All I Have in This World (2 page)

Carrie Elwood began to type again. Marcus wondered what she could possibly be writing. He decided she was making a list of homophones. Perhaps she was just feigning industry to legitimize her fee. But after a minute or two of furious typing she closed the laptop and began to talk. She spoke of objectives. She mentioned business models, as if he had not explained to her more than once his desire to make the education center not for profit. She spoke of the need for the center to have a “narrative,” a term Marcus distrusted for its odor of linearity. She spoke of “flow,” another term he disliked for its elasticity. She spoke to him of her previous designs, of their successes. Then she invited him to sit next to her and opened her screen and began a slide show of her accomplishments, replete with many fancy photographs, which went on for what seemed to Marcus six weeks. He did not listen or look at the photographs. He smelled the newness of her safari vest, the odor of fabric stiff and unwashed, and he wondered how anyone could wear something straight off the rack and not itch to death, and he rued the mix of insecurity and ambition that had led him to doubt his ability to tell the true story of the Venus flytrap in his own words, with his own visual aids.

The insanely large check he wrote to Dr. Carrie Elwood at the end of her endless visit was the second strike, after his stubborn refusal to use greenhouses, which he ought to have heeded and did not. There was a third strike—he could, if pressed, name any of a dozen—but Marcus, at some point, quit counting. The reasons for his failure were not worth contemplating, especially now that he had left all that behind.

Marcus had been off the interstate for close to an hour and had seen no sign of, nor even signs for, a town. He could pick up just enough of the wayside with his high beams to see that it was broken only by the most tenacious flora, stunted and sparse. A place forgotten by rain, foreign to creek, stream, pocosin, sound. No nearby ocean to court storms fierce enough to be named. Just the opposite of the land he'd lost, this place appeared inhospitable to any exotica on which he might squander what money he'd managed to hide from the bank. And, far more importantly, from his sister, who deserved the money far more than the bank did. Marcus cranked his window down and let the desert wind blow the thick drift of receipts and bills lining the dash onto the seat beside him, the floorboard. A few flew out the window, but he wasn't littering. Let this breeze wipe clean at least this dash. Who would come upon the remnants of his failure in this backcountry untrammeled by humans? But Marcus was not naive enough to think that the desolation into which he sped was nothingness. More the sweet beginning of something else.

In the break room of the Buick plant, they called Brantley “Preacher.” Not just Brantley but everybody who worked on the line in Marriage, fitting chassis to body. “How many you guys marry this morning already?” they'd say to him, and he'd say, “Like I'm counting,” and they'd say, “Sounds like Preacher-man has got tired of tying knots,” and then someone would point out that he alone out of his team of four wasn't married, and someone who knew him from high school (for half his graduating class from Wentzville had ended up on the line at the plant, wasn't anything else to do except make the hour drive to Saint Louis and find some other manufacturing job that maybe paid a little more, but you'd eat up any profit in gas) would say, “When you and Carmen getting married?”

This question made Brantley do something with his face. He would try to smile but he felt like what happened with his mouth was fixed somewhere between smirk and wince. Which was dangerous because Carmen's dad worked on the line and so did two of her four brothers, and he never knew who was in the break room because it was half the size of his high school cafeteria. He kept his head down, didn't talk much during lunch, sat most of the time with Arthur from his team, even though he knew some people made fun of him for eating lunch with a black dude. What the hell, it was 1983. Sometimes Brantley would say something to Arthur, and it was always about work, but Arthur didn't like to talk about work. He liked to eat when he ate and that made Brantley eat his sandwich and his chips and drink his Coke in, like, five minutes so he could wait in line for a pay phone in the hallway by the bathrooms and call Carmen if she had worked the night shift and was hanging out at home.

Carmen worked at Long John Silver's. The apartment she shared with Cindy Dakeris smelled like fried fish. Carmen's hair did, too. Her skin sometimes. Cindy was always complaining about it. “At least you could get work at Wendy's, I like the way their fries smell.” Cindy was a big girl and so dumb that when she got high she got smart. Or smarter. Brantley and Carmen loved to get her high because she would watch a commercial for laundry detergent and say something really surprising about it. Other times she'd go on about stupid shit. Carmen and Brantley spent most of their time in Carmen's room, anyway, listening to music, turning it way up so Cindy couldn't hear them fooling around. Carmen always got furious when Cindy said she stunk up the apartment. She would go into her room and slam the door. She was just working there to save up money for community college. They were going to move to Saint Louis after Christmas. “It isn't like working at Long John's is my life's dream,” Carmen would say. “No one wants to smell like this.” She loved to complain about her job, but that didn't mean she wanted Cindy even to mention it.

One night she said, “You know what's like the grossest thing ever to me?”

“Me?” Brantley was stretched out on the bed, waiting for her to shed her uniform.

“Shut up,” she said. “Tartar sauce.”

“What is it, anyway?”

She was pulling off the T-shirt she always wore under her uniform. It, too, reeked. She threw it across the room at him. He batted it away lest it land on his head and cover his mouth.

“You know what it is. Tartar sauce!”

“No, I mean what's it made out of ?” said Brantley.

“Mayonnaise mostly. I have no idea what those green specks are that are in it.”

“Nor do you want to know.”

“Exactly,” she said. She had unhooked her bra and thrown it in the corner and was pulling on her Pretenders T-shirt. They'd seen them last year in Saint Louis and Chrissie Hynde talked shit about Ohio where she was from and on the ride home Carmen was all, like, in a British accent, “I live in London, England, and I have escaped the exasperating Midwest never to return except to play my songs for you poor unfortunates,” even though Carmen hated Wentzville more than Brantley did even, she was always talking about moving to Arizona because she'd flown over it once on the way to her cousin's wedding in California and everybody on the street had a swimming pool in their backyard.

Brantley knew better than to raise himself up off the bed, where he was propped on pillows to rest his back, which hurt after his shift from all the bending over (even though this week all he had been doing was standing along the line and signaling Arthur, who was running the crane that lowered the chassis onto the body, to move a few inches left or right), and reach around and cup her breasts before she had had a chance to pull her T-shirt on. That was a good way to get slapped. Carmen had to be in the mood. After work for at least an hour was not a good time. She hadn't even showered yet. He'd rather wait until she got the smell out of her hair at least, but he was a boy, what could he do, even her bare back stirred him.

“I bet they're like chopped-up olives,” he said.

“I said I didn't want to know.”

“Mayonnaise is disgusting.”

“You like it on hamburgers.”

“No, I don't,” said Brantley.

“You never tell them to hold it.”

“I hate telling people stuff like that. People working for a living and you're going in there all picky about what they put on some slab of beef you're paying a buck fifty for. Special orders on a Big Mac?”

“Yeah, well, you're not like most people. Most people will stand there for five minutes telling you how to fry their chicken strips. Like the girl taking their order is going to go fry up chicken strips right then and there.”

“Like that chicken has not
been
fried.”

“Seriously. But I can't say a word because fucking Dorset is all about counting the ‘Ring the bell if we did well' bell. If he doesn't hear the bell for five minutes, he'll flip out.”

Brantley heard this every night. Complaints about Dorset, the manager. “ ‘Ring the bell if we did well' bell” was as common a phrase out of her mouth as “I love you.” Way more common, in fact. She never asked him about his job, which kind of bothered him even though he didn't want to talk about it. She could at least ask. Maybe if she did, he'd want to marry her. But he wasn't going to marry Carmen. He knew he wasn't. She was the first girl he'd ever slept with and he wanted to sleep with more girls and she was sort of mean. Still, they talked about getting married and moving to Saint Louis, and she was going to get her associate in arts degree and go to work as an administrative assistant for a law firm like her girlfriend Melissa did. One time Brantley said, “So wait, you want to get your AA so you can become an AA,” and she got seriously pissed and said, “Better than getting stuck in Wentzville.” To which he had to agree. A kid by the time they were twenty. Go to work on the line, come home bone-tired, and have to deal with a screaming kid. She said, “I hate rubbers.” He didn't say, I hate little babies. But he thought it. He thought, I hate mayonnaise but I'll eat it rather than make a big deal out of some poor asshole taking it off if they screw up and put it on. He thought, I hate that about myself because mayonnaise really is disgusting. I hate how I am sometimes. Hate that she never asks me about work and would hate it if she did.

Oddly enough, it was Cindy who asked him. Train tracks ran right behind the apartment they rented. They'd drag a bench from the picnic table someone had left behind one of the units and they'd get high and wait for the train. One night Cindy all of a sudden said, “So okay, Brant? When you're putting the cars together, do you ever wonder, like, where they will end up? Like, who's going to end up driving the one you're working on at that moment?”

Carmen was doing something to her fingernails. She was looking at them in the weak flood lamp some neighbor had turned on, probably to keep an eye on the kids in 9D. Carmen held her hand up close to her face, did something to her nails. Cindy was looking at him. Her question in the air was like the first faraway thrum of train in the night, coming closer. Brantley did not feel like her question would flash past and leave trails like the train always did when they got high and came outside to watch it. He felt like Carmen had pushed him on the tracks and instead of the train coming it was Cindy's question.

“No,” he said.

Carmen stopped looking at her hands and reached one down to the grass and picked up her wine cooler and sipped it and put it back down in the grass.

“That's cool,” said Cindy. “I guess you got to keep your mind on what you're doing.”

But that wasn't it, really. He could not say why. The next day at work Cindy's question kept needling him. He even heard it. To hear anything in the plant was not possible over all the machines. The shift supervisor, when he wanted you to do something, came close in to your face and yelled in your ear. At home his ears rang for hours. Carmen loved to go see shows at the Checker Dome and he never did have the heart to tell her that was the last thing he wanted to do, go hear every band that came through town when his ears were already ringing. That day Cindy's question kept rising from the noise. It reached him as he worked on a light blue Electra. They'd been running Electras all week. He didn't want to think about her question because if he thought about it for this blue Electra he would have to think about every car on the line, and Brantley remembered this one time when high Cindy, all of a sudden not-so-dumb Cindy, said when they were watching something on TV, “Hey, do you guys think it's possible to, like, not think? Because I was just thinking that if you knew you wanted to clean your head empty, then that wouldn't really be like not thinking because you'd have to think, I'm not thinking, which isn't that like a thought?” Then she said “I'm not thinking” again and then again louder until she was sitting on the couch during a commercial for nasal spray screaming, “I'm not thinking, I'm not thinking,” and Carmen was laughing so hard that later she claimed she wet her pants a little and then when they were in the bedroom with the door closed Carmen said, “I wanted to say to her, Yeah, girl, I think it is possible for you not to think.”

Brantley remembered Cindy's question as the Electra, at his signal, directing Arthur from above—I now pronounce you chassis and body—became a car. Or the shell of one. Down the line it would become more of a car until finally it was a car, washed and detailed and gleaming among hundreds of others of various colors on the lot, where it would sit until a carrier came and loaded it up and took it to a dealer and someone would buy it. He did not want to know who. But who? Who would buy it? Who would drive it? Every time he thought about it he would say quickly, “I hate rubbers, too”; he would say it louder and louder to stop himself from thinking about where this car would end up, and then he saw it merging onto an interstate and at first he was above it like in one of those choppers that worked for the news and reported on the traffic and then he was inside the Electra, on the interstate, and Carmen was with him and then there was a UPS truck ahead of them and the truck swerved to miss someone stopped half in the lane to change a tire and then Brantley was standing by Carmen's grave and people were coming up to him and hugging him and saying the same things to him, and Cindy, who Carmen had made such fun of, was bawling under a canopy and it was raining. Brantley put his left hand up and signaled to Arthur a little to the right. What kind of sick shit was that, thinking his girlfriend was dead and everybody was, like, all thoughtful and sad for him and he was standing in the rain and it felt, I don't know, like, glorious somehow and then he felt so selfish and awful for allowing that thought into his head, a fantasy about his girlfriend's death by vehicle while he emerged without a scratch, and how people would come up to him and say stuff about doing things for him and he would nod and his tears would mix with rain. “You are at work, asshole,” he said, “you're going to be here for another six hours and this car is just another car and I AM NOT THINKING I AM NOT THINKING I AM NOT!”