Nothing but a Smile

by Steve Amick

  Wink was out there for just a moment or two—she couldn't hear anything else—and then he was back inside, moving fast, throwing the bolt on the back door, and rushing to her side.

  “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ …,” he kept repeating as he knelt on the bottom step, trying to examine her.

  “No, no. I'm okay.” It didn't feel like she could stop shaking her head as she gathered the torn robe back around her, feeling the last thing on earth she wanted right now was to have her body scrutinized further, though she did find she was rubbing an elbow and a hip and the small of her back, spots she'd banged up stumbling against the stairs.

  “Yeah, but—what about the—”

  She knew what he was thinking, but she doubted the baby had gotten squashed. “I banged up my side, yeah, but … He fell on me a little, but off to the side, not on the baby. More on my pride.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said again, the veins on his neck throbbing. She'd never seen him look like that—her gentle artist, her sly smart mouth. He looked like he wanted to kill—or as if he possibly already had.

  “I think he … figured it out there right before you cracked him on the head.” It was reassuring, to a degree. Of course, she wasn't sure what would have happened if the big goon hadn't realized she was expecting. Maybe he just would have looked at her, leered at her, getting a thrill from checking her out in the flesh, and that would have been the end of it. Maybe he wouldn't have done much more than that even if she wasn't expecting. It was possible he hadn't had any intention of forcing himself on her or anything like that …

  Maybe.

  90

  Keeney rushed right over with some scrap lumber and plywood and helped him board up the front door while Reenie comforted Sal and helped her pack some things.

  When the girls were upstairs and out of hearing, Keeney asked what he'd done with the intruder, if he'd called the cops. Wink explained that no, he hadn't, and why he hadn't—who the intruder had been.

  “Shit on a shingle!” Keeney said, low and worried. And when he told him he'd dragged the boxer into the alley, the ex-marine insisted that might not have been far enough. “You don't want him coming to and coming back in for a second wave. Shit, pal, even that silly little Dugout Doug managed to make good on his ‘I shall return.' Let's you and me drag this monkey into my truck, drop him somewhere else to recover, far away. Some other distant alley.” Keeney hefted the sash weight he'd used. “You sure you didn't kill him?”

  They went to check on him, Wink bringing along the sash weight just in case, but Kid Fortunato had taken a powder.

  He'd left him right there, half propped up against the downspout, in a heap. He'd looked like a sack of old clothes left out for Goodwill.

  Wink wasn't sure if he should feel glad about the fact that he probably hadn't killed him or panic that this meant he might return, as Keeney had said, like General MacArthur. His main impulse was to just get far away and figure this out later, and he doubted Sal would have any objections to this plan.

  “We'll keep an eye on the place,” Keeney said. “You just get out of here.” He offered him Reenie's car, the old Buick, and even in that hurried moment, Wink couldn't help but think the sly dog was playing pretty generous with a gift she'd been given by an old boyfriend.

  The first safe place he could think of was four or five hours away. If the idea of sudden travel had come up a few hours ago, he would have said no way, he was too tired to drive anywhere tonight. Now he felt as alert as a goddamn German shepherd.

  91

  Because they'd arrived well after midnight, her first real view of the place was bright and early the next morning. She woke to the sounds and smells of a panfried breakfast and the whole house creaking with quiet activity. There was a radio on, far too low to make out—old-timey hymns, maybe?

  The little bedroom window was dusty and warped with imperfections, but it was enough to see the flat farmland and the distant edging of trees and the overcast sky all around. Michigan, all right: midsummer, yet gray as bachelor's laundry.

  She remembered now. Wink had slept on the floor. There wasn't room for the two of them to even spoon, in her condition, in his narrow boyhood bed. His uncle had announced that there weren't any double beds in the whole house, but he'd figure out something “more matrimonially suitable” for the future.

  She could have used a bathrobe, but she was unclear what Wink had managed to stuff in the suitcase that still lay unpacked under what he had identified as a chick incubator, taking up one end of the small room, and she didn't relish bending over to get it, so she put on what she'd had on during the drive, including her raincoat, and took her chances on the narrow rickety staircase.

  She could have used a husband, too—he was not waiting for her in the kitchen. His uncle Len, long and lanky as that actor Raymond Massey, if not Lincoln himself, seemed sheepish to see her, as if he needed his nephew to interpret.

  “Didn't want to wake you too early,” he said. “So I held off on breakfast for a good while.” She glanced at the clock. It was seven-fifteen.

  “The boy, he's up to the store. Fetching the Sundays. For the real estate ads. Feels, also, that you're needing orange juice, so …” He said this last as if Wink had run out for frankincense and myrrh.

  She stood there, not sure what to do, trying to cover her belly with the raincoat. It barely closed these days.

  As dim and dreary as the morning light was, compared with the endless blackness last night in that long, terrified ride, this seemed bright and startling, washing in on the dingy linoleum and the chipped dinette. They'd rocketed through a lot of desolate night, driving all the way from Chicago to … nothing, a turn off the highway in about the middle of the state that he swore was St. Johns.

  The old man cleared his throat a little. It appeared he felt as awkward and disoriented about all this as she did. “You're going to be fine,” he said, pulling out a chair for her at the kitchen table. “Just fine.”

  Wink had several large newspapers with him and a bottle of orange juice for her and a sack of cinnamon doughnuts for his uncle—or so he said. She actually only sipped the orange juice but wolfed down three of the doughnuts.

  She asked him what he was doing; if he was looking for a job or something.

  He opened the paper so she could see. “A farmhouse.”

  “But what will we—?”

  “He can partner with me,” Uncle Len said. “If he wants. Or if something better comes along, that's fine with me. Whatever you young people—”

  “Here?” she said, and then felt bad for how it might sound to his uncle. “But—wait. Can you tell me about the hospitals? And—”

  His uncle, it turned out, seemed convinced her condition presented no problem. “I've oversaw many a birth, believe you me.”

  Wink looked skeptical, himself. “Any you didn't end up milking or eating?”

  “A mammal is a mammal,” the older man grumbled, swatting his nephew playfully. “You never paid much attention in school, did you, son, other than them art classes? Any rate, there are plenty of knowledgeable ladies living on farms nearby, if you were to get in a pickle. But I'm pretty certain I would know enough myself to keep things moving along, if it came down to it.”

  She already liked this old guy a lot, and it was clear he was bending over backward to make them both feel welcome and safe, but the idea that it might come down to him rummaging around in her business like she was a cow or a horse or something was frankly horrifying.

  “Of course, I'm not saying you couldn't make the county hospital. You might could. First babies sometimes take their sweet time … We could drive over there, clock it on the odometer, see what you think.”

  “So there is a hospital? A modern hospital with regular … stuff?”

  Len shrugged a little. “Well, you know—it's not like you'd find down in Lansing or Ann Arbor, granted. But …”

  She liked the sound of those places. She'd at least heard of those places. She hadn't h
eard a lot, just enough to imagine secure little tree-mobbed college towns with reliable hospitals and public schools. And actual residential neighborhoods. The prospect of a yard with a fence and a lawn struck her as far rural enough—settling here in this flat land of tractors and dust seemed like an overreaction to the crisis at hand. She'd never lived outside of the Loop, and if she was going to have to abandon her lovely tall buildings and lights and rattling El and shimmering lake—and Reenie, wonderful Reen—and hide out in the hinterlands, she'd at least like to feel there was an outside chance it could be bearable.

  “Wink,” she said. “Could we maybe take a little drive and …” She wasn't sure how she was going to end this sentence: either just slow down and think about all this or at least go take a look.

  She wasn't sure herself what she wanted—other than not having Wink's bachelor uncle, potentially, as her midwife.

  Wink exhaled a little frustrated puff. She knew he was exhausted and unsure. She knew he was doing everything he could imagine to do right by his new little family here, and for a moment she felt like she was asking too much—the poor guy probably once saw himself ending up more like his uncle Len, free from the burden of a pregnant wife and the prospect of a family, not to mention having to protect them from creepy men and criminals. It was a lot to pile on a guy who'd probably pined for his freedom all through his military service, only to come back home and immediately find himself at the service of a needy woman. If he had his choice now, if he could do it all over again, she didn't doubt that three years ago he would have just jotted down her first husband's message, slipped it through the mail slot, and kept on walking, never even setting foot in the camera shop.

  But he also seemed distracted by something in the paper, only half listening, and then he pointed to it and turned the paper her way. It was under a column marked BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES. It was a retail storefront for sale in downtown Ann Arbor.

  There were several, actually. Some of the town names she didn't recognize, but he said they were right around there, too.

  He was getting up from the kitchen table now. “Let's just go for a little joyride then, see what's what.”

  92

  He thought she might settle for just driving down to Lansing instead, since it was only twenty miles away, but the prospect of the retail space in Ann Arbor had piqued her interest.

  It seemed to Wink that now, in the overcast daylight and flat open spaces, it might finally be a little easier to talk about what had happened and maybe, a little, start to talk about what they wanted to do.

  Reaching over to pat her belly, he asked how she was feeling.

  “Safer,” she said. “Ready to talk, I guess.”

  They hadn't talked much during the drive the night before. She'd seemed too shocked, and he'd been resisting a strong impulse to rant and cuss and carry on—resisting this partly because it wouldn't help matters and would likely upset her more, but mostly because he honestly had no earthly idea what they were going to do. Reenie's so-called Boyfriend Bucket, as Keeney called the Buick, had a radio, thank God, so they'd sat there wordlessly washed over by delirious dance bands, silly and stupid and dreamy, coming around under the lake, all through Gary and the Indiana Dunes and the Michigan resorts, and they never reverted to conversation even as the big stations faded, replaced by static and farm reports and distant-seeming, high-pitched whistles that sounded like lost souls and “haints” or messages from the Arctic Circle.

  The floodlights came on in the barnyard just as they pulled alongside the porch, and his uncle met them at the screen door in his robe, his deer rifle resting like a broom, handy to one side, leaning against the glider. They hadn't had a chance to call ahead, but he must have read something on their faces because he didn't ask questions until they got Sal settled upstairs in his old room and they could talk alone back out on the glider where they were less likely to disturb her.

  He wasn't sure he'd ever seen his uncle up so late, except possibly the night of Wink's high school prom. It felt strange introducing his only real remaining relative to his wife in such awkward and awful circumstances, but that was the way it happened, and it couldn't be helped. He felt sure his uncle wouldn't grow to adore her any less because it had occurred so imperfectly and so late at night, coming in so bedraggled and bewildered, like gypsies or Okies.

  It helped, he knew, that he didn't tell him exactly what happened.

  He'd had the whole drive from Chicago, listening to the radio, to decide how to phrase it, and so he told him that there was this “known underworld figure” who'd been wanting a piece of their business—letting Uncle Len assume he meant the camera shop itself—and that this person had been intimidating them in various ways and that earlier that night “one of his henchmen, this boxer he promotes, really just a thug” smashed their front door and “accosted” them a little and “really spooked Sal.”

  It was close, though, Wink thought. No point risking his uncle disapproving of Sal by telling him they were in the girlie-picture business and that his wife had actually been stark naked when the drunk boxer lunged on top of her. He needed his uncle to like her. He didn't have enough family left on this earth to have them at odds with each other.

  Or disapproving of me, too, he thought, for engaging in what Uncle Len would surely see as corrupting a woman's virtue.

  “I hope you ran him off, this hooligan?”

  “I ran him off, sure, but it's not something we can go back to.” He said it without checking with Sal. They hadn't conferred about any such assessment or decision, it had just seemed like the thing to say.

  And then early that morning, after only a couple hours' sleep, he set out on his own, again without conferring with her.

  Bushed though he was, it had been bracing to find himself standing facing downtown St. Johns after so long. Gazing down the short stretch of storefronts, he'd tried to refamiliarize himself, wondering absently if there was any kind of store there where, if it weren't Sunday, they could purchase a larger mattress. It seemed doubtful.

  He picked up the papers and orange juice and doughnuts and enough change to call long distance from the corner phone booth, the main purpose of his early errand.

  “I've been through the sports pages and the obits and the police beat page for all the locals,” Keeney said when he reached him at the news shop. “Reen's brothers are asking around, to boot, and so far, nothing. My belief is, he lives.”

  “The monster walks among us,” Reenie chimed in in the background, trying to crack wise in a half-assed Karloff.

  “Or,” Keeney went on, “let's say he didn't pull through. Let's face it: that was no flyswatter you smacked him with, brother. In which case, what? Price just has him on ice somewhere? Maybe. Hoping to distance himself, looking to avoid any exposure on the monkeyshines he's been pulling with you … ?”

  Wink thought he would hardly call it monkeyshines, watching that drunken lug flounder on top of his naked, knocked-up wife. But such nitpicking mattered little at this point. They were where they were now and had to find their way forward.

  “I say he lives,” Keeney told him. “And I suggest you two follow suit.”

  From the phone booth, he had a great view of the grain elevator across the street, and he thought of Chesty and how that stuff was more dangerous than most people knew. When things started heating up, it could all blow, just like it had for him.

  • • •

  He reported all this to her now, in the car heading down to Ann Arbor, along with an apology for rushing to the farmhouse option, and he asked her what she thought they should do.

  “We should do what your uncle did,” she said. “To your room, I mean.”

  He'd mentioned before about the reorganizing and purging his uncle had done on his behalf, in his absence, and he thought he'd seen her taking in the room with that in mind last night before they turned off the lights.

  “Pare it down?” Wink said.

  “Pare it all down. Figure out what's imp
ortant. To us, I mean. Item by item.”

  It sounded like a sensible approach. He wouldn't have expected anything else from her. But despite this plan, they didn't really get very far with it before they found themselves caught up in the rhythm of the road and a good old-fashioned Sunday drive.

  93

  She liked the looks of it, what she saw. Ann Arbor seemed like a lively little college town, with a drippy, dreary sky, and the streets bustling with bobby-soxers in summer school and their daddies' old hand-me-downs—oversize oxfords, shirttails untucked, baggy dungarees. It was no bustling city, true, but at least, just driving around for the first time, she never once saw a prizefighter or any menacing hoodlums break a plate-glass window or disrobe a pregnant lady. When she pointed this out to Wink as something the town was lacking, he didn't smile but said, “Wait until football season—you maybe spoke too soon.”

  Nestled on the edges, there were the houses she'd pictured, outdoing themselves with not only lawns and fences but porch swings to boot. Along a shady side street to the west, they passed a young mother pushing a stroller who looked no older than the girls who'd worn men's trousers closer to campus—a former coed recently turned missus?

  Sal wondered how the two parts of this town overlapped. It appeared sleepy enough, yet the place had to be brimming with progressive thinkers—bearded eggheads and artists, even. Conceivably, secrets of a bohemian past might be more common here than one might think, porch swings or no. University art classes required life models—some gal around here must have taken the job at least once, maybe on a dare, maybe in a bind. Even the unconventional had to live somewhere.

  The retail space they were considering was on a street called Liberty, back downtown. While looping around to make another pass by it from the other direction, but still smack in the residential section, the bright masonry of the Argus Camera Company headquarters suddenly appeared before them as if plunked down amid the elms and maples. “Hey!” Wink said. “Home of the Brick! How's about that for a sign, boy!” He sounded so peppy about the whole adventure, she wondered if he was putting it on a little thick; if he was actually, in fact, as nervous and scared as she.