But Barnaby had heard the conviction in Ada’s voice earlier, and the conviction was inside of Ada still. It was inside of Barnaby. Love was real, and Barnaby was going to Doug’s to court a Brooks Brothers waitress who was more of a redhead than a blond.
Before he got around the corner and through the living room, however, Happiness came out the other kitchen door to intercept him at the door of the condominium. He had left his balls of garlic on the dining room table, and she had them, and she looked at him severely.
“Don’t forget these,” she said, and pressed them into his hand again.
He took them from her and kept moving.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, and with profound calm he cruised out of the condominium toward the station wagon and the blossoming of his fate at Doug’s.
He did think about glancing at himself in the station wagon’s rearview mirror, but that chance of reflection had been a maze of cracks since his daughters’ game of mirror mirror on the windshield several summers ago.
In Doug’s parking lot, it was only just early evening, but it was already well dark, and a man’s voice called out from the darkness, “Barnaby.” Barnaby looked over to the lighted main parking lot. He looked on down along the dim stretch behind the kitchen where he’d parked not too far from the battered staff vehicles, one of which he hoped belonged to his waitress. He looked out into the wide, indistinct apron of dirt that lay between Doug’s and a secondary freeway access road.
But he could not see anyone.
“Barnaby,” came the voice again. It was a familiar voice and yet not a voice that Barnaby recognized right away because to be hailed in the proximity of anything like a saloon made Barnaby expect to discover a colleague from other provinces than Oklahoma.
Finally he did see a silhouette there in the dirt field, coming slowly up along the edge of the staff parking, coming from a good ways away. Barnaby stepped out past the front of the station wagon into the field himself and waved at whomever it was. He waved and tried to think whom he could know.
“How you feeling?” came the voice. “How you feeling today, old buddy?”
It was Peterpotter’s voice, and it was Peterpotter walking toward him.
To his credit, Barnaby did not right away register physical fear. Perhaps because he was chilly. This was the first week in December, and Barnaby had not put a jacket on over his turtleneck. He was fit and he had thought he should make that point, but he wanted to make it inside, to the girl.
What’s more, he had to piss.
And here he was at the gates of love, and Peterpotter had become a private troll sent not just to take his money and position but also to beat him up and now to keep him out of the last and most important place, the palace of the beautiful princess.
Well, if it really were a fairy tale, Barnaby felt as if he could work things out. Last night, after all, it was Peterpotter’s violence which had in fact introduced Barnaby to the princess.
And just like that, in the ripple of confidence and familiarity suggested by fairy tales (how could he ever have imagined religion his provenance?), Barnaby’s sense of smell returned.
Suddenly he could smell the ripe exhaust from Doug’s kitchen as they cranked up for dinner in there.
The smell of the same exhaust would, in several hours, adhere to the beautiful Brooks Brothers waitress, just as it had during Barnaby’s sleep last night while Barnaby dreamed of her touching his lips. In his dreams, she had not been perfumed or freshly bathed. Much as he approved of and encouraged cleanliness, Barnaby had smelled her and savored her as a mixture of half-eaten cooking and her own dried sweat, all a tang of effort and aliveness.
Barnaby shuffled his feet with indecision and could feel loose dirt and a scree of stones under his sneakers as Peterpotter approached from a pickup truck far beyond the staff low riders and Volkswagens. Although he was still at a good distance, Peterpotter’s silhouette had already acquired purposeful malevolence, and for some reason he chose to veer further out into the dirt no-man’s land, luring Barnaby out with him. In the past, Barnaby had never had a reason to believe in malevolence, but that had changed with bankruptcy and with the fleshy discomfort now inside his mouth.
Barnaby wondered briefly whether Peterpotter might not let him just run inside and say hello to his waitress. At a distance, a young couple was over there pushing a stroller toward Doug’s door, and Barnaby thought he might go in with them if he promised to come right out again for his beating.
Did he really think something so shameful?
He wondered briefly whether he ought to call to the young couple and their baby for help; the lighted parking lot over there seemed so hospitable with them around. Even the empty, shadowed, staff parking lot looked friendly now, in December, in the beginning of Advent with the green-and-gold neon glow of Doug’s palm tree giving the tops of cars a Christmas aura.
Barnaby, unfortunately, was several yards outside the staff lot and its dim, fronded, desert festivity. He was out in the field with Peterpotter, standing in long-since-bulldozed leavings of dirt and rocks and occasional bottles. Out here, the palm tree light was faint, and the dulled colors of that light had submerged the air into something dangerously other than Christmas. Anybody would recognize this as a place for a beating. Jesus, a place to become a martyr, but Barnaby had quit that game—should he mention that to Peterpotter? Would Peterpotter give a shit? Anybody with any sense would just get away, back past the station wagon and across the main parking lot and into the restaurant. What could be simpler? Peterpotter was still far beyond any chance of intercepting.
“Going to run away? Big chickenshit snot going to run on in the restaurant? Go ahead. I won’t come after you. But it’s only me tonight. I don’t have my big friends with me. You know who they were? TJ Baker’s sons. Remember them? But they didn’t enjoy themselves last night, wouldn’t hardly kick you and didn’t want to come back, so it’s just me and you. What do you say?”
Barnaby didn’t say anything, but he had been a chickenshit all his life when common sense dictated and when people spoke the sort of violent local cadences that Peterpotter had reassumed.
Now, however, common sense did not apply any more than martyrdom. Barnaby was coming to win a princess, so it was love that applied. Though he did have to take a piss, and badly.
Scared to death of shitty little Peterpotter. There. He’d admitted it.
He stood in the dark and watched Peterpotter approach, still at a distance but coming, slightly iridescent with the light from Doug’s palm which broadcast its green out over the field like a radioactive shadow.
Barnaby shifted his sneakers on dirt and stones and understood that he too was iridescent. His blood would be green. Was it fair he should be martyred after he’d gone off the pilgrim track forever?
“Go on. Run, you son of a bitch. If you don’t, I’m going to beat you again, all by myself. And this time when you go down, I’m going to get down with you and keep hitting you with my fists so I can feel it better.”
The two big friends were not here. That should have been an encouragement. Instead it convinced Barnaby all the more of how deeply Peterpotter hated and how crazy the hatred had made him.
That he came alone only made Peterpotter scarier. And it made Barnaby, God forgive him, that much more frightened.
But run inside? Did any knight ever beat at the gate of the princess palace and cry that the dragon was after him?
“You want me to beat the shit out of you, don’t you, old buddy.”
And now Peterpotter was not all that far away.
Barnaby bent down and grabbed a rock up from between his sneakers and in a spasm of frustration flung it at Peterpotter.
What would his father say about that?
Peterpotter laughed and said, “Throwing rocks?”
Barnaby just could not, oh could not, hide behind the princess he hoped to woo, not now when he’d seen her and she’d touched his lips, when Ada had
pronounced that actual love was at stake. On the other side of the coin, he was awfully afraid of Peterpotter. He bent down and scrabbled his hand in the dirt and came up with another good-sized rock for flinging and flung it wildly. Who cared what his father would say?
Peterpotter laughed and kept coming. “You dumb fuck. You think that scares me? You know what I’m going to do? After I beat you to death? I’m going to get my car lots back, and I’m going to get my oil leases back, and then I’m going to go to your fucking restaurant and order a shitload of food and throw it on the floor, and when your faggot Frenchman asks if everything is all right, I’m going to take out my dick and piss on his food and I’m going to tell all your friends, ‘This is what the rest of the country thinks of you, and this is what I did to Barnaby fucking Griswold.’ Then I’m going to come home and plant kudzu on your grave and I’m going to fertilize it with waste from the toilet in my plane. How’s that sound?”
With that, Peterpotter bent down and clawed around his feet like an angry crab. Was that how Barnaby had looked when he was grabbing up his own rocks? And then Peterpotter stood and flung a rock wildly back at Barnaby, and another rock, and then came ahead toward Barnaby again.
“Okay? That enough rocks?” Peterpotter shouted. “Or you want some more?” And Peterpotter grabbed up three more and flung those three more, laughing as he did and shouting. “I can throw rocks. I’ll throw rocks with you, you fat, poorfuck cityboy.”
But Peterpotter, in fact, could not.
Barnaby saw that Peterpotter could not throw rocks at all.
Barnaby made himself stay where he was, and winced at each of Peterpotter’s motions of throwing, and Peterpotter’s rocks landed nowhere near him.
Peterpotter didn’t have a good throwing motion. Peterpotter was in a frenzy of what he thought was deadly rock throwing, but in fact he threw like a girl.
Once he’d thrown again, Peterpotter advanced again.
But Barnaby’s fear had left.
Barnaby had learned to throw, really throw, during the tide pool summer, and he had hardly stopped throwing then. His first and loneliest summer away at camp, the summer after the pond summer, Barnaby had thrown rocks every chance he got for two and a half months. He’d thrown every rock he could find, at trees, into the lake, at other rocks, over the tennis court. He had never thrown at people, but he had definitely learned how it was done. He had learned the motion. He was never any pitcher, but by the end of that first, unhappy, camp summer, whenever he threw at trees, usually he had hit them.
Now, with no fear anymore at all, he took his time and bent down and gathered four good-sized stones and squeezed one of them into his throwing hand.
Peterpotter saw that and stopped advancing and bent down himself for more rocks, laughing as he did.
Barnaby sighted on Peterpotter and took one long stride forward as he reared back with his throwing arm. He kept his sights on Peterpotter, and he let loose.
Barnaby threw like he knew how to throw, and the rock went for Peterpotter on a line. Almost on a line. It went true.
It missed.
Peterpotter was so busy laughing and gathering up more of his own rocks that he didn’t notice. He should have noticed.
It missed, but it was a near miss.
Barnaby stood calmly as Peterpotter started flinging his new batch, and some of those rocks Barnaby could see in the dark and in the green glimmer from the neon palm, and some of the rocks he could not see, but with Peterpotter’s form there was every assurance of safety.
Barnaby himself took another long stride and brought his throwing arm back deep, and fired. Barnaby threw his rock like a rock was meant to be thrown, and he knew as soon as he let go that he was on target. He couldn’t see it fly, but he knew.
He heard it hit, a quick thup, a solid, painful sound even from a distance.
“Ow. Fuck. Fuck me. Fuck, that hurts.”
Peterpotter grabbed in the dirt and ran several furious steps forward at Barnaby, flinging handfuls of dirt and stones with both hands.
When he stopped to grab more, Barnaby went calmly into his motion and fired again.
Thup.
And now Peterpotter was close enough that Barnaby could see the stone strike off a shoulder.
“Ow, fuck, fuck. Ow. God. You fucker. You fucking fucker.”
It was understandable but not particularly to his credit that now it was Barnaby who began to laugh, and the laugh, unfortunately, put off his aim. His last stone kicked in the dirt just beside Peterpotter.
Without even flinging his last handfuls of dirt and rocks, Peterpotter was running away.
Barnaby picked up another couple of stones, but Peterpotter was moving away fast, despite a limp. Maybe the first hit had been a knee.
So Barnaby called after him, “I was never sorry.” He dropped his rocks and shouted, “I take back my apology.”
That was it. Barnaby brushed his hands.
Nothing stood between Barnaby and his miraculously sustained quest of love (nor anything between himself and his suddenly far-more-urgent-than-before need to take a piss), but the bright, green-and-gold distance to Doug’s door. He walked that distance with grave composure.
And inside the door, inside the restaurant dimness which seemed now darker than the lighted parking lot he’d just crossed, right there, as if she’d timed it all out, the waitress stood exactly before him, in front of her wilderness of tables like forest royalty. She stood tall and thin and supple, one loose hand on her hip, an athlete who had gotten somewhere first for the fun of it.
Had she expected him like Ada had, and like Peterpotter had too apparently? Had she known all about him all along?
She smiled at him with a mischief that suggested there was a something going on and Barnaby might be the last to learn.
Her top lip quivered above her smile with mischief, and mischief was also in her pale, elegant freckles which bunched beneath her eyes when she smiled. She was more beautiful than he remembered, and she was teasing him.
Barnaby liked to be teased. All of the noblest people were teasers.
But he couldn’t simply stand and marvel at her, and this was certainly no moment to speak about pissing and to ask for the bathroom. Nor was it time for anything resembling sanctimony. He had driven off the dragon and won his way into the castle, and it was time to stand forward and speak boldly to the chalice of his affections.
“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Barnaby Griswold,” and he could hear that tonight at least, whatever else might be going on, his voice and his mouth were making real words.
“Yeah. Sure,” she said through her smile and her mischief. “I know who you are.”
“You do?” Did she really? Had she opened the back door of the kitchen and witnessed the battle?
“Hey. When was the last time you looked in the mirror?”
Oh. That was what she meant. She knew his face.
“Last night was messier,” she said. “But all in all, tonight looks worse.”
“Really?”
“You look terrible,” she said, and Barnaby was aware that people had come in behind him and were waiting to get past. “Anyway,” she said, “table for one?”
She was still mischievous, but clearly he was not a glamorous boxer, and just as clearly his time was running out. “I wanted to thank you for last night. For helping. For cleaning me. Seeing I was all right.”
Was that what he had fought all the way in here to say? He might as well have done a “Bless this food to our use” for the near tables.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and her smile did not stop, but she looked to the people behind, two youngish women though not as young as she. They pushed around Barnaby, and one of them looked up at Barnaby’s face with a start of something like alarm.
His waitress turned from Barnaby and began to lead the women away among the little steel tables.
If she had not still been smiling, if it had been his usual self at any other time, Barnaby woul
d have gone away too. He would have gone quickly for the bathroom and then just as quickly out to the station wagon. What else could he do? Deals had always come to him like ripe bones falling off a truck in front of a dog, and beautiful women had always run away from him—deals and women had always been very different events for Barnaby Griswold, and he had learned to honor that difference.
But she was smiling when she turned away.
And Barnaby was not himself.
This was love.
He called, “Will you come out with me?”
The two youngish women turned back, and both of them were plainly revolted by the sight Barnaby offered.
His waitress turned around, and said, “Me?”
Barnaby understood what she meant now. She just wanted to know if he was really speaking to her. He could have answered. He could have nodded. But he hesitated, and even as he hesitated, he felt his powers of communication bleeding out of him as they had done last night. He wondered if his shirt was stained again.
The women refused Barnaby’s unsettling aspect and scurried on past the waitress, but the waitress continued to look back at Barnaby. “Out?” she said.
She hadn’t lost her smile entirely, but she stared at Barnaby as if she were questioning everything he had ever suggested in his life. He brought his hands together like an opened book, and put them up in front of his nose and mouth and the bottoms of his eye sockets. He peeked at her over his fingertips. It was an insane thing to do, but he couldn’t help himself.
“With you?” she said.
He hid his pale nose and his purpled mouth and blackened eyes behind his hands. He was aware that he had crossed what, even for someone with his history, was a significant line in the sands of behavior, but he would not have taken his hands down from his face for almost anything.
She started to turn away once more, and he dropped his hands and shouted, “To the zoo.”
What a wonderful idea. He smiled at both the idea and at his courage in shouting. He was brave again.
“Okay,” she said. “But it has to be tomorrow. And you’ll never find my apartment. Pick me up here at noon.”
Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 17