Blind Spot

by Tom Kakonis

  The child seemed puzzled by the question, looked to Norma for interpretation.

  “Do you like your burger, Davie?” she asked him.

  He nodded solemnly around a mouthful of it.

  “More than your dad there, from the looks of it,” Norma said, indicating Buck’s barely touched basket.

  “Heat,” he said by way of explanation. “Real oven in there today. Wrings the appetite right outta you.”

  “You’ve got to eat, though, Dale. Keep up your strength. Seems like you’ve been awfully tired lately.”

  Buck didn’t want to pursue that topic, so to the boy he said, “How about some dessert? They got pie here. Ice cream sundaes. Whaddya say?”

  Again the child nodded.

  “Which?”

  “Ice cream,” he murmured.

  “Norma?”

  “Same for me.”

  “Ice cream all around,” he said, signaling the waitress, person, whatever you called them anymore. They settled on flavors, and shortly the three desserts were laid in front of them. To forestall any more talk about his lagging appetite, Buck spooned his in dutifully, cleaned it right up. Then, offhandedly, as though it had just occurred to him, he remarked, “Y’know what I been thinkin’?”

  “What’s that?” Norma asked.

  “Remember that trip you was sayin’, other night?”

  “To the Dells?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinkin’ that’s maybe not such a bad idea after all. I still got a few vacation days. Back ’em up to a weekend and we could have ourselves a nice little getaway.”

  She gave him a look not quite astonished but full of perplexity. And doubt. For both of them the Dells, site of Sara’s last vacation, held a bundle of ambiguous memories, joyous, bittersweet, precious. “Are you sure you want to go back there, Dale?”

  “Why not? It’s great for kids. Boy’d like it up there.”

  “I’m sure he would, but—”

  “What’s a Dells?” Davie broke in.

  “It’s a place in Wisconsin,” Norma told him. “Another state. They have all kinds of fun things to do there.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh, there’s the Storybook Gardens. That’s where all those stories and rhymes we read in your books, well, come to life. And a little choo-choo train you get to ride on.”

  “And that petting zoo,” Buck joined in, catching the spirit, “where they let you feed the animals. Not just ducks either, like over at the park, but big ones too. Deer. Remember that, Norma?”

  “I remember,” she said quietly.

  The boy’s eyes widened. “We go feed the deers now?”

  “Well, not tonight,” Buck said, and at the instant dismay registered on the child’s face he added, “But how’s next Saturday sound?”

  “Go then?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “But Saturday’s the plant open house,” Norma reminded him.

  “Yeah, well, my thought was we’d maybe just skip it this year,” Buck said, looking into his lap.

  “But why would we do that? Everybody will be there. Even Della’s going.”

  Now he lifted his eyes, fixed them on her. “How come you know that? You been talkin’ to her?”

  “No, she told me that Sunday they were over. Why?”

  “No reason. Except, see, that’s the reason right there. Be a mob a people in there. An’ you seen it before.”

  “I have, but Davie hasn’t. I thought he might like to see where his daddy works.”

  “He’d get too tired. You remember them tours—couple miles walkin’, last a couple hours, least—all that noise, heat…” Buck had the uncomfortable sense of saying too much, too fast, tangling himself in words, which never came easily to him. All the same, he rushed on: “It’s no place for a kid. Even runnin’ half shift, like they plannin’ to do, gonna be hotter’n holy hell in there.”

  Norma glanced quickly at Davie. “Dale,” she said, mild reproval.

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. But you see what I’m sayin’.”

  “Maybe you’re right. It might be too much for him this year.”

  “There you are. Do it next year.”

  The boy had been following this conversation intently, looking anxiously back and forth between them. “We don’t go feed the deers?” he asked Norma.

  Buck answered for her. “Oh yeah, we do. Saturday for sure.” And to her he said, “Tomorrow I’ll put in for three days. Maybe you can call up there, get us a motel. That one we stayed in before, maybe.”

  “With the wading pool, and the water slide.”

  “That’s the one. We could sleep in Saturday, get started around noon, have most of the day. Come back Wednesday morning.”

  “Four days! You’ll spoil me, Dale.”

  “Hey, who got it comin’ more’n you?”

  Norma tucked back a fluttery wisp of hair fallen across her brow. She smiled at him tenderly. It was his way of saying he loved her. Davie too. Loved them both.

  Another threesome, Lester, Waz, and Beans, were also dining out that evening, though in their case beer and other spirits were readily available since, at shift’s end, they had made it no farther than the Norseman Lounge. Waz was along not so much for the company but because Tuesday was Della’s bingo night, leaving him with the scanty options of here or warmed-over Tuna Helper casserole at home. Here was better. Beans, thrice divorced (once on the grounds of extreme cruelty, a legalistic nicety for his chronic and intolerable flatulence) and currently living alone, had elected to join them because, like Waz, he wasn’t interested in cooking something for himself: “Too fuckin’ hot,” in his phrase (even though the Norseman, its air-conditioning system thoroughly routed by the mass of sweaty bodies, could hardly be characterized as cool). And Lester was there for the unremarkable reason that he rode with Waz and this was as far as they got. He didn’t mind. Beat the oppressive silence of his room and what remained of a jar of Cheez Whiz.

  After a few stand-up brews at the bar, they secured a booth and ordered South of the Border Platters, which spicy dish had the immediate effect of convulsing Beans’ lower visceral tract, resulting in a recurrent series of volcanic eruptions. The latest in that series was of such truly Krakatoan proportions that Waz was finally moved to clothespin his nostrils and remonstrate in nasalized moan, “Jesus, Beans, you got no class at all? I’m tryin’ to eat here.”

  Beans merely shrugged. Helpless shrug.

  “Could at least wait’ll I’m done. That ain’t a whole lot to ask.”

  “Holdin’ back a ripper,” Beans observed philosophically, “be like holdin’ back the heat in summer, snow in winter. Can’t be done.”

  He was a heavy, earthy man, Beans, beady of eye, saggy of jowl, bulbous of gut. Nobody knew for sure how old he was. Old. Plant legend had it that, years back, one of his fabled back-door emissions detonated too near a cast house furnace, ignited a runaway blaze.

  Lester, who worked alongside him in the box shop and who, over time, had grown impervious to the stink, remarked, “That makes eight.”

  “Eight what?” Beans asked him.

  “Farts.”

  “So?” Beans said, somewhat defensively. “You keepin’ count?”

  “Matter a fact, I am.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Reason is because I was readin’, just the other day, it was, how your average person farts thirteen times a day. That’s an average, now, y’understand.”

  “Fuck you read that?” Waz wanted to know.

  “In the paper there. Ask the Doctor.”

  Waz gave a skeptical snort. “That all he got to do, go around clockin’ farts?”

  “Just tellin’ ya what I read.”

  “You sayin’ thirteen a day is average?”

  “Ain’t me sayin’ it. It’s doctor.”

  “Well, he ever check out Beans here, he gonna get his average tipped.”

  “Fuckin’ truth,” Beans allowed through a prideful chuckle. “At thirte
en a day I’m already about caught up to next November.”

  “November?” Waz grunted. “Shit, you somewhere out in the twenty-first century.”

  “Not that far. Be in stiff city by then.”

  “You’ll still be corkin’ ’em, stiff or not. They hafta plant you off in a desert someplace. Or at sea. ’Cept that wouldn’t work either. Snuff all the fish.”

  Beans turned over the palms of his hands, a gestured What can I say? and Lester seized the opportunity to leap back into the conversation. “I knew a fella worked in one a them funeral places—y’know, room where they spiff ’em up before they plant ’em—and he tol’ me that’s exactly what they do, your stiffs.”

  “Do what?” Waz asked.

  “Break wind. He said it’s real weird, y’got one laid out on the table, doin’ whatever it is they do to ’em, an’ all a sudden it cracks a boomer. Stiff does, I mean.”

  “Nothin’ weird about that,” Waz declared, taking down the last of a burrito on a current of beer. “They got all that gas bubblin’ inside ’em, gotta go somewhere.”

  “Yeah but how they gonna, y’know, squeeze it out? Bein’ dead and all. Ain’t like they got any control, their asshole down there.”

  “Don’t have to squeeze. It’s what you call a reflex.”

  “Boy, I tell ya. Never catch me workin’ a place like that.”

  “Ain’t so bad. Della use to do it.”

  “Della!” Lester exclaimed, astonished. “Della worked in a stiff parlor? C’mon, you shittin’ us, Waz?”

  “Nobody shittin’ ya. Back in her hairdressin’ days they’d sometimes call her in, pretty up a stiff for the services.”

  “Y’mean like give ’em a haircut?”

  “Haircut, permanent wave, dye job—you name it. All that stuff they do.”

  “Della done that?”

  “What’d I just say, shitear?”

  Lester shook his head slowly. “Jesus, that’s gotta be creepy. Workin’ on dead people like that.”

  “Least they don’t bitch.”

  “Don’t tip none either,” Beans put in.

  “Can’t have it both ways,” Waz drawled.

  “Must be somethin’, bein’ dead,” Lester said, awed suddenly by the enormity of the prospect of his own passing.

  “No, y’got that wrong,” Waz corrected him. “Ain’t something. It’s nothin’, dead is.”

  “Nothing,” Lester repeated dully, and for a moment he contemplated the drab threads of experience—past, present, those yet to come—that, woven together, made up the colorless fabric of his life. Bad as they’d been, stale as they were right now, joyless as they promised to be, the thought of forfeiting them, marooned forever in the long sleep of death, seemed somehow very real, and immensely saddening. “You ever think about that?” he said. “Nothing?”

  “You got a real knack for killin’ a conversation, speakin’ a dead. Y’know that? Am I right, Beano?”

  “Real gift,” Beans concurred.

  “Look at it this way,” Waz said, coming to his feet. “Workin’ at Norse, you good as dead already. So it won’t be much of a jolt when the real thing comes along.”

  “Pro’ly won’t even know the difference,” Beans added, also rising.

  Lester, still seated, looked anxiously from one to the other. “Where you guys goin’? You ain’t leavin’ already?”

  “Myself, I’m headed home,” Waz said. “You want a ride, this your chance.”

  “Whyn’t you stick around, have another brewster. It’s early yet.”

  “Said I’m leavin’. You comin’, or no?”

  “Beans?”

  “Splittin’ too,” Beans said.

  “C’mon. One more. I ever tell ya ’bout that time I went to get my license plates renewed? Wait’ll y’hear it. It’s a howl, that one.”

  Waz screwed his face into an attitude of mock indecision. “I dunno, ’nother Lester story, that’s a real temptation. Whadda you think, Beans?”

  “Tough call, all right.”

  Both of them chortled. Not Lester. He managed a grin, but weak, near to morose.

  “So,” Waz asked him, “you want a ride? Last offer.”

  “Think I’ll hang out awhile.”

  “How you gonna get home?”

  “Somebody here gimme a lift. Jimmie maybe. He’s shootin’ stick in the back.”

  “You sure, now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pick you up in the morning, then. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Waz sighed. Goddam sad apple had a way of making you feel guilty even when you doing him a favor. “You okay?” he said gruffly. “All that stiff talk draggin’ on your ass?”

  “Me? Nah, I’m good.”

  He wasn’t, though, and left to himself the morbid abstraction of mortality soon translated into vivid, particularized images (there was Della trimming his limp hair, there the stiff parlor guy probing his lifeless naked blueing corpse, batting away its foul escaping fumes) that, unaccountably, crowded in on him like advancing ground fog. To hold them off he attached himself to an assembly of grunts gathered at the bar, contributed a couple of jokes that got some small indulgent laughs and then, as the hours passed and the group scattered, was reduced finally to making conversation with Skinny Nick. Or trying to:

  “Hey, Nicker, how’s she goin’?”

  Unintelligible mutter.

  “You makin’ any money?”

  Negative bob of the hairless skull.

  “Maybe you oughta get some dancin’ girls in here. Liven the place up little.”

  Irritable scowl.

  “Just tryin’ to help.”

  “You drink, or what?”

  Jesus, some talker. “Yeah, sure,” Lester said. “Gimme another.”

  The Greek produced a bottle, held out a sausage-fingered hand in rude demand of payment, and steered his bulge of belly away.

  Lester settled onto a stool, sloshed down some suds. Oughta find a fluff, he told himself, shack up. Maybe get spliced, even. Least be somebody around, talk to. Except the face gazing back at him from the mirror behind the bar, round, lardy, vacant as an affable sheep, dispatched the mordant and decidedly unaffable question: Who the fuck gonna wanta marry a sorry lump like you? Deep-six that good thought.

  The door swung open and he glanced over and saw a guy standing in the entrance, hesitating an instant, like he was lost, maybe stumbled in by mistake. Nobody from Norse, that’s for sure. Tell that by the sissy clothes on him. Seemed dimly familiar, though. Lester looked again, closer. Damned if it wasn’t the same dude from out by the gate yesterday. He burst into a big welcoming grin and waved him over, calling, “Hey, man, c’mon in. Buy ya a drink.”

  The cue ball was stuck on the back cushion, not your best angle on the eight, nestled as it was against a side rail and with a whole lot of green between it and its designated corner pocket. No problem, you’re Jimmie Jack Jacoby. He lined up the shot, pumped his stick a couple of times for luck, stroked, and sank it, clean drop. “Whoa, see that?” he gloated. “Took the paint right off it.” His opponent groaned, laid a five spot on the table, and racked the balls.

  He was an accomplished player, Jimmie was, particularly at last-pocket eight ball, which, being more a game of cunning strategy than skill, was right up his alley. ’Course, even he had to admit the competition tonight—knuckle-dragger name of Vernon McCord, went by Tiny on account of his Godzilla size, fucker big enough to fill a room all by himself—was not exactly what you’d call world-class. Already he’d lifted thirty off him, chump change finally, but any kind of sugar in your pocket spent sweet, was Jimmie’s motto.

  “Break ’em,” Tiny growled.

  Jimmie chalked up, positioned the cue ball, took careful aim, and split the rack with a resounding boom. Nothing fell. Not enough punch on his stroke, not enough follow-through. Reason was he was more’n a little knocked out, hustlin’ Rolies in here late last night, then back again first thing in the morning, nail both the
other shifts, then do his own. Who wouldn’t be cashed, all them hours? Worth it, though, watchin’ that total climb up past 270. Allow, say, twenty backoffs, you still lookin’ at a take oughta put a smile even on Dingo’s vinegar face. Put one on his own every time he thought about it, which was often. Except when he remembered that other nagging problem. Still in the glue, that one, and still no idea how to wriggle out. Maybe it’d come to him.

  Goddam if it didn’t, and without an ounce of effort, his part. Tiny sinks an easy natural, misses his next shot, and Jimmie’s stretched out across the table, drawing a bead on the nine ball when he happens to glance over the top of it and down the length of the bar and fucked if it ain’t the leaflets geek, same goddam shitheel, right there in his sights. Turkey shoot. Money from home. Shoulda played the Lotto today.

  He laid down his stick, boosted himself off the table.

  “Fuck y’doin’?” Tiny said. “It’s your shot.”

  Jimmie sauntered over by him, looked up into the baffled eyes. “Tiny, my man, how’d you like to make back what you lost here tonight? Whole wad, with a double saw on top of it. How’s that sound?”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “What you do best. See that pussy up at the bar?”

  “Where?”

  “One talkin’ with Lester there.”

  “Yeah, I see. What about him?”

  “Y’want that fifty?”

  “Fifty’d be good.”

  “Okay, listen up. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

  It was the first friendly face he’d seen all night. Only one. Never mind its indelible simpleton stamp. For Marshall it was like a breath of purest ether to an expiring man. Incongruous flower blooming in an arid waste. Blade of sunlight piercing a leaden slab of sky. Name your sustaining image: that’s how Lester’s warm and altogether unexpected greeting touched him.

  Quite in contrast to the uniformly hostile receptions he’d encountered over the past three hours. There were a dozen or more taverns in the immediate vicinity of the Norse plant, and he’d tried them all, starting at a place called Turk’s Sportsman’s Saloon, where his carefully patched-together air of confidence unraveled the instant he came through the door. He paused there uncertainly, leaflets in hand. Eyes skimmed over him. Voices braided in an urgent festive hum. The smallest action in the baseball game playing on the large-screen television excited a raucous whoop. Dramatic difference from the genteel place he’d been in only twenty-four hours ago. Marshall filled his lungs with the smoke-poisoned air, squared his shoulders, and approached the nearest table. “I’m looking for a missing boy,” he said, enunciating very slowly, very deliberately, a leaflet displayed like a visual aid.