Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  “I don’t know, though,” he followed up quickly. “Check said the other day, ‘Honesty can be destructive,’ and I said, ‘But that gets you into a weird area awfully fast.’ I guess I believe in people being straight with each other, Rache. I know I’m new here and all, but sometimes someone on the outside can see things people on the inside can’t. There’s something seriously ugly going on here, and it’s at your expense. Really, you’re a lovely girl, with a terrific singing career ahead of you, if you could get somebody to give you a hand instead of burying you here in this dingy Queens closet. Okay, that’s your choice. But it hurts even more to watch you squander your loyalty than squander your talent. I don’t know how you feel about that Secretti character, and I don’t want to pry. But it’s clear even from what you’ve said here tonight that you stick by him even behind his back, which is a damn sight better than he does for you. You gotta know who your friends are, Rachel, because misplaced trust can be dangerous. A friend doesn’t go around bragging about how in love with them you are and how they don’t give a shit—”

  Rachel made a little sound. It was not “What?” but Eaton chose to interpret it as inquiry, anyway.

  “Okay, he didn’t say, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ He’s a songwriter, right? What was it? Something about fishing…Oh yeah. That picking you up would be like ‘fishing a stocked pond,’ he said. ‘And catching the size you throw back.’ He prefers ‘deep sea,’ whatever that means.”

  Eaton paused, letting his story sink in. “I’m sorry, but he just said all this stuff, and let me tell you, it made me pretty uncomfortable, too. You and I have hardly talked, but you’ve always seemed nice and you’re good-looking and I guess I’ve felt a little shy. But when you know something you don’t have the option on being an observer anymore. Even to keep quiet is to participate. I see you lately, I feel like I’m lying, you know? So I just wanted you to know how things stand, get it off my chest. There are some nasty games going on around this place, but I’m not playing.”

  The candle was now a fire hazard. It had lost its vertical integrity altogether and was spread in a pond over the table. The wick squiggled over the top like a fishing line. The quote had done the trick, of course. Rachel had sung enough Check Secretti to recognize his lyrics.

  Eaton blew out the candle; curls of smoke mingled with Rachel’s hair like cassis in wine. Rachel kept staring at the candle as if waiting for the snuffed flame to relight, but instead, the surface curdled and stiffened; Rachel’s face set with it, her expression glazing, the corners of her mouth firming up. The waitress turned on the neon top light, and all the romance of Plato’s fled in its leaden blue glare.

  “Listen, usually you kids can stay late as you want, but nobody’s here and it’s Check has the extra key to lock up. You’re gonna have to call it a night.”

  Saying nothing, Rachel stood up, her blouse wilting in the humid summer air. As she walked away, the waitress set to scraping up the mess Rachel had left on the table. It would take considerably more work to clean up the mess that Eaton had made.

  Rachel’s voice is thin

  14 / Close to the Edge

  Checker had disappeared again. Each evening Rachel DeBruin sat at the same table, disemboweling new candles, lying in wait. Though she didn’t usually drink, she made a point of ordering Scotch this week, straight up.

  Regularly Eaton would stop by Plato’s and note her presence with satisfaction, as if he’d planted a bomb and was pleased to find it still ticking. Sometimes he’d make conversation, though she was terse, and whenever he drew close, she hugged her big blue pocketbook; it rattled.

  “What’s your theory about Irving’s disappearing acts?” asked Eaton one such evening.

  “Everyone says it’s a girl,” she tossed off, hard.

  When they performed that weekend, without Checker, Rachel’s delivery was so vicious that more than one patron remarked on her shift in style. Eaton drummed her into that edge, like driving her toward a sheer drop.

  Eaton himself was solicitous. He bought her more drinks, kirs and Tequila Sunrises with the reds oozing over the ice; Bloody Marys.

  Yet finally, the next week, Eaton watched from the other side of the bar as in an instant all his painstaking hard work washed away. He was actually looking at her face when it happened—suddenly her expression went liquid; with a swing of that front door, all the thick black bitterness he had carefully distilled went pale and runny again. What a terrific waste of energy.

  Checker’s jeans were hanging lower on his hips than ever, and Eaton noted this latest weight loss was unattractive, though he doubted Rachel would notice. Rumpled and sweaty, Check looked as if he’d come back from a week of rowing crew. As he advanced into the club, Rachel’s eyes thrashed wildly around the room, jouncing off stray furniture, grabbing on to candles and beer mugs as if trying to keep afloat in a rising tide.

  Checker raised his head at a tilt, hearing the gurgle of something new. He went straight to Rachel. “How are you?”

  An everyday question, but Rachel wouldn’t get away with “Fine.” She drew her legs tightly together. Checker put a hand on her shoulder, and she winced—not because it didn’t feel good, but because it did—the strong calloused palm, the wonderful fingerprints. Her chin touched her chest; Checker wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and knelt before her chair. “What’s the trouble, Jackless?” He put a hand on either side of her neck and turned her toward him, looking at her with a focus we could say was irresponsible.

  So it was a long, cruel moment, Checker’s big warm hands, the eyes blue on brown, Checker the promising, handsome boy, never mind the weight, the one everyone liked, the fine drummer who’d been gone. She’d missed him. And Rachel, so white for the season, her skin like kid. Without the stocked pond this might have done her for weeks: Checker’s hands around her neck.

  He took them back. He held her fingertips instead, the plump of them between his, retreating as he always did, walking his favorite thin line. “Cannibals say that’s the tenderest part of the human body,” said Checker, pinching the inside of her thumb. “Like the oyster in the back of a chicken.”

  Rachel had tiny hands, and the nails were coated with pink polish that was flaking off. Her skin was moist and cold. She left her thumb with Checker. “Want a nibble?”

  He folded it into her palm. “You have to save the best bites.”

  “Who for?”

  Checker relinquished her fingers and sat across from her. She twisted in her seat, the string taut between them. It was dreadful to be hooked so soundly by a fisherman who only wanted you off his line.

  Checker, on the other hand, saw not fish but something considerably more tender. It was like having responsibility for a tiny creature and being so careful, but also so big-boned and awkward, that no matter how gently you handled the animal, you were bound to mangle it in the very effort of keeping it alive.

  “Toughen up!” Syria had mocked him when he’d appealed for advice. “You don’t have enough problems, is that it? You have to go out shopping for more?”

  “Rache is my problem,” he’d insisted.

  “She is now. It’s a cinch to grab problems; they’re not so easy to give back. You ever play Old Maid? Nobody’s going to stop you from taking the little lady into your hand. But try and get them to draw her back again.”

  “I don’t think Rachel would appreciate being the Old Maid.”

  “Hearts, then. The Queen of Spades.” True, Old Maid was a child’s game, and nineteen may be precisely the age that games turn adult in a way no nineteen-year-old is prepared for; the Queen of Spades was an applicably more deadly choice of cards.

  “So what’s been happening?”

  Rachel shrugged. “We played.”

  “How’s Eat doing?” Check asked, having watched Eaton slip out the door as if deliberately leaving the two of them alone.

  “Good” but Rachel looked puzzled, since this was the wrong word. Because Rachel was not in Tibet but in As
toria, Queens, it wasn’t possible for her to say, But, Checker, he makes us think terrible, ugly things—you should keep him away from your drums, they’re hurting, it’s like turning your dogs over to a bad kennel. And, Checker, don’t leave for so long, you don’t understand the danger. He’s a medicine man with a little black pouch, and he sets noxious powders into the air when you’re not here—he drums messages to different powers. Oh, who cared about Eaton Striker right now, anyway; who cared about anything? So she simply added, “We sound different when he plays,” lamely.

  “He’s skillful. Better trained than I am. It’s good for you to sing with different musicians.”

  “Don’t act like your disappearing all the time is doing us a favor.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I talked to him.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was very interesting.”

  “He told me he thought you were pretty.”

  “Which is more than you’ve ever said.”

  Checker cocked his head, for it was dimly beginning to get through to him that something had happened. She knew very well that he couldn’t tell her she was pretty, that was against the rules. “I think you’re a knockout, Rache, you know that. But coming from Eaton—well, I’m not a girl, but isn’t he pretty decent-looking himself?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Trying to push me off on Eaton Striker.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You are, too. Why do you think I want to hear you tell me how good-looking some other guy is? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Rachel…are you sure you want to do this?”

  Rachel had that look of someone who has been perched on the high dive for a long enough time to have become a kind of pool fixture, but who has finally decided to jump in. Checker’s face shimmered before her, blue space and deep water. “I’m tired of this, Checker. I can’t do it anymore. What’s the point?”

  “It’s necessary.” His heart was beating hard; he wondered what he was afraid of.

  Rachel could as well have pointed her hands above her head and sprung. “I’m in love with you,” she said. “I’ve been in love with you for two years. You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you haven’t done anything about it, have you? You’ve never even asked me to a movie.”

  Checker had the feeling that she’d never precisely made this observation to herself. “No,” he said heavily.

  “Maybe I’m growing on you. Maybe it’s gradually moving from friendship to something more. Is that the way you see it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then how do you see it?”

  Checker traced the romances engraved in the table: RC + MS. Ricky forever. “You’re a great friend and vocalist, Rachel.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Look at me,” she said, and that was definitely the meanest thing she did to herself that night, because he did and his eyes were both very beautiful and very honest. “Will you ever fall in love with me?”

  “No, Rachel,” said Checker softly. “It’ll never happen. I’m sorry.”

  He’d thought that was what she wanted. Even Rachel had thought that was what she wanted, or needed, to hear. They were both crazy. Nobody wants to hear that, ever.

  “Excuse me,” said Rachel, lost and astonished because she’d thought she was prepared for this. “I have to go to the john.”

  Blindly Rachel groped her way to the ladies’ room, bumping into chairs, clutching the big blue pocketbook, trying to keep it from rattling so loudly on the way.

  There was no danger of Checker finding RDeB loves CS anywhere on the table in front of him, for Rachel would never carve in plain view. In fact, she wasn’t a graffiti type of person, and come to think of it, the tiny inscription on the bottom inside corner of the stall in Plato’s ladies’ room was the only thing Rachel DeBruin had ever written on a wall; each time she came in here, she moved the stack of toilet paper aside and checked that her initials were still there. Doubled over the toilet, Rachel traced her neat rounded printing behind the roll.

  Back at the table, Checker sat numbly wondering what else he should have said. He felt sure he was about to be punished, though he wasn’t sure for what. He had such a strong sense of what Syria would say to him now. Melodrama! Her arms would be akimbo. You enjoy it, don’t you? Court it, even. But of course, it’s getting out of hand. This starts off as self-indulgent, idiot! You’re an adult now. This is the big time. The stakes are high. Syria faded with her warning, and he strained to hear more—more disgust, more slander and condescension, and though that seemed to be all for now, he was so pleased by the accuracy with which he could predict her, that in a moment of perfect bad timing he had to smile just as Rachel returned to the table.

  She shot him a dirty look for the smile, though consoled herself that any bad behavior on his part now would make him feel worse later. She took her seat, oddly relaxed. She’d done the high dive, and here she was, head above water. “So isn’t it a relief? Now you don’t have to keep being nice and having little talks—”

  “Rachel, I like talking to you—”

  “You know, I said two years; even that was a lie. I think it’s been five. I watched you all through high school. I nominated you for offices, anonymously. Campaigned to get your old band to play dances—”

  “Big Sprocket,” Checker ruminated, his mind beginning to wander, as if this scene were over; feeling the flaccid character of a bag whose cat was out, the terrible loss of tension between him and this girl.

  “And even that first band—”

  “God, Freewheel was terrible.”

  “Not to me. And I knew your locker number and your home room. I memorized your whole schedule every semester, and sometimes I’d ask to leave my own class to get a drink of water just to walk by your biology section and catch a glimpse of you in the front row. I’d go by your apartment building after school, and I’d figured out which windows were yours. There was always weird stuff in them—”

  “Mobiles,” said Check. “My mother.”

  “But everyone watched you—”

  “Not really.”

  “No, they did. You’d walk down the hall and—there was just a feeling, ‘like someone opened a window,’ my friend Judy said once. Even teachers, Check. Didn’t you know? Ms. Carlton—”

  “All right!” Checker held up his hands. “We were friends.” It was happening again, the queer accusation that people liked him. Checker stopped just short of saying “I’m sorry.”

  “Friends with your English teacher. You know there were rumors—”

  “They weren’t—”

  “I don’t care. The point is, everyone—well, they all liked your drumming, but you know very well that all you had to do was walk down the hall…Excuse me.” In a feeble blur, she blundered back to the bathroom.

  How long was this going to go on? Checker was exhausted. But the situation precluded cutting out, that would be uncool. So Checker just had to sit here, he supposed, and let her run out of steam. It was dreadful to actually be getting bored.

  When she returned she told him, “My mother found my journal once and she said I’d better not get involved with a nigger, and I said you were only half black. She said that was even worse. Oh, we had a big fight over you. I did a regular Coretta King thing, you know? She said those black boys just want to get their girlfriends pregnant to prove they’re real men, because that’s the only way they know how. I said I’d love it if you proved you were a man with me, and she slapped me.”

  With this as with her other confessions, there was something disturbing about her delivery, an eerie breeziness, as if she had nothing to lose. As far as Checker could see, there was still a great deal to lose, and he finally intruded, “Rachel, you don’t really have to tell me all this.”

  “I’m telling you how wonderful you are, why wouldn’t you like listening to that? Besides, you
won’t have to do anything more for me after tonight.”

  It was the third time she returned from the bathroom, though, that Checker wasn’t bored anymore. She weaved to the table, ricocheting back and forth between chairs. One of the few customers left in the club made a remark about her having had enough, but Checker knew that at least while he’d been there she hadn’t been drinking. He stopped trying to inject his own comments, for she was no longer making much sense. She repeated herself a lot: “There’s something I always wanted to tell you…I just wanted you to know…I always…”

  “What?”

  Her voice had softened; he had to lean forward to hear. Her consonants went thick in her mouth. Her lips were dry and puckered, her tongue plaqued. Her eyes were dilated and unfocused; her head would nod toward the table, then jerk up again. She lurched once more from her chair and wafted toward the bathroom.

  “Rachel!” In a single furious swing Checker knocked her pocketbook out of her hands and sent its contents splaying over the nightclub floor. Amid the tampons and lipstick, white, pink, and red pills sprang over the brick, bouncing like hard rain. They leaped over the extent of Plato’s, springing into cracks, where they’d be found years later, and sometimes taken by adventurous patrons who’d be disappointed when the tablets only made them feel tired. The pills were ecstatic, as if they’d narrowly missed a much darker fate, the very throat of disaster.

  Checker grabbed Rachel’s hair at the nape of her neck. “What are they?”

  She smiled a sleepy grin and pulled ineffectually against Checker’s grip. “Something to make me relax.”

  “How many?”

  “Wassa problem?” she whined, finally feeling the painful tug at her hair.

  Later, everyone left at Plato’s that night had a slightly different story, but they all said they’d never seen Checker Secretti so angry. Checker being half black, it was hard to tell when his blood was high, but by all accounts his face was clearly red tonight, and the muscles in his jaw popped in and out as if he were cracking ice. He swooped down and scooped up a handful of the tablets, dragging Rachel down with him by the hair, and there was a look on his face as if he hoped he hurt her. Shoving the samples in his pocket, he shouted to the waitress to call an ambulance and herded Rachel into the ladies’ room. “Out!” he shouted to the girl in the stall.