“Lars Larson’s right,” said LaVeronica. “Think of it this way, Red. A guy who looks exactly like you takes the woman you love and not only messes with her body but completely undoes her head. That’s an unfair advantage over all of human life that ain’t twins. Fred’s not your alter ego. He’s the pus in a boil on your heart, and you got to squeeze the sucker out.”
Everyone looked at her but Fred, who kept his eyes on Lars. “Lars Larson from the TV ads?” he asked.
“That’s Lars’s dad,” said Cindy.
“Your whole family is a bunch of cheating used-car dealers and you have the nerve to call me pus?” Fred said. “You better worry how you’re gonna look on TV if I catch you outside.”
Lars despised himself for it, but he gulped, like the same lame coward he’d been when he was fourteen years old. He sipped his beer so his second gulp had liquid in it instead of fear.
For the last little while, Cindy had been trying to hold Red’s hand. “Don’t you see how wrong you were?” she asked. “LaVeronica sees it, Lars was able to see it from the other side of a log he was hiding behind, and I’ve been telling you and telling you … Fred is just a pus-head, Red, the boil on the ass of our relationship.”
“I wasn’t exactly hiding,” said Lars. “I just didn’t want to talk.”
“Fred ‘Pus-head’ Kelso,” said Red. “Ladies and gents, here sits a man who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
“Fred ‘Pus-head’ Kelso,” said Cindy, like it was a testament in church.
“All right, Lars, I want you out in the parking lot right now,” said Fred. “Call me a pus-head, will you? Well, I’m gonna turn you into a real one!”
He stood so quickly that his chair fell over. The bikers and the bartender turned to stare, and when the bartender said, “No fighting inside, boys,” Fred looked over at the bar and asked, “Who wants to be next?”
Lars believed in clarity of speech. In the car business, you had to be clear or you wouldn’t sell any cars. You couldn’t throw words around, or numbers, either, since customers always remembered what was most favorable to themselves. So he said, quite correctly, “I didn’t call you a pus-head, Fred; that was someone else. I was just sitting here, same as I was behind that log.”
He hoped one of the bikers would raise his hand when Fred asked who wanted to be next, but no tattoo twitched. Until, that is, Red stood up and said, “Hey, Pus-head. I don’t want to be next; I want to be first.”
Fred spun around so quickly that his Buddha earring rode out from its earlobe like a kid on the swing ride at the Puyallup Fair.
“You’re better than this, Red,” said Cindy. “This just brings you down to his level,” but LaVeronica shook her head. “No, honey, that ain’t true. This is a required course for Red, like biology was for us back in high school. He got to beat the bad out of himself while he’s beatin’ the shit out of Fred. Otherwise, things will never change. Ain’t that right, Red?”
“Yes it is,” Red said. “He needs to be gone from our lives, Cindy. If Fred goes, so does the guy you saw me turn into down at the beach. If Fred goes, then I can be myself again.”
“He’s got a devil on one shoulder, angel on the other, and it’s them doin’ battle, Cindy, not Red himself.”
Red and Fred stared at each other like LaVeronica’s words had turned them into Old Testament warriors on a mountaintop. And then, on a signal no one else could read, they turned and walked outside, with everyone following along.
Fred had a T-bird, too, also with oversize tires. The twin T-birds faced each other while each man stood in front of his, and the bikers stood beside their bikes. Lars looked at his VW for a second but decided not to stand in front of it.
“This will go on forever if we fight like we used to,” said Fred. “So no holds barred this time, Red. Might be only one twin survives.”
Once, back in the day, the kid who’d bullied Lars had said, “Last time I got into a fight, the other guy went to the hospital,” so Lars knew as well as Red did that this was a tactic. Still, had he been fighting Fred, it would have worked like a charm.
Fred took off his Buddha earring, looked for someone to hand it to, then set it on the hood of his T-bird. Red reminded Lars of Gary Cooper in High Noon, a movie he sometimes watched with his grandfather, while Fred reminded him of Gary Cooper, too.
Fred and Red came away from their cars to circle each other. Red kept his hands down, fists not balled yet, and Fred did also. When Fred feigned left, so did Red, and when Red missed with a quick left hook, Fred countered with a left of his own, also off the mark. When Fred kicked, Red kicked, and when Red went straight at his brother, the two men bumped chests hard, bouncing back. Fred threw dirt in Red’s left eye, while Red threw dirt in Fred’s right, and when Red tried a karate kick, his own thigh got whacked by Fred, who had the same idea at the same time. It was like watching two thumbs doing battle over a pair of folded hands.
“This ain’t solvin’ much,” said LaVeronica.
Red slapped Fred when Fred glanced at LaVeronica, and when Fred slapped him back, both men’s heads flew sideways, their opposite cheeks aflame. They both rubbed the thighs that had been kicked, then limped backward. Red was sweating and Fred was sweating and when one looked up into the descending rain, the other did also. They were like two huge turkeys in a barnyard.
There was so little traffic on the road in front of the tavern that Lars could easily see the Jag Ruth liked to drive, an old MK VII, coasting down toward them. Most days, he kept the MK VII in his showroom, though he knew it was a risk to the sale of newer models, since it highlighted what cars had been like when style was really style. Red and Fred were car lovers, too, and when Red saw the Jag roll in next to Lars’s VW, he dropped his guard. “Look, Fred,” he said. “What I wouldn’t give for one of those in my Christmas stocking!”
Fred hit him on the right side of his jaw with a powerful roundhouse uppercut that knocked Red’s teeth loose and cracked so loudly through the rain that the others heard it even before Ruth turned the Jaguar’s engine off. Red slammed onto the hood of his T-bird.
“Tell you what, Lars,” said Fred. “Sell me that car and I might let you live. I’ll even throw in my T-bird. It’s a hundred percent original, never mind the tires.”
Fred was the evil twin but knew his T-bird was diminished by those tires, which was more than Red seemed to know about anything. If the T-bird had been from an earlier year, Lars might have considered the deal.
Fred looked at Lars as if waiting for an answer, thus allowing Red time to get off his car and execute an uppercut of his own, sending Fred across the parking lot to crash into the T-bird he had just offered to trade. His Buddha earring leapt up off the hood like a jumping bean, sailed over the T-bird’s left front fender, and disappeared into a mud puddle. Ruth, meanwhile, saw what was happening and restarted the Jag. She’d had enough of fighting in Eritrea and just about enough in her current life. She rolled down the MK VII’s window and said, “Lars,” but a delivery scooter cut through her line of vision at just that instant.
“Here are your pizzas,” said the bartender. “Maybe you could take a break, call this round one.”
Red looked at Fred, who had stood up off the hood of his T-bird, rubbing his jaw. And when he muttered, “I’ve lost my goddamn Buddha,” LaVeronica said, “You shouldn’t wear it anyway, Fred, not till you get closer to what Mr. Gandhi and Dr. King and all of them other Buddhist motherfuckers was tryin’ to tell us. You want another earring in the meantime, I’ll give you a fine ruby elephant minus his trunk.”
She pointed to her bag as if the ruby elephant were hiding in it.
At first Red seemed to want to continue the fight, but Fred was unable to take his eyes off LaVeronica’s bag, as if thinking maybe a ruby elephant minus its trunk would be a very cool thing to wear around. When Ruth put the MK VII back in gear, creeping out of the parking lot again and driving back up the road, Lars noticed the raindrops on his face for the first
time since coming outside. They felt like someone else’s tears, like another person’s heartache. When he looked at Cindy, she said, “You can share my pizza if you want to, Lars. You were great down at the beach, popping up like some kind of strange detective.”
“No thanks, Cindy,” said Lars. “I’m late for work as it is and I want to make sure that Jag gets cleaned up properly.”
He nodded up the road, as if the car were all that had really left him.
When Cindy hugged him, he patted her back, then shook hands with Red before Red and Cindy followed the bartender and the three silent bikers back inside.
Fred and LaVeronica were still over by Fred’s T-bird, with Fred kneeling down in front of her while LaVeronica affixed the ruby red elephant to his ear. It didn’t look trunkless, the elephant, but half-trunked, a truncated trunk, thought Lars, and that made him laugh, causing Fred to cast him another mean look.
“No, no,” said Lars, “the time for fighting is over, Fred. I’m just laughing at my own sorry life.”
It surprised him to hear himself say those words, and it also made him think of his grandfather, up at Tobey Jones.
When Fred and LaVeronica went back into the tavern, clearly expecting him to follow, Lars knelt down where Fred had been, in order to try to see up the hill to where his grandfather maybe still sat looking out his window. Lars felt like praying, so he bent his head to his knees, his hands out in front of him, prostrate before everything that had brought him here, his childhood, his marriages, cars and money and Ruth. The rain had increased to the point where he could feel it needling his hands and the back of his head. He liked rain, always felt secure in it. “A truncated trunk,” he said, and knew right away that this was his prayer.
He sat up again, fearful that someone might have heard him, but when he looked around, he quickly knew that he was alone but for the smiling face of Fred’s Buddha, which had popped back up and was floating on the surface of the mud puddle with its hands behind its head. He remembered that the Buddha’s hands had been laced across its belly when Fred came into the bar, but now they were behind its head. Lars scooped his own hands into the mud puddle and, careful not to disturb the Buddha, lifted it out, stood, and hurried over to his VW. Worlds within worlds within worlds. Could this Buddha possibly know that his meditations were now taking place in the two cupped hands of a man like Lars in Tacoma, Washington? And, in turn, could Lars possibly know whose hands he was cupped in?
He managed to open the VW’s door with the extended pinkie of his left hand. A half-empty Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug sat on the console, so he tipped his hands quickly, letting what water they still contained, plus the Buddha, flow into the mug. The Lars Larson Motors bottom-heavy travel mug had a small mouth, giving the Buddha, when he popped up yet again, an even smaller pool than that made by Lars’s hands.
“The secret to happiness is in not wanting,” Lars said. It was advice he’d received from someone once. It hadn’t kept him from wanting, but it was something to think about, and something to say once in a while.
The Buddha’s hands were still behind its head as it looked up out of the coffee mug, making Lars doubt that they had ever been laced across its stomach.
“Ah doubt,” he said, and when the Buddha didn’t answer, he pulled out into the empty street and headed back across town.
Sarco-gophus
[2007]
1
WIZENED, GRIZZLED, INTO HIS SIXTIES, and back in Tacoma for the first time since joining the Merchant Marines after high school, Perry White sat in the docket at the County-City Building, listening to his arraignment on murder charges. His hands were in his lap and he stared at them.
“He grew up here, Your Honor, he’s got roots,” said his attorney, Susan Blake. “He’s not going anywhere.”
His attorney had been appointed by the court.
“Mr. White?” asked the judge. “Could you assure me of that directly?”
“Not goin’ anywhere. Got roots. Got my brother. He’s right back there.”
“Half brother, Your Honor, just to be clear,” said his attorney.
She turned toward the back of the room, where Perry White’s half brother sat with his hands in his lap, too. He raised one of them in order to salute the judge. “Nice to see you again, Your Honor.”
“Likewise, Mr. Lilly,” said the judge.
Both men smiled at the formalities. They’d known each other since college, when Judge Follett used to write wills for people in a tavern where Richard Lilly tended bar.
Judge Follett turned his attention to the prosecutor’s table. “Ms. Packer, I’m about to set bail if there are no objections from your office,” he said.
“Bail, Your Honor?” said Ms. Packer. “Are you kidding me?”
Though the courtroom was nearly empty, she looked back into it anyway, not at Richard Lilly but at the rows of vacant benches, as if they should also be shocked by the idea of bail for a transient charged with second-degree murder. She faced the judge again. She knew he wasn’t happy with “Are you kidding me?”
“My office vigorously objects,” she said. “Mr. White’s been gone for forty years. If he has roots, they’re planted somewhere else.”
Thank God the room was empty. She’d had a hellish fight with her mother last night and hadn’t slept.
“I don’t have roots nowhere else,” said Perry White.
“And Mr. Lilly has agreed to provide domicile as well as bail, Your Honor,” his attorney said.
“Anyone can see he’s a flight risk,” said Ms. Packer, but the judge set bail at $300,000. “That’ll put a dent in your wallet if he does fly the coop, Mr. Lilly,” he said.
“I know, Your Honor, but family is family,” said Richard Lilly. “And Perry has promised me he’ll stick around.”
“Family is family,” Ms. Packer muttered. “Can’t beat that as a tenet of the law.”
HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF THE CASE as we know them thus far. Perry White found a teenage girl wandering around in a cemetery, killed her, and placed her body on top of someone’s grave. The dead girl, Katie Smothers, had lived near the cemetery, and Perry had been seen during his time back in Tacoma visiting the grave Katie’s body was found on, that of a certain Winifred Wilcox. When questioned by the police, he said he’d simply been paying his respects. Before his arrest he’d lived at the Salvation Army apartments on Sixth Avenue, without contacting anyone from his past. But when the story hit the papers, Richard Lilly came forward, thus getting us to the point of his release on bail.
And here are the details concerning Ms. Packer’s fight with her mother and her poor performance in court. She’d made it clear to her mother and her mother’s longtime boyfriend that she wouldn’t recuse herself from the case. Her mother had asked her to do so because, in precisely the sort of coincidence that happens in towns like Tacoma, her longtime boyfriend was Richard Lilly, the defendant’s half brother.
Outside the courtroom, Perry White’s attorney was chatting with Richard Lilly when Beverly Packer came out. Though the judge had granted bail, it would take a while to complete the paperwork, and Richard hoped to lunch with Beverly in order to smooth things over from the night before. He’d been her mother’s boyfriend since Beverly was in high school and loved her quite as if she were his daughter. And she, though she’d have been hard-pressed to admit it at the moment, felt the same way.
When Susan Blake saw Beverly approaching them, she shook Richard’s hand and strode away while Beverly muttered, “How can you stand her, Richie? She’s more famous for her bleeding heart shenanigans than those Humane Society ads you hate so much on TV.”
Richard Lilly shrugged. “She champions the underdog,” he said, “but what’s gotten into you, Bev? You weren’t very good in there, you know.”
“My fight with Mom’s what’s gotten into me. I don’t mind fighting in court, but fighting with her makes me hate myself.”
“Why don’t we have lunch?” asked Richard. “Eve
ryone said too much last night.” But Beverly said she had to meet her paralegal, prepare for possible jury selection, and develop a strategy. She hugged him and got out of there fast, before last night’s tears demanded a return engagement.
When she got to her office a half an hour later, her boss was there, sitting on the edge of her desk.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
Her boss was not the prosecuting attorney but his chief assistant, with eyes too close together and shoots of unruly hair that gave him the look of having just gotten up. Beverly put her briefcase down. She was in no mood to hear what she feared she’d hear, and hoped her look let him know it.
“Okay, Clement, who called you?” she asked. “Or is this coming from the horse’s mouth?”
“I’m afraid it’s coming from the horse’s mouth. He’s reassigning the case.”
“The hell he is,” said Beverly. “It’s my turn, dammit. Don’t we do things in rotation around here? What ever happened to our storied office backbone?”
“The man’s your father’s brother, Bev. You should’ve known that wouldn’t fly.”
“He’s not my father’s brother; he’s the half brother of my mother’s boyfriend. That’s it. Who’s in line to take the case if I do recuse myself?”
She picked up her briefcase again, pressing it against her breasts.
“You know as well as I do that it’s me,” he said. “That way, you won’t miss your turn.”
“Too bad I’m not recusing myself then,” she said. “Tell the horse’s mouth he can kiss my horse’s ass.”
But he only told her to have her notes in his office by the end of the day.
“LOOK, MR. WHITE,” SAID SUSAN BLAKE when they got to her office a few minutes later. “My job is to counter what the prosecution throws at you; your visits to the cemetery, your talk with Katie Smothers over the fence to her backyard, and most of all your first words to the cops, which they thought were a confession. But I don’t want a confession from you; I hope that’s clear.”
Tacoma Stories Page 19