Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  If Lincoln hadn’t been expecting her, he wouldn’t have recognized the woman who entered Rockers then as Beverly. At the Vineyard Gazette, nicely dressed and made-up, she’d been attractive enough to make Lincoln feel guilty for noticing. Now, sans makeup and wearing baggy shorts and a threadbare sweatshirt, she looked every one of her years and then some. Given what he’d just been told, it was hard not to see her as a woman who’d once been thrown across the room by an abusive husband. Only when she placed a hand on Coffin’s shoulder did he look up from the dregs of his beer and locate his daughter-in-law in the backbar’s mirror, his expression inexpressibly sad, as if their speaking of her had conjured the woman up in her current, diminished state. Then, all too quickly, his expression darkened. “Kevin,” he called, the dark malice that Lincoln had glimpsed earlier back in force.

  Lincoln took a deep breath. If things were going to go really, really bad, it would happen right now. “I was the one who called her, Mr. Coffin, not him.”

  If Coffin heard this, he gave no sign. Having put a twenty on the bar earlier, he now pushed it toward the approaching bartender. Kevin nodded hello at Beverly, then pushed it back. “On me, Joey. Be real good, though, if you didn’t come in here anymore.”

  Coffin, leaving the bill right where it was, turned to Lincoln. “You know what happens to bodybuilders who eat steroids?” he said. “And don’t say they get stupid, because they’re already that or they wouldn’t be bodybuilders.”

  “Joe,” Beverly implored him. He still hadn’t acknowledged her presence. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

  “They get this bright red rash up their spine. Looks like a strawberry patch.”

  “Mr. Coffin—” Lincoln began.

  “Am I right, Kevin? You got a rash like that up your back? This twenty says you do.”

  Kevin shook his head. “You really want me to come around this bar, Joey?”

  “No, I just want you to show my new friend Lincoln your rash. He’s never seen one, and he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t believe what you tell him unless he sees it with his own two eyes.”

  “Because if I do come around there, Joey, I’m not going to be gentle with you. I know you used to be a tough guy, but you’re old now and those days are gone.”

  “Please?” Beverly pleaded. “Joe?”

  “This isn’t necessary, Mr. Coffin,” Lincoln assured him. “I believe you, okay?” He was trying to diffuse the situation, of course, but when he said the words they didn’t feel like a lie.

  “You’re not just blowin’ smoke, Lincoln? I wouldn’t want you to say that just to save Kevin a beating.”

  “That’s hilarious,” Kevin told him.

  “No. I believe you,” Lincoln repeated, and it didn’t feel like a lie this time, either.

  Coffin studied him drunkenly, deciding. Finally, he said, “All righty then. I guess we can all go home.” Again he pushed the twenty toward the bartender. “Put this in your tip jar. Use it to buy some medicated cream for that rash.”

  Sliding off his stool, Coffin lost his balance and probably would’ve fallen if Beverly hadn’t been there to steady him. Something about how she managed this suggested it wasn’t the first occasion she’d had to. For his part, Coffin seemed emptied out, not just of energy but even of a pulse, as if talking to Lincoln had drained him completely. Lincoln hoped that wasn’t the case, because there was something he needed to ask. “Before you go?” he said.

  “Yes, Lincoln?”

  “That incident you told me about earlier? Involving my friend Mickey? You wouldn’t happen to remember when that took place?”

  Coffin stared into the middle distance. “I want to say 1974, but like I said, you can look it up.”

  “Okay, thanks. Can I give you a hand outside?”

  It was really Beverly he was asking, but Coffin answered, “No, I think the evening has been humiliating enough without that.”

  Nineteen seventy-four, Lincoln thought when the door finally swung shut behind them. If memory served, that fall was when Gerald Ford declared amnesty for draft resisters, and when Mickey, like so many others, returned home. While he was in Canada, except for a single postcard, they hadn’t been in touch. The card had arrived care of his parents in Dunbar in October of ’71, by which time Mickey had been gone several months. It pictured the magnificent Château Frontenac in Quebec City, and on the back Mickey had scrawled: Thought you might like to see my new digs. He’d signed it Big Mick on Pots. Excited, Lincoln had called Teddy, only to learn that his parents had received the identical card and message. “I guess he must not have heard about Jacy,” Teddy speculated, “or he would have asked if she’d been in touch.” Only later did it occur to Lincoln that his friend’s logic was flawed. If Mickey’d wanted to know about that, he would’ve needed to provide a return address, which of course he wouldn’t have, lest the information fall into the wrong hands.

  It wasn’t until early ’75, after the amnesty, that Lincoln heard from him again, this in the form of a belated Christmas card letting him know that he was back and would contact them all again once he was settled. For now he was in West Haven, living with his mother while he looked for work and an apartment. He knew a couple guys who were looking to form a band, so he might do that. This time he did mention her: I guess nobody’s heard from Jacy? A month or two after that they spoke on the phone and he explained that his mother, with whom he’d been in touch while he was in Canada, had told him Jacy had evidently run off rather than get married, which Mickey accepted as the most likely reason for her disappearance. When Lincoln expressed his own doubts on this score, Mickey waved them away. “Mark my words,” he said. “She’ll turn up one of these days with a European husband and brag about being a foreign correspondent based in Singapore or some fucking place.” When asked how he was doing, he claimed things were coming together, but Lincoln heard something in his voice that made him wonder if he might be struggling more than he was admitting. Now that he was back home, did he regret having gone to Canada? Was he being treated like a pariah? You should come see us in Arizona, Lincoln told him, and Mickey said he definitely would, once he got settled, but that visit never happened.

  So if what Coffin was telling him now was true, most of this had been at best an evasion and at worst outright deception. His friend’s first order of business hadn’t been to find a job or an apartment or to form a new band. Nor had he really been sanguine about Jacy’s disappearance. No, Job One had apparently been to locate her father. But why? Did he think Donald Calloway would know his daughter’s whereabouts? Most of the time Mickey was in Canada the man had been in jail. The person more likely to have heard from Jacy during this period was her mother. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to track her down? Lincoln tried to understand all this, but it was like coming across an old jigsaw puzzle in the back of a closet, with half its pieces missing.

  Taking out his cell, he considered trying Mickey again. If he’d hauled this Delia person home by water taxi, he’d surely have arrived on the mainland by now and would have reception. But if he answered, Lincoln would need to decide whether he was calling as friend or inquisitor, as a member of the We Don’t Do Right by Girls Club, urging him to flee while he had the chance, or as Jacy’s avenger, determined to know the truth regardless of the cost. He hated to admit it, but Coffin was right. Belief and knowledge were different animals. It was the latter he’d been after when he first Googled Troyer and again when he visited the Vineyard Gazette. When he went to see Coffin in Vineyard Haven, it was still information, answers, he’d been looking for. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that asking questions about the past might disturb the present, that in the end he might want to unlearn what he’d found out?

  Son? came the hitch-pitched voice of Wolfgang Amadeus, piping up all the way from Dunbar, Arizona, no trace of a stroke in his voice. I fear you’ve forgotten your Genesis. Yes, it was the Tree of K
nowledge in the Garden. But Adam’s sin was pride.

  Put a sock in it, Dad, Lincoln told him. I’m trying to think, here.

  The old buzzard did have a point, though. He had been prideful. Perhaps even vainglorious, another of his father’s favorite words. Solving the mystery of Jacy’s disappearance was a task he’d let himself believe he was equal to. But his quest for knowledge, for understanding, hadn’t really been about her. Or about truth, or justice. It’d been about himself. How ridiculous was that? Sixty-six years old and still trying to prove to a girl four decades dead that he was the one she should’ve chosen.

  So you admit it, his father said. I’m right.

  Mind your own damn business, Dad, Lincoln told him. Go talk Spanglish to your new girlfriend.

  Now, Son, replied Dub-Yay, that right there was a low blow.

  * * *

  —

  LINCOLN EXPECTED COFFIN and his daughter-in-law to be gone, as in long, when he emerged from Rockers, but there they were, just up the dark, deserted street, Beverly trying her best to wedge his carcass into her VW’s passenger seat. Had he fallen crossing the street? Was that why they’d made so little progress? Or did she have to argue him out of driving himself back to Vineyard Haven? Since neither seemed to notice him, Lincoln slipped quietly behind the wheel of his rental car and scrunched down so he could surveil the tableau playing out. When Beverly tried to belt him in, Coffin swatted her hand away, and she rested her forehead on the door’s frame. Then, giving up, she closed the door and moved around to the driver’s side.

  There’s your serpent right there, Dub-Yay chimed in.

  No, Dad. That’s just a sick old man. Like you.

  Though again, he did have a point. The serpent in Genesis had been a cunning, insidious whisperer of half-truths and innuendo, his pitch to Adam not unlike Coffin’s rabbit-hole soliloquy about men not doing right by girls, which—why not admit it?—had entered Lincoln’s bloodstream like venom. The narrative’s myriad details had been vivid and had the ring of truth, but could the same be said for the whole? Lincoln wasn’t sure. Its main thrust seemed to be that male misbehavior existed on a spectrum, like autism. Sure, some men were better behaved than others, but in the end they were all complicit because they closed ranks, as he’d put it, whenever it became truly necessary. As if to prove his point he’d offered Lincoln the opportunity to join that club himself. What made Lincoln suspicious was the man’s most plausible intention—to convince him that his belief in his lifelong friend was divorced from real, cop-worthy knowledge. Coffin’s circuitous monologue also trailed an unmistakable warning: that the knowledge Lincoln had been chasing earlier might now be chasing him. Resistance was futile. Ultimately, his faith in his friend would crumble before the relentless assault of fact, like those who had tried so hard to believe that the Vietnam War was just and necessary.

  But hadn’t Coffin also overplayed his hand? Not content to cheapen Lincoln’s faith in Mickey, he’d also slandered Jacy. Even if you granted his assertion that men didn’t do right by girls, what was his assault on Jacy’s character besides another instance of victim blaming? Yes, Jacy had been as wild as the times they were then living through, but she’d also possessed an innocence that Coffin, who’d never met her, had utterly no knowledge of. She’d been both loyal and true. Their all-for-one and one-for-all friendship at Minerva had never once been contaminated by irony. I couldn’t bear it was what she had written to them on that final morning about the prospect of having to say goodbye. It was that loyalty, that innocence, that Coffin’s narrative sought to undermine by painting Jacy as a tramp, who’d maybe been disappointed when Mickey arrived on the scene and spoiled her fun, the kind she never got to have with the three of them because they were such cowards and prudes. It was a cynical, insidious argument that Lincoln would’ve rejected out of hand if it hadn’t semi-aligned with his mother’s own assessment of the situation—that Jacy might’ve been waiting in vain for one of them to find the courage to declare himself. They’d all been perfect gentlemen with her. What if it wasn’t a gentleman she’d been looking for?

  All of which made Lincoln yearn for the one thing he clearly couldn’t have: he wanted his friends back, all three of them, and not just back but back as they’d been at Minerva, with their whole lives ahead of them.

  What you really want, Son, Dub-Yay assured him, is your own lost youth.

  But no, Lincoln was pretty sure that wasn’t it. He and his friends weren’t entitled to a second youth any more than they deserved a second chance to do everything right. Nor was it really about lost innocence, because by ’71 that had already been shaken by what they were learning about life in their classes, as well as at the Theta house, not to mention the war and a draft lottery that could alter their individual trajectories.

  Then what? Dub-Yay wanted to know. If not youth or innocence, then what is it?

  At first Lincoln didn’t know, but then he did. What he really longed for, he realized, was his generation’s naïve conviction that if the world turned out to be irredeemably corrupt, they could just opt out. Embarrassing, when you put it like that, but hadn’t that been the central article of their faith? They’d believed that being right about the war their parents were so stubbornly wrong about meant that they were somehow special, maybe even exceptional. They would change the world. Or at least they’d give its crass inducements, its various bribes and dishonest incentives, a miss. Wolfgang Amadeus might be wrong about a lot of things, but neither he nor Lincoln’s mother, nor anyone else in their generation, had been fool enough to imagine you could bail out of the world that made you.

  Up the street, Beverly’s VW was backing away from the curb. Lincoln watched it drive up Circuit Avenue until the taillights disappeared. Joe, she’d called her father-in-law, not Dad, as Anita occasionally referred to Wolfgang Amadeus. And just like that Lincoln was certain that the two were, or had been at some point, more than friends. Yet more venomous, unwanted knowledge.

  When his phone vibrated in his pocket, Lincoln thought about letting the call go to voicemail, but Wolfgang Amadeus wouldn’t hear of it. God hates a coward, Son.

  “Lincoln,” Mickey said. Not Face Man, Lincoln noted.

  “Mick. Where are you?”

  “Your place. Chilmark. You need to go fetch Ted.” Not Teddy. Not Tedioski, not Teduski, not Tedwicki, not Tedmarek. Ted.

  “He’s still in recovery.”

  “No, he isn’t. I just talked to him.”

  “They won’t release him until morning, Mickey. At the earliest.”

  “Just pull up in front. He’ll be waiting.”

  “Mick—”

  “Do it, Lincoln.”

  An order, and in or under it something in his friend’s voice that he’d never heard before.

  Okay, Dad, he thought. What now?

  But of course the connection had gone dead. The purpose of such imaginary conversations, he knew, was to practice for the day in the not-too-distant future when Dub-Yay, like Lincoln’s mother, would exist only in Lincoln’s mind. Bad timing, too. The world he and his friends had imagined they could either reinvent or opt out of had at last come calling. In fact it was banging at the door, demanding to be let in so it could present its past-due bill for payment.

  “Tell me why,” Lincoln said, making a demand of his own, though to his ears it sounded both petulant and pleading. “Give me one good reason.”

  “Because you both need to be here” came Mickey’s reply. “Because I’m only telling this fucking story once.”

  Mickey

  Though the season was different—the end of summer, not the beginning—the moon rose over the distant waves just like it did back in 1971. That night, too, there’d been a chill in the air, one that eventually drove them inside. Down the slope Mason Troyer’s house was dark, just as it had been then. Yesterday Mickey had even considered strolling down there
and offering a much-belated apology for punching him. Had the man’s jaw completely healed? Mickey’s own right hand, which he’d never seen a doctor about, still ached on rainy days and was prone to swelling. His own damn fault, of course. His father, who’d been a brawler in his youth, had warned him about physical violence, both its dangers and, especially, its pleasures. When you threw a punch, whatever was coiled in you got released, and release, well, what was better than that? Starting and finishing a fight with a single punch, as Mickey’d done with Troyer? That was the absolute best. Proving that any job, no matter how dubious, could be done well. Indeed, it was his father that Mickey had been thinking about that afternoon outside the SAE house. Bert. That’s what the guys in his father’s crew all called Michael Sr., due to his resemblance to Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. “Hey, Bert,” they’d say. “What makes the muskrat guard his musk?” And his old man, playing along, would reply, “Kuh-ridge.” And damned if those stone lions hadn’t looked just like him, too.

  By contrast, the beating Mickey’d given Jacy’s father had felt like a distasteful duty, not even remotely pleasurable. Maybe it was the office setting, and that there’d been so many people around, the majority of them women, all of them horrified. Mickey’s first punch had reduced the man’s nose to ruined cartilage, and yeah, okay, that had felt pretty good. So had saying, “Your daughter says hello,” as the man lay there on the snazzy carpet. Maybe if that first punch had landed flush and he was out for the count, Mickey would feel better about it. Instead, Calloway had struggled to his feet not once but three more times, as if he didn’t want Mickey to stint on the beating they both knew he had coming. So Mickey had obliged, though with each subsequent punch he’d applied less force and torque. When the cops arrived and cuffed him, he was glad. He wouldn’t have to hit the man anymore. The experience had so soured him on violence that he hadn’t punched anyone since, except occasionally in his dreams.