A Question of Will

by Craig Spector

  Julie’s lower lip pursed, pouting. "So you’re saying I’m fat."

  "On the contrary," Paul countered, turning and wincing into the water. "I’m just saying there are some things that no artist, living or dead, could ever hope to capture. They’re just too perfect."

  Behind him, a hint of draft, as the shower curtain widened. Warm hands slid around his waist, followed by the warmer press of flesh on flesh. Paul turned and placed his big hands squarely on the subject of their debate, and pulled her under the steaming spray. Barefoot, Julie was a tiny thing, the top of her head just brushing his chin. She tilted her face up toward his.

  Fatigue went out the proverbial window as little head replaced big head in the driver’s seat, and Paul found himself growing instantly energized. The little fireman was awake now, too. Julie’s hand reached down to greet it, as she nuzzled his neck.

  "Good answer," she murmured.

  FOUR

  "No shit?" Dondi said, grabbing the heavy board and hefting his end. "You actually said that?"

  "Yup," Paul nodded.

  "Damn," Dondi added, "remind me to call you when I need to brush up on my bullshit."

  The two men were heaving-ho into the last of a pile of sheetrock stacked in the center of what was once and would one day again be, God willing, a living room. The house at 514 Marley Street was what real estate agents euphemistically referred to as a ‘cozy fixer-upper with terrific investment potential!!’ -- which was a polite way of saying it was dingy, gutted, and would cost more to fix than it did to buy it. A rundown two-story Edwardian rowhouse sandwiched into a block of similarly borderline buildings, it harkened back to an earlier elegance, with high ceilings, wide casement windows, and hardwood floors, though the decades and socioeconomic changes had clearly taken their toll. Outside, the weather had pulled a schizophrenic and flu-inducing one-eighty, turning balmy and warm. It was a gorgeous day.

  Inside, Paul and Dondi were grimy and tired in jeans and thermals, half-toasted off the dwindling supply of Old Bohemian stashed in an Igloo chest in the ravaged kitchen. It was five-thirty and they’d been at it all afternoon, though as the day wore on they spent more time drinking and kvetching than actually working.

  "I dunno," Paul sighed, "it’s like this game we play, except sometimes she’s serious. The bitch of it is, I never know in advance where the joke part ends and the serious part begins."

  "Of course you don’t," Dondi responded. "That would be too easy. That’s how they get us -- you’re standing there with your mouth hanging open and your foot sticking in it, and they’re like, what, you didn’t get the memo?"

  Paul laughed. They laid the sheet down in the equally hammered dining room, then walked back and grabbed another one off the pile. "Yup." he replied, "and God forbid I ever give the same answer twice. She remembers all of them."

  "Got that right," Dondi said. "Connie’s memory has a half-life like plutonium." He shook his head. "She can remember every dumb thing I ever said, going back to before we even met. There should be some kind of moratorium on stupid comments; a general amnesty, statute of limitations, something... like a Miranda warning on the marriage certificate: anything you say can and will be used against you, til death do you part." Dondi paused, mock-philosophically. "Why do they do that, anyway?"

  "Because they can," Paul laughed. "It’s like this weird power they have, for total emotional recall. With Julie, it’s gotten so it’s half seduction, half loyalty oath." He paused and swigged his beer, genuinely stumped. "Ever since she hit thirty, she worries that she’s over the hill or something."

  "Yeah, right," Dondi said, wistful. "Connie should still look so good. I think it runs in the family; one night I said something about how if her mom’s butt got much bigger someone was gonna have to ride around behind her with one of those wide load signs, and you know I’ll be hearing about that one until the galaxy collapses."

  He paused, looked around reflexively, as if expecting to get hit. "You think they know we talk about ‘em like this?"

  "Are you kidding?" Paul replied. "They make us look like punters. I heard Julie on the phone, talking with a college friend once: they talk length, girth, and which way it bends."

  "Ouch," Dondi winced. He grabbed two fresh brews from the Igloo and tossed one to Paul. "Still, consider yourself lucky," he said. "Connie won’t give it up while the kids are in the same time zone." He paused. "So where was you-know-who while all this connubial bliss was going on?"

  "Where else?" Paul replied. "In her room, with the stereo blasting. We could have pounded the plaster off the walls and she wouldn’t have noticed." He switched gears then, mildly annoyed. "What is it about sixteen year-olds, that they suddenly want to play everything so loud their brains liquefy?"

  "Oh, gee, grandpa, I don’t know," Dondi chided. "Remember Blue Oyster Cult at the Meadowlands? I seem to recall you couldn’t hear for a fucking week."

  "Yeah, but that was different, " Paul bitched. "At least they could play."

  "Tell me about it..." Dondi said. "All this Dawg-E-Dawg, E-Z-E, Chuck-E-Cheez rap crap. Like, what, suddenly every middle-class white kid in America suddenly became a homey from Compton?"

  Paul nodded. "It’s like the bad pants thing -- now all the kids wear these big, baggy, hanging off the crack of their butts-style pants, so now we’re having that fight. And she’s already pissed because last week she wanted to do her hair in dreads, and I told her I don’t feature our kid looking like Buckwheat from an ‘Our Gang’ episode. She’s been pouting around the house ever since."

  "Man, you’re gettin’ cranky in your old age, you know that?" Dondi warned.

  "I know," Paul groaned, nailed. "It’s like a nightmare. I’m turning into my fucking stepdad."

  "One of life’s nasty little ironies," Dondi said. "Like the first time you catch yourself saying ‘because I said so!’ "

  Paul laughed then, and Dondi smiled. "Hey," he said, "You remember that night we pinched your stepdad’s Chevy and blew down to Asbury Park with Gina Lorenzo and whatsername..." Dondi squinted, searching his mental archives. "Bobbi," he came back, then luridly amended. "Roberta Janeskew."

  "Oh, God," Paul echoed, then laughed guiltily. The name alone was enough to induce a time-tripping grin. Gina was Dondi’s high school squeeze and cute enough, but Bobbi Janeskew was the adolescent wet-dream incarnate of every good Catholic boy at St. Thomas High, and most of the bad ones. She was an erogenous timebomb in plaid skirt and knee socks, and more than one venal sin had been committed in her name during Paul’s junior year. He had set out in conquest of her like Don Quixote on a bender, only to discover to his unending delight that Bobbi Janeskew lubed for streetwise bad-boy types.

  It was a doomed revelation, as Paul quickly found out. Because Bobbi Janeskew’s succulence came with a heavy pricetag. Ma and Pa Janeskew were second generation old-school from Warsaw, and they held some very particular ideas about their little girl’s virtue. And Paul Mister-idle-hands-are-the-devil’s-playground Kelly soon found himself designated persona non grata at the Janeskew household, banished in near-record time.

  Old man Janeskew, in particular, hated him with a passion normally reserved for Nuremberg war criminals. He was a Polish pitbull -- jowly, thick-necked, and bug-eyed -- and he watchdogged his daughter’s virginity as if it were a piece of the one true cross.

  Roberta, of course, had rebelled at every opportunity, surreptitiously cutting loose from her good-girl persona whenever she thought she could get away with it, which was never. It looked like true love was destined to die en utero.

  Until that one fateful night...

  Bobbi had miraculously conned her parents into letting her sleep over at Gina’s under the guise of working on a school project together, and with assurances of parental guidance and an eleven o’clock lockdown. The Lorenzos were totally cooperative in this.

  But the girls had other plans.

  Paul had performed his bit of familial larceny like a pro, sneaking downstairs shoeless
after his mom and stepdad had turned in for the night, lifting Ken’s keys from the eyehook in the kitchen on his way out. He and Dondi had motored over and coasted up with the lights off and the engine dead, a rolling ninja funmobile. Bobbi and Gina slid out her bedroom window, and together they slipped into the night.

  They cruised all the way Route One to the Jersey shore, shotgunning cheap Mexican and sucking down brews, tripping out on Supertramp, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs, getting utterly, thoroughly wasted. And then, while Dondi and Gina amused themselves elsewhere, Bobbi had ended up fulfilling the fantasies of a lifetime by doing the bone-dance with Paul under the E Street pier: all full lips and ripe curves and precocious carnal abandon, her nubile teenage flesh shining otherworldy and electric in the shadowed moonlight.

  They dropped the girls off by the dawn’s early light, undetected, and rode away like masters of the known universe. Paul had let Dondi off a block from his house, then secreted the Malibu back in the driveway and snuck back inside: shoes off, smug, satisfied. It was the perfect crime, with one small exception.

  Ken. Waiting for him. In the kitchen.

  The moment Paul stepped through the door...

  "God, I remember," Dondi groaned. "Bastard kicked the living shit out of you..."

  "Yeah, but it was worth it," Paul laughed, then shrugged. "Screw him. He always said I was a dirtbag, anyway."

  "You were," Dondi snickered, "But then, so was I." He raised his bottle in toast to lost youth. "Kinda scary, ain’t it? We were exactly the kinds of kids we hope our kids never meet."

  "Tell me about it," Paul replied. "Every time some little roving hormone shows up for Kyra and I see that look in his eyes, part of me just wants to pin his head to the floor. It’s like, yeah, sure, you can take my daughter out... just check your dick at the door, and I’ll give it back to you when you bring her home." He paused. "How’d we ever end up on the other side of this equation, anyway?"

  "Karmic payback, I guess," Dondi laughed, and gazed around the interior. "Anyway, I wish you better luck with women than you have with real estate. This place is a piece of shit."

  "What," Paul shot back, offended. "It’s an investment."

  "It’s a Goddamn firetrap, is what it is." Dondi gestured to the walls, which were laid bare down to the joists, exposing ragged clots of plaster and skeletal wood, frayed wiring and copper pipe. "Wiring’s fucked, plumbing sucks, the boiler... I don’t even want to talk about the boiler." He swigged his beer. "Why the whole damn place hasn’t been condemned is beyond me."

  "Your problem is, you got no vision," Paul replied. "I’m telling you, another five, ten years, max, this place is gonna be a boomtown. Better than Hoboken in the eighties..."

  "Uh-huh. Sure."

  "Seriously. I paid five grand for this place," he said. "I figure, pump another twenty into it to bring it up to code, rent it out for a few years, it’ll practically pay for itself."

  "Yeah? How you gonna do all that on twenty-five large?"

  "Ruthlessly use my friends," Paul grinned, wiggling his eyebrows. "It’ll give you something to do with your hands."

  "Fuck you, I’ve got something to do with my hands. You’re the one getting laid in the shower."

  Paul ignored him. "Anyway, Kyra’s gonna settle down one of these days, after she finishes school and college. I mean, eventually she’s gonna get married, want to start a family of her own. This is kinda like an early wedding present."

  "Gettin’ a little ahead of yourself, ain’tcha, hoss?" Dondi commented. "She just got her driver’s license."

  "Yeah," Paul said. "But I never really knew my old man, and Ken didn’t give me a damn thing growing up. When I turned eighteen he just opened the door and said, ‘There’s the world.’ And then he booted me out into it." Paul drained his beer and crumpled the can. "I just want to give her what I never had."

  "Nothing wrong with that." Dondi drained his as well, then let out a luxurious burp. "Better tack another five onto the budget, though. For beer." They laughed and tossed the crumpled cans into the trash, and then Dondi stood and clapped his friend on the shoulder.

  "Well, this is all fine and dandy," he said. "But before you go strolling down the aisle and picking fabric swatches and all, lemme show you what’s wrong with this piece-of-shit boiler you got." Dondi ambled toward the back corner of the kitchen and the door that led to the basement, gestured for Paul to follow.

  "Among its many other charms," he continued, "there’s some severe fuckage in the gas mains. You don’t get it fixed, and you’re liable to blow this place sky-high. And then I’ll have to come ID your crispy ass, and that’ll just ruin my whole day."

  They were just about to descend when Paul stopped and peered at the back door immediately adjacent to the basement steps, in what the real estate agent had laughingly referred to as ‘the mud room’.

  "Hey, Dondi, check this out," he said.

  One of the panes of glass nearest the doorknob had been neatly broken, stray shards littering the floor directly beneath. Dondi smirked.

  "Like I said, great neighborhood," he chided.

  "Goddammit." Paul muttered. "Why would anyone want to break into a gutted house? S’not like there’s anything to steal."

  "You kidding?" Dondi replied. "They were probably looking to rip out the plumbing or the wiring for the copper. Junkies, man. They’ll steal anything."

  They opted to check the rest of the house, to make sure it was secure. It was barren, but intact, and there were no signs of looting.

  But as they reached the end of the second-floor hall Paul pushed open the master bedroom door and sent something hard and brittle skittering across the hardwood planks. The door swung wide, and Paul and Dondi peered in.

  "Looks like someone’s been hanging in Daddy Bear’s crib," Dondi said.

  And he was right. A squat had been set up in the big bedroom; in one corner a dropcloth and an old sleeping bag lay piled like a nest, empty beer bottles and cigarette butts strewn around it. Even the fireplace bricks were blackened with ash and bits of burnt plywood scrap.

  "Don’t see any works or vials," Dondi said, the tip of his boot nosing through the clutter. "If they’re junkies, they’re awful careful about it."

  But Paul was not amused. It was clear this was more than an annoyance to him; it was tantamount to a violation. Dondi nudged him.

  "Something else to put on your shopping list," he said. "New locks."

  Paul frowned.

  FIVE

  The sun was just setting as Paul drove his black ‘86 Ford F350 pickup down the street, heading for home. John Mellencamp’s "Case 795 (The Family)" from the Human Wheels album played on the Sony CD player, the volume pumped up to bleed. Paul liked Mellencamp, even back in the "Jack & Diane" days, before he lost the goofy "Johnny Cougar" moniker his label had saddled him with early in his career. He liked his nicotine-saturated voice, straightforward guitar-driven tunes and the working class pathos of his lyrics, which were like little stories sliced from the heart of life. But mostly he liked him because Mellencamp was a frank anachronism and didn’t care who knew it.

  "Everything’s allriiight with the family…" Paul sang along, shamelessly and badly, "…everything’s saaafe here at home…" He drummed the steering wheel in time with the driving beat. "Everything’s allriiight with the family… the beds are made but there’s no sheets on…"

  The song wailed on, Paul’s tuneless voice drowned out by two hundred and forty watts of RMS power. A big tuned-port subwoofer in the back of the king cab vibrated his ass like a magic fingers bed at the Kozy Kove Motor Lodge. He couldn’t sing to save his life, but who cared? The truck was a big, testosterone-spewing gas pig with dualies on the back, a fiberglass shell covering the bed, a winch on the front bumper and a hundred thousand plus miles on the engine, but it was paid for, and all his. He wheeled it into the driveway, fat tires crunching on crushed gravel laid by his own hand.

  The neighborhood wa
s a quiet, middle-income enclave, mercifully removed from the neat but unbelievably tacky abodes that characterized the bulk of Glendon, where fake wood-grained aluminum siding ruled, offset by postage-stamp lawns now festooned with pumpkins, ghouls and all manner of macabre ornamentation for Halloween.

  Coming home at the cusp of dusk was one of life’s little pleasures that Paul never tired of, the windows of his house aglow and golden against the deepening blue background, radiating warmth and welcome. Indeed, the Kelly house was a rambling and romantic old manse on a lot dotted with oak and elm and poplar, far from the seedy human backwash that was Paul’s standard stock-in-trade. The house bristled with peaks and gables and gingerbread trim, all painstakingly restored by Paul and Julie, down to the wraparound porch and leaded glass windows that made rainbow prisms of the morning sun.

  He wheeled around back and pulled into his slot, noting that Julie’s midnight blue Honda Prelude was tucked in the garage. Paul keyed off the engine, as Mellencamp & Co. disappeared in a puff of sonic smoke. He wistfully wished for a two-car garage -- parking space ranking second only to closet space in marital power-brokering. His clothes had long ago been squeezed from closet to armoire; when Julie got the Prelude, his truck had similarly been banished. God help him when Kyra got wheels, which, given that she’d just scored her license, should be imminent. He’d probably end up parking on the roof.

  Paul grabbed his ripstop nylon ditty bag and climbed out, heading up the patio leading to the back door. The patio itself was inlaid brick from a demolished factory downtown -- trucked in by the ton after a deal Paul made to install smoke detectors in the contractor’s home -- and was covered with fallen leaves that rustled and crunched underfoot as he made his way toward the kitchen door. A lot of work went into making the Kelly house a home, a lot of time, a lot of love. The property taxes were murderous. But it was worth it.

  As Paul approached he noticed that the gutters and rain-spouts were clogged with leaves again -- Kyra hadn’t done her weekly chores, which among other things included raking duty in the fall. He grumbled momentarily, then his stomach rumbled as he caught the first aroma of food. Thoughts of parental reprimand instantly vaporized; he was starved. And dogged as his schedule tended to be -- no matter what he was doing, or where he was doing it -- Paul always made it a point to be home in time for Sunday dinner.