This is Just Exactly Like You

by Drew Perry

  “Right.”

  Ernesto comes back in, says their farmer can bring them the soil. “By ten-thirty,” he says. He gives the phone to Hendrick, who begins pressing each number, counting in Spanish. “Ocho,” he says. “Siete.”

  “Kid’s getting to where he can talk about as good as you, Paco,” Butner says.

  Jack picks up stacks of paper on the desk, sets them back down. It’s Tuesday in his life. Hen’s on the sofa, calling Guatemala. Beth’s been gone however many days. Seventeen. He sips his beer. “The catfish is smoking,” Jack says. Maybe if he explains it one small piece at a time, that’ll work. He says, “He’s smoking a cigarette.”

  Butner says, “He’s doing what?”

  “He’s smoking. He’s got a cigarette in one flipper.”

  “But he’s a catfish, right?”

  “Right.”

  Butner rubs at his hand, the one that got bitten. He’s got it bandaged up. “OK. How’s he smoking under water?”

  Jack hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s a problem,” Butner says.

  “The cigarette is supposed to light up on the end.”

  “I mean, I get it,” Butner says. “But the whole underwater thing is still there.”

  “You’ll like it,” Jack tells him. “You’ll still like it.”

  “Yeah, I probably will,” he says. He walks out the door, onto the lot, turns around, looks back in at Jack. He says, “You know what? I like it well enough so far.”

  “Thanks,” Jack says.

  Butner raises his beer at him. “You’re welcome,” he says.

  If there’s an eight-foot catfish standing over a sidewalk racetrack by the end of the day, then that’s one kind of success. Jack works on that idea while Ernesto takes Hendrick through the subtleties of verb tense. The three of them are in the cab, plus Yul Brynner. Butner’s riding the trailer. He couldn’t be talked out of it. I’ll be fine, boss man, I’ll be fine. He’s got one of the lawn chairs strapped down to it, and he’s strapped himself into the lawn chair. He’d be crushed to death if Jack flipped the thing, but other than that, all this seems about as safe as anybody could hope for. Ernesto keeps turning around in his seat, looking through the little metal rectangle of mesh holes in the dump bed right behind the back window, checking on Butner. In the rearview, Butner’s hair blows in the wind.

  It’s ten in the morning and with the windows down, with Hen and Ernesto and Butner and Yul Brynner with him, Jack feels like he’s on some kind of mission. He almost feels good. He thinks of Rena, checking her mail, maybe watering a few plants. He thinks of Bethany. What he feels like he knows, now: Rena will have to go back to her house, whichever house that ends up being, and Beth’s got to live in hers, whichever one that ends up being. What happens to Canavan, or to him, after that, Jack doesn’t know, but it’s Canavan who’s had the worst of it, Jack decides, changing lanes, letting himself smile at that. Canavan’s got fifty-four staples in his leg, the fucker. Fifty-four. Jack imagines the gleam of the stainless steel. He thinks about the chainsaw finding bone, the luck of it kicking back out instead of digging the rest of the way through.

  He knows there’s more to it, of course. He knows they don’t just get to rinse this clean. There’s the easy picture of Bethany in bed with Canavan, for one thing, and the just-as-easy picture of Rena in his plastic chairs, unraveling the universe for him. But he aims, for now, at least, toward the better feeling, tries to choose it, tries to do not much more than listen to the hum of the truck tires on the macadam, a word the NCDOT guys would use. Macadam. He listens to Ernesto and Hen. En Español, claro. Which way to the train station, the language lab voice would ask Jack. ¿Donde está la estación de tren? Over and over in those headphones. ¿Listo? Ernesto’s asking Hendrick now, and Hen’s saying listo back to him. Listo. Ready. They pass a cop sitting in the median and Jack keeps checking his mirrors, waiting for the blue lights, for him to pull them over, walk up to the window, eye the dog, Butner, say Sir, could you please step away from the vehicle? But the cop doesn’t move. The cruiser looks like a giant bug there in the grass. He’s getting away with it. Jack almost feels good.

  Zel is sitting in the open window of the mini-golf trailer when they get there, up on the putter counter. It occurs to him that she probably lives in it. There’s nothing else on the property that looks like it could house anybody. She kicks her legs at them and raises another blue drink, same tall glass, in salute. Jack taps the horn at her, and she sets her drink down on the blue Astroturf that covers the counter and waves crazily with both hands. Welcome, welcome. He slows on the gravel lot and pulls the truck and trailer as close as he can to the fence, to the undersea creatures, and cuts the engine. Butner’s singing something back there, something Jack feels like he knows the words to. They get out of the cab, Ernesto reaching back in and hefting Hen down. Butner’s filling in the parts he doesn’t know with blank syllables, vowel sounds. Hie, hie, hie, hey, hey. Then he goes into a guitar solo, and strapped into the lawn chair like that, he looks like he’s the one they’ve come to take away, that they’ve just tied him, chair and all, to the trailer, and now they’re going to take him back to the institution. He shakes his hair all over the place during the solo, finishes his song. They all stand next to the trailer, looking at him, and he says, “What?”

  Hendrick adjusts The Duck. “The greatest hits of yesterday and today,” he says.

  “Goddamn right,” Butner says, and unstraps himself. “This is the place?” he asks. “These are the undersea creatures?”

  “Yes,” Jack says. “This is the place.”

  “Cool,” Butner says. “Cool, cool, cool.”

  There’s a flat heat, flat blue sky to go with it. The catfish looks like he wouldn’t want his cigarette relit just now. Jack sweats down his spine. Butner hops the fence, goes up to the catfish, knocks on it. He gets a hollowed ring back. He gets down on one knee, looks at the fins, at the base, says, “Did you bring a socket set?”

  “There’s one in the glove,” Jack tells him.

  “Toss me the wrench, and I’ll get at these bolts.”

  He hadn’t really thought about them being attached to anything, but it makes sense, of course. They’d blow over. Or get stolen. You’d need an NCDOT trailer to do it, but still. He hands the socket set over the fence to Butner, and then heads for Zel, who’s still sitting up in the window.

  “You’re back,” she says.

  “I am.”

  “Donald called here last night,” she tells him. “They let him make a call. He earned it, he said. Some kind of points system they have them on.” She sips her drink. “I told him about you buying his fishies. He said he was glad they were going to a good home.”

  “They are,” Jack says.

  “That’s what I told him. A nice young couple and a beautiful little boy, I said.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where’s your wife today?”

  Jack considers all the possible answers. He says, “I brought these guys instead.”

  “Fair enough,” she says. They watch Hendrick leading Ernesto around, pointing things out to him. Explaining. Every now and then, Ernesto reaches out, takes a bolt from Butner, but mainly he’s letting Hendrick show him the secrets of the golf course. Jack wonders whether Hen’s talking to him—really talking—or if he’s giving him last night’s newscast.

  Zel says, “So what are you going to do with them?”

  Jack smiles. “It’s a little out there.”

  “As out there as all this?” Zel waves her glass at the Carolina Flea Market and Undersea Adventures Mini-Golf.

  “You see the guy working on the bolts?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s going to get a friend of his to pour a big sidewalk in our yard. Like a Big Wheel racetrack.”

  “Yep,” says Zel, like she’s got a tricycle racetrack in her back yard, too, like everybody does.

  “I’ve been thinking maybe a figure eight.
And I thought maybe they could all go in the middle of it. In the holes of the eight. Or out around the edge.”

  “See? That sounds perfect,” she says. “Just perfect. Donald will like that. I’ll tell him that the next time he earns himself a phone call.” She pulls a piece of hair out of her mouth, examines it. “Would you like to know where we got them?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “From a catalog. You get all these mailings when you start up a mini-golf. Like you wouldn’t believe. And not just golf stuff. We’d get these catalogs with go-carts in them, where if you bought thirty go-carts, you got some kind of discount. Also batting cages. You know we could have bought a batting cage with three pitching machines for ten thousand dollars?”

  “I did not.”

  “Plus the chain-link fencing and the ball return and the machines for tokens. The whole thing. You’re talking about pouring concrete, right? All we’d have had to do was hire someone to come pour us a mile or so of concrete to get everything to slant back towards the machines. All those catalogs. You name it, they make it.” Out on the course, Butner and Ernesto have worked out a system, and they’re already lowering the shrimp to the ground. Hendrick is sitting on the tee box of Atlantic #3. “People don’t think about where things like that come from,” she says.

  “That’s true,” Jack says. He’s wishing Rena were here for this, to see Zel one more time.

  “They don’t just come from nowhere.” She gets down off the window. “You know what I always thought would be nice out here?”

  “What’s that?”

  “One of those waterfalls. A little river running through the whole place, and then over there, right out next to the octopus, a waterfall. Right between the two courses.”

  “That would have been nice,” Jack says.

  “It would have given them something to look at,” she says, and Jack’s not sure if she means the people who came to play golf, or the undersea creatures. He gets his cash out of his pocket, crisp new bills from the bank, counts them out. Ten hundreds. “You’ve got to be going, probably,” Zel says.

  “Probably,” he says, and hands her the money.

  She folds it in half, holds it. She says, “Do you want to know what he told me right before he hung up?”

  “Sure.”

  “He said he wanted us to walk across the whole country. On foot. He wants to start in Seattle and finish in Miami. Top left to bottom right. He kept saying that: ‘Top left to bottom right.’ And he kept saying how we were going to need all these pairs of shoes, because we’d wear them through so quickly. He’s getting it all planned out. He says we’ll mail shoes to ourselves all across the country, and they’ll just be there waiting for us when we get to Montana and Missouri and Georgia.” She lights a cigarette. “Does that sound like something a person could do?”

  “I think it does,” Jack says.

  “That’s what I keep thinking, too.” Butner and Ernesto pick up the catfish, walk it over to the trailer. “I told you his cigarette has a light in it, right?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Jack says.

  “I’m not your mother,” she says. “Don’t call me ma’am.”

  “OK.”

  “Call me Zel.”

  “OK, Zel.”

  “Go load up the fishies and take your boy back home to play with them,” she says.

  “OK, Zel.”

  “I like you,” she says.

  “Thank you.”

  “I can tell you’ve got a good heart,” she says, and reaches out and pats him on the chest. She stands there, putters on the wall behind her and golf balls in eight shades of blue stacked up in wire bins. She says, “You need anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then I guess we’re done.” She looks out at Butner and Ernesto, shields her eyes so she can see better. “Look,” she says, “that catfish is heavier than it seems, if I remember right.”

  “Thank you,” he says.

  She says, “You’re welcome,” but she says it a little quickly, like she might want to be somewhere else right then. He’s about to ask her if she wants to rethink all this, if she maybe doesn’t want to sell after all, but she disappears into the trailer, shuts the door, doesn’t come back out. Jack waits for her, but she’s gone. Maybe he should knock. Butner calls for him, wants to know if he can maybe give us a hand over here a minute. They’re having trouble getting the catfish over the fence. Jack leaves Zel in the trailer, goes to help.

  Hendrick’s touching his fingers to his thumb one by one, working on the long version of the Kernersville Chrysler Dodge commercial, complete with the description of their zero percent financing and Employee Pricing, Kelly, that’s right, EP, they’ll pay the same price we would on this brand new Durango, the country’s hottest SUV. Perfect for tailgating. Jack and Ernesto and Butner get the creatures loaded up onto the trailer, into the bed of the truck. Jack leaves the clam, Zel’s favorite, where it is, out by Pacific #6. Butner straps his lawn chair back down, straps himself back in. He’s facing sideways this time, riding between the catfish, which they laid down on its side, and the octopus, which is sitting upright, its tentacles reaching out for Butner. The shrimp, the two jellyfish, and a small gray whale wearing what might be an Olympic medal are stacked into the bed of the dump truck. Jack and Ernesto and Hen get back in the cab. Zel does not come back out of the trailer. The mini-golf window is still open, the signboard telling everybody they get a fourth game free when they pay for three. Jack pulls the truck slowly out of the lot and beeps the horn for Zel, wherever she is in there. Just drive slow, Butner told him, and we’ll be alright. They didn’t have quite enough tie-downs, Jack thought, but Butner reassured him. Just drive slow. Jack drives slow.

  Everyone in every car that passes them on the way back north stares. It must be a hell of a picture they make, Jack thinks, holding the speedometer between 35 and 40. He’s got the hazards on. The trailer lights aren’t hooked up. He’s just hoping, keeps looking for cops in the medians. So far, so good. Ernesto says something Jack doesn’t hear. “What?” he says.

  “El imperfecto,” he says. “I’m explaining past tense.”

  “Oh,” Jack says. “Good.”

  “Hablaba,” Ernesto says.

  “Hablama,” Hen says back.

  “No. Hablaba.”

  “Hablaba,” Hen says.

  “Good,” says Ernesto. “Perfecto.”

  “How’s he doing?” Jack asks.

  “He’s doing great. Really great,” Ernesto says.

  “Thank you,” Jack says. “Thanks for teaching him.”

  “It’s nothing at all,” Ernesto says. “I enjoy it. He does, too.”

  Jack checks Butner in the side mirror. He can just see him. He’s got his head leaned over the back of the chair, and he’s turning his face into the wind. All pleasure. Everything for pleasure. The thing for the sake of the thing itself. Butner and Yul Brynner and Hendrick are all the damn same. Jack rolls down the window a little further. “Let me ask you a question,” he says to Ernesto.

  “Of course.”

  “What if I put these in at the new house, instead? Do you think that would work?”

  “The racetrack and the whole thing?”

  “The whole thing,” Jack says. “Why not?”

  Ernesto looks at Hen, then at Jack. “I think it would work the same anywhere you put it.”

  “Yeah,” says Jack. “That’s what I was thinking.” Across the street. Because that’s where something like this belongs. He feels as sure now about that as he does about anything else. He checks his mirror one more time. Across the street. The new house. When they get back to the lot, he’ll tell Butner to tell his guys.

  They stop back by PM&T to pick up the skid and to check in down the street on the NCDOT guys, make sure their soil arrived. It did, and Kenny’s all smiles. Jack can keep the trailer all day if he needs to. Jack explains to Butner about the shift in venue, and Butner doesn’t ask him anything about why, w
hich is good. Butner makes a few phone calls and says he’ll head over to wait for the concrete, get everything started. I’m on every part of this, boss man. By the time Jack gets there an hour later—he stops for lunch for Hen, because he can’t remember when he’s supposed to meet Beth, or if he’s already missed it, or if they’d even had anything set up for today—there’s a cement mixer sitting in his driveway, big drum on the back of it spinning around. It reminds him of an old record player, of old wax cylinder recordings. RANDOLPH & SONS CONCRETE is painted on the side of the drum. The lettering looks like they did it themselves. There’s a guy laying down boards in his side yard, rolling out an enormous rubber mat over the top of them, and Butner’s backing the skid down off its little trailer, which he’s towed over off the back of his car. Jack parks out front, along the curb. The sun throws bright noontime shadows off everything. Rena’s standing in the driveway. She comes over, leans in the open window. “You’re back,” he says.

  “I couldn’t miss this,” she says.

  “Me neither,” he says.

  She says, “I talked to Butner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re really going to do it over here?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “This is going to be a little like an eclipse,” says Rena. And before he can ask her exactly what she means, she walks away, follows Butner as he drives the skid over the rubber mat and into the back yard.

  Beth’s entire head will come off her body. She’ll at the very goddamn least want to know why he put it over here, instead of at their house. How in the hell do you expect to sell it now, with the yard like that? And he’s got a ready answer for that. This is what came to him riding back home. He doesn’t expect to sell it any more, he’ll say. He’s got a whole new plan. This is all for her. For them. They can move over here. This thing with Rena’s all but done. That much is sure. So they’ll move over here, and what he’ll do is find some way of finishing the kitchen off over there, and that one, with its walls already knocked through, with paint up on the walls, mostly, can be the one they sell. 3BR. 2BA. BRAND NEW KITCHEN. She never liked that house, anyway. He’ll start in on the attic over here, get their little room put in over here. There’s already a good floor up there from where the old man had his workbench, from where he’d loaded up all his shotgun shells, getting himself ready. They’ll drop a new stove in this kitchen and be done with it. Leave the walls where they are for now. Nothing fancy. No demolition. A plain, simple house. Small rooms. More like their old rental in Burlington. Get everything back down to how it was. They can sit out back in the evenings, talk about whether they’ll ever get Hen to try out for something like Little League, look at the ground lights lit up around the sidewalk racetrack. He’s going to need some ground lights.