« Rufus: Chapter Two
Rufus
Chapter Three
by Conrad Phillips
“Tom!”
Rufus banged on the brick wall of Tom’s apartment at three in the morning, as if he could shake the entire building with his pounding and wake everybody up. He was beginning to annoy the people on the first floor, but Tom was up on the third and couldn’t hear a thing yet.
“Tom!”
A pudgy face with a mop of dark hair popped out of a first-floor window. “Shut the fuck up!” the kid yelled. “It’s three in the morning!”
“I’m looking for Tom!” The kid on the first floor was only six feet away. Rufus didn’t need to yell.
“He’s not here!”
“How do you know!”
“Just shut the fuck up!”
The kid went back into the apartment and closed the window. It was much warmer now than it had been, but not warm enough to keep the windows open. Rufus thought about yelling again, but instead he pounded silently on the wall with his fist, then he walked away and sat on the curb, depressed. Fifteen minutes later, while Rufus was staring into nothing, Tom stepped out of the building in a ratty bathrobe. “Rufus?”
“Tom?” Rufus stood up. “Tom!”
“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell? Or knock on the door or call me?”
“I know it’s a little early . . . but it’s March 8, remember? You said you’d have time. And I was just tooling around and I realized what day it was and you’d be on break and I thought --”
“Just get inside, Rufus. Someone’s gonna call the cops.”
“. . . Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that.”
The two took the stairs up to the third floor and Tom’s apartment. It was a cramped, campus-controlled apartment, enough for a few beds and amenities and not much else. Tom’s two roommates stood by the door, waiting to see what was going on. “You know this guy?” one of them said, a guy of average height who was getting a little round but looked unnatural about it, as if he’d only really learned to eat once he’d gotten into college.
“Yeah, this . . . he’s my Uncle Rufus.”
“Oh . . . that’s the guy?”
“Yeah.”
Rufus had been never called an uncle before, and even though it was probably an insult, since Tom had to lie to explain this strange man to his friends, somehow being called uncle made Rufus unreasonably proud of himself. Tom introduced his friends. Chris, the fat one. Darius, who was shorter than average and whose body seemed to waste away a little. They shook each other’s hands and realized that they all would rather be in bed right now, even though Darius had been awake when Tom had come calling. Tom told Rufus that there wasn’t much room but that Rufus could sleep on the floor if he liked.
Rufus thought twice and became concerned. “I just want to make sure cuz I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. Are there any rules about visitors or anything?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tom said.
“Tons of rules,” Darius continued. “More than we can keep track of. But nobody bothers enforcing them unless you piss someone off.”
“Okay,” Rufus said uncertainly. “Good.”
Everyone went to bed and tried or pretended to sleep. Rufus, without a blanket or any means of comfort, wasn’t sure what to do, so he sat in an empty corner and curled into a ball. He was pretty sure he’d be able to fall asleep, but his back was gonna hurt him in the morning.
At about eleven, Tom kicked Rufus gently in the ribs to wake him up. When standing, Rufus looked relatively thin and fit for a man his age, but now that he was crumpled into a corner, all his fat coalesced on his gut. It stuck out over his jeans and sagged downwards over the button and zipper, like a beer belly that had been popped with a pin, gotten sick, died, and was now dripping all over his crotch. Rufus woke up slowly and sullenly, his eyes staring ahead without much purpose, but then he realized it was Tom.
“Cmon . . . do you want breakfast? Chris and Darius left already.”
“Where did they go?”
“They’re gone. Here cmon, I don’t know if anyone’s still serving breakfast.”
“. . . I’ve never been much for breakfast.”
“Well, good. You should still probably eat something.”
“Okay.”
“Do you wanna shave or shower or something? I might have some clothes that’ll still fit you.”
“No . . . no, not really. Not right now.”
“Let’s go, then. Let’s go. We’ve gotta get you moving around.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“I have to get up first.”
Rufus leaned over to stick out his right arm, gesturing that Tom should grab him and help him to his feet. For a second, Tom was convinced that the old sonofabitch could get up just fine and was looking for pity, but he helped Rufus anyway. Once on his feet, Rufus took some time to straighten out his back. “The damn thing spasms on me now and then.” In the light of the late morning, the apartment seemed even smaller. “You’ll know what I’m talking about . . . you said something about breakfast?”
“There’s a McDonald’s nearby.”
“I don’t wanna go there . . . don’t you have any cafeterias? Campus cafeterias or something?”
“Yeah.”
“Well it’s been awhile since I’ve been on a campus. I want to see it.”
It was only a short walk away, and there really wasn’t much to see. Tom got a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of soda. Rufus took a bagel and some juice. When they came up to the woman behind the register, Rufus handed her a twenty before Tom could even reach for his wallet. “For everything,” Rufus said. She looked at him suspiciously, wondering if the unkempt, unshaven man was a bum or just another one of the professors. Seeing the look on her face, he continued, “I’m his Uncle Rufus.”
“He wants to see the campus,” Tom added.
The woman behind the register decided she didn’t care one way or the other. The two went to an empty table on the far corner of the cafeteria, underneath a flat screen TV turned to a news channel. Rufus tried to figure out what the announcers were talking about, but all he could tell at this point was that something had happened or was happening somewhere. Or possibly hadn’t happened yet. Rufus opened his juice and looked at his bagel. “Is there any salt?” he asked.
“There should be a shaker or something,” Tom answered.
“I’m not seeing anything.”
“Try one of the other tables.”
Rufus stood up and searched among the napkins and detritus on the surrounding tables. No one had been in to clean up after breakfast, so everything was still in a state of disorder. “I didn’t see your two buddies,” Rufus said a little too loudly. “Chris and . . .”
“Darius.”
“Darius . . . did they have plans or something?”
Rufus was walking back up to the counter as Tom said. “We were going to Mexico. They left this morning.”
The cafeteria was depressingly empty now that it was Spring Break, but at least it was quiet. When it was crowded. all the crumbs and napkings were part of a general, hurried mess, but now the mess was its own little setpiece that Tom studied in relative peace.
Rufus came back with a handful of salt packets. “I didn’t know you had plans . . . and here I just went and ruined them, didn’t I . . . I’m sorry. Where were you going?”
“Mexico.”
“Oh, Jesus, really? That would’ve been great. Where exactly?”
“Cancun.”
“Oh . . . well that ain’t Mexico.”
“What do you mean?”
“Now I don’t feel so bad . . . yknow what I found out? If you take some salt and put it on one of these warm bagels, it’s just like one of those super pretzels they make you buy at football games. But this isn’t nearly as expensive.” Rufus split his bagel in half, then poured far too much salt on one end. Then he took a big bite out of the salted end, wincing as is throat shriveled and tried to push back all the salt. And he smiled.
“So what are Chris and Darius up to? What are they studying?”
“Darius is in pre-med and wants to be a doctor or something.”
“Something?”
“Something in health that pays good money. Chris used to want to be a journalist.”
“What does he want to be now?”
“The reason he got out of it was he started making up the articles he was supposed to be making for homework assignments. And he got away with it. So he quit. I don’t know what he is now. Something with literature. Every time I ask, he says he’s studying nothing.”
“Good for him.”
“. . . Right.” Tom took a bite out of his sandwich, frowned, and chewed slowly. He pulled something indistinct and thin, a misplaced piece of spaghetti, out of his mouth. “So what have you been up to?”
Rufus looked back at his heavily salted bagel, but this time he couldn’t take it as well and chased it with the juice, which really didn’t help. “I’ve just been . . . wandering. Not very far yet, but I’ve been wandering. I told you, or I think I told you, I was tired of waiting. I’m tired of waiting. I’ve been going out there and doing what my soul wants. I’m finally doing, or I’m trying, this is harder than it sounds, I’m doing what I think I want to do.”
“So what did you do first?”
“I went to a whore.”
“Really . . . how was it?”
“Depressing. Well it wasn’t the first thing I did. I drove around for awhile, and there were always these parts of the city where I’d say that I shouldn’t go any farther or I have no reason to any further. So now I went further, and sure enough, there they were, plain as day. It was night out, but you still figured the cops could just stroll down the street and arrest them one by one. I didn’t go the first time I saw, I just drove around a little, but it grew on me. These weren’t any high-class escorts or something, most of them were ugly and desperate, but that’s what draws you to them, because you’re ugly and desperate, yknow?”
Rufus bit into the bagel again, this time with determination. Tom stared down at his half-eaten sandwich. He decided not to finish it, not because of anything Rufus was saying, but instead because there was something seriously wrong with the sandwich. The bread, the meat, and all the unnamed extras tasted like they’d been dipped in brackish water.
“One thing I found out when I finally . . . made my decision was that these women should be in sales. It’s not like you get your fifteen minutes and get out, at least not with the one I was with. She saw, I don’t know how, that I was the kinda guy who was willing to spend money, so before she even undid my belt, it was all about what she could do for me. We could make this an evening, she was saying. She knew a guy who would bring us liquor, a guy who could get us cocaine or heroin or pot, she knew a girl who was into older guys. That’s what she said. It was synergy. She knew everybody. And it was all so cheap you knew that even the liquor had to be illegal somehow. I just came and went, and she was nice about it, asked me to come back whenever I wanted. Because if I came back, she’d drag me in for a little more and get a little more out of me. I can imagine a poor schmuck going in for a quick blow and staying the whole weekend because of all the cunt shoved at him and all the cheap drugs they got in him. Cuz it’s hard to look ready cunt in the face and say no, right? Right?”
“Right,” Tom said. It was not a conversation he wanted to be having. He might’ve been able to stand it in his apartment, late at night, drunk off one thing or another, and he would’ve been listening to a friend or roommate, but here, in a cafeteria approaching noon, sitting across from his mother’s ex-husband, all he wanted to do was go away. But he didn’t have the nerve.
“She sounded like a telemarketer. I feel sorry for these people. It’s just their job, and I don’t want to pile my shit on top of their shit just because I’m annoyed. I told her I’d be back real soon, I almost asked for contact information, like a business card or something. She knew I wasn’t coming back, but she was good about it. Real professional. And I started going to the forest preserve.” Rufus took a long, last gulp of his juice and pushed the bagel aside. “Do you know how many forest preserves there are in this city? They’re all over the place! I never bothered with them before, and they’re more at the outskirts than anything, but it’s really something. On one of the warmer days last week, I saw a dirty old guy . . . old, I’m old . . . and he was rubbing his crotch and walking up to this kid who couldn’t have been older than twenty. The kid really didn’t do anything, I think it took him awhile to figure out what the guy was doing, then he just walked away. I was right there, but the guy didn't seem to care about me. I guess I’m not as good-looking as I used to be.” Rufus pushed around his empty salt packets. “I don’t think I want my bagel anymore.”
“The food’s usually better than this.”
“I hope so.”
Tom took his plate to an almost full garbage can, then walked back to Rufus and his small plate. “Are you done?”
“Yeah.” Tom took it away. “Thanks.” When Tom came back, it was only a matter of counting down time before Tom hustled Rufus away. So Rufus made his move.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Tom.”
“What?”
“I’ve been meaning to take off for a little while . . . I mean, yknow, just go . . . would you want to come with?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I want someone to come with.”
“I still have to --”
“Whatever we do, you’ll be back by the time classes start. I just want someone to help me. That’s all.”
Rufus tried to stare at Tom, but instead wound up staring at the table. His shoulders were hunched over, and one of his fingers played with a grain of salt that must’ve fallen off his plate. Tom wanted none of it, not the uncle, not the proposition, not the pitiful stance Rufus had adopted. Still, Tom wasn’t all that surprised at his own response.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“You can’t take one loss and run with it. It was just a client, and we didn’t even lose the client. I mean, when people lose jobs, when children lose their toys, when fucking rats lose their cheese, they all go looking for more jobs, more toys, more . . . cheese. No . . . we all gotta pull that parachute out, that support line, we just have to find out what that is. If you just think about what you actually want, not this soul stuff, I’m talking material stuff, stuff you can hold in your hand. If you can just think about it hard enough, and think about how badly you really want it, and I know you want it, otherwise you wouldn’t have been working as hard as you have for so long, if you can think about those goals and those achievements sitting there in the palm of your hand, they will come to you, and you’ll be happy. It won’t be magic, they won’t just magically appear, but just by thinking about them, you’ll focus on them more, and without even knowing it you’ll work harder to get them. Just keep thinking about how good life could be, and life will be good. That kind of thinking has gotten a lot of people a long way, and, so far as I can see, any other kind of thinking, like thinking negatively or thinking about things that may or may not exist, only leads to failure and suffering.”
Tyler Ehrenreich talked to himself and clicked through his notes concerning the people who worked under him, the people who had worked with Rufus. Stephen, Natalie, Sylvia, Dean, Patricia, Jim . . . He had finished what he said he was going to do that day, and now he was left pacing back and forth in his head, thinking up things to do or going over past events in his mind, wondering how he could’ve done things better. He always showed up fifteen minutes early, not too early, not too late. He would work late if he had to, but he always insisted that none of the people he supervised should feel obliged to do the same thing. “I am your boss and I am paid more than you are and you should not have to work harder than I do.” Tyler knew that, behind his back, people thought he was a something of a prick, someone who prided himself too much on being perfect, and he had the vague impression that they relished every one of his mistakes. But he was the boss. It was his job to make decisions and take shit. He hoped they appreciated that.
He decided he was going to save Rufus.
And that was that. He didn’t know what it meant that he was going to save Rufus. It could’ve been that he imagined himself as Rufus in the future and didn’t want to come to that sort of end, going to pieces over what amounted to a mild failure. He seemed to think that the whole Rufus affair was bad for morale, and maybe that was true. But it was a boss’s decision. A hunch, and now he had to find out if the hunch was right.
Tyler went through his list again and called in Natalie, Sylvia, and Jim. They would be able to help him, if they wanted.