The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  “Applause, applause!” Tim clapped above his head. “Fantastic, guys!”

  George gave him a little surprised smile.

  “Much better,” Mona said.

  “Very, very nice,” Tim agreed, “and I was glad to see your car in the driveway, George.”

  “But,” Mona answered, shutting the fallboard, “they were in it this morning, moving a ton of liquor boxes in and—”

  Tim cut her short, pushing into the kitchen and then opening the fridge. When he turned back, George was there. “Can I ask you something, Tim?” The guy was a foot taller, but he stooped to make up for it. “Would you mind if I spoke to the bar owners about the driveway? Ordinarily I wouldn’t get involved, because this is completely your area, but Mona just gets so upset, and I hate to see her that way. Tim, last week she cried.”

  Tim let his beer arm drop. “And what is it you would say to the creeps?”

  “I’m sure they’re reasonable guys. I’d try to sell them on the idea that if their neighbors are angry with them, then that’s bad for business. Their neighbors should be their best customers! Wouldn’t you love to go across the street and sit at the bar and watch a game sometime? Have some onion rings? Of course you would, but not now, not with the way you’re treated.”

  “You know what, George? Yes, I think you should do it.”

  “Is it really okay? For Mona’s sake?” The guy was shifting from side to side, preventing Tim from leaving his own kitchen.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, that’s great!”

  “Here’s to you.” Tim raised his beer in a one-way toast and shepherded George out to the driveway, where Tim would have to back up to free the BMW.

  “I have another favor to ask,” George said, stopping behind Tim’s truck. “I’m a Freemason. I don’t know if you knew that. And I would love to invite Miles to some of our youth events. We get the kids involved in doing things for the community. Last year, we painted over all the graffiti on three city blocks. The kids got a lot of donated sports equipment for doing that, but the main thing is that while they’re working, we talk to them about life and help them make the right choices. I see Miles is, well, he’s in need of something to do. And maybe, eventually, if it all works out, he would ask to be initiated. Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for the kid. Great contacts there.”

  “It’s too late, George.” Tim clapped him on the back. “Kid’s already joined the warlocks.” Then he dodged the fairy godfather and closed himself into his truck, which, when started, blasted Sousa’s Semper Fidelis. He drove too slowly around a few blocks so he could hear the complete polyphonic masterpiece, dedicated to Marines everywhere. The tremendous high and low melodies contrasting and commingling made him dizzy with glee, and he nodded to all curious onlookers like he was leading a parade. Of course, when he returned to the driveway, it was plugged up by the bar owners’ van.

  # # #

  “Let the weekend begin,” Tim said when he’d shut the front door again. The reason he knew he would transform into Rusty the next day was that he had decided it. He’d just decided it! He had Blondie’s address, and he would go and get her. His wife, it was clear, could settle down with Big George once Tim was no more. George could resolve the bad business with the bar and take care of buying the parking spots. Problems solved. And Miles would be a Mason.

  “Daddy’s coming for dinner.” Mona came down the stairs in a nice dress. “Can you clean off the table? He’s bringing the money for the parking space.”

  “Does he know the price is twenty-five K?”

  “Yes, he does! And let me take care of this. I’m doing the talking.”

  Tim flopped onto the couch, where he noticed the folded blankets had disappeared. “Is this why Vinnie’s gone?”

  “He is visiting the Cheesecake Factory, but he should be back soon,” she said from the kitchen, but then she came back out and held up her hand in a stop sign. “Don’t say anything to him,” she said. “He’s thinking of moving back here.”

  “Christ, I knew it!” Tim winced. “I thought he had a boyfriend down there!”

  “He did, and then he found out the man is going to marry a woman. That was the man’s Miata.”

  “He stole it?”

  “How would I know?” Then from the kitchen, she added, “Am I the gay police?”

  “What about the movie? Is there even a movie?” Tim asked the kitchen door.

  # # #

  Mona’s father arrived in a suit coat and fedora. The jacket came from a time when he was thinner, and it could no longer be buttoned. He spent a few moments at the shrine, touching the piano lid—murmuring to the little framed photo of his wife—before taking his habitual place in the armchair in the living room, leaving Tim, Mona, and Vinnie to crowd together on the sofa while Miles hunched on the floor under one of the windows.

  “Okay, guys, I like the parking space.” He tapped an armrest. “I like it because Mona needs it for her students, and I like it because it makes a good investment. They are not making any new parking lots in this city. So I want to buy it, for Mona, but it will be my property.”

  “Good,” Tim said. “Very nice.” He was happily realizing that when his transformation happened the next day, he would never have to endure this man again.

  “Daddy”—Mona shot a hand through the air toward her father—“this is not something you can resell whenever you want, unless we move, which right now we cannot do. And we need the parking to be part of any sale of our house. That’s how we get above water. They have to be connected.”

  “But just giving you twenty-five K? What am I supposed to do, give David and Donna also twenty-five? You see what I mean?”

  “It’s a loan, Daddy. Didn’t I tell you? Tim got a raise. He got a nice raise.”

  “Very good! Congratulations.”

  Tim gave a monk’s nod.

  “So he can pay you back. It’s not like we can’t pay you back. And he’s tuning pianos now too!”

  “Already?”

  “For some people at the opera, Daddy. Some of the big shots,” Mona answered, and Tim just offered a big dumb smile.

  The man fixed on Tim. “We’ll do a payment plan, then,” he said.

  “Fine. How’s five thousand per year? Can we do that?” she asked.

  After a few loud nose breaths, he nodded his assent. “Am I having dinner, or what?”

  She kissed his bald head on her way out of the room. “You want wings? I got wings! You want meatballs? I got meatballs!”

  “What are you doing these days, Miles?” He looked at the boy with great concern.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is that how you answer a person?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve just murdered the conversation.”

  “Oh.” He let out half a laugh.

  “I’m not trying to be funny.”

  “I’m helping Dad get in shape.”

  “There you go! That’s an answer. What’s he getting in shape for?”

  “The Marines.”

  “No,” Tim said, “I’m just trying to get healthier.”

  “You’ve got a long way to go. What about you, Vinnie? I heard you’re on all the shows.”

  Tim stood and headed for the kitchen, but the older man pinched his sleeve as he passed and pulled him down. “It’s you who will pay me the money, once a year on Thanksgiving. This year will be the first year because you are getting the raise and doing all of the tunings. And if you have to sell something, sell something.” He then released the sleeve.

  # # #

  After dinner, Tim slid the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check into his coat. He would take it to the old man’s bank the next morning and cash it. He was sticking with the plan of having George buy the driveway for Mona. He only needed to finalize the transaction, so he texted Phyllis:

  Don’t have your signed P&S yet. Can you scan and email? Copy Mona? Hope all is well.

  That night, late, while Tim scrat
ched at the blister forming on his over-gelled forearm, he doubled down on thoughts of his ideal self in Afghanistan. To have strong, normal thighs again, and ribs he could trace, or that she could, his Girl in Back. The only worries for him now were his mother and Miles, but his mother was never going to agree to get rid of her dogs, so that was futile, and really, what could be done about Miles? No, nothing could be done, even if Tim had more time.

  DAVIS

  “That’s where it was found.” Davis pointed out the dark roadside blotch to Megan, who gave the dirt a blank stare while shouldering her pack. He had asked her to come out of habit, called out to her as he left, like for any weekend errand, but this time she’d said yes. He had actually closed the door behind himself before realizing she’d agreed.

  A wind gust flipped up his bangs as he made a slow, complete turn, assessing the surrounding hills. “They like to den on high ground, but that won’t help us here, I’m afraid. There’s high ground in every direction. Let’s just head west and look for scat.”

  He crossed the road and found an opening between the trees. “A clan of hyenas deposit their droppings in one spot, their latrine. So look for a collection of poop that’s chalky white, from all of the bones they eat.” He could not hear her following. Sure enough, she was still in the road, squinting at the sky.

  “How will we get back to the car?”

  Knowing that getting lost was for Megan the ultimate loss of control, he tried to be tender: “I have a compass on my phone. So do you.” He patted the hard plastic belt clip holding his cell. A holstered gun hung on the other hip. “We may also find pellets on the ground because, like owls, hyenas throw up what they can’t digest, hair and hooves and such.”

  “If I see a thrown-up hoof, I will die.”

  “Okay, let’s go. Come on. And less talking, more listening, would be good for both of us.” She followed him in.

  “What am I listening for?” she loudly whispered after a while.

  Davis stopped and rolled his eyes upward in the listening look. “They can sound like cows lowing.” He made the sound. “They can also sound like elephants trumpeting. Also like chimps. It’s a wide spectrum of vocalizations. Just listen for anything out of the ordinary.” The woods were much easier to traverse in the fall, now that the ferns had collapsed and the leaves were half gone. He held branches up for Megan and helped to steady her on tricky descents or brook crossings. Occasionally they stopped to listen before continuing on again. Davis never imagined he’d have a daughter as an expedition member, but he had imagined his son tramping along—for a few months anyway he had imagined this, but then the boy was lost. An incompetent cervix, they’d said, like it was some bumbling birth canal raised in the woods. Jenny’s cervix had opened up early and allowed the baby to come down, causing a miscarriage. It wouldn’t happen again, they’d promised her. Next time, they’d sew it up, the cervix, and then release the sutures when the baby was ready to be born. But Jenny had said no, or rather she had just continued shaking her head no, which she’d begun when the miscarriage occurred and kept up for quite some time, like a no-tremor. She couldn’t face a loss like that again, she’d said.

  So that was when adoption was put on the table, not right away, of course. But whenever any world tragedy happened, Jenny wanted to go and save an orphaned baby. Then when 20/20 aired a segment on Romanian orphanages, showing malnourished children tied to stained cots, Jenny’s longing hit an all-time high. The segment showed children with no affect, lost. The reporter explained that Ceauşescu’s regime, which had outlawed contraception and abortion in order to force women to have more children, had then decided to spend the country’s economic resources to settle foreign debt, so there was no money for the orphanages that were bulging with babies. Next, of course, came unregulated adoptions, which in many cases further endangered the children. When Davis and Jenny adopted Megan, there were nearly forty thousand children still waiting in squalor. Each institution had a “baby shop” of those ready for adoption. If he and Jenny had wanted to save some money, they could have purchased a child from any of the dozens of mothers and fathers who approached them on the street. “You here for buying baby?”

  Davis and Jenny had walked into only one baby shop, because it would have been impossible to do two. They passed the rusty metal cribs of toddlers who had never toddled, and although the children were clean, they all rocked back and forth, their own soothers. Not one cried. Crying had proven ineffective.

  They had decided on a girl (not wanting to see the child as a replacement for the boy), and Jenny finally stopped at one crib, placed her palm on a child’s head, and called, “Davis?” She explained that this one seemed to see her, to react to her a little.

  And here she was now, a beautiful, strong young woman who could probably carry her father back to the car should he need it. Her misunderstanding of the world, of human nature, of people’s intentions, broke his heart. The machinations she felt she had to go through to gain a simple thing—sustenance—devastated him. But pity did her no good.

  They stopped at a swift brook and took a break, letting their legs hang over a large flat rock above the water. Davis asked her for a drink. “I’ve worked up a sweat, have you?”

  She looked down at herself and then out at the woods. “No.”

  “Hyenas can go for long periods without water, so they don’t need to live close to it.”

  After pulling the water from her pack, Megan drank first and then handed him the bottle. He took a few long pulls and swiped at his mouth with the back of a hand. “Another odd thing is that they don’t bring food back to the den for their young; they don’t regurgitate any meals for them either, which means the young suckle until they are big enough to travel great distances.”

  After a long moment of just enjoying the scene, Davis said, “I may shoot the hyena if we see it. I’d rather get a photo but—”

  “Is it fully loaded?” She reached over and slid her index finger across the textured grip.

  “Fully. Seven bullets. It’s just that a photo takes more time than we will likely get. That’s how the world of science was introduced to the mountain gorilla, someone finally shot one. Can you imagine? Such an incredible beast, and we didn’t acknowledge its existence until a dead specimen was brought down out of the mountains in 1902, after nearly forty years of hearing tales about the creature and discounting them.”

  “You always tell the same story.”

  “I’ve told this to you? I didn’t realize.”

  “It’s always some story where no one believes people, but then they were right. Like all along they were right.” She loved to point out his behaviors. He did have a preoccupation with scientific bigotry. He would give her that. The idea that human beings living closer to nature should be disbelieved about natural things provoked him. He was the native peoples’ paladin.

  “Dad?” she said after a while, “I have a problem with people touching me.”

  “Who?” He flashed on a vision of Lindstrom looming over her.

  “Just anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m afraid of people touching me. I’ve been thinking about why, and part of it is seeing them or their hand come closer and closer, and I freak out.”

  “Whose hand are you picturing?”

  “No, it’s not one person! It’s just touching in general.”

  “But you’re always touching other people.”

  “It has something to do with seeing them start to touch me, I guess.”

  “I did not know this. So it’s a visual thing, you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s not the actual touch itself?”

  “Could we try something? I was going to ask Mom, but…”

  “Sure. You can ask me anything.”

  “Okay, I’ll close my eyes, and at some point, not right away, you can tell me you are going to touch me, and then you move your hand toward me—slowly!—and keep telling me, and then you can touc
h me.”

  He turned to face her, sitting cross-legged. “Where do you want to be touched?”

  “Just, I don’t know, on my arm. Okay, I’m closing my eyes.”

  They listened to the brook for ten seconds, and then Davis said, “I’m going to touch you now.” And he reached over and brushed his fingers against her forearm. She flinched.

  “How was that? Not so good, huh.”

  “Not great.”

  “Let’s try again. Close your eyes. Okay. I’m coming in for the touch.” He floated a finger through the air. “Get ready. You can handle this. Remember, I’ve touched you many times before. Closer, closer.”

  “Stop!” she jerked away.

  “I’m not so sure it’s the visual, Megan. I think it’s the actual feeling.”

  “Yeah. Never mind. I don’t want you to tell Mom about this.”

  “No. We can have our own secret things.”

  # # #

  On the way home, Davis stopped at a convenience store for fountain drinks. As he waited to pay, he looked out at Megan in the car, her face still and expressionless. She seemed to power down when no one was around; she didn’t listen to music or read. It was as though the only reason to engage was to affect or manipulate another person.

  When he opened the driver’s door, she woke to him. “Did they have Cherry Coke?”

  “Just regular.” He sat and handed her the drink. Then something made him think of his wallet, and he patted the side pockets of his cargo pants, but it wasn’t in either one. “Oh, dear,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I left my wallet in the store. I’ll be right back.”

  He jogged back in and interrupted the clerk, who was ripping off a long strip of scratch tickets for a pregnant woman, but the guy said he hadn’t seen it. Davis searched the floor on his way out.

  “Did you find it?” Megan shouted out of the car window.

  He shook his head.

  When he reached for the door handle, she wailed, “Dad, did you drop it? Did someone take it off of the counter?” Her cheeks were raw and wet.