“In’t this your lunchtime?” Rick squinted up through the bare, crooked branches at the sky above the courtyard.
“Yes, but—” Paul’s t-shirt was already stuck to his back.
“You’re so serious this morning,” Rick said, still without looking at him. “Come take a look at that sky.”
“Sorry?”
Rick patted the bench beside him. “Have a seat, Paul. Let’s just take a moment.”
Paul glanced at the blank amber gaze of the wide windows all around him, then he slowly lowered himself onto the bench next to Rick.
“Now just set and take a look at that sky,” said Rick. “In’t that a beauty?”
Paul sat stiffly on the bench. The heat was reflected off the windows and the deck; it beat down from the sky. He felt sweat trickling along his sideburns and down the back of his neck. Still, he lifted his eyes up through the dying branches of the oak. Even if Nolene hadn’t told him about the oak wilt, Paul would have noticed that something was wrong with the tree; most of its leaves had turned a mottled brown and fallen off. Its branches seemed contorted as if in pain. Every week, a Hispanic guy with a leaf blower strapped to his back came and blasted away the dead leaves; even in the depths of his cube, Paul could hear the whine of the machine. Beyond the tree, beyond the sharp roofline of the building, there was nothing remotely attractive about the sky, which was the whitish glare of high summer in Texas, with a blazing blot of sun. Paul blinked up through the branches painfully, grateful only that the sheer oppressive weight of the heat had stopped his trembling. What the hell am I looking at? he wanted to say.
The moment extended itself almost beyond Paul’s endurance. He glanced sidelong at Rick. Not only was his boss looking up at the sky with the wide-eyed wonder of a child at a planetarium — his kinetic eyebrows at rest for once — but there wasn’t a drop of sweat on him. He could have been sitting in a snow bank.
I can’t stand it, thought Paul. He could feel his hands begin to shake again.
“Welp,” barked Rick, slapping his thighs and sitting upright, folding himself nearly in two, “sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Back to work.”
He shot to his feet and started across the deck through the litter of dead leaves.
“Um, Rick!” cried Paul, heaving up from the bench through the viscid air. “I need—”
Rick stopped and pivoted on the ball of his foot, grinding that indestructible price tag against the redwood planking. His eyebrows shot up.
“—a raise?” Paul said, sounding much less certain about it than he wanted to.
Rick’s eyebrows shot up even higher. It’s now or never, Paul thought, I’ll never work up the nerve again.
“It’s just that the temp agency sent me here as a typist, okay?” He heard his voice rising in pitch the way his students’ used to when they were pleading with him about their grades, and it disgusted him. “But you’ve been working me as a tech writer? And I think. . well, it’s just. . I was wondering. .”
That’s it, I’ve blown it again, he thought. I should have kept my big mouth shut. He’s going to fire me and get another temp from the agency. Fucked again.
“Way-ul, you’re right, goddammit.” Rick turned and started up the steps. “Let’s go in and work it out with the personnel honchos. But when you’re right, you’re right.”
“I’m sorry?” Paul could scarcely breathe.
“I say, you’re right, son.” Rick looked down from the walkway. “I’ll have to clear it with Eli, but that won’t be a problem.”
“Uh. . great!” Paul realized he was standing with his palm on top of his head, and he snatched it off.
“Don’t look so dang surprised, Paul. You been doing a terrific job, and you know what the man says: Good things come to them that toot their own horn. Now let’s go in and get Nolene started on the paperwork.”
Suddenly the air seemed cooler, and the tree overhead less decayed. The sun shone with a mellower light. It was as if the Time Traveller had found the saddle again on the Time Machine, and the sky was wheeling backwards, away from the awful silence and the dying sun and the flopping thing on the beach, back towards the good life in his comfortable study centuries before. Paul found his feet at last and dashed up the stairs after Rick, and Rick held the door for him as they went in.
FIVE
ALL OF LAMAR, TEXAS, is divided into three parts. There are the musicians, slackers, aging hippies, computer entrepreneurs, and academics in the arboreal old city north of the river; the Republican, Texas two-stepping, cowboy boot — wearing, SUV-driving Baptist middle managers in the sun-blasted suburban prairies south of the river; and the Hispanic and African-American gardeners, nurses, fast-food workers, and day laborers crowded into the crumbling streets east of the interstate, among the taquerias and truck depots and tank farms. The rentier class, living off the productivity and consumer spending of the low-landers, have their own enclave in the hill country west of the river, a separate municipality called Westhill that technically isn’t even part of Lamar. They live along picturesquely winding roads protected by a savagely enforced sign ordinance, where only the silhouettes of their houses — vast, gaudy boxes with giant plate-glass windows and enormous air-conditioning bills — rise out of groves of fragrant juniper and stands of tough old live oaks, serrating the ridgelines like teeth.
This, at any rate, was how Paul described Lamar to himself; he called it his Texas Theory of Surplus Value. This reading of the city was a byproduct of his self-laceration. By rights he should have started his residency in Texas in the part of town he called Groovy Lamar, the genteelly shabby neighborhoods of bohemian coffee shops and organic groceries around the university, where he could have walked to work at Longhorn State every day past the pierced and dreadlocked homeless kids on the Strip across from campus. Instead, his academic career in ruins, he had moved into a comfortable, forty-year-old suburban ranch house down among the buffet restaurants and propane dealerships south of the river. Today, as he lurched home through his old neighborhood in his hot, farting little automobile, bumper-to-bumper from stoplight to stoplight on South Austin Avenue, he recalled that his chief consolation when he had lived here, in south Lamar, had been that at least he wasn’t living with the no-hopers across the interstate. Which was, of course, where he lived now.
Still, not even the blistering heat and the SUV fumes and the staccato rattling of his car could ruin his good mood. Even TxDoGS could move quickly when it wanted to, and by the end of the day, all the paperwork for Paul’s raise had been filed, and all the appropriate signatures — Rick’s, Eli’s, some woman’s in Human Resources — had been obtained. Paul had floated all afternoon. Inspired by Rick’s magnanimity to do some actual work, he had photocopied a stack of the latest draft of the RFP for the maintenance managers’ meeting tomorrow, and he dove into the deeps of Microsoft Word to see if he could come up with a watermark. He e-mailed Erika, the pert young woman at the temp agency who had placed him at TxDoGS, to ask when he was going to see the raise in his paycheck. Indeed, creeping forward in his car through rush-hour traffic in his t-shirt, smelling his own sweat, he daydreamed about the extra $120 a week he was going to make. That was almost another $500 a month! Almost a rent payment! Even better, Rick, on his own initiative, had asked that the raise be made retroactive for a month. Human Resources had balked at that, but Rick had managed to get Paul at least a retroactive week at the new, $ll-an-hour rate. That meant, with his next paycheck, an extra $240 right off the bat! Rick was a saint!