Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  “Dub-Yay’s in the hospital. He’s been having these ministrokes?”

  But Teddy was still only half listening. “Can you see what’s going on up there?”

  Lincoln couldn’t, at least not very well. The musicians had been joined onstage by a woman who looked too old to have spiky purple hair. She was holding a mic, and when Mickey reached for it she backed away, holding it out of reach. “There’s someone who seems to think it’s open-mic night.”

  Teddy shook his head. “I’m not believing this,” he said. Though Lincoln couldn’t imagine why, he seemed genuinely alarmed. Mickey and the woman with spiked hair did seem to be having some sort of disagreement, but the look on Teddy’s face suggested he was witnessing something far more serious. What was it he’d told Lincoln that morning? That sometimes his spells took the form of premonitions? Was he having one of those?

  Only when his phone vibrated in his pocket did Lincoln remember the other call that had come in while he was talking to Anita. Was there time to check his voice messages before the band roared back to life? The audience had already begun to clap in anticipation. Punching PLAY, Lincoln covered his right ear so he could hear the message playing in his left. It was Joe Coffin’s voice. “Lincoln. Call me when you get this message. I’ve been doing some snooping.”

  Teddy grabbed his shoulder. “You have to see this!”

  Expecting the argument between Mickey and the spiky-haired woman to have escalated, Lincoln was surprised to see that things had actually calmed down on the stage. Her back to the audience, the purple-haired woman was talking with the other band members. Apparently they were going to let her sing. Even more inexplicably the crowd seemed thrilled by this development. The clapping was even louder now.

  “Hang on a minute,” he told Teddy.

  Obviously, the thing to do was to go back outside and make the call from the street, but the place was heaving. It’d take him forever to make his way to the door, so he hit CALL BACK.

  Coffin must’ve been sitting with his hand on the phone because he answered immediately. “Where are you, Lincoln?”

  “Place called Rockers.”

  “That explains the noise. Let’s meet. Not there, though.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tonight would be better.”

  “Lincoln!” Teddy’s eyes were still on the stage, his grip on Lincoln’s shoulder viselike.

  “Why?”

  “So I can explain about your friend Mickey,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “Did you know he beat a guy half to death back in the eighties?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Wanna guess the man’s name?”

  Feeling a chill, he turned to face Teddy, who was now regarding him with an expression that Lincoln could only interpret as sorrow, as if he too had somehow been privy to the conversation and already knew what Coffin was about to reveal. “I have no idea,” Lincoln admitted.

  And yet he must have, or he would’ve been surprised when Coffin said it. If the name he spoke hadn’t already been in the back of his mind, he wouldn’t have thought to himself, Of course.

  Three clicks of the drummer’s sticks and the entire band came in on the fourth, a wall of sound. Lincoln recognized the singer’s voice immediately, evidence as undeniable as a fingerprint. “WHEN THE TRUTH IS FOUND,” it boomed. Though he hadn’t been willing to admit it, he’d sensed her presence the moment he stepped off the ferry and again, more powerfully, at the Vineyard Gazette. And now here she was. Of all the female singers Jacy had covered with Mickey’s band, it was Grace Slick she’d loved best, and this particular song—“Somebody to Love”—had been her signature. She’d sung it with complete conviction, as if she’d written the lyrics herself and knew their backstory, so Lincoln anticipated the next line before she sang it, “TO BEEEEEEEE … LIES.”

  The crash that accompanied the word lies sounded like a cymbal, except that it didn’t come from the stage but closer to hand—Teddy, losing consciousness and pitching sideways onto an adjacent table and then to the floor, where he lay twitching in a puddle of beer threaded with blood.

  Teddy

  Instead of heeding the anesthesiologist’s instructions to count backward from one hundred, Teddy decided his more urgent need was to make an inventory of what he knew to be true. It would be succinct, he suspected, the events of the weekend having turned the solid ground beneath his feet to sand. Best to be quick about it, too, because the drugs he’d been given by the EMTs were very good. They’d not only made short work of the breathtaking pain (Hooray!), but also routed his anxiety so completely that he could no longer say with certainty what he’d been so anxious about (Hooray again!). He doubted, however, that those same narcotics were bolstering his analytical faculties.

  So … what did he know for sure? Well, he was reasonably certain he’d passed out back at Rockers. He remembered feeling woozy when he rose to his feet, but then everything went dark, and there’d been a loud bang, the sound, he now speculated, of his own head ricocheting off a nearby table. He was also pretty sure—because he’d overheard the EMTs discussing the possibility—that he might lose his right eye, or maybe just the vision in it. Evidently he’d fallen on and shattered a wineglass, shards of which had burrowed deep into his cheekbone, one coming to rest dangerously close to his optic nerve. He should ask Lincoln, who was around somewhere. While being wheeled to the operating room he’d heard his friend telling him not to worry, that everything would be fine. Had Lincoln been acquainted with his history of falling, he wouldn’t have been so sanguine. Oh, by the way, that other long-ago doctor had told him after he’d landed on his tailbone, with spinal injuries there was one thing to keep an eye out for. (Whoa! Teddy thought. Keep an eye out! Now here was an expression poised to take on a whole new meaning.) Back then, at sixteen, the odds of a full recovery had been very much in his favor. (Chances were his chances were awfully good.) Whereas the results had been … well, awfully bad.

  And yet, to be fair, he had been lucky, right? Unlucky would’ve meant a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Like causality, luck could be further parsed into proximate and remote. Yes, he’d been lucky that day in the gym, but it would’ve been luckier still not to have fallen in the first place, and if you were talking about real luck, he might’ve begun life with a different father, one more like Mickey’s, who would’ve recognized his parental duty to teach his son that bullies and louts had to be met head-on, sometimes even with violence. At some point, surely, Michael Sr. must’ve sat Mick down and explained such things to him, even showed him how to deliver the kind of punch that had knocked Troyer clean off his feet.

  If Teddy himself had been blessed with such a parent, things couldn’t have helped turning out differently. The first time that vicious little shit Nelson had intentionally tripped him when he knifed through the lane, Teddy would’ve picked himself up off the hardwood floor, recognized the situation’s imperative and broken the kid’s nose for him. Then, later, when Teddy went up for that destiny-forging rebound, Nelson would’ve thought twice about undercutting him, and instead of coming down on his tailbone Teddy would’ve landed right on his feet and gone through life with a working dick. At Gay Head, when Jacy chose him, she would’ve been choosing the man she imagined him to be, instead of the one he was. They would’ve arrived back at the Chilmark house as a couple. And in the fullness of time they, like Lincoln and Anita, would’ve married and had a passel of kids and grandkids.

  Pretty though all this alternative reality was to contemplate, Teddy suspected it wouldn’t bear close scrutiny. For one thing, a kid fathered by a man like Michael Sr. wouldn’t have been Teddy at all, but rather a kid like Mickey. Moreover, would this new, improved Teddy have been guaranteed a better outcome? Not necessarily. If he’d been the kind of boy who could break another kid’s nose for tripping him, then mightn’t he also have discovered that he enjoyed doing so? Indeed, over time he himself might’ve evolved into an ign
orant brute (Brom Bones!) not unlike Nelson. And later still, having developed a taste for risk and physical confrontation, he might’ve ignored his high draft number, enlisted, gone to Vietnam and gotten himself killed there. Or, had he survived, he might’ve become a Republican, a supporter of other dim-witted foreign adventures that got other young men killed. Squinted at in this fashion—when he awoke from surgery with only one eye, would squint still be an operable verb?—human destiny was both complex (it had a lot of working parts) and simple (in the end, you were who you were).

  Because was it not for this very reason—that Teddy was who he was and not some other hypothetical human—that he’d fallen again? Falling was apparently written in caps somewhere in his genetic code, and this time the chances of a good outcome were apparently not awfully good. Earlier, when he overheard one of the doctors say, “Okay, let’s see if we can save that eye,” he’d taken it to mean, We might as well give it a whirl—maybe we’ll get lucky. An hour or two from now, when he regained consciousness and was again instructed by his doctors to be on the lookout for this or that, he could have just the one eye with which to look. If he had any kingly aspirations, he’d have to locate and travel to the Land of the Blind. This would be his new normal.

  So, was that it? The sum total of what could be said for sure? Well, he was pretty darn sure that in addition to an eye, he was also losing his mind. Indeed, his reason had been under siege from the moment he arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps even earlier. The first sign of his unraveling had been on the deck of the ferry, when he’d identified the young woman standing next to Lincoln on the pier as Jacy. The question was, why? What was going on in his head that he’d conjured her up like that? It wasn’t as if he’d been obsessing over her nonstop for the last four decades. Okay, sure, dark-haired young women of a particular type had invariably reminded him of her, and whenever there was a story in the newspaper or on TV or the Internet about a young woman going missing, he always felt compelled to read, watch or click. But such triggers were normal, weren’t they? Even if Jacy had been haunting him all these years, would that have been so strange? She was the first girl he’d ever fallen deeply in love with, and who ever forgets first love? Granted, he remembered her with profound sadness, but it wasn’t as if losing her had been the end of his life.

  Here on the island, though, every emotion he felt when he thought of her was somehow amplified, as if playing through Big Mick on Pots’ lethal sound system. This morning, riding out to Gay Head, he’d sensed the volume being turned up past HIGH all the way to STUN. Why had he kept pedaling toward its source? Had he been trying to conjure her, or was she demanding to be conjured? If she was a ghost, what was she born of? Even ghosts had motives. Did she blame him (or Lincoln or Mickey) for whatever horrible thing had befallen her all those years ago? Or did she want him to know that she still loved him (and Lincoln and Mickey)? Even more puzzling was her timing—why now, on this particular morning? Could it be that her ghostly power derived from the island itself? Had she, like Prospero, been waiting all these years for him/them to return? Could she really be buried here, as the old cop Lincoln had spoken to seemed to believe? In a ghost story that would explain why she was so much more present now than she’d been at any time in the last forty-four years, when her signal had been lost in the noise of the larger world. According to the eerie logic of such tales, she, a restless ghost, had contacted him as soon as he came within range. Had he sensed her reaching out to him there on the ferry? Was that why, instead of going out onto the deck, he’d remained inside? Had he sensed the danger even before it manifested?

  What Teddy found reassuring about this occult possibility was that it meant he had company. Maybe he was losing his mind, but wasn’t Lincoln as well? A happily married man, his friend probably thought about Jacy less often than Teddy did, and when he did think of her it probably caused less distress. Yet he’d no sooner arrived on the island than he’d become obsessed with the mystery of her disappearance. Like Teddy, when he got close enough to receive her signal, he, too, had fallen under her spell. Why? Because he, too, had loved her. Love, timeless love, had opened a new frequency that allowed her to communicate even with someone as settled, squared away and unimaginative as Lincoln.

  And Mickey? You only had to take one look to know that he, too, was haunted, maybe even more than Lincoln or Teddy himself. And didn’t it make perfect sense that he should be, given his geographical proximity. On the Cape, when the psychic wind was right, he was able to hear her siren call, whereas Teddy and Lincoln were too far away. Hadn’t the two women Mickey had married, then quickly divorced, both resembled Jacy? Had they at some point realized that they were mere stand-ins for the woman he was really in love with? Was that why the marriages had failed?

  Damn, Teddy thought. What was in those drugs he’d been given? There had to be some psychedelic, mind-altering component, because he was suddenly seeing things that until now had been shrouded. He was having what amounted to a genuine Carlos Castaneda moment. What worried him was that any second now the anesthesia would kick in and that would be the end of it. Maybe he’d be able to convince his doctors to prescribe another dose for later. If not, he’d have to find a shaman who could return him to this place of magical clarity, because he felt close, really close, to understanding, well, in a word, everything.

  Alas, the only thing he was unable to bring into meaningful focus was at the very center of it all: the singer with the purple hair back at Rockers. Even though he couldn’t get a good look at her from the other side of the crowded room, he’d been certain it was Jacy. Yeah, okay, he’d also thought that girl on the pier was Jacy, but this was different. The one on the pier had been dark haired and about Jacy’s size and in her early twenties, as Jacy had been when she disappeared. But he’d quickly recognized her for what she was: a wish. Or, as Lincoln had put it, a fever dream. Teddy had wanted her to be Jacy, wanted for Jacy to be alive, and so, for a second or two, she was. By contrast, the purple-haired singer hadn’t looked like Jacy, she’d been Jacy. Teddy would’ve known her anywhere. There hadn’t been a doubt in his mind. Except she also wasn’t Jacy for the simple reason that she couldn’t be. His reason might be under assault—sure, he might be having visions—but he wasn’t completely untethered from reality, and the facts were all wrong. The singer had been late thirties? Early forties? Jacy, if she were alive, would be a woman on the cusp of old age, just as he and Lincoln and Mickey were. So what if her voice was Jacy’s? So what if she was channeling Grace Slick, as Jacy had so often done back at Minerva? What difference did it make that she’d chosen to open her set with “Somebody to Love,” Jacy’s favorite, a song that asks what happens when the truth is found to be lies? None of that mattered. He recalled an essay he’d once written for Tom Ford, where he’d cleverly marshaled a mountain of evidence in support of a truly ingenious thesis. There’d been just one small, troublesome fact that unfortunately invalidated the whole thing. He’d tried his best to explain it away, but to no avail. What can’t be true, isn’t, Ford had written in his endnote, no matter how much you want it to be.

  “Teddy?” said a voice.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, or tried to say, assuming it was the anesthesiologist, reprimanding him for not counting backward from a hundred as instructed and drifting off into blissful, untroubled sleep, so they could get on with botching his surgery and shepherding him into the final stage of his life as a pathetic, general studies, limp-dicked, one-eyed man.

  Except it was a nurse and she was wheeling him somewhere else on a gurney. “You’re going to be fine,” she assured him. “The operation was a success.”

  When they got to where they were going and she came around to the foot of the contraption, he got a good look at her, a dark-haired woman his own age. “Jacy,” he said. “I love you.”

  The old nurse grinned down at him. “Hey, I love you, too.”

  Lincoln

  It was nearly one o’clock by the time Lincoln got back to R
ockers, which had emptied out, and not a single musician was in sight. At the far end of the long bar, a few stragglers were watching a West Coast baseball game. When the goateed, tattooed bartender who’d shouted “Rock and roll!” several hours earlier noticed Lincoln frowning at the stage, which was still crammed with sound equipment, he came down and told him that Big Mick on Pots was done for the night.

  “I figured they’d play to closing,” Lincoln said, extending his hand across the bar. “I’m Lincoln, by the way.”

  “Kevin,” the guy said as they shook. “Normally they do. How’s your friend?”

  “Looks like he’s going to be okay.”

  “Man, that was a lot of blood,” Kevin said, eyeing Lincoln’s polo shirt, patches of which were now rust colored, as were his chinos. He’d cleaned up as best he could at the hospital, but he was still a sight to behold.

  “You know Mickey?”

  Crossing his massive arms in front of his chest, the bartender snorted. “Everybody knows Big Mick.” Big guys, his body language seemed to say, all know one another. Guys Lincoln’s size wouldn’t necessarily be cognizant of that. “He’s a legend in these parts.”

  That fact, Lincoln thought, could be added to all the other things he apparently didn’t know about his friend. In the hospital’s waiting room he’d revisited the questions Teddy had posed when they were driving here, questions that loomed larger now. Why had Mickey punched that SAE pledge all those years ago? Had this been the first real evidence of rage simmering just below his usually good-natured surface? And why had he continued to scrub pots in the steamy kitchen of the Theta House, his shirt drenched with sweat by the end of every shift, when he might have worked the cool, dry dining room serving some of the prettiest girls on campus? It couldn’t have been social awkwardness. Having grown up with all those sisters, he was pretty much at ease around even the sexiest Thetas, most of whom treated him like a big brother. And, finally, why had he gone to Canada instead of reporting for duty? A spur of the moment decision, or an intention he’d had from the start but hadn’t trusted his friends enough to confide in them?