The Handyman by Carolyn See

Author:Carolyn See [See, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76624-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

10

“The one place I always wanted to go was Calcutta. Doesn’t that seem splendid in every way?”

Ben was better now, but you could see he was still weak. He got up sometimes to sunbathe in the backyard, but he didn’t like to go out in public. He stayed in the dining room on his bed and watched people move around him, and he was hardly ever alone; Hank stayed with him.

“Why Calcutta? You talk about it all the time.” I’d done a little straightening up around the house and was spelling Hank so he could go for a walk. I had a surprise in mind for later, and I asked the kid again, “Why Calcutta?” But Ben had dozed off.

In the three weeks I’d known these guys, I’d changed my mind about Hank. The guy had a lot of courage. Courage to come out to LA to live the life he’d always wanted, but more courage to have stayed in that Ohio town for the whole first part of his life, living with his Christian parents, impersonating a tough guy when he drove trucks for his brother-in-law, fending off country girls who—over the years—had thought he was “cute.”

And I couldn’t even measure Ben’s courage.

Every afternoon, I tried to come by. Every afternoon when Hank got back from his walk, we’d pull a couple of beers out of the refrigerator. The two of us would sit on the front porch, just a couple of guys in Levi’s and T-shirts, chugging our brewskies and watching the life of this little street, Chicana girls pushing babies in strollers, old, forgotten white ladies who hadn’t moved out after their husbands died, and a lot of young guys washing their cars. Hank would tell me what it was like talking to strangers on the phone about their setup. He told stories of missed appointments and lost papers and counselors at AIDS Project Los Angeles, who started out sounding like they could do something but got less and less enthusiastic when they heard the whole story—that he and Ben were from out of state, that they didn’t have insurance, that neither of them had job benefits, or family, or money, or even a car.

Then he’d change the subject, and it turned out he was homesick. He talked about what it was like back home—the American plainness of it—miles of woods and grassland and scrubby hills that never got anywhere and that hadn’t changed since the whites took the land from the Indians. The one-street town of Althea, all built of red brick. The truck-driving school they had there, where guys who couldn’t read or write learned to drive semis as big as a football field, and what bad drivers those guys were! The strip joints outside of town, where you watched girls you’d gone to high school with take off their clothes.

The churches. Hank had been raised a Methodist, and he would say, even now, that he believed in God. The best thing about the church

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