Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) (7 page)

“I didn’t want to leave him completely alone.” There had been no sound, barely a detectable motion from the hole beneath his feet, where the captive now sat braced, knees wedged in dirt. “I wouldn’t say I’m in charge in any wider sense,” Stevick continued. “I’m something of a stopgap or placeholder, really.”

“I more than understand,” the café employee said. “We’re in a similar situation. Just a gig between real jobs,
that’s what I keep telling myself.” He tossed his fuming butt into the gutter, quite near. “There’s a million stories like yours and mine.”

“That’s not what I was getting at,” Stevick began, but, uninterested, the counterman had returned inside. The café’s population had never completely recovered from the jackhammer exodus; that, combined with the rain, kept Stevick’s vigil a lonely one. He preferred it, actually. The usual early-afternoon dog-walkers passed by, hunched in tented plastic ponchos, their smaller dogs, the terriers and dachshunds, sheathed in sleeveless plaid coats, but Stevick had always regarded the walkers as ships on a distant sea, some passing flotilla. Even on days of bright sunshine, they were too occupied with canine herding and the management of plastic-bagged turds to engage in the human life of the street. Though few other humans acknowledged him, Stevick liked to believe that he was still a participant in this mainstream. Whether his relation to the man beneath the boards qualified as a human transaction was another question.

*

Toward evening, the rain tailed, though not enough so that Stevick lowered the umbrella. The café’s clientele turned over; the tables were set for dinner, decorated with lit candles, menus in place; the staff even switched off the WiFi in order to chase out the most tenacious of the
afternoon Googlers. Others of Stevick’s neighbors, the professionally dressed, beleaguered rush-hour subwayers, slavers in financial offices, trudged past the corner with their own umbrellas. Though Stevick always thought of them as upright sheep, some were surprisingly bold in their muttering.

“What did you say?” Stevick shouted back.

“You heard me, friend. You’re lowering property values for the rest of us.”

“Not in my backyard, eh?” Stevick said. “Boy, when something like this arrives in your midst you learn pretty fast who’s who in this neighborhood, you yuppie.” Stevick spoiled for a fight, feeling now all the insurgent defiance he ought to have summoned for the diggers of the hole. But what was done, was done. Defense of what should never have been in the first place had become Stevick’s province.

“You artists need to grow up and learn the difference between an installation piece and a hole in the ground,” the man sneered. Surely Stevick’s age or younger, yet dressed like Stevick’s grandfather, he added, “Slack-ass.”

Stevick was incensed. “There’s a man in this hole!”

“Don’t bore me with your disgusting personal situation!”

“It’s not a personal situation, you fucker!”

“Roll up and die, grubbie!”

“Yaaaaarrrr!”
They charged with umbrellas out-held, Stevick feeling he’d abandoned his station but unable to
stem the urge to gore the man on the sidewalk and see him plead for mercy in the rain. Yet the two men essentially missed, failed to engage, the broad opened umbrellas merely grazing in a rubbery wet shudder as they passed. The single thrust having apparently exhausted his neighbor as much as it did Stevick, the man regathered his briefcase tightly beneath his elbow. “I need to go pay the nanny,” he murmured as he slunk off. Stevick retreated to his task.

It was night, and inside the café the menus at several of the tables had been taken up, wine poured, little plates delivered by the time another specialist made contact with Stevick. He wasn’t, as Stevick might have hoped, a sentry arriving to relieve Stevick of a duty that, now that he contemplated it, he had to admit was self-assigned. Rather, the jumpsuited man, a sturdy, almost fat one this time, with heavy, black-rimmed eyeglasses and a Yankees cap shielding him from the rain, appeared to be some kind of inspector, charged with ensuring the rightness of the site and recording in cryptic shorthand, with a ballpoint pen on a clipboarded sheet, certain impressions. The man double-parked his car, the blinking hazard lights of which gave clear evidence of the passing nature of his visit, and suggested to Stevick a long itinerary of random checks still ahead of him. He then politely asked Stevick for assistance in drawing aside the cover of planks. Stevick, in turn, extended the umbrella to help protect the operative’s clipboard while he wrote.

The captive, Stevick noted with relief, didn’t appear any more—or less—uncomfortable than when he’d first been lowered into his hole. He stood, as if to acknowledge the inspector’s attentions, but didn’t glance upward, possibly not wishing to incur rebuke, or perhaps he had merely grown incurious about what were, for him, routine operations. When the inspector went back to his car and returned bearing a wax-paper cup with a straw and a pair of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, Stevick understood that he intended to feed the man in the hole, and saw also that the captive had at some point spat the dirty cloth from his mouth, so that it now encircled his throat like a necklace. Probably it had never been secure to begin with, and the captive had not wished to embarrass the men who’d dug the hole by flaunting their ineffectual knotting skills. The inspector lowered both the cup with the straw and half a sandwich to within range of the captive’s mouth, and the man in the hole quietly and efficiently fed and drank. Stevick considered the fact that the captive could have cried out at any point and had chosen not to. Perhaps he’d learned that it led only to more punishment, if punishment was the right word. Stevick had begun to realize that he ascribed a certain strength, a gravity and authenticity, to the man in the hole, or perhaps to the hole itself, with which he wished to be associated, as in the sense of a shared undertaking. The passerby with whom he’d crossed umbrellas had been, in a manner, right: This was a kind of personal situation.

Stevick helped the inspector replace the wooden planks over the hole, then gratefully accepted the gift of the second wrapped sandwich, which turned out to contain pleasantly peppery chicken salad, albeit on soggy white bread. Stevick had been hungrier than he realized. Before departing, the inspector went back to his car one last time, returning now with an olive-green duffel, which he chucked gently to the edge of the hole, just beside Stevick.

“What’s that?”

“Standard issue,” the inspector explained obscurely. “It’ll be there when you need it.” He offered Stevick a quick salute and was off.

*

It was only after the café had closed for the night, the chairs overturned on the tables, that the rain ceased completely, leaving Stevick with the question of whether his shift here ought to conclude. He shook out and shuttered the umbrella, and had just reached for the enigmatic duffel when he was greeted by the sound of his own name in the familiar voice of his ex, Charlotte. It was perhaps inevitable that she’d pass by if he camped out here all day. In another lifetime, which was what even yesterday seemed to be after this present occurrence, he might have been guilty of doing exactly that. As it happened, he’d overlooked completely the possibility of her wandering
past. Charlotte was dressed and scented for a night on the town, clacking in her heels toward the subway entrance, most likely to undertake her usual carousel of Stevick’s former favorite bars in the company of his lately-out-of-touch friends.

“Well, now, look at you,” she joshed. “Keeping busy, as usual.”

Stevick guiltily withdrew his hand from the duffel bag and stood alert to indicate his vigilance, though now, rain cleared, umbrella folded, it was hardly evident what his duties were. He’d always had to straighten his posture in Charlotte’s presence, her height and perfect carriage a kind of warning or rebuke to him, and now he found himself wishing that she’d step off the curb, down to his level. The three planks that covered the hole were too expertly flush to the asphalt to be any help to him.

“There’s a man in this hole, Charlotte.” It was the second time he’d tried to even the field by stating this absolute truth, almost as if he needed to hear it himself to believe it, though he’d been presiding there all day. He wanted acknowledgment of his effort, but first he had to establish the basic situation.

“Sure,” Charlotte said. “I’ve heard of this sort of thing.”

“I guess I’d heard of it, too, though it’s different to have it right in front of you. Still, I guess it has to be somewhere.”

“True enough,” Charlotte said. “I just hadn’t pictured you getting involved. But by your logic, I suppose, someone had to step forward.”

Stevick couldn’t really improve on this sentiment, so he let it stand.

“So, what’s in the bag?” Nothing was lost on Charlotte, he had to give her that.

“More sandwiches, I suspect,” Stevick said, surprising himself with the guess. Should they be called rations, or provisions? It depended on who was eating them, he supposed. “They’re not bad, if you like chicken salad. Take one, if you’re hungry.”

Charlotte had by this time poked inside the bag, assuming her usual privileges in regard to Stevick’s boundaries, and pulled out a plastic-wrapped jumpsuit, identical, except for its virgin state, to those worn by the operatives and by the captive below. There appeared to be four or five of these stacked within the small duffel.

“You’re hired!” Charlotte exclaimed. “You’ve been promoted from a temp position to staff.”

Stevick found himself pleasingly able to ignore her goading. In many ways, Charlotte, like much else, was receding from view. The new conditions made irony a luxury. Was he meant to hoard the jumpsuits for his own use or to recruit other operatives from the neighborhood? Or, for that matter, were they intended for future incarcerees? Stevick considered the possibility that he’d eventually be fitted for a hole himself. The beauty of the uniform was that it settled nothing.

“Do you want to see him?” he asked Charlotte, and immediately regretted a question that seemed inappropriate, even somewhat craven on his part. He knew only
after he’d said it that he would never again let himself use the man in the hole as a token or a bargaining chip. He was a person!

Charlotte’s cavalier reply felt predestined. “No, thank you,” she said. “I should go, I’m running late. But it’s really good to see you doing so well, Stevick.” Her voice was like a pat on a baby’s downy skull.

The hint of tenderness cloaking Charlotte’s dismissal disgusted Stevick. Talk about your passing connections! Stevick felt closer after a single day to the man in the hole, though they’d exchanged not a word. As he watched Charlotte make her way up the street, Stevick experienced only relief that she’d refused his suggestion. To pry up the planks when he had nothing to offer was a small indignity he had spared the captive below. The last thing Stevick wished to do, after all, was annoy him with inessentials. Success in an endeavor like this one lay in the details. Stevick was certain he was going to do a good job.

Page one, panel one, the island. A dense atoll in a wide barren sea peppered with shark’s fins. Palm trees, sandy shore, pale lagoons, distant smoldering volcano, etc. Interior rain forest cloaking caves, freshwater springs, shrieking inhuman trills, a nest of ferns where bleached skeletons embrace, who can say what else.

Page one, panel two, the plane. A bolted turnip with wings, now aflame.

Page one, panel three, porthole windows of plane. In first class, the Dingbat Clan. Father Theophobe Dingbat, mother Keener Dingbat, son Spark Dingbat, daughter Lisa Dingbat. In coach, Large Silly (a clown), Poacher Junebug (a hunter),
C. Phelps Northrup (a theater critic), Murkly Finger (a villain), Peter Rabbit (a rabbit), King Phnudge (King of the Phnudges), C’Krrrarn (a monster). Large Silly and C. Phelps Northrup are in black and white, all others are in color. All gaze downward, terrified, except C’Krrrarn, who plays computer solitaire.

Page one, panel four, splashdown. The plane’s wings curl inward to cover its windshield as it crashes into the lagoon. The wings have fingers, and the doomed pilot and doomed copilot peer from between the fingers like eyeballs.

*

From
The Journals of C. Phelps Northrup

July 14

On this fifth day of our desolitude I fear our little compact of necessity has fractured. Mr. and Mrs. Dingbat have refused Poacher Junebug’s sagacious notion that we depart the beach for the caves of the interior, insisting that salvage is imminent and in trepidation of the rumored wolverines and bandicoots roaming the deeper groves. However, despite his intrepitude and riflery, Poacher Junebug has succeeded in bagging nothing, which circumstance neither allays our fears nor stocks our larder. The hunter also continually alludes, in snide asides, to the possible deluxe repast to be made of Peter Rabbit. Hence, much dissension, resulting
in parturition of our ranks; Peter Rabbit now savors protection within the circled wagons of the Dingbat Family, on the sand where we first crawled ashore, while Poacher Junebug, Large Silly, King Phnudge, and I have undertaken to conquestify the interior. Murkly Finger has, too, stayed behind and entrenched on the beach, in a fragment of the airplane’s darkened hull, within which he hoards untold provisions. Only King Phnudge has managed penetration of Finger’s lair (King Phnudge has no arms and so perhaps represented no threat to Finger’s cache), but his vocabulary was inadequate for conveying to us any sense of the inventory he’d espied there:

“Creamy dreamy breamy—hip hurdle hoo!”

C’Krrrarn has of course from the first gone his own way. He was sighted again, by the brainy little Dingbat girl, early this morning, posed atop the volcano. Lisa summoned us all to see him there, still as sculpture, foreclaw beckoning to the new sun.

*

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