Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  “Help me! Help me!” Checker imitated sadly.

  She laughed, for too long. Clearly he could do anything short of leave and she’d be happy as a clam.

  “Is it fun? Is it like being high?”

  “No,” she shuddered. “It’s awful.”

  “‘Deliriously happy’ is a strange phrase, then.” Checker was running out of things to say.

  “Checker—” Her hand reached out and clutched his shirt. “At Plato’s—”

  “Hey, you’d taken a whole drugstore, right? We can forget that entire conversation.” Or try.

  “No! I meant every word, and more!”

  As she tugged at the material, Checker stared at his vocalist in horror. She was broken. She’d been fragile before, sensitive, the works, but never shattered. In the hospital bed before him was a woman with no pride, and it was like looking at a cripple or a vegetable or anyone else with something tragically missing. “You said, Checker,” she went on, “you said you’d never fall in love with me.” Her eyes were wide and blurry. “You said it would never happen, you said never. Checker, is it true? Did you mean it? Never?”

  Checker looked down at the little white paw with its claws clutching the sleeve of Syria’s work shirt. So what if you didn’t want a pet? Someone leaves a basket case on your doorstep, what are you supposed to do, drown it?

  “Oh, I don’t know, Rache,” he said slowly. “You’re a wonderful girl. Sure, it’s not out of the question.”

  Checker couldn’t look her in the eye, and as she burbled, “I didn’t think so!” tumbling on about how he should just tell her when he’s “ready,” Checker tried gently but firmly to release the green shirt from the grip of her nails. She wailed when he left, but Checker had to get out fast now, smoothing out the tight, bunchy wrinkles from his sleeve as he rushed down the hall. He was overwhelmed with a feeling he’d just done something terrible, though perhaps less to Rachel DeBruin than to himself.

  J.K. floats

  16 / Why We Fought World War II

  Secretly, The Derailleurs were delighted Rachel had attempted suicide. An overdose was a damned sight more entertaining conversation than what suggestion to mail in this week for the Late Show’s Perfect Album Side; for once they sent Danno no card. And there was that stirring way Plato’s patrons whispered in the corners when one of The Derailleurs walked in—thank you, Rachel DeBruin, who could ask for more?

  For she’d introduced a charge, what they always tried to siphon from Checker: a sense of today being different from yesterday, a surety that Caldwell was right for once: these were the Old Days they would remember, even if no one had the nerve to name them Good outright. Kicking bottles by the river, scuffing up to the rail, staring wanly into the setting sun by the bridge; staying up late at Plato’s even on week nights, a little disappointed that all the members left were boys and could not therefore burst into tears at slow moments to break up the evening—well, it was wonderful just to have something happen, and frankly, nine times out of ten when anything happens it’s bad. Let’s face it, graduations and award banquets don’t make it. No, someone is usually dying or threatening you with a lead pipe; something you care about is at least at risk, if not swirling down the tubes altogether. Catastrophe is a queer route to feeling alive, but it nearly always works, as any VFW man could assure you. For most of us, the darker emotions are the richest of the palette: agony, rancor, blame.

  Though accustomed to a certain notoriety, Checker noticed an unusual hush descend on the club when he walked in, a stony glare from the rest of the band.

  “See Rache?” asked Caldwell tersely.

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s a mess.” Checker sighed, and might have gone on at length but caught himself just in time, as if starting to lean back in a broken chair. Only Rahim at the end of the table sent him a smile, the pretty, even teeth aligned like perfect soldiers at attention, troops on his side.

  Side? There were no sides here, were there? This was the band, The Derailleurs, his people. So why did it seem they’d start talking again only when he left?

  “Tonka.”

  The band rarely caught sight of this woman, and couldn’t help but stare. Her graying hair extended straight out from her ears and came to points over her shoulders, like small wings. Her eyes, too, were gray, perpetually mild. She floated into the room with a slight stoop, her gnarled hands balanced on either side. She looked older than she was, for Lena Secretti didn’t “take care of herself.” The only person who took care of her was Checker, and he was only nineteen.

  Everything her eyes lighted on seemed to surprise her. She took her time, gazing at each of The Derailleurs in turn, smiling, though in a slightly feeble or disconnected way. She wasn’t exactly crazy, but she didn’t live at this address. She approached her son last of all and stroked his neck and told him why she was there, all with curiosity and confusion but no pain. As if it simply weren’t her problem. “Romaine’s been arrested, baby,” she said in that airy voice of hers. “The police took him away. I don’t know what to do.”

  Checker, whose feet had been up for only three minutes, took them wearily back down. Since it wasn’t his mother’s problem, it was obviously someone else’s.

  “See you guys,” Checker sighed, and led his mother by the hand, feeling her exasperatingly light grip, preparing himself for the long ordeal of trying to find out from her where they’d taken his brother and what in God’s name Romaine had done this time.

  “Ro.” Checker decided to stop there. It was critical to say as little as possible, since absolutely anything Check said would drive his brother into a frenzy.

  Check left Romaine glowering on the station bench, hands shoved deep in his pockets, eyebrows low, lips pouting, pupils retracted into hard, resentful coals. There was paperwork his mother was not competent to see through, or at least that’s what she pretended. Actually, Checker was beginning to figure out that his mother was a great deal smarter and more connected than she let on. He suspected she was perfectly capable of getting Romaine released into her custody, but the process didn’t interest her and she wanted out of it. Little by little his sympathy was moving toward his father. She generated that mistiness of hers like a fog machine; it saved her all kinds of trouble. His mother sat next to Romaine with her hands quietly folded, looking just calculatedly sane enough that the police wouldn’t think she was too weird and keep Romaine in jail. Of course, they weren’t looking for an excuse to keep him—what did they want with another two-bit sixteen-year-old delinquent?

  Checker showed his mother where to scrawl her looping imitation of a signature, glancing at Romaine, who was now slouched so low that he threatened to slide off the bench altogether. Romaine wouldn’t meet his brother’s eyes. No doubt about it, this was the world’s most hopeless relationship.

  Though Romaine Secretti was a mulatto like Check, he was more darkly complected. So Ro had decided to be black. He extruded his lips; he “talked street,” though with the overly studied quality of an acquired tongue—his incessant “Yo!” got on his friends’ nerves. He’d started using his father’s old name, Jones—drab, but at least not Italian. He’d go to extravagant lengths to keep his friends from his mother, and not long ago, when he passed her on the street and she waved, he muttered, “Crazy white bitch,” and kept on walking.

  “Hey, ain’t that yo mama?” asked one of his friends.

  “That trash, bwa,” Ro muttered.

  “Don’t razz me, sucker! That yo mama, I seen her wid you, three, fo time!”

  “Bull, jive ass,” Romaine insisted, and finally, rather than claim his mother, he ditched his friend.

  Romaine loved to ride his older brother for having so many white friends; his latest nickname for Checker was “Clorox.”

  Romaine would inevitably hate his brother to precisely the degree Ro admired him, which was, unfortunately for both of them, very much. It was hell to be Checker’s brother, and Check himsel
f was aware of this, though sympathy only inflamed Romaine more. When, younger and stupider, Check had once made the mistake of addressing their problem directly, using words like “rivalry” and sheepishly naming some of his own successes, Ro never forgave him. “I guess I jus jealous a you bein so popular,” he would quote viciously for years later.

  Checker was their mother’s favorite for largely practical reasons. While Check was self-sufficient from an early age, Romaine had expected to be a child, a real child, with a real mother. She resented scenes like this one, not because she was ashamed of Ro for getting into trouble, but because he forced her to confront a whole side of the world she preferred to neglect.

  Yet Romaine’s delinquency had the same too deliberate flavor of his lingo. He didn’t have a flair for it, even his friends said so, and he too carefully got caught.

  What with Rachel a few blocks away still clutching Syria’s goblet like a promise she had wrested from him and would now never let go, and The Derailleurs up the way all, save Rahim, refusing him the time of day, Checker wasn’t in the mood. Leading his motley family out the door with a date set for his brother’s hearing, he muttered to Romaine, “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull off here, but it’s not working.” However, in that Romaine had added one more brick to a boat already riding low in the water, it was working, all right. It was working just fine.

  The following afternoon, returning from the recording studio, Caldwell was feeling expansive from Eaton’s praise—his riffs were so sophisticated, his lyrics so subtle, this demo was going to blow Manhattan away. Thinking malignantly that Checker didn’t go out of his way to compliment other musicians, Caldwell passed the laundromat on Eighteenth Street and caught sight of Himself.

  As Caldwell stared in the door, Checker was standing before a top-loader with his eyes closed, fingertips resting gently on the machine, his chin raised, as if offering up a prayer to the God of Clean Clothes.

  “You are whacked, man.”

  Checker smiled and sang “Good Vibrations.”

  The cycle spun its last verse; Checker unloaded the wet clothes into a cart. “I had that—effective feeling all day. Laundry was the ticket.” He wheeled the clothes around a corner with a flourish and pushed; the cart careened down the aisle and stopped directly in front of a machine out of which a woman had just pulled her last sock—Checker got tail winds on the way to a dryer. He poked his head into the barrel and sang, “You can’t start a fire worrying about / Your little world falling apart / This gun’s for hire / Even if we’re just dancing in the dark.” It echoed. He withdrew. “Better than a shower.”

  Check surveyed the bank of portholes with that proprietary air that distinguished his relationship to most objects. Checker bought little; he owned things simply by liking them so much. Shopping with Check drove Caldwell wild. Caldwell came back with a couple of albums full of disappointing cuts and a shirt he would stain with pizza sauce the first time he wore it; Checker’s haul would include every outfit they’d looked at in windows, and all the good songs Tower had played while Check danced between Jazz and Rock and Caldwell frantically flipped through albums, wondering if he should really be buying CD’s. Caldwell would blow his whole wad; Check would throw a bum a single quarter. Down at the strip, when Check admired a Corvette, its owner would grip the fender in a surge of jealousy when it was already his car.

  “I love dryers,” said Check, slapping his clothes with a thwap in the tube.

  “Is there anything you don’t luv?”

  Checker looked up curiously and didn’t answer.

  “I mean,” Caldwell fumbled, “don’t you ever not feel like doing your laundry? Isn’t it ever the last fucking thing on earth you want to do?”

  “Sure. But I don’t do it then.”

  “What if you never felt like it?”

  “I guess I’d get pretty dirty.”

  Caldwell stuck out the load, trying unsuccessfully to remember Check was his friend, their good times together. Checker gestured to the window of the dryer. “It’s like watching a Star Trek you’ve seen one too many times.” Caldwell laughed, following the flashes of overfamiliar material up against the glass like watching TV. But there was something sad and lonesome about the weightless clothes, always falling, never reaching the bottom, like a bad dream. With winsome grace the arms of shirts reached toward one another but never quite met, legs wrestled and twisted and tore free. The dryer seemed tossed with agony and missed connections. When the load was dry, Caldwell helped Checker fold; he found himself stroking the shirts he recognized, smoothing out the wrinkles in heavy red cotton, overtaken with that particular Caldwell nostalgia for what should not yet be over. However much he reminded himself that nothing had changed, though, that wasn’t quite true this time. As Checker cooed over the feel of fresh denim, the smell of clean sheets, the miraculous resurrection of laundry, Caldwell watched the scene like a memory: Remember how Check washed clothes? Remember how he’d put his hands on the machine and hum like some kind of Zen crazy? Remember how he’d spend two dollars in quarters just so the towels fluffed out? When Check buried his face in a thick magenta pile as in a woman’s hair, Caldwell could have been looking at slides. He had to restrain himself from leaning over and whispering, while Checker played with the cart and its amazing castors, “I’ll miss you, you son of a bitch,” or even, “I miss you now.” Something horrible was happening, and his best friend in the world was beginning to annoy the living fuck out of him, and he couldn’t stop it.

  “Pick up a beer?” asked Check, slinging the sack over his back.

  “No, thanks,” said Caldwell formally, with the same twinge he felt when he turned twelve and for the first October in his life declined the offer to go trick-or-treating because this year he was too old.

  The Astoria Park pool closes at eight, but only technically—it’s nice that the lifeguards can call it a day, but the place is almost disappointingly permeable at night; though he often tore his clothes on the chain link, even Howard could scrabble over the fence.

  That hot August night the band hadn’t needed to make arrangements but naturally gravitated toward the pool, spilling in dribs and drabs over the fence, drawn by the expanse of water that on some level they all acknowledged, though they would not use this language, had mystical powers. The Astoria Park pool is the Stonehenge of Queens. Centered between the two bridges and twice Olympic-size, the huge blue rectangle is ringed with stairs like the Roman Colosseum. Three large inexplicable blue pyramids loom at regular intervals mid-pool. In hundreds of years archaeologists will unearth this place and assume it was holy ground.

  Generously well lit, the water seemed to float above the park, reflecting the Triborough’s entire string of lights. Though envious of Caldwell’s beautiful flat racing dive, Howard disapproved—the whole pool was three and a half feet deep. As Howard eased onto his back, the lights of the bridge, the stars, and the Manhattan skyline swirled overhead. It was understandable why Checker had already been here an hour, tirelessly sidestroking across the far side, making only the faintest trickling sound as he passed by.

  The crawl in the next lane may not have had the elegance or stamina of that seamless sidestroke, but Howard Williams was still a competent swimmer. While churning and gurgling with a suggestion of hysteria, Howard swashed a steady three laps to Checker’s four.

  Caldwell chopped a few rapid lengths and pulled out again. Dripping next to Eaton, who was reclining with his white Ban-Lon collar upturned, his neat blue running shorts crisp and pleated, Caldwell wasn’t surprised that Eaton declined to jump in. Something about this guy was essentially dry.

  Of course, it was happening again—it happened all the time now. The pool glimmered before Caldwell like a jewel in a window—something he couldn’t have or something he’d pawned. It griped him that Checker didn’t get tired. Just those few lengths and Caldwell was panting. There’d been no point in going on, though. With each stroke the water slipped away from him; cupping forward, hi
s hands had desperately tried to collect the bright blue color, but it slithered through his fingers, the light shattering out of reach. This is beautiful, he’d thought. Or I remember thinking this was beautiful before. I’ll remember this as having been beautiful. But however much he concentrated, it didn’t seem beautiful as he looked at it, only after he looked away.

  Eaton nodded at Check. “Seems our friend there’s got some energy to work off. Guilty conscience?”

  “Nah,” said Caldwell. “That’s just Check being Check. Mr. Rah-rah. Jacked on water. I’ve seen him swim three, four hours, nonstop.”

  “Discipline?”

  “No, that’s just what it isn’t! That’s how normal people would swim that long, Eat. But Check does it because he’s happy.”

  “Even with his vocalist in the hospital?” Though she had been in three days, Astoria General was keeping Rachel a day or two more—her pulse remained uneven and eerily low. But then, any of The Derailleurs could have warned the doctors that Rachel’s heart was not a resilient organ.

  “Yeah, well.” Caldwell twirled a strand of his white-blond hair until it frayed. “I wonder sometimes if that guy’s got a conscience at all.”

  Eaton nodded; they watched the others. Rahim would shout and listen to the echo bounce over the water; “Sheck-air!” rang through the air like a toll. Quiet Carl slid along the bottom of the pool, holding his breath for minutes at a time. A floater, J.K. bobbed contentedly between pyramids like an unsinkable bathtub toy.

  At last Checker hoisted out and stretched, the Triborough gleaming on his wide shoulders, condensing in his tiny waist, nestling in the hollows of his ass. He had cyclist’s thighs but strangely slender knees. It may have been these extremes of breadth and narrowness that explained his impression of size. Actually, he was a small boy, but at this distance looked ample, intimidating.