Rules for Becoming a Legend (17 page)

Still, Jimmy would not bite, tried to play it cool. “Man,” he said, rubbing at the grass stains on his jeans. “You got them all dirty.”

It took Dex to get things started. “You're not that strong, and you're old, too!” he took a running charge at the gangly suit hanger,
bulleted him in the chest, and they fell in a mess of limbs, Dex mostly on top but it was hard to tell with the flapping suit coat.

“I's not old, I's so strong!”

Dex was laughing and trying to get the Flying Finn pinned, but the old man was full of tricks and before long he was on his feet again, strutting back and forth, crowing, literally, like a rooster. “
Cock-a-doodle-do!
”

“Come on, Jimmy,” Dex said.

Jimmy looked at Todd once more, and Todd nodded his head. He wanted his boy to get messy.

“All right, OK,” Jimmy said, and this time both boys pummeled into their grandpa. All three fell into the muddy grass laughing and boasting about their strength. Todd went back in the house, shaking his head in joy.
Just like that
 . . .

•   •   •

Those visits from the Flying Finn were hard though. Todd had to willfully not think about the day of Suzie's funeral every time the old man came, which of course made him think of it all the more. He remembered how they were all dressed in black—even the Columbia City sky was dark with thunderclouds rolling in from the ocean—to put to rest this tiny box, painted white. It seemed too small to hold anything of substance. That box. Especially an entire person, especially a little girl who had hidden depth enough in her smile to hold a happiness so big it swallowed up two accidental parents.

At the funeral, Todd folded his arms high and tight on his chest against the wet, Oregon cold. He was shaking, vibrating, like at any moment he would come unraveled. Genny Mori beside him, slack and out of it. Eyes blurry, unfocused, but put together in a neat dress. The Flying Finn in a suit, old, dusty, and elegant. A used-to-be black, some of the color burned off. Todd turned to his
father. Old man acted like he knew everything else under the sun, he should know what to do now for God's sake.

“Dad?” Todd spoke overloud. “Dad, what do I do?”

The Flying Finn turned away.

“Todd, stop it,” Genny Mori said. She was huge, pregnant with Jimmy, and concerned he was going to make a scene. That was Genny in a nutshell, anti-scene.

Todd grabbed his father's shoulder and turned the old man around. It wasn't difficult. Todd was still solid and the Flying Finn had more or less turned to paper. He expected to see tears in the old man's eyes. But there were none.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Get the hold on yourself.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing-nothing-nothing.” Voice a pile of dried-out wood shifting on itself.

Todd had the man by both of his shoulders. The priest was watching.
He
was crying at least. The Bergs, father, son, and pregnant new wife were there, even though no one asked them to be.

“Todd,” Principal Berg said. “Come on now.”

“Todd . . .” someone else. James? “Todd, buddy, come on. Come here.”

Todd kept squeezing his father. He could feel the structure of the old man's bones beneath his hands. He felt like he could crumple him entirely. Fold him into a paper plane. Let him fly.

“Todd, honey, let go,” Genny Mori said in that whisper that meant,
Other people are watching, you're embarrassing yourself.

Then the Flying Finn said the thing that Todd had to willfully un-remember every time the old man came over to visit: “She lucky to die so young, see none of this bad place.”

Todd let go of this man. He didn't understand. This man wasn't his father. Not the same man who pushed so hard for him to be
the best basketball player he could be. The man before him was a fraud.

“Lucky?” Todd turned as if he were walking away, Genny turned too, but then, with a quickness that electrocuted his bones, a speed that the Flying Finn had so long honed in him for basketball, Todd turned back and pushed his father in his chest. Old man flew back and slid across the wet cemetery grass. In the process, Todd's knee popped. He buckled to one side, limped around cussing.

On his back the Flying Finn looked up at the sky. Storm was threatening for real. He was breathing fast, shallow breaths. “I can't get no protection!” he shouted. “Even my own flesh and blood.”

Principal Berg walked over. “Here,” he said, and offered him a handkerchief.

“No, you the worse of the lots. All of yous.” He scrambled up, his back a cake of mud and grass, and ran off in a slippery trot that would have been comical in other circumstances.

Todd meanwhile became concerned with finding out who had been in charge of setting up the burial. “They did such a fine job,” he said between sobs, “I want to give a tip, they did a fine job.”

“Who's in charge here?” James said desperately, trying to help. “Who?”

Todd looked at him, closed his eyes, and sat in the grass.

•   •   •

Now, with Todd allowing the Flying Finn to visit, the old man took his second chance seriously. Each day before he came, he washed with palm-cupped water in Norma's restaurant bathroom like the giant, bony, wingless bird he'd become, humming to keep his mind off the cold. He showed up at the house reeking of antibacterial hand soap, skin pink, almost red, because of how hard he'd scrubbed.

On these visits, the Flying Finn did most of the talking, Jimmy and Dex did most of the listening, and Todd sat way back in his chair, watching.

“You know why I called the Flying Finn?” He liked to ask the boys. “It's the soccer team. In Finland. I's the fastest son of the dog of the whole bunch.” He puffed out his boney chest. “Move my feets so you only see where I's been, and there he goes like he's a flying Finn!”

Sometimes Todd interjected. “Oh, you made that up yourself.”

“Me? No! It was the fans. My fans.”

“You never had any fans.”

“Yes, I did and they called me Flying Finn. I already told all about that.”

The Flying Finn stayed for hours on his visits, wearing out his welcome, but the boys were nice to him, even as their mother strangely ignored him. He cracked them up. He used the bathroom to “Conduct Official Business,” and ran the water full blast the entire time, singing, “We will, we will ROCK YOU,” at the top of his lungs while he stomped his feet from where he sat on the toilet—classic grandpa. And then on his way out of the door, the Flying Finn asked Jimmy and Dex to help him pluck the flowers from Genny's garden. He was always in love with one waitress or another at Norma's Restaurant. “FLOWERS FOR MY LOVEYS!” he'd yell at the top of his lungs. And then, in a nudge-nudge whisper, he'd tell the boys, “Maybe you twos will be lucky to have a lady like my Lovey. She has Jesus tongue.”

“What?”

“Tongue move so good you say, PRAISE JESUS!”

If Genny Mori caught him picking flowers, there was hell to pay.

“You get back here Finn, those are my tulips!”

“Too quick for you, Mori!” the Flying Finn shouted back,
running down the sidewalk suit coat flapping. “I need tulips to kiss the lips!”

•   •   •

During that summer, fighting the mood of nothingness that descends on small-town streets for three months each year, people went out of their way to shake Jimmy's hand, offer him a free slice of pizza, an ice cream cone. Next year he would be a freshman and all expected him to carry the Fishermen back to glory. Dex thought it was hilarious. He liked to stir the pot by shouting, “The great Jimmy Kirkus is here, live and in person. Five bucks a handshake, ten an autograph.”

“Damn, Dex, I'm not signing anything. People are going to start asking you to put your money where your mouth is.”

Dex thought on it a second. “People shouldn't be putting money where their mouths are. It's disgusting—you know where money's been?”

Sometimes Pedro would chime in, “We got two for the price of one. That's right, two Kirkuses today, so act quick, supplies are limited!”

The truth was, Jimmy was hopped up on the attention. It filled a need he hadn't known was there. He liked the way the girls smiled at him, how the boys gave him confident high fives. It didn't seem to matter that he never had anything to say, hated holding eye contact. And all this because of ball. If he could just never let them down, then all the love would keep coming. It was a simple equation and though it seemed ridiculous, for our kid Jimmy, who'd only experienced basketball success so far, it was entirely plausible.

•   •   •

Toward the end of the summer, Todd let the Flying Finn move into the house. He was staying longer and longer on each of his
ever more frequent visits anyway so it made sense. He slept in the pantry. It was barely big enough to fit the green cot that Genny Mori put in. He slept among jars of jam and cans of vegetables. Some mornings he'd emerge, chin stained with jam or peanut butter, complaining of stomachaches.

“Goddamn it, Finn,” Genny scolded. “You can' be eating all night, making a mess of it, sticking your fingers straight into the jars.”

“A midnight snack is how they say this,” the Flying Finn responded. “It's so very common where I come from.”

“This
is
where you come from, you old goose,” Todd said.

Sometimes Jimmy and Dex would come down early in the morning, their mom already gone for the day, and find the two men sitting in the kitchen, be looking out the big, river-facing windows, talking about old times. Drank pot after pot of coffee while they waited for Todd's shift to begin in the afternoon.

One morning Dex asked for coffee too.

“Ah, you'd hate the taste,” the Flying Finn said. “Asides, it'll stump your growing.”

“It's
stunt
, not
stump
,” Todd said.

“I don't believe it. You pulling on the foot?”

“Grandpa, I'm already tall,” Dex said.

“Ha-ha!” the old man cackled. “I think you right. You're too tall! So go, drink coffee. You a tree, not a stump!” Then he gripped Jimmy's shoulder. “But you stay off the stuff. You're too short!”

On those mornings, Todd and the Flying Finn spoke as though the boys weren't there. Of where he went in the years after Todd lost his knee, future, and Suzie Q.—“
South, south, south. Figured I didn't need much if I were warm at night!
”
Why when he came back to town he'd worn that ridiculous helmet—“
I was afraid someone would see me. Then there is the answer! I find a green motorcycle helmet that covered my ears, my eyes. A disguise!
”

Other than Suzie's funeral, the one thing they never spoke about
was the night Todd went wandering off drunk before the state championship game. But it was there, just under the surface and the boys had no clue about any of that.

•   •   •

That summer, the Flying Finn learned about the Tour de France. During the day he'd take over the TV for hours so he could see if Lance would win.

“Goddamn that's my sport!” he'd shout above all the normal household noise. “I was never one for my hands or my feets, but in my legs, I got the class.”

“Isn't the Finnish thing like bobsled or something?” Dex asked.

“Goddamn it! It's in our legs. We show them smug Euros!”

“The Finnish
are
European.”

“Just listen to your grandpa when he talks!” He threw the remote at Dex, chunked him in the side of his big head. The Flying Finn clapped. “Get me a bike, get me a bike and I'll show you!”

“Ouch, Jesus,” Dex said, rubbing the spot. “You're insane.”

At the local thrift store he picked up used bits of cycling gear until by the final few days of the tour, he was watching in a hodgepodge cycling uniform that advertised about a hundred different companies and seemed composed exclusively of neon Spandex. Hopping up and down in the living room, the big, glowing, skinny man—made all the skinnier by Spandex—watched Lance Armstrong win the tour again.

“Just get me a bike, you knuckleheads, I'll show you, I'll show you so good.”

When Jimmy and Dex found a rusted old Schwinn in the thick blackberry bushes behind the elementary school one day, they took it to Pedro's house that always smelled of motor oil and fried food. His uncle Flaco fixed it up in no time.

“What you need a bike for, Jimmy?” Pedro asked.

“It's not for me.”

When the Flying Finn saw the bike, he broke down crying.

“You little bastards,” he wailed, “You can't just let an old man live proud to his boasts? It's all I gots after all!”

“But Grandpa,” Jimmy said. “We wanted to see how fast you could go.”

Then the Flying Finn leaned in close to the boys and whispered, “It's sorry to say, boys, but I never learn how to ride.”

So there were the Kirkus boys, running next to the Flying Finn in his neon biking gear and his bright green motorcycle helmet—both with a hand on the bike frame somewhere to prop up his terrible balance, while he screamed and giggled. Pumping his legs, knees angled out, like a maniac.

“I feel like flying,” the Flying Finn yelled.

•   •   •

Meanwhile, for Genny Mori, the house started to feel like a foreign country she didn't have a passport for. She could find ways in, sure, but it was always with the fear that she'd be discovered at any point and deported. All boys and then her. All old stories, and somehow no mention of her. A whole decade of Todd slowly shutting down to her, but somehow still this light for his loudmouth father? She started lingering at work with the one person who always seemed to be around, Doc McMahan.

The affair started because Doc and his wife lost a child that summer. Happened after a long, painful fight where the little girl put up with all kinds of stuff little girls shouldn't have to put up with. Tubes down the throat, needles, and blood samples. An autoimmune disorder Genny Mori hadn't heard of before. They started meeting up after work to trade notes on grief. Commiserate and laugh over the stupid things people said in order to show you that they cared.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I was shocked when I heard. You have our condolences. We'll keep you in our prayers.