Chic set the envelope down in the middle of the yard and, using the back of a spade shovel, hammered a stake into it to keep it from blowing away. In about a month, that was his timeline, well before July, he was going to transform his backyard into a little slice of Florida. Diane couldn’t be mad at him after he did that. They had honeymooned in Florida. They had conceived Lomax there. It was like their Garden of Eden. Chic went into the garage and got a spool of string and a hammer and staked off the shape of the pool, wrapping the string around the stakes like he was fencing off new grass seed.
Lomax came out the back door.
“Look, Lomax. A pool.” Chic gestured to the stringed-off area. “I mean, it’ll be a pool pretty soon.”
“Mom know you’re doing this?”
“Not yet. She will though. Imagine it. Our very own pool right here in the backyard.”
Lomax shrugged. “I don’t really like to be out in the sun.”
“You’re going to love it. We’ll get one of those tables with an umbrella. Hey, by the way, I hear the neighborhood kids down the street playing baseball. Why don’t you go get your glove and join them?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Lomax said, then went back inside the house. Almost immediately, Diane came out the door and huffed and stomped until she stood just outside the stringed-off area. She glared at Chic, her hands on her hips. “A bomb shelter? You’re digging a bomb shelter in the backyard? Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? I know you think you’re protecting our family somehow by taking the blame for Lijy’s affair, but a bomb shelter? You really think something horrible is going to happen, a nuclear bomb, in Illinois, and all of us will need to hide out? Is that what you really think? Really? I mean . . . ”
“I’m digging a pool.”
“A pool?”
“You remember that pool at the Sea Shell Inn? Well, this is going to be like that, or sorta like that. You know they closed the Sea Shell Inn? Or the name changed. Anyway, yeah, I’m putting in a pool.”
“Here?”
“Yep.”
“Chic, you can’t change what happened. Nothing you can do can undo that. Nothing. Not one thing. Not a pool. Not a bomb shelter.”
“I’m not building a bomb shelter.”
Diane walked back toward the house, but before she went inside, she turned around and faced him. “All of this ....this pool. You may think you’re doing the right thing, but you just keep making things worse.”
Buddy Waldbeeser
June 7 and 8, 1960
Buddy locked the motel room door, put the key in his pocket, and nodded to the Mexican man wearing a sombrero sitting on a folding chair by the lobby door. He carried Bascom the Cat in a duffel bag; the bag wasn’t zipped shut, and Bascom’s head was poking out. That morning, Buddy had run across a real estate listing in the Journal Star for an abandoned Central Illinois Light Company—CILCO—switching station. The ad said that the building was ten thousand square feet and overlooked the Mackinaw River. This would be all he needed—a giant empty brick building with concrete floors. He’d be so far outside of town that people would leave him alone. He could smoke his cigarillos and no one would bother him.
At Wyman’s Hardware Store on Main Street, a few blocks from the pumpkin cannery, he bought a flashlight, extra batteries, and a black ski mask. The cashier, Mrs. Wyman, looked over the top of her glasses and asked him how his mother was doing. Buddy shrugged and told her she was fine. He, of course, didn’t know how she was. He hadn’t talked to her in years.
In the car, Buddy had a hard time keeping his head clear. Everything he’d worked so hard to achieve had slipped through his fingers. He’d gone on the road and ended up in California, and come home with a wife, a wife he loved, a wife who . . . he couldn’t even let himself continue. “I had a goddamn plan,” he said aloud. The cat looked at him with big yellow eyes. Was he really talking to a cat? He drove by the cannery and slowed the car down. In the parking lot, he spotted Chic’s car. He stepped on the gas and sped around the block and came back around again, like a shark circling its prey in the water. He was going to get even with Chic. He wasn’t done. He tore around the corner and sped across town to Chic’s house. In the front yard, Chic’s odd son, Lomax, was on his hands and knees scooping dirt into a mason jar. Buddy wanted to roll down the window and tell him what a horrible man his father was. He wanted to tell Lomax that he hated his father, hated Diane, hated him, Lomax, hated Middleville. He had so much hate inside of him it felt like a small animal was nipping at his heart. He choked back tears. There wasn’t any time to cry. He sped away.
When night fell, Buddy parked in front of the Stebbenthal house, which was next door to his home. The living room light was on, and Lijy was sitting on the couch drinking tea. His mind flashed to her on top of Chic. Buddy shook his head to erase the image, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. Jesus Christ. Jesus H. Christ. He put on the ski mask. “I’m going to make this better, buddy,” he told Bascom the Cat.
The morning—a sunny blue winter morning—his father was discovered frozen to death behind the barn, Buddy was upstairs in his bedroom eating a Baby Ruth candy bar. It had recently stopped snowing, and a white blanket spread out in every direction from the farmhouse. Looking out his bedroom window, Buddy saw a black station wagon he didn’t recognize pull into the drive. He didn’t have a view of the back of the house from his bedroom, so he went into the upstairs bathroom and, standing in the claw-foot bathtub, watched as two men bundled in wool coats got out of the station wagon and went around behind the barn. His mother and Tom McNeeley were already in the backyard. A toboggan leaned against a tree. Buddy didn’t understand what was going on; it looked like his mother and Tom McNeeley were preparing to go sledding, but why was that station wagon there? Tom McNeeley tried to hug his mother, but she pulled away. Just then Chic came into the bathroom and wanted to show Buddy his hands. He’d been tracing them on a piece of paper, and they were covered with different colors of ink. Buddy didn’t care about the ink on his brother’s hands, and kept on looking out the window. The men from the station wagon came around the corner of the barn carrying his father on his side, his legs out and his back straight as a ruler, his body forming an L. He was wearing his pajamas and no coat. The pajama pants were tucked into his untied snow boots. Buddy noticed that his father’s eyes were open and that tiny icicles hung from his mustache. His mother yelled something and shook her finger at his father. Buddy couldn’t make out what she was shouting about, but he could see the anger in her jerky motions. Tom McNeeley tried to hold her back, but she shook him off and continued to wag her finger at his father. Even when the men put his father down on the ground behind the station wagon, she continued to rant at him. Finally, she turned away and buried her head in Tom McNeeley’s chest. Through it all, his father’s expression never changed. Buddy whispered, “Stand up,” even though he knew his father was dead. He whispered it again, louder this time, “Stand up.” Chic, who was washing his hands, asked Buddy who he was talking to. Chic then said he wanted to see what was happening outside, but Buddy told him to go to his room. Chic insisted that he wanted to see. The sink water was running and soap was lathered on Chic’s hands and he was dripping on the bathroom tile. Buddy turned and gave his little brother a look that said if he asked again, he’d tell Mom and then he’d be in trouble, so Chic said, “Fine,” and finished washing his hands, dried them on his pants, and went down the hall to his bedroom. The two men from the station wagon positioned themselves on either side of Buddy’s father, hunching over, preparing to pick him up again. Buddy suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen his father since Friday night, when he had been in the kitchen fixing himself a drink, getting ice cubes from the aluminum tray in the freezer. Buddy had been in his room polishing his coins and had gone to the kitchen to get a glass of water. His father was whistling when Buddy came into the kitchen, and he said hello, which was strange since his father pretty much ignored everyone even if they were standing right next to
him. His father poured some Scotch over the ice cubes and the warm liquid made the cubes crackle. He capped the bottle and held up the glass to Buddy and said to him, “America. You have to love it. Someday, you’ll see. It’s not worth it. None of it.” He downed the Scotch in one gulp and set the glass on the counter and put on his winter boots (he was wearing his pajamas) and told Buddy he had to check on something in the barn. He went out the back door. The men picked up Buddy’s father, and like they were loading a piece of furniture, they turned him this way and that, trying to find the right angle to shove him into the back of the station wagon. Downstairs, Buddy heard the back door open and his mother and Tom McNeeley come into the house, both of them stomping the snow from their boots. Chic’s bedroom door opened, and he ran down the hall yelling, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom.” Finally, the men found the right angle—his father on his side, head first—and pushed him into the station wagon.
When the living room light finally went out, Buddy knew that Lijy had finished her tea and gone to bed. He waited about five minutes, then told Bascom the Cat that he’d be right back. He quietly got out of the car and softly closed the door. He snuck through the neighbors’ backyards, going tree to tree and climbing over fences. When he reached the back of his house, Buddy climbed up on the gas meter and shined the flashlight into the kitchen window. Lijy’s empty tea mug was upside down in the sink. He tried the window, knowing it would be open, and pushed it up as far as it would go. He slid through the opening, being careful not to make too much noise. Once he was inside, he could hear the ticking wall clock in the living room. The house smelled like one of Lijy’s curry recipes. He crept upstairs to the master bedroom, shining the flashlight off the walls, the floor. At the end of the hallway, the bedroom door was closed. Standing outside, Buddy listened to Lijy shift her weight, the bedsprings sighing. His hand was on the doorknob. He wanted to burst into the bedroom and tell her how bad she’d hurt him, how angry he was, how sad she’d made him. He wanted to cry into her chest, and he wanted her to pet his hair and tell him it was going to be all right. How could she, how the hell could she? She was ruining him. Did she know that she was ruining him?
Instead he went to the basement. He shined the flashlight around until he found his coins, stacked like poker chips on a card table. An ironing board piled with folded laundry was next to the table. His white shirts hung on hangers from the ceiling rafters. Buddy picked up an Indian Head penny and shined the beam on it. He quickly scooped the rest of the coins into the ammunition boxes he used to transport them. Back in the car, Bascom the Cat was curled up on the front seat but immediately woke up when Buddy opened the back door and loaded the first of the ammunition boxes.
The next morning, Buddy called the real estate agent, Phyllis Glover, who was listed in the Journal Star ad. Buddy had gone to school with the Glover kids. He tried to disguise his voice. Phyllis put him on hold, saying she needed to pull the spec sheet. When she came back, she asked what sort of business he was in.
“Storage,” he said.
“I can’t quite hear you. It sounds like your hand is over your mouth.”
Buddy didn’t say anything. He looked at Bascom the Cat sleeping on the unmade motel bed.
“Are you there?”
“Storage.”
“Oh. Okay. What sort of storage?”
“Human, Phyllis. Human storage.”
“Is that a polite way of saying a funeral home?”
“I’m going to live there, Phyllis. It’s going to be my home. A big, goddamn house. Human storage. Get it?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, a buzzing sound.
“Look, Phyllis, do you want to sell me the place or not?”
“Of course, Mr., ah—”
“Waldbeeser. Buddy Waldbeeser.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, Phyllis. My father froze himself behind the barn. Thank you for your condolences. It’s been twenty years. And my mother’s fine. She’s great. I have no idea where she’s at but I’m sure she’s wonderful. Can you just meet me at the property in an hour?” Buddy hung up the phone.
The CILCO plant was down Route 7 about six miles from the Wel Kum Inn. A chain-link fence enclosed the property, with barbed wire coiled around the top. Sumac and locust trees hid the building from view. The gate was unlocked, and Buddy walked down the gravel drive about a quarter of a mile, until the drive opened into a parking lot. The building, a square, squat, one-story brick thing, looked like an automotive garage. It was clearly abandoned. The front door was boarded shut, and some of the windows had been rocked out. Buddy wiped dust away from one window and looked inside. In one corner was an abandoned Steelcase desk with a wooden chair on top of it. In the middle of the room was a lone metal garbage can stuffed with scraps of wood. Sunlight streaked through the windows illuminating floating dust particles. Buddy picked up Bascom the Cat up so that he could see in the window too, petting him between the ears. “Look at that. This is going to be our home.”
Buddy was leaning against his car smoking a cigarillo when Phyllis pulled up.
“Can I show you the building?” she said.
“I already saw it. I walked up there. The gate was unlocked.”
“Well. What do you think?”
“You take cash?”
“Of course. We’ll have to fill out some paperwork. And then there’s a closing, but the owner is a motivated seller. If you have some money to put down today, we can get the ball rolling.”
Buddy flicked the cigarillo on the ground and went around to the trunk of the car.
“You know, my son was a few years younger than you,” Phyllis said. “Or maybe it was your brother. You Waldbeeser boys both look so much alike.”
Buddy took a deep breath, then put on a smile. “Let’s not talk about family.” He opened the trunk. Sitting next to the spare tire were eight ammunition boxes. He opened one to show Phyllis that it was full of coins. Buddy picked up a coin, flipped it, and showed it to her. “Took me twelve years to amass this fortune. Twelve years of driving all over the country. I had a plan, Phyllis, but that plan has changed a little bit.”
She was eyeing him, looking at the coin, at his face.
He studied her worried face. This wasn’t going the way he wanted it to go. “These are rare coins. Collector’s items.”
She fidgeted with her pearl necklace. “I can’t accept your coin collection, Buddy.”
“Wait a second. Hold on. Just hold on.” He went to the car and scooped up Bascom the Cat. “I can give you my cat.”
“You want to give me a cat for the building?”
“This isn’t just any cat. This is a very special cat. His name is Bascom.”
“Come see me when you get some money, Mr. Waldbeeser.”
“I have money, Phyllis. My coins.”
“Is everything all right Buddy?”
“What do you mean is everything all right? Of course everything is all right. It’s just that . . . I think that . . . my brother. You know I . . . he . . . why? Do I look like something is wrong? Nothing is wrong.”
“Why don’t you sell the coins and come and see me when you have cash? And keep your cat. It’s a cute cat, and it’s named after your father.”
Buddy watched her get back into her car.
“He’s named after all the Bascom’,” he yelled after her. “My great-grandfather, grandfather, dad, and me. All of us. He’s named after all of us.”
Buddy Waldbeeser
June 8, 1960 (ten minutes later)
What was he thinking, trying to pay for a building with a coin collection? He was too busy thinking about his brother sticking his dick in his wife to actually think; that was the problem. He needed to think. He needed to stay focused. Think happy thoughts—think of waking up with the morning sunlight streaking through the CILCO building’s windows, think of the wind whispering through the trees, think of the Mackinaw River in the distance. Think calming thoughts. The car drifted toward the ditch. Buddy opened
his eyes and jerked the wheel to swerve the car back onto the road. Bascom the Cat was curled next to his leg, and he scratched him between the ears. “Hang on, buddy.” He turned on the radio, and Chatty Jim Melvin the radio preacher shouted, “You should love your neighbor like your brother.” Buddy shut off the radio and stepped on the accelerator. He looked at Bascom the Cat. “Is this how you felt?” The cat looked at him. “Before you went off behind the barn? I’ll tell you what. I feel like going off behind the barn. You’re listening to me, aren’t you? Dad? You’re hearing me, aren’t you?”
Buddy glanced in the rearview mirror. He thought he saw someone in the backseat, but there was only another car approaching, coming on fast. He looked down at his speedometer. He was going fifty. The other car had to be going seventy, maybe eighty. Buddy glanced over his shoulder. The car was in the left lane making a pass. He tried to speed up, but he couldn’t go any faster. When the car was parallel to him, he looked over. “Dad?” Buddy whispered. “Is that . . . ?” The guy was looking straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel. “Dad!” The car pulled into the lane ahead of him. Buddy floored the gas pedal, but it was no use. The car kept getting farther and farther ahead. “Don’t leave me.” The car disappeared over a hill. “Dad! Please!” He slowed down and pulled the car over to the side of the road, the gravel crunching under the tires. He got out. It was dusty and hot. The sun was high in the blue sky above him. It was the kind of heat where your pants stuck to the backs of your legs. He loosened his tie. He was going to show his father. He was going to show Phyllis, Lijy, Chic. The entire town. He was going to buy that goddamn CILCO building. The cat was looking at him. “You,” he said to the cat. “Get out.” The cat cocked its head like it was confused. “Get out of the goddamn car.” Buddy grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and pulled him out. The cat scurried underneath the car. “Leave. Get out of here.” He kicked the side of the car hard, which hurt his toe. “Goddamn it.” He grabbed his foot. “Jesus Christ. Get out of here, you goddamn cat. I don’t need you. I. Don’t. Need. You.” He got on his hands and knees. The cat was cowering, looking at him with his big yellow eyes. “Go on. I don’t need you. Scram.” He stood up and clapped—three quick smacks—which scared the cat. He bolted into the ditch weeds. “Now, please. Leave me alone.” Buddy got back into the car and pulled away. He glanced in the rearview mirror. The cat had crept back onto the road and was watching him.
Onward Toward What We're Going Toward Page 13