She stepped aside and Todd barreled past.
• • •
There’s a small eddy of calm in being behind the curtains again. It’s enough for Jimmy’s thoughts to get all the way through his swollen head. It’s the day after and his pops knows. Blood pats down in Jimmy’s lap. Sticky. He pinches his nose high on the bridge, and guess what? It gives him a headache.
Jimmy gets up. Shaky, he holds on to the bed. The pain meds have been useless and what little effect they did have is waning as they are spreading their wings, flapping, ready to leave him but not yet sure of flight. Every movement sets his body afire in hurt and he knows it will be even worse once the last of the pills have flown the coop. He puts on his shorts from last night. Feels the small territories of stiffness where his blood had dried. Sweatpants over them. No T-shirt anywhere in the bundle and there snaps back to him a memory of ripping it off in the gym. He whimpers and pulls his sweatshirt on over his bare torso. Then his winter coat. Last his socks and sneakers. This is a challenge. Down on one knee, wobbly-weak with the burden of balance, tying the laces. A pair of white sneakers go by, visible beneath the hem of the curtains, pushing something with wheels. If people’s feet were portals into other lives, Jimmy would choose these. Simple, white, perfect for their world of hospital corridors and break rooms.
He stands up. Slow, steady. He pulls on his hood, careful of the radius of ache around the soon-to-be-famous wound. Puts that mess of black hair in check. Pulls the drawstrings tight, knots it in two bunny ears. He doesn’t have that beautiful, straight-as-an-arrow Japanese hair like his mother and Dex did. It’s got more of his pops in it. Curly shape at least.
He wonders how his pops found out, but then brushes the thought from his mind. It’s a useless mystery to entertain. By now everyone in Columbia City must know; it’s too little to hide a secret this big.
That’s small town.
He leaves the curtained area and there’s a nurse standing with her clipboard—someone he doesn’t know. She looks up at him, smiles. “Jimmy, I’m Sarah.”
He blinks at her, not sure how to respond.
“I think my mother had you in English class, Mrs. Parson? I was here when Mr. Berg brought you in. Quite the shock.”
Our kid feels sick, sweaty, and ready to sit down. This nurse in scrubs printed with hundreds of fish all pointed the same direction is in the way. Big eyes ready to take everything in. She steps closer, reaches out and takes his hand. He lets her, though he keeps it limp. Hers is small, dry, but with an expert dexterity in her squeeze.
“Listen, it’s never as bad as it seems, do you hear me? I can tell you that for a fact, it’s never as bad as it seems.”
Who the fuck is this woman? He’s hurt, clothes stiff with his own dried blood, and she’s giving him this? What if it’s just exactly as bad as it seems? What if it’s even worse than he’s letting on? He takes his hand away and Sarah the nurse smiles. He’s going to brush past her but she puts a hand on his chest so he stops and slaps down her clipboard. It clatters on the ground, outsized in its noise. She reaches down, all calm and easygoing like it was her fault. She straightens the papers and smiles at Jimmy again.
She tucks a card into the pouch pocket of his sweatshirt. “I’m a good listener.”
He goes down a stubby hallway and exits into the waiting room. His pops is there, hunched over the counter, signing some paper. The nurse behind the desk has pushed her chair back a few feet, watches him over this gap. A tall Mr. Clean–looking dude stands back against a wall, arms folded.
Jimmy sits in one of the chairs. This room smells of coffee. Coffee in the morning used to be a thing him and his brother, Dex, joked about. They’d come shuffling into the kitchen, noses leading the way, bumping into things. You know, after that Folgers commercial. People waking up because of the smell of coffee brewing. Like shitty coffee could bring a family together. It used to crack them up till they were laid out on the floor, his mom being like, “Can’t I ever get some peace and quiet?” and his pops just trying hard as hell not to smile in front of her.
The stink of coffee.
His pops is done with the papers. Comes to stand over Jimmy. He’s got a flimsy cup of the hospital coffee and is machining through mint after mint that he pulls from a bag in his pocket. He cracks a mint in his teeth, and then takes a noisy sip. Must be an interesting taste. He always has a big bag of those green candies wherever he goes these days. Cracking them habit enough to keep his mind free of the drinking. There’s a cabinet above the fridge stuffed with family packs. At about fifty a pack, Jimmy has it figured his pops goes through over two hundred candies a day. That amount of sugar could have killed an elephant. But hell. Couldn’t touch his pops. Freight Train himself. If his mom were around she would have been bugging him about switching to sugar free. She could be like that sometimes. Working in a hospital and all.
“Let’s go,” his pops says loudly and Jimmy’s head fizzes.
“Can’t a kid get some coffee?” He wants to delay whatever his pops has planned for as long as possible. His heart pounds.
“You want coffee?”
“I always get coffee.”
“Dead don’t get coffee, and you already dead.”
He didn’t want coffee anyway, but this is too much too soon. Only been a few hours since the wall. He didn’t die, did he? Can’t this all just slow down? “Shit, Pops.”
“Shut up. You run yourself into a fucking wall you don’t get to speak neither.” His pops is trembling, and Jimmy wonders, Am I gonna get smacked? Right here in front of some nurses? Dial up child services. Old man’s losing it.
Instead the big man stomps over the waiting room tile and out the big automatic doors. That limp is there. Same as always. Bum knee. The boom, creak, slide. Boom, creak, slide. Jimmy follows him out the automatic doors and the wind is immediate. It’s cold as hell and he feels stipple designs up and down the back of his neck. Jimmy turns back to the hospital waiting room for shelter from the wind and zips his winter coat to the top, pulls its hood over his sweatshirt’s hood. The doors have closed again and he catches his reflection in the glass panes. Hood on and blood streaking down from his nose, bruise like a third, busted eye. Blooming, almost tropical in color and vibrancy, whitish bandages covering the epicenter. A beat-to-hell movie monster. Doesn’t recognize himself.
It’s five in the morning and Jimmy hasn’t yet been called the nickname that will dog him wherever he goes: Kamikaze Kirkus. It’ll come soon enough though. By this morning’s first class, kids will be whispering the strange story of Jimmy Kirkus and the gym wall. Adults will be talking in hushed tones. It’ll be on the lips of everyone. It will snowball, include the basketball feats of his childhood, the drama of his parents’ lives, getting bigger all the time until it takes in things that have no relation to the things he actually did. Until it’s about someone who seems nothing like our kid Jimmy. Until it’s an avalanche.
And he’ll never try and stop it.
Rule 4. Come from a Difficult Background
Saturday, December 1, 1990
JIMMY KIRKUS NOT YET BORN—SEVENTEEN YEARS UNTIL THE WALL.
A weekend morning and the world was their lumpy, king-sized bed. Room happy in its disarray. Todd’s Van Eyck uniform flung over the door to the closest, a shed skin, while other things of all sizes—from a little girl’s shoe to a woman’s black stockings, strung out and runny on the windowsill—lay about. Comfort in the chaotic domesticity. Todd blinked his eyes, still somewhat sealed with sleep. He rolled over, slowly—his bladder full—and found Genny’s hip with his palm. From this reference point he traveled northwest and found the beginning swell of her pregnant belly. Another baby on the way; a boy, Todd hoped.
“Quit it,” Genny said. She waved back with her left arm and hit him in the side.
“Oof.” A burning fullness swelled out from the impact. Todd hadn’t peed the bed s
ince he couldn’t remember when, but just then, almost.
Genny leaned up, suddenly awake. “Are you OK?”
“My teeth are floating is what.”
She laughed and lay her head back down. “I almost popped the balloon?”
Todd got up and shuffled through the drifts of his adult life—dirty laundry, coffee mug, small stack of bills—toward the bathroom. “It could have been bad for you, too.”
“At this point, I wouldn’t care.”
The worst part of their house on Glasgow was that there was no bathroom attached to their bedroom. Todd had to scoot down a little hallway—always a chill here—and enter the bathroom via a swollen, likely to stick, impossible-to-keep-quiet door across from the pantry. It would take a miracle to use the bathroom without alerting the whole house that he was awake. And then it would be Suzie jumping up and down, singing whatever song she’d picked up from the morning’s cartoons, demanding a detailed itinerary of the day’s events. If not that then the Flying Finn would come in, probably just in his boxers, eating graham crackers or something, crumbs all over the place. They would be listening for the creak of that bathroom door, even if they didn’t know they were. Todd had done the same thing when he was a kid and that room was Finn’s.
Out in the living room he heard the purring click of the Wheel of Fortune spinning on the TV in the living room. Todd was absolutely certain Wheel of Fortune didn’t play at eight a.m. on a Saturday. It had to be one of the Flying Finn’s tapes. Todd wondered how the old man had persuaded Suzie to switch away from Looney Tunes, or whatever.
Todd reached out and turned the knob to the bathroom all of the way, anticipating the latch clicking. Next he stepped forward and put his bare foot at the base of the doorway, so that when he pulled, the clear section, near the bottom, wouldn’t come out before the swollen section nearer the top. Next he gave the door little jerks, easing it out centimeter by centimeter until, blessed be thee of wood and brass, it came away quietly. Todd stepped in, sat down for his piss to minimize noise, and was back in the bedroom with no one the wiser.
The warmth around Genny was delicious, and the moment he settled in next to her he was able to regain the just-below-the-surface sleepiness that was the best part of waking up.
“Is the old goat watching Wheel of Fortune?” Genny asked.
“I think it’s one of his tapes.”
“Why would anyone watch a game show more than once?”
“His name is, legit I mean, the Flying Finn, so watching game shows on tape is basically par for the course.”
“Legit, like it’s legal?” She turned around to face him. She goosed his ribs so he shot out his arms and held her, brought her close, conformed to the curved shape of her body. “In a court of law?”
“You know what I mean.”
Then the door burst open and Suzie came running in carrying something bleached white in each hand. “Look it, look it, look it!” she yelled.
Genny pulled away from Todd—the successful coup of sneaking into the bathroom all for nothing—and smiled down at their daughter. Todd rolled away, arm draped over his eyes, trying to dunk himself back under the waterline. “What is it?”
“Grandpa gave it to me if I didn’t watch ’toons.”
“Jesus,” Genny said—and in this one word Todd heard the business end of his wife come out and was thrust onto dry land, totally awake. “Todd?”
He sat up and looked at what his daughter held. It didn’t correlate with anything he recognized until he tilted his head to the left and saw the grin. His little girl, sweet chickadee of summer and light, was holding the skull and separated jawbone of a long-dead cow. “Whoa, Grandpa gave that to you?”
“Your father . . .” Genny was whispering savagely.
“It’s for my white collection,” Suzie said—the ct in collection coming out as an sh sound.
“That’s great, baby, but do you know what that is?” His daughter, ever since she had been able to get around on her own, had gathered things together that caught her eye. This magpie tendency had become color-coded in the last six months and the habit only seemed on course to get more sophisticated going forward.
“Moo-cow’s head,” she said seriously. “He’s dead now.”
Then the Flying Finn was in the doorway with a jar of peanut butter in one hand, scooping out the last bits with the other. Todd and Genny still in bed, people coming in, this felt like John and Yoko.
“Mori”—this was how his father always referred to his wife—“almost no peanut butter.”
“A cow’s skull, Finn?” Genny said.
“Oh, so you want she’s playing with the pink dolls!” He was mock-outraged, peanut butter caught in his whiskers. It was a joke between them. Whenever they saw little girls around Suzie’s age, all trussed up in ribbon and lace, they conspired about where else a bow could conceivably be tied—around the knee, on each ear?
“Get your own peanut butter!” Genny yelled, halfway ready to laugh, but not there yet.
“Get out of our room, Dad.”
“This was my room one time!” he yelled back, already on his way out.
“Go watch your reruns!”
“It’s practice for when Vannah calls. Then you see the laughing, and it’ll all be me!”
“Daddy, let’s go to the beach! For collecting!”
Genny collapsed back into bed. “Can you take her? Maybe I can sleep a bit more.”
“Yes, let’s go, let’s go!” his daughter said.
Todd kissed his wife on the cheek, tucked the sheets in around her. She smiled back, already sailing. “Wash the damn cow skull,” she whispered.
• • •
Beach was winter white. Bleached driftwood and white-capped waves. Blown-out sand sculptures formed around things washed up and forgotten. The littlest piece of trash, or stick, or turned-over cup grew in the drifts of sand until it seemed big enough to hide a creature. Some malformed thing waiting to scuttle forth and eat when the time was right. Passing rain squalls dumped parts of their burden on their journey inland, patterns in many-cratered pointillism.
Todd watched Suzie run in the sand, so small she seemed unreal, collecting the things she found in the basket she made with the front of her T-shirt. She had her blue jacket unzipped and it flapped in the gusts. When she turned a certain way, the wind flipped it completely up, and it looked like his daughter was hanging by the armholes as her jacket tugged her into the heavens.
“You stay close,” Todd called out on that last day.
“OK, Daddy,” she yelled back, not even looking.
He chuckled to himself. Little, pretty, Suzanna. A startling thing he called Suzie Q. Baby girl born so cute nobody was safe. Even the most checked-out teenage boys stopped to coo at little Suzie.
It was the last day Todd was fully happy. Oh there would be other days of pleasantness, surges of positive feeling, but this was the final time he was filled all the way up. He lay back in the sand and crossed his ankles, a practice Genny Mori said would give him varicose veins. She was always saying things like this. It was how she told him she loved him. He crossed them anyway and sighed. What a luxury. The people of Columbia City had finally started seeing him for who he had become rather than what he could have. They asked him questions about little Suzie instead of rehab on his knee. There were no illusions of a basketball comeback. No pipe dreams of an NBA star hailing from their town. Not anymore.
The beach was empty and surprisingly warm in that Oregon way—that is, only when the wind slacked for a moment. Todd thought he felt his spine aligning into a straighter form as he sank into the sand and the wind built banks of it at his side, working hard at covering him up. His little girl was safe, in his sight, scampering to driftwood logs, stealing the treasures caught in the little wet caves of their sides. His wife was home, pregnant with their second, probably studying
at the kitchen table, going to be a nurse. Another child had been Todd’s idea. “Suzie’s lonely,” he’d said. Life was in order so he let his blinks linger a little longer. A little longer still. Small curtains of sand ran over his nose. In a day or two, hell, he’d become just another mysterious shape hidden by the beach. It was hard work at Van Eyck Beverages. Loading case after case. And soon he was asleep.
Some time later—how much he didn’t know then, but would spend many years trying to calculate—he jolted awake. He stood. Blood stuck in his legs made way for his head. His whole body was tingling, asleep or dead. He looked out and saw an empty beach.
“Suzie?” he yelled. And then yelled again. Nothing. He scanned the beach. Empty. He had the sudden thought that she’d been kidnapped so he rushed up the sandy dunes in the direction of the parking lot. His old gray minivan was there and nothing else. He felt his weak knee, watery with pain. He turned and was back on the ridge of the dune, looking down at the ocean and the sky and the harried little waves that came in. Gray, white, white. He looked far to the left and then to the right and it was the same. Gray, white, white. Gray, white, white. Then. Blue.
Her blue coat.
She had needed a new one growing as fast as she was, so they took her to Fred Meyer and she chose her own.
“Which one do you like, honey?” Genny Mori had asked.
Suzie ran down the aisle and stopped in front of a bright blue one. “Blue, blue!”
Todd came up behind her. “OK, blue, we get it, OK.” He picked the tag, looked at the price, and then let go as if it were hot. “Jesus.” He showed it to Genny.
“Think this is bad, just wait till high school.” They shared a laugh at that. Not much, but no matter. Sometimes enough really is enough.
• • •
There was a big driftwood log shifting and half-caught in the water. The tide had come in a ways since they arrived and the ocean seemed intent on sucking that big log out to sea. There. Blue. Todd saw so clearly. A bright blue sleeve pinned by the log. It floated as lazily as the seaweed around it. He started running. There was her hand—small—sticking out of the end of the sleeve. So electric white it could have been plugged in.
Rules for Becoming a Legend Page 5