The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  The man looked pained as he started the Jeep. “It was going to end today anyway.”

  “I want to see your driver’s license,” Davis had said. “I want to know who you are.”

  “Tough.”

  “I’ve got a gun in my waistband.” Davis looked about the lot. Then he untucked his shirt to display the handle of the gun. “Three-fifty-seven.”

  The porker actually gave it some thought before hoisting himself up to get his wallet out. Then he held it open with his driver’s license in a see-through slot. Timothy Turner, Malden, Mass.

  “You stay away from my daughter, Timothy Turner, or you will be dealt with. You hear me?” He pushed away from the window.

  After all that, she never even got off the bus! Jenny hadn’t come to meet the guy. But then how could she if she was playing eighteen? She never intended to meet him. She was trying to turn back time, he knew, while he himself was forever slogging forward.

  # # #

  While he stood at the motel room window and watched the Lobster Shanty bartender hoist a trash bag up into a bin, Davis used his newly returned phone to call his lawyer. He told the guy about the pervert at the bus station and about the videos his wife had clearly sent this man of their daughter playing volleyball. “Can’t you use that to get her to convince Megan to knock this off?”

  “Do you need something else I can get for you from the house? That might be a good time to mention it.”

  “Get me my Fouke Monster castings. And remind my wife of Aletta Van Der Hooft, will you? Mention the coffee-and-a-cigarette lady that I never got to know, which was my great sacrifice. Now it’s time for hers.”

  He pressed the button to hang up and walked out across the parking lot, cold in his shirtsleeves, toward the pulsing red lobster sign. He thought he’d have a Tanqueray this time. Perhaps he’d tell the bartender the story of the “extinct” catamount. He still had a video of it on his phone. Long tail switching in the grass. Impossible to fake.

  VINNIE

  Devlin’s dead mother’s house—the one that should now be his and Vinnie’s—was a bit squat and had vinyl siding that Vinnie would have scrapped, but since Devlin was living here with Mia now, that didn’t matter. Still, Vinnie pictured himself replanting the gardens, wearing some old, soft chinos, and painting the front door aquamarine as the sun now rose to illuminate it all.

  “Miles”—Vinnie woke the kid, who’d been sleeping a few hours now in the truck—“it’s her.” A woman’s face had appeared in one of the windows, and because she kept moving away and then back into place, Vinnie figured it for the window above the kitchen sink. She had a pinched look, he thought. A malcontent. She was probably critical of Devlin, whereas Vinnie had always been overly encouraging and supportive, to a fault probably. “Wait till she sees the car.”

  As if on cue, the sun off the silver Miata must have flashed in her eyes, because she leaned toward the window and her jaw dropped. There it was, in her driveway, at last.

  “Here she comes.” Vinnie elbowed Miles, again.

  She wrapped a sweater around herself as she stepped off the porch and floated across the frosty lawn in her pink slippers and pajama pants. The newly washed and waxed car looked straight off the assembly line, and the headlights—Vinnie had spent a whole day wet-sanding them—like crystals. Now she’s thinking about how great she will look in it, he figured. Her hair would have to be carefully managed, but this car would likely be the best dress she’d ever owned.

  “Here we go.” Vinnie wasn’t trying to hide from her. He didn’t duck in the truck cab. He hadn’t parked down the street, because she wouldn’t be looking at anything but the dream car.

  They watched her lift the passenger door handle and crack open her present. Then nothing. “Where are they?” asked Miles as they both leaned toward the scene.

  The men had shut the three dogs in for five hours with marrow bones littering the interior like in a mass grave. Marrow, Vinnie learned, gave dogs the runs.

  At last, the dogs shot from the car, bouncing off of the frozen woman and shaking off foamy loads of saliva with each leap upon her pink legs.

  “Devlin!” Mia flung her arms into the air and scrambled back to the house while the wet mutts whirled around her. “Dogs have shit up my whole fucking wedding car!”

  Once she was shut inside, the guys opened the truck doors, stepped out, and whistled for the trio. Miles loaded them into the crate, and Vinnie then had to wedge the cage onto the kid’s lap after he was back in place. When they pulled off, Vinnie said, “Did you look in that car? Did you see it? Don’t fuck with us, people.”

  “I think they need water,” Miles said while the dogs licked his face through the wire.

  “Sure. We’ll get water. And when we get back, I’ll leave them out in your grandma’s yard for a while to get everything out of their system.”

  “Guys, guys,” Miles protested, giggling. “They’re gonna be happy to get home. Her oven doesn’t work, by the way.”

  “That’s fine, I’m only there six months. I can eat salad. I need to lose weight for the part anyway.”

  Miles kept moving his squinting face up against the cage for tongue flashes and then pulling away again.

  “It’s the lead role.” Vinnie waited for a question. “I don’t know if I told you, but this theater is the best in Boston. Of course, they wouldn’t cast me for a deaf mute before. Oh, yeah! True story! But now that I’ve been in New York, everything’s different. And that’s how it goes.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Well, it makes sense, though, because if you make it in New York, then you are at the very top. No denying it. Hey, read me some more of your grandma’s book,” he said to Miles, who then managed to reach around the crate and pull his phone off the dash.

  “We’re on chapter ten, The Power of the Bush.”

  “‘The Power of the Bush,’” Vinnie repeated, like announcing a fighter in the ring. “That’s a best seller right there, Miles. Get ready for a very famous grandma.”

  TIM

  Sunny stopped on her way through the living room, her arms loaded with used books from a sale. She looked weary. “I feel sorry for you, Tim.”

  “Well, I feel sorry for you. What’s it been? Three weeks?” A mover’s blanket had been covering her floor the whole time, to contain all of his pegs and tools, but it was now nearly Thanksgiving and he was still at that Klopotek. It was the making of the jig that offset his drill press to the precise angle of the peg holes that had been the biggest bear; now it was just the slow process of repositioning the jig precisely for every hole, clamping it down and drilling. “I’ll try to finish up, but you may be making me a plate of turkey on the day,” he said, as he tap-tapped the jig with the wooden mallet, microshifting it into position.

  That afternoon, Tim and company were to move another piano; it had become his main business again since he’d been fired from Bells Up. They moved pianos in the evenings and on weekends when Mike was available, since he was the strongest among them. It couldn’t happen without Mike, so he’d been forgiven.

  “Are you going to Sheena’s party tonight?” he called out in the direction of the library.

  “Hadn’t heard of it,” she said, reappearing in the doorway.

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s just for singers, then. One of those things.”

  “I give more than I’d care to say to that organization.”

  “Aw, you don’t want to go to this thing, Sunny. It’s a party in name only. The woman should be a funeral director.” He was going only because Mona had seen the invitation from the Opera’s artistic director as a sure sign she was back in favor, that she maybe had a chance at Rosina. “I’m telling you a week in advance so you can get pants that fit,” she’d told Tim, and when she learned he was going to move a piano that afternoon, she panicked about time, so Tim told her if he was not back by six-thirty, he would meet her there. “I have to take this job,” he’d said. “The piano store guy is the don.”
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  Tim rolled down the drill bit to test his position and then made a few more taps and tried again. Precision work was not his thing.

  “Will you tell me if there are other donors there?” She’d come back to the doorway.

  “I certainly will,” he said, and then switched on the drill and cranked the bit into the hole, where it sent shreds streaming out like frightened, skinny worms.

  # # #

  The Bösendorfer Model 225 Semi Concert Grand has four extra bass keys and weighs in at a whopping 924 pounds. This one was going into a condo in what was once a Back Bay town house. Tim knew it was on the third floor, but he hadn’t shared this with the guys. They double-parked the piano store’s truck on Commonwealth Ave., and Vinnie looked up at the elegant buildings with their mansard roofs. “What floor?”

  “Think of your tip,” Tim said as he swung out.

  When Mike arrived, they rolled the piano into the foyer, and Tim covered the first flight of marble stairs with blankets. The side of the beast that would rest on the stairs had a board strapped to it that would allow it to slide. Tim and Miles, it was decided, would control the upstairs end, yanking on straps, so they got into position, and then the other two tipped the piano until its long end rested on the blanketed treads. “Mike,” Tim instructed, “put the top of your head right up against the case, just above the fallboard. Vinnie, you’ll walk up behind him with your hands pushing up higher. Now it’ll be one, two, push, then hold. Okay, ready? One, two, push!”

  “Arghh!” Mike groaned. A small movement occurred. Six inches.

  “And one, two, push!”

  They roared.

  “Kick the lower blankets out as you go.” Tim would make $250 for this move. The others would get $100 each, plus dividing the tip. If he lucked out, Tim would score tuning work, too.

  “One, two, push!”

  # # #

  Joe Masotta had fixed this life for him. Joe, who had sat beside The Publisher on stage and exchanged pleasantries with her over their handheld mics, and when he’d answered all of her questions and she asked if there was anything else he’d like to touch on, Joe had smiled another moment and then begun, “Pain retains. That’s a Marine saying.” And The Publisher had looked out to the audience with an ecstatic expression. “We were told that a lot in boot camp,” he continued. “When the sergeant wanted you to remember something for a very long time, he’d make sure it hurt. We’d say it during relentless push-ups with our muscles on fire. Pain retains. We’d say it when we were forced to hold our heavy racks off the floor for an eternity. And while I was in agony, every single night, I also had to contend with obsessive thoughts of my best friend, Tim Turner, screwing the only girl I ever loved. You know Tim?” he turned to ask The Publisher, whose smile could not be relaxed.

  “Senior editor for Bells Up, I believe,” the man said. “Tim, would you like to stand?” But Tim held fast. “He’s sitting in among all of you wonderful band leaders who should also know that this journal that you imagine celebrates you actually looks at you with disdain, sees you, in fact, as liars and thieves. Weren’t those your words?” He’d turned again to The Publisher. Then he went on to say that this woman also despised her staff. And had, in fact, refused to give a breast cancer victim’s family her final paycheck.

  “That’s a lie!” The Publisher hauled herself up, her metal chair teetering. “Her check is to be presented tonight! In a special ceremony! Bring out the check, Rita!” She called into the wings. And then, after hearing someone knocking about backstage, the audience saw a slight woman in an outmoded long dress struggling to cross with the oversize check. “Is Angela’s family here?” The Publisher called out.

  Rita rapidly shook her head. “They were only invited to the party,” she whispered loudly.

  “It’s for quite a bit more than she’d earned,” announced The Publisher in her most majestic voice.

  # # #

  By the time they got the Bösendorfer safely onto the first half-flight landing, their heads had purpled and their breaths were as loud as bellows. Miles rubbed his hands on his pants. “It’s slipping on me, Dad. I can’t do this.”

  “Are you saying we have to do what we just did five more times?” Mike agreed.

  “No. We don’t have to do it five more times. No. We only have to do it one more time. Get to there.” Tim nodded up to the next landing.

  “Yeah, each time, one more time,” said Miles.

  “You know, we might get a thousand-dollar tip on this one, guys? It’s possible.” Tim patted Vinnie on the back. “Take a rest,” Tim told them. “We’re not working by the hour.” He would be happy to miss Mona’s opera party, where she would likely hear that someone else got Rosina, after all of her believing. He put his forehead against the landing window, looked down at a Mercedes parked in the alleyway. “Mercedes-Benz. Look at that. I ever tell you guys about the time I dropped a gallon of white primer out a fourth-floor window onto a black Mercedes-Benz? Oh, God, this is a good one.”

  # # #

  Before Joe Masotta dropped his payload at the convention, before the interview of sorrows, one hundred and six men and women in black trousers and dark jackets discovered their kin on Boylston Street in downtown Boston and were arranged into rows by a chubby man with a clipboard as they held aloft their glimmering treasures, recently unearthed and oiled—music having weeks before been laid on a kitchen table where their breath began, again, to turn into sound, no, a song.

  “You got a lyre?” Tim asked one flutist about her music clip, but she shook her head and said she didn’t need one; she had the music memorized. “You’re my idol,” he told her.

  They hadn’t practiced any of the three pieces together even once, and this made them all nervous, being the taskmasters their jobs had required.

  “How long’s it been?” they asked their neighbors, some with ranks-collapsing comebacks.

  The mix was lopsided, too few clarinets and way too many tenor saxes. Drummers evidently did not often go into music education; they had only three snares. “Twenty trombones!” Tim cried, putting the last one in line. They all turned to high-five. Tim had brought in ringers from his old playing days, a guy on cymbals, two bass drums.

  Those who lived locally were waving off their families to go find places along the route. The players were nearly all over forty and many well past that. They were instantly in love with each other and laughed too loudly and pretended they couldn’t see the tiny music and were liable to trip in the effort. One man shouted out, “Six to five? Eight to five? Some of us have a limited stride,” and they all hooted.

  “Twenty to five!” one woman decided.

  Tim gave the order of the pieces: “The Washington Post,” “Hands Across the Sea,” and “Our Director” (for obvious reasons). He hoped they’d be playing “Hands Across the Sea” as they began circling the Common, where most of the people were. It was a grand piece with some big tuba statements, and he knew these players would have it down.

  Soon they got the signal to start, and Tim lifted his sousaphone over his head and joined the other five of his kind. He’d borrowed their enormous instruments from a local high school along with the bass drums.

  They were silent in anticipation. Then the snares played the cadence that precedes a march and the band stepped off. They’d only gone a block before the drums changed their rhythm to signal the start of first piece, and all bells rose. Sousa’s “The Washington Post” begins with a little windup—everyone playing the same notes in different octaves, a climb and a descent, a climb and a descent, a climb and final descent to a complete, full stop. Kshhhh! A cymbal crash. And now they’re off and running, with alternating soft and loud proclamations of the vast superiority of everyone playing and hearing this music over everyone else on the earth.

  EPILOGUE

  Dear Rusty, I’m not trying to start up again, just a note to say that I bought the land in Pozos that your friend was selling, and now that we’ve settled our daughter in Califor
nia (where she seems to have a quality that many movie directors love!), we’re down here putting up a casita. Your friend Phyllis, the realtor, has introduced us around, to all the other ex-pats. The common denominator is that we all believe in signs. You must believe in signs to decide that this is the place. Davis is out dawn to dusk, hunting the chupacabra, the “goatsucker.” He will be voted in as mayor if he finds it, as it eats a lot of livestock. He is also planning a museum in the town, which God knows could use some kind of a draw. When I first imagined myself in this place, you were here with me and we were wild and young, our hair ropy with dust, our bodies strong, and for some reason I saw you playing the guitar while strolling the mountainside. And I don’t even know if you’re musical at all!

  I’m happy to have known you, Rusty. It’s like we invented a new piece of the past that we can now remember beside all of the other pieces: the time when you were a gunner on a fire team at war, when I was such a man’s desire.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel had a great number of contributors, not least were the friends and family who read it at early stages and made wonderful suggestions: Renee Bender, Margaret J. Broucek, Sharon Rousseau Brown, Brock Clarke, Joan Dempsey, Anne Dubuisson, Larry Mondi, Kate Montgomery, Bill Roorbach, Leigh St. Pierre, and Karen Smith.

  Thanks also to my muse, the great Chicago storyteller Jack Zimmerman, who told me stories over beers that inspired some of the better scenes in this book.

  Hewnoaks Artist Colony provided me time away to write (and surrounded me with introverts so I was forced to).

  Unending gratitude goes to Tim Schaffner, my adventuresome publisher, and Sean Murphy, my comedy-loving editor, who have brought this novel into the light of day with great care and passion.

  Brian McMullen created the arresting cover design.

  Pamela Marshall was the novel’s sharp-eyed copyeditor, a real language maven.