Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  But sending him off to California to see Charlie? Is she thinking of that as a rehearsal for the time when he’s gone for good?

  “Well?” she pushes now. “Do you think you could bring yourself to visit Charlie and Gloria if that’s what it took to get you your meeting with Przybylski?”

  “I . . .” Ziggy wants to protest something, though he’s unsure what it is. Because suddenly he’s gripped with fear, an arctic chill that goes all the way to his toes. And just when he’s sure he’s going to freeze solid, the fear leaves him and he’s in some place where everything is clear and peaceful, as if he’s accomplished something big, the entire sequence of his feelings mirroring what he experienced as a teenager once when, on a dare, he managed to convince himself to dive—drop, really—off the high board at the Y. Somewhere in the course of that stomach-tightening plunge, in the grip of gravity, all his fear had left him and he yelled at the top of his lungs as he hit the water, swallowing a mouth- and noseful of chlorinated liquid. It stung, but nothing had tasted so delicious. “Well,” he says now, “maybe.”

  In his mind, though, maybe has already mutated into yes. He can do it, all right. Already he’s calculating—God, he’s excited. After years of keeping his head down, trying to be a good boy, here’s a chance he doesn’t want to miss. He’s going on a trip, all the way to California. He’s never been to the coast before. Even in the palmy days, he only got as far west as Las Vegas. Out there, on the far edge of the continent, he’s going to track down Przybylski, he’s going to look him in the eye and ask him a yes or no question: did you work with the cops against me? His answer won’t change anything—it certainly won’t bring back the plush years, it won’t bring back the place on the island, the big parties where even Mayor Van Antwerp was likely to show up. But it will be something, it will be something. Once again Ziggy feels a shiver. It’s as if, at least for a while, he’ll be able to touch his own past, to shake hands with the Ziggy who came before him, and something of the fear he felt moments ago returns. But he’s going to do it.

  He gets up and walks over to Maggie, pulls her to her feet and gives her a hug. “Whoosh,” she says, catching her breath. “I hope you’re feeling this good when you come back.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ziggy’s in Chicago. Under the roaring El whose steel girders enclose the street like a cage, he lights a cigarette: the match’s sulphur and the burning tobacco blend deliciously with the smell of pizza and frying onions coming from somewhere down the block. When was the last time he was in the Windy City? Probably for one of those bowling tournaments with the numbers guys when he was in his thirties. God, that was so long ago. He remembers the bunch of them, sharp dressers except for Morty Krause, already gathered at the back of the car with their suitcases as the train pulled into the station, little kids impatient for Santa’s arrival. The memory warms him, though the pleasure of recalling those days is, as always, muted by a tinge of regret, even guilt. Well, everybody’s paid in their own way. He exhales a thin cloud of smoke and watches it dissipate in the street. Gone, like all those years.

  He hasn’t come all this way just to stand around and mope, though. It will do him good to walk a little. He’s grateful for the opportunity to move his old bones and joints after being cramped in the bus through the first leg of his trip from Detroit. Then too, he just needs to be doing something because his blood is pumping, the way it did in the old days. The funny thing is, this surge he feels has nothing to do with his mission, if you want to call it that, nothing to do with his having taken the first steps toward hunting down Przybylski, and clearing up the mystery of the undertaker’s role in his fall—hell, Ziggy hasn’t thought of Przybylski at all. No, it’s just that he’s on the road, on his own, feeling free for the first time in God knows how long. He breathes in the gritty aroma of the street: cars’ exhaust, cigarettes and chewing gum—the smell of people in motion. Chicago has always excited him, and he remembers the wild times they had when they came here for those bowling tournaments. They actually managed to get in some bowling—Ziggy himself had been pretty good in his day—but it sure wasn’t bowling alleys they’d come here to see.

  A train thunders by overhead, car horns squawk, wide-assed buses belch exhaust into the street and pedestrians with something to do rush by—he’s in a live city for a change, where people aren’t afraid to come out after dark. Why did Chicago turn out to be lucky, he wonders, escaping what happened to Detroit? Sure, it’s a lot bigger and it’s always been more important: every school kid knows that most of the big rail lines in the country converge in Chicago, because of the stockyards, wasn’t it? Of course, there’s the lake—Detroit only has the river—and you can’t deny there’s a lot more to do here. Hell, even the museums are interesting, and Ziggy, who isn’t much of a guy for educational tourism, remembers being more than impressed when he went down under the earth to the coal mine in the Museum of Science and Industry. So, OK, Chicago’s got more to see and do. Still, there was a time when you could get off the train from Detroit at Union Station and expect to be treated as if you came from some place that mattered, because it did matter, and nobody could say otherwise.

  Now, it’s like two different worlds and there’s no question which city, given the choice, anyone would want to live in. Who wouldn’t want to be part of this noisy hustle? For a couple of heartbeats he lets himself entertain the fantasy of just staying here. Forget about that long trek in a bus across the country. He could get a pretty good bang for his buck here in Chicago before he ran out of money, couldn’t he? He tosses away the cigarette. Well, there were times in his life when he just wanted to disappear somewhere, but those days have come and gone.

  It feels good, though, to be carrying a bit of cash for a change. He has to hand it to Maggie, who worked up quite a package for this venture, pooling some of the stash she’s accumulated for a rainy day with a bit of his own money, then hitting up Steve and Alice for what amounted to a humor-your-old-man tax, so that in the end he has a few hundred bucks in his pocket—well, not in his pocket exactly, since the money is dispersed into a number of safe places. The fact is, he has plenty for the kind of low-budget trip he’s planning. The bus is cheap and it isn’t going to cost anything to sleep there. As for food, he certainly has no plans to dine in five-star restaurants along the way. Once he gets to the coast, Maggie kept telling him, he’ll have free room and board at Charlie’s; but he and Charlie have never really hit it off, and the prospect of spending an extended amount of time with his daughter-in-law makes his skin crawl. Fortunately, Ziggy has already come up with some ideas of his own. First thing, he’s going to look up Father Teddy; there’s more than an even chance he can coax some free lodgings out of the ex-priest. He’s done his homework and found out that Venice isn’t all that far from Burbank on the map, so he might be able to spend a couple of days there. He’s given himself no more than two weeks for this trip. Hell, if he gets lucky, he might even get the business with Przybylski done without having to stay more than a day or two with Charlie and Gloria.

  “Spare some change?” The sharp croak comes across as a challenge. When he looks up he sees a short, dark guy in ratty jeans and a denim jacket, his head topped by a cowboy hat adorned with a dirty, broken feather. The man, who could be anywhere between forty and sixty, is staring darts at him, as if he’s convinced Ziggy’s the one who stole all his money, ran off with his wife and poisoned his dog.

  “Yeah, you,” the man snarls. “I’m talking to you.” An Indian, Ziggy sees now. A bum, but an Indian.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he answers, irked. “I’ve got nothing to spare.”

  The Indian’s mouth twists into a sour smile. “You’re breaking my heart, Roscoe,” he snaps. “You trying to tell me that after you took all the land from my people and broke all your solemn treaties and slaughtered all the buffalo and screwed us out of our mineral resources for trinkets and dime-store jewelry, you got nothing to spare.” He shakes his head. “And you people call yourself
civilized. Hah!”

  Ziggy tries to get past him but the man blocks his way. This Indian has already made himself a major pain in the ass but, more than that, Ziggy can’t figure him out. Is Chief Wahoo here for real or is this some kind of act? He looks around for help, but the people nearby are all hurrying past him without paying attention, as if they’re part of some biblical parable.

  When the Indian leans closer Ziggy can smell the beer on his breath. “You’re telling me you can’t even spare a nickel,” he laughs maliciously, “a nickel with the red man’s face on it. Not even a nickel. That’s the trouble with you white people: you’re all constipated, you hold everything in. You walk across the land and never feel it under your feet. Do you ever listen to water flowing, ever hear the wind?”

  Ziggy’s curiosity holds him here. Any second now the guy is going to crack a smile, isn’t he, and reveal that all this is nothing but a put-on? Ziggy studies the man’s dark face—could it be makeup? But he does seem to have the cheekbones of an Indian, all right. Throughout his tirade his features have remained for the most part expressionless; still, there’s no hint of anything but genuine hate in his eyes.

  “Shit,” he says, “I don’t need your stinking money, white man,” and pivots sharply, as if to leave. He stops a moment, though, and when he speaks again there’s a distance in his gaze, as if he’s looking at a butte on the far horizon. “You’re going to pay, my friend,” he says, “you and all your white buddies. Nature is going to take its revenge on you with fire and flood.” He cocks his head. “You think you chased away the spirits, but they’re still out there waiting for you.”

  In a flash he’s gone, melted into the crowd, and Ziggy’s heart is pounding. I didn’t kill any goddamned buffalo, he wants to protest, I never bought any land with dime-store jewelry. He’s glad, though, that the man is gone. “Hah,” he laughs out loud; but he has to admit that the encounter has shaken him up just a little.

  Soon he’s back at the bus station, cheered unreasonably by the echoing sound of place names coming from the public address system. There’s not an Indian in sight; he can resume his journey in peace now. He appreciates the break he’s just had, though the trip from Detroit wasn’t that bad. After the last few years of being a hamster running on a wheel, he felt a sense of expansiveness as he left the dingy streets of Detroit behind him and was carried westward past Ann Arbor, where the leafy spring landscape became gently rolling. It reminded him of the Irish Hills, where he and Big Al had gone a couple of times when they’d decided they were going to be golfers. It didn’t take them long to realize they should have stuck to bowling, though it had been satisfying just to be on the course with all those snooty types who obviously hated their guts.

  Passing through Jackson, though, he couldn’t keep from thinking about Big Al and J.J. doing time in the prison there. Ziggy’s friendship with them never survived that. “You have to remember,” his expensive attorney Edward P. Fitzgerald kept telling him, “your responsibility is to protect yourself and your family. You have to separate your trial from that of your associates. Believe me, they’d do the same thing if they were in your shoes.” In the end there was no doubt the lawyer was right: doing time in Jackson was nothing Ziggy missed. He was glad when they were past there, heading toward Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, all those places he’d learned about as a kid in Sister Gendura’s geography class; and he could visualize a line moving westward over the mitten shape of the lower peninsula toward Lake Michigan.

  He wasn’t alone, of course. Most of the trip he spent listening to a little bald guy in his fifties who sat beside him. He was on his way to Kalamazoo but he lived in Pittsburgh, and he spent the whole time talking about the factory where he worked making golf balls, which was soon going to shut down and move its operations to Virginia. He was the union secretary at the plant, so he felt pretty secure in the face of the coming layoffs and the relocation of the factory, or so he said. But he kept telling Ziggy he’d put in just over twenty-eight years with the company—you could see he knew that figure down to the day, and he was sweating that last year and some months before his pension started kicking in.

  Listening, Ziggy couldn’t help remembering his own time at Chrysler, when he was in his twenties. God, he’d gotten pretty desperate toward the end. He hated coming to work, haunted as he was by the sense that he was going nowhere, he was doomed to grow old in the factory and eventually turn into his own father, which was a truly frightening prospect. “You think you’re Mister Big Shot,” the old man would bellow at him, “but you’re not going to amount to shit.” If little Billy Pelz hadn’t shown up that day looking for Moose Kubek, who was sick, Ziggy would never have gotten into the numbers and there’s no knowing how things would have turned out.

  Whatever happened to him later, Ziggy never regretted having got himself out of that damned factory.

  The guy who made golf balls was trying to put the best face on his situation, but he didn’t really seem to believe in what he was saying. From what Ziggy could see, he might have had himself a bigger problem than getting laid off. “I got a bad bronchial,” he kept explaining whenever he had to stop talking because of his cough. It was probably the fumes from his work, he guessed. He hoped things would be better in Virginia, though the new plant there wasn’t going to be unionized. “My union’s going to be down there working day and night to unionize it,” he said, but he didn’t seem to feel they could do much. Even if they succeeded, he confessed, it would still take them years before they could achieve all the benefits they had in Pittsburgh. Ziggy wished him luck, but it didn’t take much imagination to see that story ending badly.

  You had to give the guy one thing, though: he was really interested in his work, describing for Ziggy in great detail how golf balls were made: they froze the center and then wrapped rubber thread around it—that was about all Ziggy remembered. That and the fact that some of the girls who made the golf balls were very nice. “I like to treat them like a gentleman,” the guy said. “You don’t find a lot of that these days.” It certainly sounded as if he had a crush on one of them. He wasn’t sure how many of them were going to Virginia, he admitted, shaking his head sadly.

  At last it’s time for Ziggy to re-board the bus. He’d eaten a hot dog earlier but he bought a candy bar for the trip. The walk had done him good. He even had a chance to use the rest room in the station, which was much preferable to the cramped one on the bus. Getting back on, he returns to the window seat he saved near the back and is getting pretty comfortable as the departure time approaches, thinking that the place beside him will be free on the next leg of his journey. A couple of minutes before the scheduled start, though, he hears a commotion in the front of the bus and soon a short, bespectacled man is making his way clumsily toward the back, burdened by a duffel bag slung over his shoulder that gives him the look of a hunchback with an unbalanced hump—and Ziggy just knows the stranger is going to sit beside him.

  “I’m sorry. Sorry. Excuse me,” the man keeps saying in a kind of whiny voice as he bangs against the seats, approaching ever closer.

  Ziggy’s still trying to remember how much free space there is behind him when the man pulls up beside his seat.

  “Do you mind?” he asks with a guilty smile.

  Ziggy shrugs. What can he say? It isn’t his bus.

  The newcomer fusses as he stuffs his bag under the seat and at last sits down beside Ziggy. He pushes back his horn-rimmed glasses, then runs his hand nervously through his hair. “Whew,” he sighs and settles into his seat, though he pops erect an instant later, his eyes ranging nervously around the bus. He fiddles with the leg rest and turns toward Ziggy with a look of vague appeal. “I’m Lennie Kurzweil,” he says with a tentative smile. His nostrils twitch. “Do you smell gas?” he asks with quiet alarm. “You think there might be a leak?”

  Ziggy shakes his head. The rest room isn’t far away and there are various other kinds of unpleasant smells all too likely to make themselves evident on a
long trip, but at the moment he doesn’t smell any gas. He closes his eyes, hoping the stranger might just be going a short distance.

  “Ever been to LA?” Lennie asks, and Ziggy opens his eyes.

  The man beside him is probably in his thirties, pale and fidgety. His gray windbreaker is zipped all the way to his neck and his restless insect-like eyes dart from one object to the next; his hands move abruptly to his face, then drop to his lap, he keeps shifting in his seat. Every now and then he checks, either with his feet or with a look, to assure himself his duffel bag is still there.

  This Lennie, Ziggy can see right away, is a talker. Without even waiting for Ziggy’s answer about LA, he informs him that he’s on his way there, where he’s going to try to make it as a stand-up comic. “After that, who knows, right?” And on he goes, recounting how he’d taken a bus from New York to Chicago, where he’d stayed with his sister Cynthia, who was married to the world’s shortest dentist. “I swear,” Lennie says, “when I got my first look at him I said to her, ‘Cynthia, he’d better have insurance. Aren’t you afraid he might drown in a root canal?’ But my sister would have done anything to get out of the house and there was no stopping her. Of course, if you knew our mother, you wouldn’t blame her . . .”

  His manic patter makes Ziggy appreciate the man who made golf balls. He might put you to sleep with his loving descriptions of how the dimpled white spheres were made; this guy talks at least twice as fast, in a high-pitched voice that keeps jumping to the edge of panic, and he’s likely to make sudden transitions without any warning.