Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  He’s started to drift, though, and he pulls himself back. “There was this other guy,” he says, “an undertaker named Przybylski. He had the bucks too and he used to love it when the monsignor came to him buttering him up before hitting him for a contribution. But Przybylski never liked the numbers. Even though everyone in the parish played—even some of the priests—this undertaker always acted as if he thought he was above that kind of thing.” Ziggy wrinkles his nose, remembering. “He had a big smooth face with a tiny mouth and he was the kind of guy, you could believe, who went to bed every night in freshly ironed pajamas. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t drink. I never liked the way he used to sit there at the bar with his glass of Vernors ginger ale and kind of smile to himself.”

  “I can see how someone like that could get under your skin,” Lennie offers.

  “You said it,” Ziggy says. “There was this other thing: Przybylski inherited his funeral home from his father. He never really had to work for anything like the rest of us. He’d just sit there quietly, watching and waiting. He knew that sooner or later we’d wind up with him.”

  “And how is this guy connected to this trip?” Lennie asks after a while.

  Ziggy takes a brief drag on his cigarette. For a moment he’s back in Detroit on the night of Eddie Figlak’s wake, his old friend’s corpse suddenly popping up in the casket, the place going crazy with people stampeding to get away from what they didn’t want to believe they were seeing; then there was all the stuff that happened later at Connie’s. He exhales the smoke. “I found out recently,” he says, “that Przybylski might have had a hand in tipping off the cops who made the raid that finished the numbers.”

  “Yeah?” Lennie nods expectantly.

  “Przybylski left Detroit a while ago for California.” He thinks a moment about what he’s going to say. “I’m going out there so I can find out from him if that’s true or not.”

  “Wow,” Lennie says again. “What are you going to do to him?”

  Ziggy shakes his head. “I just want to hear from his own lips what happened. That’ll be enough for me. Then I’m going back.”

  Lennie’s silent for a while. Then he says, “That’s impressive. You’re on a real quest.”

  Ziggy laughs. “If you say so.”

  After a moment, Lennie asks, “What do you think he’s going to say, after all these years?”

  Ziggy shakes his head. “I don’t really know.”

  “You must have imagined it, though. Right?”

  “Yeah,” he nods. “I have. But lately, I don’t know, the whole thing seems kind of unreal.”

  Lennie nods, keeping his thoughts to himself. Then he asks, “You’re sure he’s still alive?”

  Ziggy snorts. “He’d better be, or else I’m wasting a lot of time.”

  Lennie shakes his head. “That’s some story,” he says. “I wish I could be there to see that confrontation.”

  “You might be disappointed. This isn’t a movie.”

  Their driver for the last leg of the trip is an unsmiling stubby crew-cut guy who has little taste for informing his passengers about the sights they’re seeing. He barrels down the scorching highways as if he’s being chased by the police, and the way he’s moving, they wouldn’t be likely to catch him. And still, after climbing one hill and dropping down another, Ziggy could convince himself they’re exactly where they were an hour ago.

  As the bus continues its westward movement he runs his finger across the worn timetable: Albuquerque and Gallup in New Mexico; Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff, Glendale and Phoenix in Arizona; Blythe, Indio and San Bernadino in California, all stand between him and LA, almost another full day to go. It’s hard to believe that even though he’s already traveled across the whole breadth of Michigan, down through the storm-battered Illinois prairie and the green Ozarks of Missouri, all the way into hot, dusty Oklahoma and Texas with its cowboy hats and buried Cadillacs, and been in the sand-colored state of New Mexico for a while now, he still has almost a thousand miles ahead of him. It makes him wonder if he’s actually going to get to California. Years have passed, for sure, since he last walked on Dubois Street.

  For his part, Lennie’s gone quiet once again, curled over in his seat like a man studying a prayer book. Occasionally he makes a comment on the scenery. “Look at that,” he says at one point, “that’s got to be actual tumbleweed, just like in the movies. Did you ever see Them? It’s a great sci-fi flick about giant ants in the desert, and there’s a scene in a sandstorm near the beginning where the wind is howling and dark patches of tumbleweed are being blown through the swirling dust. It’s all so creepy and ominous—you just know something horrible has happened out there.”

  Ziggy hasn’t seen the movie but he watches the wind-driven tumbleweed plants bouncing seemingly weightless across the desert floor. How far, he wonders, will one of them go before it stops? This is a strange country indeed.

  “We could be on the dark side of the moon,” Lennie says later. “Think of how hard it has to be for any creature to survive in that kind of unforgiving environment.” He looks toward the distant horizon. “What’s amazing,” he says, “is that, even though it’s so dry out there, we’re actually traveling across the bottom of what used to be an ocean. Imagine: scientists who search through these rocks are likely to find not just fossils of dinosaurs but traces of giant clams and icthyosaurs as well as whales, and my personal favorite from childhood, the megalodon or giant shark.”

  So that’s where we are, Ziggy thinks, traveling along the bottom of a dusty sea on the dark side of the moon. He can believe it. Gigantic whales and dinosaurs once lived here, leaving their outsized skeletons in the layers of sediment that make up these huge, twisted and silent rock shapes. Possibly the giant shark prowled this very highway: the tiny creatures aboard this bus would just be appetizers. When Ziggy’d paid for his ticket in Detroit he never imagined he’d be traveling through any place like this, where in the blowing sand an isolated cactus could be an ancient Indian spirit intently watching the passing bus from the depths of the desert. The image chills him. He realizes that an old depression has found him out again and he feels lost among these alien shapes and eerie vistas. He may have told Lennie that he’s going to California in order to ask Przybylski a question, but out here in these vast desert expanses it sure doesn’t feel like he’s the one who’s making choices; he could easily believe he’s being pulled westward by some unseen force. What that force could be isn’t something he wants to think about.

  “We’re going to be very close to Death Valley pretty soon,” Lennie says. “Some of the hottest, driest and lowest spots on the planet are there.”

  Ziggy nods. Death Valley. Sounds about right for the way he feels just now.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Joshua trees, that’s what Lennie said they were, those weird shapes out in the desert trailing long black shadows in the morning light. With their branches raised toward the sky they look like damned souls in Hell begging God for water. Ghost trees, they should call them. They certainly aren’t anything like the elms of Ziggy’s childhood or the big chestnuts that line Dubois Street, comfortable city trees that provide welcome shade in the summer and rustle excitingly just before a storm. God, he’s come a long way from home. This is the last leg of his trip and as far as he’s concerned, it can’t be over too soon.

  Lennie’s quiet too—is he remembering Brooklyn? The bus is fairly empty for this final stage of the ride. As far as Ziggy knows, he and Lennie are the only two passengers who’ve been aboard since Chicago. Though others have joined the company along the way, there doesn’t seem to be the old camaraderie among the remaining travelers. Maybe it’s the place they’re passing through, but just now the others onboard seem to be locked into themselves, like a busload of fugitives intent on staying unrecognized. Or maybe they’re all thanking their lucky stars they’re inside this bus, where the air-conditioning is at least pumping away at half-speed, and not out there in the desert, where before th
e day is over the temperature will reach well over a hundred degrees. Even the driver, the same no-nonsense guy who took the wheel a couple of states back, seems to be in a desperate hurry to get out of here, and the bleak landscape flies by in a blur, making it seem all the more unreal.

  Still, Ziggy reminds himself, it’s really happening, I’m already in California, though the desert towns he’s glimpsed through the window are hardly what people think about when they hear that word. These desolate settlements look like the places where the pioneers gave up hope and just stopped—little more than speed bumps consisting of a shabby gas station that doubles as a general store set among a handful of other low flat buildings on grassless plots, a couple of trailers, maybe a dog lying under a pickup truck, and nothing but desert as far as the eye can see. No wonder they’re always reporting UFO sightings from places like this. What was that movie Lennie mentioned that had a dust storm in the desert? He can imagine something like that here.

  At least the towns provide some contrast. Once they’re beyond the settlements, the same bleak landscape continues to roll by his window hypnotically until he drops into a half-sleep, only realizing he’s drifted off when he comes suddenly awake. Because of the unchanging scenery it’s impossible to tell how long he’d left consciousness behind, but enough of its traces linger to identify where he’d gone to: he was back in Detroit on V-J Day, when the war ended.

  It’s no surprise his memory carried him back to that particular day, which was one of the memorable moments in the city’s history. He’d been downtown with the crowds who pushed through Campus Martius in front of City Hall as capless soldiers and sailors climbed atop streetcars that were no longer moving, stopped by the throngs that had poured into the center of the city, driven there by the pent-up need to celebrate. Old men waved bottles of beer, teenagers were shouting, everybody was happy. Drunks got warm greetings from people who were sober, thousands were screaming, singing and dancing while sirens and whistles blew, even a trumpet and a sax joining in. Kids shinned up lampposts and total strangers kissed each other—Ziggy saw a nun hugged by a trio of soldiers. Flags were waving everywhere, black people shook hands with whites in the same place where two years earlier they’d chased each other with baseball bats. Arms were moving like trees in a storm, they rose and fell in swimming motions. Horns blew, horns were stuck, all the prewar Fords and Chevys were stopped in their tracks, unable to move, but the drivers were smiling. Here and there someone was openly crying with joy.

  That was a great time for the city, all right, but as he re-experienced it moments ago, he doesn’t remember feeling all that happy, he’d been watching apart from it all. Yes, there was something holding him back, wasn’t there? It doesn’t take him long to grasp the underside of that memory: of course, the war ended only a few days after he’d broken off his affair with Helen Nadolnik, and as those celebrating crowds pushed against him he was still caught up in a tangle of feelings about her. Jesus, Helen!

  Even now it’s hard to believe he did some of the things he did back then, but he’d been a desperate man. Vince’s death tore a huge hole in the neat map he’d constructed in his head, and only Helen seemed to realize how much his friend’s abrupt removal from the world had shaken him, the sudden questions it raised about life and what we were all doing here. Hadn’t he seen the mark on her hand where she told him she’d put the burning cigarette just to prove to herself she was actually alive, hadn’t he touched it, kissed it?

  And yet in the end none of those questions got answered in their secret meetings, though in the fierce combat of sex it often seemed as if the answers were almost within reach. When Ziggy could no longer deny that, for all the passion and excitement, the two of them were no closer to solving the mysteries opened up by Vince’s death, he realized what he was risking in this pursuit of unanswerable questions; and there came a day during the week the war ended when he was in Helen’s apartment above Mrs. Kubek’s, listening to the ticking of the brass clock on the wall, looking down at the familiar brown rug as if he’d lost something there, and he was saying, “It has to stop. It can’t go on.”

  Helen drew on her cigarette and exhaled. “I always knew it was going to end this way, Ziggy” she said. She’d got up and he stood too, both of them on that small rug like castaways on a desert island.

  “But it’s not ending,” he said. “We’re still going to be friends.” It sounded hollow, even to him.

  “How can you say that, Ziggy, after what we had?” He’d never seen her look so angry.

  He stood there, a few feet away from her, in his tan summer suit, a straw hat moving slowly in his hands like the steering wheel of a car being put through the most careful of turns. He’d prepared himself for how tough this was going to be, but he hadn’t been prepared for the way time seemed to have stopped: they stood there for eternities saying nothing more, the clock ticking, the war on its way to ending, she in her pink flower print dress with the big shoulders, her hands clasped before her so that the knuckles were sharp and pointed, the thin white curtains behind her scarcely moving in the summer breeze, the strains of “Sentimental Journey” coming softly from the large brown console radio.

  Then Helen’s nostrils flared as if she’d smelled ammonia. “All right,” she said. Nothing was moving. How white her face was, he was thinking. She stood there in her pink dress, still as a corpse, saxophones crooned, the curtains hung like smoke. He had a sudden thought of Niagara Falls, tons of white water falling with the force of stone, the shuddering roar, the mist. One afternoon in a bed in the Jewish hotel in Mt. Clemens he’d actually promised to take her there. “You won’t believe it,” he said, remembering how he’d felt the first time he’d seen them. Now, standing on the brown carpet, he was thinking, Jesus Christ, what am I doing? And at the same time, Hold on, in five minutes it will be over, you’ll be walking down the steps, this thing you thought you could never do will be over.

  And it was. Though a couple of days later, among the crowds celebrating the end of the war, he found himself thinking that if he and Helen were there, they could kiss openly and everyone around would smile at them. It took a while for it to be over, really. In the end he knew it was the right thing to break it off with her, but his mother would have said that God never forgets. She’d also say that though he’d survived that business, Ziggy still has a lot to answer for.

  He’s still caught up in this reverie when it occurs to him that there’s been some subtle change in the sounds around him and he realizes that the bus is in the midst of a long climb, its gears whining with the effort of the ascent. The land keeps rising continually until it seems as if they’re pulling themselves upward out of a bottomless hole, and Ziggy’s just about accepted that they’ll keep climbing forever, when suddenly the sound changes again and he knows they’ve reached the top of something. In a moment he feels a weight lifting as the bus begins its downward plunge: the desert is behind them at last, he realizes, they’re on their way to the coast, and he feels a sudden irrational joy, as if he’s just found twenty dollars in his pocket. When they come to a settlement now the houses are more thickly clustered and there are all sorts of plants growing around them, a whole different set of colors: brilliant reds, fiery yellows, rich greens and purples. What’s more, there even seems to be a bit of a mist in the air. Can there really be humidity on this side of the mountains?

  Lennie is at his side now, leaning toward the window. “Hey, we made it, pardner,” he says, caught up in the excitement of the change. “Think of those pioneers plodding along with their covered wagons through hundreds of miles of prairies, hoping the cloud of dust on the horizon means buffalos and not Indians. Then they have to navigate that long stretch of desert we were in where the only road sign they’d see would be a bleached skull along the side of the trail. And after surviving all that, what do they get for their troubles? Another long slope to climb. Hell, at that point a lot of them must have been ready to just give up; but then, coming down the last mountain like
this, they must have thought they’d suddenly landed in Hawaii. You almost expect grass skirts and hula dancers. Look at all the colors, all the stuff growing. It’s enough to get a dead man’s pulse racing.”

  Ziggy doesn’t say anything. If he were to try to describe what he’s feeling now he’d have to start by saying he’s just been stabbed by a surprising jolt of fear. But what is there to be afraid of? This place is a hell of a lot more attractive than what they’ve left behind, isn’t it? With each mile there’s more evidence that they’re entering a more populated area. Ziggy pays silent attention to the successive towns with their stucco houses and tile roofs, and before long the driver is announcing the last stop on their journey.

  In downtown LA, Ziggy and Lennie, their bags in their hands, stand in the terminal among the dispersing passengers. “Are you sure there aren’t any more stops?” Lennie says. “I expect to hear some announcement that I have five more minutes to board the bus.”

  Ziggy nods, looking warily at this alien place to which he’s come. “Hey,” he suggests, “how about a cup of coffee before . . . ?”

  “Sure,” Lennie says, apparently no more eager than Ziggy to move to the next step. It’s early afternoon and the city buzzes noisily outside the coffee shop. For all the distance Ziggy’s covered, the bus trip seems like a period out of time. Now that the traveling is over, things seem to have speeded up alarmingly and he wants to slow them down.

  In the coffee shop, though, neither man has much to say. “Well,” Lennie declares abstractly, “here we are in LA after all, aren’t we?”

  “It sure isn’t very glamorous around here,” Ziggy observes, depressed by the shabby surroundings.

  Lennie nods. “I’ve got to get up to West Hollywood, to a place called the Tropicana Motel. I sure hope it’s better than this.” At the moment, Lennie doesn’t look very confident about his future as a stand-up comic.

  They fall into a silence and Ziggy has to fish for some way to keep the conversation going. “So how are you going to be practicing your comedy while you’re doing other jobs?” he asks.