Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  A crestfallen shrug.

  “Well, I should mix with the others.”

  Though he had fumed about being sent away like a kid to the TV room, sticking around at Archer’s till quarter to ten was a grind. He always felt on edge around money. Hard to believe he’d worked so long at banks.

  Walking down Christopher Street with John, he said, “Do you miss this, man? Saturday night, a real city, petals on a wet, black bough, all that.”

  “No, I can be happy anywhere.”

  They stepped off the curb to let a foursome pass. “But are you?”

  “I’m saying I can be.”

  Lucas couldn’t always distinguish half-baked platitudes from hard-won wisdom, but later, in the jazz basement, while Glasper played a melody that sounded to Lucas too much like bumper music for an NPR show about personal finance, he looked over at John, who had no sense of musical history, who couldn’t hear when his mandolin was miles out of tune, but whose eyes were now closed and whose head was tilted back and who was obviously hearing something beautiful and important that Lucas wished he could hear too.

  July 2011

  Lucas’s mixtape was loud enough for Karyn to feel the bass when her left knee grazed the passenger door’s armrest. “You know, I’m feeling really strong,” he said. “I could easily take the last leg, push on to the Peg.” Through Gemma and Archer he had secured a Winnipeg crash pad; twice already he had articulated his ostensibly budgetary interest in getting there a night early.

  “It’s probably too late to cancel the reservations in Grand Forks,” she said again. Thinking of Lucas’s poverty, she had switched from the second-cheapest place in town to the cheapest. “You should also consider my advanced age,” she said. “Long sedentary stretches put me at risk of, oh, deep-vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism.”

  “I’m fine with the stopover.”

  “Aggravated lumbago, sciatica.” This breezy litany was as close as she could come to admitting how much pain she was in. It was fine to joke about being older than Lucas, but she didn’t want to drive the point home too powerfully. “Temperature okay back there, honey?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  No one spoke for a song and a half. The rows of cumulus clouds through the windshield looked like the bellies of hammerhead sharks.

  “Why is it so flat here?” Maxwell asked.

  “From science,” Lucas said.

  Karyn reached for her phone. “It was a seabed, right?” She shifted in her seat, tried to extend her lower back. “Spotty service. We’ll research it later.”

  “I have a new game,” Lucas said.

  “Can we turn this down a hair?”

  “I’ll name a movie, and you have to guess, Maxwell, whether it’s a real movie or one I made up.”

  “Why can’t my mom play?”

  “She’ll know which movies are real.”

  “All right.”

  “B*A*P*S.”

  “Fake.”

  “No, real.”

  “Hey, Tony!”

  “Real.”

  “Fake.”

  “I suck at this.”

  “Here’s our exit,” Karyn said.

  The down-at-heels motel was an authorized Zippo dealer and trumpeted this status in many spots around the check-in desk. The owner’s T-shirt—I PUT THE “PRO” IN PROCRASTINATE—was later helpful in explaining some of the disrepairs in room 18’s bathroom. There were two tolerably comfortable beds, but the walls were thin, the lack of air-conditioning necessitated open windows, and a small but boisterous gathering of alcoholics was waxing in the parking lot. Maxwell was engrossed in his tablet, not researching the geological origins of the Great Plains. Karyn leaned against the headboard. Her pores emanated an unpleasant oniony sweetness from the soup she’d had in Hillsboro, where an old, plaid-shirted farmer, after asking about Karyn’s camera, had told the group about driving from his family’s nearby farm to Grand Forks—at age twelve, by combine. When Lucas asked how long that had taken, the farmer said, “Oh, most of the fall,” which was now the capper to Lucas’s just-published Facebook post about the droll farmer. The post perhaps condescended to agrarians, as when white people carry on too gushingly about the beauty of people of color, but Lucas’s upbringing was less urban than Karyn’s, so perhaps he had the right. She clicked LIKE, closed the screen, and stared at the cattle brands hanging above her room’s subcompact television. She thought abstractedly about the plight of cows. By the time she was ready to go to sleep, the party outside had entered a shouting stage.

  She put on a light robe and stepped outside in her espadrilles, thinking she’d make a neighborly request for quiet. Mosquitoes swarmed around bowl-like lamps mounted to the motel’s yolk-yellow exterior wall. Instead of saying something to the five middle-aged men and one woman sitting in lawn chairs around a cooler, she walked over to Lucas’s room and knocked twice. The television went mute. “Hello?” he said anxiously. “This party is keeping me up,” she said, loudly enough for an attentive reveler to hear. One of the men got up from his lawn chair—to confront Karyn, she thought, but he only stamped a can and sat back down. Lucas came to the door, shoeless but still wearing his T-shirt and cargo shorts. He was watching one of the small talk shows that come on after the big talk shows. His borrowed review copy of The Second Stranger was tented on the bed. He wasn’t at all bad looking, really, with his deep-set brown eyes and long, pouty cheeks. She had no intention of sleeping with him, no firm intention, but she enjoyed the hunch that doing so would demand next to nothing of her powers of seduction. She said, “Do you think you could go out there and say something to them?”

  “They’re just having a good time.”

  “It’s late on a Thursday night. Say we have to work in the morning.”

  “You think that’s plausible? What are we, like, itinerant laborers?”

  “They’re not going to ask follow-up questions.”

  He walked to the window, pulled the curtain aside a few inches. “Yeah, I don’t know. I’m getting a ‘don’t tread on me’ type o’ vibe out there.”

  She turned to the TV. “Is that Vic Tayback?”

  “No. Some celebrity chef.”

  “Maybe I’ll call the front desk,” she said.

  With a determined sigh: “Well, hang on.” He stepped outside, still shoeless. The tops of his feet were hairy. Now she felt silly playing the persecuted maiden. She listened to Lucas through the open window: “Hey, uh, I don’t mean to be a dick, but my sister’s kid has pneumonia, and I guess he can’t sleep.” He was casual, diplomatic, in command of an ex-DJ’s gift for reading a group’s preferences and prejudices, how for instance his “I guess” hinted at reflexive skepticism of all complaints issuing from women and children. A moment later Karyn was thanking him with muffled laughter, briefly pressing his shoulder as if for support. He smelled of Pert. It embarrassed her that his show of valor—met with good-natured sympathy and cooperation—made her think that she did want to seduce him, which, if successful, might provide the added benefit of instigating her period, now rather late. Unpleasant to imagine, though, how the parking lot might react to incestuous noises leaking from the motel’s thin walls while a boy lay pneumonic, sleepless, and alone in the room next door. “Sorry ’bout your kid,” a man called to her beerily as she returned to her room, where she lay awake till half past one, feeling guilty that the party might have carried on at a livelier volume after all.

  Thirteen hours later, she retrieved Lucas and Maxwell from the Winnipeg hotel’s tiny, unventilated arcade. Ms. Pac-Man blipped through a maze. Concentrating, Lucas said, “Do we need to get going?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.”

  They’d made it into town long before the rehearsal dinner was scheduled to start. Selfish of Karyn, she now saw, to let her mild social anxiety deprive Gemma of Lucas’s presence at one of the weekend’s more intimate events.

  “I’m on the third level,” he said.

  She moved closer.

 
Maxwell looked up at her. “He has the high score, but the machine’s Nerfed.”

  “No,” Lucas protested. “Maybe set a little slow.”

  “It’s Nerfed,” Maxwell said.

  After a moment, Karyn said, “On what instrument was Ms. Pac-Man’s soundtrack recorded?”

  “It must be—”

  “A labysynth.”

  A run of notes descended mournfully from the game.

  “Mom, you’re distracting him.”

  She left to get supplies, promised to be back in ten. The hotel was on the four-lane road that the highway had become. She jaywalked to a discount store where she bought a box of energy bars, an early pregnancy test, and a sudoku book that Maxwell probably wouldn’t find diverting. He and Lucas were waiting by the car when she returned, and the three of them started driving without specific purpose to the Forks, the park and agora where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet.

  Lucas examined a crinkled list of local landmarks he’d printed off the internet. After a few blocks, he said, “When did you say you were last here?”

  “Not since my grandma’s funeral. So ’75, ’76. After my grand-parents died there wasn’t much of a lure. My dad’s maybe twelve years older than my uncle Walt.”

  “That’s Archer’s biological?”

  “Yeah. And they were never close, my dad and Walt.” She turned up a radio documentary about a radical First Nations country singer from the seventies. A low-fidelity interview with the doc’s now-dead subject segued into a Dylanesque song, unchanging and hypnotic, and Karyn raised the volume from nineteen to twenty-one, willing the song to enliven the family restaurants, auto shops, and endangered DVD-rental places to their left and right. The Canadian chains were recognizable but nominally unfamiliar, like guests at a small office party wearing inaccurate name tags. It occurred to her that, to repel posers, a bohemian Shangri-la would trouble not to look like one.

  “None of the money came from your uncle, right?”

  “From Walt? Ha!”

  “It’s all from Archer’s mom and stepdad?”

  “You don’t know the story? It’s in one of Archer’s essays.”

  “I missed that one.”

  “Okay, Pamela, Archer’s mom, was filthy rich from the start.”

  “Right, glass something,” Lucas said.

  “Borosilicate glass. And lumber. Her first husband was this grocer named Motrinec, Charles, I think it was. Motrinec’s was the semi-upscale supermarket chain in Winnipeg and Regina, and my uncle managed the store where Pamela shopped. She came in daily rather than weekly.”

  “Très Old World.”

  “Yeah. Having adopted Continental shopping habits, it was a short step to trysts in the walk-in cooler. But that’s just bag-boy gossip as reported by Archer. According to him, all these nymphomaniacal legends started years later, after Pamela married the marital-aids guy.”

  “What are marital aids?” Maxwell asked.

  “Um, items couples use to spice up their sex lives,” Karyn said.

  He didn’t seem to want or need elaboration.

  Karyn’s idea about stealth bohemias disintegrated when they entered a district of vintage-clothing stores, record shops, launderettes, and smartly designed fast-food joints for the grass-fed set. There being no solid agenda, she parked. Lucas stretched his arms on the boulevard. “Veni, vidi,” he said. More to bolster the idea of independent retail than to satisfy a desire, she bought an old punk-rock CD that would have cost much less at home, and before long they found themselves sitting moddishly at a Japanesque creperie’s red-and-white window booth. Karyn drank tea while Lucas and Maxwell ate Nutella- and marshmallow-filled crepes. There were big, drippy color spheres on the wall and lots of tiny food splotches on the floor. “How’s The Second Stranger treating you so far?” she asked Lucas.

  “I don’t hate it,” he said.

  “These are awesome,” Maxwell said with his mouth full, and he and Lucas gave each other a fist bump in which some Nutella changed fists.

  When a group of girls took a nearby table, Maxwell jerked his head to give his hair the sweep he liked.

  “Sorry, I need to text this Dave I’m s’posed to stay with,” Lucas said.

  “Wait, if you text him—”

  “By the way, I looked up Vic Tayback. Dead.”

  “If you text him—”

  “I just did.” He made an eek face of cartoon concern.

  “Will he be able to tell where you texted from, that we’re in Winnipeg?”

  He stuck out his lower lip. “No. I don’t have GPS or anything on this phone. The cops could find out, but I doubt it’ll come to that.”

  “I feel bad now about missing the dinner,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t. If we went, I’d probably make a drunkenly profane toast, and everyone would hate you for being with me.”

  “You think they’d hate me?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “That was a pivotal scene in Three Times Caitlin, wasn’t it?”

  “Three Times Courtney,” he corrected.

  “Sorry.”

  “No one takes my unfinished screenplays seriously,” he said, looking down at his phone.

  “Do you think you guys could finish those in the car without—”

  “Pow! Second interview at Aria.”

  “Whoa, congratulations!”

  “I knew I nailed it. Not to count my chickens, but . . .”

  “It must have been the Larry Craig anecdote.”

  “Don’t call it a comeback,” he rapped. “Second thought, call it a comeback.”

  At the Forks, Lucas and Maxwell threw a baseball back and forth on a big open field. Karyn sat on an unshaded bench, enjoying the sun, following the baseball, listening to the whacks of failed skateboard stunts, trying to pinpoint the arrival of her last period. Lucas’s end of the game would have been called catch only out of convention and courtesy. He claimed to be having trouble adjusting to his borrowed glove. She called up the calendar on her phone. If she was remembering correctly, she was only a week, maybe eight days, late. Not such an exercising delay, especially since her periods were already becoming irregular, though mostly in the unhappy direction of increased frequency. The course would have to change eventually, though; it could be doing so now. “Nice grab!” Lucas yelled. Weren’t diaphragms supposed to be somewhat more effective than condoms? Maybe hers needed refitting. She visored her eyes with her hand, watched Lucas and Maxwell stroll toward her.

  “But it sucks ’cause the last two times I’ve played EDH decks, I’ve gotten mana-screwed,” Maxwell was saying obscurely when they reached the bench.

  “That does sound suctorial,” Lucas said.

  Five minutes later they drove into a parking lot near a whimsically painted candy-and-nut factory. They waited for the attendant to finish giving directions to a family whose numbers, to Karyn at the moment, suggested carelessness or fringe religiosity.

  “Any nut allergies, Maxwell?” Lucas asked. “Maybe this candy place gives tours.”

  “I think nut allergies are fake,” Maxwell said.

  “What? They are not!” Karyn said, looking back at him.

  He raised one eyebrow.

  “Here comes the guy,” Karyn said. The lot didn’t take credit cards, and neither Karyn nor Lucas had any loonies yet. So far on the trip she had felt rather too much like the adult of the group, but now she felt as if they were all children.

  “Oh, you can just park for free, then,” the attendant said.

  “I have US currency,” Karyn offered.

  “Sure, I’ll take that.”

  As they pulled into a spot, Karyn whispered, “It’s real-life Monopoly. Free Parking.”

  “Except you did pay,” Lucas said, not whispering, “and there’s no pile of money in the middle.”

  “That’s actually a made-up baby rule,” Maxwell said. “If you look at the real rules, Free Parking is just a free spot.”

  From the attendant
they learned that the Winnipeg Goldeyes were about to play minor-league baseball in the large stadium Karyn had recently and obliviously driven by. They could go there. Lucas had at moments gotten on her nerves over the past few days, but she liked how amenable he was to the planlessness she favored on vacations and weekends. When Maxwell was little, she had passed whole Saturdays like this, by simply leaving the house, letting him stop at whatever safe-enough thing interested him, playing kicking games with orphaned nuggets of sidewalk, drifting from yard to yard like dandelion seeds.

  She followed Lucas and Maxwell through the crowd toward the box office, watching their backs and listening to the organ music and pregame announcements. Lucas cocked his wallet to buy the tickets—a nice gesture—but was instead handed freebies as part of a father-son promotion sponsored by the fire department. “Is it meant for fathers and sons taking in the ballgame without their, like, wife-mothers?” he asked the woman in the booth. “Because his mom’s right here.”

  Karyn smiled.

  “Oh, I didn’t know you were all together,” the woman answered from the booth.

  “We’re not together together,” Lucas said, “but we’re here as a group.”

  “That’s cool. I’ll just pretend it’s a father and two kids. And if you’re ever in the market to buy a fire truck, you know who to call.”

  “Also I’m not the father,” Lucas said.

  “Such honesty! For that I’m giving you a bratwurst coupon.”

  The seats were in a front row. It happened that the Goldeyes were facing the Saint Paul Saints, whose third baseman ended the first inning by catching a foul and tossing Maxwell the ball. “Hey, thanks!” Tomorrow was forecast to be uncomfortably hot, but it was beautiful tonight. It wasn’t her normal way of looking at the world, but Karyn felt as if she were being spoken to. Maybe none of it—the (briefly) free parking, the tickets, the coupon, the familiar opponent, the ball, the breeze—was singly so remarkable, but the run of encounters with good fortune and offhand generosity seemed charmed in the aggregate. She put her arm around Maxwell, then put her left hand on Lucas’s bicep. “Everything’s free in this town,” she said to Lucas. The fixity of his expression made her look down at his hands, at a vein-crossing scar on his wrist, a subtle tan line from bike gloves. “It’s like we’ve been given the keys to the city,” she said. She looked up when he cupped her elbow, but whatever he was about to say or do was interrupted by an inter-inning sack race.