Blind Spot

by Tom Kakonis

  No good thinking that way, so he turned his thoughts to the conversation with Thornton. Vacation. He wondered where he was off to this time. For sure someplace glitzy. Thornton was famous for his vacations. Vine had it he wasn’t above shaking a few trees, fund them. Which was nothing to him, none of his business. Except that’s why the rap on the street had the department motto as We Serve and Collect. And that’s why poor dumb fucks like them Quinns sit home watching a phone that don’t ring, waiting for word that don’t come.

  He remembered a badge he knew over at Four, whiz on the computer, made a name for himself working grand theft auto. More times than a few he’d helped him out, could call in a favor now, he wanted. Why not? Couldn’t hurt. Pacify the parents. Be his good deed for the decade.

  Shortly before eleven o’clock that night, a black Lincoln Town Car bumped its way down a deserted back road near a bugspeck village that went by the improbable name of Sandwich. After a few miles the driver pulled off the road at a stand of trees, cut the engine, and waited in the latticework of shadows cast by a lemony rind of moon. About a quarter of an hour later, two thin fingers of light appeared in the distance, fattened, seemed to merge, and in another moment a Plymouth van swung in under the trees and lurched to a stop alongside the Lincoln. Simultaneously the two drivers exited and stepped to the rear of the vehicles, lifted trunk and tailgate, respectively, while exchanging laconic greetings through the simple pronouncement of the other’s name.

  “Dingo.”

  “Jimmie.”

  Without another word they set immediately to work. One by one, keeping tally in his head, Dingo removed several flat cardboard boxes from the trunk, then a large square one and a number of smaller cartons, handed them over to Jimmie, who stacked them carefully in the back of his van. When the transfer was completed, they secured their vehicles and came around either side of the Lincoln and got in the front seat. Dingo unlocked the glove compartment and took out his ledger. Leaving the compartment door open to supply some small light, he read from a page in the book: “Seven VCR’s, one case of V.O., five of Marlboros, and eleven Nikon cameras. Does that match your count?”

  “Says it in the book, it’s gotta be right.”

  “You’ve got all the figures down?”

  Jimmie leaned in close and scrutinized the numbers opposite each item on the page. Dingo recoiled slightly, nostrils twitching. He reached into a pocket and produced a roll of breath mints. “Would you like a Cloret, Jimmie?”

  Jimmie, still engrossed in the numbers, lips moving as he read, replied absently, “Huh?”

  “Cloret?”

  “Cloret? Nah, never use ’em.”

  “I noticed,” Dingo muttered in stoic aside.

  Evidently it went on by Jimmie, who glanced up and said, “Numbers look good. How ’bout that cat? You able to get ahold any?”

  “I was. It’s in the compartment there.”

  Jimmie removed a leather pouch and held it up in gleeful display. “This the one gonna stain our fingers sugar green.”

  “Maybe. But I’d be very careful how you dispose of it. That’s not weed you’re holding, or crank. It’s got a jacket for deadly. Fatal, even.”

  “Negative in the sweat department,” Jimmie assured him. “Dude I’m layin’ it off on doin’ his own dealin’, gonna be a big-time rack-a-teer. So that puts plenty space between us and the serious heads.”

  “Still is risky. Merchandise, soft feed, that’s one thing. This is another. Get nailed on this and you’re looking at a heavy jolt.”

  Dingo was acutely conscious of backsliding into street, for all his disciplined efforts at linguistic betterment. Talking to Jimmie the words just spilled out, impossible to contain, though no less disagreeable to him. He resolved to work on it, hold firm to his fastidious and insular agenda.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna get nailed, Ding. You got my guaranfuckintee on that.”

  “I hope so,” Dingo said quietly, leveling a bone-cold stare on him. “You wouldn’t enjoy doing time, Jimmie. Someone like yourself. Nor would I. Once a lifetime is more than plenty.”

  Jimmie shifted uneasily in his seat. “Man, you got that one right, time,” he said, and to wrap things up fast, get himself out from under that stare, added, “So, we all squared away for tonight here?”

  “Not quite. Couple of other matters we need to consider.”

  Jimmie managed a slack grin, thinking, Uh-oh, don’t like the sound of that, not one little bit. So he was pleasantly relieved when Dingo thrust a wrist under the light and said, “You didn’t notice my new watch.”

  “Holy shit! That a Rolie?”

  Dingo smiled. Small enigmatic smile. He took off the watch and handed it to him. “Would you like it?”

  Jimmie hesitated, wondered if it was some kind of gag, give you a shock or squirt water in your face. Didn’t figure, Dingo giving anybody anything for nothin’.

  “Take it,” Dingo urged him.

  “You’re givin’ me a Rolie?”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s not a Rolex. But you’d never know it, would you?”

  “It’s a fake?”

  “Very authentic-looking fake, I’d say. And it happens I’ve got a source in Gary could supply us. Think you could move them at your plant?”

  “Fuckin’ A. Watches always a big item in there. What kinda dollar we be talkin’?”

  “To make it worth our while you’d have to deal in quantity. In lots of a hundred I can get them for fifty each. Expect you could get, oh, two fifty.”

  Jimmie did the mental arithmetic, whistled softly. “Be a nice take for us.”

  “Question is, can you move a hundred?”

  “Oughta be able do that, easy.”

  “Ought to,” Dingo said, smile suddenly departed, chilly stare back in its place, “or will?”

  “Will,” Jimmie repeated for him. “Maybe do better’n that, even.”

  “That’s what I like to hear, Jimmie. Because of course I wouldn’t want to commit to a delivery unless you were absolutely sure.”

  “Time-wise what’re we lookin’ at?” Jimmie asked, and then, hearing his choice of words, snickered, “That ain’t a little joke I’m makin’ there.”

  Dingo, unamused, said, “Two weeks. I’ll go ahead with the arrangements on my end, you keep me informed of your progress.”

  “You got ’er, Dingo.”

  “Splendid. Now, take this one along with you. Use it as a demonstrator model. Should help you place your orders.”

  Obediently, Jimmie slipped the watch around a bony wrist. “That it, then?”

  “No. You remember I said a couple of matters.”

  “What’s the other one?”

  “The Caulkins account. Seems it’s still in deep arrears.”

  “Huh?”

  It was a word he’d come across in a book on business management, arrears, had a nice substantial ring to it. The book was an endless source for words like that, and he was trying to get through a chapter a day. You’re in business, you want to sound like a businessman. “Delinquent,” he explained. “Past due. Late. I believe we spoke about this some time back. A couple of months ago, at least. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember that. But he’s been makin’ some payments on it.”

  “Be a reach to call those puny sums payments, Jimmie. Looks to me like you’ve got a stiffer.” Dingo regretted having to put it this way, but sometimes, given your audience, that’s what you had to do, make your point.

  “Lester a stiffer? Nah, no way. He’s maybe pullin’ with one oar, but he’s basically a harmless shithead. He’ll come up with it.”

  “I want that account brought into balance, Jimmie.”

  “Lemme see what I can do.”

  “Do that. You’ve got a week.”

  “Week!” Jimmie squawked. “Jesus, Dingo, I remember right, it’s some pretty large cush he owes. Ain’t like he’s goin’ noplace. An’ I gotta do business with them boys, y’know.”

  “This is busin
ess. A week.”

  In the pale compartment light the skin on Dingo’s face appeared sallow, yellowish, and drawn tight over the bones as the skin on an onion. His mouth was set in a thin line, turned up slightly at one corner. A smile?—not a smile?—no way Jimmie could tell for sure, but looking at it he was sure of one thing, fucker was cuttin’ with a dull tool and you never wanta dick with a looper. So he edged over toward the door, saying, “Okay, I’ll try.”

  “Try hard, Jimmie. I’ll be in touch.”

  In the second floor bedroom of their Westmont home, the Buckleys lay contentedly side by side. The light from his post-coital cigarette made a tiny hole in the dark. She gazed at the ceiling, working up her courage. Finally she said, “Dale, could I ask a big favor?”

  “I dunno. Once a night ’bout all I’m good for anymore.”

  She gave him a playful little swat. “Not that!”

  “What, then?”

  “Now that we’ve got Davie, would you mind terribly not smoking in the house?”

  “Why you want that?”

  “Well, you read about all that secondhand smoke being bad for people. Especially children.”

  Buck thought about it a moment. “Sure, I can do that,” he said, and he butted the cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand. “Take it outside when I got to. Be kinda tough in winter, though.”

  “You could use the garage.”

  “Yeah, that’d do.”

  She snuggled up next to him. “Thanks so much, hon. I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “It’s nothin’.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful, having him?”

  “He’s a good kid, all right. Awful quiet, though. Almost like, y’know, sad. ’Bout the only thing makes him smile, for me anyways, is that merry-go-round, down the park.”

  “He’s getting used to us. Takes awhile. But it feels like we’re a real family again, now he’s here.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “Maybe,” she ventured cautiously, “we could go back up to the Dells sometime. The three of us.”

  “Dells,” Buck said, stalling. He knew where this line of talk was leading, and he had no desire to follow it too far.

  “For a little vacation. Like we did before.”

  “Not so sure that’s such a good idea, Norma.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why.”

  “Sara, you mean.”

  “That’s right,” he said, unable even yet to utter her name.

  “Remember how much she liked it? All the fun we had up there?”

  Only too well, he thought, but he kept silent. Too many blighted memories here. Too many ghosts.

  “I wonder how he’d have gotten along with her, Davie.”

  “C’mon,” Buck said gently, “no good thinkin’ about things like that.”

  “I know. But wouldn’t they have been a pair? Sara always chattering, always so, well, sunny. She’d have brought him out in no time at all.”

  “She’s gone, Norma. Can’t bring her back.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, and began to weep softly.

  Buck put his arms around her, drew her closer. “Been six years now. Can’t change the past.”

  “Six,” she repeated, the mingled colorations of wonder and disbelief and denial in her pitch, as though the simple articulation of that number erased the time and the sorrow and all the slow-ticking moments of loss it represented. “Seems like just yesterday she was dancing around the house, laughing, singing. Remember how she loved to sing?”

  He remembered it, his daughter’s high, clear voice filling a room. Also did he remember, vividly yet, across the widening distance of all those years gone by, the leukemic death sentence laid on her by a pitiless God, and the last terrible hours of her life, her withered body eaten away by the wildly multiplying outlaw cells, drifting in and out of a drugged sleep till even the drugs were powerless to shield her from pain, powerless as he was, her father-protector, unable to protect anyone anymore, stalking the white, neutral halls of a hospital, fists balling and unballing, raging against God and fate and drugs and doctors, unable any longer to endure the anguished screaming and to meet those hollow baffled terrified eyes wordlessly pleading for a help he couldn’t give. He remembered, all right, but that’s all he could bring himself to say: “I remember.”

  “Sometimes, when Davie says something to me, it’s like it’s her voice I’m hearing. Once, just the other day, I even started to call him by her name. Does that sound crazy, Dale?”

  “Don’t sound crazy. But you got to let it go.”

  “I’m trying. I will.”

  “We got the boy now. It’s like you said, family again. Like a second chance at it. New start.”

  “Maybe that’s how God wanted it to be.”

  “Maybe He did, at that,” Buck said, believing not a word of it.

  And no more than ten miles away, in the cramped little room of their Naperville home designated as his study, Marshall Quinn was, at that same hour, thinking not so much of God and fate and family (though occasionally such sterile reflections would intrude, puncture his rapt concentration) as of an elusive symbol on a banal sticker affixed to the bumper of a murky vehicle fleeting off, lost to the desperate reach of his fading, failed memory. Search it as he might, pinch and prod it however he would, it yielded up nothing. Yet if the psychologists were to be believed (he persuaded himself), nothing is ever lost, everything indelibly stamped on the plate of the subconscious, a lifetime’s bundled experience waiting only for some sensory trigger to unseal it, piece by piece. The way the monotone hum of a fan will unaccountably spark some forgotten melody, say, or the shape of a cloud call back a ghost of an inconsequential face from the country of the past, and with it a rich catalog of particulars buried under the weight of the years.

  And so he remained rooted to his chair and hunched over a battered wooden desk, forehead creased, chewing the tip of a ballpoint, staring fixedly at a dwindling pad of unruled white paper laid out in front of him. Crumpled scraps of it spilled from a wastebasket and littered the floor at his feet. At the top of the covering sheet was a rectangular diagram of a license plate with the letters AZ penned in and bracketed by question marks, and beneath it a sketch of a bumper sticker, complete with unfurled flag and “Buy American” legend. The remainder of the sheet was given over to a series of crude drawings, associative links designed to pluck an image of that confounding symbol from the shadow-land of memory. Here were fashioned stick figure persons with big faces cast in a variety of expressions: stern, smiling, quizzical, blank; there miscellaneous clumsy renderings of birds and animals: hawks, eagles, lions, bears, wolves, in a variety of stances; elsewhere assorted machines of transport: cars, planes, boats, cycles, trucks, tractors—and all of them, persons, animals, machines, crossed out or angrily scribbled over. The deeper he probed, the more impenetrable the darkness, and the more it closed around him.

  Eventually, all his meager artistic talents and all his inventive energies exhausted, he put down the gnawed pen, glared at it accusingly, as if it had somehow betrayed him, and cradled his head in his hands. And from out of a spirit bitter as a poisoned well the muttered words “Damn damn damn damn Goddam Goddam ” rose to his lips, emerged almost as a rhythmic chant.

  Apart from the harsh yellow light of a gooseneck lamp on the desk and a narrow slant of moonlight from the brace of windows above it, the room was otherwise dark. Two walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with books and learned journals. Along a third, flanking the entrance, was a pair of tables, one holding an inexpensive word processor, the other an ancient manual typewriter, valued possession, Marshall had been told often enough, of his late father. Late by close to three decades now, gone before he’d ever known him, the way his son was gone, an empty, aching void at either pole of his life. The two vanished masters of his blood. Except the one you could understand, adapt to, accept—death with its punctual certainty; the other a kind of rascally jest, beyond co
mprehending, scattering all you knew—or thought you knew—of reason and coherence and order. And finality. For if Jeff was dead, certifiably dead, there could be at least the mercy of closure, and with it an enduring image of childish innocence, frozen forever in time, almost, as with a never known father, a peculiar sorrowful blessing. No blessing here, no mercy. And no terminus.

  On a corner of the desk was a framed photo of the Quinn family, a studio portrait, stiffly smiling threesome in their dress-up clothes. Gazing at it now, Marshall could bring back all its trivial details, its where and when, sights, sounds, smells, words spoken, even the face of the fussy photographer, the tenor of his voice, his unctuous manner (“Could we all just tilt our chins slightly to the left, please? Can we get the boy to look directly into the camera? Big smiles now, folks!”). Everything. Yet something so simple, so elementary, as an inane symbol on a bumper sticker remained stubbornly outside his grasp, taunting and fugitive as the moonbeam filtered through the window: seize at it and it’s gone.

  He switched off the lamp and got up heavily and crossed the room and shuffled down the hallway. At the open door to Jeff’s room he paused, adjusting his vision to the dark. Soon he could make out the contours of a bed, a shelf piled high with kiddie books pored over nightly by father and son as prelude to sleep (did he imagine similar, time-twisted episodes from his own lost childhood, a father’s sonorous voice lulling him into slumber?—he couldn’t remember, couldn’t be sure), a chest filled with miniature men and battery-powered toys that, activated, made curious clattery noises. At the foot of the bed was Jeff’s hands-down favorite plaything, a weather balloon, round and squat as an outsize pumpkin, like one of those horticultural freaks displayed at county fairs. How readily his memory summoned the day he had first discovered it in some obscure scientific catalog, and the long-awaited day of its arrival in the mail (a Tuesday, it was, precisely ten days before the sky fell), the two of them laboriously inflating it with an old and rusted bicycle tire pump, its remarkable buoyancy, lighter even than the air that suspended it, Jeff’s squeals of delight at sending it soaring with the simple tap of a hand over the tops of trees, over the roof of their two-story house, Lori’s concern as they chased it recklessly, wind-driven, down the street. And recalling it now, that playful little scene, all of it, he was overtaken by a helpless longing for another time, when the world he inhabited was as orderly as the theorems of geometry, or as statistically predictable as those great social forces he traced and measured and explained for a living. Anymore, he received and measured the world by the indecipherable texture of his own dry misery, which came to him only in fragments, piecemeal—a photo, empty bed, shelf of unread books, collection of silenced toys, grounded weather balloon—explaining nothing at all.