Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  At some point in the first half of January, Jack Stone began to suspect that, for Gerald Prince’s assistant, the word “actually” was a verbal tic. Some people avoided eye contact or fidgeted when they lied. Gerald Prince’s young man said “actually.”

  He has even tried sending e-mail on three occasions, but Gerald never answers, and Jack wonders if he has the right address.

  The one-sided game of phone tag and e-mail has gone on longer than Jack could have imagined such a thing could. A couple of times, he reached Gerald himself, and his old classmate always reassured him that things were happening, that the work was not just interesting, but interesting and compelling.

  One of the times they talked, Jack screwed up his courage enough to ask Gerald if there might be some kind of advance. Gerald advised him, in a voice that indicated Jack might have just told him a rather funny joke, not to put “the horse in front of the cart.” Jack didn’t have the nerve to correct him.

  He hasn’t left the house much, so as not to miss a return call from New York, although he has yet to ever receive one.

  He had thought the wheels would move with great speed once Gerald got the new, improved version of a book Gerald thought was promising even in the third person. He knows what he has written is good, and he knows that only human foibles keep delaying the inevitable.

  He knows it’s going to happen. He’s as sure of that as ever. He’d just like to know when. The pressure from several sources is getting more pronounced. Jack Stone thinks sometimes that he is the only one in the world who knows Lovelady is going to be successful. Two, if you can count the old man.

  “You have to believe,” he tells Gina, who has gotten quieter by the day as winter drags on. Jack wishes Gerald Prince would go ahead and finish the deal so she could have some peace of mind.

  Just give me until the end of the month, he tells the voice from the mortgage company, but the voice has no mercy and promises him that, if he doesn’t catch up on his payments by February 1, the house will be seized. He tells the voice he’ll be working again part time for UPS in February, just to get them off his back, but the bank wants its money now. He’s told Gina the same lie.

  We’ll just buy it back from them when I get the advance, he tells Gina, who stares at him and walks away without a word.

  The insurance company isn’t doing him any favors, either. Mike and Sandy are more than happy to make up any deficit he’s having in incoming calls. They phone constantly and seem to think that he personally can make an insurance company half a country away do what it promised to do by the end of the year but still has not: pay them.

  “We’ll get our money,” he tells them. “Don’t worry.”

  He knows they blame him, through Brady, for the house burning down. Because the insurance company says it still isn’t quite satisfied about the way it happened, Mike and Sandy are convinced that Brady torched his grandmother’s house, perhaps out of revenge over being kicked out. The fact that Brady moved to California afterward only feeds their paranoia. Where else was he going to live, Jack asked Mike during one of their more heated calls. With you?

  Brady himself sends a card every couple of weeks. He seems to be doing relatively well, if his nearly illegible notes are to be believed. He has food. He has shelter. He even has work of a sort. Well, Jack writes back, if you’re going to be an actor, might as well go where there’s some acting going on. When doing as the Romans, go to Rome.

  Brady says he’ll pay back the money he owes him. Jack, reading it, laughs and shakes his head.

  And poor Mack McLamb. He’s been positive all along that Cisco and the other, even riskier stocks in which he invested so much of his and his clients’ money would come storming back “any day.” He calls Jack at night to assure him. Jack tells him not to worry, that it will work out. But every time the stock falls more, Mack buys some more. Buy low, he says. Sell high. To sell high, Jack thinks, you’ve got to get high first.

  The last time Jack saw him was Sunday afternoon. The doorbell rang, and there was Mack, leaning against the side of their house, trying to focus. The fact that he had started drinking again might have been looked on by some as a positive sign, a return to normalcy.

  This was a different kind of drunk, though. Liquor had always made Mack friendlier, warmer. He was, beneath the back-slapping and bawdy jokes, something of an introvert. Milo always said it took a few bourbon-and-waters to get Mack’s personality up to ninety-eight-point-six.

  But on Sunday, as soon as he got in the car with him, even before Mack peeled rubber on the way out, Jack could almost smell the rancor.

  “The bastards,” Mack said. He said it three times before he got to the verb. “The bastards are going to can my ass.”

  He had invested a good part of a 76-year-old widow’s money in some of the same stocks in which the broken remnants of Jack’s nest egg resided, and her son was screaming bloody murder over the diminished state of her portfolio.

  “Like he gave a damn, or ever looked at where her money was going,” Mack spit out. “They were all happy enough when I was making her rich. It’s easier to fire me than to deal with a lawsuit.”

  Jack told him that there were other stock brokerage companies.

  “Yeah,” Mack said. “Maybe I can find one in fucking Timbuktu that won’t do a reference check. ‘And under what conditions did you leave your last job, Mr. McLamb? May we call your former employers?’”

  Jack sat with him in the parking lot of the Speakeasy Diner because Mack didn’t want to go inside.

  “Look,” Mack said. As he turned, Jack saw that his eyes were red and puffy. “I’m sorry about all this. Maybe it’s going to work out. But it just isn’t going to work out now. I’m sorry I have temporarily lost your money.”

  They talked about inconsequential things. Jack was drinking Coke and ice in a plastic cup while Mack killed two more bourbons. He offered to drive him back to Richmond, but Mack waved him off.

  Back at the house, Jack walked around to the driver’s side window and put his hand on Mack’s shoulder.

  Mack looked up, then reached over, so quickly he caught Jack by surprise, and put his right hand on Jack’s. His grip was surprisingly strong.

  “Hell, it’ll work out,” he said. “It’ll work out for you too. The book and everything. You and Gina are going to be just fine. You’ll outlast me and Sarah; I’d bet on that.”

  “Remember the Code,” Mack said, then drove off into the gathering darkness.

  “The Code,” Jack said to himself, shaking his head as he walked back up his driveway.

  Shannon goes in to make herself a pre-game soup and sandwich. Jack sighs and picks up the phone, reduced to calling Gerald Prince one more time. He reminds himself that Gerald is his ticket, that he is part of the plan, whether Gerald realizes it or not.

  This time, amazingly, the young man doesn’t say “actually” and actually transfers Jack.

  “Sorry to keep bugging you,” Jack says. It pains him to make such an uncalled-for apology. The assistant told him the last time he called, four days ago, that Mr. Prince would call him back that afternoon. “But I’m dying to hear what’s going on.”

  “Ah, well,” Gerald says, “I’ll tell you what.… I’m talking with some people on Friday. Let’s see: I’m going to be out of the office Monday. I’ll call you next Tuesday.”

  Jack asks when on Tuesday, and there’s a pause on the other end.

  “Oh, about 2 o’clock.”

  Jack tries to bring his old acquaintance up to date on the latest happenings around greater Speakeasy, but in less than half a minute, Gerald interrupts and says, actually, he has a call on the other line.

  The plan is for Jack to take Shannon to the gym at 4:30. Gina will come to the game straight from work, although she has had to stay late a couple of times in the past week.

  “Save your best stuff for the second quarter,” she tells Shannon, “just in case.”

  He drops his daughter off at the school. He
starts to yell “Good luck, sweetie,” but sees she’s already headed toward her friends and teammates, and away from him.

  He drives back into town. He has time for a quick meal before the game.

  He thinks about dropping by the doctors’ offices, grandly called the Speakeasy Medical Center, to say hi to Gina, but he’ll see her in an hour or so. He glances over and sees her car in the lot, which is still full, even this late. Jack isn’t sure Speakeasy has the best doctors in the world, but for most of the town’s citizens, they’re a better alternative than a trip into Richmond to see someone they don’t really know.

  On past Speakeasy Lightfoot’s marker and Milo’s one-story, second-generation, redbrick insurance agency—where Milo, too, is still at work—Jack parks beside the diner and goes inside.

  Pauline smiles from behind the counter and waves to him across the room as he grabs a booth. One of his former co-workers at UPS, a man with six kids who looks perpetually tired, is having a beer, and Jack talks to him for a few minutes about common acquaintances and when Jack might be coming back to work.

  Jack has a fish sandwich and some french fries, stopping twice to speak to other people he knows.

  One, a woman who was his mother’s friend since they were girls, tells him how much she misses Ellen, misting over a little when she says it. Jack says he misses her, too, and he realizes he still does.

  The other, Ray Bain, doesn’t have much to say, once Jack has inquired about Martha Sue and the children. On his way out, though, he asks Jack, with more seriousness than even Ray Bain normally exhibits, if everything’s OK.

  Jack assures him that everything is, or soon will be. Ray nods, frowns and tells him to say hi to Gina.

  The basketball game is about to begin when Jack returns to the gym. He guesses that there are 100 people there, mostly parents and the kids who live close enough to walk to the game.

  It’s the same gym where Jack and Bobby Witt and the rest performed more than 30 years earlier, although one wall was knocked out some years ago and extra bleachers added. It has the same smell, of liniment and floor polish and popcorn and sweat. Sitting there, he remembers something he hasn’t thought about since the night Bobby and Posey drowned.

  The night before, Gladden was leading Cane Creek by two points with less than two minutes to go. Bobby had been carrying them, as he almost always did. He already had 25 points. Jack Stone had eight rebounds, six assists and four points and had held his man to only two. The little gym, only four seats deep then, was packed. Hard-eyed farmers and recent dropouts stood lining the walls behind the baskets, the better to intimidate the visiting players.

  Coach Glenn had called a timeout and was giving them hell, as usual. Coach Glenn’s idea of inspiration was to yell louder, Bobby said.

  In the middle of his admonitions to keep their hands up, no dumb fouls, look for the open man, and other pearls of wisdom they’d known since grade school, he suddenly stopped talking.

  “Something funny, Witt?” he growled when he spoke again. He’d lowered his voice so much that Jack had to lean forward to hear what he said over the crowd. When he looked where the coach was glaring, there was Bobby, with the vestiges of a smile still on his face.

  Bobby was silent for only a second.

  “No, Coach,” he said. “I was just wondering if Jack’s going to finally get laid tomorrow night.”

  The coach gave a sound like he was choking on something. His face turned the same color as one of Speakeasy’s famous tomatoes, and before he had a chance to either scream at Bobby Witt or break out laughing, a couple of the other players beat him to it. By the time the horn sounded for play to resume, the referee had to come over and ask them if they intended to forfeit or play. Coach Glenn, wiping a tear from his eye, short of breath from as much merriment as anyone had ever seen him exhibit, said he reckoned they’d play, and they went out and whipped Cane Creek by nine points.

  Jack didn’t think it was all that funny himself. He could imagine everyone asking him, and Bobby, on Monday morning whether he’d “gotten any.” But Bobby could always make it right.

  “Hey,” he said, putting his arm around him as they walked off the court, “no offense. I just wanted to get the bug out of Coach’s ass.”

  With everything that happened after that, Jack has only now recovered this scrap of his past. It almost overwhelms him, thinking about how good they all had it, up to that point.

  He wants to take Shannon home and spend the rest of the night telling her how easy it is to screw your life up.

  Shannon is a natural. He can see that. She has her mother’s dark good looks, but she has some of him, too. She wants the ball, the way he wanted it in football if not basketball. She plays hard, unconcerned with anything outside the court. She already has that rarest of athletic gifts: the ability to perform better when the heat’s on.

  Some of the girls really aren’t that good, and Jack thinks his daughter would probably shine brighter with some better shooters and passers around her. She wants to go to a basketball camp in Charlottesville this summer, and Jack thinks she should.

  Shannon scores six of her team’s 10 first-quarter points, and the lead is 15-8 midway through the second period when Gina finally slips in beside Jack.

  “Sorry,” she says. “It seems like everybody in town picked today to have so-called medical emergencies, none of which seemed like emergencies to me, by the way. But what do I know?”

  Jack fills her in on what’s happened so far. He’s pleased to see that Shannon doesn’t look at them, doesn’t even know when her mother came in. She wants them to be there, he’s sure, but that’s secondary.

  He and Gina talk more when they’re watching Shannon play basketball than they do in their own bed. Maybe it’s because they’re distracted by their common focus. She doesn’t emit the irritation and panic he sometimes feels when they’re home alone.

  The bedroom is the worst. If she’s looked at the manuscript, he can’t tell it.

  It’s better, usually, for them both to just turn their opposite ways and go to sleep. He wants Gina, but he wants her to want him. Just one more reason, he thinks, to get everything straight about Lovelady. He’s thought about how it’ll be then, when it’s all in the bag, and he knows he’ll be capable of forgiveness.

  “How could you have been so sure?” she’ll ask him with wonder in her voice, and he’ll tell her what he’s been telling her all along: He just was.

  The game is really over by halftime, with Shannon’s team leading 22-10, and late in the third quarter, with the hosts up by 20, she’s replaced by one of the girls who usually only gets two minutes of garbage time at the end of the game. Shannon, who has more than half the team’s points, gets a big hand from the crowd, and especially Jack and Gina, whom she finally acknowledges with a smile. She high-fives the other girls on the bench and sits in the space that has been cleared for her, beside the coach, a young woman in her first year of teaching.

  “She’s really something,” Gina says.

  “She reminds me of you,” Jack tells her.

  “Uh-uh. I couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Not that there were the opportunities she has now. No, she got that from you.”

  “Call it a tie, then.”

  Gina looks at him and smiles, the first time she’s smiled at him in days, he realizes. But then she looks away, as if she’s remembering everything their daughter’s game made her forget.

  They suffer through the sloppy last quarter and then wait for Shannon to change.

  On the way home, Jack and Gina both tell her how well she played, which only embarrasses her.

  “I just got lucky,” she says.

  “No,” Jack tells her, “that was skill. We’re the ones who got lucky. We got you.”

  Shannon groans but reaches forward from the back seat and squeezes his shoulder.

  Back home, the three of them go their separate ways. Jack stays up long enough to see the highlights of every NHL, NBA and college
basketball game worth seeing, plus all the Super Bowl hype.

  When he finally comes to bed, Gina is asleep, turned on her side away from him. In the moonlight, he sees the still-sharp angles of her face, listens to the slight whistle of her breathing, and he wishes it were all settled.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He still enjoys watching the sport at which he once excelled. He even goes to a Redskins game every year or so.

  He sees Super Bowl Sunday, though, the same way a serious drinker sees New Year’s Eve. Amateur night. They’ll take up several rooms at Judge Edmonds’ house, with the talk and smoke so intense that you can hardly hear or see the big-screen televisions posted throughout. Every so often, someone will ask which ones the Ravens are, or inquire as to why the Colts aren’t in Baltimore any more, or remark with wonder on the girth of some player who’s been seen on ESPN every 10 minutes for the past two weeks.

  Still, there are obligations. Susan has given the party on and off over the years, according to her marital status at the time, and old friends are expected to attend. He tells Gina that he has been to some 20 of Susan’s Super Bowl parties in five different houses, and he doesn’t believe he’s actually seen an entire game in all those years combined. Sometimes, when it’s a match-up he particularly wants to see, he’ll tape it and watch it later.

  Football is merely the excuse for Susan’s parties. More attention is paid to the commercials than the game, and Jack has to admit that the former often are more entertaining.

  He and Gina arrive after 5, still more than an hour before the start of the game itself. They have to park two blocks away. Susan Edmonds has a lot of friends.

  They go inside the front door, half-open and festooned with purple and blue colors approximating those of the competing teams. The house is so packed that they don’t even make contact with the judge or Susan for the first 10 minutes. Soon, they are separated, and Jack is on his own. The judge’s place is smaller than he remembers from their long-ago make-out parties, when they would wander through a seemingly endless succession of rooms filled with the antiques and bric-a-brac of six generations of Edmondses. Still, it is a substantial house.