by Deborah Reed
“Seriously?”
“Cracker born and bred. But it’s a fiddle, if you don’t mind.”
“How about that. You know any Dylan?”
“How on earth did you stroll in here today?”
“Simple twist of fate, I guess.”
“That’s corny as hell,” he says.
“Way more where that came from, Mr. Rhyme Maker.”
“I have no doubt,” he says with his dimpled smile. He looks around for someone in the crowd. “Hey, Bill,” he yells. “You mind running home to get your guitar for this lady here?”
Bill stands like a man used to filling favors. His cap reads Inspected by Allison. He glances at Annie and then he pulls the keys from the front pocket of his jeans. “It’ll take me a few minutes with the snow.”
“My place is right next door,” Frank says to Annie. “I’ll go grab that violin.”
PART FOUR
THIRTY
The railroad tracks are covered in snow. For the first time in Uncle Calder’s life he looks down from the window to find them gone. He throws back two orange pills and drinks from the tumbler of ice water in his hand. He’s unusually tired, his stomach alternately sour, hungry, and tight. He feels unsteady, a little drunk, though he hasn’t had a drink in weeks.
He burps the bitter taste of medication and thinks to lie down but can’t. He’s supposed to visit Calder in little over an hour. The blue Christmas lights blinking in the corner remind him of the boy’s eyes.
But now he’s fallen into heavy thought at the window. He’s beaten the odds, lived past eighty without ever having married. Bachelorhood should have shaved ten years off his life, but he’s already passed the average lifespan of the American male. “Do you have some lady friend who keeps you going like this, Mr. Walsh?” they ask down at Florida Geriatrics Research, Inc., and he wonders if loving a woman, even one who breaks your heart, has a way of keeping a man going for another day.
He recalls her hands. Someone should have turned those hands into a painting. A sculpture. Slender, porcelain-looking fingers fastening her copper hair to a pin. When she laughed it caught like wildfire around her. That should have been on film. He could have watched reruns of it every day of his life. Who could resist that mouth? Those lips? That copper hair falling around her shoulders when she laughed?
“What kind of food do you eat?” the researchers ask him. Cantaloupe and green beans and swamp cabbage. “How much exercise are you getting?” With my stairs, plenty. “How often do you urinate?” When I drink sweet tea, plenty. “Would you mind stepping up on the scale?” Red and white blood pressure caplets, orange painkillers for the lower back, ammonia-smelling shampoo for hair loss, and little yellow pills for erections. He was just telling someone this the other day, listing off all the medication he takes. Annie. Annie was here in his living room. He didn’t tell her about the one for erections.
He glances at the Rollator in the corner. A glint of gold flickers from the Purple Heart beneath the lamp on the end table. He is, and always has been, a sturdy, steady man.
He rests his forehead against the cold window and wonders what it would feel like to smash his skull through the glass and then stand there, breathing in snow through the shards.
He tightens his grip on the tumbler in his hand and the cold feels good inside his aching fist. It’s possible that the tiniest bones might actually be broken. He’ll need to stay away from the researchers a while longer. They’ll want to know all about his hands, want to take x-rays and feel along the brittle bones of his fingers with the firmness of their own.
Anguish is what he feels. A word that still reminds him of Kearney’s death. He thinks of how he’d stumbled through the days afterward, knocked around by pinballs of torment he couldn’t foresee. An old customer asking for Kearney; the look on her face when he told her Kearney had passed was all it took to splay the tender hole in his chest. A cedar birdhouse propped in the window display at the hardware store had him choked up by the time he asked for nails. An Irish joke on the radio caught him unaware and he laughed before jolting back to the fact that there was no one in the world he could tell it to.
But the one thing he never could have imagined was Miriam turning him away. They’d never needed to fight over money or children or housework, the usual domestic spats he assumed had been reserved for Kearney. The only anger he’d ever felt toward her before she turned him away was of his own doing. He’d lured her away from his brother with nothing more than his own vanity, a trumped up manly flirtation designed specifically for her, and a part of him hated her for being so easy to penetrate, for taking the bait, for causing him to fall so helplessly in love with her.
And then Kearney died and he should have stepped in and redeemed them both, but instead Miriam’s eyes went hollow. They were no longer bright and quick to drink him in when he got her alone. He would never again watch as her lids floated when he entered her, and then flung back open when she came. They were eyes that never wanted to see him again. She said she couldn’t bear the thought of tainting Kearney’s memory. It was not enough that in life they had to protect him from their love affair, but now they would have to protect the man’s ghost. “What if he can look down and see the two of us in his bed?” she’d asked, as if through a fever dream. “We shouldn’t even be in the same room together.” She was convinced that an all-knowing Kearney would put two and two together and figure out what had gone on while he was alive and spend the rest of eternity writhing in devastation from the betrayal of the ones he loved most.
Uncle Calder tried to reason with her. “This is not some class you’re teaching on Shakespeare, Miriam. For Christ’s sake, think of the kids. They’re hurting, too, you know.”
“It’s the kids I’m thinking of most,” she said, but instead of seeing Miriam loved for the rest of her days, instead of watching his kids play ball and fish and star in school plays, Kearney got to look down from heaven and watch Miriam lose herself in hardnosed misery while his kids fended for themselves, and with that kind of logic he got to watch Uncle Calder masturbate to a photo of Miriam at the beach.
He pulls his forehead away from the window and kicks his foot into the wall, spilling water to his wrist. He’s angry. So heated so fast. It’s happening all over again.
He pitches his tumbler to the floor and grabs the Rollator. With a two-fisted grip he hurls the Prime 3 Deluxe Edition against the window with an enormous crash. The yellowed plastic shade tears from the rod, and he beats it until the shade and rod and jagged glass have all plunged outside into the snow. Then he wedges the Rollator into the sill and all it takes is a small shove for it to fly into the air.
The room swells with cold.
That Dane’s accent had been distinct. Not more than three bar stools down from Uncle Calder. There was no mistaking that the man was from somewhere else. He had a handsome, big baby face he would clearly never outgrow. His fists were pink and meaty as grapefruits. Couldn’t be the same Dane, Uncle Calder thought. Not the man whose wife Calder was in love with. Then Uncle Calder ordered another beer and got to thinking about Kearney up there orchestrating the whole thing.
The Dane had a lady hanging all over him. A breast slipped out of her low-cut blouse, and without warning the Dane tucked it back in. Sally was the woman’s name. “Where is he, Sally?” he asked more than once. “You just made up this skinny landscaper to get me jealous.”
Uncle Calder sat up straight and wished he had a hearing aid.
“You’ll see,” Sally said. She took on a playful, sassy tone. “I’ve seen him with her. He’ll show up here and order a Coca-Cola and you can ask him about the way he looks at her. Like there’s no one else in the room.”
The Dane turned his head away and knocked back the rest of his drink. He reached down and pulled his sock securely over what Uncle Calder could see was a knife with a pewter handle. Their eyes locked.
“What are you looking at?” the Dane asked.
“Not a thing.” U
ncle Calder peered down the other end of the bar and fingered the rim of his beer.
Sally wiggled her way onto the stool between them.
Moments later the Dane leaned forward and studied Uncle Calder with lazy, drunken eyes. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Uncle Calder hesitated. “Kearney,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Magnus.” He offered his hand around Sally’s back and they shook.
“Are you waiting on someone?” the Dane asked.
Uncle Calder had to laugh. “I’m waiting on someone. But I don’t think she’s ever going to show.”
The Dane seemed to consider this. He looked at Sally fixing her hair in the mirror strung with red Christmas lights behind the bar. “I know what you mean.”
“You’ll see,” she said.
Uncle Calder slid off the stool and slowly wound through the people lining up for drinks. He dropped two coins in the pay phone across the room. It rang until Calder’s voice mail picked up.
He hung up and returned to the stool and ordered another beer. He sipped it slower than the first. With every medication he was prescribed, he was warned to stay away from alcohol. The list of side effects was long and varied. Some were simply unknown.
Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas,” his voice slinking out of speakers in the corners of the room. Somebody must have turned up the heat. Everywhere Uncle Calder went people were fussing with thermostats, trying to deal with the cold. The Dane’s forehead glistened. He wiped it with a beer napkin until the napkin was limp.
Uncle Calder’s own head sweated and he swiped it with his hand.
“Do you have a wife?” the Dane asked him.
“No. I sure don’t.”
“I have a wife.”
“Well,” Uncle Calder said.
“She doesn’t care for me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s my fault,” the Dane said.
“Is that right.”
“Because I think she is a bitch.”
Sally burst out laughing.
Uncle Calder flushed with anger.
“I hate this place,” the Dane said. “What is wrong with you people? The water smells like sulfur.”
The Dane continued to wipe his pink face with a napkin that was now the size of a gumball. He called for another whiskey, knocked it back, and then held his hand to his chest and belched. From the way he stared he seemed worried that more than air was about to come up and Uncle Calder almost felt sorry for him, so easy was it to imagine him as a sick little boy whose face would never grow up and whose mother would baby him accordingly.
The Dane slid off the stool and staggered across the room and banged his way out the door.
Sally slapped her hand on the counter when the bartender refused her another drink. The place was fuller now, and all eyes seemed to be on her when Uncle Calder slid off his own stool and strolled past a red-haired man he thought he recognized in a booth. From the side he looked a lot like that boy Annie used to run with when they were teenagers. But not so much that Uncle Calder was sure it was him.
“Just one more?” Sally argued. The bartender refused. She called him a motherfucker and he was asking her to leave when Uncle Calder picked up the Rollator he’d parked in the corner and weaved out into the night.
He found the Dane laughing in the dark parking lot behind the bar. Puffs of steam rose from his mouth in the cold. His rear end leaned against the side of the building, his head bowing forward beneath the small bathroom windows at his back. A light came on in the bathroom and after a moment went out again. Uncle Calder dragged the Rollator behind him through the gravel. “What do you say, Hans Christian?” he asked.
Someone turned the music up inside. “Rocking around the Christmas Tree” breached the walls. The Dane staggered upright and seemed to be focusing in the dark. He pointed to the Rollator. “You’re old,” he spit out. He held his hand against the wall and dropped his head like he was going to be sick. The bathroom light went on again, and the man’s skin in the dim light was as pale and smooth as the underbelly of a shark.
“I guess I am,” Uncle Calder said.
The man looked deep into the ground. He tensed up, clearly on the verge of getting sick. He belched but nothing came. “What do you want, Kearney?” he said through the thickness of his accent.
“You ought to get your life straight,” Uncle Calder said. He wasn’t planning on hurting the man.
“Who are you?”
“It’ll all go by a whole lot faster than you think, and then what’ll you have to show for it?”
The Dane gagged and still nothing came. “Get away from me,” he said.
“Nothing. Except a trail of hurt.”
The Dane reached for the knife in his sock. He swung it sloppily in the air as if he were only playing.
Uncle Calder reared back. “There’s a whole lot of other women out there to choose from, you know.”
The Dane seemed to consider this. “Kearney,” he said. “I choose them all the time.”
Here’s your chance, he heard the real Kearney say from on high, to put things right.
“Let your wife go then.”
The Dane shook his head at the ground. “She belongs to me,” the Dane said. “What is it you say here, till death do we part?”
And that’s when the anger shot up faster than a freight train.
The Dane must have felt the heat coming off Uncle Calder. He seemed to think it was funny. He laughed so hard he barely made a sound. He poked the knife into the air like jabbing holes in a sheet.
“Put the knife down, boy.”
The Dane jabbed harder.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Uncle Calder said.
“I wouldn’t do that,” the Dane mocked him with a whiney little voice. “No wonder this woman you’re waiting for is never going to show. You’re a coward. Listen to you. Don’t you know how to stand up to people?”
Uncle Calder stepped forward.
“Forget it,” the man said with a laugh. “Don’t listen to me. You’re a good man, Kearney. You’re the best.” He tossed the knife to the ground and came forward with an outreached hand.
That was the last thing the big Dane ever did.
Snow blows through the open space where the glass used to be. The arms of his brown sweater are covered in flakes. Hunger, tightness pulls in his chest.
Calder could be his own child. Wasn’t this the real truth Miriam didn’t want Kearney to discover? That his only son wasn’t even his? Of course, a boy could take after his uncle. But there was so much likeness. The hands, the feet, the voice, the height. And worst of all, the need for a woman who belonged to someone else.
There’s a bang on the door. “Mr. Walsh? Is everything all right?” The woman from downstairs. Whatshername.
“Everything’s fine,” he whispers.
“I heard a loud crash. Something fell out of your window. Are you all right?”
The blue tree lights blink and blink and blink. His body feels heavy, the insides of his feet pooled with blood. How long has he been standing here? He slowly crosses the room and falls into the sofa and taps the quartz face of his watch. He’s supposed to see Calder in forty-five minutes. He could close his eyes for twenty minutes with no harm done. He just doesn’t want to forget.
“I’m going to call someone! If you can hear me I’m calling someone, all right?”
He thinks to write something to Miriam. A line in a Christmas card, something. He’s never had the chance to write her anything. In the beginning Kearney might have found it, but even after Kearney was gone Miriam would have thrown away, unopened, anything he tried to send. Still, he wants to tell her before it’s too late. He reaches down and tears off a large corner of the newspaper and with the pencil he uses for crosswords he writes, Miriam, I never stopped, but then the pencil begins to feel as if it’s made of something softer, a blanket, a napkin, a silk glove sliding from his fingers.
Sometimes
when he takes the red pills and the white pills and the orange pills all on the same day he has trouble remembering things. Sometimes his chest feels like a hot ray of light.
But now he sees the other man, big as life, the one he’d actually known as a boy. He pulled into the parking lot as if by a gravity feed. He must have been meeting his redheaded brother inside, that man in the booth who looked so much like him. This one here was the real deal, Annie’s old boyfriend, the one who’d driven him home that night, the night he got drunk and tried one last time to convince Miriam she was wrong. And all these years later he was moving out of the shadows, a grown man but so easy to recognize with the spark of that boy still in him. “Mr. Walsh!” he yelled, cutting through the fog inside Uncle Calder’s head.
“Jesus. What have you done?” the boy who was now a man said.
What happened? What had he seen?
Uncle Calder doesn’t know. All he thinks he knows is that at some point the Pinckney boy lifted the Rollator off the Dane’s head. There was a wet, sucking sound, and the boy turned and nearly threw up against the arm he’d raised to his mouth. The knife lay on the ground reflecting the bathroom light before the light went out again. The boy grabbed Uncle Calder by the elbow and led him to his car with the Rollator. “Are you drunk? Can you drive yourself home?” he asked, and it was like a dream, how everything had come around.
“He would have killed my boy,” Uncle Calder said. “You understand? If it weren’t for me the two of them would never be together.”
“Who?” the boy asked.
But then he was home, tugging the chain beneath the ceiling fan. How to turn it on? How to turn it off?
THIRTY-ONE
Christmas Eve and the Haldol takes hold like a warm gel beneath Calder’s skin. He’s thickheaded and dry-mouthed, his concentration fractured, but his body is finally still, which seems a miracle, considering.
It’s only a matter of time now. He could walk out of here tomorrow. It’s possible. Anything is possible. What starts out one way ends up another, and who better to tell him that than Joshua Pinckney?
