by Nick Arvin
Duke licked away the sweat on his upper lip. In the heat of the sun, held by his old man’s glare, he felt simultaneously big and awkward in his body and small and inconsequential beneath the vaulting sky and upon the long ribbon of the road. He said, finally, softly, toward his feet, “Dad, I’m trying to make something of myself.”
“I’d say you’re doing a good job of making something of yourself—fat.”
Duke looked at his old man again. “What if I just leave you here?”
His old man angled his head a few degrees. “Say what?”
“I might as well leave you here. You heard me.” Duke set his gaze and held it until his old man’s eyes dropped. Duke shivered. He could not remember backing his old man down before. The day was sunny but not hot, and yet gleaming lines of sweat marked his old man’s temples. He looked pale, and his nostrils and jaw were trembling.
Duke came forward, all sense of victory abruptly gone. “Just like you,” his old man said, “first make a mess of things, then leave me to clean up.” But the invective lacked spirit. Duke wrenched at the door with both hands and it came open, metal screeching, and saw then that his old man’s trousers below the left hip were scarlet and moist. Long, red drips scored the side of the car seat. Duke jumped back, pointing, shouting, “Dad! You’re bleeding! Dad! Dad!”
His old man scowled at him. “Cut that out! What is it? Will you stop that?”
“Look!”
“What?” His old man peered down. “Oh, damn it.”
“I’m sorry!” Duke said. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Calm down.” His old man felt gently along his thigh. “It’s hardly more than a scratch.” He pulled some broken glass out of his pocket.
“What is that?”
“This thing I won in poker. The Glass Lady.”
Duke leaned closer and peered at his old man. “Dad. The what?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s this glass thing I won in poker.” He dropped the shards on the ground.
“You had it in your pocket,” Duke said tensely.
“Yes. Listen,” his old man turned aside and coughed into the sleeve of his shirt, “you shouldn’t have come around that bend so fast.”
“Oh, Dad,” Duke exclaimed, pointing again.
“Cut that out!”
“Look at your arm.”
There was blood now on his old man’s right sleeve, a scatter of red droplets. He was seized by another cough, a violent hacking that ejected a wide spray of blood onto his shirtsleeve and past it. He stared at the blood on the steering wheel and the dashboard and muttered, “Now, how did that happen?” A delicate red bubble extended from his nose and burst.
Duke whirled. “I’ll take the cart!”
“Where are you going?” his old man called after him.
“For a phone!”
“Why don’t you use my car phone?”
“You have—” Duke ran back to the car. “Where is it?”
His old man indicated the glove compartment, and Duke found the phone beneath a mess of receipts and gum wrappers. He punched at the buttons, but nothing happened. He calmed himself and looked carefully for a power button. There was no power button. “How’s this work?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never used it.”
“Come on! What did you get it for?”
“For emergencies.”
Duke poked one by one at all the buttons on the face of the phone and nothing happened. He said, “It’s broken.”
“It’s not broken. Look at it. It’s fine.”
One button said talk. Duke hit this, talk talk talk. The phone did nothing. “When’s the last time you charged the batteries?”
“Batteries?”
Duke dropped the phone. His old man looked shrunken and hunched. His skin had paled to a spectral blue. Duke sprinted to the go-cart. He perched on the tiny seat and fiddled with the controls. “I’ll be back!” he cried and set off for the house down the road. He’d break in the front door if he had to.
The old man watched him buzz away: a big man on a small go-cart, his knees splayed in the air, his arms reaching to grasp the steering wheel. He tilted this way and that with each bump in the road. But the cart had impressive go; it dwindled quickly into the distance even with Duke’s weight on it. The old man remembered him as an infant, big and red and always curling on himself. And silent; Duke was an eerily silent baby. Even then he’d been baffling. Kevin had been normal, a real screamer.
He wished Kevin were here. Kevin knew how to handle things. But this thought made the old man feel bad. Duke was a good boy. He tried hard. And if he occasionally did things like start grease fires while trying to cook the family a surprise breakfast, well, these were mistakes, not malice.
It was such a difficult thing to spread love with an even hand. Especially when one son practically raised himself while the other somehow managed never to grow up at all. These were the two things about Duke: one, he was a good boy, and, two, he was infuriating. Not the sharpest tack in the box, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, not the quickest chimp in the monkey house. For instance, the time he accidentally killed the neighbor’s dog feeding it chocolate bars. Christ, Russell still sometimes called to give him a hard time about that. And now this business about going back to the plant as an engineer. The old man still had friends working there. How much shit were they going to give him? And how long before Duke installed some machine that eliminated one of his friends’ jobs?
Well, perhaps he expected too much. He was sometimes unkind to the boy, he knew, but his nature was such that exasperation always leaped in front of everything else. He lacked the patience to sort intentions from incompetence. It was a shortfall in his own character; he was not proud. But patience was not a thing he could go out to the store and buy. Mom, bless her, had always been able to forgive him for this. And Duke had had her approval. Why couldn’t that be enough? He was just some stupid old man.
A figure emerged from the corn and approached the front of the car. The old man needed a moment to focus. It was the go-cart girl. He said, “It’s the corn fairy. Where’d you go?”
“I hid.”
“He’s scary-looking, but he means well.”
She said, “I saw him hit you.”
“That’s right!” The old man nodded vigorously. “You saw everything. You’re my star witness.”
She came around to his side of the car, stopped, stared, mouth hanging. Then she put her hands into her overalls. “Are you going to die?”
“No, kid,” the old man said. “No way.” She was entranced by the blood. “Kid!” She looked at his face. “Why don’t you hand me that phone?”
She picked up the cell phone and held it out by a corner, as if she were afraid of touching him. He took it and fumbled a moment, dropped it in his lap, then picked it up again. He looked it over and found an on/off switch on the side. What were they teaching that boy in engineering school anyway? He slid the switch to “on” and the buttons lit up pale green.
He stared at the glow of the buttons. They seemed to dim, then light up green again. But he doubted that they had actually done any such thing. A sudden, terrible pain pierced him. His stomach clenched; he winced. The girl said, “You sure you’re not going to die?”
He would have made his scary monster face at her, but he didn’t have the energy. He paused a moment, trying to think, then, digit by digit, pressed out Duke’s phone number. Holding the phone to his ear, he tilted his head to one side. The phone seemed very heavy. Duke’s answering machine came up. “Howdy, pilgrim! This is Duke. Kindly leave a message.” Same message he’d had for five years now.
It beeped. When he tried to speak, his tongue felt dry and brittle, like old newspaper, and he could not form a word. He worked his throat to raise some spittle, smacked his lips. “Duke,” he croaked, “numbskull, the phone works. There’s this little switch on the side.” He paused a minute, listening to himself wheeze. “Look do me a favor. Get a
job somewhere else. Work on bombs, better mousetraps, whatever, but by God—” The answering machine beeped and cut him off. “Fuck,” he said, then glanced at the girl. “Sorry, miss.” He laid the phone down and punched at the buttons with a finger.
“Howdy, pilgrim! This is Duke. Kindly leave a message.”
“These machines are worse than useless. Here, before I forget again, what I want to tell you is this.” He gulped. “OK, I guess we both know, God didn’t give you a lot to work with. But son, you’re trying. I see you trying.” He clicked his teeth, nodding. Then a cough wracked him. He gasped, said, “I guess the point is, Duke, I’m proud of you. Proud.”
He thought a moment, the phone resting against his head, then, just to be clear, he added, “This is your old man.” He dropped the phone into his lap again.
The go-cart was nowhere to be seen. A hovering trail of dust led all the way to the house. The old man let his eyes rest a moment, then fluttered them open. He pressed 911 and gestured for the girl to take the phone. “Talk to this person, will you?”
He relaxed against his seat and looked at the ceiling of the car. Darkness swarmed and evaporated, swarmed and evaporated.
There was a voice. Duke’s? “—be here soon.”
“I know. We called them,” the old man whispered.
“They told me to keep you talking. Gotta talk, Dad.”
“Mm.”
“It’s a nice day isn’t it?”
“Mm. No.”
There were hands on him, slick, as if greasy. The old man did not know whose hands these were, his own or some other’s.
“OK, Dad, listen, here’s one thing I learned in my fluid mechanics class, about blood. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid.”
“Yeah?”
“That means it’s kind of strange, that it flows differently than water and most other fluids.” A pause. Hands again. “Ketchup is also non-Newtonian, and that’s why you have to hit the ketchup bottle to make it go.”
“Who cares?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
The old man groaned. “Goddamn it, Duke. I’m dying, and you’re talking about ketchup.”
There was a little girl talking into his phone. It was all very confusing, and everything was distant. The world darkened. The hands on him were too strong and deft to be his own. He felt like a child. Then he didn’t know what he was doing, closing his eyes or opening them, but all he could see was his son, Duke.
Commemorating
I grew up on a lake in Minnesota where the winters were paper-white with trees like stick figures drawn in charcoal. One midwinter day when I was just four years old and the lake stood frozen, covered with a vast surface of snow, I was in the kitchen, finger painting. I had all the basic colors—green, blue, violet, orange, red, black—except for yellow. And I thought of a girl, a couple of years older than me, who lived in the house next door. She had yellow hair, so distinctly and startlingly yellow that people would comment on it. Thinking of her and the missing yellow paint, I knew, somehow, to worry.
Later that day, she fell through the ice on the lake. I did not actually see this happen, but the image was very clear to me: the girl running, dressed in a blue coat, green mittens, and a red woolen hat, with yellow hair just peeking out beneath. Then, suddenly and silently, she dropped through the snow, leaving only a small, dark hole.
I blamed the missing yellow paint. Sometimes life rings with that much subtlety. And then sometimes it thunders like an invasion of fully armed marines.
For the past two decades, when people have asked, What do you do? I’ve smirked with self-effacement, to warn them not to expect much, and I’ve told them that I sell insurance.
Eighteen years ago, on an early spring day in the park, I spotted a woman dressed in white standing amid a crowd of people wearing blue and brown. Lita was her name, and soon enough I married her. We rented a tiny house in the woods and filled it with secondhand furniture. We were isolated and happy, I believed, although as I think back now, I recall certain small things—the uneven keening of the winter wind, closed doors that came oddly ajar, birds that hit the windows and died.
I loved Lita for her predictabilities. On summer evenings we sat in lawn chairs behind the house and listened as the frogs and cicadas struck up their lyrics, and on these evenings, if she stretched her neck and bent her face to the darkened sky for a long moment, she would always, always, five minutes later announce her intention to go to sleep early that night. In winter months when the isolation became unbearable, we went to the movie theater in town. If the film was sad, and definitely if good people died, I knew Lita would suggest a stiff drink, usually gin.
But then, not long after our second wedding anniversary, Lita told me she had signed up for a drawing class. I was surprised and said as much—she had never expressed an interest in drawing before, never mentioned that she would like to go to a museum or buy a sketch pad. I’d never even seen her doodle. She shrugged. She said it had been in a corner of her mind for some time to do this, and suddenly she’d decided. Only in retrospect could I see the clues that might have given me notice: a little drawing of a flower that a waitress had put onto my lunch bill a day earlier, and the pattern of cracks I had noticed the week before in the ceiling of the post office—they had appeared to outline a lady in a veiled hat writing in a book, but she might have been drawing, not writing. Lita enjoyed the class, and her style was fairly distinct. She liked to work with ink to create objects and characters without shading or crosshatching, like cartoons.
One day that same winter I came home from work and began to tell her about an old woman I had seen slip on the ice outside my office. The woman tried to catch herself against my office window, only to slide down it. She had broken her hip; an ambulance had come. I said maybe we ought to call Lita’s mother, just to tell her to take a little extra care.
“Sure,” Lita said. She nodded emphatically, as she did when she was being falsely earnest. “Sure. That’s completely logical. And while I’m at it I’ll mention maybe she should keep an eye out for black cats and broken mirrors, that sort of thing.”
I began to explain the difference between this and a black cat. I may have raised my voice. We’d had similar arguments in the past, but this one ended with me in the car in a sleeping bag for the night. We simmered around each other for days afterward, until Lita finally pointed out that nothing had happened to her mother, that clearly I’d been wrong. I didn’t admit she might be correct, but as a peace offering I suggested a trip. This was March, and why not go to someplace warm? We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had enough to fly down and take a reasonably nice hotel room for a week in Fort Pierce, one of the less glamorous stretches of Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Stepping out of the 737 in Orlando, I immediately felt the humidity and smelled the salty sea. I thought of sand, of palm trees, of fruity drinks, of the simple pleasures of being alive. A man held a cardboard sign which read, “Limo for Mr. Goode.” I leaned into Lita and pointed to it. “It’s a good sign.”
“Yes,” she said with a small smile.
In the hotel lobby we could hear, in an undertone, the rumble and crash of waves. Their steadiness seemed reassuring to me, and I did not think at that moment to ask myself what I wanted to be reassured of. The sky was clear and blue and perfect. We pulled on swimsuits and ran barefoot to the beach. We swam, though the winter Atlantic water was chilly, and we laughed at the golden sun as if we had not seen such a thing in years.
We ate dinner that night in the hotel restaurant, blue crab for me and whitefish for Lita. I noticed a man, fat and balding, perhaps in his late fifties, eating with his wife at a nearby table. He had a distinct smile, displaying slightly yellowed teeth, that never disappeared. The smile nagged at my attention the way a too-loud conversation does. He held it through his entire meal.
“Maybe he has a medical condition,” Lita said. But I preferred to think of him as the ambassador of a smiling land where emotions were measure
d only in degrees of happiness.
Over the next several days we broiled in the sun, went through novels like chocolate candies, and ate as much seafood as we could. On the fourth day, I saw a boy fishing, and I decided I wanted to do some surf fishing. Surf fishing is simply fishing with a pole from the beach, and I remembered doing it with my grandpa during a couple of trips to Florida when I was a teenager. I got a pole, some tackle and bait, and set an alarm clock for before dawn.
The next morning I left Lita asleep in bed and shuffled out with my equipment. I emerged into a dark fog. It made every gesture small and illusory, concentrating reality to the sand under me and the noise of the sea. I followed the roar down to the beach, then I walked northward along the scalloped edge of sand wetted by the push and pull of the waves.
Eventually I noticed a gray light suffusing the fog above the sea, and I saw, vaguely, the moving lines of foam rushing in. I stopped and cast my bait. Although I’ve felt it magnified tenfold since, at that time I thought I had never experienced such a sense of solitude. The entire universe might have shrunk to the small gray place surrounding me. I felt the fishing pole tug and snap feebly as the bait was tossed by the waves. Coded signals, I realized, sent directly to me, as clear as Morse code, if only I knew how to interpret them. I wondered a moment whether indecipherability might be a signal in itself, but I set that aside to concentrate on the feel of the telegraphs from the sea. I ought to be satisfied, I felt then, that the ocean had words to whisper in my ear, even if the words meant nothing to me.