“No shit?” Flood sat looking at Raphael, his dark eyes suddenly burning. “What are you doing in this sewer, Raphael?”
Raphael shrugged. “Let’s call it research. I think there’s one single common symptom that they all have that makes them losers. I’m trying to isolate it.”
“How much consideration have you given to sheer stupidity?”
“That contributes, probably,” Raphael admitted, “but stupid people do occasionally succeed in life. I think it’s something else.”
“And when you do isolate it, what then? Are you going to cure the world?”
Raphael laughed. “God, no. I’m just curious, that’s all. In the meantime there’s enormous entertainment in watching them. They’re all alike, but each one is infinitely unique. Let’s just say that they’re a hobby.”
The expression on Flood’s face was strange as he listened to Raphael talk, and his eyes seemed to burn in the faint red glow of the winking scanner. It might have been Raphael’s imagination or a trick of the. light, but it was as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from the dark-faced young man’s shoulders-that a problem that had been plaguing him for months had just been solved.
iii
Raphael worked only a half day on Wednesday, since he was just about to the bottom of the pile of repairable shoes that lay to one side of his worktable.
About eleven-thirty Denise brought him a cup of coffee, and they talked. “You’ve changed in the last week or so, Rafe.”
“What do you mean, `changed’?”
“I don’t know, you just seem different, that’s all.”
“It’s probably Flood. He’s enough to alter anybody.”
“Who?”
“Damon Flood. He was my roommate at college. His family has money, and he’s developed a strange personality over the years. Ire came to Spokane a couple weeks ago-I’m not really sure why.”
“I don’t think I like him.”
“Come on, Denise.” Raphael laughed. “You’ve never met him.
“I just don’t like him,” she repeated stubbornly, pushing a stray lock of hair out of her face. “I don’t like what he’s doing to you.”
“He hasn’t done anything to me.”
“Oh yes, he has. You’re not the same. You’re flippant. You say things that are meant to be funny, but aren’t. The humor around here needs to be very gentle. We’re all terribly vulnerable. We can’t be flip or smart aleck or sarcastic with each other. Don’t put us down, Rafe. Don’t be condescending. We can smell that on people the way you can smell wine on a drunk. If this Damon Flood of yours makes you feel that way about us, you’d better stay away from here, because nobody’ll have anything to do with you.” Raphael looked at her for a moment, and she blushed furiously. “Has it seemed that way?” he asked her finally. “Have I really seemed that bad?”
“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that I’m not going to let anyone hurt any of my friends here.”
“Neither am I, Denise,” Raphael said softly. “Neither am I. Flood makes me defensive, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to be defensive with us.” She made a little move toward him, almost as if she were going to embrace him impulsively, but she caught herself and blushed again.
“Okay, Denise. I’ll hang it on the hook before I come to work, okay?”
“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”
“No. I wasn’t paying attention to how I was treating people. Somebody needed to tell me. That’s what friends are for, right?”
It troubled him, though. After he left work, he drove around for a while, thinking about what she had said. There was no question that Flood could influence people-manipulate them. Raphael had seen it too many times to have any doubts. He had, however, thought that he was immune to that kind of thing. He had somehow believed that Flood would not try his skills on him, but apparently Flood could not resist manipulation, and it was so very subtle that it was not even evident to someone who knew Flood as well as he did.
When he pulled up in front of his apartment, Sadie the Sitter and Spider Granny were in full voice. “Just wait,” Sadie boomed. “As soon as I collect his insurance, I’ll show her a thing or two: I’ll be able to spend money on fancy clothes, too-and a new car-and new furniture.”
It was evident by now that Sadie regarded the insurance money on her husband as already hers. The fact that he was still alive was merely an inconvenience. She counted the money over and over in her mind, her piggish little eyes aflame and her pudgy, hairy-knuckled hands twitching. When her husband came home at night, walking slowly on feet that obviously hurt him, she would glare at him as if his continued existence were somehow a deliberate affront.
Spider Granny, of course, cared only about the bellowing-idiot grandchild, and hurriedly agreed to anything Sadie said simply to prevent the horrid subject of commitment from arising again.
Raphael shook his head and checked his mailbox. There was some junk mail and an envelope from his uncle Harry. Harry Taylor forwarded Raphael’s mail, but he never followed the simple expedient of scribbling a forwarding address on the original envelope.
Raphael went on upstairs. He dumped the junk mail in the wastebasket without even looking at it and opened Uncle Harry’s envelope.
There was a letter from Isabel Drake inside. The envelope was slightly perfumed. Raphael stood at the table holding the envelope for a long time, looking out the window without really seeing anything. Once he almost turned to pitch the unopened letter into the wastebasket. Then he turned instead and took it to the bookcase and slipped it between the pages of his copy of the collected works of Shakespeare, where Marilyn’s letter was. Then he went out onto the roof. He made a special point of not thinking about the two letters.
Flood arrived five minutes later. He was in high good humor and at his sardonic best. “What a wonderful little town this is,” he said ebulliently after he had bounded up the stairs and come over to where Raphael sat in the sun beside the railing. “Do you realize that you managed to find perhaps the one place in the whole country that’s an absolute intellectual vacuum?”
“What’s got you so wound up?” Raphael asked, amused in spite of himself. When Flood was in good spirits, he was virtually overpowering, and Raphael needed that at the moment.
“I’ve been out examining this pigsty,” Flood told him. “Were you aware that the engineering marvel of the entire city-the thing they’re proudest of-is the sewage-treatment plant?”
Raphael laughed. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Absolutely. They all invite you to go out and have a look at it. They all talk about it. It’s terribly important to them. I suppose it’s only natural, though.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Old people, Raphael, old, old, old, old people. Spokane has more hospitals and doctors per square inch than cities five times its size because it’s full of old people, and old people get sick a lot. Spokane is positively overwhelmed by its sewage-treatment plant because old people are obsessed with the functioning of their bowels. They gloat over their latest defecation the way young people gloat over their most recent sexual conquest. This place is the prune juice and toilet-paper capital of America. It’s got more old people than any place this side of Miami Beach. And the whole town has a sort of geriatric artsy-craftsy air about it. They do macramé and ceramics and little plaster figurines they pop out of readymade rubber molds so they can call themselves sculptors. They crank out menopausal religious verse by the ream and print it up in self-congratulatory little mimeographed booklets and then sit around smugly convinced that they’re poets.”
“Come on.” Raphael laughed.
“And the biggest thing on their educational TV station is the annual fund-raising drive. There’s an enormous perverted logic there. They hustle money to keep the station on the air so that it can broadcast pictures of them hustling money to keep the station on the air. It’s sort of self-perpetuating.”
“There are some colleges here,” Raphael objected. “The place isn’t a total void.”
Flood snorted with laughter. “Sure, baby. I’ve looked into them-a couple of junior colleges where the big majors are sheet metal, auto mechanics, and bedpan repair, and a big Catholic university where they pee their pants over basketball and theology. I love Catholic towns, don’t you? Wall-to-wall mongoloids. That’s what comes of having a celibate priesthood making sure that their parishioners are punished for enjoying sex. A good Catholic woman can have six mongoloids in a row before it begins to dawn on her that something might be wrong with her reproductive system.”
“You’re positively dazzling today, Damon. You must be in a good humor.”
“I am, babes, I am. I’m always delighted to discover elementals-things that seem to be a distillation of an ideal. I think I’m a Platonist-I like to contemplate concepts in their pure state, and Spokane is the perfect place to contemplate such concepts as mongolism, senility, perversion, and bad breath in all their naked, blinding glory.”