by Lynn Kostoff
“The problem here, Edwin?” Ben said.
“See for yourself.” Edwin ran his hand over his head and stepped away from the door.
The inside of the Bull’s Eye was steeped in a murky light. Next to the cash register a cheap plastic boombox cranked out early Metallica. Ben nodded at the regulars lining the bar. Most returned the greeting, but a couple made a point of turning their backs.
“Down there,” Edwin said, then ducked behind the bar to serve up new orders.
A man circled one of the small tables fronting the long pool table and the cues racked on the north wall. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and brand new blue jeans, the square cardboard tag still attached to the right rear pocket. His off-white athletic shoes were untied.
Ben cleared his throat. The man paused in his circling. Ben put him in his early forties, the eyes a decade ahead of him. They were dark brown and blurred by an afternoon of boilermakers, their corners a stack of weather-worn wrinkles.
Amidst the empties on the table were a black disposable lighter, a box of wooden kitchen matches, and five complimentary matchbooks from a local pancake house. Hanging on the top rung of one of the chairs was a black baseball cap with the front brim awkwardly scissored off.
“For all intents and purposes,” the man said and then sat down. He set his hands on the table. His fingertips were blistered and bright red.
Ben waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t, Ben asked his name.
“Ronald.” He lowered his head and pulled over the kitchen matches. He lifted the box to his ear and shook it as if he were about to roll a set of dice.
“Ronald what?”
“Fill in the blank,” he said. He looked up at Ben. “Come on. Nothing to it. Think hamburgers and then tell me what kind of parents would do that to their own offspring.”
Ben, caught off-guard, smiled despite himself.
“There you go,” Ronald said, nodding at Ben. “I saw that.”
“Take it easy,” Ben said.
After three tries, Ronald got one of the wooden matches lit. Its tip sputtered, then flared. Ronald touched it to his left cuff.
“What exactly is going on here, Ronald?”
“What’s going on,” he said, looking up at Ben, “is I’m trying to set myself on fire, but I can’t get this sweatshirt to catch.” He shook his head. “I mean, go figure. All the synthetics they use in these, you’d think they’d go right up.”
Ben let his hand drop near the baton on his belt. He wondered where Poston was. He’d confirmed he was running backup.
Ronald twisted in his chair and shouted in the direction of the bar, “Edwin, there was no need to call the cops. If I’d got the sweatshirt going good, I’d have taken it outside.”
Ben moved quickly with the cuffs. Ronald lowered his head and tried to palm one of the matchbooks. Ben leaned over and pushed them all into the center of the table.
“Protect and Serve,” Ronald said. “What’s that mean exactly by the end of the day?”
“What’s that have to do with the matches, Ronald?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Some things can’t be helped. You ever think about what it means to say that?”
“Not sure I’m following, Ronald,” Ben said.
Ronald tilted his head, making a show of furrowing his brow and studying Ben. He seemed disturbed by what he saw. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re not following me. You’re already ahead of me. I see that now. You better watch your step.”
“That sounds like it might be a threat.”
“Maybe it was meant as a warning, maybe a sign of concern.” Ronald paused and looked at the ceiling. “You know, the easiest person in the world to fool is always yourself.”
Edwin called over that Poston had just pulled into the lot.
“What rhymes with ambulance?” Ronald said.
“That’s enough,” Ben said.
Ronald looked at the matches Ben had pushed to the center of the table. He nodded once, then said, “If I was a Buddhist monk, a couple gallons of high-test, and we’d be talking Holy.”
Poston cleared the door, quickly looked around, and then hustled in Ben’s direction. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I radioed in, but all the closest available units were tied up. A tractor-trailer overturned on 17.”
Poston’s face was flushed as if he’d been exercising or out in the sun too long. That and the buzz cut and the clear, untroubled blue eyes made him look even younger than he was. Poston was less than a year out of the academy. He hadn’t lived or worked long enough to cast a shadow yet.
Or to have to live in one, Ben thought.
“I got here as soon as I could,” Poston said.
“It’s ok. Everything’s under control, right, Ronald?” Ben leaned over and pulled him to his feet.
“It’d be nice to think so,” Ronald said.
“You want me to take him in and run the paper?” Poston said.
“He’s all yours,” Ben said.
“His name’s really McDonald?” Poston said.
Ben nodded, then filled him in on the charges.
“He tried to set himself on fire?” Poston said. “Jesus. Why would anyone want to do that?”
Ronald smiled at Ben.
A moment later, he lifted his cuffed hands and pointed at Ben’s chest.
“You’re missing a button, Officer,” he said. “Third one down from the neck. Center of your chest. There’s nothing there.”
FIVE
FURNITURE WAS Corrine Tedros’s revenge.
For now, it was the best she could do to get back at Stanley and his unwavering ideas of home and character.
She couldn’t push it further than that. Stanley Tedros kept maintaining her marriage to Buddy wouldn’t last a year and a half, and even though Corrine had soldiered through fourteen months with Buddy and he was as pliable and clueless as ever, Stanley’s pronouncement was still quietly unnerving. It was like thinking you were alone in a dark room and then suddenly getting tapped on the shoulder.
Corrine checked the living room clock against her watch. King Street Furniture had promised to deliver by noon. They were close to an hour late.
She had ordered a new loveseat and two matching wing chairs and three new lamps. Corrine wanted them in place before Stanley swung by this evening.
She was determined to never let the house even come close to a home.
Corrine could already anticipate Stanley’s disorientation and disdain when she led him to a seat in the living room, Stanley who had not redecorated his home in over forty-five years and who prided himself on never throwing anything away because he could never be sure he wouldn’t find some use for it. Stanley, all immigrant thrift, sacrifice, and no-nonsense, exquisitely uncomfortable in his nephew’s and wife’s house because with the furnishings constantly changing he was never able to get his full bearings or give anything even close to his blessing to the lives within its walls.
Stanley’s obvious discomfort and bewilderment over the new and ever-changing furnishings was the closest Corrine could come to outright revenge.
At least for now.
The next door neighbor’s dog started barking, a signal that the mail had arrived.
There was a reassuring weight to seeing her name on the mail she took from the box next to the front door. She rifled through the envelopes, watching her name appear over and over. She was Mrs. Corrine Tedros. The name erased everything else. She was clean and clear of Phoenix and the names she’d lived in there.
Corrine left the front steps and walked into the middle of the front lawn, then stopped. She kicked off her shoes. She looked up and down the street. At this time of the afternoon, everything was empty and quiet. The houses up and down the block shadowed each other, all of them in White Pine Manor having three basic layouts. Corrine had memorized each, just as she knew each of the houses tipped the scales at 3100 square feet and the lots clocked in at one-third acre.
She turned and fa
ced her house. A two-and-a-half-story Mock Tudor, with the emphasis on the Mock, it had been a wedding present from Stanley Tedros, his way of literally and figuratively putting Corrine in her place. She and Buddy had talked about building their own home, Corrine conjuring up the layout to its rooms, savoring each detail, Buddy and she even scouting out lots, but as their wedding approached, Stanley had gone to work on Buddy’s resolve and Corrine’s character, Stanley constantly pointing out to Buddy all the eligible Greek women in the area and praising their virtues, evoking family, tradition, and the importance of the blood flowing through each, until Corrine, worried about how things were beginning to play out, had convinced Buddy to elope. Stanley had the last word though, giving them the house in White Pine Manor as a belated wedding present and making sure Corrine understood its point: White Pine was peopled by those who had yet to fully arrive, the development occupying a nebulous position just north of the mid-point on the slope of the area’s social register.
Still holding the mail, Corrine stood in the middle of her front yard and lifted her arms and closed her eyes and felt the warmth of a spring sun on her face and imagined the whole of White Pine Manor on fire, every home ablaze, every shrub and flower and lawn burning beneath a sky empty of clouds, any rain coming too late.
SIX
THE OFFICER DRIVING the blue and white reminded Jack Carson of a minor league saint, some obscure foreign holy man whose gaunt Byzantine profile belonged in a dusty corner panel of stained glass or stamped on a small coppery-green religious medal.
“Did I hurt him?” Jack asked. He waited. The name eventually bumped into view. “Don Meade.”
The cop glanced over at Jack, then went back to his driving. Outside, the afternoon light was pale and thin.
Jack Carson thought it was probably April. Maybe March.
The officer hesitated, then said, “Meade’s ok.”
It might have been afternoon, but the inside of the cruiser smelled like a late Saturday night, the point where promise collided with disappointment but had yet to curdle into regret or resignation.
“I’ve got references.” Jack cupped the back of his neck with his left hand. “I do good work.”
He shook his head and then looked out the window. “Don Meade doesn’t. He doesn’t have to.”
Jack closed and opened his fists. The skin around the knuckles was tight. The cuts he expected to see weren’t there.
“The bids, they were supposed to be sealed,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” the officer said.
“You know the apartment complex over on Warley? Barely five years old and you see what shape it’s in. That’s Meade’s work.”
The officer reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror.
“You have kids?” Jack asked.
The officer waited a long moment before answering, “No.”
“If you did,” Jack said, “you’d understand why I needed the bid on renovating the recreation center.”
Just as he would have understood what tore loose in Jack Carson when Don Meade walked into the High Tide and started buying everyone drinks, a little early celebration, Don Meade everybody’s pal, brother-in-law to the president of the city council and star of his own television and radio commercials, Meade Construction, let us build your dreams, and Jack Carson for his part wondering if he could make this month’s payroll, his own construction company once again losing out to the bigger outfits, Jack angry and afraid in equal measures because his word and his work had always been good, and then Don Meade stepping up and setting a beer in front of him and dropping his hand on Jack’s shoulder.
Jack was not sure how many times he’d hit Meade.
He looked out the passenger window. A street sign, white on green, popped up and disappeared in a blur of consonants. Two vowels, a and e, followed like a comet tail.
“Almost there, Jack,” the officer said.
Jack leaned forward and tried to read the left pocket on the cop’s chest. D-E-C-O-something. The light kept getting in the way of the rest.
Jack hoped it wasn’t something about the bus. They hadn’t pressed charges yet, but there’d been some ugly undercurrents.
The officer hit the signal and turned down a street lined with magnolias. The leaves were a dark waxy green and shaped like a hand with its fingers extended and tightly pressed together.
Jack kept bracing himself for a smudge of yellow among the green and then the appearance of the bus, squat as a loaf of bread.
Over the next block, he counted his breaths.
Something was not right, he told himself.
Like a magician who didn’t know anymore what his hand would pull from the hat.
That’s what it felt like sometimes.
The bus thing, it had just gotten away from him. He hadn’t meant anything. He needed the paycheck.
The officer took another left. Jack craned his head and barely managed to catch the street sign: DeHaviland.
The movie star or the airplane. That’s what he was thinking. They sounded the same, but he was pretty sure one of them had two l’s.
The officer turned his head in Jack’s direction. “You know where we are, Jack?”
Jack didn’t remember saying the name out loud.
The radio crackled and buzzed. It sounded like some movie extraterrestrial clearing its throat.
The obvious tapped Jack on the shoulder. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it earlier.
He was sitting up front in the cruiser.
That meant no crime or charges. It was something else then.
A slow panic began filling his chest. Jack glanced over at the cop.
“Is it Carol?” he asked finally. He thought of murky ultra-sounds, Henderson the OB/GYN man clearing his throat, Carol soldiering it for seven and a half months, the baby, their first, riding low and ticking in her womb.
“No,” the officer said and smiled. “Carol’s ok.”
The smile didn’t match the eyes though. They saw more than they were giving back.
Jack’s panic slowed but didn’t subside. He needed to ask the cop something about Carol, or maybe it was that he needed to tell the cop something about her, but everything inside was running away from him.
The officer cleared his throat. “Hey Jack, you still with me here?”
Jack nodded and looked toward the street. The long slant of afternoon light. The parallel lines of magnolias. Older middle-class homes, most of them white and vinyl-sided, their lawns shedding winter and working their way to green.
He tried to insert a life into the scene.
The cop followed DeHaviland to Farrow and took a right. He drove three blocks north. Along this stretch, the houses had a frayed respectability, their former middle-class seams showing.
The cop slowed and then glanced over at Jack. He hit the turn signal and pulled into a T-square driveway full of crushed oyster shells. The afternoon light threw itself against the windshield.
The house was a weathered one-story with a wrap-around porch and sat on a wide lot dotted with white pines, live oaks, and crepe myrtles. It was a good twelve feet off the ground, supported by six telephone-sized poles. The space beneath the house to the left of the front stairs was used in lieu of a garage. This afternoon it was empty.
“Shit.” The cop peered over the steering wheel and rubbed his jaw. “Any idea where she is, Jack? Aren’t Tuesdays her day off?” Jack frowned. “You told me Carol was all right.”
“I’m talking about Anne, not Carol,” the cop said. “Anne, your daughter. It’s Tuesday.”
Jack pointed through the space between the rearview mirror and the passenger-side visor. “Isn’t that her?”
A girl, somewhere between eleven and thirteen, stepped onto the landing and peered over the railing. She was wearing jeans and a pink knit top. An expression that Jack couldn’t read scuttled across her features.
The cop was already opening his door. “No,” he said. “That’s not Anne. Sit tigh
t, Jack, until I find out where she is.”
The radio crackled and buzzed, the voices a call and response that was buried in static. Jack watched a gull break over the roofline of the house and disappear into the afternoon. He closed his eyes for a moment and repeated the name of his wife to himself, a makeshift chant, keeping its syllables alive on his lips.
SEVEN
“WE’LL TRY THE RESTAURANT,” Ben Decovic said, backing the car around.
The Salt Box was a little over a half-mile away, one of the dozens of family-owned restaurants clustering the northern shoreline of Magnolia Beach. Ben had gotten into the habit of eating there on a regular basis.
He called in his location. Once out of the car, he tied Jack’s shoe and then led him inside. The greeter was in her early twenties, left eyebrow pierced, a T-shirt designed to mimic a painter’s palette, and dark red shorts. She tapped a clipboard against an overly thickening thigh. “Forty minutes, minimum, for a table. We’re really swamped today.”
Ben looked over her head into the crowded interior. “I can see that. But we’re not here to eat. I need to talk to the assistant manager.”
The greeter sighed. “Ok. You can wait over there.”
Ben led Jack to a small alcove. There were seats built into the walls and a large hibiscus with salmon-colored blooms sitting beneath the front window.
A few minutes later, a short, dark-haired woman appeared. She wore a green Salt Box apron tied around the waist of a new pair of jeans, a white oxford shirt, and white athletic shoes. She was pretty in a way that surprised you, possessing a quiet understated beauty that only came into focus after a second or third look. Her eyes were a very light brown, large and startlingly clear, but today the flesh beneath them was smudged with exhaustion.
“Oh no,” she said. “Not again. That’s the second time in less than three weeks.”
“I found him on Crescent.”
“Oh Dad, what am I going to do with you?” She stepped toward him, then stopped.
“Ms. Carson —,” Ben began.
“Anne.” She held up her hand. “Remember? I told you to call me Anne?”
Ben remembered too late and inwardly winced. He liked the woman and had been stopping by the restaurant on breaks and the end of shifts for a while now. The beer was always cold, the hush-puppies homemade, and the seafood gumbo top-notch. The Carson woman had a nice smile and a way of making you feel at home.