Rumors from the Lost World

by Alan Davis

  The memory made her angry. I’ve seen Melinda since then, she thought. Other people, no, but I’ve seen her. Staring at the well-thumbed notebook, she shook her head stubbornly and turned off the light. The library books, the last conversation, the way Melinda precariously balanced what she said and what she carried. At the funeral, clutching Melinda’s notebook like a portable altar, deliberately impersonal, one of the few without tears, Diane was detached, even serene. Mourners descended upon her. “They called for her,” she told them. “The death was painful because she could leam something. And my father didn’t feel anything.” At the wheel, he had a heart attack, the car swerved across the highway’s center stripe.

  Come to me, she willed, sitting up in a half-lotus position. Instead, Melinda stood painfully vivid before the car with the library books. Okay, sis. I know things don’t work that way, but give me a sign. In what form do you watch over me? Make yourself known, I will wait for you here. Her tongue swollen, she dragged herself to the bathroom for water. The light at the bottom of the stairs guided her down the hall, past her mother’s empty bedroom, where two glasses glinted on a night table.

  She gulped down the water and turned, to go back to her room. Instead, she slipped off her gown and opened the medicine cabinet over the basin. She took down a pair of scissors with blades the color of graphite. I’ll trim my wings, she thought, beginning to cry. I’ll have baby wings.

  AWOL

  Your son’s AWOL,” the officer told Leon Levoski on the phone. There was a long silence, some whispering. “He couldn’t hack it. We don’t think he’s back here, but you never know with this type of individual. Hell, he could be anywhere. He might be in Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong. Hell, he might be getting off the bus across the street from your house.” Levoski heard a rasping cough, the unmistakable whisper of a match close to the speaker.

  The officer’s flat monotone lay for weeks like too much whiskey on his chest, and now, wife in tow, he was drinking off his despair at the Stardust, a dive in Chicago Heights. Strips of braided foil danced in heating ducts. Mistletoe and holly fluttered over the doors. Colored lights winked from the bandstand, where The Memphis Hound Dogs covered Elvis songs. The overwaxed dance floor was empty, but two bleached-blonde women on the far side of forty, both tall, both pancaked with makeup, swayed at the uncrowded bar. They were lost in erotic contemplation of the singer and his greasy ducktail. The taller woman had a beauty patch penciled on one cheek. As she swayed under a fluorescent tube, the patch seemed to crawl up her face. Levoski stretched his own features into a contemptuous leer.

  “What the hell, Marge,” he said, reaching for the pitcher of beer. “The trouble with life is, everyone stays home on Christmas Eve.” When he rose, the blood rushed to his cheeks. Marge stroked the thin dark fabric of her dress and reached for her coat, draped over their booth. The Elvis clone whispered “Love me tender” into the mike, then jerked his pelvis.

  “Hold your horses,” Levoski said. “I’m just going for a leak.”

  “Let’s get home, Leon.” Marjorie studied her watch. “Paul might try again. He always calls Christmas Eve.”

  “For chrissakes,” Levoski said. She still didn’t know about the phone call. “Let it be. He’s not gonna call. Let’s just sit here and get goddamn drunk, okay?”

  The waitress reached between them for the ashtray and Levoski noticed a dark, ugly mole on her upper arm. “You ought to get that taken care of, honey,” he said, touching the mole lightly.

  “You a smartass, or what?”

  The singer, still grinding his hips, belted into “Hound Dog.”

  In the near-dark of the small entranceway, Levoski leaned his head against flimsy paneling. He couldn’t get a handle on the thing. His own son, a deserter? “Daddy, where are the clouds?” Paul would ask after dark, his voice plaintive, barely audible, his Oshkosh overalls a size too large. “The clouds are still there,” Levoski said, frowning. “You just can’t see them, kid. Why don’t you go out for a pass?” Paul clung to his father’s stocky denim-covered thigh. “Daddy, where are the clouds? Where do the clouds go?” Levoski pried the boy loose and waved the football toward the street. “They evaporate. At night they evaporate and go to bed.” He tucked the ball under one arm and gave up. “Let’s go inside, kid.” But Paul didn’t give it up. Dressed in jammies, his eyes were still troubled. “The clouds evaporate?” he said. “What’s evaporate?”

  A couple entered the lounge, letting in a blast of air from the wintry suburban parking lot. The man, in a gray leisure suit, opened the woman’s fur wrap and pulled her close for a long kiss. She winked at Levoski. “What’s up, big shot?”

  He blushed. “I“m on my way to the john.”

  “M-E-N,” the man spelled out. Beneath his metallic jacket he wore a silk shirt and a gold chain. “Right where it’s been all night.” His face, equipped with a full moustache, stretched tight over his bones. “Don’t mind me, my man. I’m real nice once I get civilized.” He held out his hand. “T. J. Raines. The T. J. Raines.” He nodded to the woman. “And this is Trudy, my nearest and dearest. Let no man rend asunder what Mary Kay decrees.” The woman slapped him playfully and pulled on his moustache.

  In the bathroom, Raines urinated in fluorescent glare. Levoski, at the next latrine, thought about Niagara Falls, a trick his father taught him, but couldn’t forget the woman’s low-cut dress, her wink, her throaty voice. Hell, even his mother got loose on Christmas, wore red and green. Looking at Marge, you’d think it was somebody’s funeral.

  Raines touched his elbow. “That never happens to women, you know?” he said. He zipped his slacks and copped a stance before the smudged mirror. “What’s your name again?”

  “Levoski. Leon Levoski.”

  “Bond, James Bond.” Raines whooped. “Shake it three times, Leo, twice for fun and once for good luck. More than that, you’re playing with it.” Raines whooped again. His hair was thin, but each strand was carefully water-greased into place, much the way Paul had once done. Levoski’s jaws tightened. Something might have happened, maybe Paul was wounded, drugged, unconscious in some alley dumpster, helpless in a jerrybuilt shack.

  “My wife’s in the bar,” he said. “You care to join us?”

  In the entranceway, the woman pulled her fur tight around her. “Jesus,” she said, “it’s cold. What you two been doing in there?”

  “Honey, you know how they say Pepsi’s the pause that refreshes? They got it wrong, sweetheart.” Raines laughed. “Anyway, you could’ve stood in the bar. I was getting to know Leo. Leo likes a good time.”

  “That so, Leo? You look a little like my first husband, the man I never should have left.” She gave Raines a look and giggled, then grabbed Levoski’s upper arm. “I need somebody to dance with, honey. T. J. won’t dance to save his life. You like to dance?”

  Their festive spirits were contagious. Raines got Marge talking about Paul, Trudy hauled Leon to the dance floor. A menagerie of sighs and sexy flutters, her hair all fancy puffs, her black stockings right out of Frederick’s catalog, she melted against Leon. The duck-tailed singer smirked. “You know I once dated William Shatner? Captain Kirk?” she whispered. “On the dance floor, honey, he’d get as bothered as you.”

  Levoski blushed. She reminded him of convertibles and palm trees.

  “That don’t mean you’re not worth corrupting, honey.” she said as they made their way back to the table.

  “After trade school,” Marge was saying, “he got with the wrong crowd, repaired diesel engines, and lived with the Incredible Hulk.”

  Raines tapped his fingers against his shot glass and motioned for another round. “Instead of trade school, you shoulda sent him to one of those prep schools.”

  “Prep school?” She squinted. There were dark circles under her eyes. “Now he’s stationed in the Philippines. I’m worried sick.”

  “He’s safer in the Philippines than here,” Levoski said.

  “The service was your idea, not
his.” Her laugh echoed high and tinny.

  “Come off it, Marge. He made the decision. Anyway, I just wanted him out of trouble.”

  Trudy reached under the table and patted his thigh. “I wouldn’t worry. He sounds like a good kid.”

  “Anyway, what’s wrong with the service?” Raines said. “You ought to be proud.” The waitress came to settle up and he grabbed the slip, smiling complacently in a way that reminded Levoski of his father. Levoski protested, but the other man merely winked, and Trudy gave his thigh another squeeze. “Yeah, my man,” Raines said, “T. J. always picks up the tab. If it ever comes to the nitty-gritty, I have a whole zoo of people I can eat out on.” He rubbed Levoski’s shoulder. “Now you’re one of them. Where you live, by the way?”

  “Not far from here.”

  He looked incredulous. “You live in Chicago Heights?”

  “T. J., be nice,” Trudy said.

  Raines shrugged. “What the hell. Hossmoor’s no better. Old fogies waiting on strokes and tumors, giving their cancers a walk every afternoon, taking their bottles of oxygen wherever they go.”

  “The glamour capital of the world,” Trudy agreed, rolling her eyes like Betty Boop. “God protect me from getting old.”

  “God ain’t got nothing to do with it, sweetheart,” Raines said, then turned to Levoski. “What you do in the Heights?”

  “Roofing business.”

  “No kidding. Big outfit?”

  “Twenty or so.”

  “Not bad, Leonie. Matter of fact, I need somebody with some good muscle. There’s a development I’m looking into, a dump. We’re getting permits to put it someplace with no clout. Like the Heights.” He flashed a quick knife of a grin. “A lot of business for someone who don’t truck with unions. You interested? You won’t have to do much roofing, you understand.”

  Levoski, his union card in his pocket, shrugged. “Sure. What the hell.”

  “Good deal,” Raines said, helping Trudy into her wrap. “Put the kid in the business when he’s done his time.”

  “Done his time?” Levoski grunted to his feet.

  “Uncle Sameroo.” Raines winked. “Your man and mine.”

  In the parking lot he gave Levoski a business card. “New Year’s Eve. Come early, stay late. Meet some people. We’ll talk some more.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “What’s your company, by the way?”

  “Midwest Roofing.”

  “Real original,” Raines said, writing it down. Then Trudy rubbed against Levoski for another kiss before the couple disappeared in a pink Cadillac.

  Driving home, Leon imagined the words LEVOSKI AND SON painted on the panels of a step-van parked in exclusive Flossmoor. Even in the city, working the steel mills, Levoski had daydreamed about a father-son business. His decision to leave the Works in South Chicago had been provoked not only by layoffs, but also by the dream of that step-van. To hell with working for someone else; he could teach Paul the ropes, tell him small stories.

  Marge was dozing, head against the window. Knocked out again. Taking pills for everything from her liver, non-prescription dealies bought on sale at the Walgreen’s, to her nerves, little white tablets her woman’s doctor gave her by the gross. What had happened since those days when they shared five rooms with his parents? The bells would ring at St. Michael’s and they would worship. The rest of the week, he and his father put in time at the mills. Marge, pregnant with Paul, stayed with his mother. She didn’t have much energy even then. Red mill dust covered everything, gases from furnaces and coke ovens settled in the lungs like the croup, and their bit of a neighborhood known as the Bush was packed like a sardine between great heaps of burning slag, rail lines, and the belching stacks of the Works. The air tasted like mildewed socks. Even now, Marge hated the place, but Levoski missed it. They couldn’t have stayed, though. The Bush was hell in a handbasket. His parents dead, no overtime, crazy fools who would pull a knife on you and strip off your shirt as soon as say hello. Just like every other goddamn place—Levoski’s mental map of Chicago was a patchwork of ghettos and tiny enclaves of civilization. Otherwise there were expressways and a thin strip of safe passage along the lake.

  At his house, a small bungalow, the glare of the streetlight cast a metallic sheen over asbestos siding and khaki-green shutters. Marge stumbled to bed and he poured two fingers of whiskey. Outside he could hear bottle rockets whine, dogs yelp. Beyond the dim moon-glow of his gunmetal gray stoop were duplexes, small bungalows like his own, and apartment buildings decorated with wreaths and strings of colored lights. It looked pretty, the one time of year people pretended the place wasn’t a dump. A tricycle lay deserted on the lawn next door. Paul had been a young freckled child who liked to look too long at things, study the way a train moved or the queer arthritic walk of the priest. It’s the truth, Levoski thought. He joined the service for me. “All right, I’ve done it,” he said one evening, hair cut close. “It’s done.” A few mornings later, single bag packed, he left. “Over the ocean,” he said. “The other side of the world. See you.” Levoski, teeth grinding, put down his newspaper, stiffly walked to the door, stood on the stoop until his son drove away, then climbed a shaky wooden ladder to the roof and worked until his eyes stung.

  On New Year’s Eve, he fingered the pebbled texture of Raine’s business card and decided to continue the patchwork job he started the day Paul left. He gathered up his coat from the living room chair where he had tossed it the night before. Marge was in a trance, staring at her pictures, the soaps, talking back to the screen as though the men and women acting on it could hear her anxious shouts. On the roof, his scalp itchy with sweat, he fidgeted with each granulated shingle, trying to lose himself in the routine, and thought about his father. The old man lived and died with the unions. The union and the trumpet, that was his life. Even when he lost his wind, he kept the instrument shiny, endlessly told the same stories abut playing for Roosevelt once in the service band. He started Leon on lessons early. Too early. One day Levoski left the brass instrument in the practice room and went to play dirtball.

  He climbed down from the roof, leaving the job unfinished. In the kitchen, holding down his shirt so it wouldn’t ride his belly, breathing raggedly, he poured an orange juice over vodka for Marge. It’s time to tell her about Paul, he thought, but she was dozing on the couch, a bony elbow shielding her eyes. On the TV, hundreds of people sang in perfect harmony. Each one wanted to buy the world a Coke. He turned off the set and covered her with an old knitted shawl.

  That night, in Flossmoor, the tree-canopied streets were unlighted. Levoski, a little drunk, looked across wide lawns and finally parked near the curb behind a string of Cadillacs and Chryslers. At the lighted entrance, a stocky man with a glistening forehead waved them in. Marge, squinting in the kitchen’s bright art deco fluorescence, took a chair, and Levoski went looking for the bar.

  The feel of large spaces, of infinitely receding rooms, each a showplace, possessed him with an illusion of grandeur. Several couples were dancing deliriously around a huge fireplace to a frantic beat blasting from the entire wall. Above the fire, two lovers in an oil painting were having one another. In the dining room two men butted heads, the glass table shoved to one side. They snorted and pawed on white plush carpet. A stuffed elk above a tiled bar stared at a buffet loaded with hors d’oeuvres. Through a picture window Levoski could see a covered pool and a tennis court.

  The roofer had been in such places, but only to present a bill or accept a cup of coffee. Now he helped himself to whiskey and looked for something sweet. As he jiggled mixers, one of the head-butters stumbled into him, draped a perspiring arm around his shoulder, massaged his collarbone. “Why do I do it?” he asked, a smile plastered on his face.

  “Got me,” said Levoski.

  The head-butter stroked his carefully-trimmed moustache and studied Levoski’s two drinks. “You have a woman here? What’s she like, this woman? Where is she, this woman of yours?”

 
; “Later.” As he turned to pick his way through a cluster of people, an ill-tempered growl was his only warning. The head-butter smashed into his lower spine, nearly flipped him backwards. His whiskey slopped into his face, the orange juice with its dose of vodka drenched the white carpet. He picked himself up, red-faced, and to the sound of scattered handclaps and hoots took a step towards his attacker, who was tramping back to the bar.

  Trudy swatted him on the rump. “Losing your balance?” she said. “Don’t bother with Vinny. He ain’t worth it. He’s supposed to fix drinks, but he’s loaded. Come on, honey, I’ll fix you up.” In a halfbath under a stairwell near the front entrance she tended to his wounded pride by sponging his face neat of whiskey. She wore the same silk dress that hugged her figure with such abandon at the Stardust. “Don’t worry. You’re going to have a great time.” She rested a hand on his back. “Come on upstairs, we’ll get a fresh shirt.”

  T. J. Raines stood in the large open-beamed room. “You two looking for something?” He fingered his gold chain. “Or what, my man?”

  “T. J., be nice,” Trudy said.

  Raines belched, turned away from Trudy, and squinted into the fireplace. “Sit down,” he said to Levoski. “I’m surprised you had the guts to show up.”

  Levoski sat on an ottoman. “More fun that bowling,” he said, ill at ease on the round cushion.

  “Bowling? Like you mean bowling?” Raines leaned forward and launched an imaginary bowling ball into the fireplace. “A ball with big holes in it. Beer. Greasy burgers. Leagues. Unions, right?”

  “T. J., be nice,” Trudy repeated.

  “You’re still here, sweetheart? Scram.”

  Raines sat in the plush easy chair that belonged with the ottoman. “I thought we had an understanding.” He fondled a leather pouch of pipe tobacco. “You told me you’d consider a little deal. You told me you owned the company.”