Plan B: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  “That guy” Don told us when we greeted him on the porch, “got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t watching.”

  “He definitely has severe delusions of adequacy.” I agreed as we stepped inside.

  “It’s such a cliché,” Chuck said. “The small-town deputy with a room temperature IQ Like that deputy on BJ and the Bear.”

  “Perkins,” Don said, impressing me. “He worked for Sheriff Lobo.”

  “Have you met the sheriff?” I asked.

  “He’s a fictional character.”

  I grinned. “I mean Sullivan.”

  “Sure. We actually spent the morning together, canvassing all the motels and inns in the area.”

  “No luck, I take it.”

  “None. The truth is, he could be anywhere.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Chuck asked.

  Don took a deep breath. “I have no way of knowing,” he said. “But for a guy as famous as Jack Shaw to not be spotted for three days . . . It doesn’t look good.”

  Chuck motioned to Don to be quiet as Alison and Lindsey joined us in the living room, but Alison said, “It’s okay. He isn’t saying anything we aren’t all thinking.”

  “I’m sorry,” Don said. “I wish there was more I could do.”

  “That’s how we all feel.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, if he were my friend, I would have done the same thing you all did.”

  “We all allegedly did,” Chuck reminded him.

  “Right.” Don smiled. At some point the night before he had become our ally, and while I didn’t quite see how or why it happened, I was suddenly grateful for his reassuring presence.

  “So,” Lindsey said. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” Chuck said.

  “Are you going to be sticking around?” Alison asked Don.

  “I’m not sure,” Don said to her, and I thought he might have been blushing ever so slightly. “I’d like to stay a little while, see if anything happens.” It occurred to me that Don had a crush on Alison.

  “Well,” I said, “tonight’s Halloween and we need to throw a little party.” They all looked at me with puzzled expressions. “I kind of told Jeremy that he could hang with us tonight, you know? His mom’s not letting him trick-or-treat.”

  “I guess we might as well do something,” Alison said.

  “We don’t have to do much,” I said. “We can just have some dinner and watch whatever Halloween movies are on TV.”

  We were interrupted by a knock on the door. I opened it to find Deputy Dan standing there. I thought about Chuck’s BJ and the Bear reference and smiled. “Yes?” I said.

  “There’s a guy down there who said you want to see him. Wants me to let him come up to the house.”

  I looked over his shoulder and saw Paul Seward pacing by the police barricades that protected the Schollings’s property. The crowd behind him had swelled, and all of the cameras were on Seward as the reporters surrounded him, assaulting him with questions. “Um, guys,” I said.

  They all came over to see. “I was wondering when he’d turn up,” Chuck said bitterly.

  “Do we want to see him?” I asked. I could tell by Deputy Dan’s expression that he did not relish the idea of returning to Seward with a negative response. “He really wants to talk to you,” the deputy encouraged. “Said he wasn’t leaving until he did.”

  “We’ll think about it,” Alison said, abruptly shutting the door on the hapless deputy. “That prick left me waiting in the lobby for over an hour when he sneaked Jack out back in New York. Let him hang out for a while.”

  “Why do we need to see him at all?” Lindsey asked.

  “Maybe he’s heard from Jack,” Chuck surmised.

  “If he knew anything, why would he come to you?” Don said. “He knows less than you do.”

  “How scary is that?” Alison said.

  “What?”

  “That someone knows less than we do.”

  One of the earliest memories I have of my father is of him urinating. Not so much the sight of it, because his back was to me, but the surprising force of the sound of his urine hitting the water in the toilet, a powerful bass so much stronger and deeper than the sound of my own urinating, which was more of a high-pitched tinkle. I was probably around four years old or so, and I can no longer recall the circumstances that led to my being present while my father evacuated his bladder. Maybe he’d been giving me a bath, and didn’t want to leave me alone in the tub while he went to a different toilet. Maybe we were together somewhere in a public restroom, I don’t know. All of the details, save for the sound of his stream and the image of his posture, slightly stooped with one arm disappearing around his hips to his groin area and the other holding onto the slack of his belt, have been wiped clean from my memory. But it was the sound alone that truly struck me. What must it be like, I wondered, to unleash so much power through so flimsy an attachment? As I grew, I always associated the sound of a powerful urine stream with manhood, taking pride in mine when it resonated deeply, and suffering momentary insecurities when it seemed feeble or unsteady.

  I didn’t know why I found myself thinking about that as I taped a cardboard, glow-in-the dark skeleton to the Schollings’s front door. I decided it was probably because I was thinking about Jeremy, and the loss he had just sustained. To lose your father at that age, when he’s still such a powerful presence in your life, constantly shaping your perceptions both intentionally and accidentally with every seemingly insignificant word or gesture, was a loss I would never comprehend. If my father died tomorrow, I would lose the man who had been responsible in many ways for the man I was, but Jeremy had lost his father while he was still a work in progress. Who knew what impressions had already been formed, and how much more would now have to come from a host of external sources. Thinking in those terms, I could only imagine the confusion and uncertainty that would follow him for years.

  In a way, I thought as I secured the left leg of the skeleton and started on the right, it explained why he’d reached out to me so quickly, the first adult male he’d encountered after his father’s death. And my strong, almost paternal response to him may have been due to the unconscious faith implicit in his attachment to me, that I was a fully formed adult who could be looked to for guidance, to fill the void. Maybe it was through his eyes that I was finally beginning to see myself as an adult, someone who was no longer being shaped by another, but was now a whole person capable of forging someone else’s perceptions of the world.

  There was something both comforting and frightening in that thought. As a child, I heard my father urinate and the boy I was had his first dim notion of manhood, of a strength and sturdiness borne of experience, instantly forgotten but stored securely in my psyche. I wanted to tell Jeremy that he had forgotten memories of his father like that in him, memories that would continually emerge as he grew up, reaffirming the living bond he had with his father. If I could make him understand that, I thought it would offer him some comfort, and he would be justified in having looked to me for guidance.

  I stood back to review my handiwork and then leaned in to bend the grinning skeleton’s posable knees into a more realistic stance against the door. I checked the crowd, looking for Seward, but he’d apparently grown tired of waiting and, I hope, freezing his nuts off. Satisfied, I gathered up my tape and went inside to see if Lindsey wanted to go with me to get a pumpkin. I was feeling a sense of well-being and contentment that I’d been missing for so long that it felt almost alien to me. My new, young friend and my rekindled relationship with Lindsey now seemed to me as parts of a greater whole. After turning thirty I’d been ruminating on all of the things I could no longer be for myself, but now I’d discovered that there were new things that I could be for other people, and it felt good. For the first time in my life I thought of myself not as an impostor but as a complete person, a true adult, and to my great surprise, I didn’t mind. I kind of liked it, actually.

  “
Wow,” Lindsey said when I shared those thoughts with her. We were driving the Taurus down 57 to where I remembered seeing the pumpkin stand. “It sounds like you had a real epiphany.”

  “Maybe,” I said, checking my rear view mirror. As far as I could tell, the press had not opted to follow us this time. “It’s weird. I haven’t felt this good since I don’t know when. I actually feel a bit guilty about it. Jack’s missing, and here I am . . . happy.”

  “Here we are,” Lindsey said. “Don’t forget about me. It’s like, Jack got lost but we found ourselves, and each other.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “You just did.”

  “Why did you agree to this intervention?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Aside from the obvious. Everyone’s given an ulterior motive except you.” I said.

  She chewed her lip thoughtfully for a minute. “I don’t know,” she said. “I know you and Chuck and Alison really wanted to help Jack. I didn’t know if it would do any good or not, I’ve never really been as close with him as you. Like I said, I wanted to help Alison even more than Jack, she was so torn up about the whole thing. But more than that, and this is going to sound selfish, I guess I wanted to help myself, too. Nothing was really happening for me, and I couldn’t seem to get my life out of neutral. Being with you guys . . . I thought it would remind me of who I was, you know? Because I always felt so secure in who I was when we all hung out. And I guess knowing that you would be there . . .” Her voice drifted off thoughtfully and she looked at me, wincing gently at her own honesty.

  “It was the same for me,” I said, feeling both guilty and relieved. “I think maybe we all needed to shake things up a little. Jack had the major addiction, the one we could all hang our hats on, but we all had our own minor addictions bringing us down.”

  “Like what?”

  “Where should I start? Alison has her Jack addiction, I’m stuck on the past, you’ve been unable to settle down . . .”

  “Right,” Lindsey said. “What about Chuck?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t pinpoint it exactly, but he’s got his own issues.”

  “He’s addicted to minors,” Lindsey said, groaning at her own pun.

  “Whatever. The point is, I think we all came up here looking to kick some habits.”

  “Does that make us selfish?” Lindsey asked.

  “Maybe, a little. But I don’t think a little selfishness is necessarily unhealthy. It’s just possible that—”

  “Stop!”

  “What? I’m just saying—”

  “No. Really, stop.” She pointed out her window and I saw that we were about to pass the pumpkin stand. I braked and pulled into the parking lot, the gravel crunching and popping like gunfire under the Taurus’s tires. “So,” she said, after I’d turned off the engine. “It was an intervention for all of us.”

  “Hey,” I said. “The Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man weren’t just helping Dorothy for the hell of it. They all had their own reasons for wanting to see the Wizard.”

  “I still feel a little guilty,” Lindsey said, blowing her hair out of her face as we stepped out of the car.

  “So do I,” I admitted.

  “But I also feel good about us, and about myself.”

  “So do I.”

  “We finally feel good and we have to feel guilty about it.”

  “That’s life,” I said. “If irony’s your bag, there’s never a dull moment.”

  She smiled, took my hand, and we walked over to look at the pumpkins.

  Dusk was falling when we returned to the Scholling house. Even before we rounded the last curve we began to see scattered cars parked haphazardly along the shoulder of the road. “Uh oh,” Lindsey muttered. The crowd in front of the house had grown significantly, probably since school was out for the day. There must have been over a hundred kids jammed into the small grass clearing on the shoulder of the road, many now in Halloween costumes. The theme, I noticed, was Blue Angel, with boys in leather jackets and the wraparound shades Jack wore in the movie, the girls in sad clown faces, in tribute to the villain of the film. Somewhere, a boombox was blaring Stone Temple Pilots. A number of kids in rubber horror masks were leaning against the police barricades and posing for the cameras with a long sign that said “Come Party With Us Jack.”

  “It appears our secret hideout has become Carmelina’s newest hot spot,” I said.

  “You think?” Lindsey said.

  As we pulled past the crowd, a number of kids crept under the barricades and ran into the street directly in front of us, leaving me no choice but to hit the brakes. “Oh, Christ!” Lindsey said.

  “Where’s Jack?” shrieked one of the girls wearing a sad clown face. “What have you done with him?” Her friend, another girl dressed identically but with a happy clown face stood directly in front of the car holding up Jack’s picture. Before I could respond, there was an amplified squawk and Sheriff Sullivan pulled up from the opposite direction. The girls screamed gleefully and fled back under the barricades. Sullivan pulled up so that his open window was opposite my closed one. As he waited for me to lower mine, I saw that our little meeting had captured the attention of the crowd. “Good evening,” Sullivan said with a smile.

  “Hello,” I responded. Someone from the crowd lobbed a raw egg, which landed a few feet in front of our car with a thin splat.

  “Heard from your friend?”

  “Nope.”

  There was a musical chant coming from the crowd, the kind you hear at hockey games, which sounded something like “Bust his ass, Sheriff, bust his ass” Sullivan smiled. “Your fan club,” he said, indicating the crowd.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to disperse the crowd,” I said.

  “Nah. They’ll get bored with it in a few hours,” he replied. “Besides, Halloween night these kids are usually up to all sorts of mischief. It makes my job easier, having them all right here where I can see them.” Just then there was another wet, crunching sound and Lindsey and I both ducked involuntarily as another egg hit our front windshield.

  “Well,” I said, inching forward. “I’ll let you get back to your crime fighting.” Without waiting for a reply I made a sharp right and pulled up into the Schollings’s driveway. I could see in the mirror that the back of the sheriff’s car had been egged a few times as well.

  Alison and Don were sitting on the porch sipping Diet Cokes, lazy spectators to the frenetic festivities going on across the street. “Getting crazy out there,” Don observed as I carried the pumpkin from the car.

  “That’s one ugly pumpkin,” Alison said. Our last minute shopping hadn’t left us with too many choices, but what our pumpkin lacked in symmetry it made up for in sheer audacity, with misshapen lumps and wells marring its rough orange surface.

  “It’s supposed to be,” I said. “You know, Halloween and all.”

  “Right.”

  I found Chuck and Jeremy inside, watching a Halloween X-Files rerun. Mulder and Scully were having one of their routine arguments in the front seat of a car as they drove through a cornfield. “Those two should just get a room already,” Chuck said.

  “Ignore him,” I told Jeremy, plopping down between them, after carefully placing the pumpkin on the coffee table. “He’s a highly disturbed individual.”

  “Where’d you get that pumpkin, Chernobyl?” Chuck asked.

  “You think it’s scary now, wait till we get done carving it.”

  “What’s Chernobyl?” Jeremy asked.

  While we watched the end of The X-Files, Alison and Lindsey prepared potato salad, corn muffins, and cranberry sauce while periodically checking on the turkey they’d stuffed and placed in the oven. Then Chuck got up to make a salad, which was always his job since he could cut like a Japanese chef, a fringe benefit of his surgical expertise. I would pass a vegetable and call out a number somewhere between ten and thirty. Chuck would repeat the number as he studied the vegetable for a second and then
launch into a series of speed-cuts, the knife pounding the cutting board in a fast, steady rhythm while I counted out loud. He always fit in exactly the amount of cuts I had specified, and the vegetable was always cut with perfect symmetry. “Seven years of medical school,” Alison observed wryly. “That is one expensive salad.”

  “It’s a gift,” Chuck said.

  I hoisted a tomato and looked over to Jeremy, who was watching with awe. “Twenty?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five,” he said with a smile.

  “Amateurs,” Chuck grumbled. He made a show of studying the tomato and then attacked the chopping board.

  “Cool,” Jeremy said.

  “You should see me operate,” Chuck said through gritted teeth as he finished his dicing. “Next.”

  Later, while Chuck and Don watched Cops, Jeremy and I used scalpels from Chuck’s medical bag to carve a face into the pumpkin. First we cut off the top and scooped out the “brains” and then set to work carving a jagged grin. We had just finished one eye when Alison took out the turkey, so we decided that a cyclops pumpkin was a fine way to go. I wedged a candle into the goop left in the bottom of the pumpkin and we carried it onto the porch, where Jeremy lit it. The effect was satisfying and we both stood there admiring it for a moment. “Pretty good, hey?” I said.

  “Yep,” he said, smiling at me. I smiled back and it was a nice moment. You can’t smile at adults the way you can smile at a kid, with no sarcastic remark or shifted gaze to keep things from getting too personal. Out on the porch we were simply two people, connected by circumstance, sharing a smile as dusk fell. Three, if you counted the one-eyed pumpkin.