Jim suddenly remembered that he had a tiny blue smiling whale on his cheek. He let go of the jawbone and stepped backward. He held up his hand and examined the white crescents that the teeth had left smarting on his palm.
Jim was surprised to discover that beer was available at the food court. Half an inch of foam twinkled and spat at the surface of his Coors Light. He drank two-thirds of the beer while the cashier was still counting out change. The kid wore a Cleveland Indians cap covered with dozens of metal pins. Jim tipped him three dollars.
“Go Tribe,” Jim said, and offered the kid a high five. He felt a hundred times better than he had moments earlier.
Charlie was licking his corndog like a popsicle and he had a smear of wet cornmeal on his chin. He eyed his father. “I thought you said you were getting a Coke.”
“I thought that would be the only option,” Jim said.
Charlie sighed with his entire upper body. He tapped the toe of his flip-flop irritably, like he was waiting on something. A sudden, cruel smirk passed over his face. “I’ll probably have to tell Mom,” he said.
“Great,” Jim said. He gave Charlie a big thumbs-up. “Perfecto mundo.” He took another sip of his beer. “You have food on your face.”
They walked to a nearby table shaded by a navy Pepsi umbrella. Charlie finished his corndog, then he poked the empty wooden stick methodically through the holes in the dark green plastic grating of the table. He adjusted his visor lower on his forehead.
“Tell Mom whatever you want to tell Mom,” Jim said, finishing off the beer. He ran his index finger around the rim of the plastic cup to capture the residual foam and sucked it off his fingertip. He gazed across the pavilion at a large man who was shading himself with an umbrella and stroking a Pomeranian on his lap.
“Maybe I won’t,” Charlie said quietly and glanced sideways at Jim.
“I don’t suppose Kevin ever drinks a beer,” Jim said.
“Not really,” Charlie said. “Sometimes he has a wine.”
Jim crushed the empty plastic cup in his hand. He wanted another one. Ten more.
He knew he deserved all of this.
Six months after the finalization of their divorce, Laura was still on the lookout for ways to finagle the other woman into conversation, even hinting at it when Charlie was around. Jim had recently convinced himself for several terrible hours that she’d told Charlie, who was particularly sour during an outing. Laura hadn’t, she later insisted, but Jim knew that she would. She would wait until Charlie was old enough to understand, old enough to decide for himself what kind of a man his father really was, Jim was certain of this. Already, Jim felt his son’s judgment and the widening gulf between them, father and son hurtling away from each other at some invisible velocity.
Charlie went to the bathroom, and Jim stared absently at a teenage couple as they ate fries with melted cheese from a cardboard box, a graceful orange string accompanying each bite. An enormous inflatable dolphin was propped up in the seat next to the girl. Jim wondered if the kid had won it for her in some game, or actually paid money for that thing.
Jim spun self-consciously back toward the men’s room. His sunglasses hung from a string around his neck, and he wiped the lenses off with the bottom of his shirt then looked at his reflection in them. His nose was thick and sunburned and porous, lips chapped to crusts in the corners, eyes soggy-looking and threaded with tired blood.
Laura’s face was so beautiful that even when they were still together, it sometimes made Jim mad to look at her. Somewhere inside himself he had always known that she was too good, that it would turn out this way.
Jim put his sunglasses back on and raised his arm at Charlie who was walking out of the men’s room still clutching a balled-up paper towel. Jim knelt to pick up the clear plastic lid of a fountain soda cup off the ground, and he threw it like a Frisbee into the garbage can several feet away. He pulled a small tube of SPF 45 from his pocket and rubbed the pasty goo onto Charlie’s face and arms and bare little legs.
Jim and Charlie wore plastic gloves while they tossed handfuls of glittering fish to barking sea lions. They took pictures of a diseased-looking walrus, its flesh mottled pink around its face. They watched a row of penguins zoom down a slide, flipping head over heels into water that was outlandishly blue. They passed a small pond with a fountain that was full of mallards, their green heads resplendent in the midday sun. Jim watched as Charlie approached the pond and leaned over it. He had his eye on something beneath the surface, and when Jim joined him, Charlie pointed. Several feet out in the water was a tiny baby turtle, its shell no more than two or three inches long, and it was swimming furiously against an artificial current that was being created by the fountain. On the far side of the fountain was a rock where five or six other turtles lay in the sun. The tiny turtle, for all his efforts, couldn’t seem to get beyond the fountain to join the others on the rock. His little legs churned. Each time he’d make a bit of progress or attempt a different route, the strength of the water would overtake him and send him tumbling backward.
Jim said, “He doesn’t know what he’s up against, does he?” At the far end of the pond, a kid in a latex seal mask howled at them.
At four o’clock, they made their way over to the main auditorium for the Shamu show. Cement semicircular tiers rose back from the pool, which was surrounded by a four-foot-tall panel of glass. The first twelve rows were marked “Splash Zone,” the lettering in blue spray paint with a faint blue rectangular outline of the stencil visible around each word. Jim followed Charlie to two open seats several rows back, at center stage. A vendor carried a wicker basket full of football-sized stuffed whales. He wore his SeaWorld hat backward on his head and his khaki shorts were frayed to strings at his knees. A whale in both his hands, pantomiming some fight scene. A few rows down, there was a little boy wearing a girl’s wig. A pair of twins that looked to be about Charlie’s age sat in front of Jim and passed a white paper bag of popcorn back and forth. One of them hurled a single piece of popcorn into the pool when their mother wasn’t watching, and Jim watched it soften in the water.
Jim had a camping trip planned with Charlie for Labor Day weekend. They would go to Cattaraugus Creek, just an hour outside Buffalo. Fish during the daytime, swim if the sun was shining, roast hotdogs at night, read stories in the tent with a flashlight. The trip had been planned for several months now, but suddenly Jim felt nothing but bitterness about the whole scenario; certain that Laura had some great big plan with Kevin for that long weekend. St. Croix, perhaps, or some other saintly island. And what would he and Charlie even talk about for three whole days? At this moment, he couldn’t think of a single thing he ought to say to this boy, a single question he could ask. He looked at Charlie, who was tracing circles on his kneecap with his index finger. Three days together?! An eternity.
The show began with gentle music and an informational video about killer whales, which was projected on the far screen behind the pool. Jim wished there was a beer vendor, like at baseball games. When the video ended, the screen rose upward out of sight, and a girl in a wetsuit trotted out around the perimeter of the pool, chirping into her microphone. Her wetsuit was like a second skin of glistening black, and even from a distance, Jim could see every angle and detail of her athletic body within it, including the delicate, happy point of her small nipples. He wondered how shriveled everything was when she squeezed out of that wetsuit at the end of a shift, how long its seams stayed imprinted on her flesh.
The whale finally appeared at the far left side of the pool, its gleaming black snout first. It glided to the center of the pool, fully submerged but visible through the glass, its tail sweeping left and right, creating a gentle slithering current that reached the water’s surface. At center stage, the whale rose to the surface, turned onto its back, and reached one of its huge paddle-like flippers up and out of the water in a la2y wave toward the audience. Its belly was as smooth and white as cream. It rolled back onto its stomach, and its exposed blowhole hisse
d and wheezed. Jim was impressed by the size of the whale, the precise and pleasing symmetry of its blacks and whites. Big white oval eyespots made the whale look very kind and not quite real.
The girl in the wetsuit reached into a metal bucket to pull out a wriggling ten-inch-long fish by its tail. She dropped the fish directly into the whale’s smile and it barely twitched to swallow the fish whole, then several more.
The girl dove in and out of the water for several tricks, at one point jogging in place on the whale’s belly while it swept slowly across the pool. The girl hugged its snout, disappeared with it under the water and reemerged straddling its dorsal fin. She hopped off the whale and onto the stage, and rewarded it with more fish.
“All right,” the girl said, undoing and redoing her slick wet ponytail and adjusting her mouthpiece. “Those of you in the Splash Zone had better move back now if you don’t wanna get wet.”
The whale disappeared to its private pool behind the stage, the arena lighting dimmed, and the music faded to a deep, foreboding hum.
The twins in front of Jim poked one another. Their young mom covered her hairdo with her forearms. Charlie bounced in his seat. The whale appeared once again at stage left and swooped across the pool underwater. Three times the whale circled, picking up speed, and on its fourth pass, the music swelled to a percussive climax. When the whale reached center stage, neon strobe lights swirled wildly around the arena, and the whale disappeared deep into the pool.
The girl started a countdown from ten and invited the audience to join her. When they reached “owe!” the whale exploded straight up out of the water. At the peak of its jump, it arched backward in the air, straightening its body so it was parallel to the water’s surface, forked tail curled upward, flippers outstretched. Charlie gasped and threw his arms around his father. His whole face was wide open and his tiny biceps felt like bike tires pumped too tight.
Jim wondered when would be the next time his son reached for him like this, and when would be the last. He felt a private, throbbing panic.
The whale crashed down with a huge, graceful swell of water and for a moment, everything felt slow and slippery and just out of reach, like the end of a dream. The water stretched and oozed and reshaped itself like an enormous line of cursive before scattering in the air. The audience screamed and winced collectively. Charlie let go of Jim just in time to grab his visor off his head and clutch it protectively in his lap.
He shrieked when the water struck.
It hit hard and it was cold. It took Jim’s breath away for a moment, as though he’d been slapped. He shivered vigorously from the base of his spine. He took a few shallow breaths and rubbed his eyes. Everyone around him was applauding. He blinked. The contact lens in his left eye had shifted and it now swam uncomfortably high on his eyeball, too far up to capture with his fingertip. Jim pulled his lid out and snapped it back, rolling his eye up far and wide in an attempt to locate it.
His chest was soaked. He could smell the fishy filth of the water, even through the chemicals. He couldn’t get his vision to focus. The misplaced contact lens felt as big and as bad as a sheet of paper stuffed into his eye socket. It made him need to cough and sneeze.
“Charlie? Are you OK?” Jim reached for Charlie, and when he found his knee he cupped it in his left hand. He couldn’t tell which of them was shaking.
“Whew-ie!” the girl was laughing loud and fake into her microphone, like a talk-show host. Jim searched for Charlie’s face, but couldn’t find it through the gluey blur of his left eye.
“Whew-ie!” the girl said again. “Y’all survive that?”
Jim rubbed his eye hard with the heel of his hand. Finally the contact slid back onto his eyeball with smooth and satisfying adherence. He blinked and peered down at Charlie, who was smiling wide enough for Jim to see the gap of his missing tooth.
Charlie reached into his pocket and produced a small black comb. He parted his hair and combed through it. Then he put the comb back in his pocket and returned the visor to his head, straightening it. Jim gazed at his son curiously while he did these things, as though Charlie was a friend of a friend who Jim couldn’t quite place.
Jim wrung out the front of his shirt with a fist, and reached for his wallet to make sure his cash hadn’t been soaked. His eyeball stung something awful and now it was watering, his vision corrugated. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and braced himself for the next big splash.
SOUTHTOWNS
Christopher Green introduced himself as “Greenie.” He was only twenty-five, though a mature twenty-five, and Tracy a youthful thirty-nine. Greenie spiked his black hair up in the front and flattened the rest of it to his skull with gel. He had a small square patch of hair beneath his lower lip. His eyes were the thinnest, palest blue, a shade best suited to watercolor. He wore loads of cologne and crunched through an entire tin of Altoids in a shift, to cover up the smell of the cigarettes that he smoked every hour on the hour. He wasn’t snooty like the rest of the staff, who talked about wine like they knew what they were talking about.
Tracy and Greenie were the only two staff members who drove into work from the Southtowns, the cluster of suburbs south of the city, rather than walking from an apartment downtown, and when she discovered this on his fourth day at the restaurant, she suggested that they carpool on the days they worked together.
“I’ll drive tomorrow,” she said. “They’re calling for a foot overnight and I just got my tire chains put on.”
It was a wet, smeary snow. Tracy’s wipers ticked and squealed back and forth, thick icy logs collecting at the base of her windshield. The streets were splashy and translucent with slush. As she braked for a lineup at the 290 exit, she was met by the familiar smell of toasting Cheerios. She peered out her window. Black smoke gushed upward in steady huffing columns from the central wing of the sprawling General Mills plant. Between soaring smokestacks, a grain elevator had the giant orange General Mills G blazed on the highest tier of its white tower.
The plant occupied almost a half mile of Lake Erie shoreline. Folks were always fussing about the pollution, proximity to downtown, wasted lakefront property. Tracy didn’t give much of a crap about stuff like this, local politics. She wondered what Greenie thought about these things, and the black man who was recently elected mayor.
She took Route 5, which ran along the water. The unfrozen lake was charcoal colored and wrinkled up against the snow-covered shore. A cyclone of little black birds danced in the wind.
When Tracy reached Greenie’s house, she was surprised to learn that he still lived with his parents. It was a plain little split-level home that sat out near the road, yellow with blue shutters. A few tall maples, bare and black, rose on either side of the house, and there was a Rubbermaid mailbox at the mouth of the driveway. A basketball hoop hung above the garage, the net gray and torn long.
“I’m looking for a place,” Greenie said, stepping up into Tracy’s truck. He waved at his dad who was wearing a Buffalo Sabres ski hat and khaki overalls and pushing a wide shovel across the driveway. Tracy waved at his dad too.
“I’ve got my eye on a couple houses on Shorewood,” Greenie continued, “some real fixer-uppers down that way. My old man did construction for a while.”
“You’d buy it then?”
“My folks would help me out. I just haven’t found the right place for the right price. I’d like something with a view of the lake.”
“That’s my thought too,” Tracy said. “A view of the lake.”
It was quiet for a bit, and then Tracy said, “I was into real estate for a while. Never got my certification, but I know a lot about it. I’ll check out the listings for you, if you want.”
They passed a boarded-up Blockbuster and a park with a tilted merry-go-round. She pointed out her house on the left. The neighborhood was nicer under cover of snow, she thought, when you couldn’t make out the car parts and rusted barbecue sets and fat yellow Toys “R” Us kitchenettes that littered her neighbor
s’ lawns. A soaring lake wind had swept the accumulated snow up into drifts with tips like meringue.
“Now you’ll know where to find me,” she said.
The next day, Tracy replaced the Us Weeklys she kept at her hostess stand with a stack of local papers and she spent the evening poring over the listings in search of fixer-uppers with a view of the lake. The dinner rush came and went. She had to remind the busboys to double-check the white linen tablecloths for stains before resetting on top of a dirty one. This wasn’t the kind of a place where they could get away with dirty linens, she said. Get your act together. She liked the busboys, but they could be real dummies sometimes.
After the rush, she made her way over to the bar and asked Greenie for a Sprite. She pushed the stack of local papers across the bar.
“I highlighted some places,” she said.
“You’re a go-getter.”
She sat at the bar and arranged her short black skirt at her thighs. She crossed her legs and spun once on the stool. It squeaked.
“We should replace these,” she said. “I’m gonna bring it up with Chef.”
Tracy was the only female on staff and she had an eye for detail. She liked making recommendations about the décor, even though none of these changes had ever actually gone into effect. The only other woman who had ever worked at the restaurant with Tracy was Chef’s mother, Wanda, who used to come in on busy weekends to help out at the host stand. Wanda smelled like a Band-Aid and she was a real stick in the mud; once she had waited for Tracy as she washed her hands in the employee bathroom, then leaned into her and said, “Honey, you need to get a lather going. See, that, what you just did, that’s not sanitary.” Tracy wasn’t entirely disappointed when Chef had announced that Wanda had a blood clot in her leg and wouldn’t be working there anymore.
Tracy stayed at the bar and drank several more Sprites, leaving only to answer the phone for several reservations and to seat a few small parties. A purplish dusk appeared briefly, then it was dark, and then it was black.
Another Place You've Never Been Page 6