Add This to the List of Things That You Are

by Chris Fink

  Most of us pass out in the SUV on the Kennedy before we even get to see Chicago in the rearview mirror. Delavan is a machine, bless him. He passes beneath the Des Plaines Oasis. The radio is now his copilot. Stone Temple Pilot. He drives and drives. The SUV is a blaring hearse hauling the four bodies back to their families.

  All bad news awakens us from a slumber. In the morning it’s our wives handing us the phone.

  Henry’s gone.

  Fuck you.

  No, man. It’s true. Listen.

  Delavan speaks now into our ears and we obey, sobering and quiet. Delavan himself got the news in a series of predawn texts and phone calls from Simon. Henry had evidently hailed a cab on Addison after he left us in the bleachers. When a cabbie stopped for the fare, Henry refused the ride. The cabbie would have been a Muslim, and Henry passed no commerce with Muslims. That was a rule he had. Who knows where he came up with it. Maybe that was his way of honoring TK and others in the brotherhood, or who knows, maybe he had a private feud we didn’t understand.

  You couldn’t have a rule like that, even we knew.

  Henry lived long enough to tell part of his story in the ER. Simon was there. Henry was awake and alive to the world. But then a brain aneurysm and massive hemorrhage finished Henry’s story for him.

  We can imagine how it happened. Henry and the cabbie exchanged words. That much we know. There wouldn’t have been too many words. In our town, you don’t spend much time telling your rival what you’re about to do to him. Henry would have gotten his licks in.

  Henry was half-in, half-out of the cab. When the cabbie peeled out, Henry was still hanging on. After that, we don’t know. When they found Henry, his body was badly mangled and ruptured. One witness later said the cabbie backed up and ran him over again, but another witness said, no, it didn’t happen that way. The cabbie escaped. It doesn’t matter. Henry, his beautiful body alive and among us just hours ago, is now cold.

  Stupid and half-awake, helpless now in our dumb beds, we don’t know what to think: The outcome you hope for is never the one that comes to you? There is no justice in the world?

  In the days and weeks after the accident, or the murder as some of us call it, the whole town is abuzz. More than one of us believe there is some kind of conspiracy going on in the city of Chicago and elsewhere in the country. You tell me, one of us says, if the tables were turned, and one of us was driving that cab, and it was a Christian killed a Muslim. You tell me things wouldn’t be different.

  Some of us agree. Yes, if the tables were turned, things would be different. One of the witnesses said the cabbie wasn’t a Muslim at all, but a Sikh.

  That cabbie is still in Chicago taking fares, which is one reason we don’t go anymore to Wrigley Field. We don’t see each other as much around town either. A thing like that. Who can say? Your sentence could be delivered to you from any quarter, each of us knows. Something always comes up. One of us is too busy at work, or one of us is home with the kid. It’s always something. Or another thing: TK’s discharge was not honorable, we learn. Something with a private. Something not very honorable at all.

  Henry didn’t have any kids at least, but his parents were still living. And he had a younger sister, we learned. Our whole town turned out for his memorial, which they had at the town park, on the same stage where one of us was once crowned Homecoming King so many years ago. Each of us loved that park, where the hundred-year-old sugar maples made one big canopy. During the service the five of us stood together. It was only natural that we did. At one point Henry’s kid sister noticed us, but then she looked away. Later during the service the wind came up, and the old maples sent down their squadrons of helicopters onto the heads of the grievers.

  First One Out

  Cunningham awoke to the high-pitched drone of an outboard motor. He savored the sound, eyes shut tight. He could imagine the flat, glass lake, colored greenish from the weed spawn. He watched himself ski behind the fiberglass boat, natural as a pendulum, cutting walls of water on each side of the wake, muscles straining, ears ringing from the Mercury’s whine and the perceptible cut of the wooden slalom on the veneer, the backspray filleting his calf. Cunningham could ski, boy. In his mind’s eye, he could see it. He could bring his shoulder down near the veneer on his cuts and lay himself flat like that, defying gravity, his spray fanning out colorful in the sunlight, a peacock tail.

  Cunningham opened his eyes and saw his flowered bedroom curtains. The alarm was buzzing beside the bed and the numbers on the clock shone redly. Cunningham awoke to the high-pitched drone of his alarm clock. He was in some city, far away from home. The windows were shut tight behind their curtains, and no seaweed breeze tickled his nostrils. Those days were long past, and these days were clichés. Cunningham hit snooze.

  There was reason to fling oneself from bed, rush barefoot lakeward, haul off the boat canvas, and prime the black rubber egg until it was hard and hurt your forearms to squeeze and your nose to smell the squirting 50:1. The reason was loveliness. A boy wants nothing more than to destroy the lovely. And the lake at 9 a.m. before boating hours and the morning breeze that ruined it is lovely, a lovely that has everything to do with evanescence and nothing to do with sticking around for people who hit snooze. Cunningham could wreck it, and only in wrecking it achieve his own adolescent, acrobatic human loveliness. There is no use in skiing, in perfecting a motion, and the expense is high. But in Cunningham’s mind the trade-off was square. He would take no shine from the hunchback fishermen in their beat-up dinghies who cursed his waves, boy.

  The alarm droned again. Twelve minutes had disappeared. There was no reason to hoard minutes these days, no reason to get up at all. Why move from bed to car to chair to car to couch to bed? Why not stay in bed? A smoker, an overeater, Cunningham figured he did himself a favor by sleeping extra. By sleeping more, he killed himself less. I am saving my life, Cunningham thought. His overweight fist shot out and hit the snooze. But the ringing was still there, waves rippling the lake.

  Minutes counted back then, boy, seconds. At ten to nine the lake was fair game, and often as not there were other boys like Cunningham around the lake prodding their dads, begging that they be the first one out. And those days are what count now, each one with its loveliness simultaneously wrecked and made: blankness filled with the boyish cursive of waves.

  As long as they are your waves and not the waves of some other undeserving rummy. Get out early, Cunningham. Be the first one. Stand ready at the gate, one foot in ski, the other on wooden dock, quivering, ready to jump, hit water, sink, and then careen to the surface, skiing. Put your thumb up then and yell, Faster! Can’t this old tub move any faster! Wreck it all quickly, without remorse. Wreck it especially for those who come after you. Leave a wake for them. And drench the sadass naysaying fishermen in their wingding boats on your way past. What are they waiting for anyway, some nibble?

  There is no date on Cunningham’s clock. The day bleeds on, becomes the next day, or the next, even. Cunningham remains in bed, corpse-like, saving his life. Somewhere in the house, a bell rings and rings, and rings, until the very sound of it begins to collect dust. If you added up all the growing-up, summertime lake stories in all the Middle West, you would have a sadass stringer full of bottom-feeders as long as this. Fact is you grow up, get tired, and hit snooze. To get a story like this right, you would have to start with Cunningham lighting a firecracker, no, a cherry bomb. Boom. Perfect red ball explodes into, say it, smithereens. Perfection begs destruction. And Cunningham gets the novel idea then that everything in the world has already been made at least once, so wouldn’t it be better just to shoot it all to hell.

  After the explosion comes the love scene, a sad one of course, starring some tow-headed girl named Rhonda with her feet a little too big, which is, of course, what makes her as lovely as she is. Cunningham tells Rhonda how one day, his best day maybe, he slingshot a midair swallow. Just a piece of gravel. And how the dipsy-diving swallow dropped, splish, dead, and floated
there in the lake like an iridescent bobber. How all the lice onboard the swallow clambered for the top of her when they felt their ship begin to pitch and heel. How that beautiful gliding bird had become just a raft for a bunch of cotton-picking lice. How Cunningham had turned that perfect bird into an obscene floater. And how his big brother had seen him drop the midair swallow, which had never been done before, and how Cunningham was a confused hero for a while.

  Isn’t that some kind of story, he tells Rhonda, reminiscing with her about his little days. These stories about Cunningham’s little days bore the shit out of Rhonda, leaving her vulnerable.

  And along comes Cunningham’s big brother, who knows all about busting cherries and who doesn’t give a shit about Tuesday when it’s Wednesday out. The story unravels from here, and Cunningham, wounded, wants to fill that dent Rhonda made. For some reason his mind fixes on the two old fishermen. Don’t they run on the same gas mix after all? Maybe it’s their steadfastness that hooks him. Cunningham tries to understand what it’s like to be those old fishermen in their boat, bobber fishing, regular as seagulls. The futility begins here. There can be no commiseration because there is no meaning in the word empathy. You don’t know what it feels like, old fishermen, to be Cunningham, so don’t say you know. You can’t even remember what it was like to be you, yesterday, what that felt like.

  When a moment is gone, it is replaced immediately with the false memory of a moment. The sublime feeling of catching a fish is resurrected only when there’s another tug on the line. In between exists only a stagnant deadness. A cherry bomb bursting, that longed-for destructive creation, becomes only the sterile ringing in the ears. This ringing is not noise but its very absence. Only the next damaging explosion offers some manner of relief.

  A swallow’s purple dive. A fish’s silver leap. Beauty. Entirely useless, but beautiful nonetheless. As arc and acrobatics. Even a myopic old fisherman can notice, That was a nice one, and look forward yet: to something more, or at least else. But not you, Cunningham, tackle box of body parts. Get back into your mind and ski, boy. That lake upstairs is waiting for your pathetic ripples.

  Lazy B

  The hair-and-nails place next door looks open, but the barbershop looks shut. The blinds are drawn and the red-and-white barber pole sits frozen. You try the door anyway. You’re long overdue for a haircut, and tomorrow is a special occasion. You find the door locked but rattle it again. Two fingers split the blinds, a lock clicks, and the glass front door swings open.

  The barber squints against the sun. Danny, where you been? he says. Come on in.

  You stand on the threshold. Over your shoulder on the busy expressway the cars reflect the slanting sunlight. Inside, Alex has a bald old man in his chair and behind him a father-son tandem in matching palomino cowboy hats.

  Sure you can fit me in?

  The barber is all smiles. You know me. I can’t turn out a good man.

  You return Alex’s friendly smile and step into the barbershop. You shut the door behind you and Alex locks it. I have a big job for you then, you say, glancing down to the small mess of gray hair on the checkered floor.

  You nod to the old man in the red barber chair. His bald head looks like some globe—Jupiter maybe—ringed with thin white hair and marred by an angry melanoma. You choose the spare red barber chair opposite the row of short red seats where the cowboy and his son sit. The little cowboy, perhaps he is eight, gazes up at Alex’s legion of model cars. Two walls are lined with a double row of wooden shelves up high, featuring die-cast models in clear plastic boxes. The big cowboy looks at a magazine. Above him, an imitation antique sign reads: This is your father’s barbershop.

  You pick from the stack of vintage nudie magazines on the side counter. You heft the magazine then open it, flipping the glossy pages, settling into the barber chair.

  There are two barber chairs here, but Alex is the only barber. One time on a slow day you found Alex himself enthroned in the extra chair, chin up, perusing one of the vintage magazines. You’ve only been in this barbershop a half-dozen times. On your second visit, Alex called you by your first name when you walked in, as if you were old friends. Actually, Alex knows you only by Danny—the name you go by—but Daniel is your Christian name. It’s pronounced Danielle, like a girl’s. You’re half Polish and half Mexican, but no one would know that. An old friend of yours once said that the Polish and the Mexican canceled each other out. Your skin might be a shade darker than white, but this is California, after all.

  Tomorrow, when she visits California for the first time, your mother will dust off that old name. Daniel, she’ll say, cupping your face. Look at you. Your father would be so happy with your haircut.

  After your last visit to Alex’s barbershop, you disappeared for six months to England on assignment with your aerospace company. This is the same company that brought you to California from Wisconsin four years ago. Here in California, the locals call your aerospace company the Lazy L because of its ranch-like setting along the 101, and also because it’s a gravy job: union benefits and government contracts. Everything used to be a ranch out here at one time, evidently.

  Now you sit comfortably in the spare barber chair waiting your turn. The old nudie magazine smiles up at you from every page. It’s nice that Alex has remembered you after six months, showing his care and familiarity.

  Alex and Jupiter number the country’s problems, part of the barbershop routine. Actually, Alex numbers the problems, and Jupiter nods his bald head in time. Jupiter looks old enough to be Alex’s father. And Alex, in turn, could be your father. From this angle, you can’t quite see Jupiter’s eyes. His neck is bent. Could be he’s nodding off. Alex’s voice rises, either for Jupiter’s benefit or because he needs convincing himself. A man will speak louder sometimes to convince himself, the bold sound of his own voice urging him on.

  In the five minutes you’ve been waiting, the barber has numbered the old problem of taxes and the old problem of gasoline prices. To Alex’s view, the skyrocketing cost of gasoline had mostly to do with the liberals and their string of lawyers who forbid searching for resources on our own soils.

  You tell me how they get nearly four dollars for a cotton-picking gallon of gasoline? Alex says.

  In the barbershop this is an old record that spins again and again. Some people avoid barbershops because of these routines, but you find it familiar to be face-to-face with Alex’s assurance. Most of the men who work at the Lazy L are similarly self-confident. After all, they make good money. And they work for the best company—the Lazy L—in the best state—California—in the best country in the world. Throw in a defined benefit pension plan and the promise of even greener pastures in the Lazy Hereafter, and it’s no surprise why everyone is so self-satisfied.

  Yes, here in the barbershop you feel right at home. A barber is just a barber, harmless as a haircut. Here, the contracts are uncomplicated, and you can see the whole place from one chair. And so you return, every three months or so, because given a choice, you would rather come back to an old place than go someplace new.

  You let the barber’s bold, ignorant arguments comfort rather than rile you. Now Alex has settled on the country’s number one mother of a problem. He’s been finished with Jupiter’s hair for some time, but he’s putting the finishing touches on with the straight razor. Alex loves the finishing touches. The old men in his chair don’t mind paying for a haircut, so long as Alex doesn’t finish them off too quickly. In theory, Alex says, waving the razor, you can link most of our problems right now to illegal immigration. All these illegals come flooding into the country and take up our jobs and suck up our taxes. You take our hospitals. L.A. alone had twenty thousand illegal Mexicans born last year.

  Alex touches the straight razor to the strop then spins Jupiter in his chair to look at himself in the mirror. Did we get her? Alex asks. Jupiter nods approval and Alex wipes the blade. He undoes the drop cloth, spilling a meager palmful of Jupiter’s gray clippings onto the black-and-whit
e tiles. That’s brown babies paid for by you and me, Alex says. Now tell me we don’t got a problem right there.

  You put down your magazine and consider. I’m a Mexican, Alex. Did you know that about me? My dad was a Mexican and a veteran of a foreign war. This is what you want to say. But you say nothing. This is what you get for passing. Talk that should happen behind your back happens in front of your face. It’s happened a hundred times, yet still it cuts. You’ll spend the next hours wishing you would have said something hard and decisive instead of sitting mute and compliant.

  Jupiter unbends himself and retrieves his wallet. Sounds like you have it all down square, Alex, he says. I can’t argue with you there. He moves around toward the door. What’s that come to now?

  That comes to eighteen, Alex says. He stands behind the chair. Above him, next to his framed barbering license, a black-and-white placard reads, Standard hairstyles for men and boys. There are several illustrations, all subtle variations on the fade, the flat top, and the high and tight.

  Eighteen, Jupiter says. He pauses, seeming to mull over the questionable figure. His fresh haircut, something like a low and tight, isn’t on the chart. He says, The first haircut you gave me cost four dollars right here, what, twenty-five years ago? Jupiter looks over to you and gives you a wink. The amount of hair I got, the price ought to go down, not up.

  Well, you got the cost of living to consider, Alex protests, until he sees the old man smile and place a twenty on the counter.

  You can make up the difference next time, Jupiter says, and moves toward the door.

  I’ll be here. You know me . . . , Alex calls after him.

  When Jupiter lets himself out, the barber locks the door behind him, finishes dusting the chair, then turns to the two on the short red seats. Next victim, he says to the boy. The boy looks down, his face disappearing behind the palomino hat, and moves in closer to his father.