The Humanity Project Read online

  “Yeah?” Floyd considered this. “Potatoes?”

  “Nothing but potatoes, come on, you know what I mean. There’s all this money in the world and it never seems to get to the people who do the actual work.”

  “What are you, some kind of communist?”

  “Sure, why not.” Communist. It had an old-fashioned sound. They hardly even had communists in Russia now. From where they sat, they could hear the noise of the freeway, a constant low-grade roaring, because the world never ran out of people going places, like nobody was ever happy enough where they were.

  Floyd said, “What’s the news with the Bank of Asshats?”

  “They get the house back.”

  “Aw shit, man.”

  “Yeah. Simple math. Only a matter of time.”

  “Sucks,” Floyd said. “I mean, seriously, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Can you get some kind of, I don’t know, negotiation? They give you more time to pay?”

  “That’s what all us broke morons want.” It felt worse to say it. It made it more real. There were too many other things crowding in behind that he didn’t want to have to ask or answer, like where they’d go and how he could afford even such a thing as rent. He felt like he was losing out, like they’d changed the rules when he wasn’t looking and drained all the good luck out of the world.

  “Another beer?”

  “No, I got to get back to the muchacho.”

  “One for the road.” Floyd repositioned himself in his chair, heaved himself upright, and headed for the refrigerator.

  Sean took the extra Corona, which Floyd probably wouldn’t have offered if he hadn’t felt sorry for him about losing the house, well, what good was total economic ruination if it didn’t get you a free drink here and there. He checked his phone; no messages. He stood up. He’d done something unholy to his back. “Later, man.”

  “Yeah, thanks for coming over. This place is really starting to shape up.”

  He tried to call Conner on the drive home, got his voice mail. “Hey, let me know if you want dinner or you’re doing something else. I can stop and get us something.” The kid was probably chained to a video game somewhere. Him and his friends lived their lives in front of computers. He stopped at the Safeway, wrote a check for dog food, milk, laundry detergent, orange juice, cereal, frozen pizza, frozen vegetables, lunch meat, bread, and a roast chicken, and wasn’t he a smart shopper because now he had two hundred and ten dollars in the bank and Floyd’s two twenties in his pocket and maybe another thirty of his own and that was the end of the line.

  Conner wasn’t home. Sean filled Bojangles’s food bowl and watched the dog eat it up in nothing flat. Whatever happened, the dog was staying with them. He wasn’t going to be one of those people who left an animal tied to a tree, or took it to a shelter.

  But maybe he was going to be one of those people who slid down bit by bit until you did things you never imagined doing.

  Conner called and said he was at Tyler’s house and he was going to eat dinner there and hang out for a while. “What about homework?” Sean asked. Conner always got good grades no matter what he did. Sean only nagged him about homework once in a while because he figured that was part of his job. Conner said not to worry, him and Tyler were going to study for the Spanish test and the only other thing was speech com. He had it knocked.

  So he fixed his own supper and ate it watching SportsCenter and then he did the dishes and got the kitchen wiped down and took two ibuprofen for his back. There were times he liked the feel of the house with nobody else in it but this wasn’t one of those times. He walked the circuit of the rooms just to keep his back from locking up, wearing a path in the sad sad carpeting that needed shampooing, but why bother when it wasn’t really his anymore. Ditto the window that didn’t open and the plugged-up shower drain and the leaking water heater, all things he could fix or attend to but what did it matter.

  He tried to start each day with something close to a good attitude and by sunset he was always back down in the black pit.

  He turned on the computer to check his mail. Pretty Lady, 38, had sent him a message three minutes ago.

  Hi Sean, well here goes nothing. I’m heading out to Ted’s in a little while, you know the place? I’ll be sitting at the bar, the hair is short and blond, the name is Laurie.

  –

  Hi Laurie, sounds good to me. As soon as I can get it together. See you.

  Sean

  Here goes nothing indeed. She might have sent the same message to the fifteen other guys who answered her ad. He knew Ted’s. It was a hike down the freeway in Novato and maybe a little more prissy and upscale than he liked. That might mean she just wanted to be a lady about picking up strange men she met online.

  Sean showered, running hot water over the funky part of his back and pounding on it to loosen it up. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans, a plain black T-shirt, and a windbreaker. He’d said carpenter, she shouldn’t be expecting anybody in a suit. He texted Conner that he was stepping out for a while, and got the dog a rawhide so he’d have something to do while he held down his spot on the couch.

  Driving, he tried to dial his expectations down to zero. If she was really ugly, he didn’t even have to say hello. Walk in, walk out again. Part of him almost hoped that was how it would turn out because then you were spared the stupidity of getting excited about something working out for once like it never did, and you just had to pour more attention and time and energy not to mention money into the situation before it crashed and burned.

  He guessed it was fair to say his luck had gone bad all around, and that included women.

  Ted’s had a bar in front and a restaurant in back, so there were a lot of couples in the entrance, dressed up and waiting for tables. Sean stood behind them, trying to check things out. The bar was a big half-horseshoe and not very crowded. From the doorway he couldn’t see all the way to the far end. No short-haired blondes in view.

  Maybe she wasn’t here yet. Nothing for it but to quit acting like a giant chickenshit, go in and sit down, and he’d just pulled out a stool when she came out of nowhere, that’s what it seemed like, sticking her face in front of his and saying, “Hi, are you Sean?”

  “Yeah, ah, Laurie? Hi.” They shook hands. She was kind of pretty. He ducked his head so he wouldn’t seem to be staring, and so he wouldn’t see her checking him out. But then, she must have already done so, must have thought he looked all right or else she’d be hiding in the john or something. He said, “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “No, just a couple of minutes.” She took the seat next to him. She already had her first drink, some kind of margarita it looked like, and that was another point in her favor since he wouldn’t have to buy it. She was wearing jeans and a short jacket that was made out of some shiny silver fabric, which was different and not in a good way, some fashion trend he guessed he’d been oblivious to. A little on the skinny side, but nothing he couldn’t live with. He wondered if that was really her name, Laurie, then decided it didn’t matter.

  They smiled at each other. “So,” Sean began. The perfume she had on fogged his head. It didn’t matter what kind of foo-foo name they put on the bottle, it all smelled the same to him: perfume. “Did you get a lot of answers to your ad?”

  The next second he wondered if that was an indelicate thing to ask, sort of like saying, ‘How’s business?’ But she seemed OK with it. Rolled her eyes and made a wry face. “I sure did. You’d think if you say, ‘Let’s talk,’ that wouldn’t be taken to mean, ‘Let’s screw.’”

  “Ha, no, you wouldn’t.” He was mildly shocked at her saying ‘screw,’ then interested, then disappointed that she seemed to be ruling it out. “I mean, that’s not cool.”

  Laurie—he had to remember the name—got some more of her drink into her, then put the glass down. She had a cute fac
e—blue eyes, pert little nose, smiley smile. She could have been a cheerleader back in high school, the kind of girl who everybody says ought to be a model or an actress or something, and maybe she tries that but it doesn’t happen for her. Her eyes and mouth had a stretched-out look at the corners, and it was likely that she clocked in somewhere north of thirty-eight. She’d put some kind of goofy silver-colored makeup under her eyebrows to match the jacket, which he still thought was a mistake. The jacket made you think of spacemen in old movies. “So, where you from?” he began gamely. “You a local girl?”

  “I am now.” She laughed, like this was something funny. “I’m new in town, that’s one reason for the ad. Meet a few people, feel a little more grounded.”

  The next thing was to ask her where she’d moved from, but just then the bartender came to take his order and Laurie said she was good for now and what he really would have liked to ask was what she meant by ‘grounded,’ since that was a different concept for the online community, a little bit of a stretch when it came to most people’s purposes. He got his wallet out to pay and decided there was going to be a definite limit on expenditures tonight.

  “A carpenter,” she announced, before he had a chance to speak. “What made you decide to do that? Be that? I hope you don’t mind me asking.”

  “No, that’s OK.” He was just as glad to have her steering the conversation. He was always afraid that something dumb was going to walk out of his mouth, and the woman would decide he was uncouth or just plain unfuckable. “I guess I kind of fell into it, you know, always liked the idea of building things, doing things with my hands. I took some community college courses in business, yeah, wheel and deal, be a big moneybags. So that didn’t happen—” He was trying to remember exactly why. He thought he’d just stopped going to class. “—and one job leads to another—” Sean stopped himself, checked to see if she was still listening. He thought she was. “I’m just your basic working stiff.”

  “Well the important thing is to do what you love,” Laurie said. It sounded like she was consoling him for something, like he hadn’t quite made the cut in the cheerleader tryouts. “And you have children?”

  She must have forgotten what he’d said in his message, or more than likely, forgotten which one he was. She finished the last of her drink and Sean looked around for the bartender. Two drinks. He was good for two, he decided, unless by then she was sitting in his lap or something.

  “Yes, I have a boy, he’s seventeen and he lives with me.”

  “There has to be a story there.”

  “We’ll save it for another time,” Sean said, not eager to start in on tales of marital failure. “How about you, any kids?”

  “Ah,” Laurie nodded. Her head bobbed in a way that made Sean wonder if the drink she’d finished was really her first. “That’s complicated.”

  “It isn’t usually.”

  Either she had not heard him or she was pretending not to. “Seventeen. I hope he doesn’t raise too much hell.”

  “Naw, he’s a good kid. Smart. Focused. He wants to work with computers. I’m all for that. I don’t want him to get stuck in the same rut I’m in. Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bony fingers.” The bartender came then and Sean said to get them two more. He twisted incautiously on the bar stool and his back flared. “Case in point.” He repositioned himself, trying to get the pieces of his spine into better alignment. “Messed up my back hanging drywall today.”

  “The thing about kids,” Laurie said, her gaze following the bartender, “is you think you know them. Have them all figured out. I mean, who else knows them better than you? Then something happens and you have to ask yourself, who are they? Did somebody, you know, like birds do? Lay a different egg in your nest?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sean said. “Birds?”

  “Sorry.” The silver stuff she’d put over her eyes was getting streaky. She smiled and he was distracted by the weirdness of her wriggling shiny eyebrows. “Sorry, I was just running off at the mouth.”

  “No problem.”

  “Tell me more about your work,” she said brightly. “I think I’d like to hear more details. I find them interesting.”

  “Yeah, they are. Somebody’s going to make a movie about it all someday.”

  Her new drink came and she latched on to it in a way that made him consider she might have run her ad just as a way to subsidize her bar time. When she put the glass back down she said, “What I meant was, with birds, everything is instinct. Birds always know how to be birds. They don’t all of a sudden start acting like snakes.”

  He was beginning to think she was either drunk or flaky or both. “Yeah, flying snakes, that would be weird.”

  Laurie took a measuring look at the drink before her, as if it was part of the conversation. She said, “Do you come here often? I haven’t, up until now, but I’m considering doing so.”

  “Are you feeling OK? Seriously.”

  “I am seriously, seriously fine.”

  “I think maybe you’ve had enough to drink already.”

  She appeared to give this some thought. “No, but there is a limit to what drinking can accomplish.”

  “You never told me where you were from,” Sean said, mostly as conversational filler. He was getting bored with her. Normal in most respects. Whatever. He was only waiting to finish his beer and call it a night. His back was being tied into knots with ropes of fire.

  “Ohio,” Laurie said. “The Buckeye State.”

  Sean waited. “So, why did you leave?”

  “It became very not grounded for me there. Like those old Road Runner cartoons where he runs off the edge of a cliff and just kind of stands there a second with a stupid look on his face and then gravity catches up with him and he falls and there’s this whistling sound, and then he lands, ka-boom. I just had to get out of there.”

  “Sure,” Sean agreed. As if any of that had made sense.

  “Make a new start.”

  “Sure,” he said again, and this part he did understand, though the closest he was going to come to that was bankruptcy.

  “I’d like it if you talked to me,” she announced. “About anything at all. You have a nice voice, Steve. All low and growly. Sometimes I think that’s the thing I love best about men, their voices.”

  “I’m running a little dry on talk,” Sean said. “Like I said a while ago when I was being interesting, I really messed up my back today and I should probably go home and tend to it.”

  “I have a son just a year older than yours,” she informed him.

  “Yeah?” Now that he’d announced his intention of leaving, she seemed to be making more of an effort. “Where is he, he come out here with you?”

  “No. He’s back in Ohio.” She looked around the room, frowning, as if expecting someone who had not yet arrived.

  “So it’s really not a complicated question, whether or not you have kids.”

  “I don’t know why I said that. It’s more like, he got himself into some complicated trouble.”

  “That tends to come with the territory,” Sean said. “Kids.” They were all spoiled rotten these days, all of them except for his own boy, who was turning out to be the only part of his stupid life he wouldn’t change or unmake and sorry, lady, everybody had problems and so far hers weren’t doing the trick of distracting him from his own. Mostly the house and how long it was going to take to grind through the miserable jerk-off process of foreclosure and sheriff’s sale and whether his ass would be on the street at that point or whether there was anything a lawyer could do, sure, throw himself on the mercy of the courts for being a hopeless fuckup.

  “This is a little different territory,” Laurie said. “Prison territory.”

  If she was expecting him to be all interested and sympathetic, she figured wrong. He said, “Yeah? That’s a tough one.”

 
“Excuse me,” Laurie said, hoisting herself off the bar stool with a kind of careful clumsiness. “Be right back.”

  That seemed a little abrupt to him, like this particular incarceration trauma made her have to pee just this instant, but what the hell. Next time he had an itch to check out the personals ads, he’d remind himself just how depressing it was to spend time with some weirdo who mostly wanted to display her weirdness to the rest of the world.

  He texted Conner: U home? And got back, Yes wer r u? Sean answered, On my way. He wanted to catch up with Conner, shoot the shit with him, impress on him all over again that if he ever did a bunch of stupid drug stuff he’d end up in jail with all the rest of the losers, and his poor old dad would spend his nights in the tavern, crying into his beer about it. Home, yes, as long as he still had four walls and a roof to his name, he might as well enjoy them.

  When she did reappear, she’d visibly freshened up, put a layer of powder or something over the worst of the silver crayon. Before Sean could begin his how-nice-to-meet-you exit speech, she grabbed his arm.

  “Oh my God.” Laurie leaned in toward him to whisper, the kind of whisper you produced in a crowded bar. “Don’t look now, but there’s a guy over there who might be trying to find me.”

  “Yeah?” He took in the portion of the room in front of him, saw nobody who looked to be paying her any attention. “Where?”

  “Don’t look! Are you done with your drink? Can we go? Can you just pretend we’re leaving together, you know, like a date?”

  She still had a hand on his arm, pulling at it, and she looked excited or scared or both. Sean said, “Trying to find you, what, another one of your Craigslist pals?”

  “Please.” She reached up, kissed him. He was too surprised either to resist or kiss back. The sleeve of her silver jacket made stiff, crackling sounds, like the color had been sprayed on. “Just help me get outside.”

  “Jesus Christ, lady.”

  “I would be very, very grateful,” she murmured, her hand still on the back of his neck, her face still close to his.