by Dan Chaon
——
Little Man’s real name is Loomis. Troy had been in favor of the name when the child was born—his ex-wife, Carla, had come up with it, and Troy had thought it was unusual and rugged-sounding, a cowboy name, which was cool. The second choice was Marley, after Bob Marley, the reggae singer. That had been Troy’s suggestion, and Carla had said that she thought Marley would sound better on a girl.
But ultimately, Loomis did not seem to stick, not in Troy’s mind at least, and he liked it even less when Carla called the boy “Loomy,” which for some reason conjured up the image of a slouching, drooling ogre, with one eye bigger than the other. Loomy. They had argued about it a little.
“Just don’t call him ‘Little Man,’ ” she said irritably. “You’re going to give him a complex,” and he had frowned at her bossy, judgmental tone of voice. “Why do you have to give everybody a nickname, anyway?” she continued. “It’s like, you can’t wait to get your hands on people’s identities and mold them so you feel superior. I mean, it’s like you calling me ‘Shorty’ all the time, and now he’s got to be ‘Little Man.’ So it’s like, what are you? Some sort of giant? Are we supposed to call you Big Man? Tall Troy? How about Humongous? Maybe we should call you Humongous.”
He hadn’t said anything. She seemed very hyper—cocaine, he thought, or crank—something like that, where you thought you were clever and your mind seemed sharp and taut as a guitar string. He hadn’t wanted an argument, he hadn’t wanted to say anything to make her change her mind.
The two of them were sitting in her kitchen, in her apartment, in Las Vegas. Little Man was in the next room, watching television, and her boyfriend, the one she was fucking now—there had been several since they had separated—was out somewhere. Troy didn’t ask. The two of them sat at the table and drank coffee and stared out at a tiny desert yard filled with hard gray earth and scattered with dog turds. The cabinets in the kitchen were white, with gold edges around the molding; a gold-painted cupid statue sat on the table, presiding over a bowl of plastic fruit.
After almost a year of being gone, she had called him in the middle of the night. “Listen,” she said, and her voice was heavily slurred. “I’m wondering if you could drive out here and pick up Loomis.” She had paused, and he could imagine her trying to compose herself, her tongue working thickly. “This is not the right place for a kid,” she said. “I was thinking about what you said. About custody and stuff.”
“Yeah?” Troy said. “What are you saying?”
“I’m just wondering—don’t be an asshole about this—but I’m thinking about whether you were willing to come and get him. Keep him for a few months. Maybe a year. Things are sort of . . . don’t start in on me, Troy, but things are not so good here. I think he’d be better off with you.” This was about four in the morning, and Troy had the vague idea that maybe everything would change, that eventually Carla and he would get back together, that after a while she’d come back to Nebraska and they’d become a family again, the mess they’d made of their marriage forgotten.
He even imagined this as he sat in her Las Vegas kitchen, as she stared at him grimly, her pupils swelling almost to the edge of her irises, so that it was hard to recall that her eyes were blue. “Look,” she said, “if you’re going to take him, you can’t be dealing anymore. Not even pot, okay? He’s a good kid, you know? And one of us has to try to . . . not fuck up, you know?”
“I’m not dealing,” he said, which was mostly true. “I’m not even hardly smoking myself,” he said, which was not. She laughed.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Troy,” she said. “Don’t lie. You should see your eyes. They’re like fucking bloodshot balloons. I wouldn’t have even called you if I thought there was any other choice.”
——
Troy thinks of this again, as he and Little Man walk along the dirt road beyond the house, the house that sits at the north edge of the town of St. Bonaventure, the road that leads up into the gray sod-covered hills. They are looking for fossils, which Little Man is very interested in, and Troy bends down to pick up a flat rock, imagining that it will be imprinted with the skeleton of a leaf or a fish, a trilobite. Troy has vague knowledge: At some point in the distant past, this dry plain was covered by a sea, thousands of miles across. Little Man is five years old, and they hold hands as they walk.
“You know what I’m wondering?” Little Man says. “If there was a sea here, what was the name of the sea? And also, were there sharks in it? Was it salt water or fresh water?”
“Hm,” says Troy. It sometimes worries him that Little Man will become a genius. And then what will happen? He remembers how Carla used to tease him, when he would sit cross-legged on the living room floor, playing Nintendo with Little Man. “You know, Troy, in a few years he’s going to be more mature than you are, and then what are you going to do?” He had grinned at her at the time, but now, remembering the comment, he feels grim.
“Let’s see,” he says. “I guess that it was probably fresh water, because, you know, there was the Ice Age, and all that? And then it sort of melted and evaporated, and all that was left was the Great Lakes, which are up by Chicago and so on.” He thinks for a moment. He doesn’t want to end up having the boy think he’s an idiot. “Maybe we should go to the library and look it up.”
“Okay,” Little Man says.
“Do you want to ride on my shoulders?” Troy says. “Are your legs tired?”
And Little Man shrugs. “I wouldn’t mind riding on your shoulders,” he says, very politic, very formal and dignified as Troy lifts him.
“Uff,” Troy says. “Either you’re getting heavy or I’m getting old. I turned thirty yesterday, you know. I won’t be able to carry you much longer.”
“I weigh forty-two pounds,” Little Man says, and hooks his heels into Troy’s armpits like a jockey gently nudging a horse. “Happy Birthday, Dad,” he says.
——
He’s happy, sure. They’re both happy, he and Little Man, the two of them together, and Troy knows he should be grateful for that. “Why do you worry about this shit so much?” Troy’s cousin Ray asked him recently. “All you do lately is worry, and there’s not any point to it.”
And when Troy shrugged, Ray gestured expansively at Little Man. “Look at him, Troy. He’s content, he’s healthy, he’s like a midget Einstein in our midst. What more do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Troy said. The two of them were sitting in the grass at the edge of the park, watching Little Man at play, cautiously passing a joint back and forth. Troy was more paranoid than he used to be, very careful now to pass the joint underhanded, thumb and forefinger, taking a quick hit and just as quickly lowering it. He didn’t know why he should feel so uncomfortable. There weren’t any other people around, and Little Man was fully focused on the slide he was working out on. Troy watched as Little Man climbed the ladder to the top and sat, hands folded solemnly in his lap, slipping down the metal pathway with the grim, determined expression of an accelerating race car driver. When he reached the bottom, he ran back to the ladder again. He didn’t seem to tire of it.
“I need to start thinking about changing jobs,” Troy said. “You know? I don’t want to be a bartender forever. Besides which, it’s a bitch trying to line up people who are going to sit for Little Man until I get off at two or three in the morning. You know, he’s going to start school in the fall, and then what am I going to do?”
“Mmmm,” Ray said, as if he were trying to sound thoughtful. He drew deeply on the joint and held the smoke in his lungs for a count. He tapped his chest with his palm, one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . and then exhaled in a stream, his eyes watery and red-rimmed. “Shhhit,” he said hoarsely. “What kind of a job are you talking about? Doctor? Lawyer? Senator?”
“Don’t be a jerk,” Troy said mildly. He was not in the mood for the teasing, affectionately insulting banter that usually passed for conversation when he and Ray were together. “Look,” he said. “I’m serio
us. I thought about maybe going to college somewhere—or a technical school or something. I saw this one thing on TV where you can get a degree in, like, commercial art through correspondence courses.”
“What’s ‘commercial art’?” Ray said, and the way he pronounced it made Troy wish that he hadn’t brought it up. Ray was not really the sort of person to talk about making any kind of change. At twenty-three, Ray still spoke grudgingly about high school friends who had gone away to college and never come back. He still had a prescription for Ritalin, which had been prescribed for him when he was a hyper eight-year-old, and which he continued to take faithfully, believing that it helped him concentrate. To Troy, it wasn’t clear why such concentration was necessary. Ray worked for the county Department of Roads as a laborer, and moonlighted occasionally for a company that contracted male strippers for bachelorette and birthday parties. It was a great way to meet women and get laid, Ray claimed, and besides smoking pot, his only other interest was working out with weights, an activity that was apparently greatly enhanced by Ritalin. “Commercial art,” Ray said again, as if it was a French phrase. “What do you do? Draw pictures for commercials? It seems like you’d have to go to New York or something to get a job.”
“I don’t really know,” Troy said. “It was just a thought.” And he listened to the sound of birds in the bushes around them. He didn’t feel like being disheartened, which was Ray’s general mode of looking at the world, and so he simply shrugged. What else was there to say? He was embarrassed to be thirty years old and still without any clear sense of what most people did for a living. He’d seen a girl he’d known in high school at the grocery store not too long before—she was back in St. Bonaventure visiting her parents, she told him, she was working as an actuary at a company in Omaha.
“Actuary, huh?” he’d said, smiling and nodding. “That sounds interesting.” Later, he’d had to go home and look it up in the dictionary.
Which was why the commercial he’d seen had caught his attention. “Tired of being stuck in the same old rut?” the announcer had asked, as on-screen a bedraggled waitress cleared a table of dirty plates with a depressed look on her face. “The Career Learning Center wants to help you discover new opportunities and actualize your potential!” The waitress then looked hopeful as a list of the many degrees you could get scrolled over the screen—computers, drafting, accounting, business. Commercial art was the one that stuck in his mind because art had been his only decent subject in high school. He could still draw fairly well—like the series of dinosaur skeletons he had drawn for Little Man on poster board and pasted on the wall above the child’s bed. They were pretty good, he thought, pretty accurate. Even Ray had said so.
“I don’t know,” Troy said at last. “That was just one idea.” Ray had stretched out on the grass and was staring up at the clouds. “It’s just like, well, I feel like I need to get my act together. Maybe it’s turning thirty.”
“Word,” said Ray, who sometimes used the slang of the rap musicians he listened to, aping their accents.
“You know what I ought to do?” Troy said. He watched as Little Man ran determinedly from the bottom of the slide back to the ladder again, still intent for the, what?, the twentieth time? Fiftieth? Troy sighed. “I ought to quit smoking pot all the time. And definitely quit dealing the shit.”
“Oh, man,” Ray said, sleepily. “Come on. What are you talking about? You’re not a ‘drug dealer.’ I mean, how many people do you sell to? Like, twelve or something?”
“More than that.”
“Yeah, well,” Ray said. “That’s stupid. It’s not like you’re some sort of Al Pacino Scarface cutting people’s heads off with buzz saws and being evil, you know? I mean, come on. You’re you. You can’t change everything just because you have a birthday and you got a kid hanging out with you. Look, everybody loves you the way you are. Everybody’s like, ‘That’s Troy, he’s the man, we love him,’ and you’re going to be like, ‘No, guys, I’m going to be all different now because I turned thirty and I’m having a crisis.’ What the fuck is that? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Troy said. “Well, if you think everybody loves Troy, you should talk to Carla’s mom.”
“She’s a bitch,” Ray said, and stared up at the sky for a while longer before resting his thick, worker-brown hand over his eyes. “You should stay away from her. No way hanging with her is any good for Little Man.”
Troy looked at him wryly. “So, what?” he said. “Can you watch him on Saturday night while I’m at work?” And he watched as Ray’s slack expression tightened.
“Oh,” Ray said. He sat up. “I would, but . . . I think I got a deal that night. Bachelorette party out in Greeley.”
They looked at each other. “That’s what I’m saying,” Troy said. “I’m not so crazy about dealing with Carla’s mom either, you know? But she can watch him. She wants to watch him. And I can’t find anyone else to do it. That’s what I’m saying. I need to make some changes if I’m going to have a kid around.” After a moment, he stood up, brushing the grass off the back of his pants. From the top of the slide, Loomis gazed at him and waved, and he waved back.
“You know what,” Ray said. “You need to get hooked up with a new woman. That is what you need. You don’t need a new career. You just need a new squeeze.”
“I don’t think so,” Troy said. He felt strangely heavy, thinking of Carla again, thinking of the old times at Bruce and Michelle’s place. Great times. Ray’s father, Bruce, was still in prison, serving a sentence for distribution of cocaine, and his mother, Michelle, was in Arizona now, living with an elderly real estate millionaire named Merit Wilkins. In some ways, Ray was still his responsibility, just as he had been back in the long-ago times when Troy used to baby-sit. Just as he had been when Bruce went to jail and Michelle had started dating various old men. During his high school years, Ray had mostly lived with Troy and Carla, crashing on their couch—had more or less become their ward, and maybe still was. That was what this conversation was really about, Troy thought. Don’t leave me, was what Ray was basically saying, and Troy felt Ray’s eyes upon him as he stood up.
“Loomis!” Troy called. “We’re getting ready to go!”
——
He thinks of all this as he drives toward Carla’s mom’s house with Little Man sitting calmly and silently in the back of the old secondhand Corvette that Troy had once been so excited about but which now suffers from serious health problems. He has to rev the engine at the stop-light to keep it from dying. Maybe something is wrong with the fuel pump. He hears the engine rasping, sputtering like a lung full of bile. He feels guilty and uncertain.
He’s making a mistake, probably. Every time he drops Little Man off at Carla’s mom’s house, he thinks: Of all the ways in which he is probably screwing up as a father this may in fact be the worst. He crosses under the viaduct on Old Oak, turns left on Main toward the park, and turns again into the series of narrow winding streets—Meadow Lane and Sunnyvale, Linden and Foxglove, a little neighborhood on the far end of the park made up of small, pretty, boxy houses, all from the forties and fifties, all nearly identical, and which, when he’d first started dating Carla, he’d thought of as fancy. Sometimes he thinks that he should just turn around and go home, call in sick at work, forget about dropping Little Man off, make some other arrangement. He will see the little white house, with its red trim and shaded windows, with its neat lawn and sidewalk lined with dark petunias, and a stone will sink inside of him.
When he’d left Las Vegas with Little Man, this had been one of Carla’s stipulations: “Just don’t let him stay with my mom,” she’d said. She’d looked at him fiercely. “You know, the minute she hears that Loomis is back in town, she’s going to call you up, and she’s going to be very nice, and she’s going to make you an offer. Just do me a favor. Don’t let him anywhere near her. You know what she’s like. She can hardly wait to get her hands on him.”
As far as he knew, Carla a
nd her mother, Judy, had always hated each other. “Cunt,” Carla said when they’d first started dating, when Troy was eighteen and Carla was twenty-four, and Troy had been scandalized that someone would use such a word to describe their own mother. “She’s poison,” Carla had said. “I don’t want to have her anywhere near me!” He learned that Judy had once had Carla committed to a mental institution, that Judy believed Carla had a mental disorder: borderline personality. And when he and Carla got married, it was a long time before Carla told her mother, arguing vehemently over the phone.
“I wouldn’t mind if she were dead,” Carla said, and he’d been shocked, just as he’d been shocked when Carla threw away the congratulatory card that Judy sent when Loomis was born; just as he’d been surprised when Judy had called him a “druggie little leech.” Just as he’d been awkward when Judy called him to say that she could watch Little Man.
But as for Little Man, he has never complained. That’s one thing. In fact, Little Man seems to like his time with Grandmom, and he seems unfazed when Troy drops him off at Judy’s house. He runs down the front sidewalk and into the small one-story house, skirting around Judy as she stands on the front stoop with her arms folded over her chest. “Howdy,” Troy calls to her, and she lifts her chin slightly in greeting. She is fat but not soft, a little bit over sixty years old, with short silvery-blond hair and leathery skin, bludgeon-thick arms and hands. She has the look of a woman who labors in the fields, in the sun, an old farm woman, though in fact she is a retired elementary school teacher—her look comes not so much from hard work as from relentless bitterness and anger. She squints at him and wrinkles spread out in judgmental rays from the edge of her eyes.