by M. O. Walsh
“I’ll catch her there, then,” Pete said.
“When you do,” Lanny said, “tell her she owes me ten bucks.”
Pete turned off the call and put on his collar. He then drank a glass of milk and took Mayfly outside to fill up her food and water. When he got back in, he heard Tipsy Rodrigue knocking on the door. He was right on time. He opened the door and they shook hands.
“A guy could get used to this,” Pete said.
“Don’t I know,” Tipsy said.
They got in Tipsy’s Town Car and drove the couple miles to Douglas Hubbard’s house. Pete hadn’t seen it in the daylight before, at least not knowing it was the Hubbard place. It was a one-story rancher, like most of the houses in that neighborhood, brown brick, with a small front porch and a yard. It had a nice little row of azaleas in the front, some mulch in a flower bed, and what looked to be about a dozen birdhouses hanging from the eaves. You learned a lot about people from their yards, Pete knew, and he pictured Douglas and Cherilyn outside pulling weeds together on the weekends, doing all sorts of chores, for a nice yard like this took attention. He pictured Cherilyn in a sun hat, Douglas pushing along an electric lawnmower. Why an electric mower in this fantasy? Pete had no idea. Douglas seemed sort of progressive to him in that way, he supposed, like he was a person who thought about big-picture things like the environment, the coast, human rights, and other obvious stuff that some people in town didn’t seem to think much about. This vision of the two of them in their marital teamwork, for whatever reason, made Pete like the Hubbards even more.
He sat in the car as Tipsy went up and rang the bell, and when Douglas finally emerged he looked rough. He had his beret pulled low on his head and a set of what looked to be cheap gas-station sunglasses over his eyes. He held his satchel in one hand instead of resting it over his shoulder and carried his trombone case in the other as if it was some unexpected burden. He seemed pale from this distance, nearly green, and slouched toward the car. Pete smiled. Here was the zombie version of Douglas Hubbard, he thought, dressed in Hubbard’s clothes and heading to work.
Douglas opened the door and sat in the back. Pete leaned over and shook his hand.
“Pete Flynn,” he said. “I believe you may have met my evil twin brother last night, Errol Flynn. My apologies for anything he may have said or swashbuckled.”
“I feel like I’m blind,” Douglas said. “I’m serious. I haven’t been this hungover in decades.”
“You look like you’re blind,” Pete said, and motioned to the sunglasses.
Douglas lifted them to show his bruise. “Let’s just say that a ‘three wise men’ is a misnomer,” he said.
“Yikes,” Pete said. “What happened there?”
“I plan to tell my students I got this by reading their essays,” Douglas said. “In reality, though, I just forgot how to walk.”
Tipsy sat in the car. He adjusted his rearview and smiled at them both. “Not to worry, gentlemen,” he said. “Douglas, I’ll get you to your car. Father Pete, we’re off to the rectory, and I’ve already dropped off Hank. We’ll have everyone in place by the morning bell.”
“Take your time,” Douglas said, “I mean it,” and looked out the window as Tipsy drove.
If this were a normal day, Douglas would be backing out of his driveway right about now and waving at Dan Pitre, who’d be out watering his lawn in pajama pants. He would honk at Bill Kelly, who’d be sitting on his front porch with the paper. He’d give a nod to Tanisha Summers, who’d be walking her three designer dogs. Yet Douglas saw none of these familiar things. He instead saw Justin Ashbaugh installing a basketball goal over his carport. He saw Lynn Pritchard chipping golf balls into a bucket. He saw Remy Esteve juggling apples. At the corner of Bertha and Jackson, Ben Shields was chain-sawing a tree in some careful way, making a type of sculpture from the trunk, it looked like, maybe a pig or a cow. On the next street, Willy Ennis shot arrows into hay bales from his wheelchair. There were three new “For Sale” signs in his neighborhood alone. And so this, Douglas understood, was not a normal day.
“How’s Miss Cherilyn doing today?” Tipsy asked him.
“Enjoying not being hungover, I imagine,” Douglas said.
“Hey,” Pete said, and turned to face Douglas. “I was wondering. You have my niece, Trina, in any of your classes?”
Douglas groaned. “I do,” he said. “First period. How’s she holding up, by the way?” he asked. “I can’t get a read on her.”
“She hates it here,” Pete said. “But she hates everything, so it’s hard to gauge. She’s not had it easy, you know.”
“She living with her dad? Out there on sixty-one?”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “That’s part of the problem, I’m sure. I’m afraid he’s mixed up in some rough stuff.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Douglas said. “It’s too bad. That man was a hell of a singer.”
“Who?” Pete said. “Lanny?”
“My God, yeah,” Douglas said. “I went to school with him. We were in choir. He always sung the solos. He had this sort of falsetto none of the other kids could hit. But then we went to high school and I guess he got tired of being the choirboy and sort of went the opposite direction. Had a rock band for a while, I remember, the Broken Clocks, or something like that. I haven’t seen him in ages but, when we were young, he had a voice that made the parents cry.”
“I didn’t know that,” Pete said. “We’ve never been close. He married my sister, but we weren’t really close, either.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, too,” Douglas said, and leaned back in his seat. He sighed, as if being required to talk in this state exhausted him. “It’s good of you to help her out, though, Pete. Trina, I mean. All the faculty thought so. You’re a good man, besides just being a priest.”
“I second that emotion,” Tipsy said.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Pete said. “I hate to see anyone so miserable.”
“Hey,” Douglas said. “If you could get her to do her assignments, you’d make my life a lot easier. I’d be afraid to give her an F. She’s got a certain look about her. No offense.”
“None taken,” Pete said. “Trust me. I know that look. You mind if I pop in there today, though? Maybe I could have a word with her?”
“Fine by me,” Douglas said and closed his eyes. “One less student to vomit on.”
“I gave her a ride yesterday, you know,” Tipsy said. “Over to her mother’s house.”
“Who?” Douglas said.
“Your wife,” Tipsy said. “She looked like she was baking out there in the street, so I just scooped her up. Such a nice lady. She feeling okay? She seemed a little beat by the heat.”
“She is,” Douglas said. “A nice lady, I mean. And, yes, she is feeling okay. Thanks for doing that.”
“Anytime,” Tipsy said.
Although he didn’t say so, this information didn’t sit well with Douglas.
Cherilyn was in this very car yesterday and he didn’t know about it? This was an odd feeling. It wasn’t a thing to make him jealous or angry, of course, as Douglas was not insane, but it was curious to him, the little pockets of life we don’t see of each other. Where had she sat in this car? In the front seat? The back? He knew Cherilyn did things without him, of course, as he did things without her. She lived nearly half of her days outside of his presence and he imagined this part of her life filled with art and friendship. He pictured her at work on her crafts, popping in at her various jobs, calling up friends to chat, helping her mother. What struck him now, though, was that he always felt he knew where she physically was when he left her, and these were limited spaces. He pictured her at the breakfast table or in her Outback, at the grocery, inside her mother’s musty house, all places that he, too, had been. And so, when he found out Cherilyn had been to a new place without him, this sleek and well
-air-conditioned car, he felt a strange need to tell her about Geoffrey’s apartment, as well, where he had been without her that past week. He wanted to describe it. He wanted to take her with him.
“Would you look at that,” Tipsy said. “Is that Jud Chaney in a tuxedo?”
Douglas looked out the window and did indeed see Jud Chaney, a forklift operator with a chest like a beer keg, walking around his yard in a tux. He had trimmed his long beard, gotten himself a haircut. He bent over, picked a flower from a pot, and put it in his lapel.
The sight made Douglas feel sick.
What outlandish readout had Jud received? he wondered. Oil Baron? International Spy? What in the world could be changing for Jud Chaney? And why didn’t the DNAMIX machine afford Douglas a new vision of himself? The injustice of it angered him. What ridiculous possibility could make a man put on a tuxedo before eight a.m.? Douglas secretly hoped that it was doomed, whatever it was, that Jud would fail in this new pursuit, and did not like this jealous and pessimistic version of himself. He thought miserably of his own readout now, and Cherilyn’s, and how he could broach the subject with her. Instead of the gracious conversation he’d envisioned the night before, Douglas now thought of logical arguments against the machine. He thought of ways to not tell her what his readout said. He thought, in other words, of ways to lie, and he practiced the conversation in his head, like, Maybe you can have an idea of something, Cher, of greatness, or royalty, perhaps, without it being a total black-or-white thing? Like Maybe this could be an interesting vision for us to consider and dream about, but it was not true, in the way that so few things are ever “true,” because these readouts are not accurate. It was a novelty game in Johnson’s Grocery and nothing more, wasn’t it? We’d be hearing about it on the news, don’t you think, if it were true? Places other than Deerfield, for sure. New York City. Los Angeles. It would be the talk of the world. And so, Maybe we can go back to our lives and just kind of remember this as an interesting thing we once experienced, that we let run its course, Cherilyn, don’t you think? That moment when we thought we might be someone else? We can talk about it. We can laugh about it. Because that’s not the view of life we even want, is it? The idea that a machine could tell us something about our fates? That the life a person has willfully chosen, that they had chosen together, could be a mistake? That it could be a disappointment? It was a horrible thing to consider. I love you for you, he would say. No piece of paper can make me think we aren’t meant to be together. I don’t care what it says.
And so, in the quick fire of his mind, the matter was settled. He would skewer the machine tonight and be done with it.
Tipsy pulled up to Getwell’s. He parked next to Cherilyn’s Outback and Douglas hauled out his satchel and trombone and thanked him. He then looked across the street to the gas station and saw Deuce Newman gassing up his ridiculous truck with its oversized tires, and the fact that Deuce would be one of the first people he saw on this shitty day made a certain awful sense to Douglas. Still, he was steadfast in his pursuit of normalcy. He had all the arguments laid out in his head. This DNAMIX business. He would debunk the whole thing. He would blow it to bits.
Then Tipsy rolled down the window and stuck out his hand.
In it, he held a blue slip of paper.
“Hey, Hubbard,” he said. “Before you leave. Let me give you my card.”
16
My Picture in a Picture Show
One “like” out of twelve followers?
Such antipathy was hard to achieve. It wasn’t the low number of followers that surprised Jacob, though; that Trina would cultivate an incredibly small list made sense. She was by all evidence cruel, and denying people entry to your social media is one of the easiest ways to be cruel. You don’t even have to get dressed. But only one of the twelve even “liked” it? Most people hit the empty heart out of habit, just to fill it, scrolling through their feed. Jacob was one of her twelve followers, though, and he certainly didn’t “like” anything about it. He hated mainly the way he looked so scared of the kiss, his eyes squinted up like he was chewing a lemon. You could see Trina’s hand on the back of his head and she was pulling him. It was obvious. She was dominating him with her tongue and he supposed this could look sexy to any number of Internet freaks out there, but it did not look sexy to him. Worse, too, he thought, was the one “like” the picture had received. It was from Deuce Newman.
Why had Trina allowed him, of all people, in her twelve? It sickened him to think about. Deuce had once requested to follow Jacob on Instagram as well, months back, as he had nearly everyone in Deerfield while trying, he said, to gather pics for his project. But nobody under the age of thirty accepted his request, Jacob was sure. It was a joke.
Jacob swiped the app closed and put the phone in his pocket.
He now stood again at the boys’ room mirror, doing his ritual face check before first period. He turned on the water and washed his hands and heard a flush from the stall behind him. Rusty Bodell undid the latch and walked out. He hefted his Dickies and popped up his collar and stood next to Jacob at the row of sinks. He tossed something the size of a hockey puck onto the sill beneath the mirror. It was likely a tin of dip, Jacob thought, Grizzly or Skoal, but saw instead that it was hair product called Killer Edge Shaping Wax. Rusty’s new coif apparently required accessories. Jacob watched him rinse his hands in the sink and pull a bottle of cologne from his pocket. He pressed a few squirts on his wrists and rubbed them together as if making a paste.
“Man, I’m telling you,” Rusty said, and dabbed his wrists to his ears. “This weekend is going to be good for business. A lot of talent from out of town, if you know what I mean.”
Jacob looked at him. He’d known Rusty nearly all his life but hadn’t had a meaningful conversation with him since they once played Pokémon together back in seventh grade. Rusty battled with a premade deck he’d just bought that day and Jacob destroyed him with one of his weakest custom decks made of Water and Plant energies, of all things. Not even one EX. Yet Jacob didn’t gloat. Rusty was obviously out of his league, as most kids were against Jacob. He looked totally out of his mind now, Jacob thought, primping his hair in those bright new sneakers.
“Actually, Rusty,” Jacob said, “I have no idea what you mean.”
Rusty smoothed his eyebrows in the mirror, checked his teeth for morning litter.
“I’m talking about girls,” Rusty said. “Talent! Starting tonight for the bicentennial, man. This place is going to be crawling with every shrimper’s daughter in the state. And you know what shrimpers’ daughters do out there in the swamp, J? They don’t think about shrimp, man. They think about getting out of the fucking swamp and meeting dudes their daddies don’t know. And this weekend, guess who’ll be here waiting?”
Jacob acted as if he didn’t know the answer.
“Who?” he said.
Rusty pointed his thumbs at his chest. “This guy,” he said.
“Rusty,” Jacob said. “Can I ask you a serious question? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Not a thing,” Rusty said. “I’m just living the dream.”
“I’ve seen you cry when you didn’t get a ticket to the first showing of Rogue One,” Jacob said. “I’ve seen you down an entire bucket of cheese balls while writing fan fiction for Firefly. What makes you think that any human female, no offense, would allow you to come near her physical body?”
Rusty turned and looked at him.
“I would prefer,” he said, “that you not put me in a box.”
Rusty reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue slip of paper.
“Read it and weep,” he said.
He held out the paper and Jacob read it.
Rusty Bodell. Potential weight 400.
Potential Life Station: LOVER.
“Well, that’s insane,” Jacob said.
“Laugh all you want,” R
usty said. “You can’t deny science. Plus,” he whispered, “it does make sense.” He gave Jacob a little wink. “I mean, I’m like a mule down there, man. I’m like an untapped resource.”
“Thank you for the horrifying visual,” Jacob said, “but what’s insane is your name. Rusty Bodell? You have red hair and your legal name is Rusty? They named you that before they knew you’d have red hair? That’s a weird coincidence.”
“That’s not my legal name,” Rusty said, “but that machine knows things, man. It’s above and beyond.” He turned to the mirror and pulled a comb from his back pocket. “You know, J,” he said. “I’d expect a more open mind from a smart guy like you. Go get your own readout done and you’ll see.”
“What will I see, Rusty? Am I supposed to be a porn star?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” Rusty said. “And you don’t, either. That’s the point. But it’ll be something better than high school. I know that. Now do me a favor, will you, and hand me that hair jelly?”
Jacob grinned and handed him the can. “I’m rooting for you to break all sex records,” he said. “Just so you know. Best of luck.”
“Don’t need it,” Rusty said. “It’s in my DNA. It’s written in the stars. It’s like a big banner in heaven that says ‘Rusty Will Get Laid.’ It’s like justice.”
Jacob turned to leave but stopped when he saw the top-left corner of the bathroom door. He felt a quick sink in his chest, a nervy heat like fire up his neck. There were now three numbers written in the corner, where it had been blank yesterday. This was the spot Trina once told him to look when the time for action came, and he couldn’t pretend he’d not seen them. The number was 687, which he recognized immediately. It was his locker.
Jacob walked out of the bathroom and down the hall. He checked his phone and he still had five minutes until class. He went to his locker and studied it. It looked the same as nearly all the rest, beige metal with a combination lock and a master key slot for daily inspections. Deerfield wasn’t yet the type of place that made kids wear clear backpacks or use bulletproof pencils. They were more likely to try to arm all teachers with AKs and rocket launchers or some other backward notion, if Jacob had to guess, but they were coming around to the dangers, as they should be. As such, Principal Pat was vigilant in her daily strolls through the halls and you could hear her randomly opening and shutting lockers from whatever class you sat in. So, as smart people are apt to do, the kids moved all their secrets to their phones, kept their weed pens and vapes in their shoes.