Loose Ends

by Neal Bowers

  CONTENTS

  __________

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY NEAL BOWERS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  FOR NANCY,

  WITHOUT WHOM I WOULD BE AT LOOSE ENDS

  Loose

  __________

  ENDS

  CHAPTER 1

  __________

  THE SHORTEST DISTANCE between two people is almost always a lie. Compared to the truth, it has the advantages of a cut flower over a potted plant. You may think you would prefer the plant, but consider the commitment—the watering, the worrying. You can’t help expecting it to live; and if it doesn’t, you bear most of the blame. A single rose, however, lasts as long as it lasts in its slender vase. Snip the stem on the bias and cloud the water with an aspirin, but still you know this momentary effusion will not become part of your permanent decor.

  Davis Banks lived by this philosophy and always traveled with his arms full of flowers—a daisy for the ticket agent, a jonquil for the steward, and for the person seated next to him, an exotic bouquet.

  “Yes, I’m the inventor of the mobile bowling alley. You don’t see them much in this country, but they’re the rage in Latin America. All you need is a pickup truck, a few sections of my patented collapsible trestles for an extension, my simulated polyurethane lane, and you’re in business. Just drive from town to town and rake in the dough.”

  Such stories illuminated the daily trench, flashed in dull eyes. And Davis especially liked it when one of his original lies came back to him, like the one about the Barber-in-a-Helmet: simply strap it on, set it for the length of hair you want, and flip the switch. But it distressed him when some of his inventions—the Bug Zapper, for instance—became real. It wasn’t that he regretted not getting the patent and making a gazillion dollars; rather, he felt disoriented, like waking in a hotel room and thinking for a moment he was in his own home. The truth, too, can be a mimic. Sometimes it dims and blinks, a bulb about to blow.

  Studying and teaching literature for fifteen years had conditioned Davis to regard everything as subject to multiple interpretations. Struggling to get his students to understand a poem or a story in a certain way had failed, so he gave himself over to their assorted misreadings, accepting them all as valid.

  His own life reinforced this approach. Moving from one teaching job to another, he had settled in finally as an academic oddity at a junior college in Des Moines. His actual title was Part-time, Temporary, Adjunct, Visiting Assistant Professor, his professional identity so qualified that he felt edited almost to invisibility. Of course, he pretended he was full-time and tenured. What did the words mean, after all? Even the world is a text, infinitely interpretable. Self-image is yet another possible version among many, the lie a person tells himself, the fiction of identity.

  On this trip, Davis Banks introduced himself as Ben Blau to the man strapped into the seat beside him. He liked names that teased, just for the extra risk. Calculating that his chance companion knew no German, Davis said, “Hi, I’m Ben Blau,” which in English/German hybrid announced that he was drunk. No recognition, just an extended hand and a name, “Jim Timmerman,” which caused Davis to study hard for a moment. Something in the rhyme sounded concocted. Could be a fellow changeling. Surely there were others like himself, probably thousands; but Davis couldn’t say for certain he had ever encountered one. As a test, he allowed Timmerman the first move: “What do you do, Jim?”

  “As little as possible.” A snorting laugh punctuated the man’s answer.

  Davis waited. “Good work if you can get it,” he said with a guarded smile.

  “Actually, I’m a motivational speaker.” From his inside coat pocket, he dealt Davis a business card embossed with a blue eagle and the words in red: JIM TIMMERMAN, WINNER OF THE CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR.

  Davis was momentarily speechless. This man might be one he could learn from, a big-leaguer going for the long ball on every swing.

  “I talk to business groups, civic organizations. You know, pump ’em up and get ’em excited about life. It’s a pretty damned good life, after all.”

  Was the ambiguity intended? Life with a capital “L,” or lowercase, as in life as a scam? Davis felt himself wobble with the lift and sway of the plane as he sat transfixed by the card. Why tell a lie that defied belief? Weren’t most Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers killed in action, their bravery transcending life? Davis had always specialized in the lie that could be true, that couldn’t finally be disproved. But here was a man who had lifted the game to another level, pushing harder on credibility and taking greater risks.

  “Sorry, I’m all out of cards right now. Gave my last one to”—he almost said the pope—“the postmaster. In Des Moines. I represent a line of satchels called the Compressor Carrier. It has special compartments for letters. Squeezes the air out of them. Amazing how many more letters you can carry when the air isn’t taking up all that space.”

  “Can you sell independently to local post offices? Don’t you need a government contract for something like that?”

  Now Davis was even more certain Timmerman was a player. “You’re right. I’m drumming up support for my carrier before making application. You know, looking for ways to improve it, trying to generate some grassroots enthusiasm. Can’t take anything for granted where the feds are concerned.”

  Davis was about to pocket Timmerman’s card when the other man reached for it. “Sorry. I’m running low, too. In fact, that’s my last one, and I’m using it just as a loaner until I get a new shipment.”

  “So, what branch of the service were you in?” Davis asked, tugging at the knees of his pants and shifting in his seat.

  “Marines.”

  “How’d you win the medal?”

  Timmerman’s face turned serious, and he cleared his throat as if he were about to address everyone on the plane, then lifted a hand that might stop traffic or swear to an oath. “Could we talk about something else? You understand.”

  Davis was certain he understood. To prevent the alternative question about how his Compressor Carrier worked, he quickly excused himself, sliding past Timmerman, who drew his feet underneath his seat but left his big knees protruding like howitzers.

  With the rest room’s small door locked behind him, Davis stood with closed eyes, feeling the rolling terrain of air passing underneath his feet. Here, more than anywhere else on the plane, he knew he was flying, the thrust and rush throbbing in his hips and spine; in his arms and legs, the loose-jointedness of a thrown marionette. Shoulder against the outside wall, he let the cold seep in, the icy brittleness of the thin atmosphere, and pulled out his insulin syringe. He studied it the way he had seen junkies do in television exposés of drug abuse. The magic needle, himself just one more wreck in need of a fix.

  Having to guess how much, he squeezed a thread into the sink, then held the needle above a pinch of flesh and waited for the moment. Strange to hesitate after more than a dozen years. Stranger still to feel the magic of the instant when it could be done, when the mind turned to stone and the eyes looked without seeing. Now—and it was over.

  A woman waiting outside the door gave an impatient sigh when Davis bumbled past her. Something in the tight line of her lips suggested disgust.
Davis was about to say “It’s only heroin” when the door clicked shut. Stupid to think she could know what he had done. He unconsciously patted his shirt pocket to be sure he hadn’t left the syringe behind. So what if she did know? What if everyone knew? Looking down the long row alive at the edges with arms and legs, he thought of insects, a burrow pocketed with lives. Maybe they sensed his disease in the telepathic way insects know the wounded and the near-dead among them. Grasping each seat back for balance, he felt himself moving along a swinging bridge. Below was the abyss. Uninterpretable.

  When the snack came, a doll-sized sandwich with a pretend bag of chips puffed up by altitude, Davis asked for orange juice. Timmerman reached for it and seemed about to take a sip before he handed it over, saying, “Here you go.” Then, as he unwrapped his sandwich, he asked Davis, “How many people do you think would fit in here if all the air were squeezed out of them?”

  “You’d do better to squeeze the water out of ’em.”

  Timmerman grunted approval, then lapsed into what must have been a serious consideration of the options. The process kept him quiet as he compressed one way and then another, loading his flattened or dehydrated people onto Timmerman’s One-way Airline.

  To have made it this far, midway between Des Moines and Nashville, without revealing a single personal detail, liberated Davis. He could be anyone on his way anywhere, his real identity as an academic second-stringer a secret, hidden partially even from himself. Entering the white noise of windsweep and turbines, he fell asleep thinking of Ben Blau and his doomed invention, of Timmerman’s creation of doom; and in his dream he opened a satchel filled with compacted lives, each in a thin folder, strange pressed leaves. He saw himself filing his mother, the label “Ellen Banks” protruding until he tamped the edges flush with all the rest, and she was gone.

  *

  Some dreams are awakened from, others into. As Davis opened his eyes, blinking away the vision of finished and filed lives, he held very still to give his mind a chance to level itself. He was on a plane, en route to Tennessee to arrange the details of his mother’s funeral. The call had come that morning, while he was at work. Not entirely unexpected, because of her bad heart. Why, then, did he still feel he was dreaming? Turning to his left, he saw Timmerman rising and falling in his seat like a weightless astronaut as the plane bounded moguls of air. Yes, his mother was dead, even if he was Ben Blau and not Davis Banks. A parentless son by any other name. . . . Too frivolous to finish. Fully awake now, he took inventory: forty-five and orphaned by death. Father gone for eight years. No brothers or sisters. One more file waiting—his own.

  He felt a sudden urge to tell Timmerman the truth, but the dry air snapped with the pilot’s voice announcing their descent into Nashville. Nothing to do now but hold on in silence. No difference, anyway. Timmerman wouldn’t know what to say and might resent the original lie, or he might not know which version to believe and become patronizing. Medal of Honor winner. Timmerman didn’t deserve the truth, didn’t really even deserve a story as good as the one Davis had told him.

  Dragging his shoulder bag over the seats, he pushed into line behind Timmerman, realizing for the first time how tall the man was. At least six feet four, several inches taller than Davis, taller than anyone else on the plane. Maybe he truly was a war hero. Vietnam. The war Davis missed because the lottery tagged him number 301. He didn’t exactly regret being lucky, but sometimes he wished he could truthfully say to someone like Timmerman, “Hey, man, I was in-country, too.” Assuming, of course, that Timmerman was there. Davis closed his eyes and thought of the two of them in the jungle, faces streaked with camouflage. What would Timmerman do to win the medal? What would Davis Banks do to keep from dying?

  Someone nudged Davis from behind and said, “Line’s moving,” making him realize that Timmerman and everyone ahead of him had gone. Not Vietnam. Nashville. How could he have flashbacks of a war he was never in—belly-down in mud, the rain a waterfall on his back? A voice in his head said, “Post-traumatic number 301 syndrome.”

  When he walked into one of the waiting areas just beyond the ramp door, he was sweating, and other passengers were staring at him. He looked down at himself as though splattered with blood and then said, to no one in particular, “My mother just died.” At first, his lips formed the words but no sound came. Then more breath than sound, “My mother just died,” followed by an aimless turning until a flight attendant took him by the arm and helped him sit down. “Sugar,” he said blankly. Her head tilted toward him as if she were waiting for a kiss. Then the whole building tipped, and he heard somewhere in his brain a sustained car horn in a mall parking lot, and he knew it was too late to find it and stop it. The blare soaked and pulled him under.

  *

  “You’ve gotta give him a few more minutes.” A southern voice in the blankness. “Here, take another bite.” He realized, then, he was chewing. “When I saw that little pouch sticking out of his shoulder bag, I knew what was wrong. Diabetic kit, just like my daddy’s.” The gray kit now lay open, exposing syringes, a blood monitor, blood-test strips, and a single vial of insulin. “Nothing to worry about as long as he comes around.” As the room re-created itself, a young man blurred over Davis. “Can you hear me?” Davis thought he nodded, but the question came again and he tried to say yes. When he saw the half-eaten candy bar in the young man’s hand, Davis grabbed it and took the rest into his mouth in a single bite. “He’ll be fine,” the voice said. “Exactly like my daddy.”

  “Seen one diabetic, you’ve seen ’em all,” Davis said through the chocolate and caramel, his belligerence returning first.

  “Hell, you must have known my daddy,” the young man said with a laugh. “He had a smart mouth, too, when the insulin zapped him.”

  Davis gave him what he thought was a withering look, but it produced only a laugh. “He’s out of danger now.” Then the man was gone, though a small group stalled nearby. The flight attendant asked if she should get a doctor, and Davis said, “No. No, I’ll be all right.” When she asked again, Davis leaned toward her, and spoke with emphasis, as if she didn’t entirely understand English, “No doctor.” She stood and clipped her way down the concourse, leaving him slumped in his chair.

  As the world returned, Davis began the critical self-assessment that always followed such episodes. Too much insulin. A low blood sugar before the injection so that the stingy airline snack wasn’t enough. And he needed to be more careful with the fast-acting Humalog. Now he wanted to thank the man who gave him the candy and apologize to the flight attendant who stayed with him. Too complicated to explain that when the sugar is gone, the brain turns bitter in its brine.

  Moving to the rest room, Davis felt his strength returning, but he worried about those moments he couldn’t remember, when he had eaten half a candy bar and been surrounded by gawkers. Did he grunt as he ate? Where was his mind while his body was hunched in primordial hunger? In the mirror, he saw his chin streaked with chocolate, the corners of his mouth stained brown. The face was his, but it had been somewhere else, attached to someone he didn’t know. Ben Blau. Treacherous son of a bitch, running off with his face. And where was Timmerman when a hero was needed? Big Medal of Honor Winner should have been there shouting, “Medic! Medic!” Why hadn’t he leaned over him, whispering, “You’re gonna make it, buddy”?

  “Shit.” Until the man at the next sink looked up, Davis didn’t know he had said the word aloud. Trying a faint grin, he turned back to the mirror and rubbed at the chocolate. Even cleaned up, he looked like a man who had fallen from a window and been saved by the limber branches of a tree. Tucking in his damp shirttail, he watched himself become Davis Banks once more, the color returning, some light in his eyes, a boyishness behind his glum mask. Forcing a smile, he persuaded himself he could be mistaken for someone in his mid-thirties, a big, athletic type. Maybe he should invent a running shoe or some sports equipment. The Verticalizer. Guaranteed to improve posture and increase height by properly aligning the
vertebrae. But what would it be? Something lightweight, easily worn under clothing. Yes, he could sell it.

  Davis stretched to his full height, turned sideways, and tensed his stomach. Now he was himself, or maybe Arch Steel, inventor of the Verticalizer. Still jittery from insulin shock, he couldn’t hold the pose. He was Davis Banks, and a suitcase riding the baggage carousel would be tagged with that name.

  CHAPTER 2

  __________

  DAVIS WOULD HAVE preferred to rent a car for the forty-mile drive north to Clarksville, but he knew someone would be at the airport to meet him, probably one of his younger cousins with a modified Chevy, jacked up in the rear by huge racing slicks, Nirvana and Alabama on the tape player. Loud speed and no chance for conversation, a screaming privacy. Instead, he found Uncle Oscar studying the conveyor, the unclaimed bags moving only a little slower than the old man drove. Wearing his usual combination of suspenders and a belt, he was the perfect emblem of caution. When he saw Davis approaching, he waved broadly enough to be guiding a jet to the ramp and started talking even before his voice was audible.

  “Awful, just awful,” he was saying as Davis sloughed his shoulder bag and clenched his arms across his chest. “A shock, I know, but the Good Lord has his reasons; yessir, the Good Lord knows what we don’t.”

  Resisting an impulse to strike the old man, Davis tightened his arms and took a step back. “How’d you get stuck with this taxi service?”

  “Volunteered, I reckon. Everybody else was wore out or just too down, ’specially your aunt Goldie. Your mama’s only sister, you know, and she’s grievin’ hard. Anyway, I wanted to talk. Ain’t seen you in forever.”

  The worst was going to happen. Oscar, the Baptist lay minister, was going to witness. Sanctimonious Oscar, the man with all the answers, because one answer served for every question: “The Good Lord has his ways.” When Oscar intoned, “We never know when our name will be called. Could be anybody at any time,” his arm sweeping the entire baggage area, Davis wished it had been Oscar instead of his mother. What possible plan of God’s would rank Oscar over Ellen Banks? Like privileging a weed above an iris. Davis wanted him yanked out and a cup of salt poured in the hole with the roots.