by Maria Flook
In the morning, Margaret heard the maids running a vacuum in the next room. It was later than she thought, past one o’clock in the afternoon. She jumped out of the bed, fearing for Laurence, but he was in front of the television, on his stomach with his legs crossed in the air.
“You must be starving,” she said to him.
“Daddy got me McDonald’s,” Laurence said. Then she saw the cheeseburger in three separate discs on the rug.
“Did you eat any of this?”
Laurence told her he ate the French fries. She pushed through the door into the adjoining room. Tracy was in one of the beds, a phone book splashed over his knees.
“I’m looking for Sandra’s address,” he told her.
“Sandra’s address? Sandra’s address is a cemetery somewhere.”
“I know, I’m trying to find out,” Tracy snapped at her.
She looked at him. He had smudges under his eyes. She asked him if those were some black eyes, and he told her, no, he was just tired. She sat next to him on the bed and smoothed her thumb beneath his bruised eye, across the tight cheekbone, swollen from sleeplessness or injury. His two-day-old whiskers were golden and spiky. He didn’t respond to her touch. She let her hand drop. “This is really fucking crazy,” she said.
He slapped the phone book shut.
“All of this, not just Sandra’s address. I mean this whole business,” Margaret said.
“We can forget Sandra, it’s Saturday. The courthouse at Downers’ Grove is closed, we can’t get hold of any records. You don’t know the name of the church?”
“I don’t even know what denomination it was.”
“You’re lying,” he said.
“What’s the point? What’s the point in lying or telling the truth.” She liked saying it.
“We could visit Resurrection Cemetery; that’s the largest in the U.S. Then, there’s Mount Carmel, where Al Capone is buried. What do you think?” Tracy said.
“You’re getting a big kick out of this, aren’t you?”
Cam came out of the shower, dressed and shaved. She looked him square in the eye. They tried to speak at once. They didn’t go any further. The truce, the apology was sealed.
Tracy said, “Versailles, we’re not.”
Margaret told Tracy he should get dressed and shaved, they didn’t have all day.
“He’s got some time. I’m going over to see Lewis first,” Cam said, “I forgot something.”
“You forgot something?” Margaret said. “What did you forget? That old cashmere jacket?”
“Maybe that,” Cam said.
“I don’t like it,” she told him. “Now I see, you’re duding yourself up for something. What’s in your imagination now?”
He was brushing his hair in front of the mirror, smoothing a short tuft of sideburn against his temple and tugging it in place. “We’ll be on the road later,” he said.
Margaret told Cam that, if they waited too long, the police might come and get Laurence.
“If they really wanted to come get Laurence, they would have nabbed him in a second. We’re riding around in the only Duster with Delaware plates, it’s got hot tires, we park it right on the street. They aren’t playing with us. Darcy’s full of shit.”
“You changed your tune to suit the band,” she told him.
He looked over at her, waiting to see if she was going to elaborate on the figure of speech she was trying. He told her, “I’m just going over there, that’s all.” He pulled the heel of his shoe over the back of his foot and ground his shoe on. He told her to be ready in about an hour or so. Tracy should get the car tanked up, they’d be on schedule.
With Cam gone, Tracy wanted to drive Margaret and Laurence over to the lake. They cruised in the Duster, sightseeing, but they were heading in the wrong direction. Margaret asked Tracy about this, and he shrugged his shoulders. She saw he might be taking her toward Downers’ Grove. “I’m not searching through any cemeteries,” she said. “I don’t give a shit who’s buried where.” She edged over in her seat and slammed her left foot on the brake. The car jerked twice as it stopped; Laurence crashed against the dash and started crying.
Tracy was angry and hit Margaret hard on the crest of her thigh. The ligament burned with immediate pain, and she bent in half. “Don’t ever do that,” Tracy was yelling. Laurence was hysterical and Tracy pulled to the curb. Laurence’s face was cloaked by a sheer red curtain. Margaret wiped the blood with the heel of her hand; it was just a little cut above his eye, but the blood continued to spill each time she took the pressure off it.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she told the boy. “Why did you unbuckle your seat belt?”
Tracy said, “You’re asking him! Ask yourself why you did such a crazy thing.”
They found an Osco drugstore and the pharmacist gave Tracy an iodine wipe to wash the cut. The woman looked at the injury and told them it might need a stitch, but maybe a butterfly bandage was enough.
“Hey, a butterfly bandage—” Margaret told Laurence, trying to distract him. The pharmacist pinched the boy’s forehead together and applied the adhesive strip.
They had checked out of their motel rooms, and they had to wait in the Duster until Cam came back. An hour passed. They went to the Howard Johnson’s down the street and bought scoops of ice cream in stainless steel parfait cups. Laurence tapped his spoon against the metal dish until Tracy lost his temper. They went back to the sidewalk where they had parked the Duster. Nobody wanted to get in the car. “Why aren’t there any park benches in cities anymore?” Tracy said.
“I don’t see any park. There’s no park to begin with,” Margaret told him.
“You’re a bitch, you know that?” Tracy said.
After a while, Tracy decided that they should go over to the Gregory Hotel; what if Cam was drinking more of that brandy?
Margaret studied the ornate dial on the elevator, watching the needle arc to the right as the compartment rose heavily, jolting at each floor. The arrow wobbled frantically like the gauge on an old-fashioned scale. She thought of the compartment’s weight, she pictured the rotted cable as it jerked them higher.
“This is not groovy,” Tracy said, when Cam met them at the door of Lewis’s apartment. Cam was holding a gun. Margaret looked past Cam and saw Lewis sitting, knees together, in a straight chair in the center of the crowded parlor, his hands in his lap. “You’re reaching a new plateau,” Tracy told him.
“Is that a gun?” Margaret stood at the threshold between the front hall and the parlor. Cam was fingering the pistol; its small barrel was the size of a pill box. She pushed Laurence behind her, reaching back to press the boy’s face against her buttocks so he wouldn’t see his father holding a pistol. “It that a real weapon?”
“Looks like some kind of snubby with a sissy rod. Silencer,” Tracy said. “This is a different chapter to the story. Well, why not?”
“I’m deciding what to do about this old scum bag,” Cam said. He seemed pleased to have Tracy there. He was more than willing to describe his motivation, his tactics, make his projections. “I can turn him in to the police for fraud, or I could cash his checks right here. Bing.” Cam touched the nose of the gun to Lewis’s ear. “Bing,” Cam said again.
“The word is ‘bang,’ ” Tracy said.
“Who asked you?” Cam said.
Lewis said, “It’s probably just a cap gun.”
“You wish,” Cam said, and he stamped his foot beside the old man’s chair.
Lewis jumped at the noise, the vibration, but he was smiling. It was an unusual smile, an inaudible but telling phenomenon, almost like Buster Keaton’s, the tolerant, world-weary grin of silent-film stars.
Cam smoked a cigarette, but he didn’t light another one or offer his own to his father. He had not yet reached that stage of intimacy that sometimes occurs between people at opposite levels of power. Cam’s shirt was riding up, and she glimpsed the formal row of knobs on his spine. “I don’t remember anything about a gun,” she told him.
/> “Don’t be crisp, Margaret,” Cam said, imitating Richard.
“I have a question,” she said. “Is that thing real?”
Tracy touched Cam’s elbow, but Cam whipped away from him. Tracy followed a step behind and they prowled in a half circle. Tracy said, “Look, let’s just get out of here nice and easy.”
“Don’t give me that Easy Does It stuff,” Cam said, “I’m not a member of that club.”
Someone holding a gun was almost as bad as someone shooting it. Why didn’t Cam go home and point a gun at their mother? Margaret imagined Elizabeth sitting on the sun porch in Wilmington, reading a new McCall’s. A perfect lens explodes in the windowpane above the high auburn crest of her permanent.
Tracy inched closer to Cam. He looked at the ceiling. Then Tracy grabbed Cam by the wrist and took the gun. Tracy lifted the gun up to his eye and handed it back to Cam.
“What are you doing? Don’t let him have it back!” Margaret said.
“It’s a starter’s pistol,” Tracy said.
“A starter’s pistol? Like for a hundred-yard dash? A race? You’re just saying it’s a starter pistol to shut me up,” Margaret said.
“You’re losing sight of the issue,” Tracy told her. “It’s a noise tool, pretty nice. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Is that thing loaded or what?”
“Why don’t you practice a wait-and-see attitude? You always want to have things now, now, now. Sometimes the truth has to trickle out,” Tracy told her.
Cam was enjoying their quarrel. “Go ahead, all you want. The fact of the matter is, it has nothing to do with you,” he told them.
Lewis sat forward in his chair and crossed his legs, tucking his toe behind his ankle. He was dressed in a worn silk jacket, the cloth polished at the cuffs and elbows, the lapels yellowed, rippled from too many trips to the cleaners. His pumps looked Italian, but one sole was peeling away from the upper leather. He looked a great deal older than the night before. He was bony; his face looked translucent in the daylight, milk-blue and shimmery like an opal. He looked like a romance-novel invalid—what was the use of scaring him?
“Elizabeth will delight in this story,” Margaret said. “She’ll say, ‘Like father like son.’ ”
“It’s undeniable,” the old man said.
“What’s that?” Cam said.
“My blood courses through your veins,” Lewis said.
“It stinks,” Cam told him.
Margaret steered Laurence to the small kitchen. There was a box of safety matches on the small gas stove; one match was removed from the box and placed on top. She opened the icebox and pulled a carton of juice onto the counter. She poured a glass for Laurence, but he shook his head. There were six or seven refrigerator magnets, small black discs, and Laurence asked for these. Margaret plucked the magnets off the enamel door. She had to remove a few slips of paper; one piece said Eggs. It was funny to think of a bachelor writing this word eggs and attaching it with a magnet to the appliance. She thought about the word itself. Eggs. It lost all its domestic meaning. She heard Cam talking in the next room. He was telling Lewis that there should be consequences when a father abandoned his children.
“What consequences?” Tracy was trying to block a linear progression.
“Shut up,” Cam said.
“If you threaten someone, you should be more concrete,” Tracy scolded.
“A consequence isn’t a threat, it’s an end result. I’m saying, an action causes a reaction. A drought, several years of drought, makes a desert. My life is a desert,” Cam said.
Margaret leaned around the kitchen door. Tracy sat down heavily in an overstuffed chair; his mouth dropped open a quarter inch. Cam didn’t speak in metaphors very often. They wanted to see.
His explication was flat, squarely detailed, unembellished; his voice was even, dipping low when he said something self-deprecating. He reminded Margaret of someone coming back from a lethal war skirmish, the shell-shocked noncom standing before a conference table of hardened officers. The only survivor, someone asked to give an itinerary of the confrontation, counting losses and injuries on both sides.
“Did you think I would just dry up and blow away?” Cam asked Lewis.
“Maybe you let it slip your mind? Maybe you forgot? Well, I started wondering about you—even when I was small. One question, the same question.
“The glass is half empty or it’s half full, you know that saying? You know the one? Okay—
“Let me tell you. Full means all the way to the top. Full means nothing’s missing. There’s no such thing as half full. You don’t have to be a genius to see that.
“I’m not saying I’m a genius, but I’ve been doing some thinking. I’ve been crystallizing my thoughts—”
Margaret’s mouth was dry. The room was hot. She couldn’t listen to Cam. His story was not entirely free of blame, but more often it followed the shape of a confession.
Cam told his father, “You see, because I’m unclaimed, I don’t trust anyone. The backlash being, no one gives a shit about me.
“My wife wants me arrested.
“My own sister can’t see any difference between me and the next guy. Or maybe she’ll just fuck anything that can keep still long enough—”
“Don’t blame me for that!” Margaret said. “We made a mistake; we tripped up.”
“You tripped, at my feet. Aren’t you forgetting?”
She was rising and sinking on her heels; tears burned the outside corner of her eyes.
“I don’t blame you, Margaret,” Cam said. “It’s Mr. Marathon over there”—he shoved the gun toward Tracy—“he’s making a whore out of you.”
Tracy said, “That word’s archaic. Let’s see, we have the word ‘nympho.’ That’s a little stale. Shit, what is the word we’re looking for?”
“Whatever you want,” Cam said.
Tracy said, “Did you ever think Margaret could evoke her own sexual chaos? Maybe it’s her blueprint. Sometimes it’s her, she’s cracking a kind of whip. It has nothing to do with us.”
Cam stopped him. “Shut up. You have a mouth, you know that? Save it. I don’t want to duel with you, Twinkletoes.”
Margaret heard this word, “Twinkletoes,” and she looked at Tracy. He wasn’t happy with Cam’s remark, but she allowed herself a full chord of laughter. She didn’t think twice about it.
Lewis stood up from his seat, “A gala event, sorry I must go now.” Cam gripped his shoulder and pressed it down, leaned his weight against his father, but the old man struggled to stay on his feet.
“I’m not through,” Cam said.
Lewis said, “Yes, but I’m finished. I’ve had enough. We meet once in a lifetime, and this is what you come up with.”
Cam looked at Lewis and shook his head. “No, you don’t. The shoe’s on the other foot, not the foot you’re talking about. I’m the one who gives the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down.”
What shoe was on which foot, thumbs up or thumbs down? Margaret tried to follow. Margaret heard Laurence scraping the dark magnets across the surface of the refrigerator. She listened to some Spanish coming from the kitchen window where a fire escape ascended. There must be people sitting out, she thought. Infants were crying across the alley; their wails intensified before breaking off. Laurence had slipped out of the kitchen to show the magnets to his father. He was standing in front of his father, his palm flat. Cam saw his son. “What happened to his head?”
“Nothing,” Margaret said. Why should she explain it to a madman? She had waited as long as she could, until the scene was too warped and razory, as if the events she watched were painted on sheet metal and circulated like a mechanical mural. Again, Cam poked the air with his gun or scratched his shave with its muzzle. Margaret watched Lewis. She saw a look of surrender surface upon his refined features. Then, a moment of warmth drifted across his lips, registered in his eyes, made his horror uneven. It was this complexity, this turn of mind, which made her frightened. If the old man was j
ust going to sit there smiling at this craziness, she was helpless to do anything.
She pulled Laurence by his shirt collar. She was leaving, but the dead bolt was sticking. She forced it, cranking its thick tongue, and the door fell open. She took the child’s wrist and tugged him down the landings. It rained when they walked to the bus station. A dusty vapor that never touched the street, but she could see it collecting in her nephew’s hair as she shoved him across the intersections. Then it rained hard.
II
She heard a siren increasing in the next lane, one blaring note. It wasn’t a siren after all; it was the flat, monaural pitch of a car horn. She looked out the bus window and saw a vehicle ripping past. She thought she saw the Duster—its compact blue form, the sweptback roof. She recognized her flip-flops where she had left them on the rear deck. The car moved off ahead, then it drifted back and rode alongside the bus. She saw Tracy leaning out the window, signaling to her. No, he was rotating his wrist in circles to catch the attention of the bus driver.
Laurence saw the Duster and squealed, three arcing bursts. He ran back to the end of the bus and wriggled between two riders to look out the back. The people allowed him to stay there so he could wave at his father. She thought of Cam driving behind the bus, and a smile needled her lips. She thought of the phrase, “I’m your back door.” It was truck-driving lingo Cam had explained to her. Then the Duster plowed past her window once more, braking to ride level with her. The bus slowed or accelerated, trying to shake loose the other vehicle, but whatever the bus driver decided, Cam mimicked in the Duster. Some passengers were laughing and shouting. The bus resumed its normal speed, braked suddenly, then pulled out into the fast lane. She saw the Duster falling behind on the right as they went past. The bus accelerated, exceeding the normal speed. Margaret smelled the strong diesel fumes increasing.
The Duster was in tandem again. Cam leaned on the horn, swerved in tight zags shoulder to shoulder with the bus. Margaret stood up to look at the man holding the wheel. He kept his head perfectly straight, ignoring the ruckus outside his window. Cam weaved in front of the bus and slowed the Duster abruptly. The bus pulled around him, Margaret felt the gears shifting; the grit on the rubber tread over the aisle bounced with the strain of the transmission. Cam repeated the maneuver. People on the bus were getting more uncomfortable; some men called out suggestions. Finally, Margaret walked up to the driver. She had to grab the backs of the seats to keep her balance and everyone looked at her with suspicion.