by Tom Kakonis
“Men’s Bible study,” he went on, a contemptuous snort.
“He just wants to see you back in church,” she said neutrally.
“Easy for him. Works an hour a week, you wanta call that work, gassin’ about the voice of God like he got a hotline to heaven.”
Norma was quiet for a moment. She had resolved never to argue in front of Davie, who sat in the backseat staring through the window of the year-old Chevy Caprice, what they called jokingly their dress-up car. Dress-up car, dress-up clothes, Sunday services, big Sunday dinner coming up, served on the dining room table with the good silver and china—what should have been a fine family day, one of those connections she prized. So when she did speak, it was pitched softly and with genuine concern, not the barest hint of irritation. “What’s bothering you, Dale?”
“Nothin’,” he said, a little too quickly. “It’s nothin’.”
“Is something wrong? You upset about something?”
“Just a lot comin’ down out to the plant. Heat, the job—you get tired, is all. Knocked out.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s got to be awful for you in there, this time of year.”
She put a tentative hand on his arm, and a look of instant regret crossed his face. “It’ll be okay,” he said and, forcing a jaunty grin, “Nothin’ a Viking he-person can’t handle.”
At home, they changed into casual clothes, and Norma set immediately to preparing dinner. Davie followed her into the kitchen. She poured him a glass of Kool-Aid, and he climbed onto a chair and watched her flutter about the room. When the glass was empty, she said, “You like the Kool-Aid, honey?”
He shook his head affirmatively.
“Want some more?”
Again he nodded.
She got the pitcher out of the refrigerator and filled the glass. “When you want something,” she said, “all you have to do is ask Mom. Whatever you want. This is your home now too. Okay?”
He said nothing.
“Davie? Okay?”
“ ’Kay,” he repeated dutifully, and in a burst of tenderness she bent over and held him against her, nuzzled his neck. He hugged back. The sun poured through the window above the sink, and the aromas of food filled the room, and for the first time in longer than she could remember the kitchen seemed to take on a lived-in look, the comforting furniture of home.
After a while Buck came through the door, looking himself infinitely more comfortable in jeans and T-shirt, though no less jumpy. He stepped over by Norma, who was slicing carrots into a roasting pan on the stove. He popped one into his mouth, and she gave him a mock scolding slap on the hand. “Dale!”
“How long you figure it’s gonna be?”
“Another hour. At least. Can’t you find something to do?”
“Like what?”
“The paper’s in the living room.”
“Paper’s fulla bad news. I don’t wanta read the paper.”
“Isn’t there a game on TV today?”
“Maybe me’n the boy run down to the park,” he said and, turning to him, “Whaddya say, big guy?”
The child gazed at him over the rim of the glass, his expression wide-eyed and hopeful but a little startled too, a little wary. He shifted the gaze onto Norma, as though looking to her for permission. “Would you like to go to the park with Daddy?” she asked him.
His head bobbed eagerly.
“All right. But don’t eat anything, either one of you. I don’t want you spoiling your dinner.”
“Hey,” Buck said, “you can count on us.”
A half hour later, they were sitting on a bench by the grassy banks of a large, kidney-shaped pond, each holding a big bucket of popcorn from which they fed a flock of noisily quacking ducks, though each was putting away his own share too. Buck’s reliable old Pontiac was parked in a lot near the playground equipment they’d headed for first thing on arriving, Buck pumping the swing for him, sending him soaring, cheering him down the fearsome cyclone slide and helping him negotiate the formidable tangle of monkey bars, elevating him on a teeter-totter with the simple balance weight of his two hands. From there they’d strolled along the walk by the pond and, catching sight of the ducks, gone over to a concession pavilion set back in a stand of trees, bought the popcorn, and brought it down to the water’s edge. The minute it was gone, the fickle ducks waddled away.
“Can never trust a duck,” Buck said. He was out of practice, talking to kids. Six years out of practice. But he was trying.
“Why not?”
“Y’got me. Just the way they are, I guess, ducks.”
“I ’member ducks.”
“You mean from them other times we been here?”
“Unh-uh.”
“When, then?”
“Before.”
Buck flinched at the sound of the word, abruptly jolted out of the serenity of the park and all the safety it seemed to promise. But led by a fascination larger than his dread, he asked, “Before you, uh, come to live with us?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You remember where ’bouts you seen these ducks?”
“Big place,” the boy said, arms held aloft and spread in a child’s demonstration of immense size. “Was bears too. And lions.”
“Like a zoo, was it?”
“Zoo?”
“Where they got all the animals runnin’ around,” Buck explained. Made a kind of sense. Even a bad mother maybe take her kid to see the zoo.
“No. These were quiet. Stood still. Didn’t run.”
“You sure? All animals got to run.”
“These ones didn’t,” he insisted.
Buck looked at him quizzically, a cautious squint. “You, uh, remember anything else? From before?”
“ ’Member stars.”
“Got to see the stars, did you? Like late at night?” Probably kept him up all hours, that mother of his, was why he’d remember stars.
“Mouse and a cat mad at each other. Fighting. Then I got real sleepy.”
Buck couldn’t follow it, all this corkscrew kid talk, weird blur of memories. Wasn’t sure he wanted to. To turn it another direction he said, “Well, corn’s all gone. Now what?”
The reply came phrased as timid question. “Go swimming?”
“ ’Fraid not. See, they don’t let you swim in here. Water’s too mucky.”
The boy looked clearly disappointed, but he made no plea or objection or complaint. Nothing. Not the way Sara would have done, put up an argument, demanded more of an explanation than that. Whole different kind of kid, this one, like somebody drained all the spunk out of him. Sad thing to see.
Even with the scorching midday heat the park was filling with people, families mostly, a few couples here and there. From across the widest part of the pond the tinsel music of a carousel started up, drifted their way. “Could go for a little gallop,” Buck suggested.
“Ride the merry-go-round?”
“Look like they got ’er goin’. Whaddya think?”
He moved his head up and down vigorously. First show of spirit Buck had seen all day, and he took him by the hand and said, “Let’s do it.”
They walked around the pond, past another thick grove of trees, and up a small rise to the ticket booth, where a line had already formed. Gradually it moved forward. Buck laid some bills on the counter, got a supply of tickets, and led the boy through the gate. He hoisted him onto the back of the grinning mount of his choice, locked the tiny hands around the pole, said, “Hold on tight, now,” and stepped off the platform and stood leaning against the guard rail, watching, the music brassy in his ears.
The carousel began to spin, slowly at first, then picking up speed, the garishly painted horses rising and falling fluidly, their riders squealing joyously, even Davie displaying a ghost of a delighted smile. And watching him, this solemn mini-man, come to them like a miraculous gift, a belated blessing, Buck felt something dense and roped inside him. Something peculiar. Something like the fear of a man who knows, none better, his wo
rst fears have a habit of routinely coming true.
The sun hung in the sky like a huge burnished coin. Its blazing light glanced off the surface of the pond, stung his eyes. A voice, not his own, seemed to rise around the perimeters of his troubled reverie, and a thought tumbled into place, more conviction than thought. And though all the confusion and nagging doubts of these past two days were still with him, all the fear, he knew suddenly what had to be done. He felt stronger for the knowing, and he found himself wondering about the source of the voice and thinking maybe there was something to this God business after all.
Lester, at that same visionary moment for Buck, was explaining to Victor Diaz the baffling mysteries of chance, as gleaned from an “Ask the Doctor” column he’d read in yesterday’s newspaper. More accurately was he explaining to a skinny, coveralls-clad ass riding high over the elevated hood of a Ford Taurus, the head and torso lost to sight from where he sat in the shade of a weeping willow, nursing a beer and watching the beaner work. “What he’s sayin’, doctor there,” Lester was saying, “is that each little drop a jizzum different. One you come from’s different than the one right before it or right after it. Y’follow me?”
When Victor was occupied with the more tangible mysteries of an ailing automotive engine, he could be laconic to a fault, and now he merely grunted.
Lester took that as a signal to continue. “Which means then if your old man had put the pipe to your old lady five minutes before or after when he actual’ did—fuck, wouldn’t even have to be that long—half a second do, point I’m makin’ here—but if he had, there’d be a whole different Vic Diaz boppin’ around. Look different, talk different, act different, think different. Ain’t that somethin’?”
The single word shit echoed up out of the bowels of the motor.
“Listen,” Lester insisted, “I’m tellin’ ya. That’s in science. You can read it for yourself, paper there.”
Victor boosted himself up and came over and dropped onto the grass beside Lester. His narrow brown face was sweat-streaked, his hair glittered with oils natural and applied. “Ain’t talkin’ about that,” he said.
“What then?”
“Goddam engine. Way they make ’em now-days, can’t get right goddam angle on it.”
“Angle a your dangle direct proportion to the heat a your meat,” Lester said with an accompanying grin that was of necessity abridged, since it still hurt to stretch his lips too wide. “That’s all the geometry I ever learned.”
Victor gave him a sideways glance. “How come you talkin’ funny?”
“Bit down on my tongue other day. Y’know. How y’do sometimes.”
Actually, the lacerations inside his mouth were coming along nicely, though he was still passing tiny slivers of glass. At twenty-eight his body healed quickly, and his mind and spirit, with the time horizons of a cheery moppet, even more rapidly. He bore no grudges. You owe somebody, you don’t come to the window, sooner or later they gonna lay on the hurts. That’s just how it was.
“So you sayin’ could be hundred different me’s?” Victor asked.
Apparently he’d been listening after all. Lester was pleased. Surprised but pleased. “Million,” he said. “More’n that even, all the come man’s got, his life. Think about it. Fill a couple dozen whiskey kegs, easy. An’ it’s just that one special little dribble that one special minute makes you who you are. Ain’t just you either. Same for everybody. Same for me.”
Thinking about it, he wondered what variations on Lester Caulkins might have been, had the random chance he was trying to get across to Vic here not produced the one he was. No way he’d ever even get to guess, seeing he had no idea who his folks was, orphanage and a bunch of foster homes where they beat on you all he ever knew as a kid. He didn’t much like to think about those times, though, so he seldom did.
“Aah, that don’t make no sense,” Victor said.
“Tellin’ ya what I read. It’s in the paper.”
“Paper fulla shit.”
Lester shrugged. No talkin’ to a spic, ’less it was about cars, or stealin’ ’em. Which was what this one done, kikein’ him down to four long and some loose change for his pickup, brand-new practically. Still, was enough to clear them books that Dingo dude was yappin’ about the other night before he got mean, so Lester figured he couldn’t bitch too much. Only trouble was, here he’s out in Aurora, deal done, and no way to get home till Vic finish up the Taurus there and give him a lift, like he promised. Also no way into work tomorrow, but he’d worry about that later. For now, he said, “How’s that motor comin’?”
“Gettin’ there.”
“How long y’think it gonna take?”
“Why? You in a sweat, spend that loot?”
“Just askin’, Vic.”
“Not long.”
Four hours and nine beers later, Victor dropped him off at the corner of Ogden and Cass, and Lester hoofed it the three blocks down to Chicago Avenue. He stopped off at the White Hen and picked himself up a sixer and a jar of Cheez Whiz (the chips and salsa he preferred still too prickly on the mouth) and carried them up the two flights to his apartment next door, you want to call a one room not-so-efficient efficiency an apartment, place no bigger than a single-stall garage and about as gritty. He found a spoon in the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink, took it over and sank onto the unmade, unhidden hide-a-bed, scooped up some Whiz, popped back a couple brews, and fell asleep.
When he woke, it was dark outside. He shuffled into the closet-sized can and took a leak. He felt like day-old dog flop. Looked like it too, the reflection in the smeary glass above the basin staring back at him with eyes like a matched pair of red marbles stuck in a bleached and shapeless lump of dough. On closer examination he thought he detected tiny flaps of loose flesh alongside either ear. An “Ask the Doctor” column he’d once read said that was a sure sign of a coming heart attack, and for a flicker of an instant he experienced a twinge of fear. Could be it was maybe just fat, though. Fuck, don’t matter anyhow. Everybody got to croak sometime.
Which stoic thought reminded him there was something he was supposed to do yet tonight, couldn’t quite remember what. Something important. He stood there awhile longer, peering into the mirror, and finally it came to him. No place like the head, get your head right, haw haw.
So he was feeling a little better when, a moment later, he said into the phone, “Hey, Jimmie, got some boss news tell ya.”
Jimmie’s voice came back measured and distant and cool: “That wouldn’t be about some foldin’ billies, that news?”
“There y’go.”
“Was hopin’ that’s what I’d hear. You get it all?”
“Whole bundle.”
“Good boy, Lester.”
“Get it to ya first thing in the morning.”
“Let’s be sure it’s first thing. You know I gotta get it to that Dingo fella tomorrow, no later. You know that, Lester.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“No hard feelings, by the way, ’bout the other night?”
“I ain’t got none, Jimmie.”
“Just business, is all. Wasn’t my idea.”
“I know. Listen, you wanna hear how I raised it? Cush, I mean?”
“Sure, you wanta tell me.”
“Hocked my wheels. Sold ’em to Vic the Spic.”
Lester waited expectantly, but instead of the hoped-for offer of a ride into work, all he got was a beat of stone silence followed by a noncommittal “Oh” followed by, “Look, Lester, gotta run. Catch ya in the morning.” Followed by the buzz of the dial tone. No help there.
Lester put down the phone and searched his head for a solution to his transportation dilemma. Twenty-six hundred grunts out to the plant, oughta be somebody he could hit up for a lift. What’re we talkin’ here?—few days, couple weeks, outside, till he got his shit together, got something worked out, wheels-wise. Wasn’t a whole lot to ask. Except no names occurred to him. Lots of boozin’ buddies, no friends.
The room he called home seemed suddenly very quiet, very lonely. Maybe a man better off his ticker just up an’ quit on him. Better off wormfood. Or not bein’ born, first place. Or born somebody else. But since none of those things had happened or seemed likely to happen, and since tomorrow was coming on fast for this still living version of all the possible mutations on the person of Lester Caulkins, he gave it some more thought, settled finally and by process of elimination on Waz. Took awhile to turn up the phone directory, mess the place was in, but once he did, he flipped through the pages to the W’s, got the number, and tapped it out on the phone, thinking, Good old Wazo, he’ll come through.
Good old Waz was not, however, of an amiable humor when the phone jolted him out of a fitful sleep. He’d already taken one call earlier that night, and it was troubling enough. Came from Buck, that first one, which was kind of peculiar right there, Sunday and all, and Buck never big on chitchat anyway, especially on the horn. He starts in offhand like, like he’s just calling to shoot the shit: “Waz, how’s she goin’?”
“Goin’ good. You?”
“Pretty good. Watch the game today?”
“Yeah, I seen it.”
“I missed it. Heard the score, though.”
“Don’t mean dick. Bears still ain’t worth diddly squat.”
“Doin’ okay so far.”
“Wait’ll the season starts. You’ll see.”
Which seemed to do in the football talk.
“Hot one today, huh,” Buck said.
“Real scorcher,” Waz agreed.
“Be a bitch in the plant tomorrow.”
They’re talkin’ about the weather, f’chrissake? Something was up. And so that’s what Waz said, careful to keep it casual, “So, what’s up?”
“Oh, nothin’ much.”
A silence filled the line, Waz thinking maybe he oughta just ring off, ring him back, start over. Instead he said, “Somethin’ on your mind?”
