The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

  His dad took off his hat, held it by its top, and tapped it lightly on the bar.

  “You remind me of her in that way, I suppose,” he said. “It might not make sense to you, but that story reminds me. It’s about the heart of you both. And I feel afraid, I reckon, because talking to you often feels like talking to her, and I don’t ever want to let either one of you down.”

  A sense of guilt as dark as the oncoming night blanketed Jacob’s chest, as it was not his father, he felt, who should be apologizing for anything.

  “Dad,” Jacob said. “I want to talk to you, too.”

  His dad perked up his eyes. He slapped Jacob lightly on the thigh. “See?” he said. “The Sleepy Possum is a magical place! Lay your saddle down, Son. I’m here.”

  “There’s this girl,” Jacob said. “A girl Toby was hanging around with. A girl named Trina.”

  His father nodded to say he knew of her and breathed deeply through his nose as if to acknowledge that he already recognized this would not be a happy story.

  Where to begin, Jacob thought. The phone calls? The duffel bag? The video? The Twitter account? The shotgun? The way these terrible options turned over in his mind was mirrored by the way the music in the room changed. The ragtime piano faded out and was replaced by the sound of a horse neighing again and again, until his father reached over the bar and unplugged his phone from a speaker, and Jacob realized this was his ringtone.

  His dad looked at the screen and grimaced. He held the phone lightly, as if he might set it down, but then said, “Hell’s bells. It’s the law. I better take it.”

  Jacob stood up from his stool as his father opened the call and said, “Sheriff. What can I do you for?”

  His dad held out his hand to ask Jacob to wait, to sit back down, but Jacob did not. Although he knew there were a thousand reasons the sheriff might call the mayor on a night like tonight, when the whole town was about to come alive in a way it hadn’t before, Jacob had the awful feeling that perhaps the reason the sheriff was calling was him.

  He began toward the house and saw his father look up at the old clock above the bar. “No,” his father said. “I’m still at home. I know they’ve got the choir doing something. I know things are kicking off. I plan to be there before it’s over.”

  Jacob walked up the steps and put his hand on the door to the kitchen. “No,” his father said. “I haven’t talked to Deuce since his performance at the meeting today. I know he’s been calling but there’s only so much a man can take on state’s salary.”

  Jacob looked back at his dad, who furrowed his eyebrows like he was being asked something unexpected. “No,” his dad said. “Jacob is here with me.”

  With this, Jacob opened the door and walked quickly through the house. It was all coming for him, he knew. Every part of him that he wished did not exist was finally coming to claim him and he felt torn wildly between the urge to hide everything in his possession and to show it. This is how we got here, he could say. Take these from me, please. Help me understand how to put them together. Help me understand how it came to this.

  His father opened the door behind him and Jacob ran down the hall to Toby’s room.

  He heard his father say, “Duffel bag? I don’t know, Randy. Do you know every single purse that your girls have lying around the house?”

  Jacob quickly unplugged Toby’s phone and stuck it in his pocket. He looked down at his backpack, which held the blue duffel bag, and picked it up, too. He saw his own phone sitting on the bed and grabbed it to see a series of messages he had missed while outside. All from Trina.

  The hollow log, the first read.

  7 o’clock, the second.

  The last, Somebody needs to be held ­responsible . . .

  Jacob saw his father’s shadow approach the hall. There was no way out of the house in which Jacob could avoid him and so he went to Toby’s window. He threw it open and ducked his head to crawl on the sill. If he could just get to Trina, he thought. If he could just talk to her.

  “No,” his father said. “You know I’m not on Twitter. What the hell do you mean, keep him here?”

  Jacob gripped the ledge of the window and rocked back and forth just as he had done on his brother’s bed. He then heard his father’s boots in the hall, the click of his spurs, all the rain that was not even there, and into the life he now understood he had made for himself, Jacob jumped.

  30

  Souvenirs

  There is a theory about dreams:

  Some say that our dreams are so hard to describe to other people once we awake, so hard to communicate clearly, because they lack a consistent frame of reference. They are like a house of the mind with no foundation.

  To put it another way, imagine yourself walking across a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. As you do this, the picture before you is clear, in all of its interlocking shapes, and so you understand where you are. Your dream, in this way, is not confusing while you are in it. Unbeknownst to you, however, these pieces are silently slid out and replaced by new images as soon as you pass them. So, when you get to the end of your dream and turn back to assess it, to recall the picture upon which you traveled, nothing is how you remembered. That’s why you find yourself, that next morning, saying things like, “I had this dream where we were in our house, but it wasn’t really our house. And you were there but you didn’t really look like you. Still, I knew it was you. You don’t understand. I could feel it.”

  Normally, this is when the other person stops listening.

  Who can blame them?

  Our dreams, because they are ours and ours alone, and because they are constantly shifting in a way that we pretend we are not also shifting when we are awake, are impossible to share. This is not a fault or flaw of our memory but is instead the way our minds preserve us, protect us, like our own hands automatically do, when we shade our eyes from the sun.

  As for Douglas, he felt that his day was like a dream in reverse.

  Everything that had transpired over the past two hours, everything he was given access to at Geoffrey’s, was the stuff of his ­fantasies. Yet rather than this being difficult for Douglas to describe, it would have been the easiest thing in the world. He could draw this dream in every detail. The balanced weight of the trombone in his hands. The glint of light off the drummer’s snare. The click of the bass player’s fingers as she thumbed the upright. The sights, the sounds, the smells. They were all there for him to relay in the way that few dreams ever are.

  Even what came after this, when Douglas couldn’t get Pete on the phone. After he accepted a ride to his house with the band. The way he pulled down the tip of his beret and ducked his head to climb into the Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ van, their name stenciled on the sides above a treble clef. The way the other residents of the Scenic Wetlands Apartments and Balconies had gathered out on the walkway, as well, to watch them load their instruments. This was the culmination of a million dream images for Douglas and he wanted, so badly, to be happy that they were so similar to what he’d always imagined. The disarray of cords and instrument cases behind the ­third-­row seats. The bumper stickers from nightclubs with sayings like “Drummers Do It in Rhythm” used to cover up tears in the upholstery. The smell of old smoke and sweat. The way the engine cranked up as if it were several engines, rumbling to life in the parking lot, making children playfully cover their ears before they could even hear the real music which flickered to life on the radio, tuned to 90.7 WWOZ out of New Orleans. Before they could hear the opening beat of “Hey Pocky A-­Way” by the Meters, circa 1974, which began on cue as if it had been waiting for them. And maybe it had, because this was a song that had a part for each person in that van to play. The drummer slapped his hands on his thighs in rhythm with the opening snare, Geoffrey fingered an imaginary piano on the seat beside Douglas, the bassist plucked at the top of the steering wheel. The way that none of them said a word but for Dougl
as to give directions to his house that whole time and the way that, somehow, by the end of the song, they had already arrived. All of these details were there for him to describe.

  But where was Douglas in this?

  Of all the outlandish turns in his afternoon, the one that Douglas would have the most difficulty describing and therefore felt the most like an unfortunate dream, was his conversation with Cherilyn. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  He’d gone back into Geoffrey’s after Cherilyn hung up and listened to them play for a while but politely turned down their requests for him to jam again. The music was good and he smiled along as best he could but as soon as an hour had passed and Pete had not come back, Douglas became antsy. Something in the tone of her voice he’d not heard before. He went outside to call Pete and got no answer, but this didn’t worry him. He was a priest, after all, and who knew how good they were with cell phones? After the second time he walked back into Geoffrey’s apartment, still looking down at his phone, Geoffrey told the band, “That’s a wrap, folks. I believe our whistler’s got another gig to get to.”

  When they pulled into his driveway, Douglas climbed out and thanked them all, said he would see them on center stage tomorrow, and then noticed an odd thing.

  His car was gone.

  How had she gotten it started?

  He thought to call and ask. He wanted to call and ask Cherilyn a lot of things, but he also had the distinct impression that she wanted some space. Whatever she was doing at her mother’s house, he had offered to come join her and she had declined. So, he would give her that. He could give people things, couldn’t he? Sure he could. As an example, he had also given his keys to Pete and so had to walk around to the backyard to get the spare, which they kept beneath a small concrete statue of a jaunty-looking frog with a fishing pole.

  Douglas entered the back door of his home as he had done so many thousands of times before, hung his blazer on the back of the chair, and was overcome by the silence. He looked toward the kitchen, where it should be wine time, where he would normally see Cherilyn waiting for him. No, not waiting for him, he thought, but living her life with him. Where he would see her drawing an end to her day, like he was, so that they could share the evening. And she was not there.

  Yet so much of her scattered around.

  Douglas looked down at the breakfast table. Six birdhouses there, all facing one another as if arranged in a small neighborhood, and he was touched by the strange beauty of the scene. Each house basically the same structure but made unique by Cherilyn’s flourishes. The roof of one was shingled entirely of plastic flower petals that Douglas recognized from the pens she had sold a couple of years ago. A large ­heart-­shaped wreath on the front of another made entirely, it seemed, of the type of ­twist-­ties one found on bread bags. There had to be hundreds of the little ties, Douglas realized, shaped and braided together by his wife’s hands. How had he not noticed her doing this? Or, if he had, how had he not mentioned how ingenious he found her? Douglas was now struck by the image of his wife as a person who saw material everywhere: the anecdotes he told her from school, the pens that had gone unsold, the colorful ties he had so often thrown away, and then of her gathering these materials to make a better life for him, a better life for birds. This notion of her giving spirit, her generosity, filled his chest.

  Then he saw something else.

  Also on the table, beside the birdhouses, sat two coffee cups.

  He’d not had coffee that morning. He’d been so hungover he couldn’t have kept it down. He thought it was unlike her to use two cups and tilted one of them over so he could see inside of it. At the bottom, the oily dregs of black coffee. In the other, the familiar tan veneer of settled milk, how both he and Cherilyn drank it. And again how peculiar, as it had been in Tipsy’s car, to think of Cherilyn’s moments without him as if filled with mystery. Who had come over today? he wondered. Surely, it was not her mother, as Cherilyn would have broken her back scrubbing the place just to avoid her mother’s ­off-­handed comments about housekeeping. Maybe a girlfriend. A neighbor?

  Douglas might not have entertained another question about this cup if he was the same man he was that morning. But he was not the same man. This was not because of his readout or his students or even the band, really, but because he was now a man whose wife had asked to stop whistling. And, as is the case with the vast majority of communication between spouses, it is not the words that are said that change things but the tone with which they reach you. Douglas had been bothersome to his wife on the phone, and he knew this. So, he rinsed out her cup in the sink and kept the one with black coffee sitting unwashed on the counter so that he could mention it later.

  He turned and leaned against the counter. Cherilyn was right, Douglas thought; they had things to talk about. Her readout, for one, which he had again decided he would listen to. If that’s what caused her to sound that way on the phone, then he wanted to do whatever he could to make sure it never happened again. He would not only hear her out but would encourage her. However she wanted to interpret the idea of being royal, whatever changes she wanted to make. He would support her. He would not say a negative thing tonight. All he wanted, he knew, was to see her happy.

  As for his own readout, he would tell her that, too. No more lying. No more omissions. He would confess where he had been the night before, as well. He would come clean and tell her the terrible truth: that the person she sounded so aggravated with on the phone was the best thing he could ever become. I’m sorry, he would say, if that disappoints you.

  But not in this dirty kitchen.

  Douglas decided instead that, as a way of combatting the emptiness he felt in the house without her, he would fill it with expectation. He would welcome her home in the way she so often did for him. If she wanted to be royal, then he would welcome her royally. He looked at the clock and figured he still had an hour, if she was going to be a bit late. He wet a towel and quickly wiped down the counters. He organized the cooking magazines. He went to the breakfast table and carefully removed the birdhouses, then took a tan tablecloth from the pantry and laid it over the table. He placed the birdhouses back on the cloth in the same manner she had arranged them and they now looked like a little suburban oasis out in the desert somewhere.

  He walked back to their bedroom and straightened his side of the room and opened the closet. He took out his nicest suit, a gray ­two-­piece that he wore to weddings and funerals and knew Cherilyn liked. He chose a pink shirt that Cherilyn had once given him for his birthday but that he had never had the confidence to wear and hung it on the closet door.

  He then reached behind his sweatshirts at the top of the closet to pull out his little lockbox. Not much in it. A ticket stub from a date he and Cherilyn went on to see Les Misérables, when Douglas had promised himself to dedicate more time to his art, which he had not done before last week. A few letters from his parents from before they passed and, beneath it all, two flattened coins.

  The coins were two once-ordinary quarters that he and Cherilyn had run through a souvenir machine on their first date, some twenty and more years ago by now, when he had surprised her by driving her a few towns over to the carnival in Fluker, Louisiana. The coins had been hand cranked by the both of them, flattened to wafers with embossed words that read: “Where the Fun Begins!” Douglas had put the coins in his pocket and, that night, when he was at home in his parents’ house and remembering her, made two small holes in the top so that they could be made into necklaces. He figured to give them to her on their next date, but it went so well that he didn’t feel the need to. And this next date turned into years in which Douglas always pushed off the gift, feeling that it was growing more powerful as time passed because it wasn’t what the coins said, exactly, nor even that they were from their first date that endowed them with power, but that he remembered this as the first time they had physically touched each other, when he tried cranking th
e wheel by himself and thought it was stuck. When she placed her hand on top of his and smiled, and said, “How about we try this together, you weakling?”

  He’d recently been planning to hold off until their ­twenty-­fifth wedding anniversary to give this to her and secretly hoped, in his greatest imaginings, that he could hold off until their fiftieth. But now, Douglas felt clearly, he wanted to give her this tonight.

  He set them on top of his suit and went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. He then took off his pants and his shirt. He looked at himself in the mirror.

  What he would give to trade this body for another. Or, if not another, then maybe the previous version of his own, the body Cherilyn had originally fallen for. The one he most recalled, without telling her, from a time they went tubing down a river, the name of which he couldn’t remember. When she had looked at him, his face and his body, and bit her bottom lip in a way that said I like everything about you.

  The body he looked at now, however, had an unfortunately comedic aspect. The pear shape of his hips was like soft jowls. Even his breasts, he thought, sat on his chest like two tired eyes. The hair down his stomach was laid out as if a broad nose, and his belly button, he saw clearly now, was a small and quiet mouth. His naked torso was like a separate face entirely, looking back at him, and when did it become this way? He cupped his hands around his love handles and gave them a shake. How many meals in the school cafeteria? How many ­skillet-­burger Wednesdays? He looked down and pressed at the sides of his belly button as if to make it speak. He gave it a ­belly-­button voice.

  “Well, now,” it said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Holy shit, Douglas thought. I have become ridiculous. What woman could a body like this seduce? He looked back up at himself in the mirror and cracked up laughing. He couldn’t help it.

  He had forgotten to take off his beret.