Snapper (18 page)

We had a household ritual on Sunday mornings, when I didn’t work, and Rick and Alan were invariably hungover. Darren was generally still asleep. When I heard Rick and Alan stirring and groaning—usually on the living room couch or floor where they had passed out—I’d go to the kitchen and slide a whole stick of butter into a skillet that I put on low heat. Once the butter had liquefied I slid a few cinnamon raisin bagels into it facedown. Rick or Alan or both would hover over my shoulder and say they felt their arteries hardening already. The butter seeps into the face of the bagel before it begins to fry, sealing it in, and the outer shell of a bagel is more or less impermeable. The result is the most delicious ring of fried butter ever made—the bread itself is incidental, a sort of delivery mechanism for concentrated organic grease.

Darren had never bothered to get up before, but now he appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“What, I don’t get one?”

“You’re not hungover,” I pointed out. “This isn’t breakfast, it’s medicine.”

“Smells foul,” he said.

“You can insult my mother or my manhood, but not my fried bagels,” I said.

“Those are my bagels,” said Darren. “I bought them yesterday.”

“We’ll replace them,” said Rick.

“That’s not the point,” said Darren. “You took my bagels without asking.”

“Maybe you should smoke your morning joint, Darren,” I said.

“Screw you.”

“You had a pound of marijuana delivered to my house without asking,” I said. This was news to Rick and Alan, by the way.

“Oh, it’s my fault.”

“I didn’t say that. We can replace your bagels.”

“Do you know what it’s like for me?” he said. “Do you know what it took for me to go into a grocery store, where every black face reminds me of Frank? Where I suspect every other customer?”

Nobody had a ready reply for that.

“You told me to get out more. I got out. I bought some bagels. And you stole them.”

“You go out sometimes already, Darren. You get your CDs and things.”

“Screw you.”

He stomped back to his lair, and a half hour later he offered me some of his joint. He did that frequently, always saying the same thing: Shall we share a peace pipe? I always declined. I’m not opposed, but as he observed, it puts me to sleep.

We didn’t resolve the bagel thing, and the next day I nearly died. You can see why I think violence is stupid. Not senseless and tragic, not avoidable. It’s mere vandalism inflicted
on people. It’s like someone working out that two and three makes eight.

There is a small post office inside the Old Courthouse in Hickory. Indiana has hundreds of grand old courthouses that are impractical for modern purposes; Hickory’s is one of the few put to some use other than that of underfunded, underused local history museum. There are restaurants and shops in there too. You enter a handsome limestone facade through immense Corinthian columns, and above you the tiled roof sports alternating Dutch and Victorian gables—the whole thing is probably a copy of some Bavarian manor or château on the Loire, though I don’t know for sure. Many of those old courthouses are. Once inside the floors and walls are all brown, gray, and white marble, with paintings and busts of past Hickory dignitaries peering at you from every wall, and you could see they had made sure to disapprove of you in advance. Turning right from a circular central hall you mount twelve curved marble steps to the post office wing, a long low counter on the left-hand wall.

I had finished work and gone to the grocery store to replace Darren’s bagels. I thought of buying him forty or fifty of them but that seemed like the kind of passive-aggressive stunt he would pull, so I just bought one replacement pack. As I walked home I saw Darren cross the street to the courthouse and vanish between those Corinthian pillars. After his insistence that buying bagels was some kind of triumphant defiance of his misfortune I wondered what in that courthouse was worth braving, how he screwed up the courage for that imposing place when he was cowed by a homely grocery store. I know now, or at least surmise, that he visited the post
office every three or four days when he made those trips to the record store. He sold his dope the same way he obtained it, courtesy of Uncle Sam’s postal network. He wasn’t caught for a few more years, and by that time he was dealing on an industrial scale. Frank will get out of prison before Darren does.

I didn’t know that yet, and at the time I was simply puzzled. I followed him in, and it occurred to me to ask if he wanted to stop for a beer in the sports bar that had recently opened downstairs.

By the time I got inside, however, he had retrieved a package from the counter and he met me at the top of those twelve curved stairs. Like the parcel that came to the house, every inch of this box was taped several times.

“Is that more dope?” I said.

I don’t think that he shoved me from fear of discovery, though I admit that was not the most perspicacious thing I could have said. I do not think he shoved me out of hatred or anger, either. What I saw in that ruddy scrunched-up face and in those severely hooded eyes was mere lack of recognition: as though he didn’t see his friend, or even another human being, but a sort of inanimate obstacle. The most expedient path of removal for this obstacle lay in the reverse trajectory from whence it came. It was not an act of aggression so much as a miscalculation, as though he were dialing the wrong number.

I felt a pressure in the middle of my chest, not hard, but as though he were trying to pat me on the back and had got it all wrong.

I seemed to fall into and away from the vaulted marble ceiling at the same time: a slow dream fall, but I didn’t jerk awake before impact. I did the reverse.

I had ear and hearing tests for years afterward, and I was always assured that somehow someday the damage would heal. I think Dr. Yamani knew better from the first. He sat with me for the half hour after I came to, until Alan had been reached and rushed to the hospital. I think the doctor could have put a nurse on this task, but he didn’t. Several hours had passed, and I was safely out of danger. He sat next to my bed surveying me with that perfect mustache and a face both shrewd and jolly, and he began to tell me jokes. They weren’t very good jokes, but I was severely concussed and probably didn’t need to laugh too much.

“An Indiana boy went to Harvard. I went to Harvard, myself, but I didn’t like it very much,” he confided.

“An Indiana boy went to Harvard,” he repeated. “And he stopped a tweed-clad professor in the street.” Dr. Yamani cleared his throat to attempt an Indiana accent, but he sounded exactly the same.

“ ‘Excuse me,’ said the Indiana boy, ‘Can you tell me where the library is at?’ ”

Dr. Yamani cleared his throat again, though his Harvard accent was no different, either.

“ ‘Here at Harvard,’ replied the professor, ‘we do not end our sentences in prepositions.’ ”

Dr. Yamani paused for effect. I knew the punch line, but I started to laugh anyway. A man from Damascus was telling me jokes about Harvard in a Hickory hospital while my brain leaked out of my ear.

“You want me to continue?” he said.

“Yes, please,” I said.

“So the Indiana boy says, ‘Fine. Where’s the library at, asshole?’ ”

I doubt that constitutes orthodox medical practice, but I was grateful to Dr. Yamani for it. He eased my return to a world that had changed dramatically since I had left it, so to speak. By the time Alan arrived my mind was so disengaged from what had happened that I was simply thinking of food. Rick had gotten Darren and his things—I doubt Darren was eager to stay—out of the house instantly, somehow, and once at home I preoccupied myself with how to rearrange the room (mentally, that is: I stayed in bed for several days). I got a hurried, worried phone call from Lola, which cheered me up.

When the sergeant detective came to see me, I was in a reasonable frame of mind. I told him I fell.

I keep a human thigh bone on the coffee table in my living room. It gets me in trouble sometimes. My landlady threatened to phone the police when she saw it, but I told her I had already done that.

I am neither morbid nor superstitious, but I can’t see how I will ever get rid of it. This bone is a sort of albatross I didn’t shoot. I didn’t even find it, technically. I took a dog for a walk through a graveyard.

She was a big German shepherd with a brain the size of a chickpea. She belonged to a guy I knew who was traveling for a week. I took her twice a day to Rose Hill Cemetery, unleashed her, and watched her bound off and away between the headstones. She needed a lot of exercise, and in decent weather I’d just wait twenty minutes or a half hour with a book I had brought. I read
Pride and Prejudice
in several
installments sitting on a flat marble slab commemorating someone named Elizabeth Bennet. Kia would give me just enough time to wax wroth with Darcy over one thing or another, and then her choke chain would jingle nearby. I had to shut the book and stand up fast to avoid prodigious slobber down the side of my face.

So it went for several days, until she showed up with a big brown stick in her mouth that turned out to be somebody’s leg.

Both of our lives were pretty grim. Although I was skeptical of her intellectual abilities, I had time for Kia, which her owner rarely did. In fact, three months later he sold her for this reason. I had that time because I was unemployed. Financially speaking it would not be long before I started sharing her food.

Descending a marble staircase headfirst meant I couldn’t work the same job, and I didn’t have transferable skills. Imagine a whole pillow somehow stuffed into your left ear. When I hear a bird, I have no idea where it is. I had developed a rudimentary version of the same echolocation technique some blind people use to navigate their surroundings—but suddenly I lacked the auditory equivalent of depth perception or peripheral vision or both. Even now I have a lopsided understanding of my surroundings. I have learned to nod and smile convincingly during conversations with short people in crowded places.

I didn’t have Internet access and I never answered my phone, because it was sure to be my parents, fretting. I had sold the
Gypsy Moth
for scrap metal when the transmission failed and I was told the cost to replace it. A taciturn grease-ball gave me fifty bucks and towed it away with a sneer. Two months later I saw her pulling into an AutoZone—I still hate
that guy, but I like to think she’s still out there, finding new ways to embarrass her current owner.

As a result of this job I had I moved around as needed. Since I wasn’t needed anymore I had returned to Bloomington, where I had done my philosophy degree, only to find it didn’t recognize me anymore. It’s a college town; people come and go. Shane was the children’s librarian there, but his wife had just had twins to go with their six-year-old boy. One Tuesday at ten in the morning Shane followed a bottle of bourbon through my bedroom window on a mission to cheer me up. He had called in sick and Valerie was taking the kids to Grandma’s; she joined us shortly. But since that glorious day I hadn’t seen them. I used to drop in occasionally, but they were always manically distracted. Valerie had a thing for feeding me, which disrupted the twins’ bedtime, so I thought I should measure my visits.

When Kia returned with that ghastly gift in her jaws, I needed some distraction, myself. Mr. Darcy will take you only so far.

It’s about eighteen inches long with knobs at each end as you’d expect. Every year it’s a little bit browner, and it was already brown when she found it. I think of bones as white or off-white, but I suppose that’s when they’re fresh. Perhaps it’s an old bone.

Obviously I scoured the cemetery, with Kia straining on her leash, looking for signs of digging or erosion. I saw none. I unleashed her again and followed, hoping she’d return to help herself to a tibia or something. She just bounced and bounded and lollygagged around.
Whee! More free time!
she would have thought, if such a complex thought were within her powers. She sniffed a few tree trunks and peed on a headstone, and she was no help at all.

I had been holding the thing in my left hand for twenty minutes before I began to contemplate its significance. I had thought of it initially as property to be returned, as if she had found a tennis racket or an umbrella. Where was the Lost and Found? Who dropped this?

But when I couldn’t find a source for it, or a place to return it, I stared at it in disbelief. Was it a plastic gag from a joke shop? What made me think it was human? Somehow I just knew.

I looked up to see Kia offering herself to a diminutive cocker spaniel whose owner was nowhere in sight. I ran to intervene, but even that was complicated. You might brandish a stick or a rolled-up newspaper to get your point across to a dog, but a human bone? Already my arm was paralyzed by some thought behind and beyond my brain. Also, how would that look to a dog, being threatened with a treat? Even Kia would see something morally wrong there.

I waved the spaniel away with my right hand and then used the same hand to leash Kia again. Already I had become reverential toward this bone.