Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  Ziggy’s thunderstruck, his heart is racing as he looks into the wide blue eyes of this young woman in a denim shirt embroidered with roses. He feels terror and rage at the same time. What does she know and why is she smiling like that?

  “Am I right?” she teases. Ziggy’s mouth moves but no words come out. “You see,” she says, “you seem to me like somebody who doesn’t really want to be on this trip, somebody who’d rather be at home. Cancers, or Moon-children as some people like to call them nowadays, they’re like the crab, everywhere they go, they travel with their shells.”

  At last he’s figured out that she’s talking about astrology! He must have misheard her. Jesus!

  “Now, me,” she goes on, “I’m a Sagittarius—that’s the archer. That’s a fiery sign. Females born under Sagittarius have strong personalities and we love our freedom, we’re always ready to explore and have new adventures.”

  Ziggy laughs, a grateful survivor. “Well,” he admits, “you guessed right about me. But it sounds like the archer got all the good qualities.”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “All the signs of the zodiac are important. Cancer men, for instance, you guys can be moody and changeable, but you’ll do anything to protect your home.” She gives him a big smile. “Women find that a pretty sexy combination.”

  I’m not so sure I did such a great job of protecting my home, he thinks, remembering those dismal days when he let what was left of the numbers slide. “You can really tell what sign a person was born under?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “Not always, of course. But if you study this stuff, you eventually get pretty good at it. See that cute cowboy that just came in a couple of minutes ago? The one with the sideburns? I’ve been watching him and if I had to guess I’d say he’s a Gemini like my old boyfriend Ricky back in Carolina.” She shakes her head and looks down at her turquoise bracelet. “Now, there was a guy, split right down the middle. He could be the smoothest talker you’d ever run into, and the thing is, he could convince himself of things he didn’t really believe. I could see right away that Ricky was fooling himself, he said he wanted us to live together, he was going to get a job.” Her eyes go distant. “His daddy had run out on the family,” she goes on, “and he wanted to show he could be a responsible guy. Shoot, I could tell from the beginning he was a wild boy, that was what I loved about him. But every now and then he’d have to start talking in this deep grown-up voice about responsibilities, and the two of us played house for a while. I’ll admit it was fun in a way for a time. But then I could see Ricky was starting to feel hemmed in. He couldn’t talk to me about it, he thought, so he got out of the situation the only way he knew how. He got drunk and went to a bar and misbehaved very openly with somebody he shouldn’t have, and we had one heck of a fight and that was enough for him, he could leave me and all that stuff I’d got tangled up with in his mind.” She’s quiet for a while. “In a way it was a relief when it was over,” she says, “but now and then I miss him.” She shakes her head and smiles. “Mm, that little man was something in the bedroom.”

  Ziggy looks away, flustered and amused at the same time. He imagines talking to Maggie about this back on Dubois Street, a cup of coffee in his hand, and it makes him feel better. Believe me, he’d tell her, I wasn’t prying or anything. She’d just tell that kind of stuff to anyone who’d listen.

  Sharlene wets her finger with her tongue and reaches down to the table for a tiny crumb of Moon Pie, which she deftly inserts into her mouth. Still savoring this last remnant of the sweet cake, she says, “I don’t miss him that much, though, no sir. Old Ricky, he’s history.”

  If Oklahoma was desolate, Texas is even more so to Ziggy. Flat stretches of bare, baking wasteland pass by the window, too hot for living creatures, and it seems as if, even on the bus, the energy has been sucked out of the passengers, including Lennie, who’s fallen into one of his rare silences. As for Ziggy, he can’t help going back to that time in the diner when he thought Sharlene told him he had cancer. The terror he’d felt at the moment was natural enough: Eddie Figlak went that way, after all, and so did Steve Koss, who was younger than either Ziggy or Eddie. What was more surprising was his instinctive sense that she was right, that she’d glimpsed something dire in him. Hadn’t she guessed his astrological sign? That was weird enough in itself.

  Somewhere near Amarillo, the bus driver makes an announcement. “I’d like you to keep your eyes open for something that’s coming up on the left side of the road in a mile or two. I won’t tell you what it is but I promise, you’ll find it interesting. I’m told that some people around here even call it one of the Seven Wonders of Potter County.”

  “What do you suppose it can be?” Lennie asks, suddenly roused. “The world’s biggest Stetson hat?”

  Ziggy leans toward the window, trying to get the first view of the promised sight. “We’re getting warmer now,” the driver says. At last Ziggy glimpses something, a dark, slant shape coming out of the earth. There are more, it’s immediately clear, and his first thought is that somebody in Texas has put up something that looks like a cross between Stonehenge and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But these aren’t stones, he soon realizes, it’s a line of cars stuck at an angle into the earth—Cadillacs, actually. The driver slows as the bus passes this apparition of about a dozen shiny Cadillacs planted nose-down, tailfins high, into the Texas earth. “Kind of shows that all the kooks aren’t in California,” the driver comments before resuming his normal speed.

  “Hey, crazy,” Lennie exclaims, craning his neck to get a last look. “I love it. That’s a pretty powerful statement, isn’t it? Sort of like Ozymandias, isn’t it? The tailfins of a vanished empire.”

  Ziggy nods though he doesn’t know what Lennie’s talking about. In his present state of mind there’s nothing about that clutch of buried Cadillacs that brings him any cheer. Whatever sour mood has overtaken him recently, he hasn’t been able to shake it off. But then, Cancers are moody, didn’t Sharlene say that? There are no more half-buried cars in the landscape he sees out his window; it’s just an unrelenting stretch of dry, dusty emptiness—even here on the bus, he can feel it in his throat. Why did he ever choose to leave the old neighborhood that, downtrodden as it might be, was at least still a place where people lived, went shopping for kielbasa or out for a drink, listened to a ball game? It wasn’t barren like this place he’s come to.

  Ziggy hasn’t been to church much lately except for an occasional Christmas or Easter mass, but just now he can’t help remembering the problems the old monsignor had just after the war with a priest from Poland who shook up the parishioners at St. Connie’s with his Polish sermons in which he seemed to confuse Detroit with the old country; so that his listeners couldn’t tell whether he was referring to Warsaw or the streets outside the church when he warned of fire falling from the sky, and miles and miles of emptiness and ruins where once-grand buildings had stood before God’s punishment fell upon the city. Monsignor Baran, who’d listened to complaints from frightened parishioners, handled the situation with his usual aplomb and had the priest quietly transferred to the Polish seminary at Orchard Lake; but Ziggy wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people who’d heard those sermons remembered them years later when the bad times came down on Detroit, causing large tracts of the city to fall into vacancy and disrepair, as if the prairie was bent on reclaiming the place for itself.

  “Those Cadillacs were something,” Lennie says, smiling to himself. “I guess Texas is about the last place I’d expect to see something like that, though.” He shakes his head. “Well, live and learn, I guess.”

  For Ziggy, though, those Caddies are long gone. Out here he feels that he’s in danger of being swallowed up by the landscape that’s no longer just flat. There are strange shapes on the horizon, the land is twisted into eerie formations that look as if they’d originally been intended to be something other than just rocks. This is stranger than the empty prairies of Texas. You can tell from the look of things that it’s
even dryer out there, and the plants are what you’d expect to find in the desert. The soil itself has changed color, as though they’ve wandered on to another planet. I’d hate to be lost out here, he thinks, imagining the baking heat, the dry earth scorching to the touch. What the nuns were talking about, maybe, hell without flames.

  “We’re stopping.” It’s Lennie, who gives him a gentle nudge.

  Blurrily, Ziggy orients himself, recognizing that he must have drifted off to sleep. “Where are we?” he asks, still trying to shake off the sense that he’s just come from someplace else.

  “God’s country,” Lennie says. “Tucumcari, New Mexico. It’s our dinner stop.”

  There’s the usual bustle among the passengers at the prospect of a bit of relief from the cramped quarters of the bus. “Look at that,” Sharlene says excitedly. “They’ve got pool tables.” She makes sure to bring the case with her pool stick when she leaves the bus.

  “Tucumcari, New Mexico,” Lennie reads the name aloud. “Can you believe that name? They might as well have called this town Timbuktu.”

  The place they’ve stopped at isn’t much to brag about, a low mustard-yellow stucco building housing a diner and bar, the sign outside spelling POOL in red neon. Inside, a couple of ceiling fans turn halfheartedly above a counter and a scattering of tables. A low archway leads to the bar next door, a windowless room where a couple of pool tables are visible. In the dim lighting in the bar section Ziggy can make out a crudely done mural on the far wall, undoubtedly the work of a local artist: a desert landscape of red rock with giant cacti in the foreground, an iguana looking on as a lone Mexican in a serape and sombrero rides by on a burro. The other end of the mural depicts an outsized rattlesnake coiled on a rock, ready to strike, and an eagle silhouetted against a dark blue sky.

  Sure enough, once she’s got a look, Sharlene heads straight for the pool tables. She extracts her pool cue from its case, screws together the two sections and begins knocking balls around with what seems—even from the table where Ziggy and Lennie are sitting—to be a lot of skill and confidence. As he munches his taco, though, Ziggy’s aware of the half dozen or so men at the bar watching her. Off by himself near the end of the bar is a short cowboy with a thin mustache who seems to be deliberately ignoring the newcomer. After a minute or so, he ambles to the jukebox, where he takes a long time making his selection. When he does at last he smiles to himself as if he’s accomplished something pretty special. From the looks of Sharlene, she approves of his choice, nodding her head to the music. When she catches the cowboy’s eye, he winks at her and she nods back. “Desperado,” the singer wails, and Sharlene seems to be humming the song to herself as she resumes her feats with the pool stick. Other men from the bar shout encouragement to her, but the little cowboy just smiles quietly to himself. Clearly, Sharlene is responding, laughing at something one of the onlookers has said, once even taking a bow after a shot. In the dim light the whole scene seems to be taking place under water.

  “Something’s going on over there,” Lennie says. He takes off his glasses momentarily and runs a hand through his hair. He needs a shave and now, with his glasses off, he looks older, like the man he’ll be in twenty years.

  Ziggy nods. “I think you’re right.”

  Lennie puts his glasses back on. “Good thing Roy isn’t still with us.”

  “Yeah.” Ziggy takes a sip of his beer. “Looks like Sharlene’s found someone she likes.” I’m tired, he thinks, I’m too old for all this stuff.

  In a few minutes the cowboy and Sharlene are playing a game of pool together, and there’s a lot of spirited byplay between them, all of which is accompanied by comments from the men at the bar. Apparently the cowboy has invested a number of quarters on the same song, since “Desperado” is playing again and now the cowboy is crooning along in a hammy way. Sharlene gives every sign of being appreciative.

  “Poor Roy,” Lennie says. “He’d have a hard time letting go.”

  By now, Ziggy thinks, Roy must have seen his son. One way or another, he’ll have found out whether his trip was worth it. “I don’t think old Roy is thinking about Sharlene just now,” he says. Meanwhile, the cowboy has persuaded Sharlene to lay down her stick and the two of them dance together while the men at the bar applaud.

  “Is it just me,” Lennie says, “or does that guy remind you of Wayne?”

  Ziggy nods. It’s Sharlene who’s doing the choosing this time, he can see, and even a whole box of Snickers bars wouldn’t be of much avail now.

  When dinner is finished, Ziggy and Lennie step outside into the dry heat of the New Mexico evening. Lennie pops a stick of gum into his mouth and sings, “I left my heart in Tucumcari.” “You know,” he goes on, “this trip is starting to get to me, I guess, because I have to admit I miss Amelie Lathrop. Think of all the information I could have gotten about the graves of our presidents that I’m going to have to learn by myself.”

  The bus is due to leave in a few minutes and some of the passengers have re-boarded already, but Sharlene isn’t anywhere to be seen. Finally, just as the last of the passengers are returning, she trots back to the bus and says something to the driver, then climbs aboard. Moments later, she’s standing beside the bus with her luggage. Recognizing what’s happening, Ziggy approaches her.

  “I decided I’m going to stay here a while,” she says. “It feels good to play a little pool again.” The cowboy, who’s never been introduced, has apparently decided to stay indoors and wait for her.

  Ziggy looks out over the desert landscape, where a round white moon is pasted in the sky over the darkening hills that form a wall on the horizon. He knows he has no chance of changing her mind: she’ll do what she wants to do. Still, he feels protective. He’s just going to have to believe she can take care of herself. “What can I say?” he tells her. “Have your adventure, Sagittarius. Don’t forget, though, to find your way to California.”

  She gives him a quick peck on the cheek. “I guess California’s still going to be there for a while. And who knows? We might be destined to meet again. So long for now, Moonchild.” Then she grabs his wrist, pulls him toward her and whispers, “I don’t know what it is that’s taking someone like you so far from home, but I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  The gloomy silence on the bus after the departure of Sharlene is broken by Lennie, who asks, “Ziggy, I never asked you: why are you going to California? Visiting relatives?”

  The bus is plunging down an incline into a valley, though valleys usually have rivers, and the closest they’ve come lately to anything that might be called a river has been when the highway has occasionally crossed a wide shallow, rivershaped gouge in the earth that somebody on the bus called a dry wash. He certainly was right about the dry part. “It’s complicated,” Ziggy says. “Sometimes I’m not so sure why I’m going there at all.”

  “Well,” Lennie says, “you’ve been very patient listening to my stories. Try me. I actually like complicated.”

  At first Ziggy isn’t so sure he wants to be talking about this to somebody he’s only known for a couple of days. It’s pretty personal stuff, after all. Then too, he knows that if he tries to put his feelings into words he’s going to have to be able to make his motives clear to himself, which might not be all that easy. But Lennie’s a decent guy, after all.

  “OK,” he says, “I used to be in the numbers business back in Detroit. This was a while back.” He pauses. “I wasn’t the top guy in our organization but I was pretty high up.”

  Lennie cocks his head, as if he’s trying to get a good look at Ziggy for the first time. “Wow,” he says. “you mean like in ‘The Godfather’?”

  Ziggy shakes his head. “No, no, there were no guns, no rough stuff. Sure, it was illegal, but it was just a bunch of Polacks playing numbers. Polacks running it, Polacks playing.” He adds quickly. “Actually, there was a fair amount of change involved. I’m talking about the war years, when Detroit was a three-shift town and everybody had money
but there wasn’t much to spend it on, and then after the war, times were flush.” After a moment, he adds, “I did pretty well for myself, pretty damn well.”

  Lennie nods appreciatively and Ziggy’s quiet for a while, basking in the memory of those times. Yeah, as unreal as it might seem out here in the middle of nowhere, all of it actually happened. But he’s supposed to be telling Lennie about why he’s going to California. “OK,” he says, “to make a long story short, our numbers house got busted in the fifties and some of my friends went to prison. I was lucky. But . . .” He shakes his head, recognizing that there’s no way he can explain what followed. “Nothing was the same after that. My life got scrambled, the numbers went all to hell and I pretty much lost everything.” He lights up a cigarette and inhales deeply. “Well, no crying over spilt milk. Those days were over long ago.”

  It’s a couple of seconds before Lennie says anything. “But . . .” he suggests. “I see a ‘but’ coming.”

  Ziggy nods, looking into the cloud of smoke he’s expelled. “Yeah.” He wants to put this as clearly as possible. “What happened after that raid, I take the blame for myself. I just kind of lost control of things, I started drinking, I let things slide.” Well, he thinks, it isn’t pretty but it’s true. “OK,” he says, “I know I’m never going to get any of that back.” That’s true too, and he accepts it, had to accept it quite a while ago. “That was a big change,” he says, “and, believe me, it wasn’t easy making the adjustment.” He thinks about that for a moment. “In the old days,” he goes on, “I was the guy in the neighborhood you went to if you wanted something fixed. The pastor would call me first if he wanted to put on a shindig and needed support or if the high school football team needed uniforms.” The monsignor was even hot for me to be head of the East Side Homeowners’ Association, he could tell Lennie, but the good father sure pulled back in a hurry after the raid.