The Most Dangerous Thing (8 page)

Chapter Ten

Autumn 1978–Winter 1979

W
e would have quickly grown tired of Chicken George except for one thing: he turned out to be mysterious. At least, that’s the way we saw it: He cultivated mystery, excited our curiosity. He was vague in the face of all questions, no matter how benign. How he had come to live in this house, when he had learned the guitar. How old he was. (Go-Go asked the last one. The rest of us knew better than to ask a grown-up’s age.) He avoided all questions and had few of his own, other than: “What did you bring me?” Still, it would have been better, harsh as it sounds, if we had stopped visiting him. It’s nice to think so, at any rate, because if we had tired of him, then things might have gone differently. And this is a story about things we wished had gone differently. Aren’t all stories?

Anyway, Chicken George had a way of disappearing. The first time, it was November, and we assumed it was weather-related. The wind had started to kick up, the pleasant tang of October had given way to a steady dank cold. Weather was more reliable then. This is not memory, but hard scientific fact. The weather of our childhood was part of an unusually temperate time on our planet, with fewer extreme variations. The things we have seen in recent years—the events of just the past year, with almost a hundred inches of snow in Baltimore and floods, not to mention volcanoes and earthquakes, birds falling from the skies—might well be connected to climate change, the wear and tear that humans wreak on a planet. We are not here to argue science. But weather was more predictable then, and when it turned cold, it stayed cold, so cold the pond froze for days, even weeks of ice-skating. It made sense that Chicken George would disappear during such weather. Not that one could tell, by the look of the cabin, that anything had changed. It was as we had first found it, complete with the chickens in the yard and clothing on the line. Go-Go was the one who thought to look for his guitar. That was missing, too.

“What about the chickens?” Gwen asked.

“What about them?” countered Tim.

“They’ll die out here. Animals will eat them.”

“So what? Chicken George was going to eat them, too. What’s the difference?”

“But Chicken George would have been more humane.”

Tim laughed. “You think so, Gwen? You think that snapping an animal’s neck is that much more humane than being snatched up in the jaws of a dog or a fox? Dead is dead.”

Go-Go liked that. “Dead is dead,” he raved. “Dead is dead!” He began throwing rocks at the chickens, then running among them, scattering them. But those chickens were tough. They spread out, giving Go-Go room, but they didn’t disperse.

Mickey and Sean had been quiet throughout, systematically looking through George’s things, trying to find clues. Mickey, although uninterested in school, had a talent for deduction. Gwen’s father, noticing how she examined facts and reached conclusions, had tried to interest her in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, but she had no patience for Sherlock Holmes. Or Nancy Drew, or Trixie Belden, or books in general. She was disdainful of people who read but not in a defensive, anti-intellectual way. She thought reading was a ruse, a completely wasteful activity. If Mickey were the kind of person who trafficked in similes or metaphors, she might have compared reading to rules such as not swimming an hour after a meal, or never going out of the house with wet hair. Instead, she just didn’t read and was baffled by those who did. She didn’t like television much, either. Mickey plain didn’t like sitting still. She wanted to make things happen. She wanted to see if she could jump from mossy stone to mossy stone without falling. She wanted to poke snapping turtles with sticks, and if one snapped, well, that was the point. She would have liked to live like Chicken George—in a cabin, accountable only to herself, although preferably with indoor plumbing.

“He’s gone,” she said and then it was real. Chicken George was gone. Sean picked up her words, repeated them. “He’s gone.”

We were sad. No one cried. Tim, Sean, and Mickey never cried, and Gwen and Go-Go had learned to follow their example. But we were all disappointed, and surprised at how disappointed we were. We had brought a bag of canned goods that day, plucked mainly from the Robisons’ kitchen, as Tally Robison was the least likely to notice anything missing, although once there was an amazing rage when she didn’t find the artichoke hearts she was sure she had in the pantry. Inventories were tighter, more closely monitored, in the other households. Sean, though, sometimes bought a few things out of his allowance, and he had added a can of deviled ham and ready-to-eat baked beans to the sack that Gwen carried. Now he took them out and placed them on Chicken George’s shelves.

“They’ll just get stolen,” Tim said.

But everyone understood what Sean was doing. He was acting as if Chicken George was okay, as if he would return. And soon, much sooner than we expected, he did. It was a raw February day, with plenty of winter left to go, when Mickey saw, or said she saw, a plume of smoke rising from his house. We trooped over there, our feet sticking in the muddy paths, which had been snow-covered only a week or so earlier.

When we arrived, Chicken George was inside his cabin. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was tolerable, a wispy heat emanating from the old woodstove. He wore multiple layers of clothes and fingerless gloves.

“Where you been?” he asked, as if we were the ones who disappeared. “What did you bring me?”

Chapter Eleven

W
hen the man in 17F rings his call button and announces he is pretty sure he has thrown his dentures into one of the trash bags by accident, McKey need only to glance at her less-senior colleague.

“I don’t see why—” Wendy begins.

“Seniority has its privileges,” she says. McKey has no idea if seniority applies in this situation, but she isn’t about to go scrabbling through the trash because some geezer can’t keep track of his own teeth. It isn’t her problem. She has a full set of teeth.

“Seniority is a terrible way to determine who does what,” Wendy grumbles.

“Yeah, that’s what everybody says when they don’t have it.”

McKey has been with the same airline fifteen years now and has lineholder status, which means she usually knows her schedule a month in advance. Wendy is still a reserve, being plugged into the schedule where she fits. Maybe she’d be a better sport about working her way up if she weren’t also McKey’s age, possbily older. She looks older, that’s for sure. The airlines hire lots of over-forty attendants these days, women reentering the workforce as nests empty or husbands decamp. The airlines probably think that mothers and wives are well suited to waiting on a group of people who regress to childhood—and a surly, drunken childhood at that—the minute they board an airplane. McKey isn’t so sure. She’s neither wife nor mother, yet she is good at this, has been from the start.

Oh, she was briefly married in her twenties. But it was hard to count that as a marriage, even a starter marriage. They married out of inertia. Inertia and the desire to have a party. They were twenty-eight, long enough out of college and close enough to thirty to feel a little desperate about the numbing sameness of day-to-day life. In the back of McKey’s mind, she entertained the idea, even as she was planning the wedding, that it was better to marry before thirty and later divorce than to hit thirty without ever having been married.

But, mainly, she wanted a party, something to break up the tedium. The marriage worked for a while and then it didn’t, like a cheap car. They parted with relative ease, given that they didn’t own their house and their possessions had never really mingled. It was shocking to realize how few things they had acquired jointly. A mattress, some of the kitchen goods. If it hadn’t been for the wedding, complete with registry, there would have been almost nothing to split. They pretended generosity toward each other, when the fact was that neither one wanted to pack up all that shit. A waffle maker that made heart-shaped waffles. A George Foreman grill. A rice maker!
A goddamn rice maker.
McKey realized she had made a very human error, filling out those registries. She thought she was going to change, that in acquiring a rice maker and a waffle iron, she might become the kind of person who made rice and heart-shaped waffles. She knows herself better now, what she can do and what she can’t. She even likes herself. Perhaps more than she should, but she’s all she has.

Her mother used to warn her—indirectly, then directly—that life was hell for an attractive woman once she ceased to be attractive. McKey isn’t buying it. For one thing, she isn’t like her mother, relying on men to support her. Besides, her looks are holding up surprisingly well. Not smoking, keeping her weight constant, avoiding the sun—it all adds up. She looks good. Not good for her age. She plain looks good. Every male who boards her flight checks her out, a particular triumph in this polyester getup. Men will always look at her, she has decided, and it isn’t conceited to recognize this fact and even exploit it. Did anyone ever say that someone was conceited about money, another commodity to which some people were born?

And she is clear on this: her beauty is a commodity. She uses it to get what she wants or needs. She is not cruel with it, not anymore. She does not wield it like a weapon. She uses it. So what? Everyone uses what they have in this world.

Take Gwen. She isn’t as pretty as McKey, but she has this saucer-eyed, you’re-so-wonderful thing going on, which boys ate up sideways with a spoon when they were kids. To give her credit, she seemed to come by it naturally, and she didn’t use it only on boys. She cast those looks on her parents, on McKey when they first met, eventually on Sean, although never on Tim, not really, and definitely not on Go-Go. The youngest Halloran always made Gwen a little nervous, although perhaps that was her parents, talking through her, especially Tally Robison. Everyone thought Gwen’s mom was so saintly, especially after she died. A well-timed death could make a saint out of anyone, as McKey would have reminded the others if they were in touch. But McKey, then Mickey, saw Tally Robison differently. Oh, yes, she was kind to Mickey, sitting down with her in the kitchen in the afternoon, waiting for Gwen to return from school, feeding Mickey the treats that Gwen had chosen for her. But Mickey quickly realized that Mrs. Robison was being kind, and there is no real kindness in obvious magnanimity. Oh, wasn’t she the bighearted grand lady, dispensing candy and cookies and Hi-C to the poor little girl who lived in Purnell Village, with her waitress mother and her not-quite-stepfather. Wasn’t she enlightened? Wasn’t she democratic?

But if an eleven-year-old girl could figure that out, imagine what the rest of the world intuited. They saw Mickey being pitied, that was what, which wasn’t fair at all. Mickey’s mother might have been a little on the trashy side, but she was pretty steady for a divorced woman who needed a man around. And Rick, the stepfather of record for most of those years, was a good guy. Too good for her mother. He was sincerely kind to Mickey, not fake kind, and when baby Joey arrived, he did what he could to keep her from feeling left out. If anything, he went out of his way to make her feel even more like his daughter. Even after he left, he stayed in touch.

Then, when Mickey was going on nineteen and Rick long gone, an attorney had contacted her. “About custody,” he said, and at first Mickey had this crazy feeling that Rick wanted to adopt her all these years later, make official the status he had sworn was hers all along. Rick had done okay for himself, maybe there was some money coming to her.

It turned out that Rick had hired the attorney because Rita was now saying that Joey wasn’t his and he was trying to figure out if he could recoup the child support he had been paying her. Legally, the case was kind of interesting, sort of like the Solomon story in the Bible, only instead of offering up a baby that would be sliced in half, it was an all-or-nothing decision about the relationship between Rick and Joey. Rick could have a court establish he was no longer Joey’s father and stop paying child support, although he would have a hell of a time getting back what he had paid in. But if he did that, he would have to abandon the relationship, too. It was real fucked-up stuff. Rick, of course, did the right thing. He decided he didn’t care what the blood test said. He was Joey’s father and he would continue to be, even if that meant paying support to a kid that he seldom got to see. Her scheming skank of a mother really played that poor guy.

Scheming skank of a mother?
Have those words really run through McKey’s head as she gathers newspapers and trash from the passengers who were sentient enough not to throw their teeth into the bag? She’s being unfair. Her mother wasn’t a schemer, wasn’t skanky. Well, maybe a little skanky. She had been sleeping with Rick and Joey’s father at the same time. But she made a genuine mistake about Joey’s paternity, and it was harder to test for those things then. Besides, that mistake kept Rick in the fold until McKey went to high school, and she was glad for that. He was a good man. He protected her. He believed her, always.

She catches a man coming out of the lavatory, the smell of smoke clearly on him. She pulls him aside. He looks so furtive and guilty that she doesn’t have the resolve to write him up, but she explains to him in an urgent, intimate whisper that she’s doing him a favor, that he could be flagged in the reservation system if she reported the infraction as required.

His furtive look switches to flirtatious. Great, now he thinks she’s hot for him because she cut him a break, when it was merely her generosity toward her mother overflowing into the world. She goes back to the galley, tells a surprised Wendy that she will take over denture duty, which is still under way, if Wendy will help her keep her distance from Mr. Not-So-Smoking-Hot.

The thing is, she felt kindly toward her outlaw smoker because his face reminded her of Sean’s this morning. Not in its particulars, but in the emotions. She had planned to keep Sean in suspense about the night before, but he looked so guilty that she couldn’t bear to goad him. She thought, hoped, it might happen, but even as she was piloting him up the stairs, she realized he would be no good to her. A shame. She always had a crush on him. She was surprised, in fact, when he chose Gwen to be his girlfriend, because she assumed he was hers for the taking should she decide she wanted him. She always chalked his relationship with Gwen up to the circumstances, which had been so very
Picture for a Sunday Afternoon
. Sean, carrying Gwen in his arms. Heck, the summer before he couldn’t have made it three steps holding her, given how much she once weighed. Gwen clinging to his chest, crying, dazed, that pretty little trickle of blood on her forehead. Who could compete with that? Mickey thought she could, but she was wrong. For a few months there, they acted like they were married, or were going to be. It was nauseating.

Yet Sean and Gwen didn’t even make it to Christmas of that year as a couple. And Mickey was
glad
. She wonders how Gwen feels, seeing him now. Childhood sweethearts seem to hold a lot of power over people. McKey’s forever hearing of this friend or coworker who has rediscovered someone at a reunion or on the Internet and ends up running off with them. McKey finds that baffling. Who would want to be with the person who remembered you as you once were? She has cut her ties with almost everyone who knew Mickey and she can imagine a day when McKey morphs into yet another persona, shedding her current set of acquaintances and coworkers.

Still, she wishes she had found a way to sleep with Sean, drunk as he was. Just the once. She bets she’s better than Gwen, despite Gwen’s success rate at landing impressive husbands. Of course, the first one turned out to be a faggot, and McKey has a feeling that even Dr. Wonderful, who put in a brief appearance at the reception after the funeral, isn’t quite the prize he seems. They never are. Sean, however—Sean tempts her, if only because he belongs to someone else. The thing she can’t work out is whether she wants to steal him from his wife or from Gwen.