by Jeff Crook
“What kind of person goes on a date on Thanksgiving?”
“You and Dad got married on Thanksgiving.”
“That’s because it’s a long holiday weekend,” she said. “It was the only time he could get off work.”
“I’ll come up tomorrow morning. I promise.”
“But I’ve cooked.” She said it as though I hadn’t considered that possibility.
“He doesn’t have family in town.”
“Well, bring him here then. You know I always cook more than we can eat, and there are plenty of spare bedrooms.” I heard my father in the background ask why she cooked so much since they always spent Thanksgiving alone.
“It’s a little early for that. This is only our first date.” Which was technically true.
“Oh!” she said in that unreadable way that drove me crazy. She might have been thrilled or disappointed or merely reacting to something on television. Either way, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving and she was cooking a twenty-pound turkey.
I heard my father ask for my date’s name. I told Mom.
“Isn’t he that man on that TV show?” she asked.
“He’s a pilot.”
“A pilot!” Now I could hear the wedding wheels cranking up in her head, wondering if I’d wear the same dress as the last two times and who she could get to cater it. I could also hear my father, the retired architect, wondering if he was obligated to pay for this one. “A pilot! Well!” Mom sighed happily. I thought she’d be reasonable once she found out about the pilot part. “What’s his name again?” I told her. “He sounds so familiar. Well. You probably need to get ready for your date. Where is he taking you?”
“Cracker Barrel.” I didn’t tell her he was a crop duster pilot. When she was sixteen, Mom’s boyfriend had been a crop duster pilot ten years her senior. He was an ex Navy fighter pilot, ace of WWII, the Big One, forever fighting the Japs. She had defied her family over him and ran around behind everybody’s back, until he flipped his biplane on a runway outside Egypt, Arkansas, and spent the rest of his short, furious life confined to a wheelchair watching other people’s planes take off through the bottom of a whiskey bottle. “Tom” had been the great romantic tragedy that sustained Mom through a lifetime of ordinary.
Ordinary is entirely underrated.
15
I HAD BEEN READY FOR nearly an hour when James knocked on my door. Six o’clock, as promised, and I only had three cigarettes left out of the pack I’d bought three hours ago. A gray pall of smoke hung at lamp height like a London fog. James wore dark blue Dockers, a gray University of Memphis polo, and clean white Nikes with neon red shoestrings. I had decided on a bulky pullover sweater and the tightest pair of Levi’s I owned. I didn’t want to give him the idea I was trying to impress him, because I wasn’t, but I also didn’t want him to lose interest. He seemed profoundly relieved when I opened the door. In any case, I smoked in those jeans, especially when I wore my black heels.
He drove a five-year-old silver Lexus SC 430, which meant once upon a time he’d had money, but not enough now to trade it in for a new model. Sinking into the leather seat was like sliding your hand into a kidskin glove. It certainly beat the crap out of my ’92 POS. I hadn’t ridden in a car this expensive since I left Reed. James obviously hadn’t always been a crop duster pilot, unless he was dusting crops in Guatemala for the CIA. I didn’t ask. I liked him enough already to not want to know, just in case I didn’t like the answer. With my luck, I wouldn’t.
The Cracker Barrel was packed, but it was always packed, and being virtually the only restaurant open on Thanksgiving assured a long wait. We sat outside in the hokey rocking chairs, shivering in the cold and watching cars circle the parking lot waiting for a space. At least we were out of the rain. I smoked and James watched me. I had let him buy me a new pack of Marlboros. You had to like a guy who not only doesn’t judge your habits, he’d even spring for them.
Not even twelve hours on the flip side of a dope bender, I didn’t feel much like eating anything, but I followed dutifully when his name was called over the PA. He held my hand as we trailed the harried hostess to our table. Sweet, sweet boy, you wouldn’t touch this hand if you knew where it’s been. It felt like everybody was staring at me, though of course they weren’t, except for the ones who were. Do I look too old for this young sky hero? I silently asked them. What if we just go home and screw? Is it too soon?
James sat next to a gilt-framed Victorian advertisement for a carpet sweeper. I sat under a giant rusty scythe. On the wall between us hung a classic Flexible Flyer sled exactly like the one that still hung in my parents’ attic.
“I used to have one of these,” James said of the Flyer.
“Didn’t everyone?” He laughed just the proper amount of time for a first date. A harried waitress, more harried even than the hostess, arrived to take our orders. We decided on the turkey and dressing. She wrote it down on her little pad. She looked like all she wanted to do was lay down for a year.
“So,” James said after she had gone. “You used to be a cop. What city?”
“Memphis.”
“What did you do?”
“My last post was in vice. I was a detective.”
“I bet that was interesting.” I smiled and hoped it didn’t look too fake. He wanted to hear cop stories. OK. I had one or two.
“One time, I busted this madame. An old lady, she must have been near seventy, named Mary Lewis. She ran a real estate agency as a front for the swankiest house in town. All her whores had realtor licenses. She had been open for business for about three years when I got the first tip from a guy who was getting his ass handed to him in the mayor’s race, behind about twenty points to the incumbent. He had some shit on her and the mayor and about half the city council. He wanted to see if it would stick. So I started digging around, not because I owed him anything, you know. I found out the old lady had this one property listed—a big, six-bedroom affair in midtown near the zoo. She had been listing the place for years. The owner was listed as her husband, who was supposed to be dead. She ran a legitimate realty business on the front, but that one house seemed damned suspicious. So I called and acted like I wanted to see it. They told me they had just gotten an offer on it that morning, so I had one of my guys, Adam, call and they agreed to show him the place that afternoon. When he asked how much she charged for a viewing, she said if you have to ask, you can’t afford it, and hung up. This woman would have one of her ‘agents’ show the house to the john for about two grand a pop, with sometimes four or five different agents showing the house on any given day.”
“So you busted her?” he asked.
“Eventually. With high-dollar whores like that, you can imagine who her clients were. And let me tell you that old lady kept meticulous records. Her son was an accountant. I started getting calls telling me to shit can the whole investigation, then the Channel Five news got wind of it somehow, if you know what I mean, so I had no choice but to bust her. She was pleasant about the whole thing, kept calling me ma’am as I put the handcuffs on her.”
“So what happened?”
“Never made it to trial. There was no way they were going to let her start naming her clients in court. It was a lot easier for them to just get rid of me. So that’s what they did. I’m surprised you never heard about it. It was all over the news.”
“We … I’ve only been in Memphis a little over five years,” he said.
We? Who is we? I noticed the slightest indentation of a wedding ring on his finger. Apparently he was still taking it off for my benefit. I wondered whether he had left it in the glove compartment or at home. Probably at home. I might have accidentally looked in the glove compartment. The waitress brought our iced tea.
“And now you take photos of traffic accidents,” James said.
What a way to start a date—Cracker Barrel psychotherapy. What’s next, the symbolism of the scythe hanging over my head?
A different waitres
s brought us a heaping plate of biscuits in which to drown our hillbilly sorrows. “So,” I said as I buttered one. “You’re kind of shy.”
“It’s been a long time since I dated.” He looked up, blushing. “Not that this is a date or anything.”
“Is it a date?”
“Maybe.” Depends on how it ends was what he was thinking. That’s what I was thinking, anyway.
“When was your last date?”
“High school.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I only ever asked out one girl in tenth grade and she turned me down. So when my wife, my future wife (he admits it), started hanging around me senior year, I didn’t think she was for real. She was so beautiful and popular, it took me a long time just to come to terms with the fact she was interested in a guy like me. I kept waiting for everybody to start laughing at the joke. They never did. She was serious.”
“So you’re married.”
“Was. We married the summer after we graduated. She passed away two years ago.”
What do you say to that? I hoped he was lying. I hoped she was still alive somewhere and he was cheating on her, because now, this beached whale of a confession lay between us. Lies I could handle. Lies I could respect and live with. But these chains of grief he secretly bore going on two years now? I could see them in the ghostly indentation of the wedding ring he still wore except when he was with me, and in the way he switched from easy familiarity, almost too easy and too familiar, to the ridiculously sophomoric shyness of a man unused to or afraid of being attracted to another woman. Being with me probably felt like cheating to him. It certainly felt like cheating to me. I could help a man cheat on his living wife, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it with a dead one.
“Read any good books lately?” I asked. It was cruel and cowardly. Maybe he wanted to open up to me, but I couldn’t deal with that much heavy, not without some kind of prologue. I barely had a handle on my own fragged emotions.
But he laughed.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Sorry for your loss. I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s OK,” he said. He seemed to relax a bit, allowing his shyness to slip. “Sometimes I don’t know what to say, either.” Aw God. Can’t I just kiss this man? I laid my hand across his on the table between us and he looked up at me with those glittering blue bits of ice that were his gorgeous eyes, swimming ever so slightly with moisture, maybe tears. God, why does it have to be so easy?
Our food arrived, the waitress practically throwing the plates at us. She had forgotten the cranberry sauce. James picked up his knife and began meticulously slicing his turkey into precise squares about the size of postage stamps.
“So what was the last book you read?” he asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“Come on!”
“I haven’t read a book in like ten years.” I used to be a reader. I used to have books, but I had spent the last ten years of my life stoned or trying to score my next high, little enough time to read anything more than magazines in waiting rooms. And when you move as often as I had, and lived in the places where I’ve lived, sometimes all you can take with you is what you can carry in a suitcase. I don’t remember what happened to my books.
I shrugged and said, “The last book I remember reading was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.”
“What’s it about?” James asked.
“It’s about this Spanish kid who has a dream telling him to go to the pyramids and find a treasure. So he goes and has some adventures along the way, falls in love, meets the Alchemist and finds the pyramids, only to discover the treasure he sought is back home where he started.”
“Sounds like a kid’s book.”
“It’s very philosophical. It’s about trying.”
“Is that all?”
Jesus, what is this, a third-grade book report? No, it’s date talk, safe talk over dinner. No politics. No religion. No complaining about work. Books and movies. I went on as though there were nothing in the least artificial about this whole conversation. “It’s also about following your Personal Legend and allowing yourself to succeed.” My police counselor recommended I read it.
“What’s a Personal Legend?” Larry King asked.
“I think it’s about living the story of your life as though you are reading it instead of living it.”
“So in other words, don’t avoid the bad parts, just trust that the good parts will follow? Without the bad parts, it wouldn’t make a good story.”
“When you put it that way, it does sound a bit Panglossian,” I said. Whose ass did I pull that word from?
“But did you like the book?”
“It’s not important whether I liked it or not.”
“Sure it is. It’s the only thing that matters. Everything else is bunk.”
“I don’t have strong opinions about books. Or bunk. It was an OK book. I thought it was somewhat overrated.” My counselor thought it would change my life. Obviously, it didn’t.
“I guess we’re not book people, are we?” James asked.
“I guess not.” I smiled and shrugged. This was getting stupid.
“So what do you do with your time?”
What could I say, with my mouth full of turkey? “I stay busy.” I had the feeling I was a test subject for an article in some men’s magazine—“Six Simple Steps to Getting Laid on the First Date.” Step One: Pretend you’re interested. Get her to talk about herself. Chicks love it when you act interested in the ordinary bullshit of their lives.
“What do you do for fun?” I asked him.
“I fly model airplanes.”
“So you fly for a living, and when you’re not working, you pretend to fly?”
“Pretty much. Flying’s all I ever wanted to do.” The way he said it, I knew he wasn’t kidding. But he was hiding something, some pain, some lost dream.
“My mom dated a crop duster pilot once.” I didn’t know why I was bringing this up. Maybe it was the dentist coming out in me again. “He was in an accident.”
“Fatal?”
“Eventually.”
“It happens.”
“Even if you’re careful?”
“You’re flying along and you flush a covey of quail. Or you get a freak gust of wind. Or just about anything you don’t expect. When your number’s up…”
“I don’t believe in fate,” I said.
“You know the Red Baron?”
“Sure. He makes frozen pizzas.”
“Manfred von Richthofen. Greatest fighter pilot of the First World War. You know how he died?”
“Downed by Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel?”
“A bullet through the heart. A one-in-a-million shot by a soldier on the ground. His number was up.”
“Well, I guess that’s settled,” I said. “No point arguing about it.”
James shrugged and ate a mouthful of potatoes. I shredded a biscuit on my plate. He said, “It all depends on what you want out of life. I take comfort in the idea that some things are just meant to be. Nothing you can do or say will change what is supposed to happen.”
Our waitress stopped by with the check. “Y’all want dessert?”
“Not me.” James didn’t want anything, either. The waitress seemed relieved to drop the check on the table and disappear.
“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I love Snoopy.”
He balled up his napkin and laughed.
16
WHY DID WE COME HERE, anyway? This wasn’t Thanksgiving dinner. Not a real one. We might as well have popped a bag of popcorn, made toast, and watched a movie. My mother was right—who goes on a date on Thanksgiving?
On our way out, I stopped in front of the giant fireplace to feel its heat. James stood beside me, staring into the fire. What was he thinking now? I used to be a good judge of these things. I could watch a guy for a little while and tell what he was thinking, like Holmes or Dupin, deducing his thoughts in a way that almost seemed like mind readi
ng. I wasn’t so good at it anymore. His face was a blank to me. I was having a hard time penetrating this man of such stark contrasts. Did the smell of a winter fire make him sentimental, or just mental? Was he having second thoughts about this whole thing?
Finally, he looked at me and asked, “Ready to go?”
I followed him out to the country store area of the restaurant. While he stood in line to the pay the bill, I examined a shelf of retro Cracker Jacks and tins of Charles Chips. We met by the John Deere merchandise display and James excused himself to visit the men’s room. I browsed the retro Coca-Cola merchandise. While examining a Howdy Doody cap gun, I almost tripped over my husband Reed squatting behind a bin of plastic toys. He acted like he was tying his shoe, but he was wearing loafers.
“Jesus, Reed, what are you doing here?” I hissed, gooselike, at him. He stood up. He still looked like a Republican governor with presidential aspirations—tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair graying at the temples. Mr. Fantastic himself, able to bend in impossible contortions to make that million-dollar sale. I saw his face wherever I went in town—on billboards, For Sale signs in people’s yards, even advertisements on grocery carts. It was impossible to escape him. But I never expected to find him hiding in a Cracker Barrel.
He assumed an air of injured dignity. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?”
“Having Thanksgiving dinner. At least I have an excuse. Are you following me?” His whole shitty family lived in town. They were old Germantown money. All two hundred of them. They didn’t need to visit a tourist trap on Thanksgiving.
“As a matter of fact, I’m buying a pumpkin pie,” he said. “I saw you coming out. I was just trying to avoid a confrontation.”
“You never could bullshit me, Reed.” If he was following me, it stood to reason that the person watching me pee at Bosco’s might be working for him, too. What didn’t stand was why he’d follow me at all. We’d been separated for four years.
