We're All in This Together (25 page)

He stepped back, wounded hand cradled against his belly and staining his jersey with blood. "Well, you asked for it," Eckstein
repeated again, just so it was perfectly clear, and so that everyone—not least of all himself—understood his innocence. It
was a good line, he thought. It was something he planned, then and there, to get used to saying from now on.

Meanwhile, the other Wonders had gathered in a loose circle around the heckler. They began to close in, nearer, nearer still.
Pelky delivered the first kick. The heckler made a shocked gurgling noise. They all started kicking him.

Snake

After Frank's father dropped him off at the curb, he started doing doughnuts in the parking lot. Frank could see his father,
Ken, in the Honda, stabbing a cassette into the tape player, and immediately starting to sing along and drum the dashboard,
bopping his head and rolling his shoulders. His father punctuated this exercise by wrenching the Civic—a tapioca-colored box
that with its Clinton/Gore
'96
bumper sticker and mismatching salvage-yard-gray passenger side door, practically screamed "public school teacher"—into a
shuddering figure eight, weaving between a rusted Impala and a long black van, and nearly clipping the van, before bouncing
out the exit. Ken honked a good-bye song,
beep, ba-beep-beep-beep, beep!

It was Sunday, a few minutes before noon, when the Jetport Mall opened. Frank sat on the curb and gathered a small pile of
stones. When he deemed his ammo dump large enough he began to throw them at the rusted Impala. Frank aimed for the fissured
windshield, and the sound of tinkling glass. The car was a wreck, sitting on flats.

The light was high and the morning frost had burned off the roofs of the housing development across the street from the mall.
The row of identical pale green boxes stretched along the crest of a hill, and then over the top, which gave the odd visual
suggestion that they were being led somewhere—or maybe sneaking off on their own.

Frank was sixteen years old, a junior in high school, but his long, stringy black hair made him look older. He wore a water-stained
trench coat and old canvas sneakers with ripped soles. His parents were divorced and it was one of his father's weekends.

However, on this particular weekend, the usual festivities of father-son bonding—sports bar burgers, rented movies, bowling—had
been cut short by the Penobscot Union Touch Football Championship, the Teachers' Association against the Public Works Crew.
His father had asked Frank if he minded, and Frank had said no, and his father had said come on, and Frank said, "Seriously,
Dad, I don't give a shit," and his father had accepted that.

"Okay," Ken had said and, with a groan, removed a packet of roast beef from the fridge.

"You can just drop me off at the mall." Frank took the pot off the burner and poured his father a cup of coffee in a mug that
was printed with an elementary school picture of Frank. In the picture, Frank was wearing a plaid tie and a grin with no front
teeth.

Ken popped a slice of meat into his mouth, and pressed the rest of the cool packet against his swollen nose. His father's
eyes were bloodshot, and the bags beneath them looked—as Frank had once read in the hard-boiled prose of a Bernie Varrick
crime novel—"like a pair of matching black hammocks." Frank didn't know if the swollen nose was from his father's new girlfriend,
or a simple fall. He understood innately, though, that the distinction was unimportant.

"How much to keep your mother from taking a piss down my back?" Ken asked.

"Forty," Frank said. He handed his father the coffee cup.

"Twenty," said Ken, "and you warm me up."

Frank pulled the flask of Dewar's out of the bread box. His father looked up at the ceiling, sighed, rolled his neck, and
then took the flask. He administered a healthy splash to the coffee. "Thanks, Frankie. But, remember, someday when you tell
your psychiatrist about this episode, I didn't ask for it. You offered."

He tossed the packet of roast beef in the garbage and went to dig the football out of the closet.

They played catch in the sun-glared driveway for about twenty minutes, mostly in silence. His father directed Frank to hit
him on the run, and Ken awkwardly jogged one way, and then the other, pumping his arms and breathing hard, but managing to
flag most of the balls down.

"These public works guys," Ken said, pausing between words for breath. "Half of them are picking up disability. But get them
on a football field. They've all been to visit the fountain at Lourdes since their last checkup. They're healed."

Frank squinted in the light and smiled. His father could still make him smile, could make anyone smile, even Frank's mother.

In the car, before he climbed out, his father told Frank he was sorry.

"For what?" Frank asked.

"For a lot." Ken patted the steering wheel. "For a hell of a lot, but listen—" and then he explained his plan for the winter.
He was going to take a leave from the high school, let someone else hose down the monkey house for a few months, and in the
meantime, really settle into his old study carrel at the university library, really buckle down, and finally put a big pink
bow on his dissertation.

The rocks chimed off the Impala's corpse. Weekends with his father invariably put Frank into a mood; the mood was hard to
pin down, though; it was that Sunday feeling, a sort of general ickiness, the way you felt after watching television for a
few hours and then looked outside to see that the day had turned into night before you even got started. Those kind of days
felt good while they were happening, while you were doing nothing, but when they ended, you felt like a slob. Of course, here
Frank was, broad daylight, all the bright hours in front of him, but the feeling was with him just the same.

He imagined his father in front of a lecture hall, giving them the Ken Ackerly Left Eyebrow of Skepticism™, a bushy black
eyebrow that he could raise so high and sharp that it was worthy of Groucho Marx. The college kids would love that; Frank
could hear them laughing.

At noon the security guard rattled open the glass doors. Frank dumped the remaining stones from his pockets and slouched inside.

The Jetport Mall wasn't much of a mall, just one level in the basic stenciled C-shape. There were a couple All-For-A-Dollar
Stores, a dingy hobby shop, a Mr. Paperback which mostly sold greeting cards and miniature stuffed animals, a pet store, the
local DMV, a florist, a hairdresser, a Dexter Shoe, a Nathan's hot dog stand, and an arcade of old and semifunctional video
games.

Ken called it the Reagan Mall, and if he was hammered enough, he could be counted on to give a lecture on the subject, about
how ever since Ronnie the country was like a dumb kid who had eaten a bunch of lead paint chips. (This diatribe, of course,
inevitably featured an appearance by the Ken Ackerly Left Eyebrow of Skepticism™.) "Those All-For-A-Dollar Stores," Ken said.
"What they really ought to call them is Cheap-Shit-For-The-Gipper Stores."

This had been before the divorce, and Frank's mother, Catherine, had responded, "Fascinating, Ken, just fascinating. Why don't
you have another beer, and then fill us all in on what the real problem with the Middle East is?"

Frank turned right at the end of the entrance wing and made a beeline for Mr. Paperback—about the only store in the mall that
interested him. He planned to burn the afternoon reading, maybe even catch some z's in the armchair in back of the store.
This single piece of furniture—certainly of thrift store origin, smelling permanently of damp, and so deep that when Frank
rose from it, he almost had to kick his way out—was an almost poignant response to the enormous new chain bookstore at the
mall in Bangor, which not only had several brand-new armchairs, but a cafe. Frank was in the mood for a crime novel, something
swift and tough. The kind of story that put a strong feeling in his chest, gathering speed as it wound through the dead-ends
and false leads, the inevitable violence, but always the certainty that one way or another, the mean truth was going to come
out. Twenty bucks could sometimes buy as many as three or four crime novels; Frank figured that should be more than enough
mean truth to keep him satisfied for a few days.

There was an unspoken arrangement in his acceptance of the money from his father. If his mother asked, Frank would say that
he and the old man went to the movies, or the library, or did something constructive. Not that he would have tattled even
if his father gave him nothing. That was a fast track to more family counseling, something no one deserved any more of at
this point, least of all his mother.

The last time they went to a group therapy session at the YWCA, the therapist had gone on and on about how when there was
strife within the family unit, it was as if the phone got disconnected, and that by the time the phone was ready to be turned
back on everyone had already made different arrangements. "Before all the shit went down you were all on this big party line,
and now, now everyone is jabbering away on their own cell phones," the therapist had said. "I mean, sometimes the party line
was a bummer, right? There was one time you couldn't call your buddy in Fresno when you really wanted to, and you couldn't,
right? But that's part of living together. That's how it goes with the party line. So, we've either got to get that big party
line hooked up again, or else learn to deal with all the bullshit that goes along with having a cell phone."

("What the fuck is a party line?" Frank had asked.)

A few days after the session Frank had come into his mother's room and found her sitting on the bed and crying, rocking back
and forth and hugging an Opus doll. "I'm forty-two, Frank. I can't start over. I can't even get a cat. I'm allergic to cat
hair." She had let loose a sob then, and belched, spitting up a little yellow something onto the head of the Opus doll. "And
look at this," she said, holding out the doll, "now I've puked on my penguin."

Frank thought what everybody really needed to do at this stage was get on with it—and in a way, that was why Frank was at
the mall. His father was getting on with it by knocking back some beers and playing some football with his buddies. Frank
was getting on with it by browsing for books at Mr. Paperback. And since she didn't know any better his mother was probably
getting on with it back home, meditating or dealing tarot cards to herself and Opus. If there was anything he'd learned from
reading crime novels it was that there wasn't any sense in making a stink. The stool pigeons never made it to the sequel.
They ended up wearing the razor necktie, or buried in a shallow grave, taking the dirt nap. The best chance you had was to
take it on the chin, do your time, keep quiet.

Frank was down the hall from the bookstore when a booming voice jumped him. A big man over at the exhibition area waved him
over.

The exhibition area was a raised platform at the center of the mall's main passage, where special events were held—a kiosk
selling airbrushed T-shirts in more than a hundred designs, a taxidermist's display, the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, a trainer
from Gold's Gym giving five-dollar neck massages in an orthopedic chair—but never anything interesting. Today, the big man
was standing in front of a skeletal arrangement of plain wooden beams.

The wooden framing made a rectangle, six feet or so high, and around twelve feet long. A couple of crates were arrayed on
the tiled surface of the exhibition area, and some hay had been strewn across the floor beneath. It was an odd setup; the
man was maybe a contractor or something, Frank thought, although it was difficult to say what the wooden framing was meant
to display.

"Yeah?" asked Frank.

The big man was about fifty, goateed, a biker-looking type with a straining belly and the dark shadow of a tattoo beneath
the hair of his forearm. He wore brown leather chaps and a T-shirt that said, i HUNT WHITE-TAILED DEER. The T-shirt showed
a man with a wolfish grin taking aim with a very long elephant gun at a girl in a bikini who had been treed high up in a pine.

A Polaroid camera was draped around the man's neck and a pair of highwayman sunglasses was hooked onto his collar. Frank thought
he looked like some sort of post-apocalyptic tourist.

"Hey, bro, you got a lighter?" The man shook out a pack of cigarettes.

"Sure." Frank took off his backpack and fished out his lighter. "You can't smoke in most malls."

"Fascists. There's more of em everyday. It's like that old sci-fi flick with the psycho plants—dweebs in ties keep on popping
out." He lit his cigarette, not bothering to offer Frank one.

A woman was slowly pushing a stroller. They both turned at the sound of creaking wheels.

"Hey, man, I don't want to offend your civic pride, but this is a pretty shit-ass mall, ain't it? Most places there's at least
a few people waiting to get in. So far it's just you and her." He thumbed toward the woman with the stroller.

"She's crazy," said Frank. "All she's got in that stroller is a two-liter Coke bottle wearing a wool hat. I've seen her here
before. She sort of does laps with the stroller."

The man shook his head. "She ever spend any money?"

"I don't think so," Frank said. "Sometimes the Coke bottle wears different hats. Maybe she buys those."

"Fuck," said the man. "I don't sell hats."

Frank could smell the guy's b.o., a funky odor that he associated with dogs. He looked irritated, and made a juicy sound as
he sucked on his cigarette.

"So what are you doing here?" Frank asked.