Northwest Corner (3 page)

And she knows she is no different, not really.

They are like two satellites: hurled into space to orbit the same
barren moon, once in a while catching curious glimpses of each other through the ash-colored murk, but never stopping to question their weirdly shared circumstances or motives.

Which maybe is understandable: by then his father is in prison; and, deep in the thrall of their emotional devastation, so are her parents.

SAM

I
T IS CLOSE TO FIVE IN THE MORNING
when he returns to the dorm. The leftovers of his uniform stink of old beer and frightened sweat. His body hurts in many unseen places. Since fleeing the bar, for the past couple of hours, on familiar streets and unknown fields, he has run, walked, run, and sat for long periods of stillness that are like falling, not knowing what to do or where to go.

Now, in the common room, a single lamp is on. His roommate, Jake, slouches unsmiling on the broken-down vinyl couch.

“It’s my fault. I should’ve stayed with you.”

“I really need to crash,” Sam mumbles, but his legs won’t move.

“I was at a party at McMahon. An hour ago, guy showed up saying his buddy’d just gone for emergency surgery. Bar fight in O’Doul’s. Internal hemorrhage or something. Very fucking serious.” Jake leans forward, his gaze nailing Sam into frame. “Somebody gut-whacked him with a baseball bat. The rumor already going around is maybe it was you.”

The duffel in Sam’s hand has begun to feel like fifty pounds. He sets it down.

“And don’t fucking try to tell me how he hit you first. I don’t give a shit. I told that asshole at the party, I swore to him on my mom’s goddamn wedding ring that there was no way—no fucking way, Sam—that my roommate would ever be stupid or crazy or just plain wrong enough to do a fucking thing like that.”

• • •

There is more, but the words turn fluid. Part of Sam absorbs their acidic implications; part repels them like accidental rain.

Until, at some point, Jake stands and says he needs to take a shower; it will help him think. After that, they will head to breakfast. Over breakfast, they will come up with a game plan.

A game plan, yes. Sam nods at his friend, or believes he does. He takes the UConn duffel into his bedroom. He closes the door.

Alone with himself, he stands looking at the brightening stain of sunrise that spreads from the window to his feet.

Something inside him has ruptured; something hideous has come out of hiding. He is leaking enough poison to kill another man, or himself. What toxin he can’t identify, but he’d swear that he now understands, at the level of blood, the meaning of the word
ruin
. A sudden conviction, like a dog’s yelp, impales him: to keep running and never look back. To find someone as far away as possible who might take him in and hide him from the clean world.

For the second time in twelve hours, he thinks of his father.

Unzipping the duffel, he dumps the contents on the floor. Amid the day’s profane waste are the clothes he was wearing before the game.

Quickly now, he begins to pack.

DWIGHT

T
WELVE-THIRTY ON THE NOSE
, I look out the store’s front window and see Tony Lopez’s cream-colored Mercedes coupe pulling into the lot.

Tony gets his car washed every other morning on the way to work. I watch him now, stopping to inspect a recent smudge or scratch, invisible to me from this distance. A quick buff with his shirt hem and he’s on the move again, eyes critically scanning the store sign; the front window displaying the impressive collection of trophies that he and his brother Jorge amassed on the baseball diamond and football field of Arenas High School; the security gate I left not quite rolled up. He frowns to himself and corrects my error, then enters the store and, shooting a look at Sandra behind the registers, orders her to get some clothes on, pronto.

“What?”
she complains, hands on her hips.

He’s got a point, I can’t help noticing: her halter top a Day-Glo display case for her own particular trophies; her name tag an extremesports enthusiast about to tumble to a happy death off the face of Mount Shasta.

Sandra shouts to Derek to cover for her, before strutting down aisle nine and through the security door into the stockroom.

“That girl,” Tony grumbles, shaking his head. “She thinks she can just show it like a free movie and everybody’s happy.”

“Some people probably
are
happy,” I venture.

“She’s my niece,” Tony says, ending the subject.

• • •

Once every couple of weeks, Tony and I have lunch together at a nearby Mexican cantina that’s another small piece in the modest business empire he’s gradually building. The lunches began not long after his hiring me as a sales assistant six years ago—no doubt as a way for the boss to keep tabs on a rookie employee with a certain kind of track record. But, to Tony’s credit, the meals don’t make me feel as if Big Brother’s watching. A few years younger than me and exponentially more set on his feet, he seems to have no interest in overtly contrasting our situations, save for the obvious reality that I now work for him. He respects the fact that, prior to my troubles back East, I went to law school and for a while was a practicing attorney. (And possibly, out of a desire not to cut off this unexpected avenue of goodwill, I’ve been guilty of not giving him a fuller picture of my former professional vicissitudes.) He also takes a sincere interest in my estranged relationship with my son.

For beyond the snappy shirts and expensive summer-weight slacks and the gold-rimmed designer shades perpetually perched on his bronzed, balding head, Tony is a genuine family man. His pretty blond wife, Jodi, and their twin seven-year-old daughters, Ruby and Jade (Tony and Jodi are fans of a certain Home Shopping Network strain in the naming of American children that would now seem to be the norm), are his delight, and he’s given to handing out wallet-size photos of them to near-strangers. He often mentions his beloved mother (Papi cut out when Tony and Jorge were still in Pampers) and the Los Angeles barrio he grew up in, and to me, anyway, it never feels like just a line. As Tony and I have become friends over time—he’s near the top of my very short list of guys to watch football with—I’ve occasionally gone to his and Jodi’s home at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains for big, festive family dinners that, after a couple of tequilas, always make me feel as if there are balloons and piñatas tied up everywhere, even when there aren’t.

At lunch today, I order the large chicken taco salad (it comes in a kind of crispy sombrero that you’re free to wear out of the restaurant
if you’re in the mood) and silently vow to ignore the chips. Since moving out to California, Diet Dr Pepper has become my daytime beverage of choice and, on the whole, I try to eat like a native. I exercise most days and am not averse to fresh fruit.

One of the ironies of enforced institutional life is that the hours of nothing time that threaten to drown you can also lead you to get yourself in pretty good fighting shape. It’s possible in certain locales to see a murderer’s handprints—or, for that matter, a tax evader’s, and wouldn’t you know it, they look much the same—faintly worn into the grimed cement floor. He’s been doing his push-ups and crunches for months now, years, day after day, preparing himself for some test with no name or prize money attached to it. There our man sits, lats and delts and traps getting bigger, finding abs he hasn’t seen since he was a high-school virgin, but the truth is he ends up scaring no one but himself. Because for all the work on his body, the rock-hard carapace he daily attempts to fashion, the absolute mystery of the overall scheme—the tragedy by which he got here in the first place—grows no plainer to him, and never will.

Then one stupendous day, according to the calendar that never lies, he gets spit out by the state. And if our man is unusually lucky and tenacious he’ll eventually find his way to some situation that looks a lot like human society. A diorama, but with real sunshine. And there he’ll continue his daily exercise routine—we won’t call it a “regimen,” which might suggest good health and a required monthly membership—that he learned inside. A certain number of reps, a certain series of poses. Disciplined man that he is, he’ll order the salad and stay off the chips. And the irony of it all won’t escape him: how he’s keeping himself strong in order to endure, or fight back, the very thing he can’t understand. Which, like the fine California weather, keeps coming at him, relentless. At this rate, he could live for a very long time.

“Hey,” Tony says mildly, snapping his fingers. “I’m talking business here.”

“Right.”

“Want to be more involved, you gotta be on the ball.”

“I’m on the ball, Tony.”

“Yeah?” He eyes me skeptically, in no rush whatever. A hint of ownership in his gaze, as if I’m a second car and he’s checking me for dings. And it occurs to me, and not for the first time, that he’s the only person in the state who knows my official record. Information that from the start he’s promised to keep confidential, so long as I live up to the responsibility given to me. As it’s turned out, I’ve earned his trust and we’ve become friends. Not partners but teammates of a kind—the way I guess the lug man in the pit crew is a member of the team, due his share on payday, even if not cut out for the bright lights of the winner’s circle.

I take a swallow of diet soda and prepare for Tony’s verdict. In my position I seem to spend a lot of time simply waiting, stuck on like a limpet, for other people to give me the news.

Finally, he flashes his
telenovela
smile. “Just keeping you on your toes, hombre.”

I smile back.

“That bakery out near the 217 overpass? Feeling they getting ready to sell. Low foot traffic and rising value of the underlying asset. I could do better with that site. Maybe time to take a look.”

“You thinking sporting goods?”

“Maybe a gym. Athletic center. Start a chain.”

“That would be a new direction,” I reply carefully.

“New and not new.” Tony finishes his mineral water and cocks a frowning glance into the kitchen, where a disorganized clatter can be heard. “Matter of branding.”

I nod, because it seems the right thing to do at the moment, and because I have nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation. He isn’t asking for my opinion, anyway. There was a time—as a young lawyer in Hartford (my first stint in that beleaguered northeastern city), billing hundreds every hour—when I had something to say, for a price, about almost anything you could imagine.

According to the law, as I still recall it, words are our fate, perhaps our character, too: they will make us or break us. But the gloomier truth is that the breakage usually happens in an instant, life changing in a single wordless act. The words are the last thing you hear before you slip into the darkness of afterward, mere nails in the coffin.

RUTH

B
Y HER STANDARDS
, she believes, the message she leaves this evening on Sam’s cellphone—the only phone he has, its monthly contract paid through his summer-job savings—is unimpeachable in its lack of emotional Velcro: he can bounce right off it if he likes, and never think of getting stuck.

She does not say:
I am looking increasingly like a woman I would give a dollar to on the street
.

Nor:
The real reason I play the piano so often and with such desperate zeal at home is not because of my lifelong passion for music but, rather, to rule out the possibility—more and more likely—of conversing aloud with myself, which, as we both know, would be embarrassing
.

Nor:
I was thinking of you yesterday morning, and then couldn’t stop. All day long, you understand? Though I have gone about what I’ve needed to do like a normal person—don’t worry, I’m not broken. I just wanted, now, to hear your voice
.

Here is the message she actually leaves, in its entirety:

“Sam, hi, it’s Mom … Just, you know, checking in … Nothing urgent … Wondering how you are— Oh, stupid of me: How’d the big game go? I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. Let me know everything when you have a moment … Okay, well … Sending love … Bye …”

There are speeches that have started wars and led to suicides. This would not be one of them. It is a penny dropped down a very deep well. Ruth has loads of pennies stored up; she is that kind of woman.

You let it go and then wait for the splash and echo; you hold your breath or pray. The rest is in how you choose to think about it.

She sits down at the piano in her living room to wait.

SAM

T
HE
G
REYHOUND TERMINAL IN
V
EGAS
.

No one in the world knows where he is. This could be freedom, except it pretty clearly isn’t.

From a waiting-room bench, three days of stubble on his jaw, he watches half his fellow losers grab their rucksacks and worn suitcases and slink off into the deathless light of the Nevada morning.

Vegas, baby.

No one around to greet them. When they’re gone, he misses them, broods over them henlike, though during their cross-country ride together he stubbornly avoided all contact. These poor unwashed bus creatures have reached their destination, apparently.

The glimpse of his own nature that abruptly comes at him then is a mental sucker punch. He almost goes down, but doesn’t.

DWIGHT

B
Y FIVE O’CLOCK
, with an hour till closing, I’m loitering behind the store next to the hulking dumpster, at my feet a tidy pile of half-smoked butts. One a day my prescribed limit—perfectly reasonable, I’d argue, given that I’m probably the last nicotine junkie in the state and bear responsibility for single-handedly keeping the industry alive. Leaving the pile visible is my way of showing whoever might be interested that I’m not only keeping with my program but can restrain myself from smoking the death stick all the way to the filter. I personally sweep up the mess every Saturday afternoon, thus to start fresh again on Monday. Creature of habit that I am. Dog urinating on a bush.