The Throwback Special

by Chris Bachelder

  Outside, the rain still fell, not hard but insistent, and at cruel angles. Chad’s shoes became heavy and wet, but even with these new qualities they were still, primarily, the shoes that his wife disliked. The shoes had become a host for parasitic scorn. The eggs of his wife’s contempt had hatched inside Chad’s shoes, and now the larvae feasted on the leather uppers. The three men stood hunched by the picnic table in November. Beside them was the dumpster, brimming with sodden cardboard. Only cigarettes—only their glowing orange tips—could give meaning or coherence to this scene, and yet none of the men carried cigarettes. Thinking quickly, which is to say without thinking at all, Chad bent down to unlace his shoes.

  IN THE DEFENSIVE LINEMEN’S ROOM, Vince and Carl were arguing about electrocution. Vince claimed that the volts killed you, while Carl seemed certain that it was the amps. The debate had entered a silent phase, during which each man, working intently on his laptop, rapidly sent the other man Internet links that corroborated his position. The unread links piled up in each man’s in-box faster than he could delete them. Then Carl, mindlessly palpating the hard, tender lump in his armpit, began to watch a video of the demolition of the Seattle Kingdome, while Vince began to watch a video of juvenile red pandas playing in the snow.

  Wesley did not feel well, and he left the room. In the vending alcove, he stepped over Peter, who was sitting on the floor with the gear of both Theismann and Kenny Hill, talking on speakerphone to a loved one whose attention was not fully on Peter. “Tell him I promise we’ll do marshmallows next weekend,” Peter said. Wesley assumed the vending machine would not contain ginger ale, and he was correct.

  There was no sidewalk along the service road. There was, instead, a narrow dirt path through the pallid grass and litter. Wesley walked the path, ducking beneath tree limbs, his shoulders lifted against the cold rain. He did not own an umbrella. Like sunglasses or suitcases, an umbrella seemed to Wesley to be a kind of luxury item. He needed it only occasionally, which is to say he did not really need it. His stomach felt unsettled, but he enjoyed the walk. He found poignancy on the path. A sidewalk merely represented a planner’s idea of where you might walk, where you should walk. A sidewalk revealed no history, no desire. It yielded few traces of its use. A sidewalk was prescriptive, dogmatic. A path, though, was the expression, the record, of something vital and communal. An individual, no matter how determined, could not create a dirt path. The path expressed and served the aspirations of many. It represented a kind of bottom-up history—no matter what anyone thought people might do, this was what people had done, what they did, they walked here, the dirt now so compact it did not turn to mud in the rain. Wesley felt connected to the thousands of people whose feet had contributed to the path, those who had walked along this ugly and perilous service road, day and night, for years. He could see his breath in the cold. He tried not to think about the year that Bald Michael got mugged. He passed a small group from Prestige Vista Solutions, exchanging with the group a nod and a stoic greeting that Wesley found moving. Beyond a high and steep embankment, the interstate ran parallel to the service road, and he could hear the cars and trucks passing at illicit velocity. The embankment was festooned with plastics that glowed wetly in the dark. By night it looked ceremonial, festive, as if it had once stood for something holy but now just stood prettily for itself. Drivers on the service road honked boisterously at Wesley, and their male passengers leaned out windows to startle him with invective. “Don’t get wet, jackass!” shouted a passenger in a cowboy hat. “Homo walk!” shouted another. “Boo!” yelled a face from a sunroof. “I’m a ghost!” Though he knew it was not personal, Wesley always took this kind of spontaneous and indiscriminate meanness personally, and it demoralized him. He was a real estate lawyer for a major department store, but it did not matter, he knew. Anyone could be heckled walking a dirt path along a service road.

  The terminus of the dirt path was a parking lot shared by a biscuit restaurant and a convenience store that offered the state minimum prices on cigarettes. Wesley emerged from beneath the large branch of a tree, and walked like a man presumed dead through the wet lot to the flickering brightness of the convenience store. Inside, he examined the refrigerated drinks. Just as he no longer recognized the celebrities on the covers of magazines, or the songs on contemporary radio, he did not recognize most of these brands. There was beer, there was soda, there were sports drinks, there were energy drinks, there were water drinks, and there were coffee and tea drinks. There were a lot of rockets, feathers, and glowing feline eyes. There was a lot of packaging that was made to look as though it had been shredded by fierce talons. All of these dazzling stimulants and depressants, all these water variants, but no ginger ale to settle a queasy stomach. Wesley did not want to be transformed. He did not want to be a werewolf. He wanted to be a slightly less uncomfortable version of himself. He wanted, it’s true, to feel safe and loved. He could not help but remember the way that his mother would cut the toast into buttery strips. It seemed impossible to Wesley that the store did not offer ginger ale. Had his culture just given up on comfort? A culture that has moved beyond ginger ale, Wesley thought, is a culture that has moved beyond nurturance. How could such a childish culture have such contempt for childhood? Wesley stood so long in front of the drinks cooler that the cashier asked him curtly if he needed help.

  “I’m just blind,” Wesley said. “I can’t find the ginger ale.”

  “Not here, man,” the cashier said. “Just beer, no liquor.”

  Wesley knew better than to look for saltine crackers. He glanced again at the drinks, then he circled the store without picking up or purchasing anything, walking very slowly and with his hands out of his pockets, so as not to look like a shoplifter. In his attempt to allay suspicion, he aroused suspicion, and the cashier watched him carefully, one hand beneath the counter, fingers wrapped around the sticky tape of a baseball bat.

  •

  IN THE FRACTURE COMPOUND, Gary, Bald Michael, and George sat on beds, passing George’s flask of homemade liquor. Bald Michael, grimacing and shuddering at the aftertaste, handed the flask to Gary, who grimaced and shuddered while drinking. George grimaced and shuddered in anticipation of his next drink. The small flask, which seemed never to become empty, had been a gift to George from his Wiccan coworker at the public library.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Bald Michael said, shuddering.

  Gary wore Taylor’s two white wristbands, so bright they revealed other allegedly white objects—the men’s teeth and eyes, their stretched V-neck T-shirts, the pillowcases—to be yellow or gray. The ring finger and middle finger of Gary’s left hand were taped together, though not in historically accurate fashion. He dropped from the bed to the floor, and performed nineteen push-ups. When finished he lay on the floor, breathing. There were people who could do one hundred push-ups. He wished he could lose fifteen pounds. He thought of Fat Michael, that vein in his arm. It would not be satisfying to destroy, ceremonially, Fat Michael’s leg. With his ear pressed to the carpet Gary thought he could hear the subterranean rumbling of the hotel’s complex machinery, but he knew that didn’t make sense because he was on the fifth floor. He was in a box inside a bigger box. The carpet was redolent of nothing at all. Granted one wish, Gary had chosen invincibility. It was often the case that the men who chose Taylor experienced a post-lottery affective crash that left them anxious, listless, disappointed, and sad. And something else—perhaps frightened, or preemptively guilt-ridden. Bald Michael was talking about air quality again.

  “Hey, man,” George said to Gary. “You okay?”

  Gary tried to nod, but the flesh of his cheek against the hotel carpet had a relatively high coefficient of static friction, and his head barely moved.

  “Hey,” George said, “you want me to walk on your back?

  “No,” Gary said quickly, though George was already peeling off his black socks.

  Nate, the fourth linebacker, entered the room. He was not wearing shoes.

 
“Hey, Nate,” George said, “can you turn off that light? Yeah, that one.”

  Nate turned off the light.

  “And can you put that jersey over the bedside lamp?”

  Nate laughed, though he did not know why. He draped Bald Michael’s Gary Reasons jersey over the lamp, and the room grew dim and blue. George unzipped his duffel bag, and selected a CD. He looked around the room, then inserted the CD into Gary’s laptop on the orange chair.

  Gary said, “Hey, George, I don’t think—” but the first track on the mountain dulcimer compilation was “Wildwood Flower,” and he found that he could not complete his objection.

  “Wait until you hear ‘Shady Grove,’” George said. “Gary, you’re going to want to lift your shirt up.”

  With his face still on the carpet, Gary lifted his shirt up.

  “Okay, Gary,” George said. “You ready?”

  Gary did not respond, and George approached with his pant legs rolled. Gary stared at George’s feet, which were coarse and clean and dry, with high arches, long and hairless toes, and toenails that appeared to be trimmed but not fussily managed. The feet were not tender and pale, helpless in the way of baby animals, but neither were they the hairy, black-soled, thick-nailed feet of a wandering hippie. If they had a smell, it was faint and mild and organic, like cucumber or loam. They were good feet, expressive of proper values. Observing no overt sign of resistance, George stepped onto the middle of Gary’s back. Gary grunted, winced, squeezed his eyes shut. George stood still for a moment, achieving his balance, allowing Gary to grow accustomed to the weight. “There you go,” George said. “That’s it. Arms straight out. Now find your breath. Find it.” Gary tried to find his breath, and gradually he found it. The dulcimer played “Black Mountain Rag,” and George began slowly to shift his weight from one foot to the other. In his cold, wet socks Nate watched, wincing in sympathy with Gary. He could feel George’s feet on his own back. He could feel a shortness of breath. Bald Michael took several pictures of George and Gary with his phone. Eventually George began to shuffle deliberately up and down Gary’s back. His balance was excellent.

  “How’s that?” George said.

  Gary grunted and tried to nod.

  “Seriously,” George said, “feels like I’m standing on a coil of rope, man.”

  With a librarian on his back, with dulcimer music in the air, with the cold rain still tapping the window, with the heavy mantle of Lawrence Taylor upon his shoulders, Gary had the rare opportunity to break down entirely. He felt he could really lose it, and he was startled by the energy it took to resist it. “How . . . did . . . you . . . know?” Gary said.

  “About your back?”

  Gary tried to nod.

  “Man,” George said, “it’s everyone’s back that hurts.”

  Nate was hoping he would be next, though he could not bring himself to ask. The dulcimer played “Whiskey Before Breakfast.” In the dim blue light, Bald Michael looked through the photographs he had taken, deleting each one for its failure to portray.

  JEFF HAD A THEORY about marriage:

  All it is, he said, and he said he learned this too late, but all it is, is watching someone and having someone watch you. He paced in front of the mute television, on which a pickup truck drove over boulders in slow motion. He sounded exasperated, as if the other eligible receivers in Room 440 (Randy, Steven, and Derek) had worn him down, forced him to defend his position, though in fact no one had asked him anything, and no one had been speaking about marriage. No one had been speaking much at all. That’s all it is, he said. He said when you’re a kid, your parents watch your life. They know what’s going on, they’re watching you pretty carefully. Or at least let’s hope they are. They know you have a spelling quiz or a baseball game, they keep track of it all, and so you get the idea that your life is important, valuable. But then you grow up, Jeff said, and it turns out nobody is really watching anymore. It would be weird if your parents knew that you switched cereals in the morning, or that the power went out at your office for two hours. Nobody really knows what your days are like. Jeff said he wasn’t talking about the big things—moving to a new city or having a kid or losing your job. He said he was talking about the tiny, stupid crap that fills most of our days, and that you can’t tell people about because it’s too small and stupid. But it’s your life, Jeff said, right? It doesn’t matter to anyone else, he said, but it matters to you because it’s your life. The water in your basement, the strange smell in your shower drain. Changing your kid’s bedsheets in the middle of the night. Jeff said that life is a precious gift, sure, but usually what life is, is going to the store to buy a stupid piece of shit-ass hardware, and then buying the wrong size, and then having to go back to get the right goddamn size, except the store doesn’t have it. If you’re not married, Jeff said, chances are, nobody sees you make two trips to the store on Saturday morning for that hinge or flange that you don’t even get. Marriage—Jeff saw it so clearly now—what marriage does is at least guarantee that one person is watching. There’s one person who knows you got the oil changed today, or that you waited over an hour for your dentist appointment, or that you’re trying a new shave gel, or that the running shoes you’ve worn for years got discontinued. On television an adopted child was reunited with her birth mother, but none of the men saw it. And here’s the thing, Jeff said. The wife does not have to care about any of this stuff. It would be weird if she did, Jeff said, right? Because it’s boring, he said, and because she has her own tiny crap she’s got going on in her own life, and that seems important to her. And you’re watching that for her, Jeff said. See? You don’t have to care, he said. You just have to watch. You just have to be sentient, a witness. You don’t even have to watch very carefully. You’re not a scientist. You’re not some astronomer. It’s not like that, Jeff said. It’s certainly not about keen perception, and it’s not about gratitude or sympathy or even appreciation. It really is not about giving or getting credit. Just, Jeff said, just trying to keep the squirrels out of the goddamn mulch. If that person who is watching happens to love you or respect you, or if that person concedes to have oral sex with you, that’s a bonus, Jeff said, but it’s not necessary. It’s not what marriage is for. It’s just vital to have someone who sees your life. It’s no small thing. And look, Jeff said to the men, if you want any more from marriage than that, you’ll be disappointed. He walked to the door, squinted into the peephole. If you want to be connected, Jeff said, or if you want to share a passion, or if you’re thinking at all in terms of big, old trees with thick roots, you’re going to end up on the couch. First the couch, he said, then a crappy studio apartment. The only thing marriage can really give you is the sense that your life is witnessed by another person. A kind of validation, Jeff said. That’s it, he said, and it’s plenty. If you have that, you have a lot. You have everything. But here’s the thing, Jeff said. People don’t like being watched. They resent it. Jeff said that he resented it. He said he wanted to be free from it. He wanted his wife to mind her own business. But when he got away from it—when his wife was no longer watching—he didn’t feel free, he said. He didn’t feel relieved or liberated. He didn’t. He said now he just feels like there’s suddenly no point at all to buying the wrong kind of caulk for the windows. You’re not in a movie, Jeff said. He said that over and over. Nobody sees you, he said. He said that’s why people pretend they’re in movies. People say they want privacy, but they would actually like a camera out in their cold backyard at midnight, pointed through the kitchen window while they make a school lunch for their kids. They want someone to just notice, Jeff said. He said that’s what marriage is for. Otherwise, he said, honest to God, we’re all just like penguins at the North Pole, doing it all for no real reason.

  Steven stood at the window, listening to the dark rain. Any weather, when sustained, begins to feel like an interrogation technique. He needed to call the front desk to report the theft of the lottery drum. He needed to tell Randy that Donnie Warren’s
wrists are wrapped in tape. It looks like wristbands, but it’s not. It’s tape. Was Jeff still talking about marriage? Was he still yammering with his stupid face about squirrels digging up the mulch? Steven didn’t care at all about anything Jeff said. Steven would rather hash things out with George than endure another speech from Jeff about human relationships. For some reason he found the mention of astronomy particularly infuriating. He checked his phone for pictures or news from the school play, but there was nothing. He was, of course, still glad he had come. He could not have not come.

  Randy lay on the bed, flipping through a woodworking catalogue. He disliked Jeff, but not strongly, so he was free to ignore him. Derek lay beside Randy, bored and restless. He was not listening to Jeff. What if, Derek had been wondering, the offense just didn’t run the Throwback Special? What if they drew up another play in the dirt? What if they broke the huddle and then surprised the defense with some other play? They could change the snap, even go with a silent count. Why had this never occurred to him before? Was it crazy? Steven would never go along with it. Randy would. It was an insidious thought, and drunken. A draw is particularly effective against aggressive linebackers, Derek considered. Or a screen.