FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-01)

CHAPTER ONE

As he worked his way down the dimly-lit hallway, he was swaying back and forth. Staying on his feet might be all that he expected of himself though the other people lining the walls, patiently waiting their turns for the bathroom were all expecting a little bit more. Of him. And of themselves. They were hoping that he'd be to avoid stepping on any of their toes, since he was, by all accounts, a very "big boned" fellow, He he been any less conditioned or about fifty pounds lighter or heavier, they'd refer to him as fat. he was in that sweet spot though. A place occupied by people with a little bit of self-confidence and enough good lucks to have carried them for years through the traps that would've stymied or stalled any lessor sort of person. He was not ashamed of who he was, though Noah Bunch was, in fact, probably least capable of telling anyone exactly who that was. He was not a man of deep self-observation skills. The surface was good enough.

"Excuse me."

He said it to be polite. He was going to plow right over the top of the guy kneeling trying to tie his shoe, regardless of what th response might be. It was a matter of little import and if he'd taken time out to reflect on this its might have slowed his forward progress.

"Hey, fuckwad," the kneeler with his fingers tangled in thick black strings looping through the eyelets of his Doc Martin boots. At least, that was what he was trying to say. He never really got it out before the Noah's weight pressing down on him from the hand he'd placed on the back of his neck, forced him to flatten, sprawling across the floor. It was an awkward position. It would've been such regardless of whether or not the cleaning crew of The Crow's Nest had been paid with checks they were actually able to convert into cash. This was a section where the lights couldn't actually be turned up any brighter than they were right now and so there wasn't any way for anybody to say with any certainty the last time the floor had be mopped or waxed. So they didn't. They didn't clean and that was the long and the short of it, now. They didn't and the only people ever likely to be in a position to know were most likely to be in the same situation as the guy with his semi-tied boots and lets face it, when he was back on his feet, the relative cleanliness (or lack thereof) of the hallway floor was nothing that would occur to him for a long while. Not until he was explaining what an awful time he'd had when he was talking to friends who wanted to go the Crow's Nest (or Crow's, as it was more familiarly known). He would argue quite persuasively against the venue, embellishing his trip to the floor by alluding to having landed face down with an open mouth and taken several hours to actually get the grime and shed hair out of his mouth so that he could drink another drink and not be thinking of the terrible wrongs that had been done to him.

"By some fat mother...walking down the hallway like he owned it."

Which, as a matter of fact, he did. Noah Bunch was, if not the owner, then a proud portion of the limited partnership who co-held Crow's. None of them were bird-lovers anymore than any of them were sailors with experience before the mainsail. What they all knew of crow's nests could be summed up by the things seen in a Peter Pan cartoon or imagined on a trip to the Pirates of the Caribbean, up in Anaheim, when they'd all been little and Disneyland was still a favored vacation destination. Noah was able to picture his old man in a silly pair of those plaid cotton shorts they called "Bermudas", his post-fortyish gut pressing cruelly against the over tight waistband and pouring over like Pillsbury muffin popping out over the top of a paper baking cup. He appreciated his father having done something so obviously out of his comfort zone by suiting up and showing up to tour the Magical Kingdom with the rest of the family. Dragging him along was a strategy of his mother's. Something she'd come up with when trying to figure out how to spend even half the money the kids would be trying to coax her to without coming home and facing an implacable budgeting stare down with his husband when the checks clearing the account;

It was a great idea. Never happened but a great idea, none the less.

The truth of the matter was something less sweet though no less efficient, in so far as her goal was concerned. The kids had loaded into the Rambler and gone to Los Angeles during the hottest day of the summer, in the end of October and left the old man to spend the day sneaking around with the woman next door. Her name was Dorene and Noah's father, named Raymond, was being called "Ray" as she asked him to pull the covers down because it was getting so hot under the sheets. Raymond, or in this case, Ray, was carrying about forty pounds more than he liked and this was the price she had to pay if he was going to bed her. She was going to sweat until the sun went down and things got dark enough to pull the bedspread off her sweat-damp shoulders, removing them from the Saran wrap like covering they were forming over his buttocks, less than ten minutes after he'd had his penis inside her in depths she was pretty sure no other penis had ever plumbed before. He may have been big but he was hung like a workhorse and Doreen like this very much about him, even if she wished he'd lose weight or get a swamp cooler for back in the bedroom, while they were fucking.

He would never buy the swamp cooler. The house would go without air-conditioning for at least ten years after he'd finished showing Doreen things she hadn't realized about her own insides. He wouldn't have the money. It was all a little too precious for the salary he carried. Which might have made it seem extra special and sweet, or extremely suspicious that he let his wife take the kids to Disneyland, throwing money around like it was confetti from a clown's cannon and never feel inclined to ask where where it all was going.

"If I'd known then what I do now," Noah's mom would often say, in the years following the divorce. It was always symptomatic of some veiled threat or an unanswered wish.

If she had, what? Would she have let the kids go even crazier at the amusement park? Or would she have just worried less about it? Maybe the trips back down the coast to Lakeside would've been less stressful? Taken less of a toll on her digestive system and less of a threat to her peptic ulcer, threatening to eat a hole clear through her stomach lining? Or something more drastic, perhaps?

"You don't get ulcers, you cause them," the old man used to say, puffing on his White Owl cigar, never looking up from the sports section of the paper.

He might have been surprised if she'd stepped up and proven him absolutely correct on that? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, or can be if you did a lot of things that worked out even better than you'd dared hope at the time of conception? Few things in her life had and mostly when she looked back like this she had a couple of regrets and s little bit of moral superiority she clung to like a bit of flotsam to a drowning swimmer. It wasn't where she would've chosen to be but was better than where she might have been and there was still a little hope for what might appear suddenly, plucking her out of the sea and watching the bit of trash slowly drift away, having fulfilled its purpose.

That was just about as bold as she got. Something of a coward to her, just like her husband. He had guts enough to tell the next door neighbor she should spread her legs and let him dive from the cliffs but hadn't had the guts to leave the lights on and so didn't know she had something closely akin to perfect breasts. It was true. A plastic surgeon who'd moved in on the other side and was sleeping with her later told her that. He meant it. He was already inside her when he said it, so there wasn't any point lying at that juncture, right?

Noah wasn't thinking of Doreen. She was one of those things. One of the sort of wild half memories that if he closed his eyes and concentrated really hard on might slowly morph into something seemingly important but with no clear value. He had a lot of things like that and almost all of them sprang from his childhood. He felt that way about the interior of automobiles from the 50s and 60s, back when there was still heavy metal in the dash and you could scorch the shit out of your chin by resting it on the console above the glove box. He felt that way about the color red, too. Liske it all meant something but he wouldn't be quite able to tell what it was and therefore, wasn't able to stay with absolutely certainty that it was meaningful and he'd be happier once he remembered.