by Tom Kakonis
“Oh, yes. I always have flowers.”
“I don’t know how you do it. Where you find the time.”
“Well,” Norma said ruefully, eyes downcast, fixed on her lap, “time’s one thing I’ve got lots of.”
Which once again effectively silenced the talk.
Fortunately for them all, Harp just then came striding up to the table, Lester in tow. With mock exasperation Harp said, “Anybody here explain to this bucket head the geography, state of Wisconsin?”
“Give ’er a go,” Waz volunteered. “What’s the prol’um?”
“Prol’um’s this. I’m tellin’ him how me’n Irene gonna take the Airstream up by La Crosse next week, that piece property we got up there. He sez, ‘Oh, I know that part a the country, spent some time up in Green Bay once.’ ”
“Green Bay’s over by the lake,” Waz said.
“I know that. Tell him.”
Lester was by now slumped in a chair, fingers linked like trussing wire under a spongy arc of tummy. A couple of buttons on his brilliant orange shirt had come undone, displaying terraced mounds of hairless, white-marbled meat. His eyes were owlish, smeary, blank. Waz turned to him and said patiently, “Green Bay’s east. La Crosse, that’s clear over the other side the state.”
“They got a big river by Green Bay?” Lester wanted to know, sloshing out the question.
“That’s Lake Michigan, brain-dead,” Harp said. “River you’re thinkin’ of’s Mississippi. An’ that’s by La Crosse.”
“Then that’s where I was at.”
“Where?”
“That place you said.”
“La Crosse?”
“Over by the river. Where they make the overalls.”
“Overalls?” Waz said. “Fuck’s overalls got to do with anything?”
Norma flinched. She mumbled something inaudible to everyone but Buck, who said, “C’mon, Waz, watch the words, huh?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”
“Maybe he means Oshkosh,” Della suggested. “Where they make those overalls. Oshkosh B’Gosh. Except I don’t think there’s any river there.”
Lester leaned over, peered at her. “Hey, Della, you join up the army?”
Della looked baffled.
“Wha’ happen your hair? Look like somebody give you a buzz job.”
“God, he is brain-dead,” Della sniffed peevishly.
Waz patted her knee. “Don’t mind him. Little swacked, is all.”
Harp threw up his hands. “Overalls, army, haircuts—I thought we was talkin’ about La Crosse here.”
“That’s where I musta been,” Lester said. “Reason I remember is I was drivin’ my Chevette—this was a few years back, had a Chevette then. All I could afford.” He broke off there, gazed at them expectantly, as though a lucid explanation had just been offered, untangling all.
“So?” Buck said.
“What?”
“What’s the Chevette got to do with it?”
“With what?”
“You rememberin’ it was La Crosse.”
“Oh. That. Well, see, I was headed north, interstate, traffic murder, creepin’ along, an’ there’s some bikers on the road, zippin’ in an’ out the cars. Pretty soon we all just comes to a deadass stop, nobody movin’ at all. I looks out the windshield, couple bikes in front a me. Look left, right, same thing. Rearview, all y’can see is bikes. Hogs, Fat Boys, Specials, Glides—everywhere bikes. I’m thinkin’ holy shit, I’m surrounded by ’em, bikers. It’s like that show where the birds come after the people. Psycho.”
“That ain’t Psycho,” Waz declared. “Psycho’s the one where the broad got slashed in the shower.”
“He’s thinkin’ a Birds,” Buck said.
“That’s what I just said,” Lester protested. “I just said that.”
“What I’m sayin’ is that’s the name a the picture. Birds.”
“Whatever. Anyways, I hit the locks on the doors, roll up the windows, even though it’s hotter’n pistol—August, I remember right—an’ your Chevettes ain’t got no air, course—but these bikers they got me boxed an’ they lookin’ real mean an’—”
“They can be badass, all right, bikers,” Waz interjected.
“Not all of ’em,” Buck dissented. “There’s them Bikers for Jesus. Hear they’re okay.”
Harp thwacked his brow with an open palm. “You boys a big help, gettin’ this La Crosse matter cleared up.”
Lester looked at him perplexedly. “But that’s what I’m sayin’, Harp. When I gets to this town, I asks around and folks tell me all them bikers comin’ for a big rally, the Harley plant, some anniversary, forget which one. An’ Harley’s in La Crosse, right?”
“Milwaukee!” Harp exploded at him. “You was in Milwaukee!”
“Milwaukee a city, like?”
“Yeah,” Buck drawled. “It’s a city.”
Lester shrugged. “Okay. Guess it was Milwaukee, then.”
“Y’know, Lester,” Harp said, cooler now, resigned, “tryin’ to follow your line a thought, be easier nailin’ spaghetti to the wall.”
Lester, cheeks puffed in dippy grin, beamed like a man just been paid a most generous compliment. A ghost of a scar, dead white, ascended off his upper lip, inflicted years ago, plant legend had it, by the rash acceptance of a dare, the details of which were murky, something about a firecracker lit in his mouth and ejected a split second too late. Buck, with a nod at him, said, “See what you’re gonna miss, Harp, quittin’ on us?”
“Yeah, miss it like a case a the—the—” He groped, reddening, after an acceptable alternative to the conventional clap, which certainly wouldn’t do in the company of ladies. None came to him, so he put a benign hand on Lester’s head, tousled the hair, pale and fine as corn silk, and said, “Miss this genius.” And to change the subject he asked, “Everybody havin’ a good time?”
“It’s just a wonderful party,” Norma answered for them all.
“Glad you’re enjoyin’ yourselves.”
“All your friends here,” she went on, “family.”
“Lot a people showed up, all right,” Harp said proudly. With a sweeping glance he took in the crowded hall. “All the old gang.”
Among those milling crowds Jimmie Jack could be seen circulating, gripping palms, clutching biceps, slapping backs, exchanging warm words. Working the room. Also, and quite unmistakably, working his way toward their table where, once arrived, he nodded greetings all around, laid a comradely cuffing punch on Harp’s shoulder, and said, “Sensational wingding, Harpo. Real hoo-ha.”
Harp responded with a chilly thanks.
“Free booze, free eats—gonna set you back little.”
“I can handle it.”
“You can’t, put it on Lester’s tab here.”
Lester, too blitzed to speak, merely snickered. No one else had anything to say.
“So how’s it feel, bein’ a man a leisure?”
“Feels good,” Harp said.
“Bet it does, at that. You be sure’n stop by sometimes, say hello all your workin’ stiff buddies still in the slammer.”
“I’ll do that.”
The pleasantries exhausted, Jimmie started to saunter away, paused and, as though in afterthought, said, “Oh, yeah, Wazzer. Got a minute?”
Waz looked at him warily. “For what?”
“Step over my office an’ I’ll buy you drink on Harp. Fill you in.”
Waz got to his feet and followed him to the bar.
“What’s that all about?” Della asked Buck.
“Beats me.”
“Now, there’s one I ain’t gonna miss,” Harp muttered.
Buck shook his head, vigorous assent. “That’s a goddam true fact.”
Norma winced. Della sulked. Lester mumbled something largely unintelligible, “ain’t so bad” in it somewhere.
And over at an otherwise unoccupied end of the bar the two men were huddled, Jimmie commencing in confidential whisper, “Got the good news bean drop
on ya, Wazo, gonna make your night. Here’s the buzz.”
And a few moments later Waz took Buck aside and whispered much the same message in his friend’s ear; and Buck’s open, weathered face worked through a battery of expressions—astonishment, doubt, suspicion, anxiety, hope—and he said grimly, “This the straight goods?” And when Waz confirmed it, Buck’s expression settled into an exultant joy and he stammered, “Jesus, Waz, I can’t hardly believe it—this is just great—wanta thank you—all you done—wait’ll I tell Norma.”
And at that same moment, in the placid community of Naperville, situated no more than fifteen miles to the north, Marshall Quinn was doing his best to comfort his anguished wife, her ominous, mystifying mood of the past several hours broken, abruptly and the instant they stepped through the door of their home, by great shuddering sobs, face dissolving suddenly into a tragic mask of wild sorrow and unspeakable loss. The doctor, same one who serviced the campus and enough of an acquaintance to summon at this late hour, was departed now, stumbling over a few commiserative words on his way out, empty words, and Lori was sinking slowly into a sedated sleep, moaning wretchedly, “He’s gone…Jeffie’s gone.…”
Marshall sat in a chair pulled up by the bed. He stroked her hot brow. Held her hand. Made soft cooing sounds. Her voice went slurry. Gradually her fevered tossing slowed, stopped. He looked out the window at a black sky riddled with stars and a moon round and yellow and veined as a jaundiced, bloodshot eye. Everything seemed distorted, a buckled, misshapen world born out of a single lancing stab of psychic pain and reassembled in queerly warped designs and patterns. It occurred to him the sounds he had been uttering were something more than that, were in fact words: “I’ll find him—I promise you—I’ll find him,” crooned over and over again, as though the act of repetition might invest the histrionic and altogether feeble pledge with a measure of sinew and force he felt not at all.
PART TWO
The man driving down the East-West Tollway late one Sunday morning was surely Marshall Quinn, though it would have required something more than a cursory glance to establish that fact. This Marshall Quinn looked nowhere near as breezy and self-possessed as the one who had embarked on a make-believe journey through the stars ten weeks and two days (by his exact count) ago, and returned out of sleep dark to a real Earth wrapped in its own senseless and unrelieved darkness. Nor so young. This Marshall’s face was haggard, scored with fatigue, its brows irritably pinched, eyes hostile—face of a man who measures everything and everyone through a lens of sullen, prepared bitterness no longer crimped by the optical illusions of eternal hope and foreordained happy endings.
Nevertheless, when he spoke to his wife—which was much less frequent lately—but when he did, his voice, in contrast with a mouth set in a grim, combative line, was surprisingly gentle. Patiently, automatically, as though the words had been committed to memory and were being recited to himself, he explained the day’s agenda: “What we’re going to try to do is cover an area west and a little south of the museum. I’ve got it all blocked off on the map. I think we can get a good share of it done today, if we hustle. And if this damnable traffic would ease up a little.”
She had nothing to say to this, and the damnable traffic rolled on, clotting the highway, barreling along at breakneck speeds. A blistering sun poured down on them, glanced off the hood and pierced the windshield. Sinuous waves of heat danced off the concrete. The city skyline rose like a file of tombstones framed against the horizon. He looked over at her, tried again. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”
She nodded dully. Her despair, so bleak and numbing and final it bordered on catatonia, seemed to lend her features a kind of somber, waxen beauty, the way a total surrender to disaster will erase the deepest furrows of dread. To Marshall she seemed, astonishingly, lovelier than ever, a peculiarly enhanced likeness of the woman he remembered dimly from that time before the trauma began, this one etched in the most delicate of glass.
“You know,” he felt compelled to say, “that we’ll have to be around Soldier Field. And there’s a game this afternoon.”
Some small animation came into her vacant face, a look not quite fearful but heavy with misgiving. “Game?”
“Yes.”
“There’ll be crowds?”
“That’s the point,” Marshall said, with an effort holding his voice as even as he was able. “The more people we talk to, the more who see the leaflets, the better our chances.”
The leaflets he was referring to were piled high in the back of their boxy Volvo wagon. Under a stark block-lettered legend that implored HAVE YOU SEEN ME?, they bore a recent photo of a smiling Jeffrey Quinn, a catalog of descriptive details, and a number to call. One of them, blown up to poster size, was secured to a window of the backseat, driver’s side.
“It’s no use,” she said, more sluggish than desolate, listless more than tragic. “You know it’s no use.”
Because she was probably right, it took another effort, greater than the last, for Marshall to swallow the anger rising in his throat. He did, though, saying only, “That may be. But somebody has to do something.”
About that, at least, he was the one certainly right. They had long since been forgotten by the vaunted media. After a brief rush of attention (local television anchormen reporting Jeff’s abduction in tones fraudulently mournful, their expressions studiedly doleful; prominent coverage in the metro sections of the Tribune and Sun-Times), the story, gloomy and unresolved, lost some of its sensational luster, gradually dwindled to afterthought mention on the six o’clock news, slipped to the newspapers’ back pages (next to obituaries), then vanished altogether, both places, ousted by fresh disasters, of which there was an ongoing and abundant supply. Enough to titillate everyone.
The police were ineffective, all their efforts to date come to nothing. After the promised visit by Detective Thornton the day following the debacle, and after weeks of sporadic, confounding (and increasingly fewer) meetings with him and his “team” (which consisted, near as Marshall could tell, of another officer expertly schooled in the same intimidating detachment), they’d heard not a word. Lately his calls to Thornton went mostly unreturned, and when they were, all he got (and that dispatched on burdened sigh) was a vague “Workin’ on it, Mr. Quinn, followin’ up some leads. Like I told you, it’s front burner with us. Soon’s we get something solid, I’ll be in touch.”
Front burner. Sure. Worse than powerless, the police. If he could have scraped together the money, he’d have hired a private investigator, but their astronomical fees, as disclosed through a few timid phone inquiries, quickly disabused him of that good notion.
Worst of all was the procession of social workers and so-called mental health counselors and support-group zealots and pastors and colleagues and acquaintances and assorted hothouse healers that appeared uninvited at their door, professional and amateur misery mongers who seemed, all of them, to possess a certain lip-licking eagerness to supply a sympathetic ear and pass along proven prescriptions for “coping skills,” as if some earnest twelve-step program could dispel the ache of loss, restore emotional balance, instruct them in the virtues of resignation. What Marshall had learned, these ten plus weeks, was not acceptance but the hard lesson that everyone—be they aloof or solicitous, pitying or practicedly neutral—was powerless, no one capable of help.
Which left only themselves. More accurately, given her tranced retreat into some anguished, cloistered chamber in her head, only him.
So what he’d done was prepare the leaflets, had them printed by the thousands, and engineered a plan, independent of police and any do-good agencies, to distribute them street by methodically mapped-out Chicago street, nothing scattershot about it. Blanket the city, if need be, till his son’s image was graven in the consciousness of every last one of its citizens, till one of them came forward and said, “I know where he is, come with me, I’ll take you to him.” Persuaded that he, small-town waif transplanted to suburban innocent, could make
it happen, if only because, by the testimony of his own hollow words, something had to be done and the someone elected to do it had to be himself, criminally negligent author of all their grief.
That was the substance of his estimable plan. But in the week or so they’d been at it (his doomsayer wife paradoxically insisting on tagging along, doubtless out of fear of the awful silence of an empty house, a terror deeper even than crowds), what he’d discovered was still another bitter truth: the passionless distance of strangers, an indifference to any pain not their own that oftentimes shaded over from the annoyed rebuff into stony resistance, now and again even into gratuitous mockery. Thinking about it only fueled the smoldering fire of his impotent anger, set his hands to trembling on the wheel. Better not to. Better to—
“Marsh! Look out!”
Lori, yanking him back from all these wandering reflections with a warning cry. For just then a car, materializing out of nowhere, out of some treacherous blind spot in the mirror, swerved into their lane, abruptly and without signal, and only by jamming the brakes was he able to escape a collision, and then only by the narrowest of margins. Heart clubbing, rage unbottled now and focused, finally, on something tangible, visible, he called out, “Goddam crazy reckless son of a bitch! Asshole!”
Lori looked at him curiously. Quietly and without a trace of reproach, she said, “You’re cursing, Marsh. You never used to curse.”
“Did you see what that bastard did? Cut me off like that?”
“I saw it.”
“Could have killed us.”
“He didn’t, though. Nothing happened.”
“I ought to ram him. Climb right up his rear end.”
“That would be all we’d need. A car wreck.”
Yet another in that mounting tally of harsh truths, self-evident, it seemed, to everyone but himself, her even. Still fuming, he punched the accelerator, made no reply. The next few miles they rode in silence.
A sign alerted them to a toll plaza just ahead. He fished through his pockets for some coins. Swung into a line of cars backed up at one of the several exact-change booths. In the lane to his immediate left, three cars up, was the same one that had very nearly done them in. It was a large, square vehicle, looked to his untrained eye like a Buick or Mercury or Chevy maybe, older model, faded bronze color, splotched with rust, badly in need of a wash. Man behind the wheel, woman in the passenger seat. Marshall longed to get his Volvo up beside them, let them know by look or, if necessary, crude gesture what he thought of their lunatic driving. Too much to hope for.