Straight Man (52 page)

This
is the question with which he expects to stump William Henry Devereaux, Jr.? Even Marjory, telephone to her ear, looks like she could answer it on my behalf. But there’s nothing for me to do but gird, as they say, my loins, summon what strength remains, grab my dean by his lapels, lift him onto his tiptoes, and draw him to me. This I do.

“I want,” I tell him as solemnly as I know how, because I don’t want this to be mistaken for irony or any other literary device, “to
pee
.”

Something—the seriousness of my demeanor, or the simplicity of my text—gets through to Jacob. “Okay, I was wrong,” he shrugs so I’ll let him down. “You
do
know what you want.”

And I’m out the door and into the corridor, hobbling at full throttle, unzipping as I go for the sake of efficiency, toward the door marked
MEN
. A minute or so later, Jacob follows, either sent by Marjory to check on me or summoned by the sound of my laughter. The look on his face as he watches me is a mixture of embarrassment and concern and perplexity. I cannot for the life of me stop laughing, and I certainly don’t expect him to understand the meaning of what he’s bearing witness to. But the fact is that no fifteen-year-old boy standing barefoot on an icy tile floor after awakening from a ten-hour sleep in a cold bedroom has ever hit porcelain with a more powerful, confident, thankful stream than mine. It is heaven. “Dear God,” somebody moans. Probably me. It’s the last thing I remember.

In my dream I am the star of the donkey basketball game. I have never been more light and graceful, never less encumbered by gravity or age. My shots, every one of them, leave my fingertips with perfect backspin and arc toward the hoop with a precision that is pure poetry, its refrain the sweet ripping of twine. And remember: I’m doing all this on a donkey. I have chosen an excellent beast—honest, bright, generous, and kind—to bear me up and down the court, and we have established between us a deep rapport. I have whispered into his ear that when the game is over I will not give him up, he will have his freedom, and this news—that he will no longer be indentured to the foolish master who keeps him in diapers—has made a young ass of him again. He is so ennobled by the prospect of his freedom that he sees in the occasion of his last game the opportunity for glory. Together we steal the ball and fast-break at every opportunity, thundering down the court to the wild cheers of the capacity crowd. I
love
this game.

“I love you, too,” Lily assures me.

Lily? How did she get here?

She got here, I conclude solipsistically, in the usual way, by my opening my eyes.

“I was having a dream,” I tell my wife, looking around at the hospital room she’s brought with her. I appear to be lying in its bed, though why is a mystery. This is one beautiful woman, my wife, and I’m very glad to see her except for her bad timing. I was about to achieve glory, and now I never will. Someone left a cake out in the rain, I think, my dream sliding away on greased skids, and I’ll never have that recipe again. I’ve always feared the day would come when that lyric made sense, and now that day is apparently here.

“How do you feel?” Lily wants to know.

“Great,” I say. “A little sleepy.”

The door to the hospital room is open, and out in the hall there’s a large man sitting, looking in at us. There’s something wrong with his face. It’s sectioned off, like a chart of a cow, the kind of diagram butchers display in supermarkets, telling you where the various cuts of beef come from. Despite this, he looks familiar.

“Phil said you’d feel pretty good. They’ve got you shot full of painkillers.”

“My head hurts a little,” I admit, studying the large man out in the hall, who has not moved a muscle. I wonder if he might be an allegorical figure. Maybe if I look at Lily and then look back he’ll be replaced by another shape whose significance I’m supposed to decode.

“You hit your head when you blacked out,” she explains, taking my hand. “You’ve had a busy few days.”

“It wasn’t easy making all your predictions come true,” I tell her. “Jail was easy enough, but how to get into the hospital had me stumped.”

The large man with the diagrammed face is still there, immobile.

“I think you’re about to go back to sleep,” Lily says.

I think she’s right, as usual. I can feel my eyes closing. Maybe I’ll be reunited with my donkey, finish the game, and make good on my promise to give the poor beast his freedom, though none of this seems quite as appealing as it did before. Now that I’ve awakened, the dream emotion, once powerfully felt, too closely resembles my father’s sorrow at the thought of having once wronged Charles Dickens. And speaking
of fathers, I motion to Lily to come closer so I can whisper to her. “Is that Angelo out there?”

She nods sadly. “We’re going to have a houseguest for a while.”

“That’s okay,” I whisper. “Don’t worry about it. Welcome home.”

As I drift back into sleep, I can’t help thinking that it’s a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It’s as close as we get to God in this life, and we reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes, for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

“So what’s he doing sending his brother, is what I want to know,” Angelo explains. “Like I’m supposed to know this seven-foot-tall Negro is Raschid’s brother? Angelo, the goddamn mind reader. I mean, here’s a kid who looks like he’s got all he can do to read the headline of the goddamn paper he’s delivering—but me?—I’m supposed to be able to read his mind. I’m supposed to know this seven-foot-tall Negro and his two eight-foot-tall pals mean me no harm. Here they are on my stoop, giving me the look, right? I’ve never seen them before, and I don’t know them from a bag of assholes, but I’m very polite. I explain how it’s my policy not to give money to strangers, whether or not they happen to be giant Negroes. I tell them my paper boy’s name is Raschid, and whether he has a brother or not I myself have no fucking idea. Again, I’m no mind reader. I tell them if Raschid has mononucleosis like they say, I’m sorry. I like Raschid. He’s a nice, polite Negro boy. One of the few. He don’t go around giving white people the look. When he gets better, he can come by my house any time he wants and I’ll pay him what I owe him. But I don’t give money to giant Negroes I’ve never seen before and that’s that. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it is. And I don’t really care if they happen to be holding Raschid’s collection book. This they could have taken off his body for all I know. It’s always the nice, polite Negro boys that get it in the neck. You don’t believe me, watch the news. See ’em come filing out of church, all dressed up and wanting to know why some Negro kid had to be shot down crossing the street when all he was was an honor roll
student who sang in the church choir. Like the rest of us are supposed to have an explanation for why things happen to these people. But they’re right. It’s the polite ones that get it in the neck every time. That much I do know. That much I’ve figured out.”

It’s eight-thirty in the morning. I’ve slept through the night, and Phil Watson’s confident prediction has come to pass. I don’t feel nearly as good as I felt coming off the triumph of my donkey basketball game and the news that my blood work has come back negative. No tumor. The painkillers I’ve been given have worn off, though I have a prescription for Tylenol 3s in my pocket. I refused one at the hospital, and I regret it now, listening to Angelo explain why he was in jail and had to be bailed out by my wife, who is driving the three of us out to Allegheny Wells. As soon as I get home I’m going to have to pop a pill and look for Occam, who’s gone missing. I should have believed Paul Rourke when he told me he’d seen the dog in a neighbor’s garden, but I didn’t. How he got out of the house is a mystery, but my guess is that some member of the media, not believing that I wasn’t home, and finding a door unlocked, must have poked his head inside to call my name. My sincere hope is that this person got a good groining.

The other mystery is why our money was required to get Angelo out of jail. I suspect he probably could have made his own bail, but he’s too stubborn to spend money this way. He’s lonely at home, and residing at the courthouse gave him people to talk to. Retired from the force for almost a decade, he still knows half the cops in Philadelphia. It was probably old home week in the slammer. Now it appears he’s going to live with us until his court date later in the summer. Lily has already impressed upon him that our rural life will be very different from what he’s used to in Philly. Very few people will come knocking on our door in Allegheny Wells, and there should be no need to shoot them. Any of them.

“But they insist, right?” Angelo continues. “Raschid has come by a couple times when I was hither, or maybe yon, so I’m a little in arrears, payment-wise. Just give us the fuckin’ money, they say, which makes me think I’m right, this seven-foot Negro is no brother of Raschid’s, who is always a polite boy, like I said. So I tell them, fine, wait right here a second, like I’m going to get the money. I go get something all right, but it ain’t the money. My pump action is what I get. I keep it
right in the hall closet for unforeseen circumstances like this one. I’m gone maybe five seconds, and when I get back I show them what I’ve brought with me. I explain to them again, still polite, about my lifelong policy of not giving money in either large or small amounts to seven-foot-tall Negroes I’ve never seen before. This time the two eight-foot Negroes, they seem to understand this practice whereas they didn’t before, but the one who claims to be Raschid’s brother, he’s still giving me the look, like he hasn’t noticed what I’m holding. He wants to know where do I get off pointing such a thing at him when all he’s trying to do is collect money I owe. I say to myself, This fuckin’ kid was born without ears. Maybe I should feel sorry for him, going through life deaf. But, so there’s no misunderstanding, I go through the whole thing again, except louder this time so I’m sure he can hear me.

“I tell him that I have this pump action in my hands because, though it breaks my heart to admit it, this is now a necessary thing where I live. I even take the time to give him some historical perspective on the situation. I explain how when my daughter was little we used to let her ride all over the neighborhood on her bicycle, because back then it was safe. This was before the days when seven-foot-tall Negroes you’ve never seen before showed up on your stoop demanding money. This was before there was prostitutes and crack dealers on every other corner and every fourth or fifth car was a pimpmobile with dark windows. I tell them the reason I’m taking time to explain all this is because they’re too young to remember. Back then, I was the only guy in a ten-block radius who had a gun in his house, and the only reason
I
had one was because I was a cop. Now everybody on the block’s armed to the teeth. I tell them it ain’t none of my business, but I wouldn’t go up on any more porches if I was them. I describe some of the advanced weaponry that resides behind some of the doors we can see from my porch.

“The two eight-foot Negroes, they’re backing down the porch steps slow. They started backing up as soon as they saw the pump action, so there’s at least some intelligence there. But Raschid’s brother, he stands his ground. He tells me to lower the shotgun and he’ll go, like he’s talking to some moron. Lower the shotgun and he’ll go, my ass. But this is what he actually says to me. If I don’t lower the shotgun, he ain’t going nowhere. He tells me this like
he’s
the one holding the shotgun
on me. Which I do not fucking believe. I think to myself, This poor fucking giant Negro is not only born without ears, he’s confused in his head. He can’t tell the difference between a shotgun pointed at his middle and one hanging on the wall above the fireplace, but he’s about to learn. I tell him I’ll count to three and I’ll do it nice and loud on account of he was born without ears. I know everybody understands this situation because the two eight-foot Negroes have backed all the way down the steps and out through the gate and they’re calling to their friend to come on before I do this thing I’ve promised to do. They keep calling to him, even while I’m counting, Come
on
, nigger—a word they use on each other which my own daughter don’t allow me to say in her presence—what’s wrong wit you? they want to know. This crazy old bastard’s gonna cut you in half.

“Now, normally I don’t like being called a crazy old bastard by giant Negroes, but in this instance here I figure, fine. At least the two eight-footers are in touch with the reality of the situation, and anyway I’ve called them some names too, so we’re even. What’s fair is fair, and they are trying to help, right? They keep calling to the seven-footer while I’m counting, saying, Come
on
, man, this crazy old bastard, et cetera, et cetera. They call him by his name, which is another screwball name like Raschid, which took me forever and a fucking day to remember. Le-Something, they call him. You know how they do? They take a real name and add
Le
? LeRon. LeBill. LeBob. LeBruce. Some goddamn thing like that. LaFonso. That’s my favorite. Alphonso, a name that already exists, they don’t want no part of. LaFonso. That’s an improvement, right? But I figure, it’s their name. Call him LePutz for all I care. Personally, I think LaFonso’s not a very nice thing to do to a kid. Like he’s not going to have enough problems in life if his name’s Harry, right? No, let’s name him LeHarry. Anyway, I’ve just got the hang of Raschid, and here comes LeBig-Brother.”

I glance over at Lily, who I can tell would pay cash money for this story to be over. She’s heard it before. How many times I don’t know. I reach over and give her hand a squeeze. I try not to be too cheered by all this, though I know that Angelo’s presence is a good thing for me. Every time my wife spends time with her father, my own stock rises. I hate to think of him staying with us for an entire summer, but by the time he leaves, I’m going to look pretty good to Lily. In a few short days
my wife will be burying her face in my neck and choking back tears of frustration and guilt and terrible love.