Where I'm Calling From

cheer me up. So she wrote that she was going to leave her kids with somebody and take the cannery job when the season rolled around. She was young and strong, she said. She thought she could work the twelve-tofourteenhoura-day shifts, seven days a week, no problem. She’d just have to tell herself she could do it, get herself psyched up for it, and her body would listen. She just had to line up the right kind of babysitter. That’d be the big thing. It was going to require a special kind of sitter, seeing as how the hours would be long and the kids were hyper to begin with, because of all the Popsicles and Tootsie Rolls, M&M’s, and the like that they put away every day. It’s the stuff kids like to eat, right? Anyway, she thought she could find the right person if she kept looking. But she had to buy the boots and clothes for the work, and that’s where I could help.
    My son wrote that he was sorry for his part in things and thought he and I would both be better off if he ended it once and for all. For one thing, he’d discovered he was allergic to cocaine. It made his eyes stream and affected his breathing, he said. This meant he couldn’t test the drugs in the transactions he’d need to make. So, before it could even begin, his career as a drug dealer was over. No, he said, better a bullet in the temple and end it all right here. Or maybe hanging. That would save him the trouble of borrowing a gun. And save us the price of bullets. That’s actually what he said in his letter, if you can believe it. He enclosed a picture of himself that somebody had taken last summer when he was in the study-abroad program in Germany. He was standing under a big tree with thick limbs hanging down a few feet over his head. In the picture, he wasn’t smiling.
    My former wife didn’t have anything to say on the matter. She didn’t have to. She knew she’d get her money the first of each month, even if it had to come all the way from Sydney. If she didn’t get it, she just had to pick up the phone and call her lawyer.
    This is where things stood when my brother called one Sunday afternoon in early May. I had the windows open, and a nice breeze moved through the house. The radio was playing. The hillside behind the house was in bloom. But I began to sweat when I heard his voice on the line. I hadn’t heard from him since the dispute over the five hundred, so I couldn’t believe he was going to try and touch me for more money now. But I began to sweat anyway. He asked how things stood with me, and I launched into the payroll thing and all. I talked about oatmeal, cocaine, fish canneries, suicide, bank jobs, and how I couldn’t go to the movies or eat out. I said I had a hole in my shoe. I talked about the payments that went on and on to my former wife. He knew all about this, of course. He knew everything I was telling him.
    Still, he said he was sorry to hear it. I kept talking. It was his dime. But as he talked I started thinking, How are you going to pay for this call, Billy? Then it came to me that I was going to pay for it. It was only a matter of minutes, or seconds, until it was all decided.
    I looked out the window. The sky was blue, with a few white clouds in it. Some birds clung to a telephone wire. I wiped my face on my sleeve. I didn’t know what else I could say. So I suddenly stopped talking and just stared out the window at the mountains, and waited. And that’s when my brother said, “I hate to ask you this, but—” When he said that, my heart did this sinking thing. And then he went ahead and asked.
    This time it was a thousand. A thousand! He was worse off than when he’d called that other time. He let me have some details. The bill collectors were at the door—the door! he said—and the windows rattled, the house shook, when they hammered with their fists. Blam, blam, blam, he said. There was no place to hide from them. His house was about to be pulled out from under him. “Help me, brother,” he said.
    Where was I going to raise a thousand dollars? I took a good grip on the receiver, turned away from the window, and said, “But you didn’t pay me back the last time you borrowed money. What about that?”
    “I didn’t?” he said, acting surprised. “I guess I thought I had. I wanted to, anyway. I tried to, so help me God.”
    “You were supposed to pay that money to Mom,” I said. “But you didn’t. I had to keep giving her money every month, same as always. There’s no end to it,