A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 12

  Three matching camel humps grading to a gentle stop made the backyard of the house on Vermilion ideal for sledding in the winter months, but in the summer it proved a real pain in the ass to mow. Self-propelled mowers were a luxury then, while dirt-cheap Endopalm-T had been retired long ago. The mower he could afford—a rusted shell over three spinning blades—was always threatening to shear his toes clean off. He was out there one Saturday afternoon, the sun was beating down, the insects were going from bad to worse, he was lightheaded, and every minute or two he had to kill the engine to wipe the sweat off his spectacles—compounding annoyances that might have led him to conclude that he was living a chump’s life. But then came the revelation: he didn’t mind. There would be a cigarette to reward him when he was done, and a cold glass of sun tea, and cornbread with dinner. He had a wife he admired, and a bathtub without water bugs, a newborn he might still do right by, and another on its way. They took in a foster kid to do all they could to help repair the world, as Charley required, and still others for a night or two while a domestic dispute simmered down or some lone caregiver had sobered up. There were always little Jimmys and Bernadettes, Graylins and Heidis coming and going, kids gone permanently mute or howling from morning to night. But he did his best to locate what was lovable about each one, even the lost causes, and to focus his attention on that until they were gone again. Altogether, these things did not make him a man to reckon with, not a rich or powerful man, but a happy man. Now, that was unexpected. When he was married to Jerry’s mom, he mowed the lawn only to gain the upper hand in the marketplace that was their marriage. I mowed for you, now you owe … that sort of thing. But he wasn’t married to Sue anymore. He was married to Charley. They were Charlie & Charley. The old equations no longer applied. I flatter you, you pay me was all wrong before the revelations of true love. He mowed to mow now, to acquit a duty without stinting or dodging or asking for something in return. He washed the dishes. He made the bed. He did the laundry. He folded the towels, and upon putting them away again did not worry that he was wasting his time, would die broke, unachieved, a fat nobody … the old equations no longer applied.

  To disarm; to perceive, if dimly, a perspective different from your own; to credit that perspective with testimony even when it went against you, even when you couldn’t see it yourself; to yield to another’s narrative; to own up to your share of obstruction, self-destruction, casual cruelty; to see yourself clearly, as another might, in the context of your blind and busy life, your ambitions, your defenses; to accept, however innocently and belatedly, your culpability in the degradations of the moment, the petty fights, the squandered nights; to mature, to dawn to facts, to move beyond denial, and to move past pride, and to be a man, finally, and not a reflexive bully … all that, too, he was trying on for the first time with his third wife, during that sweet short window when he was his best self.

  Move in the direction of love and life gets harder. He had known that much from the time he was sixteen, when he got a job so as to buy a girl a Coke. From dreamy youth to a paperboy pedaling in the predawn overnight. It was in the same spirit that he now decided he must quit Old Poor Farm and go to work at Waukegan Title. He had, God knows, bigger dreams than being regional salesman of the month and taking third in local golf tournaments. But Old Poor Farm didn’t pay well, and his wife, the true devotee to the social cause, deserved to pursue her calling without worrying about the car breaking down or the heat getting turned off in winter. And it wasn’t all that different from what he’d been doing for years: moving around when it meant more money or he was offered some perk the old gig didn’t have.

  Now, Charley Proffit didn’t know any of that: Charley Proffit was in the dark about Steady Boy’s professional past. She had married him for two reasons: his beard, which suggested he might make a good father figure, and his commitment to Old Poor Farm. He came in from mowing, removed his grass-stained tennis shoes, peeled off his tube socks and sweatband, and found his wife at the kitchen table doing paperwork while the baby napped and the foster kid watched TV.

  “Hey,” he said, “listen, I’m thinking about taking a job with Archie Baker at Waukegan Title.”

  A suggestion so strange he might have been proposing another road trip to California. In the three years since that little swerve, her new husband had done much to live up to her expectations. He went to work. He cared for the baby. Now a familiar dread crept back into the pit of her stomach. How could someone who would quit Old Poor Farm to sell title insurance be wise or moral? He was everything she took him for, right: the crusader in God’s army with the consistency of a Gregory Peck?

  “Are you nuts? Why would you quit Old Poor Farm?”

  “It’s getting harder and harder to make ends meet.”

  “God will provide, if we do right.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Heart and soul,” she said. “Don’t you? What is Waukegan Title? And who is Archie Baker?”

  He would have to back up. He would need to explain a few things if he hoped to be understood.

  “I don’t think I have a life calling the way you do,” he confessed. “Social work, I mean. It’s not in my blood the way it is yours.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since … forever. What do you mean?”

  “I mean this is news to me.”

  “To be honest, I kind of lucked into the job at Big Brothers.”

  “Lucked into it?”

  “You know Happy Necker, who owns the dealership? Well, Happy has this cousin …”

  He went on to explain all about Happy Necker’s cousin. Before the cousin got him the gig at Big Brothers, he worked a gig at Gemco, and before that, a gig at Hyster.

  “A gig?”

  “You know, a job, a full-time job.”

  “What is Hyster?”

  “Forklift assembly,” he said.

  “Forklift assembly? You assembled forklifts?”

  “Not me. The guys in back.”

  “The guys in back,” she said. “Chuck, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Look, I moved around, Charley. Didn’t want to just settle. Figured if I kept looking, sooner or later I’d find the perfect thing.”

  “Old Poor Farm,” she said, “is the perfect thing.”

  “I don’t make that much at Old Poor Farm.”

  “What you make is not what matters. What matters is what you do.”

  “You see, I’ve just never thought like that.”

  “This is all news to me,” she said. “How many jobs have you had?”

  “Total? Jeez,” he said. “Dunno. Never counted.”

  “Ten?”

  He gave it some thought. “Forty, maybe?”

  Her eyes bugged out. “Forty?”

  “Thirty, forty, somewhere in there.”

  She was dumbstruck. “How is that even possible?”

  She had had one job since graduating from college.

  “I guess that’s another thing,” he said. “I never really got my college degree.”

  “I thought you went to Michigan State.”

  “I did go there,” he said.

  “But you didn’t graduate?”

  The sweat coming on now was of a different variety from the one he’d worked up while mowing the lawn, and he was feeling a little sick to his stomach. Maybe he should start fudging things a bit, or back away entirely from this ballooning disaster. But he was sick of fudging. He’d been cutting corners his whole life. He had to come clean and be real or risk never deserving such happiness.

  “I attended Michigan State for a semester and a half,” he said.

  She was very confused now. “A semester?”

  “And a half.”

  “Did you study social work, at least?”

  “I was a prelaw major.”

  He could tell by her expression that his attempt to get real was having the perverse effect of making him less substantial with every word, as if he were resolving into
a total stranger, and she asked him outright, “Who are you?”

  “Who am I? It’s me, Charles. Same as before.”

  If “Buy me a Coke” had inaugurated him into working life and “But I love Marshall” into adult betrayal, each one stripping away an earlier illusion to arrive at some greater degree of reality, “Who are you?” led him to understand that he himself served as the measure of what was real in other people, those who depended on him to be who he claimed to be, a devoted social worker and a man with a college degree. He’d fucked up here, more than he realized. But the error did not reside in the disclosure. The disclosure was just a bookkeeping matter. The error rested in the life, the incongruent life.

  “But who is that?”

  “The man you married, Charles, come on! Same guy as before.”

  “But I didn’t marry someone with thirty or forty jobs. I married someone with a career in social work … a life in social work.”

  “That was a rough estimate. Could be twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five!” she cried. “What the fuck is Waukegan Title?”

  “It’s what pays better! It’s what would cover the mortgage and let you keep your job.”

  “Keep my job? Chuck, I don’t have a job. I have a sacred commitment to God. And until about ten minutes ago, I thought you shared that commitment with me.”

  Which of these romantic nuts was more out to lunch? That they found each other, that they fell in love, that they joined together, however briefly, in holy matrimony—was that a miracle or a travesty? The one had never told the truth but was trying to come clean, trying to get real, while the other married only divine immortals and then quickly moved on when they fell to earth.

  “What else have you been keeping from me?” she asked.

  Move in the direction of love and your life gets harder. He told her about Endopalm-T and the Clown in Your Town™, his faithlessness with his first wife, the paramour’s dog he backed over and the blood he blamed on a bobcat. Then he took a deep breath and told her what he’d never told anyone, lover, friend, child, no one. These were very exacting rules, all of which he alone imposed—yet he would not bow out.

  “I had my teeth pulled when I was in my twenties,” he said. “I wear dentures.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I kind of guessed that,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “You don’t?”

  “But forty jobs? And no degree?”

  She excused herself, left the kitchen table to step inside the bathroom. He could not comprehend how things had gotten so far out of his control. He only meant to share the good news that he had the offer of a better-paying job. Now his marriage suddenly felt precarious, all so that he could be “understood.” What a crock. His first bid at honesty was for the other party the confessions of a pathological liar, while what he hoped to be the minting of hard truth and a fresh start turned out to be more like a coin toss: heads I forgive you, tails it’s too much. He still didn’t know how it would land. Yes, even the plainspoken truth was a matter of perspective. She opened the bathroom door and came forward, halted, stood backlit in the door frame holding her enormous belly with both hands.

  “I think my contractions have started,” she said.

  They gathered the baby and the foster child and drove to Lake View Hospital. Their second child was on the way.

  34

  It was not Lake View but First Baptist where, several lifetimes later, he arrived in the late afternoon inside a luxury loaner, courtesy of his mechanic. He entered the ER by way of Imaging’s well-insulated corridor. He was carrying flowers. His wife’s delight at his sudden appearance was tempered by the trouble she was encountering from a lacquered ring of red onion. She had just forked it into her mouth as part of a side salad when Charlie appeared, but then it wouldn’t be wrangled any further. She tried clipping it with her front teeth, but the satiny thing remained intact, and when she tried to fish it out with finger and thumb, it slipped from her grasp while Charlie stood by giggling, until at last she pinched it hard and fast and tossed it in the trash.

  “Ugh!” she cried, then brightened. “Hello, young man!”

  “For you,” he said, and presented the lovely flowers. “And look at this, honey!” He held up the pants he found at Nordstrom Rack. “Brunello Cucinellis—for sixteen smackers!”

  “You went shopping?”

  “I had such a terrible morning,” he began. “Got some just terrible news about a client of mine—”

  “Charlie!” she cried impatiently. “Did you hear from the doctor?”

  “Oh, right!” He smiled. “Guess who has a clean bill of health?”

  She came around the nurse’s station in her boxy scrubs and leaped into his arms. How good it was to hold her! He had learned his lesson. He had to be a better man for Barbara, a stronger man, invincible even. She loved his suits, his beard, his aftershave, his methodical thinking, his care with a client, his understanding of taxes and interest rates. Danville was behind him; Steady Boy was behind him; as of that morning, pancreatic cancer was behind him. He had his Chippin’ In, an idea that even Rudy approved of, and a new pair of pants by Brunello Cucinelli. And he had her. It was enough. He lifted her off her toes and turned her in tight little arcs … when finally they broke off, she had tears in her eyes. She loved him. He was her silver fox, a good man devoted to helping retirees, and handsome in a hat.

  “Did they give you those numbers I wanted?” she asked.

  He patted himself down. “Where are they?” he wondered aloud.

  Finally he pulled from his back pocket a limp paper napkin. She received it with a laugh at how unceremonious a document it was—“It was the first thing at hand!”—and opened it. The surface was torn here and there by the sharp nib of the pen with which he’d taken down the raw data that only a doctor could make heads or tails of: CA 19-9 levels, amylase readings, his CEA numbers … how did his wife know what any of that meant? She asked him to confirm some of his digits.

  “Forty? You sure?”

  “I believe so.”

  She frowned. “Have a seat,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “Have a seat, Charlie.”

  She departed, still looking down at the napkin, still frowning. He did as he was told and had a seat. But he knew. Before she returned, before he saw the man striding alongside her, the graybeard in the lab coat—he was the head of hem-onc at First Baptist—holding in his tan hand the wavering white napkin, he knew: she had frowned.

  “And they didn’t ask for a follow-up?” the doctor asked.

  They were flanking him. It was happening too fast.

  “Charlie?”

  “Huh?”

  He wasn’t listening. People floated by him like extras in a dream. He believed he had a clean bill of health, returned to work, took his car in, went shopping. What would he have done with that time had he known? What would he have done with his life? Sixty-eight years old and he was still at a loss. He had known he was dying. There was the weight loss, which was undeniable, as was a change in his bowels. He had gone on pretending anyway. Pretense and fakery. Even now he was only a little wiser, for he knew only that he had passed another day like a dancing bear.

  The bill had come due for all the bowing out he’d done. He’d cut corners, disappeared down trapdoors whenever it suited him, and spared himself hassles like an early start time, a dick boss, and the “fundamentals” of two-handed dribbling … but there was no bowing out of this. Steady Boy sensed he was in for more hard work than he ever could have fathomed as a younger man, the rules more exacting, the punishment more severe, and at the same time knew the end had come, the dream had died, he would never make a killing, found an empire, or prove his worth. He had been on a wheel—a wheel, no more—and now that wheel was winding down so that he could step off into his grave.

  He would not have cared to live out his life as if in a farce, but it
was in a farce he was forced to live. There his quarrel with the world began, and there his quarrel with the world ended.

  “Why didn’t they require a follow-up, Charlie?” Barbara was asking. “Did they give you a good reason, any reason?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know?”

  It was at that instant that the power went out again, as it had that morning on Rust Road. Again there was no light, no sound, no song, no color, no texture to whatever struck his optic nerve, no dimensionality across the whole of his optic field, no hum or animation in the immediate surround, no life anywhere. Yet when he looked up at the wall-mounted television provided by the hospital, expecting to find it blank, he saw that it continued broadcasting uninterrupted, flickering with images and alive (for all he knew) with sound, and he was forced to admit that the power had not gone out after all. It was all in his head, and this was how life would be from now on.