Where I'm Calling From

Billy. Listen, I take one step forward and I go two steps back. I’m going under. You’re all going under, and you’re pulling me down with you.”
    “I paid her some of it,” he said. “I did pay her a little. Just for the record,” he said, “I paid her something.”
    “She said you gave her fifty dollars and that was all.”
    “No,” he said, “I gave her seventy-five. She forgot about the other twenty-five. I was over there one afternoon, and I gave her two tens and a five. I gave her some cash, and she just forgot about it. Her memory’s going. Look,” he said, “I promise I’ll be good for it this time, I swear to God. Add up what I still owe you and add it to this money here I’m trying to borrow, and I’ll send you a check. We’ll exchange checks. Hold on to my check for two months, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll be out of the woods in two months’ time. Then you’ll have your money. July ist, I promise, no later, and this time I can swear to it. We’re in the process of selling this little piece of property that Irmajean inherited a while back from her uncle. It’s as good as sold. The deal has closed. It’s just a question now of working out a couple of minor details and signing the papers. Plus, I’ve got this job lined up. It’s definite. I’ll have to drive fifty miles round trip every day, but that’s no problem—hell, no. I’d drive a hundred and fifty if I had to, and be glad to do it. I’m saying I’ll have money in the bank in two months’ time. You’ll get your money, all of it, by July ist, and you can count on it.”
    “Billy, I love you,” I said. “But I’ve got a load to carry. I’m carrying a very heavy load these days, in case you didn’t know.”
    “That’s why I won’t let you dowri on this,” he said. “You have my word of honor. You can trust me on this absolutely. I promise you my check will be good in two months, no later. Two months is all I’m asking for. Brother, I don’t know where else to turn. You’re my last hope.”
    I did it, sure. To my surprise, I still had some credit with the bank, so I borrowed the money, and I sent it to him. Our checks crossed in the mail. I stuck a thumbtack through his check and put it up on the kitchen wall next to the calendar and the picture of my son standing under that tree. And then I waited.
    I kept waiting. My brother wrote and asked me not to cash the check on the day we’d agreed to. Please wait a while longer is what he said. Some things had come up. The job he’d been promised had fallen through at the last minute. That was one thing that came up. And that little piece of property belonging to his wife hadn’t sold after all. At the last minute, she’d had a change of heart about selling it. It had been in her family for generations. What could he do? It was her land, and she wouldn’t listen to reason, he said.
    My daughter telephoned around this time to say that somebody had broken into her trailer and ripped her off. Everything in the trailer. Every stick of furniture was gone when she came home from work after her first night at the cannery. There wasn’t even a chair left for her to sit down on. Her bed had been stolen, too. They were going to have to sleep on the floor like Gypsies, she said.
    “Where was what’s-his-name when this happened?” I said.
    She said he’d been out looking for work earlier in the day. She guessed he was with friends. Actually, she didn’t know his whereabouts at the time of the crime, or even right now, for that matter. “I hope he’s at the bottom of the river,” she said. The kids had been with the sitter when the ripoff happened. But, anyway, if she could just borrow enough from me to buy some secondhand furniture she’d pay me back, she said, when she got her first check. If she had some money from me before the end of the week—I could wire it, maybe—she could pick up some essentials. “Somebody’s violated my space,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been raped.”
    My son wrote from New Hampshire that it was essential he go back to Europe. His life hung in the balance, he said. He was graduating at the end of summer session, but he couldn’t stand to live in America a day longer after that. This was a materialist society, and he simply couldn’t take it anymore.
    People over here, in the U.S., couldn’t hold a conversation unless money figured in it some way, and he was sick of it. He wasn’t a Yuppie, and didn’t want to