Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “Hey Bro?”

  “Yeah Ben.”

  “Are we going yet to have dinner?”

  “Soon. Couple more minutes. Couple more songs, Dude.” Shepp is now in my head, choosing my words.

  “Okay, Bro-Dude. I know what those couple more songs will be too.”

  Ben is soon knocking the side of the van with his foot, keeping time. The girl has made it across the field to the parking lot. She walks to the corner and crosses the street to the bus stop. She sits on the bench and waits. I look up at Cait. She hasn’t moved.

  In my head, my conversation with Shepp plays on an endless loop, working to rearrange the reality I had finally come to accept. I had firmly concluded that Shepp and Mae have long been fucking behind my back; that Mae dumped me over a plate of lasagna in order to pursue a surely ill-fated but gorgeous romance with Shepp that they had already consummated; that the story about Shepp’s sister looking for paralegal work was a fabrication to explain their little rendezvous at Savannah’s; that they actually needed an innocent explanation for that little rendezvous because they actually had seen me get arrested outside on the sidewalk and then, after a post-coital cigarette and a good laugh, had put two-and-two together and had realized that I had not been the only one busted that afternoon. I had finally accepted that neither of them really cared much about me in the first place and that my recent troubles had simply provided each of them with a convenient opportunity to brush me aside and finally lay claim to each other.

  But now all of that is in flux again. Now I sit in a decommissioned ambulance staring out the window at my new non-girlfriend as she tries to prove that she may actually be dumber than I am, and wondering if I have been wrong about Mae and Shepp. Wrong about everything.

  A bus hisses to a stop and gobbles up the girl. On the bleachers, Cait is now up and making her way down to the field. I concentrate on re-summoning my rage at her stupidity, pumping it back up to its former strength.

  “What the fuck, Cee Cee?!” I scold in a harsh whisper when she opens my door.

  “You drive,” she says. She pulls my arm until I am standing in the street next to her. She smells like I want to smell.

  “Do you even remotely appreciate how much trouble…”

  “Yeah, Dave. I know. It was a calculated risk.”

  “A calcu… Well it’s my ass, Cee.”

  “Is it? Really? You weren’t out there. You were over here. Off school property, talking to hunky blond men. I’d say the risk was all mine. Let’s go.”

  I don’t budge. “I thought you didn’t have any. You said you didn’t.”

  “I said I didn’t bring any with me. I didn’t. Not inside. It was out in the van.”

  She starts laughing before I can erupt.

  “Dave, just… can we go?”

  I cross my arms and glower at her like she has just tried to steal my wallet.

  “I’m starving.”

  “Oh, your staving. I’m shocked.”

  “Okay. I keep a small stash in the van for emergencies.”

  “Emergencies.”

  “Yeah. Usually not for me, but today I made an exception.”

  “Oh… how fucking convenient, Cee Cee. Jesus. If you just want to keep it all for yourself, if that’s what this is all about, fine. But you don’t have to lie about it.”

  She looks down at her boots for a second. When she looks at me again, it is with a countenance of perfect serenity, which is as serious as she can get when she’s high.

  “You know, Dave, one day when you’re eighty-nine years old, or maybe sixty-two, or maybe fifty-two, and you’re too weak to get out of bed and the cancer is almost done with the marrow and is starting to gnaw on your bones and is getting bigger and stronger with every bite and it’s three in the morning and you can’t bear to be awake but you’re too terrified to sleep and the morphine turns you into a vegetable and the vomit keeps coming and you can’t get that stench out of your nose and all you can think of is how it will end, then you too, Dave, you too will hope and pray that your hospice worker is one of those reckless, law-breaking types that has thought ahead to keep a stash of pot tucked away in her van and that she will want to take the calculated risk that she will be caught and prosecuted all to help ease your suffering.”

  I am speechless and look away at the school. I can feel the anger draining out of my body onto the street. Emergencies. Fuck.

  “Hey Bro-Dude!” Ben’s head pops out from between the seats, headphones dangling from his neck. He is not talking to me.

  “Benny-my-man!” exclaims Cait like they haven’t seen each other for a week. “Is it chow time or what?”

  “Chow time Bro-Dude-Mo-Fo!”

  I walk around to the driver’s side and climb in and wait for them to finish their ridiculous greeting. Cait straps Ben back into the gurney and then knifes herself, boots first, from the back of the van cleanly into the passenger seat. She clicks the seatbelt and then punches me in the arm.

  “Thanks for driving,” she says.

  “Doesn’t really matter,” I lie. “I’m getting a contact buzz just sitting next to you.”

  I start the van and ease out into the street, adjusting to its size and weight.

  “So what were you doing?” I ask her as the school falls slowly away behind us. “I mean what did any of that accomplish aside from giving you the munchies?”

  Cait gives me her wry smile but doesn’t answer. She pulls off her hat and rakes her fingers through her hair. Her eyes are a little glassy. She seems to enjoy passengering.

  “I saw you made a little stoner friend. Did you at least learn where we might find Carmen?”

  She pats me on the face lightly with her hand.

  “It’s all good,” she says. “That was Carmen. Let’s go get some food.”

  * * *

  “So you just knew.”

  “No. I told you. It was a hunch.”

  “She’s dealing.”

  “Yep.”

  “Anything harder than… you know… potsa? I mean pasta?”

  It is my brother’s uncanny ability to soak up conversation and then repeat it inopportunely that I insist on speaking in code, or at least speaking vaguely. Fortunately, he is largely preoccupied with the animatronic bonobo that appears to be teasing a hippo at the fountain in the center of the restaurant. Dinner is slow in coming and I am now so full of spicy crocodile hot wings, that I could easily skip the entrée. Cait and Ben are bottomless pits.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “Could have been anything in that backpack. I didn’t ask. I didn’t even ask for the soft stuff. The pasta. I had my own, remember?”

  “Did you…”

  “What, give her any of mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course not. Jeez, Dave, who do you think I am? She’s just a kid.”

  “Well… You sat next to her… you know… as she enjoyed her own pasta.”

  “What am I going to do? Lecture her? I’m not her mom.”

  “Okay, forget that. Just tell me.”

  “I recognized her. Not at first because she’s cut off all of that hair and did something weird with the color. She barely resembles her Internet headshots. But by the time I got to the bleachers I was almost positive it was her. I knew if I approached her she would get suspicious and just clam up so I decided to play it cool and see if I could get her to come to me. And it worked.”

  “What worked? Lighting up? I don’t …”

  “Yeah. Look, if you were Carmen and turned around and saw me sitting up there enjoying my pasta, would you suspect the pasta police? Mr. North? An agent of Brittany’s family? Someone from the school? Someone who knows Carmen or wants her for something?”

  “No.”

  “Right. I’m there minding my own business. By that one flick of the lighter I was beyond suspicion. I’m just a loner pastahead. And if she’s into the pasta scene, either because she dealing or using or both, then I figured she’d find me interesting. And since there
was nothing about me crowding her, she didn’t feel threatened.”

  “So what made you think … that she really, really… liked pasta?”

  “Based on what you …”

  “I like pasta with cheeeeezze,” intones Ben, his mouth and hands smeared with crocodile sauce. I open two wet-wipes from the little made-in-China grass-woven basket thing on the table.

  “Here, Ben. Time for a little maintenance.” As he cleans, I give Cait the look.

  “Based on what you have told me, I assumed that what was true of Brittany was just as true of Carmen. My assumption has been that while Brittany may be the one caught between a rock and a hard place trying to come clean with Richie the pizza man, Carmen is just as involved.”

  “Hey, are you having pizza, Bro-Dude?”

  “They don’t serve pizza here, Ben. You know that. Here, you’ve still got some work to do on that face. Use another couple of these.” I open two more wet wipes and hand them over. “So, basically you’re saying it was a lucky guess.”

  “Might have been a guess, without the car.”

  “What car.”

  “The one in Carmen’s garage. The one she’s now forbidden to drive.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Of course you don’t. Because that miscreant brother of hers had your undivided attention. Had you taken the time to look in the garage, you might have seen the yellowish-brown El Camino. License plate G17189.”

  I blink at her, trying to process. A grin spreads sideways across her face. She is enjoying herself.

  “Holy…so she was the one… she picked up Brittany. She was waiting outside the whole time. They were in on it together.”

  “Carmen’s in this thing up to her eyeballs.”

  Our server arrives in his safari hat and vest to deliver our food. I cannot fathom why I have ordered the Wildebeest Burger and a side of Lion Fries, which is an embarrassing quantity of food even without having eaten a half-dozen spicy crocodile hot wings. If I am ever on death row I am asking for this to be my last meal if only because it will take me roughly a month to eat it. Cait and Ben have each ordered the Serengeti and Meatballs.

  “Is that a real whip?” asks Ben, pointing a red-stained finger to the brown rope-like thing looped through the waiter’s belt. The man gives a self-conscious laugh avoiding eye-contact with my brother who is still a mess. My family is used to the awkwardness that can accompany Ben in public settings. Often, in the split second that a stranger realizes he has a mental disability, there is a collision of disparate impulses in the brain – guilt, compassion, confusion, embarrassment – that short-circuits the regular rhythm of interacting and leads to all manner of response, including evasion, curtness, overcompensating laughter, patronizing sympathy, and grandiose displays of normalcy. I can see the man thinking.

  “Sure,” he says too loudly. “Here in the jungle we whip anyone who doesn’t clean their plate.”

  He makes a whipping sound, slapping the air above our table, pivots, scoops up the empty plate of wings and scurries off. Ben looks stricken.

  “He’s just kidding, Ben. Eat whatever you feel like.”

  “I know he’s kidding, Bro” he says relieved. “Jeez-Louise.”

  I push my plate back, too distracted to worry about forcing down any more food.

  “So let’s go to Chuck… or to his organization… with this information. Carmen definitely knows where to find Brittany.”

  Cait is busy twirling her Serengeti around her fork.

  “Bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s still your word against the world. They’ll go to Carmen… again; she’ll deny having any knowledge… again; they’ll confront her with your version of events; she’ll double down on whatever story she and Brittany have concocted about you. The only thing it will prove is that you know what kind of car she drives. She’s probably the one who did your car. I don’t think you want to force her into a corner. They’ll be prepared for the possibility that you saw her that night.”

  I hate that she’s right. She’s stoned and still at least five steps ahead of me.

  “So what then? Do nothing? I mean we can’t just…”

  “Just hold on a minute.”

  Cait shovels in an enormous load of spaghetti, biting off the strands that are still connected to the mound on her plate. I wait. When there is once again room enough in her mouth for language, she continues.

  “Carmen as much as said that she could hook me up if I needed more… pasta. I told her I was having a problem with… with people who thought I was eating too much pasta and wanted me to stop.”

  “Were they going to whip you?”

  Ben asks this hopefully. He cracks an imaginary whip in the air like our server. There is a slight spray of sauce across the table. Cait laughs. He wants this to be a fantastical adventure yarn.

  “No one is whipping anyone, Ben. And maybe don’t take such big bites.”

  “I told her I wanted to keep a low profile,” Cait continues.

  “Which is why you were out there in broad daylight …”

  “Hey, we were alone on a field, not at a shopping mall.”

  “The field was at a school.”

  “Do you want me to finish?”

  “Sorry.”

  “She said that she and her friend were having the same kind of trouble. You know, with the pasta haters. She said she wasn’t worried though because, get this, her friend’s dad was in the agency.”

  “The agency.”

  “You know the one. It’s very centralized. And intelligent.”

  “Not the other one?”

  “No.”

  “Because Brittany said…”

  “Yeah, I know. Not the Bureau. The agency. Centralized. Intelligent.”

  “Yeah, I got it, Cee.”

  “She said her friend had made contact with her dad, and that they were waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For her dad to finish up with a … surprise party.”

  “Is her dad a chef?”

  Cait smiles at Ben. “I guess so, Benny.” She reaches across the table with her fork and steals a strand of his Serengeti.

  “Hey! No fair!”

  “Maybe he cooks for surprise parties,” says Cait looking over at me. “That’s what Carmen thinks.”

  “That would be cool!” says Ben. He tries to reciprocate the theft but slips and buries his elbow in the Serengeti sending his knife and spoon to the floor. We get looks from the neighboring table.

  “Okay, how about everybody eat off their own plate.”

  “Sorry, Dad,” says Cait. Ben giggles.

  “So what’s supposed to happen after her dad… the surprise chef… resurfaces?”

  “She was vague about that. But the idea was that once daddy got involved, a certain over-zealous pasta-hating someone would no longer be a problem. A world of hurt she said.”

  “Not Richie the pizza man, but that certain…”

  Cait finishes for me, nodding. “Over-zealous pasta-hating someone.”

  “Chuck.”

  “Chuck,” she confirms. “Of course, I’ll bet she thinks that someone who works as a surprise chef for an agency that intelligent and that centralized might also be able to take care of Richie the pizza man.”

  “But she was talking about Chuck.”

  “Right. She didn’t say boo about the pizza man. And why should she? She’s trying to assure me, the loner pasta lover, that she’ll soon be able to get me a steady supply of pasta without any more problems from…”

  “Chuck.”

  “Well, really Chuck’s organization in general. But we know Chuck is the one that has been leaning on Carmen to get to Brittany, and we know Brittany hates him, so I’m suspecting they’ve simply personified Chuck’s organization.”

  I stare at my uneaten food, trying to make sense of what those two dimwitted girls might be thinking, understanding that it might have all the plausibility of their most rec
ent scheme to barter a violin for drugs and cash and, failing that, to tantalize me, get me drunk and rob me blind.

  “So you think…” I stop because I don’t know what I think.

  “I think the pizza man found an untapped market. What high school kid doesn’t like pasta?”

  “And Brittany and Carmen were…”

  “May as well be wearing little aprons and roller skates.”

  “I have roller skates,” says Ben.

  “And then, because of me, they lost some pasta at Billy Rocks.”

  “Baby, because of you they lost pasta plus at Billy Rocks. They lost some cannoli at Billy Rocks. And now they’re getting squeezed at both ends. The pizza man is not happy and the certain pasta-hating someone is not happy.”

  “Chuck.”

  “Chuck. Along with his whole organization. And Brittany’s mom.”

  “So they’re waiting for the surprise party chef who is supposedly going to come in and turn down the heat?”

  “So Carmen implied.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Why? I mean, why would he?”

  “Don’t know. To help out his daughter, I guess.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “Not a word. I mean, come on. But I believe that she believes.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Me too,” says Ben.

  “Is it even possible to be that stupid?”

  “You’re not stupid, Bro-Dude,” says Ben. “You’re challenged.”

  “Not me, Ben. But thanks for that. Now what?”

  “I want to make some calls,” says Cait.

  “Calls? To who?”

  “Whom.”

  “What?”

  “You meant to whom.” She gives me that shit-eating grin.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “No. What was your first clue?”

  “You waited all afternoon to tell me about Carmen’s car, for one thing.”

  “You’re very excitable. You’d have gone running down the street waving your arms in the air.”

  “Why won’t you tell me who you’re going to call?”

  “I told you. You’re very excitable. And you tend to have a lot of impromptu conversations with certain pasta-hating someones. You might crack under the pressure. Besides, you’ve got enough to worry about.”