The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  “You’re Quinn Porter,” he said.

  Quinn ran into former bandmates all the time—they turned up sooner or later, often beyond recognition, lugging forty extra pounds and a degree in something sensible and a self-image readjusted to allow for their botched expectations.

  “I’m sorry?” Quinn said.

  The man’s face ruddied up, then seemed to disintegrate in slow motion: a jelly-quiver to the cheeks, the small mouth working open, the eyes panicked and searching and shot through with blurry veins.

  “You all right, man?”

  The stranger spoke again, or tried to: Quinn couldn’t make him out. Then he found the face beneath the face.

  “Juke—?”

  The man nodded wildly, his voice stuck someplace south of his larynx. It took another beat before Quinn understood that the man—Juke Blakely, who’d lived for eleven years inside the David Crosby story and now played a role in a different story altogether—was merely crying. “If you want to hit me,” he gasped, “go ahead. If you want to tear me up with your bare hands, be my special guest.” His mouth zigzagged with the effort of controlling his voice.

  “Whoa,” Quinn said. “Juke. Jesus.”

  “I wanted to tell you”—he sounded as if he’d been running hard—“you and your wife, I wanted to tell you—”

  “Don’t tell me anything. Really, Juke. Don’t.”

  Juke’s soft body pitched forward and back, a stutter-step of unstoppable weeping, his features chewed into mismatched pieces: eyes puckered shut, mouth undulating, forehead harrowed, the entire mess gone maroon with misery. At the back of the house his bandmates took notice, stalled amid their ever-proliferating setup. One of them spoke into the mic: “Check, one, two. You okay there, Juke? Check, one.” Several patrons began to openly stare.

  “Take it easy, friend,” Quinn said.

  Maybe it was the word friend: a sudden upshift in Juke’s bawling introduced the possibility of a 9-1-1 call. Quinn led him outside to the grimy concrete slab that served as Jailbreak’s service ramp.

  “Listen, sit down,” Quinn said, easing Juke to the ground. “Jesus, man. Get ahold of yourself.”

  “They told me not to talk to you,” Juke said, his sheeting cheeks quavering. “Don’t talk to the—family, like I was a machine they—could click on and off.” He had a pick stuck to his sweaty palms.

  Quinn leaned over him. “Breathe.”

  “The lawsuit was killing me,” Juke went on, seemingly to himself now, stopping often to suck in more air. “I wanted to tell you how sorry—but they kept saying don’t talk—to the family don’t—say sorry don’t—say forgive me.” Quinn began to feel short of breath himself. “I spent my—savings on lawyers and point taken you know point—taken, mistakes have consequences.”

  Juke shook his head, his waxy nose sequined with sweat, his deep breaths accommodating more and more words. He wiped his hands on his pants and the pick clinked to the ground. “I had eight patients backed up and a cartload of charts and I was over my head and they warned me not to say forgive me but I can—say it now for what it’s worth, forgive me, I’m saying it, I’m asking you, Jesus God, and I’m thanking you for calling off the dogs before I lost it all.” He sat there, panting.

  Quinn sat down next to him. “They’re not my dogs.”

  Juke breathed in and out, for minutes, it seemed, until he recovered himself. His voice went quiet. “I watch myself writing out that prescription. I see it over and over. The ink on the paper. My hand on the pen. They said not to talk to you or your wife. But I can say it now, oh, my Christ, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  Quinn stared out at the squalid back lot, pitted with ancient frost heaves. Gary’s Jag resembled a kid’s toy, parked with two feet of clearance between Ona’s dumpy Reliant and Rennie’s SUV. A couple of pole lights bathed the whole mess in a vinegary sheen. How many hours of his life had he spent in back lots and alleys, guarding a heap of equipment? He thought of Belle’s father, the disgraced toy magnate, going over and over—and over—the wrongful-death writs and briefs and et ceteras.

  “I didn’t call off any dogs,” Quinn said. And then realized: Belle must have. Good old Belle. He experienced a transitory glimmer of joy: something decent had been returned to the world.

  Juke ran his palms over his cheeks, leaving shiny tracks where he’d rearranged the moisture. The night air began to take effect. He took another tremoring breath: “It’s like I’ve been crawling through this dark forest, calling and calling.” He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of a lemon-green shirt patterned with regular-green bumblebees. Over that he wore the same leather vest he’d affected in the old days, though his expanding girth had shrunk it to the size of a doily.

  “It was her father pulling the strings, Juke. Belle’s not like that. I don’t want you to think it was her.”

  “I deserved it,” he snuffled. “I deserved to go all the way down.”

  “You really didn’t,” Quinn said, and he meant it. He silently thanked the God he didn’t believe in for the near misses in his own life, the ones he would never know about because the one in a million was never him.

  Juke’s voice slid down half an octave. “I looked right into your wife’s face and said, ‘Why don’t we try this?’” He mimed writing on a pad. “‘Why don’t we try this?’” He resumed weeping, quietly now, Quinn watching this spectacle of despair in a kind of awe.

  “She’s not my wife anymore,” he said.

  Juke uncovered his face. His eyes were nearly swollen shut.

  “She married somebody else,” Quinn said. “A good guy, actually.”

  The band had started up: a white-boy cover of “I Feel Good.”

  “Your guys must be wondering where you went,” Quinn said.

  “They’re really a trio anyway,” Juke said, wiping his face. “The blond one’s my sister’s kid; she made him ask me in. They think I don’t know I’m a charity case.”

  One of the pole lights sputtered out. They sat a while longer, listening to the end of “I Feel Good” and the beginning of “Sweet Home Alabama.” The lead guitar wasn’t bad.

  “Remember that night on the island?” Juke said.

  Quinn nodded. “David freakin’ Crosby.”

  “You ever—think about that?”

  “Sometimes. Once in a while.”

  “I never told anybody.” Juke sounded dozy now, like a man whose fever has just broken. “Not even my wife, because for a while afterward I sort of hoped he’d get in touch with me and I didn’t want to jinx it. Idiot.” He chuckled lifelessly, flooding Quinn with a confusing sympathy that included them both.

  “You were good, though, Juke.”

  “Not that good.” He shook his head. “Idiot.”

  Just then, Rennie gusted out the back door, tight-lipped and chafing and toting his gear bag. “Fuck him,” he muttered. He turned to Quinn, red-faced, shouting, “We’re fired.” He jacked open the back of his SUV and shoved his bag inside, then sat disconsolately on the carpeted floor. Gary and Alex appeared then, heading toward Quinn, veering away when they spotted Juke’s puddled face.

  “Listen to me,” Quinn murmured, close to Juke’s ear. “Any other kid—I mean any other kid in the known world—could have taken those pills and done just fine.”

  “Oh, God,” Juke whispered, face once again in his hands. “I have a son.”

  This time, Juke’s remorse reached Quinn in a heretofore entombed place. He made a frantic, involuntary, interior leap away from his own pain but it found him anyway, knifing him with a clean, clarifying memory: not of the boy, but rather a photograph of the boy, the one sent by the boy himself to his rented room in Chicago. The effortful smile, the starched uniform, the fake backdrop of a barnyard fence. Women liked this photo (Is he yours?), thinking the boy beloved. He’d framed it and kept it and, in the end, carried it all the way back home.

  “Your guys are looking for you, man,” Gary said, appearing out of nowhere, peering down at Ju
ke. “You all right, buddy?”

  “He’s all right,” Quinn said. He stood up and then bent to Juke. “Get up, man. You have to get up.”

  Quinn helped the man to his feet—he was heavy and trembling—and patted his back. “Just go on back in. It’s all right.”

  “Tell me, just tell me—”

  “I forgive you, all right? I forgive you.”

  “Your wife—”

  “Belle can forgive anything of anyone. It’s the best thing about her. Go in peace, my man,” he said, copping one of Resurrection Lane’s most persistent benedictions. He watched Juke move toward the door, where heavily metered bass notes thudded from the darkness beyond.

  Rennie and Alex were in the lot now, Rennie stalking over to the van to reload the equipment.

  “What the hell was all that?” Alex asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Sal says his bartender left a message on your machine.”

  “I don’t have a landline anymore, I have voice mail.”

  “Then your voice mail’s not working, because we were supposed to be here last night, which Rennie couldn’t have done anyway because of Kayla’s recital, but Sal was an asshole about the mix-up, so Rennie kind of went off, and now Sal’s really, really pissed off.” He looked around, then added, “We’re all pretty pissed, to be honest.”

  “You’ll live,” Quinn said.

  “If you had an answering service—” Alex said, then shook his head. “We count on this gig, Quinn, is what I’m saying.”

  “Fuck you, Alex,” Quinn snapped. “What Sal pays won’t equal a single one of your billable hours.”

  “Hey, hey,” Gary said. “Easy.”

  Quinn looked at Gary—reliably sweet-tempered Gary, who owned four dogs—and saw him whisper something to Alex, who then backed away. All summer Gary had put himself in charge of reminding everybody of their bandmate’s “loss.” In Amy’s catalog of Quinn’s moral failings, prone to violence did not appear, but he suddenly wanted to yank Gary’s liver up through his throat. Gary, his friend of thirty years.

  “I didn’t mean money-wise,” Alex said. “I meant—you know, fun-wise.”

  “Do I look like I’m having fun?” He stared at his friend’s salon haircut, his beautiful watch. He shouted to the SUV—brand-new, ferociously waxed—where Rennie was still sitting, brooding down at his old-guy stomach. “You hear me, Ren? Do I look like I’m having fun?”

  He headed inside—like walking through water—where Sal blamed the screwup on a new guy who couldn’t manage a calendar. “No prob,” Sal said, “except for Rennie’s attitude.” Sal said he didn’t like attitude, and these rich guys could be surly as a goddamn crow.

  Quinn agreed, sure, but they went back too far to end things like this, and maybe Sal could stop for a sec and imagine what Rennie had to put up with running that outfit of his, you want surly you should meet his day supervisor, and Sal laughed a little and wound up shaking hands and apologizing, then apologized again for not having said a thing about, you know, and how was the kid’s mother holding up, and Quinn said don’t worry about it, the kid’s mother was okay, and Sal said Jesus friggin’ Christ, though, what a thing, and Quinn said yeah, what a thing, and when he returned to the lot he said nothing. Something about their jumpy faces, their halted breath, it made him sick all of a sudden, because he understood it. He understood yearning. Walking into auditions with his shined-up guitar thinking, This time, this is it, he’d looked like them a thousand times over. Exactly like them. Wanting in. Thinking he deserved it just because he wanted it so badly.

  So he said, “Sal’s thinking it over,” and helped them load the rest of the gear.

  He drove home, mercifully alone, bidding good riddance to the howling of his fellow man, grateful for the use of a car so unhip that none of the guys cared to join him in it. The moonlit highway took on a recriminatory gloss, every fleeing mile reminiscent of previous flights.

  If only the boy hadn’t been born in the middle of the David Crosby story, Quinn arriving at the hospital humming with the memory of a star-lighted island, a draped gazebo, a sudden belief in possibility. When he and Belle finally brought their delicate, underweight baby back home, Quinn’s imagined future felt like a shut door, but for one unexpected, mitigating high note: the baby had notable fingers. Long, squishy appendages attached to fists the size of a doll’s eyeballs. Quinn’s first thought: guitar.

  The sensation that came to him now felt too dangerous to identify. Belle would have called it a memory of love. It felt like a haunting; a glimpse of the might-have-been. And it blazed by so quickly that it left nothing in its wake but a stabbing memory of light.

  Just inside the city line, a cop pulled him over. The cop was young; by the book; a kid in grownup clothes. “Sir, may I see your license and registration?”

  Fuck, Quinn thought. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. He found Ona’s registration in a plastic sleeve, crisp and bright and beyond reproach, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say for his back seat, which looked like the aftermath of a music-store heist.

  “Wait here, sir.” The cop returned to his chuffing cruiser while Quinn stared into the Saturday-evening traffic of Brighton Avenue, this stretch of the artery clogged with chain restaurants and cut-rate motels. Up ahead glowed the big, bright Lowe’s sign and beyond that the car dealership at the corner of Sibley. So close, so reachable, he could probably make a break for it, reach Ona’s driveway in two minutes, bang on her door, scare her silly, much hue and alarm before Ona cleared him—Of course he has permission, how else do you think he got my key?—but surely not before the cop looked up Quinn’s driving history.

  The minutes ticked away. Quinn surrendered to what Amy liked to call “the karma of the hour,” which was supposed to make you one with the universe, unless, as now, the karma sucked out loud and you ended up being one with your own ridiculous self. Juke’s outpouring of sorrow returned as something growing beneath Quinn’s skin, tumid and pulsing, and there wasn’t a thing he could do at the moment except sit with it.

  The cop was back, his face ballooning into the window. “Mr. Porter, the owner of this car is a Miss Ona Vitkus.”

  “I know that,” he said. “She’s a friend.”

  “She’s a friend. Okay. Looks like you also had yourself a busy time last winter. I’m looking at three speeding tickets in January alone.”

  “I paid those,” Quinn said. “I took the course, the driver’s-ed thing.”

  “It’s called defensive driving, sir. And then in May you were stopped for an expired registration—”

  “I sold that car. I don’t even have it anymore.”

  “—and speeding—”

  Thirty miles over, a steep fine incurred on the night after the boy’s death. He’d sold the car within two days and given the money to Belle.

  “—at which point your license was suspended.”

  “I paid up. I’m all squared away with the State of Maine.”

  “All squared away. Okay.” The cop flicked his flashlight over Quinn’s license.

  “You can see for yourself it’s current,” Quinn said.

  “It does appear current, sir, that’s correct. But sometimes appearances can be deceiving. And it doesn’t explain what you’re doing in a car owned by Miss Ona Vitkus.”

  “I have her permission.”

  “You have her permission. Okay. This registration is also expired, are you aware of that, sir?”

  “What?”

  “It was due in April, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Would you step out of the vehicle, Mr. Porter?”

  “You can ask her yourself,” Quinn said, getting out. “She lives four blocks from here.”

  “Would you place your hands right there, Mr. Porter, where I can see them?”

  “I’ve got her on speed dial,” Quinn said, spreading his palms on the roof. “Wait, scratch that, she’s in bed, don’t scare her.” He expected a pat-down but the cop was still ex
amining the license. “Listen, she’s a friend. I repointed her foundation.”

  The cop aimed the light into the back seat. “This your stuff, Mr. Porter?”

  “I’m a guitar player. I’m on my way home from a gig. Which is how I got those speeding tickets back in January.”

  “On your way home from a gig. Okay.” The cop made a theatrical connection with his wristwatch. “Whereabouts?”

  “Portsmouth.”

  “Portsmouth. Okay. That’s what, about an hour away? I was in a band once myself, waaay back. I used to play a little bass.”

  Quinn thought, Waaay back? When you were, what, six?

  “My experience?” the cop said. “Gigs usually start around eight, nine o’clock, and it’s ten past nine right now.”

  “Scheduling mix-up. Long story.”

  “Long story. Okay.”

  Quinn breathed slowly. “I’m a professional musician. I pay taxes.”

  “On behalf of the State of Maine, I thank you for that, sir.”

  “Look, her house is right down there, Sibley Street. Just past the dealership. You can see it from here.”

  “Keep your hands where they are, Mr. Porter,” he said. “I know where Sibley Street is. In fact, I personally happen to know the lady who owns this vehicle.”

  After a moment, Quinn said, “You the cop who watched her house after the break-in?”

  “You the grandson she didn’t want to call?”

  “Her friend. I’m her friend. She did call me.”

  The cop shifted his flashlight beneath his arm. “Somebody should be taking care of her, sir. She’s a nice lady.”

  “Somebody is taking care of her!”

  “Keep your hands where they are, sir.”

  “I’m taking care of her! I am!”

  “Relax, sir. You can remove your hands now.” The cop handed back the license. “Now, I could arrest you right now, bring you down to the station, and have this car towed, because you’re done driving till this registration is renewed and your license is reinstated.”

  “It’s been reinstated for weeks.”

  “Sometimes our records don’t match, sir. Once in a while that happens.”