Pay It Forward Read online

  I have undergone eleven operations, all in all, to repair what was, at one time, unsightly damage. The area that was my left eye, and the lost bone and muscle under cheek and brow, have been neatly covered with skin removed from my thigh. I have endured numerous skin grafts and plastic surgery. Only a few of these were necessary for health or function. Most were intended to make me an easier individual to meet. The final result is a smooth, complete absence of an eye, as if one had never existed; a great loss of muscle and mass in cheek and neck; and obvious nerve damage to the left corner of my mouth. It is dead, so to speak, and droops. But after many years of remedial diction therapy, my speech is fairly easily understood.

  So, in a sense it is not what people see in my face that disturbs them, but rather what they expect to see and do not.

  I also have minimal use of my left arm, which is foreshortened and thin from resulting atrophy. My guess is that people rarely notice this until I’ve been around awhile, because my face tends to steal the show.

  I have worked in schools, lounged in staff rooms, where a Band-Aid draws comment and requires explanation. Richie, what did you do to your hand? A cast on an extremity becomes a story told for six weeks, multiplied by the number of employees. Well, I was on a ladder, see, preparing to clean my storm drains….

  So, it seems odd to me that no one will ask. If they suddenly did and I were forced to repeat the story, I might decide I had liked things better before. But it’s not so much that they don’t ask, but why they don’t ask, as if I am an unspeakable tragedy, as new and shocking to myself as to them.

  Occasionally my left arm will draw comment, always the same one. “How lucky that it was your left.” But even this supposed consolation is misguided, because I am left-handed, by nature if not by practice.

  Until I was shipped home from overseas, I had a fiancée. I still have pictures of us together. We were a handsome couple—ask anyone. To someone who wasn’t there, it might seem as if my fiancée must have been a coldhearted woman. Surely she could have married me just the same. I wish Eleanor had been a coldhearted woman, or even that I could pretend such to be the case, but unfortunately I was there. The real truth is hard to re-create. The real truth is that we both agreed so staunchly not to see it or care about it that it was all we could see, nor had we time left over to care about anything else.

  Eleanor was a strong woman, which no doubt contributed to our defeat.

  She is married now and lives with her husband in Detroit. She is a plastic surgeon. I haven’t entirely decided how much significance to attribute to these facts.

  Any of them.

  From The Diary of Trevor

  I saw this weird thing on the news a couple of days ago. This little kid over in England who has this, like…condition. Nothing hurts him. Every time they showed a shot of him, he was wearing a crash helmet and elbow pads and knee pads. ’Cause I guess he would hurt himself. I mean, why wouldn’t he? How would he know?

  First I thought, Whoa. Lucky. But then I wasn’t that sure.

  When I was little I asked my mom why we have pain. Like, what’s it for? She said it’s so we don’t stand around with our hands on a hot stove. She said it’s to teach us. But she said by the time the pain kicks in, it’s pretty much too late, and that’s what parents are here for. And that’s what she’s here for. To teach me. So I don’t touch the hot stove in the first place.

  Sometimes I think my mom has that condition, too. Only on the inside where nobody sees it but me and maybe Loretta and definitely Bonnie. Except, I know she hurts. But she still has her hand on that hot stove. On the inside, I mean. And I don’t think they make helmets or pads for stuff like that.

  I wish I could teach her.

  Chapter Two

  ARLENE

  Ricky never exactly came home, not like she thought he would, but the truck did. Only not like she thought it would. It had been rolled a few times; all in all it looked worse than she felt. Only, it ran. Well, it idled. It’s one thing to start up and run, quite another to actually get somewhere.

  Much as she hated that damned Ford extra cab for imitating her own current condition, she could have forgiven it that. Potentially she could. It was the way it kept her awake at night. Especially now, when she’d taken a second job, at the Laser Lounge, to keep up the payments. And since it was the truck’s fault that she didn’t get to bed until three, it at least could have let her sleep. Surely that would not have been asking too much.

  Yet there she was again at the window, double-checking the way moonlight slid off the vehicle’s spooky shape. The way its silvery reflection broke where the paint broke. Only Ricky could screw up a truck that bad and walk away. At least, it would stand to reason that he had walked away, seeing that the truck was found and Ricky was not.

  Dragged off by coyotes? Stop, Arlene, just get ahold of yourself. He’s sitting in a bar somewhere, talking that same sweet line to some poor girl ain’t learned yet what it all adds up to. Or what it all don’t add up to.

  Unless, of course, he limped away, not sauntered off, maybe dragged himself to a hospital, maybe got out okay, maybe died, far from anything to tie him to a Ford extra cab, far from any ties to hometown news.

  So there could be a grave somewhere, but how would Arlene know? And even if she did, she could not know which one or where. Even if she bought flowers for Ricky out of her tip money, she would never know where to put them.

  Flowers can be a bad thing, a bad thought, if you don’t even know where to lay them down. Just stop, Arlene. Just go back to bed.

  And she did, but fell victim to a dream in which Ricky had been living just outside the town for months and months and never bothered to contact her with his whereabouts.

  Which made her cross to the window again to blame the damn truck for keeping her awake.

  “SO THEN, WHAT IF I GET IT HOME and it’s bent? I just spent two hunnerd dollars on nothin’?”

  “You just said yourself it’s reinforced over that door, so you can roll the damn truck and the door don’t get bent.”

  “I’m just sayin’ what if, though. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll hold your check for a couple, three days. You can’t get it to go on your truck, you bring it back.”

  “Yeah. I guess. One seventy-five.”

  “Get outta my driveway you’re gonna jack me around.”

  “Okay, two hunnerd.” With a little smile.

  Guys like it when you talk to them like that. For some damned reason.

  He leaned on the mangled Ford’s hood and lit a smoke. Marlboro Red, same as Ricky used to smoke, like she wouldn’t have known that without looking. Seemed this world, this town, was just full of men cut from Ricky’s same pattern. Seemed so to her, anyway. Which is why she felt drawn to this guy, this Doug or Duane or whatever the hell he said, her first customer.

  And she knew that was why, and that there would be more if she were to bother to dig for it. She knew if she asked him he would say his daddy whupped him harder than most and that he has been on his own from some ungodly young age. She knew if she were to take off his T-shirt he would have a tattoo on his shoulder, with a name too faded to read. Someone he knew for a month or two when he was too young to know that forever only goes for the scars. And the blue ink you have allowed under the skin.

  And it made her feel tired to be attracted to Doug. Duane.

  Later she would say to her best friend, Loretta, “I no longer think I lack judgment about men. I will never again say my instincts are poor, no sir, because how do I keep finding this same guy over and over? I am beginning to think I have a very keen sense of judgment, only it would seem that it is on somebody else’s side.”

  For the time she seemed content to watch his big arm muscles breaking loose the bolts on the door hinge and to feel tired knowing that part of her was scoping out the next big life mess before she had even cleared the rubble of the last one from her normally tidy driveway.

  Before
she could finish this dampening thought, Cheryl Wilcox, Ricky’s ex-wife, pulled up into Arlene’s driveway to thank her for being a two-faced slut.

  And it wasn’t even 9 A.M.

  From Those Who Knew Trevor Speak

  by Chris Chandler (1999)

  I don’t want to disappoint everybody. It wasn’t exactly the Immaculate Conception. Just one of those risks you let happen sometimes. Probably seems kind of stupid and careless now, after the fact. Still, thank God it worked out the way it did, right?

  I’m not saying I didn’t toy with the mention of precautions, somewhere along in that evening, but the thought didn’t go no farther than that. Seemed like any poorly thought-out words might’ve broken up that moment. Brought everybody home to their own good sense. And if you want to see a man come to his senses, try saying something like, Do you happen to carry a rubber in your wallet? Did I mention I’m not on the pill?

  Besides, him and his wife, Cheryl, they’d been trying to get pregnant forever. Never thought it was all her fault. Why would I? Never really thought it was something more likely to happen to those who don’t try, no matter how many people it might’ve happened to just that way, and maybe in my head I knew it.

  He was married. At first. It’s kind of complicated.

  So, anyway, what I did say was to complain that we would never be able to go dancing. Maybe if we’d lived in New York City, maybe then, but not in Atascadero; you could not. Not where everybody knew everybody, at least to the point of knowing who rightfully matches up with who.

  “You wanta go dancin’?” he said. “I’ll take you dancin’.” And he did. Drove us up somewhere along the Cuesta Grade, looking down over the lights of the town, which I must say looked kind of nice from so much distance. We got out of that old sedan, and he reached back in and turned the key to accessory, which I guess he should not have done, because it ran his battery down, not that we cared at the time. Or later, come to think of it.

  He tried three stations for a slow number, and then the next thing I knew, well, it’s kind of hard to explain. It’s like the whole world was all his hand in the small of my back, nothing bigger than that, nor ever would be. And when he dipped me, the warm feel of his breath on my neck, which had always been there and would never entirely move along. It was something that was keyed to fit on the manufacture, and I’m not sure it’s our fault we discovered it too late, after the exchanging of rings elsewhere and vows one might live to regret. It was like a map, I decided. You know, with red lines to divide up the states, and blue lines for the rivers, and brown folds for a mountain range. Which is more important: this deal we all make that Idaho stops being Idaho right here, or the mountains and rivers that were there before anybody took to tracing?

  It’s like there was always a me and Ricky, and I was sure there always would be. Even if I didn’t know exactly where he took that love. I mean, when he was gone. I thought it was there, and I would wager he could feel the weight of it, whether he was traveling or holding still for a change. I’m gettin’ off the subject. Everybody wants to know about that night.

  When we made love for that first time I felt like I’d lost something, even before it was over. I thought, There is nothing here for me to keep. Nothing that is really my very own when all this is over.

  But I was wrong. I got something to keep.

  CHERYL STOOD IN HER LIVING ROOM. Said, “Don’t you got anything to drink around here?”

  And she did, although her sponsor had warned her to throw it away. Sooner or later I got to be around it, though, she’d said to her sponsor, who is named Bonnie. Later is one thing, though, Bonnie said. You only got five days under your belt. Only not anymore she didn’t, because she took down two glasses.

  Bonnie also said, time to make your amends, clean up the wreckage of your past, which is why Arlene invited Ricky’s ex-wife into her house in the first place. To apologize for sleeping with Ricky while he was still married to her. For that nine or ten years of overlap.

  Otherwise, when Cheryl pulled into her driveway to thank her for being a two-faced slut, she might have just said you’re welcome and let Cheryl scream on out of there leaving some bad-smelling rubber dust for a souvenir. In her old days she just might have. Then smiled at Duane like nothing had ever happened. Seen what his plans were for the evening.

  But here Doug had gone off with his trial-offer truck door, Cheryl was standing in her living room, and it was all her sponsor, Bonnie’s, fault. Later, when she was good and drunk, she’d have to call Bonnie up to tell her just that.

  Cheryl said, “I believe you know where he is and you just ain’t telling me.”

  Arlene said, “If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be parting out that truck to get maybe one-third of my lost monies back. I’d find him and tell the loan collector where and shove that sorry piece of junk you know where and let them take the depreciation out of his sorry ass.”

  Cheryl said, “It’s what you get for cosigning. You got just what you deserved.”

  Arlene started to say something back but couldn’t think what it should be and worried maybe it would be a bad, weak-sounding something no matter how carefully she thought it up. So instead she poured two fingers of good old José Cuervo. The one man in her life who never told lies, so you always knew what you would get. And you could never say you didn’t know. Then she said, “I brought you in here to say I was sorry.”

  And Cheryl said, “Yeah. That’s what I always say about you. You’d have to be pretty damn sorry, coming in my house like you did, like a guest, eating my dinner like you was my friend. Being all nice to me.”

  Arlene stopped to consider this, how she’d lost points for niceness. “Why you just telling me all this now?”

  Cheryl took a big breath, the kind people do when you’ve hit a crack, a seam where they’re prone to bend from some of the collisions they’ve absorbed. Lately everybody reminded Arlene of that piece of expensive trash in her driveway: rolled a few times, and nobody’s doors fit quite right anymore.

  Cheryl said, “When I heard the truck was here, I thought—”

  “You thought what? That he was here with it?”

  “Maybe.”

  What is it about Ricky, she could not help but wonder, that makes women wish he’d come back and mess things up some more? “Well, he ain’t.”

  “Yeah. I see that now.”

  The door opened. Arlene’s boy came spilling in. His hair was a mess, which was Arlene’s own fault, because in her hurry to start parting out that disaster in her driveway she’d left the boy more or less to his own devices. Part of the seat was ripped out of his blue jeans, but Arlene didn’t even want to know about that. Yet. And at least he had on clean underwear, thank God.

  “Trevor, where you been?”

  “Over at Joe’s.”

  “Did I say you could go to Joe’s?”

  “No.” Downcast eyes, which Arlene thought he might practice in the mirror. He knew who this was in the living room with Momma, but not why. But he knew it was not for fun. Kids know. “Sorry.” His eyes on her drinking glass. No judgment, just a silent taking in, too grown-up for a boy his age, knowing certain things, like why grown-ups try. And how damned unlikely they are to succeed.

  “That’s okay. Go on back there now.”

  “I just got home.”

  “Will you mind me for once?”

  And he did, without back talk. Arlene made a mental note to take him out for an ice cream later, the usual fallback for any out-of-sorts behavior on her part; as a result they ate a lot of ice cream. The door slamming behind him made Arlene ache with a separateness from him, like she still hadn’t gotten over the cutting of that cord in the first place.

  Arlene filled both glasses again. “Thanks for not saying nothing in front of the boy.”

  “He looks so much like Ricky.”

  “He ain’t. Ricky’s.”

  “Spitting image.”

  “He’s twelve. I only took up with Ricky ten years b
ack.”

  She felt as though Bonnie were looking over her shoulder, reminding. This was not the honesty that would help her set a course to a whole new life. But it was such an old lie, and so hard to shake after all those years of telling. That lie fit so well after all this time.

  “I see him in that boy.”

  “Well, you’re seeing what ain’t there.” Or what you wanted for yourself and never got. What we don’t get, we see everywhere we look. What we won’t let ourselves do, be, we refuse to tolerate in any other living soul. Arlene was beginning to notice this.

  NINE O’CLOCK THAT SAME EVENING Bonnie came unannounced to her door.

  “I know how this looks,” Arlene said. “But I was just thinking to call you.”

  “I thought you might want to talk.”

  “You got some kind of ESP?”

  “Not as I know of. Got a message on my machine from your boy.”

  This sudden news made Arlene cry, for reasons she could not entirely sort out. Lately the tears seemed to hover just below the surface, and any little jolt would bring them up, like when a sudden burst of laughter or fright made it hard to hold her bladder, especially if she’d been holding it too long as it was.

  Bonnie brought herself through the door, all 315 pounds of herself, and folded herself around Arlene like a big pillow, smothering her in a not entirely unlikable way.

  After a while they went through the cabinets and poured all the liquor down the sink.

  “I’ll just start all over again tomorrow. Maybe get it right this time.”

  “What’s wrong with right now? You can start over any old time of the day, you know.”

  “I guess.”

  Bonnie followed behind her to the bedroom window and looked out with Arlene into her driveway, across the moonlit wreckage of everything that had once seemed worth anything. Almost as though Arlene, who could never find the words just right, would show Bonnie the problem. The ghost. Like to say, If you were haunted by the likes of that, who’s to say you’d do much better?