Sweet Nothing (15 page)

THE BEAR WAS
already busy when Benny awoke. Kneeling next to the husk of what was once a house, he broke the dried mud that surrounded it with his screwdriver, then scraped away the dirt he made with his free hand. When he reached the foundation, he began to move along it, jabbing and digging, in search of passage into the basement. As soon as Benny approached, he tossed the kid a chisel and said, Pick yourself a house and go for it. Benny went to the next ruin and followed the Bear's lead. Stab, twist, stab, twist, scoop. Stab, twist, stab, twist, scoop. They kept to the shade, working on whatever side of the houses the sun chased it to. The Bear unearthed a faucet that still had a hose attached and called Benny over to look. A short time later, he showed him a plastic flower, part of a thing to feed birds.

Benny didn't care much about the junk. He had a blister on his finger, and his back hurt from bending. His progress slowed after a while, and finally whenever he knew the Bear couldn't see him, he quit digging completely and sat against the wall and stared out at the mountains rising hazed in the distance. The Bear was flagging too, until his screwdriver hit something that made a hollow sound. In a few frenzied minutes he'd scraped away enough dirt to reveal the remains of a wooden door. Hey, he called, hey!, eager for Benny to know they weren't wasting their time. The kid came running, and they yanked at the rotten boards until they gave way, but all they got for the effort was more mud. The basement was full of it, up to the ceiling.

The Bear had built up so much momentum by now, he couldn't stop. He and Benny worked together, him breaking ground, and the kid carrying off the muck. After an hour of this they'd exposed only the first two steps of the stairs leading down. Benny took a break, went up and sprawled on what had been the porch of the house. An object half buried in the mud got his attention, its color a brilliant blue that flashed against the infinite drab surrounding it. He wiggled the thing free and dragged it back to show the Bear, who, even after he pawed the sweat from his eyes, didn't see the meaning of the mangled sheet of siding until Benny pointed out the numbers painted on it: 412. You got the wrong place, Benny said.

THE BEAR BUGGED
then, started punching the mud and screaming, Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! He kicked the siding out of Benny's hand and stomped off to another house on another street and knelt to dig there in the full sun, stabbing wildly at the earth. Benny returned to the porch and watched him give up on that ruin and move to another, then another. The wind rushed in, and with it the dust, which stung like bees when it hit bare skin. Benny took cover in the crevice he and the Bear had excavated. He hunkered down with their bedrolls and rucks and struggled to keep them from blowing away. A moaning filled the air, violent gusts shook the vestiges of the town, and the light of day was choked down to almost nothing.

The Bear welcomed the storm. It gave him something to do battle with. He was half crazy and knew it, digging here, digging there, first with a gambler's determination to turn his luck, and then, finally, merely in defiance of the blow. He swallowed mud; he made his hands bloody claws; he flew from ruin to ruin, stabbing, scraping, and growling. And when the wind ceased and the dust settled, he collapsed in such a broken posture that Benny worried he'd died. He lay where he'd fallen until the first stars showed themselves. Benny ignored him when he finally limped into camp, sat with his back to him and sucked on the last of the soldiers' candy. You didn't know how it'd be, the kid said without turning around. Ain't no shame in that. The Bear stretched out on his blanket and fell asleep tonguing the dirt and sweat off his lips and counting a coyote's yips. Benny sat up in the busy dark, pretending he was alone, testing how it felt. It was nothing he'd choose, he concluded, but something he could tolerate.

THEY BOTH WOKE
raw and peevish, as if their dreams—the Bear's of the past, Benny's of the future—had butted heads all night, warring to a stalemate that left the dreamers stranded in the dreary present with neither nostalgia nor expectation as a balm. After a polite breakfast, the Bear gathered his tools and made ready to go to work. Benny rose to follow, the muscles in his back and legs groaning, but the Bear waved him off. You take it easy, he said, and walked by himself to the town's main street, where he ducked into the first structure he came to and began to probe the dried mud that covered the floor and to chisel at the walls. Benny got bored sitting by himself, got hot, and eventually scuffed over to join him. He found the Bear pulling wire out of a hole in the ceiling. The Bear showed him how to coil it by laying it across his palm then wrapping it around his elbow again and again.

They went from ruin to ruin in search of salvage that had survived the flood. Benny had no eye for it, so he waited for the Bear to point him to a spot. If it was a wall, the moldy plaster gave way to reveal a length of pipe. If it was the floor, there, hidden under six inches of dirt, was a stack of plastic funnels or some lead sinkers. It was as if yesterday had never happened. The Bear had his magic back. They scrounged the gas station, the grocery store, and the little Baptist church, then started on the houses. The heat was against them again but didn't seem so awful today, with all the booty they were piling up. Still, Benny worked himself dizzy and had to lie in the shade for a while. He woke from a surprise nap, and the sun was sinking fast. The Bear was crouched in the street, sorting the haul and stuffing the best of it into Benny's ruck. Go on and gather some wood, he said. We'll have a fire tonight. Is it safe? Benny asked. You don't trust me? the Bear said with a laugh, then tossed Benny two cans of chili he'd hauled all the way up from Bako. They were supposed to be the celebration when they found the Krugerrands, but they'd squeezed enough something out of nothing today to have earned a feast.

THE BEAR CHUCKED
more wood onto the fire, and what was already burning snapped and sparked and spit. He'd just told Benny he wasn't going back with him the next morning, and tending to the blaze was his way of avoiding any discussion. But the kid wouldn't be bullied. Why? he asked. What's wrong? The Bear opened his shirt for an answer, had Benny feel the lumps under his arms and on his neck. Picker cancer, he said. It came on quick and's been getting worse. You ain't seen it kill a man, but I have, and I won't do that kind of suffering. Benny was stripped of words. He sat there and toed the dust, shaken by new vistas of sorrow. I'd hoped to leave you and yer ma something, the Bear continued. The gold's a bust, but what's in that ruck'll trade for a new roof. You can have my bike too, and the trailer and everything in it. And yer gun, Benny said, hand that over too. Ha! the Bear said, lifting the pistol out of his pocket just enough that Benny could see it. I appreciate the sentiment, but I got my mind made up.

The flames leaped for an instant and caught the two of them staring into each other's eyes, but then the flickering darkness returned, and Benny was alone on his side of the fire, trying to reconstruct his world without the Bear in it, while the Bear on his side batted away a few regrets. I don't know what to do, Benny wailed. It's simple, the Bear said. You follow the road back to Bako. You get a job in town, something regular, no picking. You meet a girl, get married, have kids. You get a house. You get electricity. You hope. Simple. Benny fell asleep eventually, wrapped in his blankets by the fire. The Bear smiled, remembering what it was like to be that kind of tired and to wake in the morning a clean slate. The flames died, and the last of the wood burned down to pulsing embers. The Bear saw castles in them, jewels, and dancing women. At dawn's first pinking he struck out across the lake bed for the high mountains to the east. A day or two and he'd find what he was looking for, a prettier place to put an end to it.

ON HIS WAY
back, Benny stopped at the cabin at the bottom of the canyon. The graves were shallow, and it didn't take him long to dig them out. He found nothing in either but bones, bones he dodged in his dreams that night, bones that clicked and clacked and kept coming for him. The second day he got it into his head that he was being tested, the Bear spying on him from the bushes to see how he did on his own. Show yourself, he shouted when he could no longer stand the feeling of being watched, but not a leaf stirred and no silver-bearded mug appeared. Benny walked on, whistling away his disappointment with two Irishmen, two Irishmen and Jesse James and savoring a vision of a hot meal, a soft bed, and a once-dark room livid with incandescent light.

TROY POKES HIS HEAD
out of the bedroom as soon as I come in from work. He's got that look, like he's been up all night and made an important decision. I've seen it before. When he was going to study hypnosis and open a clinic. When he was going to move to Berlin to marry some girl he met online. When he thought he had the lottery figured out.

“Want to go for a walk?” he says.

Troy weighs 450 pounds. He has no chin, no waist, hasn't seen his dick in years except in a mirror. The only time he leaves the apartment is once a week to drive to the supermarket, and then it takes him fifteen minutes to haul himself back up the stairs from the carport to our place after paying a kid from the neighborhood to carry his bags.

And he wants to go for a walk?

“Around the block,” he says. “For exercise.”

I'm beat. Still can't get used to working nights. It's the kind of constant fatigue where you feel like you're floating an inch off the ground, where you see things out of the corner of your eye that aren't really there. Right now all I want is to guzzle a few beers and hit the hay, but Troy is my only friend in the world, and that should mean something.

So: “Sure,” I say. “Let's go for a walk.”

First come the stairs. Troy clutches the rail with both hands and descends sideways. Two steps, rest. Two steps, rest. I cradle his elbow in my palm.

We're on the second floor of one of those open-air complexes that's wrapped around a few messy beds of tropical greenery and a tiny swimming pool. The sun only shines on the water for an hour or so in the middle of the day, when it's directly overhead. This early, the pool is still in shadow. The deck chairs are empty, and a beer can drifts aimlessly in the deep end.

“You're doing great,” I say to Troy when he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

He's better on level ground, more sure of himself. We walk past the mailboxes to the gate and push out of the complex into the bright, blaring morning. Gardeners are doing their thing all up and down the street, lawn mowers and leaf blowers, and a disgruntled garbage truck snatches up dumpsters, flips them over to empty them, then slams them back to the pavement.

It was hot yesterday, and it's supposed to be hotter today. Troy wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He hikes up his pajama bottoms and sets off stiff-legged down the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard, his arms extended out from his sides to help him balance.

“Damn, man,” I say. “You sprinkle speed on your Wheaties?”

“I've got to start taking care of myself,” he huffs. “If I don't do something about my weight, I'll be dead in five years. And I don't want to die.”

“Me neither,” I say, “I don't want to die either,” but that's a lie. Sometimes I do.

Troy only makes it as far as the liquor store before running out of steam. A hundred yards. He leans against the building and gulps air like a flopping fish. His face is bright red, and his Lakers jersey is soaked with perspiration. I ask if he's okay.

“Will you go in and get me a Coke?” he says, fishing in his pocket for a dollar. “Diet.”

I bring the soda out to him. He drains it quickly, and we start back to the apartment.

“Tomorrow I'll go a little farther,” he says. “And the day after that, even farther.”

I'm pulling for the man, definitely, but I remember the hypnosis clinic, Berlin, and the lottery, so the best I can do for now is humor him.

A lemon drops off a tree and rolls across the sidewalk. I nearly trip and fall trying to get out of the way. Time for bed.

I NEVER THOUGHT
about life before mine started to go wrong. I just lived it, like everybody else. But then you lose your job, and your wife leaves you for the neighbor and takes your kids, and you go from whiskey to weed to coke to crack just like the commercials warn you will. You lie and cheat and steal until one night you find yourself holding a knife on this guy, Memo, who's supposed to be your buddy, your partner in crime, and Memo gets the jump on you and gives you a concussion and you come to in jail the next day, bleeding out of your ear.

Stuff like that raises questions: Why me? What next? Where will it end?

THE SUBWAY I
work at is half a block from a hospital, which is where most of our customers come from. The restaurant is open twenty-four hours, and I'm on from midnight to nine a.m. Some nights are dead, just me and the radio, and other nights it's so crazy that I'm tempted to tear off my apron and call it quits. The reason I don't is that this is what starting over is like. It's hard. It's minimum wage and night shifts and managers who are fifteen years younger than you.

I got this job after rehab, when I transitioned into a sober-living facility, and I'm still here, ten months later. The part of me that once made a hundred thousand a year and had four salesmen under him is unimpressed, but the part of me that was living in a park and breaking into vending machines for dope money can't thank me enough.

Two Korean teenagers slink into the restaurant around 2:30 a.m. One of them is holding a bloody T-shirt to his shoulder. He slumps, pale and silent, in a booth while his friend orders sandwiches.

“Your buddy all right?” I ask.

“He got shot,” the kid at the counter replies. “We're going to Kaiser after.”

People do this a lot, stop in on their way to the emergency room. They eat something first because they know they'll have to wait hours to be seen. A guy came in a couple weeks ago with a nail through his foot. He'd been messing around drunk with a friend's tools. Said it didn't hurt except where the nail was touching bone.

I check the booth after the kids leave, wipe away a smear of blood. My favorite show is on the radio,
After Midnight
. The host is talking to a man who found a hole in the ground that he claims is a portal into hell. He lowered a microphone into it and recorded the screams of the tortured souls.

“That's ancient Latin,” the man who discovered the hole says.

“What are they saying?” the host asks.

“‘Save me.'”

About four a woman comes in and orders a cup of coffee. It's rare I get a lone female at this hour, and when I do, she's usually bundled up like an Eskimo and pushing a shopping cart. This chick is gorgeous. Arab. Armenian, maybe. Tall and thin with olive skin and long black hair. She's wearing jeans and a pink blouse, a white sweater over that.

“You work at the hospital?” I ask as I slide her cup across the counter.

“No,” she says with some kind of accent. “My daughter is there.”

I notice that her eyes are red and swollen and that her mascara is smeared, and I feel bad. Here she is, going through some sort of tragedy, and I was imagining what she'd look like naked.

“No charge,” I say, waving away her money.

“Please,” she says. “Take it.”

“Really. My treat.”

She pushes the bills into the tip jar. Her fingernails have been chewed to the quick. She sits in the booth by the window and stares out at the electric orange night. A bus blows past full of people going to work, and I begin to prep for the morning rush. After an hour, the woman tosses her cup in the trash and calls out a thank-you as she leaves. The pale creep of dawn is filling in the blanks outside. Another goddamn Tuesday, gentlemen. Let's make this one mean something.

I WALK WITH
Troy again when I get home. He goes twice as far, almost to where Spaghetti Factory used to be, where they're putting in more condos.

“I think I'm losing weight already,” he says.

I check my e-mail on his computer while he's in the shower. There's something from my son, who'll be fourteen in September.
Sick Shit
is the subject. It's a video of a kickboxer getting his leg broken in the ring, his knee snapping back the wrong way. I almost puke watching it. Every month or so the boy sends me something like this. Never a message, just a clip from YouTube, usually disturbing.

I haven't seen him or his little sister in three years. My ex and the neighbor packed them off to Salt Lake City after they were married, and there was nothing this here crackhead could do about it. I was actually kind of happy they left. The kids were getting to an age where they'd notice my shaking hands during our once-a-month lunches at Pizza Hut, my red eyes, the smell of booze on my breath.

The last straw was when Gwennie, my daughter, found a bloody syringe in the glove compartment of the car I'd borrowed to drive down to Orange County for our visit. The rig wasn't mine, but I still had to do some fast talking about how diabetic kitties need shots just like people do. That story always got a laugh from some asshole when I shared it at meetings.

I don't go to AA anymore, and right now I'm so glad. I grab a can of Bud out of the refrigerator. I'll never touch drugs again, but I need my three after-work beers. They're all I have to look forward to these days.

Troy's got
Kelly's Heroes
and asks if I want to watch it with him. Maybe it'll take my mind off my kids. He has a fifty-five-inch TV in his room, surround sound. I sit on the floor with my back against his bed. When the movie's over, he says he's going to order some chicken, but I'm not hungry. I'm not tired either, so I go down to the pool.

It's nice. A breeze is blowing through the courtyard, and birds chatter in the bamboo and banana trees that fill the lava-rock planters. The pool mirrors the square of blue sky above it, clouds floating in the water. I take a deep breath all the way from my gut and pop open my last beer of the day.

The new people spill out of their ground-floor unit with towels and sunscreen and a pitcher of something. A guy and a girl, early twenties. They moved in a couple weeks ago and have already thrown two parties the property manager had to shut down. The guy's playing music on his phone, the kind of shit kids dance to these days.

“This gonna bother you?” he asks, pointing at the phone.

“Not me,” I say.

They're both tall and tan and in great shape. She has blond hair and big fake boobs; he's darker, with a tattoo of a thorny rose wrapped around one thick bicep. They look like advertisements for something you want and want and then realize you didn't really need.

A police helicopter flies low over the complex. The girl whoops and lifts her bikini top to flash it. When she sees me watching, she yanks the top down and says, “Oops. Sorry.”

The guy waves the blue plastic pitcher and calls out, “Margarita?”

I show him my beer. “Thanks anyway.”

I can tell he's going to sit next to me as soon as he offers the drink. He's got a buzz on and wants to talk to someone who won't know when he's lying and might get some of his jokes. His girlfriend is hot, he'll say,
but just between you and me, bro, dumb as a bag of rocks.

He's Edward, she's Star.

“Star?” I say. “Really?”

“Her parents had high hopes,” Edward explains.

The two of them are in from Miami to test the waters. If something happens and they decide to stay, the first thing they'll do is get out of this shit hole and buy a house in the Hills with the money Edward is due from some kind of settlement. He's been bartending to keep busy, and Star dances at a nightclub. I give them six months out here, tops.

“What do you do?” Edward wants to know before he's even asked my name.

Star is on the other side of the pool, where the sun is brightest, on her stomach on a chaise.

“I was a sales director,” I say. “Industrial refrigeration units.”

“If you hear of anything in entertainment, I'm available,” Edward says.

The guy's not even listening to me. That's okay. I sip my beer and stare at his girlfriend's ass. I haven't had sex since sober-living, when this Oxy fiend and I snuck off to the laundry room.

“You live with that fat guy,” Edward says.

“Troy,” I reply.

“That's got to be weird. Does he stink?”

I had the same sort of questions in the beginning. I found Troy on Craigslist when I was looking for a place. His last roommate had skipped out suddenly, and he needed someone to make rent for the month. It was six hundred dollars for the bedroom or three hundred for the futon in the living room. I took the futon.

I'd never lived with a fat man before and wondered how it would be. He eats a lot, of course. Large pizzas, quarts of ice cream, a box of doughnuts in fifteen minutes flat. He sleeps in a sitting position, propped up on the bed with pillows, something to do with his breathing. And he snores, man. He snores like a car that's ready to conk out. That's the only good thing about working nights.

He wasn't always so big. He showed me photos of himself when he was in high school, and he looked like a jock back then. He got sad, though. He came out here from Ohio to be an actor but ended up office manager for a chiropractor, and that did him in, the disappointment, after being so sure he was born to do something special. He let himself go, lost his job, and now he squeaks by on disability and the occasional check from his parents.

“Does he lay like the biggest shits you've ever seen?” Edward continues.

“Troy's great,” I say.

Edward is already on to something else, the time Sean Penn showed up at the bar where he works. I let him finish the story, then go upstairs. I can tell I won't be able to get to sleep, that I'm going to lie on the futon and listen to the afternoon pass on the other side of the blinds while thinking about my kids and how I've probably fucked them up for life and wishing it was like it used to be, when I could knock myself senseless with whatever was at hand.

A COUPLE OF
days later the Arab woman shows up at the restaurant again, at four a.m., just like last time. There are dark circles under her green eyes, and her fingers tremble when she passes me the money for her coffee.