“I hope you won’t be mad, but I’m gonna pass.”
“Mad? Heck, these will come in handy during the second half.” He carefully tucked the joints back into his pocket. He slapped Danny once on the back. “You made a decision and that’s great,” he said. “You done good kid.”
After quickly pounding the hard-muscled shoulder and scratching the head of Chet’s dog, Danny was out the door.
“Sneak over whenever you like. I’ll even give you a rain check on these two doobies.”
“Thanks.” Danny buttoned his coat and turned to walk away. He was halfway across the field when Chet called out.
“Hey kid, don’t forget what I said about dreaming, okay?” Chet shut and locked his door.
Danny went back through the fence and began to walk down the long dirt driveway. He had a clear view of any traffic coming down Grover for over a mile in either direction. Spotting no headlights, he felt unhurried and relaxed. The fall air tightened his body and stirred his blood. The darkness around him slightly lightened just above the horizon, and the sky, the world, widely opened above the orchards and vineyards all around him.
Once he reached Grover he crossed the street and stood waiting, warming his hands in his coat pockets and kicking a few small rocks into the street while he made plans for the following day. After several minutes he saw a pair of headlights, probably Troy’s, turning onto Grover about a half a mile away.
As the car came close, slithering off to the side of the road, the dark metallic paint of the 1950 Plymouth threw out and scattered flashes of light as Troy coasted the car to a halt under the bright street light mounted high on the telephone pole next to Danny.
Danny opened the passenger door; loud Metal music blasted against him like a spiny wave. He hesitated and even backed up a step.
Troy reached over and turned down the stereo while he checked his hair in the rearview mirror. “Did you get it?”
Danny sat and pulled shut the heavy door. He knew immediately to what the question referred and was not surprised by the guileless style used to ask it. Troy never lacked frankness.
“No, things didn’t work out.”
Troy pushed his back against the cushion of the bench seat while he used both hands to tap a quick rhythm on the large steering wheel. “Well I’m not driving all the way into town then. That meeting is a bunch of crap. I thought we were going to do something different tonight. If not, I’m going to go home and help my granddad pull the head off his Chevy.”
“Fine, see you tomorrow.” Danny got out, carefully shut the door, then stood and watched while Troy U-turned and sped away.
Danny felt relieved, rescued. Suddenly exempt from the usual drudgery of the long walk down the driveway, he was at the backdoor in a flash of time. He went inside, relaxed and watched TV, constantly switching channels, for less than an hour. After, he tenderly lifted his dog from the rug and carefully carried the frail animal, still sleeping, out into a vacant corner of the garage where he gently set him down onto the cushion of his plywood bed-box.
Five minutes later in the darkness of his bedroom, down to just a T-shirt, shorts and socks, Danny stared out the window at the murkiness sprayed with fits of ground fog beginning to build and thicken, swimming at him in hurried wisps.
He knew first thing in the morning, after a cross-examination, his stepmother would be all over him for missing the Exchange Club meeting. Some type of distasteful repercussion would be planned, and he could clearly imagine the confrontation, her voice exact, deliberate, and unforgiving. He could hear his father’s recurring speech, ‘She’s only looking out for our best interests, son. When your mother died I was a mess, I don’t know what I would have done without Helen. She helped us through some rough times. I wish you would respect her for that’.
Continuing his gaze out the window into the night, leaning forward his forearms against the windowsill, he enjoyed the still silence, and the mental picture of his parents and the thought of their voices finally slid away. Everything burdensome disappeared from his mind. Watching the gathering of the mystic fog, he stared deeply into the darkness, and drifted away, imagining he was facing and fully feeling a clean, brisk wind while standing on the huge, flat deck of a gigantic aircraft carrier far, far out at sea.
The End
OMAHA
On a chilly October day, when he realized he had been absently staring for eight or ten minutes at a Rockumentary on MTV featuring Justin Timberlake, John Kane turned off the television and left the room. He went into his father’s room where he pulled up a tall, hard, wooden stool and sat looking down at his father who was asleep.
Though the horizontal slits of the blinds, the sun trying to burn through the constricting overcast seemed tense as its dying light filtered into the room and lit the outline of the old man, a motionless lump under a crumpled, yellow blanket.
John, sitting quietly, hands resting on his thighs, deeply felt every breath move in and out of his body. His thoughts were unsteady, rough and unclear. Hasty glimpses of his youth popped in and out of his head, only highlights, the great successes, the great failures and frustrations; old friends, their faces a few degrees from pure focus in the mind’s eye; exuberant, foolish, full-bodied times of near harmless fun, succeeded, whenever they were caught, by exasperated words of advice.
Absently reaching down and squeezing two legs of the stool, John brought himself back to the present. He wished he could gather himself, back off from the confusion and find a decisive, rational road to follow. He felt like a ship searching for a light in the fog, a lost ship in foreign waters. For the first time in his life John was suddenly and very personally struck with the harsh certainty of the inevitable, and other than a cold feeling of isolation, he was having a hard time pining down his emotions. He truly did not know how he should feel. He certainly did not know what he should do.
He looked up at the ceiling, and then down at his dad, the large, taut, pale hairless head propped up on the pillow. His body covered by the thick, woolen blanket tucked beneath his chin. Here was this thin, weak, useless, sick old man being passed off as the same man, the maniac, who had tirelessly worked twelve-hour days selling and repairing TV’s and appliances, six sometimes seven days a week for as long as John could remember. A man so busy he sometimes ate while he bathed and never wore shoes with laces, just to save time, just to ‘Stay ahead of the game’.
‘Stay ahead of the game’. He could almost hear his old man’s voice, and the thought conjured up more happy images from the past, images, which suddenly filled John with the urge to cry. He wanted to burst out, break the pressure and just let loose, but no matter how hard he tried, the tears just would not come. Maybe he was angry or tired or just frustrated but here again, he just was not sure.
John set his stool in a corner out of the way. He twisted shut the blind but left shinning a gentle light from a small lamp controlled by the wall switch. He left the room and walked into the kitchen where he stood looking out a window, watching the bare trees standing stoically against the darkening overcast.
A few minutes later he heard the garage door opener engage, and a minute after his mother came into the kitchen. She was exactly five feet tall with short red hair cut shorter on the sides. At fifty-five she was a decade younger than his father, but she looked and acted younger than her years, always upbeat and positive, always full of energy.
“How’s things?” She smiled as she set her purse on the table.
“He never even moved, slept straight through.”
She hung up her coat, and put a kettle on for tea. “Sleep is the best thing. At least he doesn’t feel the pain.” She smiled again, lightly with just her lips.
John continued to look out the window. “I was thinking of going over to Lucky’s for a few beers, would you mind?”
“Of course I don’t mind. Go, go have a good time.”
John looked at her fussing with a new box of tea bags. He wanted to grab and hug her tightly but didn’t.
Such a sudden, unexpected conciliatory measure would be out of place, selfish and out of place, in the end serving only to manifest a dilemma of which she needed no extra reminder. John had been home for only a day and a half after an absence of over three years. She had had to live with his father and his sickness for nearly two years. Instead he said nothing, went into his room, dug a plaid flannel shirt out of his suitcase, put it on over his T-shirt, said good-bye to his mother, and then walked through the backyard and out the rear gate.
Lucky’s, a single-story, red brick building, stood across the alley and a tiny parking lot directly behind the Kane’s backyard. John pulled open the backdoor and walked down into the dark smoky room where despite his years away it seemed nothing had changed. Near the back entrance between the small bathrooms and the bar the jukebox cast out a soft glare, and a sharp burst of light was thrown down and out from the broad light fixture hanging above the pool table. The room’s only other light was from the neon beer signs and the muted lights mounted high up on the walls paneled with cheap-looking simulated redwood.
Lucky was standing behind the bar playing dice with one of the five or six people seated in front of him. After checking his hand hidden behind his dice cup he casually looked up from, then back down at his dice, instantly he jerked his head up again. “Johnny Kane!” He covered his dice with the cup and reached out for John’s hand. “Long time no see, kid. Good to see ya.” He briskly shook Kane’s hand. “Pull up a chair, kid. Be with ya in second.”
John walked five or six steps and took a stool at the curve of the bar.
Lucky, slamming the dice on the bar and then scrutinizing his new hand, looked, just like his bar, as if he hadn’t changed. He was a tall man with a big round stomach, large hands, powerful forearms, and small shoulders that did not seem to match his frame. His gray flattop haircut, a style he had worn for over forty years, was now back in vogue.
“ALL RIGHT! I finally beat him,” said a thin kid with long straight hair past his shoulders who jumped up from his stool and waited for a dollar Lucky grudgingly pulled from the cash register. The kid took the money to the jukebox.
“Ya lucky little bastard, ya better play at least one country song, or I’ll pull the plug.” Lucky looked to his right. “What’ll it be, Johnny?”
“Bud?” Kane shrugged his shoulders.
Lucky popped the top off a longneck bottle, walked over and set it down in front of Kane. “You still two beers and out?”
“I’m up to about four sometimes five before I become wasted. I guess alcoholism is a progressive disease.”
“Thank the good Lord. The way all this health nut crap is spreading the bar business gets tougher every day.” Lucky took a drag of his cigarette, rested it in the groove of an ashtray and blew a cloud of smoke out into the room. “Damn, you’re looking good, kid. You thirty yet?”
“Two years ago.”
“God. My, my, time does go by.” Lucky toyed with his cigarette, placed his elbow on the bar and his fist against his cheek. “So your dad’s not doing too well, huh?”
“He’s pretty sick.”
Lucky pinched his lips together and shook his head. “He’s a good man, John, one of the best. Little businessmen like me and him, along with the farmers we used to be the guts of this country.” He looked down at his boot propped up on the edge of a small plastic garbage can. “No more…no more.” He looked back up at John and smiled. “But what’s with you, kid? I hear you been all over the place.”
“Just working for a living, like everybody else. It’s just I tend to move around a lot. I guess to try to keep things interesting.”
“You’re still single ain’t you?”
“You bet.”
“Well then, you ain’t hurting nobody.” Lucky took another drag of his smoke and replaced it in the ashtray. “So what’s the deal now? You plan on sticking around for a while?”
“Yeah, I guess I’m here to stay. I’ll get something going. Maybe my new career will be picking up aluminum cans.”
“Forget it. Nowadays the competition’s fierce.”
Kane laughed at that, but then an uneasy moment of silence passed. John took a drink of beer, and then started to speak, fighting to keep his voice from becoming shaky. “I worked in a hospice in New York for a few months, cleaning bedpans, changing sheets, holding their hands…watching them die. I’ve seen lots of death, Lucky, lots of tragedy, but I’ve never…I’ve never.” He rubbed his chin and shook his head. “It’s never hit home like this.” Kane held his bottle with both hands. “Hearing about him being sick was bad enough, but seeing him sick.” He sucked in and blew out a deep breath. “Lucky, I’m fucked up, man. I’m just fucked up.” Kane looked down at the bar for a few moments. He shook the picture of his father from his mind and looked up at Lucky. “Well, you got any of that old classic sage mid-western advice for me?”
“As a matter of fact I do, kid. My advice to you is to not watch any late night television. The way you’re feeling one of those TV Baptists might catch you at a weak moment and reel you in like a hungry catfish.”
A customer yelled for service.
Lucky pressed both of his palms flat on the bar and leaned forward. “Hey, I’m dead serious now, John. You’re the one that’s got to be strong, for your mom, for your sister, and your dad.” He lightly slapped a big hand on Kane’s shoulder. “And this is no idle bull, I’ve known you almost your whole life. I’ve seen you grow up from a rambunctious kid into a man. I got faith in ya, John. I know you’ll handle all of this all right.”
“Thanks, I hope you’re right.”
“Now enjoy yourself a little. The first one is on me, after that you’re on your own. Good to see ya, kid.” Lucky smiled, gave the bar a quick tap and walked away back to work.
Kane turned, leaned his back against the bar and stared in the direction of the harsh light hanging over the pool table. One player seemed to be in control. He was skinny, had short black hair, wore tight black pants and a bright gold shirt rolled up at the sleeves. He quickly, fluidly moved around the table like a snake on the prowl, always talking, always smoking. A large golden cross hung down from a chain around his neck whenever he stopped to take a shot.
After each game he would stand next to the bar waiting for a new rack. “Better luck next time,” he would say after he had pocketed his winnings, contemptuously abandoning the just defeated only a short moment before he began to negotiate the provisions of the new game with his next opponent.
Kane continued to watch him play, outclassing the competition, but John was not impressed. The guy shot too hard, missed too often and gave little thought to control of the cue ball. Kane quickly tired of watching but kept at it, forcing himself. By concentrating on the game, silently planning each player’s strategy, he thought he might keep his mind from wandering and keep all those grim thoughts of life and death from sneaking inside his noggin and anxiously banging around, growing and swelling until his entire body felt like a worn-out water pump ready to blow.
But the diversion was of little use, no matter how hard he tried to force it. He hated to believe he was so weak, but could sense his breaking point was very near, just around the corner. The feeling of weakness intensified his gloom making him feel terribly useless and foolish since he, the neophyte to the family dilemma, had so quickly had all he could handle. He had never felt so frail so shaky so worn. Maybe he just needed rest, but sleep did not seem probable or appealing. John could not remember his last drunk or his last hangover, but a temporary twisted shift from reality seemed more constructive than jumping off a bridge; suddenly providence had placed him in the right spot for the job at hand so Kane, suddenly feeling unburdened by guilt or integrity, bought another beer and moved to a table closer to the pool table.
He quickly finished that beer, bought another and sat back down. He watched the player in gold easily beat a big burly, shaggy-haired, bearded guy wearing overalls. But now Kane was only halfheartedly observing the game. Feeling m
ore relaxed, he looked around the room and imagined himself miles away, racing down the interstate in a green Porsche on his way to Las Vegas, the stereo blaring, the wind singing, his pockets stuffed with hundred dollar bills. The reverie was composed and pure. He agreed that dreams do occasionally come true, but by the time they become reality the script had usually been trimmed to meet production costs and insert commercials. Nothing pans out exactly as planned he thought, nothing at all.
He caught himself shaking his head in agreement with himself just before it occurred to him that he must be a pretty depressing sight, looking slumped and bland; backed into a metaphorical corner where the thrill of watching a low-class hustler take a bunch of losers for their weekly beer money was his shield, his ready path to serenity. He smiled as he mulled that one over and just about that time the third beer began to kick in, and he began to feel a whole lot frisker. He walked across the room, wrote his name on the board to challenge the pool table, then stopped and stood next to the bar.
Nobody Bats a Thousand Page 28