by Laura McNeal
The one improved element in Mick’s life was Myra Vidal. He’d hung out with her two of the last three Saturday nights, and each time he was around her, he felt a little more normal about it. He’d gotten used to the way a lot of guys would stop in their tracks to stare at her, and how most of the rest would slide glances her way when they thought she couldn’t see. He’d also gotten used to the looks he got—it was clear they couldn’t see the attraction, and the truth was, there wasn’t any, at least none that Mick picked up on. He was like her little brother, and for some reason he couldn’t grasp, hanging out with a little-brother type was comforting to her. Both Saturday nights they’d gone to the library, and then around ten o’clock, they just rode around in her Honda Civic, listening to Pakistani music and talking. Myra hardly ever talked about her boyfriend in California, but she liked to talk about Pam (in a serious voice), and school (semiserious), and her weird, drooling professors (amused). Mick had asked if Myra had a history professor named Doyle. Myra said no, but she’d heard you had to camp out in the history wing the night before in order to sign up for his classes, which gave Mick something to tell Lisa the next time they raked leaves from the lawns of Village Greens.
The exercycle conversations always interested Myra. Once when Mick told Myra how Lisa would fall silent whenever he even hinted about doing something together, Myra said, “Whatever happened to tall, dark, and Mormon?” and Mick said he didn’t know. The truth was, it was the one question he was afraid to ask Lisa. Myra said, “Okay, you just have to accept her keeping her distance for a while. Probably it means that either she’s got her eye on someone else or her mother is trying to keep her away from non-Mormons, which is you.” This sounded right to Mick, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
Sometime during the evening, usually when things seemed most comfortable, Myra would slip in a question about Nora, and Mick would feel something within him clamp tightly closed and he’d just stare out the window. This past Saturday night Myra had waited while this silence collected, and then said, “Okay, let’s look at her from a different angle. What was it about her that you’d always liked until whatever it was you didn’t like happened?” This was easier for Mick. He said, “I don’t know, I just always liked being with her, you know? Whether it was in her classroom, or in our kitchen or out in the garden, I just liked being around her.” Myra waited a second and in the quietness of the car said, “Kind of like how you like being around me?” Mick was surprised by the directness of this, but he nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.” He’d expected Myra to say something more, but she didn’t. She’d seemed satisfied to stop right there, as if his answers had led her to something she could see, but he could not.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Joe Keesler
Sunday evening, Lisa Doyle sat at the table with her parents, moving her carrots slightly to the left.
“What’s made you so mawkish all of a sudden, cupcake?” her father asked. “You stare out the windows all the time, like you’re watching for somebody, and then you sigh.”
“Nothing,” Lisa said.
“It’s that missionary,” her mother said.
Lisa glared at her mother.
“Young Goodman Brown?” her father asked. “I thought missionaries were undateable.”
“You can still have a crush on one,” her mother said. “And missionaries can still cultivate crushes, whether they’re supposed to or not.”
Lisa picked up her plate and said, “Well, if everyone has that all worked out, I think I’m going to go study for my World Literature final.”
It’s not a crush, she thought as she set her plate by the kitchen sink. And he’s not “cultivating crushes.” Though as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she was once again glad her mother had not been in the church foyer this morning to see Elder Keesler hand her a book and say, “Sorry it’s so tattered, but it’s my only copy. I wanted to give it to you before I leave.”
His only copy. His copy.
She’d thought he was going to shake her hand then, but the foyer was nearly empty. Elder Pfingst was writing something in his daybook. Somewhere a baby screeched. Far away, at the opposite end of the church hall, a door closed. Quickly, Elder Keesler leaned forward, and to Lisa’s surprise, put both arms around her. The hug had been brief, but she was pretty sure he’d kissed her hair. “My address is in there,” he’d said. “You can write and tell me what you thought of it.”
Lisa sat down on the edge of her bed and opened the book so she could see his name again. “Joe Keesler.” Joe Keesler. Reading the name in his own cramped, scribbly handwriting was like seeing him without a shirt on. And holding the book—his book— even if it was some kind of African travel book called The Heart of the Hunter: A Journey into the Mind and the Spirit of the Bushman, was feeling herself once again pressed gently against his collar-bone. She started reading the parts he’d underlined: “There is a dream dreaming us” and “It is position in the spirit that matters, not magnitude.” Then she read the first chapter, hoping it would give her something intelligent to say in the letter that he had said—definitely said—she could write to him.
Dear Elder Keesler, Lisa wrote.
I guess I should call you Joe now but it feels a little forward. Thank you for giving me the Bushman book. I read the first chapter and it just amazed me. I especially liked the description of the desert.
“O-kay,” Lisa said to herself. “That was incisive. Now what?” Nothing came to her. She lay down on the bed with the book over her stomach. Still nothing came to her. Maybe she should try the dippy writing exercises they did in English. It was called clustering. You wrote a topic in the center.
Elder Keesler.
Then all around it, like flies, you put words the topic suggested.
Smart. Funny. Handsome. Likes aboriginal people.
“Then write anything that comes to mind,” her teacher had said, and told the class about a famous Hollywood choreographer who when stumped about what to do next told his dancers, “Well, do something, and then we can change it!”
Lisa wrote, The bushman seems really sweet. Innocent, I mean.
This was worse than writing an essay for the annual high school history competition. She touched the book again and wondered if Elder Joe Keesler would write long letters to her from Boston. Would she go visit him, perhaps by train? Would he wait for her to graduate from high school? Maybe she could go to college in Boston, and then they would emigrate to Kenya. Maybe they would sleep together under mosquito netting and he would wash her hair in a stream, like Robert Redford did in Out of Africa.
She flipped through the book again, reading lines from it, wondering what to say, when she found the line that seemed perfect. She wrote it out. What am I to do without you, to know the things I think before I know them myself? Then she signed the note Love, Lisa, and folded it in two.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Propensities
Wednesday night Janice was at Maurice’s, sitting on the floor near the wood-burning stove, eating fat-free popcorn while Maurice helped her prep for her Thursday vocabulary quiz. He’d opened a bottle of beer for her—she held it in one hand and took the occasional sip.
“Propensity,” Maurice said.
Janice spelled it, defined it, and used it in a sentence. “Maurice has a serious propensity for Bazooka gum.”
Maurice grinned, snapped a quick bubble, and went on to “promulgate.” When she’d finished the list without a hitch, Maurice said, “Well, ain’t you a brainy thing.”
Janice got up, smiling. “Brainy thing gotta pee.”
It was the beer. She hadn’t drunk that much, but it turned her into a sieve. It also gave her the teeniest headache. In the bathroom she opened the medicine cabinet, found some generic aspirin, and was tapping out three when she noticed an old photograph wedged under the mirror brackets inside the medicine cabinet door. Actually it was half a photograph, of a girl, a pretty girl, but someone who’d been standing next to her had be
en cut off. All that was left was a disembodied arm wrapped around the girl’s shoulders. Janice slipped the photograph out.
“Who’s this?” she said when she came out of the bathroom. She held up the picture for him to see.
Maurice shrugged. “My mother.”
Janice looked at it again. “She’s pretty.”
Maurice was quiet.
“Whose arm is wrapped around her shoulders?”
“Some boyfriend’s. It was before she married my dad, but she liked the picture of herself, so she cut the boyfriend out. She was pretty good at cutting people out.”
Janice was staring at the photo when something suddenly struck her. “She’s a redhead.”
“Fake redhead,” Maurice said. “Almost everything about her was fake.”
Was, Janice thought. “But your mom’s alive, right?”
Another shrug. “Far as I know.”
“How about your dad?”
“He died when I was, like, three. I’m not even sure I remember him. I think I just remember pictures of him.”
Janice waited a second or two. “You don’t know what he was like?”
Maurice took a last long drink from his bottle of beer. “Well, he did one heroic thing. He was in Vietnam, in the Air Force, a PJ—a parajumper—on one of the Sikorsky helicopters that would go down into the jungle under fire to rescue downed bomber pilots.”
Maurice had been standing, but now he sat down on the edge of the bed. “This particular day, one of the other PJs got hit trying to pick up a wounded pilot, and this PJ was my father’s buddy. He was hit bad and the Vietcong were moving in for the kill and he was radioing for help. My father’s name was Gordon and his buddy was saying, ‘Gordy, can you read me—for God’s sake, can you read me, Gordy?’ ”
Maurice had begun peeling bits of paper label from the beer bottle and dropping them inside. “Anyhow, the fighter planes that protected the Sikorskys were called Sandys, and they were out of ordnance, and my father’s helicopter was almost out of fuel, but my father talked the pilot into going back down for his buddy.” Maurice kept staring at the bottle in his hands. “This is where it gets interesting. The story I was told was that my dad went down on this cabled penetrator thing to lift his buddy out, and he had him in his arms a few feet into the air when the Cong shot them both.”
Janice said, “That’s horrible.”
Maurice nodded. “Horrible but heroic. So at least I grew up knowing my dad had been this pretty great guy. And then one day when I was sixteen and having about the millionth big daylong argument with my mother, I said I wished she had died and not my dad. She opened her mouth to yell something back, but then she just stopped. I knew right then she had a card up her sleeve, a real good card. Sure enough, she went into her room and came out with this newspaper story.”
Maurice opened his wallet and unfolded a yellowed clipping and handed it to Janice. The headline said
MAN FLEEING POLICE
DIES OF HYPOTHERMIA
The story was about a man who had died after wading into an icy river to escape police who wanted to question him about a series of purse snatchings and home burglaries. The police officers’ names were Eleazar Mendoza and Gilberto Silva. The dead man’s name was Gordon L. Gritz.
Janice looked up. “This was your dad?”
“Not so heroic, huh?” Maurice smiled bitterly. “You know what pisses me off most of all, though? Those low-rider cops driving my dad into the icy water, and then they stand around waiting for firemen in wet suits and shit to get him out. I call that just a little bit gutless.”
Maurice kept peeling strips off the label. “Anyhow, when I ask my mother why she made up the hero stuff, she says, ‘First of all, your father did go back down after his buddy, and his buddy got shot as they were being lifted out.’ While she’s talking, she has this weird faraway look in her eyes. She says, ‘I told you he was killed that day because I always believed that was the day he’d really been meant to die.’ She says, ‘Besides, it was the right version for you. You were little. You needed a role model.’ Then after staring off a while, she turns to me and her face turns harder and she says, ‘You’re not little anymore. It’s time you knew the truth.’ ”
Maurice looked at the bottle in his hands. “The next day she tells me she thinks it’s about time I move out on my own, and so what was I going to do?” A pause. “I took my clothes and stuff and left, but I forgot my clock, so a few days later I went back for it and, I couldn’t believe it, my own house key didn’t work anymore. She’d changed the locks on the doors. It was the weirdest feeling, and, I don’t know, something just snapped. I’m pounding on the door and even though she’s inside, she won’t open up, which makes me even madder. I start yelling. From inside my mother tells me to go away and I yell louder. This is a real scene now. Our neighbor Mr. Farnsworth comes out and says, ‘Come back when you’re calmer, son,’ and I drill him with all the good words I’ve been saving up for him for about ten years.
“My mother’s crying and yelling, ‘Go away, just go away.’ And then she says, ‘Go away or I’ll call the police.’ I say, ‘What?’ And she says she’ll call the police, yells it really, and then Mr. Farnsworth yells he already has. I’m thinking, What? They’re calling the cops on me who’s trying to get into his own house? And I walk over toward Farnsworth, who beats it back into his house, as well he should. I go back to my mother’s front door and knock lightly this time because, it’s funny, I really want in, I want to get my radio but I also want to hear about my dad, what he was really like and stuff, and”—here Maurice tried to smile, but it looked more like a sad facial distortion—“also just to talk to my mom and, you know, be with her like normal, but she wouldn’t open up and pretty soon I hear sirens and I don’t know what to do. I wanted to say, ‘I’m not going away. You can ask me to leave and you can change the locks, but it’s not that easy because I’m not going away.’ ” Maurice took in and released a deep breath. “But I was only sixteen and the sirens were wailing and what can I say? I just beat it out of there.” He slowly closed and opened his eyes, and seemed more like himself again. “Anyhow, that’s the last conversation I had with her. If you can call it that.”
Janice was quiet a second or two before a question occurred to her. “How’d you get the clock?”
Again the bitter smile. “Went back a couple nights later when my mother was gone, broke a window, and took it.” He paused. “Two days later I get notice that she’s got a restraining order against me, which was kind of a slap in the face. I whited out the names and wrote over them in reverse so it was like a restraining order against her and I mailed it to her, but it came back addressee moved, no forwarding address.” Maurice peeled the last strip from the label. His voice was quiet—it was almost as if he was talking to himself now. “It bothered me at the time, but who knows? Maybe it was all for the best. You know, my wrestling coach found me a good place to stay and I really got into the wrestling.” He made a little smile. “For a couple of years there, I was a regular wrestling fool.”
He turned away and Janice drew close from behind and began massaging his shoulders and neck with both hands. His neck seemed to loosen, and then his shoulders. She let her hands slide under his T-shirt and up his back, and then she wrapped them around his smooth chest. She could feel him giving in to her. She’d just begun moving her hands down his stomach when the phone rang and his body again turned wooden.
Don’t answer it, she thought.
He answered it. After listening for a few seconds, he said, “Where?” and then he listened some more until finally he said, “Okay, no problem. I’m on it.”
He turned to Janice. “There’s a pump problem at the long pond.” He smiled. “Can you stand thirty minutes without me?”
Janice shrugged, and Maurice went out in black galoshes that made her think fleetingly of Paddington Bear.
After he was gone, the room felt suddenly quiet. She finished the popcorn. She got up to feed a couple o
f logs into the fire. She walked over to Maurice’s dresser, picked up the clock, and turned it in her hands. There was an inscription on the back. It said To Maurice on his third birthday from his everlovin’ Dad.
Janice’s eyes lifted to the dresser mirror, and with a sudden shock of recognition she saw reflected there the smaller Janice she once was, the girl who over the years had received and saved dozens of gifts from absent fathers—strange dolls and empty jewelry boxes and even a horrible tiara. In the mirror her face looked as miserable as Maurice’s had when he was talking about the clock. That’s who she and Maurice were—the left behind. Except now they weren’t. Now they had each other.
The sudden sharp ring of the telephone gave her a turn. She wondered if it might be Maurice but knew she shouldn’t answer. After four rings, the answering machine connected, but the volume was turned down so Janice couldn’t hear anything. She glanced at the door through which Maurice would at any moment return, and then she slid the volume control up.
A man’s voice was saying, “The board of directors are ninety-nine percent ready to sign, absolutely primed, and this contract is fat, Maurissimo, but they just need the teeniest push, if you read me.”
Click.
Janice slid the volume control back down. The voice was familiar—she’d heard it before, she was positive of that, but she didn’t know where.
And then all at once she did.
It was the same man who’d answered at Jocko’s Whatever-it-was Security. But whose board of directors was ninety-nine percent primed to sign what? And what kind of push was he talking about?