“Yeah. Why?” Joe said. “Everybody steals.”
“Everybody?”
“I haven’t caught everybody.” He took a seat at his small desk. He was drinking a bottle of cherry pop and smoking a cigarette; he had moved the bandoleer from the peg to the corner of his chair.
“I don’t doubt they all rip me—Herm—off,” Joe said. “Big or little. Teens, married women working part-time, retired guys. It goes on. They have enough respect for me not to let me catch them.” He smiled broadly at Robert; he had big horsey teeth with brown furrows of nicotine between them.
“You want to get some lunch?” he asked. “I’m sorry I was gone so long. Mrs. Marsh won’t let me go once she gets hold of me.” He winked, then ran his tongue across his browned teeth.
ETHEL WENT TO the foot of the stairs to call up through the house for Buzzard. Duke hopped past her coming into the kitchen. He had caught a cold that ran deeply through him. Around his head swarmed the droplets of his sneezes like a cloud of gnats.
“How you doing, Duke?” Robert asked, setting his apple core on its base. A brown seed fell with a pit! to the table.
“I’ve been better,” he said. His voice sounded almost electronic, as if it were coming from behind him and passing through a thick filter woven of static.
Buzz came into the kitchen without a word. He took his seat and drank his entire glass of milk without pause.
“Can I have more milk, Mom?” he asked.
“You know where it is,” Olive said.
“Are you ‘Mom’? Are you in a family way?”
“Don’t get smart,” Ethel warned. She filled Buzz’s glass.
“Who’s the zebra?” he asked.
“I got a job.”
“Doing what? Officiating high school basketball games?”
“Working at SportsHeaven. I told you last night at dinner. This is what we have to wear.”
“You look ridiculous,” Buzzard proclaimed, then turned his glowering attention elsewhere.
Olive moved bowls of food onto the table. Duke blew his nose into a blue tissue that he peeled off a roll like money. Buzz made a keening wind sound with his mouth, and pretended to have to hold down his plate and utensils.
“Buzzard!” Ethel scolded.
“The guy’s sick all the time,” Buzz said.
“I am not.”
“I’m lucky I don’t get the fucking plague from you.”
“Buzzard!”
Duke countered, “You missed more school than I did before Dad died.”
“You’re full of shit!”
“Just wait,” Duke said. He got up, positioned his crutch under his arm. “I can prove it.”
“Duke,” Ethel said, “it can wait until after dinner.” But Duke was already gone; they could hear him in a distant room.
“You still throwing after school?” Robert asked, picking a safe question to absorb the malice radiating from Buzzard.
The boy glared at him, though, sizing up Robert’s true interest or his intent to mollify.
“Yeah. I throw every night.”
“Don’t burn your arm out.”
“You sound like Dad,” Buzz said. “I’m behind now because he made me wait to throw the curve.”
“You won two-thirds of your team’s games last year. How can you call that behind?”
He shrugged darkly. “I could be better.”
Duke returned with old report cards. “Look,” he said. “Our report cards for the year before the crash. See here? I missed four days all year. Buzz missed seven.”
“Eat your dinner,” Ethel commanded.
“One year,” Buzz scoffed. “Big fucking deal.”
“Buzzard!”
“No wonder you’re such a dolt,” Duke countered. “Missing all that school. Look at these marks: C, C–, C, D+, C, C–.”
“Eat this,” Buzzard said. He leaned across the table and thrust his middle finger within a quarter-inch of Duke’s scarlet nose. “I’d whip your puny ass if you weren’t already a crip.”
“Buzzard!”
Robert blew his whistle then. He took it out of his pocket and blew it hard and the sound seemed to put the room under, as if stunning it with a plunge into cold water. Ethel, last to speak, still had her mouth open on the tail of her exclamation. Olive’s fork had fallen soundlessly to her plate in the shadow of the whistle’s reverberation.
He had bought the whistle at work that day. It was plated in nickel, with a hard speckled pea inside. Being an employee, he got a discount. Walking home, he tried the whistle only tentatively, whistling under his breath. The cold mouthpiece warmed between his lips.
The whistle had a strong, clear note to it. He wanted to cut loose but the streets of Mozart were crowded, and with his coat over his ref’s shirt people would not make the connection.
But now he stood over Buzz in the kitchen as the air and the other members of the family began to move again.
“You’re out of here, mister,” Robert proclaimed with an exaggerated jerk of his thumb. “You’ve been ejected from the dinner table for gross inhumanity to your brother.”
Buzzard even began to rise, so commanding was Robert. But he thought about it, and sneered, “Fuck you, Bob.”
“You want to miss breakfast? You want to miss TV for a week?”
Buzz looked at Ethel.
“You heard him,” she said. “You’ve been ejected from dinner.”
“He can’t do that.”
“He just did.”
“Who died and made you ref?” Buzz asked Robert.
“I’ve got the shirt. I’ve got the whistle. Now get to your room. And no lip.”
Buzz tried to remain; but the food was routed around him and the words he spoke were ignored and finally he threw back his chair so it tipped with a wooden clatter to the floor and he departed.
Ethel said cheerfully, “What an inspired idea.”
“Don’t let it go to his head,” Olive cautioned. “And don’t try to pull it on me.”
But she invited him to her room that night. She requested that he wear his referee shirt and bring his whistle, and when he arrived she took his pants off but not the shirt, and fucked him with the whistle in her mouth and her hands wound in the stripes to get a good hold on him, as if they were bars, and when she came her rhythmic expulsions of breath set off a musical piping Robert thought would wake the house.
“Now I can say I’ve been fucked by a zebra,” she whispered later, “which is just a horse with no taste in clothes.”
AT SPORTSHEAVEN THE following day Robert caught a woman shoplifting a grip strengthener. From the end of the aisle he saw her drop it in her purse. He took out his whistle and the woman jumped when he blew a short blast.
She turned toward him, bent at the waist, her feet wide apart; she seemed to be weighing flight.
“I’ll have to ask you to put that back,” he said.
She took the grip strengthener from her purse. The device had two red plastic handles connected by a coil of chromed steel. She pleaded, “Don’t turn me in. I’ve never done anything illegal before in my life. I’ll do anything you want. My husband would die of shame if he found out. Please tell me what you want.”
Robert squeezed the grip strengthener once; it made a tinkling bell sound and turned the bunched skin of his hand white. He was sorry he had caught the woman. Her panic gave him too much responsibility; that she had allowed him to catch her angered Robert.
The woman stepped toward him. She wore red nylons and a coat of leather patches sewn together, rabbit fur at the collar and cuffs. She asked in a fearsome whisper he thought could be heard throughout SportsHeaven: “Do you want sex? A blowjob? I’ll do anything.”
“No.” Robert shook his head. He wanted to whistle the woman long and loud for base
thoughts inappropriately expressed. She had embarrassed him enough allowing him to catch her; now this compounding of embarrassment.
He said, in a low, quick voice, “I want you to leave this store and never return. If I see you in here again I’ll trail you like a hound.”
Freed, she gave him a disdainful look and left without a word.
He was paged to the back of the store. Joe Marsh was at his desk, fingering the bullet loops on his bandoleer. He had a yellow flower there, and three sticks of blue chalk. He asked, “You hear a whistle?”
“A few minutes ago? Yeah. I thought I heard something a couple aisles over.”
“Probably kids screwing around.”
“Maybe it was the buy light going on,” Robert offered.
Joe Marsh laughed at that. “Wouldn’t that be sweet? This would be a whole lot easier if a whistle blew every time someone got the hots to spend money.”
ROBERT TOLD THE others at dinner about the woman he caught shoplifting.
“Did you blow your whistle at her?” Buzzard asked scornfully.
“I did, as a matter of fact.”
“You’re kidding.”
Olive gave him a wary look: the zebra gone mad.
“She was trying to steal,” Robert said.
“So you whistled her for that?”
“Yes.”
“What did your boss think of that?” Olive asked.
“I didn’t tell him.”
Ethel was hurrying through her meal. She was going out. They had lost count of her dates with Stephen; they would think they had them totaled and then Olive would tell them of some sly meeting, laying it open like a fresh infidelity. Ethel had learned it was easiest to depart without fanfare or final instructions, that her children were old enough to tend their pains and carry on.
She cut a piece of roast beef and ate it. She gulped her coffee.
Robert took his whistle from his pocket and blew a short trill. “Insufficient mastication of foodstuffs,” he said, pointing at Ethel.
“Yeah!” Buzz exalted. “Get her!”
“Your penalty is to spend the evening at home with the rest of us,” Robert pronounced.
“I’m late,” Ethel said. “I’m also the head of this household and nobody dressed like a zebra is going to tell me to chew my food more thoroughly.”
After Ethel left the table, Robert asked Olive, “What has she said to you about this Stephen character lately?”
“She’s pretty tight-lipped, which worries me. I think it indicates a certain seeking of privacy for her feelings. Or maybe her feelings have become too strong to be comfortably shared with her daughter.”
“What if she gets married?” Duke asked.
“She won’t,” Buzz said. “You’ve seen the guy. He’s twenty years older than Mom. He’s on death’s door. She’s not going to saddle herself with another guy who’s going to die out from under her right away again.”
DAVE CAME INTO SportsHeaven the following day to buy felt letters. He demanded that Robert wait on him. He said, “My letter supplier bollixed up my order.”
He bought ten of every letter of the alphabet and ten of every numeral. Some letters, such as the rare consonants, he cleaned out, and of some he left only one or two behind.
“So there we are,” he recounted, “a T-shirt shop without letters. Maybe this will hold me. We’re not sending T-shirts out the door in a rush, I’ll grant you. I went to the stationery store and—would you believe it?—they didn’t carry bulk felt. I didn’t even hold out hope for glue-backed felt. Just plain felt. No dice. No wonder they’re going under. Nobody writes letters anymore; writes, period. What do we need with a store that sells pens and paper? It’ll be gone in a year, Rob-O. T-shirts, however, are eternal.”
Two days remained until Thanksgiving. The temperature outdoors was 22˚, two inches of fresh snow had fallen the night before, bringing the winter’s total to nineteen inches, and yet his father was dressed only in brown corduroy trousers and a white shirt with a blue T-shirt over it that proclaimed DANGER! TURKEY DRESSING AHEAD!
“You look good in stripes,” Dave said, touching Robert’s shirt. “Puts color in your face. Makes you look taller.”
“Thanks. Buzz and Olive call me a zebra.”
“You like this slogan?” his father asked, inhaling.
“I can’t lie.”
His father laughed; he feinted playfully like a boxer and punched Robert in the chest.
“I hate it, too,” Dave said. “But you try to come up with a good Thanksgiving slogan. It’s a dead holiday.”
Joe Marsh appeared and Robert introduced him to his father. Joe took a second to read Dave’s shirt; his lips moved.
“Clever,” he said absently. “Rob, there’s a couple kids screwing around in Aisle 7. Take care of them, will you?”
“Sure, Joe. Dave, I gotta go back to work.”
“Go on,” Dave said. “I want to see you in action.”
Two boys, maybe thirteen years old, were playing basketball in Aisle 7. They did not dribble the ball and so played in an eerie silence. The rim hung tenuously from cable just seven feet off the floor and the wide white fan backboard shook and swayed when the ball bounced against it. Each time the ball went through the hoop it stuck in the net and one of the boys would flip it out and the game would resume.
“Game’s over,” Robert said, whistle in his pocket. The two boys stopped and looked at him. They were lean, panting softly, with a casual, bored aspect to their expressions.
“That whole rim and backboard might come down on you,” Robert warned.
“Fuck you, ref,” one kid said, and they dropped the ball and walked away. Dave scooped the ball up, checked the aisle for emptiness, and let fly at the nearest kid’s head. The shot missed, but an ear was nicked. The two kids ran without looking back and the ball hit a counter at the end of the aisle and caromed back to Robert.
“Dave! You can’t do that,” he scolded.
“They’ll think twice before they mouth off again,” Dave said. His face was red, excited by that one beanball. “A kid talked like that in my store I’d put his hand in the letterpress for a minute or two.”
“It doesn’t work, Dave.”
“Don’t tell me what doesn’t work,” his father cried. “Those kids’ parents haven’t taught them anything. And they sure aren’t going to. I might as well do what I can.”
“You’re asking for trouble,” Robert warned. “If you’d hit that kid, knocked him down, broke his nose, his father would’ve sued you so fast.”
“Good. Let him. Give me a chance to tell him he’s a crappy father.”
Robert put the basketball back on the shelf, orange and brown globes rising overhead and to either side of him.
His father traced the letters on his shirt with a finger.
“Come to dinner sometime,” he said. “I see you around town, I get all excited because I think I might not see you for a while, so I should get it all out right then. I forget we’ve got time, that you’re right here. I start thinking and talking in T-shirt and nothing is accomplished. So come over. Give us time to talk.”
“Sure, Dave,” Robert said.
“You fit in here,” his father said before leaving. “I told you—sales is in your blood. You look much better as a zebra than a bag of leaves.”
Chapter Nine
MR SPTS
A VEIN OF arctic air blew through Mozart the first week of December and for six days the warmest it got was –4˚. Robert moved in with Olive. The arrangement was traditional, a sweet time, when each needed the other and strove to be gracious. In just that way they had seen two previous winters through.
At first Robert completed the charade of climbing the dark stairs to his room on the fourth floor, where ice was a half inch thick around the white ri
m of the window, and he could see his breath, then sneaking back down to Olive’s room when the house settled for the night. However, Olive soon told him to come directly to her room, which was hardly toasty itself. She wanted Robert beside her during those long moments the bed was coldest. It was a fine season in that regard; he nearly fell in love with Olive every winter. They made love often because that kept them warmest, then slept bound within each other.
“My mother may think I’m a slut, but at least I’m a warm slut,” Olive said, her mouth against Robert’s chest.
“She doesn’t,” he said. His head, where it poked its cap of hair above the covers, was cold.
“I don’t know,” Olive whispered. “I think she does, but doesn’t feel she has the right to tell me flat out.”
The kitchen was the only truly warm room in the house and at the height of the cold spell chairs, the TV, blankets, books, and pillows were moved there. Sometimes Ethel was out, and sometimes they were all together in the close space.
In low moments, Robert felt squeezed and reduced, the cold forcing them into an ever smaller space. He had to stand and stretch, or pace from his chair to the far end of the kitchen. It was the winter feeling and he was dismayed it had come so early; only December, not yet Christmas, not even past the winter solstice. He was surprised each year how he managed to forget about it in the mild months, and how it grabbed him like a boy and lodged in his heart without mercy. It came into the cold house through every drafty passage and crack, shepherded everyone into the warmth of the kitchen, then sat upon them where it knew they must remain.
Robert often wore his striped shirt around the house. He rarely carried the whistle, though; the novelty of it had dissipated abruptly on the shoplifter. In less than a month he had become simply a salesman of sporting goods. He liked the sound of that; he was content with it for the time being.
The ice on Oblong Lake was a solid foot thick. He saw a sleigh pulled by a black horse out on it, the runners cutting a long double script, and skaters in close to shore, their faces hidden but for eyes behind scarves.
He got off work one afternoon and went by the high school to find Buzz. The maze of the old building’s hallways was placed perfectly in his memory. The walls of the front foyer were lined with athletes’ pictures. He wasn’t represented, but his father was. Preserved behind glass five years since its last dusting, a perfect younger likeness of Dave holding a javelin and squinting into the lens. His father’s legs were muscular, his stomach flat, and his chest deep behind the block M on his track jersey. Pine trees rose in the background. His name was printed at the bottom: DAVE CIGAR MOZART COUNTY JAVELIN CHAMPION 1944.
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