Driver's Education (27 page)

A fragile, violet replica of an iris inlaid in a milky-white globe.
A black dot's been painted on where the pupil should be. As we all situate ourselves, I watch it for longer than I should—I try to look away, but I can't—and it never blinks. While her right one twitches, and moistens, and dilates, and shrinks, the strange glass eye stays deathly still. It reflects the light of the room and the forms of our bodies too perfectly, too exactly.

Randal says, “We're here to make a deal.”

But she can't actually see out of it, right? It's not as though it's functional; no, it's just a placeholder, a dog-ear.

The Gangster says, “Keep going.”

Or, conversely: it's superfunctional. A Sauron/Wonder Woman hybrid. A full-body airport TSA scanner, and then some. She's not just seeing me, my naked flaccid self, but also strange and telling bits of my soul. I find myself sitting on the right edge of my chair, half my ass hanging in midair, as I try to elude the laser stare.

In the reflection of the eye, I see Randal cross his legs at the ankle. “Banks's baseball,” he says.

“It's not for sale.”

“Who said anything about money?”

He sets our forged specimen on the table. At our feet, in the backpack, I feel Mrs. Dalloway shift her weight in anticipation.

The Gangster balances the ball on the tips of her fingers. She rotates it in the yellow light, bringing it ever closer to her right eye, the good one.

“What's this?”

Randal leans forward on his elbows. “What you've got there is Ernie Banks's five hundred twelfth home run ball.”

“And?”

“And it's the last one he ever hit. It's also signed—something I noticed your ball is not.” He leans back so the chair's two front legs lift from the ground. “We're willing to make an even trade.”

“Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

The Gangster lifts her brow and the bun on top of her head shifts slightly. She taps a finger against the glass eye. Yells, “DOUG!”

The kitchen door swings open and there's a blast of cheesy heat.
A fat, mustachioed man with a doughy face dusted in flour lumbers over to the Gangster, wiping his hands against his apron. He leans into her and they converse in a series of hurried whispers. She hands him the ball and he scrutinizes the autograph; he turns it over so he's looking at the name upside down. He runs a finger over each of the letters, squinting as he feels the pen's etching in the ball's leather. When he returns to the Gangster's ear to relay his findings, Randal uncrosses his legs.

Doug stands up straight; he folds his arms and licks flour from the corners of his mouth.

The Gangster says, “We're not interested.”

“You're making a huge mistake.”

“Am I?”

The Gangster stands and Doug clears his throat. I steal a glance at Randal, who's biting at the torn edge of a cuticle and pressing his lips against his teeth. In front of us, the ball rolls back and forth on the warped table.

She stands. Says, “I'm a busy woman,” and, from below, Mrs. Dalloway hisses.

I kick the bag once, but not hard enough. The hissing continues, growing into a flubbed attempt at a roar: a balloon being deflated, the edges of the rubber pulled so the air comes out in a minor-keyed moan.

Doug's halfway to the kitchen door, but the Gangster stops him, gripping his arm with one of her wingish hands. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” I say too quickly. “It was nothing.”

She glides back to the table. “Open the bag.”

“There's nothing in the bag.”

“I said
open the bag
.”

For the first time, the left eye makes a move. As her face strains, the globe presses outward, turning the pink lining of the socket veiny and red. Entranced and terrified, I lift Randal's pack. I stand and pass it slowly to her.

“Finn,” he says through clenched teeth. “No.”

The Gangster places the pack on an empty chair and unzips it greedily. Her cheeks crease as she twitches into a smile, as she lifts the cat by
the scruffy nape of her neck. As she flicks her single front paw, sending it swaying like some wind-ravaged branch.

“Fascinating,” she says.

Dalloway responds with her best poker face.

The Gangster continues, “Doug, take the five hundred twelfth ball and give the kids the other one from out front. We'll need to order up a new plaque—call someone about that.” Then, to us: “We'll take the ball and the cat. Those are the terms. Nonnegotiable.”

Randal scoffs, feigning his lack of interest. “Why the hell would anyone want a three-legged cat?”

“You have your reasons,” the Gangster says. “I have mine.”

The skin on Mrs. Dalloway's neck folds over the Gangster's knuckles. She rubs her two back paws together and her threadbare tail twitches, curling into itself.

“I'll have to discuss this with my associate,” Randal is saying, but it's too late. He doesn't get the words out soon enough. They dangle, suspended in his choked throat, as I hear myself say:

“Done. You've got a deal.”

•  •  •

We're standing at the intersection of Belmont and Sheffield, where we've parked Lucy. Directly above us is the “L,” and the trains passing on the tracks throw sparks that illuminate our faces like combustible fireflies.

Randal is yelling: “What the
fuck
were you thinking?”

And I'm saying, “I don't know. I mean—I wasn't. I wasn't thinking.” I've got Ernie Banks's five hundredth homer palmed in my right hand and I anxiously pass it to the left. Playing catch with myself. “It was that
eye,
man. It was that fucking glass
eye
.”

Randal sits on a curb. He puts his head between his knees, balancing his brow on the ends of his thumbs. But he's too nervous: He stands as quickly as he sits, fidgets in both his pockets for a cigarette, and kicks an aluminum trashcan when he can't find one. The sound bangs off the steel beams of the “L” that encase us.

He says, very suddenly, “I'm going back.”

“You're what?”

“I'm going back there. I'm going to save her.”

“You're fucking nuts.”

He takes a knee on the sidewalk. Tightens the shoelaces on both his sneakers. “We don't have any idea what they've got planned for her.”

“It's a cat! What could possibly happen to her?”

He looks up at me from where he's crouched, and in the city's neon twilight his cheeks glow red, blue, green, orange.

I change my tone: “What I mean is that woman's probably just lonely. You know, like how cat people are lonely.” I don't believe myself. “She probably just needs, like, a friend.”

He stands and flexes his calves against the curb; he pulls each foot to his ass, separately, stretching his hamstrings.

“They're going to kill her.” Then: “Follow up with Lucy. Park her along the curb one hundred feet west of the restaurant, and keep the engine running.”

“This is crazy,” I tell him. “You're fucking crazy.”

He trots west toward the Gangster's, emerging out from under the “L” and into a triangle of light sliced out of the road by a streetlamp.

“There's blood on your hands, McPhee,” he calls.

I get in the car, slamming the door so hard that the windows rattle in their frames. I stab the keys into the ignition, but I don't turn them. I pull at the ends of my greasy hair until there's a sharp pinch and four strands come loose. I thud my palm's heel against the steering wheel.

“He's lost it,” I say to no one, to Lucy. I'm silent, then, half waiting for her to respond, for her radio to blink alive and dictate some sage wisdom.

A car passes us and the pavement crackles.

“Fine,” I say, throttling the engine. Kicking her into gear. “Just
fine
.”

It's nearing eleven o'clock, and all the spots along the curb are taken, so I double-park next to a Honda a stone's throw west of the restaurant, as I'd been instructed. White-knuckling the wheel, I count how many seconds I can stand between glances in the rearview mirror. The neighborhood surrounding The Gangster's has undergone some intense gentrification
since the 1970s, so instead of catering to a circus of oddball crooks, its streets are now checkered with gay men and young couples who'll wait hours to get into restaurants that have outside seating.

I say, “Christ, Randal. Hurry
up.
”

I watch the couples as they hold hands, lifting their looped arms over chained bikes, fire hydrants, children. To distract myself, I edit them into different pairs—place this woman with this man; make these two guys slip their fingers into each other's pockets; have this girl plant an unexpected kiss on her friend's cheek—things that I'll no longer be paid to do, but that would make their lives infinitely more interesting.

Then, finally, I see him.

Randal's sprinting, but awkwardly, his arms wrapped around his midsection. When he gets closer to the car, I see that his kneecaps are covered in flour and bits of mashed-up cheese. A brushstroke of marinara shadows his left eye. Dalloway's head peeks out from the collar of his shirt. Her chewed-up ears brush his jawline as she peers over his shoulder at Doug, who trails them by about twenty-five yards, hurling obscenities.

“Get her in gear!” Randal shouts over Doug's
fuck
s and
sons-of-bitch
es and
faggot
s. He says again, as he swings around Lucy's rear, “Get her going!”

We're rolling by the time he slides into the front seat. Doug launches a pizza saw at the car, but it bounces off the back bumper with a harmless clink, powerless. In the side mirrors, I see the gay men and the amorous couples take to the fringes of the sidewalk.

“We got those motherfuckers good.”

He lifts his shirt and Mrs. Dalloway slithers out into the open air. He pulls a trapezoidal chunk of pineapple from her front paw and then, very theatrically, she shakes the experience from her, sending barely noticeable tears against our cheeks. Quickly, she bounds between us toward the car's rear. She presses her nose against the back windshield and watches Doug, who is currently shrinking into a fat, thrashing speck.

•  •  •

We've passed the border into Iowa and the night is beyond black: it's a vacuum that eats the stars. We are driving through the night.

The mobile phone rings once.

“Dad?”

“Finn?”

“It's me.”

“You need to come home.”

I tell him, “I'm halfway there.”

There are no other cars in sight, and so the road exists for only as long as Lucy's headlights allow. A silence persists in which my father realizes what I've done. In which his breath shortens and then draws itself out again. In which I think we both realize that if it weren't for each other we'd be totally alone.

This time he says, “Please hurry.”

1987: Finn

By Colin A. McPhee

There were two earthquakes.

The first one happened on October 1 and coincided with the exact moment of his birth.

“Well,” the delivering doctor said, “that was interesting.”

His surgeon's mask had gone askew and the stool he'd been sitting on had been knocked to the ground. Nurses buzzed around us—checking, measuring, snipping, stitching. One of them wiped clean Finn's tiny body. She swaddled him in a blanket and handed him to Clare, who was propped up on her elbows, the bed's pillows having been thrown to the corners of the room.

The maternity ward was on the first floor. Above us, I heard the frantic clack of feet running. Nervous, overcooked voices.

“Should we leave?” I asked. “I mean, should we evacuate?”

The doctor pulled the gloves from his hands. “What, because of a little tremor?” He rinsed his fingers in a sink and then reached down to pick up a roll of paper towels that'd fallen beneath a cabinet. He looked at Clare, at Finn. “Son,” he said, “you're in for a lot more than that.”

I watched from the hospital's window as Los Angeles tried to pull and patch itself back together. A car had run head-on into a fire hydrant, causing a steady stream of water to geyser twenty feet into the sky; the
driver had turned on her windshield wipers. Newspaper stands turned over and spilled their printed contents out onto the sidewalks. People kicked through the separated pages, pulling them from their shins, their knees. They toed the curb wearily, with hesitation, verifying that the world had stopped its rollicking before they took their first steps. The next day, I'd read how the earthquake—it would come to be known as the Whittier Narrows—clocked in at a magnitude of 6.0. I'd read how, a few miles south in the city of Cypress, a ten-ton replica of Michelangelo's
David
now lay supine in the grass. I'd read how a falling slab of concrete killed Lupe Elias-Exposito as she crossed the parking lot with her sister at the state university in Los Angeles.

Finn was crying. I knelt down beside Clare's bed and looked into his puckered face as he gulped his first mouthfuls of air. Later, we'd speculate as to whether he was born because of the earthquake, if the ground's trembling and splitting gave him the final push he needed, or if it was actually vice versa, that Finn's eagerness to climb from his mother's belly made the whole world shake.

Clare whispered
shh, shh
while she brushed thin wet strands of hair from his forehead. He reached his arms out, up, his tiny fingers grasping at nothing, at everything.

“Isn't he so beautiful?” she asked.

I said, “Is he supposed to be that blue?”

•  •  •

For that first year, Finn was Clare's purview. I had just begun to encounter the writer's block that would come to characterize most of my adult life; just started to recognize its stern corners, its sharp edges, the perpetual shadows it threw. At that point, though, I was still convinced I could move it. I was still convinced that if I locked myself away for long enough, or if I let my eyes cross enough times while staring at the screen, I'd manage to burrow through the block's center, eventually hitting light on the other side. And so, during those long, futile hours, Clare was always the one who fed Finn, who bathed him, who went to him when he'd cry at night. We'd hear his piercing scream, and I'd make a show of lifting myself from the sheet, but she'd press a hand against my chest,
say, “No, I've got him.” I'd follow her sometimes. I'd creep down the hall behind her, past the office where I wrote, the shell-shaped nightlights along the wall throwing yellow against my toes. I'd watch through a crack in the nursery's door as she held him, as she rocked him.