The Smack

by RICHARD LANGE

  “You’ve seen too many cartoons,” Beck said.

  He got up and grabbed a chair from the dining room and placed it in front of the TV.

  “Lesson one,” he said. “Sit here.”

  Petty humored him. Stood, walked over, and plopped in the chair.

  “You’re on stage,” Beck said. “The curtain’s rising; the play’s about to begin. The scene is you sitting alone, silently, for three minutes. Go.”

  “What do I do?” Petty said.

  “Whatever you want,” Beck said.

  “I don’t want to do anything.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Beck sat on the couch and stared at Petty. Petty shifted on the chair, uncomfortable under his gaze. The only time he’d been on stage before was as a kid, in a church Christmas pageant, when he’d played a shepherd and wore a bedsheet for a robe. He looked past Beck to the photo on the wall and concentrated on that. Beck and his wife. Melanie? Mary? He drank some beer. He crossed his legs. His stomach gurgled. His ears rang. That had to be three minutes. He glanced at his watch.

  “Curtain,” Beck said.

  Petty stood quickly. “So I was supposed to learn something from that?” he said.

  “Now you watch me,” Beck said.

  Petty took Beck’s place on the couch, and Beck sat in the chair, back straight, hands on his knees. He stared past Petty with a blank look on his face. Gradually his expression changed, and it seemed to Petty that he was remembering something. Petty glanced over his shoulder to see what he was focused on. Maybe it was the photo, and he was thinking of better days. A sad smile came to his lips, and his chest rose and fell, a single deep breath, a sigh. The smile faded, and slowly, slowly, he bent forward, rested his forearms on his thighs, and stared at the floor. Then slowly, slowly, he sat up. His face was blank again, but now tears filled his eyes.

  Petty blinked back tears of his own. He marveled at this as he would have marveled at a magic trick.

  Beck dropped his head for a few seconds and came up smiling his real smile. “Stanislavsky’s first rule,” he said. “When you’re on stage, you’ve always got to be acting, either inwardly or outwardly. If you’re good, even if you’re just sitting there, saying nothing, the audience’ll be affected.”

  “That’s some crazy shit,” Petty said.

  “It can make you crazy, that’s for sure.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  Beck waved off the question. “What’s important is what you were thinking about while you were watching,” he said.

  Petty gestured to a shelf full of DVDs. “Do you have anything you were in?”

  “They’re all crap,” Beck said.

  “Let’s watch one.”

  “That’s not why I asked you here.”

  “I know, but come on,” Petty said.

  Beck looked at him sideways. “You’re trying to get me to break out the good booze, aren’t you?” he said. He walked into the kitchen and came back with a chilled bottle of Absolut and two glasses.

  The disk he put in was a movie from the nineties, something called Hollywood & Vice, two cops chasing a serial killer. “Shot for a buck and a half in beautiful downtown Toronto,” Beck said. He played the older cop, Sergeant Blackburn, the married one, the good dad, the by-the-book dude always bickering with his partner, a nut job who wrecked cars and roughed up suspects. Petty had seen the same story a hundred times before, but Beck was pretty good in it.

  In the first scene, he and his partner were about to bust up a bank robbery. It looked to be a suicide mission, and before they charged in, Beck as Blackburn slipped away to call his wife from a pay phone. You thought he was going to say something hokey to her like “I love you,” but instead he asked normal questions like “What’s for dinner?” and “What are the kids doing?” and you realized, mainly through Beck’s acting, that what he really wanted was just to hear his wife’s voice for what might be the last time.

  The scene hooked Petty, and he would have paid more attention to the rest of the movie if Beck hadn’t kept talking over it, pointing out who was an asshole and who was cool and telling a long story about an explosion going off at the wrong time and nearly killing an extra. After a scene in which Blackburn was forced to relinquish his badge and gun to his boss, Beck pressed Pause, went to a bookshelf, and came back with the actual badge and prop gun from the film.

  “I took these when we wrapped,” he said. “They owed me for making me use a Porta-Potty as a dressing room.”

  He settled down after that and stopped cracking jokes. By the time the movie ended he was asleep in the recliner, glass of vodka still in his hand. Petty decided not to wake him. He got up from the couch as quietly as he could and crept toward the front door. As he touched the knob, Beck let out a loud snore that froze him in his tracks. He waited for a second snore and a third before slipping outside.

  The big house was still lit like a shrine. Petty walked past it and down to the gate, where he used his phone to find out where he was and call a cab. A mist had settled over the road, blurring the streetlights and dampening the pavement. Something moved in the distance. Petty shook off the vodka and squinted. Two spectral coyotes were headed right toward him, trotting side by side down the middle of the road. “Hey!” he shouted, trying to frighten them away, but they kept coming. Eyes. Teeth. Claws.

  He opened the gate and stood behind it. The coyotes padded silently past, one of them shooting him a hateful yellow glare. “Git!” Petty shouted. The animal smirked and continued on its way. Petty stayed behind the gate until the taxi drove up and honked its horn.

  10

  IT’S ROWAN,” PETTY SAID.

  His mom had picked up the phone in the middle of her ancient answering machine’s outgoing message and was now barking “Hello? Hello? Hello?” while her instructions to “leave your name and number” played in the background. She’d had a hip replaced a month ago and was still using a cane, which slowed her down some. When the message ended and the beep came, she shouted once more: “Hello!”

  “It’s Rowan,” Petty said again.

  “You scared me.”

  “How?”

  “I must have dozed off.”

  Petty was surprised to hear this. Before the surgery, Joanne never took naps, was constantly out and about. Church stuff mostly. She belonged to a nondenominational congregation with a gay pastor. The church ran a homeless shelter, and Joanne was in charge of collecting food for it, going from supermarket to supermarket, restaurant to restaurant, asking for donations. If it wasn’t the homeless, it was illegal immigrants or runaway teens or mothers in prison. She’d joined the church shortly after Sam moved out and had been devoting herself full-time to doing good since retiring three years ago. Petty couldn’t help but suspect that someone somewhere down the line was making money off her selflessness, but hey—whatever made her happy.

  Because she’d been through a lot. When she was growing up, her dad ran the house like it was a boot camp, and her mom let him. Lots of yelling, lots of hitting. Joanne was in secretarial school in Kansas City when she met Petty’s dad at a bowling alley bar. He was on a hot streak, in the midst of a cross-country ramble on which his mission was to take down the biggest home game in every city he stopped in.

  “I asked him if he was going to San Francisco” was how Joanne’s story went. “It was 1972, and I really, really wanted to see San Francisco. He said, ‘You want to go to San Francisco, I’m going to San Francisco,’ and when he left town, I left with him.”

  They never made it to the West Coast. Petty’s dad’s luck ran out in Denver, where they ended up stuck for three months, living in a leaky yurt on a commune. This was the first in a string of broken promises, a string that culminated years later with Petty’s dad abandoning Joanne and eight-year-old Rowan in Tampa. Joanne’s early lessons in discipline kicked right in. Within a week she’d rented an apartment for the two of them, found a job at a real estate office, and arranged for a neighbor to watch
Petty after school. Then, seemingly without a moment’s hesitation to get her bearings or a single spasm of self-pity, she set about giving Petty the stable home life he’d never had before.

  A year passed, two, and they settled comfortably into a routine that consisted of work, school, and weekends at the beach. Even back then, though, Petty could read people, and when he looked at Joanne, he saw a woman holding her breath. She was nice looking, kept herself up, and men were always asking her to dinner or drinks, but she turned them all down, and Petty knew it was because she secretly hoped his dad would reappear.

  Instead, five years after he split, she got a call informing her he’d been found dead in a Saint Louis motel room. Murdered, the cop said. Stabbed to death over a two-hundred-dollar gambling debt. Petty couldn’t say what his mom learned from this disappointment, but he knew what he took away from it: that’s what you get for hoping.

  And then poor Joanne got screwed all over again, saw another dream go up in smoke, when Petty ended up being no better than his old man, blood winning out in spite of all her efforts to put him on a different path. So if it did her heart good to pass out ham sandwiches and tube socks to hobos, that was okay with him. She deserved whatever peace she could find.

  “I’m in L.A. for a couple of days, and I want to get in touch with Sam,” he said to her now on the phone.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Oh what?”

  “I don’t know if she’ll be up for that.”

  “Why not?”

  “She never has much nice to say about you.”

  “She talks about me?”

  “No. But when she does, it’s not nice.”

  Petty and Joanne still butted heads on occasion, especially when he detected judgment in her voice. But he didn’t want to spar with her today. Not while he was sitting by a swank hotel pool in the dead of winter, watching a woman he was hot for float tits-up in the shallow end.

  “Mom, just give me her number,” he said.

  “She might not want me to,” Joanne said.

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “She’s my daughter. She’s gonna have to endure a call from me whether she likes it or not.”

  “You really should,” Joanne said. “You should listen to yourself sometime.”

  She set the landline down to search for her cell phone. Petty could hear music playing on her end. Joni Mitchell. She loved Joni Mitchell. The sun sparkling on the water made him blink. He adjusted his chair so that he was lying flat on his back. A small plane passed overheard, dragging a banner behind it, an ad for an energy drink.

  “How have you been?” he said to Joanne after she’d given him Sam’s number.

  “Now my knee hurts, too,” she said.

  “So go to the doctor. And take something stronger than herbal supplements. Those things are complete bullshit.”

  “You know everything, don’t you?”

  “I just don’t want to have to worry about you,” Petty said. Tinafey waved at him. He waved back.

  “How are you doing?” Joanne said.

  “I’m fine. Everything’s great.”

  “Are you gambling?”

  “I’m working on a project.”

  “A project. I see. And what is it you do for a living these days?”

  “Come on, Ma.”

  “Ha!” Joanne said. “Your dad could never answer that question, either.”

  Tinafey wanted pizza for lunch, so they walked to the mall’s food court. Petty told her he had business to take care of and put her on a bus for a two-hour tour of movie stars’ homes. His original plan for the afternoon had been to head back to East L.A. to do more reconnaissance on Tony. Instead he dialed Sam’s number. He felt bad about fibbing to Tinafey, but the messiness between him and Sam was nothing she needed to be involved in. His call went to voice mail, but a few minutes later his phone rang.

  “Who’s this?” Sam said when Petty answered.

  “Your dad,” Petty said.

  “Who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “I heard you the first time. What do you want?”

  “I’m in L.A. Let’s get together.”

  “When?”

  “Today. Right now, this evening, whenever.”

  “I’m busy today.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “I’m busy tomorrow, too.”

  Petty smiled to himself as he stared out at the Hollywood sign from the window of his and Tinafey’s room. Did this kid think she actually stood a chance against him?

  “It’d mean a lot to me to see you, even if it’s just for a few minutes,” he said.

  “Why?” Sam said.

  “It’s been seven years. We let it go too long. I let it go too long.”

  “I’m happy with the way things are. I don’t want any…confusion.”

  “Confusion?”

  “I’m trying to keep my life simple.”

  “That’s great. That’s smart. Simple is good. But all I’m asking for is ten minutes, a cup of coffee. We don’t even have to talk. I just want to see you.”

  Sam paused, thinking this over. Petty smiled to himself again. The hook was set.

  “I don’t know why,” Sam said. “After all this time.”

  “You said it right there,” Petty replied. “Time. The years are starting to fly by. You remember about my dad, right, what happened to him?”

  “How he died and all that, when you were a kid?”

  “I hadn’t talked to him for five years, and then, all of a sudden, he was gone. The guy was a bastard, but these last few years, you know what I find myself thinking about when I wake up in the middle of the night?”

  “What?” Sam said.

  “I find myself thinking, after all this time, that I wished I’d seen him one more time before he died,” Petty said.

  This wasn’t true—he hated the man as much as he ever had—but when it came to closing, you had to be ruthless. He picked out a car on the freeway below, watched it climb toward the Cahuenga Pass.

  “Jesus. Listen to you,” Sam said.

  “I’m serious,” Petty said. “Regret, I guess you’d call it, right?”

  “You’re fucking shameless.”

  Echo Park was right off Sunset Boulevard around twenty minutes from the hotel. Its centerpiece was a small man-made lake that reflected the tall palm trees that surrounded it and the blank blue sky overhead. The spray from a fountain in the middle of the lake cooled the Mexican families circling in rented pedal boats.

  Petty found the statue of the woman at the edge of the water where Sam had said to meet her, but Sam was nowhere in sight. A bench next to the statue looked out toward the skyscrapers of downtown. Petty sat there for a second, then stood again, his antsiness getting the best of him. He walked to the water and stared at the ducks muttering in the reeds. A woman with butterfly tattoos and pink hair pushed a stroller past. Her kid flung a pacifier that bounced to a stop between Petty’s feet. He picked it up and handed it to the woman. She took it without acknowledgment, kept talking on her phone.

  A tall girl in a knee-length skirt, a T-shirt, and a green army fatigue jacket appeared on the path that circled the lake. Sam. There was no mistaking her long, elegant neck and willowy frame, both inherited from her mother. Petty was shocked, though, at how pale she was. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her lips were dry and cracked. He forced a smile as she approached. “It’s you,” he said.

  “You sure about that?” Sam said.

  They didn’t hug. Sam pulled the black knit cap she wore lower over her greasy blond hair and rewrapped the scarf around her neck like she was hiding from someone.

  “What do you really want?” she said. “Grandma isn’t sick, is she?”

  “I really wanted to see how you’re doing,” Petty said.

  “I’m doing fine,” Sam said.

  “Great, so we’re good for another seven years,” Petty said. The joke fell flat. “I
s there a place to get coffee around here?”

  “There are ten places to get coffee around here,” Sam said.

  “I could use some. How about you?”

  Sam hesitated. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “But don’t try to daddy me.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Petty said.

  “You’re right, you don’t,” Sam said. “What was I thinking?”

  They walked to a bookstore that had a café in back. It was full of kids who were probably living off their parents while playing in bands or studying art history. Part hippie, part punk—Petty couldn’t figure it out. He ordered a coffee and persuaded Sam to let him pay for her green tea and vegan cookie. They sat at a table on the patio next to a bearded guy who alternated between staring into space and jabbing at the keys of his laptop.

  Sam took off her jacket. The word veritas was tattooed on the inner biceps of her right arm.

  “What’s that?” Petty asked her.

  “‘Truth,’ in Latin,” she replied.

  She’d been barely a teenager when he’d last visited her at Joanne’s, awkward and excitable, one hand hiding the braces on her teeth, the other flailing like a wounded bird as she laid into him for asking how her grades were. It pained him to see her as she was now. Her fingers trembled when she raised her cup to her mouth, and her pretty blue eyes were as dull as a dead girl’s. Petty knew a dope fiend when he saw one, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her what she was strung out on, wasn’t sure he had the right.

  “You like country?” he said instead, pointing at the photo of Willie Nelson on her shirt.

  Sam pulled the shirt away from her torso and looked down at it like she was seeing it for the first time. “It was in the dollar bin at the thrift store,” she said.

  The dollar bin. Jesus Christ.

  “Your grandma says you’re studying to be a teacher,” Petty said.

  “Trying to,” Sam said. “My scholarship—”

  “Scholarship?” Petty said.

  Sam shrugged. “I’m a good student,” she said. “I’ve always been a good student.”

  “You didn’t inherit that from me,” Petty said with a little laugh.