“Or is it JDL?” Fred said. His jacket was unbuttoned. In a defensive confrontation there is not always time to unbutton your jacket.
“What’s that, a radio station?” the one wearing the baseball cap said.
“Maybe he wants us to follow him,” the one without the baseball cap said.
“Or,” the other one said, “maybe he wants to follow us.”
“He’s not my type.”
“Said he’s the one we want.”
“Says he’s married.”
“Rock Hudson was married.”
“He was married to Liberace.”
“Looks a little shaky to me,” the one who said he had a bad ear said.
“Must be nervous.”
“He’s making me nervous,” the one with the bad ear said, and the one he called Mikey said, “They don’t want to make you nervous.”
The waitress came back with the new owner. He was a tall handsome Greek in a sport jacket who spoke with an accent and had provided a nonsmoking section, added a children’s menu and Telly Savalas. Changed everything but the name.
“Gentlemens,” he asked everyone, “how is everything?”
The man with the baseball cap looked at the other man. “So how is it?”
The man with red hair tilted his head. “Ask whateverhisnameis.”
“Fred?” Dimitri said to Fred.
“They’ve been dogging me for weeks,” Fred said.
“Docking?” Dimitri said.
“Bothering him,” the waitress said, “he means.”
“Maybe months,” Fred said. “Don’t let the red hair fool you. I won’t even go into the calls.”
Dimitri looked at the men in the booth. “Did you ever said anything to this man?”
The man with red hair looked at the waitress and then so did Dimitri. She shook her head like it weighed a ton.
“Fred was on 20/20,” she whispered into the booth.
“He’s gonna be on disability if he don’t stop bothering people,” the man with red hair said.
“He’s giving you twenty years,” the other one said. “Twenty years and fifty pounds.”
“I can’t even drink my tea.”
Dimitri told the waitress to go look after his customers.
“Guys, I am sorry for this,” he said down into the booth.
“Well that’s a start,” one of them said.
“It was just a matter of time,” Fred said.
“Fred,” Dimitri said, “go have your coffee. You have your coffee and don’t bother no one. You bother my customer you go to coffee at Dunkin Donut. Understand?”
“I was drinking coffee on that stool before you ever set foot in here,” Fred said, as if that superseded mere ownership. But it was very quiet in the diner. The kind of silence it takes a lot of people to make.
“If I’ve made a mistake,” Fred said and the guy who wasn’t wearing a baseball cap sighed and reached into his jacket. Fred stepped back and reached into his. Cross draw. The guy without the baseball cap was closer and he shot him once in the forehead. It was all one movement and Fred swung his arm to the left and shot the other guy twice in the chest. The guy with the baseball cap slumped and lowered his head as if in admission of guilt. His cap fell in his lap. Telly Savalas grinned, spattered.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “your breakfast is on me.”
“If it ain’t, it’s gonna be on someone,” the one with the hole in his head said. He put back his wallet.
SOFA & LOVE SEAT
Beautiful sofa and love seat, Carolina blue, excellent condition. Originally paid $1200, will take best offer.
$30 TOASTMASTER MODEL TOV200 4-SLICE
Easy-clean, nonstick interior. Bake, broil, toast, defrost, reheat and top brown. 30-minute timer with stay on feature. LED power indicator. Full range temperature control. Slide-out crumb tray. Rack advances when door is opened. Includes wire rack, back pan and broil insert. Firm. Cash only.
ELECTRIC CHAIR
Authentic, full scale, never used. Being sold for non-payment. THIS IS NOT A FAKE. Solid oak construction, nylon restraints, adjustable seatback, leg electrodes, and more. Once in a lifetime opportunity, ideal conversation piece for the well-heeled collector. Original value 35K, make offer. Helmet not included. Will go fast.
The next one was from a guy who called himself Hans Raeder, though he didn’t sound German. He apologized for tying up the business line (“but in a way this is all of our business”). He seemed to be in a hurry but it took him a while. “Yes,” he said, “but yeh,” said he heard strange noises on his phone—Zog was listening. He thanked Fred for writing it. Did he know the Three P’s? He would have gone to Toronto but he’d had surgery (strangulated hernia). He said he was a big fan, said he wasn’t alone. He sneezed. Took him a while but he got around to it: they had a name and number, they could be reached. There would be speeches, pot luck, socializing, maybe a raffle. He could talk about the Report, they could talk about Zog. They would listen to whatever he wanted to say, and they would compensate him for saying it. Wouldn’t say they were rolling in it (“We have mortgages like anyone”) but he hoped they could work something out.
He asked if Fred ever heard strange noises on the line. Did he know how to use a multimeter? (Hernias were congenital.)
They would love to have him.
He sang a song in German.
The next one was Sue from Jiffy. They still hadn’t picked up their clothes.
His wife’s cousin had acreage south of Norwalk, right off 61. Recreational property. He gave Fred directions over the phone. Go right in, he said, there were wild turkey and whitetail deer.
“I shoot nothing that lives,” Fred said.
Go right in, his wife’s cousin said, just like that. Not everyone was against him.
Fred called the warden, told him where it was. The warden said he’d try and make it: “If I’m late start without me.”
Fred pulled off 61 South in the early afternoon. A winding county road, then a road with no name or number but a sign that marked it as a dead end. Bumpy and narrow, leaves and branches pressing against the windows like a mob of uncertain sympathy, and if you met someone coming the other way…but somehow you knew there would be no one. At the end there was barely room to turn around, just an opening into the woods and another sign with its rusty declaration: PRIVATE PROPERTY. He turned off the engine and waited.
Or had he said he’d try and fake it?
He waited for most of an hour, started to nod off…the last letter…Zog, a giant with one eye, a long arm. He snapped out of it and got out of the car, walked around it looking for scratches. He stood by the sign. If it was private property, why not a gate? A lock? He looked back up the way he’d come, listening for traffic on the county road. Not everyone was against him, but if the phones were tapped…It had been a while since he’d pulled a trigger. He went back to his car, got the Colt out of the glove compartment. If the warden came he could honk his horn, but he didn’t think the warden would come.
Fred went into the woods, a creature of clothing. It was cold but walking warmed him. The footpath was wider than he’d expected. Trees, trees, bushes, grass, bare branches against the bright sky like veinwork. He almost stepped on a caterpillar. Heard something—a rustling, snapping—something of size and weight, but it seemed to come from no particular direction. His wife’s cousin had said there were deer, and turkeys could be aggressive in the breeding season.
If a tree falls in the forest…how did it go again?
He came into a sort of clearing; the path forked around a patch of tall grass the color of straw with a big rock in the middle. Something sat atop the rock, looking at him. He heard the sound again. This time it was behind him and he spun, the hammer cocked.
If you shoot a tree in the woods, and no one is there…
He hadn’t noticed how much noise there was till it stopped.
When he looked at the rock again it was no longer looking back. When he looked back
at the dead tree, the smoking scar in its trunk was oozing. A mistake. Someone could have been hurt. He stood and listened, waiting for sound to resume like a kind of forgiveness, but the quiet would not let up. Even the wind had stopped. Finally he fled it, hoping he could still find the car. That he could still get out.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“What?” she said. “I was dreaming.”
“Listen.”
They lay on their backs and listened together. The night was mild, Indian-summer warm, the window open. Sounds of traffic on distant unknowable errands, the snarled snarl of a catfight, then only their own voices speaking up into the common darkness where the ceiling had been.
“Was that it?” she said.
“Maybe something bumping in the garbage cans.”
“Cats,” she said. “A raccoon.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Big one tried to follow me up the porch the other day,” she said. “Big as a little bear.”
“But what was I dreaming?” she said.
His head was turned toward the nightstand on his side of the bed. The small drawer in it.
“Stay in bed.” She could see what he was thinking in the dark.
“Where was I going?” he said.
“Your ulcer,” she reminded him.
Silence resumed. He struggled to think of something else to say, as if saying would defer happening. He felt her turn onto her side; the wall of her back. He couldn’t think of anything, so he put his hand on her hip.
“Let me sleep,” she murmured.
He took his hand away.
“You could leave it,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” she could barely say.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“I can’t help it.”
“You don’t have to help anything,” he said.
“It’s nature,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
“I’m awake now,” she said.
Then why not? he didn’t say, and he smelled something.
“You smell something?” he said.
“Coffee and cigarettes,” she said.
The smoke alarm in the hall went off.
“Nine one one,” Fred said as if it were a matter of routine and swung his legs out from under the covers. He put on his glasses and got the gun out of the drawer and took it toward the bedroom door.
A tinny continuous piercing. She groped for light on her nightstand.
“Where is it?” she said. He flipped the switch by the door and went out into the hall. She found her own glasses, the phone, the buttons.
The dispatcher sounded like a customer service rep. He asked Fred’s wife where she was calling from.
“I think we’re on fire,” Fred’s wife said. “We need the fire department.”
The dispatcher asked her if she saw flames. Fred came back into the bedroom.
“Did you see flames?” his wife said.
“Smoke out the ass,” he said. “Are they on the way?”
“Is the fire department on the way?” she asked the operator. She listened and looked at Fred and said, “He said they’re on the way,” then: “What color is the smoke? he wants to know.”
Fred took the receiver and hung it up. “Come on,” he said and gathered the comforter off the bed. “Downstairs.” The phone rang. They coughed almost simultaneously in response.
“Don’t answer it,” he said. “Come on.”
“My slippers.”
“There isn’t time.”
“My feet,” she said, and knelt under the bed and retrieved what looked like two small mammals. She stepped into them and kept stepping, following Fred out of the bedroom. The phone kept ringing behind them. Already a lambent glow at the end of the hall, at the top of the stairs where the smoke alarm was. A slow-changing gray shape like a genie rubbed from a lamp. When they got there they started coughing uncontrollably and covered their mouths with the blanket. Downstairs, yellow flame had fed its way across the living room carpet to the stairs and was starting to climb the risers. Its tongue on the banister, the brown starting to blacken, smoke pouring up the ceiling of the passage like a dark river inverting gravity.
“My little people,” she choked out, for this was what she sometimes called her Hummels, and the heat rose in slow drafts to their faces.
The keening above them was such now that Fred jumped and swung at it with the butt of the revolver. Failing that he took aim and she covered her ears and he shot out the alarm as if it were the cause of the problem. Now they could hear the fire.
They went back down the hall to the bedroom in a throat-burning, eye-blinding fog and shut the door. The phone was still ringing. Fred bunched the blanket at the foot of the door, but smoke was coming up through the heat register and he covered it with a pillow, still coughing, nose running, eyes crying. The floor was warm under his feet. He went to the phone and again took aim, but his wife said his name and he just pulled out the cord. Then he opened the other window looking out onto the porch roof.
“Should we lay down?” his wife said.
He crawled out onto the roof and she asked what he was doing. He turned around and reached through the window. “Come on.”
“I’ll wait here,” she said.
“That floor’ll go any minute.” He choked, turned and spat. “We have to.”
“My bathrobe,” she said, but might have felt or heard something under her slippers and lurched forward and gave him her arms. He fairly dragged her out onto the roof over the porch, and they knelt together on the rough granules of the shingles and listened for sirens. Instead they heard someone say, “You up there Fred? I can see your dining room.”
Their next-door neighbor stood near the foot of the driveway below. A chubby, thirtyish kid who lived in his parents’ garage where he drank beer and played the electric bass, unaccompanied. He was only drinking beer now and sounded it, and he was pale as a slug and you could see him even in the shadows.
“Never mind that,” Fred said, “Call nine one one.”
“You didn’t call?” the neighbor said. “I thought I heard a shot.”
“You hear any sirens?” Fred said. “Make the call, please. You have a ladder?”
“On it,” the neighbor said, but stood staring into the house as if his mind were being consumed. His face started to glow.
“Just get the goddamn ladder!” a voice from up the drive yelled and the thirtyish boy went grumbling up toward the garage. He’d been married once for a month.
The lights went on in the house on the other side. Things were bursting inside somewhere below them. Fred looked at the crab apple tree that rose from the lawn, branches overhanging the roof. He still had the gun. Suddenly, he felt crosshairs on them.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Go where?” she said. “He’s getting the ladder.”
“The tree,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks out here,” and grabbed for her meaty arm. She snatched it back, but only so she could use it to crawl dutifully behind him as he moved crouching down the slope of the roof. When they were enfolded in branches she hauled herself up by his pajamas, stood with her hands on his shoulders. He tried to shove the gun into his waistband but it was too heavy, so with one hand and bare feet he stepped into the tree, into its leafy smell and small bitter fruit. Something flew out of it then and made for the moon, shrinking against that big pale disk as if crossing the void to reach it. He told her where to put her feet.
“I don’t know,” she said, but tentatively exchanged one set of limbs for another. Then they stood on boughs he hoped could be stood upon, on each side of the trunk, clinging to it and to each other as they had rarely done in marriage. Fred’s feet were sticky with sap.
He could see the orange glow inside the house expanding in ruthless revelation and then the flames that were its source, illuminating the porch and the front lawn and the small crowd that had materialized on its edge, pajamed, sweatsuited, some of wh
om had seen him on television and were his audience once again. No one looking up.
“Someone get a ladder!” he shouted.
“Oh my God,” his wife prayed, eyes closed. She couldn’t stop shaking.
“In the tree,” someone said.
“You okay, Fred?”
“Goddamn science projects…”
“My little friends,” his wife murmured, and inside the house, stripped of paint and charred to one color, they were popping like toy grenades.
“Where’s a ladder?” someone said.
“Wait for the firemen,” someone said.
“Where the hell are they?” Fred said and there was a loud crack just below them and she was gone. A violent rustling, whipping and snapping, then a scream and a thud and a groan, then nothing. He couldn’t see. He cried her name and climbed down in the dark like he was twelve years old again.
“Is that a gun?” someone said when he was almost to the crotch of the tree. It was, and when he tried to hang-drop the last four feet with one hand he fell to the ground and it discharged on impact.
The onlookers screamed and scattered in their bathrobes and sweatsuits, leaving one old man in a smoking jacket and rubber boots holding a small dog (and what had he been about?), leaving Fred’s wife and the man she’d landed on lying prone under the tree. Her leg was bent at an angle nature had not intended, her head in his lap as though he would provide comfort even in oblivion. The flames cast their shadows on the lawn in lurid animation.
“Don’t shoot,” someone said, and Fred saw the son of his next-door neighbors standing in the driveway, holding the ladder. It stood straight up into the night.
—Maintain eye contact. Look at individuals, not an anonymous blur. Establish credibility and rapport with your eyes.
—It’s OK to hold notes in your hand. However, make sure your notes are well organized and not too bulky.
—Use humor freely. A little humor can go a long way. Anecdotes, humorous exaggeration, and gross understatements about your topic help get and keep your listeners’ attention.
A big room with a wooden floor. The kind of space people fill with smoke while they elect union stewards, hold wedding receptions, wakes, celebrate First Communions. A clock on the back wall. Unfolded chairs. A man with a hundred keys on his hip. The floor had not been waxed but it was clean, and the windows were caged. There was no stage but a riser consisting of a wooden frame to which carpeting had been nailed. A microphone with stand. Fred wished there was a lectern; he wanted something in front of his body, a place to put his hands. He wished there was a lectern instead of the banner tacked up on the wall behind the riser, but he supposed people were entitled to an opinion (though wasn’t his more than that?) and his back would be to it when he spoke.
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