Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  The greeting breaks Pimletz’s concentration. He pulls away from the screen, looks up, and sees the guy next to him, Hamlin, back from a smoke or the Men’s with a ridiculous white band stretched against his too-thick hair. He looks like John McEnroe used to look, Pimletz considers, back when he used to pitch tantrums instead of financial services. Thick, curly hair, belted like a bale of wheat. Of course, Hamlin only looks this way up top, now, with the headband. Rest of him is fat around the neck and middle. Only exercise he gets is in his fingers, from the way he works his phones and his keyboard. Truly, the guy gets more done in a day than Pimletz can manage in a month, and what eats at Pimletz is the way Hamlin rarely leaves his desk to accomplish it. It’s all right there. Hamlin can work the phones like no one else in the Record-Transcript newsroom, no one is close, and the kicker is when he finally bangs out his stories, it’s like he’s taking dictation. The words just burst from what he knows. Zip. Splat. Done.

  The thing between Pimletz and Hamlin has been going on six or seven years, and what it is has been mostly Hamlin’s doing. What it has been mostly is Hamlin riding Pimletz about anything he can find, whenever he can find it. Guy’s never wanted for ammunition. Sometimes the riding is about Pimletz’s failure to escape the obit desk after twenty years, his inability with women, his inertia. Sometimes it’s about a foot in Pimletz’s mouth regarding a colleague or some other newsroom transgression. (Once, Pimletz was goofed into calling an already-humiliated Mike Dukakis for a comment on the accidental drug overdose of his wife, Kitty; Hamlin got a good ride out of that one.) Mostly, it is just a calling to embarrassing attention Pimletz’s occasional lapses in judgment, some of which have passed into lore.

  Today’s ammo is just about nuclear, and it is stretched across Hamlin’s creased brow. “So?” he tries again. “I’m waiting.”

  “For what?” Pimletz doesn’t know, yet. Two and two have never been easy for him.

  Hamlin points to his silly headband, and, with his in-shape fingers, highlights the block-lettered PIM from the Chinese laundry Pimletz sometimes uses. Pimletz finally makes the connection, quick on his feet or no. What’s not to connect? He gets an eyeful of what used to be the waistband to his underwear, stretched now and advertising his shame—PIM—and he shrinks from it. Jesus, Pimletz thinks. Fuck me dead and out the door. I’m just a humiliated piece of shit.

  In a beat, he credits Hamlin with puzzling together the whole sorry bathroom episode from a few moments earlier, working backward from this thin piece of evidence. Then he thinks, wait, I’m being paranoid, right? This is paranoid. It could be anything, this PIM. How does a guy like Hamlin make the leap from something like that to me? Where does that come from? Not even Hamlin’s mind works like that. No way he knows about before. Then he thinks if he pretends not to get it Hamlin’ll go away; it’s never fun for him unless he gets Pimletz going.

  “What?” Pimletz says, trying to salvage what there had been of his dignity. He means to play it calm and interested.

  “Don’t give me what,” Hamlin says.

  “No, really, what?”

  “This,” Hamlin says, playing at exasperated. “This.” He slips his finger under the waistband, lets it snap back against his thick hair. The noise is not what he was looking for, so he tries it again. “This is what.”

  Pimletz pretends to consider Hamlin’s fashion statement. “Okay,” he says, “fine, it’s you.”

  “Oh, come on, Axel,” Hamlin says, mischievous, not giving up. “You gonna sit there and tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “You haven’t said anything. You’re not talking about anything. What are you talking about?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Again with the what?”

  “Again with the what.”

  “You have nothing to say to me?”

  “What do you want me to say to you? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What else do you want me to say to you? I’m missing something, right?”

  “Fuck, yeah, you’re missing something,” Hamlin says. He lifts the band from his head and places it on the desk in front of Pimletz. “This. You’re missing this.” Then, “Tell me this isn’t yours.” He’s got a smile on his face only Pimletz recognizes. “Claim it, and I leave you alone.”

  Pimletz examines the band. He holds to his plan. “Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, returning the evidence. “Where’d you get this?”

  Hamlin takes the waistband, then he takes the step or two between himself and Pimletz. “In the trash, where you left it,” he says.

  “So now you’re going through the trash?”

  “Nothing to go through. It was just there, right on top, hanging out.” Hamlin starts to twirl the band around his index finger like a lariat.

  “Hamlin.”

  “Tell you what, Axel,” Hamlin says. “Let me see your shorts.” He stops with the twirling and makes a sudden reach for Pimletz’s belt, the kind of locker room antic that doesn’t usually happen in the Record-Transcript newsroom. “You got any on, I leave you alone.”

  Pimletz hadn’t figured on this. “Don’t be an asshole,” he says, squirming away.

  “Just lift your shorts.”

  “Enough,” Pimletz says. He thinks about slapping his hands against the desk in a show of firmness, but he doesn’t have this in him.

  “Enough what?”

  “Enough,” Pimletz says, broken. “It’s mine. Okay. It’s mine. That what you wanted?”

  Hamlin pulls at the elastic garment like a rubber band, snaps it at his prey. It lands softly on Pimletz’s humiliated, piece-of-shit head and, for a moment, dangles in front of his face like a wild For Sale tag in a hat store. “No, Axel,” Hamlin says, gesturing to the landed waistband in that same moment, “that’s what I wanted.”

  The rain is bucketing down on Terence Wood, still on the hood of his parked car, still locked on the way things used to be. Hendrix has passed onto Smashing Pumpkins, and Springsteen, and news on the hour. Keith Richards, solo. The Presidents of the United States: she’s in your head, she might be dead. Wood no longer hears the music or feels the bass thumping through his car. He’s lapsed into his own meditation, and, in his head, the storm has become mere color, detail. It’s there, but it doesn’t bother him. If he were wearing his trademark baseball cap (plain, gray, corduroy), the water would be pouring from the bill in rivers thick enough to fill one shot glass before he could down another, but the rain does not touch him in any way more direct than as stage direction. Camera pulls back to reveal WOOD, sitting on car, weathering the hard rain like a soldier. Camera pans to WOOD’s P.O.V., across the dark horizon, into nothingness.

  The dirt beneath Wood’s Pathfinder has been quagmired by the downpour. The front tires, pulled into a just-started ditch about three feet from the rusted metal rail rimming the lookout parking area, have been all but swallowed by the pool of muddy water that has, in turn, essentially filled where the just-started ditch used to be. The front bumper is kissing a section of metal railing with the message “Get to Know Us!” spray painted onto its crenelated surface, the bright graffiti mixing with the rusted grunge in a breath of inner city along Maine’s rocky coast.

  Wood emerges from his meditation long enough to fix on the graffiti—he saw it when he pulled up and he is pulled back to it—and, on impulse, he slides down the sloped hood for a closer look, with an exaggerated adult, “Wheee!” The momentum from his slide is more than he expected, and he is nearly thrown from the lookout’s edge before he catches himself. He lands in a tributary to the puddle surrounding his tires, filling his essentially new Adidas Torsion Response Class running shoes with a cold, wet muck he cannot, at first, place. Oh, yeah, that, he realizes. Mud. Of course.

  Wood pulls close, balances against the rusted railing, but it comes loose with his full weight. It doesn’t snap away suddenly or dangerously, but he has targeted a section of railing that has
been rotted by neglect and by the elements, and it refuses to support his leaning. It leans itself, with him. If there were sound effects, the railing would bend away from Wood with the creek of a door in a haunted house.

  He stands and kicks at the still-fastened end of the railing with his muddy Adidas. It breaks free with his second try, and, with a third kick (and the same bluster that went into its spray painting), he sends the loose section over the edge of the seaside crag from which the wheee-d! Terence Wood, only moments earlier, had rescued himself and from which he is now not quite so protected as he earlier had been, even though earlier there had only been this rusted-through section of railing charged with his safekeeping. Still, he feels exposed, vulnerable, where earlier he didn’t know to consider either. He imagines the descending flight of the kicked piece of metal, catching air through its ridges, slapped by the harsh winds against the rocky hillside, alternately floating and hurtling down the couple hundred feet to the stormy sea below. He figures how long it will take to reach the water—thirty-two feet per second, per second, he remembers—then he waits it out, listens.

  When he hears nothing and tires, he backpedals to the driver door and fumbles with the handle. He pulls the door open. The car rocks with the heavy, powerful motion. It rocks, too, when he returns himself—also heavily, powerfully—to the driver’s seat. There is sudden give to the wet earth, and the car shifts uncertainly with this new burden. Again, with sound effects, he guesses he’d be hearing the avalanche crunch of moving rock and wet soil, the coming loose of ground beneath his treads, his own difficult breathing, amplified. Wood’s drenched clothes flash cold against his back when he leans against them, and he sits up straight, away from the leather seat.

  Suddenly, Wood is thrown to the dash with a lurch. Actually, it is not all that sudden, and he is not quite thrown. It isn’t even much of a lurch, but the effect is the same. It happens, really, in a strange, slow motion, like an action sequence drawn out for special effect, but it is very definitely a change in position. The weight of the Pathfinder, and Wood’s within it, is too much for the wet, giving ground, and, as he bends forward to free his cold, clinging shirt from his back, the car shifts with him, makes a new place for itself on the changing terrain with an overstated inhale. There. Better. It doesn’t occur to Wood he might be in any danger, not at first, and when it finally does, he doesn’t move too swiftly to save himself. He’s afraid to upset the uneasy balance the vehicle has just now achieved, and so he slithers himself tentatively along the leather seat—there, okay, just a bit more—pushes up and out against the slammed door, and reminds himself of the DeLorean he still keeps in one of his garages, somewhere.

  He steps from the cab and into the mud, and the car lurches again with the shift. This time, it pitches to its passenger side at an even sharper angle, and the driver door is slammed shut by this new perspective. Without its hulking, tortured, celebrated presence of a driver, the car settles into its new space and is still.

  Wood gets a thought. He doesn’t know where it comes from, but his head is like a lit pinball machine with the idea. There is no ignoring it and no thinking it through. It is something to do, and the only thing to do, both. And so, also on impulse, he slogs to the rear of the car and begins to push. It’s a struggle, at first, to claim his footing, to get a grip against the slick of rain on the back bumper, but he manages a kind of traction. He is giddy with what he’s doing, drunk, and he doesn’t stop to think. He is caught up in it, transported. He puts his full weight into the effort, but the car doesn’t move. He does this again. He pulls a muscle in the small of his back (his diagnosis) and straightens himself to ease the pain.

  Okay. He needs a strategy. He doesn’t mean to think too much about this, but it appears now he must. Think, he coaches himself. Think: all four tires are encased in a thick of mud, the parking brake is on, and these are likely inhibiting his progress. Wood, realizing, returns to the cab, lifts the slammed driver door, unlocks the brake, and throws the car into neutral. He lets the door return itself to its foundation.

  He figures the way to move this baby is with an easy rocking motion to help the treads get a new hold. He’s seen this done, on location in Santa Fe, when a sprinkler valve burst and flooded a sound truck into place. One of the grips, who had a towing business as a sideline, suggested this course, so Wood retreats to the rear and presses his weight against the back bumper, like he is testing the shocks, like he was shown. The Pathfinder bounces to his considerable shifting weight, up and down, and soon it gets going side to side as well. Up and down. Side to side. Up and down. From a distance, it looks like a car full of sweaty, his-and-her teens parked on some Inspiration Point. There’s another not-quite lurch, slow-motion sudden, and he strains to help it along, but the tires are bogged in the mud and not going anywhere.

  He’ll have to gun it, he determines, already having put more thought into this act than it comfortably should have required. Oh, he hasn’t yet thought it through to its other end, but it’s coming. He once again races to the driver door and lifts it open. This time, he climbs in and braces his left arm against the heavy door to keep it from shutting. With his right hand, he turns the key, puts the car into gear. His ass is half on the driver seat, half off. His left leg is anchored in the mud outside his door, ready to spring him clear, his right stretched under the dash. He stomps on the gas pedal, thinking of Lombardi, thinking, “Get to Know Us!”

  The Pathfinder, gunned, responds to Wood’s loose plan like a bad idea. The tires spin wildly, like the car is on blocks. The clean roar of engine is exhilarating, and it rubs against the laboring tire noises to where Terence Wood almost forgets what he’s doing, why. Actually, now that he’s on it, he’s got no idea why. Why not is as far as he’s gotten. Why the fuck not?

  He gives up on the gas. He’ll have to try something else. A board. Yes, that’s what he needs, a block of wood, something flat and hard to wedge beneath his tires. He searches the car. About the only flat, hard surface he can find is his leather briefcase, which contains what there so far is of his memoirs. There isn’t much, mostly fits and starts, some notes, one full chapter about his first wife, Elaine, a book he’s supposed to be reading called Writing Well, a long memo from his publisher.

  Wood steps out of the car and around to the front passenger side. He crouches. He burrows a space in the mud just ahead of the tire and fits his briefcase into it, like a ramp. Then he walks back to the driver door and resumes his position, one foot in, one foot out. He’s ready to go either way. He guns it again. The tires spin wildly again. Nothing. He gives it another try. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s deep into it now, can’t redirect himself. This is what he’s doing. This. Here. Now.

  Finally, one of the tires catches traction, and then another, and before Wood can out-think himself, the car moves forward. It kicks out from under him, although this too happens in slow motion, and in this long unfolding he has time to step his right leg and half-ass from the car and with his right hand on the wheel point the machine to the new opening in the metal railing. It all happens in an instant, but it is an instant protracted, drawn out in Terence Wood’s head to where he can hear his own heartbeat, bury his past, conceive his future.

  In the next moment, on normal speed, he imagines his two tons of metal and leather and state-of-the-art Bose sound system careening to the choppy sea. He gets a clear picture in his head. Then he cuts to a memory of his son, Norman, sending one of his miniature Matchbox racers down the spiral staircase up at one of the cabins (possibly New Hampshire), watching it bound, and shatter, and separate at the fittings, and then he cuts back to the present, big as life, his black Pathfinder spinning front over rear, plunging, thirty-two feet per second, per second, thundering down the couple hundred feet to the water, losing its rear axle against a stone promontory along the sea wall below. He wants desperately to hear the explosion, or splash, something, to give emphasis to what he has just done. He braces for the impact.

  Woo
d on Down

  Axel Pimletz is so infrequently at his best in the morning he couldn’t place it if it stared back at him after a shave. Still, usually, it takes him a couple hours to at least reach his norm. Even he will concede this. Most mornings, it is all Pimletz can do to peel himself from bed, stumble into the shower, curse the clogged drain that leaves him wading by the time he is through, towel off, find some outfit that isn’t too hideous or too like what he wore the previous day, reach into the fridge for the bowl of cereal he poured and milked the night before (he likes his Frosted Flakes sogged, substantially), and depart on his walk from the mouth of Storrow Drive, through Back Bay, across the Common, past the blink of theater and red light districts, and on to the dilapidated Record-Transcript building. When he arrives, he is still not there. Not necessarily. Not yet.

  On this morning, it takes longer than usual for Pimletz to achieve speed. There are reasons. First, he’d forgotten to replenish his Flakes—yesterday, after work—something that had been on the internal To Do list he is always misplacing, so he must leave the house hungry, and without roar. Second, he can’t find a reasonable-looking tie with enough brown in it to suggest anything at all of his too-brown slacks and less-brown sports coat, the miscalculations in style to which he’d earlier committed. Third, it’s raining, hard, second day running, and Pimletz’s feeble umbrella proves far more efficient at inverting itself against the accompanying hard wind than at keeping him dry.

  Fourth, and most troubling, he gets to his desk and discovers no one has died. Well, not no one, exactly, but no one good. Better, no one good enough for the Record-Transcript. Think of it: not a single newsworthy human being has perished in the hours since yesterday’s routine. This happens, sometimes, but it is never a welcome thing, at least not where Pimletz and his already brittle sense of self-worth are concerned. It stops him dead, leaves him wondering what he’s doing, what he’s done, what’s expected. This very public not having anything to do strips him of all identity and purpose, or any semblance he’s been able to manage of either, and, for a moment, he allows himself to wonder if anyone would notice if he slipped out the back door and took up thumb wrestling. When he is faced with nothing to do and an entire working day in which not to do it, it is too much for him. He can’t bear it. In truth, Pimletz would rather have something not to do than nothing to do at all, so he looks to pull some poor soul from the paid death notices, some belovedwife-lovingmotheradoredgrandmothercherishedfriend, and set up her passing for the complete treatment. Something not to do.