by Tom Hanks
“Like swingin’,” said Chick.
“Or bodacious,” said Paul.
“Or tits,” said Daniel. Again, no expression.
No one knew what to say to that.
—
The Daniel fellow spent a few days at the Legaris place. Bette heard the two men talking in the mornings, their distant voices coming over the fence in the backyard. She saw them leaving together in the evenings around 7:00 p.m., and then one night the skinny redhead was gone. Greene Street became, once again, a place of bikes, balls, and kids playing with a decided headiness since the beginning of school was bearing down. The end of summer was suddenly in the air, palpable.
On the final evening of August, Bette took the kids for pizza at a place that was wall-to-wall arcade games. When they returned home, the block was a quiet heaven after all that noise. The Patel kids were playing with a garden hose on their lawn, so Eddie and Sharri joined them. Dale went into the house. Bette lingered out front in a cooling, lovely breeze that stirred the leaves of her sycamore. Some of the spare pizza made it from the take-home box and into her hand as she leaned against one of the lower limbs, nibbling away.
There was no sign of Paul Legaris. His car was not in his driveway, so she felt relaxed in the calm of Greene Street, though guilty over what was her fourth slice of pepperoni, olive, and onion. As she tossed the thin crescent of uneaten crust into the grass—some bird would soon find it—she thought she saw a very large insect crawling across Paul Legaris’s driveway.
She nearly let out an eek of terror—that could have been a huge spider—but then realized it was only a set of keys lying on the ground, right where Paul’s car would have been parked.
Bette, then, found herself in something of a dilemma—what was a neighbor to do? She should pick up the keys, hold on to them until Paul came home, then knock on his front door and return them. If indeed they were his keys, as was most probable, she would save him the angst of a fruitless search. Anyone would do that, but—pop—Paul would be so happy at getting his keys back he would insist on repaying Bette with a dinner he would cook himself. Say! How’s about I BBQ some ribs in the backyard with my own sauce recipe!
Bette did not want to go there. The simple solution would be for her to have Eddie return the keys. When Paul came home her son would scamper over and do the good deed and Bette would be inside her own house and that would be that.
She reached down and picked up the keys. There was a fob with the seal of Burham Community College, a couple of house keys and two industrial types with serial numbers stamped into them, a bike-lock key, and, the largest item on the ring, a plastic poker chip held in place by a hole drilled through its rim.
The chip was worn down, its serrated edges smoothed over. It had once been red but now was only flecked with faded spots. Still visible in the center was a big number 20. Paul must have won twenty bucks at one of the fake riverboat casinos at the state line. Or maybe the chip was all that remained of a two-thousand-dollar stake. She turned the chip over and saw NA on the other side. The letters were exotic and stylized, like a tattoo, sitting inside a square set on its corner like a baseball diamond. In the fading evening light, she saw some writing in the open areas of the chip, but it, too, was worn down and illegible save for a few letters—a g here, an oc, and what looked like vice but could have been roit or ribs or any four-letter word.
Across the street, the kids were playing Punch Ball against the Patel garage door. Bette took the keys inside to hold on to until she could assign Eddie the mission to return them.
Dale was on her laptop in the living room, watching YouTube videos of horse jumping.
“You busy?” Bette asked her. Dale did not answer. “Hey, kid-o-mine,” she said, snapping her fingers.
“What?” Dale did not look up from her computer.
“Can you google something for me?”
“Google what?”
“This poker chip.” Bette held up the key chain.
“You want me to google ‘poker chips’?”
“This poker chip.”
“I don’t need Google to tell you. That is a poker chip.”
“Where is it from?”
“A poker chip factory.”
“I am going to bounce this off your head if you don’t google this.”
Dale sighed and looked at her mother and the key ring and the poker chip and rolled her eyes. “Okay! But can I just finish this?”
Bette showed Dale the detail of the chip—the faded red, the 20, the NA on the other side with the rubbed-out letters—leaving the key chain behind to go wash her hands of pizza crumbs. She was loading the dishwasher when Dale hollered something from the living room.
“What?” Bette called back.
Dale came into the kitchen carrying her laptop. “It’s a thing for narcotics.”
“What is?” Bette was putting silverware into the top rack of the dishwasher.
“The poker chip,” Dale said, showing her mother a collection of images on her computer. “NA is for Narcotics Anonymous. Like AA, but for narcotics. I entered poker chips with NA and a site came up, then I searched for images and there you go.”
Bette was looking at the same design as was on the key ring. NA was in a baseball diamond, with the words Self, God, Society, Service in the open spaces.
“They give them out to celebrate ‘sobriety,’ ” Dale said. “That means for not doing drugs. For thirty days on up.”
“But this one says twenty.” What was Paul Legaris doing with a poker chip from Narcotics Anonymous?
“I think that means twenty years,” Dale said. “Where did you find these keys?”
Bette hesitated. If Paul Legaris had anything to do with drugs or Narcotics Anonymous, she didn’t want Dale to know until she knew more herself.
“Found it someplace,” Bette said.
“I need to google anything else? Potato chips or the rules for poker?”
“No.” Bette went back to loading the dishwasher. When she was finished she called Maggie.
“Sure, Narcotics Anonymous,” Maggie told her. “AA for drunks. CA for cokeheads. They have an Anonymous for everything.”
“NA is for junkies?”
“Not narcoleptics.” Maggie was curious. “You sure they are his keys?”
“No. But they were in his driveway, so let’s assume—which will make an ass out of you and me…”
“Guys in twelve-step programs always sleep with someone else in the twelve-step program. Sarah Jallis had a niece who married a guy from her AA group, but I think they divorced later.”
“If Paul Legaris is in NA, has been in NA for twenty years, I wonder what for.”
“Well.” Maggie paused. “I’d guess narcotics had something to do with it.”
Eddie and Sharri came in an hour later, wet from the Patels’ garden hose. An hour after that, all three kids were bathed and in front of the PlayStation watching a movie in HD. Bette was in the kitchen on her iPad, looking up Narcotics Anonymous on website after website. She did not hear the knock on the front door.
“Professor Legaris is here.” Eddie had come into the kitchen. Bette looked at her son with no reaction. “He’s at the front door.”
And there he was, on the porch, just on the other side of the doorway, dressed in jeans and a white shirt with leather deck shoes on his feet. Bette closed the door slightly behind her to block the sound from the movie.
“Hi,” she said.
“Sorry to bother you. I wonder if I can use your backyard to access my backyard.”
“Why?”
“Because I am a knucklehead. Locked myself out of my house. I think my sliding door is unlocked. I’d go over my own fence but I’d land in my garbage cans.”
Bette looked at Paul, at the same face that had brought her a HoneyBaked ham a month before, at the same guy who washed his car on Friday and thought her kids were a hoot, the neighbor who made his own telescopes and fixed old typewriters. Pop! Paul Legaris is sitting
in a circle of men and women, all on folding chairs. He is listening to Daniel, the skinny redhead, talking about his days scoring heroin. Paul nods his head, recognizing his own behavior of twenty years prior.
“Wait right here,” Bette says.
She returned seconds later with the key chain in her hand.
“My keys,” Paul murmured. “You swiped my keys? That’s a joke.”
“They were in your driveway. I thought it was a big bug, but nope.”
“My car remote must have fallen off without me noticing, one more event to which I am oblivious. I had no clue where I’d lost them, so thanks.”
“Credit Greene Street and its good neighbor policy,” Bette said. Now would have been the time for her to close the door on any more interaction with the guy who lived next door, the guy who wore flip-flops, the guy whom she had been avoiding since she had moved in. But she surprised herself with a question. “What happened to that Daniel fellow with the red hair and the lofty vocabulary?” she asked.
Paul had turned to go but stopped, facing Bette in the doorway. “Ah, Danny.” Paul paused. “He’s in Kentucky.”
“Kentucky? He from there?” Bette was now leaning in the doorway, casually, comfortably. She found herself relaxed with Paul in her doorway, something she had never felt, not since that first Are you doing anything tonight?
“He’s from Detroit. A spot opened up at a place in Kentucky, so he took it for ninety days, if all goes well. I hope there was no problem during his stay with me.”
“No. I did want to give the guy a sandwich to fatten him up.”
“Yeah. Danny needs to eat better.” Paul stepped away again, leaving.
“You know,” Bette said, “in olden times redheads like him were considered demons. Because of the devil-colored hair.”
Paul laughed. “He’s got his demons, but no more than any of us.”
Bette looked down at the keys in Paul’s hand, at the poker chip that celebrated twenty years of sobriety, two decades narcotics-free. She did some math in her head. Chick Legaris was at least twenty-one years old, which would have made him a baby when his father hit his own rock bottom, when Paul began his journey from wherever that was to this night in August.
In that wink of an eye, Bette was even more assured she and the kids belonged here, on Greene Street.
“Thanks for saving me a ton of hassle,” Paul said, waving his keys.
“De nada,” Bette said, watching him step away toward his house next door.
She was just turning back into her house when—pop—she saw herself in her kitchen, early in the morning, with dawn still hours away and kids all still asleep in their beds.
“Hello, big boy,” she is saying to her espresso machine, steaming her morning latte and, in another mug, a double cappuccino with just a frothing of foam.
Then she is carrying both wake ’em ups out her front door, down her porch steps, across her lawn, and under the low hanging limbs of her sycamore.
Paul Legaris has set up his telescope on his driveway. The instrument is pointing at the deep, dark blue of the eastern sky over Greene Street.
Saturn is just rising. Through the eyepiece, the ringed planet is a glory, bang solid fat as a goose and cool as hell.
Alan Bean Plus Four
Traveling to the moon was way less complicated this year than it was back in 1969, as the four of us proved, not that anyone gives a whoop. You see, over cold beers in my backyard, with the crescent moon a delicate princess fingernail low in the west, I told Steve Wong that if he threw, say, a hammer with enough muscle, said tool would make a 500,000-mile figure eight, sail around that very moon, and return to Earth like a boomerang, and wasn’t that fascinating?
Steve Wong works at Home Depot, so has access to many hammers. He offered to chuck a few. His co-worker MDash, who’d shortened his given name to rap-star length, wondered how one would catch a red-hot hammer falling at a thousand miles an hour. Anna, who runs her own graphic design biz, said that there’d be nothing to catch, as the hammer would burn up like a meteor, and she was right. Plus, she didn’t buy the simplicity of my cosmic throw-wait-return. She is ever doubtful of my space program bona fides. She says I’m always “Apollo missions this” and “Lunokhod moon landing that,” and have begun to falsify details in order to sound like an expert, and she is right about that, too.
I keep all my nonfiction on a pocket-size Kobo digital reader, so I whipped out a chapter from No Way, Ivan: Why the CCCP Lost the Race to the Moon, written by an émigré professor with an ax to grind. According to him, in the mid-sixties the Soviets hoped to trump the Apollo program with just such a figure-eight mission: no orbit, no landing, just photos and crowing rights. The Reds sent off an unmanned Soyuz with, supposedly, a mannequin in a spacesuit, but so many things went south that they didn’t dare try again, not even with a dog. Kaputnik.
Anna is as thin and smart as a whip, and driven like no one else I have ever dated (for three exhausting weeks). She saw a challenge here. She wanted to succeed where the Russians had failed. It would be fun. We’d all go, she said, and that was that, but when? I suggested that we schedule liftoff in conjunction with the anniversary of Apollo 11, the most famous space flight in history, but that was a no-go, as Steve Wong had dental work scheduled for the third week of July. How about November, when Apollo 12 landed in the Ocean of Storms, an event now forgotten by 99.999 percent of the people on Earth? Anna had to be a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding the week after Halloween, so the best date for the mission turned out to be the last Saturday in September.
Astronauts in the Apollo era had spent thousands of hours piloting jet planes and earning engineering degrees. They had to practice escaping from launchpad disasters by sliding down long cables to the safety of thickly padded bunkers. They had to know how slide rules worked. We did none of that, though we did test-fly our booster on the Fourth of July, out of Steve Wong’s huge driveway in Oxnard, hoping that, with all the fireworks, our unmanned first stage would blow through the night sky unnoticed. Mission accomplished. That rocket cleared Baja and is right now zipping around the Earth every ninety minutes and, let me state clearly, for the sake of multiple government agencies, will probably burn up harmlessly on reentry in twelve to fourteen months.
MDash, who was born in a sub-Saharan village, has a super brain. As a transfer student at St. Anthony Country Day High School with minimal English skills, he won a science-fair Award of Merit with an experiment on ablative materials, which caught fire, to the delight of everyone. Since having a working heat shield is implied in the phrase “returning safely to Earth,” MDash was in charge of that and all things pyrotechnic, including the explosive bolts for stage separation. Anna did the math, all the load-lift ratios, orbital mechanics, fuel mixtures, and formulas—the stuff I pretend to know, but which actually leaves me in a fog.
My contribution was the Command Module—a cramped, headlight-shaped spheroid that was cobbled together by a very rich pool-supply magnate, who was hell-bent on getting into the private aerospace business to make him some big-time NASA cash. He died in his sleep just before his ninety-fourth birthday, and his (fourth) wife-widow agreed to sell me the capsule for a hundred bucks, though I would have paid twice that. She insisted on typing a receipt on one of her husband’s old typewriters, a green Royal Desktop, a behemoth, just one of many that he collected but failed to maintain, as there was a stack of them growing rust in a corner of the garage. MUST TAKE DELIVERY IN 48 HOURS she typed, as well as NO RETURNS/CASH ONLY. I named the capsule the Alan Bean, in honor of the lunar-module pilot of Apollo 12, the fourth man to walk on the moon and the only one I ever met, in a Houston-area Mexican restaurant in 1986. He was paying the cashier, as anonymous as a balding orthopedist, when I yelled out, “Holy cow! You’re Al Bean!” He gave me his autograph and drew a tiny astronaut above his name.
Since four of us would be a-comin’ round the moon, I needed to make room inside the Alan Bean and eliminate pounds. We’d have no Mis
sion Control to boss us around, so I ripped out all the Comm. I replaced every bolt, screw, hinge, clip, and connector with duct tape (three bucks a roll at Home Depot). Our privy had a shower curtain for privacy. I’ve heard from an experienced source that a trip to the john in zero gravity requires that you strip naked and give yourself half an hour, so, yeah, privacy was key. I replaced the outer-opening hatch and its bulky lock-EVAC apparatus with a steel-alloy plug that had a big window and self-sealing bib. In the vacuum of space, the air pressure inside the Alan Bean would force the hatch closed and airtight. Simple physics.
Announce that you are flying to the moon and everyone assumes you mean to land on it—to plant the flag, kangaroo-hop in one-sixth gravity, and collect rocks to bring home, none of which we were going to do. We were flying around the moon. Landing is a whole different ball game, and as for stepping out onto the surface? Hell, choosing which of the four of us would get out first and become the thirteenth person to leave bootprints up there would have led to so much bad blood that our crew would have broken up long before T minus ten seconds and counting. And let’s face it, that crewman would have been Anna anyway.
Assembling the three stages of the good ship Alan Bean took two days. We packed granola bars and water in squeeze-top bottles, then pumped in the liquid oxygen for the two booster stages and the hypergolic chemicals for the one-shot firing of the translunar motor, the minirocket that would fling us to our lunar rendezvous. Most of Oxnard came around to Steve Wong’s driveway to ogle the Alan Bean, not a one of them knowing who Alan Bean was or why we’d named the rocket ship after him. The kids begged for peeks inside the spacecraft, but we didn’t have the insurance. What are you waiting for? You gonna blast off soon? To every knothead who would listen, I explained launch windows and trajectories, showing them on my MoonFaze app (free) how we had to intersect the moon’s orbit at exactly the right moment or lunar gravity would…Ah, hell! There’s the moon! Point your rocket at it and put on a show!