The Water-Method Man

20

His Move

He left his wife and kid in Iowa,

and he bought a one-way ticket.

--Ralph Packer, from the narration of Fucking Up

HE STANDS ON the dark sidewalk, shielded from the streetlight by a shrub, and pays his respects to Biggie's lighted window, and to Mr Fitch, night watchman for his own and neighboring lawns. Fitch waves to him, and Bogus starts his tender-footed limp toward town, slow steps along the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street; in the shadows between the lampposts he blunders into someone's pile of leaves.

'Got to get up early to get those ducks!' shouts Mr Fitch, who is capable of believing anything.

'Right!' calls Bogus, and bleeds downtown to Benny's where he finds Ralph Packer in a wallow of beer. Ralph, however, is sobered by Trumper's pained and spectacular appearance.

Packer is sensible enough to intervene when Bogus starts an assault on a harmless fat student in a white Gandhi robe who wears the sign of the Tao and electrocuted hair. Bogus is telling him, 'If you say you love everyone, I'm going to disembowel you with a glass ashtray ...' He picks one up and adds, 'This glass ashtray.'

Packer beerily ushers Bogus out onto Clinton Street and hobbles him along the curb to his racing bicycle. With the unfeeling stamina of the indestructibly drunk, Ralph pedals the two of them down to the river, across the bridge, and up the long, lung-killing hill to the university hospital. There Trumper is treated for festering foot wounds, chiefly punctures and lacerations, and is released.

All day Sunday Trumper kept prone, reclining on Ralph's couch, his throbbing feet stacked on a pile of pillows. Feverish visions in Ralph's nasty two-room apartment: smelling Ralph's mongrel, whom Trumper called Retch, and the odor of hair oil which seeped upward through the floorboards from a Jefferson Street barber-shop below Ralph's rooms.

Once the phone rang, on a table behind his head. After some groping Bogus managed to answer it, and a strange angry lady informed him that he could go fuck himself. He didn't recognize the voice, but whether it was his fever or a clear-headed conviction, he didn't for a moment believe that the call was intended for Ralph.

By nightfall, Bogus had shaped several emotional impulses into what could vaguely be called a plan. Overturf, indulging his sense of drama, would have called it a scheme.

Trumper struggled to remember the brief letter from his father which had been torn up and

hurled in tiny pieces to Risky Mouse:

Son:

I have had to think very seriously about everything, and I should at first say that I am most disapproving of the various ways you have conducted yourself, both in your personal life and in your career goals.

It is strongly against my better judgment that I have concluded to make you a loan. Understand: this is not a gift. The enclosed check for $5,000 should be ample to put you on your feet again. I will not be so inhuman as to set a specific interest rate on this figure, or to set a specific due date for its return. Suffice it to say that I hope you will consider yourself responsible to me for this money, and that you will accept this responsibility with a gravity quite lacking in your past behavior.

Dad

Bogus was capable of remembering that he had not torn up the check and hurled it into the basement too.

The next morning Trumper took slow, swollen steps to the bank. A day's transaction included the following: a deposit of five thousand dollars, which prompted the personal congratulations of Bank President Shumway; a twenty-minute wait in President Shumway's now-cordial office while the bank processed a new numbered checkbook for him (the old one was home with Biggie); a withdrawal of three hundred dollars in cash; and the theft of fourteen courtesy matchbooks from the little basket on the counter by the teller's window ('I intend to rob you,' he whispered to the startled teller, then grabbed the matches).

Trumper limped to the post office and wrote out checks to the following:

Humble Oil & Refining Co.

Sinclair Refining Co.

Iowa-Illinois Gas & Electric

Krotz Plumbing

Northwestern Bell Telephone Co.

Milo Kubik (Peoples Market)

Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Office of Financial Aid, State University Of Iowa