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His Name is Sam
1
The land out behind the house sunk an inch under his boots as Jack walked through the sparse trees toward the river. He heard his neighbor to the south calling to his dogs beyond the heavy brush. The day had been rainy, and still the sun would not shine, which was unusual. He always felt something was coming, something was about, when the weather felt this way. A snake slithered through the grass ahead of him. He only saw the briefest glimpse of its form, not enough to identify it, but enough to know it was quite large. He had better be careful. It was difficult to maintain an essential sense of presence after he had been inside too long. He had been ill with a stomach virus and so had not been out, which he did not like to do. He tried to be out for several hours on each day, to maintain his contact with the natural world, which he now began to focus on in earnest, as he remembers it. Then, he noticed he was not alone.
Something in the bush moved, ever so slightly, a motion that could only be detected through experience, when you have been outside so long. He stopped and waited. He sniffed the dank air. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. He waited. Then, he caught a flash of ebony and mauve skitter away to his left. A large lizard. Still, he waited. Then it saw it--then more of them.
He slowly backed away, as one of them, a small one, sensing his movement, started toward him as he turned to face it, and then it turned away, but a larger one, which followed the first's attack, did not hesitate, and so he took off running in the opposite direction, because if they are determined to attack, the only hope is that you can outrun them. At first, he ran north as fast as he could, but then, beginning to think, he quickly jerked his way around a tree, a dangerous move if the beast was too close behind, because they could turn with lightning speed, but it was not so close, he felt it was not so close, and he caught it by surprise, and he passed it far to its right before it had the time to react. He headed toward where he had heard his neighbor's voice, because if he was to be bitten, he wanted to be close to another human, hoping for the possibility that he might not be eaten before an intervention could occur. But it did not follow him after the turn.
He stopped short when he realized he was alone again, until he again realized he was not. He caught a glimpse of another one in the underbrush ahead. But it started away just as he saw it. He heard motions of others to the west, moving back toward the river. Then he saw his neighbor coming through the brush, his dogs yipping after him.
"Paul," he shouted out. "Be careful. Crocs all over the place."
"I know, mate. We've been chasin' 'em."
He felt foolish, then. But he was not a native, having lived here only seven years. And he did not have dogs. He'd had a dog, but it got eaten, so he never bothered to get another, because they were a lot of work only to succumb to so casual a demise.
2
He remembered a time back in the States when his father came for a visit and stayed two years. He got himself a place out by the junkyards so that he would not be in the way, even though he assured him he would not. He used to go to the junkyards every three or four days to see him, but mostly because he wanted to be near Joan, who had moved nearby, he discovered early on. He would never have made his presence known to her, that being the way he was, but he liked it that he could be near to her, in the same neighborhood, so to speak, because where his father lived could hardly be called a neighborhood, it was little more than a shack, but Joan lived adjacent to the area in a neighborhood that was hardly more than a collections of shacks itself. He wondered why she chose to live there. He wondered if her life had changed at all, because surely she could afford better housing, she had a good paying, if low-class job, unless something had happened. He really wanted to know, but not enough to go and seek her out to ask her.
And then one day as he was returning from picking up electronic supplies from a nearby town, walking along the old dirt road, he met a man who had sold supplies himself, standing at the front fence of his yard. The man recognized the label on the box he carried and commented on it, and they struck up a conversation about the business, and the guy told him about an old man who lived in Joan's neighborhood who had huge amounts of surplus electronic parts for sale at very reasonable prices. He got the man's address, dropped the package off at his father's house, and headed on over to the neighborhood. The old black man was sitting on his porch as he approached the house. They talked for a while, and the man told him that he was no longer in the business. He had a few things left lying around that he sold from time to time, but he had nothing that Jack wanted. As he was leaving, he saw Joan, walking across the street toward him, smiling broadly at him.
"What are you doing here? he asked, pretending not to have known she lived here.
"I live here now."
"Why?"
She didn't answer him, but kept on approaching, staring.
Something was different about the neighborhood, something he could not get his mind around. Then, as several people who obviously had been partying exited a house across the street and headed toward another larger group approaching from down the block, he realized that the air was filled with a festive activity, that atmosphere of pending revelry that he hated, as if a party was about to happen.
She must have sensed his wonder, because Joan said, "We're having a block party." He nodded, as if he knew it all along, or as if he concluded it on his own, which he did not. He should have, because that's what it felt like to him. But it had only been imagination in his mind, or maybe intuition that he had not attended to.
As Joan and he talked, about any subject that came up, she became more and more forward. She had always been awkward with him, making him more awkward with her, or maybe it was the other way around. Whichever, his ease with her as the conversation flowed, more easily than ever, prompted her to become more at ease with him. He had always liked her, and he had always assumed that she had always liked him even more. Or maybe that too was the other way around.
As they continued their conversation, which he knew even they spoke was about nothing at all, really, he began to become aware that people attended to them, interest grew as to their relationship, which was not much of anything until this day, but which always held a lot of potential, or so he, and/or she, thought. Where did he come from, these people, who seemed to know her, seemed to be thinking. When he became aware that his father was a part of the group, that he stood about a block away among a crowd with a glass of beer in his hand, looking his way, as if he saw what he was up to, he thought that it might be more than he could take. Strangers who might know what you are up to, the lurid thoughts you harbor in what might be called your soul, if that is not a sacrilegious idea, are perhaps okay, if they will accept what it is that you are all about, like any other person, if they will fail in your presence to acknowledge the secret intent you have. But when people who know you do they same, feel the same way, about you, then it makes you more self-conscious. And when your own father becomes a part of that group that is becoming aware that you are, after all, only a normal, prurient person, then... This kind of thing always happens when he talks to long, two threads of simultaneous thought, one normally social, the other increasingly paranoid, the two diverging the longer the social interaction continues, as if the one requires the other to balance it out.
It begins to get too close for him, and she begins to notice. But what might turn another woman off only serves to intensify Joan's feelings, he has always known--or felt. Understanding this about her, he is torn, between offering apologies and retreating, or continuing to do what he is not doing, standing, merely talking to her, nothing more, unless staring expectantly into her expectant eyes is something, more than how you would otherwise engage a different person. She is glowing now, he thinks, happy to be thusly engaged, becoming more and more animate, bestowing gentle touches on his arms, reaching out, doing everything she instinctively knows how to convince him to continue to approach that moment when he will ask that inevitable question, in whatever form, disguised or more direct, that it will take.
But he does not ask it. He never asks it. He has never asked it, of anyone. He doesn't believe in asking. He believes in waiting, for a response to a question he never asks.
His father has worked his way down the block and stands behind him in the old man's yard. He turns slyly occasionally when the encounter with Joan permits it, when he can allow himself to look away for a moment from her eyes, when he can work their stance around so that he is facing that other side of the street when she isn't working it around another way for whatever reason she will have, and when he turns his way, he can see his father and the old man talking amiably and looking in his direction. He thinks he knows what they say, that is, he thinks he hears it, in unspoken words. The old man has come to a different opinion of him, he is sorry for being less than cooperative with him in his enquiries about the technical equipment, he has a better opinion of him now, now that he knows that his father is also black. It's usually the other way around, he remembers, when people, black as well as white, will come to know his heritage, thinking the less of him for the accident of his nature, for the oddity that his is, a genetic black with white skin, a hybrid, a breed, and a rare one at that, recessive to a bitter fault, and depressive as a result. And suddenly a thought of horror fills his chest: Joan does not know any of this. But she is very liberal, he thinks. She will understand. And yet, he cannot, could not ever, bring himself to tell her the truth. She would have to discover it for herself, and then he would have to pay the price, if any.
Being now vulnerable, or rather, now better understanding his vulnerability, he sees he is even more attractive to Joan, She doesn't know why, but she experiences intuitively the fact of it. And in the void he is creating by his lack of action, she is beginning to pursue him. He relies on this. It's his modus operandi. She finally sees that she has the power and she uses it, and they are all of a sudden leaving the street, toward a loft in a nearby converted warehouse where friends of hers stay, friends who are at the party. He feels relieved, of the burden of being known by anyone but her. They, others, might know tomorrow what he had been up to today, they might even know it, see it coming, some of them, today, but he will be out of their sight for a few hours, maybe even for the whole night.
3
The next day he was alone again, Joan having left him early that morning, before it had gotten light. He knew she expected him to call her. He would not. He had asked her not to leave. She felt she had to, so that she could play out her waiting game, he thought. But late that afternoon, she saw him across the street visiting the old man again. He saw her see him as she tried to turn away before he saw her, and when he did, she gave it up and crossed the street to him, waiting at the fence until he had finished speaking to the old man. They walked across the field beside the old man's house to the warehouse area behind the neighborhood. She was mostly quiet, walking with her arms folded awkwardly across her chest. He was quiet too, but he walked openly, remaining, ideologically, open to her, always, open to any woman who would want it to be so. And he knew she wanted it to be so, but she had to play the game, it had to be his idea, this relationship. He wanted to say these things to her, but he knew that it was a futile effort.
They sat beside an old road that ran along the expanse of abandoned warehouses. The day had been sunny, but now the sun was going down. She still held herself, her arms wrapped around her as if she were cold, although it was still a warm day. Eventually, awkwardly, they got around to talking about their previous night together. Although she would not commit to the idea that she had enjoyed herself, he knew she had. He knew he could talk her into it again, tonight, but he didn't try, which was what she wanted him to do, and what he wanted her to do, forever. But they were getting to that point again where she would, do it again, if fate in the form of previously made plans hadn't intervened.
An old rusted pickup truck approached, and all of Joan's melting reticence refroze. It sped down the cinder road and skidded to a stop. Despite himself, Jack heard himself say aloud, "Oh-oh."
"It's okay, " she said. "He always drives like that. It doesn't mean anything." She seemed, again, to be able to read his mind.
The guy got out of the truck, his slow, ambling bulk of a posture belying his driving manner, giving truth to Joan's analysis. He wandered over toward them and said something about going out with her that evening which started with the words "Hey, how ya doin' there, sweetie..." after which Jack found himself lost in an inability to attend to details so as to retain them, a skill he was well-trained in, attending and retaining, and which usually stayed with him, but which left him in this case like a speeding truck as his upper body filled with, well, hormones, for lack of a better word. He hated to feel like this, and whenever he did, his first, second, and last reaction was always to hurry as quickly away as he could without drawing any attention at all to himself, in other words, to be completely polite, civil, congenial, whatever, as he made his gracious escape, which people always praised him for, his coolness in charged situations, because they never knew the truth, he was that good at concealing it. But no matter how much he lost the actual words as he tried to plan his escape, he quite clearly got the sense of the short conversation between Joan and George. (Joan introduced them in the midst of this conversation, and they shook hands.) She and George had a date that night, and George had been looking for her.
Joan was as practiced at Jack at concealing her real feelings. Maybe, she was even better at it. She looked, for all the world to see, as if she were ready for the date, understanding no discrepancy between what she was apparently about to do and what she had done last night. Jack stared at her, not in any disrespectful way, not in anger or frustration, not out of jealousy or hurt, though all of those possibilities were to some degree inherent in his internally hidden behavior. But neither did he look at her in the way he had been looking at her previously, especially yesterday. And yet she saw what she must have thought was all of him, inside and out, he did not hide himself away with her as he did with George, what she must have thought was all of him poured out through his eyes and into her, or her into him back into her, or both together, back and forth. George watched this brief eternal exchange and must have thought, Jack thought, when he broke away to catch him watching, he knew what it was they felt. Jack looked back at Joan, and when he met a more determined, stoic face, he raised his arms palms out as if to say, "Make a choice." But he said nothing. And neither did she.
And then, fate again, stepped, or rather drove, in. A car turned into the road heading toward them, but stopping far short, probably because the road's increasingly poor, potholed, puddled surface repelled the driver. The road so obviously contrasted with the car's new and expensive appearance. The driver's door opened and a good-looking woman stepped out. She raised her hand, and Joan and George both looked at Jack, who raised his hand in an acknowledgement. The woman motioned for him to come to her. Joan had to know that this was an ordinary occurrence in his life. Someone from his past was always showing up, or so it had been when she had known him. She didn't know his far more recent past, when the pattern had reversed itself, or rather, when he had insisted that it become reversed.
Jack raised a finger to her and then turned back to Joan, who simply continued to stare at him, in the way he had stared at her. Not wanting to, he nevertheless forced himself, to say, only, "Well?"
She shrugged her shoulders. Nothing more. He turned and walked away toward the car. George turned his way to watch him go. When he turned back to Joan, she had changed. He didn't know how, nor why, but she looked different. He tried to understand.
George was a big man, broad-shouldered, not overweight, but husky, heavy, and tall. He had a broad face that could grin as broadly, as he had proven as he had approached the couple. His hair was slightly thinning, but it only added to his handsome appearance. As he stood before her, trying to read her, Joan sighed, barely perceptibly, but enough to let him know he was not very likely to have such a good time with her this night as he had had in the past. He asked, "What's the matter," as if he didn't know.
"Nothing," she said, in a way that meant he was not to believe her. She looked away from him toward the car just as Jack arrived at it. George turned to follow her gaze and they watched Jack and the woman talking in what appeared to be an intimate manner. "He doesn't care for me," she said.
George looked at her. "Sure he does."
She looked at him, away from Jack. She stared at him until he knew she was demanding an explanation.
"He wouldn't have walked away like that if he didn't care," George said.
She didn't understand and so continued to stare.
"He would have just left, if he wanted her instead, he wouldn't have told her to wait a minute. He wouldn't have asked you to choose first."
"He didn't ask."
"Sure he did. You just didn't hear him."
"You sure are being nice."
"I can be nice."
"Yes you can." She smiled. But she didn't mean it.
"A lot must have happened since last week."
"Since yesterday. But not so much."
"You should tell him how you feel."
"I can't."
"Why not."
"I already did."
"Oh. I see."
"No. You don't."
"I think I do."
"I didn't actually tell him anything. I meant...I mean..."
"I know what you mean."
They looked back down the road at the car. The woman was getting back in, and Jack was walking back toward them. George turned toward Joan to catch the look on her face before she made it go away.
As George looks on, they begin to haggle over who will do the chasing, who will be responsible for taking the initiative. This takes the form of words he can't remember. He wants her to be the way she was yesterday, assertive, leading the way, being the sexually aggressive partner. She did that, she feels, only as an initial ploy, to get him to begin to chase her. But she did it all night long, off and on, when he would not. Jack remembers his elation at each abandoned attempt pof hers to be less than intimate.
George leaves. He's far more intelligent than he appears, Jack thinks. His mind races. Being able to see well through her games, which she points out to him as a fault when she gets an inkling of what he's thinking, he says, "You don't want me then. You want George." That is, he thinks, she wants an instinctual male, not an intellectual one and doesn't know how really smart he is. But she smiles obscurely at his remark. She knows she doesn't want what he suggests. They come to a tacit agreement, that they will both desire each other, secretly, preserving an appearance of stone sobriety in public and reserving their passion for the bedroom. This exchange takes place in a very short time with so few words that Jack thinks he may have gotten it all wrong. Repressed passion does this to you.
He tells her, after they come to another brief experience of psychic understanding, that the woman in the car is his sister. He says this as a response to her suggesting an accusation of future infidelity with her.
"I remember seeing your sister," she says. "At the company picnic that time, when she showed up looking for you. I was watching from the hill as they drove into the parking lot, her and her radical friends. She didn't look anything like that woman. She used to be so...punk."
"She looks a lot more civilized...since she died."
He almost didn't say it, but they had come to a point where she would again know if he were holding something back from her.
She still couldn't see from a distance the pale olive color of her skin.
As close as they had become, as close as they had always been, non-physically, they still remained, a part of them, distant. She thinks she knows him, she thinks, she wants to know, more, bracing against further revelation, unaware of it, thinking she remains open toward him, when she is closing off. He can feel it, the closure she doesn't know, which she thinks she does.
She doesn't even know his real name, because when he worked with her he had been using an alias. His name is Sam.
And yet, she feels, she knows him. Something inside her relates to him directly, so that specific facts don't matter, she thinks, she knows him.
Yet still she doesn't know the truth.
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