In Here, Out There - Michael Thériault

“How did you get down there?” said Paul, still lying on his back.

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“I’m tempted to tell you to get back the same way,” said Paul, “and then just hang up on you. Do you know what time it is? Why don’t you just catch a bus back? Why should I lose any more sleep?”

Grace touched his thigh with her hand beneath the blankets. He frowned even though he was sure it was too dark for her to see him do so.

“All I got’s this dime,” said the boy. Was his voice strange because of the telephone, or because of something else?

“Hitchhike or something. Or walk. It’s only forty or fifty miles,” Paul said.

The boy was silent again.

“Don’t make him hitchhike, sugar. Something could happen to him, especially at this time of night,” said Grace. She moved her hand up and down his thigh.

“What could happen to him that he isn’t already doing to himself?” said Paul. He left the mouthpiece uncovered. He listened for some reaction from the boy, but heard nothing.

Grace switched on the lamp and sat up. He blinked several times, then noted her expression and the quickness and unevenness of her breathing. He rubbed his eyes. “Still there?” he said to the boy.

“Yeah.”

“All right. Give me an hour or so.”

“Sure,” said the boy, and Paul heard a click. He kept the receiver to his ear a few seconds more. No further words came from it. He hung up.

Grace swung her legs to the floor and stood. Paul noted the places where her loose nightgown met her broad smooth hips, the goosebumps rising already on her bare shoulders, the sleepy crisscrossing of strands of her long, dark-brown hair. She took a step toward the door to the hall, stopped, turned, and went to the closet. She stood a moment in the closet doorway, her back to him. Then she covered her eyes with one hand and leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb.

“Sweetheart, could you make me some coffee while I get dressed?” said Paul.

She nodded and reached for her robe.

*

Heavy, infrequent raindrops spattered on the pavement as he walked to the car. He zipped his jacket all the way up and fastened the button at the throat. He pulled his watch cap down over his ears. He left the jacket and cap this way when he was in the car; for months he’d had neither the time nor the money to fix the heater. Every free moment and dollar seemed to have been used in one rescue of the boy or another. While he waited for the engine to warm up he poured and drank a cup of the coffee from the thermos Grace had given him.

He met only a newspaper truck and a police car on the streets between the flat and Highway 101. The freeway wasn’t much busier. Just outside of San Francisco he drove into heavy rain. He came out of it two or three minutes later. After another few miles he drove into more. The pavement was in poor shape and many of the reflectors marking the lanes were broken or missing. Wrapped in darkness and water, he lost his lane several times and wandered into others. He was thankful the traffic was light.

Once past the airport he felt cast adrift. First he would be blinded by rain and when he emerged from it would find himself in another suburb he couldn’t name, amidst houses for nameless families, nameless industrial parks, streetlamps lining nameless streets, pale stuccoed places of food or of amusement for the hordes of the nameless. The freeway, at least, was a guide, and sometimes, when the clouds lifted and thinned, he was comforted briefly by the sight of the black mass of wooded hills to the west or the black expanse of bay to the east.

But how much longer to the exit his son had told him to take?

It was a hell of a drive. He’d try to make the boy appreciate that. The boy must be able to appreciate something.

*

Paul stopped beside the phone booth at the gas station. The boy came out of the booth, opened the passenger door of the car, and sat down. Although only a few drops of rain were falling, the boy was dripping wet.

“Hi,” he said, shutting the door. He didn’t look Paul in the eye.

Paul sat watching the boy and waiting. Maybe a minute passed; the boy said nothing. The car filled with the odors of damp wool, marijuana, and stale beer. Paul pulled back onto the street and returned to the freeway.

“Your voice was weird over the phone,” he said. “I smell the dope and the beer. But that’s not all you’ve been taking, is it?”

“No,” said the boy. “Yes. I took something else. Or maybe I didn’t; I mean, even if I told you what it was you wouldn’t know what it meant. Not really know. You’re not in here.” His voice was the same as it had been over the phone.

The moisture from the boy’s clothes was fogging the windshield. Paul rolled down his window a couple of inches. He felt the damp cold cut through his jacket and cap. He glanced at the boy as they drove beneath the streetlamps of an overpass. Slender and lightly clothed, the boy sat hunched in the corner of the seat and looked out the windows or at the dash, but not at Paul. Then they were out of the light and Paul couldn’t see him.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” Paul said. “What are you trying to get away from? We’re not rich, we can’t give you money to blow, but you’ve got clothes and food.”

“You could be Gordon fucking Getty and it wouldn’t make any difference,” said the boy.

Paul rolled his palms forward and back against the wheel. He huffed twice. “Is it that your mom and I don’t give you enough love?” he said.

The boy said, “You do what you can, I guess. But it don’t apply.”

“It don’t apply?” Paul was shouting now. “We might have had a house of our own, with a garden. We might have gone without seventeen years of worrying about you. It don’t apply?! Maybe we could have traveled, gone to Italy, seen where our families came from. But we wanted a kid, we wanted to love a kid. And your mom and I have never been at each other like we have over you since you started this. Never. And it don’t apply?”

“It’s real simple,” said the boy in a voice weirdly tranquil. “I’m in here, and you’re out there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Paul.

The boy was silent. Paul glanced at him but could hardly see him.

Paul said, “If it doesn’t apply, maybe I should just take the next off ramp and make you get out.”

“If you want to. I can probably find an overpass to stay under until it stops raining. I can get by, if I want to. If I want money I can always get it fast. I’ll sell my ass on Polk Street. I don’t care. It’s just an ass,” said the boy.

The rain wasn’t heavy, but Paul caught himself drifting into another lane.

“I remember such good things,” he said. “Halloweens at Aunt Maria’s. You danced in front of the television. That vacation on Tony’s boat in the Delta, all the catfish and sturgeon we ate, all the swimming. And the day you and I went down the Russian River in a canoe. Do you remember? Don’t you remember other good things, too?”

The boy didn’t reply. Paul glanced at him as they passed beneath the lights of a sign announcing the next exits. The boy’s dark hair still dripped water. His dark eyes still avoided Paul’s own. Paul couldn’t now discern but was reminded of the recent sallowness of the boy’s face and the blue pouches beneath his eyes. He wanted to let go of the wheel, to put both arms around the boy, and to wail.

“There are colors in these lights,” said the boy, “that you wouldn’t know.”

Then they were out from under the lights.

“Jesus, kid. Jesus. Put your seat belt on, would you?” said Paul, his voice unsteady.

He heard the boy begin to laugh.

Originally published by Berkeley Poets Cooperative/26, 1985

Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, six stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by almost three dozen publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and New World Writing. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.

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