The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  “Look, sir. I’m not with the media. Does this look like a face for television?”

  The neck lengthens further. Wily old snapper, well-fed in the mud.

  “Don’t need much of a face for radio. Don’t need any face. Or for newspapers or the Internet either.”

  “All right, old man. Have a nice day.”

  Across the street from the grass-cutter, two houses over, a flash of white in the backyard. Go closer, Daisy with her nose pressed against the mesh fence.

  Ah, Lynette. Stand by your man.

  §

  No answer at the front door. None expected. Go round back and get over the fence. Daisy walks at me, growling. I raise the hammer to her and she slinks off. Curls near a bush, licking herself.

  I approach the house. Behind the sliding door, Sandor is sitting at a round wooden table, drinking. I have to cup my hands around my eyes to see him clearly. Lots of cans in front of him. He’s got his head down, not looking my way. I try the door. Locked. At the sound, he lifts his head. Peers blearily in my direction, raises his middle finger. I raise the hammer, cock it at the glass. Slowly, pushing off the table with his hands, he gets up, can in hand, and lets me in.

  “Back at work, I see. Busy on the grieving process.”

  Bare feet, jeans. Untucked plaid shirt falling to his thighs. Days of black stubble, eyes sunk in whiskers and greasy curls. A rank smell. He speaks with his back to me, returning to his corner seat. “Come in, get lost, sit down, stand up. Have a drink, don’t, I don’t give a shit.”

  “I know you don’t, Sandor. That’s what we’re here to discuss.”

  “My tête-a-tête with the avenging angel. The perfect end to the perfect week. I wonder what I ever did to deserve you. It must’ve been something horrible.”

  He drains the can he’s on, head way back to catch it all. “Have a beer if you want. But I’ve got nothing to say to you now. I never did really. And I don’t think you’ve got anything more to say to me.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong. But I’ll take that beer.”

  He reaches into the nest of cans, knocks a couple of empties over, and pulls out a full one for himself.

  A weird assortment of beers, hectic. Maybe a dozen brands among the twenty or so cans on the table—Budweiser, Canadian, Heineken, Tuborg, Blue, Coors, Grolsch, Kronenbourg… It would fit a bunch of kids learning to drink, mixing and puking. Or someone in desperate straits and searching confusedly for the right drug, the one that might work. Even so, I can’t make this grab bag fit a long-time drinker, who knows his brand as well as all the others.

  I select a Coors Lite, thinking to start cautiously, but at the first sip my thoughts reel, as if a socket wrench has been fitted over my brain and torqued violently. As if I’m on my fifth can, not my first. Stone: Last call.

  Judy hitting his head with the hammer. The head shifting a little, hand and hammer bouncing back. That picture more sickening, somehow, than her carving of the Sunday roast.

  The Wyverns swept clean. Or nearly so—Sandor could be the janitor left behind to close up the building. Five of them at the start. Or six, with Vivian. Eight, counting her vanished sisters? Who knows how many the hive contained finally, swallowing up adjacent colonies, carrying back captive strays? Now, one dead of natural causes. One dispatched by the daughter he abused. Three in lock-up: one for a short time, I hope, before she rejoins her life in homes for the mad, back behind the pharmaceutical bars she knows. The other two for years and years. For forever, I hope. And the last, bloated in front of me, deluged by the family problems, bailing the flooded ship as best he can. Bailing its bilge back into himself. The women not of Wyvern blood knocked down too. Vivian, used and using, talking as fast as she can in a little room to cut a deal. Gwen, popping Tums like never before, gnawing her nails between calls to her lawyer. Lynette—well, who knows about Lynette? The only thing you can say about a lifelong depressive is that, whatever’s happening, she’s probably depressed and anxious about it.

  So sick of all of them.

  Sick enough that the questions I had about them, mysteries that assailed and whipped me on, seem pointless now. I feel them falling out of my head, grains from a smashed hourglass. Did Maude know about her husband’s secret life? How deep a hell was her marriage? Deep enough that she welcomed—a part of her did—the oblivion of Alzheimer’s? Keeping Christmas Music when she was put away, shoving it down under old nylons—an attempt at leverage? A trump to hold over the old prick? Lost when she didn’t use it in time. Which means you’ve been working for her on this adjustment all along. Pleasant thought. The dead make the best clients, the only truly satisfying ones. The most exacting, and the most in need.

  Or someone else buried it there? Hid it to find?

  No, you’re done with them. Done with this.

  “Ten minutes ago, I thought it was crucial to find you. Now that I have, I’ve got no idea why I’m sitting here, drinking your beer at eleven in the morning.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “A last-ditch effort, I thought, to get you to take care of Judy. To try being her brother. To start. You’ve got the power and the money, or you will have. What would it take? But that’s the one thing I’ve never been able to get from any of you Wyverns. Looking after Judy in even the most basic fashion. It’s a deal-breaker, as they say. I don’t think I could force you with a blow torch and pliers.”

  “She’s mentally ill.”

  “Unlike you and me.”

  He gives me a sickly, plastered smile. Idiot leer the bare truth summons—sniffing a con, utterly unable to take you at face value. Count on one hand the people who’ve asked me, Really? You think everyone’s batshit crazy? And never got as far as defending it as the most humane assumption, true or not. Assuming universal insanity helps you deal with people properly. The ones with dangerous conditions you avoid or handle with wary ruthlessness, as you would vipers or scorpions. The harmlessly batty you treat with compassion. The rest you approach alertly and with an open mind, ready for anything. Ward world. Locked and unlocked, teeming.

  “Just kidding, of course. There’s a puppeteer works my face. A ventriloquist says odd things through my lips.”

  “No secret there,” he says. “Hard to miss when they’re standing right behind you.”

  And so we find ourselves back on familiar ground. What we’ve found together. All we could find. Bantering in a pub. Challenging to escape challenge. Candour a flag truth hides behind. Whip and chair to back it into its cage. Saying anything, since saying has no price.

  “The last time we met, you were a fan seeking an autograph.”

  “I was a reader. One of the few. And a devoted one. Though the theme of the martyred caregiver got a bit thick.”

  “Which tells me you’ve never done much of it.”

  “You’re addicted to the idea of yourself as a gentle giant. But there’s no such thing. Not in a crisis anyway. Then you’re either a giant, wielding a giant’s might… or else a cruel dwarf.”

  “And that’s how you see yourself?”

  “Which?”

  “A gentle giant?”

  “No. Not gentle. And definitely not a giant.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I seldom do. Strangely enough, it keeps me listening.”

  The room is oddly unfurnished. Undecided maybe. The table we’re sitting at, and the chairs around it, seem to belong in a kitchen, but the kitchen’s over there, across a large space. The appliances gleaming new, the counters covered with dirty dishes and glasses, takeout cartons and bags, liquor bottles and beer cans. Empty alcove at the end of it where this table should go. Instead, it’s pulled over into this corner by the sliding door, sitting on rust-coloured shag. Most of the large, L-shaped room beyond us is empty. A gas fireplace in the brick wall at the other end. Large-screen TV, a black rectangle, mounted on the w
all beside it. A little way out from the TV, a U-shaped sectional couch in pale leather, like a sand spit with more cans and cartons, clothes and a quilt, washed up on and bobbing around it. No lamps, no overhead I can see. From this brightness by the door the room recedes into dim, the couch a shadowy whale rolling at dusk, then brightens again at the short end of the L, presumably from windows at the front. It looks like an animal’s den. Except for all the evidence of feedings, and the absence of boxes, it could be the lair of someone just moving in or just moving out—or, more likely, the debris field of a bad divorce, with the remaining partner failing utterly to pick himself up and regroup.

  “You’re too late,” he says thickly, the can resting on his bottom lip tilting up as soon as the words are out. He’s hard to see, a bulk with pale gleams. He’s got himself tucked into the corner by the drapes, out of the direct light which falls on me, but it’s also the grains in my eyes, swirling more thickly now, enveloping him in sooty smoke. “For whatever you were after. Which none of us were ever sure of. Opinions varied. Judy’s friend was all we knew for sure.”

  Which us? What opinions? Lynette, most likely. The other members of the writing group perhaps. They saw you in the Queen’s Arms, would have talked it up. You always assumed Sandor was outside Max and Vivian’s thing, the old man’s thing when he surfaced—on the outside of everything, planetoid orbiting the rim of the family solar system, assigned the lowliest jobs of caring for the deranged. Such a man knows very little, as little as needed. It still seems true. But question it. No disguise like that of the total fuck-up. Hard, though, with the window closed or closing fast, each sip of Coors like a full can chugged.

  “It’s hard to explain what drives me,” I hear my voice saying. And see a neighbour man, a long way back, I was helping clear his eaves of wasp nests. Him up on a stepladder, rearing back fearfully as he sprayed Raid into the opening of the cone, the yellow bodies falling out covered with poison foam, me stamping on them as they wriggled on the ground, impressing him with my zeal. He doused the largest one with barbecue starter and lit it up, a blackly smoking torch, me standing by with the hose in case the house caught. But when I pressed to hunt for more, he got a strange look in his eyes and sent me home. Go on, now. You were a big help, but it’s time you got on home.

  “I came over here to get the truth of your involvement in this, and to get a promise from you that Judy would be cared for, but you’re too far gone to work with. Your trouble is you always take the easy way out. Even when you think you’re being hard on yourself, you’re really going easy. You spoil yourself rotten.”

  “Involvement in what?” he says, sounding several degrees more sober. And there it is again: the weird sense I’ve had with him, from first meeting on, that we have portholes into each other’s heads. But I don’t know—and it’s an effort to remember this—what Sandor knows and has done, just as he doesn’t know the same about me. Couldn’t imagine that I spent his father’s last moments with him, our knees almost touching. Or what those moments were. Or how merciful they were compared to the prison cell and public zero-ing he had coming to him.

  “I read the papers,” I say, hoping that enough of Sex Crimes Investigation has been aired.

  “Do you?” he says, with a hard look that reaches me out of his murk. Not his Toogood Pond thing surfacing, it’s permanently up and wallowing, his eyes black gleams off its back. “I was beginning to wonder. I thought you might just be an avenging angel that swoops day and night around the skies, touching down where you’re needed.” As a picture of the adjustment life, it comes close to accurate, if way too exalted. But self-pity comes to the rescue, as it does so often when human conversations threaten to become acute. He uncaps another can, takes half of it down, and hangs his bushy head. “Fuck. It. I lost my entire family in the last two weeks. Mom first. Then the rest of them in the last three days.”

  “You lost them long ago. And never sent out a search party. Why, I wonder.”

  “I don’t follow you. You’re not making sense.”

  “You follow fine and I’m making perfect sense. You’re just a terrible listener. All your family are. Your ears work perfectly, but you take in what you want and flush the rest.”

  “My family’s ruined,” he says, slurring now, fingers lost and roving in his curls. “Everything’s fallen to shit.”

  “So start building.”

  “Build what? Where?”

  “Start with Judy. She’s going to need your help. She always has.”

  He looks up at me without raising his head, blinking, as if I’ve said something utterly outlandish. Judy again? Still?

  “Or demolish it. Finish the job. Sometimes you’ve got to smash things. When the house is rotten all the way through, there’s nothing to be salvaged—you’ve got to take the wrecking ball to it and then dig up the foundation. A clean hole is all you can expect to work with.”

  Stillness from his side, the fingers stopped, peering with glazed eyes above the cans and below my face. Jab him with something new. No, it’s too late for this guy.

  “Where’s your can? I’ve got to take a leak.”

  Barely moving, the black eyes indicate a short hall past the kitchen.

  §

  “…a look’n your way pas’,” burbles the voice behind me. Is he putting this on? Sober and sparring one moment, near coma the next? No, a veteran drunk, drowning the cells, turning them to pure alcohol, while the mind teeter-treads above, floundering and sinking, then riding a clean board high above the churn. It hasn’t been that long. Hell, is happening on half a Coors.

  This morning’s Globe on the corner of the kitchen counter, open to the obituaries.

  Head and shoulder shots, staring up: the officer in dress uniform, the bride in white. What you saw that first day at Vivera, the missing heads. But two hours ago, the poolside pensioners smiling from the Star? Two sets of obit pics? Or are you that far along? Past distortion phase, on to full hallucinations?

  I can’t read well, even worse than earlier. I just pick out scraps, fuzzed space between them. Enough to confirm the usual malarkey, in the usual proportions. The great man’s childhood, schooling, service to his country, medical career, service to the community, honoured by… presented with… proud to. Maude’s name flitting in and out, her two main appearances near the start—met the love of his life—and two-thirds through—devoted mother to their three children. And, near the end, before it reverts to him: courageous battle with… Like watching a movie with the sound off: just count when people come on, how long they’re on for.

  Endings matter. Force yourself to focus.

  I turn back to Sandor. He looks smaller, slumped behind his moat of cans, me looking down at him.

  “‘He died at home, surrounded by his family.’ You added that last line, I guess, as some kind of payback. A joke on him.”

  “No, he did, believe it or not. He wrote their obituaries and filed them with the funeral home years ago. Tinkered with them probably, like his will. Had individual ones, if they died far apart. And this joint production, with Mom slotted in around him. He always thought he could control everything, even his own end. I think it had something to do with putting people to sleep for forty years. But I left the line in. No, not quite as payback.” He muses, seeming to go somewhere distant and come partway back. “But I guess to show how wrong I think he was.”

  “Wrong about?”

  “Always knew something was off—wrong—about my father. Something about women. People in general, but especially women.”

  True enough, but I don’t trust Sandor’s fleeting epiphanies. He lacks the guts—the cornered need, if there’s a difference—to stick with anything, even a valuable truth he’s discovered. The baby of the family. Arriving late on the scene. Overlooked. Spoiled.

  Standing there, sighting through swirling grains, I see yet another version of the dark bulk in the gloom. It come
s over me in an instant, a new account of those turbid, roiling eyes. Not grief, not guilt and shame—not just—but something more like embarrassment. Embarrassment and lifelong pique. He sicced me on his older brother and father, or acquiesced in Lynette doing so—not to avenge his discarded mother, not for money (which Max will hardly be able to spend, or at least control so well, from jail)—but to get out from under their thumbs. To stop being the baby, the overlooked one. Even Judy more respected in a weird way, at least for her power to disrupt. The thing surfacing in his eyes: the look of sly guilt and fright in a little boy who lights matches and then sees the flames spreading beyond his control. Panic of mischief gone amok.

  Past childhood, an accusation not an excuse.

  Time to find the bathroom and finish this.

  §

  During the flush, I open the cupboard under the sink. Find, on one side, Comet and Drano, about twenty bars of Dove from some sale. Next to them—hello. A stash like I found in another brother’s pad. But concentrated here, two small half shelves in the dark, not spread out as in the official home. Nothing to contradict—at least not to eyes not too prying—the filthy razor and hair-laced soap bar on the sink.

  Bag of cotton puffs. Curling iron, cord twist-tied. Make-up case. Mirror. Creams and ointments. Lancôme in gold letters on a little mauve obelisk. Other swishy names.

  One ship going down, jump to another? Or keep passage booked on both of them—who knows what the high seas will bring? Or just—a periodic return to home port? The old man’s “disappointment” in his youngest, their long estrangement. Sandor a lazy athlete, he sneered. But not so lazy as a ladies’ man. Unless finding your first at home counts as sloth.

  The thoughts trail off, I can’t follow them long. It’s not just closing window fatigue. More like built-up toxicity from prolonged exposure to the Wyverns. Their cold congealed sleaze—like staring at a plate of yesterday’s spaghetti crawling with roaches. I’ve never felt it on an adjustment before. Disabling exhaustion, sure, many times, the last steps performed as if underwater.