“I don’t know, Mom. He’s sure lost without you. I hired him to work for me here.”
His mother laughed with disbelief. “You are kidding, aren’t you?”
“No. That’s why I called. He’s a half hour late. Not too impressive on your first day at a new job.”
She sighed. “Have him call me when he shows up.”
Robert had no one to put in charge while he went looking for his father. He told Buzz to sit in the back room and put price stickers on volleyballs, and to tell anyone who came looking for him that he would return in ten minutes.
He ran down the street to the restaurant. His father was at a booth by the window, holding a chunky white mug of coffee to his lips. He wore a zebra shirt. Robert had given it to Dave when he hired him, so he would not have to face the indignity of changing in the back room, and so that Robert would not be subject to that spectacle himself.
Robert took the seat across from his father.
“You’re late, Dave. Look at me.”
His father would not comply.
“Why didn’t you tell Evelyn you closed the store?”
His father slurped coffee. The underside of his jaw looked sore with razor burn.
“She’d crown me,” he muttered.
“Nonsense,” Robert said, an echo of Evelyn. “But regardless—I’ve got a business to run, and I’ve hired you. Are you coming to work or not?”
“Don’t use that tone with me.”
Robert leaned forward. “I can use that tone with you, Dave. I’m your boss.”
His father’s eyes opened wide; he might not have thought of it in those terms.
“I’ve never had a boss before,” he reflected. “I’m almost sixty years old and I’ve never worked for anyone else. Just your mother.”
Robert smiled. “And now your son.” He slapped his father’s shoulder, then stood. “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to fire somebody. Don’t make it be you.”
They walked to SportsHeaven together. Buzzard was still in the back room. Nobody had been in to see Robert. SportsHeaven seemed to run itself. Robert picked up one of the volleyballs and spun it on his fingertip. In purple ink on the orange price sticker was the figure $1.295.
“Wrong price, Buzzer,” Robert said. He took the price gun from Buzz’s hand. “You put the decimal point in the wrong—one place to the left of where it should be,” he explained. “These balls are $12.95.”
Robert felt his father’s presence behind him, his smoky breath and old man’s scent, the displacement of his body, pushing against him; and before him, Buzzard’s hurt, chastised face, and three dozen mispriced volleyballs.
“You never showed me how to work the fucking gun,” Buzz cried.
“You’re right. I should have. Watch your mouth.” He set the price and returned the gun to Buzz. He said evenly, “No harm, no foul.”
“Now I’ve gotta pull all the stickers off,” Buzz complained.
“You’re right,” Robert said. He turned and there was Dave, who backtracked from the hot light in his son’s face.
“Little snot,” Dave whispered when they were clear of the back room.
“He’s just nervous. It’s his first day, too. He was on time.”
His father sniffed. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Evelyn wants you to call her.”
His father’s cocky look fell away. He jammed his hands in his pockets.
“She’ll just read me the riot act, Rob-O.”
“No she won’t. She’s never raised her voice to you as long as I can remember.”
“Oh . . . you don’t hear the half of it,” Dave said, his eyes wide.
“Call her. Then report back to me.”
“Who’re you going to fire?”
“A kid,” Robert said. “A thief.”
He left his father. He could not recall his mother ever chewing his father out; she seemed to love him so carelessly, even his failures had charm. She found something radiant in the way he lived off her. In the night, in their room, did she turn on him in secret?
Hiring his father had brought SportsHeaven to the employee limit allowed by Herm Branch. Hiring Buzz had put Robert one over that limit.
He found Dick by the bicycles. Long ago, when Robert was only seasonal help, he had discovered Dick deflating a basketball to fold into the narrow space of his locker. Robert had stored the incident. When he became assistant manager, Dick called in sick two days running. He returned to work with a fresh haircut. The back of his neck was smoothed and powdered, as if in preparation for a falling blade. But nothing had happened then.
Robert was promoted to manager and Dick again came to work the first day with his hair cut. He worked hard, arriving early, staying late. But Robert never forgot that half-emptied ball, the casual lack of guilt in the kid’s eyes; Robert saved the moment like a favor for the day he needed to be rid of Dick.
Dick was wiping spots of oil from the bikes. They were newly arrived, and in shipping oil had dripped onto the hard rubber seats and spidery frames. Dick’s hair had grown out; Robert had been in charge for a while.
He tapped the kid on the shoulder. “Time to go,” he said.
“Time to go where?” Dick asked.
“Wherever you want. You’re through here.”
Dick picked at the SportsHeaven patch sewn to the shoulder of his zebra shirt. The patch was the shape of a comet, with a star at the head and a tail of sporting goods—baseball, basketball, bicycle, ski poles, baseball bat, tennis racket, pistol—pouring away behind it, into heaven.
“Why’d you wait so long?”
“You were on borrowed time as soon as I caught you,” Robert said. “It’s your bad luck I became boss.”
The kid had worked a gold thread loose. “I need this job,” he said. “There aren’t many places to work in Mozart. I know a couple other guys who’ve ripped you off. I’ll turn them in if you’ll let me stay.”
“Go home. You’ve convinced me I’m right in firing you.”
Dick jerked on the gold thread and the sports comet came free from the shirt. Tears were in his eyes. Two girls in zebra shirts spied from the end of the aisle; they walked away when Robert saw them.
“You’re a good worker,” Robert said, “when you think it’s to your benefit. Next job, you’ll think twice about stealing.”
The kid took a swing at Robert then, catching him with a hard fist on the side of the head. The blue room went white and Robert saw Dick moving away from him. Robert hit the floor on his tailbone, a bike pedal chewing into the skin on his spine. Dick had not been in retreat; Robert had only been falling backwards. His fate sealed, the kid decided to make the best of it. He advanced on Robert, his fists curled, his foot drawing back to kick.
But Buzzard was there to shoot Dick in the face with a jet of purple cleaning fluid. The ammonia seemed to put his eyes out, the kid shrieked so. And before Robert could intervene, Buzz hit the incapacitated kid so hard Dick knocked over a line of eight bikes and lost a tooth in the fall.
The episode filled Buzz with boundless happiness, though he held his throwing arm as if surprised by a fresh pain.
“Did you see me?” he shouted to Robert. “I earned my pay today!”
“Get him some water,” Robert said, pointing to Dick, who was on all fours among the toppled bikes. When Buzz left, only the clicking of a revolving wheel could be heard.
“Don’t rub your eyes,” Robert said. “That will only make it worse.”
“Fuck you.”
Robert got to his feet. The abrasion on his spine burned. A small ridge of swelling was hardening the skin to the side of his left eye.
Buzz came with a bucket of cold water and a blue SportsHeaven towel.
“Hold still,” Robert said. He wrung the wet towel out over Dick’s tipp
ed-back head. The water ran off his face, into his shirt, onto the floor. But cold puddles, like rain trapped in depressions on a hill, formed over his eyes and he made no move to empty them.
“I’m going to sue your ass,” he threatened in a low voice.
“No, you aren’t,” Robert replied. “Right now I plan to let you off. I’m just happy to be rid of you. But if you sue, I’ll press assault charges.”
“I might be blinded!”
“You got hit with mostly water and a little ammonia. You won’t go blind, and you won’t sue.”
Dick took the wet towel and pressed it to his face. The mark raised by Buzz’s punch was hidden in the scarlet eruption from the ammonia. The young man sat on the floor for a long time. The spectacle he made, the cascaded bicycles, the spreading low lake fed by the dripping towel, the sense of his absolute sadness, grew commonplace, and the few shoppers and employees watching dispersed. Robert told Buzz to set the bikes back up, to angle their front wheels precisely alike. Then he told him to get the mop from the back room.
“Let him do it,” Buzz complained, pointing at Dick.
“He doesn’t work here anymore.” Robert took Dick’s arm. “Come on. Time to go,” he said solicitously. “You can’t sit here all day.”
It took ten minutes to get Dick on his feet and dried off. The puffed stamp of Buzz’s punch was now plain; it rose in almost the identical location as Robert’s swelling. Dick’s wet eyes were dense nets of irritated veins. He carried his tooth, an upper canine, in his cupped hand.
But he moved with the sluggish grief of a young man who has lost a loved one, or been the sole survivor of a catastrophe. In his wet zebra shirt and black pants he looked feeble and disheveled. Robert had to lead him down the aisles to the time clock, then to his locker, and finally out the back door. He guided him on this slow trip with one arm around Dick’s waist, but in the open air in the back of the store the sun made Dick squint and he came to life, as if rejuvenated like a forest plant freed from darkness by the felling of a competing tree.
He thrust a finger close to Robert’s face.
“Fuck you, Cigar! I’m going to sue your ass from here to Milwaukee, and I’m going to sue this two-bit store.”
Robert touched the soreness beside his eye, as if to remind Dick. Robert said, “Remember what I said about that.”
Robert stepped back into SportsHeaven and shut the door, cutting in half the young man’s threats.
Dave was on the back room phone, hidden in a corner’s dimness by the sunlight Robert had just emerged from. Robert heard his name paged, called to the front of the store.
Dave put his hand over the phone. “Your mother says hello,” he reported. “She says she will never forgive me for this masquerade.”
“Don’t believe her.”
“I don’t.” Dave smiled. “Already she is coming around.”
“Talk her into reopening the shop,” Robert said, going through the curtains, into the store. Talk her into taking her husband out of her son’s hair.
He made a pass by the bicycles. Buzz had put them in perfect order, then mopped the floor. Robert found him in another aisle, putting the newly priced volleyballs on the shelf.
Robert’s name went out over the PA one more time. It sounded cut from thin letters of electricity, then stitched in the store’s blue air. His head ached. Waiting for him was Frank Abbott, who caught his eye before Robert could slip back into SportsHeaven unnoticed.
IN THOSE STRANGE days after the accident, the one person Robert thought he had a fix on was the pilot. He seemed clearly innocent. He had landed his plane on a dark lake and intersected the point on the lake containing Ben and Duke. It was simple, tragic geometry. Robert was almost grateful for Frank Abbott; he was the one clearly cut element in the entire mess. Ben was missing, Duke was shy a leg, and Buzz, Olive, and Ethel floated in their grief and confusion, as though clutching a fragment of shattered boat in a body of cold, patient water. Of the participants in the tale, only Frank Abbott had definition; the pilot was the lone person who did not shift and darken and intensify in Robert’s imagination.
In two weeks the story was over except for those most affected by it. The divers had long given up the search for Ben; Robert had only begun his diving in earnest after the fire department was called off. Duke came home from the hospital and sat all day in a chair whose wheels squeaked. Ethel was trying to pick her way through each day; she did better than Robert would have expected. And the official verdict of the accident was that it was just that. There even was a sliver of blame stabbed into the vanished Ben, for being out on the lake in a rowboat without any illumination whatsoever. Robert laughed when he read that in the Madison paper. His lips and the tips of his hands were blue from his dives in the lake.
Then, as though compelled to square off the edges of the tale, Frank Abbott disappeared. He had sold his plane soon after the accident. Those who knew him (none of them well) said his enthusiasm for flying had been blunted by the accident. The plane was well tended but for the dented pontoon, the price was low, and it sold quickly.
A pilot without a plane, Frank Abbott moved out of the rooms he rented in a house on the lake, and told no one where he was going. So lacking was interest in the pilot that no stories were made up to give form to his time away.
HE SHOOK ROBERT’S hand and spoke his name unnecessarily. He was a tall man, sideburns cut to a dated length. His leather jacket smelled of motor oil and that smell took Robert back three years to the days of the accident. He had seen the pilot only two or three times then, and had never spoken to him, but that oily leather smell got through to wait in his memory.
“Can I talk to you?” the pilot asked. His eyes went up and down Robert’s shirt, as though each black stripe was a corridor in a deceptively straightforward labyrinth. His eyes were green and seemed to be weighing something.
“I’m sort of busy,” Robert said. “A number of small fiascos have taken place—all at once. I’m way behind.”
“Maybe after work.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’ve moved back. I’ve got a room at The View.”
Robert nodded. The View was a residential motel on the road out of town, a sorry place whose view was of the woods that encroached on its rear cabins. Out front, invisible two miles away through tall trees and thickets of summer cottages, was Oblong Lake.
“Can you come see me?” Frank Abbott asked.
“About what?”
“I heard about your diving,” he said. “I wanted to talk to someone else who couldn’t let it go.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, really,” Robert said.
“Then listen to me. You don’t have to say a word.”
Robert saw no point in this; Duke held the only secret worth knowing about that night and he was resolute in his protection of it. Robert doubted the pilot had heard Ben’s quiet voice as his plane descended.
“I don’t think I can,” Robert said.
“Aren’t you curious where I’ve been? What I did that night?”
“No.”
“Mr. Cigar . . . I think you are curious.”
“Don’t call me that. You’re ten years older than me.” He took a breath. “I never blamed you for what happened. It was a freak occurrence. A car hitting a squirrel.”
The pilot closed his eyes a moment; he was in his plane, in the air, the North Star large and bright as an open window. Below, lights thickly rimmed Oblong Lake, a necklace of gems laid out on velvet display. He began his descent.
He opened his eyes. “I never should’ve sold my plane,” he said to Robert. “It’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Now I’m airborne in my imagination—and it is always that flight. I should have kept the plane and gone flying again. Then I could’ve worked up the courage to fly at night again. To land on the lake in the dark. But I p
anicked.” He shrugged his shoulders in the oily jacket.
“What cabin are you in?”
“Four. I’ll be there all night.”
“It will be late,” Robert said. “After midnight.”
A SODIUM VAPOR light bright as a second moon high on a pole created a harsh illumination. Cabin Four was around back. The pilot was waiting for Robert on the cabin’s front porch, sitting in one of the two painted steel lawn chairs, their backs molded in the shape of fan shells, provided by the motel. He was drinking beer and fetched one for Robert without asking. Moths, one large as a bird, snapped and whirred in the porch light. They threw shadows like stains across the men.
Robert folded his hands around his beer bottle’s cold brown neck. The night was warm. He was prepared to take the pilot at his word; to listen and say nothing.
“Thanks for coming,” Frank Abbott said in a soft, nervous voice. “I’ve carried this around with me for almost three years. Then I heard about you—and I was heartened. I thought I was the only one—as I said this afternoon—who couldn’t let it go.”
“Where did you hear about me?”
The pilot shifted in the shell chair. His leather jacket was draped across his shoulders.
“A moment of utter coincidence,” he said. “I was in Chicago, looking for work. I bought a paper for the want ads. But before I got the want ads, I looked at the sports. And there was a story by an Al Gasconade—a name I half remembered from my life in Mozart.”
Robert turned in his chair at the mention of his friend.
“This was the winter past,” the pilot said. “I was upset, seeing his name, because I thought I had put some time and space between Mozart and myself. But even this faintest tie to this town turned me inside out. Just that name—Al Gasconade—and I was back here”—he raised his bottle to the warm night, to the chattering forest, the false moon—“where I didn’t want to be.”
“I know Al,” Robert said.
“I found a job—something menial. I kept seeing his name in the paper. Al Gasconade. In my mind he became familiar. I even started to remember—or think I remembered—what he looked like. One day I called the paper and asked for him.”
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