Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (3 page)

This is how the world is starting to look when we finish the last of Seventeen’s beer, dusk settling on the water, which seems to whirl in a slow eddy that spins the boats and ricochets the stars. After Seventeen takes us out for cheeseburgers and doesn’t even squawk when Louisa uses about forty of those little packs of ketchup, ripping them open with her teeth and shooting the contents in jags that scribble her with red, the three of us end up, where else, at the trailer, where Louisa, despite her happiness or maybe sated with it, falls on the sofa and commences snoring like a man. In my mother’s bedroom Seventeen says,
Now you gotta let me see the rest of that snake
, and when I roll up my sleeve he starts to improvise his murmurs
. . Let’s see if you got any other secret pitchers. .
and I show him it all to prove there’s no more pictures.

Let me say flat-out that, despite these promising overtures, sex with Seventeen is not a memorable event. The alcohol makes his athleticism sloppy, and when he touches me he’s wide on all his marks. Sure you could heap some of the blame on me, but the woman is generally not held accountable once she’s tilted off the upright. And that’s not laziness but a female way of lending grace: you’ve got to give these guys control of one thing when everything else about their lives is veering off its course, the one thing they think is most important, the one thing they think’ll turn them into men.

What I’m trying to explain is why I’m not crestfallen in the morning when I discover Number Seventeen is gone. Only for a moment does his vanishing come as a surprise, until I remember that sometime during his examination of my marked and unmarked skin he told me that he’d have to be at a roofing job by six. In fact when I first wake up I think I’m lying in a strange motel until I realize that it’s just my mother’s bedroom with its Johnny Carson drapes.

And just like in a cheap motel there’s this loud thump-crash-thumping coming from the other rooms, where I find Louisa romping around with Seventeen’s beast, who’s still chained to the tire that he’s dragging across my mother’s rug. Already they’ve broken one wing off the wingback chair, and now he puts his paw right through a sofa cushion as though he were stepping into a bucket. Hanging from his teeth the dog’s got some kind of translucent seaweed that I finally realize is Louisa’s rainhat.

“What’s going on here?” I scream, but Louisa’s confused that I could be angry on such a joyful morning. “I think that boy left this nice dog for me.” And damned if she’s not right: on the counter there’s a note that reads,
Didn’t want to tell you I am married, etc. Wife has allergies and wanted me to put the dog down yesterday, so maybe it was Red’s good luck that I ran into you and your sister, who seems like she could use a hound like him
. Spelling is not Seventeen’s best subject; actually the note reads, “I am marred, ect.”
I am marred?
And I slap myself when I finally get it — should have known he was married. Said his mother was dead and yet that T-shirt reeked of laundry soap.

I crumple the note and yell for Louisa to throw herself between the dog and the knickknack shelf.

“What’s the matter?” Louisa says, too late, as a china lighthouse crashes. “I love this dog.” She drapes her body along his length and squeezes his ribs, which causes the dog to spread his legs and discharge a yellow stream.

Too late for either of us to go to work, I call us in sick while Louisa lies on the sofa holding a block of frozen peas to her head while Red laps from the toilet. “I have a
hangover
,” Louisa moans, doling out the word like it’s a million bucks. Before noon the toilet’s dry and Red is hankering for out, so we take him down to the vacant lot. First I have to take a hacksaw to his chain to cut the tire free, and then Louisa uses a plastic jump rope as a leash, on the end of which he strains and wheezes. Louisa bellows,
Hold on, boy!
as we zigzag down the street.

As soon as we get there and she lets go, Red’s bolting across the wasteland like a streak, the spiky late summer wildflowers still in bloom but what does the dog care about that kind of beauty as he tramples it underfoot. Louisa follows in hot pursuit, and soon the two of them are leaping through the field while I hang back at the edge of the street.

“What are you waiting for?” she yells. “Mummy’ll be home soon.”

Now Red stops to look back at me, his dark eyes flashing, one rear paw scratching up some rocks. I think it’s me he wants, but when I step forward his hackle-hair rises. And oh, how these bad boys can snarl.

No, not me, as he trots off in the wake of my sister’s dust with a whimper that is musical and soft. And damned if I don’t know that trick, how they’ll sing you a schmoozey song before they break your heart like a china plate.

But it’s no use trying to warn her; she would just think I was trying to keep him for my own private thrill. The thrill of being smashed into and crashing, when he knocks her down and they go rolling through the weeds.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Arnie’s mother said more than once on the drive out, “Vegas was no place for a child.” They’d gone to Las Vegas because of the last guy, and now the new guy thought he could line up work on a salmon fishing boat, which was why they were driving to a place on the Washington coast that his mother kept calling
the end of the earth
. At least one good thing about this place, Arnie figured, would be that if his mother took it into her head to move any farther west they’d have to set sail for China. And his mother usually didn’t go in for Chinese guys.

The new guy had been an abrupt transaction. This morning, which was now yesterday morning, Arnie was woken by the crinkling sound of his mother putting his clothes into plastic grocery bags. “You can bring one toy,” she said, and he chose a flying lizard that transformed into an attack spaceship. But when she put the bags in the hatchback of their old Datsun, she saw he’d also thrown his fishing pole in.

“I said one toy,” she’d objected. “We still have to fit Jay’s tools and the TV.” But he’d argued that a fishing pole was not the same thing as a toy, and the new guy intervened on his behalf, assuring her that the fishing pole might come in handy.

“Lotta fish in that ocean,” he said. “Lotta salmon in those creeks.” Arnie knew the new guy’s name was Jay, but the old guy’s name had been Ray and Arnie was afraid of mixing them up. Like the lizard and the attack ship, they were mostly interchangeable: same body — long-armed, short, and barrel-chested — but with different heads. Over the years, the guys stayed the same age while his mother got older. In this way they were the one constant she maintained.

The new guy had a beard and he drove, their Datsun blowing blue smoke out the back. From the back seat, Arnie saw the Sierras swirling away in a haze of blue mist. The new guy called Arnie “Little Man.”

“Yo, Little Man back there, fish me up another pack of cigs.”

It was morning when they left, and it was the next morning but earlier still when the Datsun sputtered up the coastal range and finally glided down its westward edge, exiting the firs that closed over the road just as the first light silvered the edges of the bay. Giant brown creatures, standing chest-high in the marsh grass, stared at them as they drove by.

“Elk,” said the new guy. “Ain’t that something.” Arnie’s mother was sleeping, slumped against where the window handle would have been if it hadn’t broken off. There were dozens of elk, chewing thoughtfully, whisking their tails to reveal their white rumps.

“Hey, whose idea was this?” the new guy said, reaching back between the seats to muss up Arnie’s hair.

When the road finally ran out underneath them, they checked into a motel, where Arnie’s mother stumbled into bed without ever fully waking. The new guy snored like a car ignition trying to catch, holding out the possibility of something about to happen. Which might not ever happen. For a long while Arnie lay on his own bed and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. There was too much bed and it made him feel exposed, as if he were camped out on the desert.

Actually, he’d liked living in the desert, how clean it made him feel. Instead of a lawn they had a whole yard full of white rocks. But in Las Vegas he had missed water, real water and not the fake-o reservoirs stocked with stupid placid perch. He missed the idea of himself living by a creek and him being the boy who sits on the bank of it, fishing. It was something he’d done only a few times, back when they’d lived in Denver, and he’d never caught anything but still he’d liked it. The quietness, sure, but also the promise that fishing made about another world existing right under your nose. A world with animals who could extract the secret air inside of water, using combs they carried in the sides of their own necks. This was how the new guy, Jay, had sold Arnie on the trip, even though it meant leaving the white rocks and all his other stuff behind. Jay had promised him that when they got to the end of the earth there would be lots of fishing.

“First thing we’ll do,” he said, “I’ll take you out to John’s River and we’ll try our luck at steelhead.” He told Arnie about how the fish swam up the creeks to breed, flinging their bodies against the rocks as they hopped from one pool to another. “Like missiles blasted from an underwater sub, I swear,” Jay said. “One after another. Bam bam bam bam bam.”

This was what he’d said around Tonopah, and all the way west Arnie let himself be teased by the idea of the steelhead. When at last they saw the great beasts standing in the salt marsh, Arnie pictured the fish swimming in between their feet. Tickling, which was why the elk every so often twitched.

“How many’d you catch?” Arnie had asked then.

“Catch what?” Jay’s eyes were barely slits. They’d been driving more than twenty hours straight.

“You know. The steelhead.”

Arnie’s scalp prickled, his hair still mussed from Jay’s having rubbed it. Now Jay rubbed his own hair, which was black and thick and hung in ringlets on his neck.

“I never caught any,” he admitted. “I never even been here. You’re seeing it for the first time same as me.”

At this point the salt marsh grew blurry, from tears that Arnie tried to keep the new guy from seeing. He should have guessed that nothing swam down there between the elks’ legs. The fish were just a gimmick to get him to come along quietly.

“Aww, Little Man, don’t wig out on me,” the new guy said, when he twisted around and saw Arnie crouched behind the seat. “Don’t worry, everything’ll be great, you’ll see.”

“If you’ve never been here, how would you know?”

“I know. I got a cousin who lives out this-away.”

IN THE MOTEL, as the margin of light grew larger around the drapes, his mother groaned and knitted herself into the new guy’s arms and legs. Eventually she hoisted herself under the sheet to reach for a Styrofoam cup that she’d left on the nightstand.

“Ugh,” she said, after taking a swallow. “Hello, Washington. I thought your coffee was supposed to be so great.”

“You bought that last night in Oregon,” the new guy reminded her, as he took the cup and tossed it into the wastebasket. The cup sailed across the room without spilling a drop, though it left a stain on the wall where it ricocheted before it fell.

She sat up then with the sheet bound across her chest and looked at Arnie.

“How you like it here so far?”

“Okay, I guess.”

She was doodling her hand in the curls at the nape of the new guy’s neck. Then her voice changed, as if an idea had just occurred to her.

“Hey, Arnie, I bet a smart kid like you could find me a decent cup of coffee in this town.” She fished out a five-dollar bill from her purse that was on the floor beside the bed and made him come around to get it.

“You know how I want it?”

“Lots of cream, lots of sugar,” Arnie recited — after all these years, of course he knew.

Their motel room was on the second floor, with a little balcony out one side. On the other side was the door that led to the outside stairs and the parking lot. Now that he was seeing it with a wider angle than the car windows allowed, Arnie realized that the end of the earth was just a spit of sand paved over to keep the wind from blasting it away. Earlier this morning, when they’d passed the salt marsh full of elk, the sun had glimmered just above the mountains, a bright smudge in the gray. But now the clouds were thicker, letting loose a kind of rain that hovered, weightless. He remembered that his coat was still locked in the car, and his sweatshirt grew heavy as it sopped up moisture from the air.

The road had ended in this bare place, where the sand scuffed beneath his sneakers and mostly the dozen motels and tacky seashell shops were not yet open for the season. Across from their motel Arnie found the marina, where rocks had been piled into a jetty that protected a pocket of water from the surf. Some of the boats had giant spools on which their nets were neatly rolled, the sight of which brought Arnie some relief. There were also charter boats with signs that trumpeted the daily rates. Where the land met the dock he found an open bait shop, where he asked for coffee and watched the man pour it from a pot that was sitting on a hot plate.