Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  Ah. He can also steal. Yes. This he’s already done, at least in theory, for a time in rehearsal. Yes, this he can do, and here’s why: early ’70s, he was signed for the lead in a picture called Harry in Your Pocket, one of those benign caper comedies that were, for some reason, popular at the time. In the interest of verisimilitude (which was also, for some reason, popular at the time), he studied for weeks with a master pickpocket named Snake, a crappy little accountant from Nutley, New Jersey. Snake happened to discover his particular gift of dexterity when he abandoned his sleeping first wife on an Amtrak train headed for Virginia Beach. Snake, then known as Bernie, hopped off in Philadelphia after pinching two thousand dollars in travelers’ checks and a complete set of credit cards from the inside zippered pocket of a baby blue rain slicker, which his sleeping first wife happened to have bunched up and put to use as a pillow to cushion her head against the hard window. Not bad, Bernie the Snake thought at the time, and for some years after. Guy landed in Vegas and made a quick name for himself. Regrettably, Wood was such a dedicated pupil and committed actor that he started to put his new pickpocketing skills to full use. After all, he justified, where was the challenge in lifting a wallet from a hanging suit of clothes when there was the real deal to consider? He wound up making his own name for himself, caught red-fingered on a casino video monitor, working his craft on an old man in a fishing hat who appeared to be from somewhere in Missouri. It made all the papers, and, in the fallout, Wood lost the part to James Coburn, a tough sonofabitch whose fingers were nowhere near as light, but who came without the excess baggage of a Nevada police record and a fucking file cabinet, legal, full of bad publicity.

  So, anyway, he can steal. Definitely. Or, at least, borrow. Shouldn’t be too hard to get the touch back in his fingers. Then, he’ll set himself up, find a way to get the pinched wallet back to the duped tourist, make good on the monies, eventually. He doesn’t have the head for outright thievery. There’s a way to live with what he has to do, he thinks, if this is what he has to do. Can’t go pinching from one of the locals, that would be like shitting on his new front lawn, but there’re enough out-of-towners to get him going: just line the suckers up and pluck ’em off, one by one. No big thing.

  Wood’s got his scheming head tilted so far toward the other side of the law that he doesn’t notice the short-legged, short-tempered police officer step onto his patch of grass and make a not-so-tentative approach. The cop kicks at Wood’s bench with a scuffed black shoe, the heel of which has worn thin in such a way as to suggest a pronation problem. “All right,” the police officer says, in a tiny bark, “move it along.”

  Wood, with guilty conscience, worries that the police officer has somehow read his mind, wants to pick him up on premeditation charges. He can’t think of a thing to say in his own defense.

  “Don’t want no trouble here,” the officer keeps at him. “Move it along.” He waves his billy club at Wood like a paintbrush, back and forth to where he just might black out the whole scene.

  Reflexively, Wood lifts himself from the bench, but then he sets himself back down, reconsidering. This, too, is reflexive, but it takes a while for it to kick in. He’s not breaking any laws here, Wood quickly realizes. It’s not a crime merely to ponder an illegal act. Hey! Far as the law knows, Wood’s just a guy killing time on a public bench, minding his own. Who is this squat little man with bad shoes and a possible pronation problem to try to move me along? Where does he get off? Cop doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, Wood thinks. I’ll move myself along when I damn fucking feel like it. A part of him wants to bark back at the officer in the same brusque tone, but he is checked by common sense. He crosses his legs, clasps his hands behind his head, leans back and says, “Friend, I’m in no particular hurry.”

  This, he believes, is an appropriate response.

  The badly shoed police officer, believing otherwise, slaps the billy club in the pit of his own left arm and reaches for his holster with his freed right hand. He wants to be ready. Last time he met up with some belligerent psycho, the fucker nearly tore his head off. This guy looks big enough to give him trouble. He wonders what the lunar cycle is looking like these days. Usually, he doesn’t pay attention, but he read somewhere that these assholes get going all kinds of weird when there’s a full moon. He’s careful to tread lightly here, doesn’t want to set this guy off, not without back-up.

  Wood sees he’s got the cop all bent with worry, and he plays to it. “Friend,” he says, “I’m thinking Boggs gets into the Hall on the first ballot.”

  Norman pulls his borrowed wheels into the parking lot of a package store just outside Nashua. It’s not a grand plan, but the idea and the store present themselves at roughly the same time and seem to get along. No way he can face what’s going on in his mother’s house without a splash of something, he is made to realize. Vodka, probably, this close to home, this early in the day. Anything else will leave him smelling tanked, when all he wants is to top himself off, dull his senses a bit before dealing with whatever the hell it is he’s going to have to deal. He certainly doesn’t want to throw any pain-in-the-ass questions or recriminating stares into the mix.

  There’s a poster out in front of the package store advertising a new line of flavored vodkas—citrus, currant, pepper—and Norman is drawn by the bright colors and the promise of refreshing sweetness, escape, a life without worry. (Good things, all.) Inside, there’s a display of, like, a dozen flavors, all spread out as if in a spice rack, and it strikes Norman that even this last, urgent need has been thought out for him, programmed into the road home. He lifts a few of the flat, four-ounce flasks and, for some reason, brings them to his nose one by one, thinking this will help him decide. The smells of glass and label and plastic seal are inter-changeable, but he is pushed to choose a citrus for now and a cherry for later.

  Good, he’s thinking, walking his bottles to the counter. This will be good. He grabs a couple swizzle-stick straws from a plastic container and fits them in his pocket with the change. Something to chew on.

  Back in the car, he twists the seal from the citrus-flavored bottle, brings it to his lips, and right away realizes that the notion of flavored vodkas is probably something better left to brightly colored posters than to his own circumstance. What stands out is more of an aftertaste, really. Nothing too terrible, but nothing too terrific. And nothing that’s exactly alive with flavor, either. A couple sips later, and he starts to think maybe it’s his situation that leaves the vodka tasting flat. Surely, this is not the way flavored vodkas are meant to be consumed: alone, in the middle of the day, in a borrowed car idling outside a state-owned package store. Surely, he fits into some demographic the marketing people hadn’t anticipated.

  Norman, anxious to turn his situation around, fishes in his pockets for one of his tiny straws, thinking maybe the citrus flavoring will have a better chance of locating his buds through a small sip than through a full-throated gulp, only the straw is too short to stand in the flask and too narrow for any significant sipping. Still, he’s determined to complete his experiment, and he pinches at the straw with the fingers of his right hand while tipping the flask gently with his left so that it might find vodka. This proves more trouble than it’s worth, so Norman places the wet straw on the dash and downs the rest of his four ounces in a single swig.

  Gulped, the vodka tastes faintly antiseptic, almost like cleaning fluid, like what he imagines Lemon Fresh Mr. Clean must taste, and the alcohol buzzes through Norman’s head like it belongs to someone else. (The head, he means, and not necessarily the vodka.) Also, it’s like the static on a still-warm television screen. These are the connections he makes. It’s there, this buzz, but not so anyone would notice, except maybe to the touch, timed right. It’s there and it’s like cleaning fluid, a little.

  He tries to shake the buzz from his head, almost in a shiver, returns the headphones to his ears, and pulls from the parking lot like Starsky and Hutch. This connection, too, just comes to him, peeli
ng from the lot, and now that it has, he’s all over it. Starsky and Hutch. Damn. He’s got their lunchbox, still, in one of Woodman’s houses somewhere, unless maybe his mother or the fucking Swede threw it out. Only now that he’s onto it, he realizes that even if he’s still got the lunchbox, that whole Starsky and Hutch deal’s been wrecked by what’s happened to that guy’s family. Starsky, or Hutch, he never could tell them apart. One of them. Guy’s wife got AIDS in a blood transfusion and passed it to her kids, and pretty soon he’s the only one left. That’s the story as it registered for Norman, and now that he’s landed on it the sadness of what’s happened to Starsky and Hutch overcomes him and becomes greater than his own. Strange how the tragedies of other people seem larger to Norman than those in his own life. After all, he’s also the only one left. His father’s gone and driven himself off some cliff, his mother’s gone and married the Swede. There’s just him, alone, headed north in a borrowed car to a house that is so unfamiliar he must consult directions.

  He starts to cry, only in his head the tears are for Starsky and Hutch. And it’s more than just tears. Stuff comes out his nose, bubbles form at his mouth when his lips part, his face is suddenly slick with sadness. It passes over him in a moment, this cry, but even in the calm, he is left whimpering. Wet and whimpering. He pulls over to the side of the road and dabs at his face with his sleeve, rubs at his eyes with the butts of his palms, checks himself in the rearview mirror, wishes for tissues.

  He reaches over to roll down the passenger window, and then back to roll down his own. He wants to get a breeze going, figures maybe somewhere in the whoosh of speeding, mid-afternoon air he’ll find a way to blowdry the tears and slobber from his face, the red from around his eyes, the ambiguous ache from his heart. He figures on these things—counts on them, really—only, when he gets going again, he finds the manufactured breeze too much of a distraction. Out of nowhere, it’s like a twister inside the car. Toll receipts are lifted from the dash by the cross currents; the pages of this morning’s Daily News are rifled in the back. For a moment, he imagines his father in the back seat, flipping through the newspaper to measure the coverage, searching so frantically for his obituary that it might be another bad review of another bad picture.

  In the whoosh, Norman remembers a car his father used to drive, some kind of convertible, cherry red. He remembers the way the Woodman would pull up at Anita’s with the top down, whatever the temperature. He’d tool around L.A. on his occasional weekends with Norman with the heater on full. “Don’t want to hear your crap, son,” the old man dismissed, whenever Norman complained about the cold. “In this town, you put up with a lot. This is nothing.”

  Soon, Norman is off I-93 and scrambling for directions. He wrote them down on the back of a Tower Records receipt, only the tiny square seems to have been blown from the shelf beneath the handbrake. He can’t recall whether to turn east or west at the stop sign, but decides to go from memory. It’d be no big deal to pull over and fish around for the receipt, but this seems easier to Norman, more practical. It’s not like he’s never driven here or anything.

  And so he follows the scent home, ticking off the familiar landmarks as they pass: Dairy Queen, Stop ’n’ Shop, BayBank, the pond where he would’ve learned to play ice hockey had he grown up here and shared the local passion for the sport. As it is, he can’t even skate. As it is, he’s only spent a half-dozen nights on his mother’s couch.

  There, just around the bend, across from the school, he can see Nils’s pickup in the carport, a rental job out front. Must be Pet’s. Must be everyone is inside, finishing lunch, waiting on word. Waiting on him.

  Waiting.

  He pulls up along the curb in front of the house, a couple car lengths back from where he would park if he felt like he belonged. He checks himself in the rearview, runs his fingers through his hair, makes himself presentable.

  They’re out to meet him before Norman’s exited the car: his mother, Pet, even Nils. A regular fucking welcome wagon. All he needs.

  “Oh, baby,” his mother says, reaching him first, collecting Norman, tight, in her long arms. She grabs onto him like there’s nothing else left.

  Nils pats Norman tentatively on the back, not sure he belongs inside the hug with the boy, but wanting to make some physical connection.

  Pet steps back from the car and onto the sidewalk, choosing to leave the moment alone before inserting herself into it. A part of her wants to turn away from it. Poor Norman looks so much like those old publicity shots of her Wood that it hurts to see him. Kills. There’s this thing they each do with their face, a kind of flared-nostril, curled-lip snarl Pet had mostly seen on Wood during orgasm, which now appears on Norman. She never noticed the similarity before. She likes to think it is every emotion, all at once, bursting from wherever it can find expression, and she takes it in wondering what Norman is trying to keep inside.

  Norman loses himself in his mother’s fierce hug. He gives himself completely to it. He doesn’t mean to, at first, but he can’t help himself. Soon, he’s not even thinking about it. In the folds of her robe and the smell of her same perfume, he is a small child again. His knees buckle. He seems suddenly unable to support his own weight. He starts to weep uncontrollably, and it is only through the sounds of his own sobbing that he becomes self-conscious again, aware of his letting go. “Daddy,” he cries out, trying to fight back the hard flow of tears.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Anita says, stroking her son’s hair, working to keep him from collapsing right there on the street. Holding him—indeed, lifting him, almost—she starts to think of Ray Bolger. She’s inside the moment, but also on its edges, thinking of Ray Bolger. Yes, Norman’s gone all limp like a scarecrow, and, for a moment, she fights the impulse to look around the yard for extra stuffing. That’s the way things are these days with Anita. Even now. She’s either not all here, or too much here, or someplace else. But then she’s back to it, instinctively, finding the right way to hold her grown son, and soon she’s rocking gently with him, almost in a dance, back and forth on the curb in front of her house. She hums a tune neither one of them recognizes and no one else can hear.

  “It’s gonna be all right, baby,” she whispers sweetly into his ear. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  Pet steps to Nils and wraps a robed arm around his skinny shoulders. She’s not flirting, or goofing, or anything at all. She just wants something to hold onto, and Nils is in easy reach. He’ll do, she thinks, and then she wonders if maybe her knees might buckle and her friend’s husband will have to struggle to support her weight.

  Nils wonders the same, realizes this reaching out of Pet’s is not the same as her earlier playfulness. This reaching out is real, but it makes him uncomfortable. He wills himself tall against it. He does it for Anita, and for the boy.

  This, all of this . . . this is not what any of them were expecting.

  Not Thinking

  Hamlin, back from a late lunch, lands himself at his desk like he’s got a job to do. His own ancient oak swivel chair receives him without wheeze, or wobble, or whatnot. Pimletz, waiting for someone to talk to, figures his efficient colleague must oil the springs himself, tighten his own screws, maybe even cart the contraption out for repairs. There’s no explaining the noiselessness of the thing. Jesus, Hamlin certainly keeps that chair purring. On it and swiveling, the man goes about his business like it should be set to string music: he logs back on to his terminal, speed dials an aide to the police commissioner, triages his message slips, milks and sugars his half cup of coffee, kicks off his shoes. He does these things in a strange, seamless choreography, rolling here and there and back, here and there and back, riding the grooves he’s made in the floor with the years.

  “You about done?” Pimletz says, one desk away.

  “No,” Hamlin replies, head down, his mind every place but the interruption. “You’re about done. You. Me, I’m just getting started.”

  Great, Pimletz thinks. Guy probably slams me in h
is sleep. It’s like a reflex with him, but he goes at Hamlin again, and, like a fool, he goes at him from inside the conversation he’s been having with himself since he got off the phone with New York. “So what do you think?”

  This gets Hamlin’s attention, this starting in at mid-stream. He steps down his stockinged feet (gold-toed!) to stop his chair from rolling and swivels to face Pimletz. The chair responds like a show dog. “A lot of things, actually,” he says, gearing for another slam. “I think it’s strange that nobody makes tomato pie. Why is that, you think? I think Ted Kennedy is looking more and more like a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I think national health care reform is a fucking pipe dream. I think, for Halloween, I’ll be going as George Pataki.” Volley, volley, volley. . . . He pauses, runs a spot check on his sarcasm levels, absorbs the blank look on Pimletz’s face, continues. “And I think the day Drew Barrymore is worth twelve million dollars a picture is the day the women’s crew team over at Harvard starts jumping rope with my dick. These the kind of thoughts you’re looking for?”

  To the rest of the world, Pimletz may appear thick, but there aren’t so many layers to him he can’t see the point. He rips into himself for being so stupid, starts back in at the top. “Okay,” he announces. “Wood. You saw the obit in this morning’s paper. We talked about it, remember?”

  Hamlin nods. “So it was both Nixon girls? Julie and Tricia? The Doublemint twins.” Beat. “Talk about your whitebread sandwiches. This is what you’re telling me?