The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  # # #

  When Tim opened his front door, George’s ass was in his face. Mona had him doing the breathing exercise, touching the toes of his tassel-topped slip-ons while she stood to the side, counting. Between his knees, George’s purple face pleaded. Then came the wet rush of his exhale.

  In the kitchen Tim grabbed a glass and filled it from the tap. His hand trembled as he raised it. “That’s as long as you can go?” Mona chided George.

  Mike had promised he wouldn’t meet Blondie when Tim caught up with him in the parking lot. He said he’d call the whole thing off, but his eyes darted around the whole time, so of course he was going. It was Blondie, after all. And this was what Tim had playing in his head all the way home. Of course, the guy would be there to pick her up, take her out to the beach, tell her her man was dead.

  When Vinnie came into the kitchen, they looked at each other like they’d each been insulted.

  “What’s your problem?” Tim asked.

  “The police came to the Cheesecake Factory. That’s what he did.”

  “What happened?”

  “Everyone was watching, and I told them, ‘I did not steal that car. You think I need to steal a car from a man?’ Tim, I taught that man how to dress, how to be. And when his mama died, I fed him.”

  “Where’s the Miata now?”

  “Well”—he worked off his tie—“they don’t know where I’m living. So they aren’t looking here.”

  Tim pulled a chair out with his foot and landed in it.

  Vinnie sat across from him. “You know what? He can have his car. It’s a gay man’s car, everyone knows that, so he can be out to everyone now.”

  “What’s his name in case he shows up here?”

  “Devlin. D-E-V-I-L-in.”

  George was attempting some impossible vocalization in the living room, low to high in unwieldy leaps.

  “That guy has a sad dream.” Vinnie pointed toward the sound.

  “If you think the dream is singing, then yes,” Tim said. “If you think the dream is spending time with Mona, then he’s a big success.”

  “When they told me someone was there to see me, at work, I thought it was the man I used to—”

  “Dad!” Miles blasted in, holding his open laptop high like he was saving it from small savages. “Look at this. The dogs are at the kill shelter. You can see them online.”

  “Calm down, Miles.”

  Miles tripped, rushing over, and tossed the laptop onto the table. “It’s absolutely them.”

  Tim pushed the laptop away from himself, but Miles turned it back to face him. “And I don’t see a picture of Sophie, just the other two. Look.”

  “Okay.” Tim put his palms up. “Relax. They are probably fixing her teeth. Then they all get adopted.” He shoved the computer away again.

  “Dad, they’re not gonna fix her teeth at the kill shelter. We need to go get them!”

  “We are not getting those dogs, Miles. Get over it.”

  “But I’ll stay with them in the basement till Grandma’s home.” Miles slid into a chair and stretched his prayer-clutched hands across the table toward Tim.

  “Are you deaf? Huh? The dogs are staying where they are.”

  Miles’s jaw went slack, and his eyes hardened. Then he drove his fists down onto the Formica, making the laptop jump. “God! You suck! You’re such an evil bastard!”

  Tim stood so fast, his chair fell. “Go to your room! Now!”

  “A Fucking. Evil. Bastard!” the boy said again, as he loped out and smacked open the door.

  “Can someone explain?” Mona asked as she reopened the swinging door.

  “If you want three defecating dogs living here, then please get involved,” Tim told her. “Please.”

  “I’m giving a lesson,” she said slowly, as though teaching him to speak.

  When she left, Tim righted the chair. He and Vinnie avoided eye contact as they sat waiting for George to run out of time.

  # # #

  “So I spoke with my accountant,” Andy began. Tim listened while looking out his bedroom window, checking on his truck and the Miata in the driveway. Andy sounded down. “And since Phyllis took out her whole IRA and never rolled it over, she has a huge tax liability, so having her sign my tax forms is a bad idea.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, would you consider putting her on your health insurance anyway, Andy? I know you care about her health.”

  “I can’t! We’re no longer married! They don’t let you put anyone you want on your health insurance.”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t she get Medicaid?” Andy asked.

  “She doesn’t have a U.S. address.”

  “Oh, boy. That’s right.”

  “Yeah.”

  After a moment, Andy said, “Hey, could she use your address?”

  “No. My address? No. But, okay, you’ll still give her all of the money from the sale, right?”

  “Well, the problem with that, my lawyer explained, is that all of that money will be taken by the court because of the foreclosure. We owe creditors money, so they’ll take all of the proceeds. Doesn’t bother me, but Phyllis won’t want to sign the property over if she’s getting nothing.”

  Tim let the curtain fall back. “You didn’t know this? No one mentioned this to you?”

  “No. I just talked with my lawyer today.”

  Tim could not believe the man hadn’t known this all along. He’d been fucking with them. “You’re some kind of a shitbag, Andy. You know that? You acted like you wanted to help her, but you never did, did you? I should have called the police on you that day I heard her screaming bloody hell.”

  “Now, Tim—”

  “You should get a dick punch every day for the rest of your life.” Tim hung up the phone and threw it onto the bed. The Fire Team Missions had all been aborted.

  # # #

  Out in courtyrd of casita swaddled in blankets. A million stars rain down while dogs and roosters, last of the night, call to each other cross the lanes. Occurs to me here you cn fall and fall lk stars, never hitting ground. Did you call Andy? Leaving messge not enough!

  # # #

  They waited a few minutes after the throbbing had started up, because maybe it was a passing car with the sound jacked. Then Mona bolted upright in the bed. “Go out with the meter.” She hopped out and slid the sound meter’s case off the bookshelf. The last time they called the police about the bar music, the cops had told them the city decibel limit was 55, but they didn’t have a sound meter, so there was nothing they could do.

  “Maybe we let this one go.” Tim held the sheet up to his chin.

  “Then why did I even buy a meter? You don’t have to talk to those guys, just hold it over by their wall.”

  “You’re the one who knows how to use it.”

  “You want your wife out there in the pitch dark?” She slipped the foam ball over the microphone and brought the contraption to Tim in bed. “See this green button, you press this. Hold the meter right up to their wall and press the green button. Then press the Max/Hold button, and that will tell you the maximum level that’s detected. Stay down there till you get a number above fifty-five.”

  There was no one in the street when he cracked the door, so he ran across in his pajamas and pressed the mic against the throbbing building.

  “Max/Hold!” Mona shouted from their bedroom window.

  The meter showed 60, then 66, then 71. He looked up at her and shouted, “Seventy-one!”

  “I’m calling the police.” She shut the window.

  That was when the cargo van turned onto the street and lit Tim up. “Hey!” one brother shouted from the passenger side as he opened the door of the moving vehicle. The other then stopped the van short, and they were both on him before Tim could get back across the street. One shoved him into the other, who grabbed his shoulders. “What’re you doing? Jacking off on our bar?” Bam! He punched Tim in the belly while the other one hooked Tim’s elbows and held fast. Tim tri
ed to kick the one in front, but the guy hopped back. Then he came in again hard at the ribs, three shots. Tim bawled like a calf. His feet were kicked out from under him by the guy in back, and as he crashed to his knees, he was bricked again in the face. Pain shot into the ends of his hair. He let loose a horse’s scream.

  “Belt him,” the guy behind grunted, and the puncher unbuckled his belt and yanked it out. He whipped it behind him, and then it came whizzing back, so the buckle thwacked Tim’s right upper arm. The guy thrashed in a frenzy, pulping Tim’s arms, which shrieked and burned like in a branding. Then the beast threw the belt aside and walked back toward the van—for a bat, maybe, or a two-by-four. Tim sucked in as much air as he could and shoved out a wet bray. The guy stopped then and turned, rocked himself to gather momentum like a long jumper about to launch. How could this be continuing? Tim wondered. Where was everyone else in the world? The bull finally propelled himself in four bounds toward Tim and blasted him in the crotch with a boot. It was like being hot-knifed and cannonballed at the same time. Finally, Tim was living only in the moment, sensing only ringing pain and nausea.

  Footfalls came, finally, down Tim’s porch stairs, and he watched Vinnie fly onto the monster, take him down sideways, pin him and knee his groin with shuddering constancy. When at last the other guy released Tim’s arms, Tim fell sideways. He watched Miles kick at the guy’s back, his long hair flouncing, arms winging, until the boy’s boot was snatched up and he was pulled off balance, his head cracking onto the road. It was only after three rounds of gunfire that everyone finally flopped and rolled apart.

  “I have called the police!” Mona shouted from the window, her father’s gun pointed skyward.

  JENNY

  In the Good Behavior Game, a teacher divides her students into four teams. Jenny had named the teams by colors, which the children wore on their wrists—colored rubber bands. Several times a day, she would announce that a game was to begin, and she would remind them what good behavior looked and sounded like during whatever lesson or activity they were about to do, and also what some of the unwanted behaviors looked and sounded like. No leaving your seat, for instance. No talking over others. After the brief review, she would set the timer for twenty-five minutes (that was the amount of time they were up to now) and go about the lesson. When Jenny witnessed a distracting behavior, she would say which team the perpetrator was on and make a tally mark on the board for that team. But no child was named personally. No one got individual attention for acting out. Then, when the buzzer rang, any team with three or fewer tallies could participate in the prize, which was always just some quick release of energy, like thirty seconds of dancing. The game had worked wonders for her students, and for her! She had moved from crying throughout the day to feeling like she actually taught a few things of value. She had grown to like some of the kids she had once thoroughly hated. Bullying and tattling had all but ended in her classroom.

  It was the idea of not letting the team down that was the key to this game. People might not care about the prize for themselves, but very few could feel apathetic about hurting others’ chances at the prize. Jenny wondered what might have happened had Megan’s early teachers known about this game. Maybe it would have changed her. Jenny herself felt she had been playing this game all her life, adjusting her behavior to fit expectations, especially in church. The rules had been clearer at the church; it was easier there. But now those rules were melting. Dogs could go to heaven. The day before, the Pope had said it wasn’t even necessary to go to church, or to give the church money! So the rules were fluid, and besides that, she had come to realize that the prizes were no longer motivating at home or in church. In fact, she didn’t know what the prizes had ever been. And the great success of this game in her classroom—how easy and how profound the changes had been—made her feel bitter about all of the years of unnecessary anguish. Cheated.

  As she applied lipstick, she caught sight of the white Jeep with its soft top on, pulling past her in the bus station lot and parking in front and to the right of her car. Heavy rock music punched out of the Wrangler and she could see his drumming thumbs on the steering wheel.

  Now that she knew what her early life choices had led to, she wanted a redo. On all of them. On Davis, on teaching, on Catholicism, on Megan. And for some reason, the biggest drive within her in these past months had been for a redo on her life as a young, sexual being, as someone who was seen, craved. She would like to give in, this time, to all temptations.

  She rolled her lipstick into its tube and popped the cap back on, picturing herself beside that young brute in the Jeep’s woolly interior, crossing dunes, ending at the sea. Then, as though hearing her cue, she snapped her purse closed and stepped out of the Nissan, walked right past his open window, bold as you please, through a fog of his musky cologne, his rugged face there in the side-view mirror. And just at that moment, he sang out with the chorus, startling her into a stagger. “And you’ve stayed too long. That fire has jumped the break.” She put a hand to his hot hood to steady herself. “There’s not a car that can outrun my [something]. It’s going to overtake!” The brazen voice of a man ready to seize her.

  She would go into the station and come back out for another pass, she decided. Inside, she bought water from the vending machine and pretended to browse the brochures. She’d no intention of speaking to him. That’s not why she had come. She wanted a glimpse down the rabbit hole at the life that was her truer life, the one she had denied herself. Envisioning that life had required real actors, and she owed them the courtesy of taking it as far as she could. She pushed open the door to the outside and smiled right at him as she approached this time, made a beeline for his passenger side like she would if she really was Blondie, then let her fingertips slide along the length of the Jeep as she passed.

  When she shut herself into her sedan again and set her purse back on the passenger seat, it was 2:15. She wondered how long Mike would wait for her after the Greenstown bus arrived. How soon after would he text to ask where she was?

  Then a fat man caught her attention as he hobbled down the lane between the rows of cars, his face bruised and hard set under a reddish brush of hair. With one sleeve empty of a hand, he came around the back of Mike’s car and then that sleeve went right into Mike’s window as the man began to bark. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his near eye was swollen shut and his head thrust with each spitting word. When he pulled the arm back out there was a gun at the end of it, which he kept trained on Mike as he stepped back enough to let him out of the car. She was witnessing a carjacking! Jenny pulled her purse onto her lap to find her cell, but Mike then took a ring of keys from the armed man, and he just ambled down the row, looking back a few times, while the fat guy climbed into the Jeep. She watched Mike enter a red truck, which then screamed out of its spot, down the row, ripping through the drop-off area and onto the road.

  What had she witnessed? That redheaded man looked familiar to her in some way, and she finally hit on the idea that it was Rusty he resembled, an older Rusty—Rusty’s father! She hadn’t seen a picture of the father, but she was now certain of it. Was Rusty’s father now waiting for her? Had something happened to Rusty?

  She had just grabbed her purse and reached for the door handle when an older, red Volvo sedan like Davis’s crept by, PG 433 on the license plate. Dear God, it was Davis. How was this possible? she thought. What was occurring? Did her car have a tracking device? She started her engine. Then she noticed that he’d pulled around to the front of the white Jeep and stopped, right in the lane. He left his car door ajar and dinging as he walked to the driver’s side of the Jeep and spoke with Rusty’s father. Jenny slid down so only her eyes were above the wheel.

  There he was, lecturing the poor man about what? She knew that expression well. Davis was the warner-in-chief. A great crusty mess marked his jacket sleeve; his flat hair was unwashed; his eyes had sunk into dark hollows. He was at sea without her. This was why she had avoided him. She
didn’t want to come upon this wreckage and be lured away from her Mexico plans.

  It was quite a long conversation for two complete strangers. Davis did a lot of insistent nodding and shaking of his head yes and then no, disgusted. Then he turned to look beyond her, at the bus that was coming down the road, the 2:25, which made its way around to the back of the station. He pushed off from the door of the Jeep, slapped the hood, and returned to his car. Then the Jeep backed out, circled around to the road, and left.

  She watched Davis park and hurry into the station. He’d come for her, knowing he had rivals.

  DAVIS

  After zippering his pistol back into its case on the motel bureau, he stood back from it. By the time he had driven halfway down there, he knew he wasn’t going to shoot the man. But he’d wanted to see him. And her. Together. What a strange scene it had been. The man was overweight (he’d sent her a shirtless photo?). When Davis told him Jenny was his wife, the tub said he’d only known her as Blondie, and wasn’t Davis a bit old? “Me? What about you?” Davis had said, “How old do you think she is, anyway?” Then he learned that she’d claimed to be eighteen. “God, no. Forty-five.”

  “I’ve seen her volleyball videos,” Bellyroll had argued. “She’s no forty-five.”

  “That’s our daughter!” Davis shouted at him. “Volleyball? That’s my daughter you think you’re meeting! Well, joke’s on you, buddy, because the woman you spoke to on the phone was my wife. I heard her talking to you.”