Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  “That’s understandable enough, boys,” said Mr. Farley. “Why don’t you open her up for us then—”

  “I’m the fuckin sheriff here!” said the other though, all fired up suddenly, and before we could interfere again he darted in and grabbed Ma. Boss was loath to unload on him since now he held her. So he had us froze. And then opened it. I was churning away inside.

  “Just ashes, Ray,” said Mr. Farley.

  “Might be something tucked in among them, Mr. Farley,” said the law and before I could think the bastard had dumped Ma out on the street, right there in the gutter. I went blind. I dozed him over backwards and kicked his head, and I kept kicking him till they dragged me off, the Boss and Mr. Farley, then broke loose and started sweeping together Ma’s bits and pieces with my bare hands. I was blind mad and blurry crying the whole while but this had to be done and done quick, for even in the soft wind some of her fluttered up and some more was smeared black on the cold paving.

  Boss held open the box and talked to me, saying stuff, but I just couldn’t handle the idea of her being upset like that, with some part of her gone into the middle of Nowhere Utah, forever gone, though the Boss kept telling me we had her all, we had her all. I suppose we had ninety percent of her but the missing ten was to me a cruel piece, and always would be. I knew that then.

  Mr. Farley was all sweet reason still, and told us to give over the cash we had plus my wristwatch and get on route before the sheriff came back to the mark. “It’s best all around,” he said. “You lost your temper—maybe you had good cause, I see that. But Ray Gillis won’t see that and he wears the badge. You get out and leave the money, I’ll talk him around the fine points. I’ll buy him a nice bottle down the street and talk him around it. Be fine if you just hustle now.”

  “Fuck him and his nice bottle,” said my brother, and pushed his boot down on the mountie’s neck. But we went along with it, gave the watch and the cash, which Mr. Farley pronounced shy but adequate at $28, and took the highway with one hellish bad feeling in the gut. Ma on the street back there, and our money, and that pig-knuckle shit of a sheriff … The road ahead looked dark and cold again.

  We were torn between racing away and crawling, for no doubt another crooked officer of the law lay crouched behind certain future billboards and brush piles. Then too, it was late. Might have set our hats for Reno as the next town of size, except it was too far to go for the way we were feeling, and the weather played a factor as well. Day was done. We pulled in to a truck stop offering good food and layover cots, and sat down in the half that was for the general public, sat up at the counter. Boss always felt it was somehow cheaper when you sat at the counter, though of course it wasn’t.

  I ordered cheeseburgers well done and pie with coffee, Boss took the blue plate special of shepherd’s pie with succotash on the side, and we said our usual nothing until the food was dispatched and the Boss was smoking.

  “Jerry, you trashed your first sheriff.”

  “Guess I did.”

  “Done like a true blue honkytonk hippie.”

  “Done like a crazy man, if that’s what you mean.” I was shaking my head, for never in my life before had I acted that way or even close to it.

  “You did look over the edge, boy. Your whole head looked so damn tight, like it’d just been pulled through a knothole or something.”

  “Can’t say I’m sorry, with what he did.”

  “Hell no. Sorry?”

  “No.”

  “Was a good day up to then, Jer. But those mountains? Man, if you’d been paying attention you’d a been scared shitless on some of those roads.”

  “I was paying attention.”

  “To your doughnuts,” he laughed. I laughed with him, but I had seen him doing his donkey dance on those skinny passes, hanging out over the loose shoulder, and wooden crosses all along the ditch. I just stayed quiet so he wouldn’t be hassled while he drove it.

  “You drove like a pro, Boss. After Murdo, too.”

  “After fuckin Murdo, boy, I was gone, like a ruptured duck in a hailstorm. If we stayed a minute longer, or left a minute slower, we would have killed that fuckin mountie.”

  I couldn’t disagree. My emotions were bad while the Boss seemed free and easy, but fine by me to be agreeing on everything for a precious few minutes. I knew it wouldn’t last long. We were bent on banging heads this trip and soon enough we got it going over some old hen from Seattle, Washington. She had been there at the counter with us and at some point in the proceedings started in telling us her life. Actually it was everybody’s life but hers, friends and relatives and even people she had only heard about; they all fell in one basket to her and the basket was hospitals and doctors.

  She was old and I guess worried about dying, so all she could think about was setbacks and seizures. It was one terrible operation after another, her whole world was keeling over, and she did take us on one hell of a depressing tour of every hospital in the west. Worse part was she had a real flair for the gory, piling on lots of phlegm and blood. But she was only being friendly in her own peculiar way and, as I told Boss later on, she was somebody’s Ma herself. You think about things that way and you end up acting better. But the Boss didn’t think, he showed no class.

  The poor biddie says to us finally, Oh dear I must be boring you boys to distraction, expecting we would say Oh no and all that, but instead Boss goes, “It is getting pretty bad, actually.” And she tried to get out graceful then, said she was sorry, it was just she had been through a lot, and Boss goes, “So have we, lady, so have we”—meaning her. He would not let her off, she just plain ran in the end. Fired out of there like a chicken with her wings clipped.

  Boss thought it one grand joke but it put me off by myself again. I ate my pie (thinking, I confess, of the Flaming Gorge doughnuts instead) and said nothing to him until we were outside by the Chevy.

  “I hope you’re proud.”

  “Right proud, in general.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “That sick old lady?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “Come on, Jer, give me a break. I never claimed I was Jesus Christ.”

  “Just a scared old lady and you probably finished her off. She probably crawled away and had a stroke and died.”

  “No way. People like that, who’ll say anything to anybody? They don’t care who listens.”

  Damned if he wasn’t mostly right about it. I was leaning on him for some reason, I needed to and he knew I did, but with Boss when he wasn’t mad it was awfully hard just to make him mad. Because he didn’t care about much, you see. And so it might have blown by us if he hadn’t gone and polished up that joke of his.

  “That damn sheriff spoiled it, you know,” he said. I did indeed know it, so I gave no answer. “My book, I mean.”

  “How’s this?”

  “My bestseller, the ten-dollar-a-day book. How can you do America on ten dollars a day if the law hits you up for twenty-odd at every little hick town along the line?”

  “Is that what you think? Is that the height of your emotions when your mother’s ashes are tossed out on the street?”

  “Slow down, boy, it’s just a little joke.”

  “The hell with your dull-assed zero-brained jokes, I can’t use them just now.”

  “More power.”

  “You are a dull son of a bee, you and your goddamned monkey men.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Boss, there are critical parts missing under your hood.”

  “Whatever.”

  At that I swung on him, he had me so mad. I suppose I wanted him to swing first but he wouldn’t, so I swung and somehow missed him. He stepped back and did his grin.

  “You really want to slug, don’t you?” he said.

  I swung again and this time got a piece of his hard skull, enough to bruise a knuckle of mine. His face turned half mean—I truthfully believe most of the old meanness was gone out of the Boss by forty-one—and he set up to slug
with me. Then he held up a second, put up his palm like he was calling time-out or somesuch, and removed his teeth. Took them out of his face, laid them gentle as could be up on the dashboard, and came back at me with that sickly gumbo grin of his. I was gone. I never could get past it, it always cracked me up, to see him filing that hideous business away like a jeweler handling his prize wares.

  “What the hell,” he said. “No sense throwing away good money.”

  “You mean you expected me to land on you.”

  “You might. One lick? Sure you might, before I crushed you.”

  “I’m leaving mine in,” I said, but of course there was no anger anymore, this was joking both ways.

  “You got no choice, yours are still attached.”

  “What the hell.”

  And so on. Once it was gone, I let it go. It was about nothing in the first place. We turned around and took cots for the night, at two bills per—for we saw no point in stretching our necks out at this juncture, maybe six seven hours from the big Pacific puddle—and straightaway we both lay down though I knew I wasn’t going to sleep this night. Weary to the bone, but I was restless too, and it bothered me how it was with me and Boss. It seemed we ought at least be pulling together now, while seeing after Ma’s final wishes, yet no way would it happen. We were too different.

  There lay the Boss, per usual, snoring along like a chainsaw and his damn teeth right by his side like the holy word. My hero snoring. But you know, he still had it, I still felt it back there on the street in Murdo. That old hummy feel—someone was pushing on us and the Boss would push back harder. It was there. If I hadn’t lost my own head, the Boss would have done some far more serious work on that mountie’s sorry form, I know it.

  But what kept me awake and tossing on the cot that night was not about Boss or any of the sloppy-adventures we’d had. It was Ma, of course. Above and beyond the shock of her spilled and partly lost (which to this very day does somersaults in my head) there was the other, that here for sure was my last night with her. By tomorrow afternoon she’d be truly and completely gone from us. So this was my last chance to talk to her, really directly, to be with her, and it made me sadder than I can tell you. A big wide pain in the chest when I went out to fetch her. The white moon lay back behind what looked like the only cloud in the sky, just enough cloud to hold it, and I was happy the night had turned gentle.

  I did talk to her under that gentle sky. I’m not ashamed. I had things to tell her before she went. I’ll be something, I told her, I will get married soon. I won’t be anything special, but I will be something. That is a promise. And then thinking how this was the last made me think again and almost change and say, Why pitch her? Why not keep her? I remembered why: she wanted it, so we had to do it. Couldn’t talk her around it at this point, so I gave it up. Brought her inside and tossed some more in the big dormitory, where a host of truckers was snoring and it was nearly sunup anyway.

  And that’s all really. The rest was nothing much. We drove ahead to Frisco, set up midspan on the old Golden Gate, and there we did do what we came so far to do. I could tell you it was awfully high and windy up there, which it was, or that the wind took Ma’s ashes every which way but loose, which it did. We were guiding them down and brushing them off the bridge and off ourselves, and they flew and fluttered and scattered like the crazy leaves of autumn. In the end they were mostly down in the water where I guess she wanted to be, and I said I hoped she was happy and I cried. Not Boss. He just said he hoped seeing what happened to her on the bridge had made me feel better about what happened in Murdo to her. It did and it didn’t, since this was by our hand and in accord with her wishes.

  Yet nothing special occurred. We didn’t get ourselves arrested on the bridge or knock out the national guards, or anything like that. And nothing special took place afterwards either. We had some brews and poked around Frisco town but we never won the Irish Sweepstakes or anything. Boss went back to Bluefield and I went back to my spot on the turnpike, though I did shift from Duanesburg to a nice set of rooms in Charleston Four Corners, in case of a wife.

  So you could ask why I bothered to tell all this and there is no reason, except it’s true. It happened. Sometimes at least that’s what a story is, just what truly did happen and if you knew it you could tell it. It might not mean anything but then what would? If we fell off the bridge, or landed in jail for littering ash, or if we met Jesus Christ at the toll booth?

  I don’t know. I’m not one of those guys who go off to the Himalayas for sixteen years and shaves his head and then comes back down to announce that Life is a Hockey Puck or something of that ilk. Mama always used to say I was a real rhinestone in the rough and I guess that suits me well enough, though I can’t say about the Boss. He does act ignorant but you never know, he might yet have aspirations.

  Fitchburg Depot

  Fitchburg is a fair-sized town but the Boston train still comes in at a simple uncovered crossing behind the Pullman Diner. It’s flat land there, just a clearing in the scrub woods between old Moran Square and one of those sad new malls. People use the tracks as a shortcut—shoppers on foot, or teenagers holding hands—and somehow they always seem happy passing through.

  My wife says it’s the fact of Saturday; that young people always sail along happy and excited on a Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I enjoy being a witness and I count it a part of my routine whenever Ellie rides up on the train. I’ll drive over early, have a coffee at the diner, then step outside and browse the scene until the train arrives.

  These are small pleasures I’m describing, I know that, though maybe that’s how I got to age sixty-five without popping an artery. Confession: I’d rather hook a three-pound bass at the cottage than go traipsing around Europe with a binocular, or lay on Waikiki Beach dripping dishonest sweat. But this hasn’t anything to do with me, it’s only meant to tell about the fellow I met down at the depot last weekend.

  I’d done my cup of coffee and was out in the breeze surveying faces when two young gents started a ruckus in the parking area. One was doing all the shoving actually, terrorizing the other, and for a moment I was afraid it could turn bad, with a knife or (these days) worse. And maybe it did, but not in our line of vision; they were continuing their little dance in the direction of Moran Square.

  “Wonder what that was all about,” I said. I didn’t really wonder, it was just we two had ended up watching together, elbow to elbow, and it seemed only natural to speak.

  “Trying to steal the guy’s girl,” the fellow replied, with a worldly shake of the head, and though I had seen no girls I did remark it was nice knowing there was a reason. I never like to see this random violence, or even a simple bully flexing his muscles.

  “Oh yeah,” he added, “it’s all the rage now. Nobody gets married any more, they all just shack up.”

  “Is that right?” I replied, a bit hollowly, having missed his train of thought. Perhaps he knew the two young men, knew something of their domestic situations? I tried for a better look at his face but he had half turned away; only a thin meniscus of sun remained over the western bend of track, and the weak glare off his eyeglasses was my friend’s most visible feature for now.

  Our conversation lapsed, and I watched the woodland to the east for some trace of Ellie’s train. Four boys crossed the track, laughing and kidding, and then a young couple carrying those soft white shopping bags, back-to-school clothes I guessed, here on the last Saturday of August.

  “Look at them,” my friend remarked. “Shacking up, I guarantee you.”

  Maybe I nodded at this, maybe I blanched. There was no telling what he might say next, and no stopping it either.

  “She took off, just like that. Here one day, gone the next.”

  “Who did?”

  “My wife,” he shot back, surprised at my disingenuousness. Clearly he felt he had given me more information than I could recall receiving. “I lose my job one day and she takes off the very next, just like that. Never says a thing, mind
you, just goes and shacks up with the guy. I’m telling you, marriage means nothing to them.”

  As the father of two happily married children, I might have mounted a challenge to his thinking. For that matter, my own wife, Ellie, had not found our marriage without meaning, so far as I knew. But her train was late, and a damp chill, a whisper of early autumn, had touched the air, and my friend caught me off balance when he said, “She might not come.”

  “My wife?”

  “No, no, the girl. She didn’t make the early bird, so I figured she’d be on this one. But maybe not.”

  “This isn’t your wife?”

  “No, no, just a girl from Watertown. A friend. She wishes I had more money but sometimes she comes anyway. We look at TV together, that’s all.”

  “Well, what did she tell you?—about when to expect her, I mean.”

  “Oh you know women, they don’t tell you. I could give her a buzz, but that’s a buck-twenty and I’m out of work, you know.”

  “What was it you did?”

  “She’ll probably be aboard. But you never know. Slim damn never, hey?”

  “It is the last one out tonight,” I said, realizing as I spoke that I had lost confidence in what I knew for certainty, that Ellie would be with me soon; be herself; and we ourselves.

  “She told me to sell my baby, that silly bitch. Believe that? Sell Tee-Bird? No way, I told her: walk. And she walked. Just like that. But I do not fool around with my baby. She is a gas-guzzler, damn her, but she’s my baby and I’ll keep her over any bitch. I cover her with a blanket every night, for Christ’s sake. Just the engine, you know.”

  Well, he had really opened the box now. People like that will, I guess, if you let them get the momentum going. His eyeglasses kept flashing at me out of the cool dark. I checked my watch and was surprised as hell the train was only eight minutes behind.

  “She told me get a job, but it ain’t so easy. Sure, get a job, without question. Except they’re laying guys off all over the country and I’m the one she leaves. Well just register this, bitch: Tee-Bird stays. Tee-Bird leaves with me, can’t go without.”