Wichita (9781609458904) (3 page)

 

T
here was apparently too little lawn maintenance,” Abby explains, turning cautiously into the driveway beneath the low-hanging limbs of an elm badly in need of trimming, “too much sleeping with the ladies in the life-drawing classes.” The tone is a familiar blend: anxious, exasperated, resigned, ruefully admiring. Seth is pretending to lash the car along like a jockey. “He was basically told to get out of Dodge.”

Seth hops down from his hood-ornament perch while the car is still moving then circles back to the hatch, which he bangs on until Abby releases the lock. Getting out, she and Lewis exchange wry, here-we-go looks as Seth takes up Lewis's small suitcase and slings the book bag over one shoulder, hops on a skateboard and rides into the garage and up a wheelchair ramp. He slams his shoulder against the door to the kitchen, somehow seizing the knob with his free hand, and when he opens it, three small mutts squeeze past, the remnant of a pack of strays Abby adopted after Lewis left home to live with Virgil and finish high school in New York. The dogs greet her with wild, keening ecstasy, writhing on the gritty garage floor and exposing their gums and sharp little teeth.

Now Seth trots down the wheelchair ramp to stand with his arms crossed, half bellhop, half B-boy. Moths and clear-winged flies batter the bare bulb above his head and in the flickering light he looks like a mosaic of some forgotten pagan deity.

“Thank you, honey,” Abby tells him on her way inside. Pausing to lay a soothing hand on his arm, she gazes up into his eyes with such naked maternal love that Lewis feels queasy and intrusive bearing witness to it.

“Brother!” Lewis calls and Abby moves mistily along.

“Brother!” Seth replies with frowning mock gravity, stepping forward with hand outthrust in a little send-up of stern masculine bond-renewal. Lewis can see the facial tattoo clearly now. From a distance it looks like tight dark beard growth on his jaw and cheek but reveals itself up close to be microscriptural pictograms and vaguely runic letters invented by Seth and the tattoo artist. Nonsense, in other words. He loves to be asked what it means and improvise absurdist proverbs. What it actually means is he'll probably never have an acting career.

Lewis can also see the scar and dent on Seth's brow from the time he was bashed by a brick in Golden Gate Park. He was living on the streets following a breakup with Candy, an older punk woman who had a nine-year-old daughter and a job as a stripper. They met at a hardcore show and got married at City Hall a week or two later then maxed out Candy's credit cards in a coke binge that ended with her declaring bankruptcy and losing custody of the daughter. Eventually the marriage was annulled, to the enormous relief of Virgil, who had been keeping top secret the existence of one “Candy Chopik.”

Lewis likes to think he's blasé about the scar, but seeing it afresh is like glimpsing a crack through which evil seeped into their world, the attempted murder of his brother by a group of fellow street punks, who lured him into the bushes with the offer of a joint then left him for dead. Why? Some vague bad blood between them, some vying for status. The doctor warned Seth that if he didn't stay in the hospital and recover properly, he risked having seizures, even dying.

Now, instead of shaking hands, Seth throws his ropey, muscular arms around Lewis, nearly knocking him over, as much by the surprise as the impact. Seth has always been a limp, reluctant hugger, leaving the impression that he deems the practice hippie-sentimental. Once as little boys they spent a week apart and when Lewis came home, Seth cried, “Lewis!” and ran into his arms. That's how far back Lewis has to go for a similar moment.

Seth stands peering into his eyes as for a sign of some sort. Then, standing aside, he makes a courtly flourish with one hand and, when Lewis has gone forward a few steps, leaps onto his back.

“Ugh!” Lewis says, staggering. But he's pleased too, and, sensing a test of strength beneath the goofiness, hooks his hands under Seth's legs and begins slogging toward the open door to the kitchen.

Seth says, “Damn, son, you're
thin
!” He pats Lewis's ribs as if checking for weapons. “That bitch really stuck a
knife
in you.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Lewis mutters, torn between wanting to object to Seth's “bitch” and liking it.

“That's OK, a
wound
is a
blessing
: it lets the light in,” Seth whispers urgently as Lewis slogs along. “But did she really say, ‘Change is good'?”

Abby has evidently been passing along details. Lewis grunts his assent. They were Victoria's parting words.

“
Change
isn't
good
—change is
Satan incarnate
,” Seth says. “I hope you set the bitch straight on
that
. Because that is some dark-side shit if I ever heard it.”

Abby, who has been watching their progress fondly, is now unsticking an envelope taped to the wall beside the door to the kitchen. Seth clears his throat and in a stuffy, maudlin voice recites, “‘I'm just
so grateful
to have you in my life—'”

Abby lets her head fall forward then her shoulders shake in silent laughter. “‘As a
friend
,'” Seth goes on, “‘as a
lover
, as a PARTNER!'”

Seth lets out a triumphant bark of a laugh and Abby tosses the unopened envelope on the cluttered workbench and goes inside. “Signed ‘D'!” Seth calls after her.

“D” is for “Donald.” Lewis met him briefly in the spring, when he and Abby stopped in New York on the way back from a trip to Virginia, where Donald's children from a former marriage live with their mother in a Christian Fundamentalist compound. Lewis just hopes he hasn't moved in. There's been no word of that from Abby, but then there was no word from her about Seth either.

Lewis carries Seth up the wheelchair ramp and across the threshold of the kitchen, where he sets him down. Bright new copper pots hang from a wire mesh frame on the ceiling and there's a big gleaming espresso machine, a wood block slotted with fancy knives—a general air of prosperity and renovation. Lewis wonders whether it's connected to the Birthday Party money then touches the slab of bills in his pocket to be sure it's still there—yes. Thinking too of Seth's hug and piggy-backing, the possibility of a pickpocketing from proudly street-schooled Seth, if only as a prank.

Abby is busily laying out hors-d'oeuvres on trays for the Hydro Stick cocktail party. She declines Lewis's offer of help as if slightly startled by the idea, while behind her Seth, two beers held aloft, beckons frowningly: leave the little woman to her work and come party.

Lewis follows him into the adjoining breakfast nook, where, resting light as a puppet in her wheelchair pulled up to the table, is teenaged Stacy. She suffers from a mystery degenerative condition but is pretty in a pale, pixieish way that reminds Lewis of the illustrations of Loki in
D'Aulaire's
Book of Norse Gods and Goddesses
. With a thin arm, she hails Lewis, who waves back feeling the usual initial stab of pity for her and guilt at his own health and able body.

Sitting next to her is Cody, Seth's homeschool classmate and sometime bandmate who moved to Wichita to live with an aunt when he was kicked out of a FLDS “plyg” community in Texas. His credulous, stoned brown eyes lighting up at the sight of Lewis, he hops up to give him a pounds embrace, his wife-beater T tucked into a pair of jeans so truncated that the entirety of his narrow ass bulges beneath the taut cotton like a head concealed in a perp walk.

Across from them is Harry, Seth's shrink, though at this point more a psychopharmacological family friend than anything else—compassionately upswept caterpillar eyebrows and what's left of his hair tied in a ponytail. Lewis is always surprised to find him still here, this New Agey Jewish psychiatrist in Christian Right Kansas.

Finally there's a mystery guest, a homeless-looking man with gray Willie Nelson pigtails that are, on closer inspection, matted into dreadlocks. He has a fine scar looping behind one ear and wears a trucker hat that says “Emerald City, Seattle WA.” Seth introduces him as Butch and Butch gives an imperious nod. It's a type Seth has an affinity for, and not just because he's lived on the streets himself. The affinity came first, from somewhere else—a past life, Abby believes (and/or a simultaneous life being lived out in a separate but related dimension). On visits to see Virgil in New York when he was a little boy, Seth would plop down next to someone with a cardboard sign and festering facial sores and chat about who-knows-what until drawn away by the hand. He doubtless knows Butch from the Inter-Faith Ministries Homeless Shelter, where he volunteers occasionally, Abby and Harry having decided that helping others—serving food, changing sheets—will help Seth focus less obsessively and self-destructively on himself. Has it worked? Abby and Harry think so, absolutely. That there's no control-group Seth who
didn't
volunteer at the Inter-Faith shelter and thus no way of knowing is something Lewis sees no good reason to point out.

He's not in the mood, after traveling all day, to try to make conversation with this crew but sits down at the table lest he be judged stuck-up. Abby's households have always been havens for oddballs and outcasts of various sorts and Lewis just needs to reacclimate to this woolier, inclusive world.

A silence falls and Seth breaks it by announcing daffily, with an air of imitating someone specific, “I can't decide whether to get an
iPhone
or not.” He wrinkles his nose and looks from face to face. “It's all I can
think
about! I'm just ob
sessed
! Butch, think I should get an
iPhone
?”

Butch sips his beer and stares stonily into the middle distance and as if he hasn't heard.

Smiling fondly, Harry raises his unopened can of Foster's and says, “Lewis, congratulations! You did it!”

“Did what?” Cody asks.

“Graduated from college, stoner,” Seth says, rolling his eyes. “What do you think he's been up to for the past five years?”

Frowning, Cody hesitates then says tentatively, “I thought college was
four
years.”

“Ah, yes, well,
Cody
, that's true,” Seth says, glancing at Lewis as if embarrassed for him, regretful to have this awkward matter arise. “And normally, people
do
graduate in four years. But Lewis took a little
longer
and we're not going to
judge
that because everyone has their own
rate
.”

“From
Columbia
,” Harry tells Butch, playing the proud parent, which Lewis is grateful for. “Summa cum laude.”

“Some cum loudly?” Seth asks, frowning innocently. Cody snickers into one hand and Stacy blushes and fiddles with a switch on the arm of her wheelchair. “No, really,” Seth protests with a befuddled look. “They give
awards
for that?”

“
Anyway
,” Harry says to Lewis, sighing and shaking his head at puerile Seth.

“By God, they give awards for
that
,” Seth says, looking around the table, “I better
clear some space on my trophy shelf
!” Then falls out laughing, backwards in his chair with both arms flung out, then falling forward to bang his forehead on the table.

“God, that doesn't hurt at all!” he pauses to announce with alarm. “I can't
feel
that!” He resumes banging his forehead. “Am I banging my forehead against the table, Cody?”

“Sure are, dude,” Cody says.

“Why can't I
feel
anything?” He bangs on. “Harry, we need to discuss my
meds
.”

“Ivy League,” Butch says appraisingly, turning toward Lewis. He has a deep, raspy voice.

Lewis shrugs. “Lots of ivy,” he says.

Seth leans toward Butch. “Now it's also true that Lewis came limping home to live with his mommy at age twenty-three with no job and no prospects
whatsoever
,” he says, scratching the facial tattoo and shaking his head sadly. “No one's trying to deny that. But it's also true and has to be said that Lewis has rejected the dry and delusional life of the mind for true wide-open realms of freedom and experience. Brav-
o
! Am I right? Brav-
o
!”

All of which Butch waits out with a sort of steely patience. “You're set for life,” he says to Lewis.

“That's the first I heard of it,” Lewis says lightly, looking around at the others. Butch seems to be mistaking Lewis for George Bush—a quip Lewis swallows, unsure of the man's stability.

“Nah,” Butch says, waving a hand, loath to be so lightly contradicted, “you're in
the club
.”

“Now maybe if he'd gone to
Harvard
—” Seth says, which gets a laugh from everyone except Butch, who continues to hold Lewis in the tractor beam of his gaze.

Lewis takes a sip of beer and looks away. He could explain that a BA, from the Ivy League or not, doesn't amount to all that much anymore. That one needs a “terminal degree” of some kind, in business or law or whatever. That Lewis, because he was on track to become a professor, has walked away from the Ivy League and its prestige prematurely. But he suspects that anything he says will just find its proper place in Butch's Talk Radio conspiracy theory. He settles for catching Seth's eye to quickly scowl his annoyance, with Seth cocking his head in canine puzzlement.

Stacy leans toward Cody and makes a remark about something. Her speech is garbled by her condition and most of what she says is incomprehensible to Lewis. But he has the sense that she's tactfully changing the subject. It seems to work: psycho Butch is now peering dully at Cody, who's prodding what looks like a bite or welt on his thin forearm.