by Peter Orner
The bridge connecting Forest to Hazel Avenue. And down there below the deep ravine, his own personal abyss.
She fended him off for hours. She’d make a great goalie, Joanna Frankel. Popper on her bed. In her pink pink room. And now his hard-on is so cemented he imagines wistful that it aims out his pants and reaches out to his handlebars and drives this bike. Which makes no sense. What he means, ladies and gentlemen, is that he is unrequited and thus heroic. This mindless throb has to count for something. Muffled battle hours. Joanna’s parents across the hall. Mr. Frankel snoring like a garage door opening and closing. Pink her room, Joanna’s room so pink. Everything pink. Carpet, wallpaper, door. Stuffed pink billy goat, stuffed pink banana. He choked the goat and whispered, Next I’ll off the banana, and Joanna breathed, Hurt my banana, Popper, and I’ll kick you in the balls. Wait, you’ll touch my balls? Never, Popper, never will even my cold dead fingers—Silent lights stripe the houses. He turns. Amid his inglorious emanations he’s being pulled over. Weird, it’s actually happening. A bullhorned voice: “Stop the bike.”
He stands in the dusty heat of the headlights and waits. The cop takes his time. Popper will die alone, untouched, his once-proud manhood fast shriveled. To top it off, he’s under arrest. The car door cracks open and the cop walks over to him, slowly. He is young and hatless and biting his lip to show he isn’t bored. No. Ensuring the public good sometimes involves innocent-seeming cases just like these.
“Your laces are untied,” the cop says. “Dangerous. Laces get caught in the chain and a kid goes flying.”
He holds the bike while Popper stoops and ties his shoes.
“I’m out past curfew.”
“That, too,” the cop says.
“What else?”
The cop looks away, at the tall trees, at the dark houses of the not-yet-indicted. The dizzy light swings.
“Who are you?”
“A sophomore.”
“You have ID?”
“You mean like a bike license?”
The cop sighs. He chews his lip. His face isn’t unkind or even that officious. Only curious. His wife thinks he’s just a suburban cop, but things aren’t always as they seem along these quiet trees. The rampant criminality here could churn your stomach. Don’t you read the papers, Diane? These people are completely out of control.
“We’ve had a complaint,” the cop says. “A face in a window.”
“Huh?”
The cop’s head doesn’t move an inch, but still Popper gets the impression that he’s sadly shaking his head. “A peeping Tom. You’d think they’d be obsolete. Not quite. Know anything about this? An apartment building across the street from the train station. A window. A face.”
Whenever he’s accused of anything, Popper immediately assumes he must be guilty. A buzzer goes off as he leaves a store and he throws up his hands. Someone screams in the night in his dreams and his hands are on someone’s throat. Why is it that the truth is always a lie in these situations?
“I was over at Joanna Frankel’s,” he says. “Studying.”
“Righto,” the cop says.
He picks up the bike and sticks it in the trunk of the car. He looks around for a Bunjee cord but ends up not finding one, so the trunk bangs against the bike frame as they creep slowly back up Linden, Walnut, St. Johns.
Back of the squad car. That smooth trampoline seat. That trapped-animal stench of stagnant crime. The no-door-handle doors make him feel dangerous to himself. The smudged windows. He thinks of all the other bravehearts who have tried to claw their way out of here to exquisite freedom.
As she opened the door, the woman had the surprised and joyful look of someone about to sneeze. Her eyes were closed. She opened them by slow degrees. The cop stepped helpfully aside to give her a better view. The light above the door was a shallow yellow. She tilted her head left a little to look at Popper from a different angle. That didn’t work, either.
Her features, her eyes, her nose, her mouth, all went into free fall.
“Is this him?”
She laughed, not a real laugh, a forced, stage laugh. “Not even close.”
A small doughy-faced woman wearing a purple kimono and, over it, a housecoat. On her feet, slippers with the tips pointing up. They looked like little gondolas. She was maybe forty, with exhausted eyes. Like Popper, she’d clearly had a long night. There were tear streaks in her makeup. Or she’d clawed her face with her fingers.
“Which window was the perpetrator standing at, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She pointed to the window to the right of the front door.
“Why don’t you go back in the house? I’ll have this individual go stand—”
“The face—It isn’t his face.”
Popper tried to seem, what, disappointed? He wanted to tell her he wasn’t getting any, either. You want a peeper, lady, I’ll peep. We just got to get rid of this cop. I’ll look right in the window at whatever you want me to see. Except Popper wasn’t the right him. He was no one, brought to her door out of the dead night.
Joanna Frankel. Popper dials her phone number sometimes. Her mother still lives in Highland Park. He hangs up. Her mother calls him back. Hang-up calls have gone the way of blacksmiths and Indians. Who are you? Joanna Frankel’s mother says. And what on earth do you want?
They tore down the apartment building across the street from the train station years ago. It’s where the new Walgreens is now. Whoever she was, she’s long gone. He thinks of her eyes, how they were fissured with tiny bloody twists. One sleepless night she thought she saw a face, a certain face (out of the past?), in the window and called the cops.
Won’t be long now before the doorbell bleats. Who’s there? What are the chances? How much potential in such a stupid tinny noise? Snatch a look in the hallway mirror, shoot back the deadbolt, hand turns a knob, pull the door open. Open it. Remarkable how fast it all happens. We fling from expectation to failure—to relief in how long?
Is this him?
Because that’s finally what she was, relieved. Relieved Popper was Popper, whoever in the hell he even was. He’s always wondered what might have become of either of them had he been that other face.
AP ENGLISH
Mrs. Engerman says that the Stranger is animalistic because he eats standing up, that Camus meant for him to be a symbol of modern dehumanization. The tragedy, of course, is that even frogs fall in love. As the Stranger loses his humanity, his love for Marie (that vixen) begins to confuse him, weakening him in his own eyes, so that love itself becomes a sickness he must overcome.
FROM THE NAVAL LIBRARY OF SEYMOUR POPPER
LEADER OF MEN
#4 Fighting Spirit: You know what this is. Without it, you are only a human biped with pants. With it, you are a live, red-blooded go-getter—one who will succeed. Have you the grit to stay with a hard job? Never say “I can’t.” Forget there is such a phrase. Don’t be a quitter. “A man may be down but never out” until he admits it.
—Bluejackets Manual, page 7
THE HILL
Late September and panting up the long hill up from Park Avenue Beach. Coach Piefke sent them to do the hill. Do the hill, Coach Piefke said, and come back. And so they ran. First down Vine and across on Linden, and then the steep descent to the lake via Park Avenue. Going down, it’s all Chariots of Fire, baby. At the bottom, the lake, blue and innocent, the light catching the white lips of the waves as they lap up the beach, bringing their tide of beer cans and detergent bottles and raw sewage. But the lake is no respite, because there will be no pausing, no moment to take in its vast transporting waters. How far could he have fled from Coach Piefke if he dove in? A man once did it off Glencoe Beach. He started to swim into the sweet endlessness and just kept going and going. Maybe he was heading for the coast of Holland, Michigan, where all the fake Dutch hotties shod their feet in wooden shoes. Somebody called the Coast Guard, but it was too late. His body washed up in Waukegan two days later.
Whoever buil
t the road up from Park Avenue Beach had little imagination. It shoots straight, no meandering; it has no respect for the unique moraine landscape of the North Shore. They started back up, leaning into the hill as Coach Piefke had taught them, letting the rise of the road pull them toward the top. If any of them cramped up, they bit their lower lips. Exchange one pain for another pain, Coach Piefke said. That’s courage. Courage, for some, is as infinite as the lake itself. Popper cramped up. He bit his lip. Coach Piefke said, Love the blood of your pain. He bit his lip till it bled, and he loved the blood. He loved it, and still the cramp crushed his gut until he could hardly breathe. He tried composing a ditty, which is what Manny taught him to do when nothing else worked. Martina, Martina Navratilova / Won’t you let me come ovah? This didn’t work either. He slowed to a little run that was more of a chicken walk with flapping arms. The other guys ran on. Manny looked back, offered to stay. Popper waved him on. I’ll catch you later. He stopped and stood there in the wind halfway up the hill and watched the others’ shoes disappear over the rise. He knelt by the side of the ravine and yacked.
Alone with the squirrels in the trees, the looming lake below. He was calm. He half-whistled through the residual puke in his mouth and loafed onward.
By the time he got back, everyone else had gone home. Coach Piefke was waiting for him behind his desk in his office, the fluorescent light buzzing ferociously. There was a chair to sit down in, but Popper didn’t sit.
It was said that Coach Piefke—somewhere deep inside—was a human being. This theory was based on the fact that his infant son was sick, with what nobody knew, but many nights Coach and his wife had to run the kid to the hospital. Mrs. Coach Piefke would sometimes come to the track with that sick baby wrapped around her stomach and watch them do middle-distance drills. Run, walk, run, walk, run, walk. She had hair that reached down to her butt and swished like a curtain when she walked. It was also said Mrs. Coach Piefke was a hippie and that the baby wasn’t even Coach’s. Once, when she came to watch them, Manny said, “Damn, her Rapunzeled hair makes my loins ache.”
“What are loins exactly?”
“They’re dormant needles in your scrotum. Arousal makes them suddenly pointy.”
Nobody gave Manny any shit about being smart. Nobody gave him shit about his French name anymore, either. Because Manny was so big now, he could pop you if he wanted to. All those years Popper and Manny were practically the same size. They tried to recruit him for football, but Manny chose to run cross-country instead. In part to be with Popper. Also, he said, running fanatical distances cleared his head.
“You can’t hack the hill,” Coach Piefke said.
“You got it, Coach. I can’t.”
Coach Piefke raised his small eyes. His eyes didn’t go with his large head, and this gave them even more power. Twin gulags floated in those tiny orbs. The extra miles on your weekly totals, the early-morning practices, laps until your heels bled, being ordered to do the hill again. Coach Piefke, another of the false-father figures who have roamed across Popper’s life. Bad enough to fail your own father, but legions? To Coach Piefke it had nothing to do with talent. Or stamina. Or having strong legs. It was about will. You either had it or you didn’t. But it wasn’t entirely Popper’s fault. It was Coach’s, too. This was by far the worst punishment he could muster, the torture of him assuming responsibility for your lack of will.
Popper used to wonder what a coach needed an office for. Now he understood. Coach Piefke’s office was a harbor for disappointment. You may rest, my son, from your futile labors here. Those pale walls. It was almost a relief to be standing there in his cold sweat and skimpy shorts. Coach Piefke closed his eyes, his unwrinkled face a lump of smooth flesh. Without his eyes, Coach Piefke looked almost benign—his skin, putty you could dig your hands into and mold. Popper wonders now how old Coach Piefke was then: twenty-nine? thirty? Mrs. Coach Piefke? Twenty-five, twenty-seven?
Their baby would die later that school year, and this also Coach Piefke seemed to accept without raising much objection. It was simple. The kid couldn’t hack it. Let the mother with the long, long hair weep a lake. He was no harsher with the cross-country team than normal after he came back from the week the school gave him off for the burial.
“You stopped in the middle of the hill?”
“Yes, Coach.”
“You saw the top, you saw the other guys go on ahead of you?”
“That’s right, Coach.”
“Glory was within your grasp and you chucked it?”
“You want me to do some laps or something, Coach? Clean out the locker room? Repair some old hurdles?”
“And you enjoyed stopping like that?”
“Absolutely.”
Coach opened his little eyes only slightly. They were wet with tearlets.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It doesn’t?”
Popper didn’t know she was there until she spoke. She had the silent kid with her, tied to her chest. She poked her head inside the office, her hair hanging downward.
“Doug? What’s wrong with you?”
May 8, 1945
Received two letters today—that’s all—one from my mother, who said she hadn’t seen you—the other from Mose—Oh, my darling—Some men get 6–7, 10–15 letters when we make port—Don’t you realize that if you only write once a week or every ten days—that that letter might miss a ship or a plane and it may be delayed another two or three weeks?
APPARATCHIKS
Some of Leo’s happiest days were in that period when the Soviet General Secretaries were dropping one after the other like fur-hatted dominoes. They’d wake up in the morning and another would have bitten the dust. Andropov lasted about twenty minutes. Leo said the KGB was poisoning the goulash in order to lull Americans into believing the Russians had lost their lust for world domination. And then, bam, when we’re not looking, they drop a bomb on Kansas City.
Leo was already in college in Boston by the time Konstantin Chernenko croaked. He called to say that Popper should watch the funeral closely and study the pallbearers to see which apparatchik was going to get the Kremlin’s nod this time.
“Apparatchik?”
“Party hack. Henchman. We’ve got them, too. They aren’t without their purpose. You know what I mean? In a way, they’re like the true pillars of any society, civilized or otherwise. Where would we be without hacks? In this Dad was right about Mayor Daley. He at least taught us this. Without blind loyalty, without obedience, nothing would get done. No higher virtue in politics. Or families. Speaking of which, always be loyal to Mom. She’s our Trotsky.”
“Trotsky an apparatchik?”
“No, they killed him because he wasn’t. Some people get to rise above apparatchiks, but you got to earn it.”
“Since when am I not loyal to Mom?”
“Sometimes you’ve got Dad’s personality.”
“What?”
“Occasional petulance, immunity issues, flashes of strange anger. Like at your birthday party when you threw apples at your—”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Just think about what I’m saying—try to be happier around the house. It’s not easy being Mom. It seems like it is. But it’s not. She thinks you don’t like Ralph.”
“I like Ralph fine.”
“Mom’s worried you don’t.”
“She’s wrong. I guess I just never think about him that much. Ralph’s kind of like the cat.”
“How is Louise, anyway?”
“We think she finally ran away.”
“She was a pretty cat.”
“She never liked us.”
“They’re getting married.”
“What?”
“And you’re going to be a good soldier. Don’t tell her I told you. She’s planning a sitdown with you soon. Act surprised. And happy. Got to go—”
TONNIO’S
Let the record show: It was not Popper who scrawled Go Fuck Yourself Tonnio and Viva Ch
é in indelible marker on the wall above the delivery phones. It was Manny. But Popper took the heat for it, since Manny was on a delivery when Tonnio noticed it. It goes on the short list of honorable things Popper’s done in his life. I got you covered, Laveneaux. Hope you get a decent tip.
They’d turned sixteen. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday nights, he and Manny delivered pizzas to the North Shore wealthy, who didn’t tip with any grace, or frequently, very much money. (His father’s old friend Melvie Kaufman, for instance, once tipped Popper thirty-four cents on a twenty-three-dollar order.)
Tonnio pointed to the wall. “You wrote this filth?” Tonnio was a round and hairy man given to screeching and conspiracy. Pretty awesome pizzas, deep dish and something called a stuffed that Tonnio invented, a pizza with unimaginable heaven-sent amounts of cheese.
“What if I did, Tonnio?”
The monstrous ingratitude of pizza delivery boys astonished him. You ungrateful cahootzes, Was it not me, Tonnio de Chirico, who pulled you boys off the street and made laborers out of you? I came to this country with seven lire, a moldy piece of bufala, and a dream. Now look at me. I move pizzas, 500 a night, from Lake Bluff to Kenilworth. And to you I give and I give…