Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “I expected that.”

  “I told the people in Boston about you wanting to retire. They asked me if there was a way to convince you it’d be better you didn’t. I guess this is it.”

  The traces of fatigue in Louise’s face sharpened noticeably and spread to her voice. “I guess it is,” she said with resignation. She reached behind her and dropped a can of Maxwell House into her basket.

  “I got a coupon for it,” Rita said quickly. Her fingers flew. “Here.”

  They moved down the aisle, Rita with an amble, rocking from side to side. They spotted Mario at the cookie shelves. He saw them coming and, with a swing of his boyish hips, tossed up a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers.

  “You want, you can borrow him sometime,” Rita said.

  Louise said, “Who knows, maybe I will.”

  • • •

  “Hold my hand,” Daisy Shea shouted to his wife. “Don’t lose me.” They were in the maw of the crowd storming the stadium for seats at the fireworks. Edith grabbed his wrist. Their two younger children had accompanied them but, armed with pocket money from Edith, had soon bounded off to an ice-cream truck with their friends. An hour remained until sunset, but the bleachers were filling fast. Families with folding chairs and blankets were camping on the grass girding the field, where Daisy had once made a spectacular run before a crowd nearly as large. His heart leaped as he remembered every detail, which made him shiver.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said as they mounted the concrete steps of the bleachers. The higher seats were choice and taken, and they contented themselves with lower ones on an aisle, though the rubbish beneath the seats disturbed Edith. Daisy’s heart continued to race, and the heat of cherished memories raised his color. Edith gave him a quick look.

  “Did you take your pill?”

  “I took it,” he said, stretching his neck, seeking familiar faces in the swarm. Policemen roamed the fringes, the young ones stiff-backed and martial, the others shapeless in their soggy shirts. The air was heated and humid. He spotted a vendor setting up a food cart, laying out hot-dog rolls, and he prodded Edith. “You want something to eat?”

  “We just had supper,” she reminded him sharply.

  He was restless. He wanted the darkness to descend immediately, fireworks to spray the sky. Suddenly he struck Edith’s knee and pointed straight out. “There’s Barney Cole. He’s with Arnold Ackerman, see him?” As she strained her eyes, Daisy jumped up.

  “Barney!”

  “Christ, Daisy, he’s clear across the field. He couldn’t hear you in a hundred years.” She pulled him down, but he bounced back up. “Stay in your seat,” she said with another pull.

  “I can’t.”

  He was up and away, sliding on one foot, dropping abruptly onto the grass, where he squirmed into a crowd that carried him to the smell of boiled hot dogs, but the queue was too long, too many young healthy fathers carrying children on their shoulders. Veering away, he cut through the ranks of lolling youths and a flurry of children waving toy American flags. Real ones blazoned the distant end of the stadium. He scanned the opposing bleachers but could no longer see Barney.

  Mosquitoes bit him. He slapped away several and pushed toward another vendor, this one hawking popcorn, but again the line was too long and, he noticed, too rowdy. Youths were shoving one another while off to one side a middle-aged bull of a man in a khaki shirt waited for one of them to wave a red flag in his face.

  “Daisy!”

  He spun around, uncertain where the voice came from, and nearly stepped on the shapely foot of an Hispanic girl. His eyes darted randomly, then lit on a man and a woman standing with video equipment next to a panel truck. The man waved, and Daisy forged ahead. The fellow was a long-ago drinking buddy named Ed. They had grown up together in the project. Ed had gone to work for the city and now was with the local cable channel.

  Daisy embraced him. “How’d you spot me?”

  Ed pushed him away. “I see a white-haired old drunk stumbling around, I figure it’s Daisy Shea.”

  “I’m not drunk, Ed. I’m ill.”

  Ed laughed. “You mean you got the shakes?”

  “I’m dying.”

  “No kidding.” Ed’s eyes were minnows in his big face. “You let me know when, maybe we can get it on camera.”

  The woman said, “You really dying?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Ed said, “This is my tootsie.”

  The woman, young and plain, had on a white dress that brought to mind the purity of an Easter lily. Daisy, bathing her with his stare, suddenly stroked her head. “I wish I could be around to watch you grow up.”

  “Shit,” said Ed with disgust. “I got a kidney stone, two raw ulcers, and a heart murmur. You’ll see me buried!”

  “You were always a braggart,” Daisy murmured.

  Mosquitoes got to him again. He slapped an arm, aware of the shadows lengthening on the field, his ghost galloping through them for a touchdown, but the roar he heard was not for him. A fight had broken out near the popcorn vendor. The big man in khaki was beating a youth senseless while warding off his friends. The woman reached down for the video camera, but then changed her mind. Ed nudged her.

  “Tell him what your father does.”

  “He’s a funeral director,” she said, rising on her toes to watch the ruckus, which two policemen were now trying to break up. Daisy gazed at her with respect.

  “When they put your hands together, do they put the right over the left or vice versa? I’m concerned because I’ve got a deformed finger on the right. I broke it playing football.”

  “One lucky game you got into,” Ed said. “Rest of the time you were a bench potato.”

  The police officers swung their clubs. The man in khaki took a glancing blow on the head from the first officer and a solid one at the base of the skull from the other. The woman again contemplated the camera, but it was all over, the first violence of the evening.

  • • •

  Louise Baker espied Henry Witlo moments after she and her mother entered the stadium. The shock of yellow hair was immediately recognizable. His gait, however, was different, which at first she attributed to the spin of the crowd but then to the fact that he was favoring an arm. Also, though his clothes were clean, he looked unwashed and unkempt. The improbable woman at his side was fiftyish, maybe even sixty, with cinnamon hair scraped back as if by a wire brush and with lipstick fastened to her face like a holiday decoration dug out of the attic. Her dress was dowdy and a size too large.

  Then they vanished.

  But Louise could not get them out of her mind. She unfolded lightweight aluminum chairs and placed them on the grass. Her mother was glad to sit down but grew uncomfortable when a lively Hispanic family spread a blanket nearby. The smaller children waved little flags. With a prod, her mother whispered, “That’s not their flag.”

  “Yes, it is, Mama.” Mrs. Leone, unconvinced, settled in warily, opened a small bag she had brought from home, and offered up a torrone, which Louise declined with a shake of her head. “It’s not American, Mama.”

  “You being fresh.” The old woman ate cheerfully of the candy, her teeth strong enough to relish the almonds. “All the time you looking over that way. What for?”

  “Just looking, Mama.”

  “Somebody there?”

  “Nobody.”

  A few minutes later some sort of disturbance broke out across the field, but was soon quelled, which raised both cheers and boos. Girls pink and fleshy, playfully shameless, paraded by, precipitating censure from Mrs. Leone. Louise came up from her chair.

  “I’m going for a cold drink, Mama. You want one?”

  “No, but you hurry. They begin soon.”

  Somehow she knew she would run into him again. He was waiting his turn at an ice-cream wagon and finally came away with two Fudgsicles in one hand. He seemed to feel her eyes on him and immediately squared his shoulders and pulled in
his gut. He would have strode past her had she not stepped in his way.

  “What’s your hurry, Henry?”

  Her voice took him back, and all at once he seemed uncomfortable, somewhat ashamed, his body full of strain. She stared at him hard and cold. The only aspect of him that seemed the same was his eyes, blue studs that might have been scratched at birth. “I want to apologize for what I did to your car, Mrs. Baker. It was an accident.”

  She ignored the apology. “What happened to your face? When’s the last time you got a haircut? You look a mess.”

  He ignored the questions. “I’ve stayed away like you asked. I haven’t bothered you at all, have I?”

  “Far as I know you haven’t.” She felt she was talking to the wind, to another child, like Ben. “Who’s the woman I saw you with?”

  “Don’t say anything against her, Mrs. Baker.”

  “I was merely asking.”

  People forged by in the fading light. Behind them, the whine of a child imitated the pule of a dog. Waves of excitement washed through the crowd as the pyrotechnician and city officials made their way to the middle of the field, where they circled guarded stores of fireworks like Pentagon people ogling the latest weapons of war.

  Henry said, “I’ve made a new life for myself, Mrs. Baker. I’ve got a woman that needs me.”

  “A lot of women have needed you, Henry, but not for long. I probably put up with you longer than most, but that’s because I’ve got a soft spot.”

  “This is different, Mrs. Baker. This is love.”

  She gave him a searching gaze. “The gal’s no spring chicken. What else is it?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

  “You’d be surprised how smart I am.”

  In the middle of the field someone was blowing into a microphone, priming it for the mayor, who was ready to make a speech. The crowd began to chant.

  “I got to get back to her, Mrs. Baker.”

  “She’ll go crazy if you don’t?”

  “Don’t make a joke about it. She’s not like you and me.”

  Louise recoiled as if he had slapped her. She felt all of her roots tugging at her. She felt the draft from a tenement window, the dead of winter. She heard the drip from a corroded faucet and heard a rat in the woodwork. She said, “Looks like I did you a favor sending you to this little shithouse of a city.”

  The Fudgsicles were melting. “I got to go.”

  She took hold of herself. “Best of luck to you and your lady,” she said, proffering her right hand.

  He tried but could not raise his.

  • • •

  The mayor’s amplified voice, scratchy and at times unintelligible, boomed through the stadium. His jokes, those the crowd could hear, bordered on stupidity. In the bleachers on the visiting-team side, Arnold Ackerman dozed off, slumped hard against Barney Cole, and woke with a jolt, his back hurting. He rubbed the small of it and said, “That’s the damn trouble getting old. You start sleeping sitting up. You know, Barney, there’s not a chair in my house I haven’t dropped off in.” The mayor’s voice vibrated, accompanied by mechanical reverberations. “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s telling Pat and Mike jokes,” Cole said.

  “Oh, my God, somebody tell him we’ve heard them all.”

  “He’s young.”

  “He’s that young, he should have his mouth washed out.” Arnold yawned, his rubbery mouth expanding to the fullest, his eyes watering. “Christ, I could be home right now watching old movies. You know something, Barney, all the ones I saw as a kid I’m seeing again. Like living my life over. All the funny little feelings I had back then, I get again. I even got a pimple.” He touched his chin. “Look, right here.”

  “That’s what modern technology does, Arnold. Intrudes even into your past.”

  Arnold swallowed and grimaced, as if his mouth tasted of something deep within himself. “I ask myself where all the years have gone, and then I realize they’re all inside me, every damn one, the good and the bad.” He belched softly. “Queer, but it’s the good ones that come up on me.”

  “You OK?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a Pepsi. You wouldn’t think it would, but it always settles my stomach.”

  “You want me to get you one?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a pain in the ass.”

  Cole picked his way out of the bleachers and onto the edge of the field, where an air of expectancy and carnival was growing. The mayor, done with jokes, concluded his speech, and the crowd, which had been hooting, cheered. Cole looked for a vendor and found Daisy Shea.

  Daisy tottered one way and then another, torn in opposing directions. He grabbed on to Cole. “You got to show me the way, Barney. I’ve lost my bearings. I must be in the final stages.”

  “Do you want to sit down first?”

  “No, I’ve got to get back to Edith. To my woman. A man doesn’t have a woman, he’s got nothing. I’m lucky, Barney. I’m the luckiest man on earth. Lou Gehrig said that to thousands at Yankee Stadium. My father heard him say it. My father wasn’t there, but he heard it on the radio.”

  Cole drew him out of the path of a throng of children.

  He said, “Do you think the mayor would let me use the microphone? Just for a minute?”

  “I don’t think so. The fireworks will be starting soon.”

  Daisy smiled his brightest. “I got to thank you again for the car. It drives like a dream. My father used to say wheels make the man. I feel like a bigger person already,” he said, and rose on his toes, his bare arms smeary from slapping mosquitoes. He slapped another. “Am I the only one they’re biting, Barney? Seems that way.”

  Cole batted the darkening air. “No, Arnold was whacking a few.”

  “I didn’t see you at Chick’s funeral. I looked for you.”

  “I was there,” Cole said quietly.

  “Police came from all over, far away as Connecticut. One of the biggest funerals in the city’s history, the paper said. Mine won’t be that big,” he said with a shrinking voice and a misplaced smile. “That’s why I wanted to use the mike.”

  “Where did you leave Edith?”

  “Let me think,” he said, stooping to pull up a sock that had lapsed into his shoe. “Which bleachers are you in?”

  Cole pointed.

  “Then it’s got to be the other one.”

  “You want me to walk you there?”

  “Would you, Barney? I’d appreciate it.”

  As they trekked through the dark the first rocket soared into the sky, exploded high up, and luminesced the night. The crowd, caught in the brilliance, responded with a concert of oohs and aahs.

  • • •

  One of the Fudgsicles fell from Henry’s grasp. Furiously he licked the other one under its paper wrap, but it was melting too fast and messing his fingers. He tossed it away, and a dog dragging a leash pounced upon it. Somebody in the crowd bumped him. Somebody else pushed him. Then they pressed in upon him, an overwhelming presence holding him in place, a black man in scholarly gold-rimmed glasses and a blond man with a face so flawless he looked unnatural. The blond one flashed identification he did not properly see, though he caught a glimpse of silver, which reminded him of the crossing-guard badge he had worn in grade school, a proud possession until a misdeed in the boys’ lavatory took it away forever. The blond man spoke. “What’s your name?”

  “Henry,” he said, and thought the worst. “She’s an old lady. You going to believe her?” They wanted his wallet. Both examined it, the black man with the longest fingers he had ever seen. Fear scrambled his brain. He considered bolting, but his buttocks tightened. “That money’s mine,” he said. “I sold my car.”

  The blond man returned the wallet intact. “Chicopee. You from Chicopee? What are you doing here?”

  He had answers, but in his head none of them sounded right. “What have I done?”

  “We’re more interested in what you might do. How long have you known the woman you were
talking to?”

  Something clicked. “You mean Mrs. Baker. Year.” A load was lifted from him. He wanted to sing. “You guys got something on your mind, better you say it straight out.”

  “We’re interested in Mrs. Baker’s friends. You act like one.”

  “You harassing me?” His voice rose, drawing stares from a hot press of faces. Children giggled. A woman burped her baby. A half-dozen Hispanic men stood straight and small, brightly painted against the approaching darkness. They had been chittering like birds but now were silent. Henry relished the audience and played to it. “Name, rank, and serial number is all I got to give. The rest, you’d better talk to my lawyer. He’s local, name’s Cole.”

  The blond man smiled easily. “My name’s Cruickshank, his is Blue, in case you want to file any complaints.”

  “That depends on you guys,” he said, his eyes now fully on Blue, who fascinated him for reasons not yet fathomed. Something about the eyes, the remote manner; he was not sure. Then it hit him, and he trembled. “Do I know you?”

  “We tend to look alike,” Blue said.

  “Nam.”

  “A lot of us were there.”

  “This guy had fingers like you, but every bit of him went up. Nothing I could do. I took cover.”

  “I’d have done the same.”

  “The rest of them, your guys, got theirs later. Got caught in a crossfire.” Henry wanted to shut up, but it was as if someone had tripped the mechanism that set him talking. “They done what I did, they wouldn’t have got killed.”

  “What’s a few more niggers more or less,” Blue said.

  “Wasn’t my fault.”

  “It never is.”

  Someone was competing with him, an amplified voice from the middle of the field. The crowd was hissing. His audience was dwindling. He said, “Christ, I was just a kid. Just turned seventeen. Some of them were old as twenty.”

  “You had your whole life ahead of you.”

  “You think I came back whole? I got no use in my right arm.” He raised his other arm and swabbed his face hard as if he feared his darker secrets were showing. His voice swept away from him, and he breathed it back, inflating his lungs. “I got to get back to my aunt. She’s an old lady. She’s waiting for me.”