Blind Spot

by Tom Kakonis

  “No.”

  Twenty minutes later, the license plate story still untold, Lester came tottering, stagger-drunk, through the narrow parking lot fronting his apartment building. He seemed to hear a voice calling his name. Real? Imagined? Couldn’t tell. He cocked his head, peered into the dark.

  “Lester?”

  Persuaded it was real, he called back, “Whozat?”

  A figure emerged cautiously from a band of shadow. “Me,” it said. “Marshall Quinn.”

  “Who?”

  The figure came closer. “Last night. Remember?”

  Lester’s face burst into a ruddy grin. ’Course he remembered: dude got his melon thumped, over to the Greek’s. He lifted a hand in a sloppy salute. “Hey, Mr. Quinn. C’mon up, have a brew.”

  Buck stood with his buttocks taut, knees pressed together and slightly bent, shoulders bunched, sighting down a ball held high and tight to his flank, a knot of focused concentration, all the intensity squeezed into his eyes. Suddenly he sprang forward, simultaneously arcing his arm back and up, then sweeping it out ahead of him, rocketing the ball down the lane. For a man of his bulk he moved with remarkable speed and a grace near to balletic. Poised there in the shred of a second before the violent collision of ball and pins, balanced on one bent leg, he looked rather like a limber dancer frozen in the execution of some intricate, inventive step. Nine of the pins vanished on an explosive whap; the tenth teetered for an instant of unendurable suspense. When at last it toppled, Buck punched the air and boomed jubilantly, “Awright!”

  Waz, seated at the scoring table, made a pained face and grumbled, “Dumb luck.”

  “Luck got nothin’ to do with that one. You see the spin on that ball?”

  “Spin on this,” Waz said, presenting an extended middle finger.

  They were serious bowlers, but good-humored ragging was part of their ritual. To keep their skills honed for the winter leagues they practiced religiously, once a week, at a Westmont alley. It was their night out. Also an excuse to soak up a few cold ones, forget the plant and the grinding labor and the heat and the insistent obligations of the onerous business of living, all of them erased for a wink of time in the mindless rhythms of the game.

  Of the two, Buck was the more expert. His average hovered around the low two hundreds, though once, years back, he’d rolled a perfect game. What a night that one was! He remembered it yet, all its particulars, vividly: the unnatural calm come over him as the strikes piled up; the mechanic efficiency of his body, like his joints were lubricated; the sense of, well, supreme harmony. What a night. Easily among the finest in his life.

  Buck liked bowling. He liked its subtle angles and fluid motions governed by the iron laws of physics and geometry. Unlike pool, say (at which he was an occasional and indifferent player), it required a certain physical presence, a contained, channeled force. There was a kind of artless simplicity to bowling, a comforting either-or quality, utter absence of cunning or guile. Pool, he decided, slouching now on the spectator bench and draining off the last of his brew, was a game for nimble hustlers, pricks. For the likes of the Jimmie Jerkoffs of this world. Which intrusive thought he shoved from his malt-mellowed consciousness and returned his attention to the game at hand.

  Waz was setting up for the final roll of the final frame of the series, a tricky alignment of three pins left standing. His approach was vigorous, but his swing was awkward, follow-through a little stiff. He fired a sidewinder that skimmed off two of the pins, wobbled the third but left it upright, denying him the spare crucial to his score. He thwacked his forehead, groaned miserably.

  “Look like you just ain’t up to the competition tonight,” Buck gloated.

  “Ain’t the competition, it’s my wrist. Sprained it at work today.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Hey, I’m tellin’ ya the facts here.”

  “Whatever you say, buddy.”

  “You try it, rollin’ off a gimp wrist.”

  “Sounds like sour owl shit to me.”

  “Wait’ll next time.”

  They changed shoes and walked over to the counter. Both of them reached for their wallets, but Buck produced his first and handed the attendant some bills. Waz looked puzzled. “Whadda ya doin’? We split it.”

  “Not this time. I’m buyin’.”

  “How come?”

  “I owe you.”

  “For what?”

  “I dunno. Don’t sweat it.”

  “That ain’t right, you payin’. All them lines.”

  “For bein’ a pushover, then. Okay?”

  Waz shrugged. “That’s how you want it. But I’m poppin’ for a road-loosener. No arguments.”

  “Maybe do one more,” Buck agreed.

  They took a table in a corner of the bar adjacent to the lanes. A waitress, at Waz’s direction, brought over two drafts. For a while they analyzed their games, traded advice and opinion, sniped at each other with easy, waggish jests. Then the talk slackened, ran down. Waz slumped back in his chair, gave his extrusive globe of belly, only tenuously restrained by a ton of belt buckle, a contented thump. “Long day,” he allowed, to put something into the lengthening silence.

  Buck nodded.

  “Wears a man out.”

  Buck leaned over the table and drew circles in a tiny puddle of unmopped beer. For reasons he could neither comprehend nor, if asked, explain, the image of a pool table, its smooth green surface randomly strewn with balls, came back to him. “Listen,” he said, tracking an elusive chain of thought unsealed by that troubling image, “want you to know I appreciate it, what you done.”

  Waz, caught off balance by this opaque remark, said, “What, buy you a beer?”

  A disagreeable figure materialized at the pool table behind Buck’s eyes, chalked his stick, and sank all the balls in a single fantastic shot. “Talkin’ to him,” Buck said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “You sayin’ Jimmie?”

  “Who else?”

  “Wasn’t nothin’. Glad to help.”

  “To me it was.”

  “No, what I mean is, I always figured there was nothin’ to it. Just Della blowin’ smoke out her ass.”

  “Still had me plenty worried there.”

  “Well, it’s settled now. You can forget about it.”

  “Got you to thank for that. All of it. Whole thing. You been with me on this from the start.”

  Waz studied the swell of his belly. He didn’t know where to look. It made him acutely uncomfortable, all this gratitude, praise. Had to wonder how much of it he had coming, if the matter was in fact settled. Hoped to Christ it was. To back away from this prickly topic he asked, “You, uh, change your mind on the open house?”

  “No, I’m takin’ some time off next week. We’re goin’ up to the Dells.”

  “No kiddin’. Well, that’ll be good, gettin’ yourself outta the oven awhile.”

  “Be good for Norma and the boy too.”

  “When you leavin’?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Myself, I’m gonna work that day. Can use the o-t.”

  “You understand why it is we’re skippin’ the open house. Della and all. It’s nothin’ personal, Waz. I like her, always have. Same with Norma.”

  “ ’Course I understand. Who knows Della better’n me?”

  “Maybe next year. Let things cool down a little.”

  Waz raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to next year. You and Norma and the boy. All the good times ahead.”

  Buck lifted his. “Here’s to friends.”

  They clinked glasses and drank. And though both of them seemed relaxed in the secure warmth of good fellowship, neither, in his private thoughts, could shake the vaguely alarming sense of something still slightly off-center, unresolved yet, some mischief due.

  But for Norma, that evening, there was only the comforting sense of abundance that grocery shopping will sometimes inspire, the warm security of pantry and refr
igerator and freezer stocked full, the way the pioneers must have felt after a bountiful harvest, provisions laid in against the long, bleak winter ahead. Wednesday, Dale’s bowling night, was her routinely scheduled time for this agreeable duty, and so directly after supper she and Davie drove to the Jewel on Ogden and steered a cart through its aisles, up one and down the next, Norma testing produce with a keen touch and practiced eye, sifting through the calculated dazzle of products carefully, prudently, taking pains to explain the rationale behind her choices, turning their pleasant little outing into a learning experience (“You see, Davie, Grape Nuts don’t have any sugar, and they taste just as good as Cap’n Crunch, better even”). Not that he required any convincing or persuasion. Not this child. He never argued, never whined, demanded nothing. It was strange, all that meek obedience, almost eerie, but she tried not to think about it. Time and familiarity and affection would eventually change all that. All he needed was the healing balm of love, and for Norma that was a commodity in plentiful supply.

  Later, at home, he helped unload the sacks of groceries, handing over cans and cartons and watching her arrange them neatly on the shelves. As reward, she opened a freezer package of Mr. Cookie Face ice cream sandwiches and removed two, one for each of them. “I think we’ve earned these, don’t you? All that shopping we did?”

  He didn’t seem to know how to respond to this, so he said nothing.

  Norma tried again. “You were really a big help to Mom, you know that? I couldn’t have managed without you.”

  He gave her a small, uncertain smile. A smile was a start.

  “Are you tired?”

  He shook his head negatively.

  “Excited about our trip?” she asked him, a question requiring some sort of reply.

  “Trip?”

  “To the Dells. Remember? Next Saturday. Just three days away.”

  He looked puzzled, as though the concept of a Dells was still foreign to him, outside his capacity to grasp.

  Norma hesitated a moment. Considered. They had never spoken to him of Sara. Maybe now was the time. “Would you like to see some pictures of where we’re going? All the things we’re going to do?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, Mr. Cookie Face, finish up your ice cream and I’ll show you.”

  Violet bands of sunset seeped through the window and fell across the living room floor. They sat side by side on the couch, the Dells album laid out on Norma’s lap, a thin film of dust on its cover. It was not an album she could bring herself to look at often. But she’d offered and he was waiting—no retreating now. She turned the pages slowly, explaining each photo, locating it in space and time and memory, relating it to their own upcoming adventure. As with all her collections of memories, this one was meticulously ordered, a start-to-finish visual record of a trip taken, it seemed, in another century by travelers masquerading as themselves: someone who appeared to be an exuberantly grinning Dale loading bags into the trunk of what was then their car; a Wisconsin souvenir shop they’d stopped at somewhere along the way, Janesville, it was, if she remembered right, probably still there; a woman who looked remarkably like herself, younger version, standing at the entrance to their motel, also smiling, also free of care, blissfully ignorant of all the terrors gathering just outside the borders of this framed blink of experience.

  Davie leaned over, the better to see in the paling light, and at the first appearance of Sara (a shot of her in ruffly green bathing suit at the top of the water slide, secure in her father’s strong grip, face crinkled in a compound of expectation and fear and glee, poised for the plunge) he asked with a child’s blunt curiosity, “Who’s she?”

  “That’s our little girl,” Norma said, unwilling even yet to think of her in the past tense.

  “Girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s her name?

  “Sara. She’s your sister.”

  He lifted his eyes from the picture, gazed at her baffledly. “She live here?”

  “Not anymore,” Norma said, a small catch in her voice.

  “Where she go?”

  “With Jesus.”

  “Where?”

  “Jesus took her to heaven.”

  Now confusion came into those bewildered eyes, a fear utterly unlike that on the image of Sara’s face, not a trace of glee in it. “Is Jesus the mean man?”

  “No no no, Jesus is a good man. Kind man.”

  “Why he take her, then?”

  Why? A question she’d struggled with for six long years and for which there was still no adequate answer. “I guess He needed her to be with Him,” she said. It was the best she could do.

  “He take me?”

  She put an arm around his shoulders, this frail, frightened child of hers, drew him in close, stroked his hair. She felt such a density of conflicting emotions her heart seemed tugged in a thousand directions. Too many feelings, too many directions. “No one’s going to take you away from us, Davie. Ever. Not even Jesus.”

  “Why you cry?” he asked her worriedly.

  “Because I’m happy,” Norma said, dabbing moist eyes. “Because we’re going back to the Dells. Because I’ve got you.”

  Curiously enough, another woman in another living room, not that distant, was at that same moment viewing a similar procession of images from the past. Only animated, hers were, flickering across a television screen, images sprung to seeming life, moving, gesturing, speaking, prancing, mugging for the camera. It had seemed such an extravagance then, a camcorder. Extravagance for them, newlyweds, graduate students scraping by on poverty-line fellowships, staring down penny-pinching years of degree collecting. But Marsh had insisted (“A visual history of our lives,” was how he justified it, “to prove to our grandchildren we were once capable of youth”) and now Lori was not sure she was sorry that he had. Not glad—for what exactly did it prove, these shadow-land simulations of themselves?—but not unhappy either. Watching them was like summoning blurred memories of an exotic foreign country visited long ago, but only briefly and only once, traveled through and left behind forever.

  She would pick a tape randomly from the stack in the cabinet by the television, slide it into the VCR’s portal, hit a play button and set the players in motion, and when she’d seen enough replace it with another. A disordered panorama, without sequence or chronology. There was their tiny, Goodwill-furnished apartment in a shabby neighborhood appropriately called Dinkytown just off the University of Minnesota campus; and there her husband bent over a desk, cramming for some exam, as he seemed perpetually to be doing in those days. Next came Jeff’s birth, the glaring lights of a delivery room, jerky scramble of figures, clash of voices calling instructions and encouragement, her own pained yelps and grunts, an infant’s wail, Marsh’s spontaneous declaration of boundless love, his camera forgotten in the joy of the moment, focused on the floor. Enough of that.

  Skipping backward in time, Marsh again, marching stiffly across a stage, accepting the ribbon-wrapped symbol of his achievement: Dr. Quinn at last. And later, still in black robes, wisecracking to some off-camera voice, “What do you call me now? Oh, call me irresistible.” And herself, similarly attired, same occasion, clutching her own certificate of wisdom, face bathed in a glow of pride, eyes innocent and untouched by any experience outside the pages of books. Lori Quinn, Master of Arts. But what art? Contemporary European Literature, the diploma said, but what did all those dusty volumes have to say to her now, and how much mastery had she acquired over the confounding vagaries of life?

  Maybe the ghost of her father, petitioned from the grave, had the answer. She cut off the graduation tape, its celebrative air suddenly wearisome, and found another labeled “Parents’ Visit, July ’92.” Its first scene was a crowded O’Hare concourse, the two aged voyagers emerging through a gate, her mother with the startled, imploring look of the unseasoned traveler, dissolving in a squeal of relief at the sight of Jeff toddling toward her, gathering him up in arms grown round and spongy from a lif
etime of hosting church potluck suppers. Not so her father, that lank, gray, hollow-chested man, always so conscious of who he was, so sure of a guiding presence hovering over him: limp hand clasp for Marsh, chilly formal hug for her, was as much as he could muster in the way of greeting. Segue into that staple of home videos, the barbecue scene. There was Marsh firing up the grill, not without difficulty; herself in gauzy pink dress dispensing lemonade all around; Jeff, with a child’s instinct for loosened discipline, performing for his grandparents, his frisky acrobatics and high, piping voice (“Watch this, Grampa, backward somersault!”) raising even a thin, indulgent smile from a man conditioned by the gravity of his calling seldom to smile.

  And watching him now, hearing again the measured rhythms of his pulpit-polished voice, she seemed to see the world through his stern Calvinist eyes, a fallen place haunted by sin and beyond any hope of redemption but for the capricious whims of an impenetrably remote deity: You’re saved, you’re not. Like those death camp wardens determining the fate of their victims at a casual glance and with an arbitrary flick of a thumb: left column labor camp, right gas. “God help you, Father—” she heard herself mumbling aloud, not in prayer or supplication so much as faintly voiced desire to work her way around some formidable, oppressive obstacle—“wherever you are…and Jeff…and Marsh.…” And having uttered last her husband’s name—the only one of that male threesome real to her anymore—she was struck suddenly by just how much there was left to lose. And with that stunned recognition it was as if a spell had been lifted, only to be displaced by another, darker spell.

  She touched the stop button and the screen blackened, all its chimerical players vanished. All of them. With a peculiar, drug-swamped mix of panic and serenity and immense fatigue, she pushed herself up out of the chair, crossed the room, and climbed the stairs. In the bathroom she studied her mirrored reflection, a face scarcely recognizable, at once gaunt and puffy, sorrow-etched shadows under the eyes. A liberating thought came to her, more fanciful notion than decision or resolve. For a moment she hesitated, vacillated. And then something in her relaxed, let go of fear and grief, and, mindful of the substantial cost in palpable pain soon to follow, as early as the first light of morning, she opened the cabinet over the sink and removed the pills bottle and emptied its contents into the stool, a chain of red beads departing in a watery swirl.