Everyday People (23 page)

“You can have it.”

“Tony, no disrespect, but I can't use it.”

“Sal, listen. What do you usually do with something like this?”

They went back and forth on who would pay to have it taken away. Finally Sal said he wouldn't charge him for the towing, seeing he was a good customer.

While he was on the phone, Tony had been pacing. Now when he got off, he had to sit down. That was it, he thought. He'd retire, spend his mornings at the St. Clair, read the paper over a cup of coffee, play the numbers every day like those old bums, smoking their stogies by the bowling alley. Outside, the rain came down, beading the telephone wires. The apartment was dark, and he imagined this was what the rest of his life would be like—Renée coming home tired from work and having to cook him dinner. All because of the boy.

How many times did he have to replay it in his mind? The truck dipped, and he still didn't suspect anything. Then the exhaust hot on his shin, his surprise that the tire was moving—the emergency brake, he'd thought, the children, one of them could be crushed—and he turned and ran. The memory had become a dream, the one scene repeated in the slow motion of a nightmare. He would run and run yet never reach the door, he'd only see the boy, his long fingers on the wheel, the Seahawk's fierce beak, and then he was falling, waking up.

He was thinking of Miami, of himself in a bathrobe on the beach, when the phone rang. It was the police. They'd picked up a suspect, if he could come down and identify him.

“Of course,” Tony said, like he'd thought hard about it.

He tried not to drive too fast, and then it took him forever to find a parking spot outside the precinct house. The sergeant at the desk pointed him through the doors with his
pen, and there was the officer who'd helped him look for Rita's St. Christopher. He had a clipboard and talked while they walked down the hall.

“We got an anonymous call that this juvenile might be involved,” he said, and Tony thought it had to be his Vanessa. She'd saved him twice now, he'd tell Renée.

The officer led him into a dark room with a single window, a heavy green shade pulled down in front of it. “We need to know if this is him, so you need to be positive. If it's not him, you need to tell us that.”

He pulled the shade up, and there in the window sat the boy in jeans and a Steeler jacket, the same kind. Where did he get all these jackets from? He was in a hallway by a candy machine, watching people walk past, and Tony thought he didn't look anything like the men in the pictures. There were no plans in his face, just a scowl, half pouting, like a child. When the hall was empty, his face changed, and he looked around, worried, and stubbed his nose with the heel of his hand, sniffed in with his shoulders as if he had a cold. Tony thought of his frozen Milk Duds, his hand out for the change.

“Is that the one?” the officer asked.

“What's going to happen to him?”

“So that is him.”

“Yes.”

“Seeing as he's a juvenile, he'll probably be sent to a juvenile detention center, depending on his record.”

“Not jail.”

“Not the jail we think of as jail.”

“I don't want him to go to jail.”

“That depends on the judge, but I'd say that's rare in this type of case.”

He had to sign a form on the clipboard, and then he was free to go, suddenly outside and in the Big Baby, shaking from the swiftness, the finality of the whole thing. He wondered what they were doing to the boy, if they would take his clothes away and put him in a cell, call his mother. He resented the boy even more for forcing him to do this. He didn't want to, even after seeing the truck. He had no choice.

Back home, he thought it wasn't right that he should feel bad after what had happened. He wondered if Vanessa or whoever it was that called felt the same way. Probably not.

No, probably, because they knew his people.

He called Sal and asked him if he'd done anything with the truck.

“You just told me not to.”

“Hold on to it, all right?”

“Make up your mind.”

“A day or two,” Tony said. “I'm in no condition to make a decision here.”

He told Renée everything over dinner, and found himself downplaying how bad the truck was. She asked how much it would cost, and he said Sal couldn't give him a number.

“I knew they'd find it,” she said.

“And someone did turn him in. You know that wouldn't happen around here.”

She pointed her fork at him, chewing. “Around here no one would steal it.”

“Someone called, that's all I'm saying.”

“Why do I think you'll listen to me? Because maybe I'm your daughter?”

“I listen to you all the time—what do you think, I don't?”

“Ahh,” she said, and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “You'd be back there tomorrow if it was running.”

It was true, he thought, if the weather was good enough. Why did it surprise him that his daughter knew her father? At one time she hadn't. That was past.

The next day it was brilliant. All afternoon the temperature climbed, the sun cutting in the windows, angling down the hall so it lit a strip of his dresser. The butterflies came off, leaving a gray patch of adhesive he scrubbed with rubbing alcohol; already the cut was healing. He pulled on his work clothes—the white pants and the shirt with his name sewn in red over the heart, the white gloves—and made sure he had enough change for the apron. He took the Big Baby, a cooler in the trunk, filling it with popsicles at the Giant Eagle.

He turned down Spofford and saw the children chasing each other along the sidewalk, jumping double-dutch, a group of mothers and older girls sitting on the steps in the sun, enjoying the last of Indian summer. He slowed and put his captain's hat on, rolled his window down and stopped in front of them. He wished he had his bells, but his horn made them turn around. They gave him this look like
Who are you?
No one moved until he got out of the car to open the trunk. Then they recognized him.

The mothers stood up, digging in their pockets like always. The children quit their games, dropped their balls and jump ropes and came running, laughing and jostling and calling his name. “Candyman!” they shouted, “Candyman!”

“Yes, children,” Tony said, as they flocked around him. “Yes. The Candyman is here.”

EVERY TUESDAY AND
Thursday after work he went with Chris in the city van, bumping his chair down the front stairs of their building while Chris lay back like an astronaut, staring up at the sky. It was not his choice; Eugene had gotten a job out at the airport, Jackie was back on first shift. Five days a week, until dinner, it was just Chris and him.

Besides this trip, Chris only left the house with Vanessa, Saturdays, their walk in the park. The city had finally started work on the lift, the workers mysteriously appearing one morning, then gone the next. Harold thought Chris had gained weight, his head resting on an extra lip of chin, but didn't mention it to Jackie. At rehab he was learning how to do for himself, cooking on a special stove he could reach, doing laundry in an ingenious pair of machines, but at home Jackie didn't let him near the dirty clothes, left him lunches already plastic-wrapped for the microwave. Harold was just as guilty, popping up from the couch during commercials to see if Chris wanted anything.

He didn't. He stayed in his room, working on his mural. He'd taped together pages from his big sketchpad and tacked them across the back wall at chest level so he could lie on his bed and pencil in figures. There were famous people and people like Bean. “And right there,” he'd say, “I'm going to put in Benjamin Davis.”

“Who?” Harold would say, and Chris would show him a picture from one of the books Vanessa brought over. The face on the wall looked exactly the same, but of the thirty people so far, Harold only recognized Bean, Minister Farrakhan with his big-ass glasses, and Curtis Martin, number 28 of the Patriots, who grew up here. He thought of his own father, how disappointed he'd be that Harold had wasted his education. He had no excuses, only a few useless tales of Vietnam—and actually they were from Thailand, from the airbase where as a mechanic he assisted the plane captain of an A-6, bucking rivets and drizzling stripped fasteners with Loctite so they didn't pop during bombing runs. He'd had a shot at college when he came back, VA benefits, but it seemed childish after Thailand, so he got a job, married, raised his children. It was a full life, despite what his father or Dre might say. There was still some honor in it that might be salvaged, if he could just keep his eye on what was important.

That was his hope now, especially on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and today, sitting in the van with Chris, he suddenly felt calm, at peace, as if the war inside him between Dre and Jackie had been decided (not by him, he couldn't say that, but by events) and he'd been given a fresh start. He honestly felt, for an instant as they turned off Penn
Circle, that the life he needed to live was the one he desired, that he would grow into it like a beautiful suit. Beside him, Chris sat hunched over a book in his chair, old photographs of jazz greats, some of them from Pittsburgh, like Roy Eldridge there.

Harold pointed at Little Jazz. “Your grandfather used to go see him at the old Hurricane Lounge. He'd come through four, five times a year when his mother was still alive.”

“You ever hear him?”

“Few times. Man could blow fire.”

Chris seemed happy at the fact, impressed, and as he turned the pages, tipped the book toward Harold to ask if he'd seen Erroll Garner, Stanley Turrentine, Ahmad Jamal. He nodded, told stories, though mostly they were secondhand. His father had heard them, an aficionado, his 78s clean as dishes. He'd hole up in his study and crank the Victrola, sit at his desk, smoking and nodding along with solos blown years ago. When he died, his mother drove the collection over to the church rummage sale in the back of the wagon, as if glad for the opportunity to clean out the house. How many thousands of dollars? Harold had been in Thailand, though the distance didn't matter; they'd hardly talked since he quit school to enlist. Despite everything, his father would be pleased that Harold was sharing some of him with his own son, and this seemed further proof of the rightness of his new life.

At the rehab he watched Chris struggle with a device like they used in old grocery stores to reach things on the top shelf. It was about ten feet long and retractable, and had
a pistol grip you squeezed. They were doing it in a model kitchen, just one wall; the thing was supposed to save you from having to roll back and forth all the time. As he watched Chris fish for a pepper shaker, his own face wrinkled in concentration, his own fingers clenched an invisible grip, and when the shaker fell and spilled a spray across the stovetop, like Chris, he wanted another chance.

This was what a father was supposed to do, he thought, not the other thing. Was it so hard to remember? And yet at times he wished he was outside, lost in a cigar, night falling behind the streetlights, the steeple of Presby a black knife against the sky.

They couldn't fix Chris; the money wasn't the problem.

Chris gripped the pepper shaker, hit the button so the arm retracted, then slowly, carefully, dropped the entire thing into the boiling pot of noodles.

“Fuck this,” he said, and made to spin away, but his therapist shoved the brake on so he froze.

“Try that again,” Willa Mae said, tough, as if he'd meant it personally. She was one of those wiry, sexless women Harold had always been afraid of. Dried-up-looking, skin grainy and flaking to ash on her hard forearms. Women like that took a switch to their kids, killed their own chickens. She plucked the shaker from the pot and set another on the counter, this one a little closer, the angle that much easier.

Chris lifted the device like a speargun, touching the button so the slide inched its way over the counter. When he was close, he opened the hinged gripper. Clicked the button once, twice, little baby steps, afraid he'd knock it over. Chris was getting tired; the gripper wavered. Another
touch of the button. Harold tilted his chin, giving it some English, and it bracketed the pepper neatly. Chris pulled the trigger.

“Beautiful,” Willa Mae said. “Now bring it back and you'll be all done.”

Chris didn't acknowledge her, just thumbed the button so the shaker zipped back to him. He swiveled in his chair, facing the stove, and, turning one fist like jerking a kite away from a tree, added a dash of pepper to the water.

“Very good, Chris,” she said.

“Nice,” Harold added, patting his shoulder, but Chris just handed the device to her.

In the van, Harold said Willa Mae thought he was making real progress.

“Oh yeah,” Chris said. “I'm gonna be the next Chef Boyardee.”

Back home, Jackie had left a chicken pie in the oven and a note by the phone; she and Eugene were at church, her at choir and Eugene running his new youth group. Harold knew this; it was just her way of saying she was thinking of him, implying she forgave him. Generous of her, and kind to remind him again, as if for one merciful second he might forget. He laid out the plates and the two of them sat at the kitchen table. And this too was right, that he should have to face his failings instead of running away, outside, into the night or someone else's arms. He didn't know what to say to Chris, never had, and now most of the usual subjects seemed cruel—What did you do today? What are you going to do tomorrow?—and so Harold relied on the two things Chris was still interested in.

“Who'd you draw today?” he asked.

“Elijah McCoy.” Chris let it sit there, teasing him. He swept his food in, his mouth low to the plate. It was one reason he was getting so big, he ate way too fast.

“Okay,” Harold said, “I don't know him.”