You Shall Know Our Velocity (16 page)

“Well,” I said, “your questions aren’t interesting to me.”

“I see. For that I apologize.”

“I just think you’re overthinking it, Mom.”

“I am prone to that sort of thing.”

“Oh really? I’d never noti—”

“Bye bye, smart mouth.”

She hung up.

Hand dressed and we scuffled back up the road. The sky was a planetarium’s half-dome ceiling, full of stars but not dark enough. The
trees stood black underneath and against the grey sky, shadowing the dirt road with mean quick scratches. I was pissed. For every good deed there is someone, who is not doing a good deed, who is, for instance, gardening, questioning exactly how you’re doing that good deed. For every secretary giving her uneaten half-sandwich to a haggard unwashed homeless vet, there is someone to claim that act is only, somehow,
making things worse
. The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt—

“What are you muttering about?” Hand asked.

“Nothing.” I didn’t know I’d been muttering.

“Between that and the talking in your sleep—”

At a snack bar we bought ice cream. The woman at the counter had hair like a backup dancer and was watching dolphins on TV. Hand had an orange push-up approximation and I had a thick tongue of vanilla ice cream covered in chocolate, on a stick. I tore the thin shiny plastic and ate the chocolate first, then the white cold ice cream, so soft in the humid and darkening air, and it ran down my hand and throat at the same time.

As we walked under the infrequent streetlights we had two and three shadows, as one light cast our shadow up and the other down, sometimes overlapping. The lights didn’t know what they were doing. The lights knew nothing.

The moon was yellow and ringed with a pale white halo. There were small stones in my shoes. I stopped to empty them, leaning against Hand. When we began walking my shoes filled again.

The area around the resort was crowded with discos and casinos. We went to the main casino first, a small, though plush, one-room affair with two card tables and about thirty slot machines. We recognized about a dozen people from dinner; my face parted the crowd, and they looked at us with tired eyes.

“Check it out,” Hand said, pointing a finger at the clientele and casting an infinity symbol over them. “You notice anything about the men here?”

“The sweaters.”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.”

Every man in the room, almost—there were about twenty men in this casino, most of them young, and twelve of them qualified—was wearing a cotton sweater over his shoulders, tied loosely at the collarbone. Twelve men, and the sweaters were each and all yellow or sky-blue, and always the tying was done with the utmost delicacy. You couldn’t, apparently, actually
tie
the sweater. It had to be loosely arranged, in the center of the chest, like a fur stole. It was about 85 degrees.

It hit me, again, that we were here. I’d never been farther than Nevada—with Jack and his family, for fourth-grade spring break, by car. We drove twenty-two hours, each way, leaving about seven in between, spent atop of horses that wanted us dead or in chains. Hand had been to Toronto, which was closer, actually, to Milwaukee, but he didn’t see it that way.

There were postcards near the door, not of the ocean but of the resorts on the ocean, and I bought one—the first postcard I’d ever even pretended to plan on sending. If I had someone to write to, a Clementine, I could document this, could shape it into some sense. If I wrote to the twins, even on this napkin here and with this ballpoint pen borrowed from the Senegalese bartender with the birthmark like an Ash Wednesday smudge, they would keep the letters and always know I thought of them—

Dear Mo, Dear Thor
,

Senegal! Can you believe it? It is something here. Something like some other place. The people … there was this man … Then again, at this point I really don’t know if we’re seeing anything or missing everything…. The air here, though, is different enough, so that’s something

“That’s good so far.”

Hand was over my shoulder.

“You really captured it, Will. All those blank spaces, too—”

“Fuck you.”

We stood outside in the cooling black night, and wondered if we could do anything extraordinary. If we could live up to our responsibility here: We had traveled 4,200 miles or whatever and thus were obligated to create something. We had to take the available materials and make something worthy.

“You call home yet?” I asked Hand.

“No. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Mine won’t care. You know them.”

I did and I didn’t. Hand’s father was a tall man who bent over, had been bending to talk to his much-shorter wife for so long that his head seemed permanently tilted, chin in his sternum. With the face of a shovel and the eyes of a wolf, he worked for a law firm but I’m not sure he was a lawyer; he might have been a lawyer but somehow I suspect he was not; he was one of those distant small-eyed men about whom anything could have been possible—molestation, murder, tax evasion, bigamy. Hand’s mom was a nurse who worked, for most of our growing up, at the hospital, though later just in one dying man’s house, for two years—a grand marble-laden house that became more or less hers, with her own bedroom, her own parking space in the garage, everything.

Which was fine but also wrong, because then Hand had to be jealous of this new home and his mother’s effortless way of seeming its matriarch. Hand had two older brothers, much older. I had seen them only a few times each, knew them more from their graduation pictures; for some reason they had graduated on the same day, even though one, I think Steve, the one who was almost cross-eyed, was a year older than Eddie, who had Shaun Cassidy hair and eyes
that didn’t blink and had come up with Hand’s nickname—first it was
Hands
, because as a toddler he’d catch any ball thrown to him—and was later shortened to Hand, to sound less like someone who would want time alone with your children.

We decided we’d head into town and find someone’s home and walk into it with flowers. It was something we’d talked about doing in the last few years—I have no idea when the idea originated or why. We would knock, we imagined, or maybe come through a back door, the porch, and either way we would bring wine or flowers. It was our firm belief that we could walk into any office or home, anywhere in the world, with flowers, and be taken in. Shock would be softened by blind confusion then affectionate bewilderment, and soon we’d be family.

The road was busy with vacationers walking to Saly’s main strip, about three blocks of restaurants, clubs and bars, and the occasional car weaving slowly around the potholes, looking for parking. We bought a small loud bouquet of daisies and violets and something local, red and wet like meat.

Two young girls, barefoot and without saddles, rode by on horses the color of gravel. Hand made a gesture indicating he was going to run after them, jump onto a car and from there onto the back of one of the horses. I shook my head vigorously. He pouted.

From a right-leaning building with a second-story balcony, a cat spoke, and we stopped. There were two mailboxes by the doorway and we, with me holding the flowers, gripping too tightly, took it as a sign.

“This is it,” I said. “We have to go up.”

“And we ring the bell, or what?”

“What time is it?”

“Ten maybe,” Hand said. “Is that too late?”

We decided to go up first and survey. The steps took our foot-steps,
knocks of knuckles against wood, and we were soon at the upper landing, between doors.

“Which one?” Hand asked.

One was ajar. “This one,” I said.

With a handle in place of a knob, it looked like a door to another hallway, so we pushed through. But it wasn’t a hallway. We were in an apartment. We gave each other looks of alarm. We were in someone’s apartment already.

But neither of us made a move to leave.

We took off our shoes, and I set the flowers down atop them. We stepped into the home and closed the door behind us, so quiet it confused me. A large portrait of a man in uniform, a political portrait, hung over the doorway. A table, a dinner table, stood on tip-toes in the middle of the small main room. Four place-settings, the remains of dinner. No sounds yet. The painted walls a faded olive, stained with fingerprints. Pictures torn from magazines pinned to the walls—three or four of professional motorcross riders, and next to them a series of postcards of women in ornate and bulbous Easter outfits. Above them, a large studio picture of a family of four, the family who lived here, we guessed, all wearing soccer uniforms. Hand raised his eyebrows at me as if to say:
Look at this! Look at us! Holy shit!

The apartment was tight, tidy and empty of anything of objective value. The kitchen was just off the main room, a cramped nook with a blue tile counter. The kitchen gave way to another room, a kind of den, with a couch and a small, upright lawn chair on either side. There was a small mountain of stuffed animals in one corner—Yosemite Sam on top—and a neat row of four plastic soccer balls. A TV pulsed, but without sound.

There was no movement in the house, no noise, but I expected something at any second. A man in a robe with a shotgun. It would almost be a relief.

Hand was across the room already, looking for the bedrooms.
There were two doors. He opened one, a closet. His head was then in the other, and quickly he jerked it back. He tiptoed back to me—I was hiding in the kitchen by now—and opened his mouth to speak. I made the angriest face I could, as quickly as I could, to thwart his attempt to talk. He stopped in time, making an elaborate gesture of surrender.

We stood for a few seconds, calming down, watching the TV across the kitchen table, in the next room. A desert scene, an ancient village in dry pink. Then a close-up shot of a gaunt man. Then Ernest Borgnine in Roman soldier gear. Then the gaunt man again, someone’s hands entering the frame—Borgnine’s?—and placing onto the gaunt man’s head a bird’s nest sort of thing—Oh. Crown of thorns.

Hand pointed to the bedroom, and held up four fingers, then made a sleeping gesture, indicating that the family, the four of them, was sleeping in the room, in one bed. We were in their house and they were sleeping in one bed in the next room. It was only then that I began to wonder so many questions: Why was the apartment door ajar? What would we do now? We’d wanted to come in, with our flowers, and then sit with them, be welcomed in, fed, and we’d leave with new friends in Saly, and they’d be left with a gift commensurate to our appreciation. But where I’d pictured loud conversation and joking in broken English and bad French, we were instead skulking in the dark, making no sounds. At least we could unload some currency.

The home was clean and comfortable and small. People lived here, even with the sound of the bars and clubs below and down the sandy street. The kids had places where they put their things, and the—I would never have something like this. I didn’t want a kitchen table or pictures on the wall. I wanted to leave.

Every time there was a close-up of the apostles, they were staring off in a way that appeared drug-induced. Saints did not have to stare so glassily, did not have to move with slow graceful gestures. Did they? I wanted a clumsy saint—or a fast one. A saint that
liked to run like a sprinter, in little silky shorts. Anne Bancroft. She was there, as mother Mary. And then, just below her, wailing, the woman from Zefferelli’s
Romeo and Juliet
. She looked the same. Borgnine, watching his comrades hoist Christ up onto his cross, was having a hard time. He felt terrible about what was happening but was, it seemed, powerless to stop it.

Hand stepped over and turned the TV off.

I looked in the cabinets above the sink for a vase, or large glass, or jar. There was a short stack of plastic NFL cups. None would support the weight of the flowers. Hand gave me an urgent look. Now he wanted to leave. I shrugged with great force, needing more time. There was a bucket in the corner, full of sand and cigarette butts. I brought it to the center of the kitchen table and jammed the stems of the flowers into it. Hand rolled his eyes. The flowers would be dead, dead, dead by the morning.

We sat in our car thinking.

“We can go looking for more donkeys,” Hand said.

We left the town and were quickly leaving the sphere of lights and people. We drove through black fields, miles and miles.

There was someone behind us.

“Jesus,” I said.

The headlights were coming quickly.

“How is that possible?” I said. “We’re going too fast.”

There was a roar from behind. The headlights engulfed us. They were coming from above, from a truck. It was inches from us. I was sure it was closing in.

—Jack.

—

—Jack will you—

I swerved to the side of the road. The truck screamed by.

“What happened?” Hand asked.

“That fucker was going 200 miles an hour,” I said.

Hand looked at me, not with me.

“Will, it wasn’t—”

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

The highway was dark and the air was cooling.

We got out, and sat for a while on the hood, throwing pieces of the road at the road. I had the idea that we should lay our heads on the road. It was a vision that had occurred to me, and we’d decided to follow through on these ideas, pretty much all of them, so we did it. The pavement was hot, but we heard nothing.

“Let’s do the money-taping,” said Hand, getting up.

“Where?”

“We’ll find a place.”

We drove on, stopping at a small square adobe home with a thatched roof. We jumped out; a goat bayed. It was a big goat, about five feet to the top of its head, white with grey crawling from its underside.

“We could drop it through their window,” I said.

“No,” Hand said.

“Why?”

“Let’s do the goat.”

We had to. Hand got the pouch and applied new tape to its sides. We were ready.

“You come at him from the front,” Hand said, “and I’ll sneak up the side. You distract him.”

“With what?”