Redhanded

by Michael Cadnum

  “Chad makes me a little nervous, too,” said Raymond quietly, flaking off a paint blister with his finger.

  He added, “That’s why I want you to meet him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My dad and I rented a unit in a twelve-story condo, part of a complex of buildings off 580 in Oakland.

  When I was a boy and my mother and my father first moved there, I marveled that sometimes I could see the animals at the Knowland Park Zoo, a giraffe sticking its head high over the distant acacias, a zebra grazing on a golden hillside. One morning, for some reason I could never guess, a lion appeared, resting beside a chain-link fence. Even now, with the trees grown over the view, some mornings I thought I could see the placid profile of a bison through the greenery.

  The day after the Del Toro fight, I left work early so I could be there when it arrived, my dad’s new piano. I hurried across the plaza, my hands feeling pink and new after manhandling dirty pots for four hours. The job was just hellish enough to be fun, and you got free meals, all the sliced turkey and gravy you could eat, plus day-old desserts. I could spend time with Danielle, and besides, I needed the money.

  I was a little embarrassed about being late, knowing how my dad felt about the delivery, nervous about it.

  The piano was already hanging off the side of the building.

  I took my place on the tiny strip of manicured lawn and gawked, just like the others in the small crowd, neighbors with miniature dogs.

  Two heavyset men held the thing steady in the late afternoon light, gripping ropes. Another man peered over from the roof, operating a Big 4 Rents winch. The piano was muffled up in a gray quilt, shrouded; you couldn’t see what it was, but you could guess. The winch whined.

  “I sure don’t like the looks of that,” said Mr. Torrance, a tall, red-faced man, a retired accountant. He was always laughing with my dad about his tax bill or his insurance premium, examples of amusing errors in math. He and his wife smoked nonfilter cigarettes, lighting them with old-fashioned Ronson lighters. Twilight and dawn you could see them walking their teacup mutt, standing far away from human habitation, flicking ash into the gutter.

  Mrs. Torrance was a white-haired woman who used to run a lab, doing blood tests for Alta Bates Hospital. She read the latest news about the periodic table, who had just discovered what new element. She helped me with my chemistry assignments when I couldn’t remember the scientific laws and rules. I still didn’t understand the subject, but dogged memorizing and Mrs. Torrance’s encouragement helped me pass the exams, and now I heard Mrs. Torrance ask, “How are your cations and your anions, Steven?”

  “All my ions are okay,” I said.

  She seemed to think this was very funny.

  I worried about Mrs. Torrance. She has a slight trembling in her hands, and with her interest in atomic particles, it seemed to me she ought to wonder what was going on in her lungs. She took my arm, and held her cigarette out to one side. She and Mr. Torrance often had me up to their apartment to eat hand-packed ice cream from a gourmet dessert shop on Piedmont Avenue. We would watch videos on nuclear accelerators or baseball games, which were almost exactly the same subject, as far as I was concerned, and load up on butterfat.

  “I grew up with a Steinway,” she said.

  “Oh really.” I really wanted to be polite, but I was very concerned about my father’s piano.

  “I hated it.”

  This seemed very much unlike Mrs. Torrance. “You don’t like music?” I asked.

  “I hated the lessons,” she said.

  I knew how she felt, recalling my father’s look of anguish when I splashed yet another chord on the little Casio keyboard.

  The manager, Liz Compton, marched across the tidy, bright green lawn and stood with her arms crossed. She was angular and unpretty, but so full of energy she radiated a sort of sexiness, if you like nerves.

  “The elevator stuck again,” said Liz, “or I would have been here sooner.”

  “Is anyone trapped?” Mrs. Torrance asked.

  “Not the last time I checked,” said Liz. My father attracts women like Liz—almost as smart as my mother.

  More men showing up on our balcony, holding their arms out to the piano several stories down, as though to encourage it.

  “Six men and none of them know what they’re doing,” said Mr. Torrance, an unlit Pall Mall waggling in his lips.

  “Tripping on their dicks,” said Liz, the sort of thing my mother would say.

  Mrs. Torrance drew hard on her cigarette, maybe a little offended at Liz’s manner and wanting to put a little smoke between her and such talk.

  I tried to offer the opinion that they looked strong enough for the job, and Mr. Torrance gave a rumbly smoker’s chuckle, winking at Liz, maybe flirting in an antique fashion, right in front of his wife. “It’s leverage that matters,” he said.

  My dad joined the piano movers up on the balcony, a hand to his mouth. He caught sight of me and waved, his hand out like a traffic cop, as though to caution me not to spread my wings and fly up to join them.

  The winch made an unsettling, wasplike keen. Without comment, all of us moved away from the lawn, leaving the rope holders plenty of space.

  “Your poor father,” said Liz. “He really looked forward to this.”

  The piano was developing a definite hitch in its position, an unmistakable cant. The winch whined, hauling the piano higher, and then too high, the piano creeping upward beyond where my dad was, leaning forward.

  We all shrank back even farther, all the way to the tennis court fence.

  You couldn’t see the mammoth piano slip, but you could see a tendency, like when you know a row of books is going to topple.

  This Bechstein beauty my dad had his heart set on was about to do a breathtaking plunge, all the way to the empty place near a half dozen retired people. And I found myself curious as I backed away from ground zero. How far would the piano keys scatter?

  The winch was suddenly silent, and the piano slipped down, inch by inch. This made it possible for my father to reach out, straining over the side of the balcony, and touch the brass tip of one leg. He touched it with the pads of his fingers, but this little barely existent nudge was enough to move the quilted piano around in the beginning of a slow countercircle.

  Dad reached that point in his own center of gravity that if one of the piano men had not gripped him, half jokingly, half in desperate earnest, my father would have taken a header and lofted down all that distance to the place where the lawn sprinklers were just sputtering on.

  The automatic timer sprayed spidery water all over the two piano men near us, who flinched a little and said formal, manly things, like “Goddamn it,” “For Christ’s sake,” making a show of not getting very upset by the water.

  I was sure the piano would fall.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For an instant I considered taking an elevator, but a small boy was hammering on the elevator doors, shouting.

  Everywhere you looked an EXIT sign was blinking off and on, or a clothes dryer ate coins without turning on. It used to be nicer in this building, and I hoped that someday, maybe when Mom came back to us, we could afford to move.

  My feet made loud echoing slaps all the way up.

  Dad was there, opening the door, showing me to the space the piano would occupy, a space of bare carpet. Potted palms and easy chairs were lined up against the wall.

  By then the piano was slowly lurching into the room, the strong men easing her through the wide open glass doors, the quilt folding back around one of the ropes, mahogany gleaming.

  My dad hovered close by, biting a knuckle, and the men heaved it into place, grinning with the strain, and then with relief.

  “Maybe a little bit this way,” my dad said.

  I stepped over to the piano and hefted it myself, feeling how lean I was, surrounded by these men in green denims and baggy Bay City Delivery T-shirts, filling out those shirts pretty well, too, paunchy but with deep chests. I put s
ome leverage into it, and felt my effort shift the piano.

  “Good,” said one of the men, with an accent, German or Scandinavian, that made the word sound guttural, an approval of my assistance that came from his bones.

  “Good work,” he said.

  The concert-scale piano was too big for this room—way too big. In recent years my dad had made do with Casio keyboards, and always had access to a Yamaha at the college. The piano men folded the packing quilts, called down to the rope holders, made notes on a clipboard, having Dad sign by the X.

  My dad gave them each a tip, a crackle of currency. He was paying for the piano by cashing in a certificate of deposit, the last of his inheritance from his parents’ estate. Our furniture was mostly rented from EZ Life Home Furnishings on Frontage Road.

  Mom and he shared expenses, but she was always gone, finishing her Ph.D. in animal biology, writing her dissertation on the tule elk. They are large, slow-moving creatures, cows with antlers. The species had been almost extinct until a lingering herd was rescued and allowed to roam some acreage north of the Bay Area. I had visited Mom a few times in her trailer, computer software and scientific journals stacked all over.

  Mom spends her time studying with Dr. Urquist, the celebrity zoologist, and Dad has his girlfriends, a new one every three months or so. Women like his upbeat chatter, his ability to tell a joke one moment and sit down and play a sonata the next—and not just hit all the notes, but render it with feeling. After several weeks, however, Dad’s women tend to screen their calls, and drift away to new terrain.

  There is no great emotional explosion. It’s just that Dad has only one act, one opening episode of his one, personal TV series, a guy with a winning smile and a gift for music. Months pass and you never see much more than that. It’s just more small talk and a chance to go see a jazz guitarist he just heard about.

  Dad clips grocery coupons out of the Sunday paper, keeping them in alphabetic order in the top kitchen drawer, paper towels right after meat loaf mix. I hear Dad on the phone sometimes, sounding full of high-octane enthusiasm for one of his new friends. I know he has another side, a side he never shows, the side that makes serious promises. I lie awake at night sometimes playing the scenes in my mind, how it will be when Dad stops being Mr. Wonderful and Mom settles back with us.

  “My God, I thought I would die,” said Dad when we were alone.

  We leaned on the piano. I could make out my hazy reflection in the finish.

  I ran my hand along the wood, just for the touch, the thrill, and gave it a gentle rap with one knuckle. A note answered my thump, a deep, sea dark intonation. Above the keyboard was displayed C. Bechstein, in faded golden letters. Way over to the right glowed the names Kohler & Chase.

  My dad had not looked so happy in months. He teaches music at Laney College, one course, on appreciating music, and the class has a waiting list three semesters ahead. He used to have a radio show on KDFC, midnight to dawn, “The Masters Revealed,” and even when he got phased out by computerized programming, local symphonies asked him to give a short pre-performance chat. When Dad says Mozart wrote the world’s finest merry-go-round music, even the Mozart fanatics chuckle.

  A knock at the door, and like a hasty afterthought one of the men carried the piano bench in one hand. He set it into place, thanking Dad again, adding, “Enjoy,” as though the piano was something at a restaurant, the chef’s special of the day.

  Dad sat and played a power chord, a full-volume glissando.

  “How about that?” he said.

  “Terrific.”

  “It’s a seventy-year-old piano.” He sighed. “I’ll have her tuned.” He played a few notes of Chopin, his fingers tentative, like someone testing hot water.

  Dad knows very little about boxing, although he has a napkin from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas autographed by Muhammad Ali. He keeps it in the bottom dresser drawer, sealed in plastic. When I asked him to sign the waiver months ago, and told him I liked sparring, he had sighed and shaken his head. “You’ve never heard of dementia pugilistica? It comes from getting hit.”

  But I had praised Loquesto, raved about the gym, and said it was giving me a shot at the Olympics.

  This last word got Dad’s full attention. He kept a list of places he had lectured, Stanford, UCLA, and saw life as the process of building a résumé. With Dad, his own list of solo performances was more important than a bank account. I could see him gazing at me with a quiet pride in recent weeks, probably thinking, “My son, the Olympic contender.”

  Dad tested out the piano, trying to find things wrong with it. But enjoying it, too, improvising chords with a gentle touch, as though he had to sneak up on contentment or it would slip away. I stayed in the kitchen playing with Henry, the yellow parakeet. I wondered what Chad, this guy I had never met, would make of the way we lived.

  The three-year-old bird did all the perky pet bird tricks, nibbled my fingernail, said its one phrase over and over, “How you doing?” It was a tiny, muzzy imitation of my father.

  Henry hopped along the wooden perch, a span about as big around as a pencil. Henry was like a pretend bird, too cute, too happy, chirping and sparring with the little mirror hung inside his cage, the one he was sure held a very real pineapple yellow parakeet.

  Henry mock-fought with the Mirror Henry, and I recognized that this was one of the training routines I followed myself, shadowboxing in the gym mirror, feinting and faking my own reflection.

  Except my own image wouldn’t hurt me.

  Stacy Martell would.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mr. Gartner had already given us a good-natured caution.

  He hurried through the place just as I was pretending I was going to skim a salad plate over to Danielle’s outstretched hand. Mr. Gartner was a heavy man with a likable, worn face.

  It was the next day, and I could not be serious, looking forward to seeing my mom. Mr. Gartner clapped his hands, a sound you could barely hear over the gush of the dishwater and distant orders being given behind the swinging door to the kitchen. You could make out what he was saying: “Cut it out!” the way he always did.

  Danielle made a half nod of apology, a winning expression that had to earn forgiveness but tonight just got a hurried, friendly glance from Gartner as he marched out into the employee lounge, where the waitresses touched up their lipstick.

  Yancy wrestled a gravy pot over toward the sink, and I helped him, the hot, half-congealed turkey gravy slopping into the sink. Danielle rushed over to help, even though she didn’t look strong enough to wrangle kitchen equipment.

  Danielle was lithe and dark-haired. We had met three months before, at a first aid class taught at a fire department substation in the Oakland Hills. Giving mouth-to-mouth to a stoical rubber dummy and learning the arterial pressure points on a diagram, we got to talking about her interest in being a health-care professional, like her mom. She had an application form for this kitchen job in her daypack. She said that she would earn spending money, something to pass the summer months, and I stopped by the cafeteria and filled out an application, too.

  Danielle starred in 98 percent of my own mental erotic adventures. In real life, Danielle and I had enjoyed two actual dates: a visit to the Cinemax in San Francisco, a 3-D movie featuring moray eels and lionfish, and an evening of thrill rides at a carnival by Lake Merritt, amusements that spun us upside down and rocketed us, yelling, in wide circles. Danielle and I were good at having ordinary fun together, but I was wondering how to dig deeper. I didn’t know how to begin.

  Steaming gravy splashed our arms and our apron fronts, but the two of us made a show of not minding the pain. The dishwasher was a big tray built in a circle, like a carousel. You stacked the spray-gunned dishes in the rubberized trays, making sure the glasses and cups were upside down, just like loading the dishwasher at home, except that this washer held hundreds of dishes at once. A multitude of dirty plates trundled off as the wheel turned, into a dark, whooshing hurricane.

 
By the time the glistening dinnerware reappeared from the washer, it was pristine and very nearly dry. The dishes were hot, too, and whoever unloaded the green-and-white Syracuse china had to wear special thick gloves, and even then got sweaty from the heat radiating from the piping hot flatware.

  The stainless steel kept the heat the longest, knives and forks too hot to bare-hand out of the crate. I helped Danielle with this chore, grabbing fistfuls of forks and putting them over in the trolley, where the busboys would come in and take what they needed for the setups, the places on the dining room tables out in the real world. Danielle had said I was the best athlete she had ever seen, after watching me skip rope for twenty minutes, and sometimes I liked to show off.

  I flipped a cup up into the air and did a basket catch, like an outfielder, and made a mock microphone out of one of the Duralex water glasses. You couldn’t really talk with all the gushing and rumbling noise, and all communication was yelled and accompanied with sign language—“I need a mop” or “Your cap’s on crooked” shouted and acted out.

  Most of the time we bent our backs to our work, looking foreign to each other in the plastic caps Mr. Gartner ordered us to wear, like green shower caps. They made us look like medical technicians, people laboring in a humid emergency room.

  The kitchen beyond was a room of wartime noise and frenzy. Even at our worst moments, with huge gravy pots carried in blistering hot, and hundreds of dishes piling up laden with half-eaten veal steaks and Thousand Island dressing, our chamber of hell was not half as hectic as the kitchen.

  Sometimes the soup and gravy pots were so hot the dishwater sizzled, and it was sweaty labor, swabbing out the crusted minestrone or country gravy, using a stick-sponge and all my strength to work free the gunk cooked fast to the bottom.

  That afternoon I was manning the spray gun, a coiled chrome hose with a grip-handle that powered a blast of water. Towers of barely eaten dinners would pile up in the stainless steel sink-top, and I would hose the food into the large metal trough. At one end of the sloping bottom was a hole, a serene maw that took it all in, not struggling or sputtering like the In-Sink-Erator at home.