by Drew Perry
You can’t just let everything happen to you, Beth tells him. You can’t always just wait. Except this: When he’s the one reaching, when he tears out his kitchen or buys the house across the street, it’s that he’s tearing out his kitchen or buying another house. It’s the grand, flailing gesture, or it’s nothing. He thinks of it like ballast, sometimes. A good day on the yard mitigated by trying to fix the shower handles, and breaking them off in the wall in the process. He’s not hapless. He just makes certain of his calculations incorrectly. Gets excited. Forgets to carry the two.
He knows there’s more required of him than this. That he cannot just ride along, and that he also can’t just reach for whatever he wants. He thought marrying Beth might do it, or thought becoming a father might, but each of those things just made him more the way he already was. Those nights before Rena turned up at the door, he looked out his windows, thought about what Beth was saying when she left. I can’t do this any more. Not like this. Maybe it’s in what they ask Hen when he’s clicking his teeth or shaking his head or popping his lips: Hen, buddy, why are you doing that? Jack knows what he’s doing. He always knows. Auctioneer spooling off prices, his hand going up in the air. He knew what that was. But when Beth wanted to know why he’d done it, he had nothing good for her, or nothing good enough.
If he asked her—if he took a shower and buttoned his shirt and drove over there and asked her again why she’d moved in with Canavan—he knows she’d have an answer, or that she could find one. If she asked him, though, what he was doing out here getting ready to buy an oversized catfish off a blue golf course on a Monday afternoon with Rena, what would he be able to tell her that she didn’t already know? Would he be able to convince her that the undersea creatures might be something new, something else? Something that could land them somewhere between the two kinds of mistakes he knows how to make?
They’re in the coral reef, almost halfway through Pacific. Rena beat him by three strokes on Atlantic. Hen’s out on the other side of the course with the dog. The way he’s playing is to hit the ball about ten inches at a time, then hit it another ten inches. He scored a thirty on the first hole, a thirty-seven on the second. He is an exceedingly careful player. They can see him from everywhere, just about, so they’ve left him to play his own way. Yul Brynner sits while he putts, like he’s Hen’s caddie. Zel’s been watching them out the window the whole time, and when Jack hit a hole-in-one at the far end of Atlantic, Zel clapped. It was a thin sound coming across all the concrete.
Jack tees up, putts his ball, bangs it off a dented metal triangle in the center of the Astroturf, and it veers toward what looks like a real shark jaw sitting in some sand. They have actual sand traps here at the Undersea Adventures Mini-Golf. It would be an impressive layout, actually, with a coat of paint, some pressure washing, somebody to mow the parking lot.
Rena sets her ball down—navy blue—in the little rubber square, lines up her putt. She hits to the far side of the triangle, up and around it on a little hill, and her ball coasts back down toward the hole itself, which has a wooden fish arched over it, blue with white and black stripes. It looks homemade, like maybe Donald made it himself. Its smile is crooked. Her ball bounces off a fin and stops right in front of the hole. “Hell, yes,” she says. “Would you look at that?”
“I’m looking,” he says, looking instead at Hen, who’s tapping his putter six times on the ground before every shot. One, two, three, four, five, six.
“You’re not,” Rena says.
He turns back to her. “Sorry,” he says.
“You go off on your own a lot.”
“What?”
“There are just times when you’re not really in there, you know? Where you’re not really talking to people? Not all the time, but there are times.”
He goes over to his ball, knocks it out of the sand. It rolls almost up to the hole, up next to hers. He putts his in, putts hers in, too. “I talk,” he says.
“Beth says you don’t. She says you don’t talk to anybody, really. I didn’t ever believe her, but now I think I might see what she means.”
“That’s not fair,” he says. “We talk. Beth and I talk. You and I have been talking all day. We were talking just now.”
“Not really,” she says.
“Yes we were.”
“Well, then, do it again,” she says. “Go.”
“What do you mean, go? You can’t just tell somebody to go.”
“Sure you can.” She picks up the golf balls, walks out the other end of the coral reef, toward the next hole. “You can talk about anything. I don’t care. It doesn’t have to be hilarious. It doesn’t have to feature you kissing some child. Just talk to me.”
He checks Hen again. He’s leaning over, forehead on the end of his putter. A still shot from a dizzy bat race. It’s hot. Go. “OK,” he says. “Here. Last Fourth of July, we took Hen to the parade downtown. In Greensboro.”
“See?” she says. “That’s all I need. A parade story. You’re doing fine. Baby steps.”
“He likes parades,” Jack says. “But he’s not supposed to.”
“Not supposed to, how?”
“The doctors are all the time telling us things he won’t be able to do. And then he does them. Like he’s not supposed to like crowds, but he likes parades.” He shakes his head. “When they find out he can speak Spanish, the Beanbags will lose their shit.”
“The Beanbags?”
“His therapists.”
“Why are they called that?”
“I call them that. They have beanbag chairs.”
“Oh.”
“We had a doctor one time tell us to think about putting him in a home. He told us we’d be lucky if he ever fed himself,” Jack says.
“What’d you do?”
“It was Beth,” he says. “She was on the ceiling—we both were—but she scheduled an appointment with someone else, and that was the woman who told us not to make our minds up about anything yet, that we should just ride along and see what happened. She was one of the first ones I liked. She seemed human. She was the first one to tell us about food, about making his diet right.”
“And that worked?” she says.
“It did,” he says. “Some.”
The wind picks up, blows oak leaves and slips of paper around. “Do they know how he’ll be?” Rena asks. “I mean, if he’ll get better?” She scratches her leg with her putter. “Can he get better?”
“Nobody knows anything,” he says. “It’s all bullshit. The books are bullshit. Nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about.”
“Is that true?”
“No,” he says. “Not always.”
They’re both watching Hen now, watching Yul Brynner watch him. “What’s it like?” she asks him.
“What is what like?”
“All of it. Raising him. Having him.”
“You and Beth never talked about this?”
“We talked about it.”
“What did she say?”
“I’m asking you, Jack.”
He rubs his nose. “It’s like it’s always happening, every minute,” he says. “It’s like you’re never, never not doing it.”
“You’re tired.”
“Fuck yes,” he says. “Very. All the time.”
“And Beth.”
“She’s tired, too.”
Rena sits down on a bench. It’s shaped like a dolphin except for the part where she’s sitting, which is flattened out. “You two aren’t that pissed off at each other,” she says.
“I think she’s pretty pissed.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what this is.”
“Maybe not,” he says.
“Terry and I’ve talked about it. We talk about it some.”
“About Hendrick?”
“More about just having kids,” she says. “Whether we should.”
“Do you want them?”
“I have no idea,” she says. “Some days I do, some days not at al
l.”
Jack says, “That doesn’t ever really change.”
She looks up at him from the dolphin bench. “Tell me the rest of the parade,” she says.
He watches a jet fly across the sky, long white contrail tracing out behind it. “These trash trucks came by right at the end,” he says. “These spit-shined, gleaming trash trucks. They were running the robotic arms on the sides up and down, running the arm on the front that picks up Dumpsters up and down. The trash guys were walking out to the side in brand new yellow T-shirts, and everything looked so—clean. Like the trucks were the cleanest things that had ever been.” He chews his thumbnail. “And then Hendrick ran out into the goddamn parade—I wasn’t holding onto him, and he ran right out in the street, and he got up in this one trash guy’s arms, and the guy carried him for the rest of the parade.” Hendrick’s doing something complicated now with his putter and what looks like a newspaper circular. “He’s not supposed to like strangers,” Jack says. “But he sat up in the guy’s arms and waved at people. He had a blast.” Hen tears a piece off the circular, puts that underneath his putter. The dog watches, learning. “At the end,” says Jack, “they even let him work the controls a little bit. He loved that.”
She gets up off the bench, reaches out for his arm. “See?” she says. “It turns out you can talk. You and Hendrick both.” She sets her ball down, putts it into a puddle. She says, “Maybe you’re both getting better.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s finish up and go see Zel and buy however many of these things you’re going to buy,” she says.
“OK,” he says.
She hits again. “Maybe you could load them up in your truck and hire them out to seafood restaurants or something,” she says. “Drive them around.”
“We don’t really have that many seafood restaurants.”
“You could open one. Patriot Mulch & Seafood.”
“You mean like a market? Like we’d sell fresh fish?”
“No,” she says. “Like a restaurant. The whole thing: Tablecloths and hush puppies and the metal napkin holders on the tables. Little pretty high school girls as waitresses. You’d like that, right? We’ll do it together. We’ll be proprietors. It’ll be great. We’ll smell like fried fish for the rest of our lives.”
Hush puppies. He could live that way, too. He watches her while she finishes the hole, picks her ball up, puts it in her pocket. “Why is it easy for you?” he wants to know.
“It isn’t,” she says. “I just make it look that way. Smoke and mirrors.”
“I’m going to miss this,” he says.
“I’m going to miss it, too, Jackson,” she says, and she looks at him. “And you. I’m going to miss you.” She makes a face. “But let’s not turn this into some kind of scene. I don’t want to be crying and wearing a T-shirt you gave me and planning out some mix tape for you while your parents drive you away from camp in your dad’s Corolla, OK? None of that.”
“OK,” he says. “Sure.”
“So long as we’ve got that straight.” She walks to the next hole. He stares at her, watches her line up her next putt. She holds her thumb out in the air to measure something—slope, distance. He’s already trying to remember all of this as best he can.
Zel tells him he can have as many as he can take away for a thousand dollars, but she’s keeping the clam. It’s always been her favorite, she says. She likes the way he looks at you. Also, there is, yes, supposed to be a light in the end of the catfish’s cigarette, but the wiring’s gone bad and only Donald knows how to fix it. When he gets out, if he stays dry, I’ll send him to see you. Maybe you two can get it squared away. He is some kind of electronical genius.
Rena drives and Jack looks out the window, watches while the landscape works itself back toward Greensboro. He’s arranged it with Zel: He’ll come pick up the undersea creatures tomorrow. He’ll bring Butner and Ernesto, bring the truck and maybe a trailer. And cash. Zel would prefer cash. It’s nothing to do with me not trusting you, just so you know. You’re good people. I can tell just by seeing you here. You two make a real nice-looking couple. Rena smiled and got in the car. Jack shook Zel’s hand one more time. Zel dumped what was left of her blue daiquiri into the parking lot and waved at them with her empty glass as they pulled away.
On the way home, they pass a man screaming at a telephone pole. They pass two dead deer. Closer in to town, they pass a church with a sign out front that says FORGOTSO LOVED THE WORLD.
Rena bumps into PM&T and coasts to a stop in front of the pile of cedar. Butner and Ernesto are not out front. No one’s over at the Shell, either. The lot’s empty except for the dump truck and a jacked-up Nissan pickup past the office. It’s that kid’s, Jack thinks, Butner’s friend from the overturned loader. The kitten tattoos. The office says OPEN, but the door’s shut. Almost the entire front of the lot is under water from yesterday’s rain. No customers. There’s a gunshot. “What the hell was that?” Rena asks.
“I think it was a gun,” Jack says. He gets out of the car. He says, “Stay here.”
Rena says, “What, are you crazy?”
“I don’t want anybody getting hurt,” Jack says.
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Like what?”
“For fuck’s sake,” she says, and gets out. She opens the door, lets Hen and Yul Brynner out. The dog’s ears are flat back on his head. He hates loud noises. Rena takes Hen by the hand and Yul Brynner snugs up close to her leg and she starts walking all of them back in the direction of the mulch bays.
“What are you doing?” he asks her, following behind.
“We are going over here,” Hen says, over his shoulder. Jack can’t get used to these outbursts. Each one’s a flashbulb going off. Maybe the doctors will tell them that he’s pulling himself into sharper focus, like some kind of eye exam: This? Or this? This? Or this? There’s another gunshot, a thin, sharp crack that comes echoing off the bricks of the Shell station. The dog bellies down onto the ground, tail between his legs, then slinks under the pickup, curls up under a front tire and hides. Hen lets go of Rena, covers his ears, turns in a circle. Jack tries to decide whether or not he should throw his body in front of him, whether or not anybody should be hitting the deck. He feels like he should be in slow motion. Slow motion shot of pigeons scattering up out of the parking lot. Off the telephone wire. Up from the piazza. Rena shouts out, “Hey!”
From behind the mulch piles, Butner and Ernesto shout Hey back. Ernesto comes around the retaining wall, smiles when he sees Hen, heads right for him. “Hola,” says Hendrick.
“¿Como estás, jefecito?” Ernesto holds his hand out for Hendrick to give him five.
Hen puts his fist into his hand instead. There’s something solemn about it. He repeats it: “¿Como estás, jefecito?” Then he says, “Estoy bien.” His accent is even getting pretty good.
Ernesto looks at Jack. “We found rats in the tomatoes.”
“You’re shooting rats?” Rena asks.
Butner walks out, the tattoo kid with him. They’re both grinning. It’s the kid who’s got the gun, a rifle, on his shoulder. “Two already,” Butner says. “Big ones. Randy, you remember Jack Lang, and his son, Hendrick. And this is—”
“Rena,” she says.
“This is Randy Troxler,” Butner says, meaning the kid. Rena shakes his hand. “He works the kitchen at Sandy’s, over by Kinnett. You probably know the place. And he helps us out sometimes.”
“Not just the kitchen,” Randy says. “I’ve been saving up. As soon as I can afford some speakers, Sandy’s gonna let me DJ on the weekends.”
“That’s cool,” Rena says.
“I’m a good DJ,” Randy says.
“You guys want a shot?” Butner says.
“You bet,” says Rena, and holds her hand out for the gun.
“Fantastic,” says Butner. He smiles big at Jack. Randy hands her the rifle without asking her if she knows how to shoot one. Back behind the bays, they’ve got th
e lawn chairs set up facing the tomatoes, a cooler full of beer. Rena sits down, and Butner and Ernesto and Randy stand behind her. Ernesto’s got Hendrick, holds him by the shoulders. Jack says, “You guys are really back here shooting rats?”
“Found ’em while we were tying everything back up after the rain,” Butner says. “Saw one walking along the caging with a cherry tomato in his mouth like he was just going home to share it around. Bright goddamned red tomato, little black motherfucking rat.”
“Where are they?” Rena asks, sighting down the rifle.
“They’ve been back in there, on the left,” Butner says, leaning over and steering the barrel toward the far end of the garden. The gun goes off.
“Oops,” Rena says. “Fuck.”
“Don’t worry,” says Butner. “It’s only a pellet gun. You can’t really hurt anybody unless you’re trying.”
“How do I reload?”
“Like this.” Butner slides the bolt out and back, and pulls a pellet from his pocket, chambers it. Pellet gun or not, all this seems terribly unsafe. Yul Brynner’s curled up even smaller under the tire.
Rena says, “I don’t see anything in there.”
“Maybe they got them all already,” Jack says, hoping.
“No,” Ernesto says. “There are always more. Siempre.”
“Siempre,” says Hen, serious.
“Are they gray?” Rena wants to know.
“Those are squirrels,” Butner says.
“Please do not shoot the squirrels,” Hendrick says.
“Yeah,” says Randy. “I like those guys.”
“Eastern gray squirrels breed twice a year, typically,” Hendrick says. Jack just looks at him.
“What?” says Rena, and the gun goes off again. Everybody jumps and Rena says, “Shit. Sorry.” A couple of vines lean over at the far end of the garden. She hands the gun to Butner. “I’m a menace with this thing. You take it.”