by David Gates
After Bugs Bunny overloads the carrot-making machine and blows it up—a not very subtle parable about overreaching—Billy takes Deke by the hand and leads him to bed. “Goodnight and sleep tight.”
Deke lets his head sink into the pillow and looks up at the ceiling. “Good night and sleep tight. Did you know Mommy has Old Maid in her room?”
“No kidding. You know, I’d forgotten about Old Maid. We used to play all the time.”
“Can we play?”
“Sure. How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning. Surest thing you know. That’s what my—what your grandfather used to say. ‘Surest thing y’know.’ He was an epistemologist.”
Deke looks at him. “Mommy said he was a teacher.”
“That was his day job, sure.”
“But what’s a pistemologist?”
“You know.” Billy’s sorry he started this. “Somebody that mows the lawn and stuff. Reads the paper. Shovels snow in the winter.”
“Like you?” Deke’s frowning. He clearly knows there’s something he’s not getting.
“Exactement.” Billy gives him his best imitation of a guileless smile. “Sweet dreams.” Kisses his fingertips, presses them to Deke’s forehead, then hits PLAY on the boom box.
He puts away the dishes, then goes down to the basement and sticks a load of clothes in the washer. He pours himself a finger of Macallan—dernier cru Scotch, Mark called it—and settles in with the Times. Down the hall, Horowitz tinkles away. Deke pipes up for a glass of water; Billy brings him half a glass, holding his breath when he bends close. As if a seven-year-old would detect the smell. Though this one might.
When he finishes what little he reads of the Times anymore, he gets up and vacuums the living room; to keep from feeling like a drudge, he does just one room a day. Then he goes back down and puts the clothes in the dryer, pours another finger of Macallan, brings it into the bedroom and shuts the door. After his father died, his mother had an extension phone put in. Billy’s with his father on this: it’s an indulgence, like a box of bonbons. But he’s gotten to like it, and once in a while, usually after a drink, he’ll lie back on the bed and call somebody he used to know. There’s not much to say about his life anymore except for specialized anecdotes of tech support, so he draws out their stories with questions and quasi-alert reactions. Really. Mm-hm. A No kidding where it seems right.
He takes off his shoes, stacks the two pillows and stretches out on top of the covers with his chin jammed into his breast-bone. Solid comfort. He looks up Dennis’s office number just to make sure, punches it in and gets the voicemail, then waits for the tone and tells Dennis he’s probably surprised to hear from him but he just has a question. Then, thinking how that must sound, says, “Nothing heavy.” If Dennis calls back, he’ll think up a question. Mark’s name for Dennis was “Miss Monica,” because of his dark hair and smooth cheeks and what he pretended to imagine were Dennis’s preferences. Mark’s snottiness about him was part of the attraction. But so was Dennis’s sheer good looks. Mark wasn’t exactly the Adonis of the Western world. Neither is Billy.
He creeps in, in stocking feet, to check on Deke. Sound asleep. When he hits STOP in the middle of the Waltz in A minor, he can hear the dryer humming in the basement. He hits REWIND, to get set for tomorrow night. Back in his bedroom, he locks the door and pulls out the magazine he keeps under the mattress and resorts to a couple of nights a week. He finishes off, cleans up, knocks back the Macallan, then goes down and gets the clothes out of the dryer. He’s folding Deke’s narrow blue jeans when it strikes him that he’s insane to run such a risk. If I should die before I wake. Well, not so much that. But if one of these days Deke, who’s into everything, should be exploring around and find Fuckbuddies—or, worse yet, if Deke and his friend should find it on their playdate. No, thank you. He could sneak it out of the house in the morning, folded in the Times. But what if he should die before he wakes?
He carries the laundry upstairs and looks in again: Deke’s on his side, mouth slack, his outbreaths roaring in the silent house. Then he creeps into his own room, slips Fuckbuddies into the sports section of the Times, carries it out to the breezeway, still in his stocking feet, and sticks it in with the garbage. He pours yet another finger of Macallan, gets into bed and opens The Interpretation of Dreams, his current go-to-sleep book: in The Western Canon, his previous go-to-sleep book, Harold Bloom did such a good job of selling Freud as imaginative literature that Billy’s giving it another try. He begins “The Dream of the Botanical Monograph,” which sounds like a Sherlock Holmes title, or Borges maybe, but quickly becomes impenetrable. Behind “artichokes” lay, on the one hand, my thoughts about Italy and, on the other, a scene from my childhood which was the opening of what have since become my intimate relations with books. Do tell. He pages around and stumbles across the part about staircase dreams, which he’d always heard were supposedly sexual. So that was why? Because you mount higher and higher and pant as you reach the top? What incredibly silly shit.
He realizes after a while that he’s been cruising along with his eyes closed, following some parallel story about painting over wallpaper with a roller; this is not, technically, reading. He reaches over and puts out the light, then instantly comes wide awake, worrying what question he could ask if Dennis should call. The only question he can think of is Did you ever fly when you were a little boy? Because he’s imagining Deke in a Diamond Dogs uniform, soaring around the bases six feet above the ground, making smart right-angle turns like Casper the Friendly Ghost. So maybe he’s asleep and doesn’t know it.
The light wakes Billy up too early Saturday morning: those flower-print curtains of his mother’s just don’t cut it. He reads until he hears Deke calling, then delivers a clean outfit, goes to the kitchen to start coffee and puts on the Shostakovich, skipping right to the zippy second movement. Before breakfast they play three games of Old Maid. Billy’s caught with the Old Maid each time, in scary defiance of the law of averages; but even if this meant something, it would simply mean what he already knows. He gets out bowls, milk, spoons and Product 19. No TV, no sugared cereals, no throwaway pop music—someday Deke will hold all this against him. Assuming Deke just stays on and on, which Billy shouldn’t be assuming.
“So I thought today we better make a pumpkin run,” he says. Halloween’s a week away. Make it through that and they’ve got Thanksgiving. And then Christmas.
“What’s a pumpkin run?”
“Maybe five dollars. That was a joke.”
“I don’t get it.” Deke’s eating with his face down in the bowl, holding his spoon overhand. Must this be corrected, or do kids grow out of it automatically?
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t funny. What I meant was, we should go out and get a pumpkin. You ever make a jack-o-lantern?”
“I don’t know. Can we read first?”
“Sure. We got the whole day.” Though in fact Billy would like to get the hell out of here before Dennis calls back. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know.” But of course it turns out to be The Runaway Bunny.
“Heck of a story,” Billy says when he’s finished reading the thing. “Now, would you go get your shoes, please?”
“Thank you,” Deke says. A reflex triggered by the please? Or is Deke actually thanking him?
“You’re welcome.” Billy decides to break the rule. “Tell me something. Are you missing your mom today?”
“Not really. Can we call her?”
“We can’t call her, but she’ll probably call us later on.”
“Can we wait?”
This requires a lie. “The last time I talked to her, she said she probably wouldn’t be calling till tonight.” Mistake: this invention is checkable. “Or that’s what I thought she said. So we have lots of time. Shoes?”
They drive up to Troy, then cut east toward Bennington. It’s a flawless autumn day, the blue of the sky either absolutely deep or ab
solutely without depth. Billy’s put on The Magnificent Gigli, and at least Deke’s not complaining. They take a side road north, past barns and tractors, through intermittent odors of manure. Billy passes on his tractor lore: red for Farmall, green for John Deere, gray for Ford, orange for Case, Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Harris. And they make up a tractor game: Deke gets a point for every red one, Billy for every green, and points for gray and orange go to whoever spots them first. Deke’s ahead four to two when they stop at a field with a beach umbrella, an aluminum chair and a PUMKINS sign.
There’s nobody here, just rows of pumpkins ranked by size and a tackle box with a three-by-five card reading HONOR SYSTEM: LG $5, MED $3, SM $1.
“Can we get a big one?”
“But of course,” Billy says in his French accent.
“But I feel sorry for the little ones.”
“So we’ll get some little ones too, for decoration. The little ones are the ones they make pies out of.”
“Can we make a pie?”
“We can think about it.”
“But can we?”
“Yeah, why not? I guess we could figure it out.” One of his mother’s cookbooks must have a recipe, though they’re probably all based on canned pumpkin. Which must be more condensed, so therefore … something. Whether Deke’s budding housewifeliness ought to be encouraged is a whole other question. But here’s Billy encouraging it.
When he opens his wallet, he finds only three singles and a couple of twenties. The tackle box has two singles and three quarters. Hmm. Deke’s walking through the big pumpkins, crowing “Look at this one—no, look at this one!” Billy steps into the road. That must be the house, way up there on the opposite side. A tall, pointy-roofed farmhouse with two-over-two windows, weathered gray. Not a place where he’d ordinarily knock on the door. If he left a twenty and took the two singles, they could get three big pumpkins and three little ones. Except he doesn’t want three big pumpkins. And he doubts you need three little ones for a pie, even if the stuff’s not condensed.
“Come here quick!” Deke calls.
“You find one?”
“You have to see this.”
Billy walks over. Deke’s sitting beside a knee-high pumpkin, classic pumpkin-shape on one side, the other side flattened, with diseased-looking patches of brown.
“Awright,” he says. “Good choice.”
“We can just turn the bad side away,” Deke says.
“Absolutely.”
“So we can get it, right?”
“If I can lift it.”
“I’ll help,” Deke says.
They wrestle the monster into the backseat, then pick out three small pumpkins. Billy puts a twenty in the tackle box and takes out the two ones. Five for the big pumpkin, buck apiece for the three little ones, ten dollars for the entertainment. He backs around, noses onto the blacktop, looks both ways and decides to drive on past the farmhouse instead of turning around and appearing to hightail it out of there. He points at the chickens pecking in the front yard and a small black-nosed sheep chained to a car wheel lying in the grass, and misses a Farmall tractor out by the barn.
“Can we listen to Barney?”
“Sure,” Billy says. “You like that song ‘The Old Brass Wagon’?”
“I guess so.”
“I’m really into it, for some reason.”
Deke looks at him and narrows his eyes, as if he’s suddenly been dealt one more crazy adult. “How come you like it?”
“Just something about it. I guess I like how you don’t really know anything about the Old Brass Wagon. It’s just, there it is. The Old Brass Wagon. Deal with it. You know what I mean?”
Deke looks out the window.
“What do you like about it?” Billy says.
“I don’t know, it’s good.”
Billy says, “Tell me something. Are you actually a Salinger character?”
Deke looks back at him. “What’s a sowinger character?”
It scares Billy that he’s allowed himself to say such an out-there thing. “Nothing. It’s just a—you know, I was thinking what you could be for Halloween. Why don’t you look in the dash and see if the Barney tape’s in there?”
Deke opens the glove compartment and reaches in. “Yay!” He hands the cassette to Billy.
“Do you want to be Barney for Halloween?” Billy says. “They have a Barney costume at CVS.”
“Could I be what you said?”
“What I said? Oh. A Salinger character?” It’s a pretty beguiling idea. “Tell you what. When we get home, I’ll show you a picture of one, and you can decide if that’s what you want to be. Basically you’d wear a backwards baseball cap and a long coat. And you’d be carrying a suitcase.”
“Oh.” Deke looks out the window again. Barney and the kids start singing. “Everybody in the old brass wagon …” Oh, well. It would’ve been lost on the good people of Menands anyway. A vista opens: Deke in doublet and hose with a skull in his hand; Deke with greatcoat, bowler hat secured by string, stones in his pockets; Deke in a black frock coat, with fake whiskers, a harpoon over his shoulder and some kind of fake pegleg. The vista closes. Billy would never take advantage. He makes another left turn, which should eventually get them over to Route 40 and then back down into Troy.
After supper they carve the pumpkin, Deke drawing the face on it in Magic Marker, Billy doing the actual cutting. He hasn’t done this since he was a kid, when his mother did the actual cutting. They scoop out the seeds in slippery, sticky handfuls and spread them on his mother’s cookie sheet to roast. Just as his mother used to do, probably on the same cookie sheet. (The pie project, thank God, has been forgotten.) Deke’s rendering of the face isn’t much use as a practical guide to cutting, so Billy tries to keep the positions and proportions of eyes, nose and mouth the same while improvising the details. His mother never aspired to more than upside-down triangles for eyes, a right-side-up triangle for the nose and a crescent mouth. Billy now finds he can cut out eyes, leaving half-round pupils in the lower-left corners for a furtive expression, and a snaggletoothed cartoon-hillbilly mouth with irregularly spaced square teeth. He considers a Picasso nose—in profile, to the right of both eyes—but Deke put a pig-style snout in the center, so he’d better play it straight: a pair of round nostrils punched into the space implied by a thin, semicircular incision.
As Billy’s gouging out a hole in the bottom for a candle, the phone rings. This must be Dennis: crap, what to say? Deke runs to pick it up, then cries, “Mommy! We’re making a pumpkin!”
Billy considers it indecent to listen outright; still, he can’t help but hear the conversation dwindle to the usual Yeah, No, I don’t know and Okay. Finally Deke says, “She wants to talk to you,” and clunks the phone onto the table without even a Love you too.
“Billy?” Cassie says. “This is breaking my heart.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. Listen, we have to talk.”
“Okay.”
“Well, we can’t talk now. He’s right there, isn’t he?”
“This is true,” Billy says. “How about Monday? You’ve got my work number.”
“God, imagine putting yourself in a position where you’re allowed one phone call a day. I’ve fucked up so badly.”
“Nothing irretrievable.” One call a day: it’s never before occurred to Billy to wonder whom she calls on alternate days. “Except what wasn’t worth retrieving anyway. If you know who I mean. So, you have any idea yet when Betty Ford’s going to get out of that house she’s in?”
“Betty Ford? I thought she was dead, for Christ’s—”
“No no no, I mean the Betty Ford I know.”
“The Betty—oh. That Betty Ford. That’s cute. I don’t know, really, but just from little things they let drop, I’m thinking sooner rather than later. But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Well, whenever. I’m not going anywhere. Always on the spot. Like Johnny.” It also strikes him tha
t she must be free to call him from work: how could her keepers monitor that? Or do they have her on the honor system?
“You really have been,” Cassie says. “Don’t think I don’t know that I can never, ever repay you—that’s a lot of negatives, isn’t it? I mean, to say a positive thing.”
When Billy finally gets the hole gouged out and a votive candle in it, he burns his goddamn fingers reaching into the pumpkin with a match. He guesses the technique is to light a dinner candle, stick it through the mouth and torch it off that way. But when they turn the lights out, Deke says “Yesss” and Billy has to agree. The thing looks both sly and mind-blown.
“We should have a picture of this,” Billy says, then realizes he doesn’t own a camera. His mother’s Minolta must be somewhere. Right: he packed it in one of the boxes in the basement. “Tell you what. You want to take a ride to CVS? We can buy one of those disposable cameras.”
“Yay!”
Billy ends up buying two, twenty-four exposures each. Since Halloween’s coming up. Cassie will surely want pictures: otherwise there’d be these undocumented months in her son’s life—though he suspects that before the crash-and-burn Cassie had let the picture-taking slide. On the way out, he shows Deke the Barney costume. “Cool,” Deke says, looking away.
When they get back home, Billy checks the answering machine. No calls.
On Sunday morning, he takes Deke to the Methodist church he and Cassie used to go to with their mother—his craziest bit of behavior yet, though to Deke it must seem no crazier than any of the rest. Sure enough, the 9:30 service still has a children’s choir, and Billy and Deke share a hymnal and try to sing along, Billy moving his finger underneath the words for him. “See?” he whispers. “When those notes go up and down, the tune goes up and down.” Deke nods, either pretending he knows or just humoring him. Wouldn’t Cassie have explained this much? They’ve got a new minister—old Dr. Griffin must be dead by now—about Billy’s age, whose glasses make him look like Philip Larkin. One of those not-queer/not-not-queer types. Billy checks the left hand: a wedding ring, for whatever that’s worth. The first word of his sermon is enough for Billy to cross him off: Hopefully some of you watched last night’s special on the Holocaust … If news of this ever gets back to Cassie, look out. In fact, maybe he should tell Deke not to tell her—or would that just make it stick out more in the kid’s mind? Plus the whole issue of keeping secrets. No, thank you. Too much like queer-uncle behavior.
