Who Killed the Fonz?

by James Boice

  “Mrs. Sealock,” Richard said.

  “Don’t call me that,” she said. She chose a record. Put it on the turntable. The pop of the needle, the hiss—then the music. Raw guitar—simple drums—then the voice. It was the early stuff, when he was just a wild, lonesome kid misunderstood by the authorities of the world. She sat down in front of the turntable, her back to Richard.

  “This one was his favorite,” she said. “He always put this one on. It could drive me crazy—I’d hear it as I walked in the door, I’d hear it from outside when I arrived. I’d come in and beg him, Please, enough, can we please change it up? He’d look at me, surprised, confused, not even realizing that he played it that often. Yeah, he’d say, sure, whatever you want. I’d put on something else, something I liked—David Bowie, Talking Heads, whatever—but it never felt right. And we’d always end up back at Elvis.”

  “I’m sorry,” Richard said, “who are you talking about? Your husband? This is, what, a vacation place?”

  She did not answer. She only inhaled deeply—the bones of her back expanding—then exhaled. It made him very nervous about asking her anything else. Either the questions would break her or make her break him. He said nothing, just waited.

  The fire was settling—it let out a loud pop. A spark flew out. She stretched her leg and snuffed it out with her boot. “Have you ever loved someone?” she said softly. He could barely hear her.

  “My wife,” he said.

  “Then you know what it’s like. Do you remember the moment you met?”

  “I do.”

  “You remember how you felt?”

  “Vividly. Like it just happened.”

  For a moment a smile appeared on her face. He saw her cheeks move. Almost immediately it vanished. “Describe it,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, “well, everything in me was drawn to her. I had never felt such a thing before, for anyone. Whether there is a hand guiding the universe, I don’t know. But when I saw her that day, sitting at the table in the library? Well, I’m telling you, it sure felt like there was.”

  “Was it something you chose?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Could you have turned it off? Said no to it?” She turned a little, to look over her shoulder toward him. “Could you have just walked out of that library that day—you and Fonzie—it was the college one, wasn’t it? Where you and he had gone to pick up girls?”

  “No, I don’t think I could have. And how did you know I was there with him?”

  “So you know,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have ignored it. You couldn’t have turned it away, that feeling, right? That love? When it happened, it wasn’t your fault.” She turned all the way around, looking at him directly, her eyes narrow and fierce, like he had insulted her. “Right? It wasn’t your fault.”

  “No,” he said, feeling like he was off balance, “of course it wasn’t. Love is never anyone’s fault.”

  Her eyes grew even more narrow; she was scrutinizing him, looking for signs, something he was not saying. But there was not anything he wasn’t saying. “Exactly,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, what are we talking about? How did you know Fonzie was there when I met my wife?”

  “He wasn’t just there,” she said. “Was he? He encouraged you to go talk to her. Otherwise you never would have.”

  “How do you know all this, Mrs. Sealock?”

  She did not answer right away. He wondered if she had heard him. Then she put her hands on the floor on either side of her, twisted her body, and climbed to her feet. The firelight on her skin made her look lit from within. “I told you. Don’t call me that.”

  “Okay,” he said, putting up his hands. “What do I call you then?”

  “Shotz.”

  “Like the beer? I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” She sat in a chair and put her elbows on the table and her fingers to the sides of her head. Closing her eyes, she rubbed her temples. He watched her face. She was scowling—like she was suffering from a horrible headache. With her eyes closed and scowling in torment like that, her face reminded him of a bust of a genius artist—Mozart or somebody. Conducting storms of orchestras in the skull.

  She breathed deeply again. “My name is Shotz. My maiden name. My family is the Great Lakes’ biggest brewer and has been for a hundred years. The result of that, and the cause of it, is we know our way around the Wisconsin political landscape. To say we have influence isn’t enough. We have money. Which means we have power.”

  “Okay,” Richard said. “I think I might see where this is going. You and your husband can use your family’s influence to get justice for Fonzie.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not where this is going. Not at all.” He tried to think, but he could not. The pipes in his head were dripping—faster now, an uncontrollable stream.

  She said, “I used to wonder if Martin knew that. When he started slipping me those cookies in the cafeteria line at Northwestern, I thought, here is someone from the real world. A human. This cute guy flirting with me—he doesn’t know or care if my family is influential in local politics in another state—he just wants, you know, what any other nineteen-year-old wants. But, Richard, there is nothing about Martin Sealock that is like any other person. No, that is not what he wanted. It took me a long time to figure it out. Who would have even imagined? I’d mention my family, and he’d look like he couldn’t care less. He’d even try to change the subject. It was boring to him. Listen, you ever throw all your dreams away in Tokyo?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “I was there for a Chanel shoot. And I’d just gotten word that I’d been offered the contract to be the face of Yves Saint Laurent’s spring collection. My dream job. I was out celebrating with my agent and my friend Laurie, another model, who had just gotten a campaign for this up-and-coming designer. She was young—sixteen. I was older, I was twenty, but I looked out for her, she was like my little sister. My agent got drunk and let it slip to us that Laurie’s job? They were going to make her look like Lolita. You know, sex her up. It was disgusting. She was a kid. She didn’t want to do it. My agent said that was too bad, that she had to. I told him if you make her do this, I’ll quit modeling. And I did. I went home that night—straight to the airport from that party, flew all the way from Tokyo to Milwaukee. It worked—I was their star. They backed off Laurie and let her not do the campaign. I was ready to return, but by then I’d been home long enough to realize there were more important things to me than all that. It was like I could see two lives.”

  “Almost like two lines,” Richard said. “The bright one is the one you’re living and the faded is the one you should be. They’re parallel. You can see the faded one, and you need to get to it, it kills you that you aren’t on it, but you don’t know how to get to it.”

  “Yes,” she said. She was smiling for the first time that night. “That’s exactly right. I knew you’d understand me. He always told me we would get along. So I tore up the contract. I came home. I had this idea that I could be a normal woman, with a family, and do work that helped people, that did something good for the world. That I could live an honest life. That’s all I wanted. I was working at a nonprofit, trying to start over. One day I went for lunch across the street to a sandwich place. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. Martin Sealock. I hadn’t seen him since Evanston. He had grown even more handsome. He was in a suit. Fate had put us in the same city again. We had coffee later. He was happy and driven and satisfied in his work—everything I wanted. I braced myself for him to tell me about a fiancé or something, but there was none, not even a girlfriend. It seemed like what you said before, the hand of the universe. I thought that’s what it was. It’s scary how close the difference can be between everything else and the genuine thing. I only found that later. Once the real thing happens, it is so undeniable you can’t believe you ever thought anything else was it. But you just don’t know until then.”

  “You’r
e not in love with Martin Sealock. You’re in love with somebody else.”

  “It was not a coincidence that Martin was in that sandwich shop that day. And it wasn’t a coincidence that he was in Milwaukee. It wasn’t even a coincidence that I had come through Martin’s line at the dining hall. He had put himself in that line, knowing it was the one I always went through. He had put himself in Milwaukee because he knew me well enough to know I would come back. He knew who I was before he knew who I was. Do you understand me? It was all calculated from the time he was eighteen years old. Because of my last name and who my father was. He never loved me. He never even liked me. I found that out after we were married, after his first affair, but I didn’t want to believe it. He saw me as something that could get him what he wanted, and he lied about loving me to get it. A man willing to lie about love is a man willing to lie about anything. And willing to do anything.”

  “This is a lot,” Richard said. “It’s a lot.”

  “You’re telling me.” The side of the record had ended long ago. She got up and flipped it, then went to the fire, picked up an iron poker from a nearby wrought iron bucket, and used it. Sparks flew and the flames had a burst of life. She squatted on her heels, watching them. Elvis was singing “Tutti Frutti.”

  “And what gets us here tonight,” she said, “is my message.”

  “Okay,” he said, not understanding.

  “Sit on it.”

  The chair scraped loudly against the floor as he pushed back from the table and stood. “That was you.” She was still. Her arms were crossed in front of her. He could not see her face.

  “Maybe two years ago,” she said, “the Jaguar was in the shop. Martin had always been the one to handle the cars—he’d always joked that if he let me near the engine I would only do more damage. He thinks I’m an idiot—that all women are. The garage called to say the car was ready. I was the only one home. I told them no one would be able to make it there to pick it up until the next day. The mechanic on the phone offered to come deliver it. He had a flatbed truck, it was no problem. Free of charge. Martin had always said this guy was the best, and now I could see what he meant. So he comes. He’s out in the driveway, unloading our car from the truck. And what you said before, how you felt seeing your wife the first time—I felt that. That’s what I felt. I can still feel it, just remembering it. But I tried to ignore it. I paid him, thanked him, and said goodbye. He probably thought I was rude, I was so short with him. But if I said too much, if I stood there with him too long . . . My son was coming home from school soon. So I was relieved when he left. I went back inside. I had work to do, I had to finalize a quarterly budget. Instead I found myself in the garage, looking through the toolbox. I found a hammer, opened the hood of the Jaguar, and took it to the engine. I yanked out whatever I could tear loose. When I was done, my shoulders burned and the engine was obliterated. I went inside and called the mechanic. ‘It seems to be broken again.’ Innocent, you know? He came back. This time he was on a motorcycle. He looked at me like he was disappointed in me. Like, I don’t know, he expected more from me. He opened the hood and asked me to get him a screwdriver. I found one in the garage and gave it to him. That’s all he needed. Maybe ten minutes later, he closed the hood and said, Okay. He had me sit behind the wheel and give it a try. It worked perfectly. He got back on his motorcycle and drove off.” She took a sharp, sudden breath and shivered. “Martin Sealock has looked at me many times over the years. I used to think he was seeing me. But at that moment I knew he never did. Because he never—not even once—ever looked at me the way that mechanic did that day. Like he could see right inside me. Right into my heart. And the next day I went to his house. The address was on his invoice.”

  “Where?” said Richard, leaning closer, excited at this chance to start filling in the last years of Fonzie’s life. “Where did he live?”

  “Right above his shop. There was a little studio apartment up there. He didn’t keep a lot in it. A hot plate. Secondhand mismatched furniture. An iron, which I used to tease him about, because he didn’t own anything that needed ironing. He’d just say, A man needs an iron. No TV. Some books, mostly in stacks on the floor. The only thing on the wall was a letter, in a frame.”

  “The one I gave him the day I left,” Richard said. A surge of emotion went up his torso.

  “No, not that one. It was from his father.”

  “His father? No. He wanted nothing to do with his father.”

  “I know that,” she said. “And I also know it was because his father walked out when Fonzie was just three years old and spent the rest of his life bumming around on boats as if Fonzie didn’t exist. Fonzie went his whole life not knowing who or where his father was, until one night when you two were maybe twenty. There was a knock on the door and it was a sailor who said Fonzie’s father had sent him to deliver a letter.”

  Richard said, “The sailor gave it to Fonzie then left. Fonzie didn’t want to open it, but my family and I convinced him to.”

  Margo said, “The first line of the letter said that it had in fact been his father who had delivered it. He didn’t have the guts to tell him. And he knew he wouldn’t. That’s why he wrote it in a letter then left. Fonzie didn’t even get a chance to see his face very well.”

  “The letter,” Richard said, “went on to explain why his father left. It wasn’t much of an explanation. All it said was that he was a merchant seaman, that he met Fonzie’s mother. When she got pregnant he had thought he could settle down like everybody else, but he couldn’t. All he said was, ‘It just didn’t work out.’ ”

  “All his life Fonzie had thought his own father hated him for some reason,” Margo said, “that he had done something wrong just by being born. But that night, you and your family made him see that it wasn’t his fault at all, it was his father’s fault for failing to live up to his responsibility. The whole thing made Fonzie see that you were his real family, not that man.”

  “That’s right,” Richard said. “No one else knew that except for us. He never told anyone about that, certainly not any of his girlfriends. That he told you says a lot.”

  “Fonzie told me how much he regretted not calling you after your father died.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “It was just too painful for him. And then the longer he waited, the more guilty he felt, until he just couldn’t do it. He even began avoiding his cousin Chachi because he couldn’t face your sister, Joanie. You were the only one he ever trusted, Richie. The only one he ever let his guard down around, the only one who knew the real him. After you left, he said he had no one like that—until me. For twenty years he was back in that shell you’d drawn him out of. He figured he would probably die that way—safe but alone, having only once really connected with another person, that one time being enough. But then I met him and I drew him back out. I restored him. That’s why he loved me—I brought him back to life. I got him interested in his old friends again. Started getting out more. I think he was planning to even start going to Arnold’s again. But he never got the chance. What he told you was true, at least I’m sure he meant it at the time, but his father’s absence never stopped eating at him. It never stopped. Underneath everything, no matter what it was, temporary happiness or pleasure, whatever, he always felt rejected, unwanted. That’s why he was such an outsider, such a loner. He grew comfortable with it, accepted it. But he could never be normal. Or happy. He could never relax. It was like he was marked from birth.”

  “I left him all alone,” Richard said. “Once again, he was all alone, with no family.”

  She reached out toward him but did not touch him. “No, no. He never blamed you. Please understand that. He never, ever did blame you. He’s the one who convinced you to leave in the first place. He wanted you to be out there. He was proud of you. He was so proud of you for what you did. He would have never forgiven you if you had come back.”

  “Did he ever reconnect with his father?”

  “No. He died s
till never knowing his face.”

  “Did he have any kids?”

  “His only babies were his cars and bikes. He ran his own shop. Making custom hot rods and repairing vintage bikes. He was picky about what he worked on, he wouldn’t work on just anything, he only worked on bikes and cars for people who sufficiently appreciated and respected and loved them. He made just enough money to stay open.”

  “So how do you know all this? What happened when you went out to see him that first time?”

  “That first time, not much. Fonzie turned me away. He was gentle about it, of course. He said he appreciated the sentiment, and that he thought I was beautiful and smart, but that one of his rules was that he did not date married women. I started coming around the shop—if there was a ticking noise in the engine, or one tire seemed flatter than the others, or anything, no matter how small, I brought it in. All I wanted was to be around him. He let me hang around, watch him work. He showed me around an engine. Soon all I wanted was to be around him and be around cars and motorcycles. He helped me discover a passion and talent I never knew I had. We’d take breaks, go to lunch. Talk about bikes and our lives, our dreams. I came to know the real Fonzie, the guy he had shown only to you before: the tough guy with impeccable virtue; the philosopher with the grease-covered hands; the lone wolf whose loyalty to those he considered a friend was unbreakable. Fonzie taught me how to ride a motorcycle. It made me feel more peace and freedom than I ever knew possible. He got my first leather jacket and helmet, he even went to the store with me to help me buy my own custom bike. He urged me to get a Triumph, like his, but I wanted a Harley. Local pride, you know? He teased me about it when I first showed up with it at his shop. He called me a Hells Angel. And I called him a traitor because Triumphs aren’t American made; they’re British. But I could tell he respected me for standing up to his pressure, for making my own decision. Even if I ripped off the design of his—taking off the front fender, putting in ape hangers, painting the gas tank silver. That day I told him about Tokyo. And what I had given up to protect my friend. He just said I was a hell of a woman. Then he said he loved me very much. And then he kissed me.”