The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

  The Outback didn’t seem to mind. It cruised over the grass and root beds as if it long expected this time would come, its tires bouncing up and down on the shocks like pistons and not disturbing the cabin at all. You could have sipped a cup of coffee without spilling a drop if you wanted and Pete made a note to mention to Douglas just what an impressive automobile this was. And then, after only two minutes in the alley, Pete was already pulling into the back parking lot of Johnson’s Grocery. If he could just whip around the front of the store and out the other side, he would have successfully bypassed nearly all the downtown traffic and could cut up 61 toward Lanny’s.

  The third sharp turn came unexpectedly, though, even to him, as he pulled the Outback into a parking spot. Pete had an idea.

  He turned off the car and hopped out and checked his back pocket for his wallet. He wanted to bring Trina a present. Not a bribe, really, just a peace offering before asking her to sit down and have a talk with him. Or, better, before sitting himself down to have a listen.

  Several people nodded to him as he walked toward the store. So many, in fact, that he got the sensation he was going in through the out door. He walked inside and headed straight for the customer service desk. Nobody else was in line so he went right to the counter to see Cal Johnson, the guy who owned the place, restocking the spools of lottery tickets.

  Cal looked at him over his eyeglasses. He was an ­old-­timer, eighty or so, but was healthy and kind and would likely work that place until he or it disintegrated.

  “Pete,” he said. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but that old girl is out of order.”

  Pete smiled. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  Cal ticked his head to the side where Pete saw the big DNAMIX machine hung with a sign that said that exact thing: “Out of Order.”

  “Believe it or not,” Pete said. “I have an even stranger request. I’m wondering if you sell Benson and Hedges cigarettes. You know, the skinny kind.”

  Cal took off his glasses and leaned on the counter. “We do,” he said, “but I have to admit, Father. I never took you for a smoker.”

  “They’re not for me,” he said. “I’m picking them up for a friend.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry,” Cal said, and turned to grab a pack. “Lord knows if I started judging people for everything they bought in here I’d have gone out of business and into depression a long time ago.” He set the pack on the counter.

  Although Pete wasn’t sure, it looked close enough to the brand he’d seen Trina pull out in his truck that he reached back for his wallet to pay. “One more thing,” he said. “What’s that gum people chew on if they want to quit smoking?”

  “Nicorette?”

  “That’s the one,” Pete said. “Could you grab me a pack of that, too?”

  Cal smiled and took a few steps to his left to get the gum. “I have to say,” he said, “you might be sending your friend some mixed messages.”

  Pete pulled a twenty out of his wallet. “What I’m trying to do is give them options.”

  Cal rang him up and Pete looked around the store. It had almost completely emptied. He saw Dave Austin restocking the produce, watched a guy come in and take a picture of the “Out of Order” sign with his phone and walk out, and saw a pregnant woman working the checkout, rubbing her belly and reading a book.

  “It’s quiet in here all of a sudden,” Pete said. “Guess you better get that machine up and running again.”

  “Suits me just fine,” Cal said. “It’s not helping business any. People come in and either laugh or cry and then leave without buying much. Nobody says hey anymore. You got people like Shelly Swanner and Deuce Newman and a couple others who come here every day and do that dang thing. They used to stop and talk awhile.” Cal pulled the change from the register and counted the bills in his hand. “Not anymore,” he said. He looked at Pete. “Some days I get the feeling they might just be using me for my ­future-­telling capabilities. It makes me feel sort of cheap.”

  “You know,” Pete said, “I sometimes get the feeling people might use me for that exact same purpose.”

  “I bet you do,” Cal said, and counted the bills onto the counter. “Here’s your change.” He then dropped the cigarettes and gum into a paper bag and slid them toward Pete. “And here’s your ­options.”

  Pete picked up the bag and pocketed the bills.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Cal said, and leaned toward him. “It ain’t really out of order.”

  “It’s not?” Pete said.

  “I just got a call a little while ago telling me to shut it down. Some folks are apparently coming to move it to the square for the bicentennial tomorrow. I guess they figure to make some real money from the tourists.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Pete said. “Who owns that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Cal said. “They just told me DNAMIX like they knew what they were talking about so that’s fine by me. Hell, I don’t even remember how it got here. I never signed off on it. I figured my manager must have but she split town the day it showed up and she did her own little reading thing. I haven’t seen her since. I hope she’s okay. She has kids and everything.”

  Pete studied the machine. “So, it’s still on right now?” he asked.

  Cal raised his eyebrows and looked around the store. “I’ll run interference if you want to hop in there and give it a go.”

  “Have you tried it?” Pete said.

  “Shit, no,” Cal told him. “I’ve been restocking groceries for over ­fifty-­five years. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I have and what I don’t.”

  Pete looked at his watch. Thanks to his shortcut, he was still on schedule.

  “You won’t think less of me if I give it a try, will you?” he said. “It only takes a minute, right?”

  “I’ll cover you, Father,” Cal said, and nodded for him to go ahead.

  Pete felt, at that moment, as if his feet were not his own. He was utterly compelled to enter the machine, but why? He’d not thought much of it at all before. He figured it might be something about the newness of this day, its utter originality, that made him willing to try it. His need to help Trina, the overwhelming reminder of his wife, his friendship with Douglas. Maybe all of these things had been in him before but, as he approached the machine, they all seemed to bud in unison and Pete felt good.

  After all, he already knew what it would say.

  It was possible that some other fate could be waiting for him on that blue slip of paper, but Pete doubted it. More so than he had in a long time, Pete got the sense that he knew exactly who he was and that he was okay with this person. So, he entered the machine and followed the instructions and had to take only one quick glance at the paper to know he was right. And then he prayed and thanked God in the sincere way only the rarest humans do.

  He put the slip in his pocket and left the store and went out to the parking lot, where he saw a moving truck backing up to the entrance. That fellow he met the night before at Getwell’s with Deuce, Jack, he thought, or maybe it was Jim, was directing the few passing cars to go around the truck and he waved Pete across.

  The two men nodded at each other in a way that suggested neither could remember the other’s name and Pete opened the door of the Outback and sat in. He was going to have to swing around the moving truck if he was going to get out on the side he needed to, but Jack or Jim, or whatever his name was, would just have to deal with it. Pete had places to be, maybe even a soul to save, and had to get there in a hurry.

  He cranked up the Outback and revved the engine with his foot.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what this sucker can do.”

  26

  Little Pictures Have Big Ears

  After school, Jacob walked home like a ghost. He spoke to no one, looked at no one, made no sound at all. When he rounded the corner at Oxbow
Street, he saw his father tooling around in the garage, hammering away at a couple of 2x4s, but didn’t have the courage to face him.

  What would he even say? I’m caught up in something, Dad, that I don’t understand. What would he confess? I’ve entertained horrible thoughts, Dad. I’ve let things get out of hand. What was his reason? The world after Toby, Dad, did not feel real. I was so confused. I was so angry. What was his problem? The world we are living in now, Dad, the one with Trina in it, with the dickheads in it, with questions in it, with me in it, seems even worse. What was his solution? I want out, Dad. I want back in. I want to be left alone. I want to be included.

  The simple truth, Jacob knew, held too many truths within it.

  And how would his father reply?

  ­Yippee ki yay?

  That wouldn’t do.

  Yet Jacob was not good at lying. He had his father’s honesty. Perhaps people would recognize that. As such, he’d spent the last few hours at school in a panic, sitting through the remainder of his classes with his head on his desk, his arms wrapped around his stomach as if it were cramping. He was sweaty and nervous and the opposite of inconspicuous, he knew, despite the fact Principal Pat was looking for the very thing in his backpack, the very thing he was on video handling. Jacob couldn’t help it. He wanted to play it cool, to wear some sort of unreadable poker face until he figured things out, but he did feel sick.

  What did it mean, anyway, for Trina to suggest that Jacob could be his brother? To leave that note in Toby’s locker. Did she plan for him to find it or not? Had Jacob outfoxed her, somehow, outsmarted her? Or, he worried, did she now have yet another thing on him?

  He had no idea.

  Was her handmade readout, so obviously considered and carefully written, some dream of hopeful potential for Jacob or some sort of threat? All of the fear he’d felt upon seeing himself on video became muddied by more positive notions. Is hope why she’d decided to befriend him in the first place, Jacob wondered, to kiss him, to trust him, because he might turn out to be like Toby? Is that why she’d said their similarity was a “problem”? Did she feel so attracted to Toby that Jacob, just by looking like him, made her feel the same way? And if that were true, was his best version, then, just a stand-in for someone else, a reflection? To put it in mathematical terms: Was Jacob a victim of the associative property? And, if so, what did she want him to copy about his brother? Not his gregarious personality, surely, not his musculature. What could he even mimic if he tried? Or did Trina perhaps believe that their similar DNA made them the exact same person, as if one day Jacob would emerge from his dark cocoon to finally become the Toby version of himself?

  If so, then why did she draw him into her scheming? If Toby’s friends really did have something to do with his death, if they hazed him into the darkness: Was that it? If the dickheads had done something to Toby, did Trina believe that the closest thing to justice would be for Toby himself, or at least the most similar version of him possible, to get his revenge? Toby and the girl that nobody else liked? Was she just making sure that Jacob couldn’t say no when the time came?

  Every single one of them, she’d said. Every single one.

  The more Jacob thought of this, the more awful sense it made. But how could he explain it to his father? To anyone? He could not.

  So, Jacob kept to the far side of the street and swiped open his phone to see if Trina had written back, but she hadn’t. His unreturned texts to her now read to him as embarrassed and needy, morphing from WTF? You spying on me now? to Lol Howd u film that? to Please don’t post. Seriously. Lets talk. to, finally, Where are you?

  Trina was apparently nowhere.

  He put his phone back in his pocket and saw that the trailer his dad parked in their driveway was now nearly emptied of wood. No telling what awful project his father had conceived. So, Jacob walked past their house and doubled back to enter through the front door, the way only strangers did. Once inside, Jacob comported himself as such. He did not go to the kitchen to make a snack or start dinner or click on the TV as he usually would. Instead, he walked down the hallway, past his own room and directly to Toby’s.

  Toby’s door had been shut since the day he and his father tried packing his stuff and, when Jacob placed his hand on the knob, he had the outrageous idea that he was about to enter a place he’d never been before. In this way, Jacob wished more for the world. He wished for it to be less reliable in its indifference, less predictable in its offerings, less disappointing even in its physics. Why couldn’t it be a world where he opened this door to a previous time? Why not open the door to a memory of he and Toby wrestling with each other on the floor, rolling over LEGOs and knocking books off the shelf like two pups in their play? Surely this day had existed and, if so, why could it exist only once? Was the world so limited, so unimaginative, that it could not be revised? And if that was too much to ask, to go back so far, then why not a less ambitious stretching of time? Why not a scene from just two months ago, on the night Toby was killed, for instance. Why not a chance for Jacob to make him stay home or, if not that, to at least say ­good-­bye? Why can we not be afforded in life the simple luxury of edits, of knowing then what we will inevitably know now? Jacob thought he might be able to handle this world, to navigate it, if all its possibilities were suddenly new.

  The room he entered, however, was only a room.

  Nothing magical had fallen into its place.

  Dresser drawers lay opened like tongues. Shoes littered the unmade bed. Posters of athletes palmed the walls, a row of trophies sat atop the bookshelf. It all looked so familiar, yet Jacob had the feeling he was trespassing. He took off his backpack and sat on the edge of Toby’s bed and sensed that he might be breathing different air now, thicker in that room than in any other place in the house, as if unchanged and unfiltered those past months while waiting for someone to open the door. Jacob wondered if this air was so old that he might be breathing in bits of his brother in some microscopic way, all of us wrapped up in our dust.

  He looked around the place. Could this have been his own room, as Trina’s readout suggested? Could he have been this person? Should he have been this person instead? Would people be happier if it was Toby who still were alive? Trina, surely, Toby’s friends, yes, but what about his father? The idea was too obvious to ignore and Jacob’s eyes began to ache. His throat tightened. He took deep breaths through his nose and when was the last time he’d cried? At the funeral? In his restless sleep? He gripped the edge of his brother’s bed and rocked back and forth, trying to hold it in. From any distance at all, Jacob looked like he was preparing to jump.

  But he did not.

  He instead sat that way for minutes, breathing heavily, fists clenched on the sheets, until he felt his phone go off in his pocket.

  Finally, he thought, Trina.

  He pulled out his phone to check the text, but it was from Denny.

  Yo J, it read. Whats up with yr Twitter feed? All ok?

  Why was Jacob, Jacob wondered, surrounded by idiots?

  He quickly thumbed back, Not on Twitter, and this was true. He’d fiddled around with it some but found everyone’s tweets so grossly ignorant or ­self-­righteous with virtually no space in between that he’d gotten off it altogether. He’d not opened the app in a year and felt a sort of pride in being Twitter free.

  Denny typed back. Then whos @j_richieu2?

  Jacob had no idea. He thumbed his way on to Twitter and searched it. Sure enough, there was a @j_richieu2 that had been active for only two weeks. The profile photo was a picture of Incineroar, a ­fire-­type Pokémon that Jacob had no love for. His profile description was the Pokémon slogan Gotta Catch ’Em All! which made Jacob wonder if it was a bot, a totally random account that had somehow matched his name. After all, this was not a phrase he had ever uttered aloud in his life, as it was more for the Pokémon cartoon and app and not for the card game. If anyone though
t this was Jacob from merely the profile, then they obviously didn’t know much about him. The account had nearly one hundred followers, though, a number Jacob never reached when it was actually him, and it followed no one. Jacob checked his followers and most of them were kids he knew from school, Denny among them, with an awful Meowth profile pic of his own. He saw that the account had tweeted a dozen or so times and, when he opened them up to scroll through them, the sink in Jacob’s stomach returned.

  It was no wonder people thought it was him.

  Nearly his entire feed, what looked like a tweet per day, read only: RIP Toby.

  He punched the tweets that had replies, the most active being the very first the account had sent out. His RIP Tobys were answered by classmates with meaningless emojis of praying hands or crucifixes, some with yellow crying faces. Some of them said Never Forget or Always my bro but, as the days went by, the enthusiasm waned and turned to what everything else turned into on Twitter: a sort of smoldering and ironic ­open-­mic session. One ­reply read What do you expect when you get hammered and drive? Another said God is in the fact that no one else was hurt. This was followed by a gif of a hand dropping a microphone, posted by someone who obviously agreed that Toby had gotten what he deserved. Jacob had no idea who had posted this reply but was tempted to track them down, turn them inside out in front of their families, and deposit a mic where he could best fit it. This awful urge only reminded him of why he got off Twitter in the first place, though, and so he moved on.

  He scrolled down to see a change in the tweets. The last few read differently. One said 3 days left. Enjoy them. The next said 2 days left. Jacob looked at the dates and realized they were counting down to today and this is when he knew things would not end well.