How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  I brought out my nicest white tablecloth and spread it over the table. The tablecloth had been my mama’s, and it was way too big for any table I’d ever had, but I thought it was the tablecloth I should use with the Lincoln china. It hung down low, nearly to the floor, but it looked fine even so. I set the lit candle in the middle of the table. Then I unwrapped the Lincoln dinner plate for me and the fish platter for Cyril and set them out. They looked so pretty on my table, the dark purple of the border set off by my white tablecloth. The candlelight glistened off the china. I could imagine the president and Mrs. Lincoln hosting a state dinner, maybe for the ambassador from Japan who would have come dressed in a kimono for men or whatever it was men wore in Japan back then, and all of them eating in just the kind of light Cyril and I were going to eat in. I unwrapped and polished the coffee cup and the teacup and their saucers and set them out for the coffee. My shoddy old flatware looked sad beside all the presidential finery, but it would have to do.

  Cyril stacked the furniture back in front of the door, then just sat at the table while I cooked, he was so tired. He told me he’d gone to talk to Randy Lewis, who had a shortwave radio and batteries to run it on, and that Randy had heard there was fighting and rioting all over the country. None of the networks were on, so we couldn’t have gotten any news even if we’d had power to run a TV or radio.

  The potatoes finished cooking, and I whipped them by hand with butter that hadn’t quite spoiled yet and canned Sego milk, which works in potatoes when you don’t have anything else. The whipping took a while, but Cyril and I both like our potatoes whipped, so I stuck with the whipping till it was done. I opened the canned peas and boiled them, then set water to boil for the coffee. When the ham was heated, I sliced it and made a gravy and we sat down to eat.

  The food looked so good, and it smelled so good, and in the candlelight it seemed the shooting and the screams were far-off, somehow, though of course they really weren’t. It struck me as a rare blessing that a mother and her son could sit down to a decent supper in times like these, and I was grateful to Cyril for his thoughtfulness to me.

  I dished myself some potatoes and handed Cyril the bowl. “I’m going to walk over to Lydia Ann’s apartment tomorrow when it’s light and try to find her,” I said.

  Cyril looked up at me and took the potatoes.

  “I’ll go look for her after supper,” he said. “Don’t you go out yet, not even in the day. It will be safer for me to go in the dark.”

  I covered my potatoes with gravy and handed Cyril the gravy bowl. “If you go tonight to look for your sister, I’m going with you. I can’t stand this not knowing about Lydia Ann.”

  He took the gravy and shook his head.

  “Don’t tell me no,” I said, serving myself a slice of ham. “I’m her mama, and I have to know if she’s all right. If you say the darkness is safer, I’ll go tonight in the dark, and I’ll go alone if I have to.”

  He took the ham and didn’t say anything. I’d told him about my decision to search for Lydia Ann in the same tone of voice I always used with my children to tell them the discussion was over and that trying to convince me to change my mind was a waste of time. He still recognized that tone of mine. We dished up some green peas and started eating.

  “Is the water ready for the coffee?” Cyril asked.

  I’d left it boiling on the stove. Cyril got up to get it and the jar of coffee, but the shoelace hooks in his boots caught the tablecloth and Cyril stumbled and jerked the tablecloth forward and the candle fell over and went out and I heard Cyril hit the floor and dishes shattering around him.

  I couldn’t move. I just sat there in the dark till I heard Cyril start getting up. I went for the matches then and another candle and bumped into Cyril and told him to stand still and asked if he was hurt and got a match and struck it and lit the candle and held it up. Cyril and I looked at each other, then at the table.

  “Oh, Cyril,” I said, but he didn’t say anything, not “I’m sorry” or even “Well, look at that.” He seemed too stunned to say anything to me then. The fish platter was on the floor and busted, together with the teacup and saucer and my old bowl I’d put the peas in — all busted. But the ham and the potatoes and my plate of food and the coffee cup and saucer were still on the table. He hadn’t pulled off the whole tablecloth. I got the broom and dustpan and started sweeping up the pieces, and the sound of that china tinkling into my dustpan sounded like a judgment on us all and I started to cry, and Cyril said he’d finish sweeping so I handed him the broom, but I got out rags and tried to wipe up the mess off the floor, which wasn’t easy considering how little water I had, and all the while I was crying. Everything was just too much for me then. When the mess was cleaned up and the tablecloth straightened, I sat back in my chair and just looked at my food sitting on a Lincoln plate while Cyril dished himself some more food onto a regular melmac plate out of my cupboard.

  “What have we done, Cyril?” I said.

  “The dishes would have all been broken anyway, if we’d left them sitting in the White House, Mama.”

  But that was not the point.

  “Eat, Mama, if you want to feel up to going for a walk with me to Lydia Ann’s,” he said.

  “Don’t patronize me,” I said.

  I stopped my crying and stood up and got myself a melmac plate out of the cupboard and scraped my food onto it off of the Lincoln plate. Then I ever so carefully washed the Lincoln plate and didn’t begrudge it the water. I wrapped it up in a fine dish-towel and put it and the unbroken cup and saucer back with the other dishes in their sacks. Then I hid the sacks in the broom closet, where thieves wouldn’t spend much time looking, I thought, if they came in here.

  The china I’d taken was a duty I had assumed. I realized that now. It represented a heritage not mine alone. The day would come when other people besides me would want to take a look at Mrs. Lincoln’s china, and Mrs. Johnson’s and Mrs. Harrison’s. They’d want to look and remember the dreams we’d once had in this country and the kind of lives folks had once led. Till that time, I had a duty to safeguard what had become my charge. Wouldn’t the people in power someday be surprised when I walked up and handed them the china and said, “Look here at what I’ve saved for all of us.”

  And I got other ideas. I sat back down to eat my cold food and told Cyril what I was thinking. “The minute it starts to look safe,” I said, “I want to walk back to the White House and take a look around. I’ll bet there’s a cup or two that didn’t get busted and maybe a saucer thrown on the rug that didn’t break or get trampled. There will be things here and there that I can pick up and bring back to save and take care of. Maybe I’m being called to do this, Cyril, or maybe I’m calling myself. It’s folks like me, I guess, who will have to make ourselves responsible for saving some of our heritage through this time.”

  He looked at me for a while, then finally started eating again. “I’ll go with you to the White House,” he said. “I don’t want you going up there alone.”

  “I’d be glad for your help,” I said, and I thought how saving things like a president’s china would give us a purpose to get us through the troubled days ahead.

  While I cleared off the table, Cyril told me how Randy Lewis had heard on his shortwave that they were talking about setting up a temporary capital in either Denver or St. Paul. “I imagine they’ll fight now over which one of those cities gets to be capital for a while,” I said.

  Meanwhile, we had the living to take care of, and a job to do after that. Little by little, we’d put the world back right.

  I sent Cyril to pull the furniture away from the door again, while I dressed in my black dress so I’d look inconspicuous out on the streets. Then I set matches and a candle by the door for when I got back, blew out the candle, and locked the door behind me. Mrs. Lincoln’s china was safe, for now, in my broom closet. I set out with Cyril to find my Lydia Ann.

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  THE SHINING DREAM ROAD OUT

>   So I buckled myself into the Driving Simulation Unit and started connecting my head to Happy Pizza’s central computer, which would connect up to Salt Lake County’s virtual-reality road map of the valley, all the while looking around at the dump of a room I was in with its peeling paint on the walls and ceiling and the used pizza boxes thrown on the floor and the heat and the smell of garlic and onion in the air, but that box of a “car” I was getting into, that was beautiful to me, because I knew what it would soon turn into, and I was getting that hit-in-the-gut feeling of excitement I get just before I head out to drive and I wanted to laugh because I wasn’t really going to leave the back room of Happy Pizza at all except through virtual reality in my mind, when the voice of Fat Joe, the owner of this particular franchise, came over the intercom:

  “Ten-minute run coming up, Clayton. If you beat your last time of 8:23 you got your raise.”

  Yeah, I thought, all of fifteen cents more an hour. “So start the show,” I said.

  And a virtual-reality vision of southbound Interstate 15 settled over my mind: the section just past the 600 South on-ramp and the Salt Lake City skyscrapers east and the derelict houses west and a sunset shining red on rainclouds above and rain already spattering down on the windshield and I thought, great, I’m trying to get just fifteen cents more an hour out of a stupid pizza delivery job and they make it rain.

  I turned on the wipers and thought how the box I was sitting in looked to me like a car now, a nice little Japanese fast car that motored along just fine, and I punched it up to eighty, even with the wet road: my tires had good traction and the road was rough enough in real-land to keep you from hydroplaning, though the city would never factor that into its VR road simulations no matter how many times I talked to them about it when they did their user surveys — it’s like, did they really believe the state would ever get that road fixed? But they must have, because in every simulation I was ever in, I-15 was smooth, and we’d drive along on top of it like we were driving on a dream road, and you’d start to understand why Fat Joe wouldn’t spring for new shocks in our real cars, not if all he ever drove was this simulation and he thought the roads out there in real-land were this nice.

  I punched up the coordinates of my run, and they glowed red digital out of the dash in the dim car, dim thanks to the rain, and I turned on my lights and thought how easy can Fat Joe make this: I-15 south to the 53rd South exit, then west on 53 to the Reston Hotel, room 115? Easy run was right — it was too easy. I saw what was coming: there’d be cops along the way and stingy Fat Joe had known it, must have punched into the city files to see how many cops were on duty, maybe drove along a little on the road himself just to check it out, just to see if he could save fifteen cents an hour but happy that I’d learn more about the real-land roads and where the cops had their speed traps so I’d know exactly where to speed up and where to slow down when I was delivering pizza, and that hit-in-the-gut feeling of mine got tighter because I couldn’t make 53 South doing eighty with cops on the road, so I braked my car down to seventy just to be safe, so I wouldn’t get caught right away, and waited to pass the first speed trap coming up: 21st South, behind or in front of the railing along the merge lane — and sure enough, there he was, a cop just waiting for me to go by at eighty plus, but I was only doing seventy and nobody’d pull you over for that unless it was the end of the month and some cop hadn’t met his quota yet.

  Fat Joe must have been pissed: he’d thought a cop would get me right away, but now he’d have to sit in his VR getup, which he hated unless he was watching porn, and wait to see if one of the cops assigned to the net for a day could catch me on VR I-15, which I knew better than the back of my hand: once past the 21st South on-off ramps and speed trap I merged into the far right lane and shoved my car back up to eighty — roadblock ahead, some old grandpa trying to pass the city sight requirements and motoring along just under fifty in a blue “Senior Driver” practice car — merge into the middle lane, still at eighty, maybe plus — roadblock ahead, some trucker trying to get back a license after one too many speeding tickets — merge right again, back and forth, weaving in and out, always in the right two lanes, never in the far left, the fast lane, the lane cops looked in for speeders: if you weaved in and out in the slow lanes the cops would know somebody was going fast, but they wouldn’t know who, the dots of the cars on their radar would all blend together if I merged in close, and sure they’d think it was probably the pizza delivery boy who’d been going a little fast when we passed them, not the old geezer trying to keep his car on the road and do minimum speed at the same time, but they wouldn’t know it for sure, which meant they wouldn’t come out — they’d wait for some sure prey — and you can bet I’d be a good little pizza delivery boy around all their traps.

  And make my ten-minute delivery in under 8:23.

  So I drove along, making good time, thinking there was a lot of traffic on VR I-15 — was every trucker and school-bus driver and delivery boy out trying to pass some driving test or get a raise? — when this pretty lady in a green station wagon with peeling fake-wood side panels speeds by doing ninety who knows what — and there were these three little blond-haired kids waving at me out of the back window.

  Weird, I thought. And thank goodness it was just VR — it was one thing for me to drive like a maniac in VR or real-land, it was another for a mother with her kids. I hoped she’d use VR to work out whatever was eating at her and keep it down out there on real I-15.The kids kept waving, so I waved back and changed lanes into theirs and sped up to keep them company from behind — no speed trap till around the 33rd on-ramp anyway, our only danger would be roving cops — and we hit ninety-three miles an hour.

  I started thinking, who is the lady driving the station wagon in light rain at ninety-three mph and when would the wagon’s engine blow, because it could, even in VR, just to teach you a lesson. Only somebody with nothing to lose or hot food to deliver would pull stunts like this, and when you looked at it that way her speed kind of made sense: I’d heard of people coming out to check the simulation to see how well it worked, and those types would certainly have nothing to lose. So I thought maybe the lady in the station wagon is the mayor checking up on her VR cops and taking her kids for a joyride and seeing what her car should be able to do in theory, all at the same time — I imagined that’s what somebody like her with a decent income and a crappy car so you wouldn’t look high-and-mighty to the voters would do on an afternoon: hold the appointments, I’ve got important work coming through on the net; then connect up, swing by the house in VR to pick up your VR kids who’d plug in when you told them to, and off you’d go — and fuck the city budget crisis.

  We started coming up on 33, and she braked, and I braked, and I thought this is a smart lady, she knows where the traps are, which of course a mayor would, and I merged over into the right lane and pulled up alongside her and looked over, but she didn’t look at me: she just watched the road and held the wheel so tight her knuckles were white. She wasn’t the mayor. Whoever she was, I thought she must have some kind of bad trouble in her life.

  I merged back behind a couple of Idaho Meat Packers’ trucks because I’d been part of a fast blip with that wagon for too long and I didn’t want to be near her when we passed 33, and sure enough, another cop was waiting there looking confused about which of us had done what and I was happy to complicate his life. He pulled out three cars behind me, and I didn’t touch my brakes, just eased up on the gas a little, then a little more, not wanting to look the least bit guilty and thinking did he somehow figure out about me, and wondering how he could have done that, and hardly daring to breathe because we passed 45 and 53 was the next exit and I’d used up nearly 5:30 of my run and if I got a ticket I wouldn’t get my raise for sure.

  So I played the good little pizza delivery boy, and I watched 53 come up ahead of us and the green station wagon take the exit and drive down the hill and I followed her off and the cop stayed out on I-15.

  But the wago
n sped up down below me, and I thought what’s the lady doing? Before the intersection, she suddenly slammed brakes, which locked at that speed, and she slid to a stop blocking the exit, in front of a red light. Real good, lady, I thought, like, did she forget this wasn’t the highway anymore, then suddenly remember? Well, she’d stopped before the red light, but any cop driving by would think the position of her car a little strange and maybe worth investigating. I hoped one wouldn’t happen by and stop to check her out because I’d lose time trying to get around them.

  I braked to a stop behind her and waited for the light to change — she could just pull out and go when it changed — but she didn’t pull out, and her head started banging around like she was being hit, though nothing I could see was hitting her in that car, and I honked to maybe bring her out of it, but she didn’t even look at me.

  What is she on? I wondered, and I watched her head jerk around for a minute. Then I saw that the kids were popping out of VR — they’d look at their mom, then just be gone, just not there, like they were maybe pulling out the connection and running in real-land to help her or something, and I thought: I have no choice. I have to screw this test and my raise. And I put the car in park, and unbuckled and got out and ran up to the lady’s door and opened it.

  That’s when she looked at me for the first time, and her eyes were wide like she was scared, not of me but of something. And I said, “Lady, what can I do to help you? Can I call someone? What’s going on?” And she said —