Pimletz nods to indicate he doesn’t.
“Coffee?”
It’s the big waitress, Grace, with a ready cup, and these people have all been so oddly agreeable, Pimletz doesn’t have it in him to decline. In truth, he can’t drink coffee. It gives him the shits, fierce, but he can nurse at it until the food comes.
“So, Axel Pimletz,” Wood starts in, pulling up a chair, “what brings you into town?”
This is conversation, Pimletz tells himself. Guy’s just being friendly. He doesn’t really want to know, not the whole story. No one ever wants the whole story. He takes a sip of Grace’s coffee. “Just some research,” he says. “For a book.” He says it like it’s nothing to be working on a book, sipping coffee, talking to strangers.
“You a writer?” Wood asks.
“You might say that.” (There’s that line again.)
“Anything I’ve read?”
Shit, in just a few seconds, Pimletz has left himself exposed, and he wants to rewrite his way from the hole he’s now in. “Technical stuff,” he tries. “Highway commission. Road usage. Traffic patterns.” There, he thinks. That should buy him some time, redirect the discussion. Then he thinks, road usage? He looks over at this Harlan person to measure the man’s hoped-for disinterest, but what he gets back is an eery connection. Something in his eyes, his voice. Something familiar. He studies Harlan’s face, but he can’t get past the beard and the long hair. The eyes, though, they’re what bring him in. They’re a deep blue, and certain, and locked onto Pimletz like they don’t want to miss a move. And the voice, if he could just hear a bit more of it, uninterrupted, he’s guessing maybe he’ll pick up on something there too.
“There a story goes with that lobster outfit?” he asks, hoping to get Trask talking.
“Is there a story?” Wood bellows, a little too largely. He leans back on his chair, turns his head for Grace. “He wants to know what the deal is with me and this lobster suit.”
“Tell him how I caught you in one of my traps and now we just let you out for feedings,” Chester suggests, with unusual wit. “Tell him how we’re just fattenin’ you up for the tourists.”
“That’s basically it,” Wood says.
“What can I get for you, Axel Pimletz?” Ah, here’s that Grace again with those lips. She seems to want to sneak up on him.
Wood reaches for the menu with his exposed hand and sets it down on the table. “Just fix us up with something special,” he says. Then, turning to Pimletz: “That okay with you? You’re not on any kind of restrictive diet?”
Pimletz wonders what the appropriate head movements are to indicate yes and then no, sequentially, but the surprising Grace is off to the kitchen before he can comment either way. He is flustered, briefly, by the exchange, and, in a more sustained way, by the exchanges of the past several minutes. He fills his uncertainty with a sip of coffee. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, what’s expected, and the coffee is something to bridge the spaces between. Been forever since he last had coffee, he thinks, sipping. He’d forgotten what it tastes like, how it always seemed more satisfying in the smell than in the swallow. He’d forgotten, also, what the caffeine can do to him, and how quickly. Jesus, it cuts right through him. Or maybe it’s not the caffeine as much as the thought of the caffeine. Maybe it’s all in his head, but now that it’s in his head it’s also everywhere else. “There a bathroom?” he asks this Harlan Trask person across the table, not wanting to let on any urgency in his voice.
“In the back,” Wood says, pointing.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Pimletz says, standing, reaching for his shoulder bag. “I can leave this here?” he says.
“You don’t trust a man dressed like a lobster?”
“It’s never come up.”
Wood smiles and removes his other claw. Then he unzips the top of his costume and lets it fall to his waist. “There,” he says, himself again, just about. He means to be accommodating. “Now it’s just a man who was recently dressed as a lobster.”
“Half-dressed,” Chester adds.
Wood has had about enough of his geek chorus. “Thank you, Chet,” he says, “for clearing that up.”
Pimletz grimaces urgently and hopes it looks like a smile. He hangs his bag on his seat-back and moves swiftly for the rest room, and as soon as he closes the door behind him, his bag starts ringing, like it was waiting for him to leave. Two Stools doesn’t pull much in the way of cell phone activity, so the sound is, at first, hard to source. The ringing is faint, muffled, and it takes several peals for Grace and her regulars to figure where it’s coming from.
“That guy sittin’ with Mr. Trask,” one of the Lennys finally says, from behind the counter, pointing. “His bag.”
Wood hears this and wonders if maybe his transformation is complete. Used to be, he’d hear a cell phone and everyone’d reach for their belts or their vest pockets, see if it was them. Him too. Now he hears this ringing, and he doesn’t think to move. It’s not as if it occurs to him and he has to stifle the impulse. He doesn’t think of it. He finally leans in for a better listen, only by this time, the ringing has stopped. Six or seven rings, then nothing. “You sure?” he says, back at Lenny.
Lenny nods. This Lenny doesn’t say much; the other one, he’s another story.
Mike: “You think someone should go in there, tell him he’s got a call? Could be important.”
“It’s important, they’ll call back,” Acky offers. “That call return feature the phone company’s got out now? I don’t understand it. There’s answering machines. There’s trying again. It’s not likely you’ll be missin’ too many important calls.”
Lem tells how he dialed a wrong number once, couple weeks back, hung up after realizing, and a couple minutes later got a call back from an irate invalid who said he had some goddamn nerve making him fight his way across the room to answer the phone and then to hang up. “If you’re askin’ me,” he says, “that call return is for beans. I get a wrong number, all of a sudden I’m an asshole.”
Just then, the bag starts ringing again, and before the chowderheads can debate what to do about it, Wood reaches in for the phone. He’s not about to hear it discussed into the ground. “Axel’s line,” he answers, large enough for the others to hear. “Highway commissioner to the stars.”
Pet, at the other end, is thrown to her chair by the voice. She’s standing, and then she’s forced to sit, that’s how hard it hits her. She’s thinking, after what she just heard on the local news about Norman, maybe she has cut cellularly into some other dimension, maybe what’s happened has somehow obliterated the lines between the here and gone. Shit, she doesn’t know what to think. “Wood?” she says.
“Pet?”
You Say You Want an Evolution
Hospital. Nashua. Next afternoon. No one saying the word “coma,” but each of them thinking it. Wood. Pet. Anita. Nils. Grace and Pimletz, off to the side, wanting to be let in. It’s out there and obvious and foremost in their heads, but what comes out is how lucky he was, Norman, the way his car looked, the way the truck driver gave his report of what happened. People talking just to hear themselves, to avoid dwelling on how things are. The swing sets were mostly fine, the talking goes, except for a stretch of snapped rungs on one of the ladders and a bent plastic slide, but the Buick apparently spun and hit in such a way that it seemed to want to swallow the truck. It collapsed in on itself, around the truck nose, making room.
Pet went out to the scene with Nils on the way to the hospital to see for herself. She came away astonished there was even any air left in the Buick after the impact, forget poor Norman’s smushed body, but the rest were able to get the same impression from the pictures—that is, all but Anita, who couldn’t bring herself to look.
It was Nils noticed the broken glass from Norman’s flavored vodka bottles, and, when he pointed it out to Pet, she turned on him. “Say anything and I’ll kill you,” she threatened. “I mean it.”
“What?” he said,
knowing what, and that she probably could.
“I mean it, Nils. This gets cleaned up. That’s what you do, right?” She looked at him, her eyes mad. “You’re in the clean-up business. Clean it the fuck up.” She knew she was being stupid, crazyridiculous, that the police already had been to inspect the crash, that the fact of Norman’s drinking was already a matter of record, but she wanted to give Anita a chance at some perspective. She wanted her friend to deal with whatever she had to deal with before dealing with everything else. There should be at least that.
Nils stepped back to his van and took out a vacuum and a loose duster. He knew not to mess with one of these Woodwomen when they got going with one of their ideas. They want what they want.
What’s also out there and obvious and not being talked about is Wood resurfacing in this way after so long. A tragic accident, a chance encounter, a misdirected phone call, and he is sucked back into how he was, alongside the same subset of people who drove him to what he did or, at least, didn’t keep him from it.
Funny, the way things happen. Ironic, funny, one of those. The doctor says there’s a good prospect Norman will come out of this okay, the next twenty-four hours will be the tell, so Wood thinks in terms of his own circumstance. He’ll have time to get his mind around what happened and, for now, supposes he’s been looking for a way back in, a reconnect with his kid, a chance to undo some of the pieces of the new life he’d made and remake pieces of the old. If he’s honest with himself (and this seems a good place to start), he can see that lately he’d been thinking it was too sudden, his checking out the way he did. Too extreme. The deeper he got into it, the further removed, the harder it was to reach back out to Norman, to reclaim the parts of his old life worth having. He’s never placed his thinking in just these terms, but here it is. It wasn’t like the old Wood to squelch an impulse, so he can’t exactly fault himself for making his sudden and not entirely thought-out exit, but he can at least listen to the new impulses finding him in this room. He can remain open to his own remaking. After all, they remake pictures all the time out there in L.A., so the notion is essentially innate to his species; it’s what you do, when there’s nothing else. The Tall Blonde Man with One Red Shoe. Cape Fear. The Absent-Minded Professor. Even The Sons of Simon Pettigrew—one of his, a western, updated as a vehicle for Angela Basset, Whoopi Goldberg, and Halle Berry, with Cicely Tyson in his gender-bowed title role. Even the ones opened to not very much business are up for remaking.
It’s like a do-over, he thinks, a second serve, and he wonders if this isn’t where Norman has taken them all right here. Another chance to get it right. An editor’s mark—STET—on an unfinished manuscript: this whole section right here . . . take it out . . . no, wait, never mind, leave it the fuck in . . . what the fuck was I thinking? It’s out and then it’s in, right and then not right, and then (somehow!) right again. It can’t make up its mind.
He looks over at Grace, not knowing what to do with herself, surprised to be included in this unfolding. He marvels at the places he’s made for her in the middle of his uncertainty. He works to understand his feelings. No, she’s nothing like the women he’d been with before, and it’s not just the way she looks that sets her apart. It’s not her delightful lack of education. (In the past, if he went with someone who’d never gone to college, it was because she hadn’t yet finished high school.) It’s where she comes from, what she’s done, how she manages. She works fourteen-hour days, mostly on her feet, makes just enough to keep going, send a little bit down to Florida for her father. He wonders what her dreams were when she was young, what she wanted, if she’s even come close. He wonders why they’ve never talked about this, why he could never share with her the truth about himself, and, underneath the wondering, he recognizes the thing between them was mostly about comfort. Was, is, whatever. There was an easiness to how they were together, once it got going.
And then she went and shocked the shit out of him when the news of what happened to Norman began to filter through the coffee shop last night. He all but dropped this Axel Pimletz’s phone. He let out a low, almost guttural moan and scrambled to Grace’s rabbit-eared black-and-white, desperate for confirmation. When it found him a few minutes later from the mouth of Tom Brokaw on NBC, there she was, and now everything between them is subject to change.
“A sad footnote tonight to the legacy of actor Terence Wood,” Brokaw began, and by the time they popped a years-ago photo of father and son onto the small screen, Grace was at Wood’s side, her arms around him in a slanted bear hug, his nose thick with the grease and sweat and trouble of her working. Man, it threw him to have to hear about his kid like that, and, at that point, they didn’t have this doctor’s good prospect to hold onto. They didn’t know shit, and, on top of that, to have to process that the charade of the past months had been revealed, and somewhere in the middle to have to take in the up-close dew of perspiration on Grace’s upper lip and not bite it off and have it be a part of him. It was a condemnation of the life he’d quit and the one he’d replaced it with, and an anchor holding him to the new place he’d made, all at once and mixed together. He couldn’t think where to put his regretting.
“So, what?” he said, turning up from Grace’s compassion, leaving her lips alone. “Everyone knows?”
“No,” she said, brushing back his hair, dabbing at the slather of quickly gathered nose run from his moustache. She covered his brow with downy-wet kisses. “Just me.”
He thought about this and considered it a good thing not to have to make a serious scene in front of Gracie’s regulars; it was enough of a scene to be crying like this, collecting the softsweet kisses of his great bear of a woman. The rest of it would come, he realized, but he didn’t want to have to explain his crying just yet, his behavior since he pitched into town. He wanted to keep it to himself. And to dear Grace, bless her big-bottomed, bear-hugging soul.
Then, it followed, there was the matter of how his estranged and nearly widowed wife came to find him on a left-behind cellular phone, and Wood didn’t leave it to Pet to explain. He was too flustered to think of it straightaway, and it didn’t occur to him in any kind of focus until after he’d pressed the End button on the device, scrambled over to the television, and started wondering if these latest turns weren’t being taken by some other group of luckless people, if maybe there wasn’t some other plane of existence he might tap into where the choices of the past months had not been made. It was a long processing of information, the inverse of how it was last fall. Then, in the first weeks after his checking out, he had to remind himself each morning of his new circumstance until, finally, the things he had going with Grace and Maine and Larry Lobster and his being out from under had taken hold. When he heard Pet at the other end, it wasn’t enough to erase his new situation. It opened a door, but it didn’t pull him through.
Pimletz, emerging from the bathroom after just these few moments, picked up that something was happening. His nose for news began to flare, the way it did when he walked in on someone else’s breaking story in the newsroom. It wasn’t quite a sixth sense, but it was a fifth and change. “Hey,” he said, returning to his table, trying to guess at how the attention of the room had shifted, “what gives?” He said this to no one in particular, not really knowing anyone in particular, and not fully realizing it had been about a decade since people said things like “what gives?”
Wood slipped from Grace’s comforting and stepped to the table. “Your phone,” he said, holding it out to Pimletz. “It rang.”
“Really?” He’d forgotten about the phone. It didn’t explain the attention of the room, but it was something to think about.
“Look at me,” Wood insisted, pulling close, the juice of his various lives by now coursing through him like never before. “You know who I am, or you fucking with me?” His voice had turned since Pimletz first came through the front door. It was hard, flat.
“Harlan Trask,” Pimletz said quietly. He paused to see how this registered on th
e face up against his. “Did I get it right?”
Wood inched closer still. “Look again,” he said.
Pimletz looked again, but he had no idea what he was looking for. The other man’s face was wet, perhaps from crying. It wasn’t raining outside that Pimletz could remember. He looked up, inexplicably, to see if the sprinkler system had been activated, if they even had one in a place like this. He couldn’t think what he’d missed.
“You’ve never seen me?” Wood tried. “You don’t know who I am?”
Pimletz shook his head.
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“And now you’ve seen me it’s not a face you can place?”
He looked again, making certain. “No. Never seen you before.” For a beat, Pimletz thought this Harlan Trask was getting ready to do a card trick with the flowery show he was making of the fact they’d never met.
Just then, Wood made the connection himself. It knitted itself together and came clear. If he had to wait on Pimletz it would never have happened, and he led the asshole his publisher hired to finish his book (it was in the papers!) to a back table to sort through the mess of these last hours. It took a while explaining, and when he was finally out with it Wood felt a tremendous weight lifting from him. First there was the weight that had lifted when he disappeared six months ago, and now there was this new weight in its place, and alongside his thoughts of Norman, he kept thinking, okay, it’s done. I’ve said it. Now I can breathe.
Pimletz, as the situation gradually emerged, couldn’t move off thinking what this meant for his book. That was the first thing on his mind. First, last, only. He wanted to flip ahead, see how it would all turn out, where it would leave him. He wanted to summon Hamlin on the cell phone, get the fucker’s help in figuring the puzzle. He wanted to call Volpe, tell him to hold the first edition, he had a scoop he wouldn’t believe. (But then he thought, well, maybe this isn’t one for the paper just yet; maybe we can make more of a splash with the book if we time it to coincide with publication; he was thinking like a business man, as if he had a real piece of the back end, when really all he cared about was being counted in.) He wanted to ask Terence Wood how it happened that he was not, in fact, dead, and what his plans were regarding his autobiography. He wanted to ask about Norman, how he was, what his chances were. In all, he wanted to say the right things, but his skills in this area were never much to begin with, and here they were further eroded by concern for his stalled book project. He didn’t have it in him to think what it all might mean for the man who suddenly appeared before him as alive as he had ever been on screen, the man who’s left-behind life Pimletz had all but taken up. He couldn’t think what it meant for Norman, laid up in a hospital down in Nashua, or Pet, waiting on Pimletz back at the cabin. No, all that floated to the surface was what this meant for Axel Pimletz, his going-nowhere career, the twenty-five thousand dollars that had been waiting for him at the other end, and the thought that, probably, with Wood back in the picture, he wouldn’t be getting any more of whatever it was he’d been getting from the man’s wife.
Mourning Wood Page 29