Round Rock (8 page)

Lewis’s knock and tentative “Hello-o” drew no response, but the office door was unlocked, and he let himself inside.

Another mess. Psychology and recovery books were shoved this way and that into shelves. Wastebaskets overflowed with styrofoam cups, the holey edges of computer paper. The desk was a thicket of stacked files, newspapers, and fast-food wrappers. A large calendar mounted on an easel displayed November, and this was the first week in February. Lewis cleared a space to sit on the plump green sofa, then plucked a brochure from the stack on the coffee table. A brief description of how Round Rock worked was followed by three lengthy testimonials by former residents. Lewis skimmed these, finding the usual earnest litanies of personal loss and physical decline followed by triumphal recovery. The back page featured a few shorter endorsements:

He flung the brochure aside—how corny can you get?—snuggled into the cushions, and sleep, his dearest ally, carried him off. The next thing he knew, Red Ray was standing over him, hands full of mail. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! How the hell’d you get in here?”

Lewis struggled into a sitting position. “The door was open….”

“Scared the wits out of me.”

“Sorry. I need some car parts picked up.”

Red tossed the mail on the desk. “Just came back from town.” He sat down, still breathing hard. “It’ll have to be tomorrow. Okay?”

Lewis nodded. Red slipped on a pair of half-frame reading glasses, pushed papers off his blotter, and began sorting through the mail. “Everything else okay?” he asked absently. “We treating you well enough?”

“Yeah….”

“Good.” Red gave him a quick, over-the-glasses glance.

Here he was, finally alone with Red Ray—and tongue-tied as a starstruck teenager. He recalled his mission, however: to let Red know that he, Lewis, wasn’t one more run-of-the-mill juicehead. He wracked his brain. “I was wondering,” he said finally. “Is there a typewriter or computer I could use?”

Red stacked letters in piles as if playing solitaire. “And what would you need a computer for?”

“I’m a Ph.D. candidate in cultural history and I have to give a paper at a conference in March.”

Red swiveled in his desk chair until he faced the calendar. Absently, he lifted the month of November, then the month of December. Behind December: empty space. They both gazed into it. The phone began to buzz. Red made no move to answer it.

Lewis said, “If you let me use this computer, I’d be happy to answer the phone for you, take messages.”

Red turned to Lewis. His eyes were kind. “How much time do you have now, Lewis?”

Lewis knew what Red meant: how long had he been sober? “Fifteen days.”

“Terrific! And you’re here for how long?”

“Thirty,” said Lewis.

Red’s forehead pleated. “Lewis, you have the rest of your life for cultural history. Why not take the next two weeks to get grounded in sobriety? Read the Big Book. Talk to other alcoholics.”

“I’d clean this place up for you.”

“You would, would you?” Red smiled, rueful, and tapped the corner of an envelope on the blotter. “Tell me, Lewis. Who’s your sponsor?”

Lewis picked at the piping on the sofa arm.

“You have a sponsor?”

“No.”

Red aimed the envelope at Lewis. “It’s a good idea to have a sponsor.”

“Yeah. But …” The whole concept of sponsorship gave Lewis the jitters. One of the more excruciating things about life in the Blue House was hearing grown men say, My sponsor says I should do this; My sponsor says I shouldn’t do that—as if no one could blow his own nose without special dispensation.

“Tell you what,” said Red. “You get yourself a sponsor, and if he thinks it’s a good idea for you to work on your paper, we’ll talk. Okay?”

Lewis couldn’t say how unokay this was. He clutched the sofa arm, trying to think. Red returned to the mail and, after a few minutes, shot Lewis another sharp look.

Against his own will, Lewis was embarrassing himself, behaving like a fool, like a clingy girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer—like that girl from Texas in his Shakespeare class. He’d slept with her once and she’d glommed on like industrial-strength adhesive. Dogged him everywhere. He would be at a bar and suddenly, on the next stool, there was Tex primly sipping a beer and radiating pain. He’d ignore her as long as he could, then break down and talk to her. Eventually, he’d grown curious: just how long
would
she sit there without acknowledgment? Hours. Several times, in fact, she outlasted him.

Lewis, so strangely paralyzed, prayed he wouldn’t sit here for hours, a pathetic, groveling supplicant.

Red spoke abruptly. “You say you like to write?”

“I don’t know how much I
like
it,” Lewis said. “But yeah, I do a lot of writing.”

“Tell you what. You write something for me, you can have a couple hours on the computer. But I don’t want you over here all the time hiding out with the damn thing.”

“I was thinking you need some help with your correspondence.”

“No,” said Red. “I’d like your drinking history.”

“My
what
?”

Red wanted a narrative about how Lewis’s family drank, how Lewis drank, and whatever trouble alcohol or drugs had caused him—arrests, humiliations, jobs and friendships jeopardized or lost, all of it. “I don’t want the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,”
Red said. “But try to be thorough.”

Lewis assumed Red needed text for another brochure and was certain he’d only disappoint him. Next to the stories told at the Blue House AA meetings—including Red’s own impressive saga, which
had achieved the status of legend—Lewis’s drinking career had the dramatic content of skimmed milk. A guy named Oscar had come out of a blackout with his arms torn up and bleeding only to find his beloved cat drowned in the bathtub. Chuck had woken up married to a woman he didn’t recognize. Lawrence had been stabbed in a kidney while shooting dope in a West Hollywood alley. Lewis could count maybe half a dozen blackouts, total, and he’d always woken up at home and in bed, safe and sound and—regrettably—alone. “I don’t know if I can provide what you’re looking for,” he told Red.

“I’m not looking for any one thing,” Red said. “Just tell the truth. Can you do that?”

The truth, thought Lewis, was just what would make ’em snore.

A
FTER
Lewis left, Red Ray locked the door and slit open a letter from his ex-wife. A note, really; half a sheet of heavy, ivory stationery, the message typed and brief. Evidently, Joe wanted to go out for track. The meets were on Saturdays, which meant he couldn’t come down to Red’s for three months, four if the team made the state finals: “You could come up here and see him run.” She signed off “Best wishes” and typed her name, initialing it with a large, loopy “Y” in bleeding blue ink.

Old fears arose, tireless as waves. Was this another ploy to disenfranchise him? Or was Joe trying to avoid him? Was Yvette exacting punishment for yet another perceived failure in parenting?

Not that Red was a terrific father even by his own standards. He ached for Joe, yearned to spend more time with him, yet often felt awkward, shy, almost afraid around the boy. At fifteen, Joe was going through such rapid physical and emotional changes, Red worried he’d embarrass or appall his son, miscalculating him from one visit to the next. And then there was the steady bass beat of dread that Red would unconsciously emulate his own intemperate, well-meaning father, who, through no effort or guile, had managed to harm everyone in his path.

Red shared with his father the same name, John Robert Ray, which neither ever used. John Senior went by “Jack.” He was a tall, lean man who had both the gift of gab and “the failing.” He would gauge the needs of others with uncanny accuracy and then promise to fulfill them—which, of course, he never did. In a few short years of
marriage, he gambled away the farmhouse in Azusa and a modest sum of money his wife had inherited from her father. Red distantly remembered a series of shabby motel rooms made huge, almost infinite with waiting, always waiting for his father to return from the bars.

His parents separated when Red was five, and his mother took a teaching job in Glendale. Red was left behind, to be shuttled among his aunts and grandmother. He saw his father with increasing infrequency. At one point, Jack was enlisted to move Red from his aunt Maude’s house in Redlands to his grandma Iris’s house in Pomona.

“We’ll make a day of it,” Jack told Red over the phone. “Get you moved, then pay a visit to the water gardens. Sound good to you, son?”

Red, seven years old, had no idea what water gardens were; he envisioned a landscape where running water was piped and channeled to flow in the shapes of trees and flowers, a park whose foliage was transparent, boisterous, ever in motion. And yes, that sounded very good to him.

Red waited for his dad in the front yard with two suitcases and Smoky, an adolescent barn cat he’d acquired from the ranch next door. From the way Jack Ray slammed on the brakes and spun his tires in the gravel drive, Red sensed that his father was in a terrible hurry and that he, Red, was to blame. Jack Ray had a craggy face and sandy hair. Aunt Maude called him “a tall drink of water” to Red and “a long list of troubles” to everyone else. Jack grabbed Red’s suitcases and loaded them into the trunk of his ’42 DeSoto coupe. “Put the cat down and get in, son,” he said.

Red would not put Smoky down. Smoky was his cat. He rolled Smoky up inside his sweater, ran to the edge of the property, and refused to get into the car until Aunt Maude appeared on the porch and told Jack that it was okay, Iris was expecting Red to bring the cat.

Jack reached an arm impatiently toward Red. “Give him here. I’ll put him in the car.”

Reluctantly, Red handed Smoky to his father. Jack tossed the cat into the trunk and slammed it shut.

At dazzling speed, they drove west on Foothill Boulevard, Route 66, through stretches of scrub desert alternating with vineyards and orchards. The front seat was black leather, warm and slippery. Red clung to the armrest and saw mostly sky over the dashboard. They’d
gone only a few miles when Smoky started to yowl, a desperate, guttural noise of impossible length and resonance. Red’s father said nothing. The yowling persisted, in waves, each louder and more protracted than the last. Red glanced around and saw that, somehow, Smoky had crawled up between the roof and the sand-colored headliner, and was slowly coming their way. Red could make out four convex points—Smoky’s paws—as he advanced, step by step. Occasionally, a translucent claw broke through the headliner’s weave. With a series of ripping sounds, the liner pulled free from where it was glued to the roof. Soon Smoky’s yowling was directly overhead, chordal, extended, bloodcurdling. Between Jack and Red, the headliner sagged with the cat’s weight and shape. Jack gazed straight ahead, driving faster and faster toward smeary clouds and washed-out blue sky.

When they arrived at Grandma Iris’s house, Jack drove up on the lawn. He leapt out, went to the trunk, and threw Red’s suitcases onto the grass.

“Get out of the car,” he said to Red and took out his pocket knife, pried open the blade. Red scrambled away and watched as Jack plunged the knife into the headliner, cut a long gash, reached in, pulled Smoky out by the leg and hurled him, a black fright wig, out into the yard. The cat sprang to his toes, unhurt, and dashed into nearby orange groves. Without another word, Jack climbed in his car and drove off, his face curtained by the flap of torn headliner.

Red never saw his father alone after that. Subsequent meetings were stiff, virtually silent half-hours in the presence of a grandmother or aunt. When his mother married Giles Southerly and brought Red to live with them, it was easier for everyone if Jack stayed away.

Eight years ago, a private investigator sobered up at Round Rock and Red let the man work off his bill in trade. Red asked him to locate his father, an assignment both assumed would result in the address of a cemetery. Within a week, however, Jack was found traversing the country in a mid-size motor home with a Choctaw woman named Winnie. Red sent a telegram to a Kansas KOA campground, and ten days later Jack and Winnie rolled into Round Rock. Almost forty years had passed since Red had seen his father. Jack was now a fragile stick of a man, face wattled in loose skin, head crowned by a wavering white flame of hair. Jack and Winnie parked the motor home next to Red’s bungalow and drank gin around the clock until
Red had to ask them to leave. Two years later, Red was summoned to Monrovia to identify his father’s body and collect his possessions: one green woolen overcoat, one pair of black steel-shank boots, sixteen dollars and change.

Since his father’s death, Red had had a recurring dream. There was no story or sequence of events, merely landscapes of water: hills and mountains of water, and, of course, gardens, with sparkling clear dahlias, surging hedgerows, weeping willows.

Red smoked and reread Yvette’s note until he knew for certain no rebuke or threat simmered between the words. He laughed a little at the strength of his own inexhaustible fears. The boy just wanted to run track, for Christ’s sake, to be on a team with other boys. Red could go up there to see him. Cheer him from the sidelines. There was still hope, after all: it was just possible that he and Joe would not end up lost to each other, two heartbroken strangers.

L
EWIS
showed up in Red’s office the following afternoon.

“Yes?” Red looked up from the computer.

“I finished that writing.”

Red looked confused, so Lewis held up a sheaf of pale-green paper covered with blotchy ballpoint scrawl. “My drinking history,” he said.

Red’s face cleared. “That was fast! What’d you do? Stay up all night?”

Lewis shrugged—three a.m. was all—and started to hand the pages to Red.

Red crossed his arms. “Read it to me.”