Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  “That was the last straw for Linda,” he says. “Ohio had become just a place filled with relatives and gray skies, Ohio was history, and she headed for California, where she decided she was going to reinvent herself.”

  A very tall woman in a bikini and red baseball cap speeds past them on a skateboard and Ziggy wonders, is she someone from Ohio who’s reinventing herself? It’s doubtful that Ted sees the woman, though, he’s so caught up in Linda’s story.

  “Unfortunately,” he goes on, “in her first year she almost managed to kill herself with drugs and booze. She tried everything sexually—threesomes, lesbianism—but in the end she decided that it wasn’t who she was. Finally she found her own path and she’s at peace with herself. It’s not perfect, of course, but, she’s making her own decisions, she’s leading the life she wants to lead. You know, I couldn’t tell you how many jobs she’s had, and some of them were pretty strange. But she’s at a nursery now, working with plants, and she says it’s what she was born to do. I believe her.”

  Ziggy certainly hadn’t expected to learn this much about Ted’s girlfriend’s private life. In fact, there are certain things he’d just as soon not know. But Ted goes on talking about her. “She came into the bookstore one day looking for something on plants. She and I clicked from the beginning, I asked her out for coffee that same afternoon. That’s when she told me I had the soul of a poet. Boy, I needed someone exactly like her at exactly that time. You wouldn’t believe how low I was. Linda saw it right away. ‘Even when you make jokes, your eyes are so sad,’ she told me. “She saw right into me, Ziggy, she really did.”

  Ziggy nods obligingly. This guy could talk your ears off, though. But then, he used to be a priest, didn’t he? They’re trained to do that. By now the two of them have apparently come to the end of their walk and have turned homeward. Ted laughs, as if he’s suddenly come out of a spell. “Hey,” he says, “here I’ve been talking about myself all the time and I haven’t let you get a word in. I don’t even know why you’re here in California.”

  “Well, it’s private business,” Ziggy says. “But the kind of business where you might be able to help me.”

  Ted looks at him expectantly.

  “Remember Przybylski the undertaker?”

  Ted nods. “Sure.”

  “You know he left Detroit in the sixties and came out here.”

  “Yeah, I heard that.”

  “I was hoping to find him. I wanted to ask him something. You wouldn’t know where he is, would you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “I was figuring he wouldn’t be too hard to track down, being an undertaker and all.”

  “No,” Ted says, “I don’t know anything about him being out here. But LA’s a big place. We can look him up in the phone book.”

  “I already tried,” Ziggy says, and his heart sinks at the memory of his earlier failure.

  “Did you try the Yellow Pages?”

  “No—no, I didn’t.” Ziggy’s suddenly filled with hope. “I didn’t have the Yellow Pages where I was.”

  “Well, we can do that back home.”

  That puts a spring into Ziggy’s step on the return trip. Unfortunately, back at Ted’s place, the Yellow Pages yield no listing for Przybylski’s funeral home, which baffles Ziggy. It’s hardly likely Przybylski would have shifted to selling cars, is it? Or did he fail in LA and move on to someplace else? There’s something here I’m not getting, Ziggy thinks. Trying to keep back the sense of failure and futility, he takes a deep breath. Well, it’s time to give Przybylski a rest for a moment and take care of other essential business. “Can I use your phone to make a collect call home?” he asks, and Ted tells him to go ahead. “I have to water these plants anyway,” he says.

  As Ziggy makes the call he’s aware of the sound of water being poured on the plants, and the room is soon filled with the rich smell of wet earth. “Maggie,” he says when he hears his wife’s voice, as before momentarily unfamiliar. “I’m out here in California, in LA.”

  “Are you with Charlie and Gloria?”

  “No,” he says, getting used to her voice all over again, “that’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m going to be staying for a couple of days with Ted Krawek. You remember Father Teddy?”

  Maggie is silent for a few seconds. “What . . . ?” she begins, but stops there.

  “It’s a long story. He’s not a priest anymore,” he lowers his voice. “He’s got a girlfriend. I’ll tell you about it later.” The thought of all the adventures he’ll be able to tell her about at the kitchen table warms him; it almost makes up for his striking out on the Przybylski business.

  “I’m sure you have your reasons,” Maggie says, unconvinced. “Are you going to tell Charlie about this?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ziggy says. “I’m just going to be here a couple of days. I’ll get to Charlie’s eventually.”

  Maggie sighs. “He and Gloria are going to be upset that you’re not coming there right away.”

  He laughs. “Hey, Maggie, not that upset.”

  After a while she asks, “What’s it like out there?”

  He sighs, trying to summon up his first response to the Pacific. “I wish I could tell you. It’s different, though, that’s for sure.”

  She waits a few seconds in case he has more to say. Then she asks, “Have you found out anything about Przybylski?”

  “No,” he confesses, “no, I haven’t. Not yet.” Blessedly, Maggie doesn’t press him on this, doesn’t ask him whether this means his trip has been a total waste of time. In the silence Ziggy hears the water that’s moved down through the soil of the hanging plants splashing softly against the trays beneath the pots.

  “When are you planning to come back?” Maggie asks.

  “As soon as I can wrap this up, Maggie,” he says. Whatever that might mean. “As soon as I can. Oh, have I got a lot to tell you,” he adds, practically in a whisper. “Any news from around the neighborhood?” he asks.

  “No, nothing here. But remember Father Bruno, who used to be at St. Connie’s? He died of a heart attack yesterday.”

  The blow is sudden and surprising. Even when he was in the parish, he wasn’t one of the priests Ziggy had that much to do with. But now he’s gone, like that. Another one. And Ziggy sensed it too, the last time he was with the priest, didn’t he? He doesn’t press Maggie for details. Moreover, he decides on the spot he isn’t going to tell Ted, at least not right away.

  All at once the image of Father Bruno gives way to something else, the memory he had on the bus of his affair with Helen Nadolnik thirty years ago. Ziggy knows himself, he certainly knows that his younger self, caught up in all the confusion of that time, wasn’t likely to turn away from Helen—if it were to happen all over again that younger Ziggy would do the same thing. Still, his successor has some sense of the hurt those actions caused his wife.

  “Maggie,” he says quietly.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  He hears water dripping from Ted’s plants. “Thanks,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “Everything,” he says.

  “Are you OK?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” he answers. “Don’t worry. I’m OK.”

  Once the call is over, he forces himself to call Charlie right away and, to his relief, he gets the answering machine. He briefly gives his information, conveniently neglecting to include Ted’s phone number, and is relieved to have got that job done.

  After the call Ziggy goes outside and has a smoke on the sofa, having already been told that Linda doesn’t allow smoking in the house. He exhales into the mild afternoon air, and watches the spokes of a bicycle wheel glinting in the sun as the bike slowly crosses an arching bridge over one of the canals. Jesus, Bruno’s dead and I’m here in California sitting on a sofa on an ex-priest’s lawn. A powerful emotion grips him, though he couldn’t say whether it’s a pleasurable or painful feeling. Well, he tells himself, I’m here, I’ve come all the way across the country. That’s someth
ing, isn’t it? He doesn’t want to let himself think what follows naturally from that, that it’s something, whether or not he tracks down Przybylski. It’s true, though, isn’t it? He wouldn’t want to give up this trip. He couldn’t have invented what he’s seen so far. Like Ted, the former Father Teddy.

  “Do you know much about plants?” he asked Ziggy, and when Ziggy shook his head, he started talking about a kind of plant called a bromeliad, that didn’t have to have its roots in the ground. “They call them air plants,” he said. Ziggy was still wondering why he was getting this lecture on plants when Ted got to the punch line. “Linda thinks I’m too much of a bromeliad.”

  Of course, Linda. “And she isn’t, you’re saying, she isn’t one of . . . those?”

  He smiled then. “No, Linda’s very earthy.” Ziggy was grateful he didn’t follow up on that with a review of her sexual history.

  Ziggy’s had his glory days all right, and he’s had his days in the toilet. After he lost the numbers he could have cracked up the way so many people in the movies and TV do, buckling under the stress. And he almost did, by God, almost managed to bury himself with the booze, crying over spilt milk. How he managed he has no idea. Maggie certainly had a lot to do with it, though sometimes he’s had the uncomfortable thought he was only able to get through it all because he inherited something of his old man’s stubbornness. Whatever the reason, he didn’t crack up. The problem is, you pay a price, don’t you? He’s had to behave all these years, punch his clock, eat his lunch, take his lumps. There’s none of the old wildness and adventure that used to make his blood sing. One of the worst things about getting old, he thinks, is that things get boring. But here he is, isn’t he, in California, rooming with an ex-priest who waters his girlfriend’s plants with as much devotion as he might have given to saying the mass. Is Ziggy ever going to see this woman? Who says life can’t still be interesting? The taste of tobacco on his tongue carries the sharp tang of mystery.

  The next morning Ziggy’s alone in the tiny plant-filled house trying to catch hold of a dream that remains just out of his grasp. All he knows is that Father Bruno was in it: he was drinking ginger ale, he was laughing, then he was crying. Ziggy can’t remember any other details about the dream. His back is aching from the night’s furtive sleep on Ted’s lumpy sofa, and after a cup of warmed-over coffee he’s decided to go outside for a smoke. Just now things are peaceful and pleasant in front of the ex-priest’s house. Ziggy has no inclination to go to Charlie and Gloria’s, and if there were any way to skip that visit entirely and just return to Detroit, he’d do it. There’s no real way he can pull it off, though, now that he’s out here. He’ll have to spend at least a couple of days there. The problem is, when he’d accepted that possibility back in Detroit he still thought his main business out here was going to be with Przybylski, so it had been easy enough to imagine his stay in Burbank would be bearable—Charlie’s would just be a base of operations. But now it’s likely he’ll have nothing to distract him there and the prospect of long, boring days weighs on him, even though he’s sure Charlie has better sleeping accommodations than what he’d had last night. Everything’s been made worse by his failure to find Przybylski.

  Well, there’s nothing he can do about Przybylski just now, is there? For the moment he’s going to be content to sit here on the sofa and watch the southern California world go by. He knows from what Ted told him that the fiery red plant is a bottlebrush, the one that looks like a bird is naturally called bird of paradise. The purple stuff on the roof across the street is something he’s already forgotten. On their walk yesterday, Ted pointed out lemon and pepper trees as well as mock orange. “It’s got the greatest smell,” he said. It’s certainly true that the colorful vegetation that surrounds these little houses of Venice gives them a bit more glamour. Ziggy closes his eyes to take in the smells around him and in the distance he hears a sound. Is it a roller-skater? Is it a skateboarder ? The inside of a seashell? It’s so faint you can hardly hear it.

  He’s lying on a sofa somewhere, but outside, on a stranger’s lawn in a place he’s never seen before, looking at strange plants. No, it’s Ted’s, Father Teddy’s, in California. But how does he know this? His heart pounds with terror. On the thin grass at his feet is his cigarette, still burning. So he can’t have been out that long—what, a couple of seconds? That makes him feel better, but he still can’t understand what just happened to him. It’s like that time in the john in Oklahoma. He remembers how that scared him. Now he has to force himself to breathe slowly to stem the rushing panic. Jesus, not out here, please. After a second he reaches down and picks up his cigarette. Even though he can taste the grass as he takes a puff, it calms him. He decided after that first episode that it might be dehydration. That could be the explanation of what just happened to him now as well. He’s certainly been on an irregular schedule, anything could have caused a brief—what? He didn’t faint, after all, just blacked out for a second or two, though even that way of putting it is too strong. He takes another puff on the cigarette. Then he realizes that Ted’s phone is ringing.

  When he picks up the receiver at last, he hears the enthusiasm in the ex-priest’s voice once more. “I’ve got the greatest news,” he announces. “Linda showed up this morning at the store and we resolved all our differences.”

  “Great,” Ziggy says, catching his breath, anything but happy about this news. This Linda, whom he’s never seen, this woman who’s forbidden smoking in Ted’s place, this person who saved Ted’s life and then compared him to a plant—Ziggy can only see her as an intruder who’s going to put him out on the street, or at Charlie’s, which would be just as bad.

  “You sound out of breath,” Ted says.

  “I was outside when the phone rang. I had to hustle in.”

  “Oh, sorry,” the other man says, like someone who has an excess of generous feelings to distribute. “By the way,” he adds, “don’t worry. Linda says it’s OK for you to crash at my place for another day or so. She’s staying with a friend who really needs her help and she may have to stay there a while longer.”

  Ziggy’s relieved and for a few seconds he just stands there holding the phone, assimilating this new information, his breath steadying. “I’m glad you two got over your problems,” he says. Actually, he welcomes the distraction from his own concern about what just happened to him.

  “Oh, Linda’s a fire sign and needs her space, that’s all,” Ted informs him. “The thing is, she really wants to meet you so I asked her to come to dinner tonight. You’re going to love her, I guarantee.”

  So he’s going to have a chance to see this wonder woman with his own eyes. Not that he’d have any say in the matter. “I’m looking forward to meeting her,” he says, at least halfmeaning it. His spirits have actually lifted in the last minute or so. He just nodded off there on the lawn, something that could have happened to anyone. After all, how much sleep did he manage to get last night on that beat-up old sofa?

  When Ted shows up in a couple of hours he’s carrying a couple of shopping bags. “What did you do all day?” he asks.

  “I went back to the beach,” Ziggy tells him. This time he found he was a little more used to all the space and sunlight, the bright colors. The cheap sunglasses he bought helped. “Mostly, though,” he says, “I just took it easy and rested around the house. It sure beats sitting on a bus.”

  “I should have let you drive me to work so you could have used the car and had a look around,” Ted says. “I’ll have to do that tomorrow.” He’s busily unpacking the bags as he talks. “I’m going to fix some of my killer lasagna,” he announces, and begins to bustle about the kitchen readying the place for Linda’s arrival, boiling water and shredding cheese, chopping vegetables and opening cans of tomato sauce. A priest who does his own cooking, Ziggy thinks. He’s going to have to tell that to Maggie. He wonders if Ted misses old Mrs. Rowinska, who did all the cooking for the priests at St. Conrad’s.

  “Need any help?” Ziggy off
ers, not really having much to offer.

  “Only moral support,” Ted says. Before long the tiny house is filled with the smell of food.

  “You sure it’s OK if I stay here?” Ziggy asks after a while.

  Ted looks up from chopping onions, his eyes glistening. “Like I said, Linda’s really eager to meet you. I told her about your problems with Przybylski and she said she wants to help.”

  That gets Ziggy’s attention. “How can she help?” he asks.

  “Oh, she’s quite a woman,” Ted says. “I told you she worked at a lot of different jobs. One of them was with a private detective. She knows a thing or two about finding people.”

  “Nice,” Ziggy says, more impressed by Ted’s ardor than his girlfriend’s resume. He is getting more interested in meeting this woman, though. All at once he remembers Father Bruno. He really ought to tell Ted about that, but this is hardly the moment. He’s not going to be the one who puts the damper on the ex-priest’s big night.

  Soon enough there’s a knock, and a blonde in a short skirt and orange tights walks through the door. Ted darts across the room like a torpedo and, after a protracted clinch, he releases her and leads her toward Ziggy. “Linda, this is Ziggy Czarnecki,” he says. “Ziggy, Linda Laing.”

  Ziggy nods but before he can finish saying that he’s pleased to meet her, Linda is hugging him amid a jangle of silver jewelry and the smell of some sweet, dry, earthy scent. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she gushes. “It’s so good for Ted to have someone from his old life visit him.”