The Throwback Special

by Chris Bachelder

  “Robert,” he said, without turning around. Like certain zoo animals, the adolescents he worked with often did not want to be looked at directly. “When your daughter fell to the ground and then began crying in an authentic way, what did you do?” Charles knew this line of questioning was a substantial risk, but in his professional opinion it was justified. Also, he wanted this conversation to be finished.

  Robert said that he got down on the ground with his daughter and brushed the wood chips out of her sweaty hair.

  “I see,” Charles said. “And did you hesitate?”

  No, he did not hesitate. He tried to calm her down. He told her everything would be fine.

  “And then what did you do?”

  Robert said he asked his daughter if she could walk to the car, and she nodded. He said he told her she was a brave kid. He picked up the curtain sash that the child uses as her long imaginary braid. It had fallen off of her head. He dusted it off and tied it back around her head. Charles knew the curtain sash to be a warning sign, but he let it slide. Robert said he walked with his daughter for a while, and she was holding her arm completely still. She was trying not to cry. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her lips were trembling. She was as white, Robert said, as a sheet. He said he carried her most of the way, as gently as he could. It was like carrying a horse. “You know,” he said, “a baby horse.”

  “A foal, yes,” Charles said, nodding. “And then?”

  Robert said he called a doctor to get advice about where to take the child. Then he took her to an emergency care facility, where she got X-rays and a sling. The next day he took her to an orthopedist to get the cast.

  “Yes,” Charles said. “Right. Do you see? Do you hear yourself?” Charles said he saw nothing to worry about. Nothing whatsoever. He said, with a hot wave of self-reproach, that ultimately Robert was responsible for his actions, not his thoughts. Charles, though, had recently begun to suspect that people might not even be responsible for their actions.

  “Thank you, Charles,” Robert said, sinking farther into his chair. “I appreciate that.”

  But Robert had not gotten what he wanted. What had he wanted? How could it possibly be true that he was not responsible for his thoughts? If he wasn’t, then who was? He rubbed his thumb across the velvety interior of the chinstrap. The orthopedist, the nurses—they had looked at Robert as if he were abusive. He had taken a child to the playground without a net, without elbow pads. And the cast! It was pink and purple with glitter. The girl got to choose the colors and patterns, even the toppings. She had been scared before the orthopedic appointment, and Robert sat on the edge of her bed and talked to her soothingly about how it would be fine, even fun, to have a cast. Everyone could sign her cast and draw pictures on it. He told her they could put a bread bag on it so she could take a bath. Pretty neat, right? Then the next day she gets this pastel waterproof Disney arm accessory, and she swims and bathes and doesn’t let anyone else near the cast with a pen or marker. Girls on the street stare at her with that glazed envy that young girls stare at each other with. The cast glitter rains through the house, sparkling in nests of synthetic animal hair. Water flushes out the dead skin, so her arm doesn’t get itchy at all. She never once has to ram a fork or chopstick into the cast to try to reach the agonizing itch. And when they cut the cast off? It really tickled, a lot. The girl had laughed and laughed. Then she got some stickers. She got to keep the cast as a souvenir. It didn’t even smell bad. Robert took her out for ice cream with her curtain sash trailing down her back. She wanted to keep wearing the cast, so Robert taped the two pieces together with clear packing tape. Then he offered, for a reason he would never understand, to make a neat bedside lamp out of the cast. Would she like that? A lamp made from the cast? She answered affirmatively in a series of terrible, terrible baby noises.

  Well, but at least he had not lied to her. He had told her the awful truth. He had said everything was going to be fine, and it was.

  THE HOTEL PARKING LOT, in which there were no trees, was covered by a thick layer of leaves. The leaves had blown from afar to reach their final resting place. They decayed pungently in pulpy clumps the color of old pennies, impervious now to wind or leaf blower. Beneath this wet stratum of decomposing vegetative matter were the faded arrows, directing traffic flow circularly toward the check-in portico, primarily a nonfunctional architectural gesture of welcome, and only rarely utilized by Old World Europeans and those of very advanced age. The lot was divided by berms, mounded and sparsely coated with bark mulch and cigarette butts. Lights on poles defined the perimeter. Power lines transected the airspace above the lot. There were few cars in the large lot, and all seemed to have been parked to maximize the distance between them.

  The rain had begun, its inaugural drops fat and hostile. Vince and Fat Michael stood on a berm, staring upward with attitudes of appraisal and discernment. Vince’s hand still ached from Fat Michael’s handshake. Vince, whose grip was moderate, had attempted, mid-shake, to match Fat Michael’s firmness, and consequently his greeting had been, he knew, restive and undisciplined. At what point, Vince had occasionally wondered, would daily life cease to consist of a series of small threats? What age must he achieve before the large cucumber was stripped of its dark power? Vince and Fat Michael were comparing forecasts for the weekend. Each, as it turned out, had a favorite meteorological website—chosen by chance and maintained by habit—and neither could quite accept the validity of rival predictions. Ignoring the real weather, they squared off about the conjectural weather. Vince scaled the berm to get taller. He suspected Fat Michael’s site was dot-gov. Their forecasts were similar—rain was virtually certain—but each man might as well have been talking to the other about acupuncture or St. John’s wort. Fat Michael rubbed his hands vigorously with antibacterial sanitizing gel.

  Others by now had arrived. Tommy, Carl, Gil, Myron, Gary, Chad. Carl, in a galling violation of an unwritten but commonsense rule of the group, emerged from his extended cab pickup wearing his jersey from last year, that of Giants nose guard Jim Burt. As always, Gary drove in slow circles around the lot, blasting his horn and shouting community-sustaining threats and maledictions. A small school of men darted away from Gary’s car, over two berms toward Derek’s green sedan. After parking, Derek had lifted the hood, and he stood bent at the waist, peering down. Andy, sitting far away in his car with the engine still running, saw the men converge on Derek and his raised hood. The men spread out on the perimeter of the engine, gripping the edge of the car, like zealous spectators at a dice table. There was just enough room for everyone around the warm and possibly defective motor. Their duffel bags lay at their feet. Andy, who may or may not have been hiding here in his running car, turned on his wipers to watch them. They all stared down, nodding. Oh, pistons, oh, hoses! Derek was of mixed race, which is to say he was black. He was the only black man in the group, though Andy had noted that Derek’s skin was a couple of shades lighter than the skin of Gil, the Floridian. So powerful was the allure of annual interracial acquaintanceship that Derek almost always had a cluster of men around him, even in foul weather. And now this black man’s car’s hood was raised, creating an irresistible synergistic force, the dream of multiculturalism fused with the dream of automotive expertise. The rain was nasty now, cold and slant. Carl’s Jim Burt jersey was obviously getting wet, forcing his cohorts to decide whether and to what extent Carl was an asshole. Other men arrived, and attended to Derek’s engine: Jeff, Wesley, and Bald Michael, whose nickname, unlike Fat Michael’s, was more or less accurate and nonironic, though still unkind. Andy watched as the engine summit drew to a close. Derek, always so resourceful, closed the hood and guided the men through the rain toward the protection of the check-in portico. They bowed their heads like monks. Gary, still driving the lot in festive, hostile circles, passed these men, honking and brandishing a shiny blue helmet through his sunroof. “Gentlemen,” he yelled, “gird those puny loins!”

  Andy turned off his wipers. He rema
ined in his car with the engine running, pretending to inspect the bottom of his cleats. He held a shoe in one hand, and with the other he used a ballpoint pen to scrape at imaginary dirt around the studs. He had cleaned the cleats carefully earlier in the week, and of course he had cleaned them after the last time he had worn them, a year ago. They were very clean. He wasn’t ready to go inside yet, and he was trying to give the impression to any possible witnesses that he was busy and content here alone in his parked and running car. Through the curtain of rain on his windshield he thought he saw George, the public librarian, doing calisthenics on a berm. George was someone Andy did not want to see. George’s thin gray ponytail was just ridiculous, never more so than when trickling out of a football helmet. Whenever anyone asked George how he was doing or how his year had been, he always replied the same way: “Just doing my thing.” Then he would talk, in a slow and agonizingly thoughtful way, about budget cuts at both the state and local levels, the power of information, the marketplace of ideas, the future of the book, the public’s appetite for memoir, the digital divide, and, worst of all, the First Amendment. Andy hated talking to librarians, and he did not want to be hugged. He cut his engine, not unlike an animal playing dead. He worked earnestly and with renewed vigor at the pretend mud in his cleats. A sudden vaporous notion—he should not have come—dissipated before it could condense into conviction. He kept his head down, hoped George would menace someone else with his idealistic interpretations of devastating factual evidence.

  There was a tap on the passenger-side window. Andy looked up to see George giving him what he believed to be the first peace sign he had ever seen outside of documentary footage. George’s face was so close to the window that he was fogging the glass.

  “Hi, George,” Andy mumbled. He kept the doors shut, the windows raised.

  “Andy!” George said.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Just doing my thing!” George yelled.

  Andy pointed to his ear and shook his head, pretending he could not hear. He hoped these conditions would prove too difficult to support conversation.

  “My thing!” George yelled.

  Andy nodded.

  “Our branch is closed on Tuesdays! Serious cuts!”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Andy said into his cleats. The rain slid down the windshield and windows. Andy’s anxious breathing began to fog up the inside of the glass. George became a wet and indistinct blur, but Andy could still hear him speaking slowly through the window. He was disappointed about a tax referendum in his county, but he still had faith in the democratic process. The information was out there. The people could find it, make informed choices. Then something about either wetlands or weapons. Andy remained silent, hidden in his fortress of condensation. He was not, at this point of the weekend, having a good time, though he knew that good times were probably just for teenagers dancing around a big bonfire in a clearing in the woods with loud music playing from an open hatchback. After a few minutes, the talking stopped and the foggy blur disappeared from Andy’s passenger window. Andy had been inconsiderate, he knew. He thought of his wife, what she would say to him. She would say that he had been cruel to George. She would say that George wasn’t so bad. She would say he’s lonely. But Andy’s wife was the person who invariably, at any social gathering, ended up cornered by a gesticulating freak. The eccentrics preyed on her, sensing her weakness, her gentle open face, her listening skills. They had things they wanted to share—their health problems, their pets’ health problems, their unpublished fantasy novels, the fires that nearly destroyed their childhood homes, the recent spate of vandalism in their neighborhoods, their long estrangements from their felonious sons. Andy’s wife would stand for hours with her back to the artwork, so careful not to touch it, clutching an empty glass of wine, making eye contact, nodding at the lunatic. And then on the drive home she would brim with misanthropic rage. Why, she would want to know, had Andy not saved her? Could he not see that she was trapped by that woman with her fringed vest tucked into the elastic waist of her skirt? With those huge feather earrings? That woman talking for over an hour about chestnut blight? Andy recalled how strange it had been, in the first giddy months of marriage, to introduce her, to consider her, as his wife. And now it would be just as strange to think of her as his ex-wife.

  Andy was startled by a loud knock on the driver’s-side window. The blur outside the car looked like it might be George. It knocked again with knuckles, rubbed the window with the wet sleeve of its jacket. “Andy?” It was George. “Are you still in there? What are you doing?”

  Andy considered this question. What was he doing? Was he doing his thing? Was hiding from librarians his thing?

  “Can I come in?” George yelled.

  Andy didn’t answer. After a brief pause, George opened the back door, and got into the car behind Andy. Andy saw him in the rearview mirror. George was soaked, and dripping onto the cloth seats. He shivered and said, “Almost Indian summer weather here in mid-November,” imitating Frank Gifford’s commentary in the seconds before the ball was snapped on Theismann’s final play. George’s imitation was not bad. Not as good as Gil’s, but not bad.

  “Anyway,” George said, continuing a conversation he had apparently initiated outside the car, “the Internet should belong to everyone. We’ve been too slow in bringing it to rural areas and the inner city. The very notion—”

  “Why?” Andy said.

  George wiped rainwater from his face. He lifted his eyebrows, perplexed, though not offended, by Andy’s undemocratic spirit.

  “Why?” Andy said. “It’s just online shopping. It’s just pornography. It’s videos of two unlikely animals becoming friends. Why do the destitute require this? Who cares?”

  Andy had meant to shut George up, but he realized his mistake immediately. There was nothing George relished more than the free exchange of ideas. What Andy had intended as a vicious, conversation-slaying remark was instead, he now understood by the look on George’s face in the mirror, a generous and provocative strand in the complex braid of their constitutionally protected discourse. Andy could feel George’s excitement emanating wetly from the backseat.

  “I just read a fascinating study,” George said, with the methodical force of a snowplow.

  “George,” Andy said.

  “This lead researcher from the University of Illinois devised an ingenious study. What he did was—”

  “George, are you married?”

  “What?”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes, by common law.”

  “Well, okay,” Andy said. “I was married, see, and now I’m getting a divorce.”

  George made an extended sympathetic noise in the backseat. In the mirror Andy could see George wincing. “Andy, I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Hey, man,” George said, leaning forward and reaching his hands around the driver’s seat. His left wrist got tangled momentarily in the seat belt, but eventually he was able to grip the tops of Andy’s arms, and squeeze. Even if Andy had wanted to free himself from George’s grip, he wasn’t sure he could have. He could feel George’s knees in the small of his back. He risked a glance, but George had the crown of his head resting on the back of Andy’s seat, and he was no longer visible in the mirror. “Come here, man,” George said.

  “I’m here,” Andy whispered.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  This was a good configuration for Andy. This could work. As long as the windows remained fogged, as long as the rain made that sound on the thin roof of the car, as long as George’s face was invisible in the mirror, as long as George gripped the tops of his arms and did not try to rub his shoulders, Andy felt that he could talk.

  “One night last February—it was February twenty-third—we had dinner with some friends. There were two other couples there. We were having drinks before dinner. There was one of those uncomfortable lulls in the conversation, so I began to speak,
just to end the silence. Another woman began speaking, too, at the same time, but then she laughed and said for me to please go ahead. I went ahead, George. I think about that now. I kept talking. I said that I had heard an interesting story on NPR. It was about these dinosaurs called oviraptors. The name means ‘egg thief’ or something.”

  “Yes,” George said slowly. “Egg seizer.”

  “The scientist who discovered and named the oviraptor had found its bones on top of a nest of eggs. He surmised that the dinosaur was snatching these eggs, raiding the nest for food. But now scientists are taking another look at these creatures, and they think maybe this male oviraptor was not stealing the eggs, but maybe he was guarding them, being a good dad. Maybe he was taking care of the nest. And all this time, you know, he’s been getting a bad rap.

  “The other couples nodded and seemed interested. Not interested, maybe, but tolerant, and relieved at least that someone was speaking. Squeeze harder. But my wife was not happy at all. Julie. Her eyes kind of flashed, and she was just grinding cashews in her teeth, just grinding them to dust. She was drunk when we came. I was, too, I guess. She stands up, George. She stands up, puts her empty glass on the mantel, and says to the group that she had also heard an interesting story on NPR.”