“Problem?”
He was standing on his neatly mowed lawn, in shorts and a T-shirt, holding a glass. He wore a floppy canvas fishing cap. He was five-foot-nine, heavyset at two hundred and seventy pounds, I’d say. Pale blue eyes and ruddy cheeks. Think the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island, but with more style.
“Damn thing keeps dying,” I said.
“Let me take a look.”
When he passed by me, I smelled vodka from his glass. He seemed like an all right kind of guy. He took one look at my lawn mower, fiddled with the engine a bit, stood up and said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He was holding something small and cylindrical in his hand. “Fried spark plug. When’s the last time you changed it?”
“Never have,” I told him. “Never thought I needed to.”
“You change the spark plugs in your car, don’t you?”
“My mechanic does that every six months.”
“You gotta do it once a year with mowers. How long have you had this one?”
“Not sure,” I said, and I really didn’t know. I think we bought it when Tina and I got the house. “Three years.”
“Well, there you go. I just might have the spark plug to fit the bill. I’ll be back in a sec.” He walked over to his garage door, opened it, and went inside. I stood next to my dead lawn mower like an idiot. He came back, smiling, drinking from his glass. He placed the new spark plug in my lawn mower and said, “Okay, son, give her a whirl.”
No one had called me “son” in a long time, except for one of the senior partners in the first firm I worked for. I felt a pang of nostalgia, and an ache for my first major fuck-up. My own father had never called me “son.” It was usually “kid” or “brat.”
I hit the button, and the mower started, and it purred.
“Damn,” I said.
“Good as new,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, over the purring engine. I held out my hand. “Philip Lansdale.”
He shook my hand. He had a very tight grip. “Bryan Vaughn.”
I mowed my front yard and Bryan Vaughn went back to his porch; he sat in a rocking chair, fresh glass in hand, and watched nothing—maybe the clouds in the sky and the occasional passing airplane. I didn’t do a good job with the lawn, at least not as good as Vaughn kept his, or many of the other neighborhood lawns.
When I was a kid, I never cared for the task. The smell of grass often made my nose itch, and sometimes I’d sneeze. Tina used to do this chore, when I was working during the day; she said she loved yard work. She could have it back as far as I was concerned.
When I was done, and I put the mower away in the garage, Bryan Vaughn called out, “How’d she do for you, kid?”
Kid. “Great,” I replied. “Thanks again.”
“Hey, no problem.”
I hesitated and said, “How about a beer?”
“In town, or here?”
“Well, here, my children are inside.”
“Sure,” he said, “why the hell not? I like beer just like any other guy.”
And vodka. But I hadn’t started to touch the hard booze yet—not yet, not until later.
Bryan came over, and I got out the good stuff, Samuel Adams. I thought it would be rude to give a man who’d given me a new spark plug a Budweiser. I had some white plastic lawn chairs I placed out front, and we sat down with our beers. His glass of vodka was still half full, which he sipped at from time to time, chasing it down with beer.
“My lawn looks like crap,” I finally said.
“Nah,” he said. “It’s okay.”
“Yours is so neat and perfect. How do you do it?”
“There’s this enterprising young fellow—eleven years old—comes around every Saturday. I pay him ten bucks. He goes from house to house. Bet the kid clears a good one, two hundred a weekend. I like kids who know how to work and make a buck. That kid’ll go far.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. “Send him over here next time.”
He laughed.
“What’s ten bucks,” I said, “between a nice lawn and a crappy one.”
“It’s not like anyone looks at lawns around here,” he said.
I was looking, all of the sudden.
“People don’t look at much anymore,” he went on. “They don’t see what’s in front of them. They don’t see the people around them. They don’t pay attention. Always busy, going here, there. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess so.” I knew what he meant.
“It’s sad. But hell, it’s the way it is, right?”
“Right.”
We opened two more beers.
My daughter, Jessica, came out, crying. Matthew wouldn’t let her watch the cartoon she wanted to watch.
“Matthew!” I yelled. “It’s your sister’s hour! Let her watch her show!”
I sent her back in. She seemed happy now.
“Sweet little girl,” Bryan Vaughn said.
“Yeah. She is. How long have you lived on this block?”
“Hell,” he said. “Fifteen years, I’d say.”
“And we’ve never met before,” I said, like it was a surprise. We both knew it wasn’t.
“I’ve met your wife, Tina, any number of times. Back when she was around more. Now she’s always gone, and you’re here.″
“She’s the full-time worker now,” I said, feeling some shame admitting that. He didn’t know that I had plenty of cash reserve from the investments; my statement probably sounded like I was lazy and my poor wife had to go out and earn the bacon. But his face didn’t register any opinion or disapproval; it didn’t register anything. And why should I care what he thought, anyway? I added, “I’m between jobs.”
“Good to take a break now and then. I gather you used to be busy, you were always coming and going in such a rush.”
I nodded.
He said, “What did you do before?”
“I was a lawyer.”
“Oh! Oh my!” He laughed and clutched his chest. “There was a time when I used to wanna shoot every lawyer in town.”
“Well don’t shoot me, I’m a lawyer in the past tense,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I was a cop,” he said, drinking, looking at the sky. “Cop for thirty years. Detective in vice when I retired. But I worked narcotics and homicide. Didn’t like corpses, killers, and drug dealers; so I stuck with pimps, prostitutes, and kiddy-porn pushers. Now I hear you get it all over the Internet, never have to leave your house. As for lawyers—damn slimy cheap lawyers and public defenders always getting their clients off on bullcrap: warrant not worded properly, rights weren’t read, violation of—what was it? How did they say it? ‘Procedural due process.’ But hell, that’s all in the past now. Lawyers gotta make money like anyone else. What kind of criminal did you defend?”
“I wasn’t that kind of lawyer,” I said. “Civil litigation.” I didn’t bother to tell him that I started off in the public defender’s office and defended every kind of petty criminal and thug you could imagine.
“You mean lawsuits?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Bullshit lawsuits?” he said.
“Sometimes they’re bullshit,” I said, “sometimes they’re sincere.”
He smiled. “Well, I won’t hold it against you. You seem like a good person.”
I wondered if I was a good person. I was then, at any rate. Tina’s car pulled into the driveway.
“Little lady’s home,” Bryan said.
“Yeah,” I said. She was early. I had a bad thought that maybe she got fired. We’d be two unemployed people, staying home all day. That didn’t sound too bad. I realized I hadn’t started dinner, and at this point I think I was too buzzed. Bryan and I were on the second six-pack of Samuel Adams and the alcohol was already starting to affect me.
“Boys,” Tina said, looking at us with a tsk-tsk quietly on her lips.
“Mrs. Lansdale,” Bryan nodded. “How’ve you been?”
“Busy busy,�
� she said. “What are you boys up to?”
He said, “Drinking beers and shooting baloney like manly men do.”
“I see.”
“You’re home early,” I said.
“Can’t I come home early once in a while?” Tina said. “I don’t want to keep a routine. I’ll be too predictable. You’ll start bringing women around if you think I’ll always come back at the same time.”
“I didn’t start dinner,” I said sheepishly. “Maybe we could go out. Taco Bell. Jack in the Box.”
“Burger King,” she said. “You know the kids’ll want Burger King.”
She went inside.
“My wife works too,” Bryan said. “Ellen. You probably haven’t met her.”
“No.”
“You will. She works down at the library. Downtown. Loves books. She doesn’t need to work, my pension does us fine. But she loves the library, and she loves books.”
“I made money off some investments,” I blurted out. I guess I wanted him to know that Tina wasn’t bringing home all the bread and butter.
“Good to have securities,” was his reply to that.
“Well,” I said, “it won’t always be there.”
“If I was smart, when I was your age, I would’ve invested in computers. Computers were a joke twenty years ago. Thirty even. Now look, they run the world.”
I didn’t tell him my investments had been on World Wide Web companies, back when people thought those were a joke as well.
Tina came out with the children—Jessica in her arms, Matthew next to her. “Off to Burger King,” she said. “What’s your order?”
“The usual,” I said.
“The usual it is,” she said.
She piled herself and the kids into her car and they drove off.
“Nice to have a family,” Bryan Vaughn said, nodding, looking at the sky, drinking his beer.
“You have any children?” I asked.
“I did. Two daughters.” He shook his head. “The oldest, Donna, she committed suicide at thirteen. Over a boy who dumped her. Slit her wrists and neck, I found her that night in the tub, same day I found two dead children in a car while on the job.” He said this so calmly, like he was reading a report of someone else’s life. “That was the day I quit homicide,” he added. “My youngest, Rachel, she left home at nineteen, and I haven’t heard from her since. That was ten years ago. She hates me and I don’t know why. Something about being a cop. A lot of anger in that girl. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead, she’ll never contact me or her mother, this I know, so I figure …” He didn’t finish. His voice had cracked.
I felt weird. I couldn’t imagine a future without Matthew and Jessica. “I’m sorry.”
“Hell, I’ve gotten over it,” he said. I didn’t believe him.
“Ellen hasn’t. That’s why she likes books so much. Books are always the same. They’re always with you. Those are her words.″
5
I liked Bryan Vaughn, and he seemed to like me as well, and, soon enough, we became good friends. Basically, all we did was sit around at his place or mine, drinking and talking. He had a lot of great stories about the police force, many of which turned out to be violent and sad.
I soon became friends with David Larson too. He lived in the house next to Bryan’s. David taught political science part-time at San Diego State University. He would get home around one in the afternoon, take a nap, and join Bryan and me at around three.
It got to be that each morning I’d get up and look forward to getting drunk with my newfound friends. I took Matthew to school, Jessica always found something to entertain herself with, or she’d nap, or she’d just play on the grass while we men lounged about. I started to become lax in my house duties, but Tina didn’t seem to notice or didn’t mention it. She was too caught up, now, in the world of full-time work.
On weekends, the three of us would sometimes get together for the rap-and-drink session, but this was usually short. Bryan’s wife was home, and she liked him to pay attention to her. David didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend; he liked to read books.
On Saturdays, of course, there was baseball.
I told Bryan that I thought David was gay. “He’s never mentioned any women in his past,” Bryan said. “And he certainly doesn’t have any women now. I hear these college professors always get laid by the young girls in their classes. Father-figure or authority-figure thing. Rachel ran away with a forty-year-old man, you know.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“She did,” he said.
“Maybe he is screwing some students, but keeps a lid on it,” Bryan said. “That sort of thing can get you fired, and he doesn’t have tenure.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t think he’s gay,” Bryan said.
“Would it matter if he was?”
“I guess not,” he said.
I knew that David didn’t make enough as a part-time professor to live in a two-story suburban home. He told us, one day, that the house belonged to his mother, and when she died, he inherited it. There was no doubt about David’s sexual orientation the day we all saw Cassandra Payne come home in a rush.
She was driving her Taurus down the street fast, and tore into the driveway of her house, tires screeching. Bryan, David, and I were on my porch, and we stopped talking at once. She hurried out of her car, sunglasses on, wearing tight blue jeans and a halter. She opened her front door and left it ajar.
Bryan raised his eyebrows and said, “Some people lead such hasty lives.”
David twitched in his chair.
Several minutes later, she came back out, this time wearing a short gray skirt and fumbling with the buttons of a pale blue blouse. I caught a glimpse of a dark bra, and her white skin, as she was trying to button the blouse, tuck it in the skirt, and get back into the car.
This sight, needless to say, had an erotic effect: the skin, the clothes, the bare legs, the high heels clacking on the cement of the driveway.
She drove away as fast as she arrived.
“She’s going to get a ticket,” Bryan said.
“She’s too gorgeous to get a ticket,” David said.
“Yeah,” Bryan said. “One glance at her, a traffic cop’ll tear the ticket up.”
“Who is she?” I said.
“You don’t know your own neighbors?” David said, like he was amused. He also seemed suddenly quite nervous.
Bryan laughed. “Sometimes, I bet, Philip doesn’t even know his own last name.”
I had to think about that one. He was kidding, of course, but it struck a sensitive chord in me. I tried not to let it show.
David said, “Her name is Cassandra Payne. And that’s all I know about her,” he added quickly. “I don’t even know her husband’s first name.”
“Lawrence,” said Bryan.
“I’ve seen her once or twice,” I admitted. “But not the husband.”
“He keeps odd hours,” Bryan said. “Out of town a lot. England, I think.”
“England,” I said.
“They’re Brits, both of them. Great accents, just like Roger Moore or something.”
“David Niven,” said David.
“I’ve talked briefly with both of them,” Bryan said, “but I don’t know squat about their lives.”
“But she’s a looker,” said David.
“You got that right,” said Bryan, smiling wide. “Did you get a load of those legs?″
“Yeah,” I said.
“Not much in the tit department, but who cares?”
“And that ass,” David said.
“I didn’t get a glimpse of her ass,” Bryan said. He was lying.
“She has a nice ass.”
“That I wouldn’t doubt.”
“Well,” David said, like he knew, “she does.”
“How old do you think she is?” I asked. “Thirty?”
“I’d say a few years younger,” Bryan said.
“How can you tell?” asked Dav
id.
Bryan said, “I used to be a cop. I can tell these things. And she likes older men, because Lawrence Payne is at least fifty.”
“How long have they been married?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Bryan said. “But they’ve lived here about two years.”
“I never noticed them move in,” I said.
“Of course you didn’t,” Bryan said.
“I did,” David said, looking at his beer.
Tina came home from work two hours later than usual. She’d called and said she would, told me she was going out to have a few drinks with some of the girls who worked at the Social Security office. I ordered pizza—the kids were excited about that. We left two slices for Tina, but when she came home, she said she’d had some food from the happy hour platter. She was also tipsy and started to act very affectionate, kissing me all over my face.
“You shouldn’t drink and drive like that,” I told her.
“Look who’s talking,” she said, touching the beer bottle I was holding. Then she grabbed it, and took a swig.
“I don’t drink and drive,” I told her.
“You’ve been drinking a lot lately.”
“You’ve been spying on me,” I laughed.
“I notice more things than you think, baby,” she said, kissing me on the lips.
“You taste like tequila.”
“Margaritas.”
“How many’d you have?”
“You’re sounding like a lawyer again,” she said. “Three, counselor.”
“With salt?”
“No.”
“On the rocks?”
“Blended.”
I asked, “So what did you and the girls talk about as you sat in some bar and drank margaritas?”
“I was the only one drinking margaritas,” said Tina. “We started talking about work. Then we talked about men.”
“Were there men in the bar?”
“Oh yes.”
“Anyone try to pick you up?”
“I think I got a few looks.”
“Smart men.”
“I’m horny,” she said.
She was reaching into my cut-off shorts. I touched her short blond hair, the tanned skin of her shoulders.
“Not in front of the kids!” I pleaded.
We went to the bedroom. It was a quick copulation. I was thinking about the sexy British woman in the short skirt and the screeching tires. I don’t know what Tina was thinking about. She had her eyes closed and was louder than usual. The proper description would be vocally appreciative. I don’t remember her ever having more than one or two drinks at a time. I suspected she’d had more than three margaritas tonight.
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