Читать книгу I’m Not from Here - Will Willimon - Страница 5

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called . . . and he set out, not knowing where he was going.

—Hebrews 11:8

Felix had dreamed of Atlanta. “When I’m done with school,” he told anybody who listened as he preached, perched behind the “10 Items or Less” cash register at the Salisbury Piggly Wiggly, “I’m going up to Atlanta.” Felix used “up to Atlanta” in a way that was spiritual rather than spatial.

Yet he was aimed on this hellish June day through, not to, Atlanta.

Far from the safety of Salisbury, forty-five minutes past Charlotte, Felix marveled at the Peachoid looming over scorching I-85. He had descended to Gaffney. Leaving the highway, he pulled into the “View the Peach” area. With his Gotcha he took a dozen pictures of the water tower posing as a peach above a barbecue joint, troubled by its realism.

“Looks like somebody’s butt with a bad hemorrhoid!” shouted a fat man getting into his van.

“You a mess!” his wife whooped back.

That the Peachoid appeared shortly after Love’s Truck Stop Felix read as an encouraging sign.

It was hot for a late Saturday afternoon in mid-June. His pilgrimage from Salisbury, past Charlotte, Gaffney, and Greenville, had grown more torrid with each mile. With all the windows down in his Corolla, Felix survived, although the interior of the Corolla felt like hell.

Thin and slight of build, Felix’s body helped him handle heat. More importantly, he had done much thinking about the relationship of body to soul (or spirit, as he preferred to call his soul). Our bodies, Felix had decided, are shells, husks, impediments—insignificant. What matters is spirit, not flesh. Odd thoughts for a man under eighty.

He was fairly sure that Plato, whom he’d read seventeen pages of at State, and the Buddha, whom he had seen on WUNC-TV, supported his thinking. Thus Felix attempted to ignore the heat, sweat, and fumes and focus instead on the spirit.

Just after crossing the bridge over Lake Hartwell, shortly before the Villa Rica exit, he pulled into the Georgia Welcome Center. After relieving himself and blow-drying his hands he asked a hostess at the counter, “Do you have maps or brochures related to the environs of Galilee, Georgia?”

Smacking gum, she responded, “Never heard of Galilee and I ain’t got time to look it up on the map but I’m sure we don’t have no brochures about it.” Smack. “Wouldn’t you rather go to the outlet mall just down the road? Everybody does. They got the best gun store in Georgia.”

She leaned to spit out her wad of gum into a nearby trashcan. A plump woman at the counter piped up, “Galilee? I know it. Car broke down there onest. Bad fuel pump. Not much to it, far as I could tell. No reason on God’s green earth for a visit, ’cept if your car is tore up or you get bad lost on your way to Valdosta.”

Thanking them, Felix resumed his journey. The simmering steering wheel had become white-hot in the afternoon sun. Atlanta appeared two hours later as he inched his way past the Peachtree Road exit. Intense, steamy humidity made the city glimmering, gilded, and sweltering. Felix lifted up his eyes from the car in front of him. He beheld The Varsity drive-in (which he duly photographed with his Gotcha). Shortly thereafter he gaped at the gilt capitol dome peeking among towers of iridescent glass and steel. His spirits rose. As I-85 channeled its way through Atlanta, the fuming Saturday traffic and broiling, dead air made him sort of faint. Felix kept on.

His sole traveling companion was a reader who sounded like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments: “Speak to us of Clothes. And he answered: Your clothes conceal much of your beauty . . . you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment.” Felix switched off his iPod, wiped sweat from his face, and attempted to repeat. He recollected something about meeting the sun and the wind with fewer clothes, a congenial thought in this inferno.

The rest of the way he drove without words, hot wind swirling through the sweltering Corolla. Thoughts of clothes as “a harness and a chain” almost made him sail past the I-20 merge to Macon. More meditation on raiment, skin, and wind and he would have been bound for Birmingham.

The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.

* * *

“I guess you think I’m punishing you by sentencing you to Georgia,” his new boss had told him the week before. “True, Galilee is a dogshit town.”

Until Mr. Quattlebaum put it that way, Felix had not thought about his first assignment as punitive. His dream was Atlanta because, as he often said, “Salisbury never felt right for a hometown.” God willing, Felix would one day go up to Atlanta, capital of the New South, home of the Braves. Today, however, he was happily resigned to Galilee.

“Only good thing ever to come out of Galilee, Georgia, was Homer Wisencock,” pronounced Quattlebaum. “Remember him? Course you don’t. Homer had two great years with the Orioles until steroids took him down. Messed up his liver. They found Homer in the gutter covered in his own vomit. But trust me. A guy like you would get tore up in Atlanta. The big boys got there first. Well, fine for them. I say fine for them. Great town for a convention; lousy place to live. Har! If the traffic didn’t kill you, the whores on Peachtree would pick you clean as a chicken! Look, you ain’t got family to speak of. You twenty-one, alone, no prospects of getting laid in Salisbury, business virgin, free as a bird. Un-a-ttached,” gesturing with his cigar. “Why shouldn’t you be our man in the Peach State?”

Why not indeed? Felix had now adjusted his mind to Galilee, Georgia. He saw it as a venture.

A mission.

A vocation.

An . . . assignment.

“Course, nobody wants to go to Georgia—cultural desert. Breeding ground for the dumbest politicians on God’s earth. Get on TV and announce the world is six thousand years old. Look like fools to people from Connecticut. So I guess damn Darwin never happened, huh?”

Quattlebaum threw his arms up in despair, exposing patches of underarm sweat, even though his office was excessively air-conditioned.

“But look at it this way, son—Trinity is giving you the chance to learn this business from the ground up. Your area is undeveloped. Untouched. Eden. You the first wave of a commun-i-ca-tion re-vo-lu-tion,” Quattlebaum said, punctuating the air with his chewed, unlit cigar on each syllable. Felix prized his boss’s penchant for the poetic, except for the profanity.

“The fields are white. Reap the harvest. There’s a bundle to be made down there from salt-of-the-earth country people. And you are just the guy to do it, I say, thou art the man. Your hour has come.” Quattlebaum slapped him hard on the arm, which Felix received as encouragement, though it may have been intended as threat.

“Our business plan is to swoop down into these jerkwater towns, tell them that the communication revolution has come near, and scoop up the business that’s ignored by the big boys. Sign them to eternal contracts as tough to break out of as for a pregnant bride to get into her wedding dress. Give it your forty days and nights and then we’ll see what’s next for you with Trinity.”

Felix wanted the spiritual depth to look at the project in just that way, though Trinity Communications at this point wasn’t as extensive as it appeared in Mr. Quattlebaum’s imagination. The company called Trinity was named for the North Carolina town of Quattlebaum’s nativity, inspired by the triune of cell phones, data delivery, and e-marketing. Nobody to whom Felix explained the name got it.

Felix’s wing of Trinity Communications assembled communications packages for businesses, particularly very small ones—a farmer, wife, and unmarried-adult-son-on-a-tractor sort of businesses.

On his way out of the office, Felix had tried to express to Mr. Quattlebaum his genuine resolve for the mission ahead, his disinterest in the paltry salary, and his eagerness to make exodus in Georgia. Quattlebaum glared and said, “Don’t play cute with me, son. I don’t take to smartasses. You go down there, do your work, show what you got. I say, show what you got. Do that, and Trinity is your oyster, I say Trinity is your oyster.”

Mr. Quattlebaum’s business aspirations exceeded Trinity’s achievements. Trinity Communications consisted of Quattlebaum, Felix, and three alleged salespersons rumored to be wandering in North Carolina and Virginia. Felix had yet to meet them.

* * *

Thus it was on the sixth day in the sixth month that Felix Goforth Luckie, Jr.—called Kicks among the Spiritual Trailblazers Discussion Group at State—at last came to the exit to Galilee (six barren miles after the exit to Hope, Georgia). Here he would establish a beachhead for Trinity Communications. On the left side of the highway he saw the first traces of Galilee—a weedy, defunct Esso gas station next to a former sock factory, both boarded up. Across the road was a one-time vegetable stand, padlocked. Two scrawny chickens free-ranged in the dust. The only functioning business between Hope and Galilee was a junkyard piled with rusting cars being consumed by kudzu. Just beyond was a peeling billboard: “Welcome to Galilee. Home of World Famous LAPUP All-Beef Dog Food. And Homer Wisencock, Too.”

His phone buzzed. He retrieved it and read the arcane text: ? THER? GIT SET CHK MON PUSH GOT. GEORGE HARRISON.

Though Felix had been in Quattlebaum’s employ a mere six days, he expertly decoded the message like a CIA cryptographer: Have you arrived in Galilee by now? Secure housing, unpack belongings, sort out and settle in. I will check with you on Monday. Be certain to push the new Gotcha line when you begin making sales calls.

Mr. Quattlebaum affected signing his text messages with improbable names from the sixties. Thus George Harrison.

When Felix saw in the twilight a sign reading, “Robert’s Drive-In One Mile Ahead,” he remembered that he hadn’t eaten since morning, having been preoccupied with his quest, unconcerned with his body, and robbed of appetite by the heat. Now that he was in range of his goal, his stomach was free to grumble. Home cooking, he thought. First time to break bread in Galilee.

The neon sign over the front door read, “ROBER D IVE-IN,” but at least the sign was blinking. Pulling into the graveled lot, as a cloud of gray, dry dust settled, he was relieved to see an ancient Chevrolet truck out back. ROBER D IVE-IN must be open. Can’t beat a small-town eatery.

As he opened the restaurant’s front door a couple of large flies seized the opportunity and buzzed in before him.

“No air-conditioning,” Felix said aloud, more in wonder than in scorn.

“Nope,” replied a man who wiped the counter with a brownish terry cloth rag. “Tore up. Decide if you wants to stay and eat. No use complainin’.”

“Oh, no complaints from me,” said Felix, smiling. “I’ve just driven all the way from North Carolina without AC, so I’m fine. I really like things kept natural.” The little café was even hotter than the world outside. So hot at 6:30 in the evening, what must it have been like at noon?

“‘Not to decide is to decide,’” mumbled the man. “John Paul Sawt. You sweatin’ almost much as me. And you ain’t even working. My girl says I sweat because I’m fat. Looking at you sweat so heavy, and you so scrawny, says to me she don’t know what she’s talking about. Sit up here to the counter. I won’t have to walk so far to hep you.”

“Sure,” said Felix cheerfully. “Just looking for home cooking. May I see a menu?”

“We got hot dogs, some meatloaf, and”—here he turned his ample torso slightly and with a minimum of motion opened the refrigerator behind him, peered in and pronounced—“a bunch of spaghetti from our last Eyetalion night . . . ‘Hell is other people.’”

Luckie played it safe with a couple of reliable American hot dogs and sat upon his stool in sweaty anticipation.

The cook waddled into the kitchen, where he disappeared for a longer period of time than is usually required to warm hot dogs. Should I have risked the meatloaf? Felix mused.

When the cook emerged with two hot dogs in buns indistinguishable under reddish brown chili, swiping the sweat from his forehead with his free hand, he looked beyond Felix and warned, “Better watch your stuff. ‘No exit.’” Felix was confused until the man wordlessly gestured with his rag toward the front parking lot. Wheeling around, Felix saw two guys busily pulling clothes out of his car, hauling plunder toward their old pickup.

Felix bolted off the stool. “Hey, hey! What are you doing?”

One of the thieves was holding a stack of Felix’s shirts, along with some of his inspirational CDs. The other was bent over the car, digging through a pile of briefs and socks on the backseat. The one standing next to the car and receiving the goods stared dumbly at Felix. The other, after hearing Felix’s cry, carefully pulled his body out of the back of the car, hoisted up his jeans, turned and looked annoyed, as if he had been thoughtlessly interrupted. Gazing down at Felix—he was tall, seemed to be about eighteen or twenty, lanky but muscular—he gripped a fistful of CDs. He laid the discs on the roof of the car with a sigh, reached into the front right pocket of his tight, faded jeans, and extracted a black-handled knife. He flipped it open toward Felix, pointed the long, silver blade at him and asked, “Now what the hell it look like we doing?”

Felix froze but finally managed to find the words, “You can’t . . . you can’t just take my stuff. Guys, I need that.”

“Oh yeah? How come you think you need this shit more than us?” asked the thief as he poked the air menacingly with the knife.

The question gave Felix pause. “Maybe you have something there. I do believe that rights ought to be balanced with need. So you’re claiming that your present need is more important than my prior ownership?”

“Here’s my damn right, fool!” the thief responded, thrusting the knife up in the air in front of Felix as if he were going to shove it up his nose. “Now you just turn your sweet little girly ass back around and . . .”

With that a huge black Chrysler with dark tinted windows appeared out of nowhere, skidding up behind Felix’s car in a roar of gravel, a wave of dust and blinking blue lights. The fat man behind the counter had called the law.

Seeing the cops, the thief with the knife turned and shoved the clothes he was holding back into the car, but he did so in such panic that he accidentally stabbed his left arm, crying out in pain and dropping the knife in the dust. The other thief dropped the booty that he was holding and made a run for their truck, huffingly pursued by an overweight cop.

The thinner cop screamed to the wounded thief, “Hit the ground, sucker! Now!” He fell to his knees, weeping, holding his bleeding arm. Felix also fell to the ground.

“Not you! Him!” the cop said to Felix.

“I’ve done killed myself,” wept the thief. The cop looked down at him and pronounced, “Damn. Guess we’ll have to take you to ‘mergency room. And on a Satiday. You ain’t dead. That patrol car there is brand new. Put some of them old clothes on the backseat so you won’t bleed on county property. If you do, by God, you will pay for a new backseat!” The thief struggled to his feet, sniveling, whimpering, pressing the wound on his arm.

“Them seats is real leather,” said the cop proudly.

Felix watched in befuddlement as one of the cops led the second thief around the back of Felix’s car and toward the other side of the patrol car. This thief was weeping too, great wails of lament. Looking at Felix, he called over the top of the car, “I hope you are happy. Now you going to get us kicked out of Tech. I’m a dead man, thanks to you.”

“But . . . but I didn’t call the police,” Felix protested. “Officer, can’t this be settled in another way? I don’t want these guys charged. Please don’t take them to jail. I don’t want retribution.”

The cop slammed the back door on the laments of the bleeding, weeping thieves, wheeled around, and grabbed Felix by his sweat-drenched shirt. “Where you from?”

“Salisbury,” replied Felix weakly. “North Carolina.”

“Well then maybe that explains why you are stupid,” said the cop. “We got laws in this town. Don’t tell me how to do my damn job. You hea’ me?”

“But I don’t want these guys’ lives ruined just because they made a mistake,” Felix protested. “What is the long-term good of punishment?”

“Shut up!” the cop commanded. “I come out here and put my ass on the line. Give a hundred and fifty percent. Here we are trying to do our job and some stupid” (he spit out the words exaggeratedly for rhetorical effect) “smartass from Sawlsberry damn, North damn Carolina thinks he knows more than accredited first responders. Well, in Georgia, stealing, with a knife too, is a helluvalot more than a ‘mistake.’ The American Way is alive in Galilee. Now you just git back on your way and mind your own damn business and we’ll mind ours, got that?”

“I hope you’re happy for destroying a young man’s life!” wailed one of the weeping thieves from the backseat of the patrol car. “The NRA says we could have had a gun. All we had was a knife! Oh Gaaawdd!”

“Shut up!” the fat cop ordered.

“I so wish we had another way . . .” pled Felix.

“Don’t blaspheme the NRA!”

The fat one opened his door (exposing the young men’s chorus of sobbing from the backseat), stuffed his girth into the front of the patrol car. Then wheeling around in the lot, the Chrysler kicked up gravel as it sped toward town.

Felix returned to the plate of cold, congealing chili dogs. Pink clots of grease globbed on the top of the mound of chili, despite the heat. Wordlessly he turned and moved toward the door.

“You don’t have to thank me for callin’ the cops and savin’ your butt. You do gotta pay me three dollars and eighty-five cent,” insisted the man behind the counter. Felix turned, smiled, and carefully searched for a five-dollar bill.

“Sawt said,” declared the man to a now empty diner, “‘every man has the face he deserves at fifty.’ Or, hell, maybe it was Camoos. You got yours early.”

* * *

“That’s him,” croaked Alberta Swanson upon sighting the gray Toyota inching in front of her house. She put her afternoon’s second gin fizz on a coaster, straightened her hair and hoisted her slip strap up. Peering through parted sheers into the gray twilight with her turkey neck, she saw a gawky, lean-looking young man emerge from the car. He pulled out and put on a wrinkled white shirt, then smoothed down his hair while looking in his side mirror. Tucking the shirt in his pants, he strode with conviction through the gate and up her walk.

“He’s not much of a looker,” she mumbled as she opened her front door. Outsider was written all over him.

“Mr. Luckie, I presume?”

“Yes ma’am. Felix Goforth Luckie. Trinity Communications and lifelong learner. And you must be Ms. Swanson,” he said, eagerly extending his hand.

“Mrs.,” she said as she opened the door. “What with global warming, can I offer you a cool gin and tonic, son?”

“Thank you but I don’t drink,” he said. “Alcohol, that is.”

“You don’t?” His answer disoriented her. “Your letter led me to believe that you were a college man. N. C. State, as I recall? In my day, college prepared one for life. Where you sent a boy to become a man. Do you suffer from some ailment that prohibits you from acceptance of a well-intentioned social drink?”

“No ma’am, it’s just that I once did something bad while I was under the influence, and . . .”

“Well, kindly keep it to yourself. None of my business,” she smirked. “Does your condition exclude tonic water with a slice of lime, or do you not trust yourself with that either?”

“Thank you, ma’am. May I ask if tonic water has caffeine? If not, that would be wonderful,” he replied.

Swanson felt increasingly uneasy about the demands of this intruder. She stood there for a moment, studying him intently with her eyes as he smiled back. His eagerness was off-putting. Then she glided through the swinging door into her kitchen. After doubly replenishing her gin fizz, she emerged with his glass of tonic water.

“Now Mr. Luckie, I want you to know that my guest apartment”—her euphemism for the two rooms above her garage—“though air conditioned, is rather basic.”

“That’s fine for me,” said Felix. “I believe in living without superfluities and worldly impediments. No carbon footprint. A bare monk’s cell is good enough for my requirements. Because I . . .”

“Basic doesn’t mean bare,” she responded with offense. “I have lived in reduced circumstances as a widow since I lost Mr. Swanson. But I’m not yet, thank God, impoverished.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Felix nervously. “How long has it been since the Lord took your husband?”

“He was ‘taken’ by a feed and seed store owner who shot him through the head. Caught him in the act with his wife. At lunchtime. Up against the accounts receivable file cabinet. The Lord had nothing to do with it.”

Felix gulped his drink.

“Well, on to more important matters. The apartment is two hundred dollars a month, as is. I will expect payment in advance on the first of each month. A damage deposit of fifty dollars is also required. As you see, my husband’s untimely demise has forced me to open my home to transients. I will not tolerate tenants chronically in arrears. If you must talk with me about business, please make an appointment. I find it best if renters keep a polite distance.

“You are a single man, unattached. While I do not approve of it, neither will I prohibit conjugal visitation. If you intend cohabitation, that must be negotiated. The apartment and bed are small. I assume your singleness is from women?” she asked, her voice rising.

He nodded hesitantly and took another nervous gulp of his tonic.

“Regardless of your activities within your apartment, I require that you park your car on the street so as not to block my Eldorado in case I need to leave town quickly. Which I may at any time of the day or night. And turn off the air conditioner when you go out. Check the commode. Sometimes one must shake the handle to enable it to seal properly. I do not intend to invest in new plumbing.”

“Yes ma’am. You won’t have any trouble with me. At present, I am on my own, celibate actually. But I do believe it’s true . . .” Here he gazed away from her as if he were looking at something far beyond her living room. That even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them . . . ”

“Mr. Luckie! You will not attempt to engage me in talk of that nature!” She was pleased that he was more interesting than he first appeared.

“Oh, that’s not me. That’s a quote from my spiritual guide, Kahlil Gibran.”

“Mooselim, I’d guess? Sounds New Age,” she sniffed.

“Actually, he wrote early in the last century.”

Awkward silence.

“And Gibran embraced all faiths equally.”

No response.

“Uh, I’ll be happy to pay for my rent six months in advance. That’s all the savings I have right now, but later . . .”

“That is not required, Mr. Luckie. The terms of payment I have outlined will be sufficient. Besides, I have no wish to become entailed with transients in long-term arrangements.”

Felix, fidgeting in his seat, nervously replied, “Uh, I majored in Ag Ed at North Carolina State. But wouldn’t you know it? When I got out, no jobs in agricultural education, at least not in North Carolina, because of the Republicans and . . .”

“Mr. Luckie, personal revelations are not required. Quite unnecessary for me to know the idiosyncrasies of persons just passing through. We have a business relationship, not one of a personal, social, or self-revelatory nature.”

He blushed and took a nervous gulp. “Yes ma’am.”

As they talked, Alberta Swanson noted that though he was very thin, pale, and slightly stooped in the shoulders, he had a well-proportioned face. A good nose. His rumpled clothes concealed his build, but she estimated that it was unnaturally slight for a man of his age, making him appear vegetarian. His unrestrained, prepubescent demeanor repulsed her but at the same time awakened an odd desire.

At length his phone buzzed. Felix fished it from his pants and glanced at the message: THR YET? JANIS JOPLIN. Quattlebaum.

“Oops. Need to check in with my field supervisor. My boss. Thanks for the refreshment and your warm welcome. I know I’ll enjoy the apartment. And I’m hoping I’ll be here longer than you think!” Felix abruptly rose and thrust out his hand cheerfully. “Can you recommend a nice church where I might visit tomorrow?” he asked.

Mrs. Swanson also rose, glanced at his soft, callow hand, took his near-full glass from him, ignored his question, and led him to the door. “Yes. Well, we’ll see. Place your first month’s rent check in the mailbox.”

Watching him walk jauntily toward his car, she moaned, “Just my luck.”