Killing Time in Crystal City (11 page)

I took a big gulp, and he joined in solidarity.

“No, on the contrary,” I responded, looking at the phone in my hand, “I've found it to be an excellent phone.”

There was a pause, then a dawning, then the two of us burst out in a huge, post-meal, tension-breaking laugh that made us sound like a whole barroom and diner all by ourselves. We got up then and started tidying up together with some grandstanding rock opera thing coming out of the radio and into us.

He let me wash the dishes while he cleaned and straightened. And poured. The music was generous, not even pausing when Jasper reached up to the shelf with one hand to return the pepper grinder and the other hand to turn up the volume and only managed to drop both items clattering down on the stove top. We laughed at that one for about an hour.

We talked, too, as the rum ran down and so did I. But that combination of factors was making comprehension and recall kind of like juggling three bowling pins when you can really only manage tennis balls. We talked about fathers. Turned out he did have one, but the rest of the story got away somewhere. Talked about the superior fathers we would be eventually. I remembered that, all of that, although the radio or the refrigerator could probably be superior to the fathers we had.

We never even left the kitchen, which surely is the sign of a successful dinner party.

My knees felt a little watery as I finished the washing and backed away from the sink. My everything felt a little watery, I noticed.

“Thanks, so so much for everything, Jasper,” I said as I sloshed in the general direction of the door.

“It's gonna turn out all right,” he said.

I turned around before getting through the kitchen doorway, and when I did, he was right there.

“What?” I said.

“Your Dad stuff. I know it looks shitty, but I still believe it'll straighten out.”

I heard my breath then, huff-puffing so fast through my nostrils, I almost believed it wasn't me but the old train line that had suddenly come back to life just up the road.

“I'm so angry, Jasper,” I said.

“I understand how you feel, and you have every right,” he said. Then he did that warm-hands thing again on my chest.

“I don't want to go back there,” I said.

“I wasn't going to let you,” he said.

SENSE OF PURPOSE

Y
ou'd almost think I had places to be, things to do, by the bop in my walk now.

My world is taking on something of a shape with the people I've met and the places I am finding. I know I need to go farther and figure out next moves and next moves beyond those, but right now what I've fallen into for a life doesn't have me in a rush to climb back out again.

“Ah, there you are, man,” Mickey says, giving me a hearty running-for-office handshake. It's raining lightly, the sand is even more like dirt than usual, and Mickey's wearing an oil-stained tan trenchcoat that would not be out of place in a spy movie from the 1930s, which is when the thing was last dry-cleaned. “Why aren't we seeing more of you, Kikidiki?”

“I don't know,” I say, trying to look past him and all around without being too obvious about it.

“The girls ain't here, man. Nobody hangs around this depressing mud pit when it rains unless they got no options whatsoever. And girls, dude, girls
always
have options, know what I'm sayin'?” He laughs a hoarse and stoney laugh. “Lucky bitches, right?”

“Right, I guess,” I say.

Behind Mickey, his pals Tailbone and Howard have somehow commandeered a half-deflated rubber life raft and are huddled under it, smoking. Much of the smoke seems to be rolling up and getting stuck under the raft bottom by their heads and making what seems to be their own private noxious microclimate.

“Sorry, brother,” Mickey says to me while gesturing toward them. “You want to come in out of the rain? It's not much, but our shelter and bounty are yours to share.”

I crouch down to try to get a glimpse of the guys' raft-and-smoke-obscured faces. It's out of morbid curiosity more than any real intention of joining them.

“Hi, guys,” I say.

They both wave. I straighten back up.

“I appreciate the offer,” I say to Mickey. “But I think I'll just continue on my way, see if I can catch up with the girls somewhere.”

“Sure, sure. Wouldn't expect them to show here anytime today. They were here yesterday, though. Both of 'em. Not together, though. First time I saw that big one—”

“Stacey.”

“Yeah, first time I saw Stacey on her own, and man, I was goin' for it. I was practically goin' pogo all the way up the beach to get to her, if you know what I'm sayin', but then she just done like a scared rabbit and shot off before I got even close. I'm bettin' there's lots o' bunny in that gal and I'm aimin' to—”

“Yeah, Mickey, right. What about Molly? She came by herself as well?”

“No, dude, she had a dude. Seen him another time too, which is like, a
relationship
right there. They was here once before, and then twice yesterday, so that's like, wedding bells and shit. Guy must be a priest or a bishop or somethin' to get into impressin' Good Golly Molly to that degree. Looked like a priest, actually, now that I think about it. Anyway, chicks ain't everything. Don't run off so fast, we want you to hang out.”

“Another time,” I say, running now up the mucky beach.

Crystal City is a grim place when it rains. Stray dogs in clumpy, matted pairs and threes seem to populate every vacant lot, both the lots and the mutts seemingly brought to life if you just add water. The streets are paved with the cheap-grade tarmac that causes car tires to make maddening, incessant sluck sounds as they roll by. Heat sticks to everything and seems to increase with the rain rather than there being any cooling benefit at all.

Yesterday, bright and blue and balmy, I didn't go to the beach when even Crystal Beach must have shined. Yesterday was my neighborhood day, my quiet, slow, drift day, which worked a treat and was just the right thing at just the right time. I went for a good long swim in the municipal pool, which is sadly underused but not sad for me personally. Waters speak words when they're allowed, and it was a fine fifty, chatty, reassuring lengths of the pool. It also told me that I'm out of shape, but was kind about it.

I had lunch in one of Syd's locals and received every ounce of hospitality he surely would have gotten if he were there himself. I received a serving of a spinach and feta cheese pie called spanakopita that was gold-medal gourmet, probably intended to serve a whole family and costing less than I would normally pay for a hot dog. There was a side dish of a grated pickled carrot-beet-parsnip medley that in a stroke overturned my relationship to root vegetables for life.

And after that I slouched across the street to the public library, where sticky closed windows and summer swelter and chunky old dark gumwood everywhere created the perfect conditions for lazy digestion of foods and words.

The poetry section, abandoned to me alone. I had to. I scanned quickly for my selections and bundled the team up with me in the fat leather chair that was heroically reproducing the sweat of a century of sensitive word-nerds who had sat there before me.

It took the entire afternoon. But I had an entire afternoon to give it.

I wasn't wrong. My memory had not convulsed to the point of jolting poetic language entirely out of my ken. The Edgar Allan Poe and Seamus Heaney and Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas that I learned to love in another time were still in there with me when I wanted them. When I called them, when I needed to.

I could still read the poets without having to become one.

It was a great and empowering day by any measure.

But I should have gone to the beach. Because it was a beach day, and beach days should be Kiki days.

And because if I went to the beach, I would not have bumbled into the library's media room as I tried to leave.

“Can just anybody use these?” I asked the librarian dusting the keyboards and screens of the three wide-open computers in the glass-walled, temperature-controlled, bedroom-size space.

“No,” she said, itching my nose with a smile and a feather duster, “but you can.”

She left the room then and returned to her quiet, untroubled front desk of summertime.

Leaving me alone with the computers. I reminded myself that I owned a perfectly wonderful, new and shiny and indestructible laptop that I deliberately left at home, along with my phone, in order to get away for real and for good. No messy ties. No looking backward.

And that was good, so, well done me. Something to prove, and I proved it.

Therefore, I had done the hard part and had earned at least a glance at my e-mail.

I had to admit that as I sat down and called it up, I was feeling like a little kid who had to run away
loudly
and keep checking over his shoulder to be sure that people noticed and the “please don't go” pleading could begin.

I opened my e-mail, and there they were.

Both of them.

Jasper had e-mailed me twice. Once, the day I left.

J:
Are you all right? That's all I want to know. Actually, I want to know a shitload more than that. But, are you all right?

Then, the next day.

J:
How could you run off, on the very day you finally became an insider?

At that instant I became horrifyingly aware of being in a glass room in the middle of a public building. I swiveled around in my chair so hard in my self-defeating desperation to seem casual that I did nearly a complete three-sixty before stopping myself again. This caught the eye of the librarian, the only other person in the place. I waved too happily when she looked too concerned.

Back to the computer, and the climate control did me no good now. I started to sweat, at the hairline and back of the neck, and I got a bit of the shakes like I was right there and then in the middle of some crazed and dangerously taboo activity.

I was right in thinking I needed to be out of Jasper's orbit just now. I could freak myself out just fine without his working at it.

Dad also wrote that first day.

D:
I am petrified and mortified and owe you a lot of things, but first I just need to hear from you so I can stop worrying about you.

Huh. Worried about me, was he? Well, what do you know? Shame. He'll probably get over it.

When he did not hear back from me, he started getting in touch on a surprisingly regular basis. Again, huh, imagine that.

D:
Please?

And thank you.

D:
I know that you are out there. I know that you can hear me.

Was he building bridges here, or preparing to chase me through the woods with a meat cleaver?

D:
Son? I have done everything wrong. I realize that now. Son?

Not fair. Jeez. He shouldn't have called me that. There should be rules. He should be able to lose the right until earning it back, like stripes in the army.

And it shouldn't have worked on me, either. It shouldn't have given me butterflies, that was just pathetic.

Did the man have a lot of time for me all of a sudden, now that I was gone?

I shut down the computer, keeping my thoughts for myself, and left the library.

ALL KINDS OF TIRED

I
ring the bell and I knock on the door and I ring the bell and I knock on the door until I am guaranteed to be either answered or arrested.

I feel like I have achieved both, when Stacey comes to the door.

“What are you doing, knucklehead?” she says, exasperated.

“I'm coming calling, what do you think? Where you guys been? Come on out to play.” And this is where I get all slick and cool. “Where's Molly, anyway?”

“We've been working, actually,” she says, and looks tired enough that it's probably true. “And because we don't have an
uncle
looking out for us, with his steaks and his glistening porcelain and his amazing soft bathrobes and whatever all else for luxuries, we have to work consistently if we want to sleep under a roof consistently.”

“C'mon, Stacey. What's going on? What's the matter? All I want is to see you guys. What's wrong with that? We're a tribe, right? Let's just be a tribe. . . . Let's just go someplace—”

“No!” she snaps. “I am someplace. I mean, it's no place but it's someplace and I need to be here. Most people don't have the kind of freedom you seem to have.”

This is the first time I have witnessed such a short fuse on Stacey. It is a sad sight in the shadow of her more rollicking regular self.

“Right,” I say. “We should probably talk another time. You're obviously having a bad day.”

“They're
all
bad, you fool. I have no home. I'm in here scrubbing toilets and pulling three-foot-long snakes of human hair and mucus and eel jelly out of drains because the goodly folks in charge keep reminding me I'll be out on my ear if I don't.
And
for the comedy kicker, I'm forced to go to church every morning to pray and thank
Him
for the privilege and good fortune of it all.”

It's the kind of thing you can't really respond to, even if you have a response. Which, I don't.

“Sorry about all that, Stacey. But, maybe Molly—”

“She's not here, Kiki, all right? She's not here, and she's not going to be here. She stayed out again, and she lost her place and that was that, but she doesn't care, because she's living with Billy now, so she wasn't bothered about that at all. Right? You get it? She thinks that this Billy is just the big everything and so good luck to her and God bless her and whatever. People never stay in these places for very long anyway and in fact I'm not long for this one myself now.”

“What? No, it's too soon. Don't leave already. I only just met you.”

She looks about to growl at me but then her face muscles shift a little and soften and I think she feels somewhat sorry for me, which is fine, which will do just fine.

“I have to get back to work, Kiki, or these people are gonna make the decision for me.”

“Okay, okay, then you should go. Will I see you later?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. I don't know. Right now I'm just . . . tired. All kinds of tired.”

“What about Molly?”

She shrugs again. “What about her? She's gonna do what she's gonna do.”

“But . . . but, I thought . . .”

“Don't think that.”

“But, no. You don't understand. It was special. It was different. She was—”

“She has been looking for you, though,” Stacey says, the nicest words coming through a hard-knuckle delivery that feels like a backhander dope slap.

“What? See? Why didn't you tell me that?”

“Because what she wants is to borrow your book. Your father's poetry. I wasn't sure you'd find that the most pleasant development.”

“My father's book?” I say weakly.

“She wants to show it to Billy. Soulful-sensitive type, apparently, though if you asked me, I'd say when he looks in a mirror there's nobody looking back, but what do I know. So I guess she wants to read to him, from your dad's poetry. And maybe he'll read some to her, too. Fucking sweet, huh?”

I guess Dad's collection ranges a fair bit beyond his classic, “Could Kevin from Heaven/Really be Seven?”

Stacey's eyes are going cold-stare as she speaks, and her voice is losing power.

“You being deliberately nasty to me, Stacey?”

“Yes, I am. Because I can't be bothered to work up the energy to support your fantasy life at the moment. Rich boy goes slumming, sweeps troubled street chick off her feet, blah blah blah. And your naïveté is getting tedious so I'm trying to help you get through it quicker and get to your fucking manhood already so I can get back to, you know, life the real thing.”

I am physically recoiling from her, backing down the stairs. She keeps looking at me as I do and I think I see the softening again, the better thing inside her, and some regret for the unkindness. I know that is in there, in her.

And yet. How the hell would I know that?

“Rich?” I say with pleading hands as I look up at her from the sidewalk. “I got nothing, just like you. I am just like you.”

Her response is an almighty slam of the door.