Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

  “Five hundred. I could use more, sure, who couldn’t?” he said. “But I want to be realistic. I can pay back five hundred. More than that, I’ll tell you the truth, I’m not so sure.

  Brother, I hate to ask. But you’re my last resort. Irma Jean and I are going to be on the street before long.

  I won’t let you down,” he said. That’s what he said. Those were his exact words.

  We talked a little more—mostly about our mother and her problems —but, to make a long story short, I sent him the money. I had to. I felt I had to, at any rate—which amounts to the same thing. I wrote him a letter when I sent the check and said he should pay the money back to our mother, who lived in the same town he lived in and who was poor and greedy. I’d been mailing checks to her every month, rain or shine, for three years. But I was thinking that if he paid her the money he owed me it might take me off the hook there and let me breathe for a while. I wouldn’t have to worry on that score for a couple of months, anyway. Also, and this is the truth, I thought maybe he’d be more likely to pay her, since they lived right there in the same town and he saw her from time to time. All I was doing was trying to cover myself some way. The thing is, he might have the best intentions of paying me back, but things happen sometimes. Things get in the way of best intentions. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. But he wouldn’t stiff his own mother. Nobody would do that.

  I spent hours writing letters, trying to make sure everybody knew what could be expected and what was required. I even phoned out there to my mother several times, trying to explain it to her. But she was suspicious over the whole deal. I went through it with her on the phone step by step, but she was still suspicious. I told her the money that was supposed to come from me on the first of March and on the first of April would instead come from Billy, who owed the money to me. She’d get her money, and she didn’t have to worry. The only difference was that Billy would pay it to her those two months instead of me. He’d pay her the money I’d normally be sending to her, but instead of him mailing it to me and then me having to turn around and send it to her he’d pay it to her directly. On any account, she didn’t have to worry. She’d get her money, but for those two months it’d come from him—from the money he owed me.

  My God, I don’t know how much I spent on phone calls. And I wish I had fifty cents for every letter I wrote, telling him what I’d told her and telling her what to expect from him—that sort of thing.

  But my mother didn’t trust Billy. “What if he can’t come up with it?” she said to me over the phone.

  “What then? He’s in bad shape, and I’m sorry for him,” she said. “But, son, what I want to know is, what if he isn’t able to pay me? What if he can’t? Then what?”

  “Then I’ll pay you myself,” I said. “Just like always. If he doesn’t pay you, I’ll pay you. But he’ll pay you.

  Don’t worry. He says he will, and he will.”

  “I don’t want to worry,” she said. “But I worry anyway. I worry about my boys, and after that I worry about myself. I never thought I’d see one of my boys in this shape. I’m just glad your dad isn’t alive to see it.”

  In three months my brother gave her fifty dollars of what he owed me and was supposed to pay to her.

  Or maybe it was seventy-five dollars he gave her. There are conflicting stories—two conflicting stories, his and hers. But that’s all he paid her of the five hundred—fifty dollars or else seventy-five dollars, according to whose story you want to listen to. I had to make up the rest to her. I had to keep shelling out, same as always. My brother was finished. That’s what he told me—that he was finished—when I called to see what was up, after my mother had phoned, looking for her money.

  My mother said, “I made the mailman go back and check inside his truck, to see if your letter might have fallen down behind the seat. Then I went around and asked the neighbors did they get any of my mail by mistake. I’m going crazy with worry about this situation, honey.” Then she said, “What’s a mother supposed to think?” Who was looking out for her best interests in this business? She wanted to know that, and she wanted to know when she could expect her money.

  So that’s when I got on the phone to my brother to see if this was just a simple delay or a full-fledged collapse. But, according to Billy, he was a goner. He was absolutely done for. He was putting his house on the market immediately. He just hoped he hadn’t waited too long to try and move it. And there wasn’t anything left inside the house that he could sell. He’d sold off everything except the kitchen table and chairs. “I wish I could sell my blood,” he said. “But who’d buy it? With my luck, I probably have an incurable disease.” And, naturally, the investment thing hadn’t worked out. When I asked him about it over the phone, all he said was that it hadn’t materialized. His tax refund didn’t make it, either—the I.R.S. had some kind of lien on his return. “When it rains it pours,” he said. “I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “I understand,” I said. And I did. But it didn’t make it any easier. Anyway, one thing and the other, I didn’t get my money from him, and neither did my mother. I had to keep on sending her money every month.

  I was sore, yes. Who wouldn’t be?

  My heart went out to him, and I wished trouble hadn’t knocked on his door. But my own back was against the wall now. At least, though, whatever happens to him from here on, he won’t come back to me for more money—seeing as how he still owes me. Nobody would do that to you. That’s how I figured, anyway. But that’s how little I knew.

  I kept my nose to the grindstone. I got up early every morning and went to work and worked hard all day. When I came home I plopped into the big chair and just sat there. I was so tired it took me a while to get around to unlacing my shoes. Then I just went on sitting there. I was too tired to even get up and turn on the TV.

  I was sorry about my brother’s troubles. But I had troubles of my own. In addition to my mother, I had several other people on my payroll. I had a former wife I was sending money to every month. I had to do that. I didn’t want to, but the court said I had to. And I had a daughter with two kids in Bellingham, and I had to send her something every month. Her kids had to eat, didn’t they? She was living with a swine who wouldn’t even look for work, a guy who couldn’t hold a job if they handed him one. The time or two he did find something, he overslept, or his car broke down on the way in to work, or else he’d just be let go, no explanation, and that was that.

  Once, long ago, when I used to think like a man about these things, I threatened to kill that guy. But that’s neither here nor there. Besides, I was drinking in those days. In any case, the bastard is still hanging around.

  My daughter would write these letters and say how they were living on oatmeal, she and her kids. (I guess he was starving, too, but she knew better than to mention that guy’s name in her letters to me.) She’d tell me that if I could just carry her until summer things would pick up for her. Things would turn around for her, she was sure, in the summer. If nothing else worked out—but she was sure it would; she had several irons in the fire—she could always get a job in the fish cannery that was not far from where she lived. She’d wear rubber boots and rubber clothes and gloves and pack salmon into cans. Or else she might sell root beer from a vending stand beside the road to people who lined up in their cars at the border, waiting to get into Canada. People sitting in their cars in the middle of summer were going to be thirsty, right? They were going to be crying out for cold drinks. Anyway, one thing or the other, whatever line of work she decided on, she’d do fine in the summer. She just had to make it until then, and that’s where I came in.

  My daughter said she knew she had to change her life. She wanted to stand on her own two feet like everyone else. She wanted to quit looking at herself as a victim. “I’m not a victim,” she said to me over the phone one night. “I’m just a young woman with two kids and a son-of-a bitch bum who lives with me. No different from lots of other women.
I’m not afraid of hard work. Just give me a chance. That’s all I ask of the world.” She said she could do without for herself. But until her break came, until opportunity knocked, it was the kids she worried about. The kids were always asking her when Grandpop was going to visit, she said. Right this minute they were drawing pictures of the swing sets and swimming pool at the motel I’d stayed in when I’d visited a year ago. But summer was the thing, she said. If she could make it until summer, her troubles would be over. Things would change then—she knew they would.

  And with a little help from me she could make it. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Dad.” That’s what she said. It nearly broke my heart. Sure I had to help her. I was glad to be even halfway in a position to help her. I had a job, didn’t I? Compared to her and everyone else in my family, I had it made. Compared to the rest, I lived on Easy Street.

  I sent the money she asked for. I sent money every time she asked. And then I told her I thought it’d be simpler if I just sent a sum of money, not a whole lot, but money even so, on the first of each month. It would be money she could count on, and it would be her money, no one else’s— hers and the kids’. That’s what I hoped for, anyway. I wished there was some way I could be sure the bastard who lived with her couldn’t get his hands on so much as an orange or a piece of bread that my money bought. But I couldn’t.

  I just had to go ahead and send the money and stop worrying about whether he’d soon be tucking into a plate of my eggs and biscuits.

  My mother and my daughter and my former wife. That’s three people on the payroll right there, not counting my brother. But my son needed money, too. After he graduated from high school, he packed his things, left his mother’s house, and went to a college back East. A college in New Hampshire, of all places. Who’s ever heard of New Hampshire? But he was the first kid in the family, on either side of the family, to even want to go to college, so everybody thought it was a good idea. I thought so, too, at first. How’d I know it was going to wind up costing me an arm and a leg? He borrowed left and right from the banks to keep himself going. He didn’t want to have to work a job and go to school at the same time. That’s what he said. And, sure, I guess I can understand it. In a way, I can even sympathize. Who likes to work? I don’t.

  But after he’d borrowed everything he could, everything in sight, including enough to finance a junior year in Germany, I had to begin sending him money, and a lot of it. When, finally, I said I couldn’t send any more, he wrote back and said if that was the case, if that was really the way I felt, he was going to deal drugs or else rob a bank—whatever he had to do to get money to live on. I’d be lucky if he wasn’t shot or sent to prison.

  I wrote back and said I’d changed my mind and I could send him a little more after all. What else could I do? I didn’t want his blood on my hands. I didn’t want to think of my kid being packed off to prison, or something even worse. I had plenty on my conscience as it was.

  That’s four people, right? Not counting my brother, who wasn’t a regular yet. I was going crazy with it. I worried night and day. I couldn’t sleep over it. I was paying out nearly as much money every month as I was bringing in. You don’t have to be a genius, or know anything about economics, to understand that this state of affairs couldn’t keep on. I had to get a loan to keep up my end of things. That was another monthly payment.

  So I started cutting back. I had to quit eating out, for instance. Since I lived alone, eating out was something I liked to do, but it became a thing of the past. And I had to watch myself when it came to thinking about movies. I couldn’t buy clothes or get my teeth fixed. The car was falling apart. I needed new shoes, but forget it.

  Once in a while I’d get fed up with it and write letters to all of them, threatening to change my name and telling them I was going to quit my job. I’d tell them I was planning a move to Australia. And the thing was, I was serious when I’d say that about Australia, even though I didn’t know the first thing about Australia. I just knew it was on the other side of the world, and that’s where I wanted to be.

  But when it came right down to it, none of them really believed I’d go to Australia. They had me, and they knew it. They knew I was desperate, and they were sorry and they said so. But they counted on it all blowing over before the first of the month, when I had to sit down and make out the checks.

  After one of my letters where I talked about moving to Australia, my mother wrote that she didn’t want to be a burden any longer. Just as soon as the swelling went down in her legs, she said, she was going out to look for work. She was seventy-five years old, but maybe she could go back to waitressing, she said. I wrote her back and told her not to be silly. I said I was glad I could help her. And I was. I was glad I could help. I just needed to win the lottery.

  My daughter knew Australia was just a way of saying to everybody that I’d had it. She knew I needed a break and something to cheer me up. So she wrote that she was going to leave her kids with somebody and take the cannery job when the season rolled around. She was young and strong, she said. She thought she could work the twelve-tofourteenhoura-day shifts, seven days a week, no problem. She’d just have to tell herself she could do it, get herself psyched up for it, and her body would listen. She just had to line up the right kind of babysitter. That’d be the big thing. It was going to require a special kind of sitter, seeing as how the hours would be long and the kids were hyper to begin with, because of all the Popsicles and Tootsie Rolls, M&M’s, and the like that they put away every day. It’s the stuff kids like to eat, right? Anyway, she thought she could find the right person if she kept looking. But she had to buy the boots and clothes for the work, and that’s where I could help.

  My son wrote that he was sorry for his part in things and thought he and I would both be better off if he ended it once and for all. For one thing, he’d discovered he was allergic to cocaine. It made his eyes stream and affected his breathing, he said. This meant he couldn’t test the drugs in the transactions he’d need to make. So, before it could even begin, his career as a drug dealer was over. No, he said, better a bullet in the temple and end it all right here. Or maybe hanging. That would save him the trouble of borrowing a gun. And save us the price of bullets. That’s actually what he said in his letter, if you can believe it. He enclosed a picture of himself that somebody had taken last summer when he was in the study-abroad program in Germany. He was standing under a big tree with thick limbs hanging down a few feet over his head. In the picture, he wasn’t smiling.

  My former wife didn’t have anything to say on the matter. She didn’t have to. She knew she’d get her money the first of each month, even if it had to come all the way from Sydney. If she didn’t get it, she just had to pick up the phone and call her lawyer.

  This is where things stood when my brother called one Sunday afternoon in early May. I had the windows open, and a nice breeze moved through the house. The radio was playing. The hillside behind the house was in bloom. But I began to sweat when I heard his voice on the line. I hadn’t heard from him since the dispute over the five hundred, so I couldn’t believe he was going to try and touch me for more money now. But I began to sweat anyway. He asked how things stood with me, and I launched into the payroll thing and all. I talked about oatmeal, cocaine, fish canneries, suicide, bank jobs, and how I couldn’t go to the movies or eat out. I said I had a hole in my shoe. I talked about the payments that went on and on to my former wife. He knew all about this, of course. He knew everything I was telling him.

  Still, he said he was sorry to hear it. I kept talking. It was his dime. But as he talked I started thinking, How are you going to pay for this call, Billy? Then it came to me that I was going to pay for it. It was only a matter of minutes, or seconds, until it was all decided.

  I looked out the window. The sky was blue, with a few white clouds in it. Some birds clung to a telephone wire. I wiped my face on my sleeve. I didn’t know what else I could say. So I suddenly stopped talking and just
stared out the window at the mountains, and waited. And that’s when my brother said, “I hate to ask you this, but—” When he said that, my heart did this sinking thing. And then he went ahead and asked.

  This time it was a thousand. A thousand! He was worse off than when he’d called that other time. He let me have some details. The bill collectors were at the door—the door! he said—and the windows rattled, the house shook, when they hammered with their fists. Blam, blam, blam, he said. There was no place to hide from them. His house was about to be pulled out from under him. “Help me, brother,” he said.

  Where was I going to raise a thousand dollars? I took a good grip on the receiver, turned away from the window, and said, “But you didn’t pay me back the last time you borrowed money. What about that?”

  “I didn’t?” he said, acting surprised. “I guess I thought I had. I wanted to, anyway. I tried to, so help me God.”

  “You were supposed to pay that money to Mom,” I said. “But you didn’t. I had to keep giving her money every month, same as always. There’s no end to it, Billy. Listen, I take one step forward and I go two steps back. I’m going under. You’re all going under, and you’re pulling me down with you.”

  “I paid her some of it,” he said. “I did pay her a little. Just for the record,” he said, “I paid her something.”

  “She said you gave her fifty dollars and that was all.”

  “No,” he said, “I gave her seventy-five. She forgot about the other twenty-five. I was over there one afternoon, and I gave her two tens and a five. I gave her some cash, and she just forgot about it. Her memory’s going. Look,” he said, “I promise I’ll be good for it this time, I swear to God. Add up what I still owe you and add it to this money here I’m trying to borrow, and I’ll send you a check. We’ll exchange checks. Hold on to my check for two months, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll be out of the woods in two months’ time. Then you’ll have your money. July ist, I promise, no later, and this time I can swear to it. We’re in the process of selling this little piece of property that Irmajean inherited a while back from her uncle. It’s as good as sold. The deal has closed. It’s just a question now of working out a couple of minor details and signing the papers. Plus, I’ve got this job lined up. It’s definite. I’ll have to drive fifty miles round trip every day, but that’s no problem—hell, no. I’d drive a hundred and fifty if I had to, and be glad to do it. I’m saying I’ll have money in the bank in two months’ time. You’ll get your money, all of it, by July ist, and you can count on it.”