The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  Patty and Mike are here tonight, and Anna and John, and Ted’s brother, Tony, and their families. Kids are running around. The talk is loud and merry, and, because of me, there’s some good-natured teasing going on. Someone prompts: “Tell him why you registered to vote, Ted.”

  Whoa. Ted registered to vote?

  Yes, he concedes. Two weeks before, at NASCAR.

  “Tell him why!”

  Ted produces a T-shirt he says he got for free from Rock the Vote, in return for registering.

  “That’s not why!”

  Kim agrees. The shirt was a different freebie. “Tell him!”

  Ted is just laughing.

  Anna taunts him, nanny-nanny-boo-boo style:

  “Ted registered for earplugs.”

  Ted grins sheepishly. Yeah. He registered to vote, at NASCAR, so he could get free foam earplugs.

  “Here’s another nonvoter!” This is how Ted’s friend, Troy Ropp, announces his arrival. Troy is thirty-seven, with flaming red hair and a backwoods beard. Troy used to work at a Herman Miller furniture factory, but he rose so far he got a semimanagement position, and he found it too distasteful to boss people around. So he runs his own tree service now.

  I ask him about the election. Troy thinks President Bush made a bad mistake going into Iraq the way he did. There were other ways of solving the Saddam Hussein problem, he says. “They could have took Saddam out with a fifty-caliber at five hundred yards.” Nods all around. A brief discussion of firearms ensues.

  Troy seems to have given the issues of the day more thought than either Ted or Kim. It occurs to me that what we have here might be a statistical anomaly—a well-informed nonvoter. I press him on why he’s not voting.

  “Because I don’t think my vote will matter.” Plus, he says, politicians are all alike. “Bush is just like…” Troy pauses.

  “. . . like that guy he’s running against.”

  “You mean Kerry?”

  “Yeah.”

  I look at him, he looks at me. He laughs.

  “I would have thought of it if you’d gave me a little time.”

  On an end table in the living room is a framed picture of a pretty brunette. It’s Kim’s best friend, Linda, who died last December, suddenly, of a brain aneurysm. Kim can’t talk about Linda without tearing up. She’d feel even worse if she weren’t sure that Linda is coming back, and she’ll meet up with her some day. Some people come back as people, and some people come back as ghosts, Kim says. She knows because she’s seen them.

  “My old lady sees ghosts,” Ted had told me out in the woods. I hadn’t realized he meant it literally.

  Kim knows it sounds kooky, but she sees what she sees. She thinks they could be visible to anyone, but you have to have your mind open to them or they’ll float right past. Kim saw her first ghost up close about fifteen years ago—a Victorian-era schoolgirl in high-buttoned shoes. The ghosts are people who died in the houses that they haunt, she believes. Some are mischievous; sometimes they’ll move Slate’s toys or Kim’s cigarettes. Kim says she’s never been afraid of the ghosts, and in some way even finds them comforting; they are a sign, after all, of a sort of afterworld, that this life isn’t all there is. Nothing is final, not even Linda’s death.

  Ted doesn’t see the ghosts, and it wouldn’t be fair to say that he humors Kim about it; he simply accepts it as he accepts many things—good-naturedly and without question. If it makes Kim happy, he says, it’s fine with him. He sounds almost envious, the way agnostics sometimes talk about the devout.

  The women stay inside, and most of the men repair to the back yard for more beer and horseshoes and shooting the bull. Ted tells the others how I took a salmon egg right out of the fish’s butt and plopped it in my mouth. This meets with some incredulity. I explain that in big-city Japanese restaurants, ten or twelve of those suckers on a piece of seaweed will sell for $4. There’s some derisive laughter at the expense of big-city idiots.

  Ted’s friends then start ragging on him, teasing him because he’s going to be famous. The cover of a magazine! Ted says the only time he’s ever contemplated being on the cover of a magazine was when he was in Tennessee. Down in Gatlinburg, there was this novelty store that would take a picture of you and then put you on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

  Ted takes all the banter with good grace. Then someone says, “Tell him about how you’re afraid of the dark.” Ted smiles and nods, but he’s got something to attend to in the kitchen.

  Afraid of the dark?

  It’s true, Kim says, laughing. The same guy who isn’t scared to yank his tooth out with pliers won’t walk into a dark room. At night, she says, if he stays up watching TV, he’ll leave the TV and all the lights on, so his path into the bedroom is lit.

  And once he’s in bed?

  “He’ll go to bed in the dark if I’m with him. If not, he’ll sleep with the lights on.”

  MONDAY MORNING. IT’S a workday. Ted meets his coworkers at the small Muskegon garage that serves as headquarters for Brown Concrete Construction, Inc. It’s a bare-bones, guy kind of place, the only splashes of color being the obligatory 1970s-era pinup posters. One is of a woman wearing only big hair and what appears to be a frilly whalebone corset. There are also a couple of back seats from cars, propped up on the ground, which provide passable couches for slouching.

  With Ted are the rest of his team—Joe McCann, Mike Anderson, and Randy Baker. Randy is telling a story about the weekend: He just moved into a nice new neighborhood, and during a meet-the-neighbors night, someone asked him whether he had any particular plans for the back yard. Randy said he was “thinkin’ of getting a couple of hogs.” All conversation stopped. Randy explained that it was a funny joke, but the wife disagreed, and now Randy’s in the doghouse.

  Andy Brown, the owner, arrives. Ted is not always great about taking orders from others, but he and Andy get along fine. Andy likes Ted because he’s a good, reliable worker, and Ted likes Andy because, even though he’s younger and has more money, he’s not stuck up. Andy works side by side with his men. “If I’ve got a shovel in my hand,” Ted says appreciatively, “Andy’s next to me with a shovel in his.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Andy and his crew have driven past those Republican cars and buses heading for the airport, and arrived at the big hole in the ground that is to become a garage.

  What happens next is mesmerizing. This team of five guys has been working together for so long, there’s no need for much gab. They just know what to do. While Ted and the others are breaking down the metal braces that support the newly hardened walls of the garage, Andy is driving a Skidster earth mover, flattening out the dirt floor. Joe runs a plastic drainage tube from the center of the floor through the dirt and out into a gully. Now Mike is pounding stakes into the ground to the level of a string line that Ted and Randy are holding taut, from marks on opposing walls. These are puddle stakes, leveling markers that will tell the men exactly how high the cement should be poured. Things seem to be happening very quickly, and on a split-second schedule. They finish moments before the cement mixers arrive.

  The owner of the property has race cars, and this is to be a giant garage—room for four cars at least. The floor is going to require two mixers, each filled to its capacity of nine cubic yards of cement. The whole nine yards.

  The whole nine yards. I’ve lived fifty-three years and used that expression dozens of times, and this was the first time I had any idea where it might have come from or what it might mean. It’s interesting how things that seem to make no sense can suddenly come into focus.

  Take Ted’s financial troubles. For several days, something was bothering me, and then it hit me. A couple of phone calls to the federal government confirmed what I suspected. As a U.S. Army veteran with an honorable discharge, Ted is eligible for a lifetime of medical care. His income is well below the cutoff point for need.

  It’s not a handout for which he need feel ashamed—it’s his right, same as anyone else who served his coun
try. Most medical services, from simple doctor’s visits to that MRI that will tell Ted if he’s got a problem with his brain, are available to veterans for the price of a few dollars’ copayment. Ted’s been eligible ever since his discharge in 1988.

  When I told Ted this, he was thunderstruck. “It just never crossed my mind,” he said.

  Here is what crossed my mind.

  Like all people who don’t vote, Ted has distanced himself to some degree from the society in which he lives. It’s symptomatic, I think, of a larger choice he has made. He has willed himself into a certain protective ignorance about the way life works. This intellectual callus might make some things easier to bear, but I’ll bet it comes at a cost. The world must be a more terrifying place when you don’t know all you can about why things happen the way they do, and why people do what they do, and whether there’s anything out there that can leap out at you from the dark.

  Still, in some ways I envy Ted. When it comes right down to it, there is something to be said for keeping it simple. There isn’t much moral ambiguity, for example, in the birth of a garage. Nothing is abstract. Everything is, you know… concrete.

  Here come the cement trucks, with their whole nine yards. Andy’s work crew has changed into knee boots, and what will follow seems almost a choreographed work, an odd ballet performed by hairy guys in T-shirts and overalls.

  The mixer, with a long delivery chute, moves in like a lumbering elephant, its trunk swaying left and right, depositing wet cement. Randy, Ted, and Andy work expertly around it, wading through the goo, each with a 2-by-4, smoothing the cement into place, precisely to the level of those puddle stakes and, somehow, not a millimeter higher.

  A mile away, George Bush strides to the lectern, to thunderous applause. He urges the Republican crowd to get everyone out to vote for him, for a safer America. This wasn’t billed as a campaign event, exactly, but nobody seems to mind. “Step one,” says the president, “is to remind your friends and neighbors that we have an obligation in a free society to participate.”

  The elephant-truck slowly backs away as the men continue to smooth the cement in place; as they work, an interesting alchemy plays out: The pebbly pieces begin to flatten and sink, so what first resembled wet gravel turns into oatmeal and then, slowly, into a surface as smooth as a table top.

  The men are working quickly; they have to.

  Across town, Bush is busy mispronouncing the name of his “friend,” the local Republican congressman, Peter Hoekstra. No matter. The crowd loves him. “Four more years! Four more years!”

  The second truck is gone now, and the finishing work begins. Mike whacks the puddle stakes down into the cement, so there’s no sign they were ever there. With big flat hoes on 20-foot handles, Ted and Joe stand at the periphery, beyond the walls, and begin smoothing the surface even more, testing it with practiced hands, feeling for the right moment for the final cosmetic step.

  Bush is mostly steering clear of the declared topic of the day, health care. It’s a complicated, nuanced issue—no match for the sexier topics of national security and tax relief, which is where the president mostly stays. We are winning the war on terror, he says, and the place goes wild. The economy is strengthening, he proclaims, with dubious authority but to raucous applause. One Republican stalwart stands to say he’s mad at the president. Deadpan, Bush asks him why. Because America didn’t get to enjoy his great policies over the last thirty years, the man says, and everyone cracks up in bonhomie.

  With pads for their knees, Ted, Randy, Andy, Joe, and Mike cautiously step onto the surface. It’s just right; unyielding, but still chalky atop. They work purposefully, squatting down, buffing the surface with steel trowels, evening out any little pocks or lines. This is the final touch, and when they are done, they have turned what was a pit of dirt two hours ago into a garage floor with a surface as slick as a hockey rink. It’s simply perfect.

  Fatal Distraction

  An actor who is frightened or angry or embarrassed is often encouraged not to stifle that emotion but to capture it and transform it into something useful. Emotion is too valuable an asset to throw away. This holds true for writing as well.

  When my editor called me to tell me that yet another baby had been found dead inside a parked car—accidentally left there by his father—I felt a familiar surge of nausea, followed by a familiar sense of dread. It happens every time I hear about one of these cases, which occur with grisly regularity several times a year somewhere in the United States. This new case was local. I knew right away that I had to write about it, whether I wanted to or not.

  A quarter-century ago, I almost did this to my baby daughter. The only reason Molly is alive today is that, at a critical moment, as I was parking my car outside my newspaper office in the searing heat of a Miami summer, having totally forgotten I had my two-year-old in the car… she woke up and said something.

  The incident stayed with me as a private horror. I never told anyone, not even my wife. She learned of it only recently, as I was reporting this story, when I needed to explain why I kept waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

  When I finally screwed up the nerve to tell Molly about the tragedy that never happened, twenty-five years after the day no harm was done, I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  The editor of this anthology, the mother of a baby boy, asks me to caution parents with infants that they may find what follows extremely disturbing. She’s right.

  March 8, 2009

  THE DEFENDANT WAS an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band.

  The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

  The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, forty-nine, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer—beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cell phone—he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July. It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

  At one point, during a recess, Harrison rose unsteadily to his feet, turned to leave the courtroom, and saw, as if for the first time, that there were people witnessing his disgrace. The big man’s eyes lowered. He swayed a little until someone steadied him, and then he gasped out in a keening falsetto: “My poor baby!”

  A group of middle-schoolers filed into the room for a scheduled class trip to the courthouse. The teacher clearly hadn’t expected this; within a few minutes, the wide-eyed kids were hustled back out.

  The trial would last three days. Sitting through it, side by side in the rear of the courtroom, were two women who had traveled hours to get there. Unlike almost everyone else on the spectator benches, they were not relatives or coworkers or close friends of the accused.

  “. . . the lower portion of the body was red to red-purple…”

  As the most excruciating of the evidence came out, from the medical examiner, the women in the back drew closer toget
her, leaning in to each other.

  “. . . a green discoloration of the abdomen… autolysis of the organs… what we call skin slippage… the core body temperature reaches a hundred eight degrees when death ensues.”

  Mary—the older, shorter one—trembled. Lyn—the younger one with the long, strawberry-blond hair—gathered her in, one arm around the shoulder, the other across their bodies, holding hands.

  When the trial ended, Lyn Balfour and Mary Parks left quietly, drawing no attention. They hadn’t wanted to be there, but they’d felt a duty, both to the defendant and, in a much more complicated way, to themselves.

  It was unusual, to say the least: three people together in one place, sharing the same heartbreaking history. All three had accidentally killed their babies in the identical, incomprehensible, modern way.

  “DEATH BY HYPERTHERMIA” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States fifteen to twenty-five times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer, and early fall. The season is almost upon us.

  Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child… well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

  The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last ten years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor, and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.