by Norman Green
They didn’t have chocolate milk, so he settled for the white stuff. I don’t think he’d ever had pancakes before but he didn’t let on, he watched me carefully and did what I did. He had some trouble cutting them into manageable portions, so after a while I woke up and helped him with that, and then he did okay, aside from getting maple syrup all over his face, hands, and shirt. I think he was pretty worried about how I was going to react to that. When we were done we went to the men’s room and hosed him down. After I got him more or less clean he stood there with his face upturned and his eyes squeezed shut, getting blasted by the hot-air machine. Jesus, God, I thought, I know this is my job, but I got no idea what the fuck I’m doing, You got to help me out, here. It struck me then that he had no other clothes, he had nothing in the world except what was on his back.
The stores in the mall were open by the time we left the pancake house. Nicky and I went inside and wandered around for a couple of hours. I bought him a knapsack almost as big as he was, then we went into Baby Gap and filled it up. I watched him work on the ladies who staffed the place, and then I took one of them aside and told her I was taking him to camp for the first time but I had forgotten to bring his stuff, I didn’t want to ruin things for him, could she fix him up with all the normal kid stuff?
She put a hand on my shoulder. “It would be my pleasure,” she said, hardly looking at me at all. She and the other women fussed over him for what seemed an eternity. He sucked up all the attention like a camel drinking water after a long dry trip, and I watched, feeling inadequate. What had made me think I was qualified to be anyone’s father? I knew the answer to that one, though. When you get a hard-on, the blood rushes out of your brain and into your dick so you can’t think at all. Otherwise, the human race would have died out long ago, because who would be so egotistical that they would do this on purpose? “Oh, yeah, I can handle this.” Sure you can, pal.
We walked out of that mall with Little Nicky looking like all the other suburban yuppie kids, Little Lord Fauntleroy, ready to inherit the world. You’re gonna have to change your style, too, I told myself. Urban street rat chic is not going to cut it. As soon as we hit the highway, Nicky fell asleep clutching his knapsack. See, I thought, you’re learning already. Wear his ass out first, then drive.
I got off the highway when we hit the Maine state line. I was sick of it by then, it seemed pointless, speeding through the countryside in a big hurry, particularly in light of the fact that I didn’t know where the hell we were going to begin with. There was a big sign, “Scenic Route, U.S. 1,” so that’s the way we went. For quite a while, “scenic” seemed to mean tourist traps, giant liquor stores, souvenir places, and outlet shops, but gradually they tapered off and we began to see more of the Maine shoreline, rocks and pine trees and wide wet mudflats that smelled strongly of salt and clam shit when the tide was out. We passed through a few small towns on the way and I looked carefully at the inhabitants, wondering how I was going to blend in up here. I didn’t know anything about my heritage, but it was a pretty safe bet that my forebears did not come from Maine. These people looked rugged, but they were white, baby, white, with lots of red faces, yellow hair, and blue eyes.
I called Buchanan from a pay phone outside a diner in Gardiner around ten the next morning. “What do you have?”
“I got something sweet, baby, I got a guy the SEC is after,” he said. “Nice deal, clean and neat.”
“How does the guy help me if the SEC is after him?”
“That’s what makes this work,” Buchanan said. “He’s holding stock in a small pharmaceutical company. They’re going to get FDA approval on a new boner drug.”
“Say what?”
“A new boner drug. You suffer from limpus dickus, it makes you seventeen again.”
“I thought these guys were trying to cure cancer.”
“More money in hard-ons. Anyway, he can’t hold the stock. He’s got to sell before word of the approval gets out. The SEC thinks he uses inside information, which he does, but if he sells early, before the stock goes up, he can say, ‘Hey, look at the bath I took,’ and they’ll back off.”
“So how does this work?”
“He sells, you buy, sometime between now and three weeks from now, current market price. You got any trades in the past twelve months?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you do?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Better and better. They look at you, they got to figure you work on the monkey and the dartboard theory, you finally got one right. So you buy the stock from him, right, you put your cash in escrow with me. After the FDA approval becomes public, you ride it up and then dump it, you’re nice and clean. He takes his end out of the cash you put up with me.”
“How are you getting yours?”
“You’re getting a free ride on this one, Mo. Once I know the name of the security, I’m jumping in on the open market.”
“Serious?”
“I like this one, Mo. This guy is golden. Listen, you got a broker or do you make your trades on-line?”
“I do everything on-line.”
“What’s the total value of your account?” I told him. “Wow,” he said. “You’re not doing so bad.”
“Job security,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Look, here’s what I want you to do. Sell everything you’re holding, and start messing around with some pharma stocks. Buy a bunch of Merck, hold it for a week, then sell it all and buy Abbott, or something like that. We want to establish a pattern of trades in the time we’ve got left until it’s time to jump into this new stock. Can you do that?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“How can I reach you? It will take me a few days to get set up with this guy, but I’ve got to get to you before the FDA goes public.”
“You can leave a message on my voice mail.” I gave him my cell number.
“Okay, great,” he said. He was actually beginning to sound excited—usually, talking to him was like talking to an undertaker. I guess the guy loved making deals. “How do you want to handle the cash end of this? I’ll need to have it when he gives me the word.”
I pictured it, inside those two big green bags, sitting on a table inside that storeroom in Hackensack. “It’s out in Jersey,” I told him. “You tell me the day and the time, and I’ll meet you there. You can do a count, and after that it’s yours.” And your problem, I thought.
“Oh, man,” Buchanan said, “I hate New Jersey. Can’t we do this in Manhattan?”
“I don’t want to move it again. It’s too dangerous. There’s too many things that can go wrong. You want my opinion, leave it where it is. I’ll give you the key and walk away, and then when it’s time to pay your boy, you give him the key and do the same thing.” Working with Buchanan depended on trusting him. Now I would find out if he would trust me not to go back and rip him off.
“All right,” he said, after a moment. “We can do it that way. I’ll call you when it’s time. Meanwhile, don’t forget to make those trades.”
I hung up the phone and went back to where the van was parked. I’d left it in a spot on a concrete bridge spanning a good-sized, fast-moving stream. Nicky was glued to his window, watching the water cascading down the hillside and passing underneath on its way to the Kennebec River. It was a weird feeling, letting go of that business with Buchanan, getting my head back to me and Nicky, and Gardiner, Maine.
“Pretty, huh?”
He turned to me and nodded, but he didn’t have words for it, and I guess I didn’t, either.
Back out on the road, Nicky and I made up a game to pass the time. It was called “bird.” If Nicky spotted a bird and I either missed it or didn’t know what it was, he got a point. If I knew the name of the bird, I got a point. The game got more complex as we went along. He didn’t believe me when I identified a seagull as a great white bug-eating stinkbird, so he got ten points for that one, and I got penalized a hundred points for making up stories, not that i
t mattered, because Nicky was keeping score and his math system was idiosyncratic, to say the least. He got bored with that game after a while, so we made up another one, the “what color is the ugliest car” game. He could pick out ugly cars with no problem, but he really didn’t know the colors too well. That game went on a lot longer than the bird game. His attention would flag from time to time, and he would start telling me about cartoon characters or the people in his building, but he always seemed to go back to the color game. Kid’s five years old, right, already he’s playing catch-up. See, that’s the way it goes. You grow up the way I did, the way Nicky had been, you’re on your own in a lot of ways, and of course no kid can make up for the lack of an interested adult. You wind up deficient, and that’s not a value judgment, it’s just how it is. You reach school age, one of the first things you learn is that you’re not like the other kids. As a matter of fact, you’re way behind, and you begin trying to compensate, you have to try to be cooler than anyone else, or tougher, or wilder, you start doing everything you can think of to catch yourself up to where you think you are supposed to be. I had been playing that game for as long as I could remember, and of course you can’t win. In fact, it gets worse as you go along, because you lose track, the gap between what you were supposed to be and what you are becomes wider instead of narrower until you can no longer see any way across. You wind up with the conviction that you might somehow cross the finish line if you keep dogging along, but no way you’re winning any prizes, bro. I was really hoping Nicky was young enough, that I had gotten to him in time for him to be spared that, but there’s no way to know that, and besides, there were still plenty of things that could go wrong. I mean, I was just making this up as I went along, and on top of that, Tommy Lee Jones might be right around the next corner.
2
The Maine coast gets wilder and more beautiful the farther north you go. I had been a street rat my whole life, had grown up thinking there was only two kinds of trees, Christmas trees and the other kind. Nicky and I found plenty of places to stop and lots of stuff to look at, and we had no problem finding motels with vacancies. We bought matching plaid flannel shirts at L.L. Bean, we climbed the hill above Camden and looked down at the boats in the harbor, we rode a ferryboat over to Vinalhaven Island and back, we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain. I don’t know what I was looking for, and I began to doubt myself, you know, maybe I should have had more of a plan before I jumped into this, but I knew in my heart that if I had stopped to think about things too long I would have wimped out. By the time we hit Washington County, up at the northern tip of the Maine coastline, we were way past the tourist zone, the radio stations all played hillbilly music and gospel, there were deserted houses with peeling tar paper in the middle of fields of tall grass, and I halfway expected to see Jed Clampett somewhere, except it was too damn cold up there for the way he dressed. We were a couple of hours north of a town called Machias when a CV joint in the front end of the minivan let go. I coasted to a stop over at the side of the road, feeling lucky to get there, because I’d suddenly lost all influence over the van’s direction. I got out, cursing, kicking the front fender. There was not a house in sight. As a matter of fact, I could not remember exactly how long it had been since I’d seen human habitation. I looked up and down the road, but there weren’t any cars around, either. Nicky climbed into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window.
“Poppy,” he said, sounding worried. “What happened?”
“Sit down, Nicky. Everything’s gonna be all right.”
He looked around doubtfully. “Are we gonna have to sleep in the woods?”
“Wow, wouldn’t that be fun, huh?” He blinked at me a few times, so I went over and rubbed his head. “Don’t worry. We won’t have to sleep in the woods, I promise. Just sit down and be cool, okay?”
“Okay.” He climbed back over to the passenger side, sat down and hugged his knapsack.
And then it was my turn to look around and start worrying if we’d have to sleep in the woods. They stretched as far as you could see, pitching and rolling over the low hills that marched off to the horizon. Not a single restaurant, not one gas station, not one 7-Eleven, not a single goddam thing to eat except for the seagulls, and good luck catching one of those. I had been driving through this landscape for what seemed an eternity, and it had not occurred to me until that very minute what a desert the place could be. I mean, you can’t eat the trees, can’t eat the grass, can’t eat the rocks. What else was there?
I cracked the hood of the van and propped it open. Might as well advertise.
I heard the sound before I saw the vehicle. From far off it was just a low rumble, but as it got closer it sounded like a farm tractor with a bad muffler. I saw it going down a hill in the distance, coming south, and it seemed to be moving very slowly for a motorized vehicle. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, some kind of a pickup truck.
It was a Jeep, green, white, and rust-colored. I guessed it had to be from the early fifties. I leaned against the minivan and watched it make its calm and unhurried way down the road. It stopped when it reached us, right in the traffic lane, and a white-haired guy with leathery brown skin looked out the window.
“You evah notice,” he said, “they nevah seem to break down anywheyah convenient?”
“I noticed it this time.”
“Ayuh. Any idea what’s wrong with her?”
“I think it’s a CV joint.”
“Now just what in the hell is a CV joint?”
“Constant-velocity joint. It’s what this thing has instead of a front axle.”
The guy shook his head. “Theyah making cahs too damn complicated anymowah. Too many things to get frigged up on ya. Computahs, plastic and metal thin enough to open with nail clippahs. You fellas like a ride?”
“That would be great.”
“Well, lemme pull off the road heah fore I get run ovah by a pulp truck.” He clunked the thing back into gear and pulled behind us onto the shoulder, tail to tail with the van, then he got out and walked back. He looked to be in his sixties, maybe five foot ten, lean, as though the wind and cold weather had eroded away all the superfluous parts of him. He had the letters “USMC” tattooed on his forearm in faded blue.
Nicky was standing up in the driver’s seat. “Hey theyah, young fella,” the guy said, going over to the window. “What’s yaw name?”
“Nicky.”
“Who’s that guy?” He nodded his head in my direction.
“Poppy,” Nicky said. “That’s my dad.”
“Well, I’m pleased to meet ya, Nicky. I’m Louis.” He turned in my direction.
“Friends call me Manny.”
“Well, Manny,” he said, “I guarantee you ain’t gonna find no CV joint noth of Ellsworth. I’ll ride ya down ta see Gevier, an’ we’ll get him to come give yah a tow.” I locked up the minivan and we climbed into the Jeep.
Louis’s truck was even noisier from the inside, but I didn’t want to say too much, since it was running and the minivan wasn’t. I sat in the passenger seat and held Nicky in my lap. There were, needless to say, no seat belts—such frivolities came along a decade or two after the truck was built. The ride was beyond harsh, and you could see the road going by beneath your feet through holes in the floor pan. And every so often the truck would hit a bump and take a funny sort of sideways hop.
“That feels a little weird,” I shouted to Louis over the clatter of ancient metal. “You feel that, every once in a while, when you hit a bump just right?”
“Ayuh,” Louis said. “She slides around a bit. The old girl ain’t much of a piece anymowah. Body sits on the frame like a hat on a bald man’s head. Long’s we don’t go too fahst nor the wind blow too hahd, she be fine.”
“How’d you ever get this thing to pass inspection?”
“Inspection?” Louis looked at me like I was nuts. “This heah’s a fahm vehicle. Kinda like a tractah. Don’t need no stickah.” He winked at Nicky. “She don’t got
no CV joints, though.”
“Just as well,” I said.
I suppose I really should say something about the way down easters, or some of them, talk, because it is a strange and anachronistic tongue which cannot properly be reproduced in speech or in ink, and if I continue to try, I will drive both you and myself crazy. It is one of those things which must be experienced to be appreciated, let alone understood.
The most basic element of this puzzle is the complete loss of the letter r, except in places where it does not belong. “Whore,” for example, is no longer a simple monosyllabic term with a concrete definition, it is “ho-ah,” and you, me, Richard Nixon, and Mother Teresa are all sons of whores, as is your minivan when it breaks down, and your decrepit Jeep pickup when it does not. No judgment, either good or bad, is implied. And while the capital of the state of Maine is Aguster and Hong Kong is part of Chiner, out-of-state yuppies tend to drive Beemahs and a man too tight with a buck is a pikah.
Certain expressions, as well, like endangered species that may be found here and nowhere else, are best understood in context. For example, if a Mainer tells you that last night he got “right fucking sideways,” his meaning may be deciphered if you notice that he is severely hungover, and if you are too dim to figure that out, he may later refer to you as “nummah than a pounded thumb.”