Chinese Handcuffs

by Chris Crutcher

“So how are your parents liking second parenthood?” I asked as we pulled into McDonald’s to get a little breakfast before chauffeuring young Ryan Ryder on his first trek out into the snowy wilderness.

  “I think they’re liking it okay,” she said. “Actually I take care of him quite a bit. I was the one who really pushed to take him when my cousin was talking about putting him up for adoption, so I figure I have to help out as much as I can.”

  “Boy, I know,” I said. “I haven’t seen a whole lot of you since you came back.”

  She said, “Kids take a lot of work.”

  “How old are your parents?” I asked.

  “They’re both sixty-one,” she said.

  You know what that means, Pres? That means they’ll be almost eighty when this little boogernose is ready to go out and take on the world. I thought that, but I didn’t say it. Stacy has always been a mind reader, though. She said, “Ronald Reagan was over eighty when he finished his presidency.”

  “And wasn’t he a prize,” I said.

  She said, “I get your point, but like I said, a lot of it will fall to me.”

  Ryan’s contribution to the conversation was to sit in the back working on the release buttons to the car seat, babbling unintelligible syllables and drooling at a rate that made me think there must be a fire in his lap.

  “That’s like being a parent yourself, though, really,” I said. “I mean, you still going to school and everything? College, I mean.”

  “I’ll make it,” she said. “People do it all the time.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t always do it well.”

  Stacy got quiet all of a sudden and just looked out her window. Finally she turned to me and said, “Look, Dillon, I’ve got all kinds of people to tell me not to have anything to do with this, okay? I’m hoping you won’t turn out to be one of them. What I would like to do today is ride in your van with you and the munchkin and not hear any negative words about anything and just make contact with you again. Do you think that would be possible?”

  “Not another negative word will race past my voice box and out my lips,” I said. “We’ll just be a lovely young couple out with their child, enjoying the winter wonderland.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  We drove along in silence for a bit, Stacy turned around halfway in the van seat, letting Ryan play with her finger, as I guided the van through the switchbacks that lead up to the top of Mount Spokane, where we could watch people ski and look about halfway around the world in any direction. Remember when Mom and Dad used to take us up there for picnics in the summer? God, I thought it really was the top of the world. You used to tell me it was lame as real mountains go, but it sure seemed like a major peak to me.

  As we neared the top, I glanced into the rearview mirror to see Ryan had been rocked to sleep by my driving. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Stacy just staring at him. I couldn’t read her thoughts, couldn’t even guess, really, but it was a look I hadn’t seen on her.

  “What’s going to happen to us, Stace?” I asked by way of “making contact again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I mean, I’ve been in love with you all my life while you were in love with my brother. We both watched him botch his life beyond belief while I kept mine in pretty good shape, all things considered, but nothing changed with the three of us. I was your friend, and he was your honey. Now he’s dead, by his own doing.” I shook my head and stared out the windshield a minute, trying to arrange it in my head so it would make better sense coming out of my mouth, to no avail.

  “I used to think as long as he was alive—with no idea that he ever wouldn’t be—that I didn’t have a chance with you. Then he died, and I realized as long as he’s dead, I don’t have a chance with you.”

  She looked over and smiled, nodding, almost sadly, I thought, but not negating any of my words. I didn’t expect her to. I wasn’t fishing; I was telling it the way I knew it to be. “What do you want me to say?” she asked.

  “Something that helps it all make sense,” I said.

  “What about the girl you’ve been spending time with? The basketball chick.”

  “Jen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about her?”

  “How come you guys don’t get something going? You spend enough time together.”

  I wanted to be honest, Pres. Maybe that’s why I’m telling you all of this, even though it embarrasses me to let you know how I talk about you, but I’m so goddamn tired of being confused and not knowing which of my passions to take where. Stacy has always been a good clearinghouse for me, even when you were alive and I ate my heart out sometimes, wanting her to dump you for me, but she was still a better friend than anything. “I don’t know, Stace,” I said. “I don’t know whether it’s her or me. Something in me is more drawn to her than anyone or anything since you, but we don’t click as partners: you know, boyfriends and girlfriends, that kind of stuff. You know how sometimes you can’t imagine being physical with someone?”

  “You mean sexual?” Of course, she knew that. It was the perfect description of me for her. She nodded.

  “It’s like that. I don’t get it. I mean, sometimes I actually feel like I love her, it’s that intense. But it just doesn’t fit anything that I know about love.”

  I pulled into the parking lot at the bottom of the ski hill and stepped down on the parking brake, leaving the van running for heat. Ryan woke when the driving motion stopped and immediately started crying. Stacy reached back and unhooked the latches on the car seat, setting him free to be brought into her lap. She dug down into the bag and pulled out a bottle, twisting the lid slightly to let a little air in, and stuck the nipple in his mouth. He was instantly at peace with his world. You should see her with that kid, Pres. Like it’s meant to be.

  “You don’t know anything about love,” Stacy said. “Neither do I. Probably neither does Jen. Don’t feel bad, though. Our parents don’t either.” She looked out the side window. “There are so many crazy things, dangerous things sometimes, that we’re taught to call love. . . .” Her voice trailed off. The strain in it made me ache. She turned back and looked me straight in the eye. “There are too many tricks, Dillon. Too many tricks,” and I remembered hearing Jen say almost those exact words. “Things have the wrong names. Remember that time a long time ago when I showed you those Chinese handcuffs? At that carnival? I got them from this gypsy lady. She told me they were a secret of life; I remember that. I thought she was full of shit, but you know, she might have been right. When you’re a kid, you think you can pull hard enough to get them off, but Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t get those things off his fingers. You have to do exactly the opposite what it seems you should do. You have to let go. Remember the first time your dad tried to teach you to drive on ice? How when the car started to slide you had to turn into the slide while every nerve in your body said to turn the other way? I think life is like that a lot, way more than we know. And I think love is particularly like that. We think we’re supposed to fight for it when we’re really supposed to let go; you know, turn into it.”

  Ryan stirred in her lap. He had fallen asleep, and the bottle lay between his legs. Stacy picked it up and handed it back. The nipple slid in like it was custom made for his mouth. Something in his face gave me a powerful rush of déjà vu, but it passed in a heartbeat.

  “We get crazy when we can’t make things be like the world tells us they are.” She looked back out the window. “It was that way for me and your brother, I think. I mean, how could I have loved him that last year? I didn’t even know who he was. He was way more attracted to drugs and bikers and that whole lifestyle than he was to me. But somebody told me that if you really loved somebody, you stayed with him no matter what. You had to fight for him.” She laughed. “Hell, I was convinced.”

  I knew she was right, but it wasn’t helping. I remember the day you died, when we were at Jackie’s, having breakfast, and you talked
about how you had really screwed things up with her. You thought you were thinking it, but you were really saying it out loud. But I really struggled with what she was saying because I couldn’t let her go—didn’t know how—and I had no idea what I’d have to let go of to get my mind straight about Jen.

  Stacy bundled Ryan up, and we walked into the lodge for a cup of hot chocolate. There weren’t many skiers, its being a weekday and all, but the view from the tables inside faces the hill directly, and you get a great view of the few diehards who were there. Ryan was awake now, babbling on and checking out gravity with a spoon that Stacy kept picking up and handing back to him. She has a lot of patience. I think you need that with a kid.

  Then she asked me if I’d ever seen a marriage I wanted to have.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly that. Who do you know that has a marriage that you want yours to be like?”

  I thought a minute. No surprise to you that my mind didn’t go directly to Mom and Dad. The only one that came to mind was her folks’, so I said that.

  She laughed. “That the best you can do? My parents have stayed together because they ignore each other about eighty-five percent of the time. They even have their sleep schedules set up so one is awake when the other isn’t. They’d be a perfect couple to man the distant early warning system.”

  I was surprised. “Really? I always thought they got along really well.”

  “They do get along really well. They never talk about anything they can fight about. If my parents’ life were a food, it would be soggy rice cakes.”

  “Well, there have to be some good ones.”

  She shrugged. “Show me.”

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t think of one, Pres, so I just sat there, taking over the spoon-retrieving duty while Stacy stared out the window at the mountain. I couldn’t figure out what had changed, or why. Stacy used to be so up. She was the one we could always count on to see the one marshmallow in the sump. Your death had been hard on her, really hard. But that was two years ago, and if Stacy is anything, she’s resilient.

  I handed Ryan the spoon, and he held it tight, his eyes locked on mine. He smiled big and dropped it once again to the floor. I felt I was in obedience school.

  When I got home tonight, I figured it all out. You must have been laughing your ass off reading the first part of this. What a frigging genius I turned out to be. I was sitting on the edge of my bed getting ready to write this, thinking of maybe signing up for the track team at school so I could quit before the first practice and drive Mr. Caldwell a little farther up the wall when a picture completely filled my head. It was a picture—a real picture—in a family album. Our family album, Pres. It was Ryan holding the spoon, smiling big as all outdoors, getting ready to drop that sucker right on its spoony head. Only the picture was sixteen years old at least. I dug through the albums Mom kept when she was still here, half wondering why she hadn’t taken them with her—hell, she was the only one who ever looked at them—and I found the one with my name on it and flipped it open to the second page—right where I knew it would be. The background was different. We weren’t on Mount Spokane; we were at that little hamburger place that used to be around the corner from our house, Fat Albert’s, I think it was called. I was about one—the back of the picture said a year and a month—sitting with a spoon poised to drop through the bomb bay doors and a big shit-eating grin on my face. Ryan’s grin.

  So that’s it. The plot thickens. I knew there was no good reason in the world for Stacy’s parents to adopt a kid when they were a short dropkick away from being set free. Old Ryan is up to his chubby cheeks in my genes; only they didn’t come from me.

  I turned out the light and lay back on the pillow, with not the slightest idea how to greet this incontrovertible news and I heard your voice, Pres, clear as a bell. “. . . and I left something else. . . .”

  Sweet Jesus.

  Your brother

  CHAPTER 7

  John Caldwell walked through the door to the faculty lounge and directly to the coffeepot, where he inserted a dime into the Styrofoam cup marked “Donations” and poured himself a cup of “hot java,” words he mumbled to the collective faculty’s growing irritation, everytime he poured himself coffee. He was agitated and poured the cup too full. “Damn,” he whispered as it burned his lip and splashed down over the front of his white shirt. Don Morgan, a social studies teacher and boys’ JV baseball coach, looked up and smiled. “Tough day, Chief?”

  “Tough day,” Caldwell said back. “You know, I do my best to understand these kids, but sometimes it just baffles me.” His eyes went to the door, and beyond, and he said to himself, “Just baffles me.”

  “Who’s baffling today?” Morgan asked. “Someone in particular or just kids in general?” It was the general faculty opinion that Caldwell wasn’t all that smart and was probably a little hyperactive and out of control sometimes, but he was liked because he worked hard at his job and really wanted to do it right. The fact that he overshot his boundaries fairly regularly with the kids was forgivable because he kept a reasonably heavy disciplinary hand, making everyone’s job a little easier. And he always supported the staff in any conflict with a student.

  “It’s that damned Hemingway,” Caldwell said.

  “Three days go fast.”

  “Too fast. Today’s his first day back. And you know how he shows up?” Caldwell shook his head in genuine disbelief. “You know how he shows up?”

  Morgan did know how he had shown up because Dillon was in his morning U.S. government class. Dillon had hustled through the door about two minutes late, scurrying down the aisle to his customary front-row seat, whispering, “Sorry I’m late, sir, I got held up in English.”

  “Didn’t by any chance have something to do with your T-shirt,” Morgan had said.

  Dillon had looked down, reading his T-shirt silently upside down, then looked back up in perfect innocence. “No, sir. It’s grammatically correct.”

  The T-shirt read, in giant black letters:

  GIVE A PERSON GUTS

  AND

  SHIT’LL DO FOR BRAINS

  It was the same shirt Dillon wore each time he competed in a triathlon, a slogan that made a lot of sense, given the grueling physical nature of the activity.

  “No,” Morgan lied, “how does he show up?”

  “In a goddamn pornographic T-shirt,” Caldwell said, shaking his head. “I send him out of here because he can’t seem to show respect for anything or anyone, and his first day back he shows up in a pornographic T-shirt. What do you do about a kid who just won’t learn?”

  Kathy Sherman walked into the room from her first PE class, poured herself a cup of coffee, and plopped down on the couch with the morning paper.

  Morgan looked back down at his papers. “Stop trying to teach him, I guess,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure. This is a tough kid,” Caldwell said.

  Kathy looked up from her paper. “You talking about Dillon?”

  Caldwell was reluctant to say. Kathy Sherman had a reputation for standing up for the students in certain situations; that was fine with Caldwell as long as it wasn’t in preference to staff or administration. She had embarrassed him on more than one occasion with questions that seemed to set him up in front of the troops. He hated that, but he was always gracious. Because you had to be, really, when you got shown up so often. Graciousness was a basic survival tactic for John Caldwell. Secretly, though, he hated her. He hated that she was by far the most successful coach in town—probably in the state—and that she accomplished that without the win-at-all-costs philosophy he considered so important in sports, and in life for that matter. She was always giving her kids a voice as she called it, and that just didn’t make sense. And she liked Dillon Hemingway, the biggest waste since New York’s floating, homeless garbage barge. Besides, he thought she must be gay. Actually, he hoped she was gay because that would explain a lot of things, though he had no idea how.
The fact that she had been married for several years and was now often in the company of a local TV newscaster didn’t sway his suspicion one iota because it was a well-known John Caldwell policy to figure out how he wanted things to be, then the facts be damned.

  Morgan answered Kathy’s question for him. “Yeah, we’re talking about Dillon.”

  “Must’ve seen his shirt, huh?” Kathy smiled.

  “I suppose you think that’s acceptable,” Caldwell said, setting his cup aside and leaning forward, ready for battle.

  Kathy shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I wouldn’t wear it.”

  “I would hope not,” Caldwell said, sitting back. “It’s just one more—”

  “Jennifer Lawless has one like it she wears to practice sometimes, though,” Kathy broke in. “I must say, it fits with her outlook about the same way it does with Dillon’s.”

  “You let her wear it to practice?” Caldwell asked incredulously.

  “She didn’t ask me,” Kathy said, turning back to her paper.

  “What’s the matter with you? Doesn’t anyone have any sense of morality or right and wrong anymore? That shirt is pornographic. It has the word shit right on it.” Caldwell was visibly angry.

  Kathy put down the paper and pushed her glasses up on her nose. Very quietly she said, “John, you know, you could be a pretty good principal if you could just learn where to make your stands.”

  Caldwell was blank.

  “I’ll bet half the kids in school agree with you about Dillon Hemingway: that he’s a smartass and he should use his talents for the good of the school. I’ve heard several kids say they agree with a lot of what you said to him in the lunchroom the other day. But you blew it picking that place, and you blew it when you brought his brother into it. When you do things like that, everyone automatically thinks you’re a jerk.”

  “His brother was on drugs. He was a dopehead,” Caldwell said.

  “You think Dillon doesn’t know that? You think every kid in this school doesn’t know that? John, in the past three years we’ve had two suicides at this school, aside from Preston Hemingway’s. Every kid here was touched by them in some way. Terrified by them. That’s a tender spot. You don’t just gouge it out with a screwdriver. You have to be careful of things like that.”