by Steve Amick
It made an almost alarming amount of sense. Her ability to size up the situation so accurately was admirable at her age. She really was special, this one. And bright. To his ear, of course, she suffered some from that malady of her generation—an almost laconic indifference toward speaking concisely—a circling and avoidance of linguistic specificity that bordered on a verbal form of shoulder-shrugging. But beyond the typical “whatever”s and “or something”s and “and stuff”s, she actually seemed to have original thoughts to express.
For a while, as she showed him how to define searches using hyphens and and/or and this, not this, he thought about what she’d just said about wanting to find a way to connect to jazz. When he asked her about her own musical tastes, she claimed she didn’t really have a favorite kind of music and he had a thought. He went into the living room and thumbed through the records till he found Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. Blowing across it, out of habit, he placed it on the hi-fi. Over in the doorway, the girl now stood, leaning, boneless, waiting. There was the scratch and pop as the needle found the groove and she made a face at the preliminary sound, asking, “What’s that?”
“Wait,” he said. “Just listen. Close your eyes.”
She did. Then came the opening bars, the loopy, almost Arabian noodling, the shuffle of Elvin Jones’s brushwork. He let it play before asking, “What do you see?”
She allowed one giggle, then swallowed it, turning serious. “A mountain. Tall grass. A lady with a guitar, spinning.” Then the realization—a smile like an explosion. “Julie Andrews.”
“Right,” he said.
“‘. . . these are a few of my favorite things!’”
“Sure,” he said. “You can connect to that, can’t you? Now keep listening and tell me what else you hear.”
She closed her eyes again and tilted her head and the music seemed to draw her deeper into the room. As she moved closer, it seemed almost a glide, a sideways slide, with a hint of waltz, and he could picture her, in that lilting moment, standing across from him on a dance floor in decades past, in a church social hall; could picture himself singling her out for the bright aura of grace around her and approaching her and asking her to dance.
“It’s still the same song,” she said, her eyes still closed, “but now I’m hearing it like totally different. It’s . . . exotic, like snake charmer music or something you’d hear in the market in a far-off land. Some place with goats—”
He had to tease her about this. “Goats?”
She giggled again, but kept going, “Yeah! And all the favorite things are maybe things you’ve never seen before—brand-new foods and experiences and stuff—whatever they’re selling at this market. Colorful fabrics and strange candies and fruits. All new stuff. New favorite things. Right?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Sure.”
She opened her eyes and her face flushed red. “Maybe that’s dumb.”
“Not at all,” he said. They stood there, listening. She kept tugging on her ear, head tipped. They stood there till the track was over. When it started into “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” he moved to the hi-fi to turn it off.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave it? Let it play.”
So he left it on while they went back to the computer to finish the lesson. And then he thanked her.
“For what?” she said.
“Your description. Now I can hear it all over again as if for the first time, too.”
She wasn’t finished with her lesson when the record stopped. She stopped in the middle of showing him how to use the address book to let him get up and flip it over for “Summertime” and “But Not for Me.” She seemed to like that fine, but when they were done and shutting down the computer, she asked if she could hear the first song again and he went back out and put it on. It was nice: even his own kids, who actually had some musical talent, never did much more than tolerate his tastes.
Later, while she was straightening up in the kitchen, washing out her mug and the coffee pot, he heard her humming the melody and it caused him to stop in the hallway and listen. She must not have heard him there, because she continued, uninterrupted. He almost gave himself away with a sob when he remembered Mary doing that same thing, humming in the kitchen. But this wasn’t Mary. This was someone alive and real and humming in his kitchen. And the fact that it was a song he’d introduced her to, felt almost like he’d given her a present she liked, as if it were a pretty dress or a hat and it fit her just fine.
THAT NIGHT HE DECIDED TO TRY what she called “Web surfing”; just explore a little bit. He remembered what she’d said about racy sitesand the first image that came to mind was a deck of pinup girl playing cards he’d had in the years before seminary: leggy girls with their scandalously dark stockings—and, sometimes, even their panties—exposed by one semi-comic mishap or another. These were pre-Playboy, mere cheesecake. Some fellows called them Petty girls, calendar girls, but the ones he had were all painted by . . . he could picture the draftsmanlike lettering now: Elvgren. He wasn’t sure he had the spelling right but he typed this in.
Gil Elvgren. That was his name. There were several options listed and he clicked on one and there they were—those fresh smiling faces from another time, pure and vibrant as produce. They were popping up now like mushrooms—rows of little square pictures, and each one contained another cheesecake girl. He scrolled down and there were more. He clicked on the squares and each one grew massive, filling the screen. He could see the brushstrokes in the poodle skirt, the palette knife work in the bearskin rug. He couldn’t imagine having this when he was a teenager. He might never have gone to seminary. Heck, he might never have left his room.
A few of these pinups he felt he recognized from the old card deck. How dog-eared and unmanageable those cards seemed now. He was always terrified he’d left one out, that it would fall down behind his bed and his mother would find it while running the sweeper and he’d come home to her sobbing in shame. Each time he looked at them he had to perform an elaborate procedure of locking the door, securing the shades, and dealing them out on the bedspread so that he could see as many of his favorites as would fit and still leave room for him.
There were more pages, more “galleries,” it said. There were far more than fifty-two pinups here. He went back to the list of Web sites and opened another, and right away, he saw how many more there were. This Elvgren fellow was apparently the Norman Rockwell of cheesecake, according to the text. Very prolific, over several decades. Plus, there were options leading to other pinup girl artists, and other cheesecake sites, some even with photos. It just went on and on.
It felt like his brain might boil over. He was actually getting uncomfortably warm. He closed out of there and drafted e-mails to his daughter and his son, trying to concentrate on writing carefully and at length, giving them a detailed update on the beginning of summer in Weneshkeen, the doings at the church and his progress with his tutor. Concentrate, he told himself, on the positive benefits of this machine. Avoid the idle and base. But the pinups were still in his head and it was very hard not to go back.
27
MARK STARKEY SAT SEPARATED from the pilot-boys by a wall of potted shrubs that partitioned a small section of the deck behind Carrigan’s so minors like himself could walk out from the restaurant side and enjoy the view of the river, along with the adults on the bar side. They’d dragged him along after work under the pretense of celebrating the fact that he’d gone a whole week without having “had to” be pushed into the river. But now that they were there, they were pretty much ignoring him, drinking their Bell’s on the grown-up side and talking about people he’d never heard of and not even springing for a Coke for him or anything. But whatever. This was fine, since he only really came along with the hope of running into Courtney.
He was watching the patio door that led back into the restaurant, the kids in baggy shorts and young parents in matching summer ensembles corralling them in and out, when he felt somethin
g tugging at his arm and glanced down to see it was Keith’s grimy finger, poking through the split in the shrubs, hooked in the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“Not bad, kid.” He was appraising his upper arm. “At least you’re starting to look like you belong on the river.”
“For real? I’m getting muscles?”
“Please. You don’t get muscles doing what we do. You get dark. You get—” He turned back to Walt. “What’s that word?”
“Swarthy.” Winking, Walt raised his beer to him in salute. “That’s what makes the girls go for the pilot-boys.”
“Even the puny little under-boys,” Keith said. “The rich blondie girl, for example? Is it just the fine, fine booty on Ass Boy here or is it because the girls, they like ’em dark? Perhaps we shall never know . . .” He raised his beer, too, clinked into Walt’s, and took a big swig that left him breathless. “Da-mn! Yessir . . . Say, speaking of liking ’em dark, what’s this I’m hearing about someone out to vonBushberger’s shacking up with the migrants?”
“Not shacking up,” Walt said. “Married her. And yes, there’s a baby on the way, but spare your small mind the strain of doing the dirty-minded math, Keith. Honeymoon baby maybe, but the kid’s legitimate enough.”
“But one of the Mex girls? Really? The guy’s one of the actual family or some hired hand?” Walt then explained it was the son but Mark didn’t catch the name. The whole thing was hard to follow. Keith said, “The son who’s a queer?”
“Turns out he’s not,” Walt said. “And I don’t think the girl’s from Mexico.”
“Well, Hispanic, whatever.”
“Actually,” Walt said, “when it comes down to it, the baby’s not going to stick out all that much. Look at Von. Von’s kinda . . . swarthy himself. In the summer at least. Don’t you think?”
Keith agreed that yeah, this Von guy they were talking about did get dark and Walt pointed out that the man’s dad had been the same. “Fred vonBushberger. Very dark features for a . . . whatever it is they are. What is that, anyway? Austrian? German?”
Keith said, “Dutch, I think. One of those. Swedish maybe?” Mark felt a sharp prick at his biceps and turned back to see Keith was flicking his arm, catching him off-guard. “Still with us, Ass Boy?”
He’d been trying to follow and, though the name rang a bell, he couldn’t match it up with any of the boats. He knew that familiarizing himself with the people was part of the job; the way to get better tips. Still, he was more interested in trying to hook up with Courtney this evening.
“Whatever it is,” Walt said, “for that type of extraction—Northern European, Scandinavian—they do run a little Mediterranean-looking almost. Surprisingly so.”
“Still,” Keith said. “Mediterranean-dark’s not Hispanic-dark.”
“True.” Walt tipped his head the way he did on the river, calling over to Mark with a heads-up. “Whoop! Watch your starboard.”
Thinking it was Courtney coming in, Mark swung around in his seat and his elbow jounced the tray held by a waitress serving Cokes to a bunch of Fudgie-looking kids at the table behind him. Keith sat up a little in his chair, calling over the shrubs to the waitress, “We apologize for our under-boy there, Joslyn. Kid’s got sex on the brain.”
“Do not!” Mark said. “Cut it out.” The guy was such a jerk. The kids at the next table were snickering and the waitress gave him a big wink. Besides, he was way wrong. At least about the sex part. Okay, so maybe he’d been thinking about Courtney, wondering when he would see her next, if he was supposed to see her tonight, if she wanted him to come find her, maybe go over to her boat slip or her condo, or if he was supposed to play it cool. But it wasn’t just the sex. He’d had sex before. Maybe even three different times before her. But never with a real girlfriend, an official girlfriend, and never with anyone he was really psyched about; always with just okay girls that liked him for a long time, secretly, only he knew all about it ahead of time and ended up hooking up with them at a party or studying after school after they said that it wouldn’t have to mean anything, that they could just hang. They were nice enough, he guessed, just nothing to jump up and down about. And even though they’d each said they would be cool and they were just friends and all, they never failed to bug him afterward, staring at him and asking, “What’re you thinking?” when really he wasn’t thinking anything, just lying there wondering if that was really all there was to it, if this was the whole deal or if he was supposed to feel something more.
“So Von’s okay with that, then?” Keith was saying.
Walt chuckled, but he sounded a little tired. “Being a little Mediterranean-looking?”
“Dude. The kid marrying the picker girl. Von approve?”
Walt let out a long wet stream of air, like what Keith had just asked was complete bullshit, him being quite a bit younger, less worldly at twenty-eight, twenty-nine, whatever he was. “What’s to approve? There’s no controlling who stirs who up. Is there? What good would approving or not approving do? You never know who’s going to stop you cold, all of a sudden, stick their hand in your gut and twist it into a knot, just by looking at you a certain way, even if it’s maybe the hundredth time they’ve looked at you. That one time it’s different and then you’re in, you’re screwed.” The old guy was on a roll. Mark had never heard him like this. “Maybe they just walk past your window a certain way, or it’s the way they turn their hand, picking a piece of fruit off a tree branch or suddenly throw a bowl of soup in your face—”
“Soup?” Keith said, snorting. “Whoa now! That’s just too specific.” He parted the shrub, addressing Mark. “Hey, Ass Boy! Five bucks says Walt’s slipping into the world of personal memoir here—whattaya say?” He stuck his hand through the shrubs to shake. Mark ignored the dirty palm and the offer to wager and Keith quickly retracted it.
“I’m saying,” Walt said, sounding like he was losing a little patience, “it changes from that time on who you are and what you want and who you want to be. There’s no preparing for that sort of event, legislating that. You can’t control that, be blamed for it, can you? Seems like a person’d be a jackass to try.”
“I guess,” Keith said and the patio lights came on all at once, probably on a timer, and the two of them started talking about the strange lights that had reportedly been seen in the sky. Mark had heard enough. This was now just old-man talk, coots in their cups, with nothing to be learned about the river work, and it was probably okay now to tune them out, with their boring local gossip and their meaningless life philosophies. Besides, it looked like he would have to go track down Courtney. He got up from the table and announced, over the shrubs, that he was leaving.
“Ah, damn,” Keith said. “Here I was all set to treat you to a Shirley Temple. Well, run along then, Romeo. And uh, hey . . . ‘Nice ass!’”
28
THE PART ABOUT STAYING WITH HER DAD every summer that Kimberly Lasco never got used to was this weird feeling that he never went grocery shopping when she wasn’t there. Of course he must have—there weren’t enough good restaurants to sustain someone who never cooked, even if he could afford to eat out every night, which she was sure he couldn’t. And he didn’t seem to have a girlfriend who fed him at her place—at least nothing that steady. So she knew he had to go shopping on his own once in a while. But every summer, especially on the first trip to the Spartan, the guy acted like he had no concept of what kind of food to buy. Or where anything was. And it wasn’t like the store was some big-ass Kroger like back home.
“You need to pick out what you like,” he always said. Which was also lame because her tastes really never changed that much, so you would think he would eventually get the hang of what to buy. But he never did. He just liked to drag her along and make her decide. And she wouldn’t mind handling the groceries herself, but he always insisted they do it together. It was some sort of bonding time, she imagined, at least in his mind.
Their first trip to the Spartan this summer, they had the cart about half-ful
l and he was walking it along slow as a grandpa, slouched on it and asking her a lot of silly questions about the sophomore winter dance—stale news by now, plus she was certain he knew all about it from her mom, who kept him updated. She could tell by the sorts of questions he asked that he already knew the answers. It sounded fake and prearranged, like those late-night talk shows and their pre-interviews.
When they came around a big Keebler elf display, entering the frozen meat section, he surprised her by jerking the cart back around behind the cardboard Ernie the Elf. It was like he was hiding. “Hold it!” he whispered. “Wait!”
She assumed he was just being lame. She didn’t wait but stuck her head back around, peeking. The one thought she had was maybe he did have a girlfriend. But that wasn’t it. It was her dad’s neighbor, Mrs. Starkey, the tall thin blond lady with the strained-looking face. Kimberly felt her dad’s hand on her shirt, yanking her back, and then he snuck a peek. After a second, he darted ahead, around the corner into the frozen meat aisle, almost like he was tiptoeing. Kimberly followed, feeling nervous about what he might be up to. Mrs. Starkey was gone now, but her cart was there and her dad was snooping on her big heap of groceries. He even picked up a couple items and rooted around, glancing down the aisle to make sure Mrs. Starkey wasn’t returning.
“What’re you doing?” Kimberly wanted to know.
He had a package of those gross sausages the old sheriff made by hand—SloffBrauts. “Spicing things up,” he said and reached into the freezer with the ones from the cart. She saw the word Mild. He grabbed a couple replacements. She saw the words Lava Links as he tossed them in the crowded cart and moved a couple rolls of paper towels over them, hiding them.
“Da-ad,” she said. She couldn’t believe he was acting this way.
But he was pulling her back down the aisle, hustling double-time in a quick little butt-wiggle. “Come on, come on, come on!” he said like he was maybe ten. It felt like they’d just TPed someone’s house or soaped a windshield on Devil’s Night.
