A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (37 page)

Ruckelbar went upstairs and knocked at his wife’s door and then, surprising himself, went into the dark room. She was in bed and he sat beside her, but could do no more. He knew she was awake and he willed himself to put his arm around her, but he could not, pulling his fists up instead to his face and smelling in his knuckles all the scents of Bluestone.

IN THE
early afternoon, a Chevy Two convertible pulls in to the gas pumps. At first Ruckelbar thinks it is two nuns, but when the two women get out laughing in their full black dresses, he sees they are gotten up as witches. One puts her tall black hat on and pulls a broom from the backseat ready to mug for any passing cars. Ruckelbar steps over. The bareheaded witch is switching on the pump. “Let me get that for you,” he offers. “You’ll smell like gasoline at your party.”

“Great,” the girl says. They are both about his daughter’s age. “What are you going to be?” she asks him.

“This is it,” Ruckelbar says, indicating his gray overall.

“Okay,” the other witch says, “so what are you, the Prisoner of Bluestone?” They laugh and Ruckelbar has to laugh there in the sunshine. Girls. His daughter would not believe that he laughed with these girls; there’d be no way to explain it to her. The valve clicks off and he replaces the nozzle. As he does, the broom witch takes it from him and holds it as if to gas the broom.

“This, get this,” she says. “Let’s get out your camera, Paul.” She’s read his name in the patch. The other witch has grabbed her broom now and poses with her friend. Hearing his name and their laughter elates him and without hesitation, as if he’d planned it, he ducks into the station and retrieves the Nikon camera. He takes their picture there, two tall witches in the sunshine, and as he does, a passing car honks a salute. One of the witches steps out now seeing the bright blue station as if for the first time and says, “What is this, a movie set? I love it that you actually sell gas.” She throws her broom and hat back into the car. The other girl, the driver, reaches deep into her costume, here and there, to find her money. She has some difficulty. Her hat falls off and Ruckelbar holds it for her, finally exchanging it for the nine dollars she pays him.

“Happy Halloween,” she says, getting into the car. “I like your outfit. I hope they come to let you out someday.”

The other girl has been at the car’s radio and a song that Ruckelbar seems to remember rises around them. As the girls begin to pull away, she calls, “You can use that picture in your advertising!” And she throws him a flamboyant kiss.

All day long the traffic is desultory, five cars an hour pass Bluestone, the sound they make on Route 21 is a sound Ruckelbar knows by heart. He knows the trucks from the cars and he knows the high whine of the school buses. He knows if someone is speeding and he can tell if a car’s intention is to slow and turn in. Just before sunset he hears that sound and a little white Ford Escort coasts into the gravel yard of the station, parking to one side. There is something odd about it and Ruckelbar thinks it is more costumes, two people, one wrapped like the Mummy, but then he sees it is a rental, and when the man and the woman get out and the man has the head bandage, he knows it is the owners of the Dodge van come to get whatever they’d left inside. People come the week after an accident and get their stuff. He stands and waves at the young people and then goes to unlock the chainlink gate, trying not to look at the man’s head, which is swollen crazily over the unbandaged eye.

The woman strides directly for the van as Ruckelbar says, “Take your time, I don’t close until six. No rush.”

The woman calls from where she’s slid open the side door of the van, “Bring the basket, Jerry. It’s in the back.”

So now it’s Ruckelbar bending into the little Ford and extracting a huge plastic laundry basket because the man Jerry says he’s not supposed to bend over until the swelling subsides in a week. “I have to sleep sitting up.” Jerry’s about thirty, his skull absolutely out of whack, a wrong-way oval, the skin on his exposed forehead about to split, shiny and yellow. Ruckelbar can smell the varnish of liquor on his breath. When he pulls the basket from the small backseat to hand it to Jerry, the young man has already wandered out back.

Ruckelbar takes the basket around to the open side of the van and offers it there, but the woman is on her knees on the middle seat bent into the far back, trying to untangle the straps of a collapsed child seat. Her cotton shift is drawn up so that her bare thighs are visible to him. Her underpants are a shiny satin blue and the configuration of her white thighs and the way they meet in the blue fabric seem a disembodied mystery to Ruckelbar. Ruckelbar looks away and steps back onto the moist yellow grid of grass where the Saab sat for eight weeks. He can hear the woman now, a soft sucking, and he knows she is weeping. He sets the basket there in the twilight and he walks back to the office. He is lit and shaken; he feels as he did when the witch said his name. On his way he hears Jerry break the mirror assembly from the van door and he turns to watch the young man throw it into the woods and then spin to the ground and grab his head.

Out front the sun is gone, the day is gone, it feels nothing but late. The daylight seems used, thin, good for nothing. He carries his chair back into the office and there in the new gloom is the boy, arms folded, leaning against the counter.

“You scared me,” Ruckelbar says. “Hello.” He sets the chair behind his steel desk and switches on the office fluorescents. He’s lost for a moment and simply adds, “How are you?”

“Where’s my sister’s car?” the boy asks. He looks different close like this in the flat light; he’s taller and younger, his pale face run with freckles. He’s wearing a red plaid shirt unbuttoned over a faded black T-shirt.

“The insurance company came and got it. It was theirs.” The boy takes this in and makes a face that says he understands. “Remember, I told you about this a couple of weeks ago?” The boy nods at him and then turns to the big window and looks out. His eyes are roaming and Ruckelbar sees the desperation.

The camera sits on the old steel desk, and in a second Ruckelbar decides what to do; if the boy recognizes it, he’ll give it to him. Otherwise, he’ll let this sleeping dog be. It feels like a good decision, but Ruckelbar is floating in a new world, he can tell. They can hear the loud voices outside, the man and the woman in the back, and Ruckelbar switches on the exterior lights.

“Where would the insurance take that car?”

“I don’t know,” Ruckelbar says.

“Would they fix it?”

“Probably part it out,” Ruckelbar says. “They don’t fix them anymore, many of them.”

“It had been a good car for Sheila,” the boy says. “Better than any of her friends had.”

“I hear good things about the Saab,” Ruckelbar says. “You want a Coke, something, candy bar?”

“I don’t know why I’m out here now,” the boy says. Their reflections have come up in the big windows. Ruckelbar drops quarters in the round-shouldered soda machine, another throwback, and opens the door for the boy to choose. “Root beer,” the boy says, extracting the bottle.

“You live in Garse?” Ruckelbar asks him.

“Yeah,” the boy says. His eyes are still wide, darting, and Ruckelbar can see the rim of moisture. The world outside is now set still on the pivot point of light, the glow of the station lights running into the air out over the road through the trees all the way to the even wash of silver along the horizon of Little Bear Mountain, and above the mountain like two huge ghosts floats the mirror image of the two of them. The leaves lie still. Standing by the door Ruckelbar can feel the air falling from the dark heavens, a faint chill falling from infinity. Tomorrow night it will be dark an hour earlier.

Now Ruckelbar hears the woman’s voice from outside, around the building, a cry of some sort, and then the rental Escort does a short circle in the gravel in front of the Sunoco pumps and rips dust into the new dusk as it mounts Route 21 headed for Corbett. Ruckelbar and the boy have stepped outside. They watch the car disappear, turning on its lights after a few seconds on the pavement.

“There’s a bonfire at the quarry tonight,” Ruckelbar says. “Garse does it. You going?”

“We’d have gone with Sheila. She liked that stuff; she liked Halloween.” The boy follows him back inside.

“You want a ride home?” Ruckelbar says, knowing instantly that it is the wrong thing to say, the offer of sympathy battering the boy over the brink, and now the boy stands crying stiffly, chin down, his arms crossed tighter than anything in the world. Ruckelbar’s heart heaves; he knows about this, about living in his silent house where a kind word would have broken him.

They stand that way, as if after an explosion, not knowing what to do; all the surprises in the room have been used up. Everything that happens now will be work. Ruckelbar is particularly out of ideas; he’s not used to having anyone in the office for longer than it takes to make change. His father sometimes sat in here and chewed the fat with his cronies, DiPaulo and others, but Ruckelbar has never done it. He doesn’t have any cronies. Now he doesn’t know what to do. Ruckelbar points at the boy. “You go ahead, get the truck, bring it around front.” He hands the boy his keys. The boy looks at him, so he goes on. “It’s all right. You do it. You know my truck.” With it dark now, Ruckelbar can see himself in the front window, a man in overalls. He’s scared. It feels like something else could happen. He reaches for the phone and calls Clare, which he doesn’t do three times a year. “Clare,” he says, “I’m bringing somebody home who needs a warm meal. We’re coming. It’s not something we can talk over. We’ll be about fifteen minutes, okay, honey? Did you hear me? Can you put on some of your tea?” He has never said anything like this to Clare in his life. The only people who are ever in their house are Clare’s sister every other year and a few of Marjorie’s friends who stand in the entry a minute or two.

“Paul,” she says, and his name again jolts Ruckelbar. She goes on, “Marjorie spoke to me.”

“I’m glad for that, Clare.”

“She’s a good girl, Paul.”

“Yes, she is.”

There is a pause and then Clare adds the last. “She misses her father. She said that today.” Ruckelbar draws a quick breath and sees his truck like a ghost ship drift up front in the window. He lifts a hand to the boy in the truck. What he sees is a figure caught in the old yellow glass, a man in there. Ruckelbar thought everything was settled so long ago.

He turns off the light before he can see what the image will do, and he grabs his keys and the camera. Outside, the boy has slid to the passenger side. When Ruckelbar climbs in the boy says, in a new voice, easy and relaxed, “Nice truck. It’s in good shape.”

“It’s a ’62,” Ruckelbar says. “My dad’s truck. If you park them inside and change the oil every twenty-five hundred miles, they keep.” He puts the camera on the seat. “This was in your sister’s car.”

The boy picks it up. “Cool,” he says, hefting it. “This is a weird place,” the boy says. “Who painted it blue?”

Ruckelbar is now in gear on the hardtop of Route 21. He looks back at Bluestone once, a little building in the dark. “My father did,” he says.

ZANDUCE AT SECOND

B
Y HIS
thirty-third birthday, a gray May day which found him having a warm cup of spice tea on the terrace of the Bay-side Inn in Annapolis, Maryland, with Carol Ann Menager, a nineteen-year-old woman he had hired out of the Bethesda Hilton Turntable Lounge at eleven o’clock that morning, Eddie Zanduce had killed eleven people and had that reputation, was famous for killing people, really the most famous killer of the day, his photograph in the sports section every week or so and somewhere in the article the phrase “eleven people” or “eleven fatalities”—in fact, the word
eleven
now had that association first, the number of the dead—and in all the major league baseball parks his full name could be heard every game day in some comment, the gist of which would be “Popcorn and beer for ten-fifty, that’s bad, but just be glad Eddie Zanduce isn’t here, for he’d kill you for sure,” and the vendors would slide the beer across the counter and say, “Watch out for Eddie,” which had come to supplant “Here you go,” or “Have a nice day,” in conversations even away from the parks. Everywhere he was that famous. Even this young woman, who has been working out of the Hilton for the past eight months not reading the papers and only watching as much TV as one might watch in rented rooms in the early afternoon or late evening, not really news hours, even she knows his name, though she can’t remember why she knows it and she finally asks him, her brow a furrow, “Eddie Zanduce? Are you on television? An actor?” And he smiles, raising the room-service teacup, but it’s not a real smile. It is the placeholder expression he’s been using for four years now since he first hit a baseball into the stands and it struck and killed a college sophomore, a young man, the papers were quick to point out, who was a straight-A student majoring in chemistry, and it is the kind of smile that makes him look nothing but old, a person who has seen it all and is now waiting for it all to be over. And in his old man’s way he is patient through the next part, a talk he has had with many people all around the country, letting them know that he is simply Eddie Zanduce, the third baseman for the Orioles who has killed several people with foul balls. It has been a pernicious series of accidents really, though he won’t say that.

She already knows she’s not there for sex, after an hour she can tell by the manner, the face, and he has a beautiful actor’s face which has been stunned with a kind of ruin by his bad luck and the weight of bearing responsibility for what he has done as an athlete. He’s in the second thousand afternoons of this new life and the loneliness seems to have a physical gravity; he’s hired her because it would have been impossible not to. He’s hired her to survive the afternoon.

The day has been a walk through the tony shopping district in Annapolis, where he has bought her a red cotton sweater with tortiseshell buttons. It is a perfect sweater for May, and it looks wonderful as she holds it before her; she has short brunette hair, shiny as a schoolgirl’s, which he realizes she may be. Then a walk along the pier, just a walk, no talking. She doesn’t because he doesn’t, and early on such outings, she always follows the man’s lead. Later, the fresh salad lunch from room service and the tea. She explores the suite, poking her head into the bright bathroom, the nicest bathroom in any hotel she’s been in during her brief career. There’s a hair dryer, a robe, a fridge, and a phone. The shower is also a steamroom and the tub is a vast marble dish. There is a little city of lotions and shampoos. She smiles and he says, Please, feel free. Then he lies on the bed while she showers and dresses; he likes to watch her dress, but that too is different because he lies there imagining a family scene, the young wife busy with her grooming, not immodest in her nakedness, her undergarments on the bed like something sweet and familiar. The tea was her idea when he told her she could have anything at all; and she saw he was one of the odd ones, there were so many odd ones anymore willing to pay for something she’s never fully understood, and she’s taken the not understanding as just being part of it, her job, men and women, life. She’s known lots of people who didn’t understand what they were doing; her parents, for example. Her decision to go to work this way was based on her vision of simply fucking men for money, but the months have been more wearing than she could have foreseen with all the chatter and the posturing, some men who only want to mope or weep all through their massage, others who want to walk ahead of her into two or three nightspots and then yell at her later in some bedroom at the Embassy Suites, too many who want her to tell them about some other bastard who has abused her or broken her heart. But here this Eddie Zanduce just drinks his tea with his old man’s smile as he watches the stormy summer weather as if it were a home movie. They’ve been through it all already and he has said simply without pretension: No, that’s all right. We won’t be doing that, but you can shower later. I’ll have you in town by five-thirty.

THE ELEVEN
people Eddie Zanduce has killed have been properly eulogized, the irony in the demise of each celebrated in the tabloid press, the potentials of their lives properly inflated, and their fame—brief though it may have been—certainly far beyond any which might have accompanied their natural passing, and so they needn’t be listed here and made flesh again. They each float in the head of Eddie Zanduce in his every movement, though he has never said so, or acknowledged his burden in any public way, and it has become a kind of poor form now even in the press corps, a group not known for any form, good or bad, to bring it up. After the seventh person, a girl of nine who had gone with her four cousins to see the Orioles play New York over a year ago, and was removed from all earthly joy and worry by Eddie Zanduce’s powerhouse line drive pulled foul into the seats behind third, the sportswriters dropped the whole story, letting it fall on page one of the second section: news. And even now after games, the five or six reporters who bother to come into the clubhouse—the Orioles are having a lackluster start, and have all but relinquished even a shot at the pennant—give Eddie Zanduce’s locker a wide berth. Through it all, he has said one thing only, and that eleven times: “I’m sorry; this is terrible.” When asked after the third fatality, a retired school principal who was unable to see and avoid the sharp shot of one of Eddie Zanduce’s foul balls, if the unfortunate accidents might make him consider leaving the game, he said, “No.”

And he became so stoic in the eyes of the press and they painted him that way that there was a general wonder at how he could stand it having the eleven innocent people dead by his hand and they said things like “It would be hard on me” and “I couldn’t take it.” And so they marveled darkly at his ability to appear in his uniform, take the field at all, dive right when the hit required it and glove the ball, scrambling to his knees in time to make the throw either to first or to second if there was a chance for a double play. They noted that his batting slump worsened, and now he’s gone weeks in the new season without a hit, but he plays because he’s steady in the field and he can fill the stands. His face was the object of great scrutiny for expression, a scowl or a grin, because much could have been made of such a look. And when he was at the plate, standing in the box awaiting the pitch, his bat held rigid and ready off his right shoulder as if for business, this business and nothing else, the cameras went in on his face, his eyes, which were simply inscrutable to the nation of baseball fans.

And now, at thirty-three he lies on the queen-size bed of the Bayside Inn, his fingers twined behind his head, as he watches Carol Ann Menager come dripping into the room, her hair partially in a towel, her nineteen-year-old body a rose-and-pale pattern of the female form, five years away from any visible wear and tear from the vocation she has chosen. She warms him appearing this way, naked and ready to chat as she reaches for her lavender bra and puts it of all her clothing on first, simply as convenience, and the sight of her there bare and comfortable makes him feel the thing he has been missing: befriended.

“But you feel bad about it, right?” Carol Ann says. “It must hurt you to know what has happened.”

“I do,” he says, “I do. I feel as badly about it all as I should.”

And now Carol Ann stops briefly, one leg in her lavender panties, and now she quickly pulls them up and says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I only mean what I said and nothing more,” Eddie Zanduce says.

“What was the worst?”

He still reclines and answers: “They are all equally bad.”

“The little girl?”

Eddie Zanduce draws a deep breath there on the bed and then speaks: “The little girl, whose name was Victoria Tuttle, and the tourist from Austria, whose name was Heinrich Vence, and the Toronto Blue Jay, a man in a costume named William Dirsk, who was standing on the home dugout when my line drive broke his sternum. And the eight others all equally unlikely and horrible, all equally bad. In fact, eleven isn’t really worse than one for me, because I maxed out on one. It doesn’t double with two. My capacity for such feelings, I found out, is limited. And I am full.”

Carol Ann Menager sits on the bed and buttons her new sweater. There is no hurry in her actions. She is thinking. “And if you killed someone tonight?”

Here Eddie Zanduce turns to her, his head rolling in the cradle of his hands, and smiles the smile he’s been using all day, though it hasn’t worn thin. “I wouldn’t like that,” he says. “Although it has been shown to me that I am fully capable of such a thing.”

“Is it bad luck to talk about?”

“I don’t believe in luck, bad or good.” He warms his smile one more time for her and says, “I’m glad you came today. I wouldn’t have ordered the tea.” He swings his legs to sit up. “And the sweater, well, it looks very nice. We’ll drive back when you’re ready.”

ON THE
drive north Carol Ann Menager says one thing that stays with Eddie Zanduce after he drops her at her little blue Geo in the Hilton parking lot and after he has dressed and played three innings of baseball before a crowd of twenty-four thousand, the stadium a third full under low clouds this early in the season with the Orioles going ho-hum and school not out yet, and she says it like so much she has said in the six hours he has known her—right out of the blue as they cruise north from Annapolis on Route 2 in his thick silver Mercedes, a car he thinks nothing of and can afford not to think of, under the low sullen skies that bless and begrudge the very springtime hedgerows the car speeds past. It had all come to her as she’d assembled herself an hour before; and it is so different from what she’s imagined, in fact, she’d paused while drying herself with the lush towel in the Bayside Inn, her foot on the edge of the tub, and she’d looked at the ceiling where a heavy raft of clouds crossed the domed skylight, and one hand on the towel against herself, she’d seen Eddie Zanduce so differently than she had thought. For one thing he wasn’t married and playing the dark game that some men did, putting themselves closer and closer to the edge of their lives until something went over, and he wasn’t simply off, the men who tried to own her for the three hundred dollars and then didn’t touch her, and he wasn’t cruel in the other more overt ways, nor was he turned so tight that to enjoy a cup of tea over the marina with a hooker was anything sexual, nor was she young enough to be his daughter, just none of it, but she could see that he had made his pact with the random killings he initiated at the plate in baseball parks and the agreement left him nothing but the long series of empty afternoons.

“You want to know why I became a hooker?” she asks.

“Not really,” he says. He drives the way other men drive when there are things on their minds, but his mind, she knows, has but one thing in it—eleven times. “You have your reasons. I respect them. I think you should be careful and do what you choose.”

“You didn’t even see me,” she says. “You don’t even know who’s in the car with you.”

He doesn’t answer. He says. “I’ll have you back by five-thirty.”

“A lot of men want to know why I would do such a thing. They call me young and beautiful and talented and ready for the world and many other things that any person in any walk of life would take as a compliment. And I make it my challenge, the only one after survive, to answer them all differently. Are you listening?”

Eddie Zanduce drives.

“Some of them I tell that I hate the work but enjoy the money; they like that because—to a man—it’s true of them. Some I tell I love the work and would do it for free; and they like that because they’re all boys. Everybody else gets a complicated story with a mother and a father and a boyfriend or two, sometimes an ex-husband, sometimes a child who is sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy, and we end up nodding over our coffees or our brandies or whatever we’re talking over, and we smile at the wisdom of time, because there is nothing else to do but for them to agree with me or simply hear and nod and then smile, I do tell good stories, and that smile is the same smile you’ve been giving yourself all day. If you had your life figured out any better than I do, it would have been a different day back at your sailboat motel. Sorry to go on, because it doesn’t matter, but I’ll tell you the truth; what can it hurt, right? You’re a killer. I’m just a whore. I’m a whore because I don’t care, and because I don’t care it’s a perfect job. I don’t see anybody else doing any better. Show me somebody who’s got a grip, just one person. Survive. That’s my motto. And then tell stories. What should I do, trot out to the community college and prepare for my future as a medical doctor? I don’t think so.”