The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  Here are the policies. I am in the basement.

  Love,

  Mom

  The basement of the triple-decker was where the washers and dryers were, so he left the apartment to help her carry the clothes up. Had they determined that he would review her policies? Flush them, he’d say. Flush them; they’re worthless! When he opened the basement door, her legs and feet were in view at the foot of the stairs.

  “Ma!” he called, as he jacked down the flight. She was sprawled facedown on the cement. “Ma?” The one eye he could see was open and blinking.

  “Can you move at all? Did you break something?” He kneeled and put his cheek against the floor to talk to her. She moaned something.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Leave me.” There was blood on the floor, spreading out from her head.

  “I’m calling an ambulance.” He scrambled up and pulled out his phone.

  He surveyed her as he waited for someone to answer at 9-1-1, her body like a marionette tossed aside between shows. He’d found her on the floor once before, as a kid. One morning on his way to get his breakfast, she was laid out in the middle of the living room floor. She asked for the neighbor woman. “Call Kathleen,” she’d rasped, one hand cupped over an eye. She’d come home the night before with that man whose name was not his real name.

  After telling the dispatcher where they were and going back up to prop open the outside door, Tim returned to sit on the stairs beside her feet. “Are you in pain? Looks like it.”

  She moaned.

  “Why would you do this, Ma? Hey, stop moving. They’re gonna be here any minute.”

  Then the phone rumbled in his hand—a Snapchat, he noticed, before sliding the cell back into his pocket. Seconds later he pulled it back out and watched the entire video with the sound off. He knew the Garbage song well enough that it played in his head. He watched, emotionless, as Blondie ran in the surf and then spiked the volleyball and had her ass patted, and when it ended, he set the phone down on the steps and listened for the ambulance. What was wrong with him? he wondered. That girl, Blondie, was a high school kid, someone his son might lust after at a school assembly.

  When the EMTs arrived, Tim stood back and watched the guys. One slipped a collar under and around his mother’s neck and then held her head while the other laid an orange board beside her. They both grabbed hanks of her clothing and counted to three before rolling her over onto it. They were swift and sure of themselves as only the young can be.

  # # #

  The scans showed a fractured hip and collarbone. According to the surgeon, she would be in the hospital for a week after surgery and then in rehab for another month, after which it would be good for her to live with a relative for another five months or so while she received in-home assisted care to reeducate and strengthen her muscles.

  “Or maybe it’s time to get into an assisted-living situation?” Tim asked the doctor, who was so tiny, she must have needed to stand on a box to operate.

  “What about the dogs?” his mother croaked.

  “I’m sorry?” asked the doctor.

  “She has three dogs. It’s not your problem.” Tim said.

  “If assisted living is everyone’s idea of a good move, then that could be where she goes after rehab,” the doctor said and breezily left the room.

  “I can’t take the dogs, Ma.”

  “It’s just for a week.” Her facial skin looked nearly worn through in places, like gauze pressed onto raw meat.

  “Do you listen? You won’t be home for over a month. At best!”

  She waved him off, the back of her hand a seabed of loose cables.

  “Do you know anyone who would take care of them for you?” Tim knew she had no friends.

  “My son.”

  “If those dogs would pee outside, your son might have a chance at it, but no way. Mona’s not gonna allow it.” His wife once released a mushroom cloud over a piece of sausage on the carpet, so pee was beyond imagination.

  “You’ll think of something. And they need to be fed now.”

  “If you had died, what did you think was going to happen to them?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t care then.”

  “Did you get a supplemental health policy like we talked about?”

  She stared at the window.

  “Then you’re going to one hell of a nice rehab place, Ma. It’ll make Guantánamo look like Club Med.” He fell against the wall and huffed through his nose. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you’re so unhappy.”

  She slid a hand down under the blanket to feel her hip.

  “How bad does it hurt right now? They’ve got great drugs here.” He plucked the pain-scale card from her tray table. The card had facial expressions to match the numbers on the scale. “Point to one, Ma,” he said, holding it up. Ten was “Worst Pain Possible,” with the face red and crying. “Is it up near ten? Where is it?”

  She glanced at the card then cranked back windowside, tears streaming.

  # # #

  Tim stepped into the foyer again and closed the front door of the triple-decker his mother lived in, detonating the barking bomb inside her apartment. How could her neighbors have stood this for all these years? After turning the lock of her apartment door, he nudged the thrashing, gasping dogs away with his foot.

  “You wanna eat, guys?” They scrabbled toward the kitchen and there began leaping against his legs again, like battling for rebounds.

  “Hey, enough!” he said, as he opened a cabinet looking for dog food, but he found instead shelves of unopened boxes from Amazon: an indoor grill, a juicer, a Conair ExtremeSteam clothes steamer. He slid them out and stacked them on the counter. The other cabinets held more sealed treasures—an electric space heater shaped like a grate of coal, a recordable DVR, three glass liquor decanters—but no dog food. “Where’s your food, guys?” He knew one’s name, but not the other two. In the fridge he found half a can of refried beans and pulled that out, also a few eggs. He would cook them a scramble on one of the working burners and then try to figure out what could be done.

  # # #

  Sunny took a while to get to her door. Tim kept looking back toward the driveway, at the frenzy in his truck cab, and then trying to peer into Sunny’s frosted sidelights. Finally came the blur of a shape in the glass, and when she pulled opened the great door, she was pleased to see him. “Well, howdy-doo!”

  “Howdy-doo to you!” he replied. “I’m sorry to show up unexpected.”

  “No problem at all! I’m anxious to get that piano shipshape.” She moved to the side to beckon him in.

  “No, it’s not the piano today, Sunny. I’ve come for an odd reason, actually. My mum’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Yeah, she fell down some stairs and broke her hip and collarbone. It’ll be a month before she’s back home.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that! Poor dear.”

  “Oh, yeah, not good. You know she has these three small dogs”—he stole another glance at the hairy windows of the cab—“and I thought of you because of little Bea. That’s her name, right?”

  “Oh, Tim, I have to tell you about Bea. She died!”

  “What?” He reared back in shock.

  “She drowned in the pool! I had a heck of a time finding her, because she was afraid of water. I’d begged her for years to get into that pool. She was trying to please me.”

  “Never in the pool before that?”

  “Not once.”

  “But you’d always wanted her to swim.”

  “That’s right. And, Tim, she was old, so lord knows what got into her.” She seemed a bit pleased. Bit of a smile.

  “Wow.” He nodded. “Well this makes my reason for stopping by even more appropriate, maybe. My mum has these three little dogs. Cute, cute dogs.” He turned aside to face his truck. “And I’m looking for someone who can take them for a month, say. I would take them, but my son’s allergic. Swells up.” He moved cupped hand
s around his wincing face, portraying several large growths. “They’re in the car. Wanna see ’em?”

  “Little doggies?”

  “Yep. I’ll go get them. Is that okay?” He fast-walked over to his truck like a kid banned from running. He could not open that door fast enough, watching their tongues flash against the windows. At last he freed the three snaggletooths along with a bank of their rotten breath, and he tried to rub loose the back of his neck as they capered about on the stiff brown grass.

  “Oh, look at them!” Sunny patted her thighs. “Come here, babies! Come here!”

  He could see in her eyes that he was going to be able to leave without them, at least for a day till the shelters reopened.

  “I don’t have any leashes right now, but I can bring some,” he told her.

  “Oh, I could open my own leash store,” she said. “That one looks quite old,” she added, pointing to the one his mother often claimed wouldn’t live the night.

  “If she dies, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t have dog food either, and now I need to get back to the hospital.”

  “I’ll give this a try.” She gave him a strong, quick nod. “A month goes by in a minute.

  As soon as he shut the truck door after himself, he felt the dog pee soaking into his pants, which grew colder against his ass during the long drive home.

  DAVIS

  Stationed again at the kitchen table, attending Megan’s special time, Davis should have noticed her texting frenzy, but he was lost in thought over another scientist who had been all too quickly dismissed: Gregor Mendel, the world’s first true geneticist. Mendel had published his pea plant crossbreeding discoveries—which would later be presented to all the world’s schoolchildren as Mendel’s laws of inheritance—in the Journal of the Brno Natural History Society, not a career-launching venue, and he was dead sixteen years before his theories were confirmed by peers. At least he’d been able to stake his claim in print, as had Davis in the comments section of the Greenstown Daily News, not to mention the spotlight on the evening news. He had on his screen, now, the original newspaper account of the beast, at which he again shook his head over Lindstrom’s mistake.

  “If you do your ethnographic research,” Davis said, mostly to himself, “you know that when the Ioway Indians reported on just such a hyena-like creature, its fur was said to be black.” Davis tapped his pointer finger against the screen over the newspaper photo of the black-furred Glenwood monster.

  “It’s a dog,” Megan said, and went back to poking her phone screen.

  “Well, you know dogs, I guess, now that you’re in the business.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “If I were working for you in your dog-walking business, what are some dos and don’ts for me?” Davis was desperate to make a rules chart for the dog-walking.

  “I don’t need help. I’ll be doing all of the walking.”

  “I guess you could say, ‘Don’t yank the dogs. Don’t drag them along. Don’t swat them or—”

  “I know how to walk a dog!”

  “You know not to leave them alone, right? If someone steals them, you’ll be liable.”

  Megan screamed, which brought Jenny into the room. “He won’t leave me alone!”

  “Don’t use that tone, honey,” Jenny said, taking off her reading glasses. “Would you like some lunch? I bought braunschweiger, Davis.”

  “I’d love it.”

  “Can’t he make his own sandwich?”

  “It’s no bother for me.” Jenny located and assembled the mustard, cheese, lettuce, onion, and liver sausage on the countertop.

  Davis never understood how the girl could get so bent out of shape over his small distresses, like losing his wallet, and then want to deny him a simple pleasure like a sandwich. “It tastes better when it’s made by someone else,” he said.

  “You will want to make some man a sandwich one day,” Jenny said, wagging the bread knife at her.

  “But it won’t be someone like Dad.”

  “Didn’t Daddy say he was giving you a lot of money to get you to California? I think that’s worth a sandwich.”

  This made Megan bolt up and pop off her chair. “Okay! I’ll make it!”

  “Ah-ha! Better get a video of this!” Davis said.

  Jenny grabbed the phone off the counter and started the video going as Megan laid the first slice of rye onto a big white plate and smiled to the camera. “I’ll do it like Gina Achillini,” she said of the libidinous cooking-show host. Then she slathered a dollop of hearty mustard across the rye, back and forth across the rye, and shook a lettuce leaf of its last clinging droplets before bedding it down with the two rounds of sausage, one resting its pink cheek upon the other. Slowly she peeled back a single slice of Jarlsberg, in a longed-for reveal, and kissed the air after each thin slicing of the glowing red onion. At last, she massaged the bulging delight with the other slice of rye, cut the prize on the diagonal, and thrust the plate out with a saucy look, as if to shove it straight into the lens.

  TIM

  “The page count is a hundred and ten,” Joe Masotta told Tim over the phone. “You know how I know? I already wrote that book! The President’s Own: Standing on Ceremony. Didn’t you guys look this up at all?”

  “No kidding? Jeez, congratulations! I had no idea you wrote a book.” Tim pulled out a desk drawer, looking for napkins.

  “Well, it’s out of print now, but it sold pretty well.”

  “I’m sure it did! Maybe we could buy it from the old publisher, rebrand it or something.” He pulled out another drawer. He needed a Kleenex to stuff under his shirt, which was still wet with excess man gel.

  “How does this benefit your publisher again?” Joe asked.

  Tim sighed. “She wants a book to sign at events, so she does want her name on it, but she’d give you half billing.”

  “Tim, what is wrong with this woman?”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Okay, last year, at this same convention”—Tim tried to put his feet up on the desk, but the plastic chair wouldn’t allow it—“she took me around the big hall and introduced me to some of the band directors, and she’s laying it on thick with these guys. This one is ‘the absolute future of marching bands.’ That one is ‘the greatest spectacle director in the U.S. of A.’ You get my drift. And the only thing these guys ever asked her for that I remember was that they all wanted to be part of a DVD that showcased their drills on the field, which she has just said are breathtaking, right? So later, then, at dinner, when it was just her and me, I asked about this DVD and how she saw it going, and do you know what she said? She said she had no intention of making any DVD because they’d all copy it by the thousands, these directors, and they would pass the disks around like free candy to all their friends, and it would be a big fat joke at her expense, because—and I quote—’band directors are all thieves, liars and thieves.’ Swear to God, Joe. Liars and thieves. But, hey, I don’t want to turn you off on this convention talk with her, ’cause you’ll be doing that for the directors. Those guys worship you.”

  There was a long silence before Joe asked, “What else about her?” and Tim told him how he didn’t think she was going to pay a dead woman’s family all that she had earned.

  # # #

  After the call with Joe, Mike popped in and hung himself on the wall. “She’s nice.”

  “Who?”

  “Blondie.”

  “Wait. What do you mean?”

  “She’s—she has a lot of wisdom, like you said.” He ran his thumbs up and down his ribs.

  “Right, but what—” Tim’s cell phone rang and he stood to access his back pocket, saying, “Hang on, my mum’s in the hospital.”

  He watched Mike back out with his hands up in surrender as Sunny began talking, “Tim, are these dogs housebroken? Maybe this is just because of the shock, but they are just going potty potty all over my house!”

  “Oh, sur
e, no, they’re housebroken. They lived in an apartment. I think they’re just very sad, very anxious. I mean, they don’t know where they are.”

  “Well…I can try this for another day or two, but if it doesn’t improve, you’ll have to come get them. How’s your mother?”

  “It’s pretty bad. She’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Oh, the poor thing. But I’m not surprised. I hear it’s just desperate pain for months. I’m afraid of falling for that very reason. But then they say the more you fear it, the more likely it is to happen.”

  “Sure.”

  “‘Cause then you stiffen up.”

  “That must be what happened.”

  “I’ll bet my eyeteeth, it was. Listen, when are you coming to finish the piano?”

  He sidestepped from behind the desk and moved into the center of the windowless, cement-walled room. “Well, the thing I have recently learned is that you need to let a piano acclimate to the new space before tuning it. Otherwise, it’s just going to pop right back out of tune. So we should wait another week or two, I think.”

  “I never heard that.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  When they hung up, Tim searched his phone’s browser and called the local animal shelter to ask about their intake process. The person who answered had a gender-neutral voice. “We can make an interview appointment for you and your dog where we look over the vet records and give the dog a personality test.”

  “What’s that, Meyers-Briggs? These are extroverts.” He smiled up at the dome light.

  “There’s more than one dog, sir?”

  “My mum’s in the hospital and can’t take care of them. Three of ’em. Their personalities are very doglike.”

  “They would need to be examined for dental issues. That’s a cost we can’t absorb. Do you know of any dental issues?” A husky voice, but he decided it was a woman, a man-hater.

  “I’m afraid to stick my fingers in their mouths.”

  “Guess we don’t need the personality test, then, sir. Also, the fact that there are three? I would suggest you try a kill shelter. Our wait for just one sterling dog is now six to eight months.”