Loud Pipes Save Lives

by Jennifer Giacalone

  He winced. “But it’s the Record. That’s barely even a real paper.”

  She fixed him with a chilly stare. She stood up, agitated. “No, it’s not a real paper; this Klotzman guy is worse than Matt Drudge. And that’s great, when he’s leaking something we want. But he doesn’t care who he hurts.”

  Erik decided not to point out that this was a trait his sister shared with Kyle Klotzman.

  “And in a day or two,” she finished, pacing around the desk, “the respectable papers will start to pick this up, and our phones are going to be ringing off the hook.”

  “Well, isn’t that what press secretaries are for? Let them deal with the fallout?”

  Lina shook her head at him. “No, this has to get stomped out before it even gets to that point. We need to shove something big out there, right away. Roberto was a piece of shit. A useful piece of shit at times, but a piece of shit. I am not having his sins get hung around Tommy’s neck to tar his administration before it’s even had the chance to do anything substantial,” she fumed. “That boy hasn’t done a wrong thing in his life. I’m going to go piss on that son of a bitch’s grave when this is over with.”

  He wanted to quip, Don’t you do that regularly anyway? He wanted to point out that Tommy, now in his thirties, was hardly a “boy” anymore. But he saw her seams starting to fray and grabbed her hand as she paced past his chair, trying to unwind her before she got too out of control. He had always been the one to settle her rages, the way she would spin upwards at any perceived slight.

  She looked down at him with an energy that crackled and spat like an exposed wire, and he worried whether he was going to be able to always do that for her. Whether or not this article was an attack, he knew she would respond as if it was. Nobody wanted to be in the blast radius when she did. She made G. Gordon Liddy look like a kitten.

  “You remember when we used to make blanket forts,” he said gently, squeezing her hand, “and you would read to me under the blanket with a flashlight?”

  “And you gave me your castoff clothes and I pretended I was your brother.” The giant, inexorable stone of her rage seemed to pause in its roll downhill as she gazed at him.

  There was love in her, still. He knew it. He saw it. He heard it. She would kill for it.

  “Come with me,” she ordered, suddenly calm. “I need to go talk to your nephew.”

  Tommy looked pained as he looked back and forth between his mother and his uncle.

  “You can’t be serious. It would never get past the city council, and if it did, I wouldn’t sign it. It’s nuts.”

  Lina, standing in front of her son’s desk, leaned forward, and bit the words off one by one: “This was an opening shot. Someone is doing opposition research.”

  Tommy sighed heavily. “You’re overreacting. This is just Klotzman trying to sell some papers. This story will exhaust itself inside of a week if we let it.”

  Lina snorted. “That’s what John Kerry said about the swiftboating story. Do you remember how well that worked out for him?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Look, I want to focus on actual governing. I don’t want to push some stupid show-bill through the City Council just for the sake of creating a sideshow to distract people from this sideshow.”

  Erik knew Tommy was right. Lina wanted the story about Tommy’s bastard half-brother swept out of the headlines as fast as possible as much for her own wounded pride as for Tommy’s administration.

  “Tommy, you wouldn’t be sitting in that chair right now if it weren’t for me. You need to do it.”

  “Fine, a big show-bill, but why this? Why can’t it be decriminalizing pot or … or lowering a tax on something somewhere?” Poor Tommy looked like he wanted to tear his hair out.

  “Because those things aren’t going to get the attention that this will. We need a circus.”

  Erik gently inserted himself into their heated back-and-forth. “Are you sure you want to court something so controversial so early in his administration?”

  Lina shot him a frosty look. “Don’t you have a charity board meeting to go to?”

  Erik bit back his comment. He was supposed to be there to back her up, he knew, but he had to agree with Tommy. He didn’t know if it was a great idea.

  Tommy looked genuinely miserable. “I don’t like the idea of legalizing harassment.”

  “You’re not legalizing harassment, you’re protecting free speech.”

  “You know that’s bullshit, Mom. I don’t even care about this as an issue, and neither do you!”

  “Of course I don’t! I care about making sure that you get another term in that chair!” Lina slammed a fist down on Tommy’s desk, grabbed his tie, and leaned in closer to him, her eyes blazing. “Look. Maggie Burnett is a bleeding-heart. She will find a loophole. We’ll leave a few nice big ones for her. You keep your conservative cred, and nothing really changes.”

  Tommy shrugged in resignation, mostly because he wasn't cut out for this kind of fighting, and not with his mother, of all people. “Fine. I don’t think we have the votes, but if you can twist enough arms to get it done, I’ll sign it.”

  Erik walked into Terrance’s apartment that night, his head still throbbing from the events of the day. Terrance liked to keep his heat up high, and he was listening to The Marriage of Figaro while playing what appeared to be a round of Japanese chess on a flat screen TV that was really too big for his modestly-sized East Village condo.

  “Are you high?” Erik inquired mildly. Not that it mattered. Terrance’s intellect didn’t seem to suffer much either way.

  Terrance shrugged. “A little.” He glanced away from the game and looked at Erik. “Well, you look like someone forced you to sit through a six-hour director’s cut of a Michael Bay movie.”

  Erik ran his good hand through his hair and sighed. “I wish. Read the papers today?”

  Terrance groaned. “Ugh, no, but I saw the headlines, and I imagine our sister’s been making your life miserable all day long.”

  Erik nodded. “Yes. She’s pressuring Tommy into doing something he doesn’t really want to do in order to create a distraction.” He sat down heavily in the leather La-Z-Boy next to Terrance’s.

  “That’s her style,” Terrance observed before moving one of his pieces.

  “How can you tell the difference between the pieces?” Erik wondered as he watched. The Japanese characters printed on them were almost impossible for him to tell apart, and unlike Western chess, the pieces were all the same shape.

  “Well, not being dyslexic probably helps,” Terrance sighed. “You can barely read in English, why in the world would you do better with kanji?”

  Erik snorted and moved on. “You know, she wasn’t always like this. She used to skin her knees playing soccer with me at the Cape. Dad—”

  “Frederick Schultze is not a nice man; I have gotten that memo,” Terrance interrupted him. “But you, golden boy, are the one who gets to sit on the board at the bank.”

  Erik frowned. “Not as much of a boon as you might imagine. Look, I just … I worry that this is going to blow up in her face. She says she just wants a distraction, but you know how vengeful she is.”

  Terrance rolled his eyes once and looked back at his game. Before answering, he paused, closed his eyes to savor a few bars of the aria that was on, and then made a move. “I’m already closer to our sister’s nonsense than I ever wanted to be. God help both of you if they ever find Laurel Witherspoon.”

  Erik pushed the button on the side of the chair and it reclined slowly while he watched Terrance play. “I still have nightmares about the Barnstable police showing up at Lina’s door.”

  “Cape Cod law enforcement isn’t very likely to find their way down here.”

  “It was an accident, anyway,” Erik responded testily.

  “Good God, I don’t care, and if anything comes of it, I’ll say I didn’t know a thing, which is mostly true.” He hovered his pointer finger over a few different pieces, contemplating. Ter
rance was brilliant enough that even high, he played better than average. He belonged on the board of Lyonsbank, not Erik. It was only because of his louche lifestyle that Frederick refused to seat him.

  “How’s your little girlfriend?” Erik inquired after a moment, looking to change the subject.

  “Which one?”

  “You know. Your favorite. The little cop.”

  Terrance snapped a piece into place and the game sounded an airy little chime. “She’s fine.” He turned to his brother. “If you want my opinion about whatever it is our sister is cooking up to deal with the crisis du jour, and Christ, I really don’t want to know what it is, let her make her own bed and lie in it. You only have so much sway. So. Look after your pet Sparr like you’ve been—”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  Terrance sighed and waved a hand. “Continue doing what you can for the Sparr kid. Keep your own conscience clear as much as you can. I’m afraid that’s the best you can do.”

  Erik wasn’t content with this.

  “Oh,” Terrance added after a moment, “and since you say he enjoys Hesse, why don’t you loan him this?” He grabbed a book off the side table and tossed it into Erik’s lap.

  It was Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Erik wrinkled his nose. “Really?”

  “It’s literature. Right up his alley from what you’ve told me. Plus, since you’ve got him tooling around on a bike now, he’ll enjoy it for that as well, I expect.” Then he pulled out his phone, tapped away at it for a moment, and added, “And I’ve just sent you a link to a TED talk that I think he might find rather interesting.”

  Erik shrugged. Terrance’s recommendations had generally been good.

  He would just keep his head down and try to stay out of Lina’s way.

  18

  Third of Four Goes Walking

  “Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.”

  –Steppenwolf

  Quin had bought his bike hoping that he and Ainsley would spend more time together. It had worked, sort of, although not to the extent he’d hoped. But the bike had led him to Nadia, who was fast becoming a jones he couldn’t shake and didn’t want to. Spring was turning into summer, and he was falling in love harder and faster than he’d ever imagined he could.

  She came, sometimes, to his basketball practices, when she could. He could spend an hour on the phone with her and not even feel it go by, debating the merits of everything from their preferred translations of Petrarchan sonnets (ride or die for Sir Thomas Wyatt, obviously), to which Darren was the better one on Bewitched (Dick York, of course).

  She worked at the Strand—because where else would she work but the best bookstore in the city? At least a couple of days a week, he’d meet her after work, take her out for dinner, and then they’d go riding for a bit. For a little while, they kept up the silly pantomime that she and Ainsley “may or may not” have been friends, but it didn’t last longer than fifteen seconds into the first double date they had with Ainsley and Khady, as they all dissolved into snickering at the table of the diner where they’d met for a late dinner.

  He couldn’t believe it, but now, as he realized that half the summer had crept by, he found he was actually thinking about writing again.

  He’d collapsed in on himself after his accident and hadn’t written in almost four years, but Nadia had gotten him brimming with words that pinged around inside him, wanting to get out. He wanted to write about his accident, his father, his bike; he wanted to write about her, and the way he felt when he was inside her and moving together with her. They never stopped looking at each other when they were in bed together, clear-eyed and smiling at each other as if they couldn’t believe their luck. She made him feel … awake.

  And along with all that, he burned for more freedom, more autonomy. Being on the bike was glorious, but it felt like a tease, and it was always a bit deflating getting back into his chair.

  He’d casually confessed this to Erik at lunch one day.

  Naturally, Erik had said, “Well, I can put you in touch with this guy at MIT,” and then pulled up a video on his phone of a TED talk by this guy who designed and built his own prosthetics. Like Quin, he’d lost both his legs below the knee in a climbing accident, and now there he was, standing on bionic legs he’d designed and built himself, talking about how he was back climbing again because of them. He had a few different types of prosthetics for that purpose, including one set he’d designed that had spikes instead of “feet,” so that he could wedge in and get footholds in crags in the rocks where able-bodied climbers couldn’t. It took several minutes for Quin’s head to stop spinning.

  “Mom,” he’d said when Eleanor got home that evening, looking weary as usual, “I need to become a cyborg.”

  She looked at him curiously, and for the first time in a while, he felt as if she was actually looking at him. She thought for a moment. “All right, then. What does that cost these days?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, probably about fifty grand,” he replied casually. He pulled up the video on his phone and showed her a few minutes of the TED talk.

  She smiled, told him to go ahead and get things started, and joked that when he started wearing the new legs, she planned on calling him Third of Four. He started working immediately with his physical therapist on strength and balance. It was all coming together.

  When he finally got them, they were something to behold. They would look like legs underneath pants or black socks, but he felt as though he didn’t want to hide them; maybe he’d even have his riding gear cut to show them. They were gorgeous, elegant machines, made of shiny, lightweight metal alloys, black carbon fiber, and clear polymers. The feet looked like minimalist drawings of a foot—just a graceful, swooping line.

  It took some time to get comfortable on them, but he stepped up his physical therapy schedule, anxious to get steady on them and take them out into the world. But summer was dissolving into fall, and he’d probably have a bit of a chance to wear them with shorts at least a few times before it was too cold.

  The first time he took them for a spin in public was when they went to one of Ainsley’s tournaments. They’d gotten seats that were at the back of the tier they were in, so he wouldn’t have to wrangle with a lot of steps. He sat in the end seat, with Nadia next to him, Khady beside her, and Eleanor furthest in. It felt like a real family outing, which hadn’t happened in a while. He actually had to struggle to recall when Eleanor last went to a tournament.

  It was hard for him to tell how his mother felt about Khady and Nadia; she’d been around both of them a few times at this point, and she wasn’t chilly the way she could be toward someone she didn’t care for, nor was it exactly uncomfortable, but she didn’t speak much. Maybe it was just a lot for her to process. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in such a long while. And even though he knew she was pro-gay rights in the abstract, he supposed that maybe it was a different thing to take it completely in stride when one of your children was gay. Different generation and all that.

  He watched Khady kiss each of Ainsley’s gloves before she went downstairs to get ready for her first fight. Like a lady kissing her knight’s sword before he rides off into battle, he thought with amusement.

  The tournament atmosphere was familiar to him by now, as he’d been to several. They were holding this one in a small arena in the Sports Center at Chelsea Piers. If he had to guess, he’d say about five hundred spectators were milling around the place. A fair number of were families who, like them, were clearly there to support a sister or daughter who was competing in one of the three rings that they had set up in the middle of the floor.

  In all of the early rounds, they kept the house lights up, and it was a lot like a carnival or a convention, with a few people
glued to the action in the rings, but most roaming around, chatting, getting snacks and the like. He noticed a fairly high ratio of girl-girl couples sitting together, or walking around holding hands, and a lot of women who weren’t paired up, but just plain looked like butch lesbians. He didn’t remember seeing so many at other tournaments, but suspected that he just hadn’t had a reason to take note of it before.

  Once they’d settled into their seats, Eleanor got up and announced she was going to go get some snacks.

  “Actually,” Quin offered, pushing himself up onto his new feet, “why don’t Nadia and I get them?”

  Eleanor paused for a moment and looked at him, standing there as he had not done for years. “Are you sure?”

  Quin nodded.

  Eleanor paused, skeptical for a moment, but agreed. “Don’t let him take more than he can handle,” she warned Nadia.

  Nadia smiled, and as they walked away, she said quietly in his ear, “If I did that, you wouldn’t be dating me.”

  The concession stand offered a mix of the expected (soda, overpriced popcorn, and hot dogs) and the strangely high-end and offbeat (lattes, vegetable samosas, and focaccia). While they waited in line, Quin asked, “You know, I never asked you, but how exactly did a Puertoriquena end up with the last name Dawson?”

  She smiled. “My great-grandfather was English. Trevor Dawson. He was a biologist. He came to PR to study some flora or fauna or something. Married my great-grandmother Amara, and stayed there. They had three sons. And every Dawson boy since then, down to my father Ignacio, married a local girl, too. So…you don’t see much British in me, do you?”

  Quin shrugged. “Wouldn’t presume, I guess.”

  She leaned closer to him. “Do you know what the lesson is?”

  “No.”

  “One white boy stands no chance against three Puerto Rican women. Remember that,” she said, with a tone of playful warning.