by Owen Thomas
Before I can resolve on this radical change of plans, the door I have been using as a looking glass swings towards me. I grab the brass handle and hold it open as a courier in an orange, logo-emblazoned jersey and black spandex bicycle shorts darts out and across the street, weaving and bobbing through the traffic. Before I can go inside, the courier is followed by a stream of business-attired humanity, like a school of smartly-dressed salmon swimming as a single, undifferentiated mass out of a bank of elevators from somewhere within the darkened lobby and toward the portal of light that leads past me and out into the world. I hold the door for all of them. They surge past me out onto the sidewalk and into the street too quickly to acknowledge my presence. I wait for an opportunity, but the surge continues unabated and I take to examining a dirty piece of chewing gum on the concrete. I decide it bears an uncanny resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev.
Hmm. Or Madonna.
When I look up again, the doorway is empty and I start inside, looking as I go at the school of dark-suited salmon swimming away from me down the street. One of them catches my attention. A fish wholly out of place in the school. Taller than all the others, with very long legs. Lush blonde mane to the shoulders. Not smartly dressed like the rest of the school. Bermudas. Flip flops. Wrong school altogether.
Shepp.
What the… I step back out onto the sidewalk, watching him standing at the corner waiting to cross the street. The building evacuates another surge out onto the sidewalk around me and I am bumped and jostled and I have to struggle to keep him in sight. He is laughing to the sky about something, head back, hair swaying. I imagine the sun gleaming off of his teeth. He puts his arm around the other fishes next to him so they can all cross the street together. No, not the other fishes. One fish. Mae.
Fuck me…
I walk slowly down the sidewalk towards them as the light changes and they start to cross the street. I tell myself that I am mistaken; that while the man must certainly be Mark Shepherd, the woman cannot possibly be Mae Chang. But it can. And it is.
I follow them seven blocks to a bar called Savannah’s. I hang back as they go inside. The mounting shock of my discovery has eclipsed any feelings I might otherwise have about stalking. I approach the entrance slowly. I see Shepp take a seat at a table positioned squarely in front of the window, which drives me back against the neighboring storefront. Mae takes the seat across from him, facing my general direction, and I turn away abruptly, feigning an intense interest in the window display behind me.
A mannequin bends suggestively to reveal the swell of a nippleless bosom in a lace teddy. She is smirking at me as if she has long known. As if Shepp and Mae are regulars past this window. She has no hands or feet and her limbs end as smooth stumps. I wish she were alive so I could tell her this and take the smirk off of her face.
I think of the ducks and of Corollary A to Lakeside Revelation No. 2, the one about pulling tail feathers to protect one’s own claim to the muck. The fucking muck at the bottom of the fucking lake. A slow boil of indignation begins to mix into my bloodstream. Shepp. Fucking Shepp. Always the coy inquiry into the state of my relationship with Mae. Always the joking invitation to join him in one of his infamous group romps. You and Mae should drop by, Dave. … Let’s go for drinks, Dave; bring Mae along. … Say hi to Mae! Say hi to Mae! Fucker. And you! My god! What the fuck, Mae? What have we been doing for the past six weeks? You think I was in this just to hear about your fucking job? Neglected to mention my buddy Shepp, there, didn’t you?
I start to screw up my courage. I will take five slow steps to my right, stop, turn, and stand coolly in front of their table, hands behind my back, rocking heel to toe, sizing them up. I will not acknowledge any attempt to communicate. There will be stupefied shock, followed by a flurry of activity between them as they decide which of them should come out to talk to me and what I should be told. By the time they decide, I will be gone. And very, very difficult to get a hold of.
I am actually about to send the command to my legs when I become aware of something behind me, insulating me ever so slightly from the noise and commotion of the street beyond. I refocus my eyes, blurring the sexy amputee. Reflected in the window is Detective Charles “Chuck” North.
“Lookin’ for a date, Dave?” he asks from somewhere up above. I spin to face him, incapable of speech. “Must be a good street. I see your fiancé found one. Course, he’s alive and still has his hands and feet. But I bet all of that costs extra.”
“Are you following me?”
“No, Dave. I’m arresting you.”
“Arresting me? You’re arresting me?”
He grabs me by the arm and pulls me away from the wall, out towards the curb. I pull against him; a silly effort. He extracts a cell phone from his pocket and tells someone on the other end where we are.
“Turn around and face the pole. Jesus, Dave, you smell like a joint. You can’t ask a mannequin out on a date smelling like a dope fiend.”
“I’m not a dope fiend.”
“I dunno, Dave. Pretty good shit in there with all the fish food.”
“You… you searched … Why are you arresting me? Why are…”
“Oh, we’ll think of something. How does possession of narcotics sound?”
“I…”
“I suggest you shut up, Dave. Let’s do this right.”
He spins me around and holds my hands behind my back, my wrist bones held together in one of his giant hands. The cuffs ratchet down around my wrists and I realize that Shepp and Mae have front row seats for all of this. I imagine first that they have stopped chewing and swallowing their bread as they watch in stupefied amazement, and then I imagine that they chew and swallow the bread without so much as a hiccup of concern or surprise. I imagine that the server stops by to take their order and that Mae has several questions about the specials while Shepp ponders the wine.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…”
There is a yellow flyer taped to the light pole in front of me. The Columbus Audubon Society is organizing its fall birding excursions. There will be a meeting. Children are welcome. The photograph of a gray, toffee-headed merganser has been defaced with red markings in the shape of a marksman’s cross hairs.
CHAPTER 30 – Hollis
Miss Daley crossed the classroom and clapped her hands at Ben and Hollis. Ben bounced and clapped back.
“Ha ha, Miss Daley! You thought I wouldn’t come today.”
“Ha ha, Sir Ben,” she said, “you can’t fool me. I knew you’d be here.”
“I’m the Grill Man and the Guitar Man!”
Ben hugged his teacher around the waist, pinning her arms to her sides. She smiled at her own helplessness in his grip and rolled her eyes at Hollis.
Suddenly done with his greeting, Ben released her and headed off without a backward glance to join a group of three girls sitting at a round table by the window. He pulled out a chair and tried to sit but the back of the chair caught the bottom of his red Buckeyes backpack and it tipped over with a racket. The girls laughed and Ben threw his hands up in the air like he had crossed a marathon finish line.
“Hi Hollis,” Miss Daley said laughing. “Nice to see you again.”
“Likewise.” Hollis bowed slightly at the waist.
Ben shrugged his way out of his pack, letting it drop to the floor, and took his seat. A boy from a nearby table bellowed something Hollis could not understand and all ten children in the room laughed. Ben’s hands went back up in victory and two of the girls at his table clapped. They too had the high foreheads and the flattened facial features and the slanted eyes. Hollis knew that not everyone in the class had Down Syndrome and wondered idly about the grouping.
“All of them at his table are D.S.?”
“Yes,” she said looking back.
“Is that by design?”
“No. They’re free to sit where they like.” She smiled. “We all have the instinct to find ourselves in a crowd. They’re no differen
t.”
“Hmm.” Hollis nodded. “He sure found the girl table.”
“Oh, yes. He’s turning into quite a ladies man,” said Miss Daley.
“All of the Johns men have had that problem I guess,” said Hollis shrugging. Miss Daley laughed. “It’s a curse, really. Very inconvenient.”
“I guess he’ll learn to cope, somehow,” she said, playing along.
Hollis took her in under cover of a smile and an unnecessary laugh. They had met only twice before. She was young and short, with large, compassionate brown eyes and a smallish mouth that had been almost over-equipped with sizeable white teeth. That much of her reminded him of some agreeably inquisitive woodland creature. She had shiny blonde hair gathered in a barrette that fell to just below her shoulders. She wore a clean, white cotton blouse and brown corduroys that flared over a pair of leather clogs.
“Sorry he’s late,” he said. “He got up a little late today.”
Ms. Daley raised her eyebrows.
“Okay, I got up a little late today. Boy, you don’t miss a trick, do you?”
She laughed and then furrowed her forehead and wagged her finger. “Susan said I should expect something like this. I’m sure you’ll be glad when she gets back.”
Hollis did not know if it was Miss Daley’s blonde hair or that she was now acting as Susan’s proxy in scolding him, but he was reminded in some inexplicable way of his wife. Perhaps it was simply the classroom setting, with its low tables and the big desk up front between the chalkboard and the coat rack. Perhaps it was the smell of chalk dust.
It was something though, and whatever it was it took him back.
He remembered loitering in the hallways of Patterson Elementary waiting for the door with his wife’s name on it to open and for swarms of fourth and fifth grade children to come stampeding out around him and then fade away down the hall as he stepped into a room not quite like this one, but similar in a less structured way. That was back in Dayton, right after they were married, at least a couple of lifetimes ago.
“Oh, don’t you two start ganging up on me now,” said Hollis, pretending to be offended, taking his turn to wag a finger. “Benny and I do just fine on our own. Everything is under control. You two are in cahoots to make me look bad, that’s all.”
Miss Daley laughed.
Hollis winked at her and she laughed genuinely back at him. His chest cavity inflated a little, drawing his shoulders up and back. His abdominals tightened imperceptibly. It was all part of an autonomic flirting reflex over which Hollis really had no control. There was breathing and there was circulation, and then there was this. His thumbs sunk down into his waistband and moved smoothly outward from his belt buckle, tracing the perimeter of his midsection like soldiers patrolling a circular trench around the General’s command tent, deftly tightening the fabric as they went.
“Sure, you laugh,” he continued. “You laugh. But I know how you teachers are.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” said Miss Daley, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and shifting her weight playfully to one hip. This woodland creature, in addition to having a pleasantly curious look, also had some seriously pleasant curves. Hollis could see hints of the lace pattern of her brassiere. He felt the General stirring in his tent.
“Yes. Yes I do. I married one so I have lots of experience. I know how you are.”
“I see. And just how are we teachers?”
Hollis looked down at her, the chalk dust in the air filling his senses.
Back in Dayton they had lived in a small but very comfortable two-bedroom house. The neighborhood was wholly unrepresentative of their meager earning power, Susan as a new teacher and Hollis as a real estate agent having trouble finding a successful rhythm with his third agency since graduating.
The house had been a wedding present, given to them outright by Hollis’ parents. His mother, MaryAnn, one of the great Benjamin Easly’s eight children, had inherited a respectable sum when her father, the founder of Cincinnati Pulp Incorporated, finally succumbed to cancer of the colon. Homer Johns, who had charmed his way ass-backwards into the Easly family fortune, had thought the wedding gift of an entire house to be an overly extravagant gesture. Repeatedly invoking the American Gothic-inspired memory of his parents, as well as his own anecdotally rich impoverishment as a young man, Homer had attempted to impress upon his wife the importance of making one’s own way in the world. Bestowing an entire house as a gift was beyond the pale and sure to cause irreparable character damage.
It was a credit to Homer that he did not allow his current circumstances to corrupt his bootstrap philosophy of living. Homer had, in fact, grown out of poverty, making his own way in the world. The fact that his way in the world got a whole lot easier when he married into a timber fortune did nothing to discredit the guiding ethic of his upbringing.
But while the free house proved to be an enormously beneficial asset in future years, it did little to meet the early monthly expenses of Hollis’ marriage. Susan’s income was a steady, but small teaching salary, and Hollis’ contribution came in the form of unpredictable, sporadic commissions. Food, clothing and utilities were challenge enough. The things they wanted, but did not immediately need, were extravagances.
Wanting decent furniture, for instance, was on the same order as wanting a private yacht. Their free home stayed barren for the first eight months of their marriage save for a bed, a sturdy card table and folding chairs, two oversized yellow vinyl beanbags, a cork-covered plywood box they used as a coffee table and a mishmash of wooden milk crate shelving they covered in fabric remnants to hold most of what they owned, including Hollis’ old Fisher hi-fi and his oak framed speakers, their treasured LP’s, their books, framed photos of their respective families, a small black-and-white television, and lots of ceramic pots holding flowers and plants that thrived in the southern exposure and served remarkably well to obscure the infrastructure that supported their things.
Ultimately, it was two visits from MaryAnn Easly-Johns that fixed the furniture problem in very short order: one visit with Homer for Thanksgiving dinner (at which MaryAnn did little to conceal her distress at the stark disparity between the gifted house and its furnishings) and one visit shortly thereafter to take Susan shopping at the Living Spaces Showroom in Columbus when Homer was off in Florida fishing. Hollis had returned from work that evening to a beaming wife and a home in the chaos of mid-transformation. He had been simultaneously delighted that he would suddenly be living in a well-furnished home befitting a successful man of business, ashamed that he was not a successful man of business with the money to buy furniture for himself, embarrassed that he had not yet set the world afire as he had predicted to anyone who would listen, and, too, just a little worried that Susan and his mother were quickly bonding over an unchecked sense of entitlement to spend money without spousal approval.
Rather than accepting the gift, Hollis had made a point of protesting his mother’s extravagance. MaryAnn Easly-Johns had listened to the tirade, unmoved, as she casually fussed with a new lamp and extracted brightly tasseled throw pillows from a bag, handing them to Susan one after another who laid them out where the new sofa and love seat would go. Then MaryAnn had replied with her characteristic brevity and sweetened condescension, deliberately using his real first name just to get his attention.
“Leonard, keep that talk up and you will soon replace your father as the poorest man ever to live under a roof made of another man’s money.”
It had been a one-sentence argument ender, stinging Hollis to the very center of his pride. His only rejoinder before angrily stalking off had been to insist that she not call him Leonard.
Hollis had taken to using his middle name once he started college, severing for good his high school identity as a gangly, well spoken bookish sort with few friends that were not on the chess team. Although he had been a gregarious and likeable boy, the others attending Walnut High School had been put off by his intelligence and his interest in the grading curve
and graduating at the top of his class rather than getting to second base with a girl – any girl – or indulging in the mania of sock hops and high school football. That, anyway, was how Hollis had come to understand the alienation of those years and there was certainly some truth to that understanding. But he also knew that the family relations had not helped things one bit.
Everyone at Walnut Hills High had known the name of Benjamin Easly, just as they had known that MaryAnn Easly-Johns had served on the School Board for the Cincinnati Public School District for many years, including all four years of Leonard Johns’ high school enrollment. And they all had certainly heard of MaryAnn Easly-Johns’ highly public campaign to wrest employment away from Principal Davis over at Taft High School for alleged indiscretions involving one of his teachers. Mary Ann Easly-Johns had claimed that Principal Davis’ affair had clouded his judgment, persuading him to retain the teacher who Mary Ann Easly-Johns thought should be fired.
The teacher in question, a Mrs. Finestrom, had felt free not only to instruct her students that Thomas Jefferson was an owner of slaves, but also to get into the whole awkward business about Sally Hemings. Since MaryAnn Easly-Johns’ school board campaign had quite proudly noted an up-stream confluence of the Easly and Jefferson bloodlines, it was true that she had felt somewhat obligated to defend her name. Nevertheless, it remained true that Principal Davis had been caught bare-assed in the band room with Mrs. Finestrom, whose contributions to the Walnut Hills curriculum were in the subjects of Health, Home Economics and the piccolo.
