Days

by Mary Robison

  “I’ve been to the zoo park,” Evaline said.

  “You’ve got some time,” Bud said. “Let’s go anyway.”

  THEY STOOD UNDER THE ZIPPER Ride, which turned people in cages upside down, and Evaline found things that had dropped from pockets and purses. She found a snapped pair of glasses with mirror lenses, a Canadian coin, an inch of ball chain.

  Music ground from the stationary vintage merry-go-round. The wooden roller coaster slammed and clattered, its only passenger a seven- or eight-year-old girl.

  Bud shot an air rifle in a plywood stall that was hung with purple and turquoise dogs. “Good,” the booth’s owner said. “You didn’t hit anything.”

  “Come and ride the Spider,” a boy said to Evaline. “Come on. The last ride of the season.”

  “What does the Spider do?” she asked.

  “You laugh,” the boy said, wiping a lot of black hair off his forehead, “or I let you off if you’re not laughing.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Evaline said.

  She waited at a concessions trailer while Bud went into the deserted penny arcade and started playing a pinball machine. She followed him in after a while, and sat on an air-hockey table and watched the steel bearings Bud fired around. Lights ignited, sounding bells and buzzers. Bud looked serious over the machine. He used his thigh to jostle the thing.

  “Believe it or not, I’m hungry,” Evaline said. “I can’t get anyone to wait on me out there.”

  The score tabulator on the pinball machine whirred and clucked.

  Bud said, “Forty-seven thousand eight hundred.”

  He took Evaline back to the empty concessions trailer and they waited under the awning some more.

  “See?” she said. “Nobody comes.”

  The trailer had hampers of popcorn, and dark globes of syrup for snow cones. There were frankfurters, which were skewered on a revolving wire tree, glistening from a glass box. Bud jumped up onto the service counter and lowered himself into the food mobile. “Help you?” he said.

  “Hey,” Evaline said. “You look good there.”

  Bud made Coney Islands, and folded up a candy-striped box and filled it with popcorn. He drew sodas into big waxed cups.

  “I’ve seen it all,” said an enormous woman who had an apron cinched under her enormous bosom. She laughed, and the flesh around her throat and belly jiggled. She looked at Evaline’s feet, which were in shredded hose, and she laughed.

  “We were going to pay,” Bud said.

  “Oh, I know you’ll pay,” the woman said.

  Bud hefted himself, with straight arms, out of the booth, and dropped beside Evaline. He paid the woman from his wallet.

  They walked along the darkened midway. Evaline said, “Uh-oh.” A legless man on a cart steered up to them. On the back of the cart was a perfectly square pile of newspapers.

  “Hey, Dispatch,” the legless man said, and Bud bought an evening paper from him. The man rolled away, guiding the cart with two rubber doughnuts.

  “I’m freezing,” Evaline said.

  Bud leaned to have her repeat the sentence. A wind was blowing leaves across the park and horns were bleating from the Flying Bobs ride.

  “I am cold,” Evaline said, loudly.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Bud said. “Let’s go see Dean and Gail.”

  “Grandma Redding tucked in my kids,” Evaline said.

  “Who tucked in Grandma Redding?” Bud said.

  Evaline looked at her thin watch. “It’s close to nine-thirty. It’s too late.”

  “You can wait here,” Bud said. “I’ll buy you a magazine. Or you can go up with me.”

  They were in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, on State Street. Evaline had just left a line of telephone booths and she stood with Bud outside the hotel’s bar. She bunched her toes in the scarlet carpet.

  “I don’t think this is all right,” she said.

  Bud went over to one of the desk clerks, a startled-looking bald man in a fiery orange coat.

  “Are you coming?” he said to Evaline. “It’s room 1410 and they want to see us. I had him call up and announce us.”

  Evaline went with Bud to an elevator with chromed walls. Bud squeezed his eyes shut against their reflection—he with beard shadow and ink-spattered clothes; Evaline dusty, red-eyed, barefoot.

  The doors sluiced open on the fourteenth floor, opposite a thigh-high ceramic bowl of ostrich feathers.

  Dean Blaines answered the door of room 1410. He wore a short silk robe decorated with black and yellow butterflies. He showed Bud his biggest smile and then he said, “Come in and have a look. It’s a suite.”

  “My,” Evaline said. She nodded at her sister, who was still in her wedding gown, sitting cross-legged on the tightly made bed, which was under a glassed Degas reproduction. She was watching a quiz show on the hotel television.

  “We came busting in on you,” Evaline said. “On your wedding night. It’s ridiculous to be here.”

  “Oh, hell, Evvy,” Gail said. “Sit down and shut up about wedding nights.”

  “Yeah, Evvy,” Dean said. “This isn’t 1920 or anything. The honeymoon will start, we decided, when we get to Madrid.”

  “Or whenever,” the bride said. “This is just another night in Columbus to me. To us. Have you two been in a pie fight or something?”

  Bud, who had been standing by a low bureau that was covered with vases of flowers, poked his finger in the cellophane that covered a fruit basket. He took an apple from where it was nestled in green excelsior. “Hey, Dean,” he said, “let’s go for a little spin down the hall. Two minutes.”

  “Dean’s all settled in—with his robe and all,” Gail said.

  “This is wonderful,” Evaline said. “It’s so big, you could get lost trying to track down the bathroom.” She left the big bedroom.

  “I don’t think the bride should say this,” Gail said, “but that was the most perfect wedding I ever went to.” She looked at Bud.

  “Milt Pilsney drank himself flat on his back,” Dean said.

  “Evvy was so funny,” Gail said. She had not moved her eyes from Bud.

  “Dean,” Bud said. “Please.”

  “I won’t let her take the dress off,” Dean said. “It’s so terrific. Honestly, Gail,” he said to his wife. “It looks really, really good.”

  “Why, thank you, Dean,” Gail said.

  Evaline came out of the bathroom cradling a white puppy who was making a little bark.

  “Shut up, Pietro,” Gail said to the dog. “Throw him down, Evaline, if he bothers you. Or keep him. He was a wedding present.”

  “We’re going to Spain!” Dean said. “Bud, can you believe it?”

  “No,” Bud said. He used his teeth on the apple he had taken from the fruit basket. “I can’t believe you want to go to Spain. In the first place, you won’t believe how dirty it is. How cruel and stupid the people are, or how punishing the sun.”

  “Okay,” Gail said, closing her eyes. “Okay, okay, okay.”

  “We’ll like it in Spain,” Dean said. “If nothing else, just for the flamenco.”

  Evaline did a little flamenco dance, drumming her bare heels on the rug and working imaginary castanets in her hands.

  “I must be nuts,” she said, stopping the dance.

  Bud, who was chewing his apple, said, “Olé. Dean, I came all the way down here.”

  “We appreciate it,” Dean said. He put himself on the bed beside Gail, who was still looking, very hard, at Bud.

  Dean began, absently, to rub Gail’s naked back. “I’m ecstatic,” he said. “I’m really too excited to sleep. You know, in thirty-five years I’ve never been out of this country once?”

  Smoke

  MARTY BAKER FOLLOWED HIS MOTHER’S car through Beverly Hills. But she was too good a driver for Marty to stay close, even on his motorcycle. The remarried Mrs. Audry Baker Sharon caught the last corner before her new home, going sixty at the apex of the curve, tires grounded, exhaust pipes
firing like pistol shots.

  She was laughing, leaning out the driver’s door of her car, brushing sand stains from her toasted feet, when Marty drove his bike onto the blacktop turnaround. He dropped his kickstand, sat sideways on the bike saddle, and lighted a cigarette. He was twenty-six, wearing Levi’s, suspenders, no shirt, and linesman’s boots.

  His mother said, “I won. You couldn’t catch me, and you had all the way from Santa Monica.”

  “I had all the way from Malibu,” Marty said. “I saw you leaving the Mayfair Market. You made every single light, though. I had to stop a lot.”

  Audry Sharon hefted a paper sack of groceries and a cluster of iced tea cans from the passenger seat of her sports car. She cradled the groceries in her arm, hooked the cans with her free fingers, used her knee to slam the car door, and came toward Marty.

  “Give us a puff,” she said.

  Marty put his cigarette between his mother’s lips. “I need to borrow a great deal of money,” he said while Audry inhaled, “before the weekend.”

  “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Talk to Hoyt.”

  Marty wiggled his jaw and yanked at his chin strap. He lifted off his motorcycle helmet. “I can’t talk to Hoyt,” he said.

  Hoyt Sharon came around from the side lawn, carrying a nine iron and a whiffle golf ball. His white hair was shaved to a fine bristle on his head and he wore what looked to Marty like a crimson spacesuit—one-piece, with the Velcro closing strips undone from his throat to his midbelly.

  “Marty! Great! Come in, come in,” Hoyt said.

  “Hey,” Marty said, “how’s the honeymoon?”

  Hoyt had planted himself over the golf ball. He rolled his shoulders and swung the club. The ball clicked and shot straight onto the shingled slant of the garage roof. “So much for that soldier,” Hoyt said. He came up behind Audry, and tried to take the groceries away from her.

  “Will you please calm down?” she said to him. “Look at how much you’re sweating.”

  “Okay. Sorry,” Hoyt said.

  Audry said, “If you want to help me carry, get the food cooler and beach umbrella from the trunk.”

  “Remember to talk to him for me,” Marty whispered to his mother as they trailed Hoyt around the side of the house.

  Hoyt hurried ahead, dumped the umbrella and golf club he was toting, and opened doors for Audry and Marty.

  They entered a paneled foyer that was cluttered with plants and old, bright oil paintings of sinewy cowboys.

  Audry went up a short, carpeted stairs and through a swinging saloon door.

  Hoyt led Marty through the game room with the emerald carpet and billiards table, through the oval room, which was being papered with flocked maroon sheets, to a big library. The library was two stories tall and had a row of theater seats bolted to one wall, a sofa as long and deep as a small boat, which was sunk in a pit area, a back wall of sliding glass, and a ten-foot mural depicting a cattle stampede and a man being flung from the saddle of a panicky-looking horse.

  Marty sat in an armchair that had been branded with dozens of ranch logos.

  Hoyt leaped into the sunken pit area and tossed himself on the boat-sized couch. He clasped his hands behind his head. “Your mom tell you about Henry Kissinger?” he said. “It’s the damnedest thing. She tell you? You won’t believe it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Marty said. “No.”

  “Ben Deverow and his wife—you don’t know them—go into the Derby for lunch and there he is, Henry Kissinger.”

  “Really?” Marty said.

  “Yeah, having shrimp or something,” Hoyt said. “Only—you won’t believe this, but he’s in drag. He’s dressed up like a woman.”

  “Oh, come on,” Marty said, reaching across the coffee table for a Sports Illustrated.

  “No. He’s really Kissinger, but he’s got a—a whatchumacallit—” Hoyt pointed to the swordfish stitched on his billed cap.

  “A wig?”

  “No, he didn’t even have a wig. He had a little—like a hat thing, you know? With a little lace veil?”

  Marty said, “He couldn’t do that. Everyone would know if he dressed up like a woman and went out in public.”

  “That’s what you’d think,” Hoyt said. “It’s what I’d think, isn’t it? But it was him. I swear it.”

  “You weren’t even there,” Marty said.

  “Isn’t that incredible about Henry Kissinger?” Audry said as she padded into the room. She had put on a pair of jeans, and fixed her hair in a thick ponytail.

  Hoyt excused himself and took a dark Spansule from his shirt pocket. He put the pill on his tongue, hopped from the couch area, crossed the room, and gulped from a cut-glass decanter.

  Marty cleared his throat and turned the pages of his magazine.

  “Oh, yeah,” Audry said. She folded her knees and sat on her heels in front of a console-model television. “Marty needs money for his business, Hoyt.”

  Hoyt said, “Why the hell didn’t he come to me before?” He slapped his palms on the seat of his spacesuit.

  “He didn’t need money before,” Audry said.

  “Look,” Hoyt said, “I get a kick out of helping young people. You know who helped me when I was stalled? Forty years ago, when Anaheim was just a crop and a half of orange trees?”

  “Gene Autry,” Audry said.

  “Gene Autry,” Hoyt said, “is who. That’s right, honey.” He turned to Marty and said, “No, I don’t see any problem here. What are we playing with? Land?”

  “Smoke detectors,” Marty said. “I can get in on a pretty safe operation, Hoyt. Some friends in Sacramento tell me they’re thinking about making detectors mandatory by the next decade.”

  “Besides which I believe in the damn things,” Hoyt said. “They’re like little alarms? You bet I do. They save lives. Friends of mine lost a kid in a fire once. I say a kid, but I mean infant. You should have seen it.” He parted his hands. “They had a teeny casket only this big.”

  Audry switched on the television and tuned in a local charity telethon. A high-school orchestra was introduced and started playing “High Hopes.” Hoyt looked interested in the show, and sat on the carpet beside his wife.

  “Can I neck with you for a second?” the show’s emcee said to a five-year-old whose legs were strapped with metal braces. The child had on a party dress. “Why can’t I?” the emcee said. “Are you married?” He dropped on one knee before the girl and squinted at her suspiciously.

  “No, I’m too little,” the child said.

  “You aren’t too little,” the emcee told her, and smiled at the audience. “You’re one of the very biggest people on this planet, because your heart is full of courage and hope.”

  Marty blinked, and got up and went to the double glass doors. He moved them easily on their runners. There was the smell of cut grass, the knock of a carpenter’s hammer, the hiss of lawn sprinklers.

  Audry switched off the television. She reached for the telephone and called in a pledge of three thousand dollars to the charity show.

  Hoyt rose and headed across the room. He sprang on the balls of his feet, shooting fists in combinations. “Okay, buddy,” he said to Marty. “Your turn. Waltz with me a few rounds.”

  “I really can’t, Hoyt,” Marty said.

  “You want a grubstake?” Hoyt said. “You got to do a little dancing.”

  He moved easily, but his face was purpling. He jabbed, wide of Marty’s throat, with the pointed second-joint knuckles of his fingers.

  Audry hung up the telephone and watched with her arms folded in front of her.

  Hoyt stopped moving. Marty stood before him, flat-footed, his arms half-raised.

  “The old monkey,” Hoyt said.

  He swung a clowning roundhouse right that smashed into Marty’s left temple.

  “Jesus, Hoyt,” Marty said.

  The blow had knocked him onto his hip.

  “He’s all right,” Hoyt said to Audry.

  “I’m all
right,” Marty said, getting to his feet.

  Hoyt danced toward him.

  “Cover up,” Hoyt said, and Marty crouched and crossed his arms over his face.

  “Breadbasket,” Hoyt said, and whipped his left fist at Marty’s bare stomach.

  Marty walked away, with his hands on his hips, looking for a breath. He collapsed to a squat.

  “Leave him alone,” Audry said. “Poor Marty.”

  “Christ, Hoyt,” Marty said.

  “Woozy?” Audry asked him. She made Marty get on all fours and she put a wastepaper can under his face.

  “I’m sorry, Marty,” Hoyt said. “That was nuts of me. Just wanted to get the blood headed back to the pump, you know? Those weren’t supposed to land.”

  “You didn’t have to put his eye out,” Audry said.

  “I think he did,” Marty said. “I can’t see out of it.”

  “Look at me,” Audry said, taking Marty’s chin in her hand. “No. All it is is a sliver cut at the edge of the brow. You’ll have a mouse that may close your eye a bit. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.” She left the room.

  Marty sat on the ottoman. Hoyt paced in front of him.

  “Forget it, Hoyt,” Marty said. “Really.”

  “I didn’t mean for those to land. You’re a great kid for not hauling off and plastering me right back.”

  Marty said, “I wouldn’t mess with you.”

  “What’d you say you’d need to get in on those alarm systems? Did you say three or four thousand?”

  “Really, three thousand is more than it would take,” Marty said. “Three thousand is great, sir.”

  “Not ‘sir.’ Don’t call me ‘sir.’” Hoyt went back to the couch in the sunken pit. He pounded his chest a few times. He put a finger on the side of his nose, closing off the nostril, and breathed deeply five or six times. “Listen, though,” he said. “Don’t those smoke alarms sometimes go off when there’s no fire?”

  “They’re working on perfecting that,” Marty said.

  “Your mother’s so mad at me,” Hoyt said.

  “I’ll tell her everything’s okay,” Marty said.

  “Everything’s all right here,” Hoyt said when Audry came back into the room. She was carrying a saucer and a full china cup for Marty. She and Marty smiled at one another. When Marty glanced over at Hoyt, Marty saw that Hoyt was grinning, too.