|
•
|
|
Security by
Martin sends two short bursts of his Buick LeSabre’s horn into the snow-dotted morning air outside Al’s trailer in Fairlawn, a town, he observes—surveying the property around the trailer mounted on cinder blocks, some kind of gutter hanging dislocated from its flat roof—in possession of nothing of its name. The lawn is anything but fair; at best a small plot of frozen mud and car parts. Green and orange Christmas bulbs wink strung around the trailer’s frosted windows, though Christmas passed over a month ago. That these lights are still up annoys Martin; he can’t say exactly why. The smell of coffee and donuts fills the car, compliments daily of the Tastee Creme off Highland Avenue. A hunched, skinny man with thick white hair emerges from the darkened hollow of the doorway, steps out into the cold. Martin notices something weird about his partner’s arms as Al shuts and locks the trailer’s door behind himself: icy sunlight appears to catch and glint off the man’s hands as he replaces the house keys into his coat pocket. And as Al comes closer to the car Martin can make out a half-dozen pins in each of his skinny naked wrists below his coat sleeves, blue hospital foam padding his knuckles, where what looks like fishing line is strung, a medical cat’s cradle jerry-rigged about his fingers. Snow flurries, dabs at the glass in little spit stars. Martin, as is his habit, glances up into his rearview, briefly observes the two eyes looking back in relation to each other and then to the rest of his face: the repeatedly broken nose, broad eggwhip scar at the rise of his left cheek, another small pale notch on his forehead got from the slashed ice of a childhood skating rink, and then, dimmed by the shadow of the visor masking the winter sun, a white gash that clefts his chin, a little too right of center to look natural or good in a rugged way. All from hockey days, glory days. His face, a map of errors in judgment and simple bad breaks. Except for the perfection of this left eye—snowy white surrounding hazel, a perfect symmetry of gold flecking, a kaleidoscope of retinal noise. An eye altogether too good for Martin, this left one. The hazel matches that of the right eye pretty well, this always impresses him, but the fixed and bloodless white draws attention to its own machined perfection and in doing so betrays him. Martin is distracted from the rearview mirror by a ticking sound to his right. Al stands tapping with one of his house keys at the passenger side window, can’t open the door with his hands caged and pinned up the way they are. Shrugs as if to say as much. Martin leans over and pulls the handle, embarrassed that he has been caught inspecting himself in the mirror. Carpal tunnel, Al says, climbing in half groaning, as he might say Good Morning on any other day. Al looks like a rhesus monkey. Martin first observed this upon meeting him two weeks earlier. The image sticks. Carpal tunnel, Martin returns, as the car pulls away slowly, churning slush and gravel. That stiffness...the tingling and numbness? Al says. Get this, I go in Saturday just to have them looked at: eight goddamn weeks with this shit on. He settles into the vinyl seat, setting his stainless steel and linoleum grey thermos on the muddy floor. The window begins to steam up and Martin cracks his window slightly, turns up the heat on the defogger. He can’t help but wonder what his scrawny partner of two weeks has done to whip up a repetitive motion disorder. To the best of his knowledge the man doesn’t play a musical instrument, nor does he type; hasn’t spoken of any demanding hobbies; his and Al’s job certainly requires no tedious motion save, Christ, the repetition of time. But Martin doesn’t quite feel prepared to ask how Al got the pins. He is still wondering, though, as they arrive at the nicer, northern section of Aurora, the village next to Fairlawn. He pulls along the curb of Burrows Lane, where they will spend the next twelve hours parked, facing a millionaire’s oversized Spanish Colonial set deep into a long yard, spray of fir trees, tennis court out back, pool shaped into the outline of a large shrimp, teardrop, or a plain kidney, drained for the season. Security surveillance, Martin’s job is called—waiting, anonymous, in his car for someone to come and throw a Molotov cocktail through one of the mansion’s lead-paned windows, or to break in and slaughter the owner and his family. Waiting for someone to pay the fucker back, Martin often thinks. The house belongs to a man whom Martin usually leaves nameless, a CEO at the Fort Jones paper mill who, three weeks earlier, laid off several hundred workers. Martin knows the millionaire’s real name but prefers to think of him without a name if he must think of him at all. Millionaire is pretty scared at the moment, on vacation, hiding, according to what Al and Martin have been told. Martin leaves the engine running, reaches over and notches down the heat. I was thinking, Al says. Yeah, says Martin. About my hands. If it comes down to it, would you mind picking up my paycheck from Fergeson? Just till I get the pins taken out. I don’t want him thinking I’m some invalid who can’t do a job. You going to try to avoid him the whole time? Martin says. I don’t see any other way so long as you get my check for me, Al says. Leave me out in the car come payday. I mean, if it comes to taking someone down, I still got a pretty good heft in my legs. Al lifts his knee in the small space in front of him (flexing? showing how he might deliver a kick, should someone confront them?). Martin has quickly discovered in Al an incredible gift for self-deception: as if the world were a special window in which his reflection always came back two feet taller and a foot wider; twenty years younger. When all the man is really, is a fifty-five, maybe sixty-year-old bony shirt, neck like a field fowl, hitched up pants. Brown socks. But if you ask Al, he and Martin are spies, or highly trained killers. A security force, a two-man SWAT team. Some nonsense like that. When all they amount to, really, are a couple of tin ducks, two small distractions; ten dollars an hour, no benefits. Lunch, Al’s turn to walk the mile out of this neighborhood over to the KFC, says he can use the exercise anyway. Like it isn’t his turn. Martin says, Fine, plays along, and watches the older man trudge away through the dirty slush of wealthy street toward the subdivision’s ostentatious entrance, disappearing beyond a mending wall onto Route 7A. He walks with a slight hitch in his step, as if he might float off the ground at any turn. Al has confessed to Martin that he has trouble with the cold because of a hip replacement several years back, another of an endless litany of medical procedures Al can go on about with an odd, almost moist-eyed regard. He is one of those in whom sickness seems a kind of comfort. As if it were a martyrdom-in-progress. The day before, discussing his bypass surgery, Al had said he was a drooler for six months while everything came back together inside him…while the scar healed—hitching his pant leg up, showing Martin the vein they’d taken out to patch up the bad one in his heart, the leg scar a long pearly indigo scrape running along his calf up to his knee. But Martin found his gaze fixed on a large snag at the top of the man’s brown nylon socks, the stocking eye rip opened over pale oyster shell skin and coarse white leg hairs, a trisect of blue vein, a spider vein bloom nearby, a second worn hole exposing the upper curve of the thread-ragged dirty heel as he tugged the cloth to make way for the scar. It is these revelations that make the stories interesting. Al reappears at the mending wall forty minutes later, scrawny blizzard-smeared Sasquatch, carrying cardboard red and white bucket and paper bag through the snow falling heavy around him. He reaches the car and climbs in and they feast on six-piece wings and breasts, hard biscuits, cold thick gravy. Al keeps dabbing at the grease and fried crumbs on his fingers with napkins, but the paper sticks in his little glinting carpal tunnel pins. Martin often finds it difficult to keep from laughing at the man sitting beside him, though as now, he does not laugh. Not out loud. Al cleans chicken and napkin bits from his fingers. I was wondering, he says. You don’t mind my asking something, Marty? What’s that, Al. Well. About your eye. The left one. What about it? Is it real? People do not ask this of Martin, and so he isn’t really prepared to answer. The question comes at him in a funny way, as he was just, at this moment, silently, gently laughing at the general aspect of the question’s asker. Later, he’ll consider what he didn't tell Al, that he simply replied: I got sticked playing hockey a couple years back. Then he rubs his nose, looks up into the rearview, checks himself, and sees headlights beaming toward them blurred in a mass of white. Ah, hockey, Christ, Al says. Never followed it really. Seen those at a pharmacy once. In a jar. Glass eyes in the jar, I mean. You still play then? Al asks, trying to pull away from his partner’s silence. Play what? Martin says, lost in the jar. Hockey. Not lately, he says as the four o’clock timed light comes on in one of the millionaire’s upstairs windows.
* * *
The headlights in the rearview mirror grow and clarify into a station wagon, which pulls behind them, then turns right, into the base of the long driveway, and stops. Even with the windows rolled up they can hear the muted bass throb. Martin makes out two people in the front seat, a man and—he thinks—a woman. The man gets out and swallows down the last of a can of beer—salsa horn section now blasting shrill into the air—throws the empty can into the snow, then returns to his car. The music mutes, throbs. Al and Martin sit, watching. A few minutes later the man once again steps from his station wagon, this time wandering into the center of the lawn, and sends another empty aluminum beer can floating in the air. It seems to hang suspended for a moment then lands soundlessly on the snowed-over stone walkway leading to the front door. Martin can smell fried chicken lingering in the browned grease of the red and white bucket. An hour later there are eight cans of beer on the lawn, red and silver edges softened by an accumulating skin of white snow. All that jungle music sounds the same, you ask me, Al says. Give me Charlie Pride any time over that shit. With each trip to the lawn the man staggers a little more, buoyant from the beer. Al and Martin sit, watch, as if some deeper meaning were embedded in the moment. Martin doesn’t expect anything to happen really—the man doesn’t look like he means or even could deliver harm. And the property is expansive enough that, really, the music pumping into the air is masked and deadened before it can pass through the rows of fir and beech and maple lining the fenced outskirts. All the same Martin is pretty sure he wouldn’t know what to do if someone were to suddenly pull out a gun or something like that. And he is beyond doubt about Al’s ability to help under the circumstances. That fried chicken sure does hang around doesn’t it? Al says, cracking his window a little. The Hispanic man is now urinating into the mouth of a lawn jockey at the front of the driveway. No harm in that. He begins to circle the painted wooden body, cutting a steaming line into the little wooden skull, washing off the snow peaked on top. I ever tell you about the picnic with the chicken? Al says finally, watching the man urinating now on the shoulders, then wiggling his water over the front torso of the statue. Went to McKinley Park with the wife. Had a wife back then. We stopped off at the Colonel’s, the one off 9, across from the mini-mall, and uh picked up an eight-piece. McKinley Park we go on over beyond the Little League diamonds with the park benches. We find a bench and sit and have our picnic. It must have been a Saturday. I notice all sorts of other people. But what was funny was they all have the same red and white KFC buckets at their picnic tables. One of those, you know—what the hell are the odds of this?— everyone eating from the same place. Anyway, long story short, about half an hour later everyone on that picnic ground, strangers, children, wife and myself alike, everyone’s vomiting chicken and biscuits all over the picnic tables, onto trees, back into the buckets, everywhere. Al pauses, then murmurs, as if to himself: Still can’t look at those red and white buckets without remembering that picnic. But that chicken’s just something else. The man on the yard, as if noticing Martin’s car for the first time, approaches. Jesus, here we go, Al says as he might on television. He rolls the window down and straightens himself up in the seat. Somehow, he looks smaller. You guys with Koestler? the stranger yells, keeping a few feet distant. Could be, Al says, and Martin sees cornmeal crumbs and gravy on his turned chin, a bit of it stained oily below on his shirt. Could be, huh? Who are you people? Y ou law or something? Sure, amigo. We’re law, says Al. Sure amigo, the stranger mimics, drunk, attempting to sound even more nasal than Al. You give him this then, Law. He comes closer to Al’s opened window, beer breath steaming through broad grin and perfect teeth, Martin notices, and drops a clear plastic bag onto Al’s lap. Al lifts it, holds it up eye level. Inside the bag there is a small plastic doll wearing a coarse-stitched burlap shirt. T he doll’s head is melted, imprinted with black cigarette burns. Long pins have been stuck into its stomach and neck, little pants hitched up exposing two dead bird’s legs grafted with thread to its plastic torso. On the bottom of the bag, tiny brass covered chocolate coins, some bloody molars looks like, a small feather, a smaller bone, a dark yellow smudge. A soda pop cap, bent in half, folded over itself. After the time it takes to distinguish the contents, Al tries to throw the bag out of the car window, but it tangles on the pins in one of his hands and he struggles a moment before he can free it from them. During this moment he gets a little delirious. The man in the snow, laughing, says, Doll look like you don’t he? Motherfucker. He picks the bag up from the ground and walks to the millionaire’s snow covered mailbox, drops the bag inside, then turns slowly away back to his car. He almost slips before the car door, but grabs the side mirror, steadies himself, opens it and climbs inside. Then he rolls his window down and the throb of music goes silent. Blue-grey exhaust spits from the tailpipe. As the car pulls out Martin sees the woman in the passenger side giving him the finger. The car crunches over the snow onto the street, then drives slowly off. I mean shit, Al manages to say. His voice sounds pinched, higher than usual and his face has turned an odd, severe crimson. I mean shit. Martin reaches behind the front seat and digs out a plastic Shop-Rite bag from under some old newspapers. He climbs out of the car and gathers the beer cans that are now buried under an inch of snow. Once, he looks back at the car and sees Al’s head leaned against the fogged over window, glaring bug-eyed. After Martin fishes the last can from the snow, he returns to the car and throws the bag onto the back seat. It embarrasses him to realize that, without thinking about it he has already planned on returning the cans for the deposit money. Al is making strange little choking sounds up front when Martin climbs back in. You all right there Al? Martin says. Al’s head is leaned against the window and his eyes look seized up. Al, Martin says, noticing the saliva pooling at the corner of the older man’s mouth, a thin line of it running down his chin and dripping onto his shirt.
* * *
On the drive to the hospital, the Hispanic man’s, Who are you people? keeps running over in Martin’s mind. You with me? Martin asks Al, figuring that choking means he is still hanging in there at least. He drives past an X-MAS TREES sign someone has neglected to take down from a telephone pole. It seems dishonest somehow, leaving a holiday up so long after it's over. It snowed this Christmas, which helped. The wine and beer and that gift bottle of Canadian whisky, they helped. He really wasn’t making enough with these jobs. Worse, the jobs themselves, one after another, made it so that he was too tired to focus on what he might try to do other than the jobs of the moment. Al is still choking when Martin turns left onto 37A, and then shortly afterwards onto Coldwater Road. What he hadn’t told Al about his eye: hadn’t explained that he’d begun skating when he was four years old, hadn’t described the local, district, and state championships through high school, or the six-hours-a-day practice schedule since as far back as he can remember. Hadn’t explained he’d even been a recruit for the Olympics, not so long ago really. Made it as far as two weeks in training up in Ottawa. Canada was the only country outside the U.S. he’d ever gotten to travel to. The kid who had taken his eye out came from Fall River, Massachusetts, a town, he suspects not unlike this one. During practice, toward the end of those first two weeks of training, I’d checked the kid pretty hard. But Christ you don’t expect…. Martin hears himself now speaking aloud to the choking sounds beside him. I never believed that kid was sorry. Still don’t. Give me a fucking break. Not even after he’d figured out what he’d done. You don’t have peripheral vision without both eyes, so. I mean, you can skate circles around a dead fly on the ice but you don’t have depth perception, can’t see the periphery, you don’t have anything in that game. So they had to ship me home. Even right now, you know, with this snow coming down the way it is, I can’t tell where certain things are, left to right, outside this window. Snow coming down doesn’t help at all. I worked for a moving company for a while. Summers I mowed lawns. I’m what, twenty-three, and I’m mowing people’s lawns. Called it landscaping one night when one of Hilary’s night class friends asked what I did. After I said it I wanted to punch the guy. I don’t know why. I thought, you know: Shit, he’s making me make this shit up. She’s getting her nursing degree, Hilary. You’ll have to meet her sometime (knowing Al won’t ever meet Hilary). Nights I porter at the Tastee Creme, the one over on Highland. Never told you that. But Jesus Al it’s hard to get a word in edgewise you know with you and your bypass surgeries and your colitis or whatever and your myocardial this and that your carpal tunnel... What the fuck is happening to your face? Jesus, we’re almost there. So I didn’t tell you I was moonlighting, did I? Yeah. It’s only three hours, every night. I dump water over the floors, scrape ‘em down, mop it up and then I’m outta there. I strip to my underwear, no one’s around. Jerry, the owner, says he’ll train me as a baker I stick it out long enough, though. Fill in for his brother when he needs a day off here and there. I’m still waiting on that one. Good place. Good people, Greeks. They let me bring home the day-olds. You know that coaching for the Boosters—teaching kids how to skate is volunteer work? Can’t make a dime. How did you get carpal tunnel, Al? You got some kind of hobby? You put angels on the heads of pins in your free time? Jesus, we’re getting there. Al breathes quietly next to him now, something roughly resembling a snore coming from his throat. Martin stops talking and just drives, observing the soft white snow flying at him in clusters. It makes him wince sometimes, just snow flying at him like this. He remembers a night, two years ago, before he lost his eye, when he had been first notified he’d be going to Ottawa. It was a week or so before Christmas—he remembered this because the phone call seemed not so much a Christmas gift, but a holiday all unto itself. He was to leave in a month. Most likely he wouldn’t make first string, but that didn’t matter. It was his and Hilary’s first Christmas together, that one. After he hung up the phone with the scout he made a couple of other calls, to his mother and father and then his brother in Michigan. That night he and Hilary celebrated at The Left Bank, the best restaurant in town. They ordered a decent bottle of champagne and he even had the escargots on the menu. It tasted just like frog, he had joked. Is it just the snow, or the Xmas sign, reminding him that later, at home, coming from that dinner he and Hilary made love, after which he fell asleep, half-drunk? He woke some time in the night, found Hilary on top of him, her nightshirt hitched up over her hips, rocking with him again inside her. He doesn’t know why he remembers this, of all times, now with Al beside him. You looked so peaceful with your eyes closed, she said in the morning. He remembers this quite often. He sometimes dreads coming home at night just because of what he has to say if asked how his day went. What can he tell her? Al told me about his triple bypass, but all I could notice were the holes in his socks. Al appears to be unconscious, breathing quietly beside Martin as the LeSabre turns into the emergency room parking lot, though the right side of his face is now flushed purple like a giant birthmark. Martin pulls up next to an EMT van, gets out and finds two paramedics. They strap Al to a stretcher and bring him inside. Martin stays by the car, watches as the sliding doors of the emergency room entrance close. He realizes they probably expect him inside, to provide some kind of information on this man he’s just brought in. But he doesn’t have any. Doesn’t know the guy, really. He could tell them only this: The man’s name is Al Reese. He lives in a trailer with Christmas lights. His whole life he’s been plagued with a series of health problems. I don’t know. None of them are very interesting. Maybe he has a bracelet or an identification card to that effect. He was married once I guess. He is sick, often. That's all I know. He bears no relation to me, familial or otherwise. I was a hockey player, point guard, was going pro, until I lost one of my eyes. My wife is beautiful, some kind of throwback from my glory days you ask me, though she’d slap you if you ever said something like that around her. Of this I am well aware. At night, if we make love at all, which is seldom if at all now, I close my eyes. I keep them shut. As he thinks this he sees that his car has pulled out of the parking lot and is now driving down Coldwater Road. And as if it helps him make it through the snow, helps him drive to his house once again, he repeats more or less what he just said the rest of the way home: his name is Al Reese. He lives in a trailer with Christmas lights. He hasn’t taken them down yet, which I’ll admit bugs me. He’s been plagued with a bunch of health problems. None of them are very interesting, though he speaks of them freely if you will listen. I understand he was married once. He is sick all the time. He bears no relation to me, familial or otherwise... |