open—she kept moving. Clumps of crabgrass made up the yard, growing around the previous tenants’ bottle caps, shreds of magazines left out to cure and weather. The broken screen door hung loose, ready for her to clatter past, to push the storm door and then step on top of the forwarded letters, the job offers, the flyers from credit card companies.

She hit all the switches. She liked the lights bright, fluorescent, flickering so fast no one could tell they weren’t steady. She was home, here where no one could hide; the weight of a footstep was felt, wherever you were. Two bedrooms, a living-dining area separated from the kitchen by a bar, and the bar and table covered in magazines, the way she liked it.

She jerked open the refrigerator, mixed herself a glass of weak Tang, just orange-tinted water, and tore into a Slim Jim, chewing fiercely as she poured water into a pot, put it on to boil. As she was getting it all going, getting past the initial craving, the shakiness, she paged through a magazine—April 1976, Denise Michele in a grass hut, near a rope hammock, no surprise. Her legs are shorter than most, her skin darker (though the lines of her string bikini are evident; not everyone gets to see all this), her left hip cocked up and her striped sarong held open as if she’s taking it off, dropping it on the floor or about to put it on, tie it, though now she won’t, now that she’s been startled—her expression is surprised, pleasantly surprised, her wide eyes, her long black hair on her bare, smooth shoulders as she stands next to that bamboo ladder, her right arm glistening, still wet.

The pot was boiling over! Natalie turned, angry, impatient with herself. She dialed down the burner, tried to find the foil packet. What if someone were watching this, through the windows? What would they understand? She went to close the blinds at the windows—the windows frozen shut in their screeching tracks—and there were no blinds so instead she turned out the lights, and then switched them back on, and returned to the stove. Mostly, she felt as good as she ever had, better, but sometimes she did only the things she found herself already doing, and she only wished she could anticipate the days she’d be sharp and the days she wouldn’t.

Boiling again. She boiled curries and potatoes in foil packets. She ate dried fruit roll-ups, energy bars. Astronaut food. She thought of it as her astronaut diet; she never sat down to eat; like now, she bounced around the kitchen, imagining she was in zero gravity. Her throat, the cilia there, had to work extra hard to keep all the food from jerking back out of her, floating around the room. As she floated, as she chewed and swallowed, she held open the magazine with her free hand and read, and looked closely at the bamboo ladder next to Denise Michele. It’s lashed together, not nailed—that would be inauthentic, but it is authentic, as real as Denise’s expression, her face so hopeful, she has freedom and can taste it, the future impossible to know and yet unavoidably delightful, a limitless promise; and she’s proud of her breasts with good reason, round and high and full, the undersides pale (the same bikini), the dark nipples that she is eager to share. She is innocent, surprised without her clothes, but happy to be surprised this way, naturally, not at all ashamed.

The phone was ringing. Natalie did not recognize it, at first. It took a moment to find it, beneath another magazine.

“Natalie,” the man said. “Did you have success, this evening? My sources at the facility saw no new wire there.”

“Holy crow,” she said. “I forgot—”

“I can’t have you forgetting.”

“No,” she said. “Yes. I mean, what I meant was that I didn’t forget, that I did have success, that I only forgot to drop off the wire. I got caught up. I had success. It’s still in the truck.”

“You know what to do, then,” the man said. “And when I’d like you to do it.”

Natalie hung up the phone. She looked at the beads of water on Denise’s breasts, her throat, at her glistening right arm, trying to figure it; past the waterfall, the grand piano—two pages back, there, she is in the bath; a bubble bath that is another reason to be hopeful, for anticipation—not that she isn’t always clean; she washes for fun, for pleasure, the way she wrings the washcloth so the bubbles catch here and there—

The phone rang again, just once, as if to remind Natalie, startle her loose.

—and yes, there were things to do. Yes, yes. The food she’d been chewing was suddenly tasteless in her mouth. The wire. She had had success. Miss April! She set Denise Michele aside, they’d meet another time, no doubt, back in 1976, in Hawaii. Denise is Hawaiian after all, the forty-ninth state and the freedom more recent, fresher, more appreciated and demonstrated, as she herself demonstrates it; she’s been working as a Polynesian dancer, had a bit part in an episode of Hawaii Five-O. She has a fiery temper, but she can also be affectionate and sensual, and yet Natalie had to put her aside, had to get out of these sandals, into those boots, and out the door, across the yard, toward the truck.

She opened the back, jerked the tailgate so it bounced open, flat. Crawling inside, she reached out to touch the four balls of wire her children had harvested for her. Three were ordinary, only average, but the fourth ball, the last wire, was of a different grade—completely different and wonderful, still humming deep within. She pressed her cheek against it, then felt for the sharpened, cut end, then unwound the thinnest strand, thin as a hair yet stronger, for twenty inches; she bent it back and forth until it loosened, weakened, gave way; then she twisted it into a loop, tied it around her neck for strength.

She had to drive! What was she doing? Outside again, closing the back, climbing into the cab, she found the key, fired the ignition, accelerated out onto the dirt road. The truck roared, jerking sleeping dogs awake, back out through the neighborhood, retracing her path up MLK. She twisted the rearview mirror. The balls of copper wire were still waiting, anxious. She had forgotten, almost. The man had reminded her. Forgetfulness wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it could make things difficult. What did she really need to remember? In the trailer she had a drawer of facts—her name, her bank accounts, a calendar where she marked down the times the man told her, the places. Sometimes she even forgot about the drawer, and then opened it by chance and surprised herself, and remembered. Forgetfulness disconnected the past from the future, took her in a different direction, and she suspected that this was not something she could always deny. For the temptation was not to remember, to really forget, to embrace her best days, like lately when she felt as free as her girls look free, moving forward, her energy multiplying, never lapsing.

Could she forget to forget? Fall into habit and routine? Was forgetting to forget actually remembering? She had to be brave! To move forward, not to circle back. Yet in her pocket she still carried her address, though she almost never forgot that, and her phone number. The man had called, to remind her. How did he find her? Did she find him? That was back in those early, difficult days, right after she’d moved to Portland. After a night when she went out, when she had lost some time, where she woke up the next morning with a phone number in her pocket. He had opportunities for her, he’d told her. He understood her situation. He didn’t want any commitment, they would never meet, he would always call her and not the other way around. She’d tried his number again, weeks later, and it had been disconnected; still, he knew how to reach her and did. He paid her promptly, too, with a receipt, as if this were all legal.