by David Gates
“Mom, can I go over to Erin’s?”
“We need to talk about some things first.”
“Like what?”
“Like whether or not you’re grounded.”
Mel’s mouth comes open, theatrically. “Why-y?”
Jean drops her own jaw open, in mean-spirited imitation. “Why? Because you skipped school, you stole my credit card, you could have gotten yourself into—by the way, may I have my card back?”
Mel bends forward to reach in the hip pocket of her too-snug Levi’s; when she straightens up, Jean sees she’s begun to cry. She hands her mother the MasterCard.
“I’m not mad at you, sweetheart. I just want to make really sure that you would never, ever, do anything like this again. No matter how upset you are. Right?”
Mel looks down, shoulders shaking.
“Promise me,” says Jean.
Mel gets out an Okay. Jean listens to the sobbing to assess its sincerity, as if homing in on an instrument somewhere in an orchestra to hear if it’s an oboe or an English horn.
When she subsides, Jean says, “I’m not going to ground you.” Like Mel’s usually allowed this wild social life. “The only thing, as far as going over to Erin’s, I think today I’d just rather have you home. I haven’t really seen you or Roger for—”
“You saw me all yesterday, Mother.” Mel’s back to normal. Too quickly: she’s devalued her weeping.
“You know what I mean. I’d like us to be together.”
“Oh great.”
“If Erin would like to come over here later—”
“She doesn’t want to,” says Mel. “Our house is cruddy, and there’s nothing to do.”
“Is that what she said?”
“No, but that’s what she thinks.”
“So what did she say, exactly?”
“That her and her mom had to go somewhere.”
“That doesn’t sound quite the same to me as saying she didn’t want to come here,” Jean says. “Are you getting hungry? We haven’t had any lunch.”
“Sort of.”
“So why don’t I go put the clothes in the dryer and then fix us some lunch. And maybe try to get Roger involved in a game of Monopoly or something.”
“I don’t feel like Monopoly,” says Mel. “I don’t know, maybe.”
It turns out to be the first right move of the day. Of the week. Roger lets himself be lured down, and as they play, they eat peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches—peanut butter and banana for Mel—and listen to the Beatles. It’s so odd that a terrifying song like “I Am the Walrus” has become kid-friendly. Roger buys Park Place and Boardwalk but passes up chances to get other stuff so he can save for a hotel. Two Beatles CDs go by before Mel begins fidgeting and Roger starts getting up to do things between turns. When Jean suspends the game—to be continued tonight—they protest, but they clearly need a break. And she needs to put in the storm windows, to stop these cold drafts.
The downstairs windows are easy: push the screens up, pull the glass down. She takes the screens out of the combination doors, carries them out to the garage, brings the glass inserts back and sticks them in. The upstairs windows, though, take the old-fashioned wooden storm sash. Does she really dare do this? She gets the aluminum extension ladder from the garage, leans it against the house and climbs up to scope out the situation. Looks like all you have to do is hang the storm sash from those hooks above the windows, push them into place and turn the little things at the sides to secure them. She goes back out to the garage for the first one. Thank God they’re not huge—you can bring them up the ladder one-handed while holding on with the other hand. And there’s only six of them.
When she comes back inside, her face feeling aglow from being out in the cold, fresh air, she calls upstairs to ask who’s ready to go on with the game. Roger yes; Mel no, then yes. Soon Jean’s having to mortgage her cheapo properties. She nicknames Roger “Roger the Ruthless,” and he goes Heh-heh-heh. For all the world like a nine-year-old. Mel’s bored but indulgent.
When Jean thinks to look, it’s dark outside. She remembers they need milk and God knows what else, so she asks Mel to play for her and goes into the kitchen to make a list. Actually, Carol left them pretty well stocked. Okay, milk, orange juice, maybe Rice Krispies, since even Mel won’t eat shredded wheat. They’ve got bread for toast, but English muffins would be a nice change. It might be good just to have something light for supper. Soup and toasted English muffins. Cut up an apple. She puts on her jacket and asks if anybody wants to ride along to 7-Eleven; no takers. Roger says she’s just won second prize in a beauty contest, collect ten dollars; this cracks him up.
She uses the pay phone outside the 7-Eleven to give Champ another try, feeling like a straying wife inventing an errand so she can call her lover. But she thought she should tell him they found Willis’s truck, at least that’s her excuse, and the kids don’t need to know about every hopeless phone call. Champ hasn’t heard a word. Not a peep. Would’ve called if he had—well, hell, she knows that. Weird about the truck. But shit, it’s all weird. What can he say?
Heading home with their little bag of groceries, Jean turns the corner and pulls over to look down the block at their house. Lights cheerily on, orange pumpkin bag bulging with dead leaves. It could be any family’s house. For a second she pretends that she has no connection to any of this. The thought creeps her out. She could just drive by that house and keep going.
FOUR
1
Champ hangs up the phone and says, “You are a sick, sick pup.”
“Yeah, okay,” Willis says. “No argument.” He’s sitting in the plump, onion-smelling Salvation Army easy chair in Champ’s kitchen, sunk with his ass lower than his knees because the springs are shot to shit; his index finger’s clamped in a book called Oswald Talked that Champ says blows Gerald Posner out of the water.
“And I’m a sick pup,” says Champ, “for going along with this shit.”
“Okay. Point taken. But what did she say exactly?”
“Well, I can’t like paraphrase it word for word,” Champ says. “They towed your truck off of Houston Street—she thought I better have that information. Look, you have got to straighten this shit out. You know what I’m saying?”
“I will. I’m going to.”
“Yeah, like when? Because I’m not doin’ this shit anymore, okay?
The last fuckin’ time I’m going to like lie to your wife.”
“When did you lie before?”
“I didn’t,” says Champ. “That’s the fuckin’ point. She calls the first time and I’m like, Nope, nope, not a word, haven’t heard shit, you know, which I hadn’t.”
“Okay, so you’re telling her the same thing now.”
“Yeah, right, except now—you want a cold one, by the way? You know for one thing, Tina’s going to fuckin’ kill me, out of fuckin’ female solidarity.” He opens the refrigerator and holds up a Budweiser tallboy. “Yes? No? Might take the edge off of shit.”
“What a concept,” says Willis. “Yeah. Please.” He takes his finger out of the book and looks some more at the picture of Oswald with his white undershirt and his I’m-a-patsy stare, posed between two thug cops in dark uniforms. One’s a fat old potato-shaped fuck with sergeant’s stripes, the other a young brush-cut Nazi like the early George Jones, glaring at Oswald as if he really was the piece of shit who shot the President.
“Okay, just to put this at its crudest level,” says Champ, “you must be tired of spanking the monkey.” Willis’s arm gives a jerk—something icy. “Here.” Champ’s handing him the tallboy.
“I don’t know,” Willis says. “Shit, what does that even mean, tired of?” Fact is, he loses focus and the Unnamable won’t stay stiff. For months now. This really could be clinical depression. He takes the first sip, supposedly the best.
“Oh, philosophy,” says Champ. “Great, let’s do that for a while.” He takes out a tallboy for himself, sits down at the kitchen table and pops it. “Yo
u’re welcome,” he says. “Fuck time is it? It’s dark out again. Oh baby. Tina’s going to fuckin’ kill me.”
“You keep saying that,” says Willis.
“I wasn’t going to do this shit anymore. Fuckin’ all-nighters. All-dayers. And I was being real good, you know? Okay, I’m fucked. I’m fucked.”
“When was she supposed to get back?”
“Like tomorrow.”
“Well, so you’ll get a chance to sleep. She’s not going to know.”
“What are you, shittin’ me? Tina has fuckin’ X-ray telepathy. And what about that?” He points at the wall behind Willis. “I mean, what does that say?” He squints and pokes his index finger five times: “Drugs. Have. Been. Abused. Here.”
Willis sticks his finger back in Oswald Talked and twists around to look. Last night he and Champ painted a speedometer six feet long and three feet high on that big kitchen wall. They’d gotten the idea on the way back from the East Village in Champ’s car. Willis had argued that a tachometer would be more ironic—i.e., revving and getting nowhere—but Champ said that was too inside baseball. Actually, Champ’s original idea was Ruby shooting Oswald—all you had to do was put like a grid over the picture and just copy the sucker square by square—but Willis said it was too political. They stopped and bought a pad so they could sketch Champ’s speedometer, a quart of black Rust-Oleum, two quarter-inch brushes and, to paint by, Parsifal, on four CDs, Armin Jordan conducting the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. (Champ circled the block while Willis hit the downtown Tower, since he was afraid to sneak up to his office for his own copy.) They roughed the thing out on the wall in pencil, then bent the shit out of a W-monogrammed butter knife trying to pry open the fucking can. Willis painted the 0 to 60 side; Champ got to do 60 to 120 because it was his speedometer. They had been going to put a red needle that you could actually move—by an amazing miracle, Champ actually had a mop with a red handle—but they couldn’t figure out a way to rig it up. Champ thought just a big screw, but by the time this became an issue, all the hardware stores were closed.
“Maybe you could paint over it,” says Willis.
“Yeah, like how many coats of white paint? Ten?”
“Well, you don’t just paint right on top of it. You use paint remover first. Or you could use stain-killing primer. Like that stuff Kilz. K-i-l-z?”
“Like you’ve really done this. What do you care? You’ll be back at the fuckin’ Bates Motel, man. Tell me something. Why don’t you at least go back up to East Buttfuck instead of that shithole? I mean, if you just want to fuckin’ dwindle.”
“I told you already,” says Willis. “I can’t go up there anymore.”
“Oh, right, because the bad boys are going to get you. I forgot about that one. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that coke makes you paranoid?”
“You don’t know the situation. These are serious people.”
“Right, they’re so serious they have you making their fuckin’ runs for ’em. No offense.”
“You’d go back there?” says Willis. “Let ’em plant dope in your house?”
“Fuck, I wish. Okay, look. You obviously want to believe this shit—you know, which is cool. Actually, it is cool. I mean, that place up there wasn’t doing you a whole lot of good. Any of you. My opinion. You have to go home, man.”
“I need to think about that.”
“Translation,” Champ says. “I need to go back and hole up again in my little motel room half a mile from my fuckin’ house. Don’t expect me to fuckin’ drive you.”
“It’s more like three miles.”
“Oh, well then, that’s different. What a sick pile of shit you are. I’m not kidding either. Fuck, I should’ve been a shrink. My family background?” He stretches forth a hand. “C. L. Willis, Psychotherapist. Practice Limited to Psychotherapy. Get a couch in here? Feel the ladies’ titties? Shit, fuckin’ Freud used to do coke. Speaking of which, what do you say? Put the edge back on?”
“I thought you said we were out.”
“Okay, that was almost true,” Champ says. “But I do have a top-secret super-emergency stash that we might as well do up. The more I think about it, I don’t need that shit around. I want to just live a pure life, you know what I’m saying? Up in the morning, beddy-bye at night, throw a fuck into the old lady couple times a week? The pure life. That’s what you need, bro.”
“That’s what I had.”
“That’s what you had,” says Champ. “Yes. Exactly. So will you call your fuckin’ wife, please? So we can get high in peace? And then I’ll drive you up there.”
“I thought you weren’t going to.”
“Not to the fuckin’ Bates Motel, no. To your house. You know, where you fuckin’ live.”
Why does Willis’s finger suddenly hurt like a bastard? Oh: because he’s squeezing it in this book. He leans forward and sets it on the floor. Oswald talks, bullshit walks.
Champ shakes his head. “Shit, I’m dead. Fuckin’ Tina, man, I’m going to have to borrow off of her to pay the fuckin’ rent, which I’m already like a week late or something. Seven hundred dollars, man, right up the old information superhighway.” He taps the side of his nose. “I can’t afford this shit, you know? I mean, I’m not a fuckin’ Wall Street analyst. Look, bro. You have to at least call and let her know you’re fuckin’ alive, man. ’Cause if you don’t I will.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t think so,” says Champ. “Jesus, how can you do it? How can you fuckin’ do it? Kids and everything? Believe me, if I had kids? I wouldn’t put ’em through this shit.”
“Bullshit,” says Willis. “You’re a bigger fuckup than me, even.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Bullshit.”
“Well, this is a really fucking intelligent discussion,” Champ says.
“So where’s this secret hidden stash?” Willis tries to get up out of the chair. “Actually I have to pee.” Could beer go through him this fast? Isn’t that supposed to be one warning sign of prostate cancer?
“Pee?” Champ says. “You have to pee? You mean you have to piss. Jesus. What do you, go in and sit down? First it’s the fucking opera … I think you need marital relations.”
Willis can’t seem to get up out of this chair. He rocks forward, back, forward; at last he’s on his feet, swaying. He looks at the speedometer. A bad drip coming off the 0 in 30. Another one off the 7 in 70. Off both 1’s in 110. Bathroom’s through the doorway and to the left. He paws at the curtain of clattering beads.
“Y’all come back now,” he hears Champ say. “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President.”
2
Somebody must have been watching him: how could you throw a fucking rifle off the Tappan Zee Bridge and get away with it? And sure enough, as he climbed back into his truck, a car on the westbound span slowed suspiciously. The toll lady wouldn’t look him in the eye, and in the mirror Willis was sure he saw her with a phone at her ear. Still, nobody stopped him the rest of the way into the city, though he was pretty sure he was being shadowed, maybe by a helicopter.
He crossed the Third Avenue Bridge at that weird hour when you can’t tell if it’s daylight or streetlight, and stopped at a Korean’s at the corner of Second Avenue and 89th to buy coffee, a shrink-wrapped slice of pound cake and a Sunday Times. He took a left on 88th, another left on First Avenue, left again on 97th and through the park, watching his rearview mirror. Once he reached the West Side, he pretended he felt safe, on the theory that if he radiated only this feeling they wouldn’t be able to pick up his presence. He parked at the corner of West End and 102nd and drank the coffee and looked at the Magazine and the Book Review, trying to find something he could concentrate on. The pound cake went to a dim, grimy man who tapped at his window; Willis pretended to believe the man really was a bum, and sure enough, off he went. What it was, he just wasn’t all that high anymore. In fact, you’d probably have to call this crashing. Every few minutes he’d start up
the truck again and blast the heater. Then he’d turn it off and feel everything around him cool down and down and down.
When squads of dressed-up churchgoers showed that it must be a plausible hour, he drove downtown and parked on Chambers Street (legal on Sunday), then walked around the corner to his office. Definitely crashing: legs heavy, head throbbing. The weekend guy in the lobby (white guy with mustache and Marine haircut, probably a moonlighting cop) took for-fucking-ever checking Willis’s ID (meanwhile the son of a bitch had fucking “Piano Man” coming out of his portable radio) and finally deigned to let him sign in and go to the fucking elevators. In the seventeenth-floor men’s room, he took off all his clothes and gave himself a whore’s bath, then went into his office, closed the Venetian blinds and got out the bottle of Rebel Yell he kept in his desk drawer. In a while, he curled up on the floor, wearing for extra warmth the shirt he kept hanging on the back of his door, hugging himself, using his boots for a pillow.
He woke up sometime after dark. Mouth dry. Hungry. He took the elevator up to 21, where they had the machines, and bought a Dannon Light raspberry yogurt and a flat package of microwave popcorn. Back on 17, he put the popcorn in the departmental microwave and made a pot of departmental coffee. He found half-and-half in the departmental refrigerator, plus a can of Diet Coke and a stick of Polly-O string cheese. The fluorescent fixtures seemed to be buzzing and pulsing, but otherwise this was an okay place to be. He considered coming here every night after people had gone home and just having that be his life from now on. But of course sooner or later.
He sat back in his chair, feet on his desk, and ate and drank his coffee while listening to the prelude to Parsifal on his office boombox. Such a trip to hear a CD again, every little thing so cold and clear. He really should listen to more opera and bag all this ignorant faux-primitive shit he’d been abusing himself with for so many years: the caterwauling inbred hillbillies and the ugga-bugga Negroes. (So he was thinking in terms of life going on.) By the time the prelude faded on that last, drawn-out, nerve-racking seventh-chord that never does fucking resolve, he’d finished the popcorn and the Polly-O and the yogurt; he hit Stop before Gurnemanz started in and the proceedings actually began. Getting a leetle edgy about being here, actually.