by M. O. Walsh
Jacob looked out of the kitchen window to see Deuce turn on the water hose. He got his father to spray it against his own truck, where the mist made a great plume off the glass. His father kept turning off the nozzle, though, pretending to holster it as if in a duel, and Deuce was obviously becoming irritated.
“Just hold the gad damn thing!” he heard him say. He fiddled with his projector. “Let me show you this, Hank.”
Jacob went back to the stove. And here, of all places, he found his little dominion. Jacob had been the de facto cook for his family since he was fourteen. He was okay with this. His father cooked serviceably enough but without any joy, heating up microwave dinners and turning out boxes of mac and cheese as if they were nightly specials. Toby never complained. He was a high school athlete and so all he needed was calories and lots of them. Food, for Toby, was merely the vehicle these calories rode in on and he would eat anything placed before him. What Jacob needed, however, was pleasure, from something, from anything, and he got this on top of the stove. He opened a can of beans and poured them in a pot. He then added some BBQ sauce, a little chili powder to spice them up. He remembered a small carton of mushrooms he’d bought himself last weekend and pulled them out of the drawer in the fridge and sliced them. He threw them into a skillet with some butter and Worcestershire sauce, found a hunk of cheddar cheese to cube, and set them atop and watched it all cook down. This was a dish with no name, a little invention of his, and Jacob liked it.
When he turned the heat low, he heard the door from the garage open and shut. Deuce Newman walked inside. His shirt was wet from the hose, Jacob guessed, and he sat at the kitchen island like he belonged there.
“Son,” Deuce said. “I think it’s official. Your father has lost his damn mind.”
Jacob said nothing, only grabbed a box of toothpicks and plucked a mushroom out of the skillet. He popped it into his mouth and it wasn’t bad at all.
“Let me ask you something,” Deuce said. “Have you ever been to Disney World?”
Jacob looked at him and chewed. He shook his head.
“That’s this town’s problem,” Deuce said. “Nobody has been anywhere. Let me tell you, I’ve been to Disney World. It’s all water and light these days. All water and light. That’s what your daddy needs to understand. We have to be progressive. Hell, we just need to catch up! I can’t do this all on my own. I’m so far behind I probably can’t even make the damn choir tomorrow night, and that would be a paying gig for me. I just need some assurances, is all, that we’ll be good to go on Saturday. That’s only two days from now, which is something your father seems incapable of understanding.”
Deuce leaned over and grabbed a toothpick, plucked himself out a mushroom. He chewed and said, “Damn, Jake. This is pretty good. You taking Home Ec or something?”
Jacob put a lid on the skillet and slid it away from Deuce. “You know,” he said. “I think they stopped offering that class after women got the right to vote.”
Deuce stopped chewing and looked at him.
“Do you know,” he said, “there’s a difference between being smart and being a smartass? You might want to keep that in mind.”
Jacob felt the creep of a familiar fire. A tingling in his neck. A bubbling anger. It was a feeling he’d had not long ago, when Chuck Haydel knocked off his hat. It was the feeling he’d had when his brother died, when he first started talking with Trina, and it was a feeling he tried to keep down.
“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Newman?”
Deuce stood up, wiped his hands on his wet shirt. “First things first,” he said. “I need a picture.” He pulled out his phone and aimed it at Jacob, who did not smile. He clicked. “Secondly, I need to get you to help me,” he said. “You need to talk some sense into your father. This cowboy shit,” he said. “I didn’t expect for it to make him even more stubborn than he already was. He doesn’t listen to me at all anymore. You just need to tell him that, unless he gets his ass in gear, we’re coming for him tomorrow at the town hall. We’ve only got one more day to get ready. It’s now or never. It’s time to piss or get off the pot.”
With this comment, the way Deuce took aim at his father, Jacob felt an almost uncontrollable urge to do some sort of damage to this grown man in his kitchen. It nearly consumed him. He would be throttled, he knew, if he tried this. Deuce outweighed him by a hundred pounds. And was it even Deuce he was angry with? Can a thinking person truly be angry with an idiot? Or was it the way it seemed his entire world had shrunk these last months to become a sort of straitjacket? In every direction he turned, he felt only frustration. His father. Toby. Trina. Deuce. How could a person’s world be so small? What could he do to expand it? To explode it?
“No offense,” Jacob said. “But our family suggestion box is full at the moment. Maybe you could find somewhere else to put your complaint.”
Deuce leaned on the counter and looked him in the eye.
“Does your daddy know you talk to your elders like that?” he said. “Maybe you should get your own readout done. Maybe it would tell you to have some manners.”
“My dad knows how I talk,” Jacob said.
“I bet he doesn’t,” Deuce told him. “I bet he also doesn’t know who you’re palling up with over at school, either. I know what goes on over there. It was bad enough your brother took that Todd girl for a ride, don’t you think? Bad enough she was the one with him that night. You going to go chasing her tail now, too? You think he wants to be reminded of all that?”
Jacob’s heart shook at the unexpected mention of Trina, the presumptive nature of this man in his kitchen. “You don’t know anything about me,” he said.
Deuce pulled out his phone again. He thumbed the screen and turned it to Jacob and said, “Don’t I?”
Jacob saw the picture Trina had taken of them in the woods, now up for display on Instagram. “I know a hell of a lot more than you think I do,” Deuce said. “Trust me on that. You kids think what you do on Twitter and all that is some sort of secret, but it’s just the opposite. You’re the most obvious generation that’s ever been. You don’t have any secrets at all. It’s sad, really. But, look. Just tell your dad to get his shit straight by tomorrow, okay? One last chance. I say that as a friend.”
Deuce left the kitchen and walked back to the garage. Jacob’s heart thumped as if he’d been sprinting and he picked up the empty can of beans and threw it in the sink. It clanged against the metal and splashed its thick juice on the wall. This was something Jacob would have to clean up, he knew, and this pissed him off even more. He grabbed his backpack to go do his homework but, when he got to his room, merely slung it violently onto the bed.
He walked back to the kitchen and looked out the window to the street, where Deuce was now pulling off in his truck. His father had apparently tied his lasso to the set of rubber balls on the hitch and it moved like a snake behind the truck as Deuce drove off. Hank slapped his hat on his thigh and laughed as Deuce stuck his hand out the window and flipped him the bird. These were the adults, Jacob thought, these were the fucking people in charge of his life, and he ran back down the hall past his room and to his father’s office. The door was closed, as it always was, and Jacob opened it. The place was a mess, but Jacob knew what he kept in here. It was like an outpost of city hall. On the wall, shelves stuffed full of building permits and tax codes, fake keys to neighboring towns, wooden plaques. Boring shit, all of it. But among these documents, Jacob knew, because he had seen them before, was the blueprint of Deerfield Catholic.
He riffled through the shelves and found it. He went to put it on the table, where he saw a gun his father had been given. It was in a glass case, some commemorative pistol and old-timey bullet his father received at some ridiculous occasion for some ludicrous reason that had previously been hung on his office wall those past few years. It was one of a hundred meaningless things in that room. Jacob moved it
to the side and unscrolled the blueprint. He was acting unlike himself, he knew, being in there without permission, giving in to Trina yet again, but there are times when being unlike yourself is the only way to get away from yourself, and so he took his phone out of his pocket, quickly snapped a few pictures, and put the blueprint back up where he’d found it.
He then left the house through the garage, still angry at everything he saw, where his father was now hammering a piece of wood paneling into the wall.
“Hey, Son,” his father said. “Here’s a shot in the dark: You have any idea where a man could get his hands on a player piano?”
Jacob stared at him but said nothing. Then he took off down the street.
He looked again at his phone and quickly loaded the pictures into a text message.
You fucking want it? he typed. You fucking take it.
He hit send.
Trina replied, almost immediately, with a face that had hearts for its eyes.
11
I Hate It When That Happens to Me
Douglas left the parking lot of the Scenic Wetlands Apartments and Balconies with as much bravado as any man driving his wife’s Subaru Outback can achieve. He was full of adrenaline, lit up like a witness to magic should be. He was also reminded brightly of the love he felt for Cherilyn, for the world, even. Learning new things always did this to Douglas. This was why he’d gone into teaching in the first place. It made him feel fresh, sort of expansive and interesting to gain new knowledge, as if his was now a mind on the scene. Geoffrey had taught him only the most basic imitation of “Seventy-six Trombones” in that last hour and Douglas was admittedly terrible at it, but he’d puckered his lips and blown all the same. He’d moved the slide in and out, puffed his cheeks, and filled that apartment with rambunctious and unpredictable noise. He would get it, eventually. It would take him a while, he knew, like everything worth a damn did, but he would get it.
He drove back through the Deerfield square with his windows down, the evening beginning to fall, and blared the jazz station from New Orleans. He took off his beret, let the air whip his spindly hair around, and felt magnanimous and wise, more certain than ever that he was on the right track. If there were any panhandlers in Deerfield, Douglas would have given them his money at that moment. He would have given them a lot of it, maybe all of it, and told them not to give up on their dreams. If he’d seen a child, he would have tousled their hair, produced from his pocket a piece of candy, and relayed to them the secrets of lifelong happiness. Even if he was in front of his class, yes, even if he was working, this energy would have brought forth the type of lecture that becomes legend. He would have blown minds, changed futures, won awards. That’s the kind of mood he was in.
This mood also made him feel more certain than ever that he and Cherilyn could get clicking again. He was going to be a jazz musician. He was going to spice up their lives. He would tell her tonight. Any interest she had in being someone else, someone royal or important, was not because of any lack on her part, he’d say, because she was already the most important person in his life. Instead, he would argue, the desire she felt for something new was probably because he himself had become stagnant. Whistling the same old songs. Trudging off to work in the same old classroom. His blandness had become contagious, he figured, infectious. He saw it now.
And he was about to cure it.
He pulled into the parking lot of Johnson’s Grocery and reached over to the passenger seat to grab the shopping list. He flipped the top flap of his satchel and found the notepad he’d written the list on, with all of its question marks and underlining, all of Cherilyn’s endearingly exotic requests. He scanned it over as he looked for a parking spot. Absolutely, he thought, and ripped the page from the pad, let’s eat some damn eggplant. Let’s eat all the eggplant in the world, my love. Put some tahini on my trombone, place a little garlic in my mouth. Let’s live a little, shall we? Come closer. Sign me up. Call me Twice-in-a-Row Joe.
Douglas found a spot at the back of the lot and parked, more cars than usual on a Thursday night. He shut the door and walked toward the store with his hands in his pockets, whistling like a man who’d just gotten a raise. He tipped his beret to Claire Sanderson, who was leaving the store with a cart full of flowers. He said hello to Dave Austin, who was sweeping the entryway by the propane tanks. “Turning into a beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Douglas said.
“I’m sweating like a pig,” Dave said.
“Pigs don’t sweat, my man,” Douglas said without slowing down. “No glands. That’s just a wonderful idiosyncrasy of our speech. Sweating like a pig. Raining cats and dogs. It’s just another reason people are interesting!”
Oh, yes, Douglas thought, he was on fire tonight.
The doors of Johnson’s slid open and Douglas entered the cold and well-lit store as if he owned the place. He grabbed a handbasket and walked to the produce section looking for eggplant, and there they were, a whole pile of them. He checked his list. How many did Cherilyn want? Four? Well, then, he would buy her eight. Spare no expense. Douglas stacked them in the basket and headed for lemons. He whistled all the while, a Stevie Wonder tune now, tossing each lemon into the air and catching it.
He even found the tahini easily enough where it sat in the ethnic foods aisle next to the Sriracha and soy sauce. Had shopping ever been so easy? He then grabbed a bottle of wine, a twelve-dollar bottle, which was as high as he and Cherilyn went on birthdays and anniversaries, and headed for the checkout. As Douglas reached for his wallet, though, the outside world returned to him. He noticed how empty it was in the store and how quiet, despite all the cars in the lot. Had he seen anyone in produce, even? He looked at the checkout line. Only one register open, nobody waiting.
He walked toward the register and, once he cleared the tall rack of potato chips and beef jerky, saw where everyone was. A line of people, probably twenty or so, over by customer service. The people were of varying ages, adults and teenagers, some of whom Douglas had never seen before, all standing quiet and single-file. Many of them thumbed at their phones, others picked at their nails.
Douglas set his eggplant on the conveyor belt and said, “Hey, Sheila,” to the cashier. She’d been a student of his a few years ago, a bright person, and he always enjoyed seeing her. He remembered specifically that she’d written a proposal essay about removing Confederate statues from government land before people were actually doing this and she’d gotten an A. These were the student papers that Douglas remembered, like finding little jewels in a sandbox. She was now pregnant and looking well, and carefully piled his eggplants atop of the scale.
“What you making, Mr. Hubbard?” she said. “Eggplant fries? Some tapenade? I’ve been hearing eggplant’s good for a baby.”
Douglas motioned to customer service. “Y’all giving away hundred-dollar bills?” he said. “Looks like a crowd.”
Sheila smiled and, before she could speak, a man in the store began shouting. The voice came from some unseen place in the line and Douglas couldn’t tell if the person was dying or cheering. Then Douglas saw this man appear from behind the curtains of a large box.
“Unreal,” the man said. “Unreal!”
This man was in his fifties, probably, well dressed like an attorney or insurance salesman, and was not anyone Douglas knew. He stepped out of the box and turned to face the line behind him. He held up his hand and waved a blue ticket in the air and said, to no one in particular, “Ain’t this some shit?”
The man then pulled off his necktie and threw it the garbage. “Not one more day in that tie,” he said. He bent down and plucked off his loafers. “Not one more day in these shoes.” He then pulled off his blazer, swung it over his shoulder, and strolled out of the store with a grin, dropping his shoes in the donation bin for the Salvation Army by the door.
Douglas looked back at the box he’d stepped out of. Of course, he thought,
the DNA machine. How could he forget?
The people in line shuffled ahead and a woman pulled back the curtains and entered the box that, Douglas now clearly saw, read “DNAMIX.” Even from this distance, it was far less impressive than he’d imagined. The whole thing looked to be made of plywood or pressboard, not even sanded to smooth corners at its edges. The logo could have been stenciled by one of Douglas’s least gifted students, it was so rustic. Still, Douglas tried not to be cynical. He was on a mission to have a good night.
He looked back at Sheila. “So, that’s what all the fuss is about?”
“Thirty-four dollars, Mr. Hubbard,” Sheila said, and held out a big paper bag.
“Yes, ma’am,” Douglas said, and swiped his debit card. “What do you think about that machine?” Douglas asked. “You tried it yet?”
“No, sir,” Sheila said. “I already know what I’m going to be.” She rubbed her belly with her hand. She gave it a pat. “In about two months from now,” she said, “I’m going to be tired. I don’t need to know any more than that.”
“That sounds like wisdom,” Douglas said. “I’m impressed.”
“I also don’t want to spend the two dollars,” she said. “I’m saving up.”
“And that sounds like smarts,” Douglas said. “You’re the total package.”
Sheila smiled and blushed like Douglas recalled her doing when he’d praised her at school. “Thanks,” she told him. “I miss your class, by the way. I miss school, in general. I don’t get a chance to read as much anymore, what with work and all.”
“Luckily,” Douglas said, “it’s kind of like riding a bike. You can start back anytime you want.”
Douglas left the register and headed for the door, having already made up his mind that he would not be joining the line. It would be almost redundant, he thought, after his lesson with Geoffrey, after he’d become more convinced than ever that he was on the right track. Plus, he wanted to get back to Cherilyn. He had some loving to give.