Now here’s where you start to get to the point of his story. Because Claudel was wrong. He wasn’t lucky. Not lucky at all. He only thought he was lucky. He thought the world was giving him a ride, and it was beginning to look like a good ride, so he figured all he had to do was just lie back and enjoy the passing scenery. And up to now, he’d been right. But then all of a sudden the scenery changed, and the road got bumpy, and then he knew he wasn’t lucky.
But that didn’t mean his father had been right, that the world was a chiseler and you had to be a miser to live in it. No, because Claudel wasn’t unlucky either. He simply hadn’t learned enough yet to have a view of the world that explained to him what happened to him, what he at first had called being lucky and what later he called being unlucky. Because for a while he did call it that, being unlucky, and if you had known him at that time or had just met him in a bar, you’d have heard him naming his life that way day and night, holding his glass up to let a bit of light from the Budweiser sign float through while he told his sad tale of bad luck to anyone who’d listen.
He’d tell you how the trailer had caught fire and burned to the ground because Ginnie had left the stove on, and how his insurance couldn’t cover the loss so he was still paying off the damned mortgage to the bank. He and Ginnie had come home after a weekend down at York Beach, all sunburned and sandy from the beach and hungover from the good times they’d had the night before with some Canadians they’d run into at the motel bar, and when they pulled into the driveway, all there was next to it, where the trailer had been, was a sixty-eight-foot-long barbecue pit. The two of them just sat there in the car in their bathing suits and broke down and wept.
And after that Claudel would tell you how Ginnie had started running around with Howie Leeke, until everyone in town knew about it, except Claudel himself, of course, until one night he came into the Hawthorne House right after Howie had been there, and everybody started giving him a funny kind of grin, so he asked, “What the hell’s wrong, my fly unzipped or something?”
Freddie Hubbard, a buddy of his from the Public Service Company, said, “No, nothing’s wrong… It’s just that Howie Leeke’s been here and left … and he was telling stories again…”
“What kind of stories?” Claudel asked, thinking maybe one might be funny enough to repeat. He liked a good laugh as well as the next man, especially since his trailer burned down.
“Aw, you know,” Freddie said. “Stories about him … and Ginnie.”
Then all the people in the place sort of wiped their grins off and shifted in their seats and turned away, so Claudel knew what was happening, and what had been happening for a long time, probably ever since the trailer burned and he and Ginnie had moved into town and had taken the apartment over Knight’s Paint Store, which happened to be across the street from Howie’s pipefitting shop.
That’s when Claudel started drinking every night after work at the Hawthorne House, hanging out there right up to closing time, stumbling home drunk and cursing his bad luck. Which of course only seemed to get worse. A man can’t control his fate, but he does make his own luck. By calling it luck. But if he’s a smart man, he won’t call it luck at all. Of course Claudel didn’t know that then. He called it luck, bad luck. So every night of the week he’d sit there on a stool at the bar of the Hawthorne House, punching all the sad songs on the juke box, ordering beers and shots of Canadian Club over and over, until finally Gary the bartender would come over and say, “Hey, Claudel, it’s midnight. I gotta lock up the joint.”
Then he’d slide off the stool and head for the door, stumble down Main Street to Green Street, past the dark windows of the stores and restaurants and the few offices, till he came to Knight’s Paint Store. Up the stairs he’d go, unlock the door, lurch in darkness to the bed, where Ginnie lay sleeping or pretending to sleep. Then, yanking off his clothes, smelling of beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke, he’d pull on her shoulder and paw at her body, even though he’d be too drunk to be much of a man, until finally she would jump out of bed, mad and afraid and disgusted.
In a month Ginnie had left him and had moved in with Howie Leeke, who had left his second wife the previous spring. In six weeks Claudel had got himself fired from the Public Service Company for coming in late so many times, late and hungover. And mad. All the time mad. He had got to be irritating to people. When he wasn’t complaining about his bad luck, he was growling at people who looked, to him, to be having a run of good luck, like Freddie Hubbard, who had been his best friend since grade school. Freddie came into work one morning and told Claudel how he’d been promoted to foreman, and Claudel just sneered at him and said it was probably because they were afraid he’d fall off a pole if they didn’t get him back down on the ground. “Keep lousing things up,” he told his old friend as he walked off, “and they’ll stick you in the front office.”
People would say to him, “Hey, Claudel, how’re you doing?” and he’d grump something like, “Depends on who I’m doing it to,” or some other remark that was designed mainly to stop the conversation dead. It was like falling into a well that didn’t seem to have a bottom. There is an end to a person’s self, though, and you can reach it, but only if you’re stupid enough or smart enough to try hard for a long, long time. And that’s precisely what Claudel did, for over a year, and eventually he hit the bottom of that well.
4
It happened one night at the Hawthorne House. He was living upstairs in a rented room by then, because after he’d got fired from the Public Service Company, he’d started collecting unemployment, and the bank had repossessed most of the furniture Ginnie had left him, the color TV and the bedroom suite and the couch. Besides, he wasn’t able to pay the rent for the place over Knight’s Paint Store anymore, so it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Maybe the only thing he could do. He’d go for days without shaving, letting his clothes get dirty and rumpled, eating Twinkies and potato chips for breakfast and cold canned beans for supper, getting himself drunk on boilermakers usually by three in the afternoon, and then sitting around in the Hawthorne House till closing time. He used to sit in one of the booths, and whenever someone would join him, because of having been a friend from the old days when, as Claudel still thought, his luck had been running good, he’d tell him over again how it all started with the fire and then his troubles with Ginnie and Howie Leeke, and how the Public Service Company had screwed him, probably because of Freddie Hubbard, who hated him, he was sure, and on and on into the night, until finally the friend would yawn and say he had to get home or someplace, and he’d leave, and Claudel wouldn’t see him again for months, because the man would have been able to avoid him.