They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee (18 page)

“Look, I appreciate what you've done for me, but I'm really starting to lose my patience. Now what the fuck are you talking about?”

But Guppy did not have to answer. He did not even have to turn on the light. Because out of the blackness came the voice that would make it all clear to me.

“Hey, Uncle Dylan, is that you?”

Fairness

The lights came up, and, just for a moment, so did my heart.

Zak jumped down from the upper cot of two that folded off the wall. He kissed me, threw his big arms around me and bear-hugged me for a long few seconds. But my joy in discovering him alive had already gone out of me. I was stiff and numb in his grasp. He backed off, searching for clues in the lines and scratches in my face. Guppy stood silently behind me. The synthesized music droned on as Buddy Holly spun in his grave.

I turned to Guppy: “Fuck good intentions! Your road to hell is paved with innocent bodies.”

“He doesn't know about her, Mr. Klein.”

“Who don't I know about?” Zak was impatient.

“The girl who dug her nails into my face after she'd been strangled. Will you please shut that fucking music off?”

Guppy came around between Zak and me and flicked off the clock radio, which sat on a small shelf amidst the most impressive and relatively compact computer workstation I'd ever seen in a noncommercial setting.

“Who don't I know about?” Zak repeated.

“Please,” Gupta implored, “give us a chance to explain.”

“Explain!” I was screaming. “You want to explain? Here, schmuck, let's go find a phone. Either one of you two fluent in Japanese?”

Zak shrank back. “Japanese!”

“That's right, Zak, Kira's dead, thanks to you two clowns. You get on the phone and explain it to her father, because I couldn't give a shit about what either of you has to say. If you want to play God, become a writer. Otherwise, omnipotence is best left in the hands of puppeteers and lunatics.”

Zak was crying.

Guppy fought back: “We were trying to save—”

“—Valencia Jones. I know that,” I said. “You've traded Kira's life for hers. I sure as shit hope she's worth it.”

“She's innocent,” Zak yelled. “She's innocent!”

“Maybe she is, but she's still on trial and I'm next. How could you jerk everybody around like this? You missed Grandpa's funeral. Your whole family is sick. For chris sakes, Zak, they think you're dead!
I
thought you were dead!”

“I didn't know how else to get anyone's attention,” Zak said sheepishly. “Valencia was going to jail for a long time and no one would listen.”

“Oh, you got peoples' attention, all right. Your father hired a Castle-on-Hudson detective to look into Valencia's case. I figure his funeral was probably yesterday. Then there's this guy, Steven Markum, he worked up at Cyclone Ridge. He was probably the guy that planted the Isotope in Valencia Jones' car. He conveniently broke his neck skiing the other day. Cyclone Ridge is burning down as we speak. Your dorm room and room at home were both ransacked. The best friendship I ever had is probably over. I'm wanted for murder. And let's not forget to throw Kira's body on top of the pile like a cherry on top of a sundae. Yeah, Zak, I'd say you got people to listen.”

“That's not fair, Uncle Dylan.”

“No,” Gupta chimed, “it is not.”

“Welcome to life on earth, fellas. What's fairness got to do with anything?”

“When I was a kid,” Zak said, “I thought fairness meant everything to you. I looked up to you because of that, because you were so different from my dad. Money didn't matter to you. What was right mattered.”

“Money's easy not to care about when you haven't got any. Fairness and what's right don't even count in horseshoes.”

“I can't believe I'm hearing this from you, Uncle Dylan. Uncle Josh used to tell me stories about you.”

“What stories?”

“About you in the old neighborhood and how the other kids respected you for doing the right thing all the time. Even my dad admires you for how you used to stick up for Larry Feld and his family.”

“Your dad hates Larry Feld and thought his family was crazy. And as for my brother Josh, he was the one who bestowed upon me the title of family fuck-up.”

“Well, I guess I'm no longer a pretender to the throne, am I, Uncle Dylan? I really am the family fuck-up now.”

That punch got through and it hurt like a son of a bitch. I knew Zak and Guppy hadn't meant for anyone to get hurt, certainly not killed. Hadn't I done an incredible amount of impulsive things and used love and desperation as justifications? But people had been killed and there was no escaping the bloody trail that led to my nephew's hideaway.

“Okay,” I said. “If we're going to keep Valencia Jones' ass out of prison and mine off death row, we better get to work figuring out just how. We can save the recriminations for our next family meal. Agreed?”

They were glad to sign on for that. I told Guppy to get his coat back on, he was going to meet an ex-cop in the mens room of the Manhattan Court Coffee House.

“What if Mr. MacClough should be suspicious of me?”

“He already is . . .” I hesitated. “What should I call you, anyway?”

“Raj, Rajiv, Guppy… What you call me is of no significance, Mr. Klein. I will know you are speaking to me.”

“Jesus, how did I know I'd get an answer like that? Like I was saying, MacClough is already suspicious and when he hears about Kira's murder, he's gonna be very tense about being approached by a stranger. Just tell him that I hate brandy, even Izzy Three Legs Weinstein's. He'll understand.”

Reimbursement

We sat there together for what seemed hours, not talking, avoiding each other's eyes. I cleaned lint that wasn't there, checked a watch I wasn't wearing, looked for dirt under my clean nails. It was the first awkward time in our lives as uncle and nephew. We had always been a team, Zak and me, two men cut from the same pattern. There had never been any attempt to deny it. The poor kid really did look and sound like me, though Zak lacked the Brooklyn patois. He further lacked some of his uncle's hard edges and street smarts. Before today, I had felt that was to his advantage. He was less suspicious, could see the sun sometimes behind the clouds.

I remembered when I was living back in Brooklyn, working my first insurance jobs for Larry Feld. I let Zak—he was only a little guy back then, three or four—tag along with me for the day. But it was safe and easy work that Saturday. All we had to do was take a few Polaroids of cracked sidewalks and dangerous intersections for Larry. We were on Kings Highway when Zak got hungry and told me he had to go
winkies.
Walking back to my car when we were done eating, Zak tugged my hand and asked me: “Why are you doing that, Uncle Dylan?”

“What am I doing, Zak?”

“Why do you slow down all the time and look at your face in the store windows?”

He was exactly right. I did stop and stare, but I had never given much thought to the reasons why.

“I don't know,” I recall saying. “I guess I slow down to let the people pass. I don't think I like it when people get too close behind me.”

He looked at his hand in mine and then up at me. “It's okay for me to be close, Uncle Dylan?”

“You? Always, kiddo. Always.”

Sure, it was cute, but that's not why it had stuck with me all these years. On that day I realized Zak had the power to make me look at myself in ways and at times I would have never thought to look. He was like a part of me that could step outside myself and hold a mirror up to the dark places I avoided. And now he was doing it again, holding up the dark mirror.

“You expected me to come,” I spoke to Zak, “didn't you?”

“Hoped, Uncle Dylan, not expected.”

“But you had my favorite beer in the fridge.”

“My favorite, too.” He hesitated, then asked: “Are you still mad at me?”

“I'm still mad at everyone, from your father to my agent, from Grandpa to MacClough. I was born mad, you know that. You weren't, Zak. It's one of the really good parts about the differences between us.”

“I get mad, really mad.”

“There's a big difference between getting and being,” I said, “a big fucking difference.”

“I guess.”

“Go upstairs and get us a couple of our favorite beers. When you come back, I think there's some stuff we need to explain to each other.”

He went first. He told me about Kira and their brief affair and how they agreed they were better off as friends. Zak's recap of his first meeting with Valencia Jones was right in line with what she had said. Zak was self-aware. He knew he was a sucker for sadness and Valencia Jones had sadness to spare. And though Riversborough College was allegedly a bastion not only of liberal arts but of liberal thinking, Valencia Jones was almost an immediate outcast. She was black, unspectacular to look at, and as soon as word of her parentage spread through the campus, she was designated a persona non grata.

That was all my nephew needed to know. Zak didn't fall in love with Valencia Jones so much as adopt her cause. Oh, they liked each other well enough, fought through the awkwardness of sexual inexperience together, and went to the movies a lot. Zak was her defender, her confidant. Having met her, I got the feeling she rather needed the confidant more than the defender. Their relationship began to unravel when many relationships do; they were getting bored. You can only play sir knight and damsel in distress for just so long before it gets a wee bit tedious. It was Zak's idea for them to move in together. Stepping back and letting go was not something the Kleins—all the Kleins—did with any ease. Valencia Jones had balked at first, but gave into the idea out of a sense of obligation. Even Zak could see how he had set them up for a big fall.

Just before the Spring break, Valencia Jones begged out of the arrangement. Although he fought it, in true Klein tradition, Zak agreed to the split.

“It was my fault, Uncle Dylan.”

“It's been my experience that it takes two to make or break a relationship.”

“But that's not what I mean,” he barked. “I was the reason she got arrested. I arranged for her to go to Cyclone Ridge.”

I choked on that. “I don't understand.”

“I was feeling shitty for the way things had gone with us living together. Val really needed to get away from me. I knew that. She was going to go down to Daytona with the rest of the college-aged world, but I talked her into finally trying skiing. She always said she wanted to try it and I had promised to take her sometime. We just never got around to doing it. So I called up there and made a reservation for her. The students at the school get a special discount. You can check, I even paid for it with my dad's credit card.”

“Funny how your dad managed to forget to tell me this. Funny how he forgets to mention a lot of things.”

“It's the way he controls people,” Zak said.

“Tell me about it. He was my big brother a long time before he was your father. So, you feel guilty because you arranged for Valencia Jones' ski weekend. It's wrongheaded thinking, Zak. How could you have known what would happen? It's not like a drug bust was part of the discount package.”

“That's cold comfort coming from you and pretty inconsistent. I'm either responsible or not responsible for my inability to foresee future consequences, but not both.”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Zak. But you're talking tennis rackets and stickball bats here,” I chided. “When you made Valencia's ski reservations, it was an innocent gesture. It would have been unreasonable to suspect anything more ominous than a broken leg to come of it. But there was nothing innocent in your dropping out of circulation. You intended for things to happen, you hoped for it. That's manipulation. It's the difference between the sun and a hydrogen bomb. Some chain reactions are natural and beyond our control, some are purposeful and man-made.”

Zak was stunned, absolutely silent, pained. Almost imperceptibly at first, his bottom lip quivered. Large tears poured over his cheeks. He did not bother to wipe them away. I think he literally wanted them to stain his face, to brand him a fool. But he did remain silent.

“I need to be alone right now, Uncle Dylan,” he finally spoke and let himself out of the shelter.

The symbolism of his exit was not lost on me. Sometimes the cost of our life lessons comes at our own expense. Sometimes other people have to pay. When they pay with their lives, reimbursement becomes problematical.

Smoke

I didn't have the strength in me not to be happy to see John Francis MacClough. At that moment, I would have forgiven him more than murder. For John had always been magic for me. Though I couldn't swim a stroke, I felt as if I was never in above my head with him about. I guess it was a silly attitude for a man of forty years to have. I realize the irrationality of it, but when he stuck his head through the shelter hatch, I felt as if I would be saved. Alas, my euphoria at the sight of him was short-lived, as his first words to me were: “You're fucked, Klein.”

Even that could not ruin my mood entirely. MacClough had been a sort of ploughman's guardian angel, the adopted older brother who could fulfill the promises my blood brothers could not. I had, in some unarticulated way, come to think of Johnny as the brother without the feet of clay. It wouldn't be the first time I'd been wrong.

“Thanks, you shanty Irish prick,” I shouted, standing up to hug him. “I'm so fucked, I'm even happy to see your ugly puss.”

But when he stepped back from my embrace, his face was blank. Not cold, exactly, just blank. “You're happy even though you think I'm a murderer?”

“The rest of the world thinks I'm one. I guess I got religion all of a sudden. Did the news reach home yet?”