Half World: A Novel (29 page)

“But you were sent.”

“I’m here in a very unofficial capacity.” Squires shakes his head. “Jimmy Dorn. You’re one of those countries on page thirteen. Does that place even exist?”

Jimmy takes a long swallow of his drink, pushes the dog from his feet.

“A while back, I was transferred to the Black Line Squad,” Squires says.
“That’s what we called it. A demotion. The last stop, probably, before getting fired. There were five of us in an office with Folgers coffee cans full of black markers, redacting documents. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Drawing lines through official correspondence, unofficial correspondence, memoranda for the record. Paperwork going back ten, twenty years. Ask me how many times I drew a line through the name Jimmy Dorn.”

“I’ve got a short window to bullshit,” Jimmy says. “The police will be here soon.”

“You called them off.”

“They’ll come anyway. Old man talking about his own death. What else do they have to do?”

“You want to hurry me along.”

“You’re the systems man.”

“I came all this way.” Squires looks hurt. A whine threatens to overtake his voice. “Driving for hours down into the boondocks and then here, finally, up the mountain.”

“You came to hear stories?” Jimmy says. “What? You came to blackmail?”

“I can’t believe this. Your quiet life. Dead in the car. Last of the great white hunters.”

“They’re coming now. I can hear them. Sirens climbing the hill.”

“Hurry me along.”

“I want you out of my house.”

“Now. You’ve decided this.”

“Yes.”

“Sit down with a drink, dog at your feet, and now you want me out of your house.”

“Yes.”

“Should have left you in that car, spread out across the back windshield. What’s it say in those letters? One to the wife. One to the son.”

“Talk fast.”

“Real tearjerkers. Let me open one. Early Christmas present.”

“Out.”

“He’s up, folks. He’s out of his chair.”

“I want you out.”

“No dice, Pops.”

“Shotgun’s still loaded.”

“No dice.”

“They make you bulletproof now?” Jimmy says. “Plans and planning? The Black Line Squad?”

Squires stands and that’s all it takes, the height and breadth, the young man in the old man’s room.

“I’m the new-model asshole,” Squires says. He walks to the end table, the television clicker by the ashtray. “Now, do you mind if we turn off the goddamn TV and get down to brass tacks?”

*   *   *

“You can’t imagine the boredom,” Squires says. “I’m not a history buff. I live in a region of northern Virginia lousy with preserved battlegrounds, registered buildings. Before I quit smoking I had to sneak out of my house on weekends, sit in my car and inhale. I’d watch the tourists tramp through the fields, these paunchy dads with Confederate infantry hats and period maps, oblivious to their hapless families trailing along behind. Falling to their knees to dig in the dirt for musket balls and shrapnel. I had no interest. History made no sense to me. Disconnected events. The documents I scribbled on never added up to anything. They were random samplings. Random saplings.” He smiles at his turn of phrase, pleased with the clever surprise.

“About a year ago I was given another assignment,” Squires says. “I was back in the good graces, liquidating documents. Sometimes, black lines aren’t enough. The paperwork I was destroying was very specific. It pertained to a project from long ago. That project and its ensuing subprojects. I couldn’t help, on the way to the incinerator, looking at the files. Natural curiosity. And then this particular job became less boring. Things started to piece together. There was a thread. And there was a name that kept popping up, a familiar character, the star of my old Black Line days. The great redacted Jimmy Dorn.”

Squires remained standing after Jimmy sat back in the chair. He has
taken the place of the television, Squires; he is the room’s sole source of entertainment. The police never arrived.

“I do more reading than burning. Weeks and months. I enter the office early in the morning and leave late at night. I stop talking to my family. I spend my time at home sitting, staring, thinking about what I’ve read. I quit smoking, or, rather, I forget to smoke and the habit follows. I’m piecing together that story, Jimmy, memo by memo, I’m deciphering poor penmanship and faded ink, I’m translating the typewritten correspondence of what appears to have been an entire fleet of dyslexic secretaries. But a story is forming and it is well worth the effort.”

Jimmy can feel another piss coming on, a bonus piss, one he never thought he’d take. He shifts in his seat, pushing the feeling away.

“I follow the story through to the end,” Squires says. “The end of the documentation, at least. Last folder into the fire. I’m a little overwhelmed. I have trouble sleeping, which I’ll go out on a limb and assume is a shared trait between us. And I’m far from an idealist, Jimmy. I’m not a blind patriot. I do not spend weekends on my hands and knees pawing in the dirt for lumps of bloody lead. So when a decision was made to reestablish contact, I volunteered. I demanded. I wanted to be the one to stand face-to-face with Jimmy Dorn.”

“This was over long ago,” Jimmy says.

Squires takes a drink. “I wouldn’t be here if that was true.”

*   *   *

Late afternoon. The fog pressing at the windows again. Jimmy has poured two more drinks. They sit at the dining room table, the long wooden slab. Squires has a folder he’s produced from somewhere, the folds of his coat. Papers on the tabletop, memos and correspondence, unaltered, free of black ink. Jimmy looks at the names on the bottoms of memos, signatures and initials, and faces come back to him easily. He’s surprised how quickly they return. What has he been doing up here in the mountains? Waiting.

“How do you know he’s alive?” Jimmy says.

“We don’t.”

“But there is a man already out there, looking.”

“Yes.”

“Your man?”

“No.”

“Who does he belong to?”

“I couldn’t say with any certainty. He’s just the hound. We have the hound, and now we need the hunter.”

Jimmy stands from the table, throws a log into the fireplace, sets it alight. He prefers this to the house’s lazy central heating. He chopped this wood himself, and he can remember each piece he tosses in, the individual battles against knots and knobs.

“I can get you a ticket to Los Angeles,” Squires says. “First class, tonight. Change in Atlanta, change in Dallas. Arrive first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“No.”

“I’ll call you a cab to take you back to town,” Jimmy says. “Rent another car. Leave yours.”

“No.”

“I handle it or I stay right here, watching football.”

Squires bites his lip. He seems to be getting drunk fast. Wouldn’t have survived half an hour here last night with the golfers.

“How will I contact you?” Squires says.

“I’ll contact you.”

Squires produces a small note pad, tears off a blank sheet of paper. “Here are my phone numbers. Home and work.”

Jimmy takes the paper, tosses it into the fireplace. “Find another one. A pay phone, nowhere near your office. I’ll call your home number once and you’ll give me the new number. We’ll go from there.”

Jimmy calls a cab and they wait, drinking silently at the table. When the driveway bell rings, he walks Squires to the door.

“There’s a legacy, Jimmy,” Squires says. “I guarantee that you have not been forgotten. I can tell you about a location in West Germany. I can tell you about a location in the Philippines. I promise you that the men in those rooms know your name.”

“Give me your keys.”

Another ring when Squires tops the driveway. Jimmy watches the cab start back down the hill, disappear into the fog. He moves to the dining room table, looks across the memos and dispatches, touching the raised ink on the pages.

Henry March. Jimmy has thought of the man every day for how many years now? The loosest of ends. He scans the newspaper headlines every morning for an old story that has been exhumed. He holds his breath when Jayne calls him into the living room to see a news story on TV. This man and what he knew. His disappearance had turned Jimmy into a dirty secret. Jimmy imagining his son or Jayne reading about the days in San Francisco. Imagining Elaine, if she were alive. No one would understand. No one understood what their lives and families cost, what they necessitated. Everything here is free. In this country, they spit on soldiers returning from war.

He gathers the papers into the folder and then tosses it into the fire. Everything but a couple of photographs, a few addresses. He sits at the table and composes two new letters, one for Jayne, one for Steven. They come easier this time, the apologies. He goes into the bathroom, stop-start, stop-start, thinks of Elaine, remembers sitting by her hospital bed, the aquamarine light, her hand in his, just cold bones and skin. He walks through the house, touching railings, straightening the pictures on the walls. Returns to the dining room. He’ll let the fire burn down, it’ll keep the dog warm. He fills a bowl with kibble and another with water. Washes and dries the bourbon glasses, puts them away in the cupboard. Pulls on his coat, gloves, hat, shoes. Quite a process. He goes out into the garage, pushing the dog back into the house. The original letters on the dashboard are gone. Squires must have taken them. Jimmy sets the new letters on a shelf where they’ll be seen. Puts the shotgun, the rubber tubing, the pills all in the trunk, then drives out toward the top of the hill, the garage door closing behind him.

2

Hannah sat across the worktable and watched him eat, macaroni and cheese from a box that she’d cooked on the hot plate. He ate like he was starving, gripping the fork in his fist, shoveling bright yellow pasta. He wouldn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on the food, embarrassed of the way he was eating, possibly, but unable to stop. She let her own plate sit untouched, knowing he would need it when he finished his own. One hand around his fork, the other around the beer can she’d set next to his plate. A territorial animal. A haunted man. Alcohol, drugs, probably; something else.

He finished his pasta. I’m so sorry, he said, shaking his head, and she stood and walked around the table and cleared his plate and set hers before him and he said, Thank you, I’m sorry, yes.

Digging in again.

*   *   *

She had found him on the bus-stop bench outside the gallery. It was going on into evening, and she’d stepped outside for a cigarette, some air. She’d been working all day, cleaning, waiting. The phone had only rung once, at about noon, and she’d run to the receiver to hear the voice on the other end of the line asking after someone in Spanish, another wrong number.

The man on the bench was not one of the usual faces, the wandering souls who stumbled into her gallery, who hovered over the bus-stop trash can looking for food scraps. He was not one of the men she gave sandwiches to, or cigarettes, or an occasional beer if she had one on hand. He was about her age, tall, heavy but not yet fat, bearded and maned like a lion. He was not particularly dirty. His clothes were in decent shape. His hair looked semirecently washed. He had a bruise shining at the corner of his mouth, a cut on his forehead. He was grabbing his right knee in his sleep. A bloody hole in his jeans there. His body twitching, his arms and legs hanging over the ends of the bench.

When she first saw him, she’d thought he was Thomas. She had been expecting to find Thomas on a bench like this, Thomas sitting in a park, sleeping in a doorway. He was about Thomas’s size. She could imagine Thomas bearded, his hair long from neglect. She’d known almost immediately that it wasn’t him, but now she couldn’t shake what remained of that feeling, some kind of connection to this man.

The streetlights on the boulevard came to life. An older Mexican woman with a purse in each hand stood at the stop and got on the bus when it came. Hannah finished her cigarette and walked around to the front of the bench, watching the man’s face while he slept. She crouched down, put a hand on his shoulder, said, Hey, Hey.

*   *   *

He ate his macaroni and cheese, drank his beer. He looked exhausted and scared. She asked him what his name was and when he said Dickie Ashby she told him that he didn’t sound so sure. He apologized, said that it had been a long day, one that had included getting hit, pretty hard, by a car. She smiled, nodded, not wanting to push him further.

*   *   *

His ribs on his left side, his knee. The bruise at his mouth, the cut on his forehead. She had iodine and bandages in her bathroom for dealing with the slices and punctures that came while cutting mattes, hammering frames. He sat on the closed toilet and she stood over him, pressing
alcohol-soaked gauze to the cuts. Bruises on his elbows, the palms of his hands. He had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist that looked fresh, that said
Sons
. He smoked while she worked, a cigarette from the flattened pack in his back pocket.

She said, We should really get you to a hospital, and he’d responded quickly, assuring her that he’d be fine. There was no serious injury. A bruised rib, maybe, something out of whack in his knee.

She wanted to look at the knee but he couldn’t roll his jeans high enough, so she told him to stand and take them off. Knowing this would have been inconceivable in a previous time, what now seemed like another life, before the drive to Oakland. She hadn’t found Thomas, but she had found this man. A month ago she would have given him a sandwich or a cigarette, but that was no longer enough.

She put a hand under his arm and helped him stand. He looked at the opposite wall as he unbuckled his belt. Hannah slid his jeans past his undershorts, to his ankles, gently, helping him step out and then sit again. His hands shaking as he brought the cigarette back to his lips.

*   *   *

He stood at the open medicine cabinet, overwhelmed.

“People come to parties and leave things,” she said. “I keep the more interesting-looking ones around, thinking there might be something to shoot. To photograph.”

He studied the faded labels, removed a bottle, replaced it. Finally selected a tall, thin plastic tube, shook a small constellation of pills into the palm of his hand.

“What are those?” she said.

“Painkillers.”

“What hurts?”

“Everything.”

She poured him a glass of water at the sink, watched him toss the pills back, the water. He closed his eyes, swallowed.

*   *   *

They sat talking at the worktable. The pills had calmed him. She told him her name again, reintroduced herself. She’d told him when he’d first woken, out on the bench, but she wasn’t sure he’d heard, or processed, his eyes moving quickly out there, passing over her face and then over her shoulder, looking for something, hunted. He looked at the new beer can she’d set in front of him and said, I don’t know why you’d do this, and she said, I don’t know either, and then she’d smiled and he’d smiled, still looking down at his hands.

*   *   *

He wasn’t from anywhere. He had grown up on air bases, the longest stretch in Oklahoma, but he wasn’t really from anywhere. He’d been drafted but had suffered an injury during basic training and spent the rest of his time in Army hospitals. He’d bummed around after that, he’d said. Ended up in Davenport, Iowa, caring for his ailing father. His father was dead. His mother was dead. He had a sister on the East Coast he had lost touch with. He’d come to Los Angeles to find an old friend but had run out of leads and money and then he’d been hit by a car crossing the boulevard.

Should I call anyone? she asked. Should anyone know you’re here?

He thought about this for a moment, and then said no, that there wasn’t anyone to call.

*   *   *

He lay on the old sofa in her work space. The sofa was large, but he was larger. His hands dragged on the floor, his feet crested the top of the far arm. He took another couple of pills and closed his eyes and she turned out the light.

She couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t due to fear. She did not feel threatened by him. She didn’t know if she should, but she didn’t. She felt something else. It was the strangeness of the situation keeping her awake, prickling her skin. Standing out in the gallery, in her bedroom, feeling him on the other side of the thin walls. This strange man in her private space.

Leadbelly, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson. He coughed once and she went to the doorway and asked if the music was keeping him
awake. Speaking into the dark room. There was no answer, just the sound of his breathing.

He’d tried to sound detached when he’d spoken about his family, reciting his biography for her as a series of facts, names, dates, but the emotion was there, in his voice, his eyes. It had made her want to tell him about Ginnie, about Thomas, her nightmarish trip through the house in Oakland. She’d had to fight the urge to unburden herself to this stranger. She didn’t think she could talk about it the way he had told her about Oklahoma, about Iowa. He was someone who had learned to live with regret. This seemed like an acquired skill, and she wanted to know what he knew, how he did it.

*   *   *

She works at her table and he looks through her photographs, newer prints, the files of older photos she keeps. He swallows her pills, holding the bottles close to his face, squinting at the labels. He combs through her shelf of records, browses her books. He sleeps on the sofa and she turns down the music to listen to him breathe while she works.

She has known addicts, has lived with a few. Not Bert—Bert never used, never drank much. Bert was addicted to work, and her, for a while, but movies were his real obsession, and when she figured that out she knew it was time to go. But she recognizes the behavior, the compulsion that draws this man to the medicine cabinet at regular intervals, pulls him to the refrigerator for a new beer before the old one is finished.

She should call the rehab house at the end of the boulevard. She should call a hospital. He pulls a book from the shelf and says something and has to repeat himself before she notices that he has spoken, turning from her work to look across the room. Not used to another voice in this space in the middle of the day. She is used to being alone.

Dickie. A child’s name. Something someone his size should have outgrown long ago. It fits him, though, perfectly, somehow.

He finds a passage from a book he likes and reads it aloud for her. He looks at her runaway photos, studying them like he’s searching for a specific face. He tells her stories about growing up, about his mother, a
forgotten singer. They order food, Chinese, Thai, Indian. When the delivery boy arrives Dickie always finds his way to a distant spot, standing behind something, sitting, hidden from whoever is waiting at the front door.

He sleeps on the old couch and after a few days she is able to sleep soundly, too, waking in the morning to the sound of a cough or the toilet flushing and remembering then that this is not a strange dream, that he is out there, on the other side of the wall, his bare feet on the cement floor.

*   *   *

She changed his bandages in the morning, at night. He had a long cut under his shoulder blades, and at night he took off his shirt and sat on the toilet or the edge of the bathtub and she pressed rubbing alcohol into the torn skin.

He wrapped his wrist with a bandage, covering the tattoo. She wasn’t sure there was an injury there. He hadn’t said anything about pain in his wrist.

Everything was strange but nothing felt strange. He took a bath every night, after they ate their delivered dinner. The bathroom was just a corner of the living space that she’d had run with plumbing and cordoned off with a few large white sheets hung with twine from the high ceiling. Diaphanous walls, semi-opaque. She wasn’t used to seeing anyone on the other side of the sheets and she couldn’t stop staring. His shadow undressing gingerly, stepping into the big metal tub she’d filled with hot water. Sucking air through his teeth at the heat on his skin, the hurt places. The sheets billowing, slightly, as he moved. Lowering himself until all she could see was the shape of his head and his arms and shoulders along the sides of the tub.

Everything was strange but nothing felt strange. She thought back to the days before she’d driven to Oakland, before she’d found this man on the bus-stop bench, and that was what felt strange, that other life.

She heard him exhale deeply from the bathtub, heard the water moving, watched the dark shape on the other side of the sheets.

Nothing felt strange.

*   *   *

She needed to get some groceries and he said that he’d be fine, so she walked to the market and then to the department store by the freeway and picked up some clothes that seemed his size, jeans and checkered western shirts, a package of socks, undershorts, a sweater she thought he might need. She didn’t even consider how reckless this was until she was on her way back, evening falling. How irresponsible, leaving him alone in her home. What he could steal, what he could deface. She didn’t consider it and then felt guilty when she did, first for the thought and then for its lateness in coming. What she would find when she opened the door.

The gallery was dark when she entered. She moved through the rooms, turning on lights. Everything was as she’d left it. She stood in the middle of the workroom and set down her bags and finally said his name.

There was a noise from the gallery and she stepped back through the doorway, her concern growing to fear, hands balled into fists. He was there, standing in a far corner, watching the front door. She’d walked right past him in the dark. He had a broken wine bottle in one hand, was brandishing it, that was the word, and watching the door, looking wild, stripped of whatever defenses he had left.

She talked him out of the corner, got him to set the bottle on the floor. His boots crunching on the broken glass as he stepped into the center of the room. Keeping her voice low, like calming a feral animal. She got him to the couch and went into the bathroom and shook a few pills into her hand.

She sat with him until she could feel that the drugs were working, his body untangling, growing heavy beside her, and then she stood and swept the glass from the gallery floor, mopped up the wine. He sat on the couch, watching her, breathing slowly again, his hands on his knees.

He said moments still came back to him from the war, some of the things he’d seen and done. She said that she’d thought he’d spent most of his war time in the hospital and he said yes, like that fact wasn’t a contradiction. She was not sure he was telling the truth and not sure that it
mattered. Standing in a corner with a fistful of jagged glass. She wasn’t sure that level of fear required a verifiable explanation.

She put on some records and he took some more pills and lay back on the couch. She switched off the light and turned from the room and he asked her to stay. His voice in the dark. She walked back into the room and found the stool at her worktable by memory and touch, sat listening to the music from the other room. Sometime later she got up to leave, sure he was asleep. She crossed out of the room, turned on the bulb in the hallway, and then she heard his voice again, awake and clear but calm, settled.

Thank you, he said, and she nodded in the light.

*   *   *

The phone rang and it was Bert. It had been a few weeks since she’d brought back the car and he wanted to make sure everything was all right up in Oakland. She said that it was, not believing she was capable of such a lie even as she said the words. You’re okay? he asked, and she said, Yes. Everything is fine.

*   *   *

There was a patio up on the flat part of the roof where she’d arranged a ring of plastic lawn chairs beneath a web work of white Christmas lights. In and around the ring were some potted cacti, a few marigolds and day lilies she always forgot to water. Openings ended up here some nights, the quiet comedown after a show, a small group, Hannah and the artists and significant others, friends, gallerists, looking at the lights in the hills to the south, streetlights and house lights and porch lights in the distant trees.