Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

  “Billy, I love you,” I said. “But I’ve got a load to carry. I’m carrying a very heavy load these days, in case you didn’t know.”

  “That’s why I won’t let you dowri on this,” he said. “You have my word of honor. You can trust me on this absolutely. I promise you my check will be good in two months, no later. Two months is all I’m asking for. Brother, I don’t know where else to turn. You’re my last hope.”

  I did it, sure. To my surprise, I still had some credit with the bank, so I borrowed the money, and I sent it to him. Our checks crossed in the mail. I stuck a thumbtack through his check and put it up on the kitchen wall next to the calendar and the picture of my son standing under that tree. And then I waited.

  I kept waiting. My brother wrote and asked me not to cash the check on the day we’d agreed to. Please wait a while longer is what he said. Some things had come up. The job he’d been promised had fallen through at the last minute. That was one thing that came up. And that little piece of property belonging to his wife hadn’t sold after all. At the last minute, she’d had a change of heart about selling it. It had been in her family for generations. What could he do? It was her land, and she wouldn’t listen to reason, he said.

  My daughter telephoned around this time to say that somebody had broken into her trailer and ripped her off. Everything in the trailer. Every stick of furniture was gone when she came home from work after her first night at the cannery. There wasn’t even a chair left for her to sit down on. Her bed had been stolen, too. They were going to have to sleep on the floor like Gypsies, she said.

  “Where was what’s-his-name when this happened?” I said.

  She said he’d been out looking for work earlier in the day. She guessed he was with friends. Actually, she didn’t know his whereabouts at the time of the crime, or even right now, for that matter. “I hope he’s at the bottom of the river,” she said. The kids had been with the sitter when the ripoff happened. But, anyway, if she could just borrow enough from me to buy some secondhand furniture she’d pay me back, she said, when she got her first check. If she had some money from me before the end of the week—I could wire it, maybe—she could pick up some essentials. “Somebody’s violated my space,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been raped.”

  My son wrote from New Hampshire that it was essential he go back to Europe. His life hung in the balance, he said. He was graduating at the end of summer session, but he couldn’t stand to live in America a day longer after that. This was a materialist society, and he simply couldn’t take it anymore.

  People over here, in the U.S., couldn’t hold a conversation unless money figured in it some way, and he was sick of it. He wasn’t a Yuppie, and didn’t want to become a Yuppie. That wasn’t his thing. He’d get out of my hair, he said, if he could just borrow enough from me, this one last time, to buy a ticket to Germany.

  I didn’t hear anything from my former wife. I didn’t have to. We both knew how things stood there.

  My mother wrote that she was having to do without support hose and wasn’t able to have her hair tinted.

  She’d thought this would be the year she could put some money back for the rainy days ahead, but it wasn’t working out that way. She could see it wasn’t in the cards. “How are you?” she wanted to know.

  “How’s everybody else? I hope you’re okay.”

  I put more checks in the mail. Then I held my breath and waited.

  While I was waiting, I had this dream one night. Two dreams, really. I dreamt them on the same night.

  In the first dream, my dad was alive once more, and he was giving me a ride on his shoulders. I was this little kid, maybe five or six years old. Get up here, he said, and he took me by the hands and swung me onto his shoulders. I was high off the ground, but I wasn’t afraid. He was holding on to me. We were holding on to each other. Then he began to move down the sidewalk. I brought my hands up from his shoulders and put them around his forehead. Don’t muss my hair, he said. You can let go, he said, I’ve got you. You won’t fall. When he said that, I became aware of the strong grip of his hands around my ankles. Then I did let go. I turned loose and held my arms out on either side of me. I kept them out there like that for balance. My dad went on walking while I rode on his shoulders. I pretended he was an elephant. I don’t know where we were going. Maybe we were going to the store, or else, to the park so he could push me in the swing.

  I woke up then, got out of bed, and used the bathroom. It was starting to get light out, and it was only an hour or so until I had to get up. I thought about making coffee and getting dressed. But then I decided to go back to bed. I didn’t plan to sleep, though. I thought I’d just lie there for a while with my hands behind my neck and watch it turn light out and maybe think about my dad a little, since I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. He just wasn’t a part of my life any longer, waking or sleeping. Anyway, I got back in bed. But it couldn’t have been more than a minute before I fell asleep once more, and when I did I got into this other dream. My former wife was in it, though she wasn’t my former wife in the dream.

  She was still my wife. My kids were in it, too. They were little, and they were eating potato chips. In my dream, I thought I could smell the potato chips and hear them being eaten. We were on a blanket, and we were close to some water. There was a sense of satisfaction and well-being in the dream. Then, suddenly, I found myself in the company of some other people—people I didn’t know—and the next thing that happened was that I was kicking the window out of my son’s car and threatening his life, as I did once, a long time ago. He was inside the car as my shoe smashed through the glass. That’s when my eyes flew open, and I woke up. The alarm was going off. I reached over and pushed the switch and lay there for a few minutes more, my heart racing. In the second dream, somebody had offered me some whiskey, and I drank it. Drinking that whiskey was the thing that scared me. That was the worst thing that could have happened. That was rock bottom. Compared to that, everything else was a picnic. I lay there for a minute longer, trying to calm down. Then I got up.

  I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table in front of the window. I pushed my cup back and forth in little circles on the table and began to think seriously about Australia again. And then, all of a sudden, I could imagine how it must have sounded to my family when I’d threatened them with a move to Australia. They would have been shocked at first, and even a little scared. Then, because they knew me, they’d probably started laughing. Now, thinking about their laughter, I had to laugh, too. Ha, ha, ha. That was exactly the sound I made there at the table—ha, ha, ha-as if I’d read somewhere how to laugh.

  What was it I planned to do in Australia, anyway? The truth was, I wouldn’t be going there any more than I’d be going to Timbuktu, the moon, or the North Pole. Hell, I didn’t want to go to Australia. But once I understood this, once I understood I wouldn’t be going there—or anywhere else, for that matter—I began to feel better. I lit another cigarette and poured some more coffee. There wasn’t any milk for the coffee, but I didn’t care. I could skip having milk in my coffee for a day and it wouldn’t kill me. Pretty soon I packed the lunch and filled the thermos and put the thermos in the lunch pail. Then I went outside.

  It was a fine morning. The sun lay over the mountains behind the town, and a flock of birds was moving from one part of the valley to another. I didn’t bother to lock the door. I remembered what had happened to my daughter, but decided I didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway. There was nothing in the house I couldn’t live without. I had the TV, but I was sick of watching TV. They’d be doing me a favor if they broke in and took it off my hands.

  I felt pretty good, all things considered, and I decided to walk to work. It wasn’t all that far, and I had time to spare. I’d save a little gas, sure, but that wasn’t the main consideration. It was summer, after all, and before long summer would be over. Summer, I couldn’t help thinking, had been the time everybody’s luck had been going to change.

/>   I started walking alongside the road, and it was then, for some reason, I began to think about my son. I wished him well, wherever he was. If he’d made it back to Germany by now—and he should have—I hoped he was happy. He hadn’t written yet to give me his address, but I was sure I’d hear something before long. And my daughter, God love her and keep her. I hoped she was doing okay. I decided to write her a letter that evening and tell her I was rooting for her. My mother was alive and more or less in good health, and I felt lucky there, too. If all went well, I’d have her for several more years.

  Birds were calling, and some cars passed me on the highway. Good luck to you, too, brother, I thought. I hope your ship comes in. Pay me back when you get it. And my former wife, the woman I used to love so much. She was alive, and she was well, too—so far as I knew, anyway. I wished her happiness. When all was said and done, I decided things could be a lot worse. Just now, of course, things were hard for everyone. People’s luck had gone south on them was all. But things were bound to change soon. Things would pick up in the fall maybe. There was lots to hope for.

  I kept on walking. Then I began to whistle. I felt I had the right to whistle if I wanted to. I let my arms swing as I walked. But the lunch pail kept throwing me off balance. I had sandwiches, an apple, and some cookies in there, not to mention the thermos. I stopped in front of Smitty’s, an old cafe that had gravel in the parking area and boards over the windows. The place had been boarded up for as long as I could remember. I decided to put the lunch pail down for a minute. I did that, and then I raised my arms-raised them up level with my shoulders. I was standing there like that, like a goof, when somebody tooted a car horn and pulled off the highway into the parking area. I picked up my lunch pail and went over to the car. It was a guy I knew from work whose name was George. He reached over and opened the door on the passenger’s side. “Hey, get in, buddy,” he said.

  “Hello, George,” I said. I got in and shut the door, and the car sped off, throwing gravel from under the tires.

  “I saw you,” George said. “Yeah, I did, I saw you. You’re in training for something, but I don’t know what.” He looked at me and then looked at the road again. He was going fast. “You always walk down the road with your arms out like that?” He laughed—ha, ha, ha—and stepped on the gas.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “It depends, I guess. Actually, I was standing,” I said. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat.

  “So what’s new?” George said. He put a cigar in his mouth, but he didn’t light it.

  “Nothing’s new,” I said. “What’s new with you?”

  George shrugged. Then he grinned. He was going very fast now.

  Wind buffeted the car and whistled by outside the windows. He was driving as if we were late for work.

  But we weren’t late. We had lots of time, and I told him so.

  Nevertheless, he cranked it up. We passed the turnoff and kept going. We were moving by then, heading straight toward the mountains. He took the cigar out of his mouth and put it in his shirt pocket. “I borrowed some money and had this baby overhauled,” he said. Then he said he wanted me to see something. He punched it and gave it everything he could. I fastened my seat belt and held on.

  “Go,” I said. “What are you waiting for, George?” And that’s when we really flew. Wind howled outside the windows. He had it floored, and we were going flat out. We streaked down that road in his big unpaid-for car.

  Blackbird Pie

  I was in my room one night when I heard something in the corridor. I looked up from my work and saw an envelope slide under the door. It was a thick envelope, but not so thick it couldn’t be pushed under the door. My name was written on the envelope, and what was inside purported to be a letter from my wife.

  I say “purported” because even though the grievances could only have come from someone who’d spent twenty-three years observing me on an intimate, day-to-day basis, the charges were outrageous and completely out of keeping with my wife’s character. Most important, however, the handwriting was not my wife’s handwriting. But if it wasn’t her handwriting, then whose was it?

  I wish now I’d kept the letter, so I could reproduce it down to the last comma, the last uncharitable exclamation point. The tone is what I’m talking about now, not just the content. But I didn’t keep it, I’m sorry to say. I lost it, or else misplaced it. Later, after the sorry business I’m about to relate, I was cleaning out my desk and may have accidentally thrown it away—which is uncharacteristic of me, since I usually don’t throw anything away.

  In any case, I have a good memory. I can recall every word of what I read. My memory is such that I used to win prizes in school because of my ability to remember names and dates, inventions, battles, treaties, alliances, and the like. I always scored highest on factual tests, and in later years, in the “real world,” as it’s called, my memory stood me in good stead. For instance, if I were asked right now to give the details of the Council of Trent or the Treaty of Utrecht, or to talk about Carthage, that city razed by the Romans after Hannibal’s defeat (the Roman soldiers plowed salt into the ground so that Carthage could never be called Carthage again), I could do so. If called upon to talk about the Seven Years’ War, the Thirty Years’, or the Hundred Years’ War, or simply the First Silesian War, I could hold forth with the greatest enthusiasm and confidence. Ask me anything about the Tartars, the Renaissance popes, or the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Thermopylae, Shilo, or the Maxim gun. Easy. Tannenberg? Simple as blackbird pie.

  The famous four and twenty that were set before the king. At Agincourt, English longbows carried the day. And here’s something else. Everyone has heard of the Battle of Lepanto, the last great sea battle fought in ships powered by galley slaves. This fracas took place in 1571 in the eastern Mediterranean, when the combined naval forces of the Christian nations of Europe turned back the Arab hordes under the infamous All Muezzin Zade, a man who was fond of personally cutting off the noses of his prisoners before calling in the executioners. But does anyone remember that Cervantes was involved in this affair and had his left hand lopped off in the battle? Something else. The combined French and Russian losses in one day at Borodino were seventy-five thousand men—the equivalent in fatalities of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every three minutes from breakfast to sundown. Kutuzov pulled his forces back toward Moscow. Napoleon drew breath, marshaled his troops, and continued his advance. He entered the downtown area of Moscow, where he stayed for a month waiting for Kutuzov, who never showed his face again. The Russian generalissimo was waiting for snow and ice, for Napoleon to begin his retreat to France.

  Things stick in my head. I remember. So when I say I can recreate the letter—the portion that I read, which catalogues the charges against me—I mean what I say.

  In part, the letter went as follows:

  Dear,

  Things are not good. Things, in fact, are bad. Things have gone from bad to worse. And you know what I’m talking about. We’ve come to the end of the line. It’s over with us. Still, I find myself wishing we could have talked about it.

  It’s been such a long time now since we’ve talked. I mean really talked. Even after we were married we used to talk and talk, exchanging news and ideas. When the children were little, or even after they were more grown-up, we still found time to talk. It was more difficult then, naturally, but we managed, we found time. We made time. We’d have to wait until after they were asleep, or else when they were playing outside, or with a sitter. But we managed.

  Sometimes we’d engage a sitter just so we could talk. On occasion we talked the night away, talked until the sun came up. Well. Things happen, I know. Things change. Bill had that trouble with the police, and Linda found herself pregnant, etc. Our quiet time together flew out the window. And gradually your responsibilities backed up on you. Your work became more important, and our time together was squeezed out. Then, once the children left home, our time for talking was back. We had each other agai
n, only we had less and less to talk about. “It happens,” I can hear some wise man saying. And he’s right. It happens. But it happened to us. In any case, no blame. No blame. That’s not what this letter is about. I want to talk about us. I want to talk about now. The time has come, you see, to admit that the impossible has happened. To cry Uncle. To beg off. To—I read this far and stopped. Something was wrong. Something was fishy in Denmark. The sentiments expressed in the letter may have belonged to my wife. (Maybe they did. Say they did, grant that the sentiments expressed were hers.) But the handwriting was not her handwriting. And I ought to know. I consider myself an expert in this matter of her handwriting. And yet if it wasn’t her handwriting, who on earth had written these lines?

  I should say a little something about ourselves and our life here. During the time I’m writing about we were living in a house we’d taken for the summer. I’d just recovered from an illness that had set me back in most things I’d hoped to accomplish that spring. We were surrounded on three sides by meadows, birch woods, and some low, rolling hills—a “territorial view,” as the realtor had called it when he described it to us over the phone. In front of the house was a lawn that had grown shaggy, owing to lack of interest on my part, and a long graveled drive that led to the road. Behind the road we could see the distant peaks of mountains. Thus the phrase “territorial view”—having to do with a vista appreciated only at a distance.