Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  Then it was late in the morning, and when he got up and went into the kitchen his mom was there mixing up pancake batter, and she said, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

  “Where’s Dad?” Michael said.

  “I don’t know,” his mom said. “You want some pancakes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you get out the milk? I need a little more here.”

  Michael went over to the refrigerator and took out the milk.

  “You know what, Mom?” Michael said. “I’d like to get a cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you do with a cat? You’re going off to college soon enough. Who would take care of it then, me? No, thank you.”

  “Cats take care of themselves.”

  “Oh, brother,” his mom said.

  The phone rang and his mom answered it.

  Michael brought the milk over to the counter and set it down next to the bowl. His mom was listening on the phone.

  “Really! That’s terrible!” she said. She listened for a few moments, then said, “No, come on over. I really want to hear this.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “Who was that?” Michael said.

  “Vi. She’s coming over for a coffee. They had a prowler last night.”

  She picked up the milk and poured a little into the bowl.

  “They did?” Michael said.

  “I guess so. Don heard something outside and went out to look and he saw a car going away down the street.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know. She said a black car.”

  “That’s scary,” Michael said.

  “You just never know,” his mom said, stirring the batter.

  “You know what, Mom?” Michael said. “I’m going to skip breakfast. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Over to Gunner’s. We’re going over to Richland today to look at some cars.”

  “What’s wrong with the car you’ve got?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with the car I’ve got. We just like to look at cars.”

  “Well, you should wait and hear what Vi has to say. If she describes the car Don saw maybe you’ll know whose it is.”

  “I don’t think so, Mom. If this is about the pancakes, it’s all right. I’m just not hungry. Thank you anyway. I’ll let you make them for me tomorrow.”

  “Well, aren’t I the lucky one,” his mother said with a laugh. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  Michael turned to go.

  “About the cat,” his mother said. “You’ll have to ask your father.”

  “He won’t care,” Michael said. “He’s never here.”

  He hadn’t been looking at his mom when he said this and now as he did, he saw her face had broken. A bad feeling, blinding him to the space around them, flooded out into the room, his mother standing there in the middle of the darkness of it.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Michael said.

  “You don’t know how hard it is,” his mother said. “You don’t know how hard I try to keep things the same for you. Things aren’t the same. I can’t do it anymore.”

  She broke out crying.

  “I am so sorry, Mom.” He was stepping to her.

  “Go on. Get out of here,” his mother said. “I need to compose myself before Vi gets here. If you want a cat you should get one. Who am I to say you shouldn’t?”

  “Jeez, Mom,” Michael said. “I am really sorry. Come here.”

  Michael put his arms around his mom. Her shoulders felt so thin.

  Chimes rang through the house.

  “That’s Vi,” his mom said.

  “What am I going to do?” his mom said.

  She wasn’t talking about Vi.

  “I don’t know,” Michael said.

  Claire

  “I must tell you a love story. This will be a love story, my love story for you. It’s about Brian, and how it ended for me with Brian. You remember he and Lola were married then? He was seeing me and it became, well, it became too involved, too intense, he was so demanding, so needy, he needed me to fix things so much it wasn’t for me, so I ended it. I ended it, and then right after, I ran into Lola in Smiley’s, and she was very drunk. She was very drunk and she came up to me saying, ‘I know what you’ve been doing, I know, and I’m going to beat you up.’ I said. ‘What is this? Yes, it’s true, but you’re too late, it’s already over, it’s finished, I’ve ended it with him.’ Now she was very, very drunk, so it ended up that I had to drive her home and put her to bed. Since I had to do that and it was raining I couldn’t walk home. It was her car, you see, I didn’t own a car then, so I had to stay over, and we slept together in her bed, and I made love with her. It was very funny. I’m wearing Brian’s clothes, his robe, and I play Brian’s role with her, and in the morning she says, ‘My God, what did we do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. What do you mean?’ And she says, ‘Brian. What are we going to do about Brian?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to tell him? Is that it?’ So when Brian came in she told him, you see, and that is my love story for you this evening.”

  Gone to Polyester

  The waitress was forty years old. Wore her hair piled up on top her head. Unfolded the linen napkin and put it on the boy’s lap. He was startled. He was fifteen years old and it was his first trip to the South. It was politeness on her part. The biscuits were powdery and wonderful. His grandfather said you eat them with gravy. He was telling the boy, whose name was Michael, about the war.

  “My war,” he said. “The big war. You’ll never experience anything like it. I sure as hell hope you don’t. You live in a foxhole that’s all mud, ’cause it rains for two straight weeks, you sleep in it, you eat in it, then there’s thermal pollution.”

  “What’s that?” Michael asked.

  His grandfather laughed. “That’s when Zumwalt has got you in an ammunition truck that’s on fire, the canvas is, and you’re driving it out of the compound during a Stuka bombing run and everything is blowing up all around you and the damned truck starts exploding behind you, or you’re hunkered down behind a log on the Rhine with the Colonel and a Kraut machine gun is firing from across the water and the slugs are chunking into the log and you can feel them hit and feel the heat from the ones singing off right over your head and both of you crap your pants.”

  “Were you hit?”

  The waitress came over and refilled his grandfather’s cup. She poured it really slowly.

  “Thank you, Elizabeth,” his grandfather said.

  The waitress gave Michael’s grandfather a smile and shifted her look to Michael and gave him the same smile.

  “No.” His grandfather laughed again. “But I sure was humiliated.”

  “Who’s Zumwalt?”

  “They called him Zip. He was a mean son of a bitch. He’d shoot guys.”

  “What kind of guys?”

  “German ones. Ones that had given up.”

  The waitress was looking at Michael, watching to see how he was taking it.

  “You tell him about your singing, Bub?” the waitress said, holding the coffee pot out. “Maybe something a little more positive?”

  “My singing,” his grandfather said. “Sit down, Bess,” he said to her. She put the glass pot on the table and sat down next to Michael.

  His grandfather’s name was Bill, but everyone who knew him called him Bub. “When you’re with your granddad,” Michael’s dad had told him, “remember one thing, he’s a big talker, so just let him talk. He’s got some good stories.”

  “My singing,” his grandfather went on, and it was all about Fridays in Paris, the late spring and summer of 1945 Paris, with all the old architecture, the wonderfully kept parks, the magnificent subway system (wonderfully kept, magnificent,—those were his grandfather’s words), and how on leave on those Fridays he would go to this old dance hall with the yellow plaster walls and long, narrow
windows up high near the ceiling, the windows always open, to work on his music, and since this would be early afternoon, with the hall not opening until after dark, it was always empty and quiet inside with only the afternoon light coming in, and giving the old woman a five, or sometimes the five and nylon stockings, or a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes after they talked, and she’d left, giving him the key, he would take the bottle and sit down at the piano, placing the bottle on top.

  “Sometimes it was Scotch,” he said, “sometimes a nice wine I’d get in this little hole-in-the-wall right up the alley.”

  And maybe he would sing first, or maybe, after loosening up his hands, he’d play, working on some chords, taking a drink, then start a song, having a drink, singing another song, taking another drink, then a third song, “Laura,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “My Buddy.” “Nights are long since you went away, I dream about you all through the day, my buddy, my buddy, your buddy misses you . . .” usually a drink a song, he said, “My Funny Valentine,” “Angels with Dirty Faces,” “Stardust,” going through the lyrics, checking out how they were, how he was, checking the feeling the words and sounds gave him, seeing if the phrasing was working, lighting another Lucky, drifting the phrasing out slowly across the chords, the light inside the hall gradually changing, taking another drink, the light warmer, softer, the pure tingling feeling that came in electric prickles across his forehead and scalp when everything was smoothly working, the alcohol helping, to where he finally would forget where he was and where he’d been, it was only the music, he was not even there, the music was playing him, and he would be sweating and drinking and rocking and smoking and singing and gradually the afternoon would be done, the bottle nearly gone, the cigarettes finished, his voice hoarse, playing just a little longer until time to go, closing the cover over the keys, taking down the bottle, and walking out toward the doors, the light coming through the windows now high on the wall, the long, worn floor nearly dark, going outside, always pleasantly drunk then, locking the doors, putting the key under the stone next to the trash, tossing the bottle into one of the bins, and going on down the alley to Le Cog Vol, The Flying Cock, “That was its real name, Michael,” his grandfather said, with inside, the first thing you saw, covering the entire back wall, a ten-foot-high, photographically accurate, wonderful painting of a forty-foot-long, silver-winged erection, the thick swollen pink shaft being straddled by a gorgeous nude, long-legged, full-breasted, with long, flowing chestnut-red hair blowing back off her face in the wind, guiding the cock by means of a black leather bridle strapped just behind the enormous head, her milk-white legs angling back, heels spurring into the pair of gigantic balls, and the little woman who ran this place, hair the brilliant, brittle-looking metallic-red common to most of the women of this quarter, who would say, “C’etait moi, moi! I was that one. Ah, ah, you should have been here then!”

  “And,” his grandfather said, “she had a point, kiddo, ’cause you should have seen me back then, at Fort Bliss, back in Texas, when every goddamned guy in the crowd, some six thousand guys, stood and clapped and cheered when I finished singing, McKenzie at the mike calling me back out on the stage, the whistling and cheering still going on, me near to tears, unable to stop shaking. I mean, that was some feeling! Boy, if it wasn’t! Of course it was wartime, anyone could’ve taken that audience, but, hell, at least six thousand guys! And I was slim as an arrow, too!”

  “You’re still slim, Bub,” Bess said.

  “Well, that’s nice of you to say, Bess,” his grandfather said, pushing his mug toward her. “Can’t sing like that anymore, though.”

  “Who was McKenzie, Grandpa?”

  “He was the pianist for Sammy Kaye. ‘Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye.’ That was one of the biggest orchestras in the country then. Mac heard me singing in the shower during basic training and asked me to sing with them during their USO tour. And so I did.”

  Bess winked at Michael and got up, topped the cup, then, taking the glass pot, walked off toward another booth to refresh someone else’s coffee. Michael waited until she was out of earshot and asked about his grandmother.

  His grandfather said, “No, I assumed she’d had other guys. Four years is a long time to be gone. For sure it is when you’re young. I never held that against her. I wasn’t so perfect myself. Once or twice some strange guy would call on the telephone until they realized I was back. Your dad was just six years old then when I got back, and just as cute as anything could be. I was really glad to see him. And her.

  “No, I don’t know what happened to Zip. I’m sure he paid for it.

  “No different then. No different now.

  “All that music is long gone. All Las Vegas lounge act music now, all gone to polyester. Music for lounge lizards.”

  “I like that music, Bub,” Bess said, coming back by again. “It’ll always be good music.”

  She was looking directly at Michael now and he saw that she had soft brown eyes and deep worry lines across her forehead and narrow ones up and down above her upper lip where her skin looked old.

  She smiled at him. There was lipstick on the tips of her teeth.

  Michael and his grandfather were standing now. His grandfather went over with her to pay the bill. Bess said something that Michael couldn’t hear. He saw his grandfather squeeze her hand.

  Going outside into the humidity his grandfather said, “Nice little gal, Michael. She’s got a good heart.”

  “She seems to like you, Grandpa. What did she say to you?”

  His grandfather laughed.

  “Said you were a good-looking boy.” He laughed again. “Told her it runs in the family.”

  Walking up the street to the pickup his grandfather said, “She works hard for her money. She has nice hands. You notice her hands?”

  “No,” Michael said.

  “Very feminine, very fine-boned and gentle, even though she’s a working gal.”

  Michael thought gentle was a strange word to use.

  “How do you know her?”

  “It’s a small town, Michael.”

  “Do you like her, Grandpa?”

  “I certainly do.” His grandfather laughed, looking at the boy now. “But not in the way you think.”

  He put his arm around Michael’s shoulders and squeezed them together.

  “I’m the one that’s gone to polyester,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  They were at the pickup now and his grandfather unlocked the doors. Michael could see the fishing rods in their cases were still lying in the bed next to the outboard. He had been worried the whole time that someone was going to take them.

  “Well,” his grandfather said, “someday I’ll explain it to you, but not today. Today’s a day for going down to the Keys, and seeing if we can get some of those bull-headed tarps to bite, okay?

  “That’s the thing about getting out on the water,” his grandfather said, getting in, putting the key in the ignition. “Once you get out there all your female troubles just disappear.”

  He fired up the engine.

  “How long will it take us to get there?” Michael asked.

  “Just about the time you’ve digested that breakfast,” his grandfather said, turning the wheel, starting them out onto the road.

  “What’s a bull-headed tarp?”

  “Silver tarpon,” his grandfather said. “And they’re about as nasty as a good-hearted woman when she thinks she’s been wronged.”

  “Sounds like a country-western song,” Michael said.

  His grandfather laughed.

  “That’s how they get written,” he said.

  They rode in silence for a time, going along the coast with the morning clouds still thick and heavy out over the water. Then his grandfather said, “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s good,” Michael said.

  “She moved back in?”

  “She did.”

  “Good,” his grandfather said. “That’s good. That’s what I
wanted to hear. Turn on the radio there, will you? See if you can find some music you like.”

  Michael smiled at his grandfather. He liked him a lot. Coming down here to go fishing with him had been a good idea.

  Mary Anne

  “He said there were lots of people I could feel that way with, and I said, ‘What good is that? They aren’t you.’ Which disgusted me, it was such a weak thing to say. I knew I should have slept with someone before I called him, had that security in my head, you know, but I didn’t. I called, and ironically, he thought I had slept with someone, and so was interested, thinking, I guess, she’s not that insecure, and then, after giving in and asking him if he has, and though he doesn’t want to tell me, ‘God,’ he says, ‘I have,’ then I have to go and tell him I haven’t, and my feelings just got out of control, and he just wanted to hang up because it’s just too serious and heavy and doesn’t feel right at all. So I have no position of interest with him at all, and the only feelings I could move his feelings with were guilt and pity, and I was so close to slipping into them that I started crying right there because I’m so mad at myself, and he says, ‘Don’t cry,’ and I say, ‘I’m not crying,’ the tears just flooding out of my eyes, ‘I’m just upset with myself, is all,’ and he says, ‘Well, I’ve got to go,’ and I know he does, and he did.”

  Empty Pockets

  The three rides before Jack Cutler bought the bicycle had all been different, but each one came down to the same thing. Each of the drivers wanted sex. The first approach was with photographs.

  “I’ve got some pictures in the glove box you might like,” this man said. “Take them out and tell me what you think.”

  The pictures were in a thick stack in the glove box. Lifting them out, Jack began looking.

  First, different naked women standing facing the camera. Then, naked women bending over, their asses to the camera, their legs spread. Next, naked women kissing half-dressed men. Then, naked women and naked men screwing. Then women with women. Then different naked men with erections facing the camera. Then men with men.