“They give you binoculars,” the man said. “I couldn’t get mine to focus.”
“You just track them while they soar around?”
The man shrugged. “The whole thing was my wife’s idea. To get me out of the house.”
“Yeah,” Dannie said. “I don’t have anything to get me out of the house either.”
“Turns out there’s not much worth doing. There’s not much out here.”
The man was softening a bit. “I dread the mornings,” he said. “The whole day out ahead of me, knowing I’m going to drift around.”
Dannie got out some trail mix and the old man didn’t want any. He didn’t want water, either. Dannie couldn’t see the condo complex at all.
“It’s not the mornings for me,” she told the old man. “It’s the nights.”
HISTORY OF ARN III
He couldn’t get any of the cushy factory jobs, so he ended up doing odd crap nobody else wanted to do. He never kept these jobs long. He always felt like someone was gaining on him. You didn’t get off scot-free from smacking your legal guardian in the head with an aluminum bat. It wasn’t a live-and-let-live deal. It wasn’t boys being boys. If Arn stayed put too long, his past would catch up with him.
Just inside Oregon’s border he worked at a mill that produced wooden arrows. The arrows looked exactly like the arrow that kid had shot at Arn in middle school. The mill had a room on the side of it where all the sawdust collected, and once a week someone had to put on a mask and go in there and shovel the whole thing out, filling dozens of tall canvas bags. This was one of the tasks that fell to Arn. Sawdust came out of his nose along with his snot. It came out of his ears when he swabbed them out. Arn’s boss would call him into the office, where he would preface whatever complaint he had with an assurance that he was not jumping Arn’s shit. “Now, I’m not jumping your shit,” he would always say. “I don’t want you to think I’m jumping your shit.” There was a woman who did quality control at the mill and one Monday she came in late, looking devastated. At break time she told everyone she’d gone on a bear hunt and three dogs had given their lives to protect her.
In Northern California, Arn worked at a winery. He got picked up in a van every morning. He did not participate in The Crush, which he’d heard so much about. The winery was small-time, a couple years old, owned by two brothers who were learning as they went. Arn’s sole responsibility, for weeks, was to open bottles of wine and dump them. Thousands of bottles, poured into a steel tub and lost down a drain. Arn never knew what was wrong with the wine, whether it was tainted in some hazardous way or merely tasted funny. When all of it was gone, Arn weeded and painted.
He rented a cheap, clean studio apartment that happened to be smack next to a high school, and this high school was a corral for countless numbers of the most alluring girls Arn had ever seen. The Spanish tutors up in Oregon were homely compared to these Lodi girls. These girls had breeze-blown bangs and movie-star sunglasses and tiny tops held in place by proud little breasts that didn’t bounce an inch when the girls walked across the parking lot. The girls who were seniors all went across the street for lunch, to a wholesome deli with tables outside in the sun. Arn started taking his lunch break at the same time they took theirs, started driving into town from the winery every day in one of the company vans to grab a table and eat sandwiches full of pesto and sprouts. He had no problem talking to the girls. He talked to one after the next after the next and managed to sleep with four of them. He would tell the girls, vaguely, that he worked in the wine industry, that he wasn’t from around here. There were no other men at this deli. It was like Arn had crashed on an uncharted island. Sometimes he felt like he was being tricked, like a mouse gorging himself on free cheese. He managed to keep himself in Lodi until summer, before losing his nerve and hopping on the overnight train.
In Fresno, Arn found work at an outfit that produced diploma frames. The place was full of lesbians, and a lot of them prided themselves on having been fired from other jobs because of their lifestyles. Arn’s task was to cut the backboards of the frames down to size. He had his own area and could set it up as he chose. When he cut a board too small or large, no one bitched. They threw it out and tried another. Arn cut boards and cut boards and ate the free food the company was always ordering for lunch.
He met a woman in Fresno, a bartender. This woman let Arn help out at her bar on weekend nights, extra money for Arn. Each night, after the bar closed, the people who worked there held a low-grade party at someone’s apartment. They would drink a little and do some drugs and eventually pair off and go home. At one of these parties, Arn drank a bunch and went out into the yard and looked into the sky and it struck him for the first time that he might be a murderer. He’d never let himself consider this possibility — hadn’t been ready to, he guessed. He’d hit the man with a blunt metal object and the man might very well not have survived. The man had not recovered. They’d rushed him to the hospital and tried everything to save him, but it had been too late. The mother and son were alone now, more miserable than before. The mother and son hated Arn. Arn’s case wasn’t getting buried by fresher offenses. It was still right at the top. A murderer. Arn’s face was probably on posters back in Washington. He was on a special page of the national fugitive database reserved for real scumbags, his face among the faces of rapists and such.
In Nevada, Arn spent his days standing on a platform, ears plugged and knees rattling, feeding strips of scrap plastic into a grater.
In Phoenix, at a mine supply, he stood inside a huge warehouse and instead of cleaning and organizing the place, as he was being paid to, he threw a golf ball back and forth with a bald man who ate a lot of snack cakes and did calisthenics. No one ever checked on the two of them. Arn realized his attitude toward work had changed. He used to want to impress people, to impress himself, and now he only wanted to reach the end of another day and another week and get his check. He was an adult, for better or worse. He took naps on piles of tire tubes. Sometimes he swept. The building was so long that when Arn threw the golf ball it would bounce three or four times before it reached the bald man.
Arn’s second day in Tucson, he went into a coffee shop to look at want ads and struck up a conversation with an Asian lady. The lady was much older than Arn, but you could only tell that by her eyes. He asked her to meet him for a movie later and she readily agreed. Arn was glad he’d bothered to put on a decent shirt. The lady left the coffee shop and Arn switched to a different section of the newspaper, the one with the movie times. There was a theater right downtown, about two blocks from where Arn was sitting, and this was good because he didn’t want this woman to know that he didn’t have a car. That was a revelation that could wait.
The Asian lady met Arn for the movie and later in the week for dinner and another day they went for a long walk in a park. The Asian lady did not seem intent on enjoying these dates, was not stymied with the question of whether she and Arn were connecting. She was going on the dates, it seemed, because she knew it was healthy to go on dates and foolish to turn them down. When Arn had been acquainted with her for two weeks he asked her if he could stay with her until he found his own place and she agreed to this.
The Asian lady had plum streaks in her hair and she ate a lot of bagels and did a lot of sit-ups. She had no family in this country. She had graduated from business school at University of Arizona and had applied for a loan to open a sunglasses shop and the loan had been approved. She was about to open a second shop. She didn’t say much to Arn, but when she touched him she did so gently, like he was precious. She never said a word about his lack of an automobile. She said nothing about the trouble he was having finding a job. She didn’t understand the jokes Arn made, seemed to have no use for them.