by Kyle Beachy
That morning on the Las Vegas strip, after Carmel had pulled away from our kiss and walked in one direction and I reflexively began in the opposite, I ended up in the MGM Grand at a craps table I could not in any way afford, dropping come bets and hard eights with abandon, bleeding my parents’ cash and drowning in a river’s flood of white Russians. When my ATM cut me off, I had no choice but to return to our shared room. There I found friends slouched in chairs and curled onto blankets in the bathroom, piled like some denim ad in one of the double beds while Audrey slept alone in the other, curled around one pillow in her stomach while the other was behind her, fresh and new, waiting for me. I lay down onto my back. She rolled over and nestled her head into my shoulder. Whispered, babes.
The waitress brought our beers. Richard picked one up and repeated himself. “I’m sorry.”
Two words echoing over the restaurant’s other voices, overpowering the voices of the broadcast announcers. I couldn’t recall my father ever having cause to apologize to me. Surely he must have, at least once, but for what? And now—for what now? I dropped my eyes from the screen to the table in front of me. The game appeared in tiny warped reflection of an empty water glass. Dirty restaurant table right immediately here.
“Your grandfather would be good at this. I wish you could have met him. Of course that’s ridiculous. People of his generation always had advice to spare, even when you didn’t ask. I remember him sitting me down and talking about love. Only about a month before he died. I was thirteen, and there was this young girl, Angela McIntyre, driving me crazy. He asked whether I was in love with her and I said yes, because I believed I was. The old man nodded and looked me in the eye. He said, Always make sure you love her more than she loves you, and she will love you even more.”
The table began to rotate slowly. I watched plates and napkins and empty bottles of beer. Things pulled back, the view grew larger, out now to the table’s edges.
“I have always tried to love your mother more.”
The hand around the bottle was my hand, it was my Budweiser. I moved my fingers and watched them move.
“We are going through some tough times, son. All marriages do, of course. This is what it means to be married. But recently things have taken a turn for the worse. There are no new problems, nothing beyond two people with conflicting ideas of what constitutes happiness. Anyway, right now, for the past few years, we’ve been in the middle of something difficult. I’m trying to say this clearly. There has been difficulty, and it’s not going away. So there will continue to be difficulty. For everyone. I’m being honest with you. I knew this would be hard. I’ve been dreading it. But here we are. You and me.”
There was my head, and my dad’s head, that full head of silver hair. My father’s shoulders and arms and hands resting on the edge of the table.
“You’re an adult, so I’m not sure how much I have to make clear. Whatever changes, nothing is going to change. This sounds ridiculous, but you know what I mean. I don’t have to say that none of this is your fault. Of course you know that much. This is a child’s concern, the guilt that drives young people into lives of therapy. You know all of this. What happens is you get to a point when you have to let the past go. To let go. This is one of the things we all know but few of us ever manage to actually do.”
Rapt. I saw Richard leaning forward on his elbows, empty bottle beneath interlocked fingers. His knit collared shirt bunched at the shoulders.
“I’m sure you’ve picked up on feelings around the house. You’ve seen your mother and me, how we have become. Of course you have. It’s difficult to know when to share, and how much. You can’t share all of it. But there’s a line somewhere. We haven’t ever hidden anything from you, but we could have been more up front. You deserve that much.”
The scene had been branded, indelibly, into my consciousness. Sportsman’s Park, the tasteless burger, more empty bottles than I would have predicted. The news had been shared. Marriage. Trouble. I listened. What other details of note? Table? Hands around beer? I imagined my mother hunched over a fund-raising centerpiece or candle fixture. I doubted there had been much controversy over who was to give me the news. Of course my father. When I looked back at the screen, the ball game had returned. The Braves were switching pitchers. Some time passed. My father was apparently finished speaking.
“Should we get the check?”
“I love your mother very much.”
“Me too.”
“And I have never, ever in the course of thirty-three years committed any real indiscretion. Not one single indiscreet moment in all those years. Moments. And things are going to be okay. You have to remember that. I have to remember that. We are all going to come out of this thing okay.” He spun the dregs of his beer around in the bottle. “I have to use the john.”
He stood from the table and I felt two overwhelming desires. The first was to pay for this meal with money I had earned delivering water. The second was to get myself immediately and carelessly laid.
“This is going to sound horrible,” I said when the waitress brought the bill. “I don’t say this sort of thing ever.”
“Right.” She stuck both hands into her apron.
“Do I know you? You went to my high school.”
“Don’t think so. You go to Kirkwood?” She chewed gum, snapped it.
“You have a sister, then. She’s my age and went to Ladue.”
“I have a brother named Andrew.”
“Andrew,” I said.
“Unless you’re calling Andrew a girl, which is enough to get you messed up pretty good.”
I sat at the table and looked upward into the eyes of this young woman in the waiter’s apron. I did not know her, nor would I ever.
“My parents are getting a divorce,” I said.
“Oh. Sorry. Do you need change?”
I left her twenty-five percent and met my father by the front door. Outside, stars dim and cicadas deafening, we walked silently to the car. I caught myself patting jeans for cigarettes. When he didn’t go immediately for keys, we stood on opposite sides of the Datsun.
“You sure you don’t want me to drive?”
“I’m fine to drive.”
We were both looking at the dent.
“I haven’t driven the Z in years,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”
“We had the same number of beers, you and I. Me.”
He ducked into the car and reached over to unlock my door. The Datsun growled as it accelerated back toward home. I turned on the radio and scanned the AM band. The old, beloved radio broadcaster mumbled, There was one out, now there are two.
july
five
how even to respond when so natural a fact, a truth thus far assumed and treated as obvious, is exposed as a fake. When the fact becomes fragile, suddenly from out of the sky contingent? I changed subjects and made myself creatively scarce. Days were covered; I developed new appreciation for the morning’s stack of papers, rich with instruction. Go here, do this. No matter that the stack came from Dennis, that bitch of a man with his pockmarks and bitter distaste for any and all people of color. I went down the list, completing the tasks at hand.
When I got there, Ian Worpley was watering the yard with a garden hose. Thumb over the spout to make a spray, he was shirtless and barefoot, standing on the path and turning a slow circle, waving the hose as he spun. When he completed the rotation he set the hose down and approached the van. I met him on the sidewalk.
“Finished early today,” I said. “Thought maybe you’d want to go on an adventure.”
“Adventure?”
“In the van.”
“Where?”
I hadn’t thought this through. It was too hot for the batting cage, too hot to stand and water dead grass. Too hot for stasis. Ian began to circle the van and I followed him.
“The airport,” I said. “We’ll go watch airplanes take off and land.”
Because airplanes are massive and they fly and basicall
y blow childish minds. I was confident about this.
“I’m not convinced this van is safe,” he said. “My dad always says that by the time you see rust, there’s so much going on underneath you don’t even want to know.”
“Rust is the common name for an extremely common chemical compound. Iron oxide. Ef-ee-two-oh-three.”
He nodded and continued around the van. He ran his hand along a dent in the van’s sliding door. “Yeah, you got rust like this, something’s wrong.”
Eventually Ian wandered back into the yard and picked up the hose, then went to the faucet and stopped the hose, then rolled it back up and left it by the foot of the porch before scuffling into the house. When he came out he was wearing a shirt and shoes.
“Come on. Look at this thing,” I said. “Safe as a tank.”
“It’s like a van in the videos they show us at school. About kidnapping.”
“I’m not a kidnapper. Kidnappers are pale men with thick mustaches.”
He opened the door. “Yeah well, no one admits they’re a kidnapper, do they?”
Today the kids in the yard were playing some variation of tag with tennis balls. I saw a blond girl level a brown-haired boy with a throw to the back of his head. Ian fastened his seat belt before I had a chance to tell him to.
I got us onto Highway 44 and took it westward. Ian reached forward for the radio, and there was the old, beloved play-by-play man saying, headed into the bottom of the fifth, score knotted at three. Ian opened the glove compartment and pulled out an empty pack of cigarettes, some napkins. He found the cheap plastic tire-pressure gauge and sat back in his seat.
“Dad says we fall six back of the Cubs and we’re in trouble.” He flipped the tire gauge in his hands.
“Still plenty of time. Plus they’re the Cubs, remember.”
“Says we have to stop swinging the bats like a bunch of pussies.”
Sometimes in etcetera, motion alone is a value in and of itself. It was early enough that we beat the traffic exile from the city. We passed small mountains of earth and rock, the yellow machinery that signaled change. Stacks and stacks of light-blue piping. The landscape out here evolved, always. The buildings themselves, huge, reminded me of models, a set of tabs and slots.
“Your thing is beeping,” he said.
“I usually ignore that.”
“And! You’re going the wrong way. This isn’t how you get to the airport.”
I reevaluated the plan, thinking for a minute to confirm that I did in fact know what was what.
“Not Lambert. The airport we’re going to is smaller,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. Spirit of St. Louis, the small one.”
“Named for the silver prop that carried Lindbergh to Paris.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s off Highway 40. We’re on 44.”
“That’s right. That’s right. North of here. Minor adjustment. Hold on.”
Our path righted, soon we passed the network of fields where I’d played summer ball, and I thought of my mother sitting cross-legged in the stands, chatting with other parents while my father paced behind the dugout. How far back did it go? Could memory, if I looked hard enough, provide evidence of unhappiness even then? It was out here that I put the dent in the Z’s roof. The foul ball I hit late one summer afternoon, how the moment it left my bat I knew it would land on his car. The tink of a barely tipped foul ball, the ball rising with menace, irrationally seeming to grow larger as it went, then the hollow moment of collision, the roof of a Datsun. Crowd response, ooh. I stepped out of the box, ostensibly for practice cuts, and my father and I shared a quick look rich with blurred meaning. And once the game was over and I had squeezed into the backseat, my parents lingered outside and I heard my mother’s muffled voice travel overhead. And if I found the right dial, maybe I could adjust the memory’s volume and discover what she said.
I exited 40 and followed a mile of frontage road along the side of the highway. Ian unfastened his seat belt so he could lean out the window. I imagined how it would look through his eyes, this world. The control tower, the paved lot with fading parking spots, the swath of green separating the lot from the penitential fence that circled the place. The spirals of barbed wire proved that this was a place of serious consequence. I turned up the radio and we got out of the van to sit in front of the fence. Eight or nine planes were in a staggered line to the side of the tarmac, with blocks wedged under their wheels.
He said, “I don’t understand. How does anyone make money selling tickets for these dumb little planes?”
“They don’t. These are privately owned. There aren’t tickets; it’s just a pilot and a few passengers. No peanuts or pretzels.”
He looked at me. “What kind of person owns an entire plane?”
Mr. John Hurst, father of three. Divorcé. Payer of settlement. Marrier of his secretary. Driver of: Jaguar XK8, Mercedes CLK, Land Rover Discovery. Maker of very much income. Secretary adulterer. Owner of private jet, Cessna.
“They must be Jewish.”
“What? No. That’s not important.”
A jet appeared from out of a hangar and taxied around the others before turning onto the runway, facing more or less exactly where we sat, waiting for clearance. I watched Ian watching the plane and firmly believed the process of takeoff was going to be of great satisfaction for the kid. We waited. After several minutes the plane turned and left the runway completely, back to the row with the others.
He stood and went to the fence briefly before moving off to my left. I was beginning to fear that we’d come on an off day and that we might end up sitting here staring like cows at this tableau of overgrown blacktop and fence and small unimpressive machine. I got up and followed him at a distance, stopping when he stopped and watching him bend to pick something from the grass. I took a step closer as he held it up to his face with both hands, worried that he was going to eat something little boys should not eat. He dropped it and bent for something else and I realized what was happening. You stretched the grass between your two thumbs and brought your hands up to your face, and if you blew just right it made a sound like a tiny woodwind instrument.
My father buzzing grass and walking through grass, playing catch in and among grass. Good old Dad, my father who only ever wanted what was best for those of us he still had left. Ian turned to face me and blew into his hands. No sound came out. He dropped the grass and leaned to pick a fresh blade.
“My mom showed me this. If you do it right it’ll buzz.”
“I like the one where you take that long grass with the fuzzy bulb on the top, and you wrap the stalk around itself and use it to shoot off the top.”
“Buckweed,” Ian said. “It’s not grass. Yeah, Mom likes that one too. Mom knows all sorts of things to do with grass.”
There was still no activity on the runways. There was a man in an orange vest holding a set of those noise-canceling earmuffs, but he was just standing there, speaking into a walkie-talkie. I remained incapable of coming up with anything to say to Ian about his mother.
“What about that girl you used to sit with by the creek?”
“Yeah. Two days ago she showed up at my house wearing a backpack and said she was running away because her parents wouldn’t buy her a pony. She asked if I wanted to go with her.”
I was surprised to hear little girls still wanted ponies.
“What did you say?”
“I told her running away from your problems doesn’t solve anything. Really it just hurts the people who count on you. Then she came inside and we watched DinoChamps until my dad came home and made her leave.”
We turned and moved back to the van. One of the planes began moving onto the runway. After a few minutes, it accelerated toward where we were sitting, front wheels lifting without ceremony and the rear soon after. Takeoff. But the whole thing was too quiet; I wanted explosions of sound I could claim as my own. To say, Listen, Ian, to the massive noise. Cover your ears. This is bigger than all of us.
“Does she ever talk about faeries, this girl?”
“Fairies? She’s eleven. Not six.”
“My girlfriend cut off all her hair, and now she and this robot girl named Carmel are scouring the European countryside in search of faeries. They have moved from Germany southward with faerie nets strapped to their backpacks.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“That’s right! Jesus, it’s good to hear you say that.”
“Fairies won’t have anything to do with robots. And you shouldn’t say Jesus like that! You only get two a year and you just wasted one for no reason.”
How laid-back this God of his to forgive blasphemy up to twice a year. I wondered if the same rule applied to the other commandments and whether the parents had created this version of religion together.
“This is kind of boring,” he said.
“But you love planes. Planes are awesome.”
“Sort of. I mean, I’m not six.”
“The first flight on record only went one hundred and twenty feet,” I said. “In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.”
“Yeah, and when he was young, Orville had typhoid. Wilbur had to take care of him.”
“Alright. But I bet you a Coke you can’t tell me what they worked on before planes.”
“Bikes,” Ian said. “We did all of this in fourth grade.”
“Alright. One Coke.”
We continued along the frontage road back toward the city and Ian flipped the tire gauge in his little fingers while I looked for somewhere more interesting than a gas station to buy his Coke. When I saw a diner ahead, I signaled and pulled into a large old vacant lot.
“Wait, stop. Stop, stop, stopstopstop!”
I stopped the van a good thirty yards from the restaurant. Ian looked carsick and confused, face white and eyes glazed. He bounced shoes on the rubber floor mat and passed the tire gauge from hand to hand.
“I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.