No Such Thing as the Real World

by M. T. Anderson

  Six weeks before my father died, I bought him a big fat festive Hawaiian shirt. Because it was festive, it helped us both. How could bad things be coming to a man in a brand-new big fat festive Hawaiian shirt? They couldn’t.

  That’s why I could go it even further. That’s why—seeing big fat don’t-you-goddamn-do-that eyes on my dad at receiving the shirt, the gift, the scaredy, and the message—that’s why I could say to him, “Hey, old man, keep those tags on there, just wear them tucked inside, because I want to return the shirt after you’re meat.”

  Because it couldn’t possibly happen if you said stuff like that, could it? No, and then the great, massive pagoda-guy in the birds-of-paradise tent shirt could continue standing guard at the gate like always, like should-be.

  I still have the shirt and the shirt still has the tags. In the closet in the house where the mail keeps coming anyway.

  Back to the Testament. Severe Gail, bordering psychotic, it says, echoing the shipping forecast, next to the name of a woman who left a baby carriage three weeks ago and hasn’t been back.

  Dad loved that shipping forecast.

  I loved Gail.

  Gail McGill—I knew it right away. She was always a little bit nuts, all the way back to fourth grade, when she demonstrated her unlimited devotion to me by licking pigeon droppings off a picnic table. Devotion and insanity may have been indistinguishable in the nine-year-old mind, but Gail and I got along better than fine for a lot of years, until we went our separate ways. Separate meant the Y in the road that splits the main thoroughfare of Lundy Lee into two pointless directions inland. Separate meant I stayed on my old right fork while Gail traveled two miles and two babies up the other way, and while living in a place such as the Lee means everybody sort of knows everybody, it somehow means in a way that everybody eventually becomes a stranger too.

  Gail pawned her baby buggy to my father.

  I circle around from my place of authority to get over to the furniture section since, after all, what’s a carriage but baby furniture with someplace to go. I find it, and find it to be one of the nicer items in the shop. It’s one of those overspecial, overpadded all-terrain baby vehicles that, if they were a lot bigger and motorized, could work as a grown man’s sleeping quarters and an eye-catching set of wheels to show off for the chicks. It has never been used. Or: It has been used by an uncommonly tidy and unbabylike baby, because this thing is showroom buff. And from the little bits of news that ever rolled down the two miles from Gail’s world’s end, her two babies (and very possibly an approaching third) were not even in the regular category of slop-slinging, tire-chewing, cat-scaring bundles of terror, never mind the extradelicate kind.

  It’s a buggy that made no sense. Maybe that’s why she pawned it.

  “Why are there so many Tuesdays?” I read out loud as I make my way back to my post. I read from the book like I’m reading from literature. I read to the assembled tools and toys and antique advertising signs like I’m reading to an audience of the willing.

  You worsen the person, I read.

  “How?” I ask. “How do you worsen them? And who is the person? You? Me? Them?”

  Answer? None. Silence.

  Alone again, but not alone enough, I sit frozen at the counter occupied for years by my father, the guv’nor, the beloved. Surrounded by the merchandise, the remains of the comings and the goings of the interactions of the relations of the customers/characters/clients/clandestines of Lundy Lee and the open sea.

  The open sea. My body cannot move, but my eye is live. Out to the horizon. Out the big faded stenciled window, over parked cars, across the street, beyond the gapped grin of low salt-eaten buildings, to the sea, which is always in sight from just this spot where my father spent his progressively sedentary years. You can see a storm coming for miles from this spot, and I watch as one comes running right now. A charcoal avalanche of malevolent cloud is pushing its way across the chop face of the water so fast, it will be here in minutes. Wind begins to rattle the windows, and the first sharp dashes of rain begin hitting everywhere.

  I love this. This, to me, is life. The universe giving Lundy Lee CPR, hammering its chest and blowing somebody else’s air in to revive it if just for a little while, and it’s a thrill.

  It is almost a disappointment that I can see the end of the storm nearly as soon as I see the beginning. For seven, eight minutes, this thundering, blustering beauty pounds the front of the shop so hard that it could very well wind up letting itself in, but there, right behind it, comes the lightning-crack tail, following it home, passing overhead, whipsnapping, leaving the town wet and breathless and alone again gasping. I miss it already.

  “Holy hell, huh?”

  I barely look in the direction of the door as the kid ambles in. It’s the lifeguard from the municipal pool, and he looks as if he has swum his way over in his clothes.

  “Holy hell,” I say with a wave.

  “I timed that perfectly,” the kid says. “Stepped out the door just as the thing blew in, then came in here just as it blew away again. Woulda stayed drier if I’d stayed in the pool.”

  “Isn’t that where you should be?” I ask.

  “Ah, not a problem. Nobody ever comes on Mondays. Ever. Just wind up talking to myself, and that ain’t mentally healthy.”

  He is about two years older than me, but we have no history. He’s just one of those people who wash up in this type of town, live above one of the shops for a while, doing this or that job nobody really needs them to do, then move on again. Nice enough guy, been here over a year already. You can hear the time ticking off of him.

  “Wanna buy a ring?” the kid asks.

  “Not really,” I answer. Buying stuff had not really entered into my mind much. I knew, mostly, what the business was about, but until now I had not gotten my mind around the idea of bringing merchandise in. This was supposed to be my livelihood now, carrying on my dad’s business, holding steady the core center of the “community” of Lundy Lee for the greater good and for life. But to be honest, I was thinking of it more in terms of outgo. Of seeing the current inventory delivered to the previous owners or the new owners, finishing up Senior’s uncompleted business and then…

  What? And then, what, Junior?

  “Isn’t that what you do?” Kid asks.

  “I guess,” I answer. I put out my hand.

  Kid pulls a ring from his pocket, places it in my palm. The ring looks the real thing, a 1929 gold Indian head coin in a chunky ten-carat gold setting that looks like something a bishop would wear. The underside is open so you can see the details of the back of the coin, with a slick American eagle etched in it trusting in God and everything.

  “I know next to nothing about jewelry,” I say, squinting at the ring and turning it over and over.

  “Cool,” Kid says. “Then it’s worth two million.”

  “Sorry,” I say, “but I left it in my other pants. Is it stolen?”

  “No way. My mom gave it to my dad; then she ran away to find herself, before anybody ever knew she was lost.”

  “Did she find herself?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Huh. Well my mother’s looking too, so maybe if they don’t find themselves they’ll find each other.”

  “That would be very sweet. Anyway, then my dad and me went fishing, to forget her, like, and he threw the thing in the river near home. The only thing I can do great is swim, so when we went home and he went to sleep, that is just what I did, I swam. I went back to that lazy no-fish river and I dove in where we were, and didn’t I find that gleaming shiny ring in about five minutes?”

  “That’s nice,” I say. “But maybe, the way it happened and everything, it’s like a sign or something that you should keep the ring.”

  “That’s what I thought. But then I need money, like ya do, right? And I don’t make dirt over there guarding nobody’s life, watching nobody swim but me. So I came in here and I had to make a choice and I chose to keep the ring, but I
put up a couple of trophies, my swimming trophies, for a few bucks with your dad. He was a fine guy too, your dad…”

  “So is yours.”

  “Thanks. But I figured, like you figured, that I should have the ring. But know what? The ring doesn’t make me happy. I been blue since the day my swimming trophies left me, and I think I made the wrong choice, y’know? So I was thinking, how ’bout you just give me those two trophies, I see them right there, the ones that have little divers on top that actually do look like me, and I will give you this ring and we will call it all square?”

  I look over at the small swimming trophies. They aren’t even nice trophies. Plastic. Chipping. One of them has the name plate glued on crooked.

  “The ring’s got to be worth about a thousand times as much as the trophies,” I say.

  Kid shakes his head, many times. He looks embarrassed, exposed, suddenly younger even than Junior. “Not really,” he says, “not really, though. For one thing, your dad gave me too much to begin with….”

  “Why am I not surprised? I don’t know how the man stayed afloat.”

  “And also…just, not really. Here, make the trade. Here, let’s.”

  I still have the ring in my palm, bouncing it, weighing it up, when I retrieve the two little statuettes from the shelf. They weigh not much more than the ring.

  Kid is reunited with the trophies, clutching both little divers with exactly that same grip Academy Award winners use when they get their mitts on the big one. Only he stares at them more like he has been reunited with long-lost loves—parents, siblings, children.

  I suddenly feel something. I am overcome, overwhelmed, with a rush a of good feeling like I have not recognized before, certainly not in recent times, as I oversee the sad little reunion. I beam over the ceremony as if I have really accomplished something here instead of having done, really, nothing at all.

  Can you see? Why a guy would want to do this? Why a complete, fully functional person would want to waste his hours and months doing this stupid business?

  So this is what good really feels like.

  So this is what Charlie felt like.

  “I don’t really need the ring,” I say.

  “But I really need the trophies,” Kid says. “And I don’t have money. Really I’m only part-time, part-part-time even, at the pool, so they don’t pay me for but a few hours a week. Most of the time I’m just hanging around there for the swimming, and to have someplace to be, and so maybe a nice girl or something might come in.”

  I laugh as I force the ring back on Kid. “No, don’t worry about it. You’ve been the highlight of my day, really. And I think I’m doing…what I should do.”

  Kid looks at his great bounty, then back at me with a suspicious, quizzical look. He takes one jokey, testing step toward the exit. “You gonna call a cop on me now or something? This some sick game?”

  I wave my friendliest unthreatening good-bye.

  Kid takes his luck while it’s warm and continues on out. “Hey, I’m gonna do a swim, like a charity swim, from here out to the Big Island and back. For charity. You wanna sponsor me?”

  “When’s the swim?”

  “Dunno. Maybe later today.”

  “What’s the charity?”

  I keep smiling and waving.

  “Not sure. Something really sad, though.”

  I smile, I wave, I don’t hold my breath. “Let me know.”

  It’s visible, what my father meant. About this job maybe being a public service, about it maybe being central to the community. I could be getting ahead of myself, but right now it feels pretty all right what I’m doing. Could I be the guv’nor?

  It must be ages I’m dreaming on that, because I hardly notice the door swing open. I hardly notice the rail-thin scarecrow of a man walking my way, walking through the door, top of his head bald as beefsteak, blond cornsilk fringe hanging down back and sides.

  “What can I do for you?” I say, almost as a way to slow his coming at me.

  He lopes his way over regardless, swinging far right and left as he walks. He could fail a drug test from halfway across the room. His eyes are dewy and kind, smiling and unsettling.

  “I am very, very, very sorry for your loss. For our loss,” says the man. “My name is Beech, and I came to meet the new boss, hoping he’s the same as the old boss. Right?” he says, smiling harder and shake-shocking my hand. “Like the Who song, right?”

  “Right,” I say. “I hope I’m mostly the same.”

  “I hope you are mostly the same,” Beech says. “We all hope you are mostly the same. The universe hopes you are mostly the same.”

  I wait. The air goes still.

  “I’ll try,” I say with a shrug I really put my back into.

  More still air.

  “Can I help you?” I ask after we have run out of polite.

  “You can, my man. I am here to collect my rightful belongings.”

  “That’s good.” I nod energetically. “Rightful belongings are our business. Ticket?”

  “No ticket,” Beech says brightly.

  I sigh. “Then how—?”

  “It’s in the safe,” he says, pointing to the narrow closet door next to the stack of drawers right behind me.

  “There’s a safe?”

  “That’s what Charlie called it. I don’t think it’s a real safe, though. I think it’s a closet.”

  It is a closet. Shelves along the left side, boxes and bags stacked floor to chin elsewise. There is a bare bulb hanging from an ancient cloth-wrapped cord, with a little chain attached, to illuminate all.

  It illuminates very little, but it does cast enough buttery glow to leave me none the wiser. “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’s a Viking,” he says, as if the question itself is puzzling.

  “It’s a Viking,” I repeat, looking back over my shoulder at the customer.

  He nods at me, friendly and understanding. “Don’t be scared. It’s not a real one, like from Denmark or something. It’s a two-foot-tall statue of a hairy Viking leaning on a mace, and with one of those horny helmets and extra big feet. Did Vikings even use maces? I don’t think that’s really historically…”

  I am already buried in the dim closet as Beech comes to his conclusion about the validity of the Viking’s relationship to the mace. I dig, and things fall off shelves and something hard clomps me good right where the spine meets the head, but I find the historically dubious gentleman, swing him right around, and present him handsome on the counter.

  They are clearly both happy to be reunited. Viking wears wide goose-egg eyes of excitement and a plunderer’s grin through his beard. Beech wears practically the same expression.

  There is an awkward moment. Like sitting on the bus next to some saddo whose birthday it is and somehow you just have to be made to know or he can’t enjoy it.

  “Check it out,” Beech says slyly. “His head twists off like this….”

  The Viking is hardly headless before the whole room knows his secret. The grass crop tucked in his belly has a smell so strong, when the bag is opened I’m sure every dope-fiend seagull is going to crash into my front window within minutes.

  “What have we got here?” I ask needlessly.

  “My homegrown. Two exceedingly smooth ounces, if I may pat my own hairy back. Right, funny thing: I had this stuff, and then some other stuff, way different but interesting stuff in its own special way, y’know?” He is waving his hands and spindly fingers in the air between us as if he is trying to mesmerize us both. He’s only batting .500 with the mesmerizing, but I am a little slack-jawed. “And this stuff doesn’t come across these shores often, am I right?”

  “I don’t know if you’re right,” I say coldly. “Just finish the story.”

  “Okay, well I don’t have a lot of time because this Afghanic guy is away on the next boat and I don’t have enough bones to stand up a cat. But because of the reputation of your straight-up old man, and of Bread&Waters Loan Company as the only true-blue s
upporter of the local small businessmen of Lundy Lee—”

  It’s like the expression

  world’s oldest profession.

  Everyone knows what everyone means

  by the local small businessmen of Lundy Lee.

  “That never happened,” I say, as flat as the calm dead sea.

  “Huh?” Beech asks, bumped right off his story.

  “Your story isn’t true. It did not happen, so you should just stop telling it now. My father did not know what is in that statue, because if he had, he wouldn’t have kept it here.”

  Beech has visibly deflated. What was clearly one of his better days has now been run right into the ground.

  And, bizarrely, I feel a pang of bad as I see him and his Viking lose their moment. I feel both totally, righteously right and guilty as hell, and it is one of the crappiest combinations ever and I cannot get them out of my shop fast enough.

  Beech mutters something as he wrangles cash up out of a deep pocket and lays it out on the counter like a child with his coloring pages.

  I point at the cash. “That is what he gave you, to pawn him?”

  “Well, there’s the what he gave me, and the what for interest, ’cause I’m late. I was in bed a few days with a fluish, and there’s the what more, like usual, that I add on for the, y’know, profit thingy, which was better than usual because of the unusual opportunity that it was. He was the only guy,” Beech adds wistfully, “ever supporting the local small—”

  “Just keep it,” I say, gathering up the bills and tucking them together the way careful people do with money. I hand them over. “We don’t handle that kind of business here. Sorry.”

  Beech looks a little sad, a little lucky, but more sad, I believe. My heart likes that in its flickering way.

  “In that case,” Beech says, “you might want to give me that sacred heart statue up there on the top shelf. And leave his head on.”

  I think I hear myself laugh as I bring Jesus down from up there. Beech smiles and nods and backs away from the counter, clutching his twins. He turns and walks to the door with less of the side-to-side than he brought in, but turns in the doorway and calls back, “Your dad was a fine guy, no matter.” He stands there firm with an I-mean-it look.