Randy hurried toward the house, but the house seemed suddenly far away and he to be walking in place. He forced himself onward and his mind searched wildly for something, as if flipping through index cards, until, as he crossed the patio, it came to a series of words: A male parent, the first person of the Trinity, one deserving respect and love. . . . And here was the door.
He wanted to get away. He wanted to be gone from them. But the screen wouldn't open; the latch was stuck. It had been sticking off and on for years. He glanced back. He yelled, "Why don't you fix this thing!"
He kicked the screen and kicked it again until the latch popped free and he opened the door.
4
Here We Are in Moonlight
When he entered the kitchen the faces of the three women jerked toward him. He walked past them and went through the house to the phone in the hall. He called directory assistance.
"Which city?"
"Houston."
"Go ahead."
"Yellow Cab Company, please."
Janet was standing next to him, holding a dish towel. He knew she must have heard what he'd said into the phone.
"What are you doing?"
He didn't look at her and didn't answer. When the recording had given him the number he quickly made the call.
"Don't leave, Randy," she said. "It's stupid to leave now."
The woman on the phone said it would be fifteen minutes. He put the receiver in its cradle and stared at it. He didn't want to look at Janet. He tried to leave but she stepped in front of him. She said, "Don't you think this has gone on long enough?" He had to look at her now and when he did he saw that something had changed in her eyes. The secret was missing.
"Let it go, Randy," she said.
He squeezed past her and went to the living room. Janet followed him. And here was his mother, holding a dishtowel and a plate in her hands. She stepped toward him. "What's wrong, darling?" He paused and looked at her but then walked on.
Janet said, "He's leaving."
"No," said his mother.
He got his jacket and opened the door. His mother called to him, but he went outside and down the sidewalk to the curb. He could imagine the scene inside the house. Teddy and his father would have come in by now and would have explained what had happened. The four would be standing in the living room, embarrassed that Mary had seen all of this and saying with their eyes, What should we do? What have we done to deserve this?
Randy zipped up his jacket and sat on the curb between Teddy's Volvo and Janet's Toyota. It was a clear night. A wisp of orange remained in the western sky. Stars were beginning to shine and a full moon hung low over the houses to the east. Surrounding the moon were several rings of stark white mist as if it were the center of a great target. The outlines of the houses and the trees in their yards were distinct in the moonlight.
Yes. His father was right. It would be a perfect night for a fire. A perfect night for them to take their seats in a comfortable room or to stand before the hearth warming their hands and hearts with cheerful talk and strong hot drinks. A perfect night to bring out the photo albums and to remember.
The door to the house opened then closed and footsteps clapped against the sidewalk coming up behind him. It was at least two people and when the footsteps stopped he heard his mother say, "What a gorgeous night."
His father said, "Hey, Bud, ole Teddy's starting a fire. Why don't you come back in. You've still got some time, he says."
I can't, he thought, and he shook his head no.
His mother stepped around him into the street between the cars. In her hands was a wad of aluminum foil. She knelt and looked into his face. The sadness in her eyes was gone now; she had the look of someone who had accepted a certain fact in her life and wanted to go on.
"I brought you some pie," she said. "It's pecan. A frozen one, I'm afraid, but it still tastes pretty good." She handed him the wad of foil. It was warm in his hands. "We'll just wait here with you," she said, smiling. "You cold?"
He shrugged and shook his head no.
"Oh my gosh," his father said. "The magazine."
Randy heard him walking away up the sidewalk. "Don't let him leave until I get back," he said, and then the door opened and closed. He and his mother looked at each other. It was apparent she wanted to say something to sooth him but couldn't think of anything. She sat on the curb next to him.
"Look at all the stars," she said. "You don't see them like this too often in the city."
They were silent, gazing into the sky.
She said, "Rings around the moon, eat it with a spoon." She must have seen something in his eyes. "We used to say that when I was a girl. I never did know what it meant." A noise, almost a laugh, slipped out of her nose. "I remember I'd lie in the yard for hours trying to figure out what made those rings. It was always kind of scary, but it fascinated me." She gave a little grunt of wonder and turned to Randy. "Do you know?"
The question unsettled him. He couldn't recall his mother ever asking him such a question, a question that required a rational, reasoned answer, an answer that would come from knowledge rather than emotion.
He said, "No."
A car turned at the corner and then the yellow splash of light from its high beams illuminated the magnolia in the yard across the street. The car crept up to them and stopped. A man's voice said, "You call a cab?" and Randy stood up.
"Oh, wait here he comes," said his mother.
His father was breathing hard when he got up to them. He handed Randy the magazine through the open cab door. His mother leaned in and kissed him on the lips.
"So long, Bud," said his father. "Don't take any guff off those doctors now." Randy could see him smiling over his mother's shoulder. "Be good, dear," she said and then stepped back. He thought his father was going to come up and shake his hand or hug him, but he didn't, so Randy closed the door.
"Memorial Hospital, downtown," he told the driver.
He gazed at his parents through the window; they had the appearance of a young couple posing for a photograph. His father's arm was around his mother's waist, and they stood perfectly still in the middle of the street, smiling in a way that pulled on him, made him want to get out of the car. They waved.
Behind them was the moon with its rings, and the light from the moon caressed everything and everything was calm and simple in the light. The car lunged forward and he looked back, pressing his face against the door window. Their figures, hazy and blue-tinted, blended gradually until they became one figure, receding. He turned in the seat to look out the rear window; they were a distant shadow now in the moonlight. He waved but he knew they couldn't see him, and he sensed something final in the gesture as if perhaps it was the last time he would ever wave to them. The car turned a corner and their dark outline disappeared.
He twisted around in his seat and as he did so he bumped his head on the ceiling of the car. That's when he realized he'd forgotten his cap. He started to tell the driver to stop, to turn around. But no, it would be embarrassing to go back. They would think he had returned because of them. How would he explain? The thought of it somehow made his leaving complete, more so than the waving hands, the hugs, the kisses. It now was an act of necessity, a fact. He settled himself for the drive and after a moment looked out the door window at the sky. It was a perfect night. There were thousands, millions, of stars, the final products of a beautiful day. They stretched far away, as far as he could see. He remembered a teacher saying once that there were more stars than people, that the universe was so vast all the stars would never be counted. New stars forming, old ones dying.
This sent his mind exploring until, rising up, up above everything, soaring up, he had a view of the earth as if from heaven. There was Africa, there Europe, here America. He could see stars hanging over everything, over all the oceans and all the cities and all the houses in the world, and over all the people in the houses and over all the hearts inside the people. He imagined a star for every person who ha
d ever lived and for every person who would ever be born. Every good person and every bad. He imagined a star for his mother and for his father and one each for Teddy and Janet. And then there was one for himself. He saw it moving among the others so many others, all the same and his star collided gently with each one, bounced free, paused to apologize and then moved on. This was his life, he thought. He knew he was alive because he could see the stars, and he knew the stars would be there forever, each moving across the sky in its own slow pace, each shining down on a solitary heart.
A chill tingled across his shoulders, and he turned up the collar of his jacket. They were on Lyman Street now, and the lights of stores and businesses passed by. The collected light along the street, rising up, obscured the stars. He could hear the raspy chatter of the taxi's radio, calling drivers to various addresses in the city. They all were going somewhere or returning to something, someone. He thought of his life, where he was going and to what he was returning, and with a sudden strange quiver in the recesses of his body he saw everything clearly, as if all along he had needed only to look up into a deep perfect night for a perfect vision of the past and the future.
He would check out of the hospital as soon as the doctor would allow it and he would take an apartment. Yes. He'd take an apartment but not here, not in Houston. He'd move to Dallas or Austin. He'd buy furniture for the apartment and maybe a car. His parents would help. He'd work; he could find a job and save his money. And maybe he'd return to school, a few classes at first until he hit stride. There were colleges in Dallas and Austin. And maybe there would be a girl, a woman, someone his age, a student. They would go to movies and eat out and maybe live together. People would know them as Randy and Cheryl. Or Randy and Charlotte. Or Randy and Chris. He liked names that began with C. He thought of Teddy and Mary. Yes. There would be another woman in his future. And other Thanksgivings.
He remembered the pie. He made a small opening in the foil and held it up to his nose. The sweet aroma made something clutch in his throat. The cavity in his chest began to swell as if filling with sea water and the opening at the top of the cavity fluttered and expanded. Suddenly he had a great urge to talk. He wanted to tell someone of his plans for the future. He blinked several times and then leaned forward, across the front seat.
"It's pecan pie," he said to the driver, a young man with a beard and long hair. "It's yours."
The driver glanced at Randy. "Oh thanks," he said. "But I can't take your pie, man. Wasn't that your mom and dad?"
He nodded and felt a smile pushing on his face.
"You keep it, man," said the driver. "Spent the day at my old lady's house before going on duty. She had the works."
Randy almost said something, but the driver answered a call on his radio, muttering into the microphone that he had a fare and would be "in service" for half an hour. Then he began joking with the dispatcher. Sitting back in the seat, Randy thought of the "works" he had passed up that afternoon and realized he was hungry. He put the magazine on his lap as a table and unwrapped the foil. It was a large triangle of pie, and the ripply faces of pecan halves shone up at him. He picked off a pecan and ate it as he watched the lights go by. Then he took a bite of the pie, and when he swallowed it went down easily. Another bite and another and soon he was gulping down huge chunks of pie.
When he had finished he looked at the crumbs on the foil and then molded the foil into a ball. He held the ball in his hand, squeezing it into an aluminum marble, and he felt the strength in his hand as he squeezed it. The marble pricked his palm, a simple pain, a pain that would last only a second. He released his grip and the pain went away. He squeezed it again and felt the pain and then relaxed his hand and the pain went away. It was as easy, as simple, as the throwing of a ball.
He rolled down the window and tossed the aluminum marble out into the night along Lyman Street. It glittered like a star as it arced away from him. In a pocket of his jacket he found a piece of paper his pass from the hospital. He gripped it between two fingers and sat there, very still in his thoughts, letting the chill wind blow across his face.
Dalrymple's Jackpot
1
Dalrymple stood stunned, paralyzed, incredulous . . . and up welled the venom. "I been fucked!" he shouted without thinking, and everybody, an old-lady customer included, glanced around bugeyed and silent, shocked by the vulgarity and its shameful truth.
This on the day there in the store when together with half a dozen other loafers and hotshots, salesmen they were called, he saw a bleak and violent and inconvenient future flashing on the screens of maybe forty color television sets arrayed for easy inspection on the carpeted shelves against the long front wall. Some of them the older guys in gray suits, fake school ties and black wingtips couldn't help giving off sniggers and shy sad embarrassed smiles. The younger ones Ripley for instance in his creamy three-piece with the wide lapels and the bell-bottom pants just grinned and dragged on their Marlboros and offered up a silent thanks to somebody, the government maybe or the God of Peace, that at least it wasn't them with the awful luck.
"Can you believe it," Dalrymple said. "Eight! Why eight?"
He glanced among their faces and then in a daze of disbelief let himself fall backwards into a cellophane-covered recliner whose new black Naugahyde complained of the outrage.
"Eight."
"Christ . . . eight!"
"That ought to teach him to gamble."
A dash of masculine laughter brought hot blood to his face.
"Eight . . . shit!"
The whispers hovered above him like a threatening thundercloud. That shapely numeral in the elegant Set of Evens, so like the luscious curves of a woman's fine body, had in an instant turned ugly and evil, an old whore waving a butcher's knife. It seemed to be everywhere around him, like an invading enemy of angry eight-shaped whores, a stupendous crowd of murderers descending from a vile and noxious vapor.
"Let's see," said Johnson, the asshole with the mouth, also known as Buttface to a few of the crew. "That's three hundred and sixty-five minus three hundred and fifty-seven, isn't it? All those possibilities." He laughed, low and mean. "But no, sure enough looks like we got us a draf-tee on our hands."
"Shut up," whispered McCleary.
"Saigon-bound too."
"Eight . . . shit!" somebody repeated.
It was his lottery number. He'd be called up for sure; he'd be going over. Like curious buzzards waiting to see if the rabbit on the highway was about to get his from a speeding pickup truck, they had gathered that quiet July morning in 1971. They were at the front of the store where the ceiling lights were kept low and the air, cool and clean because of it, tenderly vibrated with that animated and all-encompassing TV hum. Ripley's number had already been announced: 286. The bastard; it was always that way with him; and Dalrymple cursed the day of his own birth. June 15, 1952, would thereafter and forevermore be a blackened page in the biography of his life. He even, silently, cursed his mother.
The others stood in a stunned kind of silence watching the vast collage of TV screens as the two old cranks from the Defense Department turned the wire cage and then reached in for the next number. But none of them cared anymore; they'd seen what they came to see. Ripley had gotten off and Dalrymple was going over. Poor son. He sat there, his elbows on the arms of the recliner, his hands linked before his mouth, staring into a bleak and violent and inconvenient future staring, at nothing.
"Tough luck," said Johnson, the third youngster in the squad of salesmen, 4F and deferred, a year older anyway and out of it. "I mean really tough luck. I mean add in two aces and another eight and you'd be holding the Dead Man's Hand."
"Shut up," said McCleary, the assistant manager, a good man.
"I didn't mean anything," said Johnson, laughing again.
"Well shut up anyway."
Dalrymple felt their stares, their shaking heads; he felt the pity too and the contempt. The moment lasted like the long aching silence in the woods that follows a sho
tgun blast.
"What are y'all staring at?" asked a defensive Dalrymple.
"He's right, guys," said Henry McCleary. "The party's over, let's get back to it, we got customers."
"Gratulations, Rip," somebody said and the others took it up, slapping his shoulder or shaking his hand before dispersing. They filed past Dalrymple, glancing down with rueful or wry faces, patting him on the crossed knee and muttering their apologies. Then they spread out across the showroom floor, weaving through the appliances and the furniture on this side of the center aisle, the displays of lawn mowers, tires and auto batteries on the far side. Only Ripley, a kind of friend, stopped.
"Eight. . . . shit!" he said, and Dalrymple heard the insincerity in it, the undertones of excitement and relief and phony concern.
"I been fucked, man."
"This is true, old hoss."
"I mean fucked!"
Ripley, a handsome kid with a wife, an early baby and at least two girlfriends, whistled in sympathy between his perfect teeth but couldn't contain a faint wavering smile of victory.
"What are you gonna do, Dal?"
Dalrymple glanced up, but he didn't, he couldn't, answer and soon Ripley left him alone to go call his women, to boast of his own good fortune. Dalrymple sat in the recliner for a long time as the morning passed away. Salesmen and customers walked by, walked around him, but he was only vaguely aware of them. Am I then to die in that war before I can legally drink, or even vote, or even see myself fully grown? When it was almost lunchtime he got up and left the store without saying a word to anyone.
2
Dalrymple flushed, zipped and stepped to the rust-stained sink in the reeking men's room to wash his hands and comb his hair. He took his time with it, dawdling, loitering in the pleasant solitude. He'd been worthless all day of course, hadn't done a hundred dollars worth of business (sold two tires to a man who didn't need to be sold), and he was glad the day was coming to an end. He had been plagued by the whispers drafted and the guarded glances and the pathetic smiles of his co-workers. So he had tried his best to avoid them, taking a long lunch break by himself but without eating and hanging out the rest of the time with Calvin, the chief mechanic, back in the garage.
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