Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  Son? came the hitch-pitched voice of Wolfgang Amadeus, piping up all the way from Dunbar, Arizona, no trace of a stroke in his voice. I fear you’ve forgotten your Genesis. Yes, it was the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden. But Adam’s sin was pride.

  Put a sock in it, Dad, Lincoln told him. I’m trying to think, here.

  The old buzzard did have a point, though. He had been prideful. Perhaps even vainglorious, another of his father’s favorite words. Solving the mystery of Jacy’s disappearance was a task he’d let himself believe he was equal to. But his quest for knowledge, for understanding, hadn’t really been about her. Or about truth, or justice. It’d been about himself. How ridiculous was that? Sixty-six years old and still trying to prove to a girl four decades dead that he was the one she should’ve chosen.

  So you admit it, his father said. I’m right.

  Mind your own damn business, Dad, Lincoln told him. Go talk Spanglish to your new girlfriend.

  Now, Son, replied Dub-Yay, that right there was a low blow.

  _________

  LINCOLN EXPECTED COFFIN and his daughter-in-law to be gone, as in long, when he emerged from Rockers, but there they were, just up the dark, deserted street, Beverly trying her best to wedge his carcass into her VW’s passenger seat. Had he fallen crossing the street? Was that why they’d made so little progress? Or did she have to argue him out of driving himself back to Vineyard Haven? Since neither seemed to notice him, Lincoln slipped quietly behind the wheel of his rental car and scrunched down so he could surveil the tableau playing out. When Beverly tried to belt him in, Coffin swatted her hand away, and she rested her forehead on the door’s frame. Then, giving up, she closed the door and moved around to the driver’s side.

  There’s your serpent right there, Dub-Yay chimed in.

  No, Dad. That’s just a sick old man. Like you.

  Though again, he did have a point. The serpent in Genesis had been a cunning, insidious whisperer of half-truths and innuendo, his pitch to Adam not unlike Coffin’s rabbit-hole soliloquy about men not doing right by girls, which—why not admit it?—had entered Lincoln’s bloodstream like venom. The narrative’s myriad details had been vivid and had the ring of truth, but could the same be said for the whole? Lincoln wasn’t sure. Its main thrust seemed to be that male misbehavior existed on a spectrum, like autism. Sure, some men were better behaved than others, but in the end they were all complicit because they closed ranks, as he’d put it, whenever it became truly necessary. As if to prove his point he’d offered Lincoln the opportunity to join that club himself. What made Lincoln suspicious was the man’s most plausible intention—to convince him that his belief in his lifelong friend was divorced from real, cop-worthy knowledge. Coffin’s circuitous monologue also trailed an unmistakable warning: that the knowledge Lincoln had been chasing earlier might now be chasing him. Resistance was futile. Ultimately, his faith in his friend would crumble before the relentless assault of fact, like those who had tried so hard to believe that the Vietnam War was just and necessary.

  But hadn’t Coffin also overplayed his hand? Not content to cheapen Lincoln’s faith in Mickey, he’d also slandered Jacy. Even if you granted his assertion that men didn’t do right by girls, what was his assault on Jacy’s character besides another instance of victim blaming? Yes, Jacy had been as wild as the times they were then living through, but she’d also possessed an innocence that Coffin, who’d never met her, had utterly no knowledge of. She’d been both loyal and true. Their all-for-one and one-for-all friendship at Minerva had never once been contaminated by irony. I couldn’t bear it was what she had written to them on that final morning about the prospect of having to say goodbye. It was that loyalty, that innocence, that Coffin’s narrative sought to undermine by painting Jacy as a tramp, who’d maybe been disappointed when Mickey arrived on the scene and spoiled her fun, the kind she never got to have with the three of them because they were such cowards and prudes. It was a cynical, insidious argument that Lincoln would’ve rejected out of hand if it hadn’t semi-aligned with his mother’s own assessment of the situation—that Jacy might’ve been waiting in vain for one of them to find the courage to declare himself. They’d all been perfect gentlemen with her. What if it wasn’t a gentleman she’d been looking for?

  All of which made Lincoln yearn for the one thing he clearly couldn’t have: he wanted his friends back, all three of them, and not just back but back as they’d been at Minerva, with their whole lives ahead of them.

  What you really want, Son, Dub-Yay assured him, is your own lost youth.

  But no, Lincoln was pretty sure that wasn’t it. He and his friends weren’t entitled to a second youth any more than they deserved a second chance to do everything right. Nor was it really about lost innocence, because by ’71 that had already been shaken by what they were learning about life in their classes, as well as at the Theta house, not to mention the war and a draft lottery that could alter their individual trajectories.

  Then what? Dub-Yay wanted to know. If not youth or innocence, then what is it?

  At first Lincoln didn’t know, but then he did. What he really longed for, he realized, was his generation’s naïve conviction that if the world turned out to be irredeemably corrupt, they could just opt out. Embarrassing, when you put it like that, but hadn’t that been the central article of their faith? They’d believed that being right about the war their parents were so stubbornly wrong about meant that they were somehow special, maybe even exceptional. They would change the world. Or at least they’d give its crass inducements, its various bribes and dishonest incentives, a miss. Wolfgang Amadeus might be wrong about a lot of things, but neither he nor Lincoln’s mother, nor anyone else in their generation, had been fool enough to imagine you could bail out of the world that made you.

  Up the street, Beverly’s VW was backing away from the curb. Lincoln watched it drive up Circuit Avenue until the taillights disappeared. Joe, she’d called her father-in-law, not Dad, as Anita occasionally referred to Wolfgang Amadeus. And just like that Lincoln was certain that the two were, or had been at some point, more than friends. Yet more venomous, unwanted knowledge.

  When his phone vibrated in his pocket, Lincoln thought about letting the call go to voicemail, but Wolfgang Amadeus wouldn’t hear of it. God hates a coward, Son.

  “Lincoln,” Mickey said. Not Face Man, Lincoln noted.

  “Mick. Where are you?”

  “Your place. Chilmark. You need to go fetch Ted.” Not Teddy. Not Tedioski, not Teduski, not Tedwicki, not Tedmarek. Ted.

  “He’s still in recovery.”

  “No, he isn’t. I just talked to him.”

  “They won’t release him until morning, Mickey. At the earliest.”

  “Just pull up in front. He’ll be waiting.”

  “Mick—”

  “Do it, Lincoln.”

  An order, and in or under it something in his friend’s voice that he’d never heard before.

  Okay, Dad, he thought. What now?

  But of course the connection had gone dead. The purpose of such imaginary conversations, he knew, was to practice for the day in the not-too-distant future when Dub-Yay, like Lincoln’s mother, would exist only in Lincoln’s mind. Bad timing, too. The world he and his friends had imagined they could either reinvent or opt out of had at last come calling. In fact it was banging at the door, demanding to be let in so it could present its past-due bill for payment.

  “Tell me why,” Lincoln said, making a demand of his own, though to his ears it sounded both petulant and pleading. “Give me one good reason.”

  “Because you both need to be here” came Mickey’s reply. “Because I’m only telling this fucking story once.”

  Mickey

  Though the season was different—the end of summer, not the beginning—the moon rose over the distant waves just like it did back in 1971. That night, too, there’d been a chill in the air, one that eventually drove them inside. Down the slope Mason Troyer’s house was dark
, just as it had been then. Yesterday Mickey had even considered strolling down there and offering a much-belated apology for punching him. Had the man’s jaw completely healed? Mickey’s own right hand, which he’d never seen a doctor about, still ached on rainy days and was prone to swelling. His own damn fault, of course. His father, who’d been a brawler in his youth, had warned him about physical violence, both its dangers and, especially, its pleasures. When you threw a punch, whatever was coiled in you got released, and release, well, what was better than that? Starting and finishing a fight with a single punch, as Mickey’d done with Troyer? That was the absolute best. Proving that any job, no matter how dubious, could be done well. Indeed, it was his father that Mickey had been thinking about that afternoon outside the SAE house. Bert. That’s what the guys in his father’s crew all called Michael Sr., due to his resemblance to Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. “Hey, Bert,” they’d say. “What makes the muskrat guard his musk?” And his old man, playing along, would reply, “Kuh-ridge.” And damned if those stone lions hadn’t looked just like him, too.

  By contrast, the beating Mickey’d given Jacy’s father had felt like a distasteful duty, not even remotely pleasurable. Maybe it was the office setting, and that there’d been so many people around, the majority of them women, all of them horrified. Mickey’s first punch had reduced the man’s nose to ruined cartilage, and yeah, okay, that had felt pretty good. So had saying, “Your daughter says hello,” as the man lay there on the snazzy carpet. Maybe if that first punch had landed flush and he was out for the count, Mickey would feel better about it. Instead, Calloway had struggled to his feet not once but three more times, as if he didn’t want Mickey to stint on the beating they both knew he had coming. So Mickey had obliged, though with each subsequent punch he’d applied less force and torque. When the cops arrived and cuffed him, he was glad. He wouldn’t have to hit the man anymore. The experience had so soured him on violence that he hadn’t punched anyone since, except occasionally in his dreams.

  Though the moon on the waves and the chill in the air were reminiscent of 1971, tonight was different, too, and not just because Jacy was gone. This night there would be no singing. They were sixty-six now, far too old to convince themselves that their chances were awfully good, that the world gave the tiniest little fuck about their hopes and dreams, assuming they had any left. Even so, before coming out onto the deck, he put some music on low. Delia, still pissed at him for blaming her for how things had turned out, finally did drift off, and she slept more soundly when there was music playing. Most nights she went to bed wearing headphones, claiming music muted the voices in her head that always reminded her that she was a piece of shit. Tonight, to mute his own dark thoughts, Mickey had rooted around in the kitchen cabinets until he found the bottle of good scotch Lincoln had mentioned buying in town. He hardly ever drank hard liquor anymore, not since going to the doctor with shortness of breath and being told about his defective heart valve. Of course it was defective. Was he not his father’s son? The pitcher of Bloody Marys he’d mixed that morning was the first booze he’d tasted in over a year. He’d promised Delia he was done with the hard stuff, and until today he’d kept his word in the vain hope that it might help her keep hers. Fat fucking chance. Mickey disliked standing in judgment, but he did wish people wouldn’t lie about being clean when they weren’t. Was that so much to ask?

  Yet what was his own life but a web of lies, most of them unnecessary. That he should want his friends to believe he was still a serious boozer when all he ever had anymore was beer—which his doctors told him would kill him less quickly—mystified him. The mountain of ribs he’d eaten tonight had also been for show. Hell, if there’d been any coke around, he probably would’ve done that, too, all to convince Lincoln and Teddy that he was who he’d always been, that his life was proceeding according to plan, that he regretted nothing because there was nothing to regret. He wouldn’t even have admitted to the motorcycle accident if the evidence weren’t so gruesomely visible, the livid white scar at his hairline. If it had been just Lincoln, he might’ve taken his chances. One day back at Minerva, Lincoln had noticed his government professor limping and asked why. Because, the man informed him, his left leg was a prosthesis right up to the hip. He’d been clomping around like Captain Ahab all term, but Lincoln had only just noticed. In some ways his friend’s habit of not really taking things in made him the perfect college student, more interested in what things meant than that they existed in the first place, as if you could determine the significance of something without actually observing it. Teddy, however, had an eagle eye, especially for anything involving bodily injury. It was as if he expected whatever he came in contact with to maim him. No hope whatsoever he wasn’t going to notice the scar.

  Had his father lived, things would’ve been different, Mickey thought, but maybe this was another lie. Strange, and yet somehow fitting, to be back here where the life of deception he hadn’t planned on had begun. This island. This house.

  _________

  BY THE TIME the guys returned, Mickey had dozed off out on the deck. The crunch of tires on gravel woke him, and then he heard car doors open and close, his friends’ voices muted in the soft night. He was relieved. He’d told Lincoln that Teddy would be ready and waiting for him when he arrived at the hospital, but he hadn’t been at all sure that would happen. Teddy hadn’t been officially discharged, so it was possible the graveyard nurse might try to stop him. Or maybe when he tried to get out of bed and dress himself, Teddy would find he couldn’t. But no, here they were. A light came on inside and a moment later Lincoln appeared behind the glass door, his face a thundercloud. Sliding it open, he stepped aside for Teddy, who paused in the doorway, wobbling and woozy. A thick white bandage the size of a tennis ball was affixed over his right eye.

  Mickey stood up. “Can I help?”

  “I got him,” Lincoln said, his fury barely contained as he guided Teddy outside. When he was settled, Lincoln started to take a seat himself but noticed the whiskey bottle and went back into the kitchen.

  “Well,” Mickey said, looking Teddy over, “you look better than you did at the club. How do you feel?”

  “Weak. Not much pain at the moment.”

  “What’d they give you?”

  “I forget. Some next-gen pain pills. They’re working, is the main thing.”

  “I hear the trick is to stop taking them when the pain goes away. You up to this?”

  “Wake me up if I nod off. I think I’ve already figured out most of it.”

  “Yeah?” Mickey didn’t see how that could conceivably be true.

  “Not figured out, exactly,” Teddy said. “It’s more like … I just woke up knowing.”

  Mickey chuckled. “Good, then you can tell it.”

  When Teddy offered up the weakest of smiles, Mickey felt a wave of guilt wash over him. What he was doing—demanding that his friends listen to his story this very night—was both selfish and cruel, though the alternative would’ve been to sneak off the island with Delia and let them imagine the worst, which Lincoln, quite possibly, was already doing.

  When the door slid open again, Lincoln reappeared with two glasses holding a few cubes of ice and set them in the middle of the table. “You probably shouldn’t,” he told Teddy, who took a glass anyway. Lincoln poured himself two fingers, gave Teddy a splash, then set the bottle down within Mickey’s reach. The message was clear: he could pour his own, which he did. “Okay,” he began. “I’m not sure where to start, but—”

  “It was an accident,” Lincoln blurted. “Begin there.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How she died. Explain how it was an accident.”

  “Lincoln,” Teddy said, his voice almost a whisper. “Let him tell his own story.”

  “Yeah, Mick,” Lincoln agreed. “Tell us how Jacy died.”

  “She died in my arms,” Mickey said. He could feel her there still, almost forty years later.

  “An a
ccident.”

  “Yes,” he confessed, though he had no idea how Lincoln could’ve intuited this.

  Lincoln swallowed hard. “Is she buried here?”

  Stunned, Mickey shook his head. If the idea weren’t completely lunatic, he’d have sworn that by here his friend meant under this very sloping lawn. “I’m lost, man,” he said. “Why would she be buried here?”

  “Don’t lie,” Lincoln said. “Don’t you fucking lie, Mick. The cops will be here tomorrow and they’ll dig up every inch of this place. If she’s here, they’ll find her.”

  Laughing was exactly the wrong thing to do, of course, but really, he couldn’t help himself. Lie your ass off for forty years and everybody believes you, but when you finally decide to tell the truth … “Lincoln,” he said, “I don’t have the first clue what you’re—”

  But this was as far as he got, because Lincoln, showing no signs of back stiffness now, came flying out of his chair. Grabbing Mickey by the throat with his left hand, his right was balled into a fist and cocked. He would’ve thrown the punch, too, Mickey was certain, if the door to the deck hadn’t slid open just then. Seeing Delia in the doorway, blinking and groggy, Lincoln let go of Mickey’s neck, straightened up and turned to face her. When Mickey rose to his feet, Teddy did, too.

  “It’s okay,” Mickey told her, his voice raspy. “Come on out and meet my friends.”

  For a tortuous moment nobody moved. But then Teddy went over to where Delia stood in the doorway and put his arms around her. Startled, she glanced at Mickey over his shoulder, but allowed the embrace. After another long moment Teddy stepped back so he could study her at arm’s length. “You look like your mom,” he said, smiling.